Mercurias

My Fire/Elec Sentinel blasts off his nuke constantly, yeah. It doesn’t have the punch of a Blaster nuke, but it definitely helps.

If you’re asking, that means you’ll probably prefer /Energy and a whole lot of pool powers for survival instead of the damage abilities. I’ve actually got a Dark/Energy Blaster like that who just stays at range and blasts cones from really far away thanks to Boost Range.

I really like all the KD in Battle Axe. It doesn’t kill extremely fast, even for a tanker, but that extra level of mitigation isn’t really nice. Also you look like a barbarian, and that’s awesome. Back on live, my older brother had an Axe/WP Brute that he really enjoyed.

I totally get this, and I get the appeal, but my main AT of choice is probably Controller, and I’ve played too much of my Elec/Kin to think it’s always hilarious to have my powers negated by someone blowing the mobs I’ve stacked up all across the map, because Elec Control has no means of preventing it. My FF/NRG Defender will bounce enemies around, for sure, but I try to slot a KB to KD IO in his AoEs so I can get the soft control out of it without starting fights. Force Bolt, however, is 5-6 slotted with Force Feedback, and it can yeet mobs into the next time zone.

I would probably go for /Radiation, /Fire, /Bio, /WP, or /Ninjutsu. Fire Blast is a powerful set with high endurance costs. There is an entire thread dedicated to the damage potential of a Fire/Rad Sentinel. It hits hard and has solid protections. Fire/Fire is the “Rise of the Phoenix is part of my combat rotation” meme. Less defense and some really nice bonus offense. Bio would give you a nice combination of hybrid protections and added damage alongside bonus recovery. It’s an extremely active, clicky powerset, though. Willpower is really tanky and likewise grants bonus recovery. It lacks the added damage of /Bio, but compensates by being extremely easy to play. You set your toggles and forget about your defenses unless you decided to pop a heal. Fire/Nin would combine the damage of Fire Blast with pure defense, which is probably the strongest PvE mitigation available. You also get a baked-in stealth power, plenty of places to slap in LotG: Recharge IOs, and both a click heal as well as a click endurance recovery power on short cooldowns. It’s less optimal, but I really like Sentinel Ninjutsu and all I’m doing right now is giving my opinions anyway. 😛

Hey that’s awesome! I hear so many things about Ill/Dark.

That’s fair. Cmbi That’s fair. Anything with cones is going to have a frustrating time with /Dark or any other secondary that needs to function well in melee.

I think the number is 70% plus Hasten, but you’ll likely want more to give yourself a cushion. I still try to shoot for as close to perma-hasten as I can, whatever that number is.

I agree that Confuse is a lot of fun, and it’s a great mez, but heck with it. People can play how they like, and I hope they enjoy it.

Welcome back to the game!

I have a friend who loves her Elec/Nin Blaster. She plays primarily in melee range with the character and as such took one of the melee powers, but she seems to enjoy it. It’s softcapped with the T4 Barrier.

Mind Control is quite strong for Dominators who build for PermaDomination. All that recharge plus amped control magnitudes on your messes makes it easy to confuse and fear enemies in big numbers. Radiation Assault looks very cool, but it’s damage is surprisingly low. You’ll benefit most from staying in melee, which I see the range for most of your heavy-hitting attacks, but keep in mind that your Fear power will require you to pop back out to range. if it were my character then I might go for /Fire or /Energy over /Rad. If you enjoy playing it, however, then who cares what a dork like me thinks?

Rad/Water would be interesting to see in action. That’s a cool choice. Also please name it Atomic Waterslide.

Kinetics is a pretty solid power set. Fire/Kin in specific has a lot of raw damage numbers in the blast set to take advantage of your /Kin buffs, but until you reach level 35 it can suffer from endurance issues, and as a whole you have little in the way of damage mitigation. I would recommend teaming up with friends. Dark/Kin might be interesting...

I would say that the threads try’s no to define what a Sentinel is are perhaps trying too hard to find a specific answer to an extremely broad question. Sentinels are an archetype with a ranged blast Primary and an Armor Secondary, tooled to have less damage and fewer maximum targets than Blasters, but be much more survivable. In teams their job is to deal damage to enemies, like a Scrapper or Blaster. Sentinels often excel at handling solo content thanks to their combination of traits. Beyond that, you can have a huge variance of Sentinels depending on their power combinations and respectively builds. Frankly, I’m inclined to say that the biggest strength Sentinels have lays in handling content solo.

I had a Dark/Dark Scrapper that I enjoyed, but that was more because I loved the look of him rather than his overall performance.

