Zem

The point of this sort of thread is usually to justify or make the case to the players and the devs that something should be done. Or.. if you disagree, that something shouldn't be done.

What I mean is... I don't think it's that useful to look at the trend from as early as creation or even the first few levels that take people just a couple hours to get through. Just throw that out and look at people who actually seem to be playing the character. At the very least this might throw out a few mules or test characters made as Blasters simply because they were the first on the list.

Really? You have only to notice that bosses have 6x the hit points of minions and 3x the hit points of LTs to realize the most efficient way to damage them is NOT with AoEs, but with single-target attacks. At least not when they belong to spawns that contain a mix of minions, LTs, and bosses. And since people like to go on about how fast spawns die in their steamroller teams, BURST single-target damage would seem to be best of all to complement a team that already has AoE in abundance.

You don't need a Stalker to do burst ST damage, but a Stalker CAN do burst ST damage and do it quite well.

Yeah, but that's more of a commentary on the wrongness of Fulcrum Shift than of Stalkers.

It's possible. But even that aside the creation rate isn't all that useful, in my opinion. If you want to know what people actually think of Blasters, just look at how many appear to be getting played at each level. The numbers initially created or even played in the first handful of levels.... just aren't that useful. Who cares how many get created initially as long as a healthy number are still playing at level 20, 30, 40, etc? What would be the problem? The AT looks TOO attractive? Is that a real problem?

He's confused about the current modifiers. Tankers are 0.8, not 0.9. Stalkers are 1.0, not 0.9. Also Bruising is only coming from the tanker's secondary tier 1 ST attack power so it's not likely boosting any of his (or anyone else's) AoE attacks by much... and it's only AoEs that Tankers could possibly challenge a Stalker on for damage. And then not EVERY Stalker.

Not in so many words. Now that you've said it I went back and looked again and I see where you said "...the first numerical anything I did was a population analysis" which would imply that yes, it was back near the beginning of the game. I know I missed that and it seems A_F did as well since he's talking about 30% like it's the current rate and that Blasters then drop to 15% played across all levels, which can't be true... and isn't.

Thanks for clearing that up.

This doesn't make a lot of sense actually. Seismic Smash does not do more damage than an Assassin Strike. Even at full fury. You aren't coming even close to one-shotting a red LT (unless by "mob" there you meant "minion") without a lot of +dmg from a teammate, in which case the Stalker is also doing that much more damage and easily one-shotting the orange or even red LT.

Not saying the Brute doesn't outpace the Stalker. Probably does. But your comparison here is a little bit exaggerated. Sounds like you're comparing a Brute at full fury with a pocket Kin to a solo Stalker. Fury's good... but it's not that good.

But you're not using BaB's numbers because BaB's numbers say that Blasters are created at 16% of all ATs and then drop to 14% active over the same period of time. So if the 30% came from Arcana in this thread, where did the 15% come from? I'm just finding it rather unbelievable that in a game with 10 standard ATs and 4 EATs (which admittedly not everyone has access to) that nearly 1/3 of people are starting Blasters and then half are dumping them. Unless that 30% number includes a lot of first timers who just picked the first AT on the list to get their controls set and familiarize with the game in Outbreak before deleting and remaking their REAL choice... I don't see how the 30% figure can be reconciled with BaB's numbers.

I'd be curious to know the actual log-in numbers at level 50 for all ATs. Has anything like that been posted recently?

I'm a little confused about this 30% creation rate number. I see the post where Arcana mentions it in this thread and yes she does say "of all characters" but I don't see how this squares with the data from BaB in Arcana's AT Popularity Analysis post. There the table that BaB gave us for "Archetypes created since Issue 12" shows Blasters at 16% of the total, not 30%. It's close to 30% of all heroes but not all characters, period.

What am I missing?

We also have some mention in this thread of the Issue 19 publicity stats (which I cannot find a link to right now, anyone have it?). The assertion is that Blasters are still something like #3 most popular even at level 50. Whatever the actual number is, that's not an indication of an AT that nobody likes. 3rd out of 14?

In a game with 14 ATs, a 15% rating is bad? I'm not sure how that works out to a conclusion of "hates the implementation". Maybe it's just that Blasters seem the most straight-forward or stereotypical choice for a comic book genre game and as people get more experience they branch out to the other archetypes... and yet while doing so a respectable 15% continue to play Blasters.

In the 2009 data from BaB that 15% was the highest of any of the other ATs. If they have since slid to even third place they are most certainly NOT hurting for players. I haven't seen you explain this in any convincing way except to suggest that you have four blasters of your own that you only use for marketeering.

I hardly think there's a large population of Blaster-marketeers out there to explain the ATs apparent popularity. That would be a bit of a stretch.

No, sometimes opinion is more important than fact. Just because you are in possession of a fact doesn't mean it has anything to do with the conclusion you're drawing from it. You're forgetting this is a game and the purpose of any game is to entertain. Actually, the purpose is to make money, but it does so by entertaining so I'm calling it the same thing.

