*** Sentry (Dark Avengers) ***

Unknown

Based on the Devs question-answering session http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17879, it's safe to say now that they're not nerfing Sentry anytime soon. So for those having a hard time getting top 10-25 in pvp, go ahead and pump that iso/hp into Sentry.

Unknown

DuffManOhYeah wrote:

Based on the Devs question-answering session http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17879, it's safe to say now that they're not nerfing Sentry anytime soon. So for those having a hard time getting top 10-25 in pvp, go ahead and pump that iso/hp into Sentry.

This is pretty much the only solution at this point.

I don't know why D3 is just ignoring such an obvious glaring problem.

During the lightning rounds, I got first place in 8 of the 12 rounds I participated in.

Just by Sentry bombing in the last 3 minutes.

It's clearly abuse, but it is the only way to be competitive in this game. I checked the rosters of the other people that were in the top 5, and every single one of them had a 166 3/5/5 Sentry.

Tell me that isn't sad.

Raffoon

This didn't make it into the Q&A somehow. It's still an issue. Why the silence, devs?

Unknown

Raffoon wrote:

This didn't make it into the Q&A somehow. It's still an issue. Why the silence, devs?

They did answer the Sentry question indirectly below:

Q: Will Daredevil get a buff? I really liked the X-Force buff. When can we expect to see the same treatment for Invisible Woman? Will the characters that most need a buff get any help?

A: We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on characters people think are over and under powered. When we’re making characters we try our best to ensure they’re all about the same power-level, but there’s no way to tell 100% for sure until it’s released to the players.

Right now we’re prioritizing making new characters, new events, and other new content for the game. But yes, we’re aware that certain characters could use some attention and we’ll try to get to them soon.

In other words, it's going to take a few months (ala Cmag). They're focusing on releasing new characters.

$$$$ > re-balancing Sentry (which changes the entire PVP landscape)

Unknown

They've learned their lesson of announcing anything regarding buffs/nerfs with the whole cmag/xforce/mhawkeye round. They announced it half a year before it was even implemented.

If they announce any sentry nerf (or any others for that matter), forumites will be hounding them until it happens.

yogi_

GappV2 wrote:

They've learned their lesson of announcing anything regarding buffs/nerfs with the whole cmag/xforce/mhawkeye round. They announced it half a year before it was even implemented.

If they announce any sentry nerf (or any others for that matter), forumites will be hounding them until it happens.

I can't remember the exact phrase I want to say but it's something like - right message, wrong outcome. Maybe it's they've thrown the baby out with the bath water.

They are not saying anything now because they've messed the messaging up in the past (which led to our reaction), so now there is none (which then leads to our reaction).

wymtime

Shush. I like Sentry bombing people and scoring high in PVP. Don't ruin the fun.

babinro

Not to be overly negative...but if they nerf sentry then he'll just get replaced by endless fields of X-Force/Other (hood, mags, fury, dino are all good options here).

X-Force is a LOT more balanced than Sentry but the fact remains we'll see almost no change in the end. Shield hopping through waves of the same premium hop team is a problem that's not about to go away given the nature of the format. I'm not saying Sentry's WR is balanced, it fully deserves a nerf or complete re-work, but I hope people understand that the issues with PvP won't ever go away from simply nerfing the current most OP shield hop character.

Unknown

That isn't sad. I have a 166 3/5/5 Sentry came in first on I believe four or five of the lightning rounds, all of which I joined with 30-45 minutes left and played normally with BP and Hood just taking every easy 20+ point victory I could. Maybe you had bad luck with brackets but personally the only thing I "need" Sentry for is if I want to score over 1000 in a PVP (at which point yeah, it basically comes down to buying boosts for a high score with the only limit being how much I'll spend).

Pylgrim

babinro wrote:

Not to be overly negative...but if they nerf sentry then he'll just get replaced by endless fields of X-Force/Other (hood, mags, fury, dino are all good options here).

X-Force is a LOT more balanced than Sentry but the fact remains we'll see almost no change in the end. Shield hopping through waves of the same premium hop team is a problem that's not about to go away given the nature of the format. I'm not saying Sentry's WR is balanced, it fully deserves a nerf or complete re-work, but I hope people understand that the issues with PvP won't ever go away from simply nerfing the current most OP shield hop character.

