ZemX

I still do that sometimes at 50 on teams. It depends on the team. If there's abundant AoE and I'm seeing bosses left standing, I switch to boss-killing mode instead of opening with an AoE from Hide. So I may leave a little early to set up a hidden AS. It's still worth doing if you can get just slightly ahead of the team. But yeah it sometimes mean I get followed and that person ends up taking the alpha while I set up an Assassin Strike. They usually only do it once though. 😀

This is always good advice for anyone stealthing to begin with, because not everyone is a fan of that. But it's particularly a good idea if you've been tanking for the team. I see this all the time when two or three people who CAN stealth go charging off leaving the rest who can't at the door. They don't much care to wait around waiting for the mission to complete when there are fields of XP in front of them so.... they start face-planting because they didn't realize how much they were relying on those people who charged off to help handle the x8 spawns. Not all the time... but often enough to notice. It's a little ironic because I'm usually on a Stalker and more and more lately I am just sticking with the team to help tank while a tanker charges off to stealth. 🤪 I love this game!

I'm pretty sure some joker covered that in like... the first post or something. Whoever that guy was. It was so very long ago, Snarky.

Good news! That's completely wrong! People can stop worrying about Blasters vs. Sentinels because it's Tankers vs. Sentinels. Here's what we've established so far in this thread about Sentinels and Tankers: Tankers: - Do more damage - Are way tougher - Can control aggro with taunt - Hit way more targets with their AoEs. Sentinels: - *checks notes*... umm... Blasting is "fun". Yeah, that's all I've got.

Isn't that what I said in the very next sentence? And yes, it's rhetorical. I know they are already at or below Tanker damage. Frankly, Tankers shouldn't be doing Tanker damage, but that's a whole other flame-war as I'm sure you know. 🤪

Are you seriously suggesting Sentinels are effectively less at risk of dying on a team than Tankers are? Because I really doubt that. The entire reason Tankers (and Brutes) have so much more durability is to compensate for the greater risk they can put themselves in. They wouldn't be able to tank at all if that weren't true. On top of that, why would you even play a Sentinel if Tankers could both outdamage them AND survive more aggro, all the while performing a usually valuable team role of controlling aggro? Aesthetics would be the only reason and it's one cited often by Sentinel players in threads like this. It's not an invalid reason... but it's not balance either.

I should think so.

Scourge effectively multiplies Corruptor damage by 1.25 if averaged over a long enough period of time.

No, I think it's 500 percent. The wikis don't appear to have been updated to include Sentinels on the Limits article. City of Data lists "StrMax" for all damage types as 5.0 on Sentinel. Same as Corruptors, Blasters, Stalkers, and Scrappers. Brutes are 7.0. So I am pretty sure I'm looking at the damage enhancement cap there.

Who said they were? Certainly, I didn't. So what's to laugh at about comparing Sentinels to the two closest ATs in the game to... Sentinels? Seems to me if you're balancing ATs, you look at similar ATs and try to fit them all in the spectrum somewhere. Sentinels being roughly as sturdy as a Stalker but able to fight at range suggests to me they should do as much damage as Stalkers. Ditto for Scrappers. That's not to say they do enough damage already. It's saying they shouldn't be boosted beyond Scrappers or Stalkers because... what would justify that?

It's been done. Domination.

Where do Stalkers get Hide from? Free power they start with in addition to the normal T1 secondary?

We're not off topic. I'm talking about Stalkers and Scrappers because they are relevant to Sentinel balance, as I made clear in my post. This is not a Scrapper vs Stalker discussion that needs to be taken anywhere else.

