nihilii

I don't think that's a reasonable presumption at all. I certainly use insps freely as they drop (why wouldn't you?), but I don't really see this dom as needing them on +0/x8, +1/x8 solo... and probably wouldn't need them even on higher difficulties if I used controls actively - but again, why spend 3s on Flashfire when you can pop 2 lucks that will be replenished from mob drops? More importantly, I'm confused as to where this even comes from. You're not so subtly suggesting I die a lot for minimal gains, then insinuating I'm theorycrafting and hoping things will work out. It's as if you see my different opinion on Char and ATO slotting as a personal attack demanding retribution, but that's really not what I meant. Shooting for maximum defense and recharge is just as valid a build goal if that's what you want out of your character.

Base duration of Char is a healthy 12 seconds against +3s (+4s post level shift). It's going to recharge in ~4 seconds, and in permadom you're going to hold a boss in 1 Char and an EB in 2 Chars. From your perspective of using Char as little as possible I can understand it is worrisome, but you have to understand once Char is used as a regular part of the attack chain, then there will always more than enough mag to keep the target held. The difference between 12 seconds and 24 seconds is essentially meaningless in this scenario. I don't even make an effort to mez stuff beyond throwing Fire Cages + Flashfire/Bonfire. That is a curious impression. If anything, I actually play my doms like blasters: in addendum to the above, more often than not I eschew actually using Flashfire/Bonfire because it peeves me to spend that much animation time on mezzing when I could just rely on defenses and attack instead. The notion is truly bizarre to me. Someone who wanted to rely on controls as much as possible should be more likely to slot Char as a hold, not less.

Going to second the sentiment of not using T1 secondary attacks. There's just so many better options. Personally I also strongly feel Char ought to be procced, including with the +dam ATO, and used as a part of your rotation. Those +dam stacks add up fast. I see mentions of 80 DPS attack chains and I don't really want to dig into the numbers to see what they refer to (SOs only, Mids numbers?). But for reference, in real conditions a Fire/Fire dom can deal ~500 DPS solo, provided they use ATO procced Char in their rotation.

Just a quick observation. Plenty of ATOs are undersupplied currently, with 0 for sale and prices in the 8-10M range. Good opportunity for Super Pack flipping. I opened a few myself so I could at least convert to the ATOs I needed, and listed the rest. A couple of the ones I put for sale (8,022,222) went off instantly.

Nitpick, but AS won't be a guaranteed crit because nothing except CU have 100% chance to give an Assassin's Stack. At 90% chance for SB and SC and 75% chance for HB, + the 5% chance to miss, your chances to have 3 Assassin's Stacks with a CU -> SB -> HB -> AS -> SC -> SB -> HB -> AS chain would be 0.95 * (0.95 * 0.9) * (0.95 * 0.75) = 57% on the first AS (0.95 * 0.9) * (0.95 * 0.9) * (0.95 * 0.75) = 52% on the second AS This isn't "crit chance", which is still higher than that, because in most alternate scenarios you'll end up with 2 stacks (66% chance to crit). So your crit chance is somewhere between 99% and 66%, leaning closer to 99% than 66%. Probably 85-90%, but don't ask me to do the math. 😛 I say this not to be argumentative, but because I was oblivious to the mechanics myself when I got into stalkers, and this led to disappointment when I kept seeing my AS not critting and didn't understand why. A good rule of thumb would be that you need 4 rather than 3 attacks between each AS if you want a near guaranteed crit. But, also generally speaking, the DPA of non-crit AS and the burden of adding an extra attack, means sticking with 3 attacks between each AS tends to be optimal. Bottomline, Croax's attack chain is good but manage your expectations. 🙂

Aye. "Poorly explained" maybe. Instead of breaking procs, why not improve the UI? Once the proc is slotted in a power, I'd love to be able to see % chance to proc X damage directly ingame.

Nerf Regen through restoring the old ET animation. Faster Energy Transfer = Higher Frequency of ET use = More -HP applied = Effective nerf to regeneration.

