Zem

It ALWAYS affected overall DPS. You are hung up on the fact that DPS did not *vary* whether the redraw animation actually played or not. And while that was true, it's because the redraw TIME was already built in whether the animation needed to play or not. In effect, it was like you were redrawing your weapon on EVERY attack.

When they removed the baked-in redraw times, DPS improved. No one here is saying it didn't or wants to go back to the old way, so again, don't see the irony. The OP is not saying he doesn't like the CHANGE that was made. He's saying that redraw still does affect DPS and this is true. To a lesser extent than before? Sure. But it's true none the less and particularly true when paired with active powersets like Kinetics or Regen.

That said, I don't think there is an easy solution. This might be as good as it gets, in which case the advice for the OP is like what you get when you tell a doctor, "It hurts when I do this."

Semantics. The real problem is animation times and the way they were never figured into balancing. The *reason* weapon sets had generally longer animation times (and thus lower DPA) was due to redraw time being included in activation time. Effectively, you paid the redraw penalty on every attack whether you actually needed to draw the weapon or not. So yes, there WAS a redraw penalty. You're just choosing not to call it that.

Remember, the OP is playing a Kinetic. Redraw is less a concern for a melee AT with a passive secondary or a Blaster who is ripping through a ranged attack chain or who might only redraw at the start with Build Up or something. Kinetics, and to a lesser extent Regens, are a lot more active.

This is not irony, because the complaint is not about the change that was made. No one is asking to reverse it. It's a complaint about what remains still imbalanced *after* the change. Though less so than before, it is still there. Weapon sets deal with it. Non-weapon sets don't. And the miniscule added accuracy is not now nor was it really ever compensation for that.

That seems a fancy way to say "If we only partially solve a problem, people will one-day complain about the part we left." Which seems more obvious to me than profound.

Long time ago... back when it was still true.

Dual Blades, I believe, introduced the first weapon using powerset that did NOT have the redraw times included in every power animation as was then the case with all other weapon sets. Since then many have been reworked to remove the so-called "baked in" redraw time you're talking about. So the individual attacks execute quicker while the weapon is out but if you do redraw, that is now extra time spent doing no damage.

Keep in mind that Smoke Flash is unlike the single-target Placate in Stalker primaries in that it does NOT put you into a Hidden state. i.e. You will not get an automatic critical after using Smoke Flash. It merely placates foes which are hit by the smoke so that they stop attacking you for a short duration. In that sense it is something like an AoE sleep while solo and a rather unfriendly "go attack my friends" power on teams.

Not that Stalkers are meant to be friendly, mind.

It's got some active defenses to supplement its passives if that's what you mean. So it will seem more active than, say, Super Reflexes. But really, the only thing that will slow you down with ANY secondary is having to recover from battle. Ninjitsu, particularly paired with Ninja Blade and some IOing will have no trouble keeping you going... until you die instantly from a lucky one-two shot from a purple boss or something, but such is being a defense-based Stalker.

Quite well. Ninja Blade's Divine Avalanche will keep you safe in melee and being in the thick of melee is where you can really carve up your enemies with those short-range cones. The knock-up and down in Soaring Dragon and Golden Dragonfly really give you an in-control feel to a fight. It's great to slide up to a boss who is going after a teammate and dump him on his backside with SD then bring GD down on his head while he's trying to get up. The only thing that will really disappoint with Ninja Blade is the lethal damage type.

It's a very scrappy combo though. Divine Avalanche means less need to IO for melee defense and thus more room for other bonuses like recharge or damage. It also means you can put yourself well *above* the melee defense soft-cap, which is a life-saver in places like Cimerora where there are crushing defense debuffs, mainly from enemy melee attacks. And Ninjitsu does not have nearly the defense debuff resistance of EA or Super Reflexes.

There's another kind?

