If you could change the sentinel (or not) which would you choose?(Poll/Opinions)

[Vulgaris]

49 minutes ago, Caulderone said:

That post happened last September:

 

CP also replied a few more times after that.

Yep- Nigh on year ago and not a single tweak after. Not to be negative about it but more realistic. The AT is in a meh spot in the here and now.

Edited April 15, 2020 by Vulgaris

[Caulderone]

Seven months is not a year.  Your expectations for how quick things will happen with a part-time volunteer Dev staff are going to lead to disappointment.

 

I never expected anything within a year after that post.  Things are going to happen slowly, especially with all the behind the scenes work they are doing to improve the codebase.

[Vulgaris]

Not meant to be entirely antagonistic so much as realistically a bit frustrated.

[Coyotedancer]

2 hours ago, Caulderone said:

That post happened last September:

CP also replied a few more times after that.

 

Yeah... and that dev post is EXACTLY why I'm worried about the whole AT being completely ruined in the name of "fixing" them, to put it bluntly.

 

[AurianArchive]

On 4/15/2020 at 12:31 PM, Coyotedancer said:

 

Yeah... and that dev post is EXACTLY why I'm worried about the whole AT being completely ruined in the name of "fixing" them, to put it bluntly.

 

I find myself re-iterating a post from a different segment of the forums.

 

Sentinels were a Baby-Pool entry point into making entirely new archetypes. They were boring, not that special, balanced according to limited data sets, and leveraged hacks/hooks in the system. I might be wrong, but I dimly recall the Powers Developer on Sekrit hijacking the Striker AT as planned by the Live Devs to get Sentinels up and working. 

 

Those of us who participated in the Sekrit knew that a complete overhaul, if not a complete envisioning, of how Sentinels could/would work was always on the cards. 

 

Part of that came down to the amount of completely new code being entered into the game. Where hacks/hooks were needed to start the AT years ago, there might be properly defined specification/database points to integrate NEW AT's as a defined modular part of the system. 

 

Part of that came down to fixing the kludges with armors and powers in general. Over the course of Sekrit an entirely new powers system was implemented, and that in turn gave rise to the chaining powers we see now in Electric Affinity. 

 

These background fixes and improvements to how the game operates also resulted in advancements such as the Tanker and Brute Tertiary powers being decoupled. At the system level you can implement new and different Tank or Brute Tertiary powers without affecting the other AT. You could also change existing Tertiary powers, but, well, that might not go over so well.

 

Flash forward to now, and the possibility that new/different AT's could be upended at a moments notice, is indeed a hard sell to an exponentially larger playerbase already sharing and designing IO builds optimized to what new/different AT's can accomplish right now. It, is not, however, something that I think the Powers Devs should shy away from.

 

I think if the Live devs had been more willing to say things like: "You know what, we screwed up on Peacebringers and Warshades, so we're just going to deprecate the current AT and just work on a whole new AT using new Tech, that should actually play like we WANTED them to play" :: then the player base would be more accepting of what they know right now being completely upended. 

 

And ultimately, that may be how the current powers developers approach the problems. The existing Sentinels could be moved to a Legacy Status; eligible for bug fixes, but replaced by a completely new AT. They'll still be in game and accessible, and if you want to have a go at them? GO FOR IT! Play how you want to play. 

[Coyotedancer]

If a legacy version is left as-is, that's fine,

If the devs want to build something completely new, that's also fine. 

 

The point is, however, that some of us do actually enjoy the AT as it stands now and would prefer not to see it scrapped.

That's something I've said "elsewhere" before, when the subject came up. My opinion hasn't changed. 

[Ultimo]

As I say, as long as I get that pairing of ranged attacks and defenses, I don't care much what else they do with the class.  I'd like to see either a bit more damage or a bit more defense, but beyond that... I'm not concerned overmuch.

[Felis Noctu]

I like the general concept of the sentinel, but I'd put my vote in for a combination of the second and third option.

 

They may have been intended as ranged scrappers, but I don't see them that way. One, there isn't really much of a need for that. Two, their innate mechanic is effectively a support tool, increasing everyone's damage. In a sense they're almost a jack-of-all-trades AT similar to the EATs, but could fit into their own niche there.

• Khelds are mostly self-focused, allowing them to fit into different roles but ultimately it's about their own abilities.
  Role flexibility through in-the-moment mode shifts.
• VEATs spread out in all different directions, but something they share are high scales for passive support with built-in leadership auras.
  Role flexibility with buff-based team amping.
• Sentinels could be the debuff version of this. Their Opportunity mechanic could not only provide that -def and -resist, but also -status/debuff resistance. Basically, open the target up to be more vulnerable to damage and secondary effects.
  Reliable 'jack' with debuff-based team amping.

