drbuzzard

Ok, finally finished the last of my project to try every sentinel secondary (and take them to 50). The last one was the Dual Pistol/Ice Armor build. While I started it before I got around to trying dark armor, I ended up making a Beam Rifle/Dark Armor build and it ended up much better than I expected so it got to 50 because I liked playing it (I'm a big fan of BR on sents). The DP/Ice eventually got dragged across the finish line, and I can't see myself spending the effort on incarnating it out properly. I'd have to like it first. I'm going to do a more in depth analysis of all the sets I'm familiar with in the context of my builds. This will skip assault rifle and energy because just perusing them shied me away from them. I dislike knockback quite a bit. Energy is loaded with it and AR has a fair bit, so I see no reason to annoy myself. I've played both sets in the past (back on live), so they hold few mysteries or appeal for me. I think up front I should explain my design philosophy for my way of building sentinels. First off, it should be recognized that they are a bit low in the D for a DPS class. This is fairly universally accepted. Their biggest strength damage wise is their tier 9 nuke on a 90 second time. While it 'only' hits 10 targets, it hits them quite hard, and a case could be made they are the best AOEs in the game. Thus I feel that doing everything to leverage that is how you make the best sentinel offense possible. This means you get your recharge boosted as much as possible- so permahasten is basically a must. This will not make you a single target death machine and get you good pylon times. I really don't care about that, so if your goals lie in that direction, you should ignore my advice. Others offer counsel in that direction. Then my approach to the protective secondaries is to figure out the strength of the set and play to that. So for resistance sets, I try to push the resistance as hard as possible. For the defensive sets, I try to softcap. For mixed sets, I try to softcap defenses that are possible, and push resistance as high as possible (getting to 75% can be often done for l/s). An interesting thing I figured out when doing all the secondaries, is how most of the ’pure’ resistance sets really come out feeling like regeneration sets. This means electric armor, fiery aura, radiation (radiation is a bit off an oddball in this, but will be addressed when I get to my ice/rad sent), and dark armor. All of them can achieve high resistance values for a lot of types, and maintain constant levels of regeneration or pulsed healing (fiery aura). So while people usually say sentinels are lousy with resistance sets because of their relatively low health (compared to other ATs with defensive powersets), I found that the resistance/regen combo usually made them quite resilient. Regeneration actually has some fair amount of resistance (and with tough can get above 50% resistance), so it might be considered with these. The most durable sets, however, are the strongly defense based sets. This means SR, Ninjitsu, and Energy aura. All three of these can be softcapped to most things relatively easily (with weave and set bonuses). EA has psionic and toxic holes, but it adds in a fair bit of damage resistance to a lot of types, so it almost verges into the hybrid types. The last two sets, Invulnerability and Ice Armor are sorts of hybrid sets. They have mixes of defense and resistance, with fairly balanced quantities of both. However, I found that it only worked out for Invulnerability and not for ice armor. I will address particulars in each build section.

Invuln is surprisingly good (to me at least), but you need to take everything but unstoppable and slot it all up plus throw in tough and weave, plus some set bonuses. The endurance bonus from durable does a nice job of making you have plenty of endurance for all the toggles (at least with a bit of help from IOs), and running around with 40ish typed defense to l/s/e/ne/f/c is quite solid on top of 75% l/s and around 30% for e/ne/f/c. Electric is more interesting in that since it carries a ranged nuke, I'm of a mind that you should stay at range, which invuln is rough enough to make you very survivable. You want to skip voltaic sentinel since it is a very close approximation of worthless, and as your nuke and other AOE are both nice ranged bursts, you might as well skip short circuit. While it is always tempting to play the energy drain game, there are far better ATs to do it with, so I'd suggest not being tempted. As always I advocate building up lots of recharge to get to perma hasten so you can drop your nuke as often as possible.

