Sentinel: Storm Blast: Category Five causes all enemies within to immediately run away and only stop when aggro drops

[VinceBlood]

DESCRIPTION

When playing a Sentinel using Storm Blast, placing Category Five on a group of enemies will cause them to immediately start running away.  This lasts until the enemy either resets their aggro or gets far enough away that they can't target the player.  It's intensely frustrating, as Storm Blast benefits from close grouping and AoE targeting.  I've looked through Cat5's power description and details, and I can't find any instances of Fear or anything that would logically cause enemy AI to decide to flee at top speed when hit by the power.

 

REPRO STEPS

1. Log into a Storm Blast Sentinel high enough to use the Category Five power.
2. Enter a mission with the difficulty modifiers set to treat you as more than one hero.
3. Find a group of 5+ enemies.
4. Drop Category Five on the enemies.

 

RESULT

The enemies caught in Category Five will fire off one attack, and then immediately begin running all over the area, away from the player.

 

EXPECTED

Much like other large DoT-based AoEs, enemies should not run away at high speed when in Category Five.  Or, if this is expected, the power description should note that enemies will try to escape the power's radius.

[FupDup]

Unfortunately this is not a bug, but a deliberate design choice. If we dig around on City of Data we can find this page: 

 

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=redirects.storm_blast.nukenado_pulse_sentinel&at=sentinel

 

Note that mag 500 avoid effect it applies to all enemies. This is what causes the instant run away thing. This is also present on other "rain" powers like Rain of Fire, Blizzard, Caltrops, and so on. The live devs did this and the HC devs chose to continue it. There are ways to partially mitigate this like using one of the epic pool immobilize powers or slotting certain procs but the devs are unlikely to reconsider this mechanic. 

Edited January 29 by FupDup

[VinceBlood]

Damn.  That's a really frustrating and IMO unnecessary mechanic.  Just like Mastermind fire patches having a mag 80 fear, this really feels like a bad way to force players into taking an AoE immobilize or lose out on significant damage.

 

Thanks for looking in to that.  It's a bad user experience and I can only hope it's reconsidered for some powers, especially a set's capstone.