nihilii

I have a feeling devs aren't even aware of this bug. I'm not sure all that many eyes look into the Archetype forums (save for us fanatics 😉 ), and that one thread in Bug Reports often got bumped out of the way by more popular issues. Perhaps we should have a consolidated Bug Report thread for all Sentinel issues. There's a fair number of small mistakes resulting from powerset copypaste, and it might increase visibility to group everything in one topic.

The ET nerf was probably the single most devastating change that happened to a powerset. I know there was a lot of noise about Regen, but I think that was mostly due to the set being popular, and nowadays it is playable. Meanwhile, anyone who played EM has the same story of permanently shelved/deleted characters. It's great to hear fixes might come eventually. As it is, EM is purely a newcomer trap or nostalgia trip.

Great idea, great mission, great map choice. I ran it using the same parameters as Bill (+1/x8 bosses and AVs) on my fire/rad/psi sentinel. I used insps as they dropped, click accolades (Magus really), Hybrid and Lore (Cimerorans Core). I think it makes sense to use all renewable tools at your disposal, as this is a "real" and lengthy mission - so anything that can go on downtime, will go on downtime. 22:10 left on the clock, 0 deaths although it came close a couple times. Gotta watch those accidental Vorpal pulls, the cone is so wide and deep it's easy to aggro another group behind the group you're attacking. My one suggestion would be to change the timer to 2 hours. Some builds might take longer than 1 hour to defeat 16 AVs. It'd be cool to see this arc become an alternate standard. Although, of course, a lot more variables come into play than simply running an attack chain at an immobile target (including playstyle specifics), so it won't be as easy to derive meaningful build stats between different players. Either way, I think I'll run it with several alts and compare my own results if nothing else. Thanks for building this. 🙂

Indeed, it's still bugged. Fire Blast does the same damage with a faster animation (1.452s vs 1.848s), half the endurance cost and a third of the recharge. Blazing Bolt's main advantage lies in the tiny duration mag4 hold (drops enemy toggles) and KB+repel effect. It's easy to keep a boss on his butt with just BB.

The market on Homecoming considers regular enhancements and attuned enhancements one and the same, so it's a better idea to buy a (say) attuned Crushing Impact for 1M than buy a normal CI for 1M + catalyst for 3M + unslotter for 100k. But if you wanted to do this unslotter build for the heck of it, I'd go with something like a mind/psi dominator. Checklist: hold, confuse, fear, immob (subdue in secondary), disorient (psychic shockwave), knockback, sleep, melee, ranged, heal, pet (app), res (app or tough), def, TAoE, PBAoE. I think that's everything?

Croax says it well. It's really hard to justify Placate when you could just attack and deal more damage + build Assassin Focus.

Shadow Meld alone can be incredible on anything that isn't pure defense. One of its most underrated benefits: while the activation stands at a lengthy 3 seconds, it doesn't root you. So you can activate it while you're moving from group to group, essentially getting a free defense buff out of incompressible downtime.

I slot SC for damage. It does roughly the same damage as Fireball-type powers, and the Homecoming version has been buffed, with much faster ticks. On top of that, as the only PBAoE for elec blast and with a 20s recharge, it's a natural fit for the Armageddon chance for fire proc and Fury of the Gladiator -res proc. This makes for even greater damage and a good chance at softening things up. Now that Thunderous Blast is crashless, draining a full bar of end is a simple matter of opening a fight with your full AoE arsenal. The only problem I have with sapping is that everything tends to be dead by the time you've used Aim -> BL -> TB -> BL -> SC -> BL.

I'd placate you, but I skipped that too.

When I'm teaming with friends, I make it a point to use secondary mutation during fights. Keeps them on their toes!

Interesting to see the number of people who skip kinetics Repel and superstrength Hand Clap, even though these powers are now great mitigation tools with KB-to-KD IOs. Old habits die hard. Even Bonfire only has a ~60% pick rate, and that's with AoE immobilizes suppressing KB now.

Absorb stacks between different sources, up to the cap which is your base HP.

I happened upon the end of support reminder (had completely forgotten about it) just a couple days ago, spent some time idly wondering if I would upgrade. Then on the next day, first message I see on the Homecoming Discord is someone saying Windows 10 shut down his computer for an update while he was playing CoH. Apologists will do their thing, but it's not like I'm looking for reasons to dislike a free upgrade. The reasons come out on their own, from casually listening to Win10 users. (I've never considered "it's not that bad if you do this fix, that fix, turn off this hidden setting and this even more hidden setting, run this registry hack..." to be a valid rebuttal either. If you have product A which works out of the box, and product B which needs tweaks to work, then product B is worse.) Oh well.

Seconding that strongly. If you consider the amount of inf you make just killing a mob (4000 for a minion), it's simply not worth your time to even run to a vendor and spam click sell. Personally, I just right-click and press the shortcut for deleting the whole stack (I think that's "S"?). The minigame becomes to avoid deleting orange salvage when it comes up. 😉

I think inertia is a strong factor. Looking at the stats, we see save for a couple farm-related outliers (spines/fire brutes, fire/kin trollers) most of the builds are theme-related, familiarity above all. Sentinels are the new, the unknown. Even though blast+armor is a familiar trope in the hero world, it might be a while still before players feel comfortable with it. Plus, you can't pigeonhole them into specific team roles... What a pain. 😉 There's been a couple times where I send a tell, the leader replies "powersets?". I oblige, then there's a lull. Then comes the answer: "sorry, filled". It feels pretty surreal to get denied on a 8-man team for a TF you've soloed. 🙃

I admire the guts it takes to boldly spin it that way. Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

If you think about it, Widows have only 2 powerset combinations, Fortunatas and Night Widows. Compare it to a regular AT where you have ~100 combinations of powersets. In a way, widows (and soldiers, and kheldians) aren't underplayed, they're wayy more played than other choices. Their popularity rivals with some of the most popular farm builds.