Silly one but it is the memory I'm most fond of for some reason. Back on Live, I had a bit of a reputation for being a bunnyhopping speed freak in my group of friends. One day, we were doing one mission in a Crey lab and I was hopping ahead to the next group with Combat Jumping + Hurdle, as usual. Now, if you're familiar with the blue tech lab maps, sometimes you get those long legs to the right and once you've defeated the enemies there, you have to go back all the way to the left to get the elevator. I kept bunnyhopping, but instead of turning my character as you would expect, I started orienting myself with the automap. So I'd jump left while my character was looking the other way, like a robot, still at top speed. Then at the next turn, facing the complete opposite direction. Jumping like that the whole mission. After a few moments, one of my friends made a comment in chat. Then another one joined in. Then everyone started laughing, in a "I can't believe the nonsense nihilii is up to, AGAIN" way. This was a subtle but fun, great bonding moment. But also, an illustration of freedom in CoH, the way we can do all sorts of absurd things and still be awesome.

I made an AE mission for testing purposes with standard enemy groups, and initially set the groups to be "Hard". Each group ends up with 3 to 4 bosses. This change alone makes for a surprisingly quick difficulty bump. Many of my characters who can handle those same groups at normal +4/x8 without breaking a sweat started struggling there. I'll third xl8's idea: if you want to bump difficulty, port this "Hard" AE effect to normal difficulty settings. Might not be enough for teams, but should give many soloers a new respect for MAXIMUM difficulty.

I find it one of the laziest approaches to game difficulty. Yes, it is effective from a developer/manpower standpoint. Hence the reason so many games go that route. Lazy and effective are one and the same here. Lazy doesn't have to be bad. But boring definitely is bad. Cranking up numbers doesn't really challenge you to change your patterns as a player, unless the numbers are so overwhelming you must do so. And if the numbers become *too* overwhelming, then the challenge simply becomes impossible. Boring. Less boring ways to do difficulty, several of which were suggested upthread: - more enemies - more attacks / different attack patterns - higher rank enemies (sorta recoups with the previous two) - stacking mob buffs +con is also boring from an immersion perspective. There's no fundamental game world reason for things to have "levels" and for a level 54 to take less than twice as much damage as a level 50. As with many things, CoH did it better than other games - the whole security level in the Lore was cute. But it's still a boring system at its core. Be happy I'm not a developer. I'd slap the Giant Monster / invasion code on the whole game. 🙂

You can hit +6s and even +8s, and make progress on them. Remove your Alpha slot and launch an Apex or Tin Mage TF solo, and mobs are essentially +8 to you. Minions, lieuts and bosses are very tough but not impossible for a solo character. EBs might be impossible. AVs probably are. But I feel like a team could do it. It'd be a fun challenge. (But more ontopic, it *is* a slog. Wouldn't want that as a normal difficulty setting. Even if challenging, +con is the lazy, boring approach to difficulty.)

Point taken. Although AV regen only adds up to an extra second. More napkin math: - round up ~93hp/s to 100 - lower 1600 DPS to 1500 DPS - 28,275 / 1500 = 18.85 seconds So it doesn't really change the overall point on that one. Resistance is muddier, in that on a team with 8 different teammates it's likely at least one person will have their damage resisted to an extent. But on the other hand many AVs have no resistance, and I've definitely been on teams where level 50 AVs with 0% resistance to everything took longer than 20 seconds to defeat.

I was thinking of DPS without external buffs/debuffs, but you know, that is an actually interesting question. If we work backwards, a full team where the average effective DPS per teammate ends up at 200 would do 1600 DPS. Which should drop a level 50 AV and their 28,275 HP in 17.67 seconds. I've been on plenty of PuGs that could take out AVs in less than 20 seconds, but I've also been on just as many PuGs who would take longer (and of course, as I tend to bring 300+ DPS characters *before* buffs/debuffs, my own contribution inflates the numbers). Anecdotally, I have seen 3, 4, 5, 6 characters barely outpacing level 54 AV regen. Purple patch and all and even before level shifts, we're still only talking about something in the ~200 DPS range. It might not be unrealistic to think many characters might run below 200 DPS even with team buffs/debuffs... putting their own natural DPS way below 100. Edit: then making, I am making assumptions of my own on the force multipliers in effect. Do most teams run with effective boosts above x2? Between -RES, +DAM and -RECH, especially against a single target where -RES can be focused and -REGEN also counts as damage, I want to say "yes", but that's just a feeling.

