Fire/EA VS Fire/Ninjutsu.

[Sovera]

An idle help me out decide. After leveling my blaster and getting horrid 5 minute pylon times I just came crawling back to a Sentinel. Fire is love, fire is life.

 

I haven't actually made a Fire/ anything yet though. I've done ninjutsu and it's pretty solid. I haven't done EA yet so it is about whether to repeat myself or try something new.

 

 Ninjutsu has:

 

- An endurance recovery clicky and a heal both on short CD. (17 seconds)

- Built in stealth.

- 'Annoying' CC protection being a clickie.

- Positional defenses, so everything is deflected, toxic, psi, lethal, etc etc.

- Decent resistances: 22% S/L, 19% E/N, 40% F/C/Psi, 33% toxic.

 

 

EA has :

 

- Typed, so I need to work on the defenses one by one meaning it has a psi (19% defense) and toxic hole (is there anything other than positional to defend against Toxic?). We can say that damage type is rare but the hole is still there.

- Its heal is a smidgen longer (25 seconds) but it comes with an endurance reduction component plus 200% regen (400% regen total VS 200% of Ninjutsu) to pump dem numbers up as we wait for the CD to recharge.

- An endurance clickie mostly eclipsed by the heal and the fact a Sentinel has Defensive Opportunity making endurance a non consideration.

- Normal CC toggle.

- 30% S/L, 37% Energy, 34% Negative, 28% fire/cold, 30% toxic... and 8% psi, so the hole is complete, anything psi goes through like in hot butter.

 

 

I won't lie, I'm definitely leaning towards a second Ninjutsu and only the petty 'gosh, annoying CC clicky' is restraining me, this despite having Hasten and the CC protection clickie bound so they alternate autos.

[Haijinx]

EA is pretty awesome on a stalker.  Just hit vet level 15 on mine with 0 defeats so far.  

 

I have been contemplating trying it on a Sent next.

 

Of course sent /SR has been tempting me too, looks really good with the recovery power.  

[oldskool]

22 hours ago, Sovera said:

- Typed, so I need to work on the defenses one by one meaning it has a psi (19% defense) and toxic hole (is there anything other than positional to defend against Toxic?). We can say that damage type is rare but the hole is still there.

Does toxic even work this way?  Most attacks with a toxic damage component are tagged "melee_lethal" or "ranged_lethal".  Toxic damage didn't exist when the game launched and there wasn't a delivery method like "toxic" or "ranged_toxic" or "melee_toxic".  So there wasn't actually a method to ever avoid anything purely listed as toxic damage (e.g., Hydra, Zombie barf). 

If it is a Wolf Spider shooting you with rifle fire, or a Bane hitting with you Venomous Ray, or a Widow firing Poison Dart those are all "melee_lethal" or "ranged_lethal", perhaps "ranged_energy" for the Ray.  Their damage components get applied to your respective resistances (Lethal/Toxic). 

Things could have changed though, so I am asking if it works that way currently because it didn't always in the past.

 

Edited September 6, 2019 by oldskool

[Haijinx]

Anecdotally i would have to say typed does work vs toxic as oldskool suggests.

 

The only thing that really hits me on my EA "easily" are PSI things like Fortunas, Countess Crey, etc.  

 

Even the vahz puke which youd think is 100% toxic misses.

 

[Teirusu]

That's pretty much my experiences with my /EA verse toxic damage.  I've been able to go through the Rikti pylon section of the Apex trial without dying a number of times.

 

That being said /Ninjutsu does look pretty great number-wise.  I do not have one, but my experience suggests it should certainly be pretty close between the two sets.

 

That being said, Power Armor now has a pretty great HP buff in it which /Ninjutsu does not have. 

[Sovera]

I feel like I've fallen into a bit of a rut. I've done my experiments with lots of little builds and now I want a high performance 'something' if only to really have 'something' to compare against. The radiation sentinel seemed strong, but only had a four minute pylon time. The radiation blaster with four procs in two out of three ST attacks plus blaster damage *looked* like it did good damage, and turned out to have a 5 minute pylon time. Fire is supposed to be the top dog, but you'd think a -res proc plus three damage procs in one attack, then four damage procs in another attack, would make up for the difference.

 

I was going to try a Fire something, but Sentinel still has Blazing Blast bugged four months later. I edited HD so it shows 5 ticks instead of 13, and, unslotted, BB does 74 damage. The big damage skill of the big damage set. Radiation's Proton Stream, unslotted, does 122 😅

 

The Sentinel seems very balanced. All T9s do exactly the same damage be it Inferno or Atomic Blast, while in the Blaster side of things Atomic Blast gets a rather massive -40% damage tax for the Hold component it has. That helps a lot in choosing since it can be all thematic. But thanks to the balance Fire doesn't really have much gain over another set. Those 3-5 extra dots for 8 damage aren't exactly game breaking in even though they will get boosted by enhancements and then incarnates.

 

Ice feels very safe when Blizzard makes mobs flop, and a purple proc in Ice Storm makes it do the same, but I don't see it performing better than Radiation.

[Haijinx]

Interestingly i have the opposite rut. Lol.

 

Ive been playing a MA/EA stalker.  My ST damage and survivability are excellent.  But with no AOE i feel like my job is only to break alphas and kill bosses for the AOE people.  

 

So i have been looking around for something that can do a lot of AOE without giving up too much ST.

 

 

[Riverdusk]

On 9/6/2019 at 4:50 PM, Sovera said:

 

Ice feels very safe when Blizzard makes mobs flop, and a purple proc in Ice Storm makes it do the same, but I don't see it performing better than Radiation.

The advantage of blizzard (and ice storm) I'd think is it not being limited to a 10 target cap.  Seems in exchange they nerfed sentinel's ice blast single target damage pretty hard though in comparison to how it is on other AT's, not to mention getting rid of its ability to stack holds.

 

One other notable of Ice though is that it is  one of the few that is completely 100% a ranged set.  Some don't care, but I know others find it nice that you never have to jump into a mob, you can just sit back and fire away.

[Sovera]

That's true. To a point Sentinel's sets were normalized so much that we can almost say no set has a clear advantage. As I mentioned with a Blaster Radiation's T9 does 1200 damage. Inferno's does 2k. Brutal difference, but Radiation's T9 does a Hold and -def and etc etc so it's a tax that it pays.

 

With a Sentinel both do *exactly* the same damage (go to the character creator, push the slider to 50, compare numbers) despite Radiation's Hold and -def and etc still being there. if we go down the list and compare T1 and T2 and even T3 the numbers are all pretty similar. The vaunted Fire, uber damage set, only has a small few DoTs which, I haven't mathed it, but seem that they would only just manage to make up for the lack of procs that the set can take compared to others. I'd do a practical test on Justin, but Fire's T3 is still bugged four months later and there is no point until it is fixed.

 

@nihiliiilli's Fire Sentinel got 3 minute times, but his is /Rad armor and that set has some extra tools to bump damage up which may account for it more than using a procced out Char. All the times I've seen with Sentinels between @oldskool and others seem to hover around four minute and four minute and a half which further emphasize the uniformity of the offensive sets.

 

Which isn't *bad*. It's good to choose something thematically and not grumble because we are gimping ourselves.

Edited September 8, 2019 by Sovera