Kalean

I second this - Pyro does some solid AoE with proc bombs, has a really chunky -10% to hit on incendiary that can be slotted up to -15% or more if you're into being "softcapped" in melee, and the -res from blastoffs is really pleasant on Radiation's big damage.

I like it, looks like an excellent alternative for those who don't mind trading away that permanent defense for some more AV-melting damage. I can probably throw together a hybrid of the two builds if anyone decides they want that weaken resolve + Achilles combo but has to protect their precious rockstar face. That would probably also be a good combination for approaching incarnate soft-cap totals for brief bursts, even if trades away perma-hasten. Thanks for the idea! I was also contemplating making a version with the teleport pool, Fold Space would be very strong with this combo. But that starts to lean more into Lila Cheney territory... Abs for days...

Paragon City! Do you miss the 80s? Do you remember when leather jackets were cool and rock music was cooler? Do you like your music loud?! Well here's your girl Alison Blair to remind you that you're only one alt away from reclaiming your Glory Days! Hit it, Alison! Just in time for Halloween, it's time for an expensive alt that'll really blow you away. It's Alison Blair, the mutant who can convert soundwaves into pure light - with explosive results! Are you tired of controlling the battlefield from range? Good, because this Permadom prefers to be out there amongst her people, getting up close and personal with her audience. With positionals at 28+, and a -17% to hit aura, she's basically soft-capped to defense... against the crowd she's surfing. Make sure to throw those glittering columns and hypnotizing lights out there to keep your distant fans entertained, you'll be with them soon enough. But first, deal with your adoring fans that just can't keep their hands off you. For those that get through, 63% S/L resist is pretty respectable against melee, and you're a permadom, so you shouldn't be expecting too many to even be attacking. Disruption Aura should keep your fans eating a solid 15% more damage, and make sure you Scream and Shout plenty to give the elites something extra besides. Conserve Power should be up about half the time, and domination will be up about every sixty seconds, but you'll still have to lean on recovery serums and blue pills, like any good rock star. Ageless should really help, though. Remember to crowd surf with spring attack whenever it's up, which should be about 3 times per hasten cycle. As long as you hit an enemy audience member, Spring attack will save a solid five seconds off all your recharge. Hit two times in two minutes and you're squarely in perma-hasten territory. You can manage two spring attacks in two minutes, can't you? Of course you can. You're a rock star! Any suggestions are welcome, improvements are always worth considering! Bass Boost is off in Mids because it artificially inflates the defensive stats and damage; it's only going to be up about a third of the time, anyway. The Razzle-Dazzler - Dominator (Pyrotechnic Control - Sonic Assault).mbd

Loving the changeling style. I always kind of wanted something like that for my Khelds, but until the toggle suppression it was basically impossible. The idea of quick-changers goes back, for me, to Exalted, and I love it. I do think that it would be better if the ATs were designed around it so it felt less macro-intensive and more "this is a skill ceiling you can reach", but nonetheless I'm having a blast with it. Thanks for sharing the builds. I'm playing the general purpose Peacebringer to get used to changeling button presses, with those extra human attacks being "comfy" to rely on in a stressful situation where you don't want to risk botching it. It's like training wheels.

Probably the best spread for both Survivability and Damage together is a Beam Rifle / Super Reflexes Sentinel with Softcapped Defenses and some resistance statting so you hit resistance cap around 35% health, at which point virtually all attacks miss you, and the few that make it through do only 25% of their intended damage, and Master Brawler adds an absorb layer to help tank those without getting your health % higher. So you can just sort of hang around at 35% life forever. And Beam Rifle is just the best damage, period. That said, Water/SR is a great AoE alternative. At the moment, Sentinels have hands down the best version of SR. If you want more showcasing, Psy Armor goes great with Elec for Sapper builds, I think KaizenSoze has a build not that different from what I tested it with, and I recall it being able to solo +4/x8 with careful play. Bio is a great damage boosting armor set, and is thematically neat. Unfortunately with the archetype change, Sonic is no longer particularly great on Sentinels, though it's still fun. Originally, Sentinels had a type of opportunity that would heal based on DPS output, and sonic had a lot of high target cap AoEs, so you could just wade in and soak up an alpha strike and not care because you would heal it all back by attacking. Elec Psy feels a little like that now; keeping Devour Psyche stacks up while enemies' endurance and recovery are floored means that the giant regeneration buff Devour gives you can heal you back up on its own.

