nihilii

It does seem more efficient to use the shards as designed. You have 5 incarnate slots using threads, and 1 incarnate slot that can use threads and shards. I've found that the progression lines up perfectly for my characters: by the time I hit T4 Hybrid + Destiny + Lore + Interface + Judgement with threads, I also hit T4 Alpha with shards. YMMV if the activities you do are more likely to reward incarnate components and less likely to reward shards. i.e., someone who exclusively runs itrials, hami raids, and maybe a side of Apex/TinM, might have greater luck using threads even for Alpha. But if you have a "balanced diet" of content, you'll likely end up with more than enough shards - heck, I run a lot of Apex/TinM myself, so I probably earn more incarnate components (and proportionally, less shards) than someone who would play standard story arcs.

I think with your specified limitations (which I'm very fond of, btw - insp management and insp usage is a fun part of the game, but email cheese destroys any challenge and adds prep time that isn't properly accounted for), one could convert all insps to purples for survivability and rely on Ageless this way. This is the approach I would take if I were to attempt this on my Fire/Rad sentinel, anyway. Great challenge idea and I'm not sure if I even want to theorycraft anymore, instead I might just try to follow your footsteps first and see what happens! Edit: I took a stab at it and won, in just under 2 hours. Some thoughts here (a lot of it is related to Sentinels): It turns out Sentinels have enough damage, so Blasters definitely have more than enough damage. Insp use should carry them through caves; perhaps shoot for some build alternating Rune of Protection, Hybrid Melee and Barrier to stay near capped S/L res most of the time and with decent defense. Meleers I feel shouldn't have too many issues (except Stalkers; survivability in melee range might be tight there), although not all choices are created equal. TW/bio would likely perform as outrageously well as it does in the IO world: include Defensive Sweep in the attack chain and use it as much as possible for defense, toy with Defensive Adaptation and Efficient Adaptation as needed,

Oldskool has a great overall writeup. If I were to recommend just one fun build to try out Sentinels, I'd say Elec/SR. - Sentinel SR is the best version of Super Reflexes available in the game. You get passive mez protection, a fast recharge absorb power, and a quick recovery clone. It's easy to build for, shoot for the softcap and you're golden. It leaves you a lot of room to focus on attacking. - Sentinel Elec blast is also the best version of this powerset. You get a proper tier3 blast in Zapping Bolt, animating as fast as Blaze. Tesla Cage turns into a tier4 blast while retaining its hold effect. Thunderous Blast is on a 90s recharge instead of the slooow 170s recharge of the original, and this 90s recharge Thunderous Blast keeps its strong -recovery and -endurance secondary effects. Ergo, it is very easy to fully sap entire spawns just by going through one Aim, Ball Lightning, Thunderous Blast, Ball Lightning, Short Circuit rotation, a combo that is available every 25-30 seconds on a highend build. This makes for an especially fun Sent to try out if you have experience with the powersets on other ATs, because it's just the same except... better.

Healing imps are vulnerable to control effects and spawn at the same spot everytime. You could have someone with a hold or even a immobilize stand at their spawn point, and immediately hold/immob them. Failing that, someone with high damage can 1 or 2-shot the imp reliably if they're quick on the draw. In your team, that could be the Arachnos Soldier using web grenade (provided they have the power). With four players, you have large leeway with team composition. I think there's actually nothing wrong with your team makeup. You're lacking hard mezzes (no holds save from demons), but that shouldn't be a dealbreaker anywhere but in the LGTF - and your Water/Poison friend could grab epic Dominate. And if you don't minmax, it's likely your group turns out heavy on defense and low on offense; but that's a problem that could be solved with some build rework or playstyle adjustements. For example, is your Corruptor standing in melee for Venomous Gas to work its -RES magic? Does your Arachnos Soldier spam Venom Grenade (more -RES)? Does your Mastermind use the whip attacks (which also inflict -RES)? If not, implementing these steps would likely make your damage output skyrocket. Your role as a Tanker is also mostly to attack, using non-damage powers such as Taunt only on long distance foes hitting your friends; in any other situation, none of your friends should be able to peel aggro off your toggle aura. Of course, the game has to be fun above all and sometimes playing a certain way isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you want an easier ride through rerolling, I think you want to aim for combos that are naturally more damaging. i.e. switch Emp for Time (or really just about any other secondary), swap Water for Fire, turn the Soldier into a Crab, change Elec to Street Justice or TW... But, it should be stressed there's no *need* to go for cookie-cutter stuff and ideally you guys should play what you like, because there is a way to make it work.

