nihilii

I'll take any */support AT, but Melee seems more interesting than Assault if only because we're already got all these Ranged options for support, and Assault is half ranged. (Of course, it's a valid point to say only Doms have Assault. Could be interesting to see more ATs using that. I'd love to see Assault/Pets... As in, MM primaries with the attacks swapped for something else).

This isn't quite accurate. The base damage is appropriate for each attack tier. Shriek, recharge 3s, damage 42.04 Scream, recharge 6s, damage 66.06 Ice Bolt, recharge 3s, damage 42.04 Ice Blast, recharge 6s, damage 66.06 Of greater importance, Sonic on Sentinels benefits from the increased damage on mezzes. Screech does 114.1 base damage. This is excellent for Sonic, because we're not locked into the god-awful Shout and its 3 seconds animation anymore. Instead, we can run Screech - Shriek - Scream. Faster, higher damage, longer -RES too. It's true Defenders get so much more out of Sonic Blast compared to Corruptors and Blasters, but Sentinels make for a valid Sonic choice too thanks to these different dynamics.

Hear, hear. The +DAM looks beefy enough on Mids, then there's playing it and the realisation it's just one part of the picture added to the extra toxic damage (and a -res aura AND damage aura, for scrappers). Pure madness. :D

Yep, generally speaking just about any tank primary can keep aggro on Recluse without help, through judicious kiting and Taunt. It's all about exploiting the duration of your Taunt to stay out of range. But, given the step-up from the skill level most of the game requires... Anyone who berates a player for not instantly "getting it" is kind of a pompous jerk. There's nothing wrong with a tank who cannot do it that way, and it's more reasonable for the team to step up and provide support. Really, if having 6 players instead of 7 on the towers is a problem, that means 6 out of those 7 players weren't pulling their weight.

This is probably accurate, but I don't think 10:45 is the ceiling here. My fire/rad sentinel is at ~215 DPS (7:16), on one try starting when Hybrid was on CD. Attack chain Blaze -> Flares -> Blazing -> Flares, Aim with Gaussian BU + Inferno with Arma Fire and Fury -RES. Setup: Hybrid T4 (doublehit), Reactive T4 (-75% res, -25% dot), Cardiac T4 Given that Meltdown < Offensive, I'd expect a Fire/Bio to push this time down. End management being a nonissue, you could likely include Fireball in your attack chain with an additional -RES proc too! ** Edit: crafted T4 Degen (-75% maxHp, -25% dot) on the aforementioned fire/rad sentinel, and gave it another go. 5:20, ~247 DPS. Hybrid was ready right away, so, this might account for more difference than Degen vs Reactive. Or, it could be luck.

Going to join the consensus here: Bio Armor is fine. "Fine" as in, it's tempting to go shhh, don't look at the powerset too closely. ;) It's perhaps balanced under the idea there's a higher skill floor required to make use of the powerset efficiently. But, frankly, getting the hang of it isn't so hard, and the benefits you get are immense.

To be fair: - Scourge is more predictable. Around ~20%, you're nigh guaranteed to crit. - Corruptor base damage is much lower than Scrappers. - ranged attacks have as a trend lower damage scale and faster animations than melee attacks (meaning you're both less likely to watch a teammate finish off mob during your animation, and more likely for your full extra damage to be useful) All of these combined makes for an Apples & Oranges situation, even though the inherents are intuitively similar.

I remember Total Focus on a literal hundred Freakshow Tanks at once... ...then watching them all scatter from the stun, to the despair of every teammate trying to exploit the stacking bug. ;D

This is such a cool idea! And, if we look at the way Preventive Medecine's absorb proc works, there's already code in the game for something like this to work. i.e., IH could provide you with a chance to instantly heal X% HP, for that chance to rise to 100% as HP goes down, and with a cooldown.

It's better to introduce additional Assault primaries than to force anyone who like current Blast primaries to "lose" their character.

