Sovera

Remember you can swap the animation from breath to a palm attack.

This is my experience leveling a Sentinel after all these months of playing one all the time (I have something like 28 saved builds for Sentinels compared to 4 builds for scrappers, 3 Blasters, 5 Controllers, etc). And this is leveraging my understanding of procs and each attack having two, no recharge, etc. I pity the regular players leveling a Sentinel without the experience to load up on damage procs to help what frankly feels like anemic damage.

Range *is* a defense. Lets not play petty games and pretend it is not. Just a few days ago I was doing a Yin and when it was Clamor time someone clicked on the computers and suddenly boom, the initial ambush now had the second ambush on top of it and at exemp level 25ish the team was not ready to handle it and most of the team wiped. At that level Blasters aren't tough enough yet and the meleers we had couldn't keep up with their low level skills not completely slotted. Of the eight only three survived and whittled the ambush down. I was floating when I saw things were going pear shaped, and munching purples, but the damage I was taking I know very well that if I was on the ground taking melee damage on top of ranged damage (plus mobs wasting time running around trying to get to me by jumping on the upper rafters) then I would have been licking ground especially once my purples were gone. Which is where a Sentinel shines. All Sentinel players have their stories of surviving a wipe and eventually killing everything. In this context a Sentinel's toughness is welcome. It's just wasted once we reach high level and both meleers and Blasters then fix their defensive holes. It's a bit like a Hunter in WoW. A Beastmaster's ability to do damage on the run without having cast times makes them enormously overpowered during hard fights as they are learned. But once the fights are learned and the casters and melee know their role and where to move, and when, they start overshadowing Hunters. It is what I mentioned a page ago. Were this the original CoH then Sentinels would have a place in it. The tough ranged character who does less damage than a pure damage dealing AT. Watch them do asspulls! Watch them hold the line once the meleers get overwhelmed! But with the IO end game fixing the defensive holes but not having an answer to do the same in upping damage (increasing recharge is the only way, but putting in lots of defense does not exclude also adding recharge) there is no real downside to just play a pure damage dealer. I think their real strength is something we never bring up and that is how they are so well balanced. Pick a blaster. You want damage? You play Fire. Playing anything else is gimping yourself to do a third of the damage. Ice with procs can keep up with Fire who doesn't even care about procs, which seems like a bad thing, but actually means they can ignore them and focus on grabbing set bonus, something which proc users are gimping themselves out of. But anything else is just disappointing as damage is traded for dubious utility. I had a Radiation Blaster triple procced in all attacks and I expected a lot out of it having come from a Sentinel with the same primary, only to see it do some Sentinel level numbers. I dropped it, made a new blaster, picked Fire, and *without* procs discovered a *large* difference. A Sentinel though? Want Ice? Go for Ice. Want Radiation? Go for Radiation. Want Fire? Go for Fire. But you don't want HAVE to go Fire if we want damage. The sets are perfectly balanced (at most Assault Rifle could use a tweak for it's T9) allowing to pick the thematic flavor as desired being sure we are not gimping themselves. TW, SS, StJ and Fire for Blaster could sure enjoy some of that. Btw, this is just me having a conversation shooting the breeze here. I have no vested interest in lobbying a 'Save The Sentinels' cause. At most it's an academic thing just talking between ourselves. I no longer play a Sentinel (and I think this is a common thing if were to take a poll) so to me it does not really matter if they are buffed or not.

Only in numbers though, but yes, when I hear the semi-cringe inspiring roleplay ideas to buff Sentinels with things like perception, ToHit and scouting ahead, then the Crab Spider does all of that and more. But they lack build diversity. Two choices VS 100-ish choices makes EATs underpopulated for a reason.

Check my link in the post above where I tested the variable % of Offensive Adaptation. Who knows but the devs? Obviously doing a flat 25% as advertised that it would do was not an option though.

