Sentinels. Are they underused?

[Monos King]

2 hours ago, Obitus said:

How about this--you tell or show me how fast a Blaster can clear 4x8 content, against a wide variety of NPC factions and without routinely chewing floor, because clearly I'm doing something wrong, if you think that Blasters are some sort of untouchable gods of clearing speed.

Oh I'm not even one of these people claiming blasters are Kings of the Clear, though the best blasters do have greater potential than the best of other classes generally. 

 

They're just better than Sents. By a lot. By the time you nuked a mob for half their health, the blaster just danced on their corpses in half that time. It doesn't take much to give the blaster enough survival to use damage as a defense. 

[Myrmidon]

On 5/4/2021 at 9:15 AM, Apparition said:

If you enjoy playing the character though, that is all that matters.

Quoted for emphasis.

 

The less you worry about what others think, the more enjoyable life becomes.

[kelika2]

Early game sents are great

late game when blasters can softcap via IOs sents kinda lose identity and usefulness

everyone loses themselves when incarnating.  i still honestly believe The Well would be the games final boss before CoX2

 

but

 

this game is so easy just be yourself

 

that crudely said, i love my dp/fire, water/fire, fire/fire, and rifle/fire sents

[Obitus]

2 minutes ago, Monos King said:

Oh I'm not even one of these people claiming blasters are Kings of the Clear, though the best blasters do have greater potential than the best of other classes generally. 

 

They're just better than Sents. By a lot. By the time you nuked a mob for half their health, the blaster just danced on their corpses in half that time. It doesn't take much to give the blaster enough survival to use damage as a defense. 

 

The first statement, WRT to "potential" is probably true, given limitless team support. 

 

The second statement just isn't true in my experience, and the numbers quite frankly don't bear it out in the general case.  You ain't dropping multiple +4 bosses (+3 after Incarnate shift) in a handful of seconds with any solo Blaster.  Been through this debate many many times before.

 

Spoiler

To quote one of my ancient posts:
 

Quote

If he can consistently drop multiple bosses with an effective HP of ~4,136 in less than ten seconds without nukes, then I'd dearly love to see his build. That's 2,689 HP divided by 0.65, to account for the fact that your powers are only 65% effective against +3s.

(For reference, a level 50 Fire/MM Blaster with Aim, Build Up, ED-capped damage enhancement and enough recharge seamlessly to chain Fire Breath, Fire Ball, Psychic Scream and Psionic Shockwave will deliver 1166.11 AoE damage, on average, in the ~9 seconds of overlap you have on Aim+Build Up, assuming that you don't have to reposition to deliver the cones, and assuming that the cones don't have lesser target caps, both of which are totally abstract assumptions.

 

Adding an extra 100% damage on top of that would only raise the total damage dealt to 1488.6. That's a far cry from 4,136, ain't it? Even [pre-crashless] Inferno with all of those damage buffs would only get you about halfway to your target, leaving you with about 6 seconds to lop off the other 1900 or so HP, in an AoE no less.)

 

 

While it's true that Sentinels don't have an analogue for, say, a balls-to-the-wall PBAoE Blapper wielding the /Fire secondary, most Blasters don't have that kind of AoE in their secondaries.  On a hat-picked Blaster build, you're probably looking at a nuke, a TAoE or two, maybe one PBAoE attack, and/or a cone.  Most of that stuff will be available to an analogous Sentinel too, and only at a ~20% damage deficit.  And the Sentinel will have his nuke up much more often.  And the Sentinel has more defensive leeway, which might allow him to slot more procs.

 

(Needless to say, taking every available AoE attack on a Blaster probably isn't the most efficient build strategy for most use cases.)

 

I find that most of my builds end up clearing spawns in the ~30s range in general content (i.e. not on builds or maps specifically geared to farming).  Builds like Tankers and Brutes tend to be fastest and certainly the easiest to play.  Blasters tend to seesaw; faster when the nuke is up, slower otherwise, oftentimes delayed by scatter/stragglers.  The Sentinels I've tried  aren't noticeably slower than the Blasters, largely due to the faster cycle time on their nukes.  Again, all of this is solo, and I try to maximize my ability to do this with minor inspiration use and against the widest possible range of the game's enemy groups.

 

Now this may be chicken-and-egg syndrome; I may just be in the habit of targeting the ~30s threshold as "good enough" for my builds.  And part of it, I suspect, is that we're talking past each other to some degree based on differences of preference.

 

Anyway, to echo mac and Myrm, there's always room for any AT in most any team, and certainly in all of mine.  This is part of the reason I am biased towards solo ability; it usually translates into the ability to carry teams.

