Midnight Mystique

Pretty sure meteor summons a pet - which means that you need to either add pet damage/hit rolls to your combat window or create a separate chat window for pet stuff with pet hits, damage, etc, added to that window. Other than that I haven't played any of my seismic blast characters for a while and I don't remember seeing any problems with meteor, but I have seen problems with other location aoes in the same matter pyrobeetle described.

Stone armor is probably the ultimate in mixed/layered defenses. One of its strengths is all the options the different powers give you, one of its weaknesses is that you really need to take all the powers. There are only 2 you could skip - geode, as its basically a 'get out of the fight and heal up' power that is only useful in emergencies and terra firma, as it doesn't provide any defensive abilities. That said, I would never skip terra firma, the accuracy and to hit boosts it provides are nice, if a bit small, but the +20% range boost is gold on a sentinel with their lower ranges. Stone provides a lot of different options, but at its core it is primarily a defense set plus regen/heal/hp boost, with some resistances filling in the gaps. S/L Def - Rock Armor + stone skin E/NE def - crystal armor + stone skin F/C resistances - brimstone armor + stone skin Healing/regen/hp boost - Earths embrace + rooted. You want to pick up stone skin, rock armor and earths embrace as soon as you can. That will give you ok S/L def (rock armor), a decent heal + HP boost that is fairly easy to make perma with just a couple slots (earths embrace) and an auto power that will take both resistance and defense uniques. If you can afford it, stick a steadfast protection +def unique in rock armor, you can slot it at L7. When you can afford the slots, get Terra Firma fully slotted with as much heal and recharge as you can spare - its your filler power when def/resistance fails you. Rooted adds regen and can be slotted for heal sets (and uniques) - as it is also your status protection power pick it up right away at L16. If you can afford it one cool trick is to slot it with a panacea +hp/end - that gives you a nice bit of healing and end recovery that will balance out the end cost of the toggle very nicely. That said, expect to spend between 8m-10m on the market for the panacea unique, otherwise just stick and end reduction or a heal SO in it. While slotting this up for regen would be nice if you can spare the slots with only a 100% boost to build on its not a lot - slotting healing set uniques here is a much better choice. Next up, crystal armor is an odd little power in that in addition to giving you E/NE def it ALSO gives you a 20% recovery boost, only 5% less than unslotted stamina. While I think its a weird design to give you a toggle that costs end but also boosts your end rec, it actually pays for itself. It can also take perfshifter +end IO's, which is nice in a toggle heavy set like this. Brimstone armor fills in the F/C gap with resistance and it gives all your attacks a chance to have a fire dot (don't remember if its 100% chance or something less, but its a nice damage boost). Finally Minerals gives you a 15% global recharge boost and fills in one of the def gaps(Psionic). As I noted earlier, while you could skip Terra Firma, its a nice power to pick up as well. Otherwise, slot this up the way you would do a DEF based set - pick up boxing/tough (to mule gladiator's armor +def even if you don't want the s/l resistance) and weave, slot your def powers for defense and if you can afford it stock up on S/L/E/NE def set bonuses. Slot up your heal (terra firma) for heal/recharge so its up as often as you can then try and fill in the F/C resistance gap. Thats a hard one, but a lot of purple sets give 5% F/C resistance so you CAN fill it in a level 50, it just costs alot. The real key here is recognizing that Stone is a defense based set with a lot of little extras. I am including the current build for my L50 Fire/stone sentinel as an example - I don't do a lot of fancy things with it, but its a fairly solid build . VolcanicEmberL50Current.mbd

Must be a play style issue then - I have always played my blasters like a ranged stalker. Probably aided by the fact that I almost always play primaries/secondaries that are better at range. Go in with stealth, set up for the pull, open with snipe, then follow up with aoe's/single target attacks as needed. (I play a LOT of /devices and /energy manip blasters, both benefit from range). My sentinels I expect to run right in the middle of the mob, open up with aoe's, then single target the remains all while mostly ignoring the incoming fire thanks to an armor secondary. Its not a matter of numbers, its a matter of feel. My sents FEEL just like my scrappers, my blaster feel just like my stalkers. Keep in mind I mostly solo - so target caps only matter in that they dictate my difficulty settings. My blasters run at +2/* to +3/ x1 or x2 (at most x2), my sentinels at +2/x2 or x3 (rarely x4). I mostly level chars to test out certain primary/secondary combo's, or because I though up a cool character theme/name/etc. I run flashback missions to maximize merits/minute, I run redside paper/bank missions every 5 levels so I can pick up invader, as I absolutely refuse to run synapse TF which means its easier to pick up invader as a rogue, the swap to vigilante to get TF commander. I run the occasional TF if someone is forming one up and I am not currently in a flashback. When I get to 50 I incarnate them out and I am done. Except for hami raids to which I only bring select DPS or holds characters depending on need, I don't play my chars much after 50+incarnates. But this is mostly off topic - on topic, in general I like the changes to sentinels. Its pretty obvious that you are meant to keep your opportunity bar full when soloing or in small teams to maximize your personal damage, only using vulnerability on hard targets (EB/AV, etc). In large groups you can leverage the new multi-target vulnerability to boost your team mates damage. The only real problem I see with the multi-target vuln. is that it makes multiple sentinels even LESS desirable unless the devs mean to allow vuln to stack from different sents.

