drbuzzard

Now I admit to not being very up on who is the current pylon king or anything such, but if the stalkers are not the kings of single target, I'd be very shocked. Yes, they suffer on AOE, but against one hard target, I'm not sure who could be better. That would be digression however. My point, and I'd like to think I was clear, was to point out that the sentinel inherent alone takes an extra hit from the purple patch. That was all I was saying. It was a comparison of inherents, not of ATs. Comparing the ATs overall is far, far more complicated. Do I think sentinels should have scrapper damage? Nah. However if they are a damage AT (and honestly, they're not particularly good at anything else), they ought to do more credible damage.

Clearly a force multiplier will be bigger if you pick a bigger team of damage dealers. Basic damage boosts are (for 50% uptime) is 50 x 1.024 + 50x1.12 = 107.2 Hence about a 7% damage increase for team members. I shudder at having to figure out the math for the scrapper ATOs. Also scrappers aren't even as simple as 1.05 for a damage boost since they get higher crit numbers against non minions much of the time. Also what assumption are you making for the rest of the team? Is it blasters? Defenders? Corrupters? Controllers? Tanks? All of these things will change greatly the damage output value of a scrapper. Honestly, there is simply no simple assumption which is even vaguely valid in a general sense. If you're on a low damage team, that scrapper pulls a very relatively large punch, OTOH on a team full of blasters and one sentinel, you're much better off with the sentinel.

I'm way too lazy for that. It's far too complicated to be done in an general sense since you need to make a huge pile of assumptions (are there other debuffs, does opportunity land on a durable enough target to matter, are you fighting a tough target or lots of lackeys?)

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This would be another example of me being math lazy. You are, of course, correct. The disparity is larger than indicated, but I wished to show how the purple patch is stacked against sentinels. Personally I found it funny when, a while back, Captain Powerhouse indicated he was extra paranoid about debuffing target resistance because it was too powerful. Now it is powerful in the sense of being a force multiplier, it takes more hits when you are measuring yourself against the hardest stuff (which generates more rewards).

Derp. My lack of proofing gets me again. I shall fix.

One thing people rarely note on sentinels is how the inherent is the most level disparity dependent one in the game. Now you may wonder why I say that. This is because on every other inherent, it provides a damage increase of a sort in a nice linear fashion. Scrapper: crits multiply by damage (say damage x 1.05 for a 5% crit chance) Brutes: linear damage increase with fury Blasters: damage increase with defiance Stalkers: crits again All of the above are affected by the purple patch in a straight up linear fashion. You take the damage result you get from the inherent, and multiply it by .48 if you're fighting +4s Now let's look at sentinels, baseline they get a 5% resistance debuff on targets, and with opportunity, this increases to 25%. However it should be noted that the purple patch also hits debuffs. So let's compare a scrapper hitting a +4 with a sentinel hitting a +4. In both cases we use an attack doing 100 damage because I wish to be math lazy. Scrapper hits for 100, with 5% crit chance so average is 105. Apply purple patch and we get 50.4 Let's see the sentinel: Sentinel hits for 100. He also debuffs for 25%. This means on even level targets you hit for 125. However both of those get the purple patch. damage goes to 48, and debuff goes from 25% to 12%. This gives us 53.76. That looks good since it is more than the scrapper number, but compare the no purple numbers. The scrapper does .48 of the initial damage, while the sentinel does .43 of the initial damage. That is about 10% less. So we start with a lower damage scalar, get a part time inherent, and then the inherent takes an extra hit from the purple patch. A more real comparison would take a power which would do 100 damage on a 1.0 damage scalar and we the adapt it to the two classes. for even level Scrapper does 100 x 1.125 x1.05= 118 Sentinel does 100 x .95 x 1.25 = 119 for +4 Scrapper 100x1.125x1.05 = 57 Sentinel 100x.95x (1+ (.25x.48) = 51 Sentinel starts out ahead if he has opportunity up, but falls behind at top difficulty (which is often where people do the comparisons). This disparity becomes much greater if we throw in the scrapper ATOs which increase the crit rate quite a bit, and can do it in a focused fashion which will favor the best DPA attacks.

Funny thing about scrappers is that if you consider the inherent without the ATOs, they are only kinda powerful. The ATOs take them well over the top. Of course the sentinel ATOs are decidedly meh.

Yeah, has to be. I doubt I could do it on any of my blasters. Best defense is a good offense. Though honestly we didn't have a whole lot of pucker moments. I saved the bacon a couple times with rebirth, but overall we were pretty safe.