[Monos King]

Just now, Obitus said:

 

The second statement just isn't true in my experience, and the numbers quite frankly don't bear it out in the general case.  You ain't dropping multiple +4 bosses (+3 after Incarnate shift) in a handful of seconds with any solo Blaster.  Been through this debate many many times before.

Cool but this is why I want you to show me your clear times. In action. I'll believe it when I see it.

[oldskool]

4 hours ago, Obitus said:

And part of it, I suspect, is that we're talking past each other to some degree based on differences of preference.

 

Everyone of these threads.  Every. F***ing. Time.

[PyroBeetle]

I must say that to me it is all build dependent. There are blaster builds which are good, but against anything that debuffs defense or has hard single damage that breaks through defense, I struggle to solo against. I have many a debt badge on my purple IOed to the gills fire/fire blaster. Great fun to play, and capable of amazing damage but lives on the knifes edge. He also has to eat purples with regularity.

 

On the other hand, as multiple posters have said, I have a couple of Sentinel builds that do tolerable clear speeds solo, take the alpha in teams and are survivable enough in all content that I generally can chew reds like I do on  a fire farmer. YMMV but for my money, I will take the high end Sentinel, especially in varied/hard content. Plus I have the availability of my opening combo every spawn. Not every other spawn.

 

I may post the two Sentinel builds that I regularly use later in this space, but they are a Psy/SR/Psy and a Elec/Energy/Elec.

 

Now the debate about ranged vs. melee is a separate issue.

Edited May 12, 2021 by PyroBeetle

[ScarySai]

The fact of the matter is that this is a min/max based discussion.

 

Maybe the best sentinel can outclear stuff like elec or sonic blasters, due to how generally terrible those sets are, but the fact of the matter is any top tier or even middling blaster will stomp the clear speeds of a sentinel.

 

Low target caps, weaker base damage and far less potential with a broken inherent is all sentinel has going for it. It's the poor man's soldier of arachnos. If a blaster manages to solve their defensive woes, it's no contest.

 

This isn't pre-i24 anymore, blasters aren't floor magnets. Their time spend eating dirt for so long has allowed them to siphon power from the well of the furies with their mouths, making them literal gods if built well.

 

Take it from a kheld main, though. Nothing in this game is useless, if you put time into your character, there's very few things in the game that can't accomplish impressive feats.

 

When weighing potential however, implying sentinels can even touch blasters is either ignorant or dishonest.

Edited May 12, 2021 by ScarySai

[Obitus]

2 minutes ago, Monos King said:

Cool but this is why I want you to show me your clear times. In action. I'll believe it when I see it.

 

What are you bringing to the table in this epeen comparison?  If you want to get together sometime on Beta, shoot the shit, and have a friendly race between your Blaster and my Sentinel, then I might be game.  But if all I'm gonna get out of you is, "lol, prove it to me, idiot," then I won't waste my time.

 

What I said isn't even controversial, if you don't willfully ignore the context, which was clear speed in difficult and varied solo content, not "the fastest possible speed for a glass cannon Blapper on easy maps," which I begin to suspect is your standard, if you even have one.

 

As noted, there is a reason that farmers don't favor Blasters.  I won't say it's impossible to make a Blaster that is competitive with a Brute for the purpose, but it's much much more difficult--and I have tried, spent billions on such an experiment, way back when.  The idea that Blaster offense is so awesome that they can brute-force their way past the scatter problem is just knee-jerk wishful thinking, from the same sort of people who insisted for years that Blaster single-target damage is unparalleled because, uh, no reason or evidence given.

 

You put forth a scenario earlier, in which your Blaster performs ~4x better than "my" Sentinel ("a blaster will dance on the mobs' corpses in half the time it takes you to nuke half their health").  Leaving aside for a moment that this claim is brutally absurd just from a damage-numbers standpoint, it also ignores the practical problems of a Blaster trying to clear the average +4x8 map.  In reality, this is roughly how things go:  Blaster approaches spawn, which may or may not be spread out to begin with.  Aim+Build Up, then the nuke goes off, followed by 1 or 2 smaller followup AoEs.  Most if not all of the minions are dead, depending on how many were clumped together, and you most likely have 3-4 seriously injured lieutenants and 2-3 less injured bosses left over.  These then scatter to the winds.

