Metatheory

Good name (and costume.. 😃 ) First time seeing DP with that chest piece - duh!

Dark Armor is good for everything, including on scrappers, and looks sweet with Psi. Go for it. Decide if you want full fluffball or toned-down visuals in the costume editor. The Dark Noir and coloring options can lead to a lot of good results. I'm pretty sure that Psi/Dark is good on ANY AT There are MANY threads around which will talk you through Psi/, /DA, and Psi/DA - including in other forums like Sentinel where you might also pick up some tips, even though the implementations are somewhat different.

After a -very- lengthy battle with +4 Dominatrix the cleanup crew had to work double overtime...

Thanks a lot @BGSacho& @Elthenar Lots of good info, and very interesting that the Gang War guys don't really start being beastly until incarnates are part of the equation. I haven't tried to make any builds as yet but I assume that getting them near-perma is very difficult until recharge bonuses from Alpha, Purples and Superior ATOs are factored in anyway, so I'm expecting a character that I will ride into a lot of post-50 content anyway. I've played cold and traps until the 30s at least on other ATs so I do have a fair amount of familiarity with the positives and drawbacks there. I kind of want to really like traps but I never quite get there, hence I'm curious if a MM might be the right AT for me in that respect. I think what I'm going to do now is start a Thugs/Time and a Thugs/Traps and play them both up until probably the low 30s before making a final decision which one to take to the promised land.

They say 'Ask and ye shall receive...' Amazing @TheSpiritFox ! I shall read and re-read to fully digest. I wasn't really thinking of traps for this run but I've never really made it work on a 'troller before - maybe this is the right place to try it. I also like to sit back and watch the magic sometimes, and the flexible play of the MM is appealing.

Dear Masterminders, I come seeking knowledge I’m a pretty experienced player but the one AT I have never explored in depth is the Mastermind and for my next project I would like to really commit to learning how to build and play one. To this end I have been loitering on this board for a little, trying to pick up some of the main factors which make this AT fun and different! And it seems like there is potentially a lot of fun to be had, but it also seems like the Mastermind really is quite different to what I’m used to from the other ‘core’ ATs! What I have in mind is to build up a pretty strong Mastermind character which can be used across the range of playstyles - casual vs challenging; solo or team-based play. I think I want to play Thugs as I fancy making a character which can leverage using Gang War as often as possible, so global recharge will be a major goal. I have a ‘perma-PA’ Illusion controller and I really enjoy that so I’m thinking this could also be fun. I like the unique attacks in the Beast set too, but I’m pretty sure Thugs is going to be the one that I want. I haven’t decided on a secondary, but I would like to pick one which offers a lot of complementarity with the Thugs. Most likely I will choose one of: Cold Electric Storm Time I haven’t played any of those sets to a high level before and I would like to try something new. I could also consider: Forcefield Empathy ...which I have played before but not for quite a long time. I would welcome comments on how these sets might mesh with Thugs, in particular any special details or ‘combos’ which offer some unique or special interactions which could be leveraged to create that something extra! But aside from the secondary I have identified the following aspects as things which need to be considered when building a Mastermind character with all the options which IOs bring. As I wrote, I’m here seeking knowledge, so I would welcome any comments on the following topics. Which are important or less-important? Perhaps a link to a thread with more information, or to point out that I am missing something relevant in my list. Here are the ‘open questions’ which I have identified from my initial reading here: Most likely I should limit the amount of Mastermind attacks selected (as the damage scalars are so low). One or perhaps even no (primary) attacks could be suitable. How best to use MM ATOs? Mark of Supremacy split three ways can give A LOT of recharge, which could be part of working towards ‘perma’ Gang War. The interaction between procs and pets. Which ones affect pets and which ones don’t? Are there any ‘must have’ procs for pets at different tiers, e.g. chance for KD Overwhelming Force? I have seen this topic discussed quite a lot and there seem to be different opinions on how it works and what are the good choices here. Mostly I'm looking to not 'waste' procs which don't do anything to help either the PC or the pets. How to combine your buffs and debuffs the best way to optimize henchman survivability and attack power. Is it better, for example, to maximize defense for the henchmen, or to combine defense and resists and potentially debuffs to have a more balanced set of tools? The powers which improve the henchmen are obviously important but what are the signature characteristics? For example, I believe that one of the Thugs will gain Tactics at some point, improving attack potential AND introducing the potential for benefitting from Gaussian’s proc? Are there other key components of the power-ups which need to be understood? Understanding e.g. Bodyguard mode and how to build the Mastermind to get the most value from it, if indeed this is a good playstyle with the Thugs? Understanding which IO bonuses affect pets and which affect the PC. Similarly, understanding how incarnate powers affect PC and summons. edit: I will add here 'is stealth useful?' Some secondary powersets offer PBAoE stealth effects and with the MM summons controls your pets can be made to ignore enemies, correct? Is it practical to 'stealth' missions with summons out? Or is that just a non-starter? Seems like I have a lot to learn! Any tips on these topics is very much appreciated. edit: p.s. Yes, I know I will need either binds or macros - I can see there are plenty of good options there

@Sodd - do you have 'remember account' checked on the login screen? because if you don't this file will not be updated.

