Sentinel Psychic Blast animation times

[Uun]

Psychic Blast has more powers with long animation times than most blast sets, resulting in a very slow feel. Just about every AT with Psychic Blast has a slightly different version of the set. Sentinels in particular get several unique powers with animation times longer than the powers they replace. 

 

Psychic Scream:  The animation time of 1.87s has been improved from the original version with 2.67s (which dominators still have), but the animation time before effect (ATBE) is still 1.83s, resulting in a long wait before the damage hits. Blasters get Psionic Darts instead, which has similar stats but a much shorter animation and ATBE. Can the Psionic Dart animation be ported to Psychic Scream?

 

Will Domination: The ATBE for this power of 1.67s is longer than the animation time of 1.10s. Can the projectile speed be increased so that the damage hits during the animation? 

 

Psionic Strike: This is the power sentinels get instead of Psionic Lance (the snipe). It has an animation time of 2.67s but an ATBE of 0.67s. There's not much going on in this animation and I see no reason it couldn't be tightened up. 

 

Psionic Tornado: The defender, corruptor, blaster and epic versions of this power all have front-loaded damage. The sentinel version is a 4.1s DoT. Why? Please change the sentinel version to match the other ATs.

 

Scramble Minds/Scramble Thoughts: Scramble Minds has a 2.0s animation and 1.87s ATBE. Sentinels get Scramble Thoughts instead, which has a 3.0s animation and 1.87s ATBE. Is there any reason Scramble Thoughts couldn't use the Scramble Minds animation? 

 

 

Edited May 5 by Uun

[FupDup]

A note about the Scramble Minds/Thoughts thing is that the Sentinel version does 217.8 base damage while the Blaster version does 62.56. Even with the longer animation time, the DPA is far greater (65.99 vs 26.33).

 

Even with that being the case, I'd have no issue with the Sent version still getting that animation update while keeping its other stats simply because the AT as a whole is undertuned and could use an advantage like this (and the rest of the set has other issues on Sents as you mentioned so this could make up for it). 

 

Also, for the Darts vs Scream thing, Sents have a 70 degree cone while the other ATs have only 30 degrees, which makes it waaaaaaaay easier to use, especially in close range. This does come with the caveat of reduced target caps on Sents though. The base damage is also actually a bit higher than Blasters, but the much longer animation does give it much lower DPA so it still deserves a buff. 

Edited May 5 by FupDup

[biostem]

You do get increased range with psychic blast - perhaps that's the tradeoff?

[FupDup]

5 minutes ago, biostem said:

You do get increased range with psychic blast - perhaps that's the tradeoff?

The OP is comparing Sentinel Psychic to other ATs. It gains extra range on every AT relative to its peers so it would in theory have similar balancing/design for the most part excluding the snipe/nuke powers being very different as they usually are on Sents. 

[Shin Magmus]

You know and mention that Psychic Blast just got a balance patch not this last big patch, but the one before.  They did already speed up the animations on Mental Blast, Psychic Scream, and Psionic Tornado (some of those changes now apply to Epic versions of the powers, but none of them apply to Fortunatas).

 

So the slow set you're complaining about actually used to be even slower; this probably represents the highest that the Powers Team wants to buff it, given that they have also created Scramble Minds and re-tuned Scramble Thoughts (on Fortunatas) and settled on those cast times.  I wouldn't hold my breath expecting the sets to ever get buffed again. 

Edited May 5 by Shin Magmus

[Uun]

3 hours ago, Shin Magmus said:

You know and mention that Psychic Blast just got a balance patch not this last big patch, but the one before.  They did already speed up the animations on Mental Blast, Psychic Scream, and Psionic Tornado (some of those changes now apply to Epic versions of the powers, but none of them apply to Fortunatas).

 

So the slow set you're complaining about actually used to be even slower; this probably represents the highest that the Powers Team wants to buff it, given that they have also created Scramble Minds and re-tuned Scramble Thoughts (on Fortunatas) and settled on those cast times.  I wouldn't hold my breath expecting the sets to ever get buffed again. 

I just renamed the topic for clarity. I'm primarily concerned about the Sentinel version of the set. It got the sped up cast times for Psychic Scream and Psionic Tornado in the recent balance pass, but Psionic Strike and Sentinel Scramble Thoughts weren't touched. Fortunata Scramble Thoughts did get the shorter animation. I'm not asking for Sentinel Scramble Thoughts to be changed to Scramble Minds, just for it to get the cast time reduction the other sets got.

[Uun]

8 hours ago, FupDup said:

A note about the Scramble Minds/Thoughts thing is that the Sentinel version does 217.8 base damage while the Blaster version does 62.56. Even with the longer animation time, the DPA is far greater (65.99 vs 26.33).

In Page 6, blasters, corruptors and defenders had their version of Scramble Thoughts changed to Scramble Minds (which is a chain) and had the cast time reduced. Sentinels kept their higher damage version of Scramble Thoughts but didn't get the cast time reduction. Fortunatas got the cast time reduction for their version in Page 7

[Shin Magmus]

Seems to me like Sent Scramble Thoughts should match one of the 2 better versions of the power then, I agree.  The Snipe replacement is probably always going to suck though: because the variation in animation time and DPA on Sentinel-only Snipe replacements is wide and random.  I thought that was going to get addressed when they did the rework to the AT: but it wasn't.