Sovera

I'm fairly certain we could level side by side me and my empty slots and you with SOs, and we would not notice a lot of difference outside of spreadsheets, if any, by the time we hit 22. The stat clamping is a thing, and SOs stats are static which do not even level with us unlike set IOs, Plus SOs remain expensive for what they do, and they go bad every three levels. All of this for a couple of hours which is how long it takes to solo to 22 or half that if in a team. SOs are a relic who are not relevant. Might as well craft level 10 generic IOs because those at least won't go bad in three six levels. But it does not bug me that SOs exist or that people use SOs,

I would really like to slot my level 50 recipes at level 1. I won't have the slots, of course, but once slotted in its slotted in and I don't need to think about it. The low level IOs are made for a game where we level extremely slowly and then there's a point in scrounging for every point. But in modern CoH between double XP and all the facilities we do not spend long enough in the low levels to warrant the trouble of slotting them. If I'm leveling the normal way with access to my piggy bank and my enhancement tables then I level with empty slots barring the F2P freebies until level 10, then slot event IOs and ATOs. I will usually slot nothing else until 22 which is usually about the time I finish soloing Posi 1 and 2. I will buy some generic IOs to fill my empty slots and then I loiter until 27y-ish which is when I can slot the last of my high level IOs until I reach 50 and respec to put in purples and scrounge a few slots from Hasten/BU. If I'm doing my by-now-usual way way of leveling without piggy bank or my enhancement tables then little changes. I will have no money for ATOs or event IOs so I level with only the P2W freebies until 22 and by then I have enough merits from soloing both Posis to fill all my slots with level 25 IOs. After that as I slowly make money I replace them with ATOs and set IOs that I will be using in my final build and keep slotting generics in my new slots. At no point does it come across I should go looking for a Pounding Slugfest instead of just throwing a generic IO into a slot. By all means don't remove the low level IOs, but they are a waste of time IMO. I would rather see all recipes craftable at level 1 (even if their bonuses at not accessible until later) instead of leveling with empty slots or craft nonsensical lowbie IOs. I can't be the only one that only throws generics in until the we reach the timegated levels.

Yes, this bug is still ongoing despite the attempted fix.

*whispers* Fire Armor4life.

With the changes there is no need for granite anymore.

Both have a second PbAoE to help with a Sentinel's ailing Aoe, but Burn has a tiny radius and half its damage is DoT, so with no agro aura the mobs run away and half the damage is wasted on air. In a team it's ok as we can just follow a tank and drop the napalm by their feet. But at that point Rad does the same and is more durable while the PbAoE is also huge and coincides with the nuke's CD which means there is always double nuke time during Aim/Gaussian's window. That said Burn has a couple nice things going for it: - Recharging faster means using it more often. That's always nice. - Burn's scatter effect makes things safer for a ranged solo character (though we usually can just Hover out of melee range anyway) as all that fear has mobs ignoring us to leg it. Frankly it is not really that much when compared to Rad where the nuke makes for much more effective AoE and it remains sturdier. Sturdier-ish anyway, I felt fragile on my Elec/Rad as Sentinels are truly not built to rely on resistances. Bio remains a more solid option in terms of defense and much better still for ST than either Rad or Fire, but lagging behind both for AoE. So it's a matter of picking what matters most for you. In terms of regular gameplay the distance between Rad and Bio is probably shorter even in ST since we go into a group of enemies and double nuke which means even bosses will have eaten plenty of damage. But in terms of hitting an AV/pylon we don't use the nuke since it has such a slow cast time and Bio pulls ahead again. But we face AVs about 5% of the time anyway. I've been meaning to try a Storm/Rad since Storm would easily help Rad's survivability between -tohit, KBs, and etc, and Rad would help Storm's not all that great AoE (if we skip the cone) but the trick to surviving is more often just kill things fast (which is not Storm's strong suit to put it nicely) so a Fire/Rad might be the most optimal Sentinel for general gameplay once we stop thinking about pylon times.

