Aside from it being very useful against survivors sentinel can’t do much, all the T1s have a clear and cut out job, and they have the tools to do them correctly. Meanwhile Sentinel, a “ranged” combat attacker can’t deal damage in range and has to get in melee range to land a shitty paralysis that doesn’t last long enough to guarantee any kill or cap. scattered spit is a mess of rng, and even then you have to get very close to a marine that can melt your hp in seconds to use it. It’s damage is pitiful, being the same as drone, meaning even if you get some slashes in you won’t be doing much. It’s supposed to be “Support” but it’s abilities are very limited to do actually anything useful.
Sentinel is good at setting up the other castes, alongside being able to drain stims. Besides that, eh.
Shotgun spit > throw hugger
Bullying dudes in external webbing ect
All spits are blocked by other xenos so you can’t even do that.
Hugger activation takes ages.
You hit someone with neuro and they die to other xenos with minimal fanfare.
It’s very effective, if I am a marine and get hit by a neuro even once while fighting other xenos I stand a good chance of death or capture
Right boys, maybe grab a cup of coffee or hot chocolate, here’s my annual discourse\rant into the history of the sentinel.
So, historically sentinel came in 2 variations. The normal one had a weaker queen-like neuro and nothing else. It took a few hits to fully incapacitate a marine, but decent players could cap newbie 'rines reliably with it. Then there was a scatter shotgun sentinel. Now that was a real terror, because it could cap a marine in a few seconds and was one of the strongest T1s. But it was sort of a fair fight too, in a way, particularly against veteran marines who knew how to manage distance, use LRB, slugs and the dreaded double buck.
At some point, one of the most aggressively suicidal players on the server went “wait a minute, I’m robust and it’s just not fair that sentinels keep capping me 1v1”. So he recoded the sentinel, taking a good care to make it all but useless. After that there were some slight attempts to buff it, but it mostly stayed in the same spot of mostly being a noob trap caste.
I’ve reset my countdown timer, gonna conserve my bile and REEEE really loudly about this next year, have a nice day everyone.
you scatterspit to start the engagement for other castes, you scatterspit to end the engagement for other castes, neuro slash makes you suprisingly quite deadly in 1v1 if you can survive getting shot with your non existent armor and mobility, more evil 1v1 combo is teaming up with a facehugger/carrier and hugging neuro stunned marines. slow spit also good in 1v1 and overall when chasing marines, i recon it is great for light armor meta. and sentinel drains stims.
why not just go defender with it massive armor? well defender is more of a brawler lacking support capabilities. sentinel can definetely play as a support with scatterspit to support your t3s and t2.