Despite my naysaying I'm actually leveling another Sentinel to cleanse my palate of all the brutes and scrappers. A Sentinel instead of a Blaster because of their strengths.... which is not being armored and having CC protection but rather being able to toss Blizzard every 24 seconds instead of 40+. I have this whole gimmicky build who is purely ranged but still softcapped and has the purple KD proc in Frost Breath, the Overwhelming KD proc in Ice Storm (not sure if it will actually work well, but didn't get to test before the servers went down), and Blizzard having native KD baked in. Hardcapped slow and recharge debuff on mobs plus a ton of slippery amusement. It will be good for funsies if nothing else.

Throw it against a pylon for testing purposes. My best time on pure ranged attacks on a Sentinel is four minutes.

SR was the squishiest armor I tried both as a Tanker and as a Sentinel. You'd somehow expect otherwise, but not really. But I also stress tested beyond what the game (usually) throws at us. As a rule we are not at the agro cap for minutes on end. As a Tanker, good grief, the fact it did not have a heal meant I had to get Aid Self, and Aid Self simply became a part of my rotation. AoE, AoE, ST attack, Aid-Self. Knowing Aid-Self recharged in 6 seconds it was amazing the spam I did. The scaling resists only really became noticeable at around 30% HP which was really living on the edge. It was pretty stressful, and more than once I was watching Aid Self's CD with hawkeyes urging it to recharge faster. My Sentinel did not even manage that. The first 30 seconds of stress testing and it was hugging the floor since it lacked the increased everything a Tanker gets. Aid Self did not nearly keep up. Now, that said, for regular play SR is fine. We meet a pack of 10-12 mobs of which more than half are minions, we use Aim, we throw our nuke, most minions are dead, we throw the rest of our AoEs and then start picking at lieuts and bosses. It is not particularly difficult since after the first few seconds we may be fighting 4-5 mobs. The most rounded set for me is Ninjutsu. Baked in stealth (less alpha if we start combat without mobs shooting at us before half are dead), endurance recovery clicky, heal (no need to mess with Aid Self), softcapped defenses and better resists that work straight from 100% HP. The status protection being a clicky can be annoying but with keybinds we can make it and Hasten alternate being our autos. Energy Armor is just squishy and I don't know why even softcapped, but it handled stress tests pretty poorly (same applies to regular playing as mentioned above). Bio is simply the most survivable of the sets I played so far if we don't mind being locked into Barrier (it always gives 5% minimum defense so we can aim for 40% across the board) and convoluted slotting to reach softcaps. The noob trap of the extra 25% damage from Offensive Adaptation is A) not actually a 25% damage boost. It actually goes as low as 8.5% on the nuke, and B) there is such a tight power and slot budget that we lose what little we gained. Procs make a HUGE difference. My Rad/Ninjutsu without triple procs in all attacks needed 6 minutes to break a pylon (obligatory 'pylon killing mentioned not because it matters but as a metric') and WITH procs needed four minutes. To compare my Rad/Bio also had triple procs AND Offensive Adaptation, but the DPS loss from the tight slotting made the gain from Offensive a wash as it too ended up needing four minutes to break a pylon.