Sonic/Ice sentinel here. I feel so speshul. 🙂

Wow, this is a really cool breakdown! I gave it a shot several times before. Never thought of -fly strategies, and just resorted to popping lucks. I gave up because I also felt Unstoppable would be a showstopper, at the very least I'd be sure to run out of resources before finishing him up. Perhaps with 300 charges of Envenomed Dagger, red insps and hoverfighting. 🤔

Dark/Invul Sentinel, courtesy of @oldskool who writes about Dark Blast in a way that makes it impossible to not reroll 🙂 Musc T3, Degen T3, Ageless T4 recovery, Assault T3 Attack chain: (Antumbral Beam -> Abyssal Gaze -> Life Drain -> Dark Blast) * 3, then AB -> AG -> Aim -> Blackstar Hybrid is clicked once at the beginning, but not clicked again when it recharges. 4:24 = 273 DPS 4:28 = 270 DPS 5:07 = 252 DPS 4:29 = 270 DPS An easy and mostly ranged attack chain, on a character that shrugs off most damage. Adding Life Drain on /invul sturdiness is gloriously overkill. Then for groups, we've got Umbral Torrent and its 100% KD, and Blackstar doing -35% tohit. Build:

The War Walkers are definitely the main challenge to get Apex done fast. With their tremendous HP + healing + resistance, I think it's best to defeat them 1 by 1. This is the moment to use Lore pets, with mastermind commands to focus the same one you are attacking. It's also worth keeping the peacebringers alive if you can. Their damage stacks up, thanks to -def. You don't want to spend time luring War Walkers to them, but some will land close enough to fight the peacebringers. The alpha slot bug is a huge pain in the ass as well. I don't know how to avoid the bug triggering specifically. It seems to pop up more often if you enter the mission and start fighting really fast, and it tends to be at the beginning of a mission. If you slot another alpha, the bug goes away (for the mission; it can pop on both missions). I have the 2 Musculature T4 alphas on my sent, so when I'm hit by the bug, I fly up, and once the 15 seconds or so of "out of combat" mode allow me to swap alphas, I slot the other one.

If you hardly use it, you could give Master Brawler a Healing enhancement in the default slot and leave it at that. It works well enough like that. If you want to get more out of it, extra healing and recharge, in that order, are good. Endurance reduction isn't too needed, the end cost is trivial to start with at 5.2.

Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. But I strongly feel you are severely underestimating both the importance of DPA over absolute damage, the relevance of endurance management, the opportunity cost of slots and even power choices, and even the player input requirement in balancing an attack chain as opposed to running one power on auto. For clarity and to reiterate, that part of the argument wasn't about lvl 50 IOed out incarnate builds, but the leveling phase. Given this hypothetical change and no change to current T1 DPA, I can't think of many level 30 builds that would be better off with slotted out attacks of all kinds over T1 + AoEs + strong focus on primary. CTRL-Clicking a T1 3-slotted for damage would give you 75-80 DPS (normalized for level 50) for no effort. On SOs, I'm doubtful the average player even reaches that *with a full attack chain*. It's more than possible in theory, but the reality of your usual level 30 is some whiffing, some endurance woes, some confusion as to what the attack chain should even be, and so on.

Echoing thoughts above. Hasten is +70% rech. One LotG is +7.5% rech. No brainer, really - no highend build ends up with more than 30s delay on hasten, so it's up 4/5 of the time in the worst case scenario. I wouldn't shoot for both S/L and melee defense, it seems a little redundant. If you end up focusing on S/L alone, it's worth noting splitting the Scrapper Strikes set will give you +5% S/L for 3 slots in its Superior version, which beats 4 slots for +3.75% S/L with Kinetic Combat. Performance Shifter +end works as well in Physical Perfection as it does in Stamina. That is to say, it's roughly worth an extra full slot of endurance in Stamina. Worth it if you have any end woes. Slotting Weave and Maneuvers beyond the base slot is worth it. I like to stick a second LotG +defense in there. Longterm, +5 both IOs and you get close to the ED cap. Critical Strikes is the bomb. The proc, that is. Psi/ doesn't get as many opportunities as some other sets to use it to its fullest (due to the way procs work, you want a power that is as slow to recharge as possible), but you can still get a decent proc rate provided you don't slot the power with more recharge.

I think this would be brokenly good (if we're assuming no nerfs to the current functionality of T1s), in the context of single target damage. You'd be giving a ~100 DPS attack chain, for free: - no power cost selection - no player input required (power on auto and you're good to go, never need to watch endurance) - few additional slots required (no recharge, no endurance, no accuracy = all damage) That later point also means you could fill up the power with procs and eke out even more damage. But even before IOs, it would raise to the floor to the point most attacks might be functionally useless during the leveling phase. Why spend powers and slots on attacks that need accuracy, recharge, endurance and active involvement, when you could rely on your T1 machinegun and supercharge your primary and pools instead? AoEs get a pass, everything else might be more trouble than it's worth. I kind of want this to happen, just for the sheer paradigm shift and gamebreaking potential. Which is probably not a good thing. 😛