XaoGarrent

There is already a Sentinel rework on the drawing board and part of it involves just scrapping opportunity altogether for something more thematically accurate to the idea of a 'sentinel.' It's still in the very, very early stages, so there's no telling how it could end up when it it actually happens, though.

Doesn't really change anything. He gave everyone false hope for a better outcome.

Very strong pairing. I have one at 50, with a bunch of IOs and incarnates. Bio and Regen are sets that benefit from being able to interrupt enemies in combat frequently, Water does this very well. Water is an extremely AoE heavy set and spawn nukes well with Bio's Offensive damage buff.

It shouldn't be doing that. Your tank was probably hitting the agro cap.

There's only one long storyline so it's more linear, but just go around taking odd jobs and it'll eventually open up just like in EV Nova.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/ It's free, too.

Cell shading with the right character at the right angle in the right place can look positively comic book.

DP/Nin Sentinel with the fighting pool. Wont be the most powerful thing around, but it'll be flashy.

Elec/Shield Stalkers are the defacto example of this, being, in effect, all melee Blasters.

I really don't see a problem with keeping it, honestly. It really doesn't amount to much anywhere it matters.

+3's is not +4's and that is still small. Especially for an inherent. So yes, you are. I'd take a flat damage increase to all my attacks that exists before the entire buff stack over a debuff that's going to shrink to less than 10% when I need it most. Especially on teams where I'm probably going to have damage buffs from a support.

You were actually right, you just got a few largely inconsequential details wrong. +4 is where the debuffs are needed the most, and purple patch shrinks anything but the most powerful debuffs in the game down to almost nothing. If you were actually wrong in any appreciable manner, people would be singing the praises of the Sentinel inherent. But they are not. There is a good reason for this. It's better to be correct and surrounded by contrarians than wrong and singing in a choir. Don't let people bully you like this.

Keep doing what you're already doing, except maybe give us some new missions and rework some of the old content nobody plays. You're doing great on the powers front, giving people lots of reason to make new characters, but we could use more attractive content to run them through. Maybe also look into putting a coat of polish onto outdated systems, assets, etc, and the hack-ish stuff like the P2W vendor. I'd love to see some of the more interesting old missions get remade, and maybe even convert their finales into small TFs and trials. Adjust the structure, rewards, polish, etc, to try and get players to go out into the hollows or run some mission arcs in Faultline like old times. I'd love to see all of Faultline uplifted into the late 20s and/or 30s, we're lacking content there and much of the difficulty in that area is closer to 20s and early 30s anyway. I'd also suggest taking a long hard look at Redside and Praetoria, but I have no idea how you'd even start with those. I don't have enough experience with gold side, but I honestly struggle to tell you what's wrong with Redside other than the early game being way more brutal and Grandville kinda sucking in general.

It's funny seeing Sentinel Dual Pistols drop down the charts by a notable amount between the 30s and 40s and level 50. Being resisted by everything on an AT with meh damage is a real drag. Inversely, it's impressive seeing how steady Dual Pistols/Martial stays on Blasters. SS/Invuln being babby's first Superman seems to inflate the amount of both on Tankers to a hilarious degree even all the way up to level 50. Poor Sonic Attack. Only ever appreciated for its debuffs, all the way to the very end. No matter how much people want to act like Empathy ain't healz0rz, its big green numbers still cement it firmly as the go to for a strictly support focused Defender, even as other sets boast better debuffs, better damage boosting, AoE res/def buffs, etc.

What you're doing is like saying "A tanker is on par with a Scrapper for damage" and trying to prove this by showing a build where the scrapper skips build up and all their high tier attacks. Nevermind that the base damage scalars aren't even the same. Yeah, if you go ignoring half an AT's kit, you tend to get really bad ideas about balance.

VEATs are a very, very different case. Most trends that apply everywhere else don't apply to them just because they're so damn good in general.

...I never thought about this before, but Spines gets more from Fire than Fire gets from Spines. Synergistically, most primaries have a have a one way relationship with the secondary they're paired with. Fire can do the things it does for many different sets, but Spines especially doesn't do much for any secondary. Most of the time your defensive primary is keeping you alive so you can continue doing damage, or actively helping you deal damage through buffs, while your primary is doing very little to help your defense or synergize with whatever attacks you rarely find in your secondary. The only time you see this the other way around is with primaries that do things like give defense or debuff to-hit, ergo why Dark/Shield melee ATs use to be a FotM.

Interesting insights being revealed on Sentinels in particular: The fact the AT isn't meta for much of anything means you see some pretty unexpected choices rise the list. Seems most people who are looking for performance just go to another AT altogether, and this is reflected organically in the statistics. The people who play Sentinels do so for concept in the way the people play Brutes or various types of Kins for effectiveness... Which also impacts the overall number of Sentinels played. Sentinels having the best version of Regen is now more or less statistically confirmed. You'd expect this to be lower on an AT that needs damage from its secondary to really shine, but no, the tweaks to Sent Regen are making a strong showing and keeping it up there with the Scrapper version... Which I actually find the popularity of more strange. *Proceeds to check the powerset combinations* ...Actually nevermind, makes perfect sense. People really like their edgy Pistol toting heroes, lethal resists be damned. More insights in general: Titan Weapons is a less popular set than expected even if it's still very popular. I see it so frequently I kinda expected it to be closer to Spines. Masterminds are still every bit as prolific as everyone thought. Maybe it's time to retire the purple cave map, yeah? Martial Assault maybe didn't need the nerfs it got, lol. Starting to think we all vastly overestimated that one. People *still* haven't caught on to how strong the control of Earth Control is.

