Hopeling

I'm really enjoying this build and the character in general; he's tied with my rerolled old main for my favorite character post-Homecoming. I've always loved Beam Rifle visually, but with no sphere attack and a 180s base recharge on Overcharge, it was just a pain to actually accomplish anything. Sentinels get Refractor Beam and a shorter recharge on Overcharge without giving up the set's ST goodness, so it feels very smooth. I haven't played any other Sentinels yet, so I'm not sure how well that extrapolates to the AT as a whole.

Secondary Powerset: Electric Armor High Healing, High Resistance, No Defense, Low-Medium "Clicky-ness" depending on whether you use Power Sink. +20% Global Recharge, -60% Global Endurance Reduction, +10 Max Endurance, 40% Slow Resist, High -End/-Recovery Resistance, Endurance Drain, Conditional KB/Immobilize Protection, No Confuse/Terrorize Protection, No HP Increase Electric Armor invites comparison to three other powersets. The most direct parallel is Energy Aura, which it is very similar to aside from being resist-based instead of defense-based. The second is Fiery Aura, which is another resist set with a click heal and an endurance drain. If you're used to this armor set on melee ATs, the third comparison will surprise you: Willpower! The Sentinel version of Electric Armor combines high resists with high regeneration, giving it layered defenses that are vulnerable primarily to alpha strikes. If you still think of the version of the set at CoV launch that had no healing at all, an /Elec Sentinel will pleasantly surprise you. On the other hand, like all Sentinel secondaries, it gives up its damage aura in exchange for another power - in this case, Charged Shield. With near-immunity to endurance drain, and potentially very high resistance to slows, Electric Armor can laugh off some of the game's most crippling debuffs. You will gleefully ignore Super Stunners, stand comfortably in crowds of dying Carnies, and forget why Malta were scary. It offers capped resistance to energy damage, and can cap S/L as well without too much trouble. You have strong resists to F/C, moderate resists to Psi and Negative, and no resistance at all to Toxic. So depending on enemy damage type, you may experience large swings in durability. -Regen debuffs are also a pain, especially since you have no defense with which to avoid them. Beginner's Overview Although Electric Armor eventually has two very powerful tools for endurance management, Power Sink doesn't come until level 35, and Energize has only 33% uptime out of the box. Considering that you get 4 toggles by level 16, you may actually struggle with endurance through the teens and 20s. Defensive Opportunity is very helpful at these levels for its endurance return, and of course all the usual slotting tricks apply. Nevertheless you do want all four toggles early on, as well as Energize. If you must put off one of these powers, make it Conductive Shield. This makes /Elec builds pretty tight at low levels; you may have to choose between putting off a travel power or the Fighting pool until the 30s or even 40s. Grounded and Lightning Reflexes can be delayed more easily, but if you do skip Grounded, you should definitely slot a Knockback Protection IO somewhere in your build, and may want to take Combat Jumping for the immobilize protection. Slotting Charged Armor and Conductive Armor should be slotted for resistance, since these are your two primary protective powers. Static Shield can be slotted for psi resistance if desired, but this is not critical. Charged Shield should be slotted for healing, and Energize for healing and recharge. The remaining powers in /Elec can easily get away with just their default slot. Skippables/Must-Haves Electric Armor has three skippable powers: Power Surge is rarely worth taking. It gives you a sizable bonus to all your resistances except Psi and Toxic; together with your toggles, it easily caps your resists even without slotting Power Surge for resistance at all. However, most of your resists aren't far below the cap to begin with, and Power Surge has a -hp -end -recovery crash like most of the older T9 powers, which is very likely to result in death, even accounting for the EMP hold effect which accompanies the crash. I can't recommend taking this power at all for most builds, but if you do, leave it at its default slot, or use it to mule a set bonus. Grounded provides some additional resistance to E/N damage and endurance drain, as well as knockback and immobilize protection. However, your other toggles already cap your energy resistance and give you 83% endurance drain resistance, so the resists offer limited benefit. Moreover, the knockback and immobilize protection only apply when you're "near the ground"; even jumping over an enemy's head creates a window when you can be knocked or immobilized. Since you can get -KB from IOs and -Immob from Combat Jumping, Grounded is a completely optional power, especially if you plan to Hover and won't benefit from its status protection. If you take this, leave it at one slot; it's a good place to put the Gladiator's Armor unique. Power Sink will completely refill your endurance bar if it hits even a few enemies, and its recharge is fast enough to handle even severe endurance problems. However, it's a small-radius PBAoE and has a slightly long animation, which is often inconvenient