If you take your squishy fighting e.g. Carnies then it starts to feel pretty optimal IMO!

Not sure I would call Fearsome Stare sub-optimal, but some fear, yes! I love a bit of Invoke Panic on some characters. It doesn't last very long but it can get the heat off you, has a nice animation and it's fun! I quite often take it on blappers and sentinels, and if I ever made a regen character I reckon it would be useful. In former times I would have included Touch of Fear from Dark Melee here as I used to use it a lot, but now that it has been changed into a power that you can't just spam you either need to pair it with Intimidate or Cloak of Fear to do anything interesting with it (both OK powers) or just use it as a ho-hum ticky-tack damage power.

Long-time lurker, first time poster... be gentle 😃 I saw there have been a few nuns posted recently so thought I would share my humble effort, the Sinister Sister! She's been around for a while and never bumped into any other sisters - good to see there are a few of us!

Yes @Hewthat's right, it is the opportunity cost that makes me skeptical of the capped S/L defense route. Radiation is quite an interesting set for a scrapper, I think, because it really does have a very diverse set of tools to play with. Aside from a small 'terrorize-hole' (which does matter a bit in places like Night Ward) pretty much the only thing it doesn't bring is defense. It has resists, regen, -regen, recovery, AoE damage, -def, recharge, absorb! So - to me - it seems like capping defenses can be done but only by risking to overlook most of the things that the set is actually strong at. That is kinda what I was hoping to discuss a bit here, because there are not a lot of posts about radiation armor on the scrapper board. Having said that, what @Nightmarer showed in a build does give me a few ideas for some slotting of IOs so I'm grateful for that and the DM/ build does cap S/L without completely trashing the secondary. I would prefer that the +Crit proc goes in Midnight Grasp, although in my leveling build it seems to be proccing often from ToF so that could maybe also work. I like the Shadow Meld option for /Rad. It gives situational high defense making capping unnecessary and giving more flexibility to build out the other survivability components and retain options in slotting of attacks. This also gives flexibility in pool power picks because it is less necessary to pursue Maneuvers and Hover for example, opening maybe a stealth build, or a teleporter, experiment pool maybe... Thanks for the discussion everyone 😃

I know what you mean @Nightmarerbut in this case it is very expensive to cap S/L on a radiation armor scrapper - and I don't mean in terms of infl (although it's also quite expensive!). I assume to cap S/L you are thinking about 2*3 scrapper's strike, plus blistering cold, avalanche, weave with lots of slots, combat jump/hover, uniques... and even so this won't get you beyond mid-30's %. This build doesn't have that many single target melee attacks, so you are forced to slot what you have with these IOs and not others. I don't think you have the luxury of heavy slotting boxing or brawl for set bonuses as it looks like the secondary is also very slot heavy to get the max out of it. Considering that praetorian enemies in particular bring lots of non-S/L damage too I'm not sure that capping typed def is the right way to go for a /Rad. I definitely could be wrong there, but I suspect it may not be worth the cost. Thanks @Uun. The resistances is fairly straight forward, I think. How much survivability does the +Regen bring in your opinion? I find it difficult to gauge how much the +400-ish % gives you.

I've been leveling a DM/Rad scrapper which is a nice & fun combination that brings a lot of options for both attack and defense. It has a ton of AoE possibilities with Maul, Touch of Fear, Soul Drain, Dark Consumption, Ground Zero, and even Radiation Therapy so it is very effective at mowing through large mobs of enemies. The question is, what is the best path to survivability in general and additionally taking on tough targets? There is a lot to take in and RA gives you a lot of options for how one *could* approach building for survivability. I don't usually play resistance sets on scrappers and don't have much experience with WP/Regen either so I'm not really sure how the numbers from Radiation will 'come together' in the late game. Additionally, it seems like slots will be at a premium for the build. There are a lot of desirable powers from both the primary and the secondary and rather few 'one slot wonders' so far as I can tell. This will place some limits on what set bonuses can be achieved. Resistance: it looks like with set bonuses and tough it should be fairly straightforward to get to 60-70% in most damage types. Meltdown can cap you pretty much across the board, however, it is probably only available around a third of the time at best. Rune of protection could be used for additional gap closing but it will take quite a lot of investment to get it, it will need some heavy slotting and with a 75% res-cap on scrappers probably not worth it overall? Regen: Particle Shielding can pretty easily be made perma and +200% regen or more. Radiation Therapy also buffs regen (amongst other effects) and probably could be made to increase regen by around 200%. These numbers sound good, but are they enough to make reliance on high regen a major focus? And using Therapy for regen means not using it as a mini-nuke so there is some cost to that approach. Gamma Boost also buffs regen, and being an auto power it is one of those which seems hard to gauge how useful it is overall? Absorb: Particle Shielding also brings a pretty nice absorb shield which is always available (with Hasten and a few bonuses) Defence: nothing out of the box, but with weave, CJ, bonuses and uniques, etc it is probably within range to get low 30's % to one or more positional types. It could also be possible to chase typed defense but probably a bit too limiting in terms of what can be slotted into attacks. Chasing serious levels of defense looks like it will get too expensive in terms of compromises elsewhere to chase specific bonuses at the cost of power utility. Shadow Meld can also be in play to close the gap between 30-ish % and the soft cap. It only requires two power picks and it is pretty good out-of-the-box, plus has a decent amount of uptown with the type of recharge most builds achieve. Also with a DM primary some investment in defense pays off because of the ghetto-defense in all of DM's attacks. These days pretty much every armor set ends up building layered defenses, but Radiation Armor on scrappers does seem to be a somewhat unique set of tools. There are quite a few elements which it brings which aren't covered here, in particular relating to endurance management, so there really are a lot of possibilities with it. What are peoples' experiences with building it out for scrapper survivability?

