Vulgaris

I actually had no idea this was the case. This opens up a few avenues for me for sure then. Edit: Thank you everyone for the info and in general being helpful too. I'll play around with my setup here and there and figure things out.

There's a tricky issue with that- in That my setup to get my AR/SR Sent to a nice cushy place defensively to get a slight buffer of above softcap, 70+% Minimum DRR and 100% status resist. I have too many LOTGs and my sentinel ATOs also give me a bit too much +recharge to really benefit from procs I thought? I heard or thought I heard that if you're more or less over 60 percent recharge bonus procs just stop being as appealing.

I suppose another crossroad I have is- Which hybrid assault to run. Since the two fire moves and full auto are essentially DoTs. But the rest of the kit is rapidly cycling single hits.

I'm interested how these values have shuffled around since the AR revamp.

I've been having fun despite the shortcomings of the mostly lethal type and the somewhat chunky animations and subjective taste picks. But I am also running into some head scratching scenarios and the curse of "Is mids wrong or am I wrong" as it keeps rearing it's ugly head from time to time when I do real world tests and more or less have inconclusive results. I'm on the fence whether or not burst is a total skip or not still as it feels like a perfectly fine single target chain attack but the broken up damage feels like it gets res taxxed harder, but it is also the only single target move I can put an Achilles into. But then skipping that leaves me with the oddball 3 piece single target combo tossup between disorienting shot, buckshot and slug. And slug despite it's decent base damage has a so so animation commitment. That and other confusing thoughts such as M30 grenade having typed damage boon due to having some fire with the lethal and is more of a reliable AOE than buckshot. And giving me another power that can crowd mow besides flamethrower and full auto. That and Buckshot of which I tend to treat like a better DPA slug currently. But then I wonder if M30 grenade is ever even worth it because it has the most atrocious damage per animation of the entire set out the box, and a beefy endurance cost to add insult to injury - And carries the KD tax on top. Can it be procced out and saved or is it a total bait pick? Then we have incinerate which if the enemy can stay put works a treat. But I feel like I never should use it or bust it out especially in group content unless I see that we have a dom or a controller or it's a type of EB or AV that isn't going to auto flee from it. And finally Full Auto - oh Nuke "Normalization"... We will have words some day. But not today - I also wonder if full auto would be better served loaded up with procs or straight damage given every little hit that gets boosted counts and adds up. The TL;DR: being I think I need some advice and maybe some Sentinel AR tips and tricks as as I feel I am not seeing the full picture or potential still.

Super useful information there actually and I had no clue even after playing all this time anything near an exact figure for how level conning and damage received works. That would certainly explain why I feel like the numbers aren't lining up. Even worse if you're running content with any level plusses then... So a +4 would be more like a +6 artificially for your typical MM's main glut of minions.

I'll make a note to test this on brainstorm or something in depth to make it as even a clean slate as possible too. If not tonight then tomorrow or so. The "track the attack damage relative to the other pet" is a good idea. And I keep in range of em always as I'm painfully aware of the ATO aura distances and I kinda overly baby my minions. Edit: Attaching images, Not the tidiest or most scientific of tests but I figured the resists that are absolutely capped with no question about it on zombies (cold and toxic) are good baselines, given there's level 50 Hellfrost Lords right outside portalinc. The level conning does appear to be influencing the received damage and that could be the reason why the poor t1 zombies just eat it from time to time even resist capped. Given they are probably getting purple conned by what's "only" orange+ to me. Lich and The Tricannon seem to be taking 1:1 the same damage as well. So at 50 as a MM T1 pets are 48, T2 are 49, and T3 is 50. And Controller pets come out at 50 as well. So potentially it's just the level conning just overpowering the +res maybe - But even the base numbers don't look that crazily different between them.. Which doesn't explain the extreme spikes entirely still. My most surprising takeway is that controller pets and MM's T3 pets are more or less same powerscale.