for a Sentinel to use. Moreover, with Energize and Defensive Opportunity, you can generally handle endurance problems without this power if desired. It's useful with just one slot, but endmod lets you refill your bar with fewer targets, and recharge doesn't hurt if you can spare it. If you want to be a sapper, Power Sink becomes an offensive tool, and may require more slotting, but it can't sap enemies effectively by itself. The remaining six powers are all important - the four toggles, Energize, and Lightning Reflexes. The armor toggles need no explanation; they are your mitigation and your status protection. Energize and Charged Shield together provide an enormous amount of healing; if both are slotted with 3 healing SOs, using Energize will bring you from 1hp back to full health before the 30-second buff expires. You could technically get by without Lightning Reflexes, but it's a great passive and requires no slotting, so I don't know why you would want to. Advanced Slotting Like /Fire and /WP, /Elec benefits tremendously from +def to layer with its resists and healing. Like /Fire and unlike /WP, it has no native defenses to build on top of. A typical strategy is to build for either S/L or Ranged defense; aiming for both, or for multiple types or positions, is usually not worth the tradeoffs. For a Sentinel, even getting one defense to the 45% softcap is quite difficult, but fortunately it's unnecessary. With S/L defense in the 25-35% range, on top of ~60% resist to most damage types and ~700% regeneration, /Elec is already quite durable, and a purple inspiration or two makes it nearly indestructible when necessary. If you build for S/L defense, you can slot your toggles with 4 pieces of Reactive Armor or Unbreakable Guard, as well as muling Kinetic Combat or Blistering Cold in Brawl, Boxing/Kick, or an epic melee attack if you take one. If you build for ranged defense, you will have to rely primarily on sets like Thunderstrike and Mako's Bite in your attacks. Either way, make sure to pick up the Steadfast Protection and Gladiator's Armor +def uniques. I like to put a full set of Preventive Medicine in Energize, but if you can't afford the slots, you could get away with frankenslotting it in 4, 3, or possibly even 2 slots with Heal/Rech and Heal/Rech/End IOs, boosted if necessary. 3 slots in Charged Shield are enough; I use Preventive Medicine Heal, Heal/End, and Heal/End/Rech, which gives good enhancement values as well as +S/L resist and +hp set bonuses. Besides defense, it is also helpful to build for +hp to take advantage of your high regeneration (including the Unbreakable Guard unique), S/L/F/C resist to stack on top of your toggles (including the Shield Wall and Reactive Defenses uniques), and global recharge bonuses to use Energize and your strongest attacks more often (including LotG 7.5% in Weave, Hover/Combat Jumping, and anywhere else you can fit them). You can also build for psi resist if desired. If you slot Static Shield and take the two +resist uniques, you're already at 46% psi resist, so a few set bonuses and Impervium Armor globals could get you to the cap. Even if you take Grounded, but especially if you don't, you should slot at least one Knockback Protection IO somewhere in your build. Otherweise, you'll sometimes get knocked while jumping or repositioning, because you're momentarily not "near the ground". Lastly, if you hate moving slowly or getting your recharge debuffed, you can build on top of Lightning Reflexes' 40% resistance, via the Winter's Gift unique and the 2pc bonuses from winter event sets. Complementary Choices Thanks to its powerful endurance management tools, Electric Armor pairs well with even the thirstiest primaries. Since /Elec requires only a low investment in both slots and powers, it fits well with builds that want a lot of other powers - either from the primary, from pools, or from an epic pool. If slotted for endmod, Power Sink drains a lot of endurance from enemies. By itself it can't drain enemies and keep them dry, but when paired with Electric Blast and/or Electric or Mu Mastery, sapper builds are a real possibility. (But due to the mechanics involved, I've always found sapping to be a disappointing form of mitigation/control in this game, so your mileage may vary.) Incarnates Alpha: I would not recommend Cardiac (-endredux, +resist, +range) or Vigor (-endredux, +heal). If you have enough endurance problems at 50 with /Elec to consider using your alpha slot on them, something is wrong with your build. If you want additional resists, go Resilient (large +res); if you want additional regeneration, go Spiritual (large +recharge, +heal). Otherwise, Musculature (large +damage), Intuition (+damage, +range), or Agility (+recharge, +endmod, +def) are good choices for the usual reasons. Interface: If you want to be a sapper, I guess you could go Gravitic Radial for the -recovery proc. Otherwise, /Elec doesn't particularly care which Interface power you take. Destiny: Again, you shouldn't need a lot of endurance help from this slot, so Ageless is probably not very useful unless you really want that extra recharge. I think the best choice here is Barrier as a panic button when you need to let your regeneration catch up, but you don't really have any gaping holes for a Destiny power to fill, so you're also free to pick a power based on its group utility, like Incandescence.