You're not closing it before I also get to chime in with some 'I really don't like the changes to DM' feedback 🙂 Love the rest of the release (that I have tried) but not these. Touch of Fear? Please rename as Touch of DoT. Hopefully we'll see another pass at DM in the future that does a better job of marrying the theme of the set with the 'need' to balance. And yes, I did post feedback before release. And no, I cannot recall any discussion of the 'why' to these changes. Having some insight into the rationale would help, IMO. Nevertheless, in no way wish to appear ungrateful for the work people do, just hoping that in this case enough volume will prompt another look.

There are definitely meant to be day spawns because there often are day spawns. As mentioned, Freaks and Warriors should be there and the DA gate should be crawling with Devoured. It's not even a server reset thing. Sometimes there are spawns and sometimes - often times recently - it is deserted.

That one is most definitely intended. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Kill_Skuls

I have had this happen several times this week, with the latest time just 15 minutes before this post. The issue is that there seem to be no enemy spawns in the South East corner of Talos Island. The issue affects at least the Eleusis and Eastern Argos Highway zones. Normally I would expect to find a lot of Banished Pantheon and Devoured Earth spawns, but there are no enemies at all. Spawns in the Central and Western areas are working correctly (Warriors, Tsoo, Freaks etc) and I haven't checked the islands to the North. Attaching screenshots from the most recent example.

One quick tip is that you can always have enough money by 22 to buys SOs. Probably the easiest way to do it - there are many - is to convert Reward Merits to Enhancement Converters under the Salvage part of the menu at a Merit terminal. You get three enhancements for each merit exchanged and they sell for c.65000 influence at the Auction House (type /ah in chat to access from anywhere). That will easily net you a few million for running a TF or even just collecting the exploration badges for a couple of low level zones (5 Reward Merits per zone). Once you have the cash flow solved you can start thinking about the build optimization at your leisure... P.S. don't 6 slot stamina (except in rare case where slotting 6 enhancements from an invention set makes sense...). As a returning player you probably remember THIS. Short version, after slotting 3 SOs of the same type the benefits drop off massively

