Sovera

/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:

With my incarnate choice and the slotting Radioactive Cloud is supposed to have a 21 second duration according to the Info. In practical terms fighting +4 (+3 with the incarnate shift) this seems to last just a smidgen more than the cloud does. Perhaps 12-13 seconds. Bosses are not affected since the Hold does not seem to pulse despite what I think I read. Or it is a one second pulse that is not affected by slotting. But using Positron Cell and Radioactive Cloud will do its job, albeit very briefly.

You don't really need a second AoE hold. The one in /atomic is all you require, and then the ST hold in /atomic will stack and (fr a short period) hold bosses as well. The problem with Radioactive cloud is that the effect only lasts one second so it cannot stack on itself reliably. Incarnates and slotting help extend this. Helen's build is a good one and in fact the one I based my own on taking from her ideas. I just wanted more so I went all proc based and still softcapped. I've been meaning to post it actually and I'll do so at lunch hour.

You will never be defense capped with Bio. In exchange you get a 30%-ish damage boost from Offense Adaptation. In practical terms you will be chugging one small purple at regular intervals to keep your defenses up while being (solidly) shored up by Ablative Shield + Rebuild DNA. The extra damage helps you to burst mobs down so they will survive for a shorter period of time where they can hurt you. With EA you will never have a native 30% damage boost from your secondary, but you will be able to build yourself to reach the 45% softcap defense to most (always having a hole in negative, psi, and toxic) which means you will not be chugging purples at regular intervals and can instead chug reds, which even a small one is 25% damage. EA's heal is also a solid endurance saver so you should not have endurance woes once you have it and triple slotted for recharge. It sort of evens out so pick which situation you prefer. I dropped out of Bio a while back because the 30% will do me no good if I'm faceplanted because I ran out of purples, and not having to save purples meant I could use a macro to convert all my inspirations into reds.

I don't even feel that there is a need for a DPS number or equation. The time it takes to kill a pylon *is* the 'DPS'. Knowing a build did 287 or 600 DPS doesn't add much than knowing one build took four minutes to kill a pylon and the other did it in 90 seconds. As for that it's why the recommendation is doing about four or five tries and post them all.

Offensive is crap anyway, but skipping the T9 *and* Aim makes my brain hurt. Perhaps the plan is to sing bad poetry to mobs and see if they die. RoA has 2 seconds less cast time than HD shows. Without Aim of course the numbers aren't appealing anyway. Anyway, I threw something something together but it still has a 5.2% hole in Fire/Cold. HP is overcapped with just accolades and Hoarfrost so there is not much point in Frost Protection. It's not perfect but perhaps you can get some ideas out of it:

...you skipped Rain of Arrows? Your T9? Explain.

And here I was thinking I had made the explanation as foolproof as possible. Walk me through what you did from the start?

Even back when I played, when Incarnates were just something talked about that were going to come, even back then a full team of eight slamming a single pack of mobs was too much, and this was before level shifts that turned hardy +4 into softer +3. Now between an extra 33%-45% damage, infinite endurance or perma CC protection for squishies, most of the game being capped at +3 and etc I feel that splitting the team into three or four and everyone goes looking for glowies or hunting in a kill all mission is more strategic than roll around like a big wrecking ball. In fact, I feel smaller teams in +4x8 content to be a lot more fun than full 8 man teams considering in the later nothing tends to to last for more than the initial 5-6 seconds of combat.

Draining won't do much, but if you want to do it then go for it. In practical terms by the time you've drained something flat that something has probably died already. But, IMO, as long as you don't mess with your slotting just for the sake of draining then sure, go for it. Fighting Pool is as important as you want to make it. By pouring more inf and being inventive with set bonuses you can try to skip it, but you might find it easier to embrace the near 6% defense you get from Weave and having Tough to mule both 3% defense uniques. Tesla Cage is your big hitter and I would personally just slot it accordingly with a damage proc as the sixth slot. It's always nice to just run a ST chain on a boss and it stays held. i have an old Elec/EA build I never got around posting, see if you can extract some ideas from it.

