aethereal

Same problems in the detailed info from the enhancement and level up screens, not just during chargen.

H This is the Scrapper version, which shows the minions crit line, doesn't show the LT/Boss crit line, lists the major normal effects as being only with fiery embrace, and then has these 2 and 4 ticks of DoT that I don't understand -- maybe they really are Fiery Embrace effects? Not sure. As far as I can tell, these are display bugs for the detailed info, the powers actually seem to be functioning okay (though my testing is not in depth and there may be subtle bugs).

Stalker detailed info from chargen screen for Breath of fire: This is pretty screwed up. We seem to be seeing the line for from-hide crits, showing a 0% chance for normal crits, and then seeing what I assume are the normal up-front damage and DoT are both tagged with the crit detail saying that the "chance increases the more allies are nearby."

It can be hard to see why Blasters do so much damage, because unlike most other DPS classes the answer isn't primarily in scalar or in an obvious damage-increasing inherent like crits or Fury. Instead, it's a combination of things. They benefit from a variety of tools that let them quickly delete spawns -- full-strength nukes, getting both Aim and Build-Up, and the ability to put together several medium-strength, large-area, high-target cap powers together in an alpha strike before the enemy mob gets a chance to respond. They're kinda late-blooming, especially on the mitigation side of things, but a level 50 Blaster in HC is still perhaps the strongest AT this game offers.

This is the Scrapper detailed info for Breath of fire at chargen. It implies that the 45 second fire damage ticks are only with Fiery Embrace. Is that correct? EDIT: Just tested, you definitely get the 45 ticks of DoT without Fiery Embrace. So I think there's maybe a detailed info display bug? What I'm actually trying to test is the crit behavior of BoF for Scrappers and Stalkers, haven't had a chance to yet. I assume the 45 seconds of DoT don't get an up-front crit, but I don't know what the crit behavior is/is supposed to be.

Patch notes say it's non-stacking, haven't tested personally.

The 45 second Fire Breath is presumably interesting against AVs/GMs, too, where you can get most/all of its damage in. I agree that the dynamics are very different when it's player versus mob (expectation is that most mobs will live far less than 45 second from start of engagement) than when it's mob vs player or pvp (expectation is that most players will live far more than 45 seconds from start it engagement). If fire breath does become a specialty AV-killing tool, it would be nice to have some clear hint as to when its DoT is over and it's useful to reapply.

It looks to me like you apply your first Vulnerability at about 0:04 and your second vulnerability at around 0:35? We'd expect the Rage meter to recover by then, but Vulnerability lasts 15 seconds, not 30 seconds.

To be clear: Sans ATO, if you start a long fight with a full bar, the way it should go is this: Time 0: You cast Vulnerability, applying it for 15 seconds, your Rage meter drops from 100 to 50 Time 15: First Vulnerability ends, your Rage meter should have regenerated to 75. You recast Vulnerability, your Rage meter drops from 75 to 25 Time 30: Second Vulnerability ends, you Rage meter should have regenerated to 50. You recast Vulnerability, your Rage meter drops from 50 to 0. Time 45: Third Vulnerability ends, your Rage meter should have regenerated to 25 -- you are unable to cast Vulnerability for another 15 seconds. With the ATO slotted efficiently and in your attack chain, it seems very plausible that you'll have gotten three activations in 45 seconds, so you should really be able to chain together four Vulnerabilities in a row. But unless you're getting on average 2.5 activations in 15 seconds, you shouldn't be able to indefinitely maintain Vulnerability. Currently the chance for +Opportunity proc has 1 PPM -- I assume it is the same on beta. With perma-hasten levels of recharge, we would expect it to fire roughly once every 20 seconds. So three activations in 45 seconds is plausible, if a little lucky, but 2.5 activations in 15 seconds would be massively lucky. Have I ever mentioned how underwhelming the Sentinel ATOs are?

Two guesses: 1. You have the ATO somewhere very efficient, where it has a high chance to trigger, is in your attack sequence, and with no local recharge. 2. Somehow you're still getting Rage(/Opportunity, but behind the scenes it's Rage) from attacking? Leftover from live. FWIW, I had the same experience as others when I did a pylon test: I could not perma Vulnerability, despite having the ATO in an attack in my ST attack sequence.

