drbuzzard

Not sure if this was intentional, but LFG no longer works to teleport you around to contacts (at least solo).

I rarely play solo, so the pets fall to AOEs all the time, and they are just burst damage, as I mentioned before. I'm not saying a SoA should be a mastermind, as I'd play a mastermind if I wanted a pet build, I was just saying if the crabbermind was supposed to be a pet build, there's issues with keeping pets alive.

My crabbermind is focused on recharge, and I'm well past permahasten. However even with the summons under 3 minutes, the pets often last less than a minute, so you're spiking at high damage for only a limited time. At best even if some do last, I've almost never seen the whole troop last for their recharge time unless I'm doing something completely easy. In team stuff, they die in droves.

I have a crab at 50 and a fort at 50. The crab has 2 builds, crabbermind and a very tanky blasting build. All are thoroughly IOed and incarnated out. >How do they compare with other damaging/Survival ATs? The fort works well as a team buffing, mind blasting, dominator with solid defenses and status protection. It's pretty solid, though the damage is probably just OK. However given the control and survivability with team buffs, I can't really complain. The solider depends on the build in use. I did up a crabbermind because of all the talk of it being a damage king. I suppose it theoretically might be, but with pets dying constantly, and slow recharge on those pets, it's a very bursty damage and cannot be considered sustained. I do hand out quite a bit of defense to the pets, but that doesn't keep them alive. In blasty tank mode the build is crazy durable, but the damage is really nothing to write home about. I have all position softcap, as well as 85% l/s resistance and 60ish resistance to everything else. That makes for a damned hard to kill character, but none of the attacks hit that hard (use the Ghost Widow Patron set for the dark blasts). It's not bad, but I feel sentinels blast better. >What is your favorite build - do you think they compare with one another? I'd say my fortunata is the better of the two. It's quite handy on teams, and stacking up a lot of confusion is quite amusing. >Are they underpowered/overpowered/okay at the moment? A crabbermind might be overpowered if you could keep the pets alive. As it is, you get to me a damage god until AOEs kill all your pets. If you aren't a crabbermind, you can be a ranged tank, but with meh damage. Not sure if I'd argue that my fortunata is overpowered. It's very helpful on teams, but death is a real possibility, and except by abusing confuse, I wouldn't expect to be soloing TFs or anything. >What would you like to see changed? Omega maneuver should be made to not be utterly horrible. It's got the recharge of a nuke, but without the damage, and the whole delay nonsense just means it goes off after your teammates have killed everything. Honestly just replacing it with a different power or something which isn't close to useless would be nice. Right now it is purely a power choice trap. Perhaps drop the recharge on the pets so damage could be sustained. Also removing the take out the gun delay would be nice. Fortunata is fine IMO. >What do you love about them? Actually since the introduction of sentinels, I've played my VEATs much less. Back when they were the only real option for a tanky blaster back on live, that's what I played all the time. I do like the crazy level of durability I can attain on a SoA, but the damage could use a bit of help. Crazy durability doesn't really do you a world of good with an aggro cap of 17.

I meant the actual DoT of the disintegrate, not the overall DPS of the set, which I agree is quite decent.

I'm quite fond of beam rifle. It is nice on single target and AOE, and honestly the whole disintegrate spread mechanic amuses me far more than it should. Sure, it's not a whole lot of damage (shooting a disintegrating target gives a decent damage boost though), but watching it spread over a crowd is just rather cool to watch. Currently my favorite sentinel is my BR/Bio one. I actually don't do the psi pool on that one, which is uncommon as I usually do, but damage is still good enough for me (but then I don't hunt pylons).

Yeah, got me a Dominator up to 50 and perma-dom put in (all the spending and even alpha to tier 3) and I realized I couldn't stand playing it since it was simply too fiddly for me. Perma dom can only be maintained when you watch it like a hawk, and honestly I don't have enough focus for that. Heck, I've had tanks die because I was paying too much attention to fighting to watch my health bar.

Did I mention nerf regen?

I think my case about engagement was just made.

You seem to read community supported as community controlled. I've never seen that either stated or implied.

I've seen the results of them choosing to be engaging in things like the attempt to address rage or the current dark melee changes. They appear to engage plenty and get grief for it already. Not sure if there's a backlog of coders lining up to add to homecoming, I don't know about that. I do know that donations get filled up in minutes, so there's certainly a surfeit of people willing to do that. I rather suspect the coders are a lot less common. I think they are doing a good job, and are pretty transparent about how things go.

You choose to donate. You can also choose not to donate and play for free. Hence it is free. The devs time is not compensated. The server costs are what donations are for. You have no claim, whatsoever, on their time.

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

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.