ever since sent lost her job at the nest, she’s received mostly just nerfs, to the point now where a sent capping an uninjured marine completely solo is seen as an achievement.
slowing spit is just ass as part of sentinel’s toolkit, you have to stick your neck out and hit a target accurately to slow them a little bit for a couple of seconds. What happened to the old neuro spit that proggresively slowed, then full stunned hosts the more you hit them? you could reliably cap a solo host that didnt run off to its friends and now you cant do shit. At the very least let the sentinel hold a hugger in its hands, that would be something.
Agreed yeah, sents main current job is just being a “counter” to no armor folks, but really its kind of irrelevant even with that.
People just dont like the effects of being stunned at all, no one does, but its also hard to balance a caste like that since realistically in a 1v1 it should be a free cap every time, atleast on weeds or against someone wounded, buuut you make it too strong and caps come too easy for a t.
Sentinel literally means guardian and previously they would be the best hive watchers as expected of them. A rework of the sent could have it more like that again, no neuro just acid spits, some way of getting more information/defending the hive from flanks, maybe vision like a boiler, maybe something placeable that gives info or something that interacts with forward cap holds as is currently pretty meta.
Then you could move the neuro stuff over to the spitter, and in turn tune it up since a t2 is fine to be stronger, maybe dumb it into a strain idk but t2s are reliably able to 1v1 nearly everywhere, and maybe a neruo specialist there wouldnt be terrible instead of on a t1.
Just revert current and return to last sentinel where it was just the slow into stun sentinel with the scattered spitter strain. That was the best version and now turned into a shadow of its former self, and literally worse in every way
People will cope hard, especially marines with saying that sentinel is in a good place right now.
As someone who played Sentinel without evoing in order to learn the current version of sentinel, no, it’s not viable.
Off-weed sentinel relies HEAVILY on finding single marine stragglers and missing your scatterspit is basically a guranteed death sentence, it doesn’t help that your scatter is short range as well, so backlining is more or less a near suicidal task.
Frontlining is also unviable as your para slash will trigger way too late, your slow spits get blocked by friendly xenos ( Something that makes front sentinel absolutely atrocious as you can’t even support other xenos by slowing a priority target ) and your scatterspit is at best a 1 second knockdown and at worst, not even that as marines will pat each other back up.
I very much agree. I am primarily a T1 player, Runner is my most played caste followed by Drone and Defender.
Sentinel is my least played T1 but every now and then I convince myself I should try and get into it and play it more, and every time I come to the same conclusion that it is just ass compared to the other T1s.
People will say it’s good at capping solo marines, but Runner can do so as well much more effectively and has the speed to better search the map for lone marines and escape when discovered in the backlines, and doesn’t have to worry about plasma. Even drone is arguably better at 1v1 capping because there’s the chance of getting a 2 tap.
People will say it’s good at supporting other castes but I think Drone, Defender and even Runner all offer support in better ways. Drone’s support benefits are numerous and obvious. Defender is very effective at tanking bullets and stunning with tail swipe which really shine when together with allies. Runner can drag away and tackle anyone hit with a big stun like queen screech or lurker pounce, converting those stuns into easy caps. Meanwhile what support does Sentinel provide? A micro-stun that is worse than defender tail swipe and misses half the time, a slow that is hard to even land because the spit is blocked by allies, and paralyzing slash that gives marines all the time in the world to move back to their friends before the stun kicks in? If you really want to support allies just play Drone.
As a more minor thing, thematically it feels like acid should be one of the advantages of Sentinel but it is worse than drone in this regard because it’s acid is the same strength yet sentinel has lower plasma and no recovery pheros. So even if you just want to melt things you’re better off playing Drone.
Another thing I’ve noticed is it is so easy to die out of nowhere as sentinel because you are both squishy and slow. Technically Drone is just as squishy but at least they can give themselves frenzy pheros. Sentinel has to get close to reliably use scatter spit or to land paralyzing slash and sometimes all it takes is one guy with a high DPS gun and you are just dead.
