Zem

Or you're fighting spectrals and your tohit is, in fact, nerfed.

That's sarcasm, right?

If yellows are helping then you must not be at the 95% tohit cap for some reason. Either that or you just had a string of bad luck. It happens. I can tell you nothing is going on with Stalkers. I did fine last night on mine.

Get HeroStats and start logging your chat to a file. You can copy/paste offending sections of it into your posts if you think there is a problem.

Eh? Re-hide is biased the same way. It's like Placate... only worse because there's no Placate effect to at least offer some chance of not being hit between the Placate and subsequent strike for critical. Defense characters will have the advantage because they can kill someone and then cross the battlefield to crit someone else even if under fire from multiple enemies, with a good chance of succeeding. Resistance characters can't say the same.

The Hide problem is more easily solved by just granting a large amount of suppressible defense(ALL) in both Hide and Placate. This is something that does not require any new mechanic or game engine changes. It's also unlikely to introduce any balance issues if done just for PvE. We already have this for AoE defense in Hide so it would just be an extension of that with the idea that even if you can detect someone who is stealthed, they may still be very difficult to hit. Also solves Castle's Shared Aggro problem... well, mostly.

For me the big deal about Divine Avalanche is that you can go *over* the soft-cap easily. This gives a Ninjitsu stalker something a bit like defense debuff resistance at least with respect to melee/lethal attacks. Absolutely great for going up against Cimerorans who can cut merely soft-capped melee defense to ribbons.

Then there is Flashing Steel which became quite a good melee cone attack when animation times were reduced and then melee range was increased to 7'. It animates quickly and recharges quickly. Don't be fooled by the somewhat low per-click damage. You can use that sucker a LOT.

I don't think either idea really helps stalkers on teams. It's easy to see how that makes soloing better, but honestly who needs that? On a team, I want to go after the boss first if I'm a single-target stalker. In which case, per-kill buffs don't do me any good. Pausing my boss fight to try and pick up a kill buff from a minion might sound like a good idea but I'm not damaging the boss while I'm doing it and the minion is going to die anyway even if I don't attack it, so does it really make up for pausing my attack on the boss? Doubt it, in much the same way that waiting for Hide to kick in by itself is also a bad idea. I can see AoE stalkers getting behind the idea of a stacking per-kill buff but of all stalkers, they need help the least.

I dunno. I think smaller steps are needed. If Castle thinks something like shared aggro is a problem then it seems like what ought to be done first is extending the suppressible AoE defense in Hide to make it defense vs. all types/positions. This after all is the whole idea of the AoE defense being there in the first place: that the stalker would not be hit by splash aimed at other teammates while attempting an Assassin Strike. Except that shared aggro causes some enemies to directly attack the stalker, requiring other defense types. And since this can be done just for PvE now, it won't make stalkers any more difficult to attack in Hide in PvP zones. Seems like an easy one and it will show Castle just how much shared aggro matters, one way or the other.

It won't fix Stalkers, but like I said, it would be a step. I also like the idea of some unsupressible PvE stealth in Hide. If it's not overpowered for those ATs that already have unsupressible stealth, then it won't be overpowered for stalkers. This would be a big help for stalkers attacking those outlying mobs or runners without aggroing neighboring spawns. Hell, my Dark Miasma corruptor can do this already and not just for himself, but for anyone near him DURING combat. Why should he be stealthier while attacking than my Stalker is?

Neither of these ideas would require much work. Neither would directly buff damage (which Castle says they don't want to do right now) and they'd both help show how much aggro is hurting Stalker damage output... if at all.

This isn't a real hurdle. Many of the powersets that have been proliferated around were once AT-exclusives. Ninjitsu wouldn't be the first.

Except that hit-and-run has never been an "effective" tactic.

I have a problem with the idea of replacing either of these in a proliferation. One, because there is precedent in Dark Armor for melee set AoE mezzing powers, so I don't see the problem with proliferating Blinding Powder. Two, because I'd hate to see Smoke Flash replaced with something that is actually useful and have to see someone who is not a Stalker with a better Ninjitsu than I have. I suppose that is a selfish reason, but there it is.

Seriously. Smoke Flash is so useless EVEN for Stalkers that it's now being offered as a temp power to just anyone. I don't care if it's thematic. Now that it's available as a temp, can we just get rid of it entirely from Ninjitsu and get something that is not worthless?

No? Damn that cottage rule!

Largely against? Well maybe, but again there is precedent. VEATs can get double Leadership powers. And even if you didn't want to take double Caltrops, it would be a potential benefit to Scrappers who wanted Caltrops but not anything else in the weapons pool.

