Frosticus

introducing a secondary can change things bots /storm does good damage. a strong build could kill most anything. demon/storm probably does way more damage though. I was just shy of 1k dps vs a pylon.

conversely I've had my fortunata die multiple times in a row while pylon testing. I personally favor the layered sets these days. but most anything can achieve some lofty accomplishments with enough time and investment.

In a lot of cases I'd agree. With super high dpa attacks like freezing touch getting them cycling as fast as possible is beneficial and focusing on procs to the point you need to inject another attack into your chain more than likely hurts you in the long run. At the same time you often want your heavy hitter to line up with AS for the crit from hide proc. but you dont want too much rech in AS cause of said proc. There is a lot going on with stalkers from a min-max standpoint. They are cool. As for mass levitate (or other similar attacks) you have to decide whether you want to spam it or just use it once per spawn. Basically solo I'd lean toward damage and rech. Teaming I'd lean toward damage and procs.

dark regen generally isnt the best tool vs a single target in that it has high costs and rolls a tohit. But a well built /dark wouldnt need it much so as long as you are proactive im sure it could work Maybe savage/dark? blood stacks for end discount amd +rech. hidden hemmorage is quite something vs meaty targets

Savage leap can most definitely crit as well. but I believe it is just a flat chance , and a low one at that. I dont feel like it is boosted by the number of teammates either, but I'd want to test that more as I mostly solo amd teams are often chaotic carnage .

Not sure if you are looking for answers from anyone else, but: stalkers have a damage scalar of 1.0. The aoes have a 50% crit rate from hide, so 1.5 scalar Procs work off of 1.0 scalar, but are capped at 90% chance to fire so the breakeven point where slotting a proc vs slotting for damage favours the low damage AT's. Long story short you definitely want to enhance the power for full damage and then look to adding procs. Assuming you aren't seeking set bonuses - I'd do five procs of your choice and a +5 damage purple with musculature core. You'll need tactics, kismet and about 50% acc set bonuses to make that work against +3s though.

I love it on my savage/bio. On a team I use it at full range, then AS a meaty target, which will often put me back into hide, then i use rending flurry. If all goes well that will be at 4 stacks of blood and good aoe crit on flurry. That usually kills lots of stuff and then you just scrap. I have a couple damage procs in leap. I use it against runners too. port over and then AS them. Not as fast at clean up as a blaster but way better than most melee builds. It casts fast and recharges quick enough that you dont need to hesitate to use it. Sometimes I leap back and then port back into the spawn for extra damage. Not the most efficient but super cool.

fun? I dunno, but I like my fire/tactical. It is a fully ranged build aside from the nuke, which is not much of an issue as flash arrow lets you get right up to them without drawing aggro. I think eagle eye is one of the better sustain powers giving +acc and perception on top of the usual. agility gives res to slow and some +rech which is always nice too fire/fire is much more in your face and frantic, but can surely do a lot of damage.

I enjoy my fire/bio. The extra offense of bio is welcome and athletic regulation is terrific paired with hover. I debated going rad armor for quite awhile. It is a really nice set on sentinels.

This doesn't match my experiences. Maybe for single target damage because of added pet damage and the high damage melee attacks doms have. But sentinels on avg do way more AoE damage and usually don't need to hesitate to leverage it as most can absorb a decent sized alpha. I mean there are certainly some builds that overlap between the two AT's, but imo sentinels are some of the best AoE available prior to heavily IO'd/incarnate builds due to their ability to leverage their abilities without fear.

propel is also an aoe knockdown so in addition to dealing good damage it also bounces everything around it. I dunno sure you don't have seeds or fearsome stare, but the aoe stuns in other sets suck until you get SO level enhances anyway. at which point you are soon acquiring wormhole. wormhole is that good of a power. I cant think of any other power in the game that is as satisfying as wormhole. It really makes you feel super powered.

ill/cold doesn't rely on containment damage to produce objectively very high damage. It relies on huge amounts of -res ( more than any other set with stacked sleet, hl and consistent achilies). containment is nice, but not all that important for the build. AVs rarely flee as the taunt of PA and phanty decoy is more than the flee of sleet and the slows, so you usually dont need an immob. Even +con AVs are affected by the slows so if they do start to flee they are easy to keep up with and redirect by heading them off. Ill/traps may well be the strongest big game hunter in the game, but ill/cold is generally much faster for any given task. Extor is correct in what he says. His initial reservations about the combo have clearly developed into some impressive accomplishments. it takes a lot of time and inf but ill/cold has an extremely high ceiling.

best at what? cause I'm partial to fe+bu (w/gaussian).

no. that said, i think sentinels have the best version of rad armor in the game.

