FupDup

We can verify this by looking over on City of Data. Every Scrapper primary attack has its own line (extra damage) tagged to be active during Fiery Embrace, but this tag is absent on every pool power. I'm guessing they probably never did but I've never looked into this particular ability sooooo... It does seem pretty weird. I guess it does make sense for certain very stronk attacks like sniper beams to not have such a huge damage bonus but the more basic and shitty pool attacks could probably use the extra boost.

I wouldn't mind it as much if fire and cold damage were more common among NPCs so that the set bonuses had more value. As it is, cold is the most rare damage type in the game and fire is sorta uncommon.

They're not very common, though. 😕

I would argue that the Trolls are science origin because their power comes from Superadine, which is a drug created in laboratories. Any normal person who takes the drug can gain their powers, and there's a storyline in King's Row about exactly that.

Crey is the big one, and Freakshow is debatable since their tank units are more or less permanently fused into their armor. Nemesis Warhulks sorta count (they're basically like WH40K Dreadnaughts for injured Nemesis troops). It's probably a design choice given that this is a fantasy/superhero setting with all sorts of different power origins colliding. I just wish we had some more costume piece variety for making our own power armored supers.

Sentinels. Yes, I'm weird. I like the versatility of having both armor AND ranged sets (as opposed to the dichotomy between one OR that most other ATs enforce). No specific powerset because I tend to move on to my next alt shortly after getting one to T4 incarnates.

It adds mezz protection to your earlier toggles: Focused Fighting: Mag 10 KB Mag 8 Immob Focused Senses: Mag 8 Sleep, Stun, Hold

I would rather put one of those procs in Sprint so that Infil can mule a defense proc. Best of both worlds.

Infiltration's defense bonus is completely lost if you engage in combat, so it really shouldn't be taken as a survival tool. It's just a travel power/mule. If you want the stealth aspect then the actual Stealth power at least provides as much defense as Hover or Combat Jumping in combat, but at a pretty high endurance cost admittedly. And it gives a tiny bit larger of a stealth radius than Infil.

I just wanna nitpick and point out that Full Auto and Rain of Arrows actually recharge slower on Sents than other ATs, with no compensation either. But otherwise I agree that Sents are more than just a "training wheels" AT. Also I wanna point out that it's ironic for the guy named "Crysis" to say that Sents are only training wheels since Sents can actually do a Crysis character concept better than other ATs. Crysis is a game about shooting stuff (ranged attacks) and the Nanosuit is a semi-organic symbiote that rapidly adapts to its environment with mutually exclusive toggles for stuff like armor and strength (literally Bio Armor to the letter). I had a Crysis-inspired Beam/Bio Sent and it was pretty beastly even before the AT got revamped.

The link you provided is broken. But anyways, without the link, the main broad concern that stands out is that trying to build for lots of ranged defense on an armor set with no built-in defense or DDR is probably not worth the cost in terms of slots. Spend some of those resources on recharge, resists, and HP (or even just regen) because those scale with Rad Armor's mechanics much better (especially recharge). For example, that 6-slotted Gladiator's Armor is definitely inefficient. Not only is the ranged defense a bit of a trap as said above, but the 3-slot bonus of KB protection also has no value on an armor set that already provides plenty of it by default. All of those Zephyr pieces are wasteful for the same reason. I think Bombardment, Annihilation, or Positron's Blast would make more sense than Artillery for Chain Lightning, again because of the defense thing. Did you already reach full slow resistance (can't open the build to see)? If not you can slot Winter's Gift in Fly's free slot to help with that. The endurance should probably be fine outside of the crash from Meltdown. It only deducts a small amount of end upfront (just -10%, negligible), but it disables recovery for 10 seconds which might get you into trouble if you blast too fast. If you do end up having issues on that front, you could try slotting the Miracle proc and/or adding some +5 boosted Endmod IO's to Stamina and/or Gamma Boost (might be a little overkill but I have an addiction to blue juice). Or just take Ageless as your destiny ability and use it to regain any lost juice during the meltdown crash.

It's a ranged AT that gets built-in mezz protection, debuff resistance, and overall better protection (armor set depending). Also, IMO a big selling point is that you don't need to spend all day in melee (Blasters) or buffing/debuffing (Defender/Corrupter). It's an AT that just can spend all day shooting without losing massive parts of their kits' functionality. It can create character concepts like Iron Man or War Machine that don't really feel right on the other ATs. Boiling hot take: Sentinels might be the only truly ranged AT in the game (Blasters are melee/mezz, Corrs are supports). Bonus Round: Some sets on Sents translate better than others, like for example Super Reflexes gets a clicky aborb plus passive endurance recovery and toggle mezz protection. Invuln is another one that is truly stupid, gaining passive absorb plus greater max endurance in one power.