Melee enemies typically have a full melee attack chain and only 1 or 2 ranged blasts. Ranged enemies are obviously the same at range or in melee. Net result: some enemies deal less damage at range than in melee. The frequency and magnitude of this lowered damage is arguable, the existence of it is not. It's fine to have a kneejerk reaction to the idea because it reminds you of days where Blasters were told to suck it up, but this has no relation to the topic of Sentinel survivability. It's also fine if you dislike procs and Sentinel epics specifically, and it's fine if you're OK with softcapped defenses through IOs and Clarion/Hybrid incarnates or amplifiers. But surely, at some point we must realise our personal choices are just that, personal. Balancing the whole game around one's own playstyle might turn ATs to be balanced for the limited toolset we choose to restrict ourselves to; but it will inevitably break said balance for people willing to use the whole gamut. I feel you pigeonholed yourself into a certain view of the game. It just so happens your preferred playstyle will make Blasters vastly superior to Sentinels. I don't see that as a balance issue. I see that as you having found your calling when it comes to AT selection. There's nothing wrong with the above, mind. I'm right at the other end of the spectrum compared to you. As a primarily solo/duo player who enjoys convenience and taking on the tough stuff, Fire Blasters simply don't deal enough extra damage to justify the survivability they lose compared to Sentinels. I say Fire Blasters because I can't even entertain any other primary, I need the sizeable advantage the Blaster version of Fire Blast comes with to even consider the tradeoff; and even then, it inevitably disappoints me. So if I were to judge the entire game by my own choices, I would say decisively that Blasters are broken and need buffs!

Sentinels share the 75% RES CAP as other ATs. Defense hardcap is something absurd like 150%. Sentinels get slightly lower values on their armors. I've never thought that was a particularly convincing point against Sentinels, because as Bill says, you take significantly less damage at range. Like... by a factor of 2.

Thanks for expanding on your opinion, it's insightful to hear your perspective. This already exists: slow resistance is available through set bonuses. It seems arbitrary to campaign against endurance drain resistance but not slow resistance. There is no current way to hit the HP cap + damage cap + defense cap permanently on a single character*. That's even if you consider the softcap as the ultimate goal (which it isn't, even basic mobs feature -def in spades). Opportunity cost is inevitable. *well, OK, maybe on a Stone/SS Tanker. Which comes with the dramatic tradeoffs in mobility we all know. Look at it this way. You have a finite number of slots. If right now you use a 3-piece set giving you +10% regen and +1.88% HP, and if tomorrow you replaced it with a new hypothetical set giving you +4% recovery and +10% endurance drain resistance, then you'd lose 10% regen and 1.88% HP. No ifs or buts about it. You *could* argue you don't care about the regen and the HP anyway, but in which case this begs the question, why'd you have the set in the first place? The "straight buff" would have happened because you weren't optimizing your build previously, not because the change itself is problematic. I struggle with an argument against homogenization when it's also suggested to pursue the most common route for survivability. Two searches for "softcap" vs "endurance drain" would likely give you a 100:1 ratio skewed towards the former. If anything, I'm for this suggestion because it would open options away from homogenization, getting end drain resist rather than chasing defense. In essence, isn't defense ultimately the most "boring" mitigation? You simply dodge most ill effects and can restrict your worries to tohit buffs and defense debuffs. I think there's two different debates here, "is adding an endurance drain set bonus a good idea" vs "are there ways to deal with endurance drain right now". At least I see them as two entirely different topics, your mileage may vary. The OP hasn't framed endurance drain to be a catastrophic problem that needs to be fixed, just that it would be nice to have an optional solution, at a cost, for this rather niche thing. I agree vehemently with his framing and suggestion.

I think this is a reasonable suggestion. It'd be great to see a greater variety of set bonuses for these misc things. Opens up more build options and versatility. Recovery: it lets you mitigate the effect by having more end, but actual end drain resist is functionally different. Recovery set bonuses are minimal (because they improve more than just end drain resist, obviously) and a hypothetical end drain resist set bonus would give you more bang for your buck, if it were at say +10% per bonus. SG base buffs: those are nice, temporary buffs. No reason it couldn't coexist with permanent set bonuses. Plenty of SG base buffs are mirrored in set bonuses: recovery, slow resist, KB resistance, and so on. Defense: universally good, no question. All the more reason we should embrace options for different routes. "Flaws are good" (Monos' point): there is an opportunity cost to everything. If you chased drain resistances through set bonuses, you'd give up some defense set bonuses for it, or +HP or +dam or what have you. I see no drawback to the OP and am surprised by the answers. Why is adding options a bad thing? I'm left to wonder if everyone is truly answering the body of the post and not just reacting to the title of the thread.

