Storm Blast Sentinel!

[JasperStone]

Lvl 50 SB/Sonic T4s Corr

Lvl 43 SB/Earth Blaster

Lvl 50 SB/Fire/Ice  Sent

 

The Corr holds its own and through the secondary very active.

Not so much time on the blaster because...

SB rocks on the Sent, especially paired with Burn and Consume, both solo and team.

 

I slotted a few sets of Unbreakable Guard to offset endurance cost

 

 

Edited June 8, 2023 by JasperStone
typo replace hold with own

[MirrorDarkly]

My experience so far SB is that it certainly works solo.  At the low to mid 40s on my SB/Regen Sentinel I've been soling missions of +0/x7 Malta and  Crey and I took out the Countess as an even level AV solo at level 44 (Endurance ended up being the biggest issue in that fight and I had to drop many of my toggles part way through).  

 

What I go back and fourth on is if it works well.  I fell like it lives and dies on my ability to get Cat 5 and to a lesser extent Storm Cell down effectively and sustain a constant barrage of attacks while they are out.  When that happens it's glorious with mobs being tossed everywhere and dyeing left and right.  However if anything interrupts that cycle; a sapper I didn't see, being confused, LoS issues, enough enemies escaping the area, etc.. it's effectiveness collapses and I'm left taking them out one after another after another....

 

I very much feel that outside of Cat 5 I lack an sort of effective AoE.  Even with Storm Cell out and using Chain Lightning on cooldown I'll often find that I have to target and kill each individual enemy.   Now sometimes that is not the case, SC will go off enough and CL will jump effectively, but much of the time that just doesn't happen.  This also can make joining grouping incredibly frustrating.

 

My general thoughts on the set right now are that it is incredibly unique and (for me) fun but that it's probably under tuned.  There are a lot of very obvious situations where it's damage output will be dead last for a blast set and its peak damage output in the best of circumstances (which is rare outside of solo play) seems to be about average. In exchange for that it gives a not insignificant amount of mitigation through knocking, slows and shear chaos that is very hard to quantify. 

 

It is also feels extremely END hungry and besides Incarnate powers (on the test server) I have not found a way to completely manage that. 

Edited June 8, 2023 by MirrorDarkly

[onyxus]

3 hours ago, MirrorDarkly said:

I very much feel that outside of Cat 5 I lack an sort of effective AoE.  Even with Storm Cell out and using Chain Lightning on cooldown I'll often find that I have to target and kill each individual enemy.   Now sometimes that is not the case, SC will go off enough and CL will jump effectively, but much of the time that just doesn't happen.  This also can make joining grouping incredibly frustrating.

The cone attack is an awesome aoe (jet stream).  If you didn't take it I strongly suggest a respec. I'm loving my new sentinel! 😄 

[MirrorDarkly]

50 minutes ago, onyxus said:

The cone attack is an awesome aoe (jet stream).  If you didn't take it I strongly suggest a respec. I'm loving my new sentinel! 😄 

 

I took all the Storm Blast powers initially and respeced out of the Cone and Gust at some point (I want to say around the time I got Clouburst?).  I've toyed around with picking it back up but I don't know what I would take the slots from....

 

Good to hear your loving it, the set can be amazingly fun.

[MirrorDarkly]

21 hours ago, JasperStone said:

Lvl 50 SB/Sonic T4s Corr

Lvl 43 SB/Earth Blaster

Lvl 50 SB/Fire/Ice  Sent

 

The Corr holds its own and through the secondary very active.

Not so much time on the blaster because...

SB rocks on the Sent, especially paired with Burn and Consume, both solo and team.

 

I slotted a few sets of Unbreakable Guard to offset endurance cost

 

 

 

Would you be willing to share your SB/Fire/Ice build? I tried for a bit to put one together on test but I was never happy with what I came up with. 

