Sentinels. Are they underused?

[Haijinx]

2 minutes ago, DrInfernus said:

But looking at the power balance, it’s all off. 

 

IF we accept the idea that Sentinels were designed (badly) to be a damage dealing AT or that they should be, I don’t understand the obsession with penalising them so much. 
 

Blaster - Bigger base damage, range, extra damage in secondary, build up and... survivability penalty
 

Scrapper - Bigger base damage, extra damage from crits, build up, strong survivability and... range penalty 

 

Sentinel - strong survivability and... damage penalty, range penalty, AoE penalty, no build up

 

So all I’m really asking is what does a Sentinel have that justifies more penalties that strengths? 

 

 

Blasters do a lot more real mission damage than Scrappers though.  Where do Sents compare to scrappers?  More or Less?  They have nukes, Scrappers don't have those.  How much do they figure in. 

 

Seems like we need a Galaxy Brain rundown.  

[Wavicle]

8 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

 

Blasters do a lot more real mission damage than Scrappers though.  Where do Sents compare to scrappers?  More or Less?  They have nukes, Scrappers don't have those.  How much do they figure in. 

 

Seems like we need a Galaxy Brain rundown.  

Sentinel nukes don’t even hit as hard as Lightning Rod or Shield Charge.

[drbuzzard]

54 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

 

Blasters are squishies 

Sentinels aren't 

 

You can't have them be the same.  On SO's and while leveling the difference is stark.  Blasters die pretty easy compared to a Sent.  

Its only in the power creep crazy IO incarnate world where Blasters are so far ahead.  

 

So that has to be balanced around too.  

 

For example.  A Sent can stand in melee on teams with a KIN and take full advantage of all the damage buffs, the leveling Blaster may not be able to.  

While I fully agree that sentinels have a much easier life leveling up in this game, it begs the question of how much time is spent leveling up vs. playing characters in their mature builds? Personally, I more commonly play characters up to 50 instead of being PLed (though I do that too sometimes as well). The amount of time that amounts too is really quite short (between p2w 2XXP and experienced power). I spend far more time per character chasing down completion of incarnate abilities to an acceptable degree (I try to get most every character to 50+3). Thus in my case at least, the blaster has a lot more value for a lot more time.

 

Now granted one does go back and do WST stuff, and that will cycle your level down, but the IO protections will likely scale down pretty well with you, and if you think you'll miss clarion, pop the 2.5 M influence for a defense amplifier, and you've got enough status protection to get you by.

 

As I said, I've played sentinels on another server who lacked build up and inherents, and were not over the top (even with full scrapper value secondaries which are higher numbers). Add in the extra hindrances that sentinels carry here of lowered range and AOE caps, and I don't really think we're talking about excess. Heck, we could just keep it simple. Give sentinels no inherent which helps damage, and increase the scalar to 1.125 like blasters and scrappers.

 

Though really, I've proffered so many different sentinel solutions at this point, I don't know why I keep bothering. If pool travels powers were more important than a class which most don't seem to finish to 50 much less play there, I don't expect any action soon if ever.

 

[DarknessEternal]

On 5/13/2021 at 11:59 AM, oldskool said:

 

A problem here though, is the Sentinel was designed to be a damage dealer.  This has been stated before and that the conceptual inspiration was leveraged against Scrappers.
 

Which is hilarious, because Blasters struggle to compete with Scrappers already.

[Underfyre]

31 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

Which is hilarious, because Blasters struggle to compete with Scrappers already.

Maybe they should make Scrapper crits work like crits in Skyrim lol, that's basically what they did with Sentinels.

[Wavicle]

34 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

Which is hilarious, because Blasters struggle to compete with Scrappers already.

Solo sure. On teams this isn’t true at all.

[Apparition]

1 hour ago, DarknessEternal said:

Which is hilarious, because Blasters struggle to compete with Scrappers already.

 

Uh, no.  Blasters do more damage than Scrappers, partly thanks to their greater AoE cap.  There's a reason why on most of the heavy hitter speed run teams you see about four Blasters, one Scrapper, and three Corruptors.

[macskull]

15 minutes ago, Apparition said:

 

Uh, no.  Blasters do more damage than Scrappers, partly thanks to their greater AoE cap.  There's a reason why on most of the heavy hitter speed run teams you see about four Blasters, one Scrapper, and three Corruptors.

One Scrapper if that, usually it's another Blaster and one of those three Corruptors is also another Blaster.

[drbuzzard]

I have to say, from seeing MoITF results, blasters at the high end really don't have survival issues. Now the ITF isn't the hardest thing in the game by any means, but still there's a lot of debuffing thrown around for IO builds, and they still plow through in quads and solo.

[Underfyre]

So scalar wise, if they were to make the Offensive Opportunity proc scalar 100% instead of 20%, and allow the damage to scale with enhancements, it would... well it'd make mastery pool powers wildly powerful since it scales off of recharge and they inherently have very high recharge. The minmax would have to be dropped down to 0/10 or something. A 75% scalar looks like the sweet spot, depending on what type of damage output your looking for. This also includes making the damage enhanceable.

 

So looking at risk vs reward stand point a Blaster basically has to wade into melee to maximize damage. A full IO build will mitigate the risk, not to the point of pushing it off the table entirely, but close. Looking from a "git gud noob" stand point a Blaster should be mixing their attacks. Do Blasters need to be penalized for just wanting to safely blast from range? I mean, currently they're still doing a bit more damage than a Sent simply because of their damage scalar. But if you made the changes I said, you would essentially be penalizing them. A Blapper styled play will still outpace a Sentinel by an acceptable margin if the target is under the Opportunity debuff, and a fairly hefty margin if the target doesn't have the Opportunity debuff.