The problem with Sentinels is not their inherent, their target cap or their damage. The problem lays deeper and will not be easily fixed with a quick band-aid. The REAL problem lays in the current City of Heroes. When we sell a Sentinel as 'ranged damage, but with armor so they are sturdy' it makes a newcomer think that there is such a thing as a glass cannon aspect to the game such as playing, say, a priest or a mage in WoW, where gameplay, knowing skills, kitting and etc is necessary to survive, but, always as a glass cannon that cannot take more than 3-4 hits before going down. In CoH this has long since not been the case. With IOs we don't truly have glass cannons anymore and for a long time now. Armor? We can use a Blaster and be softcapped. Mez? We can use incarnates to close that hole. So the problem here is deeper because if we are selling an AT saying they should be doing less damage since they are ranged and also have armor and mez protection then a Blaster is just 🙂 as they hear it. But now you could say, but Sov, a Blaster needs to be at high level to have this while a Sentinel has it at a much lower level? Do they? Do they really? Other than super early blooming sets such as SR it still requires to be in the 40s or maybe 50 for a Sentinel to be softcapped unless they use inspirations, and if they use inspirations a Blaster can use them too and be softcapped as well. That leaves mez protection that a Blaster must wait for level 50 to obtain and then not be able to exemp down without losing it, but in a game with AH bought Breakfrees this is not a huge problem, nor do all factions have CC to begin with. Someone might then say, but Sov, during leveling... What during leveling? A casual player can take a week to reach max level. If they play the character for two months before becoming bored what is a week of leveling, or just 2-3 days if they are happily logging on each day to smack bad guys? Alright, this is not another Blaster VS Sentinel thread here. My point is that the way the game sells classes they are each with their downsides and strengths, but the IO game has changed this so that there are no downsides, so when we are sold a class who is supposed to do less damage AND have target caps AND a wacky inherent because they are oooooh, armored and sturdy and CC protected. the truth is that we are only getting the downsides. And while we can compensate for downsides we can't really augment strengths. We can softcap a character and make them sturdy, but we can't give an AT a (substantial) damage boost. At most we can give lots of recharge to increase DPS (not really a damage boost per se) but the characters who softcapped themselves ALSO give themselves that so the gap is not narrowed down.

My own take on Aim (and BU) is that a Blaster's damage is nearly inconsequential compared to the nuke, and the nukes take too long to recharge to be used at every pack. So when I play my Blaster what I do is NOT use Aim and BU on the first pack, just the nuke and then regular AoEs, at the second pack THEN I use Aim and BU to empower my regular AoEs. Aim and BU together sort of fill for the lacking nuke, and when we use the nuke it already automatically kills all minions leaving the regular AoEs following after moping up the lieutenants with ST attacks to finish the last sliver on the boss(es). That said you can be a bit more proactive with popping Aim and BU. If it takes 3 seconds to get both off don't run to the middle of a pack and then pop both. As you're running there start popping them. With minimal practice you'll get the hang of the timing to not do it too soon and waste time while you finish snuggling to the middle of the pack nor too late that you are there and soaking damage while running through the activations.

It's late in the suggestion thread, and when I mentioned it there was no traction, but I'll bring it back again since the conversation has returned to the homogenization of the classes between Brute and Tank. Now the truth is that it's not Brute VS Tank we should look at but Brute VS Scrapper. The difference between 90% (seldomly achieved outside of a /Radiation or /Electric Armor since how often do we usually team up with a Thermal or a Sonic?) and 75% is minimal IN PRACTICAL TERMS. Yes, spreadsheets show how much more survivable the Brute will be. Spreadsheets are fine, but in practical terms is there really a difference? S/L or Fire my Scrapper can be tossed into a ComicCon and be at agro saturation levels for 5 minutes in a row and survive it just fine. Do we ever reach target saturation outside of special farm maps? Even regular farm maps don't do agro saturation since they tend to be one pack of mobs and we rarely go about agroing one pack and then bounce to the next and wait for the two to meld. So, if, IN PRACTICAL TERMS NON SPREADSHEET, the trio of Scrapper, Brute and Tank are all so similar what separates them? Agro management. - The Scrapper has weak agro grabbing and anyone playing it is not going to aim for REAL tanking. What they might do (as I do) is jump into the spawn first, toss a couple AoEs, make the mobs mad at them for the first few seconds before they all die under the rest of the team's onslaught. - The Brute is the mid-term. People want to tank, sure, but are not aficionados to the point of wanting to slog under the low damage Tankers currently produce. They may care about grabbing agro, some might get Taunt, but bottom line: a Brute player wants to do damage and tanking is secondary but most of the time it is an actual consideration unlike a Scrapper player. - The Tanker is that masochist that wants to keep the team safe and soak ALL THE AGRO IN THE WORLD, AAAAAAAAH! They slog through the game with their attacks coming late and doing less damage to a point that one of the first fixes Cap Powerhouse instated was adding an extra 20 points of endurance because that's how slow they are at killing things. So anyone who currently has a Tanker IS that masochist who wants to sponge all the agro already. Surviving? Other than 5% of the game such as some prrrrrretty specific AVS (not all of them. Has Imperious in ITF made anyone tremble lately, even as a +4?) surviving is not a consideration. Heck, most Blasters can facetank MOST AVs. So, do Tankers really need to up their damage? Sort of. A Tanker is not a class someone picks to solo things. It's the class picked for teaming. In a team a Tanker's individual damage is not much of a problem. Yes, in spreadsheet terms in vacuum their lower damage drags a team down by some single digit percentages, but things usually revolve around T9s and Judgements and unless we are timing things with a watch no one is going to notice that the Tanker that was brought slowed things more than if a Brute had been picked. Where this is noticed is in farming where 1-2 minutes of being slower when doing 6 minute runs is an appreciable difference but not really in a 30-40 minute full team TF run. So, damage buff? Yeah, sure, why not? But it's not what the class is about. Those who care about damage and want to play melee are already running Scrappers or Brutes. Those who run Tanks want to be agro sponges. So I re-re-bring my suggestion (without knowing if it is really mechanically feasible): make a TANKER's Taunt become a PbAoE that does an inverted KB. Give it a good radius. Instead of knockback (push away), or knock up (push up), make it an implosion (pull in). All that scattered pack of mobs with some at range, some in melee, are now a clumped ball around the Tanker fit to be AoEd down a la Death Knights in WoW. 'Shit, dude, don't knock mobs away...' BOOM! Tanker reels everyone back in. And I mean, does anyone here not think that this would be a lot more mechanically distinct than what we have? Or that it would not make a Tanker worth their weight in gold and make them super attractive to any team?

