Sovera

After a tepid attempt at Dual Pistols I turned to a Beam seeking more damage. In the low levels we can feel it. The Disintegrate effect has noticeable chunks of HP removed which is noticeable coming from a Dual Pistols. This wanes later on, but I think (without having pylon tested for metrics) that the single target is actually decent. For a Sentinel. I expected more from the Disintegrate spreading having visions of loadsa splash damage, but not really. The splash damage is not all that being just a carrier for the effect which is ACTUALLY meant to trigger MORE damage when skills are used on something that has Disintegrate. In practice this doesn't work out too well since everything dies too fast. I took being level 40+ running a +3 ITF to finally feel I could use this mechanic. So, in practice. Using AoE or ST skills on a target that has Disintegrate makes it take extra damage. While leveling and everything dying fast this can be mostly ignored as nothing +0 lasts long. Open with Cutting Beam, use Refractor Beam, pick a target, use Disintegrate, Charged Shot, then Lancer Shot. This will spread Disintegrate and the next uses of Cutting Beam and Refractor Beam will thus do more damage to those affected. Piercing Beam might be better if it hits more than once mob, but screw dat 2.64 animation. Still, both Piercing and Lancer are interchangeable so pick what you'd like. After 32 things finally pick up. The AoE rotation becomes Disintegrate, Aim, Overcharge, Refractor Beam, Charged shot, cycling Disintegrate (to start the spread), followed by Charged Shot (to activate Defensive Opportunity which in AoE situations ought be up 90% of the time, but also also to fish for Force Feedback procs) and Refractor Beam (doing a bit extra damage to those who have Disintegrate). These three can be used near gapless even before the build is finished. In ST situations replace Refractor for Lancer Shot. I've stopped using Cutting Beam at this point though I suppose an argument could be made for using it. But long animation cones that do double digit damage are just 🙂 . I suggest trying it and see how it works out. In my experience the Aim + Overcharge alpha kills most minions leaving only lieutenants and bosses and those are being tackled by the rest of the team, so using the cone for 4-5 mobs doesn't feel interesting and I prefer to help killing the hard targets with Refractor Beam tossed in as a nod to AoE. A more advanced rotation (if things live that long) would be Disintegrate, Charged Shot, Refractor Beam, Lancer Shot, Charged shot, Refractor Bem. Basically using Disintegrate only every two rotations. The good interactions with the build: Defensive Opportunity *really* likes Cutting Beam, Disintegrate (I think) , Refractor Beam, and Overload. A single use of any of these on a group and the opportunity bar fills to the max. This also means a use of these ALSO triggers Defensive Opportunity flooding us with small heals and endurance. As a purely ranged character on top of this it means not only decent self healing that tops us but also that my experience is leveling at 90%-100% endurance the whole time which is why there is no attempt at adding more Recovery to the build. The expensive end game build. Cremate and Fire Sword Circle are meant to be fillers and not really be used. Some might say not using Fire Sword Circle would be a waste and I possibly agree with them (mobs do try to come to us, this character is an agro magnet). Use if you'd like. Mids also says there are two free slots but it's just Mids not able to handle Fire Sword where it is. Leveling build/I don't have money for the super expensive stuff build. No effort has been made to fix the defense. This is merely an interim build:

Well, in my case, Scrappers are the only thing worth playing. Anything else is faffing around. Even at low levels my Claws scrapper will plunge into a group, Spin, get a crit and wipe several minions. On the other hand any Sentinel will go three AoE rotations (use all AoEs, wait for recharge, do it again) before killing even level minions. That's... just... bad. But when I get bored of meleeing I do come back to Sentinels because they just start early. They are tough, and at 32 they start wiping groups partly on their own. If you never played one this level 32 thing is what they live off on with 25 second nukes once all is slotted up. But outside of it the damage is just nothing special. But approach a spawn, pop Aim, drop the nuke, quickly throw the rest of the AoEs while Aim is still up and most things are pretty hurt with all minions dead. The sad thing is afterwards with everything still alive and the nuke recharging 😄 Anyway, I'm being too pessimistic. It's good fun to be tough and zoom around shooting things and not have to chase them. It's also nice to not have to worry about CC or being squishy. I would recommend a Beam/ sentinel, I guess. The ST damage seems nicer to me (I haven't tested yet to see if it actually is better from others I have played) while the AoE seems about the same as the others (two digit AoEs, wooo! The AT really is balanced around that fast recharging nuke). If you want I have a Beam/Bio and I was thinking of throwing a quick write-up for it.

