Hopeling

Ah, you're right, I had misremembered. The full-duration one is mag 6. Melee Core Hybrid is indeed nice, but it's not specific to Blasters. I'm not saying that Blasters cannot be made durable. I'm saying that exactly the same amount of effort will make a Sentinel significantly more durable than that.

RoP+Melee Core gives a 30-second gap every cycle.

Yes, of course there's an endgame for Blasters. Blasters are one of the most popular ATs in the game and clearly do quite well. The question of this thread was whether there's an endgame for Sentinels in their current state. The claim I was contesting was that Blasters have a way bigger advantage in damage than their disadvantage in durability. If the Blaster focuses very hard on mitigation and the Sentinel doesn't, sure, that durability gap gets pretty small, but like you say, the Sentinel could do the same thing and be even tougher. Or if they focus on offense, they'll still be about as tough as the toughest blaster, and narrow the damage gap. A similar argument goes for Clarion, which some others were talking about - sure, a Blaster can patch their mez hole that way, but they're still only getting mag 3 protection for half the duration, and in exchange they're not using Rebirth or Barrier, which widens the durability gap.

I was thinking something like Kinetic Combat that isn't too heavy on recharge, but frankenslotting would work too. With PPM 5 and considering that proc chances cap at 90%, there's no benefit to a cycle time longer than 10.8 seconds, and since Broadsword's AS has a 1.67s cast time, that means you can enhance the recharge down as low as 9.13s before seeing any drop in proc chance at all. That's 64% recharge enhancement, and the proc itself gives I think 26.5% recharge at 50, so any set with less than about 40% recharge enhancement is already "optimal" in terms of ATO proc chance.

As of i24, PPM proc rates are calculated off recharge rate including enhancements (but not including global recharge), rather than base recharge. The Paragonwiki page still gives the i23 info because Paragonwiki in general hasn't been updated for Homecoming stuff. Stalker's Guile does indeed have a lot of recharge. The good news is that with PPM 5, even slotting the full set in AS will still give a pretty high proc rate, around 75%. If you don't mind missing the 6-piece S/L resist bonus, you could also slot just the proc in AS along with something else that doesn't give too much recharge enhancement, and then put the other 5 pieces in another power.

Right, that's about what I'm seeing too: 25%ish profit on average, but requiring a great deal of micromanagement, and either a high tolerance for risk or pockets deep enough to work in large volumes where it balances out. At current margins, lots of players seem to find it not worthwhile, as seen in eg this thread. If prices rose significantly, that calculus would change.

It obviously would raise prices on ATOs, but I don't see how it could reduce the price of purples. Supply would decrease slightly (Super Packs contain significant numbers of merits, which can be used to buy purples), and demand would increase because ATOs become less viable as replacements. Similarly, the supply of catalysts, boosters, converters, and unslotters would decrease, leading to a rise in prices. The price of Super Packs partially acts as a control on inflation: if prices rise, Super Packs become more profitable, so more people open them, which destroys inf and increases supply until prices fall again. Right now, prices are such that Super Packs are barely profitable, if at all; unless this is just coincidence, it suggests that the control is fairly effective. Raising the price amounts to relaxing this control, allowing prices to rise until Super Packs are once again profitable.

Typing /ah and dragging over a bunch of salvage is often easier than figuring out which salvage to buy and zoning to find an invention table. For really high merit counts, boosters offer a similar return to converters with far less clicking.

I would contest this claim. My Blaster has mid-30s S/L defense, 60%ish S/L resist, and about 500% regen via Sustain. My /Elec Sentinel has mid-30s S/L defense, 60-75% S/L/E/F/C resist and 40%ish psi/negative resist, and 700% regen plus the actual heal from Energize. On healing alone, my Sentinel can survive about twice as much incoming DPS as the blaster, and has only a toxic hole instead of an "everything except S/L" hole. Like yes, Blasters can have comparable numbers on their best defenses, but it's rare for a blaster to have significant defense and/or resists to more than one position or damage type, while it's very common for a Sentinel. In practice, this means that even with IOs and epic shields, Blasters tend to feel brittle, because they can still die almost instantly when they come under fire from the wide swathes of enemies they aren't specialized in defending against. Sentinel defenses are much more robust. On the damage front, considering that Opportunity boosts your damage and everyone else's by 20%, and that Sentinel base damage is only about 15% lower, Sentinels are actually reasonably competitive for ST. Blasters remain the kings of AoE thanks to their higher target caps, and I do think that Sentinel damage is a bit undertuned in general, but it's well above the corruptor/defender level that it's sometimes compared to.

If you want to active two different powers in sequence, I think you'll have to use bindload tricks.

Technically there are many, like crafting fees and inspiration vendor prices. But these are mostly insignificant compared to the amount of influence that level 50 characters can generate. The other major one is AH fees, and with converter flipping being so popular, I think AH fees might be taking more inf out of the economy than they did on live.

That's because you CAN play Invulnerability on a Stalker.

It does what it says it does: grants stealth for 120 seconds after teleporting.