Introduction Psi/Dark is a thematic pairing which I have enjoyed playing in other ATs and I have recently leveled a Sentinel to 50, currently exploring the incarnate world. Both sets are quite attractive visually – I personally like the look of Dark Armor, in particular when Cloak of Darkness is run in Minimal FX mode so that the character costume is still visible, and the shield effects are quite complementary with Psi Blast primary, I think; Murky Cloud with its sparkle aura and in particular Obsidian Shield with its head-aura pulse. Furthermore, Dark Armor is one of the best sets for resisting psionic damage which to me at least feels ‘right’ for a pairing with Psi Blast, although you could also make a ‘my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness’ thematic pairing with something like Invulnerability which could also be fun. The primary set also turns out to be quite attractive visually, with plenty of options for customizing the blast animations, and a gently satisfying set of sounds so everyone can always know when you are around without becoming too annoying… I’ve played a lot of Dark Armor on melee ATs and I have always both enjoyed it and felt something of an attraction as it has, at times, been something of an outsider compared to the really popular defensive sets. I don’t think that is really the case anymore, as inventions origin sets make it easy to deal with the notorious endurance consumption and to potentially add a lot of defense and/or resistance to its base numbers, but it is still for many something of an awkward set of tools to try to make use of, and I was curious to see how the Sentinel implementation would compare. Overall I’m really positive about it, the only negative for me being that Cloak of Fear seems to be quite difficult to make work for a Sentinel due to the extreme lack of other fear-causing powers to pair it with. I’m pretty sure that no blast power causes fear, and therefore we are left looking at either taking a minimum or two powers from the Presence pool, maybe three if we want to use Invoke Panic, or being a Vigilante aligned character and making use of the Fear Incarnate Alignment Power. It’s a shame that the options here are so limited unless one wants to just run with the ‘minions only’ out-of-the box performance as I do feel that Cloak of Fear should be one of the defining powers of Dark Armor for thematic purposes if nothing else, and terrorizing your enemies is just cool AND a very effective form of protection with the reduced attack rate and –to-hit effect. Nonetheless, when thinking about how I wanted to realize my character I decided that the fear-based route seems difficult on a Sentinel, and instead planned to take the stun aura, Oppressive Gloom. When paired with Psychic Blast this seemed a much more promising direction of travel; Psy Blast has two stun generating powers at tier 8 and tier 9 in Scramble Thoughts and Psychic Wail. They come late, but ‘Gloom comes later so that is no issue, and they are both great powers which we will want to take anyway. Furthermore, the Psychic Mastery epic pool which I also want to take for thematic purposes also contains a nice stun power in Psychic Shockwave, and it is PBAoE so naturally pairs very well with the nuke. Things are starting to take shape with the character, then. I have the aim to build around stacking stun effects and those stuns are primarily going to be generated at close range, so I will need to be able to survive extended periods in melee range. Existing Resources Having established some goals for my character I headed over here to the Sentinel forum to look for advice, in particular to get some insight into those two powers in Dark Armor which are unique to Sentinels – Tenebrous Regeneration and Obscure Sustenance. Dark Armor with regen? Weird! But I guess that is the point about Dark Armor – it’s meant to be weird… Psi/Dark has been fairly commonly discussed on the Sentinel boards, and I don’t want to repeat all of that in this post so I will link here the main topics which I found useful when thinking about my character and my approach to leveling. My hope is that it will be useful to have all of this information collected together for easy accessibility and thanks to the linked topic contributors who helped me to get a good grip on the utility of Psychic Blast and the unfamiliar features of Sentinel Dark Armor. First of all there is the amazing ‘Collaborative Project’ guide which is stickied in this forum. I think this is my favorite topic on the whole forum. Here we find two guides to Psychic Blast by oldskool and drbuzzard as well as oldskool's guide to Dark Armor, all of which were very valuable Furthermore, I made use of the following topics for better understanding some of the details. Thrillmill actually started a topic around the same set of power sets and epic pool even if you have to ignore the recommendation to go Fortunata instead of Sentinel! Psi/? Build Help! has some fairly detailed responses looking at the primary set, while serxiom's topic covers Psychic Blast but I found it mostly interesting for the discussion around Dark Armor. There are other topics which also cover one or other of the Sentinel sets so I do encourage you to look further afield and make use of the search because you never know which one might contain the nugget of gold which you seek, but the ones I have linked here were quite sufficient to get me up and running, literally running around Paragon City in fact! Discussion and leveling experience Returning to the topic of how I thought about the character I was struck by just how good the Psychic Mastery epic pool is on Sentinels! That really is a good set of tools and I did consider talking everything in there, although my current build skipped Mass Hypnosis as I felt it didn’t really fit well with my aim of spending a lot of time inside the mobs and making heavy use of AoE and stun attacks. Apart from that, however, pretty much everything fits the concept perfectly. Shockwave has already been mentioned and synergises very nicely with Oppressive Gloom and Psychic Wail. Mind Probe has a very short range – it is listed as melee range – but that is perfect when that’s where I anyway want to operate most of the time. Dominate is well known for its Proc potential but it is anyway a high-utility power which with set bonuses can be made cheap and fast-recharging making it easy to fit into a late-build smooth attack chain, and Link Minds has great team benefit and contributes to the layered mitigation that I’m looking to build up – the to-hit buff is gravy. Now if Psychic Mastery had an AoE immobilize in place of its sleep then I would have found that irresistible, considering its synergy with stun effects to bring brutal lockdown to the party. But, really, that would be just too good. I could have found the group immobilize in quite a few of the other pools but only at the cost of less thematic compatibility so the choice was made. There are potentially drawbacks to this approach, however, as a lot of powers come late in the leveling process, and I therefore planned to