drbuzzard

I'm not sure why I had not looked closely enough already, and from seeing builds around here, I get the impression that nobody else has. Did anyone else notice that the ice mastery set does really nice damage? Sure, ice sword is no mind probe, but it still does reasonably good DPAS (damager per activation second) of 82 (mind probe is 90). Among all the epic pool melee single target attacks, it's only beat by mind probe, KO Blow, and Havoc punch (which is king). The real gem is frozen aura. That is a great power to take if you have a melee AOE nuke. It's got a recharge of 40, and does 173 in 10' radius to 10 targets. Couple this with your T9 nuke and you're doing well past blaster nukes on your nice short sentinel recharge. Sentinel nukes do about 193, blaster nukes do 250 (base without other stuff). Add in 173 on a timer shorter than the sentinel nuke timer, and you're clearing some spawns. Frozen Aura even has a fast enough animation that it is fairly high DPAS (77). So if you're going to be mixing it up in melee anyway, you might want to take a closer look at ice mastery. Actually I'm a bit concerned about posting this in case it gets a nerf because people notice it.

For the lazy man to make this work, and I was too lazy to go all the way, you find a low level enemy and nuke it with a fiddy. He didn't specify any details. I took a lvl 50 sent and nuked a lvl 2 hellion. This is obviously sub optimal, but I did 5k damage. No debuffs, just aim and 2 red candy. Heck, I didn't even bother to use vulnerability. With more effort I could get over 10k. I don't think it's worth doing.

If you are on a team with anything but corrupters and maybe a tank, you're sub optimal. That's just how the game works. Complaining that sentinels are less than optimal is like saying water is wet. So are scrappers, brutes, etc. Sentinels are at least roughly competitive now. Given good slotting, and knowing how to play the game, I can keep up even on good teams (perhaps not with my storm, but with a better sentinel).

While I'd agree that Storm blast on a sentinel is not the best choice by any means, this is a bit hyperbolic. You certainly don't need to door sit and will still contribute. I've got my storm/SR sentinel to 50 now and it does work OK. Of course I have a lot of sentinels which work better, but storm does have its uses in certain places. One good case is BAF trials. With my normal high levels of global recharge in the build I could spam perma Category 5 (and storm cell, but that's perma anyway) during the prisoner escape phase, and that a good job of blocking things. One thing that shocked me was even with only +1 level shift I was getting the pissed off AV rings from Nightstar and Siege at the end. I would not have assumed by damage to be so good, but I guess all the effects stacked do amount to a good bit of damage. I have trouble decoding the City of Data on this set (as it's all powers triggering sub powers) so really getting how much damage potential it has is not clear. The limitation of storm blast is the same as the limitation of any of the location based buff/debuff sets. It does suffer a bit on high speed teams. However you will eventually hit an AV unless you're doing radio missions (for some reason I don't grasp) or farming. On AVs the powers work pretty well as long as you have a tank along to keep them in place. Without a tank things can get scattered a lot which will cut your damage.

Yeah, I always build to the fast recharge nuke. Neat thing on storm is you can actually get near perma on the T9 nuke since it is DoT. It would be great solo, but on teams it would just be wasted damage.

I built a storm/regen on test, and it worked OK. I'll probably build one on live just to give a review of the set, but I can't see it becoming one of the top tier sets because of the weak nuke.

I placed them in places on the battlefield where I thought they would help.

I made a crab spider using the rifle attacks and soul mastery (like one I have on live). Being as though I just wanted to test redraw, I simply went to the Vanguard base and blasted away at the target dummies. The redraw that plagues the character on live was completely gone, so I'm happy. I didn't test all that extensively.

Made a sentinel (storm/regen) yesterday. Built them for recharge (+112% before perma hasten) with spiritual core alpha. The recharge was quite over the top. This resulted in roughly perma category five, which was kinda neat. The trial run was wiping out wall spawns in Cimerora. Damage was OK. Lightning strike hit pretty hard (though not extremely), and the rest was OK. It was definitely a change of pace having the attacks be indirect. Very much it has a Storm (the character) feel to it. The perma category five will be fun to use solo, but the slow build up to damage means it really won't shine on teams. Mind you, I didn't have a team to test with, but with most other sets having front loaded damage, this will result in a large chunk of the Cat 5 damage being wasted on corpses. Overall it's a cool set with really cool animations, but it will likely be shunned by high performance oriented players. It will be a hit with role players. Oh, also the aim equivalent is rather weak, I assume this is because it does other things. I did pop storm cells, but I'm not sure I really understood the point. I guess I need to understand the mechanic better.

I find that it, coupled with fire having lousy T1 and T2 powers makes the set not terribly appealing to me. Blaze is great and all, but it doesn't offset other aspects of the set which are meh.

Yeah, it's a knockback/repel combo which you can't undo. It amounts to a solid mechanic for taking a target out of a fight for a bit of time, but if you like to keep things bunched up to cook them, it's annoying.

I'm not pointing fingers, but I read somewhere that it's been found that the people who wanted help with coding found more success with posting wrong code than with simply asking nicely. Many people can't resist the urge to correct wrong things. Luckily I'm aware of this or I'd actually consider firing up Mids.

