*** Sentry (Dark Avengers) ***

GrumpySmurf1002

Phaserhawk wrote:

Here were my findings
=====================
3/5/5--most damage and still plays similar even post nerf but all but 100% reliant on 3/5/5 Hood
5/3/5--not the best Sentry damage build but best build with X-Force and compiments X-Force, doesn't need Hood, World Rupture is very bad and non-existent needs another Green user, (easily best PvP build assuming X-Force as other partner)
5/5/3--least self damage build, 2nd most damage build, not as dependent upon World Rupture, more dependent on other sources of strike tile generators, doesnt need Hood
4/5/4--Better Sac tile, worse Supernova, does less damage than 5/5/3, so this is viable but not strongest build
5/4/4 and 4/4/5 just don't make sense as upgrades from 3 to 4 weren't worth it, 4/5/4 isn't only viable hybrid build.

Obviously a lot is focused on XForce these days, and thus why I hedge 535. Reality is no matter what I still won't use him much, so I'll probably just take the 1000iso from these yellow covers and call it a day. Thanks for the informative answer.

Unknown

In my experience with Sentry, I find 3/5/5 completely unviable now.

The difference between abilities like World Rupture and Call of the Storm is once you get your 14 AP for CotS, the damage is immediate and unstoppable, barring AP steal.

With World Rupture, you have to farm up 12 AP, without the help of thunder strike, and then you have to wait at least 2 turns. 3 turns if you aren't running Hood or can't get 9 black AP.

This gives the enemy at least 2 turns to cast a variety of board shake that can not only destroy your countdown tiles, but also destroy your strike tile.

This was fine back when WR was 7AP and you could get it early enough that the opponent won't have the time to farm up for their board shake. But raising it to 12 AP means you could get several turns at 9 AP before you finally get a 4th (or 2nd/3rd if you're boosting/super boosting) match to finally get that ability off.
In addition, you need to get your 8 yellow AP and then wait 3 turns for everthing to activate.

This is waste of time, boosts and it has a pretty high failure rate for a little gimmick.

I can win a game with Xforce faster than Sentry Bombing now. There really is not reason to use Sentry anymore. Not at 5/5/3.

I'm respecing him to 5/3/5 and I expect this will at least be strong on defense, as his red could totally ruin people's plans when attacking me.

I just don't see any reason to run 3/5/5 anymore.

Unknown

onimus wrote:

In my experience with Sentry, I find 3/5/5 completely unviable now.

The difference between abilities like World Rupture and Call of the Storm is once you get your 14 AP for CotS, the damage is immediate and unstoppable, barring AP steal.

With World Rupture, you have to farm up 12 AP, without the help of thunder strike, and then you have to wait at least 2 turns. 3 turns if you aren't running Hood or can't get 9 black AP.

This gives the enemy at least 2 turns to cast a variety of board shake that can not only destroy your countdown tiles, but also destroy your strike tile.

This was fine back when WR was 7AP and you could get it early enough that the opponent won't have the time to farm up for their board shake. But raising it to 12 AP means you could get several turns at 9 AP before you finally get a 4th (or 2nd/3rd if you're boosting/super boosting) match to finally get that ability off.
In addition, you need to get your 8 yellow AP and then wait 3 turns for everthing to activate.

This is waste of time, boosts and it has a pretty high failure rate for a little gimmick.

I can win a game with Xforce faster than Sentry Bombing now. There really is not reason to use Sentry anymore. Not at 5/5/3.

I'm respecing him to 5/3/5 and I expect this will at least be strong on defense, as his red could totally ruin people's plans when attacking me.

I just don't see any reason to run 3/5/5 anymore.

Comparing any green ability to CotS is silly. It's like saying BP black is bad because look at Surgical. Also WR causes cascades, giving you ap, triggering multiple strike tile boosted matches, stops people from placing some special tiles, is 2 ap cheaper, and is on a character that has a second huge AoE ability. Are you expecting all green abilities on all 3* characters to be as good as Call?

These direct comparisons people make between two abilities directly are completely inane. Aggressive Recon is better than 90% of the purple abilities in the game. 1* Black Widow's blue stun is probably the best stun ability in the entire game. They are balanced by the rest of the abilities in the character, their health, their main colors etc.

The fact remains that a 3/5/5 Sentry that gets off WR+Sacrifice will very likely kill the opposing team from full health, if the tiles (or even most of them) survive. If you don't think that's powerful, you should check it against most other characters in MPQ.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

onimus wrote:

In my experience with Sentry, I find 3/5/5 completely unviable now.