Hidden status should suppress the aura, so it is only active while you duke it out. Yes it would stack with other stuns such as the stun proc in energy drain, or any other source.

rarely. imo it requires max recharge to be very useful which means dedicating too many slots to it during leveling. Once I have the spare slots I no longer need it. Maybe a base rech of 30-40 sec and I'd likely take it. As it would be up almost every fight while leveling.

No it isn't. Not in the way the previous poster was asking about at least. Your base tohit chance is lower against +cons. But 20% tohit buff still gives you 20% more tohit chance Similarly, you damage is reduced against +cons. But buildup still increases that damage by 100% enhancement. Sonics debuffs which are 13% vs even cons become 13*0.48 = 6.24% vs +4's. The easiest way to think about it is that if it is a self buff then that isn't impacted by the level of the enemy you are facing. But if you are interacting with an enemy then it is subject to relative enemy level whether positive or negative.

I don't know what a soft floor is, or an effective floored resistance, but I can assure you that you can well exceed 90%-res and the damage keeps going up and up. I will say that sonic is governed by animation times. The animations govern how much -res the st attacks can stack as the main attacks are all very short duration debuffs. howl+shockwave (w/ kd proc) is welcome on any team. Albeit very slow aoe output. dreadful wail is fantastic, but has more like a 40% uptime on the debuff. Sentinels on the other hand can approach perma debuff from this attack. Additionally, sonic needs considerably more than 50-65% -res (which really assumes no interruptions in your attacks) to keep up with fire and ice blast in an optmized build. The dpa of the key attacks in those sets are approx 2.5x or more than anything sonic has. It is a huge gap to close. One that most people will agree doesn't happen in spawn to spawn clearing, or even on a long duration static fight. My hope is that eventually screech gets ported over from sentinels and shout gets a second shaved off the cast. I still love my storm/son defender as it is a great example of self force multiplication synergy and a huge boon to any team.

It is, but 13% -res will still boost damage by 13% regardless of the resistance of the target. ie 100 damage becomes 113 vs 50% res 100 damage becomes 50*1.13 = 56.5 The debuff is of course impacted by level modifiers, but that doesn't come in to play vs GM's, but is noteworthy vs +con AV's/bosses.

There might be some miscommunication, but sonic doesn't work the way you are describing. You'd need a whole team of sonic blasters to reach the -res hardcap.

/drain psyche will put such a significant dent in the GM's regen that any primary should eventually get the job done. ice and fire get it done much more quickly than others. Dark blast much more safely due to the heal. Water blast has a heal as well, but i personally find the st chain to be clunky, so I don't enjoy it, but you might. I wouldn't vote for sonic blast myself unless you have pets to leverage, or teammates as the damage comes up a bit short vs other blast sets. beam should work fine. Keep in mind that when I say things like "comfortably" i mean that you have enough mitigation and enough output to drop more or less any GM that you encounter as well as all the adds it might pick up while it wanders. As such, being able to do it very quickly is my preferred approach. The longer a fight continues the more chances increase of a bad run that has you downing insp/temps to see the fight through.

Words like probably, likely, comfortably... those aren't absolutes so stop treating them as such. grats on your blaster build. The new blaster secondaries likely never got a final balance pass. They are a mess for slotting sets. If someone wants to hunt GM's the strongest -regen debuff they have access to is drain psyche. It is over twice as strong as the next closest. -regen makes solo'ing huge bags of hp a lot easier. Feel free to do as you want though.

Do they though?

This pretty much precludes all but /mental drain psyche is hands down the best -regen power available to blasters and probably the only one strong enough to comfortably allow blasters to take on a variety of GM's solo. Probably pair it with fire, ice, or dark myself. dark/mental would be what I lean toward. Not as high damage as fire or ice, but pretty decent with procs added and drain life will add a lot of survivability. If you take out the GM requirement then I'd vote for fire/atomic. You get fire blast's unreal damage with the extra bonus of achilies -res from negatron slam (or fist if you prefer) and +rech of accel metab+beta decay. Plus fire/atomic is one of the best choices for getting you to the AV/GM as it plows through spawns at an unbelievable rate.

Perhaps, but if you put the contagious confusion proc in seeds then controllers as well are typically 1 shot confusing boss spawns. Granted the proc doesnt last nearly as long as domination seeds, but you rarely need it to ime. I think what it boils down to is plant is great for either.