FupDup

Giving an AT different FX options feels weird and I can't really agree with it because it limits the fantasy of other classes, especially for such highly requested things as eye beams. If this was going to be a post about making the powers mechanically/functionally different, like how BR gets another AOE or Elec Armor gets higher Regen, that I would support 42069%. There are definitely some primaries and secondaries that would benefit from being made more mechanically different to suit the unique needs of the AT.

SR is definitely a great armor set, but I think calling it an off-tank might be pushing it a bit. SR is more of an all-rounder with a slight offensive edge due to the recharge boost it gives. DP/SR is a fine and extremely common Sent build because of the fantasy it provides, so if you want to run it then run it, as long as you keep your expectations grounded. Something really, truly tanky would be Dark/Invuln (one of the tankiest armors paired with a debuffing primary) if you're aiming for that specific gameplay niche rather than a Matrix/Tomb Raider/whatever character fantasy that SR provides.

My suggestion for Presence is to just add a toggle taunt aura as a second T2 power choice. This kills a few different birds with one stone: >Makes the T3 powers more worthwhile because the current T2 is pretty bad, meaning you effectively have to take a "wasted" power pick for them >Allows any AT to try to play as an offtank, which could be especially useful for things like MMs, Crabbers, and Kheldians >Helps alleviate player concerns with runners

We have water ranged attacks and support powers. We lack water armor and control powers, which may make it hard to fill in the necessary 5 power slots on certain ATs.

Power creep is anything I don't like.

A lot of it comes from the -res debuffs and/or +damage buffs supplied in their secondary support set. Of course, the amount of those buffs/debuffs can vary wildly between different support sets, with a few having either no -res or +dam at all.

What Lumi is referencing is a past statement by one of the power devs that Sentinels were designed as "ranged Scrappers" rather than an "armored Blaster" or whatever. This design philosophy is likely the root of most issues faced by the AT. Even with that supposed design philosophy, most people rightfully still compare Sents to Blasters and other ranged ATs because the entire reason Sents were created in the first place was to provide a ranged blasting playstyle paired with the safety of armor. Sentinel AOE power was already curved pretty massively by reducing their target caps to mirror those of melee ATs, so including the range reduction on TAOE's is just another layer of annoyance on top of that (multi-layered interlocking nerfs is a staple of Sentinel kit design it seems).

Since cones take the same TAOE enhancement sets, my brain lumped them all together. It looks like rain-type powers are only 60 feet on non-Sents but most of the others do tend to be 80 except for a few nukes (90 Meteor and Rain of Arrows, 60 Thunderous Blast and Blizzard).

Sentinels are an unpopular AT, so discussions about them tend to slip through the cracks unless those discussions are shitting on them. On to the topic, yeah it'd be nice for quality of life but the power devs seem to think that the armor secondary is super omega extremely powerful, which caused them to place a lot of extra limitations on their primary and inherent powers that most other AT's don't need to deal with. Another thing is that many of these AOEs do actually have shorter range even on the other ATs. Like Flamethrower and Buckshot are also 40ft on Blasters for example. Fistful of Arrows is 50 ft. Some go out to 60ft, some go all the way out to 80ft, it's pretty inconsistent. So if we normalized all of them to 60 on Sents, this would actually have Sents out-ranging the other ATs in some cases. To avoid that, I think the rule should instead be that they're allowed to share the same range as the normal version capped up to 60 feet max for most sets and 75 for Psi (because Psi has extended range).

As a bit of a sidebar, I do wish that bank missions gave merit rewards upon completion, at least for the radio/paper-assigned ones. The quick ones you get from special contacts would be exempt of course.

The added offense to Council is generally not very controversial, but man I really don't like how bullet-spongey they got. The issue is partly that the dev team is balancing on the assumption of a decked out full team, which means that solo play gets slowed waaaay down to mollasses, while ironically teams only got slowed down a little bit.

On a semi-related note, I think that the "combine 3 to make another type of the same tier" thing should be proliferated to Dual, Team, and Team Dual insps. Right now, unlocking them often just means more inventory clutter because they can't combine.

>Storm Blast's Chain Lightning >Electric Blast's Tesla Cage at full Static >Ion Judgement probably doesn't count A few more to this list could be nice though, just a matter of finding a place to fit them in.

It would be one thing if he argued that certain specific debuffs are weak, like defense debuffs used by players (they're pretty much worthless on their own and only exist to give players more proc bombs). But debuffs as a whole?

I'm going to lean towards "mostly not" but it depends. For normal content it rarely matters because the team will probably win easily enough. A lot of people are already unintentionally running builds that would make veterans cringe and it seems to be working fine for the most part. For special stuff like hardmode then I think the minimum bar comes up a bit, I don't think you should need 100% giga turbo optimized stuff with 69 procs slotted into every attack power, but definitely avoid the blatantly obvious troll builds like petless MMs or John Empathy Defenders and have a "moderately good" build set up.