It would take more time than I have now to give a proper fix. However some simple things: Flares has much better DPAS than fire blast, and because it recharges so fast it can easily fill gaps in chains. Take it instead. Skip fire blast altogether. I have a fire/fire sentinel. As with all sentinels I have perma hasten and the single target chain ends up something like flares, blaze, flares, blazing bolt, repeat. There's basically no gap and good DPAS. If I'm in closer I throw in mind probe. Invulnerability is slightly tricky as sets go because there's only one power I deem worthy of skipping (unstoppable). Everything else goes to good use. Make sure you find space for 5 LotG global charge boosters (hover, afterburner, invincibility, tough hide, weave or mind link will all take one). Get rid of the leadership pool, it's a brutal endurance hog for little gain. You can do much better by dipping into the psi epic pool and getting to mind link. I have a rad/invuln sentinel and the build has perma hasten, around 40% (+/- 3% before mind link) typed defense to all but psi and toxic, as well as capped l/s resistance. It's quite hardy. You should be able to achieve something like that.

I know my inability to pay attention would result in me getting mezzed if I didn't have it on auto click. Heck, I managed to get my rad/SS killed because I wasn't paying attention to my health bar. Yes, a rad tank- and they didn't need to be at all. Sometimes I just space.

Ninjitsu is quite nice on sentinels, with many features not present on other ATs. It's just if you like the click status protection. Given that I really like perma hasten on sentinels, it holds me back from endorsing it (have a dark/nin at 50 though), but the set is still quite solid. It's quite easy to double stack it.

I think it's just a matter of the absorption being so damned tiny. You probably just don't notice any effect because it's only part of a hit worth of damage. I really don't get the point of it. It's funny because on other sets the absorption is the cornerstone (looking at regen in particular).

I managed to really prove to myself the damage issue with sentinels. Now how did I do this? I make a proc monster defender to see what could be done. With 3 or 4 damage procs in all the slow recharging attacks, the damage doesn't really seem much behind a sentinel build (traps/rad, so don't assume I was damage capping). When I can basically catch a DPS class with a support class just using procs, there's definitely an issue. I was certainly behind in AOE damage since as I always harp on, the 90 second recharging t9 is the only currently offensive strength of the sentinel, but in single target work I didn't really feel much off. I can see why so many go proc happy on their sentinels. Of course I also did a bit of testing, and oldskool was dead on correct about spiritual alpha not being something you do with procs. Damn, just base spiritual collapsed my proc rate. Though while the proc damage build is interesting, the fact that so many powers are basically constrained out of having decent set bonuses is pretty annoying. I really am not motivated to chase proc optimization on my sents.

Yeah, I've been dreading doing up dark armor since it looks to be a bit soft on sents. I'm also out of primaries I want to bother with (down to AR and energy). I'd sooner rehash things I've done and try new combos. Thanks for the warning.

Fair enough. Though even though I have been stocking up on winter IOs, I won't bother. The build is DP/Ice and to be honest, I don't much care for either side. There are much better secondaries to invest in.

OK, where is the ice/fire defense coming from? The only powers in the set which give fire/cold defense are wet ice and moisture absorption and that's around a whole 6%. You must have a heck of a lot of set bonuses in place to carry it that far.

Yes, sentinel SR has no endurance troubles at all in my experience.

Icy bastion has a 5 minute recharge with 30 seconds of uptime. Posting the stats while it is active is (IMO) pretty disingenuous. That's 10% uptime out of the box, and even if you get to perma hasten (which you should of course on a sentinel), it's then on a 81 second recharge, so only up slightly better than 1/3 of the time. Yes, so 1/3 uber, 2/3s suck. I'm working up a dual pistols/ice armor sentinel now (my self designated goal is something in each set, except perhaps AR and energy blast, because I really dislike those). It's really rather flimsy. I had some hope that the frigid shield absorption would be enough to make the set at least decent like the absorption power in regen does for that set, but the amount is so damned tiny as to be negligible. I do have a build worked up which can softcap s/l/e/ne and resist cap cold. However chasing the other holes (and fire is certainly a hole) is a waste of resources. So you're basically completely open to psi and barely protected at all against fire and toxic. That's a whole lot of holes IMO. I guess I can see why people would laud icy bastion since it's probably something you pop every time it is up just to try and recover from the beating you take when it's not up. I will drag the build to the finish line eventually, but I'm not terribly enthusiastic. I've often lauded the great jobs the devs of sentinels did on their secondaries, but I admit there's certainly a few duds. Bio is better in other examples vs. sents, and ice is pretty much lousy. I'll get around to dark sooner or later, but it doesn't hold much promise from what time I've spent looking at it.

The build includes a knockback protection IO in case he does want to hover blast.

