drbuzzard

So basically you set up a straw man to argue against this suggestion. The initial suggestion does not (and in fact specifically says not to) propose increasing the AOE caps. It only proposes increasing the aggro cap. That is a completely different kettle of fish, and in terms of balance, really isn't that big a deal IMO. Right now for aggro control and tanker can easily get exceeded, and thus you might need a second tank on a team, but only sometimes. Now if you think that aggro control is a big balance issue, then argue that and don't bring up AOE target caps, as that is a completely separate issue. Personally I think this suggestion would be a good thing for a couple of reasons. First off, as the OP says, sometimes you can't avoid getting a second group involved on a big team, and the tank then tries to grab extra aggro, but his current aggro targets then make his team start faceplanting. Increasing this number would make him much more capable of doing his job, which is simply to take a pounding for others. The second reason is actually for those who aren't number crunchers and forum readers. There's still lots of people back to COH who have no idea there even is a aggro cap, and they do things which get teams killed because they are playing like in the early days of the game. You can easily get enemy attention without locking down aggro, and that causes a lot of needless debt when people engage thinking the tank has aggro. To make a point as to why there's really no balance issue here, and as someone who used to herd maps into dumpsters for the nuking, it was the lack of AOE caps that make herding worth your while. As it is now with 14 at best as the AOE cap (outside of incarnate) herding is mostly just a waste of time. A team is more efficient running group to group and steamrolling.

I agree that the inherent needs some work. I find that defensive opportunity is so negligible in effect that I don't even take the tier two power on my sentinels to avoid wasting the chance at offensive opportunity (which may not be anything spectacular, but still beats defensive). Oh, and one other suggestion vis a vis the inherent, could they pick a different color (assuming defensive opportunity remains) than green? Before I read up on the sentinel I kept assuming that my tier two blast was on auto click for some reason.

This is a common misconception among players. While it’s true that Psi defenses are rare for players, it’s absolutely not true for NPCs. Resistance numbers upwards of 60% are extremely common among late-game enemies, to the point that, on average, Psi is one of the most-resisted Damage types, up there with Smashing and Lethal. I'd like to see numbers on that. My experience with a psi sentinel really doesn't reflect this. The only things which have solid psi resistance are council or skyraider robots (praetorian ones for some reason have little psi resistance), and users of psi damage themselves (I can't name them all, but they are just parts of factions like wisps, fortunatas, and others). I also have a high level sentinel with lethal damage (archery) and psi is so much less resisted than that it is utterly laughable.

I'm not sure what you're experiencing in terms of resistance, but it doesn't much synch up with what I see. I have a 50 psi/wp sent and psi damage is pretty poorly resisted at endgame to be quite honest and I like that quite a bit. It is a fact that lethal is the most resisted damage type in the game, and smashing is probably a close second so you're asking for less effectiveness. The only things terribly resistant to psi are certain robots (not even all, as praetorian robots don't seem to resist very much). As for psi melee, I have a 34 brute and I think it's a splendid set. The fast animations are great for building fury, and while it is a bit short on AOEs, the ones it has are pretty good with reasonably short recharge. Now I suppose some people like a utility power in every set, but I could definitely do without Boggle. Then again I also appreciate being able to skip powers as I always end up with a fair number of pool powers. I didn't notice Insight being a DoT but just a damage boost. When I have Insight and I smack someone with Greater Psi Sword it packs some extra wallop.

I disagree. I would rather have the assault set on my fire/fire sentinel, but if they introduced both blast & assault sets, then I would have to start over from scratch because one cannot respec into a new powerset. I would hate to be forced to abandon my Sentinels with the current set because someone had the bright idea of yanking the rug out from under a character I currently like quite a bit. If you are unsatisfied, then you get to do a new option from the ground up. To be specific to the OP, I abhor this notion. I do not want an assault set, and if sentinels were changed into this I'd probably stop playing mine, which would be pretty damned annoying since I've got my main as a vet level 37 sentinel.

