Sovera

I have to say, Nihili, you really make me want to continue playing my sonic character and test myself. Though not in this particular thing since getting players or dual boxing just to try it would be more than I'd like to get myself into.

I revised the numbers posted since the initial impromptu post-something-while-having-breakfast wasn't well fleshed out. The numbers in ST are closer but depending on how procs work in AoEs Bio boosts those by a good margin. As for what you said, hmmm, I personally don't agree. Healing and resistances crumple like paper under a beating. Healing and resistances work to mitigate the hits that do come in. I speak under the throw-myself-at-a-high-level-pack approach and not a follow-the-tank. That said a 32% approach is much less demanding and if taking too much damage a single purple candy will greatly mitigate damage while said healing and resists keep us up.

Very good work Sunsette. Everyone will have a hard time following on that 😄 On a different topic I'm just going to think out loud here. I'm starting to believe that Bio's 30% extra damage is actually a bit of a noob trap. We either work the defenses up to a good level (32% or 40%. Actually 45% to all is near impossible) and then we cannot make use of procs and recharge is not as good as it could, or we play almost like old school blasters with defenses hovering at around 25% ish, which, in my experience, is like playing naked. There is a lot of talk in the Defender forums and the Scrapper Pylon Thread regarding procs and how they boost the damage by a *lot*, but that demands we can reach our personal defensive goals via minimal involvement from our primary. After these weeks of messing with Bio on a sentinel when I went back to Ninjutsu (DDR, heal, endurance clicky, stealth, movement speed, all in a neat low FX package) I was *shocked* (hyperbole, hehe) at how I had softcapped defenses and still had 12-15 slots to use! *Without* having touched the primary (in this case Dark though Ice is a good proc contender too albeit not for the rains who don't take well to procs, apparently). Though Pines is not the best to calculate procs due to the PPM formula not being 100% accurate in it, numbers show, for example. T2 attack: - Gloom 344 damage, 78% accuracy, 95% damage, 47 endurance. Cloud Senses and Javelin proc. - Scream 224 damage, 96% accuracy, 96% damage, 49% discount, 72% recharge. With bio's 30% that adds 67 damage making it 291 damage. Not including sonic's -res since we can make a sonic/ninja. T3: - Antenumbral Beam: 548 damage. 59% accuracy, 89% damage, 33% discount. 89% recharge (this is probably not well slotted since the PPM will go down if recharge is slotted in an attack. But I wanted to slot in a purple for the 10%. This might still require fine tuning). Cloud Senses and Javelin proc. - Screech: 388 damage, 96% accuracy, 101% damage, 49% discount, 100% recharge. With Bio's 30% that makes 116 = 504 damage. Dark is probably not the best choice for a proc optimized build though. Where Bio pushes ahead is how it increases the damage of AoEs where the procs will not hit *everyone* but rather just one mob in the middle of the other ten (someone correct me if wrong) though T9's vary. Dark 's Blackstar, for example, without procs is 562 damage while Sonic's Dreadful Wail is 534 with Bio turning it into 694. My Sonic sentinel has Hasten at 131 recharge with two +5 recharges whereas the Dark has the same slotting but Hasten at 123. No incarnates used. This is all dependent on how fixated we are on defenses. Ignore melee, ignore AoE, focus solely on ranged, and we can slot all those procs in and still bask in Bio's 30% (though I am almost sure the 30% does not actually increase the proc's damage since those also ignore Fulcrum Shift. Again, someone correct me if wrong) but if we are aiming at Blaster's level of defenses then why not just roll one. Edit: had to revise the numbers since Dark had a Gaussian BU in Aim and Sonic did not. I placed a Gaussian BU in Aim for Sonic as well and the numbers assume Aim is up and BU procced.

Can you show us your build, @Nihil? Something sturdy enough to take a Pylon without insps and do those numbers purely at range is something I'd like to dissect to see what makes it tick.