Really? AS is scale 7 damage from Hide. 7/8 seconds is 0.875 scale DPS. Most stalker attack chains should average out better than 1 DPS, I think, except those whose animations are excessively long anyway. Spines maybe?

Also you cannot count on timing this perfectly every time or, certainly, not being interrupted some of the time even with a soft-capped defense build. Knock more off that 0.875 DPA to account for this and it starts to look considerably below-average to me.

To me this is kind of like someone coloring Radiation Blasts blue and pretending it is jets of water instead of streams of deadly particles. Just because the game doesn't let you have Mako's patron power without "going Rogue" doesn't mean you should accept that. Take a vacation from RP. Go get that power that fits your concept perfectly. Redeem yourself.

Pretend it never happened.

Hmpf.. guess I should read Dev digest once in a while.

If you can afford to stand in the middle of that pack of enemies *without* caltrops then you wouldn't use them in that situation in the first place. I only throw trops at my own feet when I feel like I'd be swarmed and killed without them or I want to slow down rate of incoming attacks vs. a heavy-hitter like a Minotaur (or as sometimes happens to me... three Minotaurs. )

It's still a pretty small window for them to do it and because they are on caltrops they won't all attack at once. Some will be in flee mode. Some will be in attack mode. But I admit, it's not something I've actually tried... yet. Gotta level up that KM/Nin some more.

You don't use caltrops for damage. You use it for survivability only when you need the extra survivability. So if you're not going to die, you don't use them. I wouldn't skip them in a build however unless you never plan to do anything more difficult than farming at +0/x8 (no bosses). For me, the idea of throwing down trops in front of an x8 ambush causing them to pile up INTO a small group which can then be burst to death is too tempting to pass up.

As for the radius on Burst, is it not 7-8ft like most other melee PBAoEs? The smallest radius AoE I've ever used personally is Assault Rifle's Ignite at 4ft.

I suspect even this guy couldn't reach out with one hand and bend a gun-barrel with a quick motion. In the movie, as has been pointed out, Bats has some kind of pneumatic device on his arm or something. He also uses it to tear into the side of a van like a can opener, if I recall. Course, the real problem with the barrel-bending scene is that the other guy wouldn't have been able to hold on to the weapon, but that's the sort of thing everybody hates to have pointed out while actually trying to enjoy a comic-book movie.

As an aside, I finally got around to getting Arkham Asylum a few days back. Damn... what a fun game. Really great attacking from the shadows and taking out the henchmen one at a time as they slowly start freaking out wondering where you'll strike next. Unfortunately not something you could even come close to in a game like CoH, but I'd agree on MA/Nin/Weapons Stalker with as many temp gadgets on your toolbars as you can fit. And *definitely* Presence pool.

"Slipping back into Hide" is for most Stalkers going to result in LESS damage, not more. You start out in Hide and you get back into Hide in 1.5s with a Placate. That's it. There are some exceptions, but generally speaking you'll do more damage to a target by running a normal attack chain than trying to wait on Hide, which even for a soft-capped Stalker can still fail against a large-enough spawn often enough.

Now I haven't done the math for Spines or Elec. It's possible their ST damage is weak enough that even using AS when NOT in Hide can make sense, but for most Stalkers again it does not win out against merely scrapping normal attacks. All that leaves you with just your two Assassin Strikes (after Hide and after Placate) and then not getting another one until Placate recharges which for most fights is well after the fight is done.

PvP is a different story, of course, but in PvE this is how it is. Not that I've never gotten back into Hide by waiting. Sometimes I have to cross a room to attack the next mob, or my mez-click has just fired and Build Up is ready and I'm nearly in Hide by then so why not wait, right? I understand Elec has a chain of actions involving Lightning Rod and some patron powers that don't count as attacks and can end you up in Hide too if you're not hit. Stuff like that. But those are exceptions, not the rule.

