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I feel the same way about picking Wall of Force at level 14 for melee characters. The minimum 40' range is 5x that of melee attacks.

My personal take on Venomous Gas is: I never take it (for reasons explained ad nauseum in another thread)... but if I could toggle the Controller version on an ally, it would absolutely be OP enough that I'd always take it (eventually). It's because the VG toggle only works on otherwise fragile ATs with few PBAoE/melee option is the root cause of my avoidance of it. Briefly: The self-toggle VG is a power that looks good in theory, but like several other powers that look good on paper it doesn't contribute enough in my actual play experiences (measured by mission clear times, number of attacks that need to be made) to warrant the sorts of build choices and changes to play style to try to leverage it. I do think that there are corner cases where having VG might be better than not having it... but in my experiences these are rare enough that if I thought such a choice was the correct one (for that content) I would just have a second build that incorporates VG (and whatever other changes I'd have to incorporate for that content).

The "statement" is a "no duh, Sentinels have (essentially) Blaster primaries"...yet for me the "Ranged Scrapper" take is more true to my experience. Sentinels don't play like armored Blasters for me... and if I am being honest about my own initial perceptions, trying to play a Sentinel like an armored Blaster was a disappointing experience. "Sentinels are armored Blasters" is one take, but for me... Sentinels and Blasters play very differently. My Blasters tend to be Blappers, and because Blasters are much more fragile, they don't get played like the armored classes. As I wrote earlier... the main playstyle difference between Scrappers and Sentinels is that in fights, Sentinels have a LOT more targets of opportunity compared to Scrappers (because of the 8 ft melee range). Blappers have even more targets of opportunity than Sentinels (longer ranges) but my Blasters are trying to cycle AoE and spawn-wipe before they take too much damage... the armors of the Sentinels mean that they can be a lot more casual, and their poorer damage/AoE (compared to Blasters) makes them feel a lot more like Scrappers who happen to have range > 8 feet. The change to Vulnerability was IMO enough of a re-tinkering for Sentinels. There are a handful of individual powers in sets that I could support being revised, but (writing only for myself) I feel that because Homecoming has been nearly endlessly porting primary and secondary power sets between ATs that many of my perceptions in this spectrum have been dulled... Sentinels get rather ho-hum (less effective) Blaster primaries combined with secondaries that can be 'set and forget'... so I can see why people have different opinions about how to categorize them. EDIT: I suppose I should add this... There is an AT that (to my experience) plays like an "Armored Blaster", the Arachnos Soldier. We don't get much variety in the types of "blasts" with either of the paths obviously. For my feels, a Soldier that focuses on the melee is a lot like a Blaster doing similar from the secondary melee picks, but it is the ranged attacks on the Soldiers that get the job done.

This feels more like an observation that the Blaster primaries were ported to Sentinels instead of the Scrapper primaries.

Is this because Scrappers typically have PBAoE with much faster cycle times?

Writing only for myself: by mid-levels, my Sentinels play a LOT like Scrappers with the primary differences being: Sentinels can be (slightly) further away from enemies than melee range for most of their attacks (unlike Scrappers) The power choices for primaries are (obviously) different... most obviously that Scrappers get melee primaries and Sentinels get ranged primaries. The Scrapper inherent (especially leveraging the ATO) IMO makes the Scrappers better at clearing xN spawns while also being (mostly) passive I don't see an objection to describing Sentinels as "ranged scrappers", unless there is some higher-order objection based on the reworked secondaries, or for overall "performance" by some arbitrary metric. I'm open to reading what the objection is.

I rather liked the idea of creating a gold-side Epic Archetype (a PEAT if you will) that was similar to thw two VEATs, where the paths ended with (essentially) a Seer, a Resistance boss, an IDF boss, a hybridized DE Soldier... and explain the hybrids as either a 'compromise' between Cole and Hamidon and/or a cruel experiment.

Using the doll, can you show the court where Stealth touched you?

I wish I could blame The Flash seasons 6+ on AI slop.

My bad! It must have been the lack of merit rewards I was thinking of.

The Nemesis AV doesn't reward a badge, FWIW.

