nihilii

There is something strange in that it is the people who want to tweak the AT radically who also tend to espouse the idea all data is anecdotal and invalid. One would think if we can't know something is wrong unless devs tell us with a vast campaign of datamining, then cautiousness is warranted. Doubly strange that this point of view is often expressed when data is posted to support the idea Sentinels can perform, and rarely expressed when data is posted to support the idea Sentinels underperform - even when the objective quality of the data point favors the former. I think there is a case here of starting from a conclusion ("Sentinels underperform"), then moving backwards to find support for that conclusion. As the data starts to pile up suggesting Sentinels are decent performers, we are now down to dismissing the validity of data rather than challenging it with more data.

I don't want the money but you tempt me. Fortitude + AB on Lore pets can work wonders, you know... (And even if we disallow Lore, PPP pets can be made perma to great effect!). I think there's a prominent defender poster who probably has done it already, anyway. @Linea if memory doesn't fail?

If we're arguing clunkiness, I'd go one step further and say I find Domination clunkier as an inherent. In my scrapperlock, I frequently forget to use it - and then I have to build the whole bar again. Inherents that work passively are much more fun for me than having to micromanage an extra click. It saddens me to see the number of people who want to turn Opportunity as an extra click. I'd rather see the active part combine its effects + tag whoever you're attacking while the bar is full (so you can switch targets and/or not worry about your target dying 1 hit in) + work with any attack power.

It could also be that Ninja Run is available to anyone as soon as level 1. My builds never take travel powers unless I have extra power slots, and even then it tends to be to mule a Winter's Gift IO or knockback protection.

I die many, many times on my Blasters. For a performance metric, I can solo Apex, TinM and the LRSF, or +4/x8 against every faction, on those same Blasters. I will just die more than any of my other characters while doing so. It's alright if anyone wants to tell me I'm really bad at DPS, playing dumb, and not good at team tactic. In this situation "really bad" can still carry me through almost all the team content the game has to offer, without a team. Once on a team, there's no question everything can be done. So there's an evolutionary pressure argument here: when "really bad" lets you do everything, the incentive to improve from "really bad" is low. Now, about that improvement... No doubt more conservative play would reduce the death count. Playing on teams with Tankers exclusively and waiting for pulls and whatnot. But once we do that, we run into the question of opportunity cost. Time spent micromanaging survival is time spent not doing damage. Not to mention having to rely on other people, who may or may not be competent themselves. In my experience there's just more damage to be done in playing aggressively with the occasional death than being more careful and never dying. It's not like one death every 20-30 minutes really hurt your bottomline when you can just pop your P2W rez and hop back into the fight. Even one death every 5 minutes is doable, one just has to go /fire epic and pick RoTP (although the retoggling somewhat hurts performance, so 5 minutes might be pushing it. 10 is fine). Granted, everyone has their own win conditions, which don't necessarily include "doing as much damage as possible"; but the damage gap between a defensively played Blaster and an offensively played Sentinel shrinks, sometimes to the point the Sentinel will come out on top. Someone with "deal as much damage as possible while never dying" as a win condition might be better served with a Sentinel than a Blaster. At the highest ends of highend play, it's also true a Blaster (specifically Fire/ and probably Fire/Fire) is the best choice out of the two. Pump it up with amplifiers, base buffs and T2/T3 insps and you've got boatloads of survivability, while making no sacrifice in damage. This is a route worth considering. Too involved in prep time for me to play like that *all* the time, and I'll happily pay a slight damage tax for the convenience of shields.

I love many things about the United States, but American imperialism being on overdrive lately makes it really hard to reconcile that love with a want for sovereignty, freedom and liberty of expression. Some of the self-righteous posters ITT could do well to try to have some perspective. To Americans, this is a "blue team" / "red team" issue. To much of the rest of the world, this is just another illustration you hold us by the balls, dictate our domestic policies, twist our cultures into a bad copy of yours, subvert our democracies with money. To add insult to injury, you herald yourselves as moral paragons as you do so. There has been a lot of distastefulness from American companies as of late. Some even shutting down their international services in "solidarity". Nevermind that many people rely on these services for their livelihood - nevermind that our economies aren't as strong as the US, and in large part due to the US. Even from those who claim to want a borderless world, solidarity strangely seems to stop at national borders. In comparison, Homecoming's statement is fairly mild and respectful. Thank you for that. We're getting to play the game for free and this is your private server, so you'd be completely within your rights to plaster #BLM banners everywhere if that's what you wanted. Appreciate the restraint and a level of professionalism over most "professionals".