There are powersets that do this to some extent, but no class that focuses on this particular task. It would give Sentinels a more solid and defined position in the AT list, where no matter what sets they take, their "purpose" is to amplify their allies through reliable and consistent debuffing of a target. Leave it automatic of course, otherwise it's no longer "reliable and consistent".

 

Better to reinforce a unique purpose than to just buff numbers or imitate another AT.

Edited April 20, 2020 by Felis Noctu

[Hjarki]

In most games I've seen - not just CoH - additional classes/archetypes are almost always a mistake because the original design included a broad swathes of concepts that they don't actually expand on with the additional classes/archetypes.

 

The Sentinel is a perfect example of this. Instead of creating an entirely new archetype, why not just add Blast sets (with an adjusted ranged Damage Scale) to Scrappers? So you could choose Dark Blast/Dark Armor or Dark Melee/Dark Armor as a Scrapper if you so chose.

[CaptTastic]

I would love to see Opportunity improved and/or damage and AoE cap increased, but if they left Sentinels exactly how they are I’d still love them. 
 

Yeah there are bigger damage dealers around, but Sentinels are incredibly versatile and reliable. They can kill for themselves and look after themselves. They can fight at range or come right into the middle of the melee without fear. They can solo great and they can add that versatility to teams.
 

With some investment of influence and time, they can kill AVs by themselves too so it’s not like they are incurable week. Will happily take that smidgen extra damage though if the devs fancy handing it out, but I unashamedly LOVE Sentinels. 

[Gobbledigook]

I don't know why they don't just up the damage scale a little and turn Opportunity into a percent chance of adding a mitigation debuff to all powers for a short 3-5 second duration similar to scrappers criticals.

 

Even reducing the secondary values slightly to increase the primary attacks to give them more dps but slightly less survival. Range and dps is survival anyway.

 

Or go nuts and turn them into a Ranged Tank lol.

[drbuzzard]

I didn't care for any of the options, so I didn't bother to vote. I've done a thread on what I think should be done.

 

To sum it all up, start with upping damage scale to 1.125 (same as scrappers and blasters). Also up defensive values to .75 like scrappers and stalkers (and brutes) instead of the oddball .7.

 

After that I'm of two minds:

 What I would really like is stacking resistance debuff to all stalker attacks, so they build up their damage, and help out the team at the same time. It would be a fairly unique mechanic (though sonic blast does it already). Scrap opportunity as is. However Captain Powerhouse has stated that he doesn't want massive resistance debuffing out there, so I doubt this will happen.

 

Alternatively, so go with an easy solution based on what CP said, just give them crits (like scrappers, not as good as stalkers).

 

The opportunity mechanic, while of some use currently, is nothing I will miss as long as something better replaces it. Sentinels are simply a DPS class that lags in DPS. That's not overly acceptable. As I see them they have one shining ability, and that's the ability to nuke often when you pump recharge. Other than that, they do meh single target damage, and even more meh AOE damage because of the lowered caps, low damage scale, and the inherent not at all helping with it.

 

Someone mentioned that another server (WeHaveCake is one of know of that does this) basically abolishes AOE caps (and aggro caps as well-both are set to 200). Playing a sentinel over there is (was)actually pretty nice since it actually leverages your survivability edge over a blaster. However it's clear that won't happen here (and that server did a weird revent to i23 on their last update, and completely screwed up sentinels).

[SwitchFade]

On 4/21/2020 at 3:59 AM, Gobbledegook said:

I don't know why they don't just up the damage scale a little and turn Opportunity into a percent chance of adding a mitigation debuff to all powers for a short 3-5 second duration similar to scrappers criticals.

 

Even reducing the secondary values slightly to increase the primary attacks to give them more dps but slightly less survival. Range and dps is survival anyway.

 

Or go nuts and turn them into a Ranged Tank lol.

Any change that removes the healing of defensive opp is an instant no vote from me.

 

It may seem small, but having defensive up and healing on every attack adds up quickly.

 

I'd also have to no vote decreasing survivability.

Edited April 26, 2020 by SwitchFade

[CaptTastic]

12 hours ago, SwitchFade said:

Any change that removes the healing of defensive opp is an instant no vote from me.

