Frostweaver

Using a lore pet is not an 'average' run... I usually take 2 or 3 runs while I am waiting for the darned power to recharge.

yeah, but of all the AT's, sentinels have the lowest number of attacks... even tankers get useful dps in many of their primaries. Sentinels ONLY get damage from their primary/pools/epics, and the three secondaries that have extra damage in them... fire, rad, and dark, kinda 'break the mold' for the whole 'ranged archetype' thing. If they are supposed to be solely ranged damage, then by all rights they should have a lot MORE damage per attack than blasters do... because Blaster Melee adds up to 5 more attacks, and they just get a crapton more damage because melee attacks do more damage than ranged attacks. Which means the entire AT needs to be pulled and started over. Blaster-scale damage wouldn't be enough, you'd need blaster caps, and something like a +1.5 scalar. I cannot see that as being the focus.

I will admit, I think I have skipped that screen every single time I build a new character, so I wasn't aware that it had them lumped in with Blasters. I consider sentinels a support/damage hybrid rather than a primary damage dealer, because of how easily they can blow off damage without just directly soaking it like a tanker, and the nice damage buffs and focus on secondary effects of powersets. Then again, I also don't play fire sentinels. to be completely fair, I consider fire sentinels to be exactly the same kind of AT-benders as fire armor scrankers, dark deftrollers, illusion controllerminds, Heavy Blappers, banestalkers, humanikhelds, and the likes. Maybe the question should not be 'should we buff sentinel damage', maybe the question is, 'should we buff sentinel secondary effects'? I mean, all things concerned, they don't have defender secondaries, wouldn't buffing them to at least corrupter-level secondary effects make their hybrid role much more obvious, and help fix the perception problem?

I am not sure what the definition of 'damage oriented build' is. II mean, EVERY AT is damage-oriented, right? Except maybe those weird empathy defenders that don't slot their secondary and then get all butthurt when I kick them off my team?

This! This this this this! You start getting IO recipes at level 10! If you don't use them, you are not an 'average player'. You are below average. well below average. Maybe I should write a guide for leveling up sentinels that includes 'stupid stuff' like doing an ae mission for tickets, trading those tickets in for an orange salvage, and then selling that salvage for a half mil each. plus level-up exp. Or doing one of the dozens of short mission chains for merits. achilles heel procs are CHEAP. you can buy 30 converters for 10 merits, and that's like 15 minutes or your time WHILE you are earning level up experience. YELLOW sets can be converted to orange sets with 2 converters. two level 25 'multi function' IO's give a better return than 2 SO's and they provide set bonuses (often lethal/smash resistance or recovery, which is HUGELY useful during levelling up) Heck, you can get an IO completely FREE by doing the IO quest in steel canyon's university... plus exp. You can have multiple LOTG procs in your build at low levels, cranking up your recharge easily... and getting almost perma-hasten by level 30, no problems. if you want to keep them, unslotters are SUPER cheap, OR you can use one of the FIVE respecs you get at level 50 to pull all of them out and use unslotters for the stuff that won't fit on your enhancement bar. an SG base with up to 16 storage tables for IO's is completely free. Or you can put a couple of salvage storage racks in there to hold stuff like converters, orange salvage, unslotters, catalysts, and boosters...all completely free. Takes 5 minutes to build a 2 room base with all the tables as WELL as crafting tables and merit vendor. A level 50... or even a level 30, that is not using a crapton of IO's is NOT an 'average' player. They are a player that has been taking shortcuts. Things like experience doublers, farms, powerlevels, or grinding the DFB and DIB conatantly... and even those provide some rather sweet rewards, recipes, and salvage for money and recipes. That is not an 'average player'. You don't rebalance an AT around characters that have been powerlevelled but cannot afford to get a good build.

Perception problem. Build problem. You build a controller differently from a brute at level 30. You build a defender differently from a Tanker at level 30. Why on EARTH would you think you could build a sentinel just like every other AT? Regardless of level?

Except in very specific circumstances this is true. Meaning there are two powersets where procced-out dominate and mind probe 'might' slightly slow your DPS. BR, because they do not spread or profit from disintegrate, and sonic, because they do not help stack -res. with the right builds 🙂 But hey, a rule is defined by it's exceptions, right?