Thing is that the problem and real reason why people want Sentry nerfed is not the lack of variety but the absurd speed and efficacy of the so-called Sentry-bombing. It means that if you are shield-hopping (and we all know that is impossible to score above 800 without -unless you have an absurdly low MMR for your roster) you cannot afford to remain more than a couple minutes unshielded because that's more than a Sentry-bomber needs to defeat you and likely steal more points from you than what you just got. In other words, you also need to Sentry bomb in order to be able to quickly grab a couple victories before being hopefully being hit and shield again.

In other words, Sentry is a tool that facilitates to be competitive but without whom is almost impossible to be competitive. That is extremely unhealthy.

simonsez

Well, they could redesign PvP in such a way that shield-hopping is no longer a thing, but based on the dev's q&a, that won't be happening.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

babinro wrote:

Not to be overly negative...but if they nerf sentry then he'll just get replaced by endless fields of X-Force/Other (hood, mags, fury, dino are all good options here).

X-Force is a LOT more balanced than Sentry but the fact remains we'll see almost no change in the end. Shield hopping through waves of the same premium hop team is a problem that's not about to go away given the nature of the format. I'm not saying Sentry's WR is balanced, it fully deserves a nerf or complete re-work, but I hope people understand that the issues with PvP won't ever go away from simply nerfing the current most OP shield hop character.

Thing is that the problem and real reason why people want Sentry nerfed is not the lack of variety but the absurd speed and efficacy of the so-called Sentry-bombing. It means that if you are shield-hopping (and we all know that is impossible to score above 800 without -unless you have an absurdly low MMR for your roster) you cannot afford to remain more than a couple minutes unshielded because that's more than a Sentry-bomber needs to defeat you and likely steal more points from you than what you just got. In other words, you also need to Sentry bomb in order to be able to quickly grab a couple victories before being hopefully being hit and shield again.

In other words, Sentry is a tool that facilitates to be competitive but without whom is almost impossible to be competitive. That is extremely unhealthy.

This.

Shieldhopping as a whole is a rather broken mechanic, but it wasn't always this bad. There used to be some risk involved, and there was a fair bit of competition for the "fastest team", as well as the consideration of scarecrow vs. speedster - that is, do you run a glass cannon like Torch to try to burn your way through, or maybe throw up a tough guy like Hulk that inherently makes fights last a long time? (Okay, Torch is kind of **** in that example, but you get the point.) Right now, No character in the game survives Sacrifice+World Rupture, making it a completely moot point. And the time you're actually in the match is almost as long as it takes to queue someone up and just start the fight with them. It's insane, and completely unhealthy for the meta. There's one viable character in endgame. One team worth using. Sentry, and Sentry/Hood respectively.

Unknown

In regards to sentry bombing, assuming fully covered, at what level does he become viable for it?

Unknown

dearbluey wrote:

In regards to sentry bombing, assuming fully covered, at what level does he become viable for it?

I would say his WR should do about 10k damage assuming you also have Hood at 5 black.

mohio

seasong wrote:

dearbluey wrote:

In regards to sentry bombing, assuming fully covered, at what level does he become viable for it?

I would say his WR should do about 10k damage assuming you also have Hood at 5 black.

He means something more like "can my 3/4/4 sentry soft maxed to 127 effectively sentry bomb?" My answer is, I have no idea. I didn't really start trying until mine was basically maxed. My guess is that it's a mix of how many WR tiles you get (so, how many green covers) and how much strike tile support you have outside of sacrifice.

The serious, yet kind of ****-ish answer is, try it out! We'll likely have normal LRs on Tuesday and there's the shield sim up now. You can try things out in either place and see if you get enough damage to down an opposing maxed sentry or maybe only teams up to 6800 or whatever the case may be.

Edit: forgot the fully covered part, so you don't have to worry about green covers, just strike tile support. With maxed battle plan or daken support you could probably get away with sentry bombs at fairly low level, but with hood it might be a different answer

Unknown

I'd say with full covers, as low as 120 is good enough. 130 is better, but as low as 120 can kill most of the cast, and leave the rest of them limping. Just skip over Hulks.

Unknown

mohio wrote:

He means something more like "can my 3/4/4 sentry soft maxed to 127 effectively sentry bomb?"

