nihilii

The logistics of forum epeen contests were slightly confusing even back on Live, but now that we're all 7 years older they're downright bizarre. Dan Petro, I'm now picturing you as a grown ass man, with wife and kids, sitting calmly in front of the family computer to type "lol.", oh yes complete with a period for that extra channeling of 1337 r0xx0r teenage angst. Come on, man. Take a step back for a moment. Surely this is not really the person you are, today. You're obviously putting together high-performance builds, and it is an impressive time worth bragging about. Now it would be cool to have the facts to understand it. Anyhow, if I had to take a guess, I'd put it as a combination of the much higher damage on Plant's AoE immob (twice the damage of every other AoE immob, which makes it a decent AoE given its radius and recharge), and MA's Envenomed Blades and AoEs.

The good news here is that between SR's base defense and the endless set bonuses we have access to these days, it's likely you're going to end up over 45% def while building for other things.

I'm having fun with Sentinels. Their numbers aren't so bad if you look at all the numbers, I think. i.e., consider the damage mobs do with melee attacks compared to their ranged options. I find my fire/rad sentinel has significantly higher survivability than my TW/rad scrapper, despite the former having no mitigation from her primary and the latter KDing things all over the place. (But, that might also be due to personal incompetence dealing with TW's "on/off" nature. YMMV) I'd never say no to any buffs. If we can get the various Sentinel bugs fixed, that'd be a great boon too. i.e. Blazing Blast doing less damage than it should... ;)

I have a SR/TW tanker built with the assumption she would use Rebirth Destiny for healing purposes. Now that she hit 50 but hasn't unlocked Destiny yet, it turns out she can take on A LOT of things on +4/x8 with no outside help and no inspirations. IDF, Resistance, Vanguard... You name it. SR at the incarnate softcap is an absolute beast, especially if you grabbed some resistance on the side. During a fight, my tanker most often sits at 70% S/L res between Tough, uniques, set bonuses and at least 1 stack of the tanker ATO. Whenever her life goes down below 50%, she's comfortably hardcapped - and the Preventive Medicine unique is more likely to proc for a juicy 400ish absorb. Adding a fast-recharging heal like Siphon Life to that? I'm thinking anything that would give you trouble would have to break the rules in such a forceful way it wouldn't be a healing problem anymore. And, because you've got Siphon Life already, you could get Barrier and plug whatever hypothetical damage burst is coming your way.

Hi there! :) For testing purposes, the Test server is super useful: you can instaboost yourself to lvl 50, and all incarnates are free. The real struggle is in managing to escape having fun on Live long enough to go run controlled tests. :D

If Mids is to be believed, Mu got the standard patron elec fences, while Electricity Mastery got the "haha we didn't look too closely at what we ported" treatment: Chain Fences is a straight copypaste of the controller power, with 30 feet radius and 8s recharge.

Rejoice, for you have missed something: Screech did become a high damage attack, and it is beautiful.

It seems like great info, but the misunderstanding about damage slotting Obitus points out makes it hard to take your numbers at face value. But if we do, the bottomline is: double hit on every character!

For melee, absorb is king against the Crimson Prototype, as he can't debuff that. So on your Dark/Shield that'd be making sure you've got a Preventive Medicine proc slotted up. You'll likely want to kite him and let your Lore pets do damage, it's hard to think of a configuration on that build that will let you stand toe-to-toe with him for a prolonged time. Some of his attacks have much higher base accuracy than just about anything else in the game (so his minimum chance to hit you will always be much higher than the 5% you're used to). Envenomed Daggers are helpful here, the same might go for Recovery Serum. Don't bother pulling him towards the entrance so the PPD chimes in for damage, as it'll also increase the Sky Raiders spawns, which is obviously what you don't want once big bot has debuffed you all the way to 1 hp.

Fire/Rad Sentinel. Sappers? Slows? Psi damage? Nope, got all of that covered. Enemies running away due to no aggro aura? I like to tell myself they flee to spread tales of my awesomeness. No, the one thing that annoys my character is her Blazing Blast doing much less damage than it's supposed to. If this gets fixed, she'll be the strongest and prettiest, and I'll sacrifice many goats to the glory of Captain Powerhouse and the Homecoming team.

I thought so too, played the character to 50 and beyond, using Blazing Blast blissfully unaware anything was wrong. I never even grabbed Fire Blast, so confident in the numbers from the power description! Then ShadowDreamer helpfully pointed out the problem: Blazing Blast only does 5 ticks of damage, which comes out to be the same damage as Fire Blast, for twice the end cost and a much longer recharge. If Blazing Blast is ever fixed, it will definitely be a staple attack of any Fire/ chain (with a KB->KD IO).

I get the frustration at everything and everyone, but the takeaway ought to be there's no point doing anything in a video game if you're not having fun. Grinding for hypothetical future enjoyment is a recipe for disaster if you don't like the grind at all.

Siding with the "no" bandwagon. Even though I love stats, and I love watching other people's stats as well. Why no, then? Because the only thing DPS meters do is enable elitism for wanna-be elitists. It's pretty easy to judge your teammates' contribution as is, if you open your eyes - and have decent knowledge of the game mechanics. If you can't tell, then you're not as good as you could be at the game yourself. So let's think about it... Maybe your teammate is a "3" on a hypothetical performance scale. But if you're a "5" yourself, what's easier? Improving your own performance, which you have full control over? Or trying to get the rest of the world to change? Or is it kicking players for not meeting some arbitrary standard, wasting time finding "the right fit"? First step of minmaxing properly is to leave your ego behind. No performance to be found in treating other players poorly.