use a respec around level 44 to switch out some powers from the primary set and replace them with the attacks from the epic pool. This also allowed me to plan to select the Fighting pool late in the build which gave me a lot of power choices while leveling to sample everything from the primary set. According to the linked topics above there are some fairly agreed upon winners and losers in the Psychic Blast set but if I believed everything I read on the Internet I’d never have played Dark Armor for a start, so using a respec was a convenient way to try out all of the primary powers so that I could decide which ones to keep once the epic pool came on-line. I never had a planned build for the character, rather I had a plan for how I was going to try as many powers as possible, knowing that I could make the final decisions based on experience rather than just ‘the numbers’. Protector of Innocents – Guardian – Keeper of the Peace: Hero levels 1-24 Before heading out in Paragon City proper I paid a visit to Atlas Park Pay2Win and picked up the Prestige Enhancements, travel powers and a Blackwand. I also selected the Double XP Boost as usual but I like to complement it with a macro to suspend XP gain. This allows me to have very fine control over how fast I am progressing, useful for maintaining access to story arc contacts and also so that I can spend enough time gaining experience with the various powers as I need, then jump ahead at quick pace if I want to do that. /macro_image “DayJob_XPBoost” “XP” “option_toggle noxp” I also have some influence stashed in email and I spent 34,000 of it to immediately purchase 8 hours of each of the Amplifiers and the Reveal power. This is a very small amount of investment for a lot of early game utility. In particular the Defense Amplifier means that I can run without any defensive toggles until approximately level 20 or so, which greatly helps with endurance use while waiting for slotting IOs/SOs and to have sufficient enhancement slots to invest in endurance reduction. It also gave the flexibility in the leveling process to concentrate on evaluating the blast set and the unfamiliar powers in the secondary. This approach worked out really well, I must say, and by level 22 I had been able to take everything from the primary and secondary sets. The Reveal power is not important to the build of course, but it does make the likes of purple caves and council maps MUCH easier to navigate. A complete bargain for 10k. Sentinel Psychic Blast in the early game I found that all of the blasts from Mental Blast (1) to Psionic Tornado (7) were able to contribute something, even the much maligned Mental Blast, although it was clear from early on that this was never going to be ‘a keeper’. Its animation is too slow, its punch is too weak and its proc-potential is poor as it only takes ranged sets and recharges too quickly to reliably leverage them. It does bring –Recharge at a respectable 30% but we can access that effect elsewhere in the set, although the debuff did seem occasionally useful when fighting low level EBs such as Atta. The Sentinel inherent doesn’t feel strong enough to justify keeping it for the long haul although if the damage boost was a little higher (for example, some future tweaking of the mechanic) it could become worth to consider. TK Blast is a superior level one pick, its hits hard enough and animates fast, even if its 6 second recharge means that Psychic Blast does struggle to put together a smooth attack chain early on if Mental Blast is overlooked. Its knockback component I find to be useful, although it is not 100% reliable and you need to be aware of which enemies have resistance to it. Nevertheless there are many occasions where I find it useful to temporarily get rid of enemies who are getting overfriendly so I was not tempted to slot a KB-KD enhancement here; I prefer its default behavior. Psychic Scream is the first AoE attack in the set and it is a cone so you will sometimes need to adjust positioning before triggering it. Cones are also a somewhat awkward fit with melee combat but my character was not fighting like that much at these levels, preferring to stay back and blast most of the time, so lining up the come was generally straightforward. I found this power to be pretty underwhelming; damage is nothing to get excited about and sometimes TK Blast would have knocked enemies out of the cone’s range, but the main issue is it just takes too damn long to animate and too long to recharge. Despite all this, I leaned on this power fairly heavily as part of my attack cycling as a filler attack until quite late in the leveling process. Will Domination is the first what I would call defining power in Psychic Blast. It recycles pretty quickly, animates fast and hits hard. The secondary effect – a Mag 3 sleep – is genuinely useful if you are not just mashing buttons and use it to disable a lieutenant-class for later attention. When you come back to them they already have one third to one half of their health removed and go down quickly. I leaned on this attack hard while leveling and still do. Psionic Strike has something of a bad reputation but I found it to be extremely useful well into my 40s and was genuinely concerned about leaving it out although I eventually did move on from it. The main reason it is not a popular choice is the long animation time as there can be no argument about the damage it inflicts from good range. What makes it better-than-expected is that the damage is front-loaded in the animation so it hits hard quickly, but delays the next attack while the animation completes – an animation I quite like, by-the-by. But that does make it situationally very useful, for example, finishing off a large chunk of damage on the last enemy in a spawn, or for quickly getting to grips with a hard target. It has a very high inherent accuracy and therefore doesn’t often miss which also softens the impact of that long rooted time. I recommend to try it and to make heavy use of it while your build matures. Like I say, I didn’t feel that comfortable about respecing out of it, although I would say that the reason I haven’t missed it later is that Psychic Wail is a more-than-adequate replacement, despite being a completely different kind of power ‘on paper’. Finally the early-ish game also gives access to Psionic Tornado in the late teens. This is a second AoE, this time a targeted AoE, which means it can also be used easily in melee range, and that is just as well as the 40-foot range constantly catches me out when blasting from distance – I find it’s not quite long enough for range blasting, although with Cloak of Darkness in the secondary it is nearly always possible to get close enough to use it to start a combat, the usual drones/snipers caveat aside. Having said that, there are nearly always better options for starting a fight, and Tornado seems to me to be another one of those Psychic Blast powers where the animation is just a touch too long and the damage is just a shade too low to be really impressive. The knock-up is genuinely useful both solo and on teams, and it can