The difference between abilities like World Rupture and Call of the Storm is once you get your 14 AP for CotS, the damage is immediate and unstoppable, barring AP steal.

With World Rupture, you have to farm up 12 AP, without the help of thunder strike, and then you have to wait at least 2 turns. 3 turns if you aren't running Hood or can't get 9 black AP.

This gives the enemy at least 2 turns to cast a variety of board shake that can not only destroy your countdown tiles, but also destroy your strike tile.

This was fine back when WR was 7AP and you could get it early enough that the opponent won't have the time to farm up for their board shake. But raising it to 12 AP means you could get several turns at 9 AP before you finally get a 4th (or 2nd/3rd if you're boosting/super boosting) match to finally get that ability off.
In addition, you need to get your 8 yellow AP and then wait 3 turns for everthing to activate.

This is waste of time, boosts and it has a pretty high failure rate for a little gimmick.

I can win a game with Xforce faster than Sentry Bombing now. There really is not reason to use Sentry anymore. Not at 5/5/3.

I'm respecing him to 5/3/5 and I expect this will at least be strong on defense, as his red could totally ruin people's plans when attacking me.

I just don't see any reason to run 3/5/5 anymore.

Comparing any green ability to CotS is silly. It's like saying BP black is bad because look at Surgical. Also WR causes cascades, giving you ap, triggering multiple strike tile boosted matches, stops people from placing some special tiles, is 2 ap cheaper, and is on a character that has a second huge AoE ability. Are you expecting all green abilities on all 3* characters to be as good as Call?

These direct comparisons people make between two abilities directly are completely inane. Aggressive Recon is better than 90% of the purple abilities in the game. 1* Black Widow's blue stun is probably the best stun ability in the entire game. They are balanced by the rest of the abilities in the character, their health, their main colors etc.

The fact remains that a 3/5/5 Sentry that gets off WR+Sacrifice will very likely kill the opposing team from full health, if the tiles (or even most of them) survive. If you don't think that's powerful, you should check it against most other characters in MPQ.

Disregarding the comparison to CotS (which I only brought up to emphasize the weakness of having to wait for your damage once you activate the ability, not as a direct comparison to CotS itself), have you seriously killed a whole team with it?

I've been play testing him a lot and in three turns, they usually destroy enough of the tiles so that it deals maybe 3 or 4k to the enemy team. Very often downing no one.

Now if you get incredibly lucky and fall **** backwards into 12 green AP by the third turn, then yes. You'll get a bunch of damage off. But if you have to wait 5 or 6 turns to get that final green match, giving Magneto enough time to match red or yellow, or Xforce to match green or black, or Hulk to match green. Or etc etc etc. your hopes of getting off the full damage potential, or even half the damage potential, are slim to none.

Or maybe I just suddenly turn into the most unlucky schmuck in the entire game every single time I take out Sentry for a spin, then return to normal luck once I bench him again.

Who can say?

Phaserhawk

onimus wrote:

In my experience with Sentry, I find 3/5/5 completely unviable now.

The difference between abilities like World Rupture and Call of the Storm is once you get your 14 AP for CotS, the damage is immediate and unstoppable, barring AP steal.

With World Rupture, you have to farm up 12 AP, without the help of thunder strike, and then you have to wait at least 2 turns. 3 turns if you aren't running Hood or can't get 9 black AP.

This gives the enemy at least 2 turns to cast a variety of board shake that can not only destroy your countdown tiles, but also destroy your strike tile.

This was fine back when WR was 7AP and you could get it early enough that the opponent won't have the time to farm up for their board shake. But raising it to 12 AP means you could get several turns at 9 AP before you finally get a 4th (or 2nd/3rd if you're boosting/super boosting) match to finally get that ability off.
In addition, you need to get your 8 yellow AP and then wait 3 turns for everthing to activate.

This is waste of time, boosts and it has a pretty high failure rate for a little gimmick.

I can win a game with Xforce faster than Sentry Bombing now. There really is not reason to use Sentry anymore. Not at 5/5/3.

I'm respecing him to 5/3/5 and I expect this will at least be strong on defense, as his red could totally ruin people's plans when attacking me.

I just don't see any reason to run 3/5/5 anymore.

I agree 3/5/5 is not as useful as before, but as I said, and with much testing, it is so dependent upon pairing with Hood and hood being 3/5/5 so you can use Intimidation that it works still pretty well in that situation, anything outside of that and it was very, very, very difficult to get the 3/5/5 combo to work.

