aethereal

I don't care what AT you play, and teaming is easy in CoH unless you're chasing four star hard mode or Really Hard Way or whatever. Playing a slightly suboptimal build isn't going to ruin your team's experience, and you should do what's fun for you. The issue is that it's hard to give you advice when you have these kind of invisible restrictions in your mind. Like, why are you asking for build advice at all here? What is actually going wrong with your play experience such that you need to change your build? If you have a clear goal, people can help you build toward it, but I don't know what your goal is. You don't want to build towards soaking alpha. You don't want to build towards procs. You don't want to build towards global recharge. Like, sure, okay, but what do you want to do? Does your current build fail you at all?

So, look: if you exclusively team, and you aren't doing any kind of absorbing hits for the rest of the team (like taking alpha, really the only kind of "tanking" that a sentinel really can do), then, frankly, sentinels aren't a good AT for your style of play. Teaming with someone else playing an active tank is a very safe activity. Blasters should be able to be built plenty durable for the job. If you do want to play a sent for concept reasons, again looking exclusively at "teaming with someone else being a primary tank," then in general you should try to build your sentinel to as close to a blaster as you can -- ignore mitigation, focus on DPS. Of course the flip side of all this is that teaming in CoH is generally very easy, outside of a very small number of hard content types. So if you want to just build to concept, that'll probably be fine too.

You get mez protection with Master Brawler -- it gets included into one of your toggles, I forget which one.

It's not 3 vs 6 values, since everything that you get outside of your actual armor powers that builds resistance will build two resistances simultaneously (S/L or F/C or E/N or P/T), while set bonuses build only one positional defense at a time. Set bonuses are also mildly higher for resistances than defenses, though not to such magnitudes that it makes up for the lower defense caps if starting from zero (resistance set bonuses are 1.5% * rarity, while defense set bonuses are 1.25% * rarity). However, the OP's point is that you're not starting from zero -- he says build resistance if your armor set gives you starting resistances, at which point it will almost certainly be less effort than building from zero. Your overall point that there are a lot of powerful options to build good defenses and fewer to build resistances holds (it's certainly a big deal that you can pick up five different defense-all toggles from pool powers, and only one S/L-only resistance power). It shouldn't be underestimated how much defense building is eased by the availability of big S/L defense bonuses in ATO sets, too. What pushes the meta of defense vs resistance is a combination of a few things: Most players want defense powers anyway to build global recharge, still one of the most powerful attributes in the game, especially with PPM mechanics. Lower resist caps than defense caps for non-Tankers/Brutes Lack of pool powers that can be taken to give you +20% or so enhanceable resist-all the way that you can get +10% or so enhanceable defense-all. Set bonuses for resistance proportionately lower than defense compared to caps. With the combination of positional and typed defenses, you still get broader mitigation coverage from defense than from resistance (this used to be a bigger deal before they stripped second type tags from attacks). A few sets like ATOs and Kinetic Combat/Touch of Death provide very attractive big adds to Melee/S/L defense that has broad coverage, no equivalently broad coverage for resistance. That all stands against this thread's (correct) overall point that if you've already got resistances from your armor set, you get increased return from the resists if you double down on resists instead of pivoting to defense.

Procs do a lot of damage. I'm not totally sure how procs work in Tesla Cage, with its conditional chaining. But if it were a single-target power that did as much damage as it does on base (ie, without the chains), a standard 3.5 PPM damage proc would be worth 42% damage enhancement in it, if it had no local recharge. The reason that people who are interested in min-maxing DPS fill up attacks with 4-6 procs is that each proc is worth a lot of damage enhancement (and of course doesn't have ED concerns). Whether that's worth the loss of set bonuses is of course a judgment call and conditional on the rest of the build.

Do not skip Grounded. Look, Electricity isn't a great armor set on the 75% resist-cap ATs, but one of its true joys is near immunity to endurance drain. The most fun you can have on an electric armor character is roleplaying. Follow this script: SOMEONE ELSE: God I hate sappers. YOU: What are sappers? SE: I thought you said you fight Malta? YOU: Yes, I fight them all the time. I'm always coming for their falcons. SE: So the sappers. YOU: Not ringing any bells. SE: The ones who drain your energy? YOU: Nope. SE: They shoot a wavy beam of light at you and then you lose all your energy and die? YOU: Oh, you mean the funny little men who have a gun that doesn't do anything? They're weird.

Both defense and resistance have an increasing marginal returns curve followed by an inflection point at cap where they convert to massively decreased returns. It is better to add defense to a defense set when you are near-but-below defense cap, and better to add resist to a resist set when you are near-but-below resist cap, and then once you hit cap it flips and is better to add the opposite polarity mitigation strategy.

Brutes get Energy Aura and Regeneration, neither of which is available to Tankers.

No. ATO1 increases passive crit chance by 2% (minions/underlings) or 4% (lieutenants and up) for the Standard version, and 3% (minions/underlings) or 6% (lieutenants and up) for the Superior version. The PPM increase isn't "slight"! It improves the uptime of the proc by 50%! It's a very common pattern to increase the PPM by 1 for the superior version of an ATO proc. For example: Blaster's Wrath is 4PPM standard/5PPM superior. Defiant Barrage is 3PPM standard/4PPM superior. Might of the Tanker is 5PPM standard/6PPM superior. There are a bunch of other examples. But 2PPM -> 3PPM is a much, much bigger difference than 5PPM -> 6PPM in a way that makes me think that the original devs didn't think very hard about this pattern of "+1 for superior version," and part of the current deal with the highest-end Scrappers being probably overpowered is the fact that the 3PPM version of Critical Strikes is a huge deal. In contrast, Scrappers are probably underpowered for everyone who's not doing a PPM-optimized version of Superior Critical Strikes.