[Sovera]

As someone who did Storm Blast/Bio I felt it was okay. And also it was pretty tanky. I say this as someone who then rolled a Dark/Bio Sentinel and immediately noticed that as helpful for survival as Dark is it did not reach Storm's knees.

 

I can't speak for other ATs though, but anything that asks for a secondary to be clicked will be immediately gimping Storm so it's almost tailor made for Sentinel, IMO.

 

Part of Storm's problem is the lack of, shall we say, better AoE. This might ask to be paired with Rad instead since Rad will dump Ground Zero and then we go ham with Storm. i don't feel Rad will add much for ST though. Fire Armor is a possibility with Burn but mobs will just ditch us and run off to the americas so Burn's tiny aoE will do very little.

 

On  the other hand Ground Zero is big and a decent second nuke.

 

Has anyone had luck with proccing Cat 5? I can grab a regular nuke and add 200-ish damage just by maxing recharge, damage, then add three damage procs, but with how Cat 5 is loaded with pseudo pets and secondary hits every X seconds I have no idea who these will interact with a load of procs.

[Sovera]

So in typical me fashion I decided to answer my own question.

 

First of all a much needed pylon test: : two minutes and 49 seconds. Not blaster times but rather decent for a fully ranged build. endurance was under control and I did not need to use any endurance recovery tools.

 

I may not have maximize Vulnerability since I only used it prior to using Intensify.

 

 

Now proccing Cat 5.

 

On paper (Mids) I went from 111 damage to 305 so the usual 200-ish from loading on three procs and have the other three boosted damage/rech.

 

Time to test:

 

- 4 minutes. ...okay, what? Also, my endurance that was solid  in the 95% range actually forced me to use Rebuild DNA three times during the test.

- Was the first run a fluke? I'll swap back to non proc slotting for Cat 5. No, still 3:58. I wonder what happened with the first pylon there. Endurance did not hold up as well (well, one minute longer fighting would do that) and I had to use Rebuild DNA despite the slotting being the same.

 

Regardless no difference with and without procs so the procs during its duration did not seem to make a difference in the output. This is a bit sad since it is another nail on an already overwrought coffin: Cat 5 neither has the non proccing of Blizz but does not have Blizz's cast and forget either, and procs seemingly have no impact on it either unlike normal nuke

 

 

Storm Cell also does damage though so time to proc it:

 

- 3:44. Not enough of a difference that simple misses would not account for it.

 

 

One last test now with both Storm Cell and Cat 5 triple damage procced:

 

4:13

 

🤷‍♂️

 

 

Super basic test but proccing Storm Cell/Cat 5 seems to show no dividends much like any other rain power. Using both as mules for sets that have no damage procs seems the way to go. Also, the first test must have been a fluke or my eyes playing tricks when I looked at the watch. A whole minute does not simply disappear like that.

 

 

[Sovera]

Last test for realsies: what if using a different secondary instead of Bio? I did not bother leveling or making a different character for this and just returned the build to it's original state before turning off the thing that makes Bio do extra damage: the offense adaptation.

 

5:20.

 

It does not completely reflect the truth though. Ston did some very nice Trapdoor tests with a Fire/Rad Sentinel getting 4 minutes with it and from what he said Bio did not nearly achieve the same times.

[MirrorDarkly]

@Sovera

 

You might try the -Res Annihilation proc in Cat5.  I've done some Pylon testing on my Storm/Regen that makes me feel like over a long enough fight it can make a difference (One Test I have 5 slotted Ragnarok leaving out the immobilize and the -Res).  But I find my times fairly swingy with storm overall, that may come down to how an unusually high % of the damage is left up to chance. 

[Bionic_Flea]

21 hours ago, Sovera said:

Has anyone had luck with proccing Cat 5?

On my corrupter, I found that it was MUCH better to use procs in Storm Cell and standard slotting for Cat5.  I used full set of Artillery for enhancement and set bonuses.  Three Superior Frozen Blast + three damage procs in Storm Cell.