I saw this *after* having done the legwork, yes, and back on Live I had a file with what I am talking about for this purpose. Yeah, he did part of the job, but laziness I'm just going to call out, such as guides on a class where the writers use acronyms and good luck for new players to untangle it, because taking the 0.5 extra seconds to write the full words would have been too much work. So, anyway, here is what I used, feel free to paste it on the main body. The links show where the badges actually are and it's more useful than just the coordinates: Atlas Park /thumbtack 511, 5, -1151 Atlas Park /thumbtack 134, 314, -340 Perez Park /thumbtack -1174, -29, 2252 Steel Canyon /thumbtack -2428, 48, -3408 Boomtown /thumbtack -448, 42, 2170 Kings Row /thumbtack -400, 4, 1760 Kings Row /thumbtack -940.5, -41.7, 2977.4 Kings Row /thumbtack -170, -42, -1467 Kings Row /thumbtack -2175.9, 97.0, 1142.5 Skyway City /thumbtack -1085, -16, -7612 Talos Island /thumbtack 1777, 22, 7843 Founders' Falls /thumbtack 1725, -8, 2400 Brickstown /thumbtack -229, 8, -370 Brickstown /thumbtack -3463, 4, 2062 Independence Port /thumbtack -1615, 80, -1872 Independence Port /thumbtack -1035, 36, -2441 Independence Port /thumbtack 910, 100, -4175 Terra Volta /thumbtack 351, 196, -3605 Echo: Dark Astoria /thumbtack 3420, 46, 3038 Echo: Galaxy City /thumbtack -752, 5, -1550 Echo: Galaxy City /thumbtack -1184, 63, -936 Because of the changes to the teleports it's no longer viable to jump leap from zone to zone with them. The route is now a bit more optimized for using travel powers with two cut off points where teleports to a different zone altogether is needed. One is from Boomtown to KR and the other from Founders to Bricks, leaving the last one as requiring an Ouroboros portal for the Echo zones (they are behind the building). Edit: Use /macro Portals "enterbasefrompasscode ZONE-8888" to move around more easily. Heldenjaegger is the contact in Steel Canyon that has the 'TF' which can be set as as -1x8. We are not examplared if we do it at 50 and thus do not lose powers or IO bonus. Set yourself as no bosses and Fake Nemesis will spawn as lieutenants who can be two-shot. Don't fight the whole map or the mobs will get Vengeance stacked. I just flew around killing all Nemesis and then logged out and back in. Got around 25 of them each time.

So, update. Reached 50! My first one since returning to CoH! Altitis, cured! I tried going to a fire farm around 45-ish and could do it at -1x8 despite abysmal slotting and basic IOs everywhere. When I reached 50 I made some inf, bought more stuff. Tried again and can now do it a 0x8 despite still being at about 32%. This was when I noticed the damage was really poor. Meh. Even at +0 and it was taking long to kill mobs. But wait, I suddenly looked at my inspiration tray and saw that they were sitting pretty and mostly unused. Greens? Defensive opportunity + Ablative Shield + Rebuild DNA was all I needed. Purples? Defensive Opportunity + Fire Cages made them not needed (mobs attack less at range and I outheal it). Blues? Defensive Opportunity. So I took them all out, googled for an inspiration combining macro that combines them when I use my movements keys, and now I'm popping all my reds before launching myself at a pack. Much, much better and it's also how farming is done. I'm still too squishy to move higher up (solved if I'd just pop a purple, but not interested in doing that) but it's working admirably. No endurance problems while AoEing (despite those still being in basic IOs only). Definite endurance problems while in ST mode but I have eight toggles: Environmental Adaption, Hardened Carapace, Super Speed (with the stealth IO to stealth missions and get in position for Dreadful Wail), Tough (only 11% res to S/L, but why not?), Weave, Hover and Maneuvers. Honorable mention to Offensive Adaption but it apparently costs no endurance. While hitting hard targets like a GM or AV for *minutes* I will turn those all off with the exception of the Bio toggles. The usual MO is pre-emptive Ablative, pop all my reds + Amplify, then Hover stealth courtesy of SS to the middle of the pack and explode with Dreadful Wail. Previously targeted boss is hit with Screech, which stacking with Dreadful Wail takes it out of the equation. Pop Fire Cages, float a bit back, do Shockwave. Opportunity bar is now full. Scream on the boss to activate Defensive Opportunity. Boss is still CCed. Fire Cages should be back now. Fire Cages now has everything locked, boss waking up from Stun included. Then I just go to town cycling Shockwave and Howl with Fire Cages refreshing every second cycle. Even if some of the mobs break free because of misses I just reapply Fire Cages and visually it's quite pretty because it ends up being a conga line which works great with the cones. I've tried hoverblasting, but it was not working well with the cones since it missed too many enemies. Speaking of cones, the range extension in both Sentinel's ATOs *really* show themselves and they now have a loooong reach.

