Sovera

Now that I'm 50 and got T4 Musculature and I'm slowly incarnating the character I've come to a few conclusions: - It's one of the best Sentinels I've played. I know I've said it in the past but each one raises the bar and currently I have this at the highest tier. Lots of AoE, fast recharging, two FF procs to speed things up, and the ST damage feels solid even for a Sentinel. - I was building for Degenerative but talked myself into Reactive to further push the damage. I'm not going to go solo crazy as I do on my Tankers since I don't have the patience to chase mobs. - Because of the teaming I'm counting the seconds until the nuke comes back so I've dropped the extra damage proc to shave two seconds off of it. - The endurance is truly well in hand to a point I never bother with Rebuild DNA (to be fair the team is constantly spamming their incarnates and Ageless is a very common one to be found, but doesn't change what I'm saying). But even outside of a team, such for the pylon tests below which means three minutes of non-stop hitting a target with all toggles up, I never had to touch Rebuild DNA, and I haven't even knocked the accolades down which tells me I could skimp on one slot from Stamina and add an Unbreakable unique for another 90 HP. It's not super important either way. I also took the time to try a pylon and it was... pretty nice? Musculature 45%, Degenerative Radial Flawless (75% chance of DoT). Assault Core for Hybrid not clicked. 2:46 on first try. 2:30 the second try. This handily beats most my Brutes and also beats my best Sentinel time (Elec/Bio at 3 minutes) though it's not the best recorded Sentinel time. But, I'm not picking epic pool attacks nor having to go into melee so as far as I'm concerned this is good. Of course these results are a bit skewed because I have an Achilles's proc AND Vulnerability used on CD, which I don't always use against regular mobs. Maybe bosses. Still, impressive for such a sturdy little thing. While I was at it I decided to test Reactive with 75% chance for fire DoT. This has always been strictly worse than Degenerative in this test since Pylons/AVs/GMs are the single thing Degenerative are really good at while having nearly no effect on regular mobs. 3:06 at the first attempt. 2:50 on the second try. One last for good luck: 2:52. Close enough though, once again, skewed because Pylons like -res effects since they are not +3 or +4 which devalues the worth.

Unless hurting for endurance I'd go (and did go) for Musculature 45%. As oldskool said there is no half pondering. Sentinels's damage is a tad weak so moar moar moar. You can further it a bit more by taking Reactive from Interface that adds a -res proc on top of a damage DoT. The difference will be minimal but present. Honestly it's probably smart to go for it rather than Degenerative from Interface since Degenerative's effect is even more minimal unless fighting an AV (or a pylon) at which point Degenerative leaps ahead. But, how often do we solo AVs? Specifically solo, since in teams there will be others with Degenerative (and it doesn't stack once the target has five of it).

With this patch changes you probably want to go back to Brutes.

Added a section for mods.

Could I tempt you into having this in the CoH Modder tool, Solar? Just for ease of use.

While I was at it I tested the other attacks and the news aren't as good. Hydro Blast: without proc Mids says it should do 283 damage. In game it does 210. Dehydrate: according to Mids it should be doing 449 with the Wet mechanic. In game it's 284. Brrrrutal. Now to do the same percentual math game with procs (in theory no shenanigans should happen since there is no wacky Enhanced mechanic). Hydro Blast's 210 with procs becomes 262. Dehydrate with Wet mechanic and procs becomes 355. Much sadness through the land. Still, more damage than originally though but firmly hinging on Water Jet. O ye who were so maligned! Original wrong damage: Water Jet = 294x2 = 588. Dehydrate = 531. Hydro Blast = 357. Total = 1476 Correct-ish damage: Water Jet: 385 damage. Enhanced Water Jet: 715 damage. 1.1k total Hydro Blast: 262. Dehydrate: 355. Total = 1717 I only later noticed/remembered that pylons have 20% resistances to all which partly explains the difference between Mids and in-game. The total ST is thus not correct since I calculated the base damage on the pylon (which is fine) but for the procs I just added them percentually (which is probably not fine). I don't think it matters greatly since it's not like a build will be played or not played because it does more or less 10-15% damage.