As always, you deliver in spades. Thanks for the plethora of answers, Nemu. I'll probably give them all a shot - Halloween event is coming up, no better time for alt-o-holics.

That sounds wildly fun, and reminds me a bit of Myshkin's "Mad King" Storm/Energy Defender, which was a real fun time to play (and took me quite a bit of advice and practice to learn to play well.) I will probably give it a run myself sometime this month, thanks a lot for sharing and explaining it. I like the idea of builds with really high skill ceilings, though I'm a coward and want them to be "safe" enough for me not to drop like a rock if I start sort of auto-piloting out of habit. You've made an insane number of builds for people over the years; do you happen to have any personal favorites that also fit in this category? Just off the top of your head - if not, don't go crazy looking through your old threads or making an entirely new build.

I'll happily test that if you can be slightly more specific. Mine didn't hit +4s often with some Hamis in it.

A few minimal FX options wouldn't go unappreciated.

Having played with it for a (very) short time, +4/8x was pretty handily solo-able on a sentinel as long as Sappers and the like were focused. Not face-roll, mind, but with minimal kiting or strategy involved. This was with a fully IO set build, but it's not like I fine tuned it much beyond the obvious uniques. My observations were : The resist numbers were a little low on the Sentinel. Even with very rare and PVP/event sets, I didn't even approach hard-cap on any resistance but Psionic. Defenses got up to the low 30s, but with no DDR, key enemy types strip them right off. Max Devour Psyche stacks and minor regen slotting kept regen at around 4.2%, very nice w/some max hp bonuses. And endurance just wasn't a problem at all while at max stacks. Aura of Insanity was quite fun at lower levels, but didn't work so hot in +4 content. Memento Mori was surprisingly good even unslotted; I pulled three groups + missed a sapper, so died. MM got me up, killed the sapper, and had time for toggles/stacks. Keeping Devour Psyche up on the enemy group was very effective at keeping their endurance empty for something that lasts a full minute. On the whole, I'd say the set is a little under-tuned defensively, but over-packed with neat ideas. It's quite fun to play with on a sentinel, imo, the maintaining of Psyche stacks while darting in for the aura to proc lines up well with the reduced nuke times for sentinels to make a constant loop of stuff to do, and the adaptive recharge really makes keeping those stacks up easy as hell once you have em. Memento Mori is ALWAYS UP, which is great as long as you remember to toggle impenetrable mind right away upon res and get psyche back up. I'd suggest making pre-cog either give out more defense, or give it DDR. Both in my wildest dreams. If you want to get dirty, you could also have Aura of Insanity's magnitude and effect area increase a bit depending on Devour Psyche Stacks. I'd play it with those changes, easy.

There used to be a decent number of us, actually. Sonic/Bio was very very survivable before the sentinel rework. Those cones +defensive advantage? Mmm. Just get back all your HP no sweat. The sentinel rework took away Sonic's ability to recover from soaking alpha strikes, but they're still alright with Bio. They're very middle of the road for damage, but if you're using Fire with it, they're actually quite good.