As the set has a ranged T9 and electric armor isn't the toughest protection out there (not bad, but the defense sets are a bit better), the ability to stay at range and blast is IMO desirable. Personally I don't find much use in immobilize, and having a PBAOE damage aura would be pointless when you stay at range. I needed the concealment pool to get sufficient places for LotG recharge specials. Electric armor is one of the less forgiving sets since the only thing I ever skip in it is the crashing T9 which I consider fairly lousy. There are two things to skip in lightning blast, but that's it. That doesn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room for an epic pool.

Umm, it's a nerf assault rifle?

There are a couple of duds, yes. I'm working up an ice armor build, and it doesn't look so good. Lots of holes and the really weak absorption layer is unlikely to cover them. Also dark doesn't look to hot either (haven't started one yet).

Yeah, it's funny, the sentinel version of SR is the best one in the game. It's like that for a lot of the sentinel secondaries.

The first sentinel I made was an archer because I fondly remembered how nice it was to have the short recharge rain of arrows on my archery guys on live. I get to 32 and pull out the shiny new nuke, and WTF 90 secs? ARGGHHHH!!!! I did finally get him to 50, but he doesn't get a lot of play.

Very close, only thing I noticed was that I have a LotG in invisibility instead of the scaling damage proc. I guess I figure with most things capped, there's no point in using it, and the ones that aren't capped it won't help enough. I'd rather have the heal up a bit faster.

Yeah, I agree. Given the present damage scalar of tankers and the duration of build up, I never take it. Rage, yes you take, fiery embrace, yes you take (for fire melee), but otherwise, meh.

On my PC currently, so the normal screen capture worked. Thanks for the Mac trick. I haven't used anything but grab for years. The below build has 75% l/s/f/c/e resistance and 47 ps, 42 NE. It is perma hsaten and reasonably capable. The softcapped defensive builds are more sturdy, but as this one does everything at range, it tends to be sturdy enough. You can always kite if it gets a bit hairy. Other than the superior ATOs and one purple set, it's even fairly cheap. It should be obvious I don't try to play the proc game to optimize damage. If you want better damage, I won't be much help. However I do get to pop overcharge every 23 seconds. \

I should check that. I wonder if corrupters are above defenders. If so I'd say that would be a mark against the name theory. Though stalkers do have a distinct play style which probably doesn't appeal to most, in spite of being the Batman archetype.

Ah, but if you gave regen tanks the secondary from sentinels scaled up, it would actually be good.

Making them enjoyable is tricky? I love sentinels as they are, even though I certainly think they could use more damage. Sentinels fill a void in character ideas which has been present the whole time of the game's existence. Even if they aren't an optimal choice, sentinels are a fun choice because you get to play something you've seen in comics for ages, and you also get to play a pretty easy to run AT. Heck, here's a real simple solution which will avoid stepping on toes, though it will be a bit duplicative of things that exist. It will also avoid stacked buffs or resistance debuffs which I suspect could be a sore spot with CP. Improve defenses to 75% tanker base instead of 70% (tidiness is all). Improve damage scalar to match scrappers and blasters at 1.125 Give them weaker crits. Don't make them 200%, just 150% or so. With that you'd probably have to ditch the current inherent altogether and the ATOs would have to be revised. Done.

