Hopeling

The obvious way: with evidence. Or at least show your work. Moreover, that simply is not what happened. You got multiple detailed responses to your post immediately, all of them pointing out that your numbers were nonsense; you did basically nothing to address these concerns. For example, the very first response you got was Tsuko asking how you got less damage for a Corruptor than a Sentinel, and how you got your numbers at all. You quoted her, but didn't actually respond to that pretty basic question. Instead, you responded with more context-free numbers without saying how you got them. If you throw out a bunch of numbers that look wrong, and don't say where they came from, how is anybody supposed to respond other than to say that your numbers are wrong? Obitus commented a full page later, and also said that he thought you were wrong, without going further into that because all the important points had already been made, and you still hadn't addressed them.

That information is not being received negatively, nor is it "offensive"; it isn't even the point of discussion. Blasters doing 400 DPS is not news and nobody has said that it is. I have no idea why you think this is where people disagree with you. People were criticizing your calculations as not making sense. Nobody said that 400 DPS is impossible to achieve, just that the specific attack chain under the specific conditions you proposed won't do it, because your math is wrong.

Trying to calculate DPS from raw power data is the very definition of theorycrafting. "In-game experience" would be something that involves playing a character, not just looking at their power info.

@Frostweaver and I had an exchange about that on the last page which I feel was reasonably illuminating. Also, the hubbub of this thread is about /Shield just as much as it's about Broadsword/. Even though BS/ is much less popular than Psi/, StJ/, or Elec/, BS/SD is much more popular than Psi/SD or StJ/SD, and the most popular combo with /SD besides Elec/. It's a combo that people are excited about, rather than either set in isolation.

In case anyone else is confused like I was by the juxtaposition of these two statements, Inferno is an outlier among nukes, in that the Sentinel version loses most of its "free" DoT damage. For most other power sets, it's more like 600 vs 1200, instead of 600 vs 2000. That's certainly still a big difference though, especially in combination with a higher target cap. Hybrid Melee is a pretty direct tradeoff against more damage from Hybrid Assault. Rune of Protection is also not an easy power to fit into a build, requiring one of your pools and three power choices. It may not trade off directly against offense, but it probably trades off against SOMETHING, even if it's just Tactics or a travel power. For what it's worth, I think the game is less than 90% AoE at the "level 50 and Incarnated-out" stage, although it depends on what you like to do with your game time. Hard targets like AVs or high-resist EBs (Cimeroran monsters, War Walkers) feature pretty heavily in many high-level TFs and trials. AoE is still very important, but an ST specialist has a lot more opportunities to shine in an STF or Tin Mage or Lambda than they do in level 35 radio missions, and with so many Judgements flying around, clearing minions is rarely a concern.

Not if you have a secondary with a taunt aura 😉 Dark Melee might get a pass too, with the immobilize in Midnight Grasp. Haven't tried it.

You can, it just requires a build that can handle all three types of mitos, and really it's mainly the green ones that are the problem (ie, you need a hold power). @nihilii has done it, for example. The last fight might also be problematic depending on your damage type, since Honoree has high resistances and Unstoppable. The Horsemen are actually not too hard to deal with; they're just EBs. Most AVs are soloable if you don't mind using /ah to load up on inspirations first, and possibly throw Envenomed Daggers. You could really go all-out with Shivans, Warburg nukes, signature summons, etc if necessary, but for most AVs they aren't. My Scrapper soloed Dr. Vahzilok and Clamor this way at about level 25.

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.