FupDup

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.

Invuln is a much tankier set in most situations, and the Sentinel version of it has some unique changes that make the gap even wider. Most importantly, Sentinel Invuln gets an auto power called Durability that grants you increased max endurance and a constantly refreshing mini absorb shield. On most ATs, Invuln has a lack of self-sustain due to low regen and no recovery tools, but this one auto power largely negates that drawback. On all ATs, a while ago there was a patch that buffed Invuln's Psi protection (but no buffs for WP) so that's another theoretical advantage to WP that has been undermined. Invuln also gets a bit of Toxic defense while WP gets none at all, along with far better resists to it too. Furthermore, Sentinel WP is slightly weaker in one way. The scaling regen power that most ATs get was turned into a static value, which is actually a buff when there's 0-3 enemies in melee range of you (melee ATs regen more with 4+ enemies nearby) but you lose the to-hit debuff that melee ATs get with no replacement for it (effectively you have slightly lower defense). This factor, combined with the low HP cap and low base armor modifiers mean that an unfocused set like WP is even more watered down than it usually is. TL;DR: Invuln beats WP on Sentinels even harder than it does on other ATs.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

There are actually some cases where the story arc ends if you can't save the NPCs. The one I know of off hand is the Doc Buzzsaw arc, if you fail to protect all the Tank Freaks in one of the missions then she ends it right there.

If we had MM pet customization, you could make your "Thugs" be any style you wanted, maybe even making up your own gang. That's the real tragedy here.

Usually a def or res power just needs the main attribute enhanced (res/def) and then either endurance or recharge, but rarely both. There's not a whole ton of benefit in terms of slotting efficiency for having purple def/res sets. I think the real potential lies in either the set bonuses and/or procs that come with them, like maybe the purple def set's proc could be something like 10% DDR. But even then I agree with the point that other categories are lacking in strong IO options a lot more.

Dream Doctor was right to want to destroy Ouroboros.

I didn't ask for anything to be removed, people who still slotted currently crap sets like Salvo or Bonesnap would still have them. They'd just get a little bit stronger so it's less of a noob trap kind of choice. Here's an example using an existing set, Volley Fire. This is how it currently looks: This is a potential revamp of it: Nothing got removed, only added.

A few examples of good sub-50 sets are Touch of Death, Reactive Armor, and Decimation...notice how these all go up to level 40. There is also Cloud Senses that only goes up to 30 but has really good set bonuses (plus the fact that it only competes against one set, and that one set has extremely shitty bonuses). The ones locked to 20-30 however tend to be shit for both enhancement power and set bonuses, outside of a few unique pieces like Steadfast's +def and KB protection. There's also some bad level 40 ones like Ruin and Focused Smite. Another funny thing is that a lot of the sub-50 sets actually have a higher minimum requirement to slot than stuff like PVPs and Winters that are far more powerful too, which adds more insult to injury. Something I'd like to see is for the crappy lowbie sets to have their max cap increased to 50 and get better set bonuses to make them a truly viable slotting option to make the building minigame feel less stale than it currently is. Instead of just making the bonuses bigger, however, what I would rather have is giving each tier an additional weak bonus so they feel different compared to current sets (choice between a small number of big bonuses or a big number of smaller bonuses).

The devs have a hard stance against any form of defense in Regen besides Moment of Glory, and the same goes for Absorb (in fact they even oppose Sentinel Regen having Absorb too). This limits our options for stuff that can be done with Regen a fair bit. Definitely needs debuff protection, including a measure of slow resistance (nowhere close to what Ice gets but something around 20% or so would be nice),