drbuzzard

OK, thanks. I was afraid I had missed some nice simple trick. Honestly, I'm usually a bit lazy about it and beat down Rommy as I rarely solo the TF (have done it 3 times, once each on a sentinel, brute, and stalker just to see if the builds could). On teams everyone seems to just beat on Rommy, so I go with the flow. Trying to properly coordinate a PUG TF is like herding cats. If I can make them avoid the ambush at the oracle, I feel I've done enough work.

Impressive. One question- how do you tell the different nictus apart at final Rommy?

Actually what I'd suggest is follow this to get your alpha to tier 3 which IMO is the first goal you should have in incarnate stuff. That gives you a level shift of +1 for all content played at 50, and this is very powerful. Then you work on the other incarnate slots as they open, hoarding up the threads for those. As you muddle along post 50 shards will accumulate however, and they can be used to craft up the second tier 3 alpha you will need to reach tier 4 (when you do a WST you get a notice of the well, which gets you that tier 3 with some shard input). Tier 4 though should be done with threads and empyreal merits making the very rare.

Now unless I am missing something, you can tailor your targets of farming to make it safer on blasters and basically reap the same rewards (minus the 10 threads 1/day or 1 merit/day). You choose the highest risk to test for your reward. That's not exactly normal (or fire farms wouldn't really be a thing). Do it against non incarnate enemies on a council farm map ( to leave AE out of this), and I expect different results.

This is a perception issue and nothing else. Mind you, this is a game, so what you perceive to be fun is what matters. I look at the absorb shield as the amount of regeneration a regen sentinel is capable of without taxing their system. The stuff they just heal nearly instantly. It's the deep wounds (organs, broken major bones, major nerve trunks), that are what get past the absorb shield. I can state one thing with certainty, you're not seeing instant heal as a toggle again without it being nerfed. Thus you should be happy with the set as is given your conditions for adjustment.

While this is true, it's not the whole story. Blasters can get mez protection (t4 clarion is permanent mez protection-maybe T3, don't recall). Blaster all have access to various flavors of armor in their EPPs. Also, the sentinel resistance debuff is either very weak (5%) or single target and tied to a screwy inherent. Now I will certainly grant that the ride to 50 is much easier on a sentinel, because they won't die nearly as much. However the survival disparity between blasters and sentinels at end game (completed builds with IOs and incarnates) is a much smaller gap than you describe. Your case seems to rest on the notion that safety has value, and I won't say that is completely untrue. However in a game with rewards, risk/reward becomes far more relevant. The lower damage and AOE caps on sentinels means they reap rewards appreciably more slowly than you can as a blaster (or brute, or scrapper, or stalker, or heck , probably even tank nowadays). That's what really matters to be quite honest. If safety were the paramount measure of power, phase shift would be in every build.

Did the VEATs slip past you or something? They are tankmages, in addition to being tankbuffers and tanktrollers (on the widow side). Have you been saying they don't belong in the game either? Hell, my crab is actually a lot more durable than my sentinels (pick one of 16 or so), though the lack of a credible nuke puts him a bit behind in damage (I have the crabbermind build available, but I dislike how fast the pets die, though when it is all up, he shames sentinels in damage). The crab also hands out more goodies to the team around him.

Oh, I forgot to call for 'nerf regen' because it is traditional.

This is actually the approach I'd follow if they were to revisit regeneration and make it feel like it was. Sentinels version of regeneration is the closest feel to old school regeneration that exists in the game now. Instead of having Instant Heal being that massive HP regenerating click (which was once a glorious toggle), they made it into a absorb toggle. This means it can have a ceiling well below your health cap, and yet still regenerate fast, but not the outrageous excesses of original Instant Heal. I think it's a very well thought out solution. The absorb bar looks a lot like the yo-yoing of the old IH, but because it is only so many points, a solid hit will still blow right through it and get to your real health which doesn't come back as fast. Thus unlike original regen where it was damned close to all or nothing if something could one shot you, this version allows you to get beat down.

I can say that things still will sell quickly if you adjust to the new price, so demand isn't an issue from my small window. While there are tons of bottom feeders out there who make selling for 1 (or 1000) on a recipe a trap, you can still gauge market prices and sell for around that and have things move.