I wish the Stalker version of Eagle's Claw (longer recharge, higher damage) was ported to Brutes/Scrappers/Tankers. I despise the short-lived hidden +dmg/crit buff tied to Eagle's Claw. It's not intuitive, it doesn't make much sense thematically, and it nudges me into a more focused playstyle than I like. I'd gladly trade it for the above - or even for a further damage increase to Eagle's Claw, even if it came with higher recharge as well. Bump the recharge to 20s and the damage in consequence, give a meaty animation the meaty damage it deserves. Eagle's Claw should be the Crushing Uppercut of MA, and not something some people advocate skipping.

Vsync is "Vertical Sync" in game. It stops visual tears you might see when moving the camera fast, but negatively affects input lag. Some people don't notice, so for them, it's win/win. You might already have it on. Going to reiterate because perhaps the amount of replies you got makes it confusing, what with people talking about their own temps with newer cards: the temperatures you're experiencing are completely fine in general, and to be expected for this card's generation. Somewhere around 2010-2012 GPUs got more efficient at heat management, and it's frequent to have newer cards running no hotter than 50°C even under heavy load and without watercooling. The Radeon 4890 came before that time and it's normal to see it go to 60-70°C. Quick Googling around for "average temps Radeon 4890" will confirm that for you. There's really nothing you should worry about here.

Balance by inconvenience is pretty bad. Some people don't mind Momentum at all and so they get their free cake and eat it too. Some of us dislike Momentum so we live through the pain to enjoy being overpowered. 😛 But there's another problem, even if you accept the argument TW needs to excel at something: TW excels at *everything* or close to it compared to other melee powersets, at least in pure performance metrics. It has: - best burst damage - best ST DPS - near best AoE DPS - much of its AoE DPS can be dealt as a side effect of its ST DPS. TW is the best at this. - best native -RES - best +DEF, as strong as other options and tied to a cone attack whereas Divine Avalanche type powers are typically ST - near best if not outright best IO/proc slotting options (Achilles Heel, Fury of the Gladiator, and generally high recharge powers giving high proc chances) I don't think anyone is arguing TW performance should be strictly equal to a standard set with no special mechanic, given the need to manage Momentum. But TW performance probably shouldn't be twice as good as most other melee options. Momentum is a can of worms and a half, too, because its very nature means you will have dramatically superior performance if you optimize around it. Jim Minmaxer running the FT -> RA -> CB -> FT -> AoE -> CB attack chain is on another planet as Joe Casual who's idea of efficient Momentum is popping Build Up then going through the higher damage attacks in succession, slowly tabbing through targets and moving at base run speed to them. Don't get me wrong, Joe is still going to push out some impressive damage above normal powersets, because TW attacks are actually better than regular attacks on a power per power basis*. but likely, he'll feel like TW is "fast fast fast... slow, slow slow slow slow". Whereas for Jim, there's only one slow attack every 10 seconds. It makes for a much wider gap than traditional powersets. *Extra emphasis on that: TW, without any Momentum, is actually a competitive powerset (if we assume Follow Through and Whirling Smash could be used, and give them, say, a 2 second animation). It even has better DPE overall.

