Thoughts on Carrier being 'still on top'

[-Amaterasu-]

1 hour ago, DoomFruit said:

That depends. If you take a hit dealing 500 blast damage, your carrier's going to take less health damage than your helios because of the additional armour. But your wyrm prime will take no health damage at all, because it has 1125 shields.

Which only furthers my point, Wyrm Prime can actually compete with carrier because it has similar survivability, other standard sents can't be compared to that though and then the new problem arises of Wyrm's availability effectively leaving Carrier Prime unchallenged.

If we were to get more Prime/Wraith/Vandal sents with comparable stats I think we would see a lot more variety in sentinel usage, the problem isn't that they have bad stats (They really don't they're pretty well balanced) or abilities (They have great variety and for the most part are a lot more useful than an ammo mutation that you probably don't need anyway) the problem is the 2 prime sents we have right now (one of which is vaulted) have far superior stats that make all other sents look bad. Wyrm Prime is one of my most used sents however carrier's Sweeper Prime does a lot more damage which I think overall makes it more desireable than Wyrm (aside from the fact you can't farm it anymore).

Edited October 7, 2016 by -Amaterasu-

[Golmihr]

6 minutes ago, -Amaterasu- said:

Wyrm Prime is one of my most used sents however carrier's Sweeper Prime does a lot more damage which I think overall makes it more desireable than Wyrm (aside from the fact you can't farm it anymore).

You can swap the weapons between the sentinels. The only exception is Helios's weapon.

[-Amaterasu-]

Just now, Golmihr said:

You can swap the weapons between the sentinels. The only exception is Helios's weapon.

Sweper Prime is still a driving factor to build carrier in the first place (once you have it you're probably going to use it), even if you swap the weapons their precepts are made with their own weapon ranges in mind so you'd probably get the best results with carrier which only engages close enemies.

and then we come back to the argument that carrier has more EHP than any currently available sentinel, why even bother putting its weapon on something that will die from a bombard when you can just keep carrier and have it with you until the end of the mission?

[Golmihr]

12 minutes ago, -Amaterasu- said:

Sweper Prime is still a driving factor to build carrier in the first place (once you have it you're probably going to use it), even if you swap the weapons their precepts are made with their own weapon ranges in mind so you'd probably get the best results with carrier which only engages close enemies.

and then we come back to the argument that carrier has more EHP than any currently available sentinel, why even bother putting its weapon on something that will die from a bombard when you can just keep carrier and have it with you until the end of the mission?

So what you meant was that you wanted sweeper primes damage with a wyrm weapons range? The Carrier doesn't have any exclusive mods that buff its gun so I'm sure it will work just as fine on a wyrm. The only negative effect I can see would be if you set it's attack priority high and it starts trying to target enemies that is out of range while it could be doing other stuff. Edit: As far as I have seen they give priority to targets that are closer.

Edited October 7, 2016 by Golmihr

[Aerensiniac]

12 hours ago, --Q--Voltage said:

if we just buff the eHP of half the sentinels then carrier won't be on top. Sorties results in a one shot to even carrier sometimes 

Its just my personal opinion, but i disagree...

Helios: scans. An arbitrary feature. It's mark weakspot mod would make it considerably more of a choice if it were not for the extreme delay on, some times simply refusing to mark enemies. Tested it. Nowhere near a level that could be considered useful.

Djinn: is situational on lower levels, kinda compliments melee builds, but is pretty much suicidal in the 100+ level region.

Shade: is a reliable utility, but mostly pointless. 99% of the time you will kill everything before they get even near activation range and there is also the operator focus tree which lets you pretty much permanently stay in invisibility if you are using melee. Functionally shade is a good pick, but pretty optional.

Dethcube: varying amounts of dps. Nice on low levels, meh on high, but ultimately its just dps. My warframe exists for that purpose.

Diriga: Spectacularly under powered abilities. When i first read it, it seemed like a good choice. When i saw its abilities on the field however, i just seen another example of "balance it till its useless".

