WumpusRat

I remember them talking about reworking the Sentinel passive midway through 2019, but I've been away from the game for a while and just starting to come back. Have they mentioned anything about it since?

Should be the other way around. Tier-1's would be your blasters. Ranged, fragile damage dealers. Tier-2's would be support/control. Tier-3 would be your tank. Highest hp, toughest to take down.

Other people in the thread have already pointed out why it would be OP. It seems like you just don't want to listen to them, though. But here's the question I always ask when this comes up, and to date have never gotten an answer (and I note you refused to answer it as well): "If defenders can self-buff, what is the purpose of the sentinel AT?"

This comes up every now and then, and every time people point out that allowing defensive sets to self-buff would make them brokenly OP. A forcefield defender could literally soft-cap their positional defenses at level TWELVE. Especially now that there are low-level SOs available. Cold would take a tiny bit more work, but they could still soft-cap at around level 15-18. A sonic defender would be running around with nearly soft-capped resists at level 13. And if you start letting them use their other buffs on themselves? Fortitude, thaw, clarity, etc? Mag 10-12 protections that don't require a toggle and have no cooldown to reapply. Kinetics who can self-speed boost. A sonic that can pop disruption field on themselves and have a permanent -30% resist to anything near them. That's not broken or anything, right? Not only that, but if you allow defenders (and corruptors) to self-buff like that, what exactly is the purpose of the sentinel AT? You may as well just trash-bin sentinels the moment you allow defenders and corruptors to self-buff, because they'll surpass them in almost every way. The only way it would remotely be "balanced" is if the self-buffs were only a fraction of the power of the full buff (like maybe 25%) and the moment you self-buff, it imposes a lengthy cooldown, so if you get taken down, you might have to wait for cooldowns in order to self-buff again. But really, letting defenders self-buff would break the AT.

Just swap out the sound file for the power to something you like better. I did that with the sonic attack set, since the sounds for that really bugged me. Same with beam rifle.

I have a couple of characters who regularly run 10 toggles. Even without incarnate stuff, managing end is pretty easy with the right slotting and set bonuses and such. I'm sure if you wanted to make a character who was like Captain Toggles or something you could make a build that had 15-18 or so, without just turning on stuff just to turn it on (like sprint, or prestige sprint).

My best time with my /ninjitsu sentinel using shinobi-iri + athletic run + some speed bonuses from IO sets was 45.5 seconds. I had the top time for a couple days, then someone got 34 seconds and blew me out of the water. 🙂

Let's see. Damage sets: Wind Blast (ranged damage set using wind powers) Stretching (melee with one or two 'ranged' powers) Earth Blast (ranged set using earth powers -- a few already exist in game, like Hurl, but it'd be nice to have a full set) Force Blast (offensive force fields -- would make the perfect thematic combo with /FF for a corruptor/defender) Cybernetic Assault (kind of like a blaster/dominator secondary, with a combo of ranged/melee attacks) Light/Laser Blast (similar to energy, but without the knockback) And obviously there are a ton of possibilities for mastermind primaries. But those are likely far harder to implement.

Mercenaries have a lot of problems when it comes to what they're meant to really do. Some of the key factors being the low durability compared to some other pet sets, the incredibly lackluster level 18 ability, the commando's insane cooldowns, and the fact that they do purely lethal damage. Some suggestions I'd have to change them around: 1) Remove the medic from the tier-1 pets and just give them a third soldier. 2) Slightly improve their resists (they're wearing body armor and gear, it should provide some small amount of elemental protection as well) 3) Give the spec-ops a group damage buff similar to the Thug Enforcers leadership and reduce the cooldowns on their CC abilities slightly 4) Replace Serum with a new pet power: Medic, a soldier equipped with a sidearm (just a ranged basic attack) and Aid Other, Injection, Aid Self, and perhaps a small +regen aura. This would also open up another power to put pet auras into, something Mercenaries is lacking in (as are several other sets, who should get something similar). 5) Reduce the cooldown for the commando's LRM and Full Auto abilities to 24 seconds each, rather than 240 (!) and 60. As another option, since Merc damage is so lackluster without the Achilles Heel proc (which, since the set doesn't have a 4th pet power, means you're eating into your pet damage even more), perhaps giving the 32nd level upgrade something like "Armor Piercing Ammunition: -10% resist debuff" or something.