 

It may seem small, but having defensive up and healing on every attack adds up quickly.

 

I'd also have to no vote decreasing survivability.

Must admit, I love the Defensive in opportunity and never really understood why it doesn’t get much love. 
 

It makes a big difference on my SR, but suppose it’s easy to see why it’s much less effective on other secondary sets. 
 

That said, seems inevitable it’s going in favour of greater damage/accuracy, which I guess is a trade off that will benefit the AT as a whole. 

[Frostweaver]

My change is much simpler.

Give sentinels blaster aoe target caps instead of scrapper. leave the rest the same.

They don't have scrapper dps, defenses (Not really at their hp) or criticals. Even several scrapper/stalker sets do appreciably more aoe, and several sets for sentinels require just as much time in melee as scrapper sets do (I am looking at you, rad/)
They should at least be able to affect a whole spawn. The scrapper target cap feels like an utter kludge to 'range is a defense' but when it comes to late-game content, range is NOT a defense. Everything seems to have -fly or more dangerous ranged attacks.

Edited May 3, 2020 by Frostweaver

[Caulderone]

48 minutes ago, Frostweaver said:

They should at least be able to affect a whole spawn. The scrapper target cap feels like an utter kludge to 'range is a defense' but when it comes to late-game content, range is NOT a defense.

At the least, the Nukes should have a 16 target cap.  This would allow using the secondary effect for most attack sets for more thorough defensive purposes.

[drbuzzard]

So there's a sort of competition on Excelsior where people run Master of ITF at +4 in timed runs, fastest time gets the glory. Runs are generally done in a 'gimmick' fashion, but singular AT, or all ranged, all melee, etc. 

 

Right now a pure blaster team is in the lead. While I haven't tried too many times, I can't together a sentinel team which can even survive it (I can, but someone else dies).  Perhaps it's because not that many high end players chase perfection in sentinels because their ceiling is so low. I suspect eventually we'll get the right sentinel team together, but I doubt we'll beat the blaster time. If they can survive the run, we can't match the damage. 

 

Sentinels are probably about the easiest AT to play. You stay at a distance and blast away (softly though), and if someone does close, you can deal with it without much difficulty. You never really are driven to chase the last little bit of optimization (some do nonetheless). Blasters are simply hard to play (easier than they used to be, but still not easy). This makes people chase every scrap of optimization they can, and it results in some pretty impressive builds. 

 

Ultimately, the sentinel needs to have the ceiling raised. You can optimize as much as you like, but as others have mentioned, IOs make defenses easy to optimize, but offense hard to increase. Sentinels lack in offense, and there's really not much you can do about it. There needs to be some revamp. While some people are good and stubborn and have turned out some impressive results from sentinels, I think high end blaster builds are more impressive. 

 

I kind of think sentinels are sitting about where tankers were before the recent revamp. They can play the high end stuff, but a different AT would numerically be better (of course variations of build quality and player quality means you can't really predict the outcome), and with equal players who optimized just as hard, you get better results with, say, a blaster. 

 

There's a reason these kinds of threads keep coming, and will continue to do so. Sentinels are fun, and definitely fill a niche reflected in a plethora of comic book characters. However, they simply get left behind eventually. 

[tjknight]

I think it's because I really ❤️ my Fortunata and VEAT's in general, but to me they are exactly the AT to compare Sentinels against.  As both Sentinels and VEATS  have medium level damage paired with with defense.   I have four sentinels, but none are 50 yet due to alitis, or because my Fortunata pretty much scratches that itch for ranged dps that isn't made of paper tissue.  Sentinels have a lot going for them, but I think the biggest issue is they lack an aspect that really stands out.  And no I don't mean "more damage"... they need something else.  I'm just not quite sure what that is. 

Edited May 6, 2020 by tjknight

[Hardboiled Hero]

It's late (or really early) as I'm writing this, so sorry if I ramble some.  

 

I notice a lot of people saying that Opportunity activation should be uncoupled from t1 powers, but what about making opportunity activation make those powers actually good for that one shot.  For example, what if the activating shot automatically hits?  what if the offensive opportunity, while still on a t1 power, not only automatically hits, but is also a critical on the activating shot?  What if the defensive opportunity automatically hits and provides a significant burst to health and endurance on the first attack..  like giving 20% of the character's max right away? (and these effects in addition to the current offensive and defensive opportunity effects).  I'm wondering whether people are really complaining about having the activation tied to certain powers, or are they really complaining about having the activation tied to powers that those people don't actually want to use.. if it's the latter make the powers so that people will want to use them. (and personally I don't think any sets should have powers that people just don't want to use.  One of the cool things about sents is that they have reasons to use some powers that other AT's can't or don't use.)