I don't disagree with 5/3/5 mentality, in strict PvP and XForce that is probably the smarter way to go, you can fall into a Supernova, but I felt that as good as 5/3/5 would be with X-force, I don't see 5/5/3 being any worse. All you lose out on is some sacrfice strike tile strength, an while the differnce between the damage of lvl 3 and lvl 5 is decent, X-Force doesn't have skills that abuse strike tiles like Sentry does with World Rupture, thus the extra dmg on the strike tiles really doesn't do much, not to mention X-Force might simple blow it up, and if I"m not going to use th Sacrifce tile very often, why level it up at all?

Unknown

onimus wrote:

Disregarding the comparison to CotS (which I only brought up to emphasize the weakness of having to wait for your damage once you activate the ability, not as a direct comparison to CotS itself), have you seriously killed a whole team with it?

Oh sure. I often run him with BP for a quick shield hop (don't have a viable xforce yet). It's nowhere as fast as it used to be, but hood BP Sentry means you need to match 3 times to get off a boosted WR at turn 5-6.

Funny thing is, if you can make sure to do it during server lag, patch BP is actually usually even faster. Maybe I'M really lucky with black matches though

yogi_

Just updating best character combos thread.

Any noticeable changes since his adjustment?

Sentry and:
- Black Panther
- Daken
- Daken + [Falcon + 1*/3* Storm]
- Hood
- Hood + [2* Black Widow or Daken]
- Punisher + [Black Panther or Deadpool or 3* Wolverine]

Thanks...

hurcules

5/3/5 is perhaps the "He's not broken in PvP any more, let's re-spec him to maximise his damage output in PvP" build.

5/5/3 is likely the "I ain't using him in PvP anymore, but I'm going to optimise him for PvE" build.

Phaserhawk

hurcules wrote:

5/3/5 is perhaps the "He's not broken in PvP any more, let's re-spec him to maximise his damage output in PvP" build.

5/5/3 is likely the "I ain't using him in PvP anymore, but I'm going to optimise him for PvE" build.

NO!!!

Your assumptions are predicated on X-Force, sure he destroys everything but what are you gaining from a 5/3/5 build over a 5/5/3 build? You get an extra 210 damage on a strike tile, if you Surgical Strike, it just does 210 more damage, if you X-Force it does 210 more damage, but here's the trade off, you have complete **** World Rupture, it is now useless because World Rupture not at 5 is really bad, so now you can't take him into PvE and really how often are you going to be running Sentry in PvP? here's the other issue, most top tier's are going to have X-Force/4hor/Sentry in this PvP. I always target X-Force first, but because Sentry is buffed red is going to be the color stolen, and if I down Sentry, 4hor is left and I still steal red, so that means unless I am running Hood, any and all green they have is going to be remaining and that means World Rupture will be going off and you are going to get more defensive wins and be more of a deterrant if your World Rupture is maxed, because more than likely Sentry will be the last target and even if X-Force uses X-Force tiles will remaining from a World Rupture and if he gets a sacrfice tile out on you look out, irregardless, yes 5/3/5 plays better in PvP, but only slightly, and the slight betterness it gains you isn't worth the tradeoff of completely destroying the character in every other enviornment.

Unknown

I briefly considered trying to respec mine to 5/5/3, but ultimately decided to keep him where he is at 3/5/5.

Here's the reason: the main way I can see using him still, other than when he's required, is to essentially suicide-bomb particularly difficult PVE nodes, especially in the gauntlet. His red is usable for that, but the best way to do that is to use sacrifice->world rupture, only slower. I see Sentry as a narrow role character, and probably not anyone I'd use in PVP, and I'd keep his red as a last-resort desperation move.

A big part of it is simply that I don't like his red. At this point, I don't really like any of his skills, since they're so damaging to the team, but his red is the worst offender since it ends the turn.

Phaserhawk

Ben Grimm wrote:

I briefly considered trying to respec mine to 5/5/3, but ultimately decided to keep him where he is at 3/5/5.

Here's the reason: the main way I can see using him still, other than when he's required, is to essentially suicide-bomb particularly difficult PVE nodes, especially in the gauntlet. His red is usable for that, but the best way to do that is to use sacrifice->world rupture, only slower. I see Sentry as a narrow role character, and probably not anyone I'd use in PVP, and I'd keep his red as a last-resort desperation move.

A big part of it is simply that I don't like his red. At this point, I don't really like any of his skills, since they're so damaging to the team, but his red is the worst offender since it ends the turn.