So for Scrappers vs. Stalkers it's both base modifiers and caps that are the same for resistance and defense. Slightly higher base hit points on Scrappers. Secondary-wise, most Stalker armor sets got rearranged so that they both had room for Hide but also kept most or all of the same defense/res values in powers. Some effects just got distributed to other powers. Hide gives a very good suppressible defense (particularly AoE) and a much smaller non-suppressible defense bonus. Nice place for defense IOs like Kismet, Shield Wall, and LotG:Recharge. Sentinels appear to have the same base and max Hit Points as Stalkers. But they have slightly lower defense and resistance modifiers (if City of Data is accurate). Same resistance caps (75%). On numbers alone, their survivability is very close to Stalkers (which is itself better than most people probably think). It's more difficult to quantify how much survivability you gain by being able to stay out of (or mostly out of) melee but it's not nothing and I imagine it can mean de-prioritizing melee defense bonuses in favor of ranged/AoE (or some other bonus) without being too big a compromise of overall survivability. It's interesting to me that Sentinels get compared so often to Blasters when their closer competition is Scrappers and Stalkers. Sentinels can't do Blaster damage for the same reason melee damage ATs can't do Blaster damage. Everybody should understand that. If they got anywhere close to Blaster damage output levels, they'd have obsoleted two other ATs entirely on the way.

Stalkers do not have weaker defense or resistance than Scrappers. They are the same. The only difference in regen is due to the slight (10-15%) difference in hit points. The secondary is changed slightly to accommodate Hide but overall values for defensive stats ends up the same. Other than that, they are extremely similar in terms of survivability. I imagine Sentinels are in the same ballpark, no? I've yet to play one.

Partly a phase and partly not. Early on, you don't have all your high DPA attacks and especially not your biggest non-AS hitter (usually). You're unlikely to outdamage Hidden AS because while it's only as good as Quick AS when Quick AS doesn't crit, it's still better than any other attack you have at that point. But even at 50, I still use it if I solo. There, I don't care much about waiting a few seconds at the start of a fight. I'm not racing any team members to attack my target. And the animation time of Hidden AS is "free" in the sense that it occurs before the fight starts when you're soloing. Plus if it misses, it doesn't break Hide. It's a very safe way to jump out to an early lead in any fight. Then it goes on cooldown while you get a 90% chance of a Hide crit on your next attack, thanks to the ATO, and proceed to build AF for the next time AS is ready to fire, this time as the Quick AS version. It's not just style. It's probably the better choice in most cases when solo. Even if you're playing on higher xTeam settings and prefer to AoE groups, it still makes sense to AS first a boss or LT (or other troublesome target), gain the benefit of the -tohit and chance to terrorize debuffs, get the 90% Hide chance from the ATO, and then fire the AoE than to do it the other way around. If you have a tele-nuke like Lightning Rod or Shield Charge (or both) , use them last. They don't break Hide but they don't benefit from it either, so use the stuff that DOES benefit from Hide first.

How? If you want to start there and play as a native Praetorian for however long you want. You still can. Allowing Primals to "infiltrate" Praetoria and run content there doesn't defeat anything. It gives you more people to team with. That's the point. Same goes for allowing bluesiders to run any content they want redside. Nobody's arm is being twisted to go there and do that. The entire purpose of that would just be making more people available, potentially, to team with, as well as giving characters, no matter where they start, access to more content. And like I said, I am not against other changes to improve Praetoria, but people need to be realistic about what it would accomplish based on the example we have of redside. And I think the devs, wondering where best to spend their limited volunteer time... would probably be thinking the same thing.

Pipe dream, sadly. Crack pipe dream. Look at redside. It has pretty much everything various folks in this thread are suggesting (and more) to be added to Goldside. More story arcs. More contacts. More zones. Bank missions. Strike Forces. Accolades. Access to co-op zones. And it's a ghost town on most servers. This is going to sound harsh maybe, but attempting to revitalize Goldside by essentially re-running the City of Villains experiment again is the definition of insanity. Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see all this and more happen to Goldside... it just wouldn't change much. People go where the most people are and thus the most activity. Blueside. For Goldside, I would only make the same suggestions I did for Redside and some have already made here. Let people run content whereever they want. It still won't balance the sides but that's not a realistic goal anyway at this very late date. First Ward and Night Ward aren't exactly hopping but you DO sometimes see mission teams running there. Why? Because anyone on any side can go there and start one. Make that happen EVERYWHERE in the game. Redside, Blueside, and Goldside.