Most people who defend "the game is balanced around SOs" don't use SOs themselves, anyway; or if they do, they certainly don't push it very far. I use SOs occasionally. Many of the power feats one can do on IO builds are still replicable on SOs, simply because you've got an insp tray, temp powers and incarnates. You lose SOME performance, but it's not as dramatic as you might think. I don't think people are being disingenuous. Just, as you say... We've all moved on to IOs a long time ago. The use for SOs tend to be restricted to the leveling process, if that. So, well-intentioned posters confuse their experience at level 20 for "SO balance". Whereas much of the performance difference they feel is a result of the difference between a level 20 and a level 50. At lvl 50, a properly built TW/bio scrapper on SOs still performs better than most IOed out builds. Interestingly enough this is one of the many combos where a brute might be better on SOs (whereas the scrapper is definitely superior on IOs); but the scrapper would still be a power build. (This is incidentally another problem with the "game is balanced around SOs": the brute vs scrapper power balance most definitely isn't right on SOs. Scrappers need their ATOs and even just sets to pull ahead as damage dealers. In the SO world, brutes deal MORE damage, because Fury lets them allocate more precious slots to accuracy, endred and recharge. Brutes vs scrappers is fine on IOs, but is broken on SOs!) In the end, TW balance concerns just can't be handwaved through the SO balance argument. TW breaks the game as soon as level 1, when you pick Defensive Sweep and enjoy Divine Avalanche as a cone attack. This power alone can trivialize the lower levels (if there was even such a need). I rolled a SR/TW Tanker a year back, cranked the rep to x8 as soon as level 1 and never looked back.

You definitely shouldn't have to worry about those temps. Graphic cards are built to handle 90-100°C. You might get good mileage out of lowering Shadows and View Distance (world especially). Turning off Water effects is good too if you haven't done that already.

This was fixed a few months back.

Could it be that the pylons outside of the path of the rikti dropship get this extra tick of damage and KB to compensate?

I'm curious as to the reasoning behind banning Long Range Teleport? Not a criticism, I don't speedrun so I'm just genuinely interested in learning.

Scramble Thoughts is basically Total Focus at range. It works well with procs due to a long animation and long recharge, but doesn't need any to perform. oldskool listed some good numbers, and that's just solo. Once you throw in team buffs/debuffs... Yum. I see my friend's Psy/SR hit 4 digits left and right against level 54s whenever I bring my heavy -res debuffers. I like to run WillDom -> Dominate -> Mind Probe -> WillDom -> Scramble Thoughts for an attack chain. If melee is impossible, replace Mind Probe with TK Blast (which you need every now and then for Opportunity anyway).

IMHO this is 100% the right answer. The fun part of Storm is sending things flying to the four winds. The least mezzes/aggro control the better, because you can feel the effect of your Storm powers much more. Storm sucks end like crazy and has no heal, Elec Affinity fixes both of these things. Elec doesn't care if you're in melee range or at range, nor where the mobs are, either - another pro for playing with Storm. Go Defender for greater buff values and go to town.

Strangely enough, it works for me. Despite knowing a stream of Sonic attacks is superior, I get more enthusiastic about the bright Sentinel reticle. I guess I'm easy to fool with GFX!

Many great arguments have been made re: agency and content. Keeping in mind those would take so much work it's unlikely to happen, I'm going to advocate for higher rewards. I don't agree with the previously expressed sentiment people would switch back to hero instantly. If redside has a permanent XP/inf/merit boost on story arcs etc., you'd spend your time consistently switching. Rather than fiat, I'd rather see a system where rewards would be boosted by X%, then every week, month, whatever interval of time we'd see how the hero/villain population balance has evolved. Crank it up further if the ratio isn't moving towards villains. Leave it be once parity is found (and of course, if villains start to outnumber heroes, dial it back down).

Vengeance stacking wrecks most of my characters, and I build these same characters to solo +4/x8 against all factions and LRSF/STF. I don't know what kind of overpowered demi-god you've built, but I want some of that goodness!

I made my ranged Stalker a ranged Stalker. Claws/Bio/Soul, using Focus, Dark Blast, Moonbeam and Shockwave. She doesn't even have Assassin's Strike. With the ATOs, it is surprisingly potent. ST DPS was in the 250-270 range, which is of course significantly less than a normal Stalker but still more than enough to solo ++ AVs and TFs. Save for that, I'm going to echo the above suggestions. /dev and /nin blasters are your friends here.