 

At this point, you have a choice.  If you're trying to maximize clear speed, like for some dopey internet-epeen competition, you might just move on with the idea that the mobs will follow you, or with the idea that it'll be faster to come back later.  Or if you're doing missions normally, you'll more likely sit there and pick things off using a mixture of single-target attacks and whatever AoEs the current positioning incentivizes.  It is this clean up stage that is the great equalizer.

 

Notice that I haven't even brought up survivability yet, or time spent using control/mitigation powers (e.g. IO'd Bonfire), which contrary to the hand-wavey nonsense in this thread, actually do matter when you're soloing +4x8 against varied villain groups.  I admit that I probably don't use Inspirations to their fullest; a solo blaster stacking defensive inspirations constantly, maybe using a combining macro (something I've only ever used on farming maps) might do better, but still.  If your claim is that it's trivially easy for Blaster builds to be made "sturdy enough" to ROFLstomp, say, a +4x8 solo tour of Arachnos, Malta, Carnies, to say nothing of Incarnate content like Knives of Vengeance (I won't even cheat by naming PPD or Rularuu)--then the burden of proof is on you, not me. 

 

You're the one who's making extraordinary claims in that instance.  "But MUH softcap" doesn't fly; I've built too many soft-capped Blasters over the years.  It helps, a ton, but soft-capped DEF to limited positions/types and without DDR can be very brittle unless you're cherry picking easy villain groups to fight, and sometimes even then you roll snake eyes.  In fact, if all you wanted to do is maximize clear speed, you're probably better off building for ~32% DEF to more positions/types, so that you can max out with a single Luck.  I generally don't do that on Blasters, because I prefer to maximize non-inspiration performance, and maybe that's a flaw in my approach to this argument--but even if so, the people who scream about IO'd softcaps, as if they were a panacea, are wrong.

 

Truth be told, even Sentinels will occasionally struggle to survive in the environment I've described.  Hell, even IO'd Tank builds usually have some sort of serious weakness that a given villain group will exploit.  Listening to people act like survivability is a trivial problem for solo Blasters only reinforces my prejudice that many forumites only solo easy content.  Seriously, it's like taking crazy pills.

 

This sort of thing would be much easier if we were still allowed to post videos. 

[ScarySai]

51 minutes ago, Obitus said:

This sort of thing would be much easier if we were still allowed to post videos. 

 

At least you got one thing right.

[Obitus]

16 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

 

At least you got one thing right.

 

So just to be clear, you're saying that all of the following statements are 100% wrong:

• Varied maps at high difficulty settings present challenges that can occasionally kill just about any AT, no matter how well built.
• Solo Blasters don't have a trivially easy time surviving in those environments.
• Mob scatter is a problem that can vastly reduce the practical kill speeds of characters who don't have taunt auras or AoE immobilizes.
• Farmers favor Brutes over Blasters.
• Blaster burst damage isn't high enough to kill multiple +4 bosses in a handful of seconds.

Thanks for the insight!

Edited May 12, 2021 by Obitus

[Obitus]

27 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

1: Maps don't kill people, mobs do. Geometry helps the player, if anything.

2: Blasters aren't as squishy as they used to be these days, and they are quite capable offensively.

3: Depending on how it happens, it can be used to gain an advantage.

4: Speedrunners favor blasters over brutes. Fire blasters are quite capable farmers, though. You can Youtube it right now.

5:  Objectively wrong, a fire blaster can drop multiple +4 bosses pretty quick with just BU and aim.

 

Glad to have educated you, hit me up if you need build advice.

 

#1 is a dumb joke, and #2-3 are transparent deflections.  "Less squishy" does not equal "can roflstomp everything," and careful readers will understand that you just handwaved the survivability question not just for solo Blasters, but for solo anything.

 

#4.  Speedrunners stacking a billion temp powers and mailing themselves inspirations to perform the CoH equivalent of party tricks aren't relevant to balance discussions.  Not saying that what they do isn't cool or impressive, but c'mon man.  This isn't good faith argument.  "If we bend over backwards to cherry pick situations that eliminate all of Blasters' weaknesses, what do you know, their weaknesses don't matter!"  (EDIT: To be clear, I'm referencing solo speedrunners here.  Group speed runs are even more off-topic to the original dispute.)

 

#5.  I already posted numbers.  But sure, feel free to post an example proving that a Blaster AoE rotation can kill multiple bosses with ...

Quote

an effective HP of ~4,136 ... That's 2,689 HP divided by 0.65, to account for the fact that your powers are only 65% effective against +3s.

... in the time it takes a Sentinel to get off his first nuke, as Monos King suggested.  Or hell, I'll be kind and give you ten seconds.  Feel free to post the "objective" numbers!  Hey, maybe I missed something.  It's just barely possible that you might find the magical powerset combination that can do it.