As I was posting the bugs in Mids' discord one of the devs, Zed, mentioned that the combo system isn't working either so I'm talking mad shit about Water Jet but the second use will do a sizeable amount more than regular Water Jet. That's 80 points of unslotted damage there, and he says it's affected by slotting. So I did what any normal person would do and copied my character to the test server, gave myself T4 Musculature and hit a pylon a few times. Without any procs slotted and no three combos I was doing 63 Smashing damage, 190 Cold Damage, and 24 Toxic (from Adaptation). Without procs slotted and with three combo points I was doing 76 Smashing, 228 Cold, and 28 Toxic, followed by three ticks of Cold damage at 69 (noice), 57, 57. A few tests show the numbers don't vary. So, normal Water Jet hits for 277 without procs. Enhanced Water Jet hits for 515 without procs. Now to add the proc damage. Fair warning that this will be cobbled and is not backed by real math. I'm going to look at Mid's damage without procs and then see the percentual increase with them, and then add that percent. So, in Mids, with damage procs, the average damage is 265 (that's already way lower than in-game WITHOUT damage procs). In Mids, without damage procs, it's 190 (again, this should be 277). 190 to 265 is a 39,4% damage increase. Adding 39% to normal Water Jet gives me 385 damage. Adding 39% to Enhanced Water Jet gives me 715 damage. Okay, lets take this with a huge grain of salt since the last numbers are napkin math. I'm not 100% sure there isn't a small dip in proc damage from Enhanced Water Jet's faster animation slightly lowering the proc chances and thus lowering the proc chances, but, I was talking mad shit about Water jet on how it does 265 x2 and thus 530 but it's actually meant to be doing 1.1k 😄 Just for completion sakes the base numbers without Adaptation or procs are: - Enhanced Water Jet: 57 smashing, 172 cold and three ticks of 57, 57, 57 - Normal Water Jet: 57 smashing, 172 cold.

Well, yeah, it's an end-game build with as much eked out as possible within my building parameters.

Finally reached 50 and transitioned to the final slotted build. The bad news is that Mids is slightly off on the numbers it presents from what I have in-game. The good news is that the real numbers are higher than Mids says. Namely S/L resistance is capped at 75% and E/N is also at 16.6% in-game instead of 14.9% of Mids. On the other hand it shows EPS at 3.63 without accolades where I'm actually at 3.35. Not a big deal since endurance is well in hand in actual game play with only the occasional Rebuild DNA needed. I would usually say to keep S/L at 70% and use Barrier to cap the last 5% but I don't see the point. Doing this would save two slots though. Not sure it warrants the effort but keeping S/L at 69.5% and saving those two slots (res/recharge in Tough and the Celerity in Sprint) could be another 4.5% more for E/N by placing one slot in Aim and change the two recharge IOs for three Adjusted Targeting and the last slot in Punch for two Touch of Death.

After a second look at the slotting I realized that the +3 Hami was an expensive overkill considering the 45% Musculature since it was pushing into ED territory. So I've ditched the 100 million +3 Hami for a 5-6 million +5 Thunderstrike and lowered the damage by a minute percentage (Water Jet does 265 instead of 268) with the added bonus of pushing E/N to 44.4%. Also dropped the second purple in Geyser to further lower the price since the stats are almost the same (loss of 0.02 endurance per second). A good trade. The three Thunderstrikes don't need to be +5 in order to keep their bonuses starting at level 27 if attuned and the damage difference will be again minimal (from 265 to 251) though the accuracy will drop to 89% instead of 96%. I don't particularly care about the extra defense in the low levels if exemplaring so I'll +5 them, but not doing so would lower the price tag to roughly 500k-1 mill per Thunderstrike.