Kinda surprised Elec/Shield stalkers aren't inflating those two choices towards the top. Kin being consistently high up on non defender support ATs is pretty expected. What's not is just the sheer amount of Emp defenders. I expected Emp to be one of the top picks, but being the very top by that large of a degree is actually surprising. I expected Stalkers to be more popular. Sentinels are as unpopular as I expected, on the other hand. I'd like to see if Devices was still top of the pack for blasters prior to this patch. Everybody needs a farmer. Just reality at this point. At least we have options now, I do *not* miss the days where you either ran Fire/Kin, SS/Fire or just didn't play with the big kids at all.

Honestly, I can't lose too much sleep over the nerfs that went through. The reason being is that the devs seem determined to make Dominators, as a whole, better. Not just in this patch, either, I think that people are forgetting that the changes to immobs now allowing knocks is something that benefits Dominators even more than Controllers, because Dominators lack mitigation, debuffs and other features that can help survivability in their Assault sets. I expect that if Martial comes out of this looking too weak, it'll get a revisit at some point. Because thankfully, they're not treating Doms like the redheaded stepchild of non-armor classes.

Psi on Sentinels isn't so great, but it's also not the worst. Weak in the AoE damage department and slightly mundane in single target, it's lower than middle of the pack in practice... Like the other Psi sets, you'll see real good performance while leveling and against popular enemy groups with sparse Psi resists on nonthreatening enemies, but the flip side of this is that you're going to see absolutely horrible performance when you run into enemy groups where more exotic features and enemies show up. Bad performance will become more and more common later in the game, as extremely heavy Psi resists proliferate. It'll get you there, but it'll be more rough as time goes on, especially without a damage boosting secondary, and you're going to have to work and twink once you actually get there. The Sentinel version of Super Reflexes is a terrific set specifically for defense, in fact it's easy to form a sound argument as to it being better than the melee AT version... At least when measured in a vacuum. The Sentinel meta, as in what makes a good sentinel just so good, currently surrounds taking a damage boosting secondary and using it to prop up the Sentinel's mediocre damage to more competitive levels... Or even better, straight up picking a primary that already does good-ish damage, especially AoE, and turning them into a tanknuke. SR is better than some other options for this, because it DOES have a cooldown reducing passive... But it's still below the likes of Bio, Rad and to a lesser extent Fire and Nin. In end game, you can try to get around the weaknesses by leaning on the high base values in order to rearrange your IO slotting around proc abuse, but the problem with this is that many setups with Bio or Rad don't even need to do this... Yet at the same time, can still do it reasonably well, if you really want to, and they will have even more damage boosting that exists outside of ED'd diminishing returns. Due to the way PPM (procs per minute) works, you're also going to want a bucket of Luck of the Gamblers if you want recharge, so prepare for that expensive investment. I would not recommend this for your first Sentinel, really. It's a bit too twinky of a build. If you're going to run this, maybe roll up a farming toon and grind out some Inf ahead of time.

Didn't say it wasn't fun. Strong... Well, if you're fighting enemies without S/L resists, maybe. But even then it's, at best, slightly above average in damage. Which is bad news since S/L resists are the most common resists in the game. Fire/Rad is universally agreed upon as being monstrous for AoE. Beam Rifle/Bio is meta among meta. Really, pairing Bio or Rad with any primary that either has lots of AoE (Fire, Water), is really well rounded(Beam Rifle, Ice), or has some appealing mitigation, debuffing or damage boosting mechanics (Sonic, as well as Water and Beam Rifle apply here as well) seems to be the sentinel meta right now.

I imagine it wont matter once you hit IOs anyway as SR and Nin would just go for the softcap anyway. It might actually be better with Bio in end game since Bio has IOing options other than soft capping, so the buff from the T9 wont be going to waste there. Really, though, I wouldn't worry too much about DP, if you're gonna play it just play it with whatever secondary you want, and don't worry too much about the details... Because it's gonna be kinda rough no matter what you pair it with.

Pistols is kinda... Eeeehhh... Overall. My first Sentinel was a Pistols/Fire and even with the damage boosting in Fire, Pistols struggles. No Aim clone, heavily Lethal, AoE damage is spread out over long animations, etc... It also really wants a defense set, because one of its few synergies is that the T9 gives you a big chunk of defense while it's animating. Bio would help push it up more in damage, but Pistols just tends to struggle.

I could be wrong, but I *believe* this was a special bonus that only applied with devices anyway. Now Targeting Drone just gives a large bonus to your first shot universally.