Sovera

For those who read my last build where I lamented over the fact its AoE was weak this is what I came up with. It pleases me on the AoE front though losing the 'fun' and beastly survivality that the Sonic/Bio boasted from an early stage. There are several persons in this thread that helped refine the build, between help with Ageless tips and alternative slotting, but @oldskoolis the one I'm going to name as the one who pushed and paved the way towards the triple proc alternate. The early iteration was an Elec/Ninjutsu that turned into a Rad/Ninjutsu for the ability to slot more procs. The real difficulty here is the theme, as my friend mockingly asked 'So, you're a ninja who throws radioactive beams?' Well, listen here you little sh-.. Ahem! My early builds focused heavily on /bio for the yummy 30% extra damage, though /bio has some great defensive tools in Rebuild DNA and Ablative shield to the point of making everything else extraneous. No need for Defensive Stance, no need for Parasitic Leech. This came at the cost of only having defenses up to 33% and needing to munch on a small purple inspiration to render me softcapped. This *usually* worked fine but it became annoying if I happened to run out of purples which was *very* noticeable in combat. Even with inspiration combining binds this happened enough to annoy me. So I switched to Ninjutsu. Easy softcap to the point I didn't even take the fighting pool. Endurance clicky (very useful while leveling. Still useful to pop between packs), heal (okay heal, nothing special), built in stealth (sure, why not?). The alternative would be Super Reflexes but it lacks a built in heal even though it boasts of an absorb shield. In my testing Aid Self simply did not keep up with the damage though. The reasoning was simple: instead of doling out purples and be in danger if I run out I instead run on reds which makes up for the offensive output of /Bio. This has worked very very well. The build boasts of not having the Fighting Pool which minimized the useless powers in it. One thing Pines was tripping me was saying that Shinobi-ri can not be used with Combat Jumping, but after testing they do work together. The build could have used Energy Aura and it's still something to consider because the heal in Ninjutsu is weak (IMO). It's a nice pick-me-up but it is not going to save anyone if the going gets tough. But EA is typed and after several Bio builds I was getting a bit sick of worrying about picking small bonuses to 36 different damage types (for example, it will always have a toxic and psi weakness though neither is a popular damage type). Still, with EA's built-in recharge bonus and its heal having a big regen component to it I will probably work on an alternate build using it. I play a Council farm when in a farming mood (I prefer Council since they run to me, where fire mobs tend to stay at a distance plinking at me. In either case neither fire nor Council mobs hurt in the slightest) and I don't think it lags much behind traditional farming builds. With the T4 Musculature and T4 Degenerative I kill a pack with 10 seconds (no bosses) to spare for my nuke to recharge, which covers nicely travel distance to the next pack. For those newer to the game working towards getting the +1 shift from Incarnates is a big big damage boost since +4 enemies turn into +3. This alone increases the damage and the accuracy factor by a lot. I started with Neutrino Bolt and eventually changed to X-Ray Beam. The ST chain worked fine, so it's a matter of picking Offensive Opportunity or Defensive. With @Sunsette having done research on Offensive and showing there is no huge gain on either at the very end-game just pick which one you care more. Don't hurt yourself trying to level with X-Ray Beam because it has a longer recharge than Neutrino and at the low levels there will be a biiiiiig gap. But, I think, after obtaining Proton Stream it is fine to switch Neutrino to X-Ray Beam because boy, is Neutrino bad or what? Caveat, in the low levels we favor burst damage more than sustain and having that extra damage tick may be more welcome. Make an informed choice though. X-Ray Beam does do a bit more base damage and the defensive Opportunity makes Endurance a non thing, but Ninjutsu's endurance clicky can take care of business allowing for Neutrino Blast and still allowing for the Destiny Incarnate to be a free pick. Chain Fences shines well in how it keeps everything clustered (do let them surround you first) but it also recharges so fast and is well slotted that an AV putting on a Benny Hill tape will find itself stuck in place before they can get going since AVs are weaker to immobilizes than they are to holds. The AoE rotation can be a simple Aim, Irradiate, Neutron Bomb (this gives times for mobs to come out of their stupor and rush to surround us), then Nuclear Blast, Irradiate, Chain Fences, Neutron Bomb and keep