Doesn't that go without saying?

There is a very large difference between flipping to make influence on the market and farming to generate influence from scratch. The former is deflationary, the latter is inflationary. Now of course farming also generates drops, so it is not quite so cut and dry, but the discussion here is about the influence generation rate, and the removal of the 2x option. Luminara's post does a good job of explaining the consequences of rampant in game inflation. Already the change removing that option has cut market prices pretty substantially. That's a good thing, even though it has certainly lowered earnings for market flippers (as I'm one of those).

I agree that target caps are important as well (though incarnate attacks can go higher), but I've just seen too many tankers herd up a bunch at once and then some poor PUG blaster starts nuking the pile, and he quickly finds out that not all the bosses are part of the tank's aggro cap.

War mace and battle axes were 2 of the original tanker sets from the start of the game. Initially clobber was a no damage stun attack, and war mace was universally seen as one of the weakest tanker secondaries (ice melee was the other bad one back then). It was demonstrated enough times how bad that WM was so the devs made clobber into the badass attack it now is, and it completely changed the tone and quality of the set. It became a good single target set with also good AOE capability. At this point battle axe is the one that lags. I was thinking of making a new alt, and while I had an axe guy back on live, I could not bring myself to make another one when I know how weak it is. I endorse WM any day, but would not encourage anyone to do BA.

If the concept of aggro caps doesn't make sense to you, I'm not going to bother to explain.

I just did smite and shadow maul, and don't really count on the procs since the recharges are so short. They are both in my attack chain, so the procs will pop eventually.

This requires a huge guide to answer. It's not really within the scope of a fast reply. A few quick points would be stone armor is weak until granite, then indestructible. It's also a major pain to play (got one to 50 back on live, won't do it again). I would suggest not making one because most people won't want the pain. You can get close enough in durability using IOs and other primaries. Dark armor, is an odd duck which is complicated to play and work with. It can be made plenty durable, but you don't think about it the way you do with other tanks. This is also quite complicated, and also very subject to individual taste. I've been pretty impressed with how SD/DM worked out, though it is a complicated build, the ability to get to perma soul drain coupled with Against All Odds means you run with a huge damage bonus all the time. It's really quite impressive. The current rage crash from super strength is rather unhappy with defense based sets like SR, SD, or Ice. One bad technique I see all too often in tankers is one who close to taunt range of a group of enemies, taunts them, then runs into the crowd. All this does is pull ranged attacks to yourself as you close. There's no benefit. Every tanker primary has an aggro aura one way or another. Merely moving into the crowd will taunt them if you just stand there. Hold onto the taunt for ones which are outside of your aura (as in ones which start moving away). Also, people need to stop herding. In a game of 17 maximum aggro cap, there is no reason for herding at all (sure, if you want, group up the single spawn, but that's not really herding). If you herd two groups together past the 17 limit it just means your team will be pulling that aggro instead of you. Sure, some builds can handle it, but don't count on that on PUGs.

Yeah, you are correct. Too long and it won't do you much good. I tend to put them into my PBAOEs which tend to have longer (I don't consider Soul Drain a PBAOE even if it technically is, but I think of it more like build up), but not too long timers.

I agree that the +res proc is well placed in a damage aura so you have it going off all the time. Given proc mechanics, you want it in something which has a long recharge time so it pops more reliably. Thus if you don't have a damage aura, I'd go with whatever attacks have the longest recharges.

The increase in scalar means a .95/.8= 1.1875 so a 18.75% damage increase across all attacks in secondaries. That's quite noticeable. Bruising was a 20% resistance debuff attached to very likely your worst attack, and subject to the level scaling of debuffs, so less than 20% most of your time. It's a very solid increase in damage dealing This is for leadership pools. I find it most noticeable in taking assault which now gives you 15% damage bonus, which is pretty damned nice for having a damage scalar of .95. If you eat some red candy on top of having a SD/DM who's managed to get a get soul drain with a 10 enemy crowd around you, you can get there. I have that tank, and I can usually keep my damage bonus over 150%, which means a total ~350% damage value, so well short of this. Yes, it would be quite easy. If you're in Praetoria, you might want to consider an electric armor tank because iirc, the critters goldside do a heck of a lot of energy and psi damage plus a lot of endurance drain. Fire will be a bit weak to that.

