Why Sentinel vs Blaster?

[EyeLuvBooks]

My very first hero on Live was a Blaster and because I played at odd times I wound up trying to solo. I had all of the Debt Badges before he was lvl 20. Note that this was back when Stamina wasn't inherent and your Movement Powers kicked in at lvl 14.

 

Most of my old Blasters will be remade as Sentinels now because in most cases I prefer playing Iron Man to playing Cyclops in a game. My various Sents can team or solo, have played stand-in Tanks, have held the ramps in the MSR and my Beam/Bio is the first new character I made that could solo +4/x8 content solo. Yes, if you're okay spending hundreds of millions of Inf on a build you can do as well or better on a Blaster but I'm cheap and not fond of 'playing' the Market. If I wanted a financial sim I'd go and play one. I'm here to create or recreate a hero or villain and fight enemies...not stand around staring at the Market interface. Others enjoy it and are good at it so more power to them.

 

I play Sents because when I'm playing the character I want to feel mighty. Getting Stunned (or perma-Stunned...) is a buzz-kill for me.

[Gobbledigook]

Blasters nukes are higher damage than Sentinels version but Sentinels nuke has a lower cooldown and can get around the low 20 second region. Try BlackStar for example in the Dark blast set and debuff a mobs To-Hit with near 100% up time lol. Some nice debuffage there 🙂

[Rathulfr]

On 4/28/2020 at 9:37 AM, CaptTastic said:

There’s just something about him though that feels weak and underwhelming. 
 

He is what he was supposed to be though: A tanky, steady yet unspectacular sentinel, so I’ve no complaints. One day I’ll get round to Fire/Invul JUST to do a comparison!

This sums up my experience with Sentinels.  I really do like them: I have almost as many Sentinel alts as I do Blasters, and way more than any other AT (including Corruptors, which also play very differently).  But at the end of the day, Blasters are still my #1.

 

And I've also rolled a few Fire/* Sentinels to pump up the volume on DPS, but it's still not quite the same.  They're good, but still feel a bit "meh" to me.  But I think that's just something I've always had with Fire, even in retail.  Fire feels like a tired old cliche, as it's been done to death in so many other fantasy MMOs that I've played.  I don't really feel like I'm playing CoH when I play Fire: I feel like I'm playing an oddly-skinned EQ or WoW.  So that's just a personal thing for me, not a failing of Fire in any way.

 

[CaptTastic]

7 hours ago, Rathulfr said:

This sums up my experience with Sentinels.  I really do like them: I have almost as many Sentinel alts as I do Blasters, and way more than any other AT (including Corruptors, which also play very differently).  But at the end of the day, Blasters are still my #1.

 

And I've also rolled a few Fire/* Sentinels to pump up the volume on DPS, but it's still not quite the same.  They're good, but still feel a bit "meh" to me.  But I think that's just something I've always had with Fire, even in retail.  Fire feels like a tired old cliche, as it's been done to death in so many other fantasy MMOs that I've played.  I don't really feel like I'm playing CoH when I play Fire: I feel like I'm playing an oddly-skinned EQ or WoW.  So that's just a personal thing for me, not a failing of Fire in any way.

 

I love this post because it cuts through all the crap and answers the Sentinel OR Blaster question in the most succinct and best possible way. 
 

The answer, as you say, is both. Play both, appreciate both, enjoy both for what they are. 

[Frostweaver]

play them both.

They are both fun in very different ways.

You have 1000 character slots.

[Hyperstrike]

Blasters, when you absolutely, positively, have to output maximum possible damage.
Sentinels, when you want to feel immortal while outputting loads of ranged damage.

It's basically the difference between scrappers and tanks.  But for ranged damage.

[killigraphy]

If you're faceplanting every 5 minutes with a Blaster, you're  either really bad at DPS or have no tank(s) on the team. Play smart, understand your weaknesses, and play around them.

 

I'm never dying on my blaster (Elec/Fire), mainly due to the fact that I pay attention, wait for pulls, and make sure, I'm only getting purps, orange and green insps. The sentinel is basically a weaker blaster with defense/hold prot. Which is very convenient, and forgiving....but is it needed? I would say no. Every game of any sort, has a glass canon class....that's the point really, you sacrifice defense/mitigation, for  the strongest dmg in the game. It makes you play smart...or it should.

 

If you're "needing" to  play a Sentinel, you're  more than likely not good at team tactic...which is fine. But I'd rather have more dmg/control, over shields, if there's  an option.

[nihilii]

I die many, many times on my Blasters. For a performance metric, I can solo Apex, TinM and the LRSF, or +4/x8 against every faction, on those same Blasters. I will just die more than any of my other characters while doing so.

 

It's alright if anyone wants to tell me I'm really bad at DPS, playing dumb, and not good at team tactic. In this situation "really bad" can still carry me through almost all the team content the game has to offer, without a team. Once on a team, there's no question everything can be done. So there's an evolutionary pressure argument here: when "really bad" lets you do everything, the incentive to improve from "really bad" is low.

 

Now, about that improvement... No doubt more conservative play would reduce the death count. Playing on teams with Tankers exclusively and waiting for pulls and whatnot. But once we do that, we run into the question of opportunity cost. Time spent micromanaging survival is time spent not doing damage. Not to mention having to rely on other people, who may or may not be competent themselves.