I've only ever done the ITF on +0 or +4. (...Ok, I probably have done it on other settings, but with friends and I don't pay enough attention.) So I'll have to rely on your knowledge here: do the AVs that spawn as level 51s on +0 start spawning as level 52s on +1, or do they remain as level 51s? If they remain lvl 51s, +1/x8 probably wouldn't change much. There would be added threat from other spawns, but there was enough leeway we're still well within the realm of what is possible. Now, level 52 AVs or above... This is where damage output might not be enough. Unless we make some clever use of Lore, which afterall I used rather poorly. I suppose I could also make a HO build rather than SO. Slapping res/end everywhere a res SO is ought to help, ditto with acc/dam instead of plain acc (allowing for more end or rech slotting)... and even dam/range to replace dam SOs, to exploit hoverblasting further. It is rather cool to think about these things. The IO space is objectively the most interesting, but we've treaded in those lands for so long a lot of optimization has been done. On the other hand, trying to minmax a SO/HO build is something that hasn't been done since the game was very different from what it is now. SO/HO + Incarnates synergies are radically new if nothing else. Amusingly, I read that part of your original post diagonally and thought you took 1 hour to do the whole thing. I was in awe. 😄 Doing it at all on +1/x8 is a massive achievement, in any case, and what a cool idea.

Now this is the strangest thing: I can truly relate to you. My average CoH session these days is either AFK farming a new character I thought off in the last couple days, or tripleboxing relatively fresh 50s through Apex/TinM or accolade content (man, do these accolades take a lot of time compared to everything else now, even if you streamline the process). I'm slightly obsessive about optimizing my playtime, so I don't play finished characters all that much as there's always a part of my mind that thinks "I could be making progress on this other alt that needs it". On old Live servers, I would frequently delete my namesake, lvl 50 and all, just so I could put the name and concept back to work on a new treadmill. But here, the moment someone posts a cool idea for a challenge thing? It's the fire/rad sent that comes to mind. There's something incredibly enjoyable for me about the way this character handles. The smart answer would go like this: Nictus have fixed spawns, so if you memorize their positions you will know which one is where. The me answer: I kinda whack on them and watch their effects and hope for the best. The autohit Nictus is easier to distinguish than the other two as you can just aim for the center of its PBAoE. If you fight them at range, it is likely you will end up targeting the autohit Nictus first without trying, because it is the most aggressive in trying to close in - it has to, in order to hit you.

PFF makes them intangible, so no. That is a tactic you can use against them. Attack boss first, once he PFFs you have some time to defeat the lieutenants knowing Veng won't buff the boss.

I'm with 0th power. I enjoy the mini challenge of timing burst damage just right, or using a knockdown at the right moment, or what have you, to prevent PFF/MoG. Fake Nemesis have lengthy animations too so it's possible to use that against them and feels pretty nice when you pull it off. Or sometimes you're playing a mediocre character who has no KB/KD/mez nor damage, but you work with a teammate to burst them down in time regardless. It's a cool dynamic. I understand the spirit of the suggestion but would much rather have PFF turned into a 90% resistance power where they can attack than removed entirely. Anecdotally the Paragon devs likely felt as you do, as Slinger who was introduced in I8 or whenever the RSF came out, uses a PFF much closer to the player version, giving him high resistance and defense rather than untangible. Fake Nem PFF is a holdover from very early design.