Odd, my thoughts are exactly the opposite. I equate blasters, with their snipes and generally better single target damage (than sents) to ranged stalkers and sentinels to ranged scrappers. While SOME sentinels have decent single target damage, most power sets lose a lot of single target damage with the conversion of snipes to standard blasts and sentinels get screwed over on a few other single target attacks (chilling ray anyone?). On the flipside, while they have lower AOE target caps than a blaster (much like a scrapper) having a 90s base recharge on the t9 means even with moderate recharge (say, 90% in power, 60-70% or more global) you can have it up either every spawn or every other spawn. Combine that with some fairly decent aoe's in ancilliary/epic pools and that makes up for the crappy cones. Factor in the armor set which means all those PBAOE attacks can be performed safely, without having to invest all your set bonuses/power picks in capping ranged or S/L def means you are much more like a scrapper.

One thing that just came to me - if you plan on going with UM and want to take hand clap with the current layout you have the choice of picking up a nearly useless attack and living with it until level 18 (24 for tanks) or respecing JUST to get a decent attack as soon as you get UM. Leveling up is already ugly on SS tanks and not pretty on SS brutes. Just something to think about - remember, despite what the forum chatter might say life does NOT begin at level 50 and for some of us the leveling journey is a good chunk of the game. Not sure there is a good fix for this - I would prefer to see hand clap completely replaced by the UM version (minus whatever extra damage UM gives) but I am sure all the current L50's who love the control of the current hand clap would scream bloody murder. Sometimes I wonder if power selection is based on some random 'how can we screw over levelers' scheme. One of my favorite melee sets, ice melee, is totally sucky for everyone BUT stalkers until you hit 18 (24 for those poor tanks), other sets have the same problems. Tanks really get screwed over as they don't actually NEED taunt at low levels, what with gauntlet/punchvoke and taunt auras but they tend to get it in place of real attacks. Just a random passing whine.

Check out impale in dominators thorny assault - it's pretty much the same power with a much faster activation (1.584s w/arcanatime), a slightly longer recharge (10s vs 8s) and extra range. Just pull the animation from that power replace the melee AT version with that - bingo, faster impale without playing around with animation frames in the current animation. EDIT: I just jumped into character creator to take a look at both attacks (spines impale and thorny assaults impale) and in the creator the animations for both powers looks almost exactly the same, so I have no idea why spines impale take 1.1 seconds more to cast than the one in thorny assault - the only thing I can think is spines has a huge amount of 'hang time' after the power fires off, which means when it was adapted to thorny assault someone ALREADY fixed the animation. I see no reason NOT to copy the thorny assault version over to spines.

I think everyone here is missing an obvious fix to hurl that already exists - port the animation and activation time from 'hurl boulder' in dominators earth assault - even leaving the recharge/damage the same as it is now that would drop the cast time from 2.64s to 1.716s (arcanatime), upping the DPA. Even better, they should port the attack as it is - a 12 second recharge with the appropriate damage increase. That would actually make it a power worth taking (not sure what the actual damage would be - its a pretty hard hitting attack on dominators but they have a pretty good ranged damage base).

Except that as it stands you will rarely get the asborb when it most matters - when your HP are low because you need to fire off PB at least every 2 mins in order to get status protection. Yes, eventually your def will get to the point where you will get hit so infrequently you will likely be able to take the chance of saving PB for the absorb - but on any AT but a tank (and possibly a brute now) your not going to be there until at least the 30's, if not 40's. That's fine for folks who PL their character to 50 in a day or two, but some of us LIKE playing the 1-49 game. Personally, I don't care what they do with scrapper/stalker/brute/tank SR - as I stated early, this is a straight out nerf to sentinel's SR that is completely unnecessary. Sentinel armor sets have always been different from melee AT armor sets - changing them to 'match' melee armor sets makes no sense to me as that just makes things boring. I don't mind losing the absorb (although I am not happy with that) but I dislike having to pay for an extra toggle when I didn't before. Now, if they add something to the toggle, maybe some extra regen or a hp boost, even a minor amount, that would balance things a bit better, give you something to slot in the power other than end reduction AND match up more accurately with other sets that have status protection toggles - almost all of those give something other than status protection. I could probably live with that.