 

If you really think that solo Blasters have the kind of burst AoE damage to drop multiple +4 bosses in a handful of seconds, and more to the point that they can maintain that pace consistently over the course of an entire mission, then I can only assume you've never tried it. 

Edited May 12, 2021 by Obitus

[Obitus]

1 minute ago, ScarySai said:

 

I can almost hear the blaster mains laughing at you.

It's really simple man.  This is the Blaster section of City of Data 2.0.  All you have to do is pick a Blaster power set combination, and construct an AoE attack rotation that can, with Aim+Build Up, deliver 4,136 damage, to multiple targets within 10 seconds.  Your smugness suggests this should be trivial.  Can't wait to see your results!

 

To everyone else, I'll just take a moment to point out that this is the problem with internet discourse.  ScarySai's a decent poster, or at least that's my recollection, but in this case he was in such a rush to mock me for saying things he didn't like that he ended up arguing that survivability is a trivial consideration for Blasters, even in a solo context at +4x8 against varied villain groups. 

 

This argument is, of course, self-evidently absurd.  Like, we're talking dancing-with-your-pants-on-your-head-on-the-shortbus levels of nuttiness.  But this being the internet, instead of backing down or at least trying to discuss things like an adult, he decided to flood the thread with substance-free smugness, to distract from what his opponents were actually arguing.

 

As oldskool said, "Every single time."  That's where these threads end up.  Anyone who's played a solo Blaster at even moderately high difficulty would have a hard time mocking the content of this post, over-long though it may be.  Quick, let's bury it in flames and distortions!

[Coyotedancer]

For what it's worth, Obit,  Mr. Coyote's favorite farmer is a purpose-built Fire blaster. He doesn't use or need the P2W temps, and tends to burn through (Pun mildly intended-) about the same number of inspies as my zen-mode Claws/Fire/Mu Brute, Ossuni... 'A fair few less than Harry, my traded-safety-for-more-damage Claws/Fire/Fire speed-famer, does, honestly.

 

He also doesn't seem to have much trouble with mopping up runners. That's the advantage of range over us melee-types with nothing but Patron attacks to use on them.

 

 

 

Edited May 12, 2021 by Coyotedancer

[Obitus]

1 minute ago, Coyotedancer said:

For what it's worth, Obit,  Mr. Coyote's favorite farmer is a purpose-built Fire blaster. He doesn't use or need the P2W temps, and tends to burn through (Pun mildly intended-) about the same number of inspies as my zen-mode Claws/Fire/Mu Brute, Ossuni... 'A fair few less than Harry, my traded-safety-for-more-damage Claws/Fire/Fire speed-famer, does, honestly.

I don't doubt it.  Like I say, it's possible.  Durability isn't the problem.  I'm assuming you use Hot feet to mitigate scatter?  I know some people favor Ice/Fire for farming.

 

But if you want to do farming fast, easy and cheap, you can't beat a Brute.  And scatter remains an issue for Blasters, generally.  Farming builds typically don't do so well in generalized +4x8 content.

[Coyotedancer]

Nope. He uses Bonfire with a KD special... Blaster Hot Feet apparently has an "avoid" effect in it that actually makes the scatter unmanageable. He tried that first and respecced out of it double-quick.

[ScarySai]

3 minutes ago, Obitus said:

ScarySai's a decent poster, or at least that's my recollection, but in this case he was in such a rush to mock me for saying things he didn't like that he ended up arguing that survivability is a trivial consideration for Blasters, even in a solo context at +4x8 against varied villain groups. 

 

Dismissing my valid responses as deflections is a good way to get me to dismiss your outrageous claims (with no evidence, by the way.) That go against ingame experience and general consensus.

 

The fact you honestly believe blasters can't drop +4 bosses in seconds is very telling. 

[Obitus]

Just now, ScarySai said:

 

Dismissing my valid responses as deflections is a good way to get me to dismiss your outrageous claims (with no evidence, by the way.) That go against ingame experience and general consensus.

 

The fact you honestly believe blasters can't drop +4 bosses in seconds is very telling. 

Then you should have an easy time countering my numbers with math of your own.  I even provided you a link to all the data!  Enjoy!

[Obitus]

2 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

Nope. He uses Bonfire with a KD special... Blaster Hot Feet apparently has an "avoid" effect in it that actually makes the scatter unmanageable. He tried that first and respecced out of it double-quick.

