Sovera

I think you make yourself a disservice by not taking it. A mass AoE CC that recharges in 25 seconds makes most Controllers green with envy. It was less needed with my Radiation/Atomic since Radiation's T9 also had a Hold, but with the Fire/Atomic I still use Inferno without BU + Aim on one spawn, then the next spawn while inferno is recharging I Radioactive Cloud first, then lazily hit Aim and BU while in the middle of the spawn, then Fireball + Rain of Fire + Atom Smasher, and it's only once all that damage has gone in that the mobs wake to start hitting me.

You're absolutely correct, @frosticus. I've transferred the IOs to a Fire/Atomic and I'm seeing what you are talking about. The chase of set bonuses forced some unhappy slotting and re-doing the build to fit Fire made me realize I could have dumped X-ray Beam and Assault, since the endurance is iffy even without Assault and I never toggled it anyway always expecting my next upgrade to give me enough endurance for it. In exchange for Assault I could have taken Cosmic Burst and used the slots from X-ray Beam. Cosmic Burst would indeed require procs and the bonus I got from that set would need to be found somewhere. I notice this with Fire when I saw I was falling in a natural rotation of Blaze, Blazing Bolt, Blaze, Positron Cell, Blaze, and it hit me how my spammy move was not some crap T2 but actually *the* strongest move I had. Edit: I still feel that the build works pretty well at being a Blanker Proctroller though as you mention the ST chain needs to be re-thought and re-worked. The concept of throwing loads of CC around while doing blaster damage is still valid. But after a Radiation Sentinel and now a Radiation Blaster I feel like I'm done faffing around with procs. Even the T9 having a 40% tax because of the Hold (1200 damage with Aim + BU compared to 2000 Inferno) starts to feel heavy now. At this point of the timeline I just want to have one high performance character to have something to compare to.

Illusion/kin would be daft for a succubus (sorry!). It ought to be Mental/Psi Dom or some such.

I would definitely never recommend a blaster for a first character. And by that I do mean not just never ever ever ever recommend a blaster but actively try to discourage them from it. All you've said above stands in terms of class design. Even things like having an aura that taunts given to a squishy blaster makes zero sense. A Sentinel would be my first choice, and if they like melee instead then a brute/scrapper (again, not a tanker, simply because expectations and low damage. Same reason I would not encourage someone to play a controller for their first character. They may love the idea of CC but be completely turned off, like, drop the game level of turn off, of doing the early levels doing low two digit damage). Once they have tried a scrapper/sentinel, then sure, have them try a blaster. They just need to be aware the game is not a mess of being CCed and killed by a gobbo with a rotten stick hitting their knee as you rightfully put it.

Playing devil's advocate. Of course if this is asked in the Sentinel forums the response will be (and were) overwhelmingly in favor of Sentinels. Most of what you speak happens as we level (I have bad memories of dying against grey mobs on my blaster). But double XP doesn't make leveling a tremendously long process. 4-5 hours from 1 to 50 if powerleveled. 2-3 days for me by doing TFs from level 8 to 50. At 50 we get Clarion, and T3 is enough, and again this is not a long thing to obtain and then boom, CC immune. One day to achieve? Two days? With enough infamy we get softcap levels of defense, which requires about a billion inf, but, yet again, this is not a six month process but rather two or three weeks, more or less depending on time to play or desire to do market flipping. To me this is a bonus. The longer i have something to work for the longer I'm playing it. Once maxed out there isn't much more reason to play the character, but this is just personal preference. What of content under 45 like the weekly strikes? Does it matter? It's usually ran at +0 and not +4. So depending on slowness we can say it takes a month to level a character to max and then trick it out to have a 'glass cannon' with scrapper level of defenses and be CC immune as long as doing level 45+ content. End result? Both my Blaster and my Sentinel jump into a pack of +4 ITF (unhealthy thing, cascading defense failure is a thing, but funny enough y blaster survives better because it has a mass AoE Hold up every 25 seconds) and go on a rampage, with the Blaster uncaring that the Sentinel has CC and a defensive secondary, while doing twice the Sentinel's damage (Aim empowered Inferno does 600 damage on the Sentinel. Regular Inferno with no aim or BU does 1k damage on the Blaster). Edit: this might seem like I'm contradicting what I said above, but I'm really not. Both posts are equally true.

More content, more powersets. Most/all TFs getting a trim to be half hour long, even if means splitting them like Positron.