All nukes recharge in 90 seconds (down from the 145 or whatever base from other ATs), sharing that recharge time with Aim. Essentially means after some slotting, it's up for just about every fight, and you never have to wait for the nuke to recharge before tapping Aim. Yum! Slap a Gaussian Chance for BU in there, and you're starting to look at decent numbers. Overall, Sentinels seem to trade extreme performance for a smooth quality of life experience.

Range is love :D Between Sentinel sets and Cardiac as an alpha slot, it does feel blasterish at times! Without looking too closely at the number of targets we hit per AOE, anyway. ;)

Precisely why T1 > T2 in most cases. You get hit with -recharge => that half base recharge on the T1 blast starts being helpful. A kin hits you with Speed Boost => you want to spend even less time locked in the animation of your T2 blast when you could be using heavy hitters. Longterm, the stable attack chain of most Sentinels probably looks like T3 -> T1 -> T4 -> T1. In regular gameplay you're likely just going to use T3, T4, AOEs and clicks. T1 coming in only to fill in a gap, or to slap that -res debuff on a boss. The least time spent on the animation, the better. Opportunity? Yeah, Opportunity isn't the greatest thing. Could be worse... if the -res was tied to the T2 blast. ;) There's strong hints the Sentinel inherent is being reworked. I'd prefer something more agnostic to your power selection, personally.

Given Sentinels are spoiled for great DPA choices, the T1 blast is actually superior to the T2 blast for most Sentinel primaries (in the sense it does the same DPA, but takes less time, leaving more room for the heavy hitters).

My examples for SS being particularly strong on SOs sits at the very top of the quotes. Out of the blue, with SS, you have access to perma +20% tohit and +80% dam. This lets slotting like (i.e.) 1 ACC/2 DAM/2 END/1 RECH be viable. Most other toons on SOs have to slot at least 2 ACC to hit +3s and +4s with any reliability, have to slot 3 DAM to dish out decent numbers, leaving only one slot for END or RECH. In essence, you're getting 2 extra slots for free on each attack. For some builds with good end management built in (say SS/Elec), it's even possible to build strong attack chains through 1 ACC/3 DAM/2 RECH slotting, something other builds can only look at with envy. Everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too on IOs. On SOs, there's so little to play with, SS brings unprecedented flexibility.

Yep, whenever people claim there's no point to go beyond 45% softcap, I'm left to wonder whether their sole gameplay experience is a farm map. Try to load up a +4/x8 mission against the IDF with a merely softcapped character. They will tear your fabled perfect defense to shreds. Besides that, most factions have defense debuffs. 45% def against +4 anything quickly turns to 30% the first time a hit lands, then cascading failure happens. Only sets with strong defense debuff resists can dodge that scenario. Defense *is* king in this game, but the 45% number on its own isn't all it's cracked up to be unless you limit yourself to very specific content.

It's not so much a pet as it is free extra charged bolts. Definitely worth it against tough single targets, and tends to mop up mobs with a sliver of health quite nicely in groups. It's annoying to cast it every minute, that's about it.

And yes the game should still be balanced around SOs because nobody starts at level 50. Any changes made should take the whole game into account. The point I was making here is that compared to other powersets, SS is *even stronger on SOs than it is on IOs*. So, if you want to argue for a reversal of the nerf on the basis of "balance", you probably don't want to look too closely at SO balance... Between IOed out builds, SS shares the top with a fair few others. But on a SO build, it's rather easy to herald SS as the king of melee. Best to pick arguments that help your desired goal, rather than work against it.

God, I hear you. The new animation ruined the set, but at the same time it looks so nice. What could even be done about this? Perhaps if the animation was sped up... I think I would play EM again if it was in the ~2s range (rather than the close to full 3 seconds it currently is). Really liking Razor's suggestion as well, what if each Energy Charge sped up ET's animation by 0.264s or what have you. Stack 6 of them, and you're back to old ET or close to it.

For what it's worth, I loved your base!

IMHO, a different primary wouldn't be the make-or-break factor in this scenario. The two of you are going to push over 300 DPS regardless, before Lore pets. It's going to come down to whether your strategy lets you survive more than whether you can dish out the damage - because no matter the primary, we're looking at someone handling Recluse for minutes until at least one tower goes down.