That's interesting.  I haven't tried Bonfire in a genuine farming map, but in general content in my experience it's spotty--effective mitigation, and some decent scatter control, but mobs have a tendency to run out of it pretty fast.  Some mobs fall over constantly, others seem immune.  Much spottier than, say, Ice Slick. 

 

Combining it with a powerful slow would help I'm sure.

[Bill Z Bubba]

6 hours ago, ScarySai said:

Maybe the best sentinel can outclear stuff like elec or sonic blasters, due to how generally terrible those sets are, but the fact of the matter is any top tier or even middling blaster will stomp the clear speeds of a sentinel.

 

Hopefully testing this with one of the best blasters I've run with against my fire/bio sent.

 

To the topic, I min/max and I absolutely adore my sent. He doesn't die unless I'm really drunk and he managed to solo a max diff ITF with zero faceplants which pleases me. Granted, it took forever since I had no immobilize to lock those pesky cowards into place whilst I blasted them to death in complete safety.

[Coyotedancer]

Blaster threat level helps, too, I think just from watching it in action... Things run out of it, and then turn around and run right back in, very much like they do with Ossuni's Burn patch.

 

But that's all way, way off-topic for a Sentinel thread.... 

[Coyotedancer]

4 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

Hopefully testing this with one of the best blasters I've run with against my fire/bio sent.

 

To the topic, I min/max and I absolutely adore my sent. He doesn't die unless I'm really drunk and he managed to solo a max diff ITF with zero faceplants which pleases me. Granted, it took forever since I had no immobilize to lock those pesky cowards into place whilst I blasted them to death in complete safety.

 

/Bio Sents are tough as nails... I ❤️ my Dark/Bio and Fire/Bio.

 

My Psy/Bio... Well, I love Artemian as a roleplay character. As a game-play choice, he's very safe. But slower than proverbial Christmas.

[DrInfernus]

On 5/11/2021 at 10:40 PM, Obitus said:

 

The main problem with pretty much all balance discussions on the forum is that a large portion of the playerbase doesn't seem to do or care about content that isn't Council farms or the ITF.  Or they run exclusively in 8-man Incarnate teams when they do harder content. 

 

It never ceases to amaze me; you make an uncontroversial statement about e.g. Blapper durability, and like clockwork fifteen dudes will jump in with variations on, "my blaster never ever dies," "learn to play," etc.  Meanwhile, if you've spent any time at all trying to solo at high difficulty levels across a variety of the game's content, it should be obvious to you that just about all builds have pretty glaring weaknesses, which will be emphasized against at least one or two NPC factions.  This is doubly true of builds that rely almost exclusively on IO +DEF bonuses, which are very strong; don't get me wrong, but by no means are they comprehensive.

 

With regard to Blasters specifically, you also quickly realize that their clear speed isn't actually very high in the absence of Controllers or Tankers/Brutes (or anything with a taunt aura) to prevent scatter.  Incidentally, Sentinels have a huge advantage here because their Epic Pools give them access to AoE Immobilize powers.  Even without taking one of those, though, Sentinel clear speed is at worst tied with Blasters at the high end, IME.

 

And all of this is before you get into some of the more advanced soloing tricks, e.g. soloing AVs or even TFs.  In keeping with the theme that all builds have weaknesses, the best builds for soloing hard TFs are also terrible at AoE clear speed (Illusion Controllers and Mind Dominators)--but if you want something that's good at both, a Sentinel's a pretty good choice. 

 

That said, and in the general case, meleers are the true tank mages, as Oedipus said above.  This has been the case, more or less, from day one.

To highlight your rather magnificent point: Both my Fire/SR Sentinel and my Fire/NRG blaster have solo’d a MoITF on the same settings. The blaster did it around 3 mins quicker. 

[DrInfernus]

1 hour ago, ScarySai said:

 

I can almost hear the blaster mains laughing at you.

Just to stress something here I feel is important if I may. I am a blaster main. I’m not laughing at him. I’m agreeing with him. 
 

I respect your opinion and your preferences and see no reason to argue with you. We all invest our time and love into this game and it’s only right we get to enjoy it and experience it however we want to. But I would ask you refrain from attempting to talk for others please. Your opinion is sufficient 🙂

[Underfyre]

Well I had an idea about racing a Psi/Regen Sent against an AR/Plant Blaster if you're game. By my numbers, both are bottom of the barrel in terms of damage output. Let me know, I built the Psi/Regen character on the test server out of boredom @ScarySai

Edited May 13, 2021 by underfyre
Sorry. My incorrect numbers.