 

  Also remember that, while a single sentinel's attacks don't stack debuffs, each sentinel on a team stacks debuffs with each other sentinel on the team.  Conceptually I think this is great, but in practice, I've been playing many sentinels on many teams over the past two weeks or so, and I've only been teamed with another sentinel twice..  IIRC, it's the third or fourth least played AT.. the point here is that I think the devs were expecting a group of sentinels debuffing their bosses and AV's by 40%.. or more realistically 3 sentinels on a team debuffing the boss for 15%.. this without activated Opportunity..  but in practice this rarely happens.  I really think the value of passive opportunity could be increased to -10% per sentinel without too much trouble.

 

  Finally, increase the Sentinel's range.  Honestly this is something I notice far more when soloing then I do in teams..  In teams I want to stand between the melee and the other rangers so that I can see when mobs are peeling off toward the rangers and I can be there to stop those mobs.  (I'm not sure whether sentinels are good at off-tanking like this now, but it's something I feel sentinels should be good at.  People who play sentinels want to put their defenses to good use)  However in soloing or small teams, the Sentinel lacks the aggro control needed to tank, and they also have a lot of trouble pulling because they often can't stand close to cover and still shoot a mob.  Where most rangers could simply peak out from behind a corner, shoot a mob, then duck back into cover, the sentinel will often have to stand in front of the cover, shoot the mob and then try to run back behind cover..  giving the target just enough time to make a ranged attack, which grabs the attention of other enemies so the whole group will come around the corner at the sentinel.  Furthermore, if the sentinel is meant to make up the damage gap through having better "time on target" by not being as easy to mez and whatnot, the range difference between a sentinel and blaster completely undoes that.

 

  I honestly don't really see any problems with the sentinel that can't be pretty easily fixed.  It's fine to have activated opportunity work off of two different attacks..  just make those the best attacks in the power set.. at least when they're actually being used to activate opportunity.  Beef up the passive opportunity some, taking into account that there will probably only be one or two Sentinels per team. Give the Sentinel normal ranges.. I understand they were going for kind of a mid-range skirmisher kind of idea, but the idea seems problematic..  if they really want to hold onto the idea, then they need to plan on the sentinel getting mobbed like a brute does and beef up the sentinel's defenses accordingly.

[drbuzzard]

16 hours ago, tjknight said:

I think it's because I really ❤️ my Fortunata and VEAT's in general, but to me they are exactly the AT to compare Sentinels against.  As both Sentinels and VEATS  have medium level damage paired with with defense.   I have four sentinels, but none are 50 yet due to alitis, or because my Fortunata pretty much scratches that itch for ranged dps that isn't made of paper tissue.  Sentinels have a lot going for them, but I think the biggest issue is they lack an aspect that really stands out.  And no I don't mean "more damage"... they need something else.  I'm just not quite sure what that is. 

I've spent some time revamping my VEAT (crab) recently. At one point I decked him out as a crabbermind, and the damage output is pretty impressive during the peaks, but then the pets die (and it's not due to a lack of buffs I'm giving out). Thus I decided to create a ranged tank build, and was very careful to pick the high DPAS attacks, and get a good patron pool. While my blasting tank crab doesn't have the flashy high damage blasts of a sentinel, all of the attacks are high DPAS, and there's a lot of AOE goodness mixed in. Add in the debuff of venom grenade and he can beat things down quite well. This is on top of all positions being softcapped, with 85%l/s and around 60% for all other damage types. You simply can't do that on a sentinel. At the same time he hands out 30% damage boost and around 20% defense to everyone on a team. The only thing really lacking compared to a sentinel is the nuke (omega maneuver being a sorry joke) .  

 

The question I end up having to ask myself is, if a SoA can be made that durable, and have that kind of buff/debuff potential, yet still have acceptable damage- then why are sentinels stuck where they are?

 

I mean let's just compare opportunity (inherent) vs. venom grenade (single power). Opportunity requires you to build up a bar, hit with a power, then applies a whopping 20% resistance debuff to a single target. Venom grenade is on a fairly short timer, and applies a 30% resistance debuff to 10 (or is it 16? I'd have to check) targets. A single VEAT power beats the sentinel inherent. 

[Siderous]

I think they just need to make the offensive opportunity work off of any single target primary attack and make one of the defense powers in each secondary set to trigger the defensive opportunity. 