Hmm, not sure if i noted the 600M in this, but it's not too expensive. I'm not completely up on the prices of everything, but there's only 1 purple set. Other than that, superior ATOs and the mandatory LotG globals are a bit of money. Also the unbreakable guard is slightly expensive. Also, the 50 end mod IOs in stamina should be shifted up to +3. Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.962 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build! Level 50 Magic Sentinel Primary Power Set: Electrical Blast Secondary Power Set: Electric Armor Power Pool: Flight Power Pool: Fighting Power Pool: Concealment Power Pool: Speed Hero Profile: Level 1: Charged Bolts (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage (3) Devastation - Damage/Endurance (3) Devastation - Damage/Recharge (13) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge (15) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge Level 1: Charged Armor (A) Titanium Coating - Resistance (15) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Endurance (17) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Recharge (17) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Endurance/Recharge (43) Titanium Coating - Endurance Level 2: Lightning Bolt (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage (19) Devastation - Damage/Endurance (19) Devastation - Damage/Recharge (21) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge (21) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge (45) Apocalypse - Chance of Damage(Negative) Level 4: Ball Lightning (A) Ragnarok - Damage (5) Ragnarok - Damage/Recharge (5) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge (13) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Recharge (46) Ragnarok - Damage/Endurance Level 6: Charged Shield (A) Numina's Convalesence - +Regeneration/+Recovery (7) Numina's Convalesence - Heal (7) Numina's Convalesence - Heal/Endurance (36) Numina's Convalesence - Heal/Recharge (43) Numina's Convalesence - Heal/Endurance/Recharge Level 8: Zapping Bolt (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage (9) Devastation - Damage/Endurance (9) Devastation - Damage/Recharge (11) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge (11) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge (45) Gladiator's Javelin - Chance of Damage(Toxic) Level 10: Conductive Shield (A) Titanium Coating - Resistance (23) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Endurance (23) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Recharge (25) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Endurance/Recharge (48) Titanium Coating - Endurance Level 12: Tesla Cage (A) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage (25) Devastation - Damage/Endurance (27) Devastation - Damage/Recharge (27) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge (29) Devastation - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge (50) Gladiator's Javelin - Chance of Damage(Toxic) Level 14: Energize (A) Preventive Medicine - Heal (29) Preventive Medicine - Heal/Endurance (31) Preventive Medicine - Endurance/RechargeTime (31) Preventive Medicine - Heal/RechargeTime (31) Preventive Medicine - Heal/RechargeTime/Endurance (34) Preventive Medicine - Chance for +Absorb Level 16: Aim (A) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control - Chance for Build Up Level 18: Static Shield (A) Titanium Coating - Resistance (36) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Endurance (36) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Recharge (37) Titanium Coating - Resistance/Endurance/Recharge (50) Titanium Coating - Endurance Level 20: Grounded (A) Resist Damage IO Level 22: Fly (A) Flight Speed IO (37) Flight Speed IO Level 24: Hover (A) Flight Speed IO (37) Shield Wall - +Res (Teleportation), +5% Res (All) (48) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed Level 26: Afterburner (A) Flight Speed IO (39) Blessing of the Zephyr - Knockback Reduction (4 points) (48) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed Level 28: Lightning Reflexes (A) Flight Speed IO Level 30: Boxing (A) Empty Level 32: Thunderous Blast (A) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage (33) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Damage/RechargeTime (33) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage/RechargeTime (33) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance (34) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/RechargeTime (34) Superior Opportunity Strikes - RechargeTime/Chance for Opportunity Level 35: Power Sink (A) Efficacy Adaptor - EndMod (39) Efficacy Adaptor - EndMod/Recharge (39) Efficacy Adaptor - EndMod/Accuracy/Recharge (40) Efficacy Adaptor - Accuracy/Recharge (40) Efficacy Adaptor - EndMod/Accuracy (40) Efficacy Adaptor - EndMod/Endurance Level 38: Tough (A) Unbreakable Guard - Resistance (42) Unbreakable Guard - Resistance/Endurance (42) Unbreakable Guard - Endurance/RechargeTime (42) Unbreakable Guard - RechargeTime/Resistance (43) Unbreakable Guard - Resistance/Endurance/RechargeTime (46) Unbreakable Guard - +Max HP Level 41: Stealth (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed Level 44: Grant Invisibility (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed Level 47: Invisibility (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed Level 49: Hasten (A) Recharge Reduction IO (50) Recharge Reduction IO Level 1: Brawl (A) Empty Level 1: Prestige Power Dash (A) Empty Level 1: Prestige Power Slide (A) Empty Level 1: Prestige Power Quick (A) Empty Level 1: Prestige Power Rush (A) Empty Level 1: Prestige Power Surge (A) Empty Level 1: Sprint (A) Empty Level 2: Rest (A) Empty Level 4: Ninja Run Level 2: Swift Some notes: I didn't chase defense at all. Electric armor is a resistance set, so I stuck to that. You end up with capped smashing, lethal, energy resistance, close to capped fire/cold, psi at 47 and neg energy at 42 (we'll not mention toxic). On top of this you have 655% regen. I have a beam rifle/electric armor build which is about the same and it is pretty damned durable. Electric is similar to beam rifle in that you can easily keep your distance (especially since the above build skips the PBAOE). There is perma-hasten, and I assume you take spiritual core paragon alpha to finish that up.