Sovera

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:

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 😄