In my experience there's just more damage to be done in playing aggressively with the occasional death than being more careful and never dying. It's not like one death every 20-30 minutes really hurt your bottomline when you can just pop your P2W rez and hop back into the fight. Even one death every 5 minutes is doable, one just has to go /fire epic and pick RoTP (although the retoggling somewhat hurts performance, so 5 minutes might be pushing it. 10 is fine).

 

Granted, everyone has their own win conditions, which don't necessarily include "doing as much damage as possible"; but the damage gap between a defensively played Blaster and an offensively played Sentinel shrinks, sometimes to the point the Sentinel will come out on top. Someone with "deal as much damage as possible while never dying" as a win condition might be better served with a Sentinel than a Blaster.

At the highest ends of highend play, it's also true a Blaster (specifically Fire/ and probably Fire/Fire) is the best choice out of the two. Pump it up with amplifiers, base buffs and T2/T3 insps and you've got boatloads of survivability, while making no sacrifice in damage. This is a route worth considering. Too involved in prep time for me to play like that *all* the time, and I'll happily pay a slight damage tax for the convenience of shields.

[Rathulfr]

1 hour ago, killigraphy said:

I'm never dying on my blaster

If you're not dyin', you're not really Blasterin'!  😜😆🤣🙃

[Hyperstrike]

3 hours ago, killigraphy said:

If you're faceplanting every 5 minutes with a Blaster, you're  either really bad at DPS or have no tank(s) on the team. Play smart, understand your weaknesses, and play around them.

Nah.  I've been on teams full of decent tanks.  But I was doing so much damage I was ripping aggro.
I'd even wait a couple attacks to get full groups engaged, come in, drop the bomb and whatever didn't die immediately pivoted and would pot-shot me.

[Hyperstrike]

1 hour ago, Rathulfr said:

If you're not dyin', you're not really Blasterin'!  😜😆🤣🙃

You've never played a blaster unless you've left tongue imprints on the floor.

[Zerethon]

3 hours ago, Hyperstrike said:

You've never played a blaster unless you've left tongue imprints on the floor.

Even with high defense and resist, you're STILL going to have that one random streakbreaker hit be a nuke or a hold, and then it's naptime.

[Hyperstrike]

The RNGods are the RNGods.  Unknowable are their reasons.  Unfathomable are their actions.
 

[killigraphy]

16 hours ago, Hyperstrike said:

Nah.  I've been on teams full of decent tanks.  But I was doing so much damage I was ripping aggro.
I'd even wait a couple attacks to get full groups engaged, come in, drop the bomb and whatever didn't die immediately pivoted and would pot-shot me.

 

Bad tanks....I never had aggro taken from me  (Invul/Enrg), and this is on 54+ enemies. Could be that I tell blasters to wait, but even then I've been on both  sides. I've been the king of pulling aggro (Fire/Elec blaster) and still never die.

[killigraphy]

18 hours ago, Rathulfr said:

If you're not dyin', you're not really Blasterin'!  😜😆🤣🙃

 

I never got it...maybe its due to me playing MMO's  like WoW(vanilla) and FF14 but I usually  let the  tanks go  a bit nuts before I alpha strike.....then everything is dead,  and I'm flying away.

[Hyperstrike]

57 minutes ago, killigraphy said:

 

Bad tanks....I never had aggro taken from me  (Invul/Enrg), and this is on 54+ enemies. Could be that I tell blasters to wait, but even then I've been on both  sides. I've been the king of pulling aggro (Fire/Elec blaster) and still never die.

The blaster, at the time, was straight "MOAR DAMAGE PLS!" built.  No defense, no mitigation.

Your typical "Kill Fast, Go Splat".

After spending a couple hours on the "Go Splat", I rebuilt for Blast-Tanking.

Damage isn't nearly so impressive.  But I'm the one standing atop the ash pile at the end.

[Frostweaver]

The only Tanker a Blaster cannot rip aggro away from is an Icer.

The first power I buy from the P2W vendor on a blaster is a self-rez.

I figure, if I don't faceplant at least once a mission, I am playing WAY too conservatively and letting my team down.

Sentinels, though, always feel more like a stalker... If it takes more than a minute or two to take down an AV, I have let my team down.

[Sovera]

I haven't died nearly as much as some people who play Blasters here. But my favorite is an Archery/TA Blaster so I :

 

A) Am 100% range and never dive into melee where the real damage is received.

B) Open every fight with RoA mini nuke which instantly kills minions and reduces a spawn size to half. Half a spawn size hurts half as much.

 

As has been said it's fine to enjoy Sentinels. The game is made so nearly everything works. Taking a bit longer to kill stuff is not preventing people from advancing. The lower damage a Sentinel does is made up by the faster recharging nuke. Again, I believe some people mistake their Sentinel's toughness for their defenses and resists instead of the fact they open every fight with a nuke and kill half a spawn.

 

This is not something the average Blaster does since theirs is up every two spawns and then they compound it by wandering around in melee range.

[Fire Chief]

I just got a dark blast/WP/DM Sent to tier 3 and with the incarnate extra damage/def/res the survivability is crazy and xtra damage is very nice for a Sent but in no wayyyy tanky/blastery but the IO'd out minus to hit/DM holds with again the I-stuff is sooooooo much fun 🙂

[Omega9]

You can off-tank or support melees or temporarily draw aggro to protect teammates. You can take Provoke from the Presence Set. Just be careful. And you can blast stuff. IMHO, the perfect hybrid!