Defense Curve for Sentinel from Gear

[Exiah]

I’ve played a lot of sentinel on hardcore since 1.0 (three level 100 toons, and two that are 80+), and continue to find myself in an awkward gear phase between getting to monoliths (~level 45) and getting to level 86 to be able to equip the best item bases. A big part of this is the importance of crit cap, which is generally solved at level 85/86 item bases. But once getting to monoliths, I find myself slapping on a Woven Flesh, and hardly improving my helm/chest/gloves/boots until level 86 because of how powerful those item bases are. This usually results in me running low armor until level 86 (e.g., running about 35% DR from armor from level 45 to 85, where it jumps to about 70% DR at level 86).

I think there are two issues that cause (at least in my experience) the defence curve for sentintel feeling like a large step-wise function and less of a smooth curve:

1. Crit cap isn’t easily solved before level 86 and puts a lot of pressure into using Woven Flesh for a long time. The difference between using Woven Flesh and a sentinel exalted body armor is quite significant. I’m aware of the crit avoidance blessing, but it conflicts with much more impactful blessings (e.g., all res, necrotic res, bleed). You could stack crit avoidance or reduced bonus crit damage on gear, but that would take a number of important affix slots to do so.
2. The difference in armor between level 85/86 item bases and other item bases is significant when adding helm+body+boots+gloves because they all come online around the same level. For example, you get 75 armor gloves at level 45, 80 armor gloves at level 64, and 211 armor gloves at level 86.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Consider buffing Woven Flesh, or maybe providing an “empowered” equivalent when you kill empowered Abomination so that the body armor slot can scale.
2. Provide higher ranges of crit avoidance/reduced bonus crit damage affixes (T5 crit avoidance is 25%-37%, which means you need 3-4 T5 crit avoidance affixes).
3. Add crit avoidance to a lower level item base.
4. Smooth base armor values between level 45 and 86.
5. Adjust minimum level requirements such that the best item bases become available at different levels and not all at once (e.g., level 76 gloves, level 79 helm, level 82 boots, level 86 body).

Thanks for considering my feedback,
Exiah

[R1ng0]

Completely agree. I usually solve that by running normal monos with 50 corruption. This league was the first time I could move from normal to empowered monos. I died a lot though initially.

What concerns me even more is that DoT mitigation is bound to certain bases which locks the Sentinel out of using uniques for quite a number of item slots, which feels pretty frustrating.