The level of coordination required for 8 team members to throw out AoEs accurately on demand is so far above and beyond any qualification of "random" in my books. The average 8-man PuG I see has at least 1 if not 2 guys lagging behind or AFK and half if not more of the team using their powers inefficiently. Even beyond the efficiency problem, it's extremely rare for a random assortment of players to play the game at the exact same speed. If the stars do align and you find yourself on such a team, if mobs also align so AoEs hit their target cap everytime, and if you stick to standard missions with no tough threats despite this highly skilled team, then yes you have a point. Maybe you do find yourself on such teams frequently. I'm not claiming it's impossible. But I don't think I've ever joined a pickup group that performed as that level, personally. As for numbers, I say the same numbers can tell another story. In an ideal scenario for maximum speed, bosses should drop down at the exact moment lieutenants and minions do; failing that, the ratio should be as close as possible. That is, it would be better to kill all lieuts and minions in 12 seconds then drop the remaining bosses in 3 more seconds than to wipe out lieuts and minions in 10 seconds and take 10 more seconds to kill the bosses. There's 2 bosses in a regular x8 group, and given the disparity between boss and lieut HP, as well as the difference in DPA and recharge between AoEs and ST, spamming flurries of AoEs past the point lieuts are dead simply isn't worth it to take down those 2 bosses. Potential counterpoint, if the team you're on is struggling with survivability it might be better to wipe out minions and lieutenants slightly faster to avoid too much incoming damage. I'm looking at this strictly from the lens of clear speed, with the assumption survivability is handled.

I like to run +4/x8 for challenge and skip to the objectives and see no logical contradiction between the two. Fighting the same group 20 times in a row generally isn't more challenging than fighting it 3 or 4 times. On the flipside, clearing the objectives quickly while facing the strongest possible opposition is a challenge in itself; and running past most of the enemies can create new attack vectors for them, as in stacked ambushed or what have you. You will see this trend in gaming all the way back to 90s speedrunning: in the original Doom from 1993, the preferred category is "Ultra-Violence Speed", going to the exit as quick as possible on the maximum difficulty.

Yep. IMHO, AoE has been overvalued since the beginning of Homecoming. It's partly a perception thing and partly people doing too much AE farming, and it just doesn't translate as well in the real game. A character designed to deal ST damage efficiently will generally wipe out minions with what little AoEs he has in the process of killing the bosses in a group. Sometimes lieuts may even fall as well. Adding more AoEs actually hurts you as the gap between lieut health and boss+ health is too big to be patched efficiently through AoE rather than ST (unless you've got a crapton of them on a full team, with so much overkill it's a challenge to find a target... at which point you're not worried for performance anyhow). Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to skip Fireball nor Inferno. But all my characters are minmaxed for ST damage, with their AoEs as a byproduct. They perform better that way. The reverse would make them abysmal. ST damage is king. ST damage is required for anything that is actually a speed bump, from high con bosses to EBs to AVs. Another point I strongly agree with. 200 DPS is also pushing it when we consider actual player builds ingame. Many people don't run attack chains, they click whatever. I'd estimate the average DPS of your typical spines/fire brute to be closer to 100 than 200. I've been on pickup itrials where the league literally didn't have enough DPS to take down the final AVs. For that matter, I still don't have the Really Hard Way badge. Most PuG I end up with are clueless as how to do this except through exploiting Lore, Incan and team insps. Their builds simply don't have the ST focus to deliver damage without tricks. The less optimized you are, the more ST DPS matters. There is a hard limit to how little damage you can deal and still outpace regen. Especially in itrials where there's timed conditions on top of it.

Fire/Fire is an absolute powerhouse. It can deal blaster level ST damage at range. AoE still forces you into melee. Combustion doesn't feel particularly impressive because much of it is DoT, but it actually gets the job done pretty fast coupled with Hot Feet/Fire Cages. Fire/Nrj has big hitters all over the place. The new energy focus (or whatever it's called) mechanic is fairly clunky, sometimes it will go away before you get a chance to use it and there seems to be an undocumented cooldown in the 10-15s range before you get a new stack. Nonetheless, between a sped up Total Focus, an energy focus boosted fast snipe, and an energy focus Whirling Hands, you get several powerful feeling attacks delivering large orange numbers. I haven't played Fire/Rad.