I am not terribly sure- If that were the case it's also accounted for as both characters were the same level in the mission with wildly different pet damage received results. No incarnates enabled, no buff toggles. The only discrepancy I can maybe think of is the lower level conning of the first tier MM pets but I have no idea what that might be doing then to offset the visible RES in their combat attributes. Edit: To append to this, Even in normal content from 20-40 and just idly playing I would often notice on my necro/sonic my pet's health sitting pretty and then one suddenly getting chunked, and this was in +0 difficulty +2 team size casual play. Like the really odd spikey damage from even conning enemies and at worst a red boss against capped res after factoring in the MM ATOs.

I've done a bit of light testing with an arsenal controller with the beefy gun drone pet and one res aura enhance to 90% res cap it. Parking in an AE against a specific elite boss (Using SS I believe, so only smashing damage) doing one damage type and watching as it just predictably takes damage in a very slow steady trickle and predictable values over a very dull but informative 6 minutes. No buffs except the raw arsenal controller pet with one +10 res enhance to make it capped. Which struck me as odd, as it's only around 600-ish HP max otherwise with zero def? Not too far off and maybe even less health and certainly less def than one of my zombies on my Necro/Sonic MM. And my experience with them and their expected durability is far different. So I do the same thing with the same EB that does the same smashing damage type that the zombie is resist capped to, and the damage he takes feels so much more swingy and unpredictable. And sometimes it feels like he takes a devastating hit contrary to their actual resist values. It almost feels like the game from time to time "Forgets" my zombie's resist values at odd intervals or ticks. The chosen EB also did no -res, only -def which changes nothing since the gun drone also has 0 def. I am also NOT letting my sonic buffs lapse either. I am also NOT running in bodyguard mode for the test, I have aggressive on and I gave one single fully upgraded zombie horde zombie the attack command and let him have at it with the EB to take some hits. So my strange hunch is that maybe some of the fragility of (some?) MM pets may be due in part to some sort of oddity with how their defenses and resist values or upgrades calculate maybe? Like their state of having defense or resist is somehow tracked with ticks or has to be constantly server checked. And sometimes you hit a "Sour" tick and the game forgets momentarily that they have resist at all. Or maybe the culprit is instead due to defender style second hand +res buffs. Like sonic might be the outlier since they're not originating from your character when applied to you, like your own native scrapper/sent/tanker toggles so they are being calculated oddly. If anyone a little more in the know about MM pets could test or help sus this out I would also appreciate it. There has to be something obvious I'm overlooking.

There's something amazingly on brand that blaster discussion has subsumed an entire page of a thread talking about sentinels.

I'm mildly surprised willpower hasn't been mentioned a single solitary time. I've heard people murmer that it was basically "The new invul" and "Tanker's Regeneration"

It looks like beam rifle tops the list but seems to get the least boon from any offensive boosting secondaries. Like Beam/Bio where bio is normally a good sentinel steroid only adding 5+ percent over the new base of /SR. Meaning it's mostly just the beam rifle primary itself doing the heavy lifting lately. Unless I'm incredibly misreading it.

Fantastic work and thank you for putting it all in. I did have a question though. This may sound a bit goofy but I am curious as to how much DPS stuff like stone/bio/fire really contributes given the neck and neck nature they all seem to come out with with a few outliers here and there. Like hypothetically speaking if you had a defensive set that just gave you recharge reudction how much DPS loss more or less are you looking at on average? Like in raw DPS and also the relative percentages?

I don't know if I missed it being changed in a previous patch but while storm and more pseudo pet behavior and scalars are being investigated, Lightning Storm is/was more or less the same values across ATs as well.

I alluded to that, but something a little more digestible at a glance was what I was hinting towards. As it is VERY informative but overwhelming and impenetrable in some regards. Like to this day I'm still not entirely sure if CC strength across ATs is a unified value or split into it's individual elements like hold/immob/fear/stun/etc.