I raise thee again, o thread! Following a fun idea by Dr Causality: I took on a +0/x8 MoITF with SOs only on my Fire/Rad Sentinel. Insps allowed, provided they drop in the mission and aren't just bought or stocked in emails. Pretty interesting run. It felt more or less as challenging as a +4/x8 MoITF without insps on a normal (IO) build, but that challenge presented itself in different ways. For starters, there's the fun in rediscovering how to do a SO build. Fire/Rad is a strong combo in that area. Radiation provides you with numerous tools to manage your endurance and decent resistances. Meltdown becomes a fantastic T9, slashing incoming damage in half as it boosts your resistances from ~50% overall to ~75% overall. There's also great synergy between Meltdown and Hybrid Melee, as you can alternate the two with some gap. I often argue Fire Blast isn't such an outlier on Sentinels. The DoT was rebalanced to lower values, Blazing Blast is a decent but not amazing T4 that comes with a repel + KB effect you have to manage; and some other Sentinel primaries got buffs from their original version, evening out the power ranking. This is true at the IO level, or even in standard team play where buffs abound. But at the SO level and for this kind of challenge, there's some definite advantages to Fire Blast: - Flares is on a 2s recharge and deals comparable damage to 4s recharge T1s. This is a drawback on IO builds as it implies lesser proc chance, but this is a boon on SO builds where you need all the help you can get to build a full attack chain. - Blazing Blast repel and KB are great for survivability. Keeping a Cimeroran boss on his back can be the difference between life and death. The /psi epic is, of course, out. Without abusing procs, neither Dominate nor Mind Probe are all that great compared to native fire attacks. There could be some use to Mass Hypnosis, sleeping spawns for survivability and focusing on ST damage, but, eh. I didn't want to overthink it. Here's what I went with: Onto the run itself! I started with my standard Incarnate loadout: Musculature, Ageless, Hybrid Assault, Vorpal, Degenerative and Longbow. The plan was to switch as needed, and use Lore as little as possible. MISSION 1 let me get my feet wet with the SO build. Mostly hopping around, popping lucks as needed (and converting most insps, swallowing rages for extra damage otherwise). This Sentinel still has decent AoE burst on SOs, with Aim + Ground Zero + Inferno + Fireball. Given that we're only fighting level 50s and that we're levelshifted, this wipes out minions and lieutenants most of the time. Still... Got to be careful. With ~50% resistance outside of Meltdown and just 9% defense, damage can stack extremely fast. I had to be proactive either with insp use or by jousting mobs. Standing still simply wasn't an option unless defense was boosted with insps. Even then, I had to be ready to react fast and saw a couple close calls. For the kheldian ambush, I targeted the Bright Novas first. Can't risk boss-level mobs debuffing defense at range. MISSION 2 was a lucky break: I got the smallest cave map, with just one fork. This was mostly a question of running forward, defeating the nictus crystal, and moving on to the next one, with aggroed mobs still lagging behind and the aggro cap working against them. Nonetheless, I chugged a lot of inspirations on that mission. MISSION 3 heralded our first real test: can a Sentinel on SOs deal enough DPS to defeat AVs? Well, first I had to deal with the insp crunch from mission 2. I swapped Incarnates from Ageless/Assault to Barrier/Melee, with a goal to replenish inspirations through fighting mobs and not using any. Endurance felt fine before, to the point Ageless seemed overkill. But then that's the thing with recovery: if you have enough it can feel like you have too much. Once it's gone you start to truly notice it. This can be especially true on Rad Armor if you use Meltdown, because there's a -recovery crash after the T9 is over. It's more subtle than an endurance crash, and it's easy to let your endurance bar drop as you keep attacking before you notice what's going on. Melee Hybrid has great synergy with Meltdown though, as previously mentioned. So I eventually settled on Ageless/Melee, once I had enough insps to make the switch. The Romulus Phalanx fight took a while. I cleaned the robots at every step of the way, else their damage might have been too much. The third robot wave, attacking in unison, took my life down to below half in an instant. After the computer blew up, I pulled Requiem downstairs. Now this is the big departure from an IO build. Usually we think of Requiem as a pansy, even as a +4. On a SO build? The guy can be threatening. Each of his attack would typically take about 1/3 to 1/2 of my life without Meltdown or Hybrid, so I had to stay alert. Thankfully, I was dealing enough damage to overcome his regeneration... but not so much I could afford to pop lucks through the whole fight. Requiem loves to run; so I saved insps for the times where extra aggro was inevitable. Romulus proved harder - naturally, as he's level 51. Add to that his sword attacks come with -def, and he's accompanied by 2 elite bosses. Which I probably should have focused down right away, but I had the great (not so great) idea I would kill them with AoEs. The net result was ~10 minutes of jousting around, and by the time they were dead Rommie himself had maybe 10% health left. MISSION 4! Up until now, Lore