 

I personally would like to also see that one or more of the secondary defense sets powers affect the team in a certain way.  Maybe a certain % of the secondary power affects others within 10 ft or maybe a defensive cone, where only attacks from a certain direction would be affected by def/res or what ever if the sentinel stands in place for more than 3 seconds.  

 

And of course make the multiplier 1.0...

[drbuzzard]

Some of the secondaries don't have click powers so having a defense power trigger defensive opportunity is not really an option (like willpower as an example). Also triggering it with a heal hardly sounds productive (which constitutes most of the click secondary powers). 

 

Personally I think the current inherent should be scrapped with a retry at the drawing board. 

 

Also if you want the damage scalar go from .95 to 1.0, that will basically not be noticeable. To be blunt if that's all the upgrades you want, there might as well be no change at all since it will leave sentinels in the same place as a  DPS class with low DPS.

 

The support the team idea is at least somewhat novel, but I doubt it will be done. It changes the tone of the class and the secondaries in a pretty drastic way. 

[oldskool]

10 hours ago, drbuzzard said:

Also if you want the damage scalar go from .95 to 1.0, that will basically not be noticeable. To be blunt if that's all the upgrades you want, there might as well be no change at all since it will leave sentinels in the same place as a  DPS class with low DPS.

This is a good point.  To be fair though, damage would become more consistent at all times.  As of right now all Sentinels impose a minor -resistance debuff without activating the inherent at all.  If taken at full value that's roughly the gap between 0.95 and 1.0.  It would become more consistent though at high difficulties.  The absorption of the -20% debuff from the inherent into a further damage buff would then apply to all attacks against all enemies.  That includes AoE which the current inherent doesn't function with beyond the Offensive Opportunity mechanic.  

The low DPS part is the powers themselves.  The DPA difference between ranged powers and melee powers is a legacy problem.  I don't see how the Sentinel gets fixed without addressing that at all.  Furthermore, addressing ranged vs melee DPA issues bleeds into every other AT with those powers.  So does a fix become Sentinel only while leaving all others unchanged or do all ranged powers get addressed?  How would this impact Blasters in light of the snipe changes?  

[drbuzzard]

5 minutes ago, oldskool said:

This is a good point.  To be fair though, damage would become more consistent at all times.  As of right now all Sentinels impose a minor -resistance debuff without activating the inherent at all.  If taken at full value that's roughly the gap between 0.95 and 1.0.  It would become more consistent though at high difficulties.  The absorption of the -20% debuff from the inherent into a further damage buff would then apply to all attacks against all enemies.  That includes AoE which the current inherent doesn't function with beyond the Offensive Opportunity mechanic.  

The low DPS part is the powers themselves.  The DPA difference between ranged powers and melee powers is a legacy problem.  I don't see how the Sentinel gets fixed without addressing that at all.  Furthermore, addressing ranged vs melee DPA issues bleeds into every other AT with those powers.  So does a fix become Sentinel only while leaving all others unchanged or do all ranged powers get addressed?  How would this impact Blasters in light of the snipe changes?  

Ok, this will bring up a quibble from your other post. Sentinels are not 70% of blaster damage in my experience. They are lower. I'd say more around 60%. I have a BR/Dev blaster and multiple BR sentinels (/elec, /bio, /DA), and while I agree with you that the sentinel BR set is the best of the bunch (due to the good AOE it adds), the damage is not even vaguely comparable. It is not hard to keep defiance values up high, and between that and the higher scalar, blasters do not in any way suffer from damage shortfalls, even keeping their distance (as my build is /dev I have no melee attacks to distort the ranged damage DPS). 

 

Sentinels need to be balanced on their own. They fall short, it is not ranged damage which does so. I'll certainly concede that ranged damage is generally lower than melee damage if you have a large unmoving sack of HP to beat on. However the existence of an idle sack willing to sit there while you empty it is hardly a given these days unless you are beating on a pylon. Ranged damage gets a seldom acknowledged DPS benefit of not having to chase down the target nearly as much. 

[oldskool]

6 minutes ago, drbuzzard said:

Ok, this will bring up a quibble from your other post. Sentinels are not 70% of blaster damage in my experience.

My quibble with this is that I did not make a sweeping statement about all Sentinel AoE being at that level.  What you're describing here was a specific comparison not a generalization.    

Though, I can see how one could take that statement as a misleading indicator of such.  That wasn't my intent, and I'll consider adding an edit to address that at some point.