So, awesome changes overall. The only borderline changes are the altered animation - I am a huge fan of adding extra animations to, well, everything as much as possible and I am happy for all the folks who want to drop the sword animations because it doesn't fit their theme, I find the new animations, well, lacking and looking kinda silly - basically you are still attacking with a blade, only now its invisible. Seriously, the GFS animation isn't so bad, although an overhand single target attack looks a bit odd, but the fire sword animation still looks like you are attacking someone with a blade, just one you can't see. I am certainly not advocating the dev's drop the new animations, if that's all they have time for its still awesome. But some true NEW animations that actually look good would be really nice. EDIT: I went back and took a closer look at the new animations. FSC is actually pretty cool looking even without the blade, so kudo's on that one. GFS is better than I first thought, its acceptable but fire sword still makes the character look like a dork. YMMV as this is purely my opinion but hey, its feedback.

I have to chime in with the folks who dislike the changes. I pretty much only played SR on sentinels, because currently its the best version of the set. It doesn't require you to constantly click to keep up your mez protection and it gives you a nice emergency button, not that I ever used it much as I tend to play a bit more conservatively than the +4/x8 solo impossible TF's folks. Between that and the extra end rec from enduring and its an awesome, playable set. The current changes on beta will see me dropping my sentinel SR' s like a hot potato and absolutely will not encourage me to play SR on any other AT's, especially as these sets won't have enduring to offset the extra end cost of master brawler. I have no interest in taking practiced brawler, I dislike any build that requires a power on auto click (I play some of them, especially dominators, but I frequently get fed up without having to monitor an auto click to make sure it goes off and switch to other toons). I am not interested in paying a hefty, extra end cost for my status protection. As previous posters have noted, however you roll it this is a huge nerf to sentinel SR and at best a minor improvement to all other versions of SR.

I have to agree with Catalyze on the Ninjitsu changes - this is a huge, ugly nerf. If you are really going to reduce the powers return this much keeping it as a click power is cruel and unusual punishment. Make it a toggle (that costs no end) or an auto power so we can take it, stick a perf shifter +end proc and run with would work so much better and still get the reduction in overall end recovery you want. Having to click the power every 30 seconds (at least) will make it unusable, at least to me. Clicking it at the end of a fight so you can move quickly to the next group, or once during a fight when you get hit by end drain is cool, constant clicking just to get slightly over half the end rec is NOT COOL. So please, be cool. But seriously - a click power that returns a bunch of end makes sense, feels good and is worth taking. A click that just slightly boosts your end rec will just confuse players as its hard to see the returns and I doubt many people (if any) like having to constantly click for no obvious return. The set already has one click you need to put on auto (kuji-in rin), with this change Seishinteki Kyoyo would be better off as an auto or toggle that boosts your end rec, just like quick recovery.

Only Sonic Thrust/Strident echo cause attune to do more damage, all the other attacks do an extra 10% damge themselves when attune is active. The patch notes for earsplitter, sandman's whisper, deafening wave and sonic clap ALL state this - the misleading part is its not in the attune description. Two examples from the patch notes (not interested in cutting/pasting more): Deafening Wave - PBAoE Melee, DMG(Energy/Smash), Foe Chance for Hold You create a large field of sonic waves, causing damage to all foes around you. It has a moderate chance of causing migraines, leaving them shaking in pain and helpless. This power will inflict 10% bonus damage against Attuned targets. Earsplitter - Melee, DMG(Energy/Smash), Foe -Res(Debuffs), Chance for Hold You generate an earsplitting sound wave right in the face of your foe, inflicting great damage. It has a good chance of causing a migraine, leaving them shaking in pain and helpless. This power will inflict 10% bonus damage against Attuned targets. Attune went through a lot of changes in the open beta, most of the 'complaints' about it are based on old information. Currently, its a fast casting (1s), fast recharge (0.5s) toggle with a 20 ft range, It adds to the damage of all the attacks in the set in various ways and does a dot as well. Is it a great power? not sure, its definitely a gimmick. I am not saying the set or power is awesome, but if you map attune to a powexec_toggle_on macro its easy to use and as far as I have been able to tell so far (L21 sonic/psychic armor brute) makes all the attacks more effective, at least on a single target. Still holding back my opinion on the entire set as a whole at least until I hit the mid 30's , which is when I will have a decent build with all the best powers, but so far its soloing at least as fast as any other brute I have played.

