Looking for feedback on Storm/Rad

[Onlyasandwich]

Hello again, Sentinel land! I've been away for some time, and am pleased to see some nice improvements to the AT. I'm itching to try my hand at Storm blast as well. The busy nature of the set looks to lend itself pretty well to Sentinels, so here I am.

 

I understand Storm has its detractors, being seen as a bit end hungry, and lacking many of the valuable proc optimization possibilities that help other primaries compete in damage. I'd like to make the best of it either way!

 

I'd love to hear of anything you see that I may have missed in pursuit of the build's goals:

• Ranged defense focus, with the goal of being within small purple of soft cap. Any easy extra bonuses I can pile on here would be great, and if you see a clear path to soft cap without sacrifice, all the better.
• Shoring up resists across the board. I do plan on keeping Meltdown on healthy rotation when needed.
• Secondary focus on recharge so I can keep a full rotation within storm powers alone (no epic attacks).
• For the few powers that take procs decently, optimize for damage in this way.
• I love slow resist. Thank you /Rad, you make this easier to cap!
• Max hit chance against +3's.

 

Concerns:

• It looks like I have plenty of end to cover the thirst - do you think I'm still short?
• I am keeping Jet Stream without KD conversion. The plan is to actually use it as a soft control, FFback enabler, and KD when I actually have storm cell up. Do you enjoy this power without KD conversion?
• Overall survivability. Between the heals, solid resists, and layer of ranged defense while keeping distance with jousting/Jet stream, I think I can hack survival while solo. What is your experience with /Rad? Does it really ask for any pieces I am missing here?

 

Build:

 

Note that I have procs disabled in view for hailstones and jet stream to avoid FFback reporting on totals, so to view actual damage will need to toggle these on.

 

Edit: Added build file directly.
Sentinel (Storm Blast - Radiation Armor).mbd

 

Visual:

Spoiler

 

Sentinel (Storm Blast - Radiation Armor).mbd

Edited July 15, 2023 by Onlyasandwich

[FupDup]

The link you provided is broken. 

 

But anyways, without the link, the main broad concern that stands out is that trying to build for lots of ranged defense on an armor set with no built-in defense or DDR is probably not worth the cost in terms of slots. Spend some of those resources on recharge, resists, and HP (or even just regen) because those scale with Rad Armor's mechanics much better (especially recharge). 

 

For example, that 6-slotted Gladiator's Armor is definitely inefficient. Not only is the ranged defense a bit of a trap as said above, but the 3-slot bonus of KB protection also has no value on an armor set that already provides plenty of it by default. All of those Zephyr pieces are wasteful for the same reason. I think Bombardment, Annihilation, or Positron's Blast would make more sense than Artillery for Chain Lightning, again because of the defense thing. 

 

Did you already reach full slow resistance (can't open the build to see)? If not you can slot Winter's Gift in Fly's free slot to help with that. 

 

The endurance should probably be fine outside of the crash from Meltdown. It only deducts a small amount of end upfront (just -10%, negligible), but it disables recovery for 10 seconds which might get you into trouble if you blast too fast. If you do end up having issues on that front, you could try slotting the Miracle proc and/or adding some +5 boosted Endmod IO's to Stamina and/or Gamma Boost (might be a little overkill but I have an addiction to blue juice). Or just take Ageless as your destiny ability and use it to regain any lost juice during the meltdown crash. 

Edited July 14, 2023 by FupDup

[Onlyasandwich]

3 hours ago, FupDup said:

The link you provided is broken.

 

And now Mids is back to crashing every time I try to export. Ah well! The newest version has been really awful for me in this way, and there are no answers pending in the Discord unfortunately.

 

Certainly that makes it hard to engage in a productive feedback process. Thank you for taking the time to respond regardless.

 

I have indeed maxed out slow resist. The Winter ATOs in place to round this out are pulling useful duty for their superior enhancement value, along with extra F/C resist already, so no real slot savings to be had by working in the Winter's Gift.  I agree that pursuing ranged defense on a resist build with no DDR is largely a waste if you are sacrificing other important goals. In this build, I'm not sure that there is a great return on investment for refocusing the slots dedicated to this, however. As it stands my attacks are fully enhanced, and those with productive proc engagement are maxed out from this angle as well.