For my own Dark Armor characters, Ageless debuff res never seemed to work as nice as it ought to on paper. This might be a failure of my own builds; because I aim (at best) for just the softcap, even 85% DDR won't stop defense debuffs entirely. DA can take a lot of punishment on its own, so in situations where I want the DDR, I'm facing some serious amount of debuffs. One hit gets through, 45% becomes 43%, then another hit 2 or 3 seconds later, then it's sort of a slow cascading defense failure. Generally standing upright for the first 30 seconds of Ageless; after which the debuff resistance goes from 85% to 42.5%, and all hell breaks loose. In comparison, Barrier gives you so much defense overkill nothing gets through. What defense debuffs were previously there will be gone by the time the 30 seconds "high buff" duration is over, and no further debuffs will be there. Of course, it's fair to say Ageless shouldn't be as strong as Barrier, as it isn't purely defensive. You get a full endurance bar and some recharge to boot. But I find that dual aspect tricky in itself. If you plan your build around the provided recharge and endurance, then you won't have Ageless saved up for maximum debuff resistance at critical times. And if you do save Ageless, then you're letting endurance and recharge sit unused. It seems easier to go all the way in one direction or another... Ageless +recovery which lets you forgo almost all endurance slotting and frees up slots, or Barrier for a really tanky character. YMMV. I could see situations where you have a build where the recharge and full bar of endurance is all that you need, without further +recovery. So in that case you might treat the +debuff as a hefty side bonus even if its strength fluctuates.

Homecoming is probably about x20 influence when it comes to purples compared to old Live servers due to the defacto price caps with merit <-> inf, boosted merits, easier incarnates and general power creep. Complaints like OP feel rather arbitrary: you're focusing on the x2 inf because it's blatant and obvious, but essentially you're complaining this server is only running x20 influence instead of x40 influence. Purples used to be something a large part of the playerbase couldn't afford for one character. Let alone their full roster. Now we've got people complaining they can't fully IO out 1000 characters slots on 2 hours a week playtime while purposefully refusing to use several of the most lucrative venues.

Fire/Rad/Psi Sent T4 Musc, T4 Degen Core, T4 Ageless, T4 Assault Radial Blaze -> Dominate -> Fireball -> Blaze -> Mind Probe -> Flares Flares and Fireball are replaced as needed by misc clicks. Whenever Aim is up, Blaze -> Inferno follows. Hybrid ON 2:08 = 427 DPS 2:32 = 380 DPS 2:16 = 409 DPS 2:19 = 403 DPS 2:15 = 411 DPS 2:17 = 407 DPS 2:12 = 418 DPS Hybrid OFF 2:42 = 364 DPS (had the Time Lord day job) 2:39 = 368 DPS 3:10 = 329 DPS 2:56 = 345 DPS About ~+15 DPS from the previous build, which checks out with the changes made: filling up Fireball with procs (which also enhances the chance for Annihilation's -RES to go off, by virtue of having no recharge slotted anymore), dropping Meltdown for Vengeance and grabbing slightly more recharge bonuses in the process, turning the attack chain gapless for most of Ageless' duration. But tradeoffs have been made: I lost about 15% melee defense, and endurance is tighter as well. Build

Watching this topic go on for 14 pages, and reading the replies, you'd believe there's an even split in the sentiment. Instead of the overwhelming majority voting "defenses are fine as they are", with a fairly respectable sample size. Not to say the vocal minority can't have fun theorycrafting, but it begs the question: why poll people to know if they feel there is a problem if you're going to disregard their opinion and march on with the assumption there is a problem?

I can confirm one instance of Achilles will stack with one instance of Fury and one instance of Annihilation, for a total of -52.5% res (IIRC).

Your best bet is likely to use a thirdparty program like AutoHotkey so you can set up a macro to click X times. "Claim All" would be a huge QoL upgrade for Super Packs. Tie it to inf sinks, I'd happily pay a billion for that.

KB to KD works incredibly well in Bonfire. I admit I don't pay close attention to what mobs do before I defeat them, but they don't seem able to take a couple steps before falling again. It's more like constant slipping.

The efficiency of any influence sink comes down to the value destroyed. Useless prestige is a great inf sink in that light. End value = 0. If you're wondering whether anyone would convert inf to prestige, I'm reading @cyvert's post as: let's bring back the SG ranking list, purely for vanity purposes.

Also note /bio has an aggro aura, making mobs stick to you like glue, nice and bunched up for your AoEs and your damage aura. /dark has no such thing, even if you can get a (end hungry, and not as reliable) approximation through Cloak of Fear.