Tactics, not assault.

Do you solo +4/x8 or play on a team? I don't have high level play experience with ice armor, so genuine question, but for example I have played a lot of /ninj high level solo at +4/x8, which has similar levels of DDR, and my experience is that it's a very noticeable problem. Not, mind you, an impossible problem -- you can, and I do, handle it, but I certainly notice it strongly when I'm dealing with def debuffing enemies.

Yeah, I've been leveling an EM brute since starting the thread and it's a good experience, compared favorably to the EM Stalkers and Scrappers that I've played. Of course, Scrappers generally lag Brutes until level 50, so we'll see where it ends up.

Ice patch is in Ice Melee, not Ice Armor. It's also max targets 5, and obviously it doesn't mitigate enemies with KB protection.

I mean, there's the T9 of course, but outside of that, I wouldn't call Ice Armor much of a layering of resists and defenses. S/L/E/N get a grand total of 3.75% damage resistance (unenhanced). F/C get the defense that all Stalkers get in hide, plus a totally nominal 0.75% Wet Ice, and a somewhat more meaningful amount in Energy Absorption. Note also big toxic and psi holes in Ice Armor. Icy Bastion is a really nice resistance bump, and will, with Tough, probably take you to capped S/L and not-capped-but-meaningful E/N resists, but it's not all the time.

Frost is bigger, Frozen Aura is not, if I'm reading CoD correctly. I think that Ice Melee has a single-target problem except on Stalkers, but it's still a solid set.

Er, but electric armor doesn't have a self rez?

I think the big holes in Ice are low DDR (like Ninjutsu, only 30ish percent) and this sort of awkward situation with fire and cold type damage. You get embarrassing levels of overcap cold resistance, but pretty bad fire resistance, and no defense for either. Building on your fire resistance has this thing that kinda bothered me where you're throwing away the child resistance that you get as well with set bonuses, but building defense (which would help versus cold as well) is hard because you're starting from zero. Which probably isn't a big deal objectively, but it was surprisingly annoying to me. The DDR is a big deal, though.

I mean, they didn't. Did you read the first post? The base damage on the powers in brute Energy Melee is exactly where the scalars say it should be -- it doesn't get any special tuning to be worse than you would expect. The weird tuning is on Scrappers/Stalkers, since Energy Transfer and Total Focus get much-less-than-full-strength crits (and, in return, some non-damage benefits for critting). But Brute Fury works like normal on ET and TF, and the base damage is, as I said, right where it's supposed to be.

Okay, great. So why is it nothing spectacular? It's perhaps the single-highest-ST damage set on Scrappers and Stalkers (maybe new Fiery Melee will give it a run for its money), and it seems like Brutes get versions of Energy Transfer and Total Focus that slightly surpass the damage that a Scrapper could get with a highly optimized crit rate. Like, I'm looking for someone who says, "Oh, yeah, I tried to run Brute EM for a high-end Pylon time, and here's what you're missing..."

It's not a bug report. I don't know why you're so confused about this, honestly. I am saying, "it seems from a basic look at things like a brute's ST damage with Energy Melee should rival a Scrappers. Does that actually bear out in play? If so, why aren't we talking more about that? If not, where does the reality diverge from the simple numbers?"

I don't really care if they should be or shouldn't be, my question is -- are they? If they aren't, why not? Where does the extra damage creep in?

Yes, but it's theory-crafting, and I assume that if someone was throwing down Scrapper-like numbers on pylons or whatever with Brute Energy Melee, I'd have heard about it.

But the point is, here they seem to be on-par damage output.

I think we all got excited when Energy Melee was simultaneously revamped and proliferated to Scrappers (and Stalkers were given some kind of AoE). And of course Scrappers/Stalkers got the weird bells and whistles for crits -- but they don't get full crit damage on the two lynchpin Energy Melee attacks. Brutes, of course, get full benefit of fury to Energy Melee. Here are the numbers: Energy Transfer Scrapper: 285 damage normal, 365 damage crit If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, 612 damage normal, 784 damage crit Brute: 190 damage base If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, + 160% damage from fury: 712 damage. A Scrapper will have to crit 58% of the time to equal Brute damage with Energy Transfer. Total Focus Scrapper: 223 damage normal, 285 damage crit If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, 479 damage normal, 612 damage crit Brute: 148 damage base If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, + 160% damage from fury: 555 damage A Scrapper will have to crit 57% of the time to equal Brute damage with Total Focus Now, okay, Scrappers will enjoy their usual benefits on the rest of the attack chain compared to Brutes, but TF and ET are the three best DPA attacks in Energy Melee (it goes fast ET, slow ET, then TF), and are central to the attack chain, and it feels like scrappers are pretty unlikely to equal Brute DPS with those attacks (you might get slightly north of 58% crit chance on one of your Energy Transfers (at best 90% chance of the ATO2 proc going off, so that's like 45% crit chance plus 16% base crit chance), but not on both of these attacks). How does this all fall apart? Obviously, you have to deal with damage from Energy Transfer, not "fairly likely to heal you instead of damage you," but that doesn't feel like a deal-breaker. You don't get the chance of two fast ETs per chain, but it doesn't feel like scrappers build towards that anyway?

I compared-and-contrasted with Brute Energy Aura > Energy Cloak, and certainly the stealth in Dark is coded differently from the stealth in Energy Cloak (which does suppress for 10 seconds after attack etc for both PvE and PvP). https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=brute_defense.energy_aura.energy_cloak&at=brute I don't have enough knowledge of the minutiae of how Stealth works/what exactly happens when you trigger a power's "cancel" condition, how notifying spreads between members of a spawn to understand exactly what behavior to expect from this difference, but Dark Armor's stealth really is different from other powers' stealth.