Triumphant

My personal experience has been this... Solo Play: Challenging from lvl 1 to Incarnate, because I can dial notoriety and number of enemies up and down until I hit the "sweet" spot. Almost every archetype is fun to play. Team Play: At lower levels it's not bad, if a bit frenzied. At high levels, melee toons will often only get a hit or two in (and this is after combat teleporting directly to the target) before powerful ranged characters nuke all the mobs. I find this to be pointless and incredibly boring. My solution: I only play blasters now, so I actually get to have some fun during team play. Am I satisfied with this solution?: Not really. What to do about it?: I have no idea. 🤷‍♂️

I play all of them, but my favorite morality/alignment to play is Rogue, which I guess is technically Villain, and the one I play the most. I tend to view it more in D&D terms as more neutrally aligned than evil, though- and tend to play it as such.

An approximately 4 in 10 chance every minute is pretty good if you've got a power loaded up with 5 different procs (for my rad/sr sentinel, Neutron Bomb is my choice for this). If you've got more than one proc-bomb going, it can be surprisingly effective. But if people are really obsessed with doing the "most" damage above all things, they need to play a Blaster or Stalker or Scrapper. I want to do a decent amount of damage, but doing the "most" damage is not a priority for me. I'm more concerned with building my hero/villain to represent the character concept that I'm going for. I also tend to view Sentinels as a support class that supports in a pure combat role, so I'm expecting tanks and blasters to have most of the AOE issues covered in group combat and the Scrappers and Stalkers to zero in on the heavy hitters to bring them down. My job as a sentinel is to lend combat strength to whichever of these needs the most support, be alert for when squishier toons need to be defended, and otherwise just blast and batter down foes as opportunity provides. Of course, the reality is, combat in CoX is almost always less tactical and more frenetic and chaotic than that, but I do my level best to perform the above-mentioned functions and I enjoy doing them.

He wanted to play a melee oriented Sentinel. I thought his disappointment was in that it didn't feel like a melee character (i.e. more close-in punchy, like Superman/hulk, etc.). I also wish to play Sentinel that has a more "punchy/brawling" feel to it, so I was sharing my plan to make my own character play that way. Sentinels are a ranged combat class, so they will never be high performing as a melee toon. Besides this, they are also weaker than the other ranged combat classes (blaster/dominator/corruptor), even if they are a little tougher and more forgiving to level up. If he was asking how to turn the Sentinel into a power build, I apologize, b/c my advice is not useful in that regard. I don't pursue power builds because I find the game so easy- even played at +4/8- that power builds are redundant (and even boring) unless you want to play those crazy 801 AE missions people make.

I would ditch irradiate and take second wind or moment of glory, instead. If you want to get in their face and melee, you need more melee attacks. I would ditch mind probe, psychic shockwave, and link minds. Take Air superiority from flight pool, Cross punch from fighting pool, and Knockout blow from leviathan patron pool, instead. This is similar to the build I'm shooting for with my Radiation/Super Reflexes Sentinel.