I've said my piece on this. I just wanted to add you keep repeating Burn was hugely nerfed and it only was for ST damage, which I'm accepting. No AoE should be a good ST attack. For AoE the damage ended up being roughly the same since Powerhouse tweaked the numbers to make up for the damage loss of all procs going off a second time. This was something I worried about and gave feedback on and tested as Powerhouse tweaked things and churned patches. Burn being a good ST attack was nice for some sets that lack good ST attacks or have awkward recharge times, but I accept AoEs should be for AoE and ST attacks for ST. Even so it's still good enough to use even when just two enemies are present. But i digress. Buffs for Fire Armor!

*waves* Somewhat veteran on fire armor. Consume is up every one minute give or take ten seconds. Now the endurance regain has been buffed to never miss I honestly have no beef with it. Being immune to sapping is a bit niche but invaluable. Obviously Consume alone is not enough to keep a blue bar healthy and most my characters used to run on fumes juuuuust before the recharge on Consume had elapsed but I went around that by tweaking my builds to replace the hefty cost of Maneuvers for the slim and svelte Combat Jumping, and, on Tankers, making all my builds not need to have Tough toggled on to still reach 90% to S/L. With these changes and picking the accolades the blue bar is healthy. But it's all moot. There is no need to do these changes or even pick the accolades when we can buy Recovery Serums for a true pittance. The times where our blue bar is on fumes and we A) don't have someone in the team throwing recovery buffs, B) don't have someone in the team throwing Ageless, C) the team is actually hitting an AV where we wail on something for a full minute non stop, are rare but if and when they come up then we can pop a Recovery Serum. I won't speak for DC though.

Really? I would understand if you said Plant. But Mind? Really?

First mission of the Market Crash TF. It is borderline a farm map with a paint of officialness.

That's where the whole 'tied to speadsheet' thing comes in. At the time there was talk of adding something to Fire Breath to make it better, like having a super long DoT, but NPCs also got it, and though the angle was requested (I mean, just make Fire Breath akin to Frost, right?) the dreaded spreadsheets came in and it was decided the set was already at capacity to add more power into it.

As Vanden said, and then remember to save your keybinds so all other new characters you may make automatically have that.

It has both which is even worse since the game has gravity and inertia. So the KB is done with the character being pushed away at the same which further increases the distance travelled. It's horrible. And yes, the fire melee changes were not the best work of the HC team, bless. It was a slapdash boost to damage with a nonsensical reasoning. There's something we can say such as the fire melting armor and thus lowering defense? But it's out of place. Increasing damage numbers would have served best but the dev team is tied to their spreadsheets and the set was probably already at maximum budget for pure damage and thus proc damage was a way to increase the damage as a sideways upgrade. It worked, Fire Melee needed it, so we can't argue with the results and only with the lack of elegance of how it was done.

One day the devs will bite the bullet and delete the fear code(s) but that day is not today.

Fire/Claws is the dragon build in my signature. You can get some slotting ideas from there if you'd like. I can't condone picking Spring Attack though some room could be made for Phoenix Rise. I'm from the camp that tankers are tough enough naturally (especially with the godlike +res ATO) and thus don't need extra special attention so offense on, brothah! (Consider the Turtle build too as it is surprisingly offensive)

Accursed Mids! Fix'ed.

I have the same exporting problem. In fact I've taken to just drop the build's file into the forums because people can't even click on the export link that Mids generates. I recently came from testing an Elec/Rad after being tempted by Tson's results with their Fire/Rad and I wasn't super impressed though dual nuke was nice. Ground Zero is slow and does damage slowly, but, I paid attention to it and by Moonfire and fully slotted it did kill a +2 minion on its own which is rather promising despite the subjective view of it being slow and killing slowly. So ultimately there is probably a good reason to swap from Bio to Rad. Now in turns of slotting defenses I had a devil of a time. It is much easier to achieve S/L on a melee character since they are chockful of those bonuses, and while I've built Corruptors/Controllers/Defenders with 45% ranged defense I confess that my results were not impressing me. So I ended up stacking defense as a sidequest and then worked resistances up since that's Rad's thing anyway. Even solo this worked decently though I do feel squishier than defense based builds. I too have a Storm/Rad as my next project and feel this squishyness will be mitigated by the mitigation that Storm brings. Extra Aoe from the second nuke will help Storm's anemic AoE and Storm will help Rad's perceived weaker mitigation. The downside will be spending something like 11 seconds doing prep time before starting to damage a group which will be untenable for full teams (though we can always look at ourselves as Controler lite who does better damage and is less aggravating than Controllers). For what it is worth here's the Elec/Rad in case you can lift some slotting ideas, though the philosophy is quite apart from your goals. I haven't worked on my Storm/Rad yet but once I do I'll come back so we can compare pointers. Sentinel (Elec Rad).mbd

