How would you buff Sentinels?

[Crysta Clear]

Honestly, I feel like the important thing is to let the -20% RES from triggering your Opportunity apply to all targets you hit with your primary attack powers until the benefit from your selected Opportunity ends, just like the inherent -5% portion, instead of single-target applying only to the one your T1/2 power hits to open the Opportunity in the first place. Either that, or let the inherent -5% resist debuff stack up to three or four or even five times, with a short enough duration to fall off quickly if you switch targets.

 

-5% resist is a very, very small number that's completely outdone by a lot of Corruptor secondaries, and some, especially /Dark Miasma, also come with the defense toggle to very easily hit the same survivability as a Sentinel is capable of. The damage scales are even very similar, but Sentinels lack a mechanic for their inherent that meaningfully increases damage output, while Corruptors have Scourge.

 

The other option would be to change the -5% Resist inherent to a -5% To-Hit instead, possibly with a two-stack limit. This would really let sentinels feel like they're providing 'covering fire' for their allies -- reducing the chance that their friends will be hurt, and plays into the defensive, protective theme that the name implies.

 

Edited September 24, 2019 by Crysta Clear

[Zepp]

Sentinels have the same Res caps as other non-melee ATs, should this be changed?

[Crysta Clear]

Not really, no. They're not supposed to be tanks and have no form of threat generation to support a tank role, they don't need higher resist caps. As an aside, Stalker and Scrapper are full melee archetypes that also only have 75% resist caps, and they do just fine. Scrappers even have a taunt they should never use or take aside from two-slotting as a set mule for some cheap max end. XD

 

Edited September 24, 2019 by Crysta Clear

[Zepp]

I didn't think there would be much support for the idea, I just thought I should throw it out there.

[Lord_Cyclone91]

I'm thinking about my son's friend who is a USAF combat controller and what he does is stalk the enemy location and then provide targeting for all kinds of shock and awe, largely from range. 

 

Maybe the Sent could be kind of a ranged and heroic stealthed guy who scouts and targets the enemy and facilitates big strikes. 

 

Give them some kind of toggle power like Bio Armor's modes. When in Defensive mode (call it Watchman mode) gives them something like what the VEATs get Maneuvers but with +perception.  Toggle over to Offensive mode (Infiltrator mode) and it's a +To-Hit and -def and/or -res team effect.   

[Zepp]

Again, I don't think stancing is the way to go with this.

[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.

[Weylin]

A sentinel is someone who keeps watch, so how do we make that descriptor into a valid and useful game mechanic?

 

Maybe some kind of toggle that immobilizes the sentinel and buffs themselves and adjacent allies? +range +acc +damage +absorb +heal on hit? Some combo of those?

Would be kind of like a "siege mode" for those games which have a class that can switch between a versatile mobile and tough/powerful stationary mode.

 

Mobility isn't hugely important in this game, so you're not really a sitting duck by sitting still, so I'm not sure what would suffice.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Weylin

[Zepp]

Surveillance, as a power in the Munitions Ancillary pool, provides -Res and -Def... that and a perception bonus should be a perfect fit as an inherent.

[EmmySky]

May be over-powered but as scouts/lookouts for the team a power or something that placed locations of mobs on the map would be neat....maybe just in adjacent rooms/areas.  Would be hard to make it show on teammates maps but they could just chat to the team 'mob right around the corner mind your aggro' type alerts.

[Sovera]

Roleplay is fine, and I myself am a roleplayer, but I would not mix roleplay and game mechanics. I don't RP with NPCs.

 

Stuff like adding +perception or +Tohit, or 'go scout and come back with info' is RP and has no use to be found in game play when game play is blitzing through packs unleashing nukes and AoEs and moving on.

[Steampunkette]

3 hours ago, EmmySky said:

May be over-powered but as scouts/lookouts for the team a power or something that placed locations of mobs on the map would be neat....maybe just in adjacent rooms/areas.  Would be hard to make it show on teammates maps but they could just chat to the team 'mob right around the corner mind your aggro' type alerts.

... you know... every spawn location on the map is in a specific, defined, location. Allowing the Sentinel to highlight spawn areas on the map would make them nearly indispensable on large clear-all or multi-hostage maps. The function already exists for the "Last Spawn", so I -imagine- it could be expanded to show all map spawns, Green and Red.