Really only when you are on a team that has enough AoE to kill minions and LTs but not enough to overpower the content to such an extent that even the bosses are dying from the splash. Unfortunately farming and speed-running TFs are popular enough that that latter case isn't all that uncommon. People want to blast through stuff killing as many weak enemies at top speed as they can. In such situations they don't even care how much AoE is wasted as long as everything dies fast. As long as there are a lot of explosions and things falling dead left and right it FEELS like you're contributing even if it was really someone else who killed all the minions a half-second before you would have.

AoE is very good in this game but despite what many think, it's not quite everything.

I use it twice. Once from Hide and once after Placate. If I get a third opportunity it will have nothing to do with the recharge time of AS but rather that of Placate. If I get some recharge with a set, fine. I certainly wouldn't sacrifice accuracy or damage for it though, but that's just me.

What I do sacrifice a little damage for is a good set of IO bonuses. Yeah, you can eke out a little more by pushing into the ED soft-limit a few percentage points than you'd get from a full set of melee IOs but I just don't see it as worth it. Is another 20pts of damage on an attack you *might* get to use twice in a combat all that worth it?

It is because of that I also wouldn't slot purples or other uniques that might be used more often in other attacks. Unless it's for PvP, anyway. For PvE, the only thing to worry about in AS is damage and even then it's good to remember just how situational AS can be. Sure, pushing into the ED limit a couple more percentage points can have a noticeable effect just because the base damage is so high but is it worth the expense?

Personally, I just threw a full set of Mako's in there for the set bonuses. Then again, I team pretty much 100% of the time. If I was a soloist who'd get more use out of AS vs. my other scrapping attacks, I'd consider optimizing it.

DPS alone works if you have a decent amount. I'd say the only people that should have trouble with this encounter are those who possess neither -regen nor good damage output AND who do not supplement that with teammates or temps. I've done this on a couple of my stalkers, admittedly well-IOed, but without any -regen ability just by finding and quickly killing his clones.

ONE teammate should be all you need. One person to stay on trapdoor and another to find and kill his clones if you don't have the outright damage to do it all yourself. I don't see why that is such a big deal for some people. The vast majority of content (even most of what tells you to bring a team) is soloable. Are a few exceptions that unacceptable?

Nerd fight!

I knew this had to be wrong, but it took me a bit to remember enough math to explain why. You forgot to subtract the chance of both. The chance of one proc going off is 100% minus the chance of neither going off minus the chance of both going off. So it's not 36%. It's 32%.

64% for neither
32% for one.
4% for both.
--------------
= 100%

So the average dps is (.64 * 0) + (.32 * 70) + (.04 * 140) = 28dmg per 10 seconds = 2.8dps... or... same thing I got before.

Disagree on the slow. I believe Caltrops is a -80% runspeed debuff. The limit is -90%. The slower they are, the longer it takes them to get free and the less quickly they scatter. Also, the 80% debuff will be resisted a bit by mobs that are higher level than you so having one slow IO in there can help.

So let's run the numbers. If I am not mistaken, a proc in Caltrops will only check for the effect once every 10 seconds. A level 50 damage proc is roughly 70dmg. So two of them is 140 damage. 20% chance of 140 damage every 10 seconds is... 2.8 damage per second on average. Not saying that can't add up, but really do most fights last long enough for this to have spent two valuable enhancement slots on?

And it's not going to kill even a minion. A level 50 minion has 430 hit points. Even if both procs hit every 10 seconds it would take 30 seconds to kill the minion and they're NOT going to hit that often (or last that long anyway).

Granted, I blew a slot on the Knockdown proc myself, but at least falling down keeps them in the patch that much longer. I mostly did it for the lulz, though.

That's on my To-Do list as well. It's just a shame about the way they've done the combos. Now with Demoralize helping to cut down on retaliation after the Assassin Strike, sweep seems almost wasted when it could have been tied to attacks that you can chain *during* a fight. And when I do get around to DB, I won't have Sweep by level 8 anyway since Build Up is a colossal waste of a power slot at level 8, it being up only once every minute and a half and no way at that level to cut it down by much.