occasionally fill in the attack rotation, and so overall its utility and ease of use at close range make this attack a decent enough fit for my character concept and it has remained in my build while never seeing heavy use. Comments on early game Dark Armor As mentioned, in early game play I basically replaced Dark Armor’s toggles by using the Defense Amplifier from P2W which is crazy cheap if you buy it at level 1. I don’t really think that anyone running Dark Armor is going to ignore Dark Embrace, Murky Cloud or Obsidian Shield for any reason other than concept, so I won’t comment on those although I did anyway take them for later use. Instead I will take a look at the two Sentinel-only powers and the Cloak of Darkness. Tenebrous Regeneration is an auto +Regen power which in isolation is hard to judge how it contributes to survivability, especially as part of a defensive set which doesn’t usually include regen as part of its layered protection. What it does offer is much more passive regeneration than Health, so it seems to me that on a Dark Armor Sentinel you should probably never need to slot health. Instead you should slot Tenebrous and decide whether to follow a proc-based approach or enhance its natural regen – or both. In the end I settled on a little bit of both, although in the early game I pretty much just left its default slot empty. Where the benefits of Tenebrous Regeneration do get interesting, however, are in combination with Obscure Sustenance. Now, coming from other versions of Dark Armor this is where I had the most doubts about the Sentinel version. On casual inspection this power seems to be a replacement for Dark Regeneration and ‘on-paper’ it seems to be a lot worse. Dark Regeneration is like the magic get-out-of-jail card for melee set Dark Armor users, a one click potentially big hit to your endurance bar but a truly monstrous heal that can easily take you from the verge of faceplant to a completely replenished green bar. Obscure Sustenance is a far more subtle, less gaudy power than that, but over time I came to realize that it really is the key to how Dark Armor Sentinels can just keep going and going and going. There is plenty written elsewhere (see linked threads) about how this power works mechanically, and it gets better as you level and assign slots to it, especially recharge and in my opinion it works better to enhance its regen than the recovery aspect, but I do think it is worth to experiment with that and find out what you prefer. But once you get into the habit of using it proactively and often it is undeniable that Obscure Sustenance really keeps Dark Armor Sentinels in the game for a long time! A couple of lessons I had to learn along the way: firstly, you don’t need to slot accuracy here or pop Psychic Focus just before using it. In fact, that is a complete waste as this one is only going to miss on a 1-in-20. Secondly, it is a PBAoE around its TARGET, not you. That means you have to be kinda close to the target to get the benefit which can be a little bit counter intuitive for a ranged attack which can hit from further away than you get the benefit, so you will need to get into the habit of running or hopping into medium range before hitting it. This also has the benefit of putting you definitely in range for Psychic Scream and Psionic Tornado so that works out quite conveniently, and for my target concept of a primarily melee-ranged fighter it works out perfectly of course. I usually look for the immediate heal green number over my character if I’m in doubt about the range – if I see it I know I triggered it successfully. For experienced Dark Armor players from other ATs this power is by far the biggest change from what you are used to and you really do need to unlearn that stuff to get the benefits of Obscure. I pretty much always take Cloak of Darkness as I think the benefits it brings are just too good to overlook, even for a dedicated tank where stealth can appear to be an odd fit (it really isn’t). Pretty much the only reason I can see to skip it are for characters who really don’t want to include any level of defense in their build and are extremely power squeezed, in which case you will want to take Combat Jumping to you get some immobilization resistance. Champion – Defender of Truth – Vindicator: Hero levels 25-39 During the mid-game levels my Defense Amplifiers expired and I had to start running Dark Armor’s toggle defences with a notable impact on endurance consumption. This was the point where I started to realize what a difference-maker Obscure Sustenance can be once it has 3 or 4 enhancement slots allocated to it and some recharge and heal standard IOs. I don’t think you would ever want to slot this power for damage, but that little bit it does can occasionally have niche uses, in particular I like to use it to finish off high level Rikti drones with a sliver of health left simply because of its insane accuracy. But this power is all about keeping you blasting longer by more rapidly filling up the blue bar and by patching any damage that isn’t soaked when taking the alpha. The mid-game also brings some good blasts into play. Scramble Thoughts is the start of our journey towards becoming a stun machine, but unlike the other ATs’ version of this the Sentinel version carries a very significant damage potential as well making it a great opening shot. I invested 6 slots into this one pretty much as soon as I could to leverage that damage potential, using a set of Opportunity Strike ATOs. This provides great accuracy and damage while helping out a lot with the 20 second base recharge and 18.5 endurance cost which are both pretty heavy. The proc won’t fire that often – around 20% of the time with the basic version. The animation time for this power is once again its main drawback, clocking in at three seconds, although I do like the ‘crusher’ alternate animation. Solo you can work around that pretty easily, but on a team you will need to select your targets carefully otherwise you will find yourself rooted in place and the target down before you actually hit them as the damage is back-loaded in the animation. Nevertheless, you can chain this to be followed by Psionic Strike for a mighty one-two punch which takes 6 seconds to animate but actually delivers its damage over around one second which can quickly put down a hard target. Psychic Wail is a PBAoE nuke which on Sentinels generally does less damage but recharges faster and costs less endurance than Blaster nukes. As usual we get some secondary effects which here are a hefty –Recharge debuff and a mag-3 stun effect, same as Scramble but affecting multiple targets. These two powers in combination allow us to stack 6-mag of stun on a boss, significantly increasing survivability. Psychic Wail really starts to open up a Sentinel’s potential to be an AoE attacker once you can get that recharge down to around 40-45 seconds. You probably will need Hasten to achieve that which I didn’t have at this point, consequently the mid-game experience for me was one where I became able to spike damage and some mez at the beginning of