As a fellow fire/rad, I'd say take those two problems together and turn them into solutions: there's nothing amazing in Sentinel epics, so might as well skip them and get as many primary and secondary powers you want. :) Blazing Blast is currently bugged and does Fire Blast levels of damage, so it's probably best to skip it. Personally, I'm running without Rain of Fire or Fire Breath either. Given Inferno, Ground Zero and Aim all share the same base recharge time of 90 seconds, you've got a nice 1-2-3 combo (with the odd Fireball thrown in) to open every fight. Jump in, unleash your PBAoEs, no targeting required. Bliss! (And, remember to stick a Gaussian Chance for Build Up proc in your Aim, to turn it into an Aim + Build Up!) Ground Zero is also a prime candidate for a Theft of Essence proc, which will refill your bar entirely when you pop it in the middle of ~10 mobs. Radiation has resistance to slows only second to Ice (IIRC), and in the long run it's possible to grant yourself immunity to slows, through the Winter IO sets. Especially nice on a resistance set, as we get hit more often than defense characters. This is what works for me... I'm sure there's people out there doing great building for the S/L softcap or ranged defense, using Fire Breath and RoF with the AoE immobilize from Elec Mastery, for example. Lots of flexibility with the combo, to be sure. :)

^^ This. Damage on Pylons is good as a baseline, and then everyone uses their own judgement as to what the numbers mean. Which means the more info, the better. :) Attack chains, incarnates used, even builds... It's all worth sharing. There's no problem with Lore or -regen or anything, as long as the info is out there. As characters got stronger over the years, and especially with Lore, it could be interesting to have a different type of standardized test; because when times get to the sub 2 minutes range, getting accurate results become harder and harder. Say, a lvl 54 AV in AE, pure punchbag without attacks. Probably more representative of the situations where we need DPS as fully IOed out incarnate builds. :)

I'd argue farming is much easier here than it was on Live (barring full on exploits), because you've got access to double XP at will, and the various price caps and merit changes make it so the cost of a full build is in the 500M range. AND you get empyrean merits through leveling up after lvl 50, too, so no need to ever step out of your farm to become an Incarnate! It's easy (and understandable) to focus on AE being half XP, but I think in big picture terms, Homecoming is actually more friendly to farming than the Live servers ever were.

I took a closer look at Sentinel Dark Blast all thanks to this thread. What a great port, and thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Reactive Defenses in Tough Hide is a great idea. You can also get yourself a Shield Wall TP protection +res, which gives +5% resistance to all.

Circling back to the SR tanker, that's where their advantage lies: with capped resist to defense debuffs, nothing is ever going to strip you of your defense. And, you can build for 59% def to all with (relative) ease. Meaning you're ready to take on those incarnate mobs with extra ToHit. Throw in Tough and the number of IO sets we've got now. It's not too hard to reach about 50% RES to S/L. Tough = +24% RES Shield Wall = +5% RES Reactive Defenses = +3% RES Each Tanker ATO, 6-slotted and catalyzed = +6% RES Solid 44% RES at full life before you go hunt for set bonuses elsewhere. And the game is just about filled with them now! 5-slot LoTGs give +3.75% RES. 2-slot Red Fortunes or Reactive Defenses give +1.5% RES. 5-slot Mako's Bite or Gladiator's Strike in your attacks for +3.75% S/L. So you can get fantastic mitigation against the most common damage type. And still do decent against the rest, from your defenses + about 8% RES growing as your life go down. Throw in Aid Self to patch your heal hole; which at incarnate level, you could replace with Rebirth +regen. Or even keep Aid Self, and stack Barrier for when you really need a breather against heavy non-S/L attacks. Oh, and with a couple Winter sets plus Winter's Gift, you can cap your resistance to slows. Not exclusive to SR, but a nice little extra. So that's a full build. But even without that, life isn't too shabby for SR tankers. When we're talking SOs to very light IOs, most other powersets don't come close to the mitigation softcap + DDR provides; especially with the decent HP pool tankers get to enjoy. I wouldn't worry about it, Bokken. IMHO, SR tankers are rare because it was "recently" proliferated. It's not as flashy as the newer sets, and it's not a staple build like the older sets. Nothing wrong with walking the road less traveled!

You're right, IMHO. With Incarnates, IOs, Cold and Time... For FF, it's a tough world out there. You get mez resist and KB/KD/Repel toys. Frankly, none of it seems enough. To argue for the relevance of FF requires an increasingly narrow focus on the first part of the leveling phase. It's not like FF is broken, but...

Bump. Please fix either the text or the power, we wouldn't want hypothetical newbs to plan their entire build and then run it for months without ever checking their Blazing Blast does the listed damage. It would be a shame. Hypothetically.

WOW. I feel exceptionally dumb now! Played a Fire sentinel to veteran level you-don't-want-to-know, with Blazing Blast as a staple of my attack chain, and didn't notice that. Even advised people on here to get it. There goes my credibility. :D Nice catch, ShadowDreamer!

I take Assault on all my Sentinels. Our epic choices don't mesh with my style, and I never take travel powers. So, there's always room for Assault. :) But, it's definitely a "last choice" type thing. Take Maneuvers and Tactics before even considering Assault.

Incarnate pets have tremendous damage output. It's considered "against the rules" in the context of Pylon Damage runs. But it's also a good reminder that for the vast majority of builds, within a 5 minute window, your DPS pales compared to the DPS of your Lore pets. Which has some gameplay implications: if your goal is to take down tough targets like AVs on your own, -RES procs are king (as they act as a multiplier to your pet damage, too). Likewise, any ally or AOE damage buff you get significantly boosts Lore pets. Unlike you, they have no enhancements, so +30% DAM is exactly that, adding 30% to their damage output.

Saving power trays would be a great QoL feature.