I think the idea is that it's supposed to roughly match melee cones, which mostly cap at 5 targets. Due to the larger area, it's really easy to saturate a Sentinel cone at 6 targets, while it would be hard to hit more than 5 with most melee cones anyway. The issue, IMO, is that Sentinel cones seem to still roughly follow the damage formula: they pay for their much larger area with decreased damage, compared to melee cones. Compare sentinel Fire Breath (88 damage, 16s recharge) to scrapper Sweeping Strike (106 damage, 11s recharge). After adjusting for AT modifiers, they do almost exactly the same damage... except Fire Breath has a longer recharge and higher endurance cost, which is supposed to be a tradeoff for hitting more targets, but for a Sentinel it can't. And that's one of the stronger ranged cones! Energy Torrent vs Sweeping Strike is just depressing.

Great catch. I have no idea what's going on there, but I'll play around with it. I was under the impression that all pets are supposed to inherit Hybrid Assault toggles while toggled on, whether they're summoned during the toggle or not. I don't have any pet classes at 50 (melee 4 lyfe), so I'm going entirely on secondhand accounts here, but are you sure you need to do resummoning tricks at all?

Inspiration, salvage, and recipe drops do get split between team members, yes. So does XP and influence, although this is partially counteracted by a bonus depending on the size of the team.

It looks like nobody has volunteered for /Elec yet. I'm happy to write one; I'll try to get a draft up in the next couple days. I'm pretty torn between Radial and Core for the assault slot on a Sentinel. I think it mostly comes down to how much you value the qualitative advantages of Doublehit.

I honestly think it's an issue of expectations. Remember, up until i16, the highest notoriety levels were Unyielding (+1/×2) and Invincible (+2/×1). At those settings, any sets do pretty well on just SOs, and are quite fun to play. On a team, again, any set does fine. Meanwhile, inventions were added in i9, and IO builds have become steadily stronger and easier to get since then. If your baseline expectation for performance is an i25 IO build that can solo on ×8 and tank AVs without even using inspirations, SO performance will disappoint you. Defense-based sets can get by with abuse of inspirations, since they only need 1-2 per 60 seconds to stay softcapped. Scaling auras have an advantage there too; Rise To The Challenge does exactly what its name suggests. Resistance sets like /Elec can't abuse either of these mechanics to the same degree, so if you use an i8 build, you get i8 performance.