Here's a fun team for you.

Sentry/Patch/Daken. Sentry is fully protected except for red, Daken gets you strike tiles, and the differnce between yellow 5 and yellow 3 and the 210 differnce can easily be made up for with Daken

having played around with him enough after the nerf, I find the 5/5/3 build to superior for the shear fact of having a game ending Supernova, because Supernova doesn't end the turn, it ends the game.

Unknown

The only purpose of 3/5/5 is to kill off goons. You need a completely untouched board in order to use World Rupture now because, even at 5 covers, his countdown tiles are too easily matched away/destroyed/neutralized to ever be worth 12 green AP (one of the two most valuable AP colors in the entire game.)

But if you can't kill 3 goons without Sacrifice WR...I dunno. That seems unlikely...

5/5/3 is also pointless because, as I said before, his green is just terrible. However, you got the 5 in red, making him decent on defense.

But 5/3/5 is probably his best build simply because, while World Rupture is a complete waste of AP, sacrifice is not. So why not max it? It's better than having a dead ability on your team.

The only downside to 5/3/5 is on defense the AI may save up for World Rupture rather than firing off Xforce...And 3 cover WR is probably the worst ability in the entire game.
But 5 cover WR isn't far behind, so if your AI is saving up for WR, it probably doesn't matter how many covers he has. You're screwed.

Now, when I say bad (I know people will attack me for that) I don't mean it can't be abused. Obviously, WR is still just as abusable as it was pre nerf. But the high price tag in addition to the long countdown makes it rarely ever worth farming for, just to be disappointed when all or most of the tiles are matched away.

In a game where the outcome can be decided based on who can charge their strongest ability first, farming towards WR is basically waving a white flag. Because even when you get the 12 AP, you still give the enemy 3 more turns to beat you, where you're essentially helplessly waiting for your countdown tiles to expire and hoping your strike tile doesn't get randomly cascaded away.

Sentry bombing was incredibly frustrating even when it was almost guaranteed. Just the thought of taking that frustration and adding the longer wait and the higher price tag makes me want to vomit.

Phaserhawk

onimus wrote:

The only purpose of 3/5/5 is to kill off goons. You need a completely untouched board in order to use World Rupture now because, even at 5 covers, his countdown tiles are too easily matched away/destroyed/neutralized to ever be worth 12 green AP (one of the two most valuable AP colors in the entire game.)

But if you can't kill 3 goons without Sacrifice WR...I dunno. That seems unlikely...

5/5/3 is also pointless because, as I said before, his green is just terrible. However, you got the 5 in red, making him decent on defense.

But 5/3/5 is probably his best build simply because, while World Rupture is a complete waste of AP, sacrifice is not. So why not max it? It's better than having a dead ability on your team.

The only downside to 5/3/5 is on defense the AI may save up for World Rupture rather than firing off Xforce...And 3 cover WR is probably the worst ability in the entire game.
But 5 cover WR isn't far behind, so if your AI is saving up for WR, it probably doesn't matter how many covers he has. You're screwed.

Now, when I say bad (I know people will attack me for that) I don't mean it can't be abused. Obviously, WR is still just as abusable as it was pre nerf. But the high price tag in addition to the long countdown makes it rarely ever worth farming for, just to be disappointed when all or most of the tiles are matched away.

In a game where the outcome can be decided based on who can charge their strongest ability first, farming towards WR is basically waving a white flag. Because even when you get the 12 AP, you still give the enemy 3 more turns to beat you, where you're essentially helplessly waiting for your countdown tiles to expire and hoping your strike tile doesn't get randomly cascaded away.

Sentry bombing was incredibly frustrating even when it was almost guaranteed. Just the thought of taking that frustration and adding the longer wait and the higher price tag makes me want to vomit.

I hear you, but don't completely dismiss World Rupture. At level 5 it creates 16 tiles compared to I think only 8 or 10 at level 3. Now if you factor in each team averaging 4 tiles destroyed per match pure math states you lose about 2 WR tiles per cycle (your turn and AI turn). That means on average you will lose about 6 tiles before it goes off and that's assuming you got 16 in the first place. I use World Rupture now the way as it was intended, which is a board shakeup/damage dealing AoE skill. Even if you only had 6 tiles but had a Sacrifice tile out thats still 3258 AoE dmg while you only take 384. The problem people are having is that it does not turbo kill, but I have yet not to have it go off without less than 6 tiles and it pretty much decimates a team, no it's not doing the 7K plus Aoe Dmg it was before, it does roughly half of that now, but if you combo it right it still is probably one of the best AoE skills in the game, on average it's better that CotS albeit slightly slower than that now.