So some commentary: Sentinels, on both live and beta, are feast-and-famine people -- they (can) spend about 50% of the time under Opportunity/Vulnerability, the other 50% out of it. Let's talk about a power that does 100 damage at 1.0 scale. Live Sentinels Famine: 95 damage (due to scalar) * 1.95 (enhancement slotting) * 1.05 (inherent resistance debuff) = 194.5 damage Feast: (95 damage (due to scalar) * 1.95 (enhancement slotting) + 10 damage (Offensive opportunity proc)) * 1.25 (inherent resistance debuff + Opportunity resistance debuff) = 244.1 damage Average damage (assuming 50/50 Famine/Feast): 219.3 damage Beta Sentinels Famine: 110 damage (due to scalar) * 1.95 (enhancement slotting) = 214.5 damage Feast: 110 damage (due to scalar) * 1.95 (enhancement slotting) * 1.15 (Vulnerability resistance debuff) = 246.7 damaage Average damage (assuming 50/50 Famine/Feast): 230.6 damage So this is why, on Pylon tests, you see basically the same results -- Beta has only a 5.1% damage buff over live, almost entirely ignoreable. But the secret of course is that the 50% feast/50% famine thing was never true -- both Opportunity and Vulnerability are only useful (in terms of their damage buffs) against single hard targets, which is a small minority of CoH gameplay. When you were facing ordinary spawns, you don't really get any damage buff out of Vulnerability, and only the small proc out of Opportunity. Essentially, you're permanently in Famine mode. Beta has a clear slightly-greater-than 10% damage buff in Famine mode. Maybe even a little better than that when you're talking about trying to alpha out groups ASAP, since your first strike doesn't get the effect of the resistance debuff, and it's a big chunk of how you deal with minions. By shifting its Famine up and Feast down, Beta makes the overall reality of "permanent Famine" notably better. I'll also say that for low-end targets of vulnerability (ordinary Bosses when you're low enough level that Bosses are challenging, or Elite Bosses which drastically outnumber AVs/GMs in high level play), the fact that you're likely to start the fight with them with 30 seconds of Vulnerability on demand probably makes for a better chance to get your rare Feast mode to actually pay off for Beta. It's against AVs/GMs/Pylons, where the fight goes on for >1 minute, where it doesn't really matter if you take your Feast mode right at the start or the middle -- it all averages out. So that's another point for Beta. --- Stylized damage of Scrapper (assuming same 100 damage power if scalar = 1) 112.5 damage (due to scalar) * 1.95 (enhancement slotting) * 1.22 (crit rate, assuming 10% base rate + 6% for ATO1 + another 6% for ATO2) = 267.5 damage Stylized damage of Brute (assuming same 100 damage power if scalar = 1) 75 damage (due to scalar) * 3.55 (slotting for 95% damage + 80 Fury = 160% damage bonus) = 266.25 damage Both Scrappers and Brutes get damage that's significantly better than Feast damage for Sentinels, all the time (without a ton of ATO2 PPM abuse in the case of Scrappers). So do Blasters and Stalkers, but they're more complicated to show with math, because their damage is built into weird contingent stuff around Build Up and what actual powers they get. And yes, Sentinels are ranged and that is an advantage, but note that melee damage powers are generally better than blast damage powers, so Sents pay for this in two different ways: the basic power and then their considerably lower damage (and also worse defensive values). With this being the case, I think we could do one of either further increasing Famine mode damage, or else making Feast mode more useful when dealing with ordinary spawns, and we wouldn't need to worry about stepping on the toes of other DPS classes.

I analyzed Blaster performance with procs, and the scalars are close enough to identical now. Procs consistently provide more damage enhancement than a normal damage enhancement does, even at Blaster/Scrapper/(beta Sentinel) scalars, if you have no local recharge, with very rare exceptions for a tiny minority of powers. Here's the sheet (ignore the Sentinel row on that sheet, it's Live Sentinels, not beta Sentinels. Just look at the Blaster rows, they'll be only like 1% different from Sents). https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1exC_bOWKCrjQ4eCjN12Cs5ETFPOpJCaBjmBnUIyMXHU/edit?usp=sharing

I would love to see one or the other of the ATO procs replaced with a damage proc that does a small radius (6', maybe?) blast around the target damaging say up to 3 total targets with the proc damage. Just something that helps spread around a liiiiiiitle more AoE damage, while also being a normal damage proc. Feels like that would help on some weak areas of Sents while not being overpowered at all. I agree with @oldskool that having Sentinel's ward replaced with a proc that gave health/endurance would be a nice way to honor old Defensive Opportunity and fill its gap, providing a little more utility than the current small absorb shield does.

It still increases your opportunity meter (so makes vulnerability usable more quickly).

Okay, so I went back to live and did the same mission as I did on test (it's for what it's worth one of the missions in Number 6's arc, so it's against level 50 Praetorian Devoured Earth), on +1/x6 (which is what this character was set to on live -- look, don't laugh at me, I made it like three years ago and didn't know how to build). Then I did it on test again. My takeaway: I didn't notice a difference on Live vs Beta except that I missed having defensive opportunity, which felt like a better way to refill my end bar than using the Ninjutsu endurance heal. But that'd probably not be a real thing if I rebuilt this character for the beta environment, so no biggie there. It's probably not that my damage wasn't a little better on Beta, it's just that the controlling factor on how fast you deal with a spawn on +1/x6 is not "how fast do you damage the ones that you hit," it's "how many do you not damage at all because they're excluded due to target caps." EDIT: I know that I'm virtually alone in liking defensive opportunity, and I do get that what a sent generally needs is more damage, not more survivability or more endurance, but I did feel like Defensive Opportunity made it so that the inherent was of some use when you weren't fighting EBs or higher -- you tap Defensive and now you get a mild top-up on endurance and health without having to do anything except keep fighting. That was nice. On beta, I don't feel inclined to even look at Vulnerability until I'm fighting a better-than-boss-class enemy.