Warshades is spot on, no notes. For ST attacks the 'usual' rotation is Midnight Grasp, Smite, Siphon Life, Smite. You can have a much earlier rotation that is snappier with Siphon Life, Shadow Punch, Smite, Shadow Punch but it's less damaging and more appropriate for a Brute for the fast paced combat. Definitely want some AoE in there otherwise you're fighting one mob at a time. I'd never skip on Shadow Maul though Touch of Fear is debatable (but I'd still try to keep it since it's what's available). But Warshades already covered this. As you've already linked to the other thread I suggest looking at duplicating the slotting since I went through the whys. Aura of Insanity for example, why I didn't push for defense, and the effort to reach 100% recharge debuff with no more than one Psycho Barrier stack. Some in the thread pointed that three Hamis were overkill and they might be on to something, but it's just one slot so easy to add or remove later on.

Made some small tweaks to the build and update the OP with more numbers.

To be fair it was widely out of date. Collating your posts into their own thread and asking that one to be pinned might work out better.

Yeah, and as I play I find the rotation rights itself even when the 5% miss happens leading to Dehydrate eating the combo points. I'll edit that out as well.

That must be the boost thing I'm seeing on Mids. Thanks for the tip o/

Since Water had some small ST buffs I decided to level one up. No reason to play anything other than Bio for Sentinels since the armor being a bit squishy doesn't matter as much on an AT that starts every fight with a nuke. After looking at the recharge times I saw no reason not to lean hard on procs. Not as hard as some, but much more than I usually build. As such every ST attack has three procs, even though I replaced a damage proc in some for utility such a FF proc or a -res proc. If wishing for more tooltip damage replace them for damage procs instead. I still worked on endurance which is another thing that can be tweaked and try to add another damage proc but I preferred it this way. If we can trust Mids (which we can't always. Oh, wasn't this prophetic) it ended with: Edit: as spoken about lower in the thread I checked the damage on the test server and there is a really wide discrepancy to what Mids says. But, part of it is because Mids does not account for resistances (obviously) and the pylon I was testing on has those resistances. The good news is that the build still does more damage than originally stated despite the pylon res and Mids' numbers not being correct. The bad news is that most buttons other than Water Jet are a lot less interesting to press. - Water Jet = A bit miserable at 268 and only recovering if used with three combos to be re-used right away which boosts it to 566. That means the initial rotation will hit for half. Initial damage hits for 385, and then the Enhanced Water Jet at 3 combo points does a boggling 715 for a grand total of 1.1k. - Dehydrate = Low key the heavy hitter if used with three combos at 480 damage once we hit the target with other powers first so that they become 'Wet', but Water Jet still hits a bit harder with three combos. Also, the extra damage from the Wet mechanic comes from a slow DoT so that extra damage needs a target that lasts at least 5 seconds for it to finish ticking. Kind of correct-ish but not really. Actual damage with the Wet mechanic is about 355 which does almost catch up to Water Jet, at least the unenhanced version. But the second loop of the rotation onward and Dehydrate is left in the dust. - Hydro Blast = 329 damage. I initially took Aqua Bolt but Aqua Bolt does nothing other than -def (which isn't particularly useful) and Hydro Blast does KD which is both soft CC and a FF proc. Aqua Bolt also recharges and animates too fast to warrant heavy proc usage though this makes it a good candidate to place the second ATO. Doing this makes Aqua Bolt do half the damage of Hydro Blast at 151 though the end damage is roughly the same since to fill up the gap Hydro Blast covers neatly then Aqua Bolt needs to be used twice which makes the damage from using it twice 302, so pretty close to the single use of Hydro Blast. Replacing the second ATO for five Apocalypse + a second damage proc can up this to 180, but even the purple damage proc that has a much higher chance to go off will be at a miserable 18% (and it will have to be removed from Water Jet which lowers its damage even more when replaced with a regular damage proc). Despite the temptation to swap the FF proc for a damage proc upping the damage to 393 I kept the FF proc since there are a lot of cooldowns that I want to have back soon. Even for soloing and not trying to have the nuke + Aim back as soon as possible there are still the defensive cooldowns, but slot this to taste as the temptation is real. Reasoning still stands, but most numbers are wrong. It actually does 262 damage. - Geyser = our nuke. Nothing much to say, with a damage recharge it shaves 2 seconds down to 26 seconds for 691 damage without Aim. With Aim+Gaussian it's 896. Replacing the damage/recharge IO with an extra damage proc has it recharge slightly slower at 28 seconds rather than 26, but it goes from 690 to 718. With Aim+Gaussian it's 922. So, either way the difference is minimal and as such slot according to taste. If teaming a lot then the 2 seconds might be the difference between having it at every group or not. But, if