ScarySai

Last time I was on, all of them that could stack. I only saved one screenie of the crab though,, seemed to be every buff, including evolving armor stacks, I had only logged on the crab and axe/bio before work. Here you can see the gaussian proc going nuts. It's purely visual, combat attributes did not show them as still active.

Soldiers are the actual sentinels, so it makes sense.

Power icons super broken for anyone else?

Change to how placate works is very nice. And WAWG working properly makes it a very, very tempting option, even for tight builds. Rare to get an immob this potent on a dps.

@Ratch_Much less procs than I expected, very nicely done. I'll try that on axe eventually, if you don't, lmao. Probably gonna wait for cryptic though, just for faster trial and error.

Arctic breath was fine as it was, change it back. I do not accept "Angel thinks it's too short" as a valid reason to add a second of cast time to a power, sorry.

Slice needs more damage and maybe a higher recharge to make up for it per whatever the formula suggests. As it stands, why would I take melee attack that does pure lethal damage over channelgun - a pure energy alternative that's ranged and has the same stats besides marginally less damage? Damage you'd probably lose on the approach to slice someone anyway.

At the very least, doms can convert knock with their root most of the time. The big issue for arsenal assault is just tripmine being bugged/bad right now IMO. If you're playing arse/arse, good luck with that knock issue though, lol.

Spirit shark could use a teal circle at five stacks also: find it odd to nerf bonfire now, since it's been falling out of favor for awhile now. Most fire blasters go soul now, it just works better.

What's tragic about that, is control sets already struggle to really have a place in a team setting. I don't understand why the guys behind axe and energy melee are being so scared of making this set good.

Changing sleep nade for the poison trap vomit effect would just work better for the power. You accomplish the same desired effect, but it actually does something useful.

1: I don't get why Night Widow BU is still mutually exclusive with follow up, despite the fact the much stronger widow spec with a nuke can take fu+aim. 2: Bane builds are extremely tight due to the sheer amount of "mandatory" picks you need to take to justify being a bane over a crab, so your room for mediocre ranged attacks that essentially only serve to flop a pack over rather than do meaningful damage is very, very minimal. So why is it that the beams are still so undertuned? You can play a mace volley + mace beam blast bane and tell me "oh it's so good because it knocks things and keeps them in crowd control range" but the problem is MBB and volley do piss for damage, while crowd control does a pretty good job of keeping things in CC range. Compare it to rotating venom>disruptor>frag>cc, I'd much rather have frag grenade kill everything that survived disruptor than bounce them. Mace Beam blast wouldn't even be on my radar if it wasn't for procs. As it stands, p-ray is the only mace blast worth taking. Buff the shit out of mace beam blast and if you're worried about excessive AoE or something, make it exclusive with frag grenade, like the Crab Spider grenade was. 3: Crab, despite having probably the least meaningful changes, is probably the best right now on the condition you play leviathan, just due to the very strong synergies, and the fact leviathan single target burst ain't bad anymore. If you don't play leviathan, it's still kinda limp. I'd still say suppression needs a big buff, and that arm lash should be a shorter, but wider cone.

If you approach buffing Smoke Cann with the idea of "Oh, we can't buff this too much, or it'll be better than seeds/mass confusion!" you'd be fundamentally misunderstanding the stark differences between how these powers work. You could buff smoke cannister to like 5x current duration and it would still not be in the same realm as seeds. It can't even dominate, before we factor in just the limit of area that can be covered by smoke cann, and the fact the affected enemies have to eat a hit before anything happens.

I'd rather have psinado buffed than scream, either way. It really needs to be changed. Thing is, Forts are the best SoA, or at least tied with crab for the honor - but they aren't the best spec in the game, they can stand to get a buff on their main filler aoe. Scream could really use it too, but I mean, if I had to pick one...

This one's kinda whatever. Also, after some crab testing, the most notable buff is probably the spirit shark buff + longfang for crabs. You get all the pros of Leviathan, but you no longer lose single target from doing so, really. It's kinda funny.

That's blast though, the knock on blast - while not my preferred way to tune the power, can at least play well with how bane works. Volley wouldn't work the same way for a variety of reasons.

On what planet does that help? At best, the power becomes objectively worse unless I pay the knock tax.

We only have so many power picks and many are essentially mandatory, of course we'll want to gravitate towards what works best. If the fear is they don't want us to rotate disruptor>blast>frag endlessly, then they don't understand how the AT is played. At that point you'd be way better served as a huntsman, but I don't know. I'm just trying to understand why it's such an anemic pass. Hopefully more tuning to come.

My overall thoughts: What was changed is generally good, but not enough changed to really move the needle on SoA besides maybe Night Widow. Long requested stuff like psinado and spin being changed are still not here, despite every other version being changed now. The ranged mace attacks are still kind of bad except for poison ray, and crabs that were using the gun might now only keep heavy burst. I expected more, honestly.

Explode.

Yeah, it's pretty on theme if you're rping as a garbage can. Illusion is threat control, it makes sense for the caster to have invisibility and no root. Because a root would be detrimental to it, and invisibility allows it to set up the threat magnets without interference. On a set with smoke grenade that desperately needs a means to keep things in its patches that aggro? No, it's not useful.

Even Mind doms don't really use mesmerize unless leveling, or they need to put an av down for a bit because they screwed up while soloing. Dunno why we keep insisting on filling sets with sleep.

Storm blast is like the only set they made that's actually a banger. Seismic is the one to make fun of.

Wishlist aside from upping power values dramatically: 1: Cryo at tier 1. 2: Mega buffs for smoke cann - there is no universe this power ever matches seeds in potency, you can really afford to super buff it without worrying about it, seriously. 3: Kill cloaking device for an aoe immob.

They already were there. Even kheldians are better sentinels than sentinels!