Zem

If only we could customize the caltrops appearance to include a few banana peels.

Would rather not have to spend slots. I'd prefer they just cut the interrupt time to a quarter of a second or something like that. That would still prevent the power from being used to "joust" since you'd still have to come to a complete stop before activating and you'd still have to be within LOS when the attack lands, but it would greatly improve the chances of actually getting off a successful strike.

The other thing that would be nice is another increase in the waylay damage. It was a good move when it went up to 2.5 scale, but that is STILL below average DPA compared to most sets' other ST attacks. With the lousy DPA and interrupt chance, it's still a very bad gamble to use outside of Hide for most Stalkers. Raising the waylay again to 2.8 or 3.0 scale would help fix that. And though it might be wishful thinking, it'd be nice if they could chop a few animation frames from some of the sets' Assassin Strikes to normalize them all at Kinetic Melee's 2.67s cast time. THEN you have an attack that is generally useful outside of Hide instead of just situational, but at the same time it still rewards you for using it from Hide with a higher critical than other attacks.

I've seen the same thing (also on Virtue, but I doubt that matters). I've run maybe a dozen trials so far with my Stalker and I can only recall seeing another Stalker in the league maybe on two of those occasions. That's saying something when it's a dozen teams of 16-24 people.

True enough, though moar recharge means more trops out at once, which can be nice. But it can do with just a single slow enhancer. I think a single level 50 common slow IO will cap the slow debuff vs. up to +2 level enemies.

No. The Placate power used by Stalkers and SoAs has multiple effects that accomplish the re-stealth (and enabling a follow-up critical attack) in addition to applying the placate effect to the target. The Placate proc just applies the placate effect to the target. It's kind of like Ninjitsu's Smoke Flash. It's placate only... no stealth.

edit: Forgot to add... I don't really see the value in this proc, especially for a Mind dom/troller. Your Mass Hypnosis already does not aggro enemies so unless you are using it against enemies already aggro on you, the Placate is meaningless. If someone wakes them up, they will likely get the aggro and even if they didn't this proc would only hit around a third of them anyway. Unless you just don't have a use for that extra enhance slot (which has never happened to me) or you really want that 5% tox resist for slotting all six... I'd pass.

It seems like you already know the answer to this one. If you know the problem is that you are comparing each character to your "best" character then the answer is to stop doing that. If you can't stop doing that, then nothing anyone has said here will help. Min/Max each character to be the best THEY can be, if min/maxing is your thing. If you can't get away from wanting that character to be the best ANYONE can be then you're going to run out of road (or you already have). Once you've got what you consider the best... the game is over.

I think his purpose was simply to swoop into the middle of the argument and throw down the "You're doing it wrong!" card. Ironic, considering how he's complaining that little has changed in his absence. THAT sure hasn't changed.

You're entitled to an opinion, but frankly this doesn't make much logical sense. AS can't kill a +2 LT in your example, so it's "useless" but an attack that does even less damage is not useless?

Of course there are situations where using another opener is better. This hardly proves AS to be "useless" however. That said, I can't think of a mob right now where what you just said would actually happen. Your main issue with AS seems to be at level 50 and you're talking about +2 LTs. So what Level 52 LT has a god mode you're worried about? And how often are you fighting that specific mob? Most of the time, on a team, your focus is going to be a boss. And there's no level 50+ boss I can think of where your BU+AS is going to put it into god mode territory. But again, even if it did, yeah sure... this would be a place not to use AS. An easier example, and far more common, is Cimerora. I NEVER start a fight with AS there because the Surgeon in the spawn will react instantly to negate the damage you just did. So he gets a quick Hide crit one-shot death and THEN I see about using AS, if possible. If I can rely on someone else to neutralize the Surgeon though... I'm back in business.

Speaking of Cimerora and god modes though, you know what's a great time to use AS? Right before a Minotaur or Cyclops gets to the point where it does use its god mode. Timed right (and it can be difficult to do so) it's a thing of beauty. I've had them drop dead just as they are starting the animation of beating their chests to enter god mode. And even if they don't they are left with very little health to chew through at the higher resistance.

You need to check your figures. Assassin's Blow takes all of 0.4s longer (ArcanaTime) to use than EC. If you're using BU in both cases, you can't count that time in the comparison. So it's not 4-5s to use AS. It's 3.17s for AS vs. 2.77 seconds for EC (if I've done the math right). For that differential, you get about 20% more damage from Assassin's Blow AND you get Demoralize AND you still have EC ready to go for a follow up. It's one of the few ST attacks worth using after Placate.

As for endurance, it's uses LESS than EC, not more. Again, it only costs more if you're interrupted.

And there are certainly cases you should use EC instead of AS. Not saying there aren't. But I do think you exaggerate AS's problems. I know you prefer AoE but AoE accomplishes something different. It may do more total damage, but that damage is spread out amongst multiple targets. If your goal is to kill a boss, it doesn't accomplish that. If your goal is simply to do the most total orange numbers then yeah... AoE. But that's not always what a team needs. AoE is quite common in this game. ST is as well, but those with AoE will favor using AoE. To me that leaves plenty of opportunity to take a nice chunk out of a boss as an opener. I use it all the time on teams. I even have targetting macros I modify for the content I am running so I can quickly pick out the bosses in any spawn. Works great.