I might pair Psychic with /Radiation. As a set, Psychic Blast has fairly light control and strongly favors being able to hang back at long range (due to Psychic Scream). While many enemies have no resistance to psychic damage, those enemies who do, resist it heavily. Going with /Radiation gives you the option of staying at range fairly safely, gives you a nice buff, some healing, and a good amount of debuffing to help chew through enemies that resist Psychic damage.

There was no data file in my game folder. The texture files are all listed under the main CoH game file, and when I attempted to extract Vidiot maps both there and deeper into the system files it just acted as if nothing was there.

Please excuse the double-post, but here's a Plant/Dark/Energy Controller for comparison. I would personally prefer it, because by using Power Boost before Fade you can softcap your defenses with significantly less investment in set bonuses, allowing you to add more damage to the build. Your lowest baseline positional defense is AoE at 25.8%. Normally with this build, Fade would only boost that by 13.5%, to a total of 39% (which is below the 45% softcap). Using power Boost, however, changes Fade's buff to a global 25% global defense, which brings your baseline 25.8% AoE Defense and brings it up to over 50% (which is honestly a bit too much). A much more adept person could probably take this and make it a good deal beefier, but I like it for the amount of effort I put into it for a side-by-side comparison.

This is an extremely expensive Plants/Dark/Soul build that has Perma-Hasten as well as softcapped defenses with Fade (also Perma) and extremely high recovery via Soul Absorption (Also also perma). In order to get these numbers, I did need to the Alpha slot for T4 Core Spiritual, but the other Incarnate slots don't matter so much. If you're taking Destiny suggestions, however, I would recommend Clarion for the Mez protection. Also Sprint is slotted with a Celerity +Stealth IO, so when you toggle it then you'll be fully invisible.

So one of the weirdest things about Force Fields is that, as a set that is focused on granting defense buffs, it's a pain in the butt to make your character defense softcapped. If you want to play this combo, I wouldn't bother with heavy IO slotting. I would go with the invisibility, slap in SO Enhancements or basic crafted IOs, get the Cardiac Core Alpha to manage your endurance, and just have fun with it.

For macros as well a small powers?

I've been looking into making binds and macros to customize a few things in my UI, but I haven't yet seen a way to make a Macro show a power's recharge, either by the game's baselong (grey out and then wink back on gradually" method or the numerical timer added. Is there a way to make a macro icon do this in-game somehow?

Sentinels are effectively ranged DPS with a defense/resistance type secondary rather than a Control/DPS/Support Secondary. I don’t remember the specific numbers, but their attacks are weaker than those of Blasters on average. They also have a smaller maximum number of enemies that their AoEs can damage at once. Their health pool is also fairly small. Opportunity is an AT feature attached to the class. As they damage mobs, the Opportunity bar fills. When it hits 100%, you trigger Opportunity with either your T1 or T2 attack. Your T1 attack will cause your target to have a Resistance Debuff. The T2 will cause your attacks to recover amounts of your endurance. Opportunity is nice, but it isn’t as big a deal as, say, Fury for Brutes or Domination for Doms. As a broad rule with many exceptions, the low health pool of Sentinels means that Defense is likely the safest option for survival (Because resistance works better for ATs with high pools of health that can absorb the steady damage). A solid, high-synergy Sentinel to consider would likely be Dark/SR or Dark/Nin. Dark Blast reduces enemy ToHit, making defense more effective, as well as a heal and solid AoE damage. Super Reflexes softcaps quickly and has a built-in global Recharge reduction power. Ninjutsu also softcaps quickly, and while it lacks the Recharge reduction, it includes both a heal and an endurance recovery power to help keep you running. Personally I would go for Dark/Nin and slot a Force Feeback Proc into Torrent, then juggle enemies nonstop to give yourself a near permanent +100% Recharge boost while also maintaining your -ToHit debuffs and having two heals and an endurance recovery power to fall back on if you take damage or have prolonged fights. Sentinels are effective solo characters, and their damage is still significant even if the numbers are lower than those of Scrappers or Blasters. Just like any other AT, it depends on your power choices, build, and player skill rather than only the archetype.

Have you considered Elec/Time? I just started one today. It's a pretty fun combo, and it's kind of a visual treat with all the lighting and light swirls. Mine is only lv 14, but he's already rocking some major debuffs and controls. Time's Juncture, Conductive Aura, Distortion Field, and Static Field all together are like your own little glowing fortress of frozen bad guys. I need to find out if there's a way to make a macro to add dancing after I use powers to make it look like an actual rave...