I mean the set has six other attacks besides Build Up, AS, and Placate. Did they really need to have TWO of the four combos begin with the same BU+AS? It's sheer idiocy. A random number generator might have come up with better combos.

Not really. The only time you are wasting any DPS is if your attack chain has dead air in it. If at any time you are waiting for an attack to recharge, you are losing DPS. Otherwise, an attack chain composed of all the best DPA attacks you can get is better.

Theoretically of course. We're still talking about a discrete set of attacks so DPS is not constant throughout. Depending exactly how many attacks you execute to kill an opponent, one chain can actually beat another even if it has some lower DPA attacks in it. But this is getting into "splitting hairs" territory. The truth is you likely won't be able to tell the difference between these two attacks so pick whichever one you like better.

It's mainly useful on teams, I have found. Solo it is easier to manipulate most enemies into melee range. Not everyone, but most.

If you can't work it in any other way, you might replace Blinding Powder. BP is good, but Caltrops is about 10x better. If you can't have both. Have Caltrops. I like Recall Friend because it works with one slot and is very team friendly on an AT that has inherent invisibility.

Should be. LOTG +recharge is a set bonus, rather than a proc. Also means the bonus goes away if you malefactor down more than 3 levels below the level of the IO, so he probably doesn't want a level 50 LOTG unless he just doesn't plan to run lower level TFs once hitting 50.

You know I looked at this recently and unless I did the numbers wrong the DPA of GC is actually not THAT much better than Sting once you factor in Arcana-Time. Basically the cast time is not really .67s, but is more like .92s just due to time quantization on the server. It's still slightly better than Sting but not tremendously slow. We're talking fractions of a hit point damage per second in DPA.

As for Achilles Heel... I really have never seen anyone run the numbers on that one. I can believe it would be useful against EBs and AVs but pretty much nothing else will last long enough for that to matter. And if you happen to be slotting for ranged defense, it is likely you may want to six-slot something like Mako's instead. You would have to balance the potential benefit of Achilles vs. that extra defense.

Also worth looking ahead to incarnate slotting. I threw in a Cardiac boost and I can no longer kill my endurance bar unless something is actively sapping me. And I don't have Body Mastery either. Just Stamina, +recovery IO, and some other minor +recovery bonuses in IOs. Not much.

ED's a soft-limit. Two IOs is 80%. Three is 97%. For something with as long a recharge time as Hasten it might mean Hasten recharges another 12s sooner or something like that. Hard to say without factoring in all other sources of recharge too. Recharge is something of a diminishing returns kind of enhancement. Two IOs is probably good enough though.

If he can get six slots in there he'll also get some ranged defense with Malaise until 50, where he can buy one of the cheapest purple IO sets there is for some very nice bonuses and a great confusion proc that takes Blinding Powder to the next level of usefulness. Bunch up an ambush with Caltrops, dust them with purpled Blinding Powder, and you might even confuse the bosses. Stalk-troller ftw!

And again this is something to take a close look at. Base recharge is 1000s. More than twice Hastens recharge time. A third recharge enhancement would likely be noticeable here. Worth it? Can't say. I only have it one-slotted and usually forget it is there, but that's because I am soft-capped to ranged and over-capped with melee once I hit with Divine Avalanche. I also have Shadow Meld for "oh crap I am debuffed!" situations.

The other thing I'd suggest about Sha is that recharge is probably more important than healing. Not incredibly so, but I'd prioritize hitting recharge limit first and then go for whatever healing I can get.

Preach it, brother. Preach it! Although if short on slots (and who isn't, really?) Caltrops works just fine with a single recharge and single slow IO. Especially with good global recharge. It's perma out of the box, so even a little added recharge will have one able to overlap two patches at least some of the time. Although, I will admit the purple knockdown IO I have in there is pretty funny. It's almost like I am mixing in a few bannana peels with my trops.