And just to make it even more clear, I am only comparing Sentinel to T1s here. I’ve seen people before say “It’s a T1 it’s supposed to be weak” but the other T1s in the game are really good at doing the things they are supposed to do. It’s only Sentinel that feels borderline useless.
its a poorly designed caste and probably wont ever be in a good place
personally i dont think sent should be a support class and should have a kit that benefits itself damage/survability wise while still centered around cc. pure cc will always be impossible to balance
back before perma nesting it was really important to have either a sentinel or warrior in the hive at all times as they could reliably stop any escape. It was basically closer to playing MP than to playing xenos lmao
I wonder if it would be better if the sentinel’s neuro and scattered spit applied some debuff like confusion, or slowing down interactions, or brain damage, as this is a neurotoxin you’d like it would affect the marine’s brain somehow.
I think sent over the board feel it’s half baked. It’s amazing against survs it really shine there, but make a caste depending on if the enemy wear armor or not is a weird direction. Was not like that before, so yeah.
As marine I have honestly never feard sents. I have maby only 600h on pfc, but never in those times I had thought sent have ever been a issue to deal with compared to any other t1’s.
Add something to make sent less of a burden from the hive is maby remove plasma pool from it. Speed it more way up more since it now forced into close range than a long range mob control it used to be.
This is on purpose and correct design to prevent castes with cc-heavy kits from having good tackles. capturing should not be as easy as throwing an ability out and getting a few free tackles and then dragging away
This results in a poorly balanced caste since its inhibited by the above and other design requirements
I was just struck with inspiration on how to make sentinel great at capping again
slowing spit applies a “neuro shock” debuff to a marine, up to three times, and it decays every 5 seconds or so, each stack of neuro shock reduces the amount of disarms needed to cap a marine and increases the length of being tackled. 1 stack reduces the amount of tackles by 2, 2 stacks increases it by 4, 3 stacks makes it just about guaranteed that they are gonna get tackled. Paralysing slash instead of how it works now, applies 2 stacks. Neuro shock wears off faster with IA in the system
you could increase the amount of tackles required for sent to like 5/6 and I think it would still be balanced with this change, as well they are still squishy so para slash is a risk/reward in group fights
lurker with a runner can let the runner tackle the marine and drag away, same thing with a lurker being lucky enough. Works great at the backline
warrior with lunging, then flinging them deeper into xenos lines and into tackling, if the marine is alone the warrior can easily capture, if enough xenos around they can trap and block bullets for the warrior.
defender and drone just tackling twice, same with warrior, just require help and can be done solo or easily
Runner(or any xeno) + screech combo, requires little coordination, just need to sponge bullets for the xeno dragging
Yes, they require teamwork and doesnt really require that much effort, but heres the issue, none of the sentinels abilities makes them work with teamwork, doesnt excel in the backline, doesnt work at the frontline. The only use case of sentinel being able to capture if a marine is truly solo, and the sentinel is on weeds. This would be great if the sentinel can do anything in the backline but its reliance on plasma makes it utterly useless in that case due to lack of weeds.
The sentinel has really shitty capture mechanics and its only thing it can do at the frontline(where theres a lot of marines) are the micro stun, and thats it, at the backline it cant even excel without having a drone, but this leaves them extremely vulnerable to any 2-3 marine group since its paralyzing slash is basically nullified by a marine shaking them up. The only time I can see this work is if the 2 marines somehow are extremely terrible and cant even keep their distance or work together.
I feel that would be nothing burger. Cause 90% of caps happen when the marines is fully helplees anyway. You dont see xenos chargeing out and tackle spaming marines.
What happens is the marines get warroir grabbed, screed runner capped, or lurker jumped. In all these situations the marines already stunned instantly. Plus even if you did get full stack on a marine to where 1 tackle would work. Marines have these things called guns so unless the marines is alone his buddies will jsut shoot whoever trys to cap him.
Plus if the marines is alone play runner who can tackle stun instantly and does not require me to shoot them 5 times before. You can’t solo cap as you are too slow and weak to do much again more thne one person at a time.
It’s like a 5-10 second slow or w/e. It’s pretty huge and very situationally strong, but it’s hard to actually survive as sentinel into those situations if your allies dont support you and you have no allies to support (because most allies are not actively trying to work together in this game)