FupDup

If you wanna go with a Dark Archer kind of concept, that would give you a good excuse to dip into the Dark Mastery epic pool. Smite can help mitigate the lethal resistance issue that Archery can sometimes run into, and if you take Engulfing Darkness that would allow you to potentially drop Fistful of Arrows (because a 30 degree cone isn't easy to aim in melee range).

As an aside, slotting for that much regen is probably not optimal, especially in the Energy Mastery powers. If you want more green numbers you could slot the Power Transfer proc (not subject to regen caps and gives it in a chunk) in Stamina and/or Quick Recovery and/or the various Energy Mastery passives if you haven't already. Otherwise focus on other stats like max HP, global recharge, slow resistance, and general damage resistance.

Why vote for the lesser of two evils when you can have the real thing? Vote for Recluse!

The patch notes are missing some context. In closed beta, the recharge on all the Sentinel epic immobs were set to 20 seconds in order to "normalize" things with the penalties that the devs decided to give epic pool powers. There was some complaining by a few people (at 20s it took too long to stack the immob magnitude to lock down high rank enemies) that got it bumped down to 16 seconds at the cost of those other attributes. Some of that stuff was also to keep the powers in-line with other penalties that Sentinels have to deal with in their base kit (target caps, range). Basically the patch notes here are missing an in-between mini-patch from closed beta where these things got changed.

Dark Blast is pretty good on Sentinels. Dual Pistols is kinda okay, nothing great but okay. Archery is kinda poop. Energy Aura, Super Reflexes, and Invulnerability are some of the better armor sets available. Regeneration has some unique tweaks compared to other classes but I wouldn't put it in the top tier. Dark Armor is kinda middling on Sents because it trades the burst heal that melee classes get for regeneration and recovery.

I'd lean towards Invulnerability or Super Reflexes. Willpower is kinda meh on Sentinels (or on non-tanks really). The AT special feature is a click button that charges up over time that applies a debuff to a single enemy target. Make sure to either put the Vulnerability power in your power tray somewhere if you haven't already, or even make a macro for it.

The inherent Conditioning really ought to be buffed. At bare minimum I'd like it to be slottable so we could stick an extra Shifter proc or something in there.

They might have been using Team Teleport. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=pool.teleportation.team_teleport&at=scrapper

I can't say what's under development, but I'm pretty sure that I can say what isn't under development. I haven't seen any word about Broadsword adjustments as of yet. Katana remains mostly better than Badsword for the time being, other than not being able to pair with Shield Defense.

It's 45 degrees. If we compare that to normal ranged blast cones (most are just 30), that seems fine. The problem is that when we compare it to other incarnate judgements, it starts to look a lot less fine. Vorpal Judgement is also a cone, and it's a whopping 120 degrees. The others aren't cones but their radiuses tend to be very large, with Ion in particular being truly stupid with how many targets it can touch. The simplest change would be to increase its cone width to match Vorpal. We could alternatively take a creative route and let it keep the cone angle weakness but give it an alternative tradeoff to make that weakness worthwhile, like increased damage or something. But I'd still prefer the cone angle because that keeps it in-line with other incarnate powers of the same type. Judgements are meant to clear an entire room, they're not precision tools.

The point of being rifle-based is that it allows natural-origin Controllers and Dominators to be a thing. Normal unpowered humans can't create cages of electricity or fire just by training real hard. They can, however, pick up a gun.

My post wasn't to argue whether it's a buff or not, but to reassure the other user that the Brute/Tanker version was not excluded from the changes. As for damage over time, maybe it might be similar for the most part but being auto-hit will be a nice counter to enemies who can give themselves or allies super high defenses that would cause you to miss most of the time. And the Brute/Tanker recharge nerf will be a slight proc rate buff.

I'd like the same for vigilantes blueside. As for whether it's possible, I'd assume that it would be given that the Galaxy City and Goldside tutorials let you pick an alignment. We could use something similar for the "grey" alignments, it's just a matter of finding a way to implement it that feels organic enough. IMO I'd like to add alternate choices to the Breakout and Outbreak tutorials for rogue/vigilante. Like for Breakout, add an alternate starting contact who lets you go do your own thing, maybe steal some crap or whatwever, instead of rescuing the Arachnos pilot dude. For Outbreak, a contact that sends you to murderize somebody responsible for the outbreak instead of protecting the people or rescuing the ambushed hero.

