I Have Discovered my Favourite Build!

[justicebeliever]

Behave.

 

Tempest, unless you are telling me to behave again (I haven’t posted here since Widower warned me), I’m really, really unclear what behavior you are seeing that needs behaving...Or did someone say something not nice and then/edit delete it?  I’m not asking for names/details, but I am genuinely confused.

[Tankshock]

 

Well, I'm also sure that as the defensive powers get slotted out better, survivability will go up as well. But everything can't be balanced around billion-isk end game builds either. And blasters can hit the defense caps at end game, too. So we're basically talking about mez protection. Mez protection is quite nice. But is it worth doing about 60% of the damage of a blaster. Ancient Alien theorists say that's a bit of a hard pill to swallow.

 

There are a ton of right ways to plays the game, and only a couple wrong ways.  So if it works for you, roll with it.  But I don't think the 60% damage jives with my experience. Something to consider is that I put almost every io and incarnate into offense on my Sentinel, whereas the Blasters have to devote considerably more resources to defense. This certainly closes the gap. But you have intrigued me, and it's on my to do list to incarnate an i25 blaster. I'll get back to you in a couple weeks. ;)

[Sunsette]

It's worth pointing out that based on the numbers, you get a lot more defensive benefit from well placed IOs than offensive. Incarnate works the other way but Hybrid only has 50% uptime.

[Ironscarlet]

Fav Sentinals

 

1. Elec/Elec

Absolute beast  even with the damage nerf and the loss to snipe she gets very well compensated by the high damage  on Tesla cage.  Two end sinks that recover you and drains opponent . With burnout you can chain T9 secondary  power for well over 8 min of unlikable. Damage is just under blasters  but with  nitch utility,  and life is just under a scrapper.  Very strong build.

 

2. BEAM/BIO

Killer of worlds I plain'ly think this is the strongest brute force combo in game bordering Elec/shield scrapper lvl of consistent steam roll of aoe damage.  The loss of Snipe is replaced by a aoe which spreads. So almost on par, equal trade less ST more aoe. The loss of damage is compensated by bio armor, equaling compared to its blaster conterpart it has better aoe and longer life and 2 life saving powers.

 

3.Pistol/Reg

I personally don't play this combo but I tank on alts and I have to say  when a team wipes pistal/reg Sentinals have been the only  combo strong enough to live through a wipe with the tank and not die. Maybe someone can explain  the super duper absorb shield they get but on Pines its much weaker than Temporal  blaster shield.  On the opposite side with the eye test its godly in the life department.

 

 

Now compared to Blasters or any other AT your going to have some builds that perform better than others. I do believe Sent have the most peaks and valleys. Out of all AT Sent one of the few if you did not know what you were doing could build and absolute gimp build.  The only major thing that needs help is the inherit maybe boost the values and change activation to its own separate  button or turn Inherit into a proc like a critical.  After Inherit is tweaked they can just tweak the underperforming classes like /Dark and others and it will be very well balance.

[Tankshock]

Assault and io bonuses give me over 30% dam buff. That's not insignificant, and a blaster going for the softcap can't do that. Plus probably some extra incarnate damage, esp if the blaster wants some mez protection from incarnate.

 

I just don't see sents as 60% of blaster. If so, I'm going +6/x16 when I incarnate a blaster. ;)

[Sunsette]

Assault and io bonuses give me over 30% dam buff. That's not insignificant, and a blaster going for the softcap can't do that. Plus probably some extra incarnate damage, esp if the blaster wants some mez protection from incarnate.

 

I just don't see sents as 60% of blaster. If so, I'm going +6/x16 when I incarnate a blaster. ;)

 

Resistance and Damage buffs are on the same layer of attack calculations, unless I've made a significant misunderstanding.

 

Let's take Power Bolt for comparison and assume all attacks that matter are slotted around 95% damage to begin with.

 

42.13 damage (Sentinel)

52.66 damage (Blaster)

 

Sentinels have a built in -5% resistance on their targets, and another -20% they can add conditionally. We'll also add your 30% damage buff. This comes out to 42.13*(1+(95+25+30)/100), which simplifies to 42.13*2.5, or 105.325 damage. Without opportunity, it's 42.13*2.3, or 96.899 damage. Without your IOs either, it's 42.13*2, or 84.13 damage.

 

The blaster has about 25% more damage base before defiance, which is underneath the resistance/damage layer, and a blaster can generally keep a 3 or 4 stack of defiance up, which is 19.8% damage on a three stack. This comes out to 52.66*(1+(95+19.8)/100), simplifying to 52.66*2.148, or 113.11368 damage. If in a team scenario a blaster is hitting the same target as the sentinel, this is 52.66*2.398, or 126.27868.

