drbuzzard

Sorry about the multi-post. It didn't indicate that it posted. Can't see how to delete the extras.

In terms of the new support set which you're questioning, I rather imagine one of the devs thought it would be a neat idea and pursued it. It's all well and good to say the community should make the decisions, but the community isn't writing the code. Ultimately it will come down to the people who do the work (voluntarily, keep in mind) doing the stuff which they have a desire to do. As for the issue with super strength, they inherited the code with the bug fixed as I understand it. An effort was made to fix the set during the tanker revisions, but there was so much tumult with no agreement, that they bailed on the effort and decided to come back to it, just getting the tanker revisions done separately.

Because I had a pile of brainstorm crap sitting around from buying hero packs I decided to see if I could at least somewhat 'fix' the uncommon market. I used brainstorms to generate uncommon salvage and dumped it into the market at 1 influence. I think I probably dumped 700 items or so in, and managed to drive the price down from 50k to 11k. This of course doesn't get it quite back to the 2222 I used to be able to buy it at if I waited.

Oddly enough the one place I've seen sentinels shine fully was over on We Have Cake. If you run a sentinel on their archive server (which is i25, rather than the strange kludge that feels like an alpha of i24 mods that is their live server), you can run around in an environment where the aggro and AOE caps are set to 200 for everything. Thus sentinels can herd up rooms and blast them to goo, and thus leverage all their defense in excess of that achievable by a blaster. Of course since such a situation happening here is approximately as likely as winged monkeys flying out of my butt, I'd say the AT needs some help.

In my view ice armor had 2 large flaws. A) An absorb shield that was basically worthless. After trying regen, which really is based on how good the absorb shield is, I figured ice might we similar since the rest of the set looked pretty lackluster. However the numbers on the shield are so low as to make it worthless. At best you'd take it for a place to put a healing proc. It's simply not worth slotting up. B) The endurance recovery tool in the set (which all sentinels have in some form or another) is also relied on to supply a significant chunk of your defense. Thus you can use it (and slot it) for one goal or another, but will be challenged for it to be good at both. Also those two things are conflicting goals, since you want defense to start, but endurance recovery later in a fight. Now I know this is a common attribute of ice armor, but at least in every other version of the set the energy absorption power over saturates your defense, so it's not so important to slot for it. Here it's a single target (and you actually have to pick a target unlike in dark armor where it's a PBAE with good range so it can just be clicked in any proximity to enemies).

What this really comes down to is the notion of opportunity cost. Sentinels, having a defensive secondary that includes status protection are inherently granted more flexibility in total builds if you want a durable ranged attacking character. Blasters have a lot of hoops to jump through if they want to be sturdy. Yes, it is certainly possible to build a damage optimized blaster (I have 2, as I have tons of sentinels, I have little desire to try to make one of those glass armored blasters that everyone brags about), but you rarely hear of those. It's always the 'I can tank an ITF' or whatnot. One pays a price to be able to do that, be it in recharge, damage, or whatever (and always in influence). My blasters are not terribly sturdy at all, but their damage is basically sick. On the other hand my sentinels mostly are damned durable, and I can run off and do stupid solo tricks in TFs and get away with it when my blasters would be dirt napping (and honesty for all the hyperbole, so would most of the glass armored blasters). Oh, and before someone says I don't think sentinels need a damage boost, please, just go away. They could use more damage. Right now on a team, they are clearly the suboptimal choice for a slot if you have a team which sticks together. This changes if they have to run off and work independently like on speed runs.

I was trying to find out where the 25% bonus was mentioned, and I didn't see it in game anywhere or in Hero Designer. That's probably a good thing since it simply is not true. The boost to damage and the toxic bonus damage are varying percentages by power. My build was missing two attacks (2nd and 8th) from beam rifle, but I tested the rest on a pylon with ablative carapace up, and the damage increase and bonus damage varied greatly percentage wise from offensive mode, to no mode at all. The tier 1 attack got the biggest percentage boost, and the tier 9 got the smallest.

OK, got a BR/Bio up to speed and I've been playing with it a bit. I also have an archery/bio, but since I hate lethal damage, I wasn't willing to put in much effort. BR being my favorite sentinel primary led to me putting in more effort here. Bio armor is pretty damned good. It's rather similar to willpower with it's mix of resistance and defense for various things. However it's different in that it is more hands on (ablative carapace and rebuild DNA) with clicks. I'm still chasing incarnate stuff, but I have it to perma-hasten, and have ablative carapace on my forward movement key so it's up almost all the time as well. Lethal/smashing is capped in offensive mode, and fire/cold/energy/negative energy are nearly softcapped. Durability is quite good. A bit of quick testing on a pylon indicates that offensive mode is inconsistent in how much it boosts each attack, which is a bit annoying. It seemed like weaker attacks got more proportional boost, and the nuke got a marginal boost percentage wise. However as offensive mode doesn't really have significant downside (IMO of course since I can cap l/s resistance anyway), there's no reason to run anything else.

