Tsye

If the goal is to make an organized team with limited slots more willing to pick a sentinel or two over a blaster or scrapper or a defender, that won't happen easily without contorting it into something unrecognizable, and also stepping on the toes of the ATs that are more overtly designed for team play and have sacrificed effectiveness elsewhere as a result. More to the point, is that even an objective that is worth pursuing? Would that make the AT more fun, more desirable for those who choose it? What are you willing to give up, remove from Sentinel's existing kit and identity, for the perceived better shot at being picked for the kickball team? ATs that work best in teams to blow through fights roided up on buffs is a crowded space. Sentinels don't fit neatly into that picture...and that's okay. That's why some people gravitate towards it. It's why I do. I think about my Blasters that I dump a billion inf into, expend countless valuable slots and power picks and incarnates, just so it can pretend to approach the resilience my Sentinels get just by existing, and it still gets shredded by cascading debuffs my Sentinels would have shrugged off, and I think I like my Sentinels better. That resilience isn't as valuable in an "optimal" team setting where damage dealers should be fairly safe, but it's highly valuable virtually everywhere else. That said, Sentinels do suffer from negative perceptions that could mostly be attributed to what it was like when it first launched. As a relatively new player who glommed onto Sentinel as my "main" AT starting out, I missed most of that negativity but it's easy to still see the fallout from it even to this day. At this point, however, I feel like it's more of a perception issue than anything else. The more I think about it, the more I feel what Vuln fundamentally does right now, that is pick out a single target to soften it up, is good. Niche? Yes, but niche is good, niche is specialized, and balanced and affords more room for buffs. Rewarding some manner of stacking buff for the Sentinel and teammates prioritizing the target wouldn't be unwelcome as an addition to what vuln already does, and this separate addition could be scaled to allow for stacking by multiple Sentinels, where the numbers would be capped but multiple Sentinel vuln make the ramp-up quicker. Making the buff something like recharge speed would be valuable and thematic, though possibly overpowered. Something like, Vuln does what it does now, but hitting the target with an ST gives the attacker a stacking +x% recharge time buff, capped at anywhere from 10-30%. Multiple Sentinel vuln applied to the same target gives more increments of the stacking effect but doesn't move the cap. I can't speak to how feasible something like this would be to implement, but it does in my mind represent an attractive boost to what a Sentinel could do without messing with what it already can do.

By the simple test of, if I woke up on patch day and this is what they do to Sentinels, would it make me more or less likely to be excited about logging in, this one's a solid thumbs down for me. Honestly, that entire concept sounds like a nerf to just having vuln. Even ignoring the relatively high value vuln presently brings as an innate debuff rather than a buff, changing it to a buff aura with ramp-up time would make it fundamentally inferior without numbers far higher than what has been proposed. Right now, I get the full benefit of vuln even when I'm out alone, and when I'm on a team everyone else derives the same benefit I do, and we all get that benefit immediately and reliably. I'm supposed to trade that for spending time building up a bunch of stacks for a weaker buff that now has proximity restrictions for teammates, overlaps with better damage buffs coming from better supporters, and I can't even get the full benefit? At that point I'll just roll a defender. Even if you retain the debuff delivery mechanism, all you've created is just vuln with less benefit and a ramp-up that makes it even worse in shorter fights. The only part about this proposed change that is remotely palatable is the implication of an aoe, weaker version of vuln, but even that only sounds palatable as an option and not a replacement for what vuln currently does. Right now, Sentinel vibes with me as an innately self-sufficient AT that can contribute to a team but doesn't need to rely on one. Vuln as it exists plays into that characterization well. Shoot my target, or don't. I don't care. It'll die, I won't. Maybe there can be talk about tweaking numbers around, up or down, it doesn't matter, but the concept is fundamentally sound. The urge to turn it into a discount defender because of a mistaken perception that it's a dollar store blaster is the wrong approach.

I'm relatively new, having been running around on Everlasting as my first COH experience for the past six or so months. After reading through all the info from various folks on this forum about Sentinel, Dual Pistols, SR and similar sets, I settled on the following build with my own personal tweaks and it seems to have performed well for me. I run solo 4/8 Radio missions in PI and Grandville primarily and fared well against the factions you typically encounter for those (Arachnos, Council, Carnival, Circle, Malta, etc.). I'd like to share this build and also get some feedback on any blindspots I might be missing in optimizing its performance. Preemptive note: I am running pistols currently, but for most of my time with this build I ran dual wield and had adjusted executioner's shot accordingly. Pistols appears to perform better on paper in terms of both damage and endurance, makes it easier to maintain the Assault Core stacking buff, easier rotation, etc. I do miss dual wield's animation, though. The order of powers taken during level up is personal preference - I am rushing having my single target rotation and most of the defensive kit fully realized as soon as possible. I always run recovery serum so endurance is usually not an issue when it comes to grabbing all the toggles early. AOE attacks are de-prioritized as I tend to focus down the biggest boss threats first, oftentimes with a good chunk of any given spawn slept. Anyway, hope for some useful feedback. Thanks.