combats but I still had a slightly inconsistent attack chain for the follow-up blasts. Taking Hasten earlier would help with this and the reason I didn’t do that was simply because I wanted to play with all the powers before deciding what the later build should keep and what to respec out of. During this phase I also opened up the Psionic Mastery epic pool and took Mind Probe as I wanted to sample it and spend some more time in melee range for using Wail and Sustenance. With some slots I found it very well suited to my purposes and began to see a future without Psionic Strike. I ended up going for 6 Touch of Death IOs here for the melee defense bonus and the negative damage proc. I could imagine builds with a different focus perhaps using Kinetic Combat, Makos or Hecatomb instead. There are quite a few options for procs if diversifying damage type is a priority but I generally find that it hits fairly hard even on resistant foes. I have definitely used it to beat Malta Hercules Titans. As discussed back at the start of this long post, this range of the game sees the rounding out of Dark Armor, but aside from Oppressive Gloom giving me the third component in my stun arsenal there is not a lot of offer here. Sentinels’ difficulty leveraging the utility of Fear effects plus the very situational usefulness of Soul Transfer make these hard picks to justify in what I was finding to be quite a power-pick tight build. I did consider trying to fit in Soul Transfer for thematic purposes, and mechanically it is an interesting power with a truly massive and wide ranging stun effect, but the fact of the matter is that you just won’t be dying that often on a Psi/Dark unless deliberately pursuing over-leveled challenges. Justice Incarnate – Hero of the City: Hero levels 40+ Heading into the late and end-game my character was able to really come together, achieving very high levels of protection and survivability, a melee-oriented playstyle and the long dreamt-of smooth and consistent attack chain. Psychic Shockwave is a fast animating attack with superb synergy with Psychic Wail, being a PBAoE mag-2 stun and decent damage. I used a full set of Obliteration IOs here, again chasing a large melee defense buff, but different play styles could leverage quite a few different options here, including some decent enough proc options as the power also takes stun sets. Dominate is extensively covered here on the Sentinel boards and indeed in many sections of the forums so no additional comment is really warranted here except, yes, I followed a proc-based route with the hold seen just as a bonus. At level 45 I finally reached the right moment for the much anticipated respec. Having leveled the character fully through regular gameplay I felt that I knew most of the powers pretty well and felt comfortable moving on from a few of the primary set blasts. Level 45 also meant that I could immediately bring in three attacks from Psionic Mastery and have enough slots to make use of them from the get-go (remember, when respeccing the game doesn’t care when you picked the power, just whether or not you have enough slots). My main aims when setting out had been to build a melee oriented fighter with the capability to bring a lot of stuns quickly to the fight – typically in the range of mag-8 to mag-10 on selected targets. In order to survive at close range my concept was to work towards a high but not necessarily soft-capped melee positional defence, backed up by a range of middling resistances which Dark Armor can provide without too many compromises. I also wanted to have access to Rune of Protection as an ‘emergency’ resistance booster and for rescue from very heavy mez environments such as when fighting Malta for example, so that drove my choice of travel power also. Three powers from Sorcery pool, three from Fighting and Four from Psionic Mastery meant that my build was rather power-pick squeezed, therefore I decided NOT to pick anything from Leadership or Leaping Pools despite their potential for increasing defenses and as LotG mules. I expect some people would consider this ‘suboptimal’ and you definitely could go in that direction, but as ever I value theme and concept just as much as optimisation, preferring to follow the layered defenses and heavy-stun approach which a Psi/Dark Sentinel can realize better than pretty much any other AT outside of perhaps a Dark/Earth tank. To make room for the pool powers I decided to lose three of the primary blasts. Mental Blast was always going to be superfluous and was an easy drop, while I finally decided to also remove Psychic Scream and Psionic Strike. I think you could definitely argue between keeping one of Scream and Tornado, neither of which are particularly impressive from a damage-dealing perspective. I kept Tornado simply because of its knockup utility and ease of use when fighting at melee range. Psionic Strike eventually became replaced by Mind Probe and Psychic Wail as reliable heavy hitters. If its arcanatime was reduced I would seriously consider finding room for it again, maybe even replacing Tornado and just taking more single-target damage over AoE, but I doubt that is going to happen and truth-be-told I don’t really miss it. The build was completed with Hasten, which I probably should have tried to work in much earlier to give a bit more capability to exemplar, especially considering that the 5 cornerstone attacks come in the second half of the build. For now I run with late Hasten, however, as I want to experiment with early access to Rune when running exemplared content. Wrap-up Well that pretty much concludes my thoughts on in-game play with a Psi-Dark Sentinel to-date. In a moment I will provide a build link, but I do want to stress that this is not meant to be ‘the’ optimal build for a Psi-Dark. It is a good and very survivable build for certain, but it is very much meant to explore the potential for a ‘Stunning’ Sentinel. Of course, my character is also ‘Stunning’ but you get my point. You could definitely hunt for more recharge, or go for typed defense, and this combination could also be played as a ranged blaster. Having said that, I do think that if you are going to play Dark Armor you need to be getting right into the heart of the action and leveraging the interesting tools the set provides, rather than just taking the shields and hiding out at the back. I will continue to experiment while gaining incarnate levels; I’m already trying out whether the immobilize proc in Spectral Interface can have any kind of synergy by reducing ‘stun-wander’, and once I have enough influence for a second build I am seriously considering going a very different route and seeing what I can do with a fear-based build, going deep into Presence pool. I do welcome comments and feedback on this post and will be happy to update or clarify based on any responses. I hope some of you have found this review interesting and maybe one or two might be tempted to explore the different types of character that Psychic Blast and Dark Armor can provide. Finally then, here is my current – NOT optimized!! – level 50 build