Since the last big patch (for tankers and such), it appears that there's been a bug affecting offensive opportunity. Sometimes it seems to stack up (you will see the normal vulnerability text appearing multiple times on a valid application of the effect). This seems to have a increased debuffing effect on the target (my damage sure seems higher, though admittedly it could be the small damage enhancement being applied many times for higher value as well). I can't imagine I'm the only person who has seen this. It does not occur very consistently, but does happen fairly often. Personally I find this bug to be a fair shot at fixing the damage concerns of sentinels, if accidental.

The fact that the people you mention have lousy builds because they don't bother to avail themselves of easily obtainable knowledge to solve their problems is nobody's fault but their own. That is manifestly not an issue to be solved. There will always be people who know a game well, and those who don't bother. The people who don't bother aren't being penalized, they are merely not reaping rewards they are not chasing. It is their choice.

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I have to agree that the old raid needed to be fixed. The zerging of hami made the whole thing a sorry joke. All the time was spent summoning him, and then he died like a skul to a lvl 50 blaster.

They never have been there for damage. They are meant to debuff the target. Mostly it's a -damage, but with a bit of -1to hit.

Cake Evolution is their live server, not their test server. So you know they didn't actually test it, you know the thing you claim they are doing.

As I said before, just try out their archive server. It's based on i25, and it quite stable with a decent market and other nice things (cheap merit prices and such). Though I doubt you will find any GMs there who can level you up. I expect there's some AE stuff which can do it fast enough though as they seem to be more sensible in realizing that if the 'I Win' button of AE exists, you might as well go in whole hog and actually boost XP in there.

Clutching my pearls? Are you daft? I actually like the We Have Cake server, but I happen to be honest enough to call it like I see it. Right now if you like their stuff, you are better off playing their archive than the 'live' evolution server. I quite like their archive server to be honest. The new classes were all released far too early as they are clearly works in progress. Many of the new classes and power sets are not even capable of slotting IOs, and many are pretty much broken as is (and I don't mean overpowered, though that's common enough) to where they barely work. It's pretty clear that they wanted to wow people and rush a bunch of stuff out the door but it proved to be half baked. The number of character wipes and other difficulties has made that abundantly clear. I would like them to succeed, but I think they have stumbled badly. Oh, and given that the Cake classes don't really work, and are based on i24 code, I think my saying 'no' is not a real reach of a guess.

As it is on Cake Evolution, which is based on i24, no. Considering how much of a mess their new classes are right now, I don't really want any of them. They let stuff out in a rush without even a basic amount of testing it seems.

When I get my BR/Bio worked up I'll test more. I just don't like fiddling with the Archery/Bio very much.

I agree on the endurance procs (actually the whole endurance approach). Though I will say you can get away with just doing +3 on the end mods since ED will trim your sails enough that the extra +2 on each is mostly a waste of influence unless you have oceans of it sitting around. You can get one of the needed slots for 3 slotting the end power from ditching the kismet +to hit in hover.

Actually on sentinels entropy aura just gives a fixed 20% recharge boost, it is not affected by having enemies around like in the melee versions of the power. Thus there's no reason to mix it up (unless you need to absorb endurance), and beam rifle is one of the nice ranged sets which gives you no good reason to get in close as even the nuke works at range.

I think the reason it is so variable is because offensive adaptation adds a bit of a damage enhancement boost, but more of it comes from toxic damage. Toxic is a damage type which is often very resisted. I'm going to try out a BR/Bio as my next project to give the set a proper go. I'll probably strip stuff out of my archer/bio since I just don't have interest in playing it.

Yeah, I don't find psi nearly as resisted as people make it out to be. Yes, council and malta robots are very resistant, but even incarnate robots are not as resistant (they are resistant, but not to the degree). When you do fight something which pops unstoppable or MOG, psi is damned handy (though somehow on my last Manticore TF, it seemed that the PP MOG now defended against psi, which isn't right).

It's funny, I actually made a bunch of tankers when the changes first went onto test. Then the changes too rather a while to come to live, and those tankers mostly sat unused. Now that the tanker buffs are live, I've made 2 more tankers, and have been playing tankers a lot more.

Considering fire farms can be done afk and basically accomplish the same thing on homecoming, the difference is a mere matter of degree not actual earning.

Been screwing around on cake some, and I guess the old powergamer in me just loves the lack of AOE and aggro caps. It's like a flashback to the old days here (but with current shinies). Though the new stuff is definitely causing issues. I imagine they will iron it out eventually.