it's not used at 26 seconds on the dot then the shaved time accomplished nothing. I choose to go with the extra damage proc. After playing the build at level 50 I was counting the seconds for the nuke to return and changed my mind back to shaving the two seconds. Probably wrong numbers here too but I just tested as is on a pylon and with Aim+ Gaussian: - 817 with three damage procs. - 756 with damage/recharge IO and two damage procs. The damage difference is partly due to the pylon resisting damage, which Mids does not account for. Procs that were meant to be doing 71 damage were doing 59 (which is a 17% damage drop) and that extends to the power's damage too. The actual single-target should also be lower than stated here since the pylon resists damage and I've thrown the damage proc percentual increase as is, but it would be partly resisted. I don't think it's important enough to untangle. In terms of AoE Water has always been good and indeed it is not uncommon to wipe a spawn within Aim's duration, except bosses. Not *too* unlike a regular Sentinel here but the extra AoE is still felt. My usual opener is picking a boss, using Opportunity on it, Aim, Geyser (soft CC with KU), Whirlpool (mobs get up from Geyser but start running away instead of fighting due to the fear effect), Water Burst (more soft CC with KU) and rinse with Steam Spray. After that there's enough time for two hits so I usually shun Water Jet (too little damage without three combos) and instead go for Hydro Blast (fishing for the FF proc) and Dehydrate (heal a bit, and it's the heavy hitter of the set anyway) Water Jet + Dehydrate which gives me three combos in time for Water Burst to be recharged which is where the three combos are used. By then Stam Spray has recharged so it's another AoE cone time. It's really a lot of AoE in quick succession. Afterwards it's just rinsing the rest with the ST rotation and sprinkling AoEs if mobs are clustered. Well clustered then Water Burst and Steam Spray are good, if not well custered but in line then Steam Spray only. Steam Spray hits hard enough that any chance of it hitting at least two mobs already puts it ahead than an ST attack. Even while leveling and in a duo this usually clears everything so fast that the nuke is not ready for the second group so I just use the regular AoEs and don't use my nuke on an half dead group. When soloing this isn't much of a consideration since between mobs running and scattering the nuke has recharge by the time the spawn is cleared. The ST rotation is Water Jet, Dehydrate, Hydro Blast, then Water jet twice and continue. At some point the dinossauric 5% will mess the rotation when Water Jet misses which then has Dehydrate using it but the rotation will fix itself on its own and doesn't warrant, in my opinion, waiting to correct it manually since it'll just happen again in the future. Regardless the rotation is gapless either way though when Hasten is not up there is some worth in trying harder for the Water Jet rotation since the gap can be filled with the second use. Regarding defenses I didn't chase them very hard. I find Bio can handle most things even with just 33% defense since we open with a nuke and clear most of a group before they can retaliate much. This has been my experience even soloing against true +4. At worst gobbling a small luck will soft cap elemental defenses before level 50 and at 50 Barrier replaces that. Despite not chasing very hard it still ends with near 45% E/N (despite what Mids shows) with F/C lagging behind at a comfortable 35%. It's high enough a small purple can soft that if needed though neither fire nor cold exist in enough quantities to be worrisome, IMO. Resistances I did push for since it's the only thing the build has against S/L and it ended hardcapped at 75% despite what Mids says. I made a bug report on Mids' discord over these small numeric discrepancies. Went to the test server and incarnated myself up and then ran some tests with pylons to check the damage. Also, lets not sugarcoat it that the build will be squishy while leveling if not either focusing on defenses or playing in teams. The build feels good as it is right now even solo despite my many deaths by dint of not slotting defenses. Dying from a volley of werewolves alpha rock throwing happened more than once while leveling thanks to going in with an unslotted Hardened Carapace toggle. But I am aware it is neither the build nor the AT's fault if I'm playing pretty much naked. Note, don't try to level with this build the way it is or it will be a lil nightmare. It needs a fair bit of global recharge to feel good. This incidentally might mean it doesn't feel very good to exemplar too far down (Synapse and under). Made some changes to lower the price of things from the original build. No reason to use +3 Hamis at 100 million a pop when it's already blunted by ED. Also no reason to slot and +5 a second purple IO for around 22-23 million total in Geyser just for 0.04 EPS when a +5 Positron for 5-6 million total reaches the same numbers and only loses 0.02 EPS. Sentinel (Water Blast - Bio Armor).mbd Edit: made a few more truly minor changes. But since endurance is completely in hand and I ended up deciding that I wanted 2 seconds off the recharge I've decided to follow this tweaked build that has that and has one slot taken from Stamina to add the Unbreakable Guard unique pushing the build to 1711 HP instead of 1603. Sentinel (Water Blast - Bio Armor v2).mbd

