drbuzzard

It does now.

Invulnerability at the time had potentially 3 toggles - temporary invulnerability (silly name for a toggle), unyielding stance, and invincibility. People would skip temp invulnerability and use tough from the fighting pool instead (which would work with other toggles). Then they'd run teleport plus unyielding stance until they got past 32 and could slot up unstoppable to run alongside invincibility. Unstoppable was able to be up all the time, though with a mean crash that could certainly get you killed. As it was a click power you could run it alongside invincibility which was your toggle. Between those two slotted up, you'd be getting 90% resistance to all but psi (toxic didn't exist yet), lots of status protection, endurance recovery, and very high defense when surrounded. Fire had 2 toggles, fire shield and plasma shield, they could both run at the same time. I know because my first 50 was a fire tank. Status protection was really weird (not located in the shields like it is now), and the builds had no wiggle room if you wanted to leverage burn (and you wanted to leverage burn). Stone had exclusive toggles, but people just toughed it out until granite and then all was covered. Ice had exclusive toggles, and sucked until you got to energy absorption which would let you softcap pretty easily. You run that click with wet ice toggle for status protection and you were good. Regeneration would allow integration and instant heal toggles to run at the same time, and you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a regeneration scrapper. Super Refexes had to pick a positional defense shield, but past 38 you could use perma elude so you were very softcapped with a large endurance boost. Status protection was and is still a click power so that wasn't a concern. Yes, dark had it rough. It was the lone set which never got away from having to pick a shield and hope for the best.

For what sets? Fire used to be able to use all their armors in i1 onwards (they only have 2 of course, but you could use both I know that). That's the only tank I played in i2. I didn't play invulnerability before i3 because of the immobile status protection. Once i3 hit, armors stacked just fine, tankers got a damage buff, and the immobile status protection powers were made mobile. Emmert did not leave in i3. Though let's also be honest when talking about non stacking armor, by the time you hit high level in i0-2 you could take perma versions of the T9 click powers. Invulnerability tanks would rock perma-unstoppable and SR scrappers would be in perma-elude. Before i3 there were 4 tank armors: Fire, Ice, Stone, invulnerability. Stone had granite which made the rest of the set mostly moot (mud pots and rooted were still handy). Invulnerability could stack invincibility and perma-unstoppable and have capped resistance to all but psi plus massive defense (at the cost of periodic crashes). Ice leaned on energy absorption for defense, and still does. Fire had quirky resistances (healing flames for stun resistance anyone?), but you could run both armors just fine. On the scrapper side you had regen, which would allow integration and instant healing to stack. SR and Invuln just ran their perma T9s. Only dark had the red haired stepchild position of non stacking armor weakness. There were gaps before you got to the powerful levels, and then you needed support on some builds, but certainly not all. I mean the example given is Malta which is level 45+. Most people would have ways of getting around any single armor limitation.

Just using the smallest amount of common sense, any update isn't going to satisfy people for long.

Now admittedly, I only showed up in issue 1, so I don't know issue 0 beyond hearsay, but I though exclusive armors were only in beta. Now there were limitations, as in invulnerability and stone both had to be immobile to have status protection (before the T9), plus fire had very odd status protection. Those certainly were limitations. Heck, a regen scrapper had no status protection until 28 (was still true till recently though it's not like anyone plays regen scrappers anymore). In the time between GND and IOs you certainly needed support on a tank if you weren't granite. It is certainly arguable that for normal non hard mode content, people are over powered. Oh well, that's what MMOs have you do- chase power.

Oh, so you're complaining that old easy stuff is easy. I see.

I use it happily on all my electric blast sentinels. Since as a sentinel, pulling extra aggro really doesn't matter, it's just more damage and that is good.

So you guys are breezing through relentless Aeons and ITFs? Damn, that's impressive.

It should be noted that Time also sell buffs recharge so that 3 in the uptime ratio is actually lower. There's really only 2 outliers, thermal and pain. If we compare the three after reasonable recharge builds (perma hasten) the uptime/recharge Pain 30/32 Time 30/21 (1/ (1+1+.7+.5)) Thermal 40/40 Pain is actually the loser, but it has more self buffing utility. Also, as mentioned before on a fast moving team shorter duration is more useful. You can improve the ratios even more if you add in spiritual alpha of course.

I don't think thermal is awful, but it is in the bottom half of defender primaries. Obviously not every set can be the best. However they should all at least be good. I think just a reduction in recharge of the T8 and T9 would do a lot to improve the set.

Control? What control? Heat exhaustion? That won't sap anyone all the way, especially with the recharge. I guess you could couple it with a sapping secondary(primary), but it wouldn't carry the load. I agree the shields are a nice change, but you basically get a healer (who misses some healing tricks compared to other healers), those fairly nice shields, and debuffs with recharge issues. .