I feel like I've fallen into a bit of a rut. I've done my experiments with lots of little builds and now I want a high performance 'something' if only to really have 'something' to compare against. The radiation sentinel seemed strong, but only had a four minute pylon time. The radiation blaster with four procs in two out of three ST attacks plus blaster damage *looked* like it did good damage, and turned out to have a 5 minute pylon time. Fire is supposed to be the top dog, but you'd think a -res proc plus three damage procs in one attack, then four damage procs in another attack, would make up for the difference. I was going to try a Fire something, but Sentinel still has Blazing Blast bugged four months later. I edited HD so it shows 5 ticks instead of 13, and, unslotted, BB does 74 damage. The big damage skill of the big damage set. Radiation's Proton Stream, unslotted, does 122 😅 The Sentinel seems very balanced. All T9s do exactly the same damage be it Inferno or Atomic Blast, while in the Blaster side of things Atomic Blast gets a rather massive -40% damage tax for the Hold component it has. That helps a lot in choosing since it can be all thematic. But thanks to the balance Fire doesn't really have much gain over another set. Those 3-5 extra dots for 8 damage aren't exactly game breaking in even though they will get boosted by enhancements and then incarnates. Ice feels very safe when Blizzard makes mobs flop, and a purple proc in Ice Storm makes it do the same, but I don't see it performing better than Radiation.

Am I the only one having problems with clicking on a link in forum posted builds and HD opens but it just loads my last saved build instead of the forum one I clicked? If I click a second and third time it eventually loads the one from the forums.

That would be smarter. After browsing the bug forums with so many but so many posted bugs with few views and no replies I wonder how many of these have officially been acknowledged.

It has been several (four?) months. Blazing Blast is still doing five ticks instead of thirteen making the set's strongest attack worse than the T2. Is there *any* news on the subject, @Captain Powerhouse? Either a 'it's on purpose since Sentinels aren't supposed to do good damage' or 'we were busy with other things these past months'? I'm loathe to believe it is just a matter to flick the 5 for a 13 when coding is involved, but news that it was not swept under the rug would be good.

Good God, 4 months later...? My will to play a Fire sentinel just crashed.

Overwhelming Force works on Bonfire, it was tested a while back, 100% KD conversion *and* it has raw damage in the IO unlike Sudden Acceleration that only does the KD conversion.

Mid 200 isn't bad. It's terrible. As I posted above someone was doing under two minutes with a fire/atomic.

I went to Justin to test since I had a fire character there. It's still doing 5 ticks of damage instead of 13. Is this still so bad that we might as well take the T2 since it has a better DPA? @GM Widower

An idle help me out decide. After leveling my blaster and getting horrid 5 minute pylon times I just came crawling back to a Sentinel. Fire is love, fire is life. I haven't actually made a Fire/ anything yet though. I've done ninjutsu and it's pretty solid. I haven't done EA yet so it is about whether to repeat myself or try something new. Ninjutsu has: - An endurance recovery clicky and a heal both on short CD. (17 seconds) - Built in stealth. - 'Annoying' CC protection being a clickie. - Positional defenses, so everything is deflected, toxic, psi, lethal, etc etc. - Decent resistances: 22% S/L, 19% E/N, 40% F/C/Psi, 33% toxic. EA has : - Typed, so I need to work on the defenses one by one meaning it has a psi (19% defense) and toxic hole (is there anything other than positional to defend against Toxic?). We can say that damage type is rare but the hole is still there. - Its heal is a smidgen longer (25 seconds) but it comes with an endurance reduction component plus 200% regen (400% regen total VS 200% of Ninjutsu) to pump dem numbers up as we wait for the CD to recharge. - An endurance clickie mostly eclipsed by the heal and the fact a Sentinel has Defensive Opportunity making endurance a non consideration. - Normal CC toggle. - 30% S/L, 37% Energy, 34% Negative, 28% fire/cold, 30% toxic... and 8% psi, so the hole is complete, anything psi goes through like in hot butter. I won't lie, I'm definitely leaning towards a second Ninjutsu and only the petty 'gosh, annoying CC clicky' is restraining me, this despite having Hasten and the CC protection clickie bound so they alternate autos.

Was it ever fixed?I remember a while back the talk of Blazing Blast on Sentinels being borked.