The amount of -regen that a sent (every AT) gets from BR is pretty small. Envenomed daggers are a better option. One should focus on DPAS (looks like the proc route above- there's better experts on that than I.

I really like electric blast as a primary (though really, most sentinel primaries are well enough balanced across sets so you can't go terribly wrong, I might avoid radiation or dark, but beyond that they're fine). It doesn't need IOs to be good, but they can certainly help. I would suggest regen as the secondary since it basically just works, even if you only use common IOs or SOs. Sure, with a bunch of set bonuses you can push your luck more, but it is already pretty durable. Also regen gets a really good endurance recovery power which will get you without all the fancy endurance pumping IOs. I strongly second Aethereal's suggestion. Get common IOs in place at 22 or 27 (lvl 25 or 30 IOs). They will give SO or near SO level values and never expire. Slotting attacks for 2 acc, 3 damage, 1 end works well enough. That's what I did when I first got back into the game and lacked resources. SOs because they expire are a sucker bet. It's actually a bit cruel that they made them available for low levels since it is a pure influence sink since they won't last long enough to do much good as low levels fly by. If you want a quick suggestion on making money, get on one of the PI paper mission teams when you're low level. This will have 2 positive effects- you'll gain levels fast, and you will get the lvl 50 common IO recipe drops which are each worth around 100K influence just at the vendor. Oh yeah, one other bit of advice is hover blasting since without IO sets, using position for protection is a good idea as you won't be that durable. Playing keep away especially favors sets which heal you up (regen, fire, willpower).

I find my /fire ones to work pretty well pushing the resist as high as possible after getting perma hasten. There are more durable sentinels surely, but if a /fire doesn't die straight out, they can run and recover most likely.

My basic advice is chase defense before you chase resistance. It's hard enough to softcap typed resistance when you're not also trying to chase resistance at the same time. Marginal improvements in defense which approach the cap should always come first. Honestly the one thing I don't understand is the 3 slotting of LotG all over the place. The 3 item bonus just isn't worth much and paying for a third is just a waste of resources. I usually go with 1 LotG global, 2 Def IOs 50. Sometimes I'll throw in a second LoTG defense instead of the base IO because the regen doesn't hurt, particularly if it's a regen set already (elec, dark, rad, regen). Also I can't find the gladiator's armor unique which is good for another 3% defense to all.

I have a bunch of regens at that point. It's a pretty easy going set if you don't try to actually tank. Taking some risks are usually survivable. I tend to slot with an eye towards overall set bonus goals. I have one where I chased resistance (numina's in the healing stuff), and another where I chased ranged defense (thunderstrike and winter sets). Both work pretty well. Opportunity is the bar under your endurance. It charges up full in a minute. The bar is full at 100 and you only need 50 to activate vulnerability (a power which is in your tray to start on a sentinel)which applies a number of debuffs which ignore level differences. I'd say the most noteworthy are defense and resistance (there are a bunch more though, usually debuff resistance). Sadly it cannot stack with other sentinels so no superteams for us. You will see it as a target pattern at the feat of your target.

Yeah, you can buy your way past a lot of build issues. I just hate it when they run out at an inopportune time when I've gotten forgetful during a TF or something.

Yeah, but you won't have any endurance to attack with. I do have assault and molten embrace on my elec/fire sent, and the damage boost is nice, but at low levels you just don't have all the endurance tricks in place yet to do that.

But it doesn't do anything like the listed damage (which is the same thing twice). In practice it does less damage that bitter ice blast. There is definitely an error.

The sentinel power chilling ray from ice blast is listing the damage done twice in the power description thus greatly inflating the amount of damage done. This same error is present in City if Data (which makes sense since it pulls from the game DB). But basically the power says it does 100.3208 points of Cold damage (all affected targets) twice, but in practice it only does the damage once. The double listing is incorporated into the calculated stats such as DPAS which makes ice blast look a lot better than it actually is.

Ice is a good solid damage dealer. It works well with any sturdy secondary which doesn't need any tricks to survive, so SR or energy are just fine. I just made a new SR sentinel recently, and it's a nice contrast at how easy it is to softcap SR compared to energy even. Though in play I do notice the lack of the resistances that energy includes as every hit that makes it past the RNG really hurts on SR.

It's worth noting that chasing resistance or defense yield increasing effect towards your cap (percentage wise), which chasing regeneration is a linear thing (though the combination does interact, so you get get effectively more regeneration as you increase resistance, and defense- though the latter is less direct and more unreliable due to damage spikes and the RNG). Radiation blast is actually one of the weaker sets when it comes to DPAS of the attacks, but is very easy to proc up damage (because if the -def attached to the attacks). You should consider what Oldskool says, though personally I don't like going all in on procs, but as I said, I like my recharge and other set bonuses. It's not hard to load multiple procs into attacks using radiation blast.

My build style generally chases recharge, so perhaps I'm not the one to offer much advice here, but you should look at the winter IOs. They offer some nice fire/cold resistances when in superior form.

You know, I didn't even think I was skipping this part of the math. Thanks for the correction.