Thunderwoman

[hoopahnan]

My altaholism continues and I made a Sentinel named "Thunderwoman" to pair with my stone/fire Tanker "Hellflyer." I want to go full elec/elec/elec but also take hover and fly. All the builds I see take super speed and combat jumping. Can I replace those two powers with Hover and Fly? What would be the benefits/drawbacks? Are there better powers I can replace?

[TygerDarkstorm]

Well, your grounded power is probably one of the biggest reasons why you're not seeing folks with electric armor taking fly powers:

If you don't care about losing your immob and KB protection, then go ahead and swap for fly. If you don't like super speed, you can always do super jump for a travel power.

[FupDup]

The Immob and KB protection can be gotten from other sources like CJ and some IOs, but it's certainly less efficient that way. 

Swapping the armor to Energy Aura would keep a very similar theme while not needing to expend extra build space to making up for not being grounded. 

[hoopahnan]

Dang, I like fly/hover. Can I ask what powersets go good with that travel mode? I know that fire aura also has a ground effect

[hoopahnan]

51 minutes ago, hoopahnan said:

Dang, I like fly/hover. Can I ask what powersets go good with that travel mode? I know that fire aura also has a ground effect

I'm not going to make a new post but I'd like "thematic but powerful" sentinel builds that can fly and hover.

[TygerDarkstorm]

5 hours ago, hoopahnan said:

I'm not going to make a new post but I'd like "thematic but powerful" sentinel builds that can fly and hover.

As @FupDup mentioned, you can swap Electric Armor for Energy Aura and have a very, very similar character theme while having the freedom to choose hover/fly.

 

Fire/Rad is also a classic sent combo that can hover blast. Pick whatever sounds fun to you--you have 1000 character slots to play with after all--and just make sure you avoid armor/blast sets that have a grounded component so you can hover blast to your heart's content.

 

Imo, Storm Blast sometimes feels best on a sent because Storm really wants you to focus on it and using its powers, which a sent allows you to do with their armor secondary. Mine's paired with Elec Armor for thematic reasons, but I'm sure you can make any of the other armors work with it as well.

 

Dual Pistols also seems like something folks like on sents--I haven't made one yet, so I can't comment to it, personally.

 

My Psy/Fire/Psy sent is my personal favorite sent atm; Burn is the only power that requires being on the ground, and it's kind of a pain to use with a super low target count that you could skip it to fly instead.

[Frozen Burn]

7 hours ago, hoopahnan said:

Dang, I like fly/hover. Can I ask what powersets go good with that travel mode? I know that fire aura also has a ground effect

 

You can take whatever travel power you want.  You don't need the effects of Grounded when you're traveling from mish to mish.  And if you want to hover blast, you have to be hovering at the lowest point above the ground to maintain the benefits of Grounded.  But then when combat is over, who cares if you get to the next mish or area by running, flying, jumping or teleporting?  🙂  

[hoopahnan]

How's Ice armor? I'm now thinking about making a Storm from X-Men character that can use Storm Blast (duh) and Ice Armor

[Warshades]

On 5/16/2025 at 6:52 AM, hoopahnan said:

How's Ice armor?

 

In need of a revamp imo, but take this with a grain of salt. I've mainly played ice armor on tanks and stalkers. I don't particularly like the changing of Energy Absorption to Moisture Absorption, that's a downgrade. Some powers like Frost Protection are entirely useless since you'll cap your HP with perma Hoarfrost. The one good thing is that the sentinel version does have Icy Bastion which I prefer over Hibernate, but overall it's a defensive set that takes more effort to reach soft cap defense compared to others that do so more easily while gaining better secondary buffs/abilities (SR, energy, stone). Ice also still lacks in resistance when Icy Bastion isn't up (why Permafrost has a base 3.5% resistance compared to Stone Skin offering a base of 7% resistance and an additional 3.5% defense I'll never understand).

 

I do think defensive sets tend to work best for Sentinels with their lower HP pools, but ice armor is borderline one of the worst defensive sets available imo. I'm a bigger fan of energy aura (pairs well with electric blast to be able to drain mobs with Short Circuit + Power Drain), SR (high DDR, scaling resist/absorb shield, and easy to soft cap), and Stone (good mixture of defense/resistance with other a lot of other buffs, very much a jack of all trades armor set). Ninjitsu is one I haven't tried on sentinels, but even doing some quick slotting and power picks, it appears to easily hit soft cap positional defense with little effort and has a better resistance buff (Bo Ryaku also offering 7% base resist to all).

 

On 5/15/2025 at 7:22 PM, hoopahnan said:

I'm not going to make a new post but I'd like "thematic but powerful" sentinel builds that can fly and hover.

 

To be honest, the game is easy enough that it won't really matter what armor set you take. Short of doing some self imposed challenges and difficulty goals, any armor set will work well enough when built properly. If you want to prioritize theme then you can pick whatever you'd like and even run electric armor with flight. If you want to prioritize powerful, I do think certain power sets perform better than others. Bio, rad, stone, and fire can all boost damage output more. Energy, SR, stone, and ninjitsu would all be sturdy defensive armor sets. I've not tried invincibility on sentinels, but I don't think it can easily reach the same defensive/resist cap benchmarks that tanker version can (at minimum, it doesn't look like invincibility scales from being surrounded by multiple foes).

[Mattmba]

I have very much enjoyed my ice/martial arts sent that does hover around most of the time but has enough def to come in close to finish off battles. The holds and slows make melee pretty safe.  Ninjitsu is fine but has no defense against -def like martial arts does. It does have a heal that would be very useful though. 

[TygerDarkstorm]

2 hours ago, Mattmba said:

I have very much enjoyed my ice/martial arts sent that does hover around most of the time but has enough def to come in close to finish off battles. The holds and slows make melee pretty safe.  Ninjitsu is fine but has no defense against -def like martial arts does. It does have a heal that would be very useful though. 

Martial Arts is a melee primary, do you mean Super Reflexes?

[Mattmba]

I have very much enjoyed my ice/super reflexes sent that does hover around most of the time but has enough def to come in close to finish off battles. The holds and slows make melee pretty safe.  Ninjitsu is fine but has no defense against -def like super refexes does. It does have a heal that would be very useful though. 

[Mattmba]

8 hours ago, TygerDarkstorm said:

Martial Arts is a melee primary, do you mean Super Reflexes?

Yes, super reflexes. Serves me right for responding right when I wake up.  I edited my original post. 

[hoopahnan]

I’m still learning and was wondering what would be better, Storm/SR with flight or Storm/Inv with flight? Anybody got dem builds?