15 seconds difference without and with Interface is really telling on how little impact that thing has. I found all three results so close together that misses might well just explain the discrepancy, but, more importantly, it was not the clear cut result that I had with my own test. I'll remove my suggestion and temper my future advice with this new piece of data.

Listen, I love ya, but, you seem more interested in arguing than showing the results you got. Take 10 minutes and hit an AV for 5 minutes with Degen (or kill it if you want) and 5 minutes with Reactive. And if you are feeling energetic still do one without Interface slotted. I am very willing to change my mind but I need some common ground.

What is this about ablative being tied to a damage bonus? The rest is valid, but Bio is good enough for a Sentinel who stays out of melee. I did Trapdoor with an elec/bio who had 33% and did not need to use inspirations despite the tunnels not allowing to stay at range. But everything you say is true in that someone who values recharge or whose theme does not fit has good reason not to go Bio.

That's a weird thing to say. I find math to be the lead cause of misinformation. Math often does not account for under the hood sub-math, or plain bugs, or some sort of dev imposed rule also running under the hood. People will think that their math is correct, because math is always correct, but the rules governing the math are subjective to coding. And yes, a single 5 minutes is not enough, but 5 minutes is the customary cut off point where RNG has smoothed out things. Most importantly the number difference was large enough to remove doubts: This is what I got. If someone wants to do some actual tests of their own and present results I would be pleased pink to have something to compare with and see what diverged. Possible swapping 75% chance for -res instead of chance to DoT would make the difference?

From testing, not math. I hit several +4 (+3 with alpha) AVs in the AE and tallied their HP after 5 minutes. Degen had a significant impact and Reactive had none. Ditto on the -res aspect and the DoT of Reactive. The 75% DoT was better in clearing maps than the 75% chance for -res. As always if someone has more data please correct me. And if we really want to be min maxey we can also have one of each tier as the Degen/Reactive does not stack, true, but only for its according tier. So if someone has T4 but the other has T3/T2/T1 the effects will stack.

Degen works on AVs and visibly reduces the time needed to kill it. Works on the pylon as well. Does little for regular missions except if using the 75% chance for DoT and then it shaves some time off kills. I use it as a middle ground choice good for either AV bashing or clearing missions. Reactive does not work on AVs (or should I say it has no visible impact on AVs due to -res resistance) but works well on a pylon due to it being considered +0, hence the similar times it gets compared to Degen in pylon tests. But it also is what has the best results for regular missions. This is not from the -res but rather the DoT so I'd go around picking the version with 75% chance for DoT. If someone has run their own tests and have different experiences please correct me.

A dirty test with turning off Offensive Adaptation gives a taste of what it is to play with other armors, and it was an extra minute on the pylon. Considering Bio is reasonably defensive and Sentinel is safe and sturdy I really can't advocate for other armors other than Rad (eat all the damage, but have extra nuke) and Bio (defensive enough and extra damage. I feel like a Storm/Rad might be something to try with Storm protecting the player as it goes into melee to detonate stuff while Rad adds some damage the set lacks, and I'll test it once the new patch hits live. But Storm already suffers from prep time and the pairing would add a THIRD long animation skill. I feel by the time a Storm/Rad has placed Storm Cell, Cat, 5, used Intensify, and finally detonated Ground Zero, that the fight is over already (2.2 + 2.6 + 1.3 + 3.1 = 10-ish seconds. Average full team fights are in the 15 ish landmark)

Simple enough to resolve though: stop making sentinel nukes normalized and have AR and RoA on 60 second timer as they were designed for.