His explanation only covers Full Auto - which I'd argue is actually a further nerf since the "inner radius" mechanic of other Sent nukes give you control over which targets get hit hardest. It doesn't explain the enormous gap between Rain of Arrows and the other Sent nukes. If these abilities were created from scratch for Sents specifically I don't think this extreme gap would exist. The simplest explanation here is that these Sent nukes all inherited some of the design traits from the parent powersets on other ATs, but the two outliers (Full Auto and Rain of Arrows) did not get any special Sentinel consideration for their unique tradeoff of lower damage for faster recharge that other ATs get.

The OP is highlighting the disparity between Rain of Arrows/Full Auto and the other Sentinel nukes: On other ranged ATs those two get faster recharge to make up for their lower damage, so there's actually a real tradeoff to consider, but Sentinels inherited the lower damage despite having normalized (slowed down) recharges.

All Sentinel nukes have equal recharge of 90 seconds baseline.

Somebody brought up the Assault Rifle nuke disparity during the most recent page testing and the lead power dev said that it's all perfectly fine and balanced because AR's random crits can hit any target in the cone, compared to other circular AOE and PBAOE nukes that only crit in the center. I would argue that's actually a further downgrade because you can't control which targets get hit by the bonus damage. This was said by the same guy who thinks that Archery needs to get a nerf if the 3 ticks issue gets fixed on Rain of Arrows...so yeah. Just use Fire Blast as god intended is the takeaway I get from all this. EDIT: Found the quote:

The new Ignite is more or less just Incinerator plus a tiny added AOE patch. The primary target always takes the full burn even if they run so it's no real loss other than not being unique anymore.

Basically all the changes except Snipe and Beanbag since Sent AR lacks them.

Sentinel AR is completely unique in the following ways: >Beanbag replaced with Disorienting Shot, moved to T2 >Slug moved to T4 >Snipe removed >Aim added >Other general Sentinel primary changes that all sets have (i.e. range reduction, nuke normalization, target caps, etc.) Blaster, Defender, and Corrupter are all the same design as each other just with different stats.

In that case, the power level of a maxed out character isn't any higher just by getting their nuke earlier. Usually this just means switching around the order of powers in leveling rather than gaining more powers at the end. Removing the T1 requirement of Tough/Weave however would give almost everybody an extra power pick. It can be debated just how large or small of a buff that would be, but it is a flat buff to everybody at max level.

Two counterpoints: 1. Previous power creep does not justify more of it. 2. Yes the devs actually are pretty concerned about it, at least for most sets. It's at the point where they actually, legitimately, considered nerfing Archery when they fix the bug with its T9 (not all ticks register right now). But of course certain sets like Fire Blast and Invuln are allowed to have free buffs with no counter-nerfs for some odd reason. Like, I wouldn't be angry or quit if the T1 requirement was loosened and the game wouldn't be destroyed. But I don't think we need a global difficulty reduction right now (no matter how slight).

Even that would still be a bit too stronk I think since saving even 2-3 slots can make a huge difference in builds. There just needs to be better T1 powers in Fighting so people don't feel "taxed" and also probably more pool resist powers in general since there's literally just two of them compared to eight hundred million different defense powers. Fighting is so popular because it's the only real pool source of S/L resists...it has a total monopoly (Rune doesn't count because it's a T3 clicky with low uptime). And if you're 2/3 powers in you might as well pick up Weave while you're at it.

Fitness was made inherent because the early game was nearly unplayable without Stamina due to overtuned endurance costs on everything. You'd throw out like 2 or 3 basic attacks then have to start huffing and puffing because you're as exhausted as if you just ran two marathons back to back. The game is playable without Fighting. You'll generally be quite a bit weaker, but it's playable. When it comes to this pool I'd just like a better T1 power like a throwing knife or axe. Alternatively, the only way I could entertain the notion of Tough/Weave without prerequisites is if they performed at much weaker levels when taken standalone.

Hami's generally aren't that terrible. D-Syncs, on the other hand...some of those are just insane.

Nerf Sents. And Regen. And especially Sent Regen.