Is 5/3/5 the best build? No. No build is the best anymore if you are either 5/3/5, 3/5/5, 5/5/3 you are going to have advantages and disadvantages but on average you will be doing the same amount of damage. 5/3/5 is trying to optimize Sentry for PvP but in reality Sentry isn't top PvP material anymore. While he still has some uses, he is good for bombing PvE nodes that are difficult, he is good as a PvP deterant because no one wants to eat a 4K or more Supernova while trying to shield hop in PvP, and he is a solid PvE character when paired with Daken. You argue to max out Sacrifice yet you run him with X-Force which means you have about a 25% but probably more chance of blowing it up in the first place just to get what a few hundred points of damage, sure it's nice but now you have essentially taken Sentry and placed him in the "only for featured PvP pile" and I don't like to do that to characters especially if they still have uses in other enviornments with a slight build modification.

If you are going to push Sentry into PvP only and still have a Hood at 3/5/5, you might as well keep Sentry at 3/5/5 because you can still Sentry bomb quite effectively assuming the other team does not have a Hood "trust me I tested it multiple times" , I slaughtered a maxed x-force, 4hor, Fury during the 4hor PvP with the old Sentry bombing method because it's not hard to get 12 green AP with boosts and Hood when they don't have one. Is the consistency there? No, but it is still effective and useful when your in a pinch.

What I currently have found effective in SHIELD and this current Starfall PvP is to run Sentry with a health regen guy (patch,daken, rocket/groot) and then rotate a strong AoE in the 3rd spot, Black Panther and Deadpool are very good options. You can still throw Hood in there, but you need to rotate guys with him now to save on health packs since Sentry himself will eat them up (this is why Sentry needs accelerated healing D3!!!)

In the end though people are going to have to play with him a little bit and find out what works best. He is not top tier anymore and there is no top build, but he is still above average in terms of 3* characters overall because of the damage he can still dish out.

Unknown

Really appreciate the thoughtful discussion here. I have a 5/5/3 Sentry because of how the covers fell to me. Now I have two yellow from PvP awards top respec to either 3/5/5 or 5/3/5. I've kept Hood 5/5/3 because I run him with Lcap more than anyone else. I think I'll keep Sentry at 5/5/3, but this has been very civil & informative conversation.

Unknown

I think 5/5/3 with a strike tile generator still makes him hold on to top 10. With boosts it's not that hard to get a WR off early and you can even do it before you have all the yellow to use BP yellow. I've been WRing successfully a lot this pvp.

5 in supernova seems like a no brainer to me now. You can either use it as a rage of the black panther-ish ability that eats a health pack or two or just keep it as one of the stronger defensive spells in the game. A 5 covered supernova will still ruin your day.

We're still in the mourning period where people swear the character was nerfed into useless garbage, much like everyone did when cMags was changed.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

I think 5/5/3 with a strike tile generator still makes him hold on to top 10. With boosts it's not that hard to get a WR off early and you can even do it before you have all the yellow to use BP yellow. I've been WRing successfully a lot this pvp.

5 in supernova seems like a no brainer to me now. You can either use it as a rage of the black panther-ish ability that eats a health pack or two or just keep it as one of the stronger defensive spells in the game. A 5 covered supernova will still ruin your day.

We're still in the mourning period where people swear the character was nerfed into useless garbage, much like everyone did when cMags was changed.

I'm really looking forward to these next set of rankings.

Because I've seen people like you talk about top 10.

And I just don't see it at all haha.

I settled on #25 for him. In retrospect, I think I underrated him. He is probably closer to #16 to #20.

But I don't think he even sniffs the top 10.

But yes, 5 in red is absolutely required in my opinion.

Phaserhawk

onimus wrote:

ark123 wrote:

I think 5/5/3 with a strike tile generator still makes him hold on to top 10. With boosts it's not that hard to get a WR off early and you can even do it before you have all the yellow to use BP yellow. I've been WRing successfully a lot this pvp.

5 in supernova seems like a no brainer to me now. You can either use it as a rage of the black panther-ish ability that eats a health pack or two or just keep it as one of the stronger defensive spells in the game. A 5 covered supernova will still ruin your day.

We're still in the mourning period where people swear the character was nerfed into useless garbage, much like everyone did when cMags was changed.

I'm really looking forward to these next set of rankings.

Because I've seen people like you talk about top 10.

