Suppressive Fire does no damage without an ammo mode for Sentinels?

[lhsabre]

It's been a little bit since I've tried a Dual Pistols Sentinel, but I remember that Suppressive Fire did significant damage regardless of Ammo mode (or lack of). It is currently acting like the non-Sentinel version now. Was this a change or a bug? If it was a change, why was the damage portion removed from the normal Ammo type where Sentinels kind of need every damage source they can get, especially early on.

[Uun]

This issue was raised on the Bug forum at the time Page 6 was released. The change to sentinels wasn't listed in the patch notes but was apparently intentional. 

 

 

[FupDup]

I think the dev rationale for doing this was because people complained about the recharge buff making their procs fire less frequently (I will once again say that the PPM formula is objectively bad game design, faster recharge should never be considered a nerf ever), so this was a compromise to keep the old slow recharge for those who want to load up procs while still having the alternate ammo as an option that can stand on its own.

 

I can see this logic on the other ATs where Suppressive Fire used to deal almost no damage in any firing mode, but since Sents did used to deal high damage with normal bullets here, it was stupid to include them in the change. But the devs are most likely not going to revert this, because Sents are generally not allowed to have nice things. 

[lhsabre]

Thanks for the info Uun and FupDup!

 

In the end, while I disagree with the devs' decision it's a minor nuisance in the end. I'm at least glad to know what happened.

[Starhammer]

It was a disappointing change to be sure. I finally liked having Suppressive as a standard part of my attack chain, even without taking Swap Ammo. A power should never be dependent on taking another power to be "good"

Of course that said, I wish I could rebuild Suppressive Fire completely, make it more like something from real life tactics. Make it target a location and give about a 25 foot radius area of effect (if I had a code genie working for me, it would also affect a cone leading to that radius). Inside the aoe, it would cause a fear effect (Somebody's shooting, I better duck!) maybe some -recharge, and have a 10%ish chance of doing actual damage comparable to Pistols. Obviously that'll never happen, but Birthday/Anniversary wishes and all that...

[Chrona Blaze]

So is it worth having in the rotation anymore? I normally did execution + suppress + dual wield on single targets using standard. Switch to cryo ammo to freeze a sapper or target that could be taken out first before engaging a mob with standard ammo. 

[FupDup]

5 hours ago, Chrona Blaze said:

So is it worth having in the rotation anymore? I normally did execution + suppress + dual wield on single targets using standard. Switch to cryo ammo to freeze a sapper or target that could be taken out first before engaging a mob with standard ammo. 

SuppFire is still important to have, but you just have to make to use either Fire or Ice ammo (Toxic does more than standard but way less than Fire/Ice).