going until all are dead. Move Chain Fences up the list if mobs are starting to run earlier than that. In teams skip the fancy and just Aim, Nuclear Blast, Irradiate, Neutron Bomb. Pick a hard mob, Proton Stream, go back to Irradiate and Neutron Bomb. The opener ST rotation I am using is Aim, Proton Stream, Atomic Blast, Cosmic Burst, Proton Stream to ensure all fit in Aim. After that it's just Proton Stream, Cosmic Burst, X-Ray Beam until Aim has recharged. Overall while neither the build nor its results are nothing earth shattering (4 minute pylon kill) considering the cost of what went into it it does prime for its ease of use. ST attacks are triple procced for extra damage, nuke is up every 26 seconds, Chain Fences keeps stragglers from straggling, all the AoEs are circular and can be spammed, Lightning Field just ticks away while we're doing our thing, softcapped defenses defend, and both HP and endurance clickies keep us topped, which leaves the user free to use a movement bind to combine insps into reds. The last iteration of the build: - Softcap achieved, but without much of a buffer. Ninjutsu's DDR is poor, IMO. A hit or two and are cascading failuring hard. This leaves several options to explore. A) Ageless Radial Epiphany will make Hasten perma and have us chockful of DDR while also doing some minimal DPS increase. I will post my tests about this further below. No particular DPS increase, though the DDR aspect is still valid and perma Hasten is welcome. Having Aim and the T9 up sooner is helpful when in a team and the debuff resistance protects against sappers such as Freakshow (the endurance clicky is almost enough to keep up with Freakshow though). B) Barrier Core Epiphany will give a large defense boost and resistances. But, you might ask, we already are defense softcapped, won't the extra defense be useless? Yes and no. Yes, we won't make use of the extra defense past 45% (or 59% in incarnate content). But no since the extra defense will act as an absorb shield for our regular defense in terms of DDR,. Barrier also grants extra resists which will make us survive better. C) Rebirth. Large heal and regen to heal back the hits that we do take. In my experience playing the game I seldomly got whittled down little by little until I died which is where Rebirt would shine. It tends to be insta kills such as routinely standing in the middle of +4 ITF spawns without a hitch for the whole TF and suddenly one of the small fat bosses doing a spinning leap crit that kills me dead from full to empty on 1685 HP. That tells me that Barrier is going to be the smarter move to mitigate the nature of such deaths. But do we plan for the 5% deaths or the remaining 95% of the game? Decisions, decisions. Make an informed choice though. Smarter move? Get all three and use according to what content you're doing. - Resistances buffed where possible making for a near EA level of 23% S/L, a meaty 40% to Fire/Cold which is by accident, but welcome for dem farms, then 19% energy, negative, 33% toxic and 40% psi. I worked towards this because as I was leveling I felt squishy as hell when my softcapped defenses were punctured through. - 1658 HP. Get dem accolades. Yes, it's dull, but it's a 200 HP boost. There is a guide on these forums. The OP is a bit sparse but there are more comments after it that flesh out the thing. - All ST attacks are triple procced. The attack chain has just a small gap with Hasten up, not enough to use a weaker attack in the interrim. This is a two minute improvement on a pylon kill (six minutes with a 'normal' slotting) from the original build, so definitely go this route. - Hasten brought down to 128 seconds, which is acceptable, and perma if going with Ageless. - A substantial 3.84 endurance recovery (Hero Designer does not account for Performance shifter, but it's another 0.24 + 0.43 from Panacea on top of 3.17 native) which is helped by Defensive Opportunity and Ninjitu's endurance clicky... - ...which is good because I have two flex powers I don't know what to do with since I have no slots to spare. I took Tactics and Assault and they are probably too end heavy for what they provide, but between the native end recovery + Defensive Opportunity + Ninjitsu's endurance clicky it is more than fine. I did Pylon testing a few times already and even after 4 to 6 minutes of wailing on one I never had to use the endurance clicky. This despite running NINE toggles. The endurance never dipped further than 70% and the next Defensive Opportunity simply refilled the endurance bar. The endurance clicky is there for non stop running in missions or farming where we don't do ST attacks as much. Clicking on it as we run to the next spawn has us at full at the start of each fight. The build: To see the binds I am using that allow to have our mez clicky and Hasten going off automaticaly while also combining insps into reds check out this thread.