Sentinel just suffers from an unjust stereotype perpetuated by the fanbase and who is then picked up by others without any basis for them to do so. IF we want to ABSOLUTELY min-max and IF we narrow it down to something specific like pylon killing, then yes, most Sentinels will lag behind. But how often to do we hit something for 2-4 minutes in a row? In most cases that's when lore pets come out and they destroy whatever 'hard' target there was. 95% of the game is AoE and a Sentinel's (usually at) 25 second recharge T9 will be there with a large radius. It does not matter if a Brute can do lots of little damage with two auras ticking and placing Burn and etc if a Sentinel swoops in and T9's a +4 spawn to half, usually leaving lieutenants at a sliver after a couple more AoEs still empowered by Aim. And if a Blaster can go BOOM with higher numbers their T9 recharges still recharges at about 40 seconds which means they usually go BOOM every three packs or so. In practical non-spreadsheet terms a Sentinel as a ranged scrapper alternative just rocks, and I say this despite currently leveling a Blaster to 50 and in the process of gearing it. Also, this breakdown was simply funny 😄 Poor Beasts/Traps 😄

I'm interested, never stop babbling, Red! I don't really agree with some of your slotting (personal opinion), mostly Heavy Burst. I'm not as fussed about range, and don't see the point in slotting for -defense when we already are so deep in accuracy (even barely slotted Heavy Burst has 231% accuracy, and I vaguely recall +4 (I think) requiring 195% to 'softcap' accuracy), while also going on thinking that a single hard target is where -res shines and a cone AoE is not something we spam on a single hard target but rather our ST attack chain, so the -res would look better in Single Shot. Single Shot and Burst are pretty much interchangeable since both recharge so fast that we can make an attack chain with just those two. I also vaguely recall you saying you placed your IOs at level 27 for exemplar friendliness, but with the advent of attuned IOs where the IOs and their bonus are available since the moment that they can be slotted why do you still put up with the diminished stats of hard locking to 27 even when at level 50?

There are some things that require a tanker, like that Recluse tanking. But most of the game, the other 90%, does not *require* a tank and your peevishness, while understood because you play a tank and love the tank role, has no room in it. My half slotted blaster 'tanked' all of the Tina arc where we eventually face Anti-Mater. We started as eight, then people dropped and eventually I was just taking point. At the end one of my squishy(er) team mates said how they were doubtful since we were doing +4 and had no meat shield, but all had gone well barring one death of mine. There is not much 'tanking' needed when a blaster annihilates a pack with their T9, and then the next pack uses the Aim + BU they saved + regular AoEs to annihilate that pack. We can follow pretty after the tank but eight people trying to kill one pack is something that has no point currently when just one single person kills it. It's just eight people trying to squeeze in a hit before everything is dead, and most of the time just animating hitting a corpse since the target already died.

I'm surprised so many seem to think Freedom Phallanx is such a grind. I've yet to reach level 50 and not have all the requirements except the explorations and Nemesis. Just now with my new 50 and I was looking at it, and yeah, gear smasher, tank buster, slayer, etc etc. The only slog is the exploration that can be skipped by going red, but we are going to explore anyway for the other three accolades. Nemesis is doing the first mission of the TF four times at about five minutes per run killing only Fake Nemesis.

FS boosts all damage, with the exception of procs.

I can tell already you won't have enough endurance, and Metabolic Acceleration won't do much for your CC resistance needs. I leveled with MA and I can tell you I barely notice it is there in terms of CC resistance. There is always Clarion for the CC but then you won't have Ageless for the big endurance problems I predict. Agility may look like it will help but recovery just goes from 4.22 to 4.65. *With* MA six slotted with Efficacy *and* a performance shifter in Stamina, plus an extra endurance IO, plus Panacea and Miracle in Health even so my endurance goes does to half after each pack. This is with eight toggles though, if you have less than those it may be fine. You'll probably want to take the fourth LotG IOs, probably the extra one in CJ as well, and slot MA better (two basic level 50 health and two endurance mod IOs with all four being +5 will max MA). Definitely run it over Justin for a test. You can save one slot in Hasten if you +5 the other two. It does add one extra second to become 124 seconds instead of 123. But it could go to Spiderlings and make it four Expedient Reinforcement which lowers Hasten down to 122 seconds. You could switch the sets in Inferno and Atom Smasher, then remove one of the purples and replace it for a Fury of the Gladiator -res . If you're hitting a single tough target you're going to want to use Inferno, but with 3 second cast time you probably won't be single targeting something tough with Atom Smasher. Since you'll be using Aim + BU with Inferno the -res going off will be feeding your empowered ST chain after Inferno goes off. Panacea gives more recovery than Miracle in Health. Consult this guide.

No one here is going to tell you to play a Sentinel instead of a Blaster, because these are the blaster forums and those who are here do so because they love the AT. ... that said my Rad/Ninja Sentinel is more of a blaster than my Rad/Atomic blaster is. The difference between having our T9 every 25 seconds instead of 40 seconds is the difference between starting every fight with half a pack dead and the rest limping or go to face them naked and with a smile. I'll post my build in a short while and, yes, once after having reached 50, and having sunk three quarters of a billion into it, and having T4, yes, it's a beast with quadruple procs on two our of three ST attacks and softcapped defenses to all but energy and psi. Much more raw damage than the Sentinel too, but if we had something like Recount on CoH to see how much damage everyone did at the end of the TF I wonder how far apart my Sentinel and my Blaster would be. That said a quarter billion isn't particularly onerous to achieve and with double XP reaching level 50 isn't particularly difficult either.