I posted on how Defensive opportunity makes my latest build and nothing has changed in that. In fact, I will be updating the post with that I have found by playing it, but summarizing it in that particular build Defensive Opportunity is letting me farm +0x8 despite having only 30%-ish defenses while I slowly slot up and work out Incarnates. This is not a one size fits all though, but with Sonic's quick cycling AoEs I'm never in lack of endurance and my HP is always full. That said the profit of doing it with ST attacks is much smaller and with more normalized slower recharging AoEs the benefit will not be as great.

The range part has been mentioned before. But it goes with the other bugs the AT has, like one of the big attacks in Fire being doing less damage than it should. Toss it into the bug forum for sure.

I've recently made a post regarding sonic/bio and how it was a dark horse. I believe the underlying why of it working so well is indeed all the CC that is incorporated in the regular attacks. When the mobs are constantly knocked down or disoriented we have a lot of breathing room, in particular with Bio's brand of regen. Now with Fire Cages this has gone up a lot though Fire Cages would do the same for any other ranged set. But having done a recent Manticore TF it was noticeable. Go in invisible with superspeed with the stealth IO, cast Dreadful Wail. Cast Screech whose Disorient stacks with Dreadful Wail's. That's one of the annoying bosses who pops a T9 now CCed until death. Fight another of those annoying bosses. At around 20% use Shockwave so it flops down instead of activating its T9. Once I have leveled the character more and put it through its paces I'll make a write up for Sunsette.

Ugh, don't get me started on capping Bio to smash (and the rest really). Such contortions I had to make in my last sonic/bio to even get to 40%. But in that particular example she has the tools to keep mobs at range (slotted fire cages with sonic is a thing of beaaaaauty!).

Ah, reading comprehension is not my forte.

I used Waterfox in the past, but because of such small niggles eventually I went back to Firefox. If it works it works and that's good enough for my casual internet self.

Oh. Good show my indeterminate gendered internet person. I'm pretty old school and was just copying the URL which had been turned into a mp4. Now that you mentioned it I went and checked, and hello, a gif version link was provided. It works!! Case solved, Dr Watson.

https://i.imgur.com/ag6kZ1B.mp4 That's not an image though. Right click that image and choose image location, then try with that.

Alright, yes, copying directly into the post *does* work for images \o/ What tripped me up is the fact imgur converts an animated gif into an mp4 which does not work. I'm not quite sure how to work this since they were my usual image sharing service.

I use Firefox and it does not work for me. I insert the URL and click Insert Into Post but nothing happens.

So it sort of averages as a 30% boost with offensive's raw damage boost *and* the toxic damage tick. Not as much as I thought but still pretty good.

Those percentages include the damage boost from Offensive or just the toxic damage? Sunsette mentioned the actual numbers from Offensive being actually 12.5% rather than the proclaimed 25%.

Insert other Media - Insert Image from URL does not seem to work. At first I thought it was because it was an animated gif that imgur had turned into an mp4, but when I tried with a .png it also did not work. Perhaps an option to load from the computer instead of an url would be good too.

I will have to get to 50 and test some more. But I like this character so much it may finally have cured my altitism.