You ought to have tried a demon thermal then. Still gets healing for pets and team, butthe res shields marry very well with res aura thatthe pets have, plus all the AV kiiling and team buffing tools thermal has.

I ran a Citadel (CAVES!!!) and as usual paid zero attention to whom I recruited as long as they were willing. We ended up with FOUR MMs! IN TINY CAVES! It was glorious and we laughed all the way through it 😄

Speaking of I just did one. Alternated Frost Sleet with Tornado to plink at the pylons without having summoned my pets. Reached the bowl phase and alternated those again to spread out the goodness. pets were mostly fine until they kept chasing mobs so far away they would be out of range and be one shot.

I believe so, but it only hits one target.

Kind words, Nihilii o/

I'd settle for ranged pets staying at range even if they have to wait.

Defenses works as you said, resistance will only work for the appropriate resistance.

Ok?

Well, that's good to know. It goes against what I have read, but if you have tested it then alright.

From all I have heard Overwhelming only has a *chance* to turn a KB to a KD. Have you actually experimented this in game or were you just assuming it will act like this?

I know you want to be useful, but considering a pylon dies in 4-5 seconds does it really matter? Plink it to get contribution and move along with the herd to the next pylon. This mostly shows how the MM has fallen behind with the game's evolution. Pets don't have a travel power, so even so much as using Hover will leave them behind, and if we switch to Fly we might as well forget having them for the next pack. By the time they have arrived someone has used their T9 and there are but a few scattered mobs left.

? Elaborate, my TL;DR fellow.

You still have an Overwhelming Force in Tornado instead of Sudden Acceleration, (despite having read how overwhelming is only a *chance* of turning KB into KD I tested it to be sure and it worked just fine in Tornado, with the bonus of adding damage to it) and do you really feel that replacing Tactics is a good gamble? Your pets will be -1 and -2 and you haven't particularly slotted them for accuracy.

Why the overwhelming force instead of Sudden Acceleration in Tornado? You have nothing to heal yourself or your pets. Is the plan to drop insps on them? I feel like dropping Dual Wield for O2 would help more than trying to fish for FF procs. Hasten is already near perma and a single FF proc from Tornado will do the trick. Other than these little quibbles I think you have a lovely build here. I particularly like how we can go around in Bodyguard mode and just let the pets go nuts, because Storm is doing damage during the alpha. With other MMs I'm forced to drop out of BG to direct the pets. In fact, I'mma make one this moment. Altitis, GO! Edit: Btw, from what I recall reading BG mode just tacks on 75% resists, it does not add 75% on top of what resists we have. That means depending on how much time you spend in BG mode chasing resists may not be all that useful.

I tried a BR/SR thinking it would be a beast in defensive terms, but found the lack of self healing too much a problem. Throwing the character at a +4x8 had it die very very fast with Aid Self unable to keep up between interrupts (a single interrupt IO wasn't of much help) and the low-ish 30% heal despite being a fire farm (no cascading failures) and being softcapped. Much like Oldskool I believe Ninjutsu to be the near perfect secondary and the more I play Bio chasing the 30% extra damage mirage the more I think it so. In the end my Bio builds require me to keep purples to softcap which could be reds instead, and that by itself replaces the 30% damage boost of bio.

