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State of (unartied) Sentinel for PvP
I just came back from a several year break, and last time I played sent seriously was right before/after axe stun got deleted. Back then the class was enormously fun, because your main attack being at ~1 second in speed while doing damage, afflictions, and limb damage allowed for a ton of different routes to take.
Now, sent's a lot more straight-forward. Worst of all, it's incredibly SLOW. Axing is like 1.8 seconds or something, and the doublethrust family of attacks are all just under 3 seconds with default weapons. This already takes out a lot of the appeal of the class, but it's still afflictions + limb damage so I can deal.
What I'm wondering is how viable the class even is. I only care about top tier combat since that's what's always mattered to me. The affliction rate is actually really good if you're including the animals, but the afflictions you can give are really limited. Not being able to pair some key affs together makes the speed a lot less useful, and the low attack speed makes limb breaking a lot less powerful than it was before, too. Arties being mandatory to being faster when before you could just get a good forged axe is a huge turn-off too.
The point: Is sentinel worth sticking with, especially without arties? I mean, I could get arties eventually, but I don't want to have to get them. What makes a class for me is flexibility to be creative with its offense, utility/mobility, ability to hunt people who aren't going to try and stick around for mark contracts, group skirmishing power, and meaningful raid contribution rather than standing around waiting while everyone else does the work. The utility is still there, but I'm not sold on the others.
Obviously I don't really need anyone to feed me strategies since I can do that on my own, but I'd rather not spend a dozen hours figuring out the new class and coding an offense only to conclude I should just switch class to something that better suits my needs. I'm considering sylvan as an alternative, but I don't know much about their state after their rework, either. They never really had the mobility/utility/hunting power I liked back then. I also considered just going back serp, but I've already done that and slightly prefer classes that can do limb damage these days.
Now, sent's a lot more straight-forward. Worst of all, it's incredibly SLOW. Axing is like 1.8 seconds or something, and the doublethrust family of attacks are all just under 3 seconds with default weapons. This already takes out a lot of the appeal of the class, but it's still afflictions + limb damage so I can deal.
What I'm wondering is how viable the class even is. I only care about top tier combat since that's what's always mattered to me. The affliction rate is actually really good if you're including the animals, but the afflictions you can give are really limited. Not being able to pair some key affs together makes the speed a lot less useful, and the low attack speed makes limb breaking a lot less powerful than it was before, too. Arties being mandatory to being faster when before you could just get a good forged axe is a huge turn-off too.
The point: Is sentinel worth sticking with, especially without arties? I mean, I could get arties eventually, but I don't want to have to get them. What makes a class for me is flexibility to be creative with its offense, utility/mobility, ability to hunt people who aren't going to try and stick around for mark contracts, group skirmishing power, and meaningful raid contribution rather than standing around waiting while everyone else does the work. The utility is still there, but I'm not sold on the others.
Obviously I don't really need anyone to feed me strategies since I can do that on my own, but I'd rather not spend a dozen hours figuring out the new class and coding an offense only to conclude I should just switch class to something that better suits my needs. I'm considering sylvan as an alternative, but I don't know much about their state after their rework, either. They never really had the mobility/utility/hunting power I liked back then. I also considered just going back serp, but I've already done that and slightly prefer classes that can do limb damage these days.
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Comments
Paging @Seftin
Skullbash kill is easy enough.
Petrify is easy enough with a little coding.
That jaguar instakill is fairly easy with good timing.
Just get some levels for more health and you're good to go.
Petrify is easily avoidable if you don't cure badly, though prioritizing it does open you up to other things in theory. Not sure how practical it is to abuse that yet.
The jaguar one I haven't even looked at much, admittedly.
Three affs every balance is obviously good, but not if you can't really combo the important affs. If I give you one important aff and two useless ones every balance, it's hardly very useful.
Especially when going for Petrify, 3 non-essential affs paired with your 3 needed affs, you're about to hit the 4th and they touch tree. Throwaway afflictions are super useful!
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
Would not play.
Skullbash is 45% damage against unarmored opponents at 15 str, 20% damage against a knight, with the majority of people it is borderline impossible to pull off dismember if they manage their sip well, you can't double skullbash in a dual leg break even with an artie handaxe and still pull off a dismember (required to get them below 65% health - the minimum for truss)
Petrify is shockingly easy to pull off because everyone has pretty shit priorities v sentinel right now. If they changed their management to prio ash/impatience they can completely negate petrify whilst also avoiding a lock in every sense of the manner without limb breaks involved which leads me on to the next point.
Entities are horrible to manage, factoring in limb breaking into the already incredibly slow class (yes - incredibly slow compared to old sentinel) and you're upwards on 36 aliases for management of each entity + limb target from doublestrike alone.
A single attack consists of - enrage summoned entity, doublestrike target, summon new entity in one balance. If your opponent cures whatever the previous entity hit with, you can't reafflict that until you have now used up your currently summoned entity - think Occultist having to switch between having each of their entities out on a balance after each attack and you have a rough idea of what its like.
If you are max str lvl 3 spear lvl 3 axe sentinel I would say its an ok class, pretty avoidable to be honest but AMAZING group stuff. This is all preliminary though, I have to really tap into it. So far I'm on my 6 rendition of how to handle entities and actually find them useful beyond just having raven out and switching between wolf/butterfly enrage for petrify. As it stands I wouldn't even bother trying for dismember, 65% minimum for a rattle to get at truss, can't be done off a double skullbash, good luck getting your opponent below 65% and keeping them there for the 3 seconds your off balance before you can then rattle/truss them, not to mention the fact that if you change your priority to just keep blindness up on being prone, you wont get rattled in the first place as you have to be transfixed.