 

Dropping all ranged defense set focus could net me:

• A bit more recharge swapping the Numina 6 slot for Panacea. 
• A little more recharge and smattering of set bonus resists from swapping Artillery in Chain Lightning to Posi or Bombardment. 
• 2-3 extra slots from the gladiator's set in Proton armor. 
• 5 more slots from dropping the Zephyr ranged def bonuses.

 

The refocus in set bonuses for existing slots is a relatively minor change. The big difference would be the pretty hefty 6-7 slots I gain in the build all told. Then it becomes a matter of where I can productively focus these slots. My attacks are effectively maxed, so not here. My resist toggles could add a little extra exotic resist with set bonuses. The gains here would be modest (Say ~6 S/L resist added, a similar amount of total exotic resist depending on what set I choose).

 

All told, the gain would look something like ~13% extra recharge, ~8% S/L resist, ~10% exotic resists (some combination of E/N/P depending on set chosen). Some of the extra free slots would give me freedom to drop a recharge in Intensify and Meltdown as well.

 

Not a terrible return! However, not a slam dunk by any measure. I am less concerned with the extra little bits of recharge as well, since I have incorporated FFback into both my aoe and single target rotations. 

 

If I can get Mids to exporting again, I'll share again with a hopefully functional link. Until then, I welcome any criticism from a power choice perspective, or other less specific context! Of special interest to me would be any experience you all have running /Rad on a sentinel, where you focused your survival tools, as well as how sturdy you found it overall.

Edited July 15, 2023 by Onlyasandwich

[Sovera]

I have the same exporting problem. In fact I've taken to just drop the build's file into the forums because people can't even click on the export link that Mids generates.

 

I recently came from testing an Elec/Rad after being tempted by Tson's results with their Fire/Rad and I wasn't super impressed though dual nuke was nice. Ground Zero is slow and does damage slowly, but, I paid attention to it and by Moonfire and fully slotted it did kill a +2 minion on its own which is rather promising despite the subjective view of it being slow and killing slowly.

 

So ultimately there is probably a good reason to swap from Bio to Rad.

 

Now in turns of slotting defenses I had a devil of a time. It is much easier to achieve S/L on a melee character since they are chockful of those bonuses, and while I've built Corruptors/Controllers/Defenders with 45% ranged defense I confess that my results were not impressing me. So I ended up stacking defense as a sidequest and then worked resistances up since that's Rad's thing anyway. Even solo this worked decently though I do feel squishier than defense based builds.

 

I too have a Storm/Rad as my next project and feel this squishyness will be mitigated by the mitigation that Storm brings. Extra Aoe from  the second nuke will help Storm's anemic AoE and Storm will help Rad's perceived weaker mitigation. The downside will be spending something like 11 seconds doing prep time before starting to damage a group which will be untenable for full teams (though we can always look at ourselves as Controler lite who does better damage and is less aggravating than Controllers).

 

For what it is worth here's the Elec/Rad in case you can lift some slotting ideas, though the philosophy is quite apart from your goals. I haven't worked on my Storm/Rad yet but once I do I'll come back so we can compare pointers.

 

Sentinel (Elec Rad).mbd

 

 

[Onlyasandwich]

Thank you @Sovera! I don't know why that didn't occur to me. Edited the OP to include the file itself.

 

Your build has a strong advantage in E/N resists and recharge (though no FFback), while mine achieves higher psi and F/C, and a ranged instead of melee focus. We have a somewhat similar amount of slot focus invested in proc strategies. Overall I think your approach is similar in spirit. Typically I think we have a fairly similar philosophy in most builds I see, so I always enjoy seeing your perspective. Ultimately different primaries afford different set opportunities, but lessons to learn either way.

 

From a power perspective, going with Evasive instead of Meltdown is a fair trade. Extra lotg, and I really enjoy the maneuverability and extra travel speed myself. I'll see how much I end up using meltdown, and might make a swap later on. Meltdown does have a rather annoying long animation.

 

From yours, I see that I can pump recharge in ground zero a bit more without hurting proc chances, so swapped my Avalanche choices out a bit, keeping damage pretty much the same and shaving a solid 8 seconds off.

Edited July 15, 2023 by Onlyasandwich