Yes, listen, if you want to test the worth of it just roll a character on justin and test it with and without procs against a pylon. Gut feelings aren't very accurate. On my Sentinel the triple proc version downed a pylon in 4 minutes. The same build but replacing the procs for a normal slotting did it in six minutes.

I preferred radiation or elec for AoE godlyness. Lightning Field does tie the knot nicely, but the mass immobilize, I find, only really works for farming. In regular teams it hardly ever finds use. For solo farming it serves to keep the mobs close though.

I've played several Sentinels and now I'm trying a blaster, and i have to say that Sentinel is really really top notch for a player who wants to be durable and do pew pews. The blaster I'm trying now does stupid amounts of damage and with having a Aim and Build-up completely surpasses the Sentinel, but good grief, go into melee, get stunned, stun wears off, prepare to continue, get slept. In the meanwhile damage is flying and we are squishy. I mean, yes, once I am level 50, and once I have incarnates, and once I've sunk half a billion minimum, then boom, watch my blaster tear through content! But in the meanwhile the Sentinel's nuke recharges in 25 seconds, not 40, so it's up every spawn, or at most every second spawn, where the blaster's omgwtfbbq nuke is up every two spawns, possibly every three. It makes a *lot* of difference to start combat each time having killed all minions and hurt all lieutenants. We have just cut down damage in half. In the case of T9s with CC effects the mobs still alive are staggering and not retaliating. I was exemplaring to play with a friend of mine who has a stalker and the poor thing barely had anything to do despite having increased the number of mobs to +2x6. We'd reach a pack, I'd T9, almost everything died. Now, I'm pretty bias for ninjutsu. It has almost SR levels of defense but also a heal and an endurance recovery power which SR sorely lacks. No heal means relying on inspirations or trying to use Aid Self which isn't very good with the interrupts stopping it. If you look a bit further below I have a radiation/Ninjutsu build bent towards AoE. Feel free to pick it up and since all the defense is from ninjutsu you can replace the primary for anything you'd like without impacting the build's defenses.

Shh!

Doing that would make them very very nice to have in the low levels. We can always respec out of them later on, but starting the grind, no endurance, long moments without anything to press. City of Cooldowns was a name back in Live for this reason.

Well, as someone who just came from Justin I can say it's not quiteeeee as portrayed here. The only thing lacking was turning my IOs into superior versions and having incarnates (Justin's new about-to-go-live version turned off incarnates and free merits for reasons), but HD showed the difference between superior and normal versions as one point in endurance cost. @HelenCarnate had a good tip regarding using influence to buy merits which saved the day. I'm still without incarnates but at least I could test the character further. So, I was testing a Rad/Atomic and had Metabolic Acceleration slotted with five Panacea and the Performance Shifter proc. Stamina with another Performance Shifter proc plus an endurance IO, Health with the Miracle and Panacea proc. It took only two packs in a fire farm to be nearly empty but I'm running 8 toggles. I switched the Panacea and the Performance Shift for six Efficacy and its better. Still going to half endurance but it recharges well enough. Pity about hte loss of the regen/panacea since without a heal I sort of expect to lean on the regen. Perhaps Musculature with the endurance recovery boost + not running Tough and Assault will be enough to tip the scales.

I believe that this is easy to replicate since it always happens in the same fashion: If someone is level 8 (minimum level for Posi 1) as they start the TF then the whole party and the enemy NPCs stay at level 8 for the duration even if the leader keeps on leveling past level 8 during the TF. Easy to test and see this. Then Doc Buzzsaw spawns as a level 15 and everyone is level 8 making it a +7 EB. The TF is a bust since we cannot hurt it. This forces a disband and do it all over again. Since we no longer are level 8 we now have ours and enemy NPC scaling working as it should and Doc Buzzsaw spawns correctly. As someone who does one DFB to reach level 8 and then start with Posi 1 this happens a LOT until I figured it out. The trick is just to pass leadership to someone who is not minimum level. I forgot to do it today. So we are restarting it and in the interim I'm finally posting about this.

You're a smart cookie, Helen! Now we just lack a slash command to give veteran experience, since veteran levels give a bunch of crafting materials it would solve the problem for the pre-release cycles.