I still sell everything that I don't vendor on AH for 111 inf. Purples, PvPs, HOs, whatever. 111 inf. I'm rich enough to fully kit out a new PLed character once a week at buy now prices. But again, we all make our inf our way and play the game our way. Some marketeer, some farm, I just murder. It works well.
As with most things, it depends. I'd certainly never ignore someone on these forums simply because they don't view something the way I do, tank overbuffing, taunt auras, etc, but there are some beliefs/opinions that are atrocious enough simply at face value that the person holding them should be jettisoned into the nearest star and ignoring those folks so that I don't become the monster is perfectly acceptable.
And it's only +0 minions that truly get floored to a 5% chance to hit. Everything above them get acc bonuses for rank and level, so no matter how much defense you have, a +4 AV will still have a (5% * 1.4 for +4 * 1.5 for AV) 10.5% chance to hit you and that's IF it's not using a power with heightened accuracy.
From what I've gathered/been told, build up Frenzy, cruise along, hit Rending Flurry for the max usage, immediately hit Thirst to get back all your Frenzy stacks, profit. I keep seeing people post that Hemorrhage is broken and thus skippable.
Looking at CoD, the sapper attacks are either ranged/energy or aoe/energy so ranged, aoe (SR, Shield, etc) or energy (Nrg, Inv, etc) defense, as long as you're softcapped, will work. If you have both positional and typed defense, the higher value is always used.
My preferred slotting for most heals/absorbs/hp buffs is Heal/Recharge from Doctored Wounds, Numina and Preventative Medicine. I'm sure there's better slotting out there as that only gets the heal/absorb/recharge to 74.28% but I've found that's generally good enough.
Wait... what? +HP automatically means +regen.
Regen with True Grit in the build and slotted, my regen is at 1893%.
Yank the power from the build entirely and my regen drops to 1861%.
Edit: I'm going from my SR days. More HP means more Regen. Full stop. Maybe it ain't much, but it's the HP AND Regen that keeps me afloat on top of the scaling damres and defense.
My earth/earth dom suffered heavily at any attempt to solo the ITF until I was told to spam earthquake and quicksand. Doing so was game changing for me.
Not quite. All the Sentinel armors were tweaked so none of them are a straight 1 to 1 comparison and Sents have vastly less base HP. That said, being able to hover-blast with an armor set at all means Sentinels are tough as fuckin nails and built in mez protection means you don't suffer the pain every other ranged character feels for the majority of its life from 1 to 50.
I honestly have no insight on the other topics other than this: My time/fire defender continues to surprise me with her survivability in melee or otherwise. She's a damn monster. I'll also give a nod to anything earth control, either controller or dominator but those are very late bloomers unlike sentinels.
No melee but easy soloing with AoEs? My Fire/Bio Sentinel is one of my most played characters. He was an absolutely breeze from 1 to 50 and now fully kitted out, he can hang well with blasters, not so much on kill speed but his extra survivability means he spends far less time running away with his tail between his legs.