Does anyone have good advice on slotting attune? Its doesn't need recharge obviously and while end reduction is nice in a toggle its not quite as important as it is in a full attack, which means that most common IO sets (crushing impact, etc) are going to be wasting a lot of their enhancement values. I am just starting a couple of sonic chars (stalker and brute) to get a feel for them but for now it looks to me like an accuracy, a couple slots of damage and maybe an end red is all you need, although I am tending to leaving it with just the basic slot for accuraccy. Anyone have better ideas?

I have been playing both a stalker and brute on and off as all the changes went through (Sonic Melee/Regen on both, mostly cause regen is a nice, nuetral easy to play secondary). I played both up to L12 just to get a feel for low-level play, then bumped them to 31 which is about where I have a fairly solid build with all my main melee powers slotted up and enough defenses in the secondary to make play decent. It also allows me to slot up medium range IO sets (crushing impact, etc), then I mostly ran paper missions as I feel those give me a good estimate of how the characters play in general. I have found that if a character doesn't play well in the low 30's I am going to be disappointed in the 40's and 50's. I can't really comment on the early game now, to many changes to the set. I found the 1-12 trip no harder than usual, but no easier either. The 31+ play was not bad, but not really memorable either. As many folks have already said, the animations are all over the place, preventing me from feeling like the set has a common theme. The damage, while not sucky is lack luster. Esthetics wise the set is lacking. Between the mix of arm strikes and what looks like screams/mind blasts its hard to fit it to a theme, which reduces my interest in the set. The animations don't excite me, nor do the sounds. All of that reduces my enjoyment in playing the characters. I design and play characters both for effectiveness in play and fun in play style, so this is one strike against the set for me. After some thought about the damage I realized that the sonic melee set is very comparable to another set already on the main servers - Ice melee. Its a good set to compare against, Ice melee is probably in the top half of effectiveness (at least I feel that way), its damage it neither resisted heavily nor are there a ton of mobs vulnerable to it. It has the same number of single target melee attacks, a cone and a pbaoe just like sonic melee. Note that I did the comparasin without factoring in attune - mostly because it is extremely difficult to factor it in. Even the stalker version is a nice match - sonic melee gives up Sandman's Whisper just like ice gives up greater ice sword for AS. Ran a bunch of numbers on paper, not feeling like repeating them but the result is that sonic melee comes off short or at best even in all cases. Frozen fists, ice sword, Greater Ice Sword and Freezing touch do better damage and have better DPA' s than their sonic melee counterparts, although earsplitter and freezing tough are very close. Having attune active MIGHT balance things but attune adds an additional 1.67s (plus arcanatime) to the attack chain, potentially reducing the overall DPA. Sonic clap FEELS like it should be better than frost, but frost does twice the damage and even with a much longer cast time still has a higher DPA - I am not factoring in the larger target cap here, frost is a smaller enough cone that both powers are likely to only hit 5 targets - in which case frost wins with more damage. Deafening wave at 15' radius might actually be reasonably balanced against Frozen Aura's 10'r, but FA still has a higher DPA. Then you get into secondary effects - the Sonic Melee secondary effects are all over the place, which makes it hard to just how useful they are, where the slows in all ice attacks and the hold in freezing touch are very reliable. As it stand I will be unlikely to play any sonic melee characters until the set is cleaned up, either to make it more effective or more pleasing to the eye/ear. Some things that might help the set (mostly echoing things other folks have said): Sonic Thrust - bump this up to a 3 or 4 second recharge with the appropriate damage boost. Fast recharge, low damage attacks just don't cut it in a world of 80%-100% global recharge Strident Echo - same deal as sonic thrust - 7 or 8 second recharge with the app. dam boost would make both these early powers possible worth keeping. Sonic Clap - its a cool attack, with one of the few decent animations but does to little damage and hits to few targets for its area. Needs to be improved Sandman's Whisper - bump up to a 10 second recharge to make it a true tier 3 attack. The sleep is crap but since it has a decent damage resist debuff I can live with it.

Just ran a quick check - as Kai Moon reported, attune is only a click on scrappers. On brutes and stalkers it is a toggle that basically reapplies the initial hit over and over again. (to the point where my stalker can kill a boss with it from hide, then use the 3 stacks of assassin's focus it generates to get an autocrit from AS - pretty cool except for the end drain).