If there is one thing that being slot starved has shown me is that the gains from Hover are so small that we can leave it with just the LotG 7.5%. Now if we are *not* slot starved then some extra set bonuses won't go amiss, but I don't know what it is not to be slot starved anymore (maybe I should stick to sets like SR 😄 ).

Weak sauce. If you go to the trouble of writing a guide why not make it a complete one? 'Grab vidiot' is good advice, but hardly where it could have ended. As someone who did the leg work of the accolades yesterday (and hadn't done it in a decade) I was reminded of how the badge part of one accolade will send us to one zone, and then the plaques part of another will have us return to it. So a better way of doing it would have been to copy from Wiki the locations for each zone to ensure there is no back and forth for the people who are here... looking for a guide.

Do you know those builds that are great but come with a warning sticker 'it only really starts at level 32/38/when you're 50 and IOed to the gills'? This is not one of those. So, Sonic/Bio. Undoubtedly a good choice for the -res and t-.. NOPE! Yeah, it does -res and its good, but not *that* good on a Sentinel. No, it's Sonic for the... AoE 😄 By level 18 we have three cones. One of them is a Sleep, one is a KB, and one is pure damage. By level 18 we also have access to the Sudden Acceleration KB>KD IO which turns the KB cone into a useful tool, and also Force Feedback since we are starved for recharge at that level. The AoE is *nuts*. Open with the KB-turned-KD cone (Shockwave), mobs fall on their rear. Throw the damage cone (Howl), damage is done. Throw the Sleep cone (Siren's Song), *more* damage is done *and* all/most of the mobs are now sleeping. At the low levels there is now a gap. Use your T2 for Defensive Opportunity. That's it, your two first cones are back up. ONCE MORE TO AOE-LAND WE GO! By level 25 I noticed I could throw myself as tank in a full TF and was *thriving*. The secret ingredient is Defensive Opportunity. The heal is small, but we are cycling AoEs and suddenly every mob we hit is recharging endurance and filling our HP bar while we keep them either flopping or napping. A *single* cone refills our Opportunity bar from zero to max but if badly positioned then two will do, and we are back at healing up while throwing out CC-baked-in AoEs. Now, if we look at Pines the damage does not look like much as befits quick recharging AoEs (that role is saved for Dreadful Wail). 105 damage for the so called damage cone? 81 for the KD cone? But Pines does not take in consideration Bio's 50% 30%-ish (courtesy of @drbuzzard's testing, 25% from offensive + toxic damage tick) plus the sonic res, which, really isn't much, but it's there and stacking on itself. Pines shows Dreadful Wail as doing 406 damage with Amplify but with Bio's 30%-ish it's now 527. My Elec stalker has Pines showing Lightning Rod doing 697 damage with Build-Up, for example, but it does not have CC baked in nor does he get to sit down and then do a pure AoE cycle until everything is killed. A slight revising. The Stalker had the Gaussian BU in Aim which Pines accounts for. With the same BU proc on Aim on the Sonic which I had not placed in the original numbers, plus Bio's Offensive Adaptation, our T9 goes up to... 694 damage. Not shabby. Actually /Bio does not add that much. Testing with Fire/ showed an increase that changed according to the skills used with as low as 8% for the nuke. I did not test for Sonic though, but no reason to believe it is different. The weak point of cones is that mobs come to us, and then we need to hop back (or hop up) and get some distance . But this is solved at level 35 where we drop the sleep cone due to being the lowest damage, the shortest range *and* not having a -res component attached to it. Instead we grab Fire Cages. It gives some much needed set bonuses, it doesn't do much damage (though Bio and the -res of the other cones helps), but it keeps mobs in one place for the cones. It also recharges fast enough to be a near gapless cycling of AoE between it and the two other AoEs. In the ST department Screech (coming at level 26), Scream and Shriek are enough for a gapless chain (until 26 alternate the cones for a filler), all fed by Bio and the stacking -res. Screech's baked in Stun is always good (and guess what it stacks with? It rhymes with mail) but not a novelty in Sentinel builds. Still, bosses will be stunned and stay stunned in the first five seconds or less of combat. My current ST chain is Scream, Screech, Scream, Shriek. Defenses are always difficult to work in Sentinel Bio, so I aimed at 40% with the intention of using Barrier Core Epiphany to fill up the last 5% (Barrier defense/resistance dwindles over time, but we will always have a minimum of 5% defense even at very end of its use). The 'this is the most fun I have had' comes up often in these forums but I will for once join in. The constant AoE really made this a fun leveling process. The cycling of cones and Defensive Opportunity coupled with proactive Ablative Carapace allowed me to just go in and start smacking packs early on. I have not felt the need for Parasitic Leech, but for those who want to take it or don't want Flight/Afterburner it's an option. Athletic Regulation also has defense debuff resistance and requires no slots, making it the smart option, but I do love flying, and flying requires Afterburner, so it's my one non min-maxed sin in the build. Leveling build pre-35, or, how *I* leveled it. Don't take the slot levels as gospel and fill up what you feel you need the most. In my case the AoEs took precedence and I went all the way into 30s+ without slotting my heals or shields more than the base slot. Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.962 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build! Complete Build pos-35. Just slowly buy all the expensive crap and slot up at your own pace: Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.962 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build! If there is any conflict with the planner I'm using Mid's Reborn (https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,6298.0.html).