I hope not, lol. So far I'm just leaning into the ST focus since that's what I'm good at, kind of like a Stalker. It works pretty well; there's always someone who can clean up minions.

/Elec blooms pretty late IMX. The resists alone don't make you that durable, and the heal is on a relatively long recharge for the amount it does. For quite a while, you're actually squishier than /Fire to most enemies. (The Sentinel version gets a beefy +regen toggle instead of Lightning Field, which changes the story dramatically; it's my favorite version of the set.) Once you have the Fighting pool, some global recharge to get Energize up more often, and some defense to layer with the resists, it improves a lot. In the meantime, carry a lot of purples.

As of i24, every Blaster secondary has extremely powerful endurance management in its Sustain power (/NRG gets perma-Conserve Power, MM gets Drain Psyche, and everyone else gets an even stronger version of Quick Recovery). No decent Blaster build should have serious endurance problems past the mid levels. I'm not sure why people say that Sentinel damage is below Corruptors. If you're comparing against a /Kin with Fulcrum Shift, sure, but otherwise it's at best a wash. Their base damage is substantially lower; for example, a /Rad Corruptor with AM up attacking a target in Enervating Field just barely gets to the same damage numbers as an unbuffed Sentinel, without even counting Opportunity. Worse, the Corruptor requires a nontrivial amount of "setup time" to do it, which the Sentinel gets to spend attacking instead. Scourge doesn't change the story much; naive calculations put it at a 25% DPS increase, but in practice it's less on normal targets, since by the time it has a high proc chance, the extra damage is all overkill. AoE is a different story due to target caps, granted.

Coming up with attack chains is kind of an art, not a science. You look at the attacks available to you, think about possible ways to chain them together, and see which one works out the best. The calculations involved are just arithmetic: DPS is damage per second, ie, (total damage of the chain)/(total seconds required to execute it).

I'm not sure what you're referring to with "so often", then?

You may have too many story arcs in progress. There's a limit. Finish up some of the arcs from your current contacts. You can absolutely gain veteran levels and threads without having the alpha slot unlocked though, and the alpha slot will unlock via incarnate XP from regular kills even if you never run Ramiel's arc at all. You just don't get shard drops until it unlocks.

You don't recall missing about one attack in twenty?

The buffs are pretty minor, and the pets die to the first AoE attack that comes your way. I rarely bother to use them at all.

I tend to forget that Psi and Savage exist, haha. Haven't tried them yet. Staff and Street Justice were in the live game, but not until relatively late in its life. Ice Melee is very much not a new set, but it wasn't available to scrappers before shutdown.

So... rad melee? That's the only new one.

Yes, exactly.

You're right, I forgot to update the areafactor calculation in the proc chance formula. I originally made this spreadsheet when the PPM changes were a hypothetical, haha. It should be fixed now. I had assumed it was one proc chance per activation, but someone on Reddit tells me that they're getting multiple procs per power from area attacks. Assuming that's correct - my testing focused on Doublehit, and I can't log in right now to confirm - then yes, 5 stacks is extremely achievable in AoE situations. This really cements Core as the better option for AoE performance. Yes, while the quantitative performance can be hard to compare, Radial has a clear edge on the qualitative side. If you're at all on the fence between Core and Radial, go Radial because it stacks with everything and works at full strength in every situation. I believe they are calculated using activation time of 0 and recharge time of the aura's tick frequency; I haven't tested this directly though. For damage auras, the tick frequency is 2 seconds.

I don't think TW is especially synergistic either, besides "high DPS + Offensive = best DPS". Any other primary should work fine. Claws/Bio or Savage/Bio seem like natural matches, concept-wise. Once I get bored of my current batch of characters, I plan to make a "corrupted by Rularuu" claws/bio with the giant Rularuu claws.