Wow, Nemu, you really evened out those resists and brought them higher. From 33% HP to hit cap on my attempt to 38% on yours - and on top of that, I was always forgetting to add the SDR IO's scaling because it doesn't show in mids. So realistically 43% HP to hit cap on your bespoke version. Thank you very much for that critical eye, that's a pretty huge health pool to hit 75% resist at. As for hover, there's just so much more control over mystic flight with it on, it just feels better and the end difference is so very minimal. You're right it requires more control to stay low to the ground, but that's not a problem for me, this game is not exactly taxing my reflexes. However, that's worthy of note for the build, it's perfectly capable of brain-off facerolling if you don't take hover. Ultimately your version is perfectly what I wanted, minus Vengeance which is a bit situational anyway. I really appreciate the help refining it. Remembering the SDR IO's math makes it clear that we actually hit resist cap at 27% HP even without rune and melee core embodiment, which is pretty darn respectable, if people want to take that skeleton and plug in different powers for theme-y reasons. My mids crashes whenever I try to export data in the full breakdown format, but all the accolades and standard Endurance IOs are kitted out here, including even physical perfection holding numina's. Nemu's right about recovery serum though - I forget about the temp powers available so readily on homecoming. As for the AoE attack chain, by default, I'm looking at Arc > Whirling > Sweep because arc's cooldown is 3 full seconds, and when it misses Whirling doesn't get Momentum to be usable, but it's true, the AoE rotation could be Arc > Whirling > Rend instead if I really need that extra power slot. Food for thought. Definitely a good point about boosting Melee defenses for Incarnate/Cimemorans, too. Hmm.

Oh, I got it up to 45 and put practiced (and the kismet holder) lower on Nemu's advice for the second build, but thank you!

Thanks for the feedback, Nemu. You've always been there to be helpful to everyone with great advice. I did specify that the resists were at 21% hp, so I was aware that the resist numbers were due to scaling resists, that was the intended goal. However, for some bizarre reason I had it in my head that Def Softcap was 40. No excuses, just my own failing memory and inexperience, there. The build already has so much recharge with the FF procs that another lotg seemed overkill since I didn't have any cooldowns that really benefitted from it, figured I'd just buff vengeance's def a little. However, your sample build has a lot of tweaks that encouraged me to take your advice. The thing about rotating Rune / Melee Hybrid is that it's well tested, like you said. This build was aiming to pull that off inherently. That said, taking your advice there with roughly this same resistance chasing does let me boost that hp % up to 33% if I'm alternating melee/Rune without sacrificing the 21% fallback. So I should probably suck it up and do it. I've re-done the build taking some of your advice, though not all. Actually at softcap for all positionals this time, but now also with rune/melee to get those resists to cap at 33. Your advice about having kismet and practiced brawler earlier was appreciated. Two further questions for you, if you have the time. I kept Conserve Power instead of Focused Accuracy; would you say the prevalence of to hit debuffs is high enough that this is crazy? Also, with the softcaps hit and the extra resist, I couldn't really see a great reason to keep defensive sweep and swapped it for Titan Sweep instead. Does that seem reasonable? Crux.mbd

Alright, so this is my first "official" build, any advice would be welcome. (Edit: Am an idiot. Updated build further down in the thread.) My goal was to make sure that in addition to hitting soft cap on defenses, I would also hit softcap on resists before some insanely low health number without hitting like a wet noodle. Ultimately, that health percentage ended up being 21% - at 21% the build is soft-capped at Def and Res, and it still hits pretty darn hard. Our rotation starts with Weaken Resolve with a guaranteed Achilles' proc for -26% res to our main target. Then it splits. AoE rotation will be Arc of Destruction (very high chance of Fury proc), Whirling Smash, and then Defensive Sweep if you think you'll hit five targets, or Rend Armor on the main otherwise. Defensive Sweep is more of a priority if you expect Damage Debuffs. Single Target rotation is Rend Armor, Follow Through, Crushing Blow, repeat. Updated Rotation for build further down thread: Both rotations start with Rend Armor instead of weaken resolve, Defensive has been replaced with Titan for 3+ targets. Issues I've run into so far: Not having a travel power is no fun. Even with Physical Perfection and modded stamina/Numina/Panacea, this build sucks blues like candy. Almost makes me want to take Elude. Chasing those resists may have left me with too little damage. Maybe I'm just missing the double build ups from Fortunata. At 21%, SLFCEN gain an additional 5% and some change from the Scaling Damage Resist, putting it at 75% or higher across the board (except Toxic and Psy, of course.) Thoughts would be appreciated. Crux.mbd