Finally the wyrm: Ragdolling enemies... maybe. Personally it just annoyed me that my targets would suddenly jump away from me, but at least this one works. Still kinda meager and optional.

 

 

And then there is the carrier which opens boxes for you and passively converts ammo with a rate of a lvl 3 conversion mod. Also wont die from enemies breathing in its general direction.

[Skaleek]

Doesnt matter if Carrier is "on top", only matters about diversity of sentinels used. So if they can bring carrier down to 50% use and maybe bring shade up to 10% and djinn up to 10%, etc etc. I think they would consider it a major victory. Main problem was that carrier was THE sentinel. There will always be a most popular sentinel (Okay there could be a tie but seriously) why do we have to dethrone them? 

That said. Some changes need to be made to sentinel survivability. I want to see Regen actually give passive regen to sentinels instead of the crappy mod it is now. I also would love to see a way to revive our sentinels, or just have revive be a cd on how long the sentinel is down. For example: Revive max rank: Revives sentinel after 120s of being dead.

The "tank" sentinels, i think thats Wyrm or Djinn (Sorry im getting old its been a while), need more love too. Stats need to be reworked but we all know how long it takes to get DE to pull the trigger on changing stats.

Edited October 7, 2016 by Skaleek

[Sloan441]

I suspect a Dethcube Prime might very well unseat the Carrier at this point in time. It would for me.

The main reasons I use the Carrier (specifically Carrier Prime) are vacuum (no longer an issue), its toughness, and it matches the prime warframes. What keeps me using it at present is habit, the previously mentioned aesthetics, and Ammo Block (or whatever it's called). The latter is mostly a function of what weapon I'm using, but since I largely tend to autotrigger primaries, it's very useful.

Going forward from this patch, I will be using more sentinels, but warframe loadouts need to be reconfigured and the three sentinels I'm most interested in all will require forma both for themselves and their weapons. This will require more time and I'll eventually get it done, but until then Carrier Prime will reign supreme as a companion.

[Insizer]

The vacuum change makes the other sentinels more viable, which is very good, but the other sentinels also need help on their own.

[junkTzu]

This seems to be a good first step.  The general consensus was that carrier was the most used because of vacuum.  Now all the sentinels have vacuum so in a few weeks they can check the usage stats and see where things line up.  If it's obvious that carrier is still the most used then they'll probably take a look at balancing the other sentinels to make them more competitive.  Then they'll (hopefully) move on to kubrows and kavats.

[-Amaterasu-]

31 minutes ago, Golmihr said:

So what you meant was that you wanted sweeper primes damage with a wyrm weapons range? The Carrier doesn't have any exclusive mods that buff its gun so I'm sure it will work just as fine on a wyrm. The only negative effect I can see would be if you set it's attack priority high and it starts trying to target enemies that is out of range while it could be doing other stuff. Edit: As far as I have seen they give priority to targets that are closer.

No, what I meant was sweeper does more damage than any other sentinel weapon which is a good reason to build a Carrier Prime alone. Wyrm Prime is effectively out of the equation since it is now vaulted but I think sent weapons should have, if not raw damage more utility. What I'd like to see is weapons that can compete with Prime Sweeper which has more damage than any other sent weapon and good status chance. Wyrm's Prime Laser Rifle can have a crit build and I think that's a good thing to have variety but I'd also like to see some other sents get buffs to things like crit/status chance so they can compete in their own way.

It doesn't necesarily need to be a raw damage buff but I think DE should seriously consider buffing sents in the form of Prime/Wraith/Vandal versions of what we have and giving their weapons vaiable alternatives since right now even the ones with good status and crit (Like the Vulklok) suffer from poor fire rate / damage per shot making them not worth using compared to Sweeper Prime. I think part of the variety issue is the association of one sentinel with their weapons and their inability to outpreform Carrier's Sweeper even if they can change weapons freely, a Sweeper Prime is probably going to preform better equiped to a carrier than to a Diriga.