drbuzzard

Can't say I agree with that. It fully depends on your defensive set as to whether or not you have endurance problems. Take a SS/Invulnerability brute (a common enough build), and they will have no endurance recovery beyond stamina unless they use the body mastery pool (which is excellent). They are also likely to be loaded up on fighting pool for tough and weave which are not cheap toggles. Sure, if they have a defensive set which boosts endurance they will be peachy, but a lot of the legacy sets don't do that. Invulnerability, stone armor, shield defense, dark armor, and super reflexes are all out in the cold on this. Some of them have very expensive toggles (mud pots, or cloak of fear). Sure, if you have one of the others which all have endurance tools, it's a different story, but if you pick a secondary without knowing, you will have issues.

While I'm too lazy to put together a full pool, I'd like to see more pools which offered endurance recovery help. Right now I feel somewhat constrained on any tanker/stalker/brute/scrapper I make that lacks an endurance boosting power in primary/secondary to pick a pool that fixes this. Being constrained for endurance sucks, and I always try to avoid it (and no, miracle and numina uniques are not sufficient IMO, and I do add the performance shifter proc and panacea). A few other options would be nice. Right now Brutes have the best of this.

Fundamentally the issue with balancing around survivability is that it doesn't gain you a whole lot. Sure, phase shift is great for survivability, but if you aren't killing anything it's rather pointless. If sentinels are a damage AT (and since they offer no team support, crowd control, and don't have pets, they aren't anything else), they need to actually do damage. Right now they do fairly tepid damage with a very mediocre inherent. In a world of IOs, you can get nearly as much survivability from a blaster which gives you a huge amount more damage. That damage gets you rewards that surviving simply doesn't. I know you like to do extreme examples of play (solo TFs and whatnot) and there survivability does come into play, and a sentinel can shine a bit there. However not everyone pushes the game to the limit, so outside of those edge cases, a blaster will do you fine and get you more bling for your time.

Now there's the regen treatment we know and love.

Must be, he said 'regen buff'.

Actually I might suggest fire/stone melee which offers good synergy because you have a combination of a great single target secondary, with a primary that does good AOE damage. I have one of those I've made recently and it's quite effective.

I'd like to think I'm a pretty competent tank. I do have a mix of builds with and without taunt, depending on how things fit. Heck, now that you can get assault at 15% boost, it's hard to convince me that tanks should go without it, and that that boost in damage won't help a team more than a mostly redundant ranged taunt. Of course, I've gotten crap from people when I do play a tanker who lacks taunt. Often for reasons which has nothing whatsoever to do with taunt. A bunch of clueless sorts often see it as a litmus test of a good tanker without any idea of how the game mechanics actually work. Tanks have a very hard time losing aggro these days, and taunt is only for pulling things or bailing out a teammate (though a ranged attack will do these just as well, and still do damage). About the only time Taunt is particularly handy is MLTF for getting LR's attention and keeping it at the end.

One nice thing I didn't see mentioned is that tanker SR is very cheap. If you're new to the game and don't have piles of influence sitting around, tanker SR will softcap you just fine on SOs (or common IOs), and you can play a tough enough tanker without spending much at all.

At least you no longer look like Mr. Hanky.

Purple triangles don't work on immobilize from what I understand. I have good success locking down Rommy and the Malta AV in Tin Mage.

I dipped into an immobilize in the fire EPP to keep them locked into place. Yes, that means I give up mind probe, but the running really annoys me.

Even playing at 50, if I'm solo, I'd rather be on one of my sentinels (and I do have a couple of defensively specced out blasters). On teams, my blasters can shine however and do quite a bit more damage. To leverage the sentinel survivability, I tend to go for speed runs and things where you have to operate independently more. My blasters tend to stay near support and tanking more. I like both. The amount of things in this game where it makes noticeable difference such that a team will really care which you brought is pretty limited.

Bah, I played Classic traveler back in the day. You had a good chance of dying during character creation in that game.

Yeah, can't tell someone how to slot things if they have their like, but for those in the peanut gallery, if you actually want to do damage, avoid that slotting like the plague.

I have to expect that this is a known bug by now, but I suppose it should be reported just in case. When you look up damage listing during character creation (or power selection) for some tanker attacks, damage from fiery embrace is calculated in. This doesn't, however, happen in all cases so comparisons across power sets as you decide on a build are drastically distorted. It also doesn't happen to all powers within a given set. For example if we look at Dual Blades, the first three attacks include the fiery embrace damage during the display throwing their damage (and damage per activation which I consider the key stat) way the hell out of whack. as listed during character creation vs. actual Nimble slash 64.34 vs. 44.38 Power Slice 88.86 vs. 61.29 Ablating Strike 101.12 vs. 69.74 That's a pretty drastic distortion. Not looking carefully led me to make a dual blade tanker thinking it had damned good DPAS when it fact it is sub par. I suppose my lesson is to look more carefully at the numbers, but it should be fixed. It's rather inconsistent across power sets. Doing a quick scan of sets I only also see it in energy melee so at least it's not too common.