I've looked at this combo and even cooked up a build, but the damage numbers were so abysmally low, even on a Sentinel's standards, that I didn't touch it after theorycrafting a build. The one thing that would liven up the build would be removing the 15 second CD on repeating Water Jet, but with the 15 seconds, eh. It does seem to have nice AoE though. But after playing water a couple of times the combo system is too unwieldy. There is a disconnect in the devs who cooked Water/ and Beam/ with the actual gameplay. Things happen too fast to be building combo points and the 5% chance is an artifact of ye old D&D times that messes with combo building too. That said go for it, maybe you will enjoy it. Your build had a lot of empty slots so it is hard to gauge things. I will say that you probably do not need at all all those slots in Stamina and Health. Defensive Opportunity is all your need. I'm leveling a Beam/Bio atm and unlike my scrappers who are touch and go with endurance all the way to 40+ this gal is either at 90% endurance or 100% for the whole duration (though mind the Beam/ interacts very nicely with Defensive Opportunity which may not be the case of Water). By the same token I find I hardly ever use Rebuild DNA so I have it at minimal slotting which is more than enough. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've had to use it on a 100% ranged character who has Ablative as a first line of defense. Were Water with any sort of melee range skills like a PbAoE nuke and you might need that extra heal more, but this is not the case. Important: pre-emptive munching on purples is better for your health than munching on greens. Use your favorite base macro and replenish your purple insps between missions. I'm going to throw you the build I had worked out, just shift things according to your desires (like taking out Flight/Afterburner for Athletic/etc). Cremate and Fire Sword Circle are mules and not particularly meant to be used, so again, shift around at will.

It's not the tanker thread. The overwhelming response has been 'yes please, can we have it yesterday?'.

Yes, I've abandoned my DP/Bio as well. I thought it would get better but it hasn't. I can't help but feel that feel Sentinels are a baby class. Fun to play with a bit but clunky and weak so at some point we move back to a real AT. My Beam/Bio is feeling good, but looking under the hood and it's also weak. AoEs doing double digits means painfully whittling down enemies. While my Claws Scrapper has Spin doing 200 damage, and if it crits then double that. It's common for me to plunge into a spawn and do Follow-Up and Spin and most minions are dead, and no need to wait 25 seconds to do it again.

*vibrates harder still*

Throw it into your SG bank so another character can use it if they ever need it?

Ugh, I had the build all planned and with that I'll have to re-tweak it 😄 Thanks for the tip though.

The 'instead of a knockdown it does extra fire damage' wording doesn't actually interfere then?

For you DP experts what ammo choice are you using? For procs to be use the lethal ammo must be used?

S'done already.

I had a triple procced pure range Rad/ sentinel which I used to think did amazing damage until I tested and had a 4 minute pylon kill and no tweaking improved it (6 minutes without using procs). 4 minutes is sort of decent since my my pure ranged tanky Blaster did it in 3 minutes, but it's slooooow. Perhaps if it had cool short animations instead of lengthy ones it would at least be a blender.

Adding to the idea above, a marked target loses the base 5% chance of missing we have baked in (why do we still have this DnD artifact? Either we are accurate enough to hit or not, and as I joked on a TF yesterday if I had 95% chance to fail missing winning the lotto I would like to do it on CoH). It may not be glamorous, it might not be -res, but no missing attacks would be a bump in the damage both in team or alone.

I'm going to add more to Replacement's words. This *is* turning needlessly hostile for what is a bit of harmless banter on the forums, but what Solarverse did I would have appreciated when I ran an underleveled team against Market Crash's last boss. We tried, we got defeated several times, people gave up. Three times, and they gave up... Only later did I learn that the last boss does a -HP debuff and knowing this did I pay attention and sure enough there are no defenses and resistances in the world that can keep us up when we go from 1.7k HP to 600 HP. So if someone had said, after the first wipe, 'Guys, if you are being targetted take a few hits but then run away for someone else to take the aggro so the debuff drops' then I'm sure we could have managed it without the disbanding. And while a lot of people here are acting as if they were born bred and raised suckling on CoH's teat I'm pretty sure that they had to learn it. A widow blinding or the Red Prototype doing a -HP debuff are good things to be made aware of. Personally even now I drop the SG macro base into the chat when running a TF instead of assuming everyone knows of it by now. And I still get the occasional 'oh hey, this is *very* useful!' indicating someone didn't.

That was exactly my reaction as well. And plus not needing so many sets allows to aim for different goals with an EA. That said your 'mistake' was aiming for 45% since the last 5% are a bitch. 40% is the sweetspot allowing for some more freedom in recovery and recharge bonuses. As for /Bio's S/L resistance it hovers around 63-65% with Offensive up, add another 5% if going the Barrier route. I'd personally not aim for incarnate softcap. 45% is fine for most everything and a small purple throws us at near incarnate cap, and those can be easily replenished between missions. Defense debuffs are /bio's big weakness though, no lie. ITF is that achille's heel. But depending on the build it can work, we can't just act like the build is immortal to *everything*. WM in particular can face the ITF thanks to all the CC. Mobs aren't attacking if they are on their back and the hard hitting WM does is killing them in droves while they flop.