More or less, but with the additional wrinkle that Core favors AoE. That TW brute might still want Core for farming; doublehit has only a 30%ish proc chance in a slotted Whirling Smash.

They kept the original formula. I tested this with a couple AoE powers before posting; the original formula gives precisely the in-game damage values. Of course, the damping factor is applied for the proc rate, since that's a PPM effect like any other. Fun fact, though: during i24 beta, the areafactor in the formula I gave was incorrectly cast to an integer data type, so if it was supposed to be 3.25, damage was calculated using an areafactor of 3. This was deeply confusing to playtest: I had the formula from a dev post, and it was right for ST attacks, but wrong for AoEs by a seemingly random amount. I eventually figured out the issue and told Synapse, and it was fixed in a later build. Didn't get Bug Hunter though. Alas. I'm not sure. I would guess Radial wins out because pets are probably bad at building stacks and some have low base damage? It does not. Think of it like an IO proc

What The Hell Is "Doublehit"? - A Hybrid Assault Guide This guide sets out to answer two questions: What does Doublehit actually do? Should I take Assault Core or Assault Radial? This is a guide that I was planning to write back when i24 and the Hybrid slot were still on the test server in 2012. I shelved the project after the shutdown announcement, but recently dug out my old notes and decided to finish it. There is a lot of incorrect information out there about Hybrid Assault Radial and its Doublehit mechanic. I've seen people say that it deals a percentage of the power's damage, that it deals the power's base damage, that it's affected by slotting, and general confusion over what it does. None of these are correct. It's a strange power which works in a strange way. But based on my old notes, and some testing both then and now, I have a fairly complete picture of what it actually does. 1. What Does Doublehit Actually Do? The t4 version of Doublehit, from Radial Assault Embodiment, is a 6 PPM proc on all your attacks. Its damage depends on the power being used. Specifically it depends on two things about the power: its base recharge, that is, the recharge before any slotting or buffs. For toggles, I believe the tick frequency should instead be used, which is 2 seconds for most damage auras, but I have not tested this directly. its areafactor, which is given by a fancy formula: ((1+(Radius*0.15))-(((Radius/6)*0.011)/5)*(360-Arc)). For single-target powers, this simplifies to 1. For spherical AoEs, it simplifies to (1+(Radius*0.15)). Once you know these two things, here's how you calculate how much damage a doublehit proc will do: Doublehit Damage = 0.4×0.2×[0.8×(Recharge)+1.8]×107.09/Areafactor If the power's recharge time is less than 1 second or more than 30 seconds, it gets "clamped" to those values. Where Did That Come From? Are You Making This Up? Nope, that's the real formula. But it's not pulled from thin air: if you hop over to the Design Formulas thread, you'll recognize this as the damage formula, with a base damage of 107.09 damage plugged in, and then a coefficient of 0.4 applied. Since the usual base damage in that formula is (55.61×AT damage scale) instead of 107.09, what Doublehit does when it procs is it deals 77% of what the power's base damage would be, if that power followed the damage formula, and if your archetype had a damage scale of 1.00. What are these "ifs" about? Well, there's two things going on: Every AT has a damage scale. You can view them raw here, but most people are more used to the user-friendly interpretation on ParagonWiki. Your AT damage scale determines how much damage your powers do: a Blaster's ranged scale of 1.125 is 50% higher than a Corruptor's ranged scale of 0.75, so Blasters will do 50% more base damage with ranged powers. But Doublehit doesn't care what your AT is. We'll see later that this has implications for Core vs Radial comparisons. The damage formula is a guideline for designing powers, but not all powers follow it. For example, Foot Stomp has a 20s base recharge and a 15-foot radius, so according to the damage formula, its base damage for a level 50 Tanker "should" be 0.2×(0.8×20+1.8)×44.488/(1+.15×15) = 48.73 damage. But a quick peek into Pine's will show you that it actually deals 63.17 damage base. Foot Stomp breaks the damage formula, so Doublehit will deal less than 77% of Foot Stomp's base damage, because Foot Stomp's damage is higher than it "should" be. What About Other Tiers of Assault? Man, I have no idea. Ostensibly, lower tiers should have a lower PPM and a reduced coefficient (instead of the 0.4 used above). But I could not tell you what they are. The numbers in my old notes came from a dev post in the old forums. I have no idea which thread it was, and looking for things on the old forums is a pain. If someone wants to do it, or do some in-game testing, I'll be happy to update the guide. 