What a tease! Now I had to go and try 801.1 to figure it out. I didn't figure it out. I'm not smart. But I have an insp addiction. The universal catchall survivability solution worked for my fire/rad sent on +4/x8/bosses (stack defense, defense, defense, avoid everything bad). Full tray of T1 lucks, + drops. Took 33 minutes... and 6 deaths. The difficulty felt on par with +4/x8 inspless MoITF (or +0/x8 IOless MoITF). That being said, the sentinel runs capped slow resist and ample tohit. Watching all these time and cold powers flying around, the caltrops and the Rages and Elude, I can picture a different outcome for a no insps barely softcapped character running just enough accuracy to 95% +3s and little to no slow resist. It's also another situation where what is considered a drawback of the sentinel in normal play (no aggro) becomes a boon, as enemies scatter when minions are wiped out by the initial alpha, making for less buff/debuff stacking from their end. Although this can go both ways: in the one spot of the map where there's a lowered platform at a corner between the normal floor height, I got stuck down there webnaded while bosses were shooting at me from upstairs. This was quite the workout. The missions feel really well designed to challenge you in interesting ways. I don't think my sent can afford more hospital bills just yet but I'll definitely try more of these later.

#1 might feel morally shady to most people but in truth, it helps with price discovery and benefits you when you're on the other end of that trade. Logically, the average player should be an equal supplier and consumer of goods on the AH. If he isn't - if, specifically, he buys more stuff from the AH than he supplies - then that means he's generating less drops per inf than the average player, contributing more to inflation (and thus, price hikes). Flipping and farming are correlated in that these two activities have counterintuitive effects. That is, we tend to think of flipping as bad whereas it's actually positive for the economy, and we tend to think of farming as good whereas it's actually hurtful to the economy.

Yes!! I knew our secret plan to pretend argue with each other would land an orange name on the Sentinel boards some day.

It depends how much global accuracy you're running with, if you have another PBAoE in which you want Arma and Fury, and whether you want set bonuses. To maximize the power without too many outside assumptions, I'd go Scirocco Dervish acc/dam/end + acc/dam + proc, Eradication proc, Obliteration proc, Arma proc. On most builds picking up global accuracy here and there in other powers, this would likely end up at 95% chance tohit against +3s.

I felt like you for a while. Strongly. With time (and advice from the forum), I slowly discovered there's significant boosts to be grabbed in epic pools if you abuse the hell out of procs. For example: - Psi Mastery: Mind Probe with Hecatomb and Dominate loaded with hold damage procs become two of the strongest attacks available to Sentinels - Mu Mastery: Electrying Fences with procs is also a strong contender comparable or even superior to primary AoEs. On top of that, AoE immobilize is a highly desirable effect for Sentinels - Fire Mastery: Fire Sword Circle deals near nuke damage with procs, with less than half the recharge (on admittedly a half as small radius as well). Cremate is another decent melee attack. Char can be procced out for high ST damage, Fire Cages is a fast AoE immobilize, even Warmth can patch up a build - Dark Mastery: Engulfing Darkness can hit as hard as Fire Sword Circle on a larger radius I've had a harder time getting good use out of the other epics, although they aren't completely useless. I don't mean to disagree with your point. A case can be made there's something questionable in epics that only become good if you do weird things with the IO system. But if you're looking for options, there's some for you.

All good suggestions, but going to second the SSD first and foremost. If you can afford it, this should give you the most dramatic improvement of all possible steps. For a quick fix, turning off ingame vertical synchronisation might help with loading times. Back when I was on a HDD, I remember it took a solid third off if not half.

It will work, and retain the maximum 90% chance to proc. It's very nice in there, because the cooldown of Aim-type powers is the same as Sentinel nukes (90s). So you get the equivalent of Build Up + Aim like a Blaster to boost your nuke damage.

Doesn't the contact bar reflect progress accurately (one notch = one mission)?