/bio has better ish resists, both have softcaps, EA's heal is a trifle too long and the fact it is used for Recovery means it is often 'wasted' and is not present when healing is needed, while /Bio's Ablative Armor triplea as heal, absorb and regen. But for regular play I don't think my perceived squishyness in EA has a bearing and it will do just fine. I just stress test it and it does not keep where /bio in the same setting does.

Easy enough. EA: Much easier to soft cap with EA. Endurance woes much alleviated at 35 with the caveat you're 'wasting' your heal instead of having it when healing is needed.. Squishier than /Bio (imo). Bio: almost forced to pick Ageless which does not mesh well at all with /Bio's difficulty in raising S/L defenses. Scrappers get Shadow Meld which pumps up the defense for 15 seconds but with an abominable 3 second animation and that does not mesh well at all with Momentum. BUT (I never tried this so take it with a grain of salt) not needing to dip into epic pools for AoE it should be doable to rely on DNA Siphon for regular play with Parasitic Aura for an extra oomp in Recovery and defensive values, while also going into the Body Mastery pool for more extra recovery, finally this all allowing to pick Barrier instead of Ageless which allows /Bio to only aim for 40% letting Barrier add the last 5%. That said WM nearly as TW good with much less clunkiness and if you were not enthused by it then TW might not be your cuppa. The endurance requirements are much higher than WM.

I'm going to quote myself here as I keep on leveling the character. I'm currently level 35 and the feeling of clunkyness does not abate. The whole set hinges around one power and that's Power Siphon. Take it early, use it often. It's just clunky. The damage is nothing special without Power Siphon but it does not give an immediate big boost and instead it's a ramp up. So we don't feel it if we use it for an AoE, but we do feel it if we use it then get close to a pack and start hitting a boss while the mobs decide on approaching, and *then* use an AoE. The clunkyness reasserts itself with a spawn half dead or just a boss and minion left. Do we go through the glacial two second animation and then not have the power at the next pack between killing the boss and minion + travel time, or chip at the boss and minion without Power Siphon? This is not usually a Scrapper consideration but the T1, 2 and 3 aren't hard hitting powers since they can be had so early, so it all hinges around the synergy with Power Siphon. At least it does not do animation lock so with practice we can use it while almost at the spawn instead of reaching it and *then* using it. Burst is a weaker version of Footstomp. Nearly half a second longer, no RP BS about needing to be near the ground to use it, I'd say about twice the damage of Footstomp (conservative just glancing at Mids and not mathing it up) with half the size. Shorter recharge. But a Footstomp still. Fully IOed up it recharges in 4.6 seconds and it takes a Force Feedback Proc so we can be even faster than those 4.6. The animations are the selling part and sticking to the first three attacks leaves the set fast, lean, and mean. Someone mentioned how Claws FU, Slash, Focus looks a bit spastic and I agree in the sense the animations don't flow, but with Kinetic Melee it's a pleasure to watch those first three attacks chain into each other seamlessly. Objectively Claws is still the better set IMO. Being able to have some distance and spam Focus + Shockwave is always useful on things like the blue circles of death in Tinpex and saves on running otherwise. Being able to spam FU, Spin and Shockwave feels better than just relying on Burst and only occasionally using Repulsing Torrent due to the horrid aperture and animation time, and it also saves on dipping into the epic pools for extra AoE. FU feels better than Power Siphon since it blends into the attack chain instead of cutting us off for 2 seconds.

I believe you may be thinking of Champions Online. There are no oversized materials around and that sort of stuff would have been recycled for other content.

I can't stick to a character for more than a few days before making a new one. I have no interest in being level 50 without a goal. But my Claws/Bio is my favorite to the point I did not even strip her of the IOs as I usually do and just left her perfectly slotted so I can slip back into her when ever I'd like, and I'm just re-earning the earning the inf to slot my next alt(s).

Truth is nothing is really hard and if you didn't even wipe it just reinforces that your worry was unfounded. This is not often the case in Posi 1 where that end fight can be pretty darn tough depending on the team composition. I have had plenty of wipes there and the fact the enemies look all the same in ink black and have the same name just makes it hard for me to even distinguish them. I usually pay zero attention to my team's costumes unless we're idling and waiting for someone. What I usually do is pop four purples and leroy it. That said you did nothing bad and I will applaud having done it. Because, you just put the finger on what happened. Blinds can be very dangerous and also extremely annoying, so that group that played with you may not indeed have patted you on the back but thanks to that tidbit of information they came out informed and the next time, who knows, one of their alts will reach the end of Posi 1 and spread that bit of info if they notice a widow is in the team.