Since no one bit i'll post my own. It's not min-maxed since I took Aid Self and Flight/Afterburner, but just change to something else you want: | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Reborn to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1444;657;1314;HEX;| |78DA65944B4F534114C7E7D25B4B4BCB431E054A5BCAABA595D20A1B5F71216862C| |0903471E303AEED0837DE00694B023E162EDC9868D48D1B9F89CF8D5F4504FD0E6E| |7C7C837AB8FF3F607227B9F9CDFCE79C3967CECC9DF9CD99F0970BF7CF2A2372CEB| |16AB5C552DD726EE96AE09255DFA85A8E4F490BC897E0C4E2BC76B4CECF3ABA5CAF| |DA65CB8170303DA36FEAD59ACE97566CED54F6872ABCB0B6E6E4E7B4B56EAF2E87D| |C41695DEB4AC4EDCEEB8A5DB6573546E7EDE595BA98F5CDAEDBE5FCFEC2A5B50D89| |65D5EABABAD52B098DCAF730A8D81AA65A12144DD564911A34CB6405BC92161AAE4| |F93EA365CED4817D90E2E8A8D411B8336CDB469A6CD55B1F1C1C6EF0B410BB580E1| |3019015B5BC936F091E4ED87AFE9DFF6B95AFB0E787497FC0E76FD001F8B4F80F10| |2EF9A30F71EECF9407E047B3F919FC1EB926B90BEC101C68B8A1037557F12E3FE04| |383048A6C0A89C7E0B6AAC5A32A8618F6811D627C2FA24589F04EB734D62B6D1AF2| |D05BF27B2870E9E57470EB925D2E060861C27B3E092ACD3E91E464375729D2189DF| |8DF846776E4F0BAA149990B928E3461BD2D45389DA07C5DFF7C2745748BD255F82C| |3AFC8D760F10D6849F41822A918779A940871AE17673587E3E0480C198EB09A23AC| |EE18ABFA4C7249D237B98918635BE46D307D87BC4BDE036F482E43F41D3A81EA8C9| |F214F92A7C0EC69F201F8D3873F66CF77F42B72CCEE80C7B6C96FE42E3831819C0D| |D96F8615CDB815F58992E37DCA4DC26AE2385900278BE414390D9AE29BE7DDC9B3A| |245DE9D22EF4E59765A60C4821B31661EFCE98D81C3FEDE5066B31EA5E0518A1E65| |CAA34C7B94398FB260F2F910C5709560BBBC04CCED57E8E0E5E0EC9F43C5302E4A2| |72DEFC465ECF3B7C7FAEFFFCA739CDD3FBC34E669| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|

Holy crap, I decided to try Sonic after looking at the AoEs listed here... and IT IS GOOD! I will make a build and post about it, but my lord, it's rocking my sox.