+1 Hopeling. I've had great mileage out of aiming for ~20% def to all, even. Trivial on any build, makes no sacrifices, 2 purples away from the softcap. All it takes is to never stop killing so the insps keep raining. ;)

Going to +1 Jaguar - the biggest threat in a duo scrapper STF is going to be beefed up Recluse. Everything else takes a back seat. First, one of you will likely have to be a dedicated kiter/taunter. Might or might not involve jetpacking through the skies and picking Confront... You could get away without Confront, but you really don't want to lose Recluse for a moment and for him to zoom to your friend, "oneshot" him (with dot), and have the repairmen undo your work. Meanwhile, the tower killer has to be on point with dealing decent DPS, and shutting down the repairmen before they get a heal off (much harder solo than it is on a team). It's a race to take the first tower down before Recluse kills the kiter, and you'll likely want to take down the Arachnos Flyer beforehand so it doesn't show up in the middle of it. With that in mind, quick animations and fast recharge AOEs could have greater importance over optimal DPS. Rad/Bio might do the trick for a tower killer, if nothing else because it has two damage auras (of sorts) + Atom Smasher. Animations are pretty long, but you can probably work with that with quick reaction times. You may or may not have to let your Lore pets do the damage and strictly focus on killing repairmen (anyone knows which pet to go for the highest ST DPS? Longbow Cataphract might be a decent overall choice in any case, their absurd -regen an useful addition to taking down lvl 54 AVs). Going to third /SD for the kiter, nice mix of def, res, hp, and not only you'd provide your friend with defense, but also defense debuff resistance which is arguably even more important. I'd assume you'd want slotted out OwtS as well as Barrier, and Aid Self to patch yourself up. Primary is up to you, as Jaguar said you're not going to land anything on Recluse before the point where it matters less, so Katana, Broadsword, Titan and DM aren't as important for their +def / heal as you might think. It's going to be a significant achievement if you guys pull this off, please keep us updated. :)

I find these ideas excellent. Rather than change the wheel, tweak values to let tankers be the undisputed kings of aggro management. Also, why not extend previous changes. Tankers once got -res added to their first attack. It wasn't enough. Perhaps Taunt could do -res to enemies as well. Encourages tankers to play to their strengths, useful solo, useful on teams, and would likely further divide tankers and brute builds, the former taking Taunt systematically and the latter infrequently.

I played a SS/DA to 50 on Torchbearer and actually forgot there was an unavoidable defense debuff now. It's worth remembering SS got a survivability buff in the form of KB->KD IOs, turning Hand Clap into (Stone Melee's) Fault. That's not to tell people bummed about the nerf they got it wrong. Defense sets get penalized much more. There's a fair argument in that the damage debuff was already unavoidable, and hit everyone equally. But, if we're honest for a moment... We all know SS is broken. +32% to +64% ToHit, perma, +80% to +160% damage, perma. A fast recharge, high damage 15 feet PBAoE with knockdown - more than twice the area of other melee PBAoEs! SS was always a monstrosity bending the rules of the game - or more accurately, designed when there were no hard rules. The right builds ended up top contenders for both AoE and ST DPS, survivability on par with actual middle of the road sets, and never suffering from tohit debuffs or mob defense debuffs. (Edit: and because I know it's coming, the "game is balanced around SOs" applies less than ever here. Perma-Rage is PARTICULARLY overpowered in the SO world, where you get to hit +2s and +3s with ease as soon as lvl 18 while everyone else whiffs helplessly; where you can easily choose to trade some of your damage and accuracy SOs for extra recharge and end reduction, while everyone else must stick at least 1 ACC/3 DAM as a baseline.) It's going to be tough to argue for a return to Live values on the basis of "balance". Hyperbole statements claiming SS is subpar take away from the argument more than anything. But it's easy to argue the nerf makes it UNFUN, and if SS needs to be balanced, then to remove the nerf until more suitable ideas come up.