Maybe have the computer explode in a 10' radius burst of shrapnel?

There is little doubt that I'm weird, but RotP does pretty damned good damage. I slot it for recharge, damage, and knockback to knockdown, and it becomes a pretty nice attack.

I agree. The main thing I like about most T9s is I feel no remorse skipping them. This is, though, poor game design because if a choice is presented, it really shouldn't be automatic (especially a skip).

I generally avoid T9 powers in defensive sets as I'd rather maintain a consistent level of durability without the 'Oh Shit' button. I have barrier for that which costs me neither a power nor slots and doesn't crash. Given IOs, I can usually build in enough durability to satisfy, and I rarely pop barrier for that matter. Oddly enough, the only T9 I take regularly from the defensive sets is Rise of the Phoenix simply because it's a good damage dealer. I don't die all that often, but I like getting in a bit of payback if I actually do. For me to have any interest in the powers at all, they would have to be drastically changed into a non 'Oh Shit' power, but I doubt that's what others would want. I like consistency in performance, and build around that, so any defensive power which has too massive a cool down to be even in the same county as permanent doesn't much interest me. Now, as for crashing T9s, those are just silly. Perhaps they can be dramatic as a desperate struggle against the clock, but when your 'Oh Shit' power actually kills you (unstoppable, power surge), I have to say that's just no good. Oh, then there's granite, which is a great and awful power all on its own. A little while ago I made a stone/WM tanker thinking about giving it a new shot since you can overcome much of the slowness with IOs. Then I played up to the point of rooted and deleted it remembering how much I abhor leveling up stone armor (probably shouldn't have left the 100M influence on it when I deleted it though DOH). Even with granite as the end prize, I didn't want to put up with the suck. Though if the cottage rule means anything, granite kinda needs to stay as is.

It's an aluminum matrix composite. Heat will do a number on it pretty easily I would expect. A laser or a torch would go right through it.

Every power choice is an opportunity cost. These powers are a good example of that. Is there potential use for said powers? Yes. Would you likely be better off with something else which is less situational and will help you more often? Yes. I suppose with multiple builds these powers might be leveraged more since you can make a build specifically for cases where the powers would be of the most use.

The version on sentinels breaks the trend of sentinels generally having an improved version of a defensive set. It's the worst sentinel defensive set in my opinion after playing all of them (to 50). It's a mixed defense/resistance set, which can be nice if they overlap, or have another protection mechanism (like Bio or Willpower), but this one is mostly defense based, but with exceptions for fire and ice (and barely any resistance to fire). It includes a dull pain like heal/HP boost, but on a damned slow timer. The linchpin of the set on other ATs is energy absorption, changed to moisture absorption here, and it's comparatively crappy. To gain the biggest chunk of your defense, you'd have to go into a crowd, pick one, and drain endurance to get your defense up high enough to be credible. While the power says it targets more than one enemy, it only applies the defensive bonus once (unlike the version on other ATs) so you get a whopping boost of under 5% defense when slotted up. I remember when I built a character to try this out, I read the defensive numbers, but held out hope that Frigid Shield might be a nice defensive buffer like the absorb shield on regen for sentinels. Nope- it's pure garbage. It gives you a 30.12 HP shield at level 50. That's less than a love tap from a minion. What's the point? People say Icy Bastion is good stuff, but I generally skip tier 9s and try to maintain a consistent level of defensive performance on my sentinels. Perhaps Icy Bastion is enough to make the set tolerable, but it doesn't work for me, and the rest of the set is mostly either under powered or simply a hot mess (ok, cold mess). Every other sentinel set I have played allowed me to make a good durable build without considering the tier 9 power.

I suppose that could be it, but it fails to do it to the original target, so it should not count towards the damage number, but it is included. I guess as a positive it does mean both the T1 and T2 both spread disintegrate (I was a bit fuzzy on that). This means the T2 is the better of the two since it at least gets a damage bonus when disintegrate is up.

As I mentioned in the first post, the T1 and T2 for Beam Rifle are wrong because they include energy DoT which doesn't actually happen. I tested this quite a few times on alts to make sure. You can probably get away with just including the base number listed (below) and leave out the DoT. I know the number up top on the creation display is completely wrong.

Well you might want to steal my beam rifle numbers for damage since the character creation values are dead wrong.