Nah, I'd say traps is a better debuffer. The downside is the set up time on fast teams, but it's very solid on AVs (better than thermal). Also you get status protection and can softcap yourself pretty easily.

Now here's a question- does to hit debuff change the minimum to hit chances of bosses and the like? (usually above 5% when def capped)

Does that let you port to a place you don't have line of sight to? That's impressive. As for the double auras perma, it's gonna be close at the cap but not quite (10 seconds of downtime at +400% recharge). I remember Repeat Offenders had an all empath team called green machine, and they were a thing to behold. Everyone always at the damage cap, recharge cap, defense cap, and regen cap. It was fairly silly since it took a really odd chance for someone to ever die.

Tried DCUO, and it failed to impress. Never tried Champions. Played STO for a while, but got bored eventually. Tried D&DO and I never cared much for it.

There's two arguments in favor of sentinels which I would proffer: A) Conceptually sentinels are a much more common superhero trope than blasters. There's just not that many glass cannons in comics (blasters). There's an awful lot of ranged damage types with inherent protections (Iron Man, Captain Atom, Human Torch, Red Tornado, and many others). For a game which might seek to be 'comic booky', you rather need a sentinel AT. B) When people say things like 'blasters do more damage than sentinels' that really can be picked apart really easily. Do all blasters do more damage than all sentinels? Clearly no, given the spread in damage between sets. A fire/bio sentinel is going to be a better damage dealer than an energy/plant blaster. Yes blasters self buff damage nicely and have higher target caps, which is nice, but many of the sentinel sets are clear steps above the blaster/corr/def versions. Also if we're talking teams with plenty of buffs, the difference at the damage cap is very low (scalar 1.125 vs 1.1 with the same damage enhancement cap). As a side note people often dismiss the sentinel inherent debuff without considering one of its strongest aspects- it ignores the purple patch. The 15% resistance (and all the other debuffs) debuff is always a 15% debuff. Say you bring a radiation emission corrupter along and you're fighting +3s (so a party of 50+1s fighting +4s which is common), the sentinel will debuff more. If you're fighting actual +4s and +5 then sentinels get a clear advantage even over defenders. Though if we're going to concern ourselves with optimal team composition why does anyone do anything beyond 7 corrupters and a tank (maybe brute)?

Yes, I use the attacks for recharge bonuses of course. Thanks for catching me on the fort duration. As for my point on power boost, I mean that because it recharges more slowly you can apply it every time you have fortitude up. You can do about half of them.

Ok, altitis struck and I leveled an Empathy defender to 50. Now there's a write up back on page 1 where there was an empathy placeholder.

I tend to agree with this, and hence I don't play my thermal defender after getting it to 50. Since they were brought up: Anguishing Cry- slightly worse uptime ratio, more defense debuff. (30/120 secs base) Slowed response: same debuffs, better uptime ratio, easy to achieve perma especially since set adds in more recharge (30/90) Though I will certainly say that waiting for a tier 9 in a set, and it being melt armor is rather a let down. There's a few T9s which make you go 'meh', and this one is certainly in that category. As for resistance debuffs without waiting (by toggle or time ratio which can be made perma via just slotting)) tar patch (30) enervating field (30) disruption field (30) envenom (40 or 20) disruption arrow (40 acid mortar (26.6) sleet (30) freezing rain (35) (resistance debuff in parenthesis) Pain dom is the weak sister as a debuffer, but the set is really more focused on heal/buff. Thermal devotes 2 powers to debuff and is no prize as both require a fair amount of global recharge to keep up a lot of the time. Yes, you need to compare the whole package of a set, but thermal comes up lacking when you do that. It heals OK (has the essentials), buffs pretty well in forge, and the resistance shields are actually a nice rarity (since softcapping is so popular), but it is a really weak debuff set. It requires a lot of resources to optimize for meh returns.

I agree. If sentinel regen were ported to other ATs, I'd actually play it on something other then sentinels.

As much as I'm not a fan of the DP animations, time/DP is probably a good combo. Not quite as good for holds as ice, but you could stack up slows with cryo ammo.

Got the corrupter to 50, and it works pretty well. The defender is a lot more sturdy, and honestly I think time works better on a defender. The defender is time/sonic which is a bit sub optimal because of all the cones though.

Yeah, but since you need to be in the mix, the cone one is a bit iffy. Time really benefits from being in close, perhaps even more than Kinetics.

Honestly the absorption shield in Master brawler is all I find that I need in my SR sentinels (and I have a lot of them). Once you are softcapped (which I consider standard on my builds), you don't get a heck of a lot of incoming damage.

Funny, I'm now working up a rad/time corrupters as that occurred to me.