Why does the Brigand node exist? It gives you armour & protections per point of dex, which sounds nice & it’d be great if it were per point of strength or attunement, but it suffers from one fatal flaw.
Sentinel’s generally don’t use dex.
A Void Knight/Forge Guard is probably stacking either Strenght or Attunement depending on whether they are melee or caster, but they would at least get some dodge out of it. Paladins on the other hand are likely to have maxxed the Shield Wall node & have -100% dodge, thereby getting zero dodge.
The only two skills that are affected by dodge are Shield & Hammer Throw and even then they are still best served by taking Strength or Attunement.
It would be nice if the Brigand node gave armour & protections per point of Strength and Attunement (since it would then benefit both melee & casters as well as the few Throwing Attack users).
It’s possible that once they introduce rogue with more throwing/ranged stuff that there might be alternatives in place for ranged sentinels using Dex. No idea. But if not that Dex node has always felt out off place to me.
But how? I think the only way they could do that is to have a weapon base that buffs Throwing Attacks as an implicit somehow and adds flat dex (like some Catalysts add Int), and even then, Brigand only gives 5 armour/protections. Is one skill point worth 10-40 armour/protections?
Dex in general just has no place in a Sentinel build (waiting for @boardman21 to do a dex-stacking Throwing Attack build).
Oh, I agree, just throwing (see what I did there) some of the unknown parameters we may not understand. Even if there are other plans for something like a stronger throwing base Sentinel I think it would be better to make it Attunement instead of Dex. At least Attunement is used in other builds. I think Strength or both Attunement/Strength might make it too strong?
Also, I’m not at my gaming computer but isn’t there some higher passive nodes in paladin that do something with Dex? For some reason that’s sticking in my memory but it may be another mastery all together and I’m just faulty.
I suggested both, since attributes take up prefix slots & there’s a lot of other good stuff you can put in them, so there’s a limit to the number of prefixes you’ll likely allocate to an attribute which will limit the amount of benefit you get from Brigand. You’ll probably have around 20-40 strength &/or attunement which would be at most 200 to all armour & protections which might give you another 5% damage mitigation and you’d have to keep Lunging every 4 seconds to keep it up (which isn’t much of a problem, unless you’re on a boss which doesn’t respond well to lunges).
No. The Forge Guard has Weapon Mastery that gives +1 dex & +5% increased stun chance per point (max 10) but that’s the entire amount of dex that you can get from any Sentinel passive tree.
Strength, however, you can get from Juggernaut (Sentinel, max 10), Prime Fighter (Forge Guard, max 5) & Rahyeh’s Strength (Paladin, max 8). Attunement you can get from Umbral Attunement (VK, max 10), Prime Fighter (Forge Guard, max 5), Iron Attunement (Forge Guard, max 5), Defiance (Paladin, max 8) & Inner Flame (Paladin, max 8).
And yeah, given how little other DEX support there is they’d probably have to rework a number of passives (which I guess is possible) to provide additional benefit from DEX. If they don’t intend to do that then the Brigand node is definitely some sort of weird outlier.
