Astredax

My fire/bio kills a pylon in about 4 min, and it's built defensively to softcap to all but psi. I'm sure it can be brought lower if you focus on offense with more procs etc. I'd guess 3:30 or maybe 3:00 as a cap for fire/bio.

I will take a more in depth look later when I’m not on mobile, but just looking at the forum post I would recommend dropping rad siphon and slotting contaminated strike instead and also slotting parasitic aura a bit more heavily. Rad siphon is a trap - a lot of rad’s dps is from contaminated targets, and siphon will strip contamination when used, leading to lower DPS. With ablative carapace, dna siphon, and parasitic aura you already have plenty of healing. Also, put both of the -res procs in irradiated ground (achilles and fury of the gladiator)

Wasn't the point of the changes to make the tank vs brute dynamic be tanks = 90% damage brute damage vs brutes = 90% tank survivability? If the best time was 1:55 on a brute and 2:09 with a tank then it's a 10% difference in damage for the absolutely most well tooled primary/secondary combo that benefits tankers the most, so wouldn't that be mission accomplished?

The thing about the secondaries is there's a pretty large difference when you're talking about with IOs and without IOs. With IOs Bio or Energy Aura are probably the strongest defensive secondaries, without them it's probably super reflexes, invuln, or maybe willpower. If I had to say best all-around pick at all stages of the game, I'd say Energy Aura. Its top end IO'd out performance is lower than Bio, but it's gonna be good at protecting you from 1-50 and doesn't require the super specific type of build Bio does for softcapping.

It improved the damage of the radial assault, but these changes IMPROVE the strength of core assault AND make the increased damage from core assault stack with team damage buffs more easily. Second, I've been min maxing the shit out of a bunch of tanker builds with these changes, and there is finally a reason to actually make tankers. The changes are a net positive for solo damage for all of the high end builds I've made - this is a net increase against strong AVs etc. in a solo situation because bruising was resisted by the purple patch (9.6% debuff after you have an alpha slot level shift). Will they do slightly less damage with a full team against an AV? Yes. But they will do significantly more damage in every other situation, and are also going to be better at buffing teammates via leadership, which they will also be better at running due to the end changes. Taking assault pretty much gives you half of your bruising debuff back anyway - only characters stacking tons of damage already through IOs or Kin would have significantly better performance from utilizing a tank's bruising than from the leadership buff. I'm sorry you don't like the changes and are losing bruising, I can see how some people might have been attached to that inherent. If you look at it objectively it's not really even a significant single target nerf, and the damage scalar changes have definitely made tanks more attractive to me. I haven't made a tanker since the game relaunched, and I'm going to be making one for the first time since I20.

I made a /rad brute on the test server that sits at 90% resist to everything (toxic, psi, cold, literally everything) at all times. You have to manage ageless and some cooldowns though.

I've got a fire/bio that's softcapped to everything but psi and can take a pylon down in about 4 minutes or so, maybe faster but I haven't checked since I respecced to do even more damage. It can also take out +4 AVs without using -regen effects. If you want to push fire/bio sentinel damage as high as it can go you actually want to take the psi pool for dominate and mind probe. Combine those with blaze and then you use flares for filler. Ageless to handle the endurance drain is pretty important if you're against a single target too since dominate costs so much endurance.

No one seems to have suggested it yet, but if you want to be a tank style sentinel I'd recommend water blast. Not only do you get a decent heal, which you can use with a def based set that you'll almost certainly want to use to do early tanking, your AoEs have a huge radius and high target caps, so you can get at least a little aggro on everything (though keeping it might be harder). Not only that, they knock your enemies around, so it helps you take that alpha strike without dropping dead before you get all your super cool god-mode IOs for surviving armageddon.

I like Fire/Bio. You can cap all your defenses and you still get the extra damage boost from Bio while doings so. I've been able to solo every villain group on +4/x8 using the build, including arachnos and rogue vanguard, although rogue vanguard required purples. It can solo AVs too, but it's annoying without envenomed daggers because they run away a lot even if you stand in melee.

Just tested it, looks like you’re right. For some reason it isn’t working. I’d personally just go for 3 +5 def/recharge IOs from different sets. You only lose the tohit bonus. Good to know about this, will add it to the list of stuff to change for v2 of the build. Damage-wise, i know I’ve beaten a number of blasters on pylon time, but it’s still significantly longer than the top tier brutes/stalkers/scrappers. Iirc my time hovered around 4.5-5 minutes when i added both -res procs to the build. Fighting AVs is a little annoying since they run away a lot for whatever reason. Rotation has good points for using throwing knives, killing AVs goes pretty fast with those.

Hey, I made the build you put up there - it’s pinned in the sentinel discord. Do you mind telling me what you mean by hamidon enhancements don’t work in link minds? They absolutely work for me on live - recharges when you expect it to and the def numbers in combat attributes seem to show it working too.

I wouldn't swap for dark - the stuff you'd want the debuffs for ends up resisting debuffs super heavily, so they aren't as useful as you'd hope. Ithink psionic and fire are the two good sentinel APPs - if you're going to switch off of Psionic, go for fire. The thing about those two pools is their damage abilities are basically swapped - fire's AOE is stronger but recharges slower, while it's melee recharges faster but has lower DPA. Psionic is the reverse. In your case, you probably want a slower recharging, higher DPA ability, so I'd personally keep psi. Link minds is nice, but unless you're planning on soloing super high level stuff, you probably don't need it that badly. Mind linking your build? It's a little hard to give better advice than that without seeing it. Plus I'm curious for myself. Got my Fire/Bio to the point where it's super strong, looking for a new project to work on, and was thinking EA - although I haven't actually tried softcapping without Agility, the idea is nice since you could take musculature and make up some of the lost damage from swapping off bio.

I use psychic mastery. Main reason to use it is for link minds and/or psychic shockwave. Shockwave is a pbaoe on a short cooldown, which is great for a sentinel since it will hit more enemies than and is easier to aim than our cones. It also has some minor -recharge and CC, but I don't notice that so much. Link minds combined with maneuvers will see you giving the team around 8-9% defense to all. It's nowhere near widow numbers, but it's a nice bonus. More importantly it helps a number of sets softcap solo, so I'd say that's its main purpose. It's what lets my fire/bio softcap, so that extra 5.5 defense from link minds is a pretty big deal for some characters. Mind probe has a high DPA so it's quite good too, although the recharge is a little long. I don't see much use for dominate or mass hypnosis, but dominate could be good if paired with dark/ or elec/.

Stay Water/Bio if you like the look, most of the people in help chat have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to Sentinels. Most of the time they don't even know the secondaries are different from scrapper/tanker secondaries. A lot of them will even say stuff like fully built Sentinels can't solo +4/x8 because their defenses are too low....like...Total nonsense things. Just make a build on test and you can see that's not true. Regarding Water/Nin, there's basically no mechanical reason to not go SR rather than ninja. You already get a heal from water, you don't need a second heal in Ninja, and SR has strong defense debuff resist and the master brawler absorb shield, which are going to be generally more useful than the blind and 8% resistance. Bio is basically the best secondary if you spend a ton of inf, while SR, Fire, and EA are the best if you don't want to do that. Water is one of the better primaries - it's not gonna be as easy to solo an AV as it would be with Fire, Beam, and maybe psi, but it's got its own strengths.

You should be able to drop one into your fireball: annihilation, chance for -res debuff. You can stick fury of the gladiator in Inferno too if it's not six slotted for one of the defense types.