honoroitisfantastic POLL: Sentinel - best of AT 2023

[honoroit]

POLL: Sentinel - best of AT

 

- best primary

 

- best secondary

 

- best epic power pool

 

¡you can choose however you like!

• Most Effective Tactic Available
• My favorite
• My desert island power picks
• If there could be only 1

[honoroit]

abstain, I'm afraid. I have never taken a sentinel past 1-2 dfb runs.

[FupDup]

It's interesting how the primary and epic choices are largely agreed upon, but the secondaries are mostly wildly different (Bio barely winning so far). 

[biostem]

I have many level 50 sentinels - they're probably my favorite AT to play.  I've really come to love dual pistols due to the versatility of swap ammo, and Ninjitsu offers a wide variety of tools to keep you in the fight.  I similarly like fire mastery for its varied selection of tools.  That being said, it is neither the most powerful nor the tankiest combination I've played, but it has a little bit of everything and a tool for just about any situation.

[kelika2]

Fire and Fire.  Could not vote because none of my sentinels have epic pools.  between awkward melee, healing and no synergy on any of them the power picks were best for regular pool mules or tough/weave

[JStacy337]

I'll always choose Energy Aura with any set that can use it, but I feel as though SR is just way too good with Sents

[Sovera]

Bio for best all rounder. Defenses, shield, heal, endurance AND a damage boost. It's like the other armors aren't even trying!

 

Rad for second-best-but-actually-sorta-best-for-regular-gameplay mostly thanks to the second nuke as an AoE backup. Can't go wrong with dual nukes every spawn. Not as sturdy as Bio (IMO) and going into melee to land the second nuke steals from the safety of being ranged.

 

 

Storm Summoning for all-rounder offense. Yes, it needs prep time, but it damages, it debuffs, it CCs, and all we do is hit our damage skills. Pity we could not revert the travel time of the drizzle attack because it hurts the damage. I would even take a damage hit to have the attack land either instantly or in half the travel time.

I don't even use Epic Pools on my Sentinels since they suck for what they do (again, IMO) so I cast a vote at random for that.

 

Edited September 17, 2023 by Sovera

[Uun]

Why so much love for Electric Blast on sentinels? On the blaster and corruptor polls, it barely registers. 

[Bionic_Flea]

9 votes for Electric out of 21 total votes (as of now) is not a very big sample size.  You might also have a person with six account that really loves it and voted six times!  *shrug*

[lemming]

I didn't vote:  My most played are Rad/Regen and Storm/Dark, but Fire/Rad & Elec/EA are fun.

[honoroit]

27 minutes ago, lemming said:

I didn't vote:  My most played are Rad/Regen and Storm/Dark, but Fire/Rad & Elec/EA are fun.

 

theres no one grading your vote, and its anonymous, no one can see.

 

feel free to do your part for paragon city / the rogue isles / wherever goldside lives, if youd like.

 

more vote responses is nice.

[nihilii]

7 hours ago, Uun said:

Why so much love for Electric Blast on sentinels? On the blaster and corruptor polls, it barely registers. 

 

Sentinel Electric Blast is the best version of it that exists.

 

- proper fast activation T3 attack, you get Elec Blaze essentially

- Tesla Cage gets T4 damage (original version is a hold with micro damage)

- Thunderous Blast gets one of the biggest recharge shave in Sentinel nuke normalization, as the original TB takes longer to recharge than most nukes. On top of that, the end drain aspect which is somewhat anecdotal on a 170s base recharge power becomes something you get to use in every fight on 90s base recharge

 

To sum up, Sentinel Elec gets stat boosts everywhere while giving up none of the secondary effects. This ends up pushing it either right next to Fire Blast or slightly above, depending how much you value these secondary effects.

 

I voted Elec, Ninjitsu, Psionic. I think Elec, Bio and Psionic are the objectively best choices. I voted Ninjitsu due to personal love for Elude builds.

Edited September 18, 2023 by nihilii

[DarknessEternal]

Where's my "none" option for epics?  They're all really bad.

[arcane]

Obviously Psionic Mastery is objectively not “really bad”

[DarknessEternal]

Anything insisting I be in melee range of something on an AT without an inherent taunt is really bad.  I'm playing a Sentinel because I don't like running around chasing jerkwads.

[lemming]

5 hours ago, honoroit said:

 

theres no one grading your vote, and its anonymous, no one can see.

 

feel free to do your part for paragon city / the rogue isles / wherever goldside lives, if youd like.

 

more vote responses is nice.

it's choose one and totally subjective on what is being "best", so it don't matter.

[Frosticus]

8 hours ago, nihilii said:

I voted Elec, Ninjitsu, Psionic. I think Elec, Bio and Psionic are the objectively best choices. I voted Ninjitsu due to personal love for Elude builds.

lol I voted the exact same even though I don't have psi app, I still think it is probably the best.

 

All the reasons you mentioned make elec blast really good for sentinels. Plus the huge drain of thunderous blast gets them proc'ing shocked constantly whereas it takes a bit to get to that point on the other AT's for most builds. 