Well, he said fully covered so I assumed 355 sentry.

But regardless, my longer, non-dickish answer is that you should aim for >10k WR by doing this math:
(# of WR tiles created - 3 that you'll probably lose to matches)*(base WR tile dmg + sacrifice strike tile dmg)

I say 10k dmg because Sentry has 10k ish health, Hood has negligible health, and featured character has of course variable health but 12k seems to be good for them. If you use Hood's Intimidate after Sentry's Sacrifice, you'll knock down that extra 2k from the featured character while the 10k dmg from WR does everything else.

This is just for max efficiency Sentry bombing where WR kills everything in one go. Of course you can start even lower than that, but I personally would not Sentry bomb if WR was doing less than 8k dmg based on the above formula. And if I didn't have 5 covers in intimidate, I might subtract 4 or 5 tiles from WR instead of 3 because of losing extra tiles to greater countdown/cascades.

Just my personal experience, other people might have a different perspective.

Edit: Sorry, I should add that this is for shield hopping Sentry bombing where timing is the main consideration. If you're just using Sentry to kill off opponents then obviously you can go at much lower numbers.

loroku

I thought the strategy to nerf Sentry-bombing was to introduce 4*Thoring? 4* Thor + Hood's Twin Pistols = dang according to Nonce. Probably takes longer to set up, though...

Unknown

seasong wrote:

mohio wrote:

He means something more like "can my 3/4/4 sentry soft maxed to 127 effectively sentry bomb?"

Well, he said fully covered so I assumed 355 sentry.

But regardless, my longer, non-dickish answer is that you should aim for >10k WR by doing this math:
(# of WR tiles created - 3 that you'll probably lose to matches)*(base WR tile dmg + sacrifice strike tile dmg)

I say 10k dmg because Sentry has 10k ish health, Hood has negligible health, and featured character has of course variable health but 12k seems to be good for them. If you use Hood's Intimidate after Sentry's Sacrifice, you'll knock down that extra 2k from the featured character while the 10k dmg from WR does everything else.

This is just for max efficiency Sentry bombing where WR kills everything in one go. Of course you can start even lower than that, but I personally would not Sentry bomb if WR was doing less than 8k dmg based on the above formula.

Why? Think about what you just said. Yeah, 8k isn't 10k. But that's still 8k AOE in the first handful of turns, and gathering 7AP to do it again is hardly impossible. Again, even at a relatively "low" level, nothing is faster.

Unknown

Thor 4* isn't going to replace Sentry. The infinite combo theory doesn't work out after factoring tile replenishment availabilty, but even if it had no such problems it's still likely slower due to the animation time needed for the number of Twin Pistols to get this to work. If all RBY tiles are charged, you still have to hit 5 yellow tiles each time with a Twin Pistols for a move that destroys about 18-2X tiles per move but you need to destroy 35 tiles to replenish 5 yellow tiles. Likewise to get an early stun lock assuming every blue tile is charged requires hitting 6 of them before you run out of yellow tiles to hit on Twin Pistols and again you running into tile replenishment issues. Of course, a level 5 Power Surge is expected to only charge 4 yellow/blue tiles on average so you don't even have all the right tiles you need charged to sustain another Twin Pistols on average. Yes, there will be cases where you've the right number of yellow tiles charged but the odds are against you because you need to hit 5 yellow charged tiles but Power Surge will only average 4.

It seems that people forgot prior to Sentry, it was possible to fail in shield hop because the time needed to win was considerably longer, and no people didn't forget how to use boosts back when Sentry wasn't around. Even with Magnetic Field doing infinite combos, it wasn't exactly a high damage move per real life time spent. While Patchneto did a ton of damage, it's not something you can reliably end a game starting with say 6g 6r because say you make a green match for Berserker Rage, you really don't know if the next 3 Magnetized Particles can finish the game for you, and of course if you needed more red or more blue that slows you down, and even if you had a pretty healthy supply of AP, like say 10 red AP, again you can't know for sure if that was enough to end a game even with Berserker Rage on (for one you can always end up destroying your own strike tiles on the cascades) so there was plenty of risk involved. Any other team had significantly less damage per real life time and is quite vulnerable to being attacked by other players.