2. Should I Take Assault Core or Assault Radial? Now, to answer the question most people are actually interested in: which is better? Unfortunately, the answer is "it's complicated". To compare the two, you have to also know what Core does. The t4 Core Assault Embodiment power gives each of your hits a 65% chance to give you a +15% damage buff, lasting 10 seconds, and stacking up to 5 times. A 10s duration means that to stay at 5 stacks, you'd have to get a stack every 2 seconds. Attacking every 2 seconds is feasible, but there's only a 65% chance on hit to get a stack. This means that, unless you have very fast attacks, you won't be hitting 5 stacks very often on a single target. But AoE powers get a chance to proc on each separate hit, so getting 5 stacks is very feasible when there's more than one enemy around - ie, most of the game. If you have 5 stacks of Core, that's +75% damage. That is, Core adds 75% of the power's base damage, and it does that to every hit. Radial adds 77% of what "should" be the power's base damage, ignoring AT modifiers. But it's a proc; it doesn't go off on every hit. The math for comparing these is tedious, because you have to use the above formula AND do PPM calculations, so I made a spreadsheet. Feel free to download a copy and enter the info for the powers you use. By default I've put the "Stacks of Core Buff" setting at 4 stacks; play with that to see how it performs in ideal or not-ideal situations. Some Cliffs notes that may help you decide, if you don't want to crunch a ton of numbers: Doublehit ignores AT modifiers, but Core does not. If your AT has a damage scale below 1.000, lean towards Radial. If it's above 1.000, lean towards Core. If you have a lot of pets (whose attacks usually have low base damage, relative to player attacks), again lean towards Radial. Core is generally a better choice for AoE damage. Core is at its strongest in AoE situations since it can build stacks easily. Meanwhile, Doublehit double-dips on recharge and areafactor: a power with longer recharge has a higher proc chance AND deals more damage when it does proc; a power with a larger area has a lower proc chance AND deals less damage when it does proc. Core is generally a better choice if most of your attacks have short recharge times, by the same reasoning. Doublehit is not subject to the damage cap, because it's not a damage buff, it's a proc. If you're often at the damage cap, Core does nothing for you, so go Radial. Radial works at full strength whenever it's toggled on, while Core needs to build stacks. If you spend a lot of time throwing support powers, buffing your pets, etc, then you won't be building stacks very effectively, so go Radial instead. Hopefully this guide left you less confused than you were before reading it, but if not, please feel free to ask questions. Either power is quite strong overall, so if you're getting anxiety over this much math, don't stress a great deal about picking the "right" one. Changelog 08/04/19: Fiddled with some phrasing. Fixed proc chance calculations. Update info about Core stacks from AoE powers. 06/30/22: New link due to a Google security update; the spreadsheet should be accessible again.

I am actually writing a guide about that right now. While the OP here is correct about qualitative things, the exact math given is fundamentally wrong; Doublehit does not deal the power's base damage. You can see this in Zolgar's test above: Hack does 199.75 damage base on a scrapper, which would be (199.75)*(1.000/1.125)=177.55 damage for a character with scale 1. The doublehit proc actually dealt 124.33 damage though. The actual math is a bit weird, but basically, it's a PPM proc whose damage depends on the cycle time and area of the power being used. My guide should go up in this forum later this weekend, if not tonight.

Nope. This is on a +0 enemy with no damage resistance, and a t4 radial Assault.