 

So:

Sentinel (Enhancements only): 84.13

Sentinel (No Opportunity, IO damage stacking): 96.899

Sentinel (Opportunity, IO damage stacking): 105.325

Blaster (Enhancements and Defiance only): 113.11368

Blaster (+Opportunity): 126.27868

 

Note I was very conservative on the defiance strength.

 

What's more, the blaster will probably pick up a comparable amount of +damage without prioritizing it. Damage often comes as just a matter of course while getting set bonuses that matter more; my sentinel didn't prioritize +damage, and has +23%. My blaster didn't prioritize it either and has +26%.

 

The math and my personal experiences suggest that the Sentinel will be able to outright survive far more situations once IO'ed, but will not have meaningfully more survival time on most 'hard' content other than the Miss Liberty Task Force or Shadow Shard (since the Sentinel will be able to put reasonable effort into defending against Psy). For incarnate stuff, most is S/L/E, and it's coming at anywhere from a 25 to a 40% damage drop -- 25% from the basic scaling, the rest from defiance, the fact that Blaster gets stronger alphas, that the blaster has a higher damage cap than Sentinel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

 

So while "Sentinel is 60% of Blaster Damage" is on the high end of this calculation, and not a statement I'd make, I think it's defensible and certainly feels accurate in soloing situations where the Sentinel is fighting much harder against a Boss, Elite Boss, or Arch Villain's regen. I don't have numbers in front of me, but I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if it turned out that my Sentinel takes about 167% of the time to kill an EB as my Blaster. It feels accurate.

 

This should in no way be taken as a statement that the solution is to just +25% the Sentinel's damage, I don't think that remotely. While I think the Sentinel could use a damage increase, it would be poor design to make it equal damage to the blaster simply because they have comparable survivability in much content at level cap with IO optimization. That's the extreme case scenario for both of them.

[earthaddy]

 

Well, I'm also sure that as the defensive powers get slotted out better, survivability will go up as well. But everything can't be balanced around billion-isk end game builds either. And blasters can hit the defense caps at end game, too. So we're basically talking about mez protection. Mez protection is quite nice. But is it worth doing about 60% of the damage of a blaster. Ancient Alien theorists say that's a bit of a hard pill to swallow.

 

There are a ton of right ways to plays the game, and only a couple wrong ways.  So if it works for you, roll with it.  But I don't think the 60% damage jives with my experience. Something to consider is that I put almost every io and incarnate into offense on my Sentinel, whereas the Blasters have to devote considerably more resources to defense. This certainly closes the gap. But you have intrigued me, and it's on my to do list to incarnate an i25 blaster. I'll get back to you in a couple weeks. ;)

 

 

I wasn't talking about billio-isk IO set incarnate min-max builds. I was talking about leveling up with generic IOs.

 

[XaoGarrent]

This is why Xao was hesitant to give numbers I think. I gave a range (10 to 20%) and spoke in probablies for a reason -- it's hard to say without actually seeing it in action. But I think it does matter quite a lot.

To put this in perspective, if the Sentinel ranged damage scalar is somewhere around .80 to .85 as I *think* it is, that means it's only a little bit over a 25% difference between Blaster and Sentinel *base* damage. Of course, the Blaster inherent, build up and whatever else is going to dramatically inflate that for short periods of time, but Senintels also have a few tricks up their sleeves, and in particular these tricks all surround having more readily available and consistent damage- shorter cooldowns on their nukes, an extra high-ish damage single target attack...

 

As Sunsette alludes to later in this post, the reason why this is important is that differences as little as 10-20% can *radically* alter TTK in these older style RPG games where everything has a cooldown, and on sentinels in particular, their tweaks to push them towards more consistent, less spike-y damage paired with their use of armor sets means they get along with flat damage increases particularly well.

 

Aside from those specific points of notice, it's also because- especially in a game like CoH- It's far safer to increase base values in small slices, little boosts of 10% or 5% with testing in between. It's way, way safer for a game to make adjustments to numbers that exist at the bottom of a massive buff stack like this. Really, smaller increments in one direction are safer in general, as you're less likely to overshoot your target and have to start nerfing. If the player hemmoraging nerf patches this game experienced early in its life time taught us anything... It's that.

[Force Redux]

As Sunsette alludes to later in this post, the reason why this is important is that differences as little as 10-20% can *radically* alter TTK in these older style RPG games where everything has a cooldown, and on sentinels in particular, their tweaks to push them towards more consistent, less spike-y damage paired with their use of armor sets means they get along with flat damage increases particularly well.

 

I support this statement. Xao, you just assembled my thoughts on the matter. Thanks.

[oldskool]

if the Sentinel ranged damage scalar is somewhere around .80 to .85 as I *think* it is

 

If you're basing this on Pine's, then please note it is inaccurate for Sentinels.  Not just damage, but entire powers* within sets as well as some secondary effects of other powersets are misleading/entirely wrong**. 

 

*Refractor Beam in Sentinel Beam Rifle still flags it as a Snipe, that it takes Snipe sets, it's damage is as high as it is (in Pine's), etc...  In reality, Refractor Beam is a chaining AoE and has lower damage than a snipe (but benefits massively from Disintegrate).

**Dark Blast in Dark Blast shows the duration is 15 seconds.  For what, I have no idea.  The to hit debuff lasts 6 seconds in reality.  The duration on Abyssal Gaze is "5 seconds".  On what?  I have no idea either.  The hold lasts just over 3 seconds.  The to hit debuff lasts 10 seconds which is the same as everything else in the set that is not the Tier 1 or Tier 9.  Blackstar does in fact last 20 seconds and does in fact impose -35% to hit.  My test DB/Regen refreshes Blackstar every 26 seconds. 

 

 

 

[Tankshock]

Think I realized why Sentinels feel so comparable, damage wise.  90 seconds recharge for the T9's is a big deal.  That has a significant damage bump in groups.

[Lockpick]

Think I realized why Sentinels feel so comparable, damage wise.  90 seconds recharge for the T9's is a big deal.  That has a significant damage bump in groups.

 

Not sure that will make a significant difference once you factor in damage from the other powers and IO builds.  My DP/MC has HoB at 37.8 recharge and my DP/Ninjitsu has HoB at 35.4 recharge with end game set IO builds in Pines, so not really significant.

[Tankshock]

Sure, DP and Archery won't see much of a difference. For most of the others, it's 50% longer.

[Sovera]

I tried without success to edit Refractor Beam on Pines, but nothing I could do made it accept the changes. Only the short description tooltip (dmg, lethal, moderate, etc) could be altered but the description of refractor Beam stayed that of the snipe.

[Daihok]

Anyone have a good build on this they would like to share? This is my first try at a build. Any critque would be great. The last 3 open slot prolly add to bullet rain.

 

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 2.22

http://www.cohplanner.com/

 

Click this DataLink to open the build!

 

Woo: Level 50 Magic Sentinel

Primary Power Set: Dual Pistols

Secondary Power Set: Ninjitsu

Power Pool: Fighting

Power Pool: Leadership

Power Pool: Speed

Power Pool: Sorcery

Ancillary Pool: Psionic Mastery

 

Hero Profile:

Level 1: Pistols

• (A) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage
  
• (3) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/RechargeTime
  
• (15) Superior Sentinel's Ward - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance
  
• (15) Superior Sentinel's Ward - Accuracy/Damage/RechargeTime
  
• (17) Superior Sentinel's Ward - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/RechargeTime
  

Level 1: Ninja Reflexes

• (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed
  
• (9) Luck of the Gambler - Defense/Endurance
  
• (11) Luck of the Gambler - Defense
  

Level 2: Danger Sense

• (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed
  
• (11) Luck of the Gambler - Defense/Endurance
  
• (13) Luck of the Gambler - Defense
  

Level 4: Boxing

• (A) Hecatomb - Chance of Damage(Negative)
  
• (7) Hecatomb - Damage
  
• (31) Hecatomb - Damage/Recharge
  
• (31) Hecatomb - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge
  
• (50) Hecatomb - Accuracy/Recharge
  

Level 6: Shinobi-Iri

• (A) Luck of the Gambler - Defense
  
• (39) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed
  
• (39) Luck of the Gambler - Defense/Endurance
  

Level 8: Swap Ammo

Level 10: Kuji-In Rin

• (A) HamiO:Ribosome Exposure
  

Level 12: Suppressive Fire

• (A) Apocalypse - Chance of Damage(Negative)
  
• (40) Apocalypse - Damage/Endurance
  
• (43) Apocalypse - Accuracy/Recharge
  
• (43) Apocalypse - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge
  
• (46) Apocalypse - Damage/Recharge
  

Level 14: Maneuvers

• (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed
  
• (33) Luck of the Gambler - Defense/Endurance
  
• (37) Luck of the Gambler - Defense/Endurance/Recharge
  

Level 16: Seishinteki Kyoyo

• (A) Performance Shifter - Chance for +End
  
• (17) Performance Shifter - EndMod/Recharge
  

Level 18: Executioner's Shot

• (A) Superior Sentinel's Ward - RechargeTime/Chance for +Absorb
  
• (19) Superior Sentinel's Ward - Accuracy/Damage
  
• (19) Superior Sentinel's Ward - Damage/RechargeTime
  
• (21) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage/RechargeTime
  
• (21) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance
  

Level 20: Kuji-In Sha

• (A) Preventive Medicine - Chance for +Absorb
  
• (23) Preventive Medicine - Heal/RechargeTime/Endurance
  
• (23) Preventive Medicine - Heal
  
• (25) Preventive Medicine - Heal/Endurance
  
• (25) Preventive Medicine - Endurance/RechargeTime
  
• (39) Preventive Medicine - Heal/RechargeTime
  

Level 22: Tough

• (A) Unbreakable Guard - +Max HP
  

Level 24: Weave

• (A) Luck of the Gambler - Recharge Speed
  
• (37) Luck of the Gambler - Defense/Endurance
  
• (46) Luck of the Gambler - Defense
  

Level 26: Piercing Rounds

• (A) Ragnarok - Chance for Knockdown
  
• (27) Ragnarok - Damage
  
• (27) Ragnarok - Damage/Recharge
  
• (29) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge
  
• (29) Ragnarok - Accuracy/Recharge
  

Level 28: Bo Ryaku

• (A) Gladiator's Armor - TP Protection +3% Def (All)
  
• (31) Steadfast Protection - Resistance/+Def 3%
  
• (40) Steadfast Protection - Knockback Protection
  

Level 30: Hasten

• (A) Recharge Reduction IO
  
• (40) Recharge Reduction IO
  

Level 32: Hail of Bullets

• (A) Armageddon - Chance for Fire Damage
  
• (33) Armageddon - Damage/Endurance
  
• (33) Armageddon - Accuracy/Recharge
  
• (34) Armageddon - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge
  
• (34) Armageddon - Damage/Recharge
  

Level 35: Dual Wield

• (A) Decimation - Chance of Build Up
  
• (36) Decimation - Damage/Recharge
  
• (36) Decimation - Accuracy/Endurance/Recharge
  
• (36) Decimation - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge
  
• (37) Decimation - Accuracy/Damage
  

Level 38: Bullet Rain

• (A) Superior Opportunity Strikes - RechargeTime/Chance for Opportunity
  
• (46) Superior Opportunity Strikes - Damage/RechargeTime
  

Level 41: Mass Hypnosis

• (A) Fortunata Hypnosis - Chance for Placate
  
• (42) Fortunata Hypnosis - Sleep
  
• (42) Fortunata Hypnosis - Sleep/Recharge
  
• (42) Fortunata Hypnosis - Accuracy/Sleep/Recharge
  
• (43) Fortunata Hypnosis - Accuracy/Recharge
  

Level 44: Dominate

• (A) Basilisk's Gaze - Chance for Recharge Slow
  
• (45) Basilisk's Gaze - Recharge/Hold
  
• (45) Basilisk's Gaze - Endurance/Recharge/Hold
  
• (45) Basilisk's Gaze - Accuracy/Recharge
  

Level 47: Link Minds

• (A) Reactive Defenses - Scaling Resist Damage
  
• (48) Reactive Defenses - Defense/Endurance/RechargeTime
  
• (48) Reactive Defenses - Defense
  
• (48) Reactive Defenses - Defense/Endurance
  
• (50) Reactive Defenses - Endurance/RechargeTime
  
• (50) Reactive Defenses - Defense/RechargeTime
  

Level 49: Mystic Flight

• (A) Winter's Gift - Run Speed, Jump, Flight Speed, Range/Endurance
  

Level 1: Brawl

• (A) Empty
  

Level 1: Prestige Power Dash

• (A) Empty
  

Level 1: Prestige Power Slide

• (A) Empty
  

Level 1: Prestige Power Quick

• (A) Empty
  

Level 1: Prestige Power Rush

• (A) Empty
  

Level 1: Prestige Power Surge

• (A) Unbounded Leap - +Stealth
  

Level 1: Sprint

• (A) Empty
  

Level 2: Rest

• (A) Empty
  

Level 4: Ninja Run

Level 2: Swift

• (A) Run Speed IO
  

Level 2: Health

• (A) Numina's Convalesence - +Regeneration/+Recovery
  
• (5) Miracle - +Recovery
  
• (5) Panacea - +Hit Points/Endurance
  

Level 2: Hurdle

• (A) Jumping IO
  

Level 2: Stamina

• (A) Performance Shifter - Chance for +End
  
• (3) Performance Shifter - EndMod/Accuracy
  
• (7) Performance Shifter - EndMod
  

Level 8: Cryo Ammunition

Level 8: Incendiary Ammunition

Level 50: Agility Core Paragon

Level 8: Chemical Ammunition

Level 50: Assault Radial Embodiment

Level 50: Preemptive Total Core Conversion

Level 50: Ageless Total Radial Invocation

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