This is a bit late now, but as someone who had been doing the Widow's arc each time and took the suggestion to do Black Scorpion I was very pleasantly surprised at how much faster it was. Auto complete the third mission and ignore mobs to look for the objectives for all the others. For those who want to rush through remember to -1 x1 the difficulty.

That's the general consensus. In fact, even Hemorrhage is skipped. The link I posted has some detail about it.

I'm just 21 but I'm not super amazed yet either. The endurance discount isn't doing much atm but once at 22 and having bought the usual IOs it may change. Flurry being a measly 8y radius AoE was a unwelcome surprise too and not wanting to use a fully charged finisher also adds another layer. Yet that link I posted seems to point it works well in actual use. I've no interest in farming but there's no reason it should not translate well for regular play.

I'm actually making one, but made for all purpose and not just farming. I'm not sure if it will be all that, but heck, I never played FA or Savage Melee.

I'm definitely interested in this and will try to butcher it into something all purpose. I've never played FA *or* SM so it will be something new to try. Before I start my butchering have you tried making a generalist version of this?

*headscratch* Anyway, for the OP. I don't know if EA is fixed but there is something missing from it and I'm not sure what, but even softcapped and such it feels real fragile. Perhaps because the heal is a bit too long. But this is only in really intensive farm like saturated target cap situations that do not arise from regular play. For regular play (bounce to a spawn, smack them, move to the next) EA is fine.

*recovery

The difference with DNA Siphon lies in that if you use it on live targets it grants Endurance, but if you use it on corpses it provides with Recovery. So once you kill a spawn, pop DNA Siphon and you'll be full of blue juice. In practical terms it's probably best to use it after the initial volley of AoEs that killed all minions (corpses despawn after a few seconds, so the minions will have disappeared by the time the lieutenants and bosses have been killed). This makes for very easy use while doing regular content but falters once hitting something for a few minutes since the Endurance part of DNA Siphon barely pays for its activation against a single live target.

Alright, good talk.

Farms farms farms. Once in a while someone mentions they made a FA character for regular playing and it is completely unkillable because of its toolbox. Anyone has a base build for it with their experiences on the topic?

Yeeeeeees, buuuuuuut, thiiiis iiiiiiiis fooooooor theeeeeeee claaaaaaaass caaaaaalled taaaaaaaankeeeeeeer.

Tanker is a class, not a role.

YOU!