Perhaps this was at the same time they fixed Spring Attack dealing no damage for Sentinels? I think that happened ~3 months ago.

^ I'm as excited as you are disappointed, haha. I think the workflow upgrades they're talking about are incredibly exciting for developers - and by extension, for the players; as less time spent on dumb stuff ought to mean better games. Baking lights, counting triangles... These are the kind of dumb optimizations no human should ever think again, and yet most devs have to lose hours on it (more like thousands of hours than dozens, when all is said and done). Current conventional wisdom for level design is so inefficient. You build the level in white blocks, take care of the gameplay, then make several art passes until the environment looks proper. Human nature being what it is, the mort art passes you make, the less likely you'll throw everything away even if it turns out later on the gameplay just doesn't work. This is why modded levels from old Doom and Quake (built directly in BSP, which is like whiteblocking from start to finish) play so much better than many modern games. It's not just the base games being great, it's also that this traditional BSP workflow allows for constant iteration on the gameplay loop until things actually work right. Room is too small? Draw the vertices around and you've carved out additional space in just a few seconds, without distorting the looks. Level designers get feedback from testers and architectural changes can happen quick even post release. I see UE5 as a glimmer of hope we might see a return to sanity in that regard.

It looks fine! The one that jumps to mind is, you're lacking the Steadfast +3 def unique and you're falling one slot short of +2.5 def to all with Gaussians. Even though you're softcapped without either, the opportunity cost/gain of getting +5.5 def in 2 slots is so significant I'd make room for it. Some options: - replace the Aegis unique with Steadfast - remove extra slots from Maneuvers/Hover - finish the Gaussian set in Aim - add Preventive Medicine and Panacea procs in Health (always good procs to have for end management and survivability) - add Power Transfer proc in Stamina (you don't really *need* it, but again, it's nice) - add Kismet somewhere (+6 tohit is nice against enemies with defense buffs or tohit debuffs) - add a couple slot to Master Brawler, swap set to Panacea for +recharge

The -HP one affects AVs and is rather efficient for that task. Lowering their HP essentially lowers their regen as well.

I've given serious consideration to the idea. But lately, my experiences with "just enough" accuracy were disappointing - because I like to solo/duo LRSF, STF and so on on a regular basis, and the amount of tough targets with +def powers is nontrivial (for me). So I'm playing it safe. For more standard gameplay, your suggestion sounds worth exploring indeed! Or alternatively, swap Pistols for Dual Wield - as ES and Suppressive can handle the 3.7s recharge. Losing Offensive Opportunity probably doesn't matter too much compared to the gains, at least on paper. Earlier in the thread, @BrandX posted a no incarnate DP/Nin running ES -> Suppressive -> Dual Wields with slight gap and also doing 210 DPS. Giving credence to that chain. ~210 DPS before incarnates is no joke in any case. Makes me wonder about the /psi epic, just for kicks. 😉 One could run ES -> Supp -> Mind Probe -> ES -> Supp -> Dominate with ease. I don't think I want to go that route with this character, because DP is just so stylish and everything flows together. Maybe on Test...

I gather in recent years, the meta- prefix got increasing use in competitive gaming cultures; and because PvP games tend to have (to an extent) a rock-paper-scissors approach, the word "meta" has become synonymous for player trends in choices. i.e., the CoH "meta" could be SS/Fire Brutes for AE farming and TW/Bio Scrappers as generic power build. Kinda like the way we used to use FoTM. But the word "meta" can also be used about IO slotting and Incarnates (implicit comparison to past times where a lower % of the playerbase would use IOs and Incarnates). Or in the way SwitchFace uses it: "the proper Brute nowadays is a Scrapper". This is how I understand it as an outsider, anyway.

Dual Pistols/Regen Sentinel No incarnates Executioner's Shot -> Suppressive Fire -> Pistols (+ Hail of Bullets, only once per Hasten gap) 7:45 = 210 DPS I'm liking those numbers. It can only go up from there. There's something to be said for not having to rely on incarnates (Ageless). Plus, no /psi epic, woo. Build Ought to get boosters everywhere. Probably replace the Thunderstrike acc/dam/end with a Glad Javelin acc/dam, too, and squeeze some extra damage %. Endurance is fine as is, and I haven't done the +end accolades.

Just got hit by this bug today. On a character with at least 5 purple IOs in the inventory. Ouch!! This could really use a big, bold warning somewhere. It was on my first build, but I was level 40 untrained to level 50. Edit: logging out and back in again, right away, gave me the IOs back in my inventory.