It is very good. Typical panic button, you click it and you're near immortal. But I found that I very rarely needed it to the point it sat there not being used. If you want a panic button that is it though. But I find when I die it is rather instant instead of being whittled down. In a team we hardly need the purple inspirations less alone a panic button. Solo I found just Ablative was enough to mitigate the damage with Rebuild DNA for recouping HP (not strictly necessary since Ablative boosts our regen as well). In particular with this build who has a ton of self healing from the primary as a Sentinel (in AoE situations).

You have infinite merits in the test server, so head to the merit vendor (there's one in the City Hall of Atlas) and buy as many enhancers as you require to superior all your needs.

Anything that reaches 45% defense and has a built in heal. Of course the 'toughest at WHAT' applies. Pylons? That implies long term sustain and enough res to mitigate the hits. +4x8 in a team? Not need for much with a team sharing agro. +4x8 solo? Burst damage taking down the mobs mitigates the need to be all tricked out in defense. All around toughest thing impossible to kill? No such thing, the devs placed tricks around the game to prevent that. Either auto hit abilities or sapping or carnies or whatever.

As I play I'm thinking that AoE caps don't matter as much as it may seem. We almost always initiate with a T9 after all. Two or more will be going off in a team. Minions are almost always wiped out in the initial T9 burst, and the remainder lieuts and bosses don't make more than ten targets. In practical terms the AoE cap is not, I feel, as limiting as it looks on paper. Radius is more important and we have heaps of that. That said any AoE that only hits six targets is just bad bad bad and ought to be fixed. At *least* ten targets, please. My new elec/bio is doing a tremendous job at clearing out packs due to being able to have an AoE rotation it can sit down in the middle of a spawn and exert. As a bonus it also saps coincidentally, not something aimed for, but a happy side-effect. I just did a Manticore TF and reliably keeping the bosses from pulling their T9s was satisfying, furthermore as not built or even aiming for it, simply doing a DPS rotation.

Probably my last post on this build since I've done as much with it as I cared. I was hoping for a bit of conversation and less of a monologue, but I'm guessing I'm too long winded and my basic ramblings don't have the hard math to back them to make for a conversation. It's my belief the last build I posted works very well, and if anything it is the build I would advise for a newbie sentinel. The constant CC starting in the very low levels with AoE KD and AoE Sleep (later replaced by Fire Cages) + refilling Opportunity with a single cone + the vampiric effect of AoE Defensive Opportunity makes leveling and teaming a breeze and a pleasure. No endurance problems, lots of HP returns, lots of CC to give time for regen to work. As I mentioned in the title Sonic/Bio is a hidden gem hardly ever mentioned but it deserves more credit. The only thing it lags behind is solo farming. The cones do not lend themselves well to it and I find all the re-positioning to cost so many seconds that my nuke has recharged before I've finished a +2 spawn. I would have liked to do a pylon test just for numbers, but I'm still lacking a few purples and T4s, and I've moved on to another build since I don't really grind the end-game much (hello altitis). I may return just for that since transferring IOs is allowed (though only 7 tabs is too few to hold a full build's IOs, argh) but for now I'm leveling an AoE beast build I'll post about later.

With the exception of Dark Armor it's baked into the the CC protection.

One of the new servers made it so controllers had their pets at level 1. When I saw that I was blown away. SO level IOs and pets both at starting at level 1 would make the low levels so much smoother. We just slog through the first 22 levels without any slots because why bother when they give almost nothing. Imagine not waiting until level 22 to actually slot stuff. Even a no inf lowbie can slowly buy stuff to at least improve their accuracy. No need to tell someone to 'bear with it' and 'just grit your teeth' to reach level 32/38. The low levels are not hard, just not much fun. I feel the fun factor would grow geometrically when the slow controllers are actually helping with the damage or soloing from the straight go.

