honoroitisfantastic POLL: Sentinel - best of AT 2023

[nihilii]

For me, the determining factor comes down to defense helping you avoid all debuffs, while resistance only helps you reduce resistance debuffs.

 

In any kind of practical scenario we consider once we bring minmax into the fold, outside of "someone else on the team is taking most of the hits and I just need to survive splash damage and the odd misaggro", resistance builds can end up getting hit 95% of the time as cascading failure settles in. Or held through mez protection. Or tohitdebuffed to nothingness. Any kind of nastiness - there are ways to handle it, but you do have to handle it, as opposed to the autopilot-until-unlucky defense allows.

My "resistance builds" don't leave home without ~20% base defense from Weave/CJ/Maneuvers + uniques, and I frequently bump this up to the softcap with 2 small lucks unless I'm feeling confident. More if I expect massive debuffing.

Whereas my defense builds tend to survive on their own merits, minus the occasional spike and splat. But then again - what would happen if I ate 2+ oranges the same way I eat purples on res builds?

 

It's hard to be as disciplined about this, simply because the need is constant and obvious on a res build, whereas it's rare on a def build. You feel like you're "wasting" your insps chomping on sturdies only to watch piddly damage get in. It's often more tempting to convert to reds instead.

 

Another option is to simply have enough maxHP you get to use MORE sturdies reactively at the times you do need them. Another reason SR is criminally underrated on Tankers; but then again almost every Tanker can be incredibly overpowered these days.

I wonder how the game would look like if resistance resisted effects the same way defense dodges effects. As in, 75% res would mean a -10% defense debuff would only do -2.5% on you. Probably broken at 90% res. But perhaps it would make sense at 75%. I'm not saying it'd be balanced, but I'm curious.

Edited October 3, 2023 by nihilii

[nihilii]

double post

Edited October 3, 2023 by nihilii

[drbuzzard]

44 minutes ago, nihilii said:

I wonder how the game would look like if resistance resisted effects the same way defense dodges effects. As in, 75% res would mean a -10% defense debuff would only do -2.5% on you. Probably broken at 90% res. But perhaps it would make sense at 75%. I'm not saying it'd be balanced, but I'm curious.

 

I always got the impression that the initial devs always valued resistance a whole lot since getting resistance bonuses in IOs was sort of an afterthought at fairly low numbers (except rare cases) which is cruel since you generally need almost twice as much resistance to get to the caps. I really doubt they'd ever get this kind of largesse. 

 

One other advantage of resistance on teams is that you see a whole lot more people offering defense to their team than resistance. Thus you end up with layered protection if you're a resistance build. I won't say you can't throw a rock without hitting a cold buff sort, but it is mighty common. This is beyond the fact of how many people run maneuvers. 

[Mythical Creature]

I like Electric Blast because of the shock mechanic, it feels like I have a way of critting, which makes me feel even more like a ranged scrapper.

 

I think Super Reflex is my favorite secondary because it is fully defensive based and is mostly fire and forget apart from the absorb, which is the crowning jewel of the set and also sentinel only.

 

In terms of epic pool, I find link minds kind of annoying to keep up with how long it takes to cast, but from a numbers point of view, I can see why it is ranked so highly. For me (perhaps because of my first two choices) I like electric epic pool because it comes with a T1 aoe that immobilizes (nice without the blaster secondary to fill this gap) and has a damage aura which helps me since I tend to be up close with my frist two choices.