ZemX

Yeah, that's why I asked. It looks kind of messy. You'd have to look at each primary attack since the last AS and figure the individual chance each one adds a stack of AF (stacking chance times hit probability). From that you'd have to figure the odds of zero stacks, the odds of one stack, the odds of two stacks, and the odds of three stacks. The total would be 100% but you'd multiply each probability by the damage it would do (where I'd just multiply crit chance times damage). Which is why I'm curious, but not that curious because as @Omega-202 pointed out, leaving out just one AS in a chain of six kills the advantage of waiting. My intuition is that just hitting that whenever it's up is probably better. It's still the highest ST DPA of any attack a Stalker has, right?

Have you worked out the DPS of that plan vs. just using AS whenever it is the highest DPA attack ready to fire, regardless of stacks, as you would for any other chain? I haven't. Just curious if anyone has.

For Long Range Teleporter, you just need to grab an exploration badge from inside Pocket D. I think what you're talking about might be a separate thing that ALSO teleports you to Pocket D. If it's still in the game. Useful if you want to get there and LRT is on cooldown.

City of Data Whirlpool hits 16. Ice Storm and Blizzard both hit 10.

You're probably talking about something on the order of an extra 3-6 endurance per fight there. If you really are running directly from one fight to the next, there's not a lot of seconds to shave just by boosting your run-speed 33%. It's a tenth of his recovery. That's not nothing, as I said. But it's not bottoming his blue bar in the span of just a couple fights all on its own either. He didn't actually say, but I am assuming it wasn't as gradual as "I can only go 8 or 10 continuous fighting spawns without taking a knee." If it was, then sure... it could be the straw that broke the camel's back, as they say. Note I am not saying don't turn it off. Absolutely turn it off... just that it's unlikely to solve the problem. It will extend, a little bit, the time before you bottom out completely.

Nah, lots of games do that. Skyrim has magic for it (or just Vampirism). Fallout 4 has a perk for it. Tomb Raider has a rebreather. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey has a magic (or first civ tech, if you prefer) enhancement for weapons that does it. When I play AC:Odyssey these days, one of my first stops once out in the open waters of the rest of the map is that little island where you can sneak Poseidon's Trident away from a chest guarded by high-level lions. 🤪 But outside any other means of underwater breathing, I still think it's more common for video games to underrepresent the ability of a person to hold their breath underwater just as a means of making it more of a gameplay obstacle than it really would be.

Sprinting, holding one's breath, and... oddly enough... flashlights (also torches). Video game light sources are notoriously temporary. Much more-so than in real life. I get the desire to make them a limited resource but it's out of all proportion to reality. Forget Lithium Ion batteries. Even an old D-Cell flashlight would last longer than 30 seconds. This one I think most modern video games have finally gotten past but it was heavily featured in such high profile games as Doom 3 and Halo, to name just two. There'd always be some noticeable duration bar that would pop up and drain whenever you turned on a personal light source. Skyrim was a little better but (unmodded) you could only hold a torch for 4 minutes before it would burn out. A real torch would last at least an hour, if not two. Sprinting? I am replaying Mass Effect again because of the remake and even though they've allowed Commander Shepard to sprint outside of combat now, he/she still only makes it about twenty feet or so before gasping for air. I mean Shep is in active-military shape and has been genetically enhanced (presumably for strength and endurance). At least the first two games have this problem. They might have finally gotten rid of it by 3. I don't remember. And yeah, swimming underwater. This one is a mixed bag. Some games feature breath holding I'd have trouble keeping up with but I'd say more often than not I can hold my breath much longer than a typical video game character's "breath bar" will last. But on the flip side, video games have their share of superhuman feats performed by ordinary people as well. Snarky mentioned one: unnatural ability to take a beating that should kill someone. Another is exemplified by just about any game featuring climbing. Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, etc. Granted, the Assassins in AC are supposed to be at least a little superhuman, but they still climb with unnatural speed and manage to grab ledges from a fall that should rip their arms off. If you've watched a real free climb up a rock face, it's impressive... but really slow compared to a video game. And that two-story fall? It didn't hurt because I... rolled out of the landing! Yeah... that works.

Welcome back! On the subject of bankrolling your alts though, you should do some searching on these forums for advice on building wealth. These days, there are likely faster ways than farming that particular mission. A 50 can run Task Forces for the reward merits (particularly the Weekly Strike Targets once each for double merits) and turn those merits into inf in several ways. Easiest is to buy enhancement converters with the merits and then sell the converters on the auction house (/ah). You can make about 65-67K inf per converter. You get 3 from each merit. So 5 merits is about a million inf. Another more time consuming way is to use the converters to convert less valuable IOs into more valuable IOs and then sell those. But if you prefer just grinding through enemies, you can usually find someone (or start one yourself) running a "kill most" ITF. In addition to the merit rewards for the task force itself, you chew through so many enemies in this one with a good team that you come away with plenty of inf at level 50 just from all those defeats. Also, don't forget to make yourself an SG base if you aren't already part of an SG. Building one is free on Homecoming. It's handy having all the teleporters, work tables, and storage bins. Add your alts with /altinvite name. When you come across or craft useful IOs for your alts you can drop them in the enhancement bins here. Same for rare salvage.

If you were noticeably struggling with end, shutting off Sprint will make minimal difference. Every bit helps, but we're talking about 0.29 end/sec here. Based on the procs you've mentioned, your recovery should be sitting at around 3 end/sec. So running Sprint was eating about a tenth of your recovery. Any other toggles you had, assuming a little end slotting, were eating up another 2-3 tenths. Everything else is your attacks, which each typically consume around 0.8 to 1.0 end/sec if used every time they are recharged. I mean it's not nothing. Turning it off is like adding another Perf Shifter +end proc to your build. But it's the sort of thing that will slowly eat your end bar over the course of several fights. If you're chomping blues in every fight, or every other fight... you need more endrdx in attacks. Or less recharge.

The +1 level shift from the Alpha applies in all content as long as you are level 45 or above (e.g. You can exemplar to run a level 45 mission team and will be effectively level 46). The +1 shifts in Lore and Destiny are "Incarnate" shifts and apply only in Incarnate content. Aside from that, the passive benefits of Alpha and Interface slots are very significant. Just not as flash as a Judgement nuke.

PuGs are the only reason I play this game. Endless variety. I'd get bored of a competent, regular, team I think. And truth be told most PuGs work. It's that they end up working differently often enough that it's interesting.

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.