Beast Mastery's tier-1 and 3 wolves can slot 4 damage procs and the achilles heel debuff. Not quite the same, but very close. 🙂

Regardless, I simply pointed out that calling it "fast recharging" was kind of silly. It's a 10m recharge. If you manage to squeeze out a perma-hasten build (which, of the MM secondaries, only /rad and /time are really going to manage it without a 500mil+ build with a half-dozen purple sets and tons of power picks purely for recharge rather than functionality -- personally I've never found perma-hasten to be necessary except on extremely rare builds, such as my illusion/rad troller who has perma-hasten, PA, AM, and indom), more power to you, but it seems like a lot of work when you could just carry a couple break frees and not have to take 3 powers from the sorcery tree as well as a bunch of random powers just to shove global recharge into. Anytime someone uses the term "fast recharging", I think of something that comes up in less than 10-15 seconds. Not 10 minutes with a billion-inf build dedicated to getting it down to a "mere" 3 minute cooldown. 🙂

The idea of calling a power with a 10 minute recharge "fast recharging" just baffles me.

I have one I'm slowly leveling up. It's a fun build. When I tried it out on the test server using the build I threw together in Mids, I was able to solo giant monsters, which is always a fun bar to reach for. ALMOST killed Eochai and Jack in Irons at the same time, but Jack's AI bugged and he started running around in circles fear-spamming, so I couldn't keep out of his arc. I'd get like one action every 15-20 seconds, and my pets were slowly dying off.

Aid Other has a 2.93s animation, but you could (minorly) slow down the animation for something like Empathy's Heal Other, which has a 2.27. Aid Self is a bit trickier, since it has a REALLY long (4.33) animation. I was thinking you could use the animation for the flex version of Tough, but that's only 3.1, so it would have to be slowed down pretty substantially. Heck, you could even just make a version of the animation that doesn't have the tricorder. You wave your hand and heal someone, or motion over your own chest to heal yourself. It would just be nice to have the option, so I could have a magic based character who could heal without having a few select sets, or pulling out a tech device.

If possible, it would be great if there were some way to add an alternate animation to the power. Just pointing and healing with a beam or something rather than pulling out the little tricorder. The problem is that a lot of builds might use them (especially certain mastermind builds where the secondary doesn't have a built-in heal), but pulling out a tricorder to heal makes little to no sense. Just having a non-tech animation for it would be a really nice QoL change.

The only way I could see this being remotely balanced is if the self-cast version is drastically weaker than the ally-targeting version. The main reason being that some buffs would break the game at low/mid levels if you allowed them to be cast on yourself. Sure, it wouldn't make Defenders suddenly "OP", but consider that a FF Defender could, at level TWELVE, be soft-capped to all positional damage. Or other sets, such as Thermal, Pain, Empathy, etc having in essence the same bonus that some of the defensive sets get (the clicky status protection), but without any need to invest anything into it. It would be perma right out of the box (90s duration, and essentially zero recharge). My concern would be that it would kind of render Sentinels completely pointless. If a Defender can pick a resist/defense set and have just as much protection as a Sentinel, AND be far more useful in groups, where does that leave the Sentinel AT?

After having experimented with replacing some of the sounds for various powers, to make them less grating (looking at you, Sonic Attack), and just to change up a few in general, one thing that might be really cool is to open up the possibility of choosing sound effects for your powers along with visually customizing them. I'm not sure how much work it would be (probably quite a lot, since it would be adding a new UI element to chargen/appearance editing), but it would make for some really nice customization. For instance, one person's sonic character might be a banshee type, who screams at enemies to kill them. Another might have a sonic cannon, which does a "wub wub wub" type effect. I doubt this would be something that could be implemented anytime in the near future, but it would be neat to have "someday".

I don't agree that Necromancy needs a Gang War power. It already has Soul Extraction. Gang War can stay unique to Thugs. Because once you do that, then you'll have a lot of people saying "Well, why doesn't X set have a Gang War type power too?" Beasts? You summon a bunch of them. Mercs? A strike team shows up. Robots? A bunch of mobile drones fly in. Etc. As a couple other people have said, having SE work on any downed enemy would be just fine. However, what I would REALLY like to see is that EVERY set has some sort of fourth pet-set power that they can dump auras into, just so certain sets aren't crippled compared to others when it comes to slotting the actual pets.