To further elaborate on the branching choices thing, the exact dev reason for not wanting to repeat it is because they didn't want to "open the floodgates" or establish a precedent. They were worried that people would start to expect the same treatment for other powersets every single time they try to change something.

I think the activation times are fine in general (excluding Piercing Rounds of course). A buff I'd rather have would be for the alternate ammo type to compose a larger % of your damage than it does now (same total damage, just split maybe 60/40 or 70/30 for lethal/exotic). And maybe change the default ammo split to lethal/smash instead of pure lethal? That would explain how it causes knockback. It would also be nice for Suppressive Fire in toxic mode to deal as much damage as ice mode does, I don't see any reason for it to be punished that way it is. A final wish would be for Sentinels to get the lethal ammo in SuppFire restored to actually inflict real damage like it used to before it got nerfed to normalize it with other ATs.

My concern is less about the damage and more about the tradeoff or lack thereof involved with getting it. Building for max damage is basically the default for most veterans and there's not really many sacrifices being made in the process. They get to have their cake and eat it too. Somebody who builds for survival, on the other hand, will be making many very large sacrifices in the process, which is how it should be. How exactly to get to this point is up for debate, whether that means changing procs, set bonuses, power base values, IDK. All I know is that it's not really good game design for one path to get the best of all worlds with minimal drawbacks.

I'm still weary of adding more offense to Empathy for thematic reasons (I understand the metagame reasons but I think that meta is dogshit and don't want to further reinforce/stagnate it), but at least this psi proc version is more creative and unique than your previous -res idea. I don't entirely hate it.

I want to make a correction here that Ice Blast on Sentinels is absolutely not a good set like it is on other ATs. This is due to Freezing Ray being replaced by a very weak power called Chilling Ray, which has far lower DPA (64% lower to be exact) and changes the secondary mezz effect to Sleep (which means limited proc choices). Freezing Ray on other ATs is a Hold, which lets it slot a bajillion different super powerful procs and you can stack that Hold effect with another power in the same set. Furthermore, Chilling Ray's Sleep is autohit but the damage is not, which can mess with the accuracy of your other attack powers due to breaking the streakbreaker mechanic.

He's probably referring to Full Auto and Rain of Arrows, which both have lower alpha strike damage and longer recharge than their Blaster counterparts. Technically they're "balanced" when compared relative to other Sentinel T9s, but when compared to Blasters they do stand out as major outliers.

You're specifically talking about Rain of Arrows and Full Auto, right? Those are the only two that get hit in both damage and recharge. They're definitely a very weird case because the devs tried to balance all the Sent nukes against each other in a vacuum, even though Sents inherited their primaries from other ATs where these powers were not normalized like that. It works fine for most long recharging nukes but those two in particular are pretty wonky. On the bright side, these two share the same target caps as their Blaster counterparts at least (16 for RoA, 10 for FA) and Full Auto can be paired with Aim to make up for the damage loss (sucks for RoA though lul).

This appears to be a common problem among ATOs, including Brutes at least.

Because I'm bored I decided to look up the other passive absorb powers in Sentinel armors for comparison. Frigid Shield (Ice Armor): 30.1 x 2 (only the second half is enhanceable) Durability (Invulnerability): 30.1 (fully enhanceable, does not cancel during mezz) Instant Regeneration (Regeneration): 48.2 (fully enhanceable) So in a vacuum, Frigid Shield looks pretty fine. Of course, one could point out that Invuln has a lot of other goodies that Ice doesn't get which more than makes up for that... The real killer is that Frigid Shield's absorbs are both set to "replace" rather than "stack" like Durability and Instant Regeneration are. This is the reason it's not building up over time. This tag needs to be swapped but I think the base values are probably okay as-is. As for the mezz canceling, Instant Regen has the same weakness in its design, but Durability doesn't, so it's debatable as to whether that's intended or not.

There's a few variables here that are being overlooked, namely the level of defense and resistance that the player can have. A squishy hero like a Defender capped at 75% resistance would only take 750 damage from that Hopkins 3K giga punch, which would still hit most Fenders pretty hard but it would be survivable. And at the defense softcap, only 5% of enemy attacks will hit you. A lot of these NPC damage values seem to be assuming that you have a certain degree of protection built up. I understand that not all ATs and powerset combos can achieve uber high def/res values easily, but even then the game's current meta largely revolves around maximizing DPS and -res debuffs to delete baddies as rapidly as possible. In such an environment, globally reducing NPC damage would make building for maximum deeps even more of a no-brainer due to reducing the consequence of going all-in on offense. In the current meta I think defensive building needs more incentive/reward rather than less. Maybe this could be something to smooth out if we ever got to a point where MOAR DAMAGE wasn't the name of the game, but we're pretty far away from that and I don't see that changing anytime soon.