I didn't test in game to be able to answer this. Three Hamis was just efficient to get accuracy and CC but it's possible that just two are enough too to supply both.

Personal preference. I don't find it useful since my auras will agro enemies. If someone is in trouble and I notice their HP dipping I jump to them and hit the offender on the head. Since Memento Mori is back to 'just' being either a ressurect or a panic button you can take Taunt instead. Or if not a Flier and aiming for Hasten+Superspeed or Combat Jumping+Super Jump then Taunt can replace Evasive Maneuvers. As for leveling the Psi/Ice just replace all the superior versions for their normal counterparts. If it's too expensive then use SOs until level 22 and then switch to level 25 generic IOs. Use five Touch of Death (take the damage proc instead of the acc/dmg) + a random damage proc of your choosing for Freezing Touch, a quadrupled stat + damage proc from Obliteration for Freezing Aura, and up to level 22 use three prestige enhancements of your choosing from the START vendor. Bombardment can be used at 27 so just for 5 levels you might as well continue using the prestige enhancements until then. Don't bother with any of the regen or status IOs like Impregnable Skin until not slot starved. Instead have three recharge in Build-up and Hasten (use SOs until 22). In Aura of Insanity just slot three confuse IOs and that's it. Consume Psyche has a bit of precedence while slotting but it depends if you're solo or in team, but two heal, two end mod, and two recharge SOs as soon as you can. Don't change to IOs until at least 22. If you need something a bit more in-depth let me know.

Thanks.

It's been a while. Is Geyser a rain power a la Blizzard or upfront damage skill with DoT component?

The stacks are only needed if you're fighting something that debuffs endurance/recovery/regen. Recharge is already taken care of. Easiest way would be to track those three and if you see them going to the red then spam Psycho Barrier. But if your health is not low then there's no need to fuss about it since the regen of Psycho Barrier doesn't stack with itself. And yeah, EM has weak clear. It's why my favorite character was an EM/Fire since Fire Armor helped with the AoE.

With the discovery Memento Mori is 'only' the typical T9 used either to survive tight spots (but I have insps/Barrier, so...) or ressurect (but I don't play planning on dying, so...) I've decided to shuffle the slots and take Shockwave instead, Regen took *another* hit in the process and is further down to 115 now and E/N went down a bit to nearly 60% even though S/L went up a bit to 73%. The (slight) losses to resistances and regen should be recouped by the added survival Shockwave brings by itself plus the boatload of recharge an FF proc in an AoE has. Brute (Claws - Psionic Armor).mbd

Seemed okay tbh. What was odd?

Seems pretty strong to my limited testing. Tossed a build to a friend who was testing stuff against true +4 (no level shift) and it survived fine against Knives of Artemis which was something his other builds were crumbling under. Seems to be hard carried by Aura of Insanity and then capped resistances with some dummy thick regen on top of a 60% shield every 20 seconds. Just the regen or just the shield would already be thicc, but Aura of Insanity CCing up to bosses while the regen is ticking finishes making it meaty.

Yes, a dev answered on discord. If there are no enemies in range it does nothing. The ten second thing is just to avoid wasting the CD.