wasn't used. Not to discriminate against pets. The grand plan for this finale was to leverage Imperious for a bit of extra oomph. The big guy packs a punch, if you're OK with things scattered to the four winds. Let's call it extra survivability. With a noncrashing Unstoppable and Dull Pain, Imperious isn't too bad at staying alive either. With Ground Zero I could heal him for about 240hp every 30 seconds, which helped somewhat. The biggest threat lies with Minotaurs/Cyclops, as they can take the pain long enough Imperious will go down eventually. So I flew up, and led him towards Romulus. We cleared the platform just fine... except the last Cyclops ran towards Romulus just as it was about to die. Fire DoTs finished the Cyclops without getting in range... but no matter. Brave Imperious already charged towards the corpse, ended in perception range of Romulus, and decided it was a splendid idea to just take on 4 AVs by himself. At least he was still in Unstoppable, so he could withstand some damage. I let him whack on Romulus, and instead started flying up and shot the autohit Nictus. So, yeah, SO build... Autohit nictus... The damn thing hits hard. I could just keep up with incoming damage with my heal/absorb/res clicks, but not take any extra; meaning I had to softcap myself with lucks to defend against other Nictus and Romulus attacks. Imperious went down. As the healing nictus closed in on me and started to heal, I felt like I wouldn't be able to make it without help. Time to summon Lore. Being the grand strategist I am, only on par with Imperious, I aimed the summoning reticle on a ground spot away from the AVs, so the Lore pets could come out and shoot AVs at range while everything was focused on me. So I slapped that reticle just in range of the Council group next to it, which promptly aggroed and killed the Longbow pets. Whatever. I'm in it, might as well give it my best shot. I was making some progress on the Nictus healthbar, so even though my inspiration tray was drying up, there was no sense in giving up too early. Still... Those inspirations were running lower and lower. I could see the Nictus healthbar down to 30%... 25%... But it just wasn't going fast enough compared to insp use. In desperation, I popped Eye of the Magus (which I forgot I had until now) for an extra minute of respite. Oh boy. Now I'm out of insps, Eye of the Magus is over and the Nictus still has 10% health. The healing Nictus is going to start hitting me regularly and I won't be able to outpace its regen. To my surprise, it didn't play out that well. Even with just 9% defense, at +0 the healing Nictus just doesn't hit you all that much. I kept making progress, ever so slowly. Managing the incoming damage as best as I could. Even juggling Vorpal in there for that +30% def bonus, shortlasted as it may be. And then the autohit Nictus went down! Woo. The moment you take down the autohit Nictus, you are - in theory - able to do everything else. Especially if you did it without a time constraint such as Lore or insps. Sure enough, the healing Nictus followed... Then the summoning Nictus. Something fun about Rommie I never noticed before. The man doesn't have much range. Perhaps just 60 feet on his blasts. If you fly straight up from his position, about 70-80 feet, the Nictus will stay glued to you and Romulus will run back and forth helplessly, never attacking you. If you're a standard ranged attacker with Hover slotted for movement, you could conceivably fight him without taking a hit this way. Sentinels only have 60 feet base range, though; and I'm using a jetpack for flight. Romulus will stay put if you attack the Nictus, but he can start running if you gun for him while he's out of range. So, got to have that unsuppressed Hover speed and extra range. Still, I stuck to flying above him to fight him, only at around 50-60 feet as to limit his running and give myself leeway to chase him. Romulus himself isn't too threatening even in his Nictus form, but you have to be mindful of the ambushes triggered at set%. The healers can restore a big chunk of his life at once, and a x8 ambush can easily debuff your defense into oblivion. I cleaned out the first ambush, got him back down to 70% HP. At this point, felt confident I would win no matter what, so I pulled out Lore again (which was recharged for a while, but I decided not to use it). Just to speed things a little. Well... Lore speeds things a lot. Romulus dropped from 70% to 20% in the blink of an eye. This had the "positive" effect, for challenge purposes, of triggering 2 ambushes at once, making for a harder and different challenge to deal with. The Longbow pets were nuked fast, so I got to clean it all up solo. Now for the best part... Sweet, sweet loot. It's not just a purple drop from killing Romulus. It's the one specific purple drop that would be of most use to this build, if I were a genuine SO player who needed it. At this moment it felt like the RNG gods were watching, and decided to reward the performance. Then two minutes later... Some amazing luck, and ever so fitting to cap a great run. Final time was just under 2 hours. It feels like it would be possible to do this no insps, no Lore at all. I don't know if I want to try it, but who knows. It's rather interesting to rediscover SO builds, in any case. For all the stuff we get to achieve with IOs, they're not that critical to absolute performance - only relative. Of course, incarnates and insps can carry you a long way.