People certainly seem to find Blasters entertaining enough to play in quite respectable numbers. Why? Who knows. If you're right and they are under-performing then the only conclusion is that people don't actually care about performance in the same way that you do. So why fix them when you could be addressing things your customers actually DO seem to have a problem with?

It's hardly breaking news that Stalkers work better with defense than resistance. You don't need to wish me luck doing this on a resistance based stalker when I have never and probably will never play one.

Incarnate trials are particularly bad for Stalkers. If the stuff isn't auto-hit outright, in many cases it might as well be due to level differences (assuming you are not +3 shifted already) and/or to-hit buffs. I'd say the devs specifically went out of their way to hose anyone that relies on soft-cap defense by pushing the bar up a lot higher.

That said, the Lambda and BAF trials at least aren't quite as bad. I use AS quite a lot there provided the league has someone handling adds during the AV fights.

Before we go off the deep end about the combo points in AS, maybe I am just not understanding how this whole combo system is going to work but isn't it going to be relatively easy to get 3 combo points with the other builder attacks? If you're a fan of just scrapping normal attacks, I doubt you'll be hurting for combo points. Unless they are just a lot harder to build than I think they are. I haven't exactly been following every scrap of info about the new powersets.

I'm not aware of any hard limit other than recharge time. Right out of the box, Caltrops has a 45s recharge and lasts for 45s, so you can have one out at all times with no enhancements. Any recharge either global or slotting enhancements, will at least briefly allow for two at a time. Get to +100% recharge and you can have two out permanently... etc. Four at the recharge cap, not that I've ever tried it.

City of Data seems to think so.

That depends. Are the points tied to an AS critical or any hit with AS, even outside of Hide? If the latter, then it might well be worth using AS outside of Hide. Not the best DPA but if it comes with 3 combo points and you're not currently the focus of a lot of aggro, why not?

At the time, buffing Assassin Strike wasn't an option. Power effects couldn't be separated between PvE and PvP and they didn't want Assassin Strike able to do that much damage in PvP. At least that'd be my guess.

Personally, I think they could increase the total damage from AS when used within Hide to around scale 8 or 9 in PvE without unbalancing anything. What you don't want is for AS to become the ONLY thing you use in a single-target encounter. Anything more than scale 9 damage and you get into that territory where doing nothing at all in-between Assassin Strikes becomes as good or better DPS than scrapping it out. You can theoretically re-hide once every 8 seconds but only if your timing is absolutely perfect. Add a second or two of padding and scale 9 damage once per 9 seconds = scale 1 DPS, which you can probably still beat with a normal ST attack chain in most primaries. But not if AS is made any stronger than that. And of course anything that encourages you to wait for Hide to re-engage works that much better on defense-based sets than the others. So it's not exactly fair.

So getting back around to Energy Melee... if they increased AS's total damage they could also give TF a full crit. Energy Transfer is another story. It was never a "regular" attack to begin with and should never get a full crit, if any crit. It's allowed to break the normal rules for balancing attacks because it also damages the user, but as they say, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and that's certainly the case with ET. Most of the time, even for a stalker, the self-damage is a non issue so the extra damage ET does is pretty much free. It doesn't deserve a crit. People complain about ET now only because they remember how absolutely ridiculous it used to be. It's STILL an exceptionally good attack even with the longer animation and 50% stun.

Assuming I understand how slow debuff works, yes. Caltrops debuffs movement speed by 80%. The cap is 90%. At 80% debuff, they're running at 20% of their usual speed. At 90%, they are running at 10%... i.e. half as fast. You should only need 12.5% of slow enhancement to cap slow.

Slow is resisted like any other debuff so having MORE than 90% slow debuff is useful against higher level foes or ones that have specific resistance to slow. A few are seemingly immune to slow (or just have very high resistance) and will run right through your trops like they aren't there, though they may take off in a random direction from getting at least one tick of the AI "afraid" status. Fairly annoying with Warwolves, for example.

Well, like I said IF I am understanding how slow debuffs and slow enhancements work. Maybe someone else can comment.

It's worth considering that without any slow enhancement, enemies can be running away from your caltrops patch up to twice as fast. Not sure if that actually works out to less damage than your one dmg proc, but it certainly does less control and damage-mitigation.

With Interface procs potentially being a lot better than ordinary dmg procs, you might want to see about keeping enemies in your caltrops longer even if it means trading out the damage proc enhancer for a slow.

Devs hate villains?

So you complain about AS and when they actually do something to improve on it... you complain some more? C'mon man, think about it. Now you might actually open with BU+AS on a boss, then if the tier7 really is an AoE you can Placate+AoE to spend your combo points. Sounds pretty good to me.

The only other Stalker set that gets ANY secondary benefit from AS is Dual Blades and DB's combos suck on Stalkers. This is a really good move. Especially if it makes AS worth using outside of Hide.

If TF had a full crit it would do more damage than Assassin Strike AND pack a guaranteed mag 3 stun, with no chance of an interrupt. And ET would be even worse. The only thing they could really do would be to make TF do less normal damage, equivalent to Eagle's Claw. Then it could have a full crit and faster recharge, with less endurance cost.