Sovera

Sure? I don't get the reasoning, but there is no one single 'correct' way. I don't even consider runnings TFs as powerleveling. I see it as: I need XP to level. At maximum level I want the accolades since they are all pretty easy to get. I run TFs, get the XP I need to level, get merits to gear the character, get progress for the accolades. A single TF is all it takes to be high enough level to do the next one, so no need to repeat them (outside of Numina at 35 since this playstyle means I reach level 33 and need to do something for the last two levels).

Ice does a lot of damage but this is partly because it can also take a lot of damage procs, which are sort of kind of like DoTs.

Funny that you should mention this because I dreamed up a Rad/Bio Sentinel last night which ought to surpass my previous Rad/Ninjutsu.

The praise on Sentinel damage is becoming a bit hyperbolic. When I said earlier that their damage in *practical* terms was good what I meant was that their nuke + Aim is available at every spawn making half of it dead from the start and only leftovers to mop. A Blaster does not do 'a little bit' more damage. It does on average twice the damage. Sentinel's Inferno + Aim is 600 damage (with the Offensive Adaptation of /Bio it should go up to around 800 damage), while a Blaster's inferno without Aim or BU does 1k. *With* it their Inferno does 2k. One recharges in 25 seconds and the other in 40 seconds, sure, but because Inferno does so much damage there is no point in popping Aim + BU with it and a player can do Inferno + AoEs on one spawn, and then the next spawn use Aim + BU + AoEs. The best pylon time I saw with a Sentinel was 3 minutes. The best time with a Blaster was 1:30-ish, though usually around 2 minutes which *is* pretty close. Saying a Blaster will diminish their offense to stack defense is a bit daft. What can they add more when recharge has reached near perma? Procs, sure, but Blasters do so much damage that they don't even *care* about procs and their best offensive set doesn't even take well to procs. I recently tried a radiation blaster with quadruple procs expecting some unholy marriage of blaster damage and a proc monster only to be disappointed at 5 minute pylon times. That's how much disparity there is between Blaster sets unlike Sentinel's homogenization (Aim + BU + Radiation's Blast's T9 doing 1200 damage while Inferno does 2k. Procs? Whatever for?). And what will a Sentinel add to their offense once they defense is softcapped? The only thing is procs, which are more the territory of ST and not AoE, and the game really is 90% AoE. Bottom line: - Without a DPS meter like Recount it does not matter nor will we ever manage to know who is staying ahead. It's a pity really, because I *loved* the mini game of trying to be the best. It's what pushed me to get better and in raid guilds where I was #1 in damage I stopped trying while if I was 2nd or 3rd I'd scour the net for theorycrafting and test and experiment and keep pushing to improve. - Blaster has the burst when it needs it (ITF, Cyst, pack of kheldian bosses, Sentinel does 600 (800 if /Bio) damage, Blaster does 2k. In fact, it does a lot more since it will then continue to unload their AoEs while still empowered by Aim and BU) but can pace themselves to keep up with a Sentinel's sustain by not blowing BU + Aim + T9 every time that they are up. This is what's called a low ceiling. No matter what the Sentinel will never get past that 600-800 ceiling while a Blaster can pick and choose whether to play in sustain damage mode or burst mode. - The difference between the two is not all that large for someone who loves a Sentinel. It's not like playing one means insta-kick from teams. I mean, yes, the average Sentinel using a theme and six slotting their build like normal will see 6-7 minute pylon times (I'm using pylon times as a reference, not because pylon times matter) while someone in the in will be proccing the heck out of their build and picking their secondaries with care. Simply by loading up in procs my Rad/Ninjutsu went from 6 minutes to 4 minutes. I keep using Nihilii's Sentinel as a reference since he had the best times I saw yet, but by picking /Rad he went to 3 minutes. If a Blaster gets an average of two minutes if doing *well*, then three minutes is pretty darn close. But that three minute time is not going to be for the average player though. That said there are Fire Blasters in the pylon thread with 4-5 minutes (perhaps using Flares as a filler (yes, I'm roasting you @modest, come at me! *flees!* 😄 )).