And I just don't see it at all haha.

I settled on #25 for him. In retrospect, I think I underrated him. He is probably closer to #16 to #20.

But I don't think he even sniffs the top 10.

But yes, 5 in red is absolutely required in my opinion.

yeah ark123 I'm going to agree with onimus on this one, not sure if he's top ten but I don't think he's sub 20 by any means. I rank mine by being both good in PvE and PvP and they are X-Force, Fury, 4hor, Thor, Black Panther, Hood, Daken these are probably your consistent top 7 and then you have C.Mags, Captain America who are IMO moving up due to 4hor as if she gets a Power Surge off on you they can use all the colors. Elektra will probably round out the top 10.

In one single match, yes Sentry is probably top 10 material since you can just go off on someone if you don't care about your health or if characters go down, but if we are also taking into acount being able to play for pushes, thats what really hurts Sentry. Like I said before as long as you have 2 colors maxed and the other at 3 it really doesn't matter your build so long as it works for you and after thinking more about 5/3/5 from onimus yeah 5/5/3 and 5/3/5 are actually about even in the WR/Sac combo, yes 5/3/5 has a larger Sac tile, but 5/5/3 will have more tiles out on average thus triggering it more, then net result is about the same amount of damage

Unknown

People like me? You mean jews? Whatever, hitler.

I think he's still significantly better than characters like Hulk. He's worse than the supreme god he used to be, but he's still absolutely deadly - He's obviously a lot better than someone like lCap for instance.

I can see the merits of 5/3/5 though - red does cause cascades.

Unknown

Sentry is still plenty good, but his red is in a weird place because while it is probably his best move now, since it's an expensive move (4 red matches) you don't always have the luxury of doing just enough damage to save for Supernova especially if you got someone like The Hood around. A lot of time I end up having one guy at 1000 HP or already downed by the time you have Supernova and then it's suddenly not that great. Sacrifice is still quite good. Not as good as Battleplan, but Sentry has more HP so it should be weaker. World Rupture is pretty hard to use now, but that's mostly due to X Force being the best green move by a pretty significant margin. Sacrifice into Supernova is a pretty potent too.

hurcules

Phaserhawk wrote:

hurcules wrote:

5/3/5 is perhaps the "He's not broken in PvP any more, let's re-spec him to maximise his damage output in PvP" build.

5/5/3 is likely the "I ain't using him in PvP anymore, but I'm going to optimise him for PvE" build.

NO!!!

Your assumptions are predicated on X-Force, sure he destroys everything but what are you gaining from a 5/3/5 build over a 5/5/3 build? You get an extra 210 damage on a strike tile, if you Surgical Strike, it just does 210 more damage, if you X-Force it does 210 more damage, but here's the trade off, you have complete **** World Rupture, it is now useless because World Rupture not at 5 is really bad, so now you can't take him into PvE and really how often are you going to be running Sentry in PvP? here's the other issue, most top tier's are going to have X-Force/4hor/Sentry in this PvP. I always target X-Force first, but because Sentry is buffed red is going to be the color stolen, and if I down Sentry, 4hor is left and I still steal red, so that means unless I am running Hood, any and all green they have is going to be remaining and that means World Rupture will be going off and you are going to get more defensive wins and be more of a deterrant if your World Rupture is maxed, because more than likely Sentry will be the last target and even if X-Force uses X-Force tiles will remaining from a World Rupture and if he gets a sacrfice tile out on you look out, irregardless, yes 5/3/5 plays better in PvP, but only slightly, and the slight betterness it gains you isn't worth the tradeoff of completely destroying the character in every other enviornment.

Actually I have re-specced to 5/5/3, based on the reasons you posted after this post (damage from 5WR could potentially be more than 5Sac), and also, what I think I will use him for in the future. I don't see myself using him in PvP anymore, unless I am desperate to win 1 or 2 more games at most and don't want to buy health packs. So his main use will be in PvE for me, to conserve health packs, rotate through my roster to get more use out of the whole roster. So we are on the same page here, but I was just pointing out what most people would perceive Sentry's new optimal build might be based on personal opinions.

On another note, in Starfall, Surgical Strike into Supernova would actually work decently. SS empties AI's red AP AND red tiles on board, so you still get the benefit of base Supernova damage (2310 to each character) to the team. If there is no more red tiles, no self-damage. Cascades from SS might bring in a few more red tiles, but self-damage from those few red tiles is gonna be far less than what was already on board. Only kink is turn-ending. But hopefully the game would have ended too.