Right now with an iron sword they can 1hit a player in fully upgraded draconic armor, so them having much better gear or a config option to lower their damage would be nice

I can add a config option for that. For reference it is currently set to 3 and an enderman does 7. It would be cool to make them spawn with different sword types too, based on what their attack damage is set to.

a mod in my pack somehow is giving sentries 4096 damage, giving them complete control all throughout the lands

Wow, that would be intimidating, any idea which mod?

Scaling health has a scaling damage multiplier option, disabling that fixed the sentries damage

Awesome, thanks for letting me know. I will close this issue now that you figured out how to fix it.