You know what? cherry picking statistics in order to prove an untrue 'fact' and then making broad and utterly false statements IS arrogant and pretty offensive. Your anecdotes strongly imply that you seem to have a build problem. I have offered several times to look at your build and see if i can help you improve it. That was not meant as an insult, it was meant as a statement of understanding that building effective sentinels is FAR different from building blasters or scrappers. Some people think that sentinels need more damage, some people think they need more HP, some think they need a better or more friendly inherent. Not having those though, does not make them inferior to other AT's, it simply means preferences. Heck, I'd like Tanker's aggro caps doubled. I'd like Brute's base damage cranked up while their Damage cap drops below scrappers, with a much lowered fury contribution so that they do more damage 'at rest' but less damage 'when filled with reds'. I'd like scrappers to get an automatic crit when they click follow-up or build-up. I'd like stalkers sneak attack animation speed cut in half and controllers to get containment from fears, confuse, and slows greater than 50%. But that does not make those AT's 'less useful in groups' or not have a role. And that doesn't mean that they need to have those buffs to be 'fixed'.

which goes right back to my original point that the problem with sentinels is perception and build expertise. Both things that I am trying to correct. This thread exists to ask a question. And you notice the first answer is 'It's fine as it is, no change neccessary', and of the other answers, 2 are simply quality of life improvements (not buffs) and one is 'whatever the heck', and a lot of the suggestions are merely minor tweaks...Most of the complaints are about the necessity of taking BOTH tier 1 and tier 2 attacks to take advantage of the opportunity mechanic. But hey, you are the secret genius/king. So why don't you show us all how we are all so wrong for finding a great AT from something you KNOW is uselessly broken and worthless... after all, you are the only real intelligence here, the rest of us are all fools.

yep, a bunch of my builds that find ninja and beast run 'appropriate' never bother with a travel power... and I get flack all the time Why on earth would a 'tiger girl' savage/EA brute (with tons of stealth even at low levels) get crap for using beast run instead of sj? I have NO idea... but when i post a build where I intentionally skipped a travel power, that's the first thing most people notice... even if I have upwards of super speed in speed bonuses. and can beast jump around grandville easily.

mmm... I hate to argue with you bill, but... well... My favorite sentinel dishes out an 800-1200 point 10 target nuke every 20 seconds, a 300 point aoe every 5 seconds, and a weird hopping disintegrate effect that cranks up the damage on 4 targets by about 20% as well as dropping their damage resistance by another 5%, which keeps hopping around and causing aoe DOT's as I single target them. My ST dps is only a little lower than most scrappers (-50 total resist) against Pylons... but my aoe Dps is a LOT higher than most scrappers... I think the only exception might be claws, since scrapper claws is one of the best dps sets in the game vs. nonresistant enemies. But when you are talking outside of Pylon tests.... Nope, I cannot agree that scrappers are faster against non-pylon content than sentinels. is there some kind of test we can run?

@Wavicle: You know, You are arguing a point that everyone else who has played the AT finds way, way off base. Maybe you should post your builds and we can help you figure out what you are doing wrong, instead of making a bunch of broad statements based on YOUR anecdotes that utterly contrast with...well...Our anecdotes.

If you honestly believe that, then you have NO idea how to build a sentinel.

They provide nearly as much damage as a scrapper or a stalker, and help the whole team do more damage like a lightweight defender... They provide as much as any other VEAT and more than several. How is that not providing enough to a team?

You done good, but I cannot help but wonder if we could tweak your build to be a lot better 🙂 I must admit though, that my favorite sentinel powersets are dp and br... and it's possible that those set's incredible performance might be giving me an inaccurate picture of how sentinels in general perform. In that case, though.... maybe it's the non-DP non-BR primaries that need tweaking, rather than the whole AT?

Why not? It's certainly a data point. Without including solo ability, you are ignoring the largest factor of being able to make expensive builds, as well as a ton of the AT's utility.

