is it me or is tech armor almost worthless?
in ME2 techarmor maxed you got effectively +125% shields (+75% then another 50% on shields destroyed) with no downside to having armor on
in ME3, looks like it maxes out at 40% damage resistance with the right upgrades (sacrifing the recharge boost)
OK, by itself not as good as ME2 in total but not bad,
BUT
There is a penalty to power recharge time of 80% of having the armor on! That just seems way too high a price to me, for just 40% damage protection.
Alternatively, you can have 10% less damage protection for 30% power recharge times bonus (effective 50% power recharge penalty).
That doesnt seem like a good tradeoff to me. The damage boost ability of +20% damage seems pointless if you have an 80% or 50% recharge speed penalty as you reduce your damage output with armor on.
You do get the benefit of damage resistance but I would think a sentinel would always want to be using powers as often as possible, given that classes like soldier have more weapon appropriate abilities when using guns.
Am I missing something here?
I have been thinking about this a lot actually, as I was/am a diehard Sentinel player in ME2 (I think it is far and away the best class in the game). Obviously coming into this demo I wanted to feel the same way. I've played about 10 hours of coop on PS3, 6 on 360, and 2 on PC.
I don't feel the same way.
Right now the Sentinel for me is the second weakest class in multiplayer and the most disappointing (even though I still enjoy playing it) just ahead of the Infiltrator (side note here: I realize the Infiltrator is actually a very powerful class and can do ridiculous damage, but I simply don't like or enjoy the mechanics).
Tech Armor, in particular, has been unbelievably nerfed. It gets essentially a free "cast" when you first charge the shield, but the overall damage reduction is vastly inferior. The pulse, even fully upgraded, from "Activating" the armor, is laughable and almost useless against armored/shield/barrier enemies on silver and gold-and I have yet to even get a single kill on an unarmored opponent on bronze with it. Activating it then triggers a 7 second plus cooldown!
The language of the 80% penalty is a little obtuse to me; it's not clear if it slows your powers down from a base of 100% to 80% (this is what I think it does) or actually slows them down a full 80% (which would be even more absurd).
Looking at the human sentinel for example, I get Cryo Blast (useful, but only situationally), warp (very powerful upgraded, longish cooldown, not much damage against shields) and a basically useless primary ability in Tech Armor (The turian sentinel has overload instead of Cryo Blast, which is a huge upgrade for silver/gold, but still).
Just compare the primary power full upgraded of the other classes (I can't find an article that breaks them all down, unfortunately) but it is substantially worse than fully upgraded singularity, adrenaline rush, carnage, combat drone, tactical cloak, or charge. The only one I can think of that is worse is the engineer turret that the Quarian gets.
After leveling nearly every class in the game to the teens, I just cannot see any role the Sentinel does better than any other class, while in ME2 (of course from a SP perspective) the Sentinel did nearly everything the non-hybrid classes did, better. I would rather play an adept to have full biotics, an engineer for pure tech, a soldier for damage mitigation. I truly don't see where the Sentinel fits in besides having the most badass heavy melee in the game with dual omni blades.
I went from knowing my level 30 sentinel import would be my first SP playthrough to seriously doubting it.