Who has two thumbs and fixed the Aim and T9 ugly recharge times? That's right, this guy. What can I saaaaaay except you're welcome, you're welcome! It's down to a much more satisfying 27 seconds both. Less once Force Feedback starts proccing. I would have still liked to slot Inexhaustible better with health slots, and place in the Scaling Resists IO, but, eh. Shuffled some powers too. Why was Proton Volley at 24 when it opens at 18? No idea. But at its correct place the build now exemps all the way down to Posi 1 like a champ. I'm actually hyped to give it a Pylon twirl and see if I beat my Rad/ninjutsu 4 minutes on the dot. I mean, obviously it will since it has the same slotting but now boasts of Offensive Adaptation on top of KO Blow replacing X-ray Beam every 12 seconds or so. But dare I dream of 3 minute times to beat our reigning pylon king @nihilii? But Offensive Adaptation's 30% does not increase proc damage (tested), so it's not a simple 30% boost across the board considering how many procs are slotted.

It's the exact same damage as all other T9s though. If you'll go to the character creator in game and crank up the slider to 50, then check Fire, Rad, Sonic, etc the numbers are exactly the same with Fire having some extra DoTs, which, yes, will be enhanced by slotting and incarnates.

I haven't leveled this particular build yet, I was just talking about it in the Blaster VS Sentinel and was fresh from having knitted a Spines/Bio br00t for a friend so I went to look at it. But from having played a Fire/Bio in Justin and the Sonic/Bio I'll say that Ablative and Rebuild DNA are OP in keeping someone up. Ablative can be used pre-emptively, or it can be used as a heal, since it heals, casts an absorb shield *and* boosts regen by 200% which is ticking while the absorb shield is being chewed. In my experience with the Fire/Bio I could throw it at +4x8 and it survived fine. It will survive even fine-r as a Rad since we open with Aim + T9 and the T9 100% holds everything (unfortunately Cosmic Burst only Stuns so it does not stack with Atomic Blast's Hold, But KO Blow does have a Hold component) that survived the initial blast.

That Aim time is bothering me. And the recharge on the T9 could be better. If only the set at least had a KD skill that could be used for a Force Feedback proc to accelerat-... HELLO THERE, GENERAL KENOBI! 90% of the time we are in melee anyway, be it to open up with Atomic Blast or use Irradiate in the interim. And I found I rarely used the mass Immobilize outside of farming which I rarely do anyway. So it's a matter of exchanging X-ray Beam whenever the new contender has recharged. HYPE!

I wouldn't exactly trust HD's DPS calculator. I have no fundament for saying this other than their PPM formula isn't kosher just yet. As for Positron I fled from the Psi and Lethal procs to avoid the damage being resisted in the end game. It's two ACC/DMG Hamis, Gladiator's Toxic, Apocalypse Negative, Unbreakable Constraint Lethal (bah for lethal, but it's a purple proc) and Superior Blaster's Wrath Fire (it has recharge, which lowers the overall proc chance, but it counts as a purple which evens out IMO).

Just a modified version of my other Rad build. Mostly same deal, loads of procs backed by Rad allowing for -res, but in this case amped in 30% from /Bio's Offensive Stance. Atomic Blast + Aim (ugh, that horrible Aim recharge time) in HD does 593 damage. With Offensive Stance this goes up to 770 and that's assuming we are not fighting a hard target (AV/pylon) and used Cosmic Burst first (check the Rad/Ninjutsu build for ST rotation) and the -res procced, or if we are in Opportunity mode and got that sweet -res. I'm not even sure if HD takes in consideration a Sentinel's native -res. Why Rad? Rad allows for a multitude of procs including -res and Sentinel's sets are homogenized (hit create new character. Compare every set with the slider set to 50) to a point where no set stands heads and shoulders above the others (hello Fire in any other AT in the game). Fire's T3 attack is still bugged anyway. The reason I stopped messing with /Bio builds was the matter of softcapping defenses and how I was forced to keep on munching purples to be softcapped where they would eventually run out even if combining them. Taking inspiration on other builds I've cooked and some experience the build fixes this by pushing defense to 40% and then relying on Barrier to provide the other 5% (at the very least Barrier *always* provides 5%). This only works from 45+, but in my experience lower content than that is usually ran at +0 so it does not matter as much. So this allows to be /Bio *and* use inspiration combining binds (I have those scattered around in other builds if curious about them) to keep on producing and munching on reds instead of purples while getting to have /Bio's OP Ablative Shield and Rebuild DNA to stay alive. Radiation's T9 having a Hold makes it especially easy to survive. The recovery is low-ish at 3.12 per second (not accounting for the three end procs) and since it is a theorycrafted build I don't know if that is fine especially with Assault, feel free to toss out Assault and put in super Speed with a Celerity stealth IO for perfect stealth. If the Rad/Ninjutsu showed anything it was that Defensive Opportunity was a great endurance refiller though. Hasten is a bit weak sauce at 133 seconds, but eh, sacrifices had to be made. The Force Feedback in KO Blow ought to help. That Aim recharge is just horrible. The strength of a Sentinel is tossing T9s every 25 seconds. Doing it every 33 seconds is almost Blaster times. Aim and Atomic Blast recharge in 27 seconds. Less once Force Feedback gets rolling.