I don't base my evaluations around the lowest common denominator. I acknowledged that a lack of build expertise was an issue, and proc builds are NOT expensive. If someone doesn't want to 'spend the time' or 'spend the influence' on a cheap proc build(usually around 80 mil, easily obtainable by ANY player, especially if you grab a few merits by doing ouro missions) Then they are welcome to whine about how much they hate a sentinel, and I will correct them. Not sure how you are spending 500 mil on a sentinel, but I have NEVER spent that much on a toon... you can easily pick up 100 merits in about two hours, as well as scads of influence and orange salvage. I refuse to base my opinion of an AT on how 'easy' it is... but even if you do, sentinel is much, much easier to build and play well than a blaster, if only because of innate mez protection. The problem is that on the one hand you are talking about the bottom rung of players, but you are comparing it to high-difficulty content... bottom rung players don't play high difficulty content, They do not solo +4/8 DA missions. If they try, they are gonna fail just as badly on a sentinel as they will on a blaster. So, let's try to cement these goalposts into place. Are we talking about bottom rung players, where a 'cheaply built' sentinel is still going to survive far better and contribute more, or are we talking top-tier hundreds of millions of influence players, where proc monster builds and knowledge of team assistance techniques is going to contribute more to a team than sheer dps? BTW- 50% damage? Umm... no. I have 4 blasters in the 'top tier' category, and my sentinel clears mission maps at high difficulty (+2/8) at nearly the same speed (Maybe a few seconds slower) as my blasters do (also at +2/8). Much more safely. 50% is WAY off the mark. 20% is a closer estimate.

Except that the blaster does NOT GET THE DAMAGE if the sentinel is not present. Therefore, that extra damage the blaster gets? Direct result of sentinel's activities. So yes, it counts. As does every single other person's damage boost. a sonic/ could count that contribution as well. Hell, an entire low-damage AT is based on what non-damage components they bring to a team to boost their damage, as are several powersets. looking at a sentinel and ignoring the extra damage they help a team bring to the table leads to an utterly innacurate picture of the AT's value. And that contribution is large enough that it is NOTICED on things like an ITF or Itrial.

The reason I said "I couldn't resist' was because you were not supposed to take it so seriously. It was sort of a semi joke. That being said, However, I don't think you CAN compare Sentinels in an SO vacuum, because IO slotting is such a crucial factor of their strength. Blasters need set bonuses. Most Blasters slot literally half their ranged attacks with 6 Thunderstrike simply to stay alive and fight against DA content. And the rest of their slotting is recharge. Sentinels have more proc slotting options. because they have innate abilities to defend themselves against damage and mez. And this is a REAL thing. Sentinels average 7 ranged attacks. Two of those are slotted with ATO"s. Two of those are 5 slotted with purple sets and an extra damage proc (ragnarok's crappy proc doesn't count) and the ST attack slotted with apocalypse is ABSOLUTELY slotted with Gladiator's Javelin Toxic at least. Or, the sentinel might skip Ragnarok and put in something else better, like maybe something with an FF proc You still have 3 attacks. One of which is an aoe. Highly likely to be FF proc monkey, but it is going to be going off a LOT faster than the Blaster's is... It is a well-known fact that HALF of sentinel nukes are Considerably HIGHER DPS (but lower DPA) than blaster nukes sans defiance, and far higher dps than defenders and corrupters. Anyway, those two ST attacks are procced to high heaven. or 5 slotted (with a proc) with an extra proc on top. And you are likely to scooch another couple of proc-heavy attacks on top. This is why I don't like comparing Sentinels to Blasters. They are much better compared to certain defender secondaries or corrupters

You should probably read the 'logic' operations manual, you seem to be having a problem with operating it correctly. Sentinels absolutely benefit from their own debuffs, as does the rest of the team.

One does not require an understanding of a subject to have an opinion on said subject. We shall simply continue Farming DA at +4/8 while they grumble about imaginary low damage 🙂

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

That was my point. My sentinel doesn't have to compete with blasters any more than my defender does. And solo? It's no contest. ALL of my sentinels can farm +4 DA content. (I usually don't, but I absolutely can). My Blaster cap at about +2-+3. And I have lots of both, with decent builds, to compare them. The only exceptions are my regen and WP sentinels, who have personal survival issues... which is why I think that increasing sentinel HP base would be a more significant change than cranking their base damage, or altering their passive.

Oh, I get what you are saying. I was just meaning that sentinels absolutely have access to cheatery forms of damage too. Now, take that hold and add in the -resist that every sentinel gets by default. And then add in the extra damage that the whole team gets through the sentinel's contribution. Compare that to the blaster's individual, Non-stacking damage contribution 🙂

I know that wasn't the focus of your comment, but I couldn't resist: That is EVERY sentinel's birthright. a 6 second, 450 point, long-range, 1.1 second cast time ST Hold 🙂