This is an appeal to authority. The idea is that the suggestion is more "correct" because it matches the original design of Stalkers. Yet the original design of Stalkers was changed by those very same Live devs to be something more scrappy on teams. The truth is that both are just opinions on how someone would like the AT to play. Dressing one up as more deserving than the other because it adheres to a concept even the original devs abandoned isn't convincing.

We can call that one "Medi-porter Technician."

So I was doing a respec on my Staff/Nin Stalker to improve defenses and resistance and... I thought of this thread. So I figured what the heck and spec'd into Combat TP. I already had the pool open for Tele Target anyway and like I said before, Ninjitsu can be kinda loose in the build, so I had room. I still have Superjump for travel so I didn't go with Teleport and I kept CJ for normal combat movement. Gotta have my super-ninja-jump on this ninja-themed character. CT is nice, but there is one thing that may convince me to spec back out of it and it's particular to Staff. CT causes redraw and staff has no no-redraw option. Bummer! So I BAMF into a crowd and then.... hang on while I draw this weapon again and THEN beat you with it! I can definitely see this being cooler with something that has a smashy/flashy non-weapon PBAoE like Ice, Rad, or Fire. I might even consider it for my Ice/SD for those moments when Shield Charge is on cooldown and I want a low-rent alternative to satisfy by zoom and boom craving: CT + Frozen Aura from Hide... hmmmm. But what to trade for it? That's gonna be a much harder decision.

If City of Data is anything to go by the Activate Period for AAO is 1 second. But to that I'd add a half second for latency. You can see that last bit in a lot of places in the game. If you run up to a glowy and click it immediately, it will often interrupt because the server doesn't know you've stopped moving yet. You have to wait just a hair and then click. Same goes for running or leaping into a pack and hitting a PBAoE. If you're too quick, it doesn't hit everyone. So if I was going to bother with this on Shield Charge, for instance, I'd leap in, count out "one and two AND..." and key on the last "and" to be sure AAO had boosted my damage. But zipping in and knocking everyone down is cool too, so.... 🤪 Maybe. I wasn't tempted by Elec/SD for this reason. I went Ice/SD because Ice has two very nice normal AoEs on relatively good timers, so the Shield Charge just seems like a little extra bit of fun.

You said I didn't give a reason when I did. That I just said "no". That's not a no-comment. That's a lie. And I'm done with you. It's obvious you were never interested in a good faith discussion but just people agreeing with you.

I did and you just totally ignored it. I said your changes DO impact everyone. I explained why. I don't want that. That's all I NEED to say. We don't actually have to agree and I don't have to change your mind. I'm good actually.

This is overly melodramatic. When you propose changes to an AT that people think are unnecessary, they will tell you so. To say you can propose changes and we can't object is ludicrous, because... ...this is not true. If you greatly increase the damage AS does from Hide, saying I don't have to use it is like saying I don't have to run around with my armor toggles turned on. It's technically true. It's also absurd. And you're ignoring who else might complain about buffing Stalkers. I don't know about you, but I have the scars from round 1 of this "buff stalkers" war back on Live and if you weren't there or just didn't frequent those forums much, you might not believe the uproar it caused even hinting Stalkers should do more damage than Scrappers, let alone Blasters. In the end, I think we got more ST damage than Scrappers, but not by much. And Scrappers generally do better AoE (but again probably by less than people think). The play style you're talking about is still relevant solo, but I AM going to give you my opinion that it's ridiculous to play a sneaky assassin on the edge of the tornado of destruction that is your typical CoH team. That's not me telling you you're "incorrect" just that I don't think your way of playing should dictate how the AT works for everybody else. I think that's fair as it's just my opinion against yours.