That actually appears to have been accounted for given the patch notes for LBE reference all 4 melee ATs: Epic > Laser Beam Eyes (Brute/Scrapper/Stalker/Tanker) - Power is now auto-hit, but damage inflicted is randomized based on the hit-roll Epic > Laser Beam Eyes (Brute/Tanker) - Recharge increased from 6s to 8s Epic > Laser Beam Eyes (Scrapper/Stalker) - Endurance Cost reduced from 8.07575 to 6.5 And there's also the bit where Body Mastery is getting renamed to Energy Mastery anyways.

On the topic of power customization, would it be possible for some of the ranged epic attacks like Charged Bolts, Gloom, etc. to have Mace and/or Crab backpack options?

My own take is that giving extra aethers might imbalance the economy with them a little bit. The official stated reason for their inclusion was to help transfer inf downward from more settled-in players to lower leveled ones, but putting too many of them into the system could drive their price down and thus not "trickle down" the inf like they're intended to. Standard reward merits could have a similar issue because converters and boosters are both very important parts of the economy. Emp merits, on the other hand, would have no real issue because the worst that can happen with those is that super insps might get a little cheaper. But those aren't very important in the grand economy. Extending the emp merit rewards out past vet level 99 would probably not hurt anything. I'm usually in the altisis camp myself (I tend to stop playing an alt shortly after reaching T4 incarnates) but I'd be okay with this. Heck, I don't even get close to vet level 99 as it is anyways but I don't feel like I'm being slighted for that. I'm honestly impressed at how someone can keep interest in a single alt for that long.

If the reward goes too high, then that could get people rejected from teams for playing the "wrong" AT so I'd rather err on the side of being too low.

Sentinels can actually get a damage aura in the Electric Mastery epic pool, as a slight correction here.

The thing to remember is that picking FA comes at the opportunity cost of not having a damage-based epic pool like Mu for Scrapper/Stalker or Soul for Brute/Tanker. And since damage is literally the only thing that matters in this game, I don't see this exchange becoming overpowered anytime soon.

The lore reason for frag exclusion doesn't stand up to scrutiny. My own headcanon reason is that the devs want to push people to take the Bane's beam AOE powers instead of relying only on grenades (which are much more effective). But they also don't want to buff the beam powers "too much" so that's why your grenade launcher can't load frags.

I have a few reasons for having more heroes than villains: 1. Character concepts, I generally like being good or at least an edgy anti-hero a lot more than being entirely selfish or an outright psychopath. 2. The lower population makes it harder to get team content going. 3. Much lower number of contacts/arcs and zones, which makes progression feel very samey between multiple alts. Blueside allows for a lot more different side-paths with stuff like The Hollows and Croatia. This is made worse by many NPCs requiring you to be introduced by a broker first. 4. The story arcs tend to be shorter, which means fewer merits awarded at the end, which means a harder time making inf. And with less team content, that's another source of merits reduced. The first one is hard to solve without messing up the tone/lore of the Isles. The second one is a chicken-or-the-egg kind of thing. The bottom two are more actionable. Just a little nudge up in the merit rewards in most redside arcs would be nice. Not a huge bump, just a few extra to help reduce the income gap a little.

I think the patch notes are referring to the "per tick" endurance cost or something. We can see in City of Data that there are two different end cost values listed: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=epic.body_mastery.focused_accuracy&at=scrapper It's definitely a confusing way to convey the patch notes.

I think what Lauci means is that the ToT rewards are one-time per character, so it naturally encourages multiple characters to get more aethers out of it in the long run.

To be fair, Blasters do get a stacking damage buff from Defiance that widens the gap a bit, and Blasters also have a larger variety of melee attacks to supplement their primaries (the game's design tends to favor melee over range most of the time). But even with those factors, the gap is definitely not as huge as many people like to harp on about.

DP can work fine as a melee-oriented blast set. Assault Rifle tends to favor range because it has so many cones in it. Beam doesn't have much reason to melee but it can if you want I guess. Electric rewards melee due to Short Circuit so that's another viable candidate here. One that you didn't mention is Radiation Blast. It comes with 2 PBAOE attacks, making it the most "blappy" ranged set available.