Hi @Zer0 Hour! and sorry for the delay... Here is the build I'm using at the moment. It is a semi-leveling build, and I'm around level 40 at the moment, not quite sure yet how to round out the build - a good sign that it doesn't lack anything important! - and haven't given any consideration as yet to Incarnate powers. And you will notice that I have so sub-optimal slotting/sequence of selecting powers so I recommend you can use it for inspiration and then head in the direction you prefer 🙂 This is just the order which I took things in while leveling and a guide to which slots I am trying to prioritise.

Where are you sitting for damage resistances, Bill Z?

Sure. Let's rephrase it to the scope of possibilities rather than the one true build. I'm interested in the different thoughts on where to take things. Even in a few responses we've seen people building for a lot of res, or some, or only S/L. It's quite interesting that /SR can be built successfully in different ways. Having said that, I think I'm mostly considering my own build ideas from a solo point-of-view. I do team a lot, but I tend to judge my builds by 'what happens when you get stuck on your own?'

Interesting... Also interesting. You are implying that shooting for very high positional def across the board requires the Agility Core, right? That is part of why I asked the question. What is the right goal? /SR gives you choices about what to aim for... Yeah, but that is not quite what I would call super easy. There are plenty of people playing the game who don't know they can sell their merits as converters and think those globals are out of reach price-wise. It's a good point, I usually just monitor def to make sure that I'm not getting debuffed 44% is still a lot considering you are building that up all from set bonuses, is that correct? How are you getting to that number? On the question of the inherent scaling resistances, I'm still not sure how useful that is. As I said most of my /SR KO's have come when I get hit by two big numbers back to back - most recently by Odysseus on Mortimer Kal SF. In those cases you never get the benefit as you just kind of jump straight past it before it kicks in. I find it difficult to judge how much extra survivability it gives, and therefore how much to lean on it in the overall build concept. Good discussion though, just what I was looking for, with a satisfying level of detail.

How do you see the most important concepts regarding building /SR on a brute? /SR has the reputation that it is easy to reach the soft-cap for positional defs and it kinda is - although it does take some slots and investment in IO's to reach 45% for the non-incarnate and on Brutes it seems to me that it would take a lot of investment and some inflexibility in power picks to reach the incarnate soft cap, necessitating the likes of Hover/CJ, Maneuvers and possibly also restricting incarnate power choices. Given that you want to take 8 powers from /SR and may want to pick the majority of your primary powers power picks can rapidly become at a premium and the result can also be pretty much cookie-cutter builds with little in the way of personality. Of course /SR also has mighty DDR which is really good outside of huge accuracy bonuses (DE, Rularuu) and the scaling damage resistance which seems to me to be nice to have but I have no idea how often it saves my bacon as it is hard to see when it is working. But IO's - and power pools - also opens up the possibility to build towards layered def, even for /SR. Tough easily takes us in the direction of fairly decent S/L resistance with a few set bonuses, but what about energy resistance which is valued highly for the 'end game'? Is 50% achievable or even desirable? Does it make sense to invest the three picks to obtain Rune of Protection from the Sorcery pool in order to run with resists between say 40% and 60% for around one third of the time? Or is it a better bet to shoot for as much regen as possible, maybe considering something like Unleash Potential from the Force of Will pool for a big boost when necessary? In my experience /SR tends to faceplant when you get hit by two consecutive big numbers without the time to eat a green/hit Siphon Life/etc, so I'm not sure regen helps much at the point of greatest need... but a lot of resistance surely will. Then again, regen seems like it works well - in theory - with the inherent scaling damage res, whereas additional resistance maybe not so much? Or is it overall superior to just aim for 59% def to everything and to hell with the RNG? Really interested to hear how people think on this topic. I do have a respec in mind but undecided what the right direction of travel is yet.

Thanks, Croax! Definitely some solid thoughts there.