aethereal

5% chance base for minions and below, 10% chance base for lieutenants and above. Note, though, that stalkers are just 10% for everyone. Obviously, having a 10% chance for critting against minions does not "waste" anything -- you're no more or less likely to crit that boss having critted the minion you just attacked.

I roll to disbelieve that a blaster in the era of sustains has an endurance problem.

Terrible news: it won't work. The proc checks for "isFriend" and won't fire if the target is a friend. The good news is that you can't sub your buddies or pets if you happen to have an endmod power that targets both allies and enemies, the bad news is you can't stun yourself.

Stalkers are barely less durable than scrappers. But on the other hand Scrappers who are built to take advantage of PPM and the ATO proc crit more than stalkers.

It seems really backward to me to say that the problem with the current meta is that blasters and scrappers need help.

My guess is that's an oversight. It's not just SR toggles, sentinel armor values are generally lower than scrappers/stalkers/brutes.

Nope, they're slightly lower. So for example, focused fighting (the first toggle in super reflexes) gives 13.875% melee defense to scrappers and 12.950% to sentinels. (Though I don't think that sentinels have any real durability problems.)

Sentinels have a ranged damage scalar of 0.95. Defenders have 0.65. Corruptors have 0.75. Obviously, Defender and Corruptors have access to buff/debuff sets, and certain of those can result in massive increases in personal damage. And they have higher AoE caps. But some people have the impression that Sentinels' base damage is much lower than it actually is.

There's no additional death penalty.

Also, it turns out that if you do get massively unlucky and a PvPer does notice you and kill you -- and I've ventured into PvP zones before, and let me tell you it's much harder to find a PvPer to kill you than the reverse -- it turns out you don't scream, "I'M MELTING, I'M MELTING" and turn into a puddle of gross fluids on the floor near your computer. You just, like... go do something else for ten minutes and then try again.

If you're concerned with getting exploration badges specifically, it might be helpful to take a second build and get the Concealment pool to minimize the chances that anyone will see you while you're running around. (Obviously, stealth is not perfect in PvP, but it's pretty helpful if you aren't even intending to attack.)

Sai aren't slashing weapons, though comics have a long history of pretending they are.

The 5% is everything, the 20% is activating opportunity, so... I mean, it's the first two powers. If they created a different way to activate opportunity (dedicated click, any ST damaging power in your primary), I assume it would migrate to that mode.

...besides the 5%/20% resistance debuff?

@Snarky is right that there is zero sign that the devs ever really take detailed proposals from the Suggestions board and use them as a guideline for implementation. I think the most you can hope for is that they maybe pay some attention to the general idea that, say, you feel that this thing needs fixing, or maybe like very small isolated suggestions, like "a badge for this." We now have years of experience and like five or so major pages/issues pushed by the HC team, and I'm pretty sure that not a single major change looks substantially like anything proposed on the suggestion board. Also, for whatever it's worth, Powerhouse claimed the last time that he talked about this that he didn't want Sentinels to have feast-or-famine. Now, that was years ago at this point, who knows, maybe he's changed his mind. But it sounded a lot like he wanted not to up-power or fix Opportunity, but fundamentally get rid of it.

This sounds wrong to me, and I just hopped onto a flying Blaster to check. I didn't test a ton, but I went around and took shots at a few different mobs in Croatoa, they ran around without counterattacking for the most part. Eventually I did get attacked, and when I went and checked, it turned out that enemy was 71 feet away from me when he used his range attack. It seems deeply unlikely to me that enemies can ignore range. Their powers have listed ranges (80', usually -- including all Malta Gunslinger powers). Both in my testing now and just anecdotally in years of experience, I see range respected. I don't know how the code would work for that -- we know they can't use melee attacks at 100' of range, are we suggesting that there's an exception to the range code for only some powers?