Yeah, not bad (we did OK). But you should mention the blaster time for comparison- 23 minutes.

Yes, I don't doubt that. But I have not pulled it off with a bunch of PUGgers on the team. Someone always dies. Though the competition has moved on to 4 character no inspiration runs. In theory this should make it easier to get a team together, it's not been done. Partly I don't try to do it because I really don't want to see how hard sents will lag.

Well you never joined us when I tried to put a team together (you weren't on). Some of the MoITF stalwarts do have sentinels, but not many so coordination is an issue. Previous runs have just been grabbing PUGgers, and that has been less than successful.

The LFG tab is used mostly for trials. It's also a useful tool for teleporting around (pick a TF with it, lock team to yourself, and queue up, it will port you to the contact). The Looking For Group chat is the general way to find TFs and such. What server are you on? On excelsior the looking for group chat is always busy.

Actually no inspirations are allowed on the runs either. Also, sentinels don't have a valid time because the attempts have failed, not due to reputation.

The inverse scourge is likely to be like most critting AOEs, perhaps with a 50% chance (on top of the scaling factor). Honestly, this is just fiddling with numbers which can be worked out on test. That's what it is for.

I am reasonably certain you can't rely on the Mids DPS calculator. Just looking at the base DPA of the constituent attacks is much higher than 133 after enhancement. A quick check in the character generator if the top DPA (damage per activation which is what matters) for a lvl 50 fire blaster Blaze 170.49 Blazing bolt 85.77 Flares 63.19 fireball 74.62 Then you basically double them (for enhancement- a bit lower due to ED, but close), then you make an assumption about sustained defiance (call it a 40% damage boost which is mild). after Blaze 409 Blazing bolt 205 Flares 151 fireball 179 Now if you just chain these (which is possible, truth is you can chain without flares which is the weak spot, but I'll go minimal) this gives a 236 DPA, which is low compared to the numbers they are tossing around. However, toss in procs, musculature alpha, build up, aim, and attacks from the secondary with high DPA and you push it up a lot.

Actually the speed runs I reference are MoITF at +4x8 on a 4 person team. I'd have to check if the 4 person blaster team or one of the melee teams has the current record. It changes all the time. Sentinels have not been of note.

Oh yes, I said as much myself. There's only so many cases where stalkers have good versions. In too many cases they give up good powers to get their core stuff (claws, or dark melee).

That would be an interesting change- inverse corrupter.

Perhaps. All things considered, I think you could get away with quick and dirty on sentinels. Pick a simple new inherent (say crits), adjust the damage scale up a bit, and fix the ATOs. Done, then play with numbers on test until it's not too broken. I don't think anyone expects a full rebalancing of the sets or anything. To be honest, compared to blasters, sentinel primaries are more balanced within the AT, so just a gross upward adjustment is good enough.

Considering how involved the travel pool modifications were, the branch wasn't that low.

Yes, and the stalker ones that refresh build up or put you back into hide to crit again are also excellent.

The scrapper ATOs are basically transformational doing a massive damage increase to the AT. The brute ones are meh.

I have to say, from seeing MoITF results, blasters at the high end really don't have survival issues. Now the ITF isn't the hardest thing in the game by any means, but still there's a lot of debuffing thrown around for IO builds, and they still plow through in quads and solo.

While I fully agree that sentinels have a much easier life leveling up in this game, it begs the question of how much time is spent leveling up vs. playing characters in their mature builds? Personally, I more commonly play characters up to 50 instead of being PLed (though I do that too sometimes as well). The amount of time that amounts too is really quite short (between p2w 2XXP and experienced power). I spend far more time per character chasing down completion of incarnate abilities to an acceptable degree (I try to get most every character to 50+3). Thus in my case at least, the blaster has a lot more value for a lot more time. Now granted one does go back and do WST stuff, and that will cycle your level down, but the IO protections will likely scale down pretty well with you, and if you think you'll miss clarion, pop the 2.5 M influence for a defense amplifier, and you've got enough status protection to get you by. As I said, I've played sentinels on another server who lacked build up and inherents, and were not over the top (even with full scrapper value secondaries which are higher numbers). Add in the extra hindrances that sentinels carry here of lowered range and AOE caps, and I don't really think we're talking about excess. Heck, we could just keep it simple. Give sentinels no inherent which helps damage, and increase the scalar to 1.125 like blasters and scrappers. Though really, I've proffered so many different sentinel solutions at this point, I don't know why I keep bothering. If pool travels powers were more important than a class which most don't seem to finish to 50 much less play there, I don't expect any action soon if ever.