As near as I can tell, this is (for many services and websites) a side effect of having some variety of privacy settings and/or script-blocking active in your browser. Certain VPN have caused this for me in 'private' browsing. For the small potatoes sites, I can't blame them for implementing a Cloudflare check... It is a blunt instrument and the easiest to choose. The big players (ehem... Goo-lnow-who) seem to only want to collect user behavior and digital fingerprints so user punishment is WIA. There are a small number of sites I use that are effectively disabled with the highest possible security settings, but through some targeted changes of my own choosing I can regain full functionality. I have yet to figure out a way to achieve this with any site that goes the Cloudflare route.

I also lurv Combat Teleport on Melee, and I happen to find the necessary investments to have Fold Space (in power picks, in slots) to exceed the budget. Once I factor in the small, marginal value it brings to teams... Fold Space is an an easy pass for me because it is gated behind Combat Teleport. I'm aware that this power is the category (with Hasten, Venomous Gas, Acrobatics, etc.) where some folks see criticism of the power as heretical... but for me it is just another power that looks good on paper and it seeming to make a difference for someone else's build and play style it doesn't mean hat the power is going to make an improvement for someone else's build and play style.

In my experience: multiple Sentinels on a team simply increases the chances that ONE of them will remember they have Vulnerability to use.

Baat'Zul is a Christmas Movie.

Keep in mind that for high DPS-scale characters, every %proc is a lost opportunity to slot a piece that enhances something like Damage, Endurance Reduction, Recharge... and franken-slotting costs some of the better Enhancement set bonuses. Blasters have two pretty good ATO sets, plus Purples and PVPs... so faster-cycling high damage attacks can perform better than slower, random damage. I'll make an exception on Psychic characters, just because so many high-end enemies end up resisting Psi damage that I want %damage of a different type to try to speed things up against them. It's rare I use anything but a set's %proc in a single-target attack for DPS characters. Dehydrate with 3x Touch of the Nictus isn't a bad choice, even though it is 8-second base recharge single target... the %procs will do more damage than rying to enhance the damage aspect.

I wanted to post a public "thank you" for sharing this command line option for the launcher. My travel laptop (with no dedicated GPU) performs a lot smoother with the simpler rendering method.

I'm sorry this happened to you. After the three badges for those hunts... it is pretty much only merit rewards... which for some of us who want the *other* badges more than we want *those* merits, why not stay at the motel?

FWIW, I like Beam Rifle a LOT better on a Sentinel than on a Blaster. It took me a while (playing regular content solo) to figure out how the BR set and the AT play best (for me). Sentinels play a LOT differently that other characters with blast primaries/secondaries. ^This^ Sentinel was (per memory) the first character to ever hit the HP cap for its AT without relying on a click power (but does have Accolades and set bonuses) Perhaps not the greatest feat of building in the world, but with an Energy Aura armor secondary this character became hella tough.

It's obviously not relevant to you in this context, but a response of "building a character to win in PVP is no different than building a character to win PVE" ignores that in one case a player is building to solve a game, the other case is building to humiliate another person. The "just build better" approach ignores that pretty much any primary/secondary AT can "beat" 95% content, but this is not true in PvE, even factoring in the players' capabilities.

In my time as a competitive athlete I learned that there is a difference between beating your best and beating other people.

I appreciate @macskull revisiting the greatest hits of PvP in CoX. Request: do SG base raids next! My personal take is that "duel mode" in arenas was about as far as the plan for PvP should have gone. Open world PVP isn't my thing (there is too much opportunity for griefing), but a more restricted sort of direct consensual engagement among a limited number of players would have been my top suggestion. We may as well have leaned hard into the 1-on-1 rock-paper-Dominators model. An extension on my take: the game is practically impossible to "balance" (among ATs, among powers) so the PVP breaks the fundamental "design a character to take on the (PvE) world" and instead emphasizes "design a character to beat other players".

Not wrong, but also not being slotted in Rage.

A %proc in a click power requires the power to be activated. If it was in a toggle or auto power, it would have a chance to trigger on every tick of the toggle (per the relatively poor proc rate for toggles). If it was a global, it would just have to be slotted. The only exception I am aware of is the Preventive Maintenance %absorb, which will fire (per its PPM) one the Health conditions are met. The Gaussian's %Buildup can be interesting if it is slotted in a toggle ally-affecting aura... each ally (pet, henchmen) within range of the aura can help it to trigger... for the character that has it slotted. In practice this is best for solo Crabberminds (because their damage scales don't suck) or on DPS characters that always have large teams.