I don't know what you mean. I rarely if ever get CCed in normal play, excepting ITF's final boss or the DiB final boss double Shivans who seem to cut through CC protection. That said you can consult Pines/Mids and check the differences between scrappers and sentinels.

Alright, I don't see where I can improve this further, but I welcome advice. There were plenty of small changes incorporated in this. Super Speed got ditched for Stealth. I took the trouble of messing with Pines' options to suppress Stealth so we see the actual defense while in combat and the magic number has been (mostly) achieved at 32.2% for all except S/L which is slightly higher than the goal. The stealth IO is now slapped on to Sprint for the combined effect of perfect Stealth, which was something I really really really wanted. Athletic Regulation got worked in (HELLO DDR! And some minor hover speed too, I guess). I removed Force Feedback because of two reasons. One of them is that perma Hasten has been achieved and in any case the recharge proc is tied to my solo mode. Solo mode I will be using the cones, but not in teams, so the proc's usefulness will be situational. The second reason is that the only thing that still benefits from *more* recharge is my nuke, and in practical terms less than 25 seconds is not needed. I'm not going to use my T9 twice in a pack (well, normally I wouldn't unless it got down to 15 seconds like Archery's) and between cleaning up the harder mobs, picking up stragglers and moving to the next pack 25 seconds is about right solo. In teams others will be chomping at the bit to use their T9/Judgement so a few extra seconds will not matter IMO. Both cones were played around with. They now have each a proc to help kill big packs faster. Howl got Ragnorok for the simplest of reasons that the KD proc would have been wasted in Shockwave who already performs KD 100%. In either case it is sort of wasted since Shockwave and Howl are almost almost gapless and by the animation time of getting back up on their feet mobs are ready to be slammed back down. So perhaps eek out a few % more by replacing the KD proc by the damage. I don't feel it matters much either way. Despite wanting to give at least one damage proc per attack I ended up giving Sentinel's Ward to Shriek. This is because Shriek is my least used attack with Scream, Screech, Scream, Shriek as my planned attack chain though I probably will have enough for Screech, Scream, Shriek (start with the hardest hitter, if it's still alive use the second hardest, if it's still alive use the third. No point in starting with Shriek and then animate/use endurance in two extra attacks). But also because I wanted to fit Sentinel's Ward *somewhere*. Due to the animation time and base recharge I don't think Shriek gets much usage out of procs anyway. Scream ended with Opportunity Strikes but I am not sure to whom this would have gone better. Screech or Scream. With its longest base recharge and animation Screech is going to carry the procs. But which? Do I want Screech with a better chance to do damage procs, or do I want Screech with a better chance to fill up my Opportunity bar in ST which is when Sonic's Opportunity bar fill up lags behind? On another hand the Opportunity Strikes proc chance is notoriously low so am I wasting Screech's slightly better proc carrying with it instead of further improving it being Sonic's ST mini nuke? My gut says improve Screech mini nuke duties but I don't have the math to back it considering improved uptime of Offensive Opportunity and the damage boost plus -res that comes attached to it. I threw more endurance recovery at the built with a Performance Shifter proc at Inexhaustible and a Panaceia in Health (the slot could have gone to Inexhaustible and made no difference, IMO) and some minor changes in slotting choices in attacks, I'm not sure if it has reached a neutral or even positive status, but as no longer requiring Barrier then Ageless is there as an option. Gaussian's BU in Amplify for a boost and a -res in Dreadful Wail are the last changes. Now, for a pack the -res is going to be of small use since it will hit 1-2 mobs in the whole thing, but my reasoning is that in a pack it will not matter much since it is literally trash we bulldoze over. But when fighting a hard mob Dreadful Wail will be used in conjunction with Amplify and the recharge times make it almost certainly work, so the -res will be present while we are still boosted by Amplify and returning to our ST chain. Perhaps a damage proc will be more useful for the same scenario? The (last?) revised build: Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.962 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build!