I just finished leveling a blaster, and let me tell you that it was exhausting. The damage is loud and brutal thanks to Aim + Build-Up, but the class feels so clunky. As our numeric friend above mentions just the T9s show this. What's the point of burning a pack to cinders if then we can't use it for the next two packs? What's even the point of burning a pack to cinders with so much 'wasted' damage since things are dead already? It came to a point I did not use Aim + BU with my T9 because no point, and I would rather have Aim + BU for the next pack where I'd be T9-less. Then of course there's not having CC protection until level 50, no defenses, etc. On the other hand a Sentinel starts with CC protection early on. Defenses early on don't do much until they stack up enough so that's more of a level 40-50 thing, but the T9 is well build. Sure, less damage, but does it matter? When we pop Aim + T9 (whose CDs match) all minions are dead, and then we use the rest of the AoEs and most things not a boss are on a sliver. AND WE CAN DO IT AGAIN NEXT SPAWN! I was playing with a stalker friend of mine and starting to feel bad for her since every spawn I'd just open up with my T9 and simply clean it and she'd just be poking at the almost dead leftovers. This is *practical* damage, not spreadsheet or pylon killing.

T4 Degenerative crafted. 5 minutes Pylon. Slotted Incarnates: Assault Core Embodiment (not clicked), Clarion Partial Core Invocation, Degenerative Core Flawless Interface, Intuition Radial Paragon. Fire is so obviously superior that not all the procs in the world are enough to catch up to our fiery overlord.

No worries. It means Crowd Control which has become the go to word to mean holds, stuns, sleeps. Anything that 'controls', be it you or NPCs, and prevents from acting.

Mind the procs though. I chose them on purpose. Everything lethal/smash gets resisted a fair bit in the end game, and with all the complaints that psi users mention of certain groups resisting their damage type it is why I eschewed all the psi procs and went for an array of toxic and negative. Blaster's Wrath superior fire proc does have recharge and it lowers the proc chance, but it's a purple proc for all purposes. I've reached T3 Degenerative, so just one more to then test. If it reaches 4 minutes I will be hugely disappointed though because that's what my Sentinel gets. We have Blasters reaching 2 minutes, such as @nihilii's even though it was Fire/Atomic. We are talking under two minute times here! I sort of expect(ed) the number of procs to close the gap between everything else and the top fiery contender. Dark is a great set, but I'm pretty much always running teams and that content is 90% AoE. Radiation or Elec has, IMO, the 'best' AoE not in sheer orange numbers but in their ease of use with everything being circular and quick recharging. When I tested Ice, for example, I found that Blizzard and Ice Storm were not enough to kill a spawn of +4. I would end with a full spawn with a sliver of HP and me having to pick them off one by one with ST attacks. Dark's AoE includes a cone and I've steered away from cones ever since playing my Sonic. Otherwise yes, Dark plays well with the 'not-quite-soft-capped-and-relying-on-gimmicks-to-get-there' that his build goes with in Beta Decay. As for why I did not take Positron Fist it is just two fold. First, I have no more slots 😄 But second is that I'm primarely ranged and don't want to chase mobs like a meleer. Even though I'm in melee range for most of the time this is by choice and not obligation which makes the difference. Nihiili's test blaster reached those numbers without using it. That said if Justin was back as a testing server I would like to test things. Perhaps lose Neutron Bomb for Positron since it's the weak link in the AoE chain (albeit one that closes the gap allowing for an AoE chain).

Nonsense. Without you I would have discarded the character already. But wanting to answer your question I looked closer and... Yeah, super obvious and glaring answer 😄

As I said at the very end I did not even bother finishing the test when I reached 3:20 seconds the pylon still had a bit over half. I predict it would have run over six minutes and change and that was so terrible I stopped right there. I'm not sure what cause it though, honestly. Bah, I'm an idiot. I forgot to craft Degenerative, no wonder the pylon time was so terrible. I'll need to craft it and re-test and let you know.

As if it stopped my first MM calling her T3 bot 'Pleasure Bot 3000'.

I tried SBNR myself, but it lumped Cosmic Burst as 'negative damage', and after a few tries where I couldn't make it separate all the negative damage from procs and Cosmic Burst I just gave up. The only DPS meter I really care about is one that lets me see how I am doing in a group to see if I'm doing well or not.

/Atomic, the kind of thing we get when devs are high. This was an experiment that I wanted to run and that Justin not being available I leveled the hard way. It did not pan out but I'll still post about it more aimed at newcomers than veterans in case they find some use in the build. It is very very expensive though, but that suits me fine since I just stop playing a character once it is finished. The way it works? How to play it? Leveling: The build: Disappointment: