Are Sentinels as bad as I'm hearing or is it trash talk?

[TheMoncrief]

16 hours ago, drbuzzard said:

A thought in general however, if sentinels were any closer to blasters in damage, there'd be little reason to put up with being a glass cannon. The main place where things end up blurring is because IOs make it easy to make yourself more sturdy, but don't necessarily pump damage as hard (I don't want to step into the proc swamp here). 

 

There is some merit to this position. On the other hand, a Blaster who does not use the damaging and support powers from its secondary power set is significantly less damaging than a Blaster who does use them. Sentinels generally have little or no damage or support powers in their secondary power set - it's all or nearly all self protection.

 

Also, Blasters are most desired for their sick AoE damage, and Sentinels... don't get that. Their AoE caps are consistently lower than Blasters, and while their nukes recharge quickly, they also don't hit nearly as hard. So even if the damage numbers on Sentinel Blast sets were the same as what Blasters get, they'd still be less damaging than Blasters in the case where people actually want Blasters.

 

I personally consider Sentinels fun to play solo or on small teams, functioning mostly as ranged Scrappers more than anything else. For a Blaster, a larger team is where I want to play. But the AT is certainly not bad enough to merit all the trash talk. That's the nature of trash talk - somebody has to be the least popular or powerful or whatever, and human nature means everybody else is going to dogpile on that somebody.

[drbuzzard]

1 hour ago, TheMoncrief said:

 

There is some merit to this position. On the other hand, a Blaster who does not use the damaging and support powers from its secondary power set is significantly less damaging than a Blaster who does use them. Sentinels generally have little or no damage or support powers in their secondary power set - it's all or nearly all self protection.

 

Also, Blasters are most desired for their sick AoE damage, and Sentinels... don't get that. Their AoE caps are consistently lower than Blasters, and while their nukes recharge quickly, they also don't hit nearly as hard. So even if the damage numbers on Sentinel Blast sets were the same as what Blasters get, they'd still be less damaging than Blasters in the case where people actually want Blasters.

 

I personally consider Sentinels fun to play solo or on small teams, functioning mostly as ranged Scrappers more than anything else. For a Blaster, a larger team is where I want to play. But the AT is certainly not bad enough to merit all the trash talk. That's the nature of trash talk - somebody has to be the least popular or powerful or whatever, and human nature means everybody else is going to dogpile on that somebody.

 

As I said, there has to be some justification for being a glass cannon, and that's the AOE caps more than anything else. Any damage boost power from the secondary is made moot by a kinetics player on your team (which any high end team WILL have). The blaster secondaries (and primaries really) vary all over the place in quality. People act like every blaster is better than every sentinel, and I believe that to be counter factual. Sentinel primaries are better balanced across sets. There will be examples where a sentinel will be better than a blaster, as every blaster is not fire or ice. At the top end of the AT blasters will be appreciably better damage dealers, but at the bottom, a sentinel is probably better because of the more narrow dispersion of the quality band (this is on single targets). The 60% greater target cap can't be worked around however, and that's where sentinels will fall behind. 

 

As to the nukes, yes the sentinel nukes don't hit as hard, but if you do the math they hit harder per recharge time (except AR and archery which are deliberate anomalies) than the comparable blaster nuke. 

[Greycat]

So, if you're worried about numbers, open up excel.

 

If you want to have fun, create whatever character you want and play it. I've had no real issues with sentinels. Had quite a bit of fun with them - they're the only things that "fit" certain characters and having them there just makes the game that much better. My only complaint with them really is some are a bit end-hoggy early on... but that's true with a lot of sets.