So the deal with Gaussian's in Leadership is that yes, it does have a chance to proc for each target, and Leadership has an enormous radius and 255 max targets. So you can theoretically get up to 50% uptime in Gaussian's that way. But the large area also works against the proc rate of the power, and the low PPM of Gaussian's means that each target has a 6.5% chance to proc (once every 10 seconds). That means that your total chance to proc every 10 seconds is: If there's just you: 6.5% If there are you and six pets (eg you're a Mastermind): 37.5% If you're on an 8 person team (with no pets): 41.6% If you're on an 8 person team and you or one party has 6 pets: 61.0% If you're on a 50 person league (with no pets, and everyone's within 60' of you): 96.5% Divide all those numbers in half to get the uptime (since it checks for proccing every 10 seconds, and Gaussian's lasts for 5 seconds). Now, I mean, 18% uptime with Gaussian's is nothing to sneeze at. But it's also a random 18% of the time, not necessarily "when you need it most."

They just escape from jail real fast. Like, in the course of the same mission.

Normal damage procs do about 71 damage, not 48. Purple procs do, I forget, around 105. 16b seconds is not the magic anything, and if your proc rate is over 90%, and this capped, you will do more dps by spring local recharge than by leaving it unslotted, all else being equal, and assuming you use the power on cooldown. The big reason not to slot local recharge is because it lowers proc rates a disproportionate amount when combined with global recharge.

This is strictly true, but somewhat misleading to have Brute fury and Blaster defiance in there alongside the crit-like things. So, let's take a 100 damage power that, let's say, has a 50% proc rate for a 3.5PPM damage proc. And an IO damage enhancement that's worth 35% damage enhancement. So these are very similar values absent any inherents or ED. The IO damage enhancement is worth 35 damage, the proc is worth 71 damage 50% of the time, so just a smidge over 35 damage. If you add in any of the crit-like things (stalker, scrapper, corruptor), the IO damage enhancement is more valuable compared to the proc -- because it also enhances the damage of the crit-effect. So if you crit for 200 base damage, with the enhancement it'll be 270 damage. The proc will still just be a 50% chance for 71 damage. On the other hand, Brute Fury or Blaster Defiance add the damage that they're going to add, regardless. The common damage enhancer doesn't affect them -- so if you do 100 base damage, and you have Brute Fury to make it 280 damage, then the damage enhancement is still worth 35 damage, and the proc is worth aa 50% chance of 71 damage.

LButton, not Rbutton.

I mean, that's actually somewhat unrelated? It's just a convention, not a rule. I kind of wonder why the convention seems to be that taunt auras aren't "offensive" if they don't have a debuff -- you can after all actually do damage through the Perfect Zinger proc on a taunt aura. But yes, the convention appears to be that if an enemy-affecting aura only taunts and nothing else, it suppresses rather than drops when you are mezzed.

On Scraps/Brutes, RttC's to-hit debuff is 3.75%, unenhanced. So, taken at face value, it's the same as Weave's defense bonus. It's not an amazing effect, but it's a nice bonus stacked on top of the primary benefit of RttC (massive regeneration). Since it's a to-hit debuff, not a defense buff: It scales with level differences (generally to your disadvantage unless for some reason you're fighting lower-leveled foes). It is reduced by debuff resistance, notably with Archvillains. It is unaffected by defense debuffs It does not affect enemies that are not in melee range (RttC has an 8' radius), or potentially even some in melee range if you're mobbed (RttC has a 10 target cap) It potentially gives benefits to your team if some of the hit opponents attack someone else (though since it is accompanied by a taunt effect, this is fairly rare) It doesn't have any holes for non-positioned attacks or toxic or anything. All things considered, I think RttC would be significantly better if it gave 3.75% defense-all instead of -to-hit.

Fair enough.

Rise to the Challenge is the taunt aura in Willpower (and Willpower is one of the sets that gets taunt even on a Scrapper). I suspect that, at least at that point in the game's design history, the feeling was that for a toggle to be a taunt aura, it had to be enemy-affecting/offensive. Since then of course we've gotten taunt auras on powers with no other enemy-affecting component (like Evasion in SR for Brutes/Tanks), but at the time that Willpower was created, I don't believe that such things existed. To my mind, that's the most likely reason why RttC has -to-hit instead of +defense.