[drbuzzard]

Electric is great for all the reasons Nihilii said. The things which make it weak on other ATs are cleaned up, and the secondary effects really help with the damage/AOE. 

 

SR is as mentioned by many, the best version of the set on any AT, and truly the easiest sentinel secondary. 

 

I noted that I'm the only one to vote for soul mastery. Now I'd be the first to admit the set doesn't have a lot going for it, soul tentacles is a decent ten target cone, though DoT. It also helps to lock things in place with immobilize. For my sentinels which have ranged nukes (so they can always stay at range), it is my go to for epic pools. 

[Sovera]

On 9/18/2023 at 2:10 PM, Bionic_Flea said:

9 votes for Electric out of 21 total votes (as of now) is not a very big sample size.  You might also have a person with six account that really loves it and voted six times!  *shrug*

 

It's also one of the (few) sets where if people like pylon breaks we can break one in 3 minutes, fully range, completely based on Elec. Most hover around 4 minutes. 3 minutes is my standard on non Moonbeam Brutes.

 

It is a bit ficticious as it depends on depleting the blue bar to have the electrified mechanic and without a blue bar bottomed out it does not get those times. I remember testing at the time and having normal Sentinel times on a pylon until I started using the nuke to deplete the pylon's bar early in the test to have the mechanic in full effect. Once depleted there was no difference between using the nuke or not, but until the bar is completely out using it matters.

 

And, also, Elec is very satisfying in that the sapping actually works despite being all on damage. PPs don't trigger MoG because drained, Minotaurs don't trigger their T9. It feels good to make this happen.

 

That said the pet could have used MM coding to be auto summoned (does not follow into a new map, does not follow if using an elevator inside a map, can and does get stuck in geometry and does not auto teleport like MM pets do. In all these cases it needs to be resummoned if and when the player notices it is missing).

[Underfyre]

I feel like this needs a ranked choice.

[Without_Pause]

11 hours ago, Underfyre said:

I feel like this needs a ranked choice.

I feel like I see a lot of meta more than what is actually best. Of note, it is widely agreed upon that Def > Res. And yet, only Stalkers list a Def based armor definitively as the highest ranked one in a poll. Bio is the primary pick or in the running for all others outside of Tankers and Rad wins out for Tankers. In other words, people love offense from their armors. I assume this is based on the fact that in teams Res based armors get enough support so you might as well go on the more offensive side to push towards steamrolling all the more. 

[Bellicose]

5 hours ago, Without_Pause said:

Of note, it is widely agreed upon that Def > Res. 

 

I always thought that it was that low HP, low Status protection toons favored Defense and High HP, well protected toons favored Resistance. 

[Without_Pause]

36 minutes ago, Bellicose said:

 

I always thought that it was that low HP, low Status protection toons favored Defense and High HP, well protected toons favored Resistance. 

The problem is that Res based characters will get hit more often and that means debuffs. -End/-Recovery/-Recharge/-Regen are not fun things to deal with if you don't protect against them. The Brutes I've had go down the fastest where Res based ones although I'm technically including WP in that which is a bit of a hybrid.

[drbuzzard]

So I've been looking into the attack mechanics a bit and it seems that defense does have some drawbacks over resistance. Yes, the debuff landing thing can be bad for a resistance build, but a lot of those sets do have debuff resistance (beyond the damage resistance debuff inherent resistance), but the defense floor of 5% at softcap isn't really that. There are modifiers for critter rank and for relative level which do have an effect. 

 

For example a +4 boss will be hitting a softcap character (1.4*1.3*5)=9.2% of the time. A +4 AV will be hitting (1.4*1.5*5) =10.5% of the time. 

 

Now for sentinels this doesn't matter a hell of a lot in comparison since you're at a 75% resistance cap, so defense is simply better. However for tanks and brutes if you can get to 90% resistance to the damage in question, I'd consider it at least comparable. Not very many defense sets have enough DDR to forestall cascading defense failure from debuff stacks. At least with resistance at 90% you don't get that, and you generally have time to bug out. 

 

Again, for sentinels, this isn't so much the case, though all the sentinel resistance sets do have  strong healing and regeneration angles included which do extend the survival time. nonetheless the defense sentinels are more survivable certainly. 

 

 

 

 

[Frosticus]

Ya the 5% (and 50% vs naked) hit rate is only for even con minions and can be extremely disappointing when you start facing harder content. 

 

Most def sets have pretty low ddr, so that takes a hit due to + cons hitting more frequently, but it is also hampered by the debuff strength being higher due to the purple patch.

 

But as you noted, that same + 4 boss hits pure resistance based builds 91% of the time rather than the 50% that gets thrown around often. 

 

All that said, resistance is nice in that it is predictable and allows ample time to play reactively. Defense is mechanically stronger and will often sail thru content that resistance struggles with, but by the same token you often faceplate in mere seconds and have a tiny window to prevent it.