I had the same experience with the Decimation proc when I tested in a Sentinel. I still have the Gaussian proc because it works so well on BU powers but I had an inkling it wouldn't achieve as much on FU's super fast recharge which this seems to validate. I'm currently leveling a Kinetic Melee but hmmmm, I don't know. It can be interesting and animations are really pretty but why does the cone have the same aperture as if we were playing a ranged character on top of the 2.5 animation time? This makes Repulsing Torrent a much weaker Shockwave and removes the ability that Claws has to not dip outside the primary in order to have a full AoE chain. I've dipped into Mu for Ball Lightning for the planned build but there will be gaps unlike with Claws with FU, Shockwave, Spin spam with no gaps. It does make for some sweet early leveling as we bounce around doing much more damage than others do by dint of having two AoEs that can be spammed with a Force Feedback on each. And we really notice this. Energy Torrent comes at level 8 and we can get an Overwhelming Force proc at level 10 to fit it much sooner than Sudden Acceleration at 17. Doing a TF, approach a group, Repulsing Torrent at a distance, go in close, Burst. If any of the Force Feedback procced then Repulsing Torrent is back up. Move away, Repulsing Torrent. Go back in, T3, T2, Burst has recharged, use it, move away, Torrent. So in terms of busy, yeah, we're not just plunging into the middle of the group and spamming attacks. The running back and forth is pretty active and with both Torrent and Burst having a KD component we're helping with soft CC. But in terms of game play and numbers the two together do not even kill white minions so we are bouncing around and not achieving really a lot. Mind, at these levels (28 atm) Claws is only relying on Spin so KM is still doing more. But once 32+ rolls in all this kangaroo business is a waste of time compared to Claws planting their feet and doing their AoE rotation with minimal adjusting. The set does feel clunky though. The damage from the BU power is very noticeable but A) no such thing as a free lunch and the set is balanced around it. And B) again, clunkyness, two second cast time instead of 1.3 every 36 seconds (once everything is slotted up) eats up on time doing damage unlike Claws whose power-up comes from passively doing the attack chain. On the upside the damage is less resisted than slash and we aaaaaalmost can do a T2 and T3 attack chain. Being able to remove the T1 would be almost a good thing but even all slotted up there's a 0.7 second gap and with the T1 being a one second cast it makes sense to use it, especially since the T1 has a Force Feedback. But there is no pleasure had in using T1s in the end game. T2, T3, T2, T1 rotation minimizes it for regular gameplay bit lowers the time hitting with the T3.

How do you 'feel' KM, Myshkin? I really really like the animations and sticking to the first three attacks makes the set bearable. The AoEs are lesser versions of what Claws has though. but obtained much earlier. Did you happen to throw it at a pylon just for a metric? I say this because using the low level attacks for a rotation superficially seems a bit iffy.

Welp, I've said my point. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind just putting the facts out there. More power for those who seek making those 10 inf sales.

Bad idea? Wat? I buy whatever I need for 5k to not bargain with prices. When we measure profits in the millions who is worried about 250 or 5k inf? I get what you're saying and when I returned to CoH in Homecoming I set five salvage racks and filled them up like, in days. But I also had this big plan to be all economical and efficient and have a character that would have the inventor badges to make crafting generic IOs cheaper, and that's the one who would supply all other characters and etc etc. I actually did this for three or four alts. Then I realized I was wasting my time (more precious than fictional currency) because buying generic IOs was pocket change. One Death from Below puts a new alt to level 8. At level 8 Posi 1 opens. After doing a single Posi 1 I am high enough to do a Posi 2. Once I both are done I am usually at level 22 and the merits earned have made me around 3-4 millions to which fully equipping myself in generic IOs will cost about 2 mill. So each new alts gears itself without need of fancy convoluted worries about salvage, crafting, crafting badges, save up pocket change by doing all of this and etc. I will always craft my purple recipes since that usually brings 3-5 million profit, but even that is usually just ugh, pocket change, but I do it anyway since they drop rarely enough that it is not a repetitive burden. Once level 50 money comes in by the bucket. 50 million a day is nothing out of the ordinary just by doing a Tinpex and the double Hami raids, and that's about an hour of content (smidge hyperbole as actually getting enough people together for Hami can take half an hour in itself, but the content itself is about an hour, and usually more like 40 minutes of actually running those three things). This does not include drops and the raw inf from doing the content. At this point we just realize that, yeah, 250 inf? 5 inf? 🙂 Unlike white recipes (that tend to always sell for about 100k) and orange salvage (that sells for 500k), and the yellow/orange recipes (usually worth 1-5k and extremely useless, but at least has the lotto aspect that MAYBE one of them is a 1-10 mill jackpot), white salvage has no jackpot and no worth. There will never be something worth lots or even a chance of, so it just uselessly piles on. So actually a salvage blocking recipe like the P2W vendor has for white recipes might actually INCREASE prices, which is good for you. Once what is available runs out scarcity will make the prices hitch up a bit (just a bit though, common salvage is common) for those who care to sell it.