Crysta Clear

Let me keep my clicky Rin please.

Yes please, cosmetic options!

That sounds much more preferable than what the OP asked for, Lines. Actual challenging things with rewards, rather than a stupid grind of 500 illusionists or whatever.

I have played it at the base level. Every character starts with nothing. I have never felt like Electric Blast was any less effective than any of my other Blasters' sets, and I've played Ice and Dual Pistols for ~40 levels each. It is not a long-needed improvement, it would be overtuning a set that does not need any help. I honestly think the two of you just suck at the game! 🙂 Don't ask to ruin my difficulty because you suck. Get better or switch sets. It's absolutely easy to softcap. It's easy to softcap a lot of archetypes by 30th level, even. Blasters tend to require 50 because the 5% defense portion of T4 Barrier that lasts the full duration is part of it, enabling you to build for 40%. But even without that, there are plenty of situational things you can use that are not incarnate powers, such as purple inspirations, or defense amplifiers, to get you through the interim. I'm sorry that you're having trouble with it, but that doesn't make it difficult.

That's nice. I've never had my Thunderous Blast fail to wipe out every non-Boss in a mob group. And my blaster is positionally softcapped and quite capable of surviving in melee even against a whole mob group, i.e., while Thunderous Blast is on cooldown. I don't even have Build-Up, just Aim, because my secondary is Ninja Training, and Shinobi's 30-second reset timer is not something I have ever waited for between mob groups! This complaint about Electric Blast having subpar damage is just objectively false. That's all there is to it. It's plenty enough to deal with the situations the game presents to me on +4/x8.

That's still no excuse to add these little things up that won't make any good, sweeping changes to keep the game's systems fresh. The OP is begging for a buff and that's all it is. "Can I trade Kick for some free damage resist?" is literally everything this suggestion is.

I get it. You hate IO's. Whatever.

It's power creep when the third slot stops being a tax. Feat taxes (or in this case, power selection taxes) are a tool for keeping more powerful options balanced.

Not if Z allows you to do something better after you learn how to do it. Complexity isn't something to be afraid of.

No, a change of playstyle is just what's expected of you as a player to keep succeeding.

Eh. That's fair. All I know is it feels really bad and low-damage every time I play a Sentinel. I want to like the archetype, I really do. But it has exactly one purpose right now, and that's the fact that its Resistance debuff is Unresistable, which makes your much more damaging party members perform better against... one enemy. The entire rest of the archetype is falling behind in basically every aspect. Perhaps the better answer is to let the 20% resistance debuff apply to every target shot while the opportunity is open, and let both of them apply on AoE attacks as well as single-target. That way, it really feels more like you're pointing out weak points to your team, and the opportunity stops being worthless in the majority of content.

I feel like all Sentinels really need is to have their base damage scale brought up to par with the Scrappers whose ranged counterparts they're supposed to be. That way, each has their occasional damage increase -- Scrappers have Critical Hit, and Sentinels have what I suspect to be the only Unresistable Resistance debuff in the game, but their baseline damage would be relatively equal, whereas currently, Sentinels just deal next to nothing.

I like my electric blast just fine, thank you. I have never had any problems with my electric blaster's damage. Enemies go down quickly enough, and I don't understand why other people are having problems.

Grinding isn't difficulty, it's mind-numbing time investment.

If Voltaic Sentinel didn't suck, I would even consider taking it. There is a very efficient defense set in the pet section, with 3.75% to two positionals.

Resistance archetype, yes please! Especially if it comes with their neat special energy pistols!

No thank you. No, no and no. Don't tie cosmetic options that may be important to someone's RP concept behind a wall of grind. If you want a whole shit-ton of grind, may I suggest Blade & Soul instead? It has great customization and really pretty character models, and all the grind your ass could ever want. But the grind is why I left it. If I have to grind for a costume piece that's important to a given character's concept, I just won't play that character, and I'll feel pretty hurt because of it.

The solution would be to first examine Dual Pistols to see if it really is underperforming compared to other ranged primaries, and if so, check to see whether the lower damage is meaningfully compensated for in another area. If, and only if, the set is found to be underperforming but not compensated for in some other way (such as control effects, or end costs, or debuffs, etc.), then the best place to insert some damage would simply be to add a small to-hit buff and damage buff to the Swap Ammo toggles, on par with other 100%-uptime variants of Build Up, such as Dual Blades' 'Blinding Feint' being only +30% damage instead of Build-Up's +80%, but it is up all the time with minimal investment. But it's very, very important to check whether the set itself actually needs such a buff, to avoid power creep. My personal experiences with Dual Pistols have been that it seems just fine on a Blaster due to the higher base damage scale, even with a secondary like Martial Combat, whose Build-Up variant is RNG and unreliable. (Seriously, we can't even see the proc chance of Reach For the Limit, or even whether it's a flat rate or PPM!) But on a Sentinel, I have noticed that any set without Build Up won't perform well, because Sentinels' damage scale as a whole is more than a bit lower than it should be, if the archetype's intent is really to be a 'ranged scrapper.' Scrappers consistently outperform Sentinels in damage. I have not played a Dual Pistols Corruptor long enough to really comment on how that one feels, only to ~20th level or so, and Defender, I can only comment that my friend seemed to love applying the ammo types' debuffs, and Defenders just aren't intended to bring high damage to a team.

It has nothing to do with wanting a grind. I hate grind, and this game is not grindy. It has everything to do with wanting to be pushed to make meaningful choices in how I build my character. If you don't want to think about what you are playing, then you will either play it poorly, or play something else, but please do not simplify and dumb-down a game that I am enjoying, just because you can't build around its existing rules. Is it worth sacrificing three power slots for the defense bonus I can get from Tough and Weave? Or can I get away with the lower defense of, say, Concealment pool instead, and save myself two power selections? These kind of choices are good.

That's what I'm getting at though, is that there are plenty of other power categories with melee defense set bonuses in their sets, and you probably could've spent those four slots on a power that's worth more than +5.25% smashing/lethal resist for having the base enhancement effects in them. XD

End isn't an issue. Slots are the issue. Tough isn't worth slotting when another resist power would be a much better place to put that set. And if you are in a situation where Tough is your only resist power, and you don't have anywhere else to put it? Then you won't have enough resistance for any amount of it to really make a difference, and you'd likely be better off choosing a melee defense set from another power category. It's wasted space.

My blaster basically never dies, but it's not Tough that makes her that way. She doesn't even activate it -- Charged Armour is all she really needs on top of her softcapped positionals. It's twice as much resistance as Tough, for less endurance, and also includes Energy.

Mhm. But it's not different enough from the ~20%-ish you'll incidentally (and passively, without endurance cost) have from your various set bonuses to justify spending 0.24 end/second on Tough, which is about what slotting it brings it down to. Basically, whether that bullet coming in at 100 damage is reduced to 80 or 65 isn't very important to the long-term survival of a blaster, who gets much more value out of managing to softcap her defenses, and your HP is low enough that whether you have 20% or 35%, an enemy's big hit is still going to squish you.

What I'm getting at, though, is that you can probably get your melee defense by putting those slots almost anywhere else and having it be more worthwhile.

My condolences. If you don't have any other resist powers, your archetype and set won't be capable of enough resists for them to matter, and you would probably get a better result out of slotting for defense. If you do have other resist powers in-set, you certainly aren't going to need Tough's miniscule bonus. Tough is a defense power masquerading as a resist power. It's almost never worth the end cost to maintain it, but you can slot 6% flat defense bonus in it that doesn't require it to be toggled on.