I don't know if we are yet. I know Flares used to be the go to filler skill, yes, but it was before the new PPM formula was brought up which shuffled things. Positron having a longer cast is not a problem as long as the other skills are not recharged by the time it has finished casting, and an attack chain eschewing Fire Ball and Flares seems to only win both in endurance and time spent casting if we are using only Blaze, Blazing Bolt and Positron Cell. Looking at the build I cooked up with 45% Musculature: - Flares at 156. - Fireball shows as doing 182 damage with 4.77 recharge. - Blaze at 417 and 2.77 recharge. - Positron at... it's hard to tell, 388? 422? with 5.5 recharge. - Blazing Bolt at 345 (I doubt this is correct with the new snipe formula though I have 21.7% ToHit) and recharging in 3.46 Blaze, Blazing Bolt, Blaze, Positron, Blaze has a one second between Blazes. Blaze being the monster hitter of the set and turned into the filler works well even with the one second gap between skills. Though I prefer that rotation there is also Blaze, BB, Positron, Fireball that shouldn't have a gap anymore but that's a lot less Blazes going out per minute.

Blazing Bolt is bugged on Sentinels, so they lose their T3, so testing the damage of a Fire Sentinel is moot until this is fixed. But Flares on a Blaster, really? Not Positron Cell with four damage procs? Flares? Wat? The scrapper pylon thread has Fire/Atomic doing 2 minute pylon runs. My Rad/Ninjutsu Sentinel had 287 DPS pylon with Rad only attacks for a 4 minute Pylon. If I was to remake it as a Rad/Bio, perfectly doable with what I've learned since then, this will be boosted by another 30%. I won't try to guess exactly the boost it would be since variables, but once Justin as test server is back I'm tempted to try it. Nihiili's Fire/Rad Sentinel (again, using Fire is gimping ourselves since the T3 is busted) achieved 3 minute runs so more than 287 DPS.

Overall I'd say Fire. Tremendous nuke. It's the Titan Weapon of Blasters. You're not nearly going to get the numbers of a BS on a Stalker (or Titan Weapons in any AT). Meleers tend to be beasts and undisputed kings of massive orange numbers.

That's true. To a point Sentinel's sets were normalized so much that we can almost say no set has a clear advantage. As I mentioned with a Blaster Radiation's T9 does 1200 damage. Inferno's does 2k. Brutal difference, but Radiation's T9 does a Hold and -def and etc etc so it's a tax that it pays. With a Sentinel both do *exactly* the same damage (go to the character creator, push the slider to 50, compare numbers) despite Radiation's Hold and -def and etc still being there. if we go down the list and compare T1 and T2 and even T3 the numbers are all pretty similar. The vaunted Fire, uber damage set, only has a small few DoTs which, I haven't mathed it, but seem that they would only just manage to make up for the lack of procs that the set can take compared to others. I'd do a practical test on Justin, but Fire's T3 is still bugged four months later and there is no point until it is fixed. @nihiliiilli's Fire Sentinel got 3 minute times, but his is /Rad armor and that set has some extra tools to bump damage up which may account for it more than using a procced out Char. All the times I've seen with Sentinels between @oldskool and others seem to hover around four minute and four minute and a half which further emphasize the uniformity of the offensive sets. Which isn't *bad*. It's good to choose something thematically and not grumble because we are gimping ourselves.

Why would you get stunned? CC is the big gigantic hole in the AT and Clarion, even just at T3, fixes this. I didn't even bother going to T4 Clarion and was never again stunned. Maybe in an ITF, sure, because there is so little CC floating there, but all toggles suppressed at the first hint of CC is a death trap. You're going to probably say you went for recharge or endurance, but seriously, both of those can be fixed within the build, but not CC protection. ITF is something that kills me easily since a blaster has no DDR, but my ninjutsu Sentinel dies just as easily since its DDR is just not enough. Since I play a gimmicky build that relies on /Atomic's -ToHit in Beta Decay and that only has a 15 yard radius I'm squishy to big death rooms (hello there, final room in LGTF) but that's what purples are for when the situation gets chaotic.

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.