Yeah, caltrops turns this into a cakewalk just about. Same thing for the Crazy 88 ambush. I did it with an MA/Nin stalker.

Which would be noticeable if ever it was possible to sustain that crit rate. Unless you are fighting a single tough opponent like an AV, you probably NEVER average 31% crit rate for a mission. THAT is why it's not that noticeable.

Those attacks might not have a higher critical rate for Stalkers. I've not seen a dev comment on it or someone else prove this in game. For all we know, the stalker sliding critical *replaced* the previous un-hidden critical these powers would give and now they have the same 10% base as everything else.

Again... proof? I'd like for both of these things to be true, but the patch notes never specified pets as part of the equation and I've again not seen a dev comment or a player experiment prove this one way or the other.

Fair point. It'd be close though, assuming we're talking about a typical "surround-and-pound" AV fight here you should be getting a decent boost to your crit rate from teammates. That can make even Elec's ST damage look decent. But in the case of Elec or Spines, sure... probably not all that bad an idea to go MoG + Placate + AS as the MoG will help protect you from splash damage from the AV as well.

You're missing my point. It's not about availability of MoG. If you use MoG mid-combat AND Placate in order to get that AS off you've just spent about 4 seconds doing no damage. AS doesn't really make up for that. You'd have done more damage just scrapping.

If you just used it to take an alpha strike or something, sure, take advantage of that to get an AS in there too. But don't use it *only* for AS. It's wasted.

Sadly, it takes 2.57 seconds to say that hello. 3s for Shadow Meld. Using it *just* to get an Assassin Strike off is a bad idea. Better not using AS in that case and saving those powers for when you need to not die rather than merely not get hit.

I think that part of the post was addressing the "use AS from un-hidden state as part of an attack chain" idea. The part I think is wrong (or at least debatable) is the conclusion that even using it after placate is a bad idea. Usually that's not the case. It's not the first time I've seen someone try to make this argument and it relies on this idea of "positioning time".

While it's true you have to be stationary, in a battle against a stationary opponent this is not an issue. Also using Placate roots you anyway so unless your target is moving, Placate + AS isn't going to be much more than 4.5 seconds and will deal scale 7 damage... which is definitely worth using. It's only not worth using if you are in a situation likely to interrupt AS or against a moving target where the positioning delay and chance of interrupting your own AS with movement are higher.

(The comment about Smoke Flash was also wrong, but it's a minor point. You can't use Smoke Flash to gain a critical except by waiting for Hide to engage after placating your enemies, which is usually a loser for DPS.)

What the devs intend players to do and what players actually do are sometimes very different things. Just look what happened with the AE when that came out.

Same thing with PvE rewards in PvP zones. If they thought it would make PvPers out of people not interested in PvP... then that was just plain naive. It's more likely to reinforce the opposite when people with no interest in PvP get ganked while trying to obtain these rewards. It doesn't matter who is "right". It only matters what people think.

Personally *I* think it's bad form to complain about being killed in a PvP zone, but that doesn't change people's attitudes towards PvP one way or the other. Just because someone doesn't complain about it, doesn't mean they are enjoying themselves. It's like farming some boring farm in a loot-centric game. People do it to get the loot, not necessarily because they enjoy the dull repetition of waiting for the thing to drop one time in a thousand off some rare creature or other.

Nope. Stalkers and Scrappers get their criticals from their respective epic pools. It just seems this didn't get ported over when the pools became shared by both ATs. There are some exceptions, though. For example, damage dealing control powers like Soul Storm (Ghost Widow's Hold) do not get a critical. But Dark Blast in the same pool crits like any Stalker primary attack would.

If you're talking about an attack chain that has no gaps then DPA is pretty much everything, assuming by DPA we mean, "damage per second of activation time" and not "damage per activation". The former is usually what people mean by DPA though.

They were too stealthy to see before issue 6... then their stealth was nerfed?

This presumes the devs are willing to make other powers as good as Fulcrum Shift. Personally, I doubt it. Nerfing Fulcrum Shift would probably make the DOOM that followed E.D. look like a polite disagreement. So they're not doing that. But it doesn't mean they are going to raise everything else to that level.

Not never... but not always either. I play on Virtue and I've done every SF on my Stalker many times over. That doesn't mean I've never been turned down or that I wouldn't have had an easier time getting on teams with a Brute or Corruptor. That's all very true, but also pretty irrelevant if all you're worried about is being able to do the incarnate requirements at all.

No AT is so undesirable that they can't get on teams pretty regularly. As easily as the most popular ATs? No, probably not. But what does that matter?

That would be only one reason. The other is that they'd have to rework all the animations. And it's also probably true that they don't think a power that can do scale 7 damage (from Hide) *should* be fast, PvP or no.