DocRadio

Stalkers. Sure they're melee... but kind of glass cannony until the upper levels when they can scrap consistently without eating pavement. And even then, they're more the strategic type than the wade into massive spawns and dominate like scrappers and brutes.

Honestly, I like versatile blasters. That means getting up in your target's grill to optimize all your damage. The idea of a purely ranged blaster bores me. If I want to hover blast I default to Sentinels. Sure they don't have the front loaded damage, but they have defense and status protection. They also famously lack any sort of melee focused attacks so Hover blasting just makes sense. All that being said Devices, Tactical arrow, and even Martial add decent tools to a hover blaster strategy.

I literally had a defender say... great You have armor and mez protection. I can concentrate on keeping the tanker upright thereby avoiding a team wipe. And she did... and I'd roll in and obliterate shit every few minutes with inferno. Never needed a buff.

Indeed. Following up Blaze with Bonesmasher... That's why you play Fire/EM.

I've tried both of them... was underwhelmed by both. Beam doesn't have a lot of AoE options so cutting beam is a consideration, though I think the damage is lackluster. Gun Drone on the other hand... Unless I'm missing something... Is there any point in that power at all?

Solid build. I'm considering dipping into psychic mastery for my NRG/Invul sent. How good is "link minds"

I didn't take Burn until the late levels. I got tired of immobiles being a weakness. Turns out I was leaving potential damage on the table. It works well with Fire Sword Circle.

Nice. In my experience /Fire wasn't the best set for mitigation. I took a Fire/Fire/Fire sent to the late veteran levels. He's my main. I'll admit he's not fully optimized. I heavily invested in recharge and damage at the cost of resist and defense but I can still pretty much solo anything. Right now I'm doing Water\Bio and Elec\Elec builds. Both are in the mid game and show great promise.

I was thinking the same thing. Also 200 +Recharge without hasten might be overkill. One could probably curtail a bit of that in lieu of additional ranged defense. Still overall it's a very solid build.

You won't need luck. I just hope you have fun.

I don't care of the sentinel inherent, but I hope they don't eff the Archetype up. Having a ranged class with status protection has been a literal dream come true.

I have a water/bio Sentinel. Water is a solid AoE centric set. It has decent single target oomph that is inferior to ice, and decent AoE that is inferior to Fire. But it also has a fairly decent heal which the other two lack. Bio gives you solid protection along with a boost to damage. It's versatile and pretty much pairs well with any primary.

I have a 50+ DP/Martial blaster. She's a hoot to play, and damn near untouchable. The rare status effect that hits me is shrugged off by the built in breakfree power in Martial. I can just rick roll anything that isn't an AV or GM.

Fact is blasters have to build a certain way, take certain incarnates and then they "might" come close to sentinel level of survivability. Extra defense and insane damage are pretty potent. I think blasters outclass them in raw damage but superior? I don't see it.

I was just playing one of my lowbie blasters. Ice/NRG... very serviceable, but one slip, one miscalculation and you're horizontal. Sentinels don't experience that at level 22.

Well.... At least it's smarter than the average.

Ice/NRG is working well for me. The combination of single target control with the melee attacks from EM is potent. I'm also running Ice/Martial. I started it as a Mortal Kombat rip off of Sub Zero but it turned out to be really fun and effective. And once again the Trap and Slap mechanic works with that combo too. Dragon's tail helps fill in for the lackluster AoE of the primary also.

Because Opportunity effing sucks. It's a confusing mechanic that doesn't seem to make a difference.

Easy. A ranged character with early access to rock solid status protection. Late game they're sort of outclassed by just about every other ranged archetype. That being said, you can concentrate on IO's that boost damage and not have to worry about status protection or survivability. You have those on tap already.

No unyielding? Exactly why did you build a sentinel? Your status protection and a good chunk of your damage resistance is out the window without it.

Thanks. I've been considering Demons/Thermal.

Is Empathy a good secondary set for MM's, and if so what is the optimal primary for it?

I concur with everything said here. I have a Kin/Elec corr well into her vet levels. I didn't really build her for survivability but somehow... she survives. And that's mostly by making things real dead real fast and relying on RoP, Barrier or Force of Nature when things get hairy. I try to have Transfusion, transferrence, and fulcrum shift up as much as possible. I use siphon speed and siphon power to keep things rolling too. It's really a thing of beauty. Any mistake usually leads to a dirtnap admittedly, but I don't die all that often. I usually pull off spectacular shit on the regular because Kinetics is a goddamn beast. As for End Drain, I don't bother trying to drain anything lower than bosses. Some bosses can be gutted by short circuit followed by transference. I also have power build-up which makes it all the worse.

Dude my first go around was as a fire/fire blaster. My most frequent co-player was a dark/dark defender. It was horrible. Darkest night did nothing. The only thing that got blackend was my eyes as all it did was get us wiggety, wiggety, wiggety WASHED. Our only working tactic was him hovering over a mob and dropping the servant on them. It would take the alpha and die in seconds but that gave me just enough time to AoE them to death before they shredded us both. We were CONSTANTLY neck deep in debt until the devs finally fixed the bugs in the -ToHit debuff. Then we were almost unbeatable. The set just got better from there. I still don't think there's a use for black hole, and howling twilight is kinda meh... but I like what's left a lot. Plus I tested a future build on the test server and it holds up. Now that I look back, that early experience actually soured me on defenders all together. In my mind the only ones worth a damn were force fielders and empaths. I considered the rest garbage. After the fix I saw what DeBuffing could do. My first defender was Rad/Rad. Which lead to Kin/Elec, and several corruptors before the live servers were taken offline. I always wanted to try my own Triple Dark Defender, but never got around to it.

I have to say it... I love moonbeam. The thing is a monster with the new snipe changes. Soloing isn't a choir because of it. Admittedly I'm not even at level 14, but I'm having a good time sniping for fun and profit.