Changes I would make is speed up unartied sentinel as its incredibly slow, nerf skullbash damage at max str, increase damage at lower strength, reduce balance time on unartied handaxe (keep artied the same) change entity management.
Would not play unartied.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE as I realise this is incredibly negative. I like the flavor of the class, the issues I have right now I will probably over come when I settle on a decent way to manage things, but the whole class seems incredibly clunky/slow.
The idea of it is lovely, the utility and range of stuff is pretty cool, but again like old sentinel it feels like a fucked up hybrid, which would be ok if it felt more viable in actual 1v1 fighting. Group it dominates, being incredibly fun and variable. Grab/traps/handaxe/doublestrike is amazingly fun. With a few tweaks the class could be amazingly awesomely monsterously strong, right now it just feels I'm taking advantage of people till they figure out how to avoid it. I enjoy the idea of enraging the animals for different effects, would change it to 1 passive animal out (which you can't enrage whilst its summoned) and then being able to enrage any of the others - balanceable by enrage having its own class cool down if used without the sentinel attacking. You can potentially lock (again if your opponent is an idiot) off a single break which is pretty funny. Rebounding is annoying as hell but then we have handaxe for that, right..?
TL/DR, most people have shit prios right now therefore easy petrify, dismember lolworthy in combat due to damage needed for truss, overall class fun but needs changes to become truly viable (speed increase for unartied/change how ents are managed)
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First off I definitely think Sentinel is worth sticking with, it has a ton of room for fun and is incredibly versatile. I know it's entirely different now, it feels weird not throwing my 0.8s handaxes anymore but it's not all bad.
So, how much does one benefit from artefact weapons?
Handaxe:
Faster, more damage. Note that the scaling on these upgrades is wonky (you get 3 damage and 4 speed from lv0->lv1, very weak).
As you may know to-hit is almost totally negligible for sentinel handaxes since we never seem to miss.
So, as I mentioned earlier, diadem is AWESOME. This is because with a non-artefacct handaxe your throw speed will perfectly align with the EQ recovery from enraging an entity.
Without diadem it would be a total pain in the ass, but with it you lose absolutely nothing from enraging on every throw. Because of this, I don't feel like the handaxe is a huge upgrade for 1v1 but I will point out what it is most useful for.
Prep speed and less time between breaks! With an artefact handaxe you will greatly benefit in limb prep speed both from the increased weapon damage (often 1 less hit to break) and throwing speed, so you can forgo enraging entities in order to gain some very fast limb breaking times. This coincides with throw speed allowing you to for instance wait until an opponent uses bal/EQ, then break an arm and tripbreak a leg before they can recover for instance, something that may not be as easily done with an unartefacted axe.
Spear:
Artefact spears do not have any impact on the balance recovery or damage of skullbash, and at the very least do not impact the balance recovery of impale, wrench, drag, trip, and I THINK not ensnare but I didn't test it.
This means that if you buy an artie spear you are buying it almost exclusively for petrify (or gouge/lacerate if you wanna bleed people out). Now this IS a good purchase, but I don't feel it's necessary. As Seftin said about priorities, most people cure poorly and otherwise can completely avoid petrify while also opening themselves up for other punishments (the most used one probably being them not curing paralysis, which you can use to bypass parry). Of course however the speed is useful, less time between attacks is huge for afflictions and unartied could mean an entire attack sequence extra is needed, or maybe even two if you miss out on rebounding, it sucks and it might make or break some wins but it's not insufferable.
Now, if you are choosing to go without artefacts you can not sell yourself short. You mentioned having to go strength spec, go strength spec! Our strength scaling is fantastic and you will want every ounce of extra benefit you can muster. Sentinel hits a sort of damage wall against a lot of people, where they just get to this point where they feel almost unkillable. You will wanna get every drop of damage in you can get, passive wolf damage is huge if you're not using another entity then you can have him out getting some hits in. Sensitivity is HUGE, your raven can 100% guarantee at least one sensitive skullbash on almost every kill sequence. Sensitive skullbash fucking hurts, skullbash itself hits like a truck against -most- people but you will almost certainly find people to struggle against. Knights have never been unpopular and they're not gonna start. You can transfix people that prioritize blindness by enraging butterfly and ensnaring simultaneously, just be wary if you have to do this because it might give them just enough time for another sip which will definitely ruin your truss. Parry bypass is annoying but we gotta make due, we prep fast as hell and hit pretty hard, you can have fun with the class and succeed as long as you put the time in.
Entity management isn't so bad, you just have to make a system you are comfortable with. I change limb targets with TRL TLL and such, then use 'a' to throw handaxe for instance and I put modifiers on it for entities. 'ab' throws handaxes enrages butterfly and resummons butterfly. 'awl' enrages wolf summons lemming and orders lemming to attack target, for instance. Edit: forgot to mention I use function key macros to envenom axe/spear which may not work for some
Also forgot to mention the class has great unartied defense. Barkskin, kite/chainmail, combined with tons of paralysis, fitness and might, and last but not least noose traps which are the most fantastic defensive crutch ever
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Rom: Thanks, that's good input in addition to what seftin said. Like you said sent still has a lot of really fun things and good defense, so it's hard for me to ditch it that easily. On the other hand, if you agree on all its weaknesses I'm not sure whether those outdo the fun parts. Seftin mentioned class balance is a lot less sluggish than it used to be so maybe I'll just wait on classleads, but waiting for years like some classes had to in the past is definitely not something I'd be willing to do.