 

 

Edited May 14, 2021 by underfyre

[ScarySai]

1 hour ago, DarknessEternal said:

Which is hilarious, because Blasters struggle to compete with Scrappers already.

 

This thread is just full of comedians.

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 hour ago, Wavicle said:

Solo sure. On teams this isn’t true at all.

 

This. Ain't a blaster out there that can survive long enough to keep up with me.

[Underfyre]

4 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

This. Ain't a blaster out there that can survive long enough to keep up with me.

Would you say "ain't a blaster alive that can keep up with me"

[Wavicle]

13 hours ago, drbuzzard said:

Though I feel it necessary to toss out there that if the devs decided that fixing travel pools was more important than sentinels, I wouldn't get my hopes up on it happening any time soon.

You've heard of "low hanging fruit"?

[drbuzzard]

3 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

You've heard of "low hanging fruit"?

Considering how involved the travel pool modifications were, the branch wasn't that low. 

[Wavicle]

1 minute ago, drbuzzard said:

Considering how involved the travel pool modifications were, the branch wasn't that low. 

But compared to rebalancing an AT, it was.

[Haijinx]

1 minute ago, Wavicle said:

But compared to rebalancing an AT, it was.

 

One is a technical challenge.

 

The other has to fight PR battles and Flamefests and everything else. 

[drbuzzard]

Just now, Wavicle said:

But compared to rebalancing an AT, it was.

Perhaps. All things considered, I think you could get away with quick and dirty on sentinels. Pick a simple new inherent (say crits), adjust the damage scale up a bit, and fix the ATOs. Done, then play with numbers on test until it's not too broken. I don't think anyone expects a full rebalancing of the sets or anything. To be honest, compared to blasters, sentinel primaries are more balanced within the AT, so just a gross upward adjustment is good enough. 

[Wavicle]

1 minute ago, drbuzzard said:

Perhaps. All things considered, I think you could get away with quick and dirty on sentinels. Pick a simple new inherent (say crits), adjust the damage scale up a bit, and fix the ATOs. Done, then play with numbers on test until it's not too broken. I don't think anyone expects a full rebalancing of the sets or anything. To be honest, compared to blasters, sentinel primaries are more balanced within the AT, so just a gross upward adjustment is good enough. 

Sounds good to me.

[Wavicle]

I've suggested elsewhere a way to do Crits to make it distinct from Scrapper/Stalker/Corrupter that will help with lead off burst damage: High Crit chance on mobs with 90% or higher health. Once enemy health is below 90%, Sentinel Crit chance drops off quickly.

[siolfir]

6 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

I've suggested elsewhere a way to do Crits to make it distinct from Scrapper/Stalker/Corrupter that will help with lead off burst damage: High Crit chance on mobs with 90% or higher health. Once enemy health is below 90%, Sentinel Crit chance drops off quickly.

So a reverse Scourge, then?

 

It would make for a natural pairing with Corruptors at least.

[drbuzzard]

8 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

I've suggested elsewhere a way to do Crits to make it distinct from Scrapper/Stalker/Corrupter that will help with lead off burst damage: High Crit chance on mobs with 90% or higher health. Once enemy health is below 90%, Sentinel Crit chance drops off quickly.

That would be an interesting change- inverse corrupter. 

[nihilii]

9 hours ago, Apparition said:

There's a reason why on most of the heavy hitter speed run teams you see about four Blasters, one Scrapper, and three Corruptors.

Yeah, that reason being:

- the game is overall easy

- speedrunning is a competitive activity

- speedrunning also happens to target the lowest difficulty settings (although the game is easy enough speedrunning teams would likely look the same on hardest difficulty settings, to be honest)

- the game is extremely easy if you play it in a competitive manner and in a coordinated team

- you have so much overkill in everything that the only thing you're looking for is to maximise damage

- therefore in this specific scenario it is worth trading just about anything for damage, even if you trade at a 10:1 ratio

 

Unless you are a speedrunner who plays exclusively on teams with friends, I doubt the speedrunning experience is particularly relevant to overall game balance. And you should be thankful for that, else you should expect many many blaster and corruptor nerfs. Let alone Fire Blast. The speedrunning meta has been "all blasters + some corruptors", but it's TW that got the axe. Because TW is what shone far above and beyond everything else in the regular game. Not speedrunning Fire blasters.

Edited May 15, 2021 by nihilii

[Bill Z Bubba]

Add me in for the reverse scourge squad. That sounds interesting. Moreso when it would lead more Sents into the alpha-eater role so that they could soften up fresh spawns.

[drbuzzard]

6 hours ago, nihilii said:

Yeah, that reason being:

- the game is overall easy

- speedrunning is a competitive activity

- speedrunning also happens to target the lowest difficulty settings (although the game is easy enough speedrunning teams would likely look the same on hardest difficulty settings, to be honest)

- the game is extremely easy if you play it in a competitive manner and in a coordinated team

- you have so much overkill in everything that the only thing you're looking for is to maximise damage

- therefore in this specific scenario it is worth trading just about anything for damage, even if you trade at a 10:1 ratio

 

Unless you are a speedrunner who plays exclusively on teams with friends, I doubt the speedrunning experience is particularly relevant to overall game balance. And you should be thankful for that, else you should expect many many blaster and corruptor nerfs. Let alone Fire Blast. The speedrunning meta has been "all blasters + some corruptors", but it's TW that got the axe. Because TW is what shone far above and beyond everything else in the regular game. Not speedrunning Fire blasters.

Actually the speed runs I reference are MoITF at +4x8 on a 4 person team. I'd have to check if the 4 person blaster team or one of the melee teams has the current record. It changes all the time. Sentinels have not been of note.