Perhaps historically, but at least nowadays all PvP stealth (StealthRadiusPlayer) is suppressible. That includes Energy Cloak, Cloak of Darkness, and Superior Invis. Adding +35 unsuppressed stealth to Stalker Hide would have zero effect on PvP.

Assassin Strike's effectiveness drops the same way ANY other attack does. Mob hit points scale up by level faster than the power damage curve. This is just as true of your Eagle's Claw. If you're opening with BU+EC then you're doing less damage than opening with BU+AS followed by EC (or whatever the rest of your attack chain looks like). The only issue with AS is the potential for interrupt, so you don't use it when that is likely.

That's not to say that a modest extra scaling of AS's damage wouldn't be welcome in PvE. It would be a nice unique feature of Assassin Strike and justify the difficulty of using it in combat. It would also make it more useful outside of Hide instead of being inferior to every other single-target attack you've got (in most powersets anyway).

Strange. I know the Raptor Pack I purchased in Grandville worked fine on a mini-BAF last night because I was using it to hover/Assassin-Strike Nightstar a few times. Is it just the ones built from temp recipes that don't work?

If you want to be precise, what Castle said was, "as strong as we want to make them" in reference to Stalkers. He didn't really leave the door open for ANY buff, let alone just damage buffing. He clarified this by saying that any further improvements would have to address those intrinsic problems with the game itself, rather than the AT. Which if you read between the lines was a way of saying, "So... don't hold your breath."

I still think it's a bit silly not to be able to talk about damage when Scrappers so clearly do more than Stalkers in most cases. At the very least, bring us up to their level. It can't be called power creep if we're not exceeding their damage level, can it?

I guess my post was poorly worded. Yes, I am not asking why they DID balance by popularity. They didn't. They created a performance metric (in this case debt and leveling speed, apparently) and balanced around that. But why? Why NOT look first at popularity to decide if there is even a problem with the AT that people seem to care about. If you're looking at one of the most popular ATs out there... what problem can there be?

Is balancing ATs by some arbitrary performance metric that is defined by the devs and not the players somehow more valid? Is it an end in itself or a means to an end. If it's a means to an end... well, to what end?

That's a rather circular definition of "correct". I get that they defined a metric to do their datamining and then determined that according to this metric (which they defined) that Blasters were "underperforming". I get that. What bothers me is why they didn't then ask the question, "Okay... but who cares?"

I'm not saying popularity is the only thing you should look at. Not all ATs can or should be at the same level of popularity. Blasting will probably always be more popular than Tanking, for example. Doesn't mean there is anything wrong with Tankers. But if you look at something that SHOULD be popular and then find out that is IS popular... why pull the fire alarm? The place does not appear to be on fire. It's like instead we're doing some math on a chalkboard that suggests the place SHOULD be on fire. And yet...

Tell that to my Shield Defense Stalker.

Hide and Caltrops would both need replacements. Hide could be traded for a combat stealth power that provides a small amount of unsuppressed stealth (ala Cloak of Darkness) and a small defense buff. Caltrops... I don't know. Scrappers get both web grenades and caltrops in Weapons Mastery. Blinding Powder is already a -tohit and perception debuff, so that rules out Smoke Grenade. Stun grenade maybe? Anything else gadgety to replace caltrops with?

The other potential problem is Smoke Flash. People will say it's not Scrapper-like to have an AoE-placate, but honestly... this power sucks even for Stalkers. It does not grant a critical the way the primary Placate power does. Solo, it is basically an AoE sleep with a short duration and very long recharge. On a team, it is a "dump aggro on my teammates" power.

Long story short, it sucks. But if Stalkers have to put up with it, Scrappers better the hell not get anything more useful in a proliferation.

You know, I think I'm just going to copy/paste this whenever someone comments that it's strange to see a villain AT playing blueside.

Err... Energy Drain is +end now. Come issue 21 it will also offer +def for Stalkers. So what would be the problem with Energy Absorption? I don't think there's a rule anywhere that Stalkers can't have endurance recovery powers. It's just been the case that when it came time to pick a power to make room for Hide, some of the sets lost their endurance recovery power just because it was thought to be least critical to survival of all the powers in the set.

I don't know how it is on other servers, but on Virtue people are usually up-front about HOW they want to do a TF. They've usually advertised it as a "speed" version or as a "kill all" or "kill most" (usually meaning whatever is in the way of the team but not going out of the way to clear). So you know what you're getting going in and if they haven't said you can always ask. Doesn't mean you won't have some random idiot mess everything up but I find that is pretty rare these days, because for the most part it IS a pretty experienced playerbase at this point.

PuGs, honestly, are the only thing keeping me in this game. New content is nice but it quickly becomes old content. Quicker than they can make it. So the only thing different about replaying that content is the team. I can't imagine wanting to play it on some regular team of super-efficient min/maxed players. That would get old for me very quick. Just figuring out how the PuG I've joined is going to work is half the fun. If I wanted predictable, I could just replay a good old single-player game.

I stand corrected. The point however is simply that the AT inherent is whatever the devs define it to be, regardless of how it is implemented. Even if every other AT inherent was implemented solely with inherent auto powers and Stalkers were the only ones whose inherent was coded directly into their pri/sec powers... it would still be true.

How do you travel though? If you use CJ+Hurdle for that then you're fine. But if you use Ninja/Beast run then it will cancel CJ. You probably want that stealth IO to work while you're traveling.