[srmalloy]

On 9/20/2019 at 7:45 AM, PaxArcana said:

My problem is, again, that the Inherent is awkward to use.  Which no other AT really has; you just ... do your thing.  You don't need to pause, to avoid using a power because it's not the right KIND of opportunity to fit what you need right then .

It seems to me that the problem in this case isn't the concept of picking defensive or offensive opportunity, but that it's tied to the first two attacks, when giving the Sentinel a pair of powers with icons, the way that Dominators get a power and icon for Domination, addresses most of the problems. You're not stuck avoiding a significant part of your attacks if you want to hold off on triggering Opportunity, and don't have to avoid the attack that would trigger the 'wrong' one, or have your Opportunity triggered on a mob that's going to go down with one hit from anyone, but your Opportunity gets triggered on it and it goes down before you get any benefit from it.

 

[Crysta Clear]

I think another large problem with Sentinels' inherent is the same problem that faces Resistance debuffs elsewhere, in that Resistance debuffs are resisted... by Resistance. So the types of enemies against which you most need to debuff their Resistance, are the types of enemies virtually immune to having their Resistance debuffed.

 

Perhaps the answer is as simple as flagging the Resistance debuff on Sentinels' inherent, and Opportunity creation, as unresistable?

[drbuzzard]

I know nobody probably wants to hear it, but resistance debuffs have to be resisted or they would be fairly overpowered.

 

As it is they work the same on targets with resistance as without.

 

You apply a 20% resistance debuff to a target with no resistance and you do 20% more damage.

 

Say you apply the same thing to one of those EB cyclopses in the ITF with unstoppable up? They have 90% resistance to all (but glorious psi which makes them drop like rain).  The 20% is resisted by the resistance (all resistance is resistance debuff resistance) so you do 10% of 20% so 2%, which also increases damage by 20% (as you will now be fighting a cyclops with 88% damage resistance).

 

If it did an absolute debuff said cyclops would go from 90% to 70% and you'd be doing 300% of what a team without the debuff did.

[aethereal]

Yeah, resistance debuffs are fine as they are.

[nihilii]

23 minutes ago, drbuzzard said:

If it did an absolute debuff said cyclops would go from 90% to 70% and you'd be doing 300% of what a team without the debuff did.

Perhaps I'm biaised, but I don't see an issue with that. For Sentinels to have a niche in enabling a team to destroy those select few tough targets doesn't strike me as ridiculous, if we assume the AT needs a boost.

Likewise, I've always wished Tanker Bruising was unresistable. Such a change could have moved the needle on the Brute vs Tanker conundrum by itself.

[drbuzzard]

I have a strong feeling that the reason resistance all resists resistance debuff is how it is done. I could imagine it doesn't actually change the resistance number, but just tags incoming damage with a damage increase of the %.

 

Of course I have not looked at the code, so that's just a wild guess.

[Rathulfr]

1 hour ago, Crysta Clear said:

I think another large problem with Sentinels' inherent is the same problem that faces Resistance debuffs elsewhere, in that Resistance debuffs are resisted... by Resistance. So the types of enemies against which you most need to debuff their Resistance, are the types of enemies virtually immune to having their Resistance debuffed.

 

Perhaps the answer is as simple as flagging the Resistance debuff on Sentinels' inherent, and Opportunity creation, as unresistable?

Opportunity's resistance debuff is already flagged as unresistable.

[Rathulfr]

On 9/25/2019 at 12:46 PM, srmalloy said:

It seems to me that the problem in this case isn't the concept of picking defensive or offensive opportunity, but that it's tied to the first two attacks, when giving the Sentinel a pair of powers with icons, the way that Dominators get a power and icon for Domination, addresses most of the problems. You're not stuck avoiding a significant part of your attacks if you want to hold off on triggering Opportunity, and don't have to avoid the attack that would trigger the 'wrong' one, or have your Opportunity triggered on a mob that's going to go down with one hit from anyone, but your Opportunity gets triggered on it and it goes down before you get any benefit from it.

 

Yes this is the nut of the problem with Opportunity, which is why I suggested that it be changed to combine its effects into a single combination that can be triggered by either the T1 or T2.

