aethereal

+to-hit or +acc or -def or +perception are all fine and fairly thematic, but they have the problem that they aren't very good. +Damage or -resist are something every team can use more of against every enemy type. +to-hit, +acc, -def, +perception are useful in niche situations or against one or two enemy types. Making sentinels focus around providing team buffs is pretty rough, guys: VEATs already do that, and probably do it better. Sents have no support abilities in their actual power-sets. Anyone who desperately wants the role of passive team buffs can get the Leadership pool, and there are a plethora of ATs who are clearly going to be much superior support. If the passive team buff is also a pretty, uh, bad passive team buff, that may confuse fewer people than the current opportunity system, but it's not going to make for an actual better inherent. Sents need an inherent that's interesting and good. They do not provide a lot of complexity inherent in their power-set, nobody's going to tune them to do more damage than scrappers, stalkers, or brutes, and all they do is DPS. The place for them to be a really first-tier AT is in their inherent, in a way that is not true of say Defenders. I just don't think a free Tactics is the way to go here.

I'm not sure that there's any realistic way to make an AT a "scout" within the framework of recognizably CoH. It's just fundamentally not the case that 99% of all enemy groups need to scouted. Stealth isn't prevalent. Perception isn't that useful except against specifically Arachnos at certain level ranges. People already max their chance to hit, and giving a damage bonus to specifically allied snipes sounds pretty damn niche. Having an inherent to-hit bonus yourself would probably make some differences in how very high-end builds slot things, but most players won't have the sophistication to bother with it, and it still won't feel like scouting. (I mean, it seems like about 80% of the player-base is ignorant of the res debuffs that Sentinels currently get and that their opportunities apply -- are they going to notice to hit buffs, which are probably less important?) An interesting role that probably is too "tanky" would be a non-tank initiator. Like maybe at the start of each combat (ie, when you are attacked or attack after 8 seconds of not being attacked), you get a substantial absorb shield that let you handle alpha (but no way to make it come back without going 8 seconds without being attacked). That might loosely fit into the idea of scouting or being the vanguard ahead of the group (or the rear-guard, dealing with ambushes), though in practice, again, I don't think any inherent will feel all that "scouty."

So, as someone whose first 50 on HC was an archery/ninjutsu sentinel, I think it's broadly fun to have the opportunities, it's neat to be able to trade off offense vs defense, and it's nice to have a single-tough-target killing niche. I agree that feast-or-famine is kinda a weird theme, that the AT is slightly under-tuned, and it's frustrating to have the whole first-two-attacks thing when you are so likely to want to otherwise skip one of those attacks. This is probably crazy, but: What if the two opportunities became two mutually-exclusive toggles available at L1, not slottable. Offensive mode and defensive mode. Offensive adds a damage proc to all attacks, defensive adds a heal and endurance heal to all attacks. They might cost endurance or might not, might have a cooldown like Hybrid abilities or might not, but the point is that they're available for extended times (not 15 seconds), on demand, with no attack reliance. They give you some more durability and longevity when you need it, or offensive punch when you need it. Then, replace the current -5% resists and -20% resist on opportunity hits with a -X% resist-all on all sentinel attacks, where X is the animation time, in seconds, stacking, with a loooong duration, like 30 seconds? Even 40 seconds? No damage scale change, no target caps change. So what's the upshot? Sentinels do what they do today, but a little better. They don't get much -resist on fast-dying foes (but that was never that big a deal), but in AV or GM fights, they eventually get you to -30%+ resist-all for the entire rest of the duration of the fight, making them really powerful hard-target killers -- eventually. It's synergistic with their set (you need to survive long enough to build up your damage bonus, hence the armor set) and the rest of their inherent (defensive toggle gets you where you need to go). They'd also continue their role as "an easily recommendable newbie AT." You tell people to keep their defensive toggle on as much as possible and then just go shoot shit. Done. This I think runs the risk of overtuning them, but they would remain outright bad farmers, I think, and less effective at clearing normal spawns that scrappers even with their offensive toggle.

It should've been possible to stack rage before ED. 240% or so recharge on both hasten and rage just from six-slotting them with recharge SOs. I didn't play back then, but did it happen?

Huh, it wasn't the client -- somehow windowed mode got turned on in the server settings, which apparently my computer Does Not Deal Well With. But I was able to turn it back off from the login-screen UI settings, which I had forgotten existed. Once I turned the in-game settings back to a fixed resolution instead of windowed mode, my game UI returned.

So two days ago I was playing CoH normally, logged off for the night, no crash. 64 bit client on MacOS Mojave. Then yesterday I start my client again and it starts up in windowed mode. That's weird, it's always been full-screen, but NBD. I log in as normal, select my character, get my normal loading screen, and... I get in, but have no interface. I see my character, I can see the "world," but no ui. It responds to keyboard commands as usual in terms of movement etc. I have tried ctrl-U, which I understand to be the shortcut to hide the UI. No change. Pressing M or C to bring up the map and chat windows does nothing. This happens on all my characters and on both servers I've played on (Indom & Everlasting). Okay, so, whatever, right? I delete the client, delete island rum. Redownload island rum, have it redownload the client. Same thing: I start in windowed mode, no game UI once I'm in the game. I uninstalled wine and reinstalled wine. Same thing. I'm baffled. This seems like it has to be a client-side issue, but I have no idea how it could have survived deletion of the application, island rum, and wine. Anyone have any ideas?

Hah, thanks! Your suggestion did in fact work, I'm back on the 64 bit client. Thanks for the help!

Welp, I deleted island rum and now the new copy won't load the manifest, so that's cool. I assume it's either transitory or else I'll just go ahead and restore my deleted copy, but an unwelcome surprise. (EDIT: And the key to that was to post a complaint on the forums, which magically unbroke it. 😉 ) Is there a way to reliably get the latest island rum? I can't seem to find a canonical location.

Until the update a few days ago, I had been using the 64 bit client out of Island Rum. After the client update from last week, the 64-bit option was grayed out and when I select it, it warns me that it "may not work this this client." If I tell it to go anyway, it doesn't do anything. I upgraded my version of MacOS from Sierra to Mojave, and did brew upgrade wine, neither changed anything. I can use the safe mode client, but not the non-safe mode 32 bit, either. Anyone know what's up?