I would like to speak in favor of there being some kind of choice involved in the inherent, not just a fully passive ability. Sentinels have the potential to be really, really simple to play -- Armor sets are mostly not very active, blast sets for the most part don't have any combo mechanics (water being the exception, and I guess to some extent new electric). Positioning is broadly simple for Sents, more so than for melee. Sentinel blast sets almost never have any tactical powers -- things that in other blast sets are infrequently used mezzes are just part of your attack rotation for Sents. Your nuke is up every spawn. That being the case, I think having an inherent that adds some tactical tension to Sentinel gameplay is more welcome on Sentinels than it would be for any other AT. I recognize of course that some people strongly favor extremely hands-off play, but we're already way over on one side of that. A little concession to active play surely isn't too much to ask. I can brainstorm up lots of suggestions for exactly what that inherent looks like -- from "something kind of similar to how Opportunity/Vulnerability currently works" to "completely off the current path," but I feel like generally these threads aren't the right place for that.

I just ran some missions with my old old old main (an Archery/Ninja sentinel, level 50, with some incarnates). I don't really notice anything in particular in terms of damage output -- but then it's been a long time since I played this character and I don't have much of a sense of how much damage it "should" do. In general, in ordinary gameplay, the issue with damage output for sentinels is more target caps on AoEs than raw damage anyway. Played around with a pylon, but definitely didn't know what I was doing until partway through it. Once I did kinda figure out how a rotation would work, I was working slowly on it but clearly had a long haul ahead of me (but that's basically because this character was built incompetently a few years ago).

Could we get either a freebie menu option to bring Long Range Teleport off cooldown, or just reduce the cooldown of LRT to 0 on Beta? Would make it easier to get around.

I'll note that pylon testing probably mildly understates the state of beta Sentinels. Despite their mediocre times, Live Sentinels are fairly optimized towards pylons -- they get a hefty resistance debuff (which as you've convincingly shown have vastly overstated effects on pylons vs other enemies), and it's easy for them to optimize Opportunity. Beta Sentinels rely less on resistance debuffs and the debuff they do get shouldn't have outsized effects on pylons vs other hard targets, plus it should be easier for them to apply Vulnerability in less controlled circumstances in a more optimal way than Opportunity could be applied on Live. So, being careful about what I'm saying here: On Live, Sentinels overperform versus pylons, and their mediocre times masks even-less-than-mediocre performance against other enemies. On Beta, Sentinels probably do not overperform as much versus pylons, and their mediocre times probably are more fairly representative of mediocre performance against other enemies.

So I think damage needs to come up more. I have three possible (mutually exclusive) suggestions: Increase Scalar to 1.2 I seriously doubt that anyone is going to go for this since it's an unprecedentedly high number, but I'll just point out that the damage from Scrappers/Blasters/Stalkers/Brutes would still be solidly higher than Sentinels (just straight up boring regular crits for a Scrapper put their scalar at de facto 1.22 or so, before their ATOs, and Scrappers without ATOs underperform Brutes and Stalkers). Restore the -5% Resistance Debuff on all/most attacks And ideally make it also not affected by the purple patch. It's not a huge difference, but it'd make the scalar be the 15% damage buff that it's advertised as, rather than a 10% buff, and it makes Sents a little better on teams. Install a damage buff effect from high Opportunity Make the Opportunity meter give a 20% damage bonus when at 100% (so 10% at 50%, 5% at 25%). This gives Sentinels an implicit tradeoff between AoE and ST, with AoE benefitting from maxing their Opportunity meter and ST benefiting from Vulnerability. 20% damage bonus is roughly the equivalent of a 10% scalar improvement, and you'd only have it some of the time. I think a problem here is that people might plausibly say, "I'd rather have a 20% damage bonus than Vulnerability even when fighting a single hard target." If that's true, it ought to make us take a really serious look at Vulnerability, because a 20% damage bonus is genuinely not that much.

That's nice.

If I'm understanding correctly, we lose the -5% resistance debuff that we used to get on all attacks, and also lose the offensive/defensive opportunity procs (so the heal/end heal of defensive opportunity and the damage proc of offensive opportunity). And vulnerability is -15% resistance while the old Opportunities were -20% resistance. Is that right, or do I misunderstand? That seems like a lot to lose for what cashes out to like a sub 10% damage improvement when solo and probably a net loss of damage when on a team. QoL and ease of play seems better, but doesn't feel like it comes close to fixing Sentinel damage underperformance. What's the cast time on Vulnerability?

Ninja does have the increased crit chance from "hide," but it's not that big a deal? Like, the charm of the set is easily soft-cap the positionals + a heal + an endurance tool + some minor other stuff like cap your psi resist. I don't know that I would fret about somewhat suboptimal use of the crit from "hide" business.

I was joking about the (objectively terrible) name "Eliter Bosses," but to be clear, I did make a serious proposal back on the first stage for how an intermediate-between-EB-and-AV rank could work, and I feel like everyone ignored it and then went on to say things that would've been solved by my scheme:

Or, hear me out here: an Eliter Boss!