[subbacultchas]

On 9/23/2019 at 7:48 AM, Myrmidon said:

 Honestly, range isn’t an issue when you can dance among the mêlée happily blasting away with abandoned.😁

Agreed. There's some PBAOE in the sentinel sets, and people that do play them at closer range depending on builds. I'd like to see something more useful to sentinels overall, and range doesn't quite cut it.

[Menelruin]

How about this:

 

Remove the T1-T2 aspect of opportunity, and the self buffs.  Instead it's another bar/button mechanic like Domination, but instead it becomes "rend defenses."  Instead of triggering an attack on ONE mob, lowering their resistance and triggering a self-buff....ALL attacks from the Sentinel for the duration of Opportunity have a short-lived but STACKING -Res debuff on EVERYTHING they hit.  So you no longer need to worry about wasting it with the wrong attack, or triggering it on an almost-dead mob....you just click it when you're ready, spray-and-pray on whatever your party wants to be vulnerable....then move on to the next target when it dies.

[boggo2300]

How would I buff Sentinels?

Make em blasters

 

Drop Mic

 

 

(I actually have one more sent that. I do blaster ATM)

[aethereal]

I've been thinking more about it, and I think that the right role for sentinels is extended single-target damage.  Fighting "hard" targets, where, depending on your optimization level, a hard target might be a boss, an EB, an AV, or a GM.

 

My concept here is:  You need something that takes advantage of an armor set.  You've gotta take damage.  Tanks and Brutes seem like they have traditional tanking pretty well-covered.  Scrappers are better initiators because Sents may naturally initiate from back with the squishies, and the squishies suffer AoE splash.  Scrappers and Brutes are probably also both pretty good at AoE.  Only stalkers, of the current armored ATs, are heavily oriented towards single-target damage, and their damage is front-loaded.

 

So a sentinel can have a natural role as sort of the flip side of a stalker: you don't have that ability to instantly melt a medium-hard target in just a few attacks, but you have more ability to take a long fight to its successful conclusion than an equally-optimized stalker.

 

A straightforward way to do this that wouldn't confuse any new players would be for sents to apply a debuff to a target: again, I think that -X% resist-all, where X is the animation time of the sent attack power (in seconds), is the right one.  Stacking, with a duration that allows you to get to a sustained -20% or better.  Then also give sent attacks that hit a target that has such a debuff a chance to proc a mild heal and/or endurance gain to the sent (similar to how defensive opportunity currently works).  If you wanted to get fancy, you could try to make it so that the heal/end heal got more likely or better the more debuffed the target was, but I think it'd also be fine to just have it be simple.

 

The -res gives the sent a team role that's different than just "inferior scrapper or blaster."  It's not confusing, new players don't have to parse green and red circles etc.  Min-maxers can work out the ways to have their attack rotations land their biggest hit at the moment when the res debuff is maximized.  They continue to be a good solo AT.  Is it really a role that's about being a "sentinel" in the common parlance?  I mean, no.  So what?  Masterminds aren't all that mastermind-y, either.  Corruptors are only pretty loosely "corrupting," especially if you take a buff set.

 

EDIT:  Is -stealth a possible debuff?  We usually give the effect with +perception, but if it's possible to give -stealth, or -strength to stealth or something, then you could have the -res debuff also be a -stealth debuff and you could get a little bit of that sentinel flavor, especially in PvP where it might actually matter.  That wraps up the "I'm removing stealth" thing with what Sents are actually good at -- fighting -- instead of being a team aura.

Edited September 27, 2019 by aethereal

[metacore]

I've played a few Sentinels and notice that solo I end up in melee range fairly often. I have always taken hover but in caves or buildings that doesn't allow you to get out of melee. With low def and res and hp this can be painful. For other ranged damage dealers they have either cc or buffs/debuffs/heals to assist with that.

I've felt that instead of having the ranged damage power sets as primary maybe Sentinels should have the Assault power sets to include some melee options. obviously this is a huge change.

 

The inherent is problematic as stated many many time before. If Sentinels are meant to provide sustained damage then have each ST attack return a portion of endurance and a small self heal. Always.

For the team benefit give a button that when used applies the -20% res for X seconds allowing the team to focus fire down a target.