I'll second the suggestion for willpower since it really just makes your life simple. If you are soloing it will just allow you to smash your way through things without much tweaking at all. It's pretty solidly durable even with just SOs. I'll also second a separate suggestion of war mace. It's a set which benefited heavily from the tanker improvements as it has a good number of AOEs, with a couple of cones that gained a good bit. It also allows a lot of different graphic options in the weapon which I find to be a fun angle. The set includes clobber which is one of the best single target hits in the tanker attack sets. When you say IOs are what you will be using to 50, do you mean common IOs or sets for bonuses, I get the impression of the former. With willpower, this will be easy enough. With some other ones, this could be more complicated.

Personally I dropped whirlpool just because it causes too much running by AVs. Yes, it does good damage if things stay put, but it's work to make them do so. Steam Jet is actually a good cone because it has the higher target number than usual sentinel cones.

I didn't see the LFG teleport mentioned. It's great for going to places without SG portals like Cimerora or the Shadow Shard. You pull up the LFG menu, pick the TF (or trial) contact in the zone you want (Time's Arrow for Cimerora), lock the team to yourself (bottom right on the menu), and queue up. You'll be teleported to the contacted shortly.

There's pretty much 2 power sets which do a good job of providing a team with a lot of defense -cold and force field. One is a brilliant set, and is fairly common in play, and as we know that's not force field. Why is this? It's because cold has a lot of utility beyond just upping defense. It also debuffs the heck out of enemies. What does force field do? It can make anyone into a sort of a defense tank, sort of. That's 3 of the 9 powers. Then it does a bunch of knockback, which while a few will sing the praises of that, I'm not one of them. It requires a lot of skill and finesse for knockback to be used in a way which doesn't hamper a team, and that's very uncommon. So why don't people play FF? Because the set sucks, it has little to do with too much defense being out there (a FF def would still be useful leveling up or for people at endgame who are not well optimized). I remember I bailed on the game after GDN hit (global defense nerf) which was in i4 iirc (ED hit after that, and took it even farther). I felt that it went too far, and happened before the invention system which enabled people to make most of it back up and eventually past it. I came back eventually since no other MMO I tried even came close to the feel that I liked. There was a period between i6 or so and i8 which I think brought in inventions where everyone was pretty well nerfed compared to the hieghts, and honestly even then you didn't see a lot of bubblers. It's just a bad powerset design. With the market prices back on live, few enough people were defensive powerhouses like we have now all over the place.

I used to play with Repeat Offenders back on live, so I know of what you speak. If I could get a proper buff/debuff team together of people who knew how to leverage that, it would no doubt break the hell out of the game. I've been there and done that. However the reason I've been talking of the optimal team composition is the master of ITF races which are run on Excelsior. There's a guy who keeps track of the records of timed ITF runs with limitations to the team (which have been getting more harsh with time as people improve). I think the main form right now is 5 player, no deaths, no temp powers, no inspirations, 30 minute timer. Blasters are the standing champs for an all AT run. I think the fastest overall was 4 blasters and 1 defender. I've tried to get sentinel teams together for this, and I have trouble getting together a 5 man team which can just survive, much less vie for the record time. Keep that in mind. The blasters have set the record in a no death run, and the sentinels have died (mine survived, and a few other well optimized didn't die, but while 3 of us have well twinked sentinels, we have to get two more and they died). For all the talk about sentinels margin of durability, it doesn't hold at endgame is fairly trying circumstances. As I've said before, sentinels are nice and easy to level up and play. I imagine that leads to people being rather more lackadaisical about optimization. Blasters get beat down while leveling up, so it's a different road which makes people scrounge for tweaks. I fully understand that, in normal circumstances, it doesn't make much difference what AT you grab for a team. I run many ITFs a day with various alts since it's my favorite TF. I don't really care what I get throwing together that PUG. This game is pretty much simply easy. However I'd like to see things a bit better balanced across ATs in an absolute sense, and sentinels need some help in that context.