Bill Z Bubba

Well, you'd think, but some players have fun dying and even use self-destruct often and are at their happiest with a full team wipe. I run with one of those and he's a hoot. 🙂

If the 90s actually provided twice the performance for that >2X price, maybe, but so far I've been more than happy with the 80s.

The sentinel's role is the same as the scrapper's or the stalker's: dish out death, don't faceplant and do so without the need of outside assistance. And they get to do so while being able to stay at range where incoming damage is drastically reduced so they're arguably safer than their scrapper/stalker brethren.

I don't think anyone knows but I do know that variables can be taken into consideration. Test with SOs. Test with Basic IOs. Test again with standardized Set IOs. Do all three and you'll probably get a very good idea where the baselines are. To the "not playing correctly" concept, I don't believe in such a thing. How you decide to build your character and play it is your business and outside of the conversation of powerset and AT balance.

I've never noticed any but my window is covered by blinds and a jolly roger flag and neither my ceiling fan light nor side lamp are in a position to cause me issues.

Still the ol 1920X1080. Decided until a vid card comes out that can push at least 60FPS across the board I wouldn't bother with a 4k monitor. Plain jane gtx 1080 on a 7 year old motherboard at the moment. Figure Cyberpunk or the new Vamp the Masquerade games may force an upgrade.

Nope. Perhaps you should be more careful in what you decide to type. Statement 1: Fun is your reward. You don't care if someone else gets better rewards over time so you don't care if powersets are balanced. Statement 2: You absolutely care about powerset balance because you think I'm capable of screwing up said balance. Statement 3: You insult me because you're annoyed that I called you out on your contradictory statements. If you don't like being called a liar, don't lie. You care. Obviously, since you're so bent out of shape about it. Which is fine. Make a proper argument against correcting bad game design and I'll listen.

Either you care or you don't care. First post, you didn't. Second, you did. Both can't be true. That which isn't true is a lie. It ain't rocket surgery.

I went the other direction. Gaming rig has a single large curved monitor at 144Hz. L-shaped desk. Workstation is to the right of gaming rig with dual-24s. I like simple.

But control and support both add to damage and survivability. So we're back to a single axis. My argument is that no blaster, corruptor or defender can match the survivability of the armors available to the sentinel AT throughout the course of their career.

Then your prior statement was a lie.

Fantastic. Then you as well shouldn't care at all about balance conversations or nerfs/buffs. Great. Balance does NOT mean homogenization.

@MTeagueWhile I do see your logic, I think it downplays heavily the survivability a sent has over the other three archetypes. As they sit now, I consider sents to be the broken tankmage that MMOs are supposed to avoid.

That's fair. I completely disagree, obviously. No, I'm suggesting that reward over time is the only metric to be concerned about.

And I am in no ways stating that you should care. I also play a bunch of characters that I find fun regardless of the multitude of balance issues. The two things are not and should not be related. If you find energy blast fun, and fun is all you care about, why would it suddenly become less fun if it was buffed to be more in line with the other blast sets? If you find titan weapons fun, and fun is all you care about, why would it suddenly become less fun if it was nerfed to be more in line with the other melee sets?

Sentinels *should* be at the bottom in overall performance of their blast sets. The order should be blasters > corruptors > defenders > sentinels. Why? Because Sents are vastly more survivable than the other three. They even come with built in mez protection very early in their careers.

And I'd be fine with that IF a powerset with awesome AoE over a wide range of time was comparable on reward intake with a set that prioritized ST damage. Now I'm biased all to hell and back but I consider claws to be one of the most balanced sets for melee in the game between ST and AoE output. It's not the best or worst at either. If I build a */invul scrapper, where * equals whatever attack set, and run 100 or 200 or 300 DA repeatable missions at x8 and after a given time parity is reached, or at least some semblance of it, then the sets are balanced. If one set lags behind all the others, it needs a buff. If it exceeds all the others, it needs a nerf. And the same *should* be true between archetypes. Run 300 missions with 8 defenders and another 300 with 8 scrappers. Then do the same with 1 defender and 1 scrapper. If defenders can drastically pull ahead of scrappers with 8 of them as a single defender is behind a single scrapper, then there's probably parity. But that's not what we're seeing in game.

For me, the easiest and most impactful thing we could do with incarnate powers is dump the levels shifts. Completely. They make a mockery of incarnate content. Be set at +4, get rewards for +4, fight +1s. Kind of a joke. Yea, even the +1 in everything from alpha. Nuke it.

If a single powerset combination is outperforming through kill efficiency in 90% of call standard (not AE farming) content, then that gross overefficiency is also overpowered. Flavor is one thing, balance is another. And I was comparing a defender to a scrapper but it might as well have been a defender and a corruptor or a blaster and a sentinel, all ATs that share blast sets that *should* be balanced internally so that we can better judge the balance between archetypes. Flavor should not affect overall reward rates as they so painfully do now. This is not a balanced system.

Efficiency in farming shouldn't be used as a metric for game balance. Why should differing roles have such a huge impact on reward gains? Or perhaps a better point should be that soloability should never be used as a metric for game balance except that this is exactly how we balance powersets within archetypes. It's why EM was nerfed and is about to get buffed. It's why claws was buffed and may be getting nerfed. It's why spines should be buffed and it's why TW should get nerfed.

And is the bad one on the left?

Therein lay the rub. Many of us do NOT consider the game "balanced enough." I often make the statement that it's barely balanced at all. The binary nature of mez, the very fact that so many DO gravitate to a few specific sets simply due to their OPness, the vast chasm of difference between reward gains for a solo emp/nrg def and a tw/bio scrapper, and the list goes on and on. It should not be this way and any movement toward balance, toward a sane and logical mathematical foundation is welcome by a great many of us. If that means outliers get nerfed, so be it.

As do I. I see no reason for a game, arguably an art form, to lack balanced beauty within the underlying math. If this means a poorly designed set needs to be nerfed or buffed, it should be done, purely for balance's own sake regardless of player feelings.

Yea, and we should love them and have fun with them like "normal" humans. Where normal = we don't know what the fuck that is.

A perfect response from a PvPer. All trolling and lacking any kind of human decency. Well done. 🙂