May as well throw my hat in the ring, though after looking at some of the other entries, I'm a bit daunted. 🙂 Supergroup Name: Penumbra Base Code: PEN-13614 In Game Global: @Lyrianna Penumbra is an island sanctuary for a number of magi, extra-planar entities, and students who wish to learn magic without the restrictions placed upon them by groups such as the Midnight Squad, MAGI, and the like. The island is home to one of the largest magical libraries in the world, allowing access to a few petitioners who are able to offer something that the library doesn't yet contain. There are a dozen or so semi-permanent residents, all working to further their understanding and mastery of magic.

What I'd really like are more doors and doorways. Right now the only door that has two sides that you can conceivably place in a normal-sized building is the CoT door, and that's got a very mystical/medieval feel to it. The 'normal door' and 'steel door' objects only have one side, meaning you can't have them swung open except at extreme angles, since from the other side they're invisible. And even then, they have the 'frame' of the door attached to them, making it look kind of awkward to have that swung open from the doorway. Also, splitting the bathroom doors apart so that they're two objects instead of one would be great. Sometimes you want the bathrooms to be in different sections of a building (across the room from one another, or with a wider separation, etc), and having them forced to be right next to one another is kind of a bummer. The broken destroyer bits with doorways in them can be used sometimes, if you meld them into a wall and try to bulk up the doorway bit to fit the thicker wall, but it always looks off. Maybe some unbroken destroyer parts, so we could make full walls out of that kind of material. More portraits and paintings, as well. There are a bunch of framed photos, but only two paintings. If you want to have a mansion, with some upscale artwork, you're kind of restricted to repeating those two paintings (and maybe the clockwork and dragon ones, though they're not framed in the antique-style frames). I'm pretty sure I've seen some other paintings around somewhere. I'll have to go see if I can track them down.

This has probably been suggested before, and I have no idea how much work it would involve, but it would be nice to be able to walk without everything getting turned off/detoggled. Walking along through a mission and just destroying everything would be fun. I honestly have no idea why walk toggles everything off in the first place. It's not as though walking is some big advantage that needs to punish you for doing it...?

I ran a bunch of tests with pets attacking the target dummies out in the vanguard base and logged it a long while back. Genin average 33 attacks per minute against the target dummy. Howler Wolves average 21 attacks per minute. Zombies average 22 attacks per minute. So beasts are actually slower than even the zombies, despite having shorter cooldowns. The genin have 6 attacks, two of them on 3 and 4s cooldowns, so it's not surprising that they'd attack a lot. But the wolves have their vicious bite on a 3s cooldown, and the other two attacks on 6 and 8s. Zombies are 4, 12, 12, 30, and STILL manage to attack more often than the wolves. Which makes me think there's something specifically wrong with the wolves' attack chain/animations.

Beasts are, overall, pretty solid. The only real downside to them as that (unless it's been corrected in the last 6 months or so) there is a minor bug with their attack chain. Periodically they'll stop attacking and just stare at the target, despite having attacks that are ready to go. I don't know if it's a delay that's baked into their animations, or there's just something glitchy about that particular set. It was the last one that the original devs built, and didn't get nearly as much testing as other stuff did, so there may well be some lingering issues that need to be fixed.

Having tried it on the test server, Defibrilate seems woefully lackluster. I had it slotted up for full recharge plus a 50th level end mod in the power, and with 18 stacks of static, it only drained about 70% of a +1 minion's end. My guess is that each static stack is only adding like +1-2%, which is pretty miserable. Amp Up I was interested in, despite the fact that for a matermind, it doesn't really do a whole lot. Most of the bonuses are lacking when it comes to tossing them onto your pets, and from what I can see the +defense doesn't work at all. It put it on one of my pets and its defense values didn't change at all, despite the power supposedly giving +45% defense. Overall, the set is very good, though there are some powers that, at least for the moment, I find incredibly lackluster. Defibrilate and Amp Up are the two that I would almost always skip, with Discharge being a "maybe if I can't think of anything better to pick". I've never found end drain to be all that effective when it comes to killing mobs, personally, since having to devote two powers for it, especially something like Defib with its long casting time, small radius and melee range, makes it impractical.

Yeah, I re-read it (several times) and realized what you were saying. S/L def is nice, but I like covering more bases. Just my own taste when it comes to defense. Especially for a tanker. I want to be able to march up to ANYONE and laugh in their face, rather than certain enemies being able to smack me. 🙂