Fire is possibly king, though while it does have 4 AOEs (fireball, fire breath, rain of fire and inferno), a couple have their issues. Fire breath is a narrow cone, and rain of fire scatterings enemies out of its effects. I'm actually liking psi pretty well since while it only has 3, the damage type is not very resisted in the late game, which is quite nice. Fire is fairly good this way as well. I have a lvl 45 sentinel who is stalled because the lethal damage of archery is so very resisted.

I ended up skipping the epics since the numbers are fairly lackluster for the alleged 'wow' powers at the end. I figured I'd be better off with other options. YMMV of course.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, something more like a Dominator's Assault secondary seemed appropriate, just take out the snipe and any power_boost/aim/build_up edit- and without any boosts just give them dmg modifiers of something like 1.05 to 1.125 for both range and melee. Seems like a fair trade-off Having a mix of shorter-ranged range attacks and melee attacks forces them to stay close to the battle for a good attack chain, and they still benefit from the utility of having some range. Personally I hate this idea. I like the sentinel as a ranged attacked who isn't a squishy. Mixing in melee attacks means I wouldn't take them, and I'd have a rather pathetic attack chain. Likely I'd just bail on the AT altogether and make a crab instead. Right now I'm very fond of the AT as a class that can blast away, and have some ability to survive the aggro generated. I already have to get in close to drop my nuke, but beyond that, I like to have distance for positioning flexibility for cones and such.

I do have a level 50 sentinel, and you are correct, defensive opportunity never becomes worth a damn. The heal is always negligible (as I have a /WP build it's even more worthless). Since I've finally got the built decked out pretty well I just removed the #2 power from my tray so I can no longer accidentally trigger the defensive opportunity and waste my full bar. The other since target powers now recharge fast enough that I can chain without it and not lose anything. I'm not really sure what the measured effect of offensive opportunity is, but I'm quite sure it's not terribly large. Truth be told, the sentinel inherent is fairly meh at best. It may look flashy, but it really doesn't do a heck of a lot. I get the impression that the developer of the class was wedded to the notion that ranged damage + protection was simply too powerful. I like the class overall though, so I shouldn't complain too much. A lousy inherent is a small price to play for a blaster like AT which doesn't faceplant as much as blasters.

Actually while the -resistance of reactive looks like it is the best, the actual debuff is so small as to be laughable (if you read the info). It says 2.5% resistance debuff non stackable from the same source. That's a damned fine approximation of nothing. I find the DoT to be the important part, so I just pick the DoT damage type flavor and run with the type I want.

Now I don't know if people recall, but back when threads were introduced (don't remember the issue) they put a limited amount of conversion from shards per day at an efficient level (1:1) then you'd have to do 2:1 with the rest if you were in a rush. This was done because people had banked up huge piles of shards from doing initial incarnate content, and wanted progression into later incarnate slots to be somewhat slowed down for those who had those massive shard piles. Now that we live in a game where a whole bunch of incarnate slots are open, and nobody walked in with a huge pile of shards since we all start from scratch, the lingering shard conversion penalty for trying to do more than 10 in a day doesn't make any sense. As we constantly get shard drops in incarnate content but they are only good for alpha slot crafting, it just amounts to a bad drop on the loot table. Either shards should be dropped altogether, or the conversion limitation should be removed.

Ah, didn't see it was available from the P2W vendor. Ok, that solves my problem. Thanks.

Ok, this is an extremely useful temp power (it debuffs regen), and I can recall using it a lot back on live. However, what I cannot recall is how one obtained them. I'm fairly sure there was an easy enough way to do it. Perhaps it was something in a PVP zone. I simply cannot recall. Paragon Wiki has no information (says it comes just via drops). So does anyone remember how one can obtain these?

Actually I suspect it won't work in the damage toggles. I have the Reactive Core Radial, and it doesn't do the damage on my elec/spine tanker which has 2 damage auras. It does work on AOE click attacks just fine though, so throw spines or spine burst will kick off the DoT just fine. As I recall from the days of live COH, they actually stopped interface from putting the DoT on the damage auras because it was letting them do utterly stupid damage. Each tick had the chance to do he DoT and it happened so much things just melted. I remember having this effect on my elec/elec tanker back then. I was able to solo a rikti pylon because the effect was so broken.