"Better" in what sense? Obviously the powers would be stronger if they were always on, but they're strong enough that they really don't need any buffs. The partial uptime is an intentional limiting factor, and that limiting factor is why they can have such strong effects without just breaking the game in half.

Ah, now I see the disconnect. This is not what I meant at all. I've played some games where the devs use the term "class fantasy" to refer to how a character class is supposed to feel. The Tanker fantasy is to be an immovable lynchpin of the team; the Blaster fantasy is to do so much damage you don't need defense; the Claws fantasy is to tear an enemy to shreds with repeated savage attacks; the Broadsword fantasy is big crunchy hits. The mechanics are distinct from and may or may not live up to the fantasy. I'm saying that Stalkers do fulfill that fantasy, in fact, they do it better than Scrappers do.

Excuse me? I don't know what "Torchlight" is. I have leveled about a dozen melee characters to 50 the hard way though, including multiple with Broadsword, and the whole point of my comment is that scrappers AREN'T the same as stalkers. Seriously, I am deeply confused where this scorn is coming from. I wasn't even responding to what you said, much less disagreeing with it, which is why I quoted SuperQ!16 rather than you.

Nothing. Broadsword's performance is not exceptional compared to other Stalker primaries; you can see this in eg pylon numbers. But the Stalker version of Broadsword is exceptional compared to other AT's versions of Broadsword, because Stalker Broadsword is just about up to par with other secondaries, while eg Scrapper Broadsword is just an inferior version of Katana. The draw of Broadsword was always supposed to be that it had big single hits, and at launch, Head Splitter really was one of the biggest attacks a Scrapper could get, with Disembowel not far behind. Hack is still one of the stronger level 1 powers in any melee set. But then Scrappers got War Mace with Clobber, and a half-dozen other new sets came along which all had Knockout Blow-type powers, and Head Splitter just doesn't stand out anymore, which leaves the set with subpar DPA and no strength to call its own. With AS and Hide crits, and potentially a 31% crit rate on regular attacks, Stalkers are all about big crits, which plays well to the Broadsword fantasy. Broadsword doesn't get any more out of Stalker mechanics than eg StJ does (arguably, it gets less), but it gets enough for the set to feel satisfying.

Only if influence enters the economy faster than it leaves. Prices seem pretty stable over the last few months; if anything, the overall trend has been slightly deflationary. On live, you were correct: influence entered the economy via farmers, and basically never left. The only meaningful influence sink was AH fees. That's why purples cost hundreds of millions of inf apiece. On Homecoming, that is no longer true; there are multiple significant influence sinks. Super Packs are a big one: a farmer can create a hundred million inf in an hour, but I can destroy that in five minutes by opening Super Packs, and I'm incentivized to do so because it turns a profit. In fact, I suspect the (fixed) price of Super Packs itself has a significant stabilizing effect. Right now, they're kind of on the edge of profitability - you can turn a profit by buying Super Packs and selling the contents, but you need to work in pretty high volumes for it to be reliable. If IO prices went up 25% while Super Packs stayed at 10m apiece, they would offer huge profit margins, and lots of people would start buying super packs - which takes lots of inf out of the economy, and increases the supply of almost every high-demand item.

"Capped" as in the server generated millions of rare salvage listed for 1m apiece. You can bid more than that if for some reason you want to, but the going rate will never exceed 1m, because at that price point, supply becomes effectively unlimited.

Any SF or AV fight is a pretty reasonable place to start. Sub-50 SFs work fine too, and still give good bragging rights since you can't use Incarnate powers. One classic test of a character's solo abilities was to run through the Maria Jenkins arc with AVs turned on, and see how many you can handle.

Yeah, that happens every so often. It's why I try to avoid refreshing Secondary Mutation during a fight, haha.

Power info never includes buffs, just enhancements. Since Domination can't be slotted, it will always display its base recharge.

Some of the content from later in the game's run works through the LFG queue directly, rather than through a contact. So yes, the only way to get it in is by using the "Queue" button. But there are two ways to do that: Queue up by yourself, and hope that enough other people also do that to fill a group. When enough people queue, the game will put you all in together. Form a group, then all queue up. Unfortunately, with so many different things you can queue up for, and considering Homecoming's relatively small population, option 1 almost never works except for things that are very popular and require only a few players, like Summer Blockbuster. There just aren't enough players queuing up to fill a group. So yes, you form it just like any other TF or trial. But rather than forming and then talking to a contact, you form and then press 'Queue'.

Queuing and waiting is not a reliable way to find trials. Most leagues are formed manually, by recruiting in the LFG channel and/or global channels. If your goal for the day is to run a specific trial, the most reliable way to do that is to form the group yourself.

What interests me is that there are 151 entries for Sentinel combos ranked by popularity at 50. Sentinels have 13 primaries and 12 secondaries, so there are 156 possible powerset combos. That means there are five combinations that literally nobody has ever played to 50 before. I haven't made a grid to figure out which five combos those are, but if you're looking to try something new...