Zem

The only new tech I am aware of is the ability to tag power effects as "only PvP" or "only PvE". So they can change the effect of a power *after* it hits, but I don't think any of the other properties of a power can be different between the two. Animation time. Attack type. Interrupt duration. etc. At least I don't know of any powers where these kinds of things ARE different between the two environments.

And PvP isn't irrelevant as long as the devs care about it and refuse to make PvE changes that would break PvP. Whatever anyone else may think.

Except you don't want to be running all over a map. To maintain an absolutely consistent crit rate (assuming the pets matter) you want the pets huddled around you and passive while you swing your lightest and fastest attack repeatedly. Maybe get a cimeroran mission and go after a boss or LT that has a Surgeon backing him up.

It did. Sort of. This isn't the same problem. Prior to 10.7 if I turned them both on it wasn't just FSAA that wigged-out. There were *large* crawling triangle artifacts on some edges. 10.7 fixed that but it still doesn't always anti-alias some edges.

It's not just the building edge. It's anything rendered against the distance fog. Just look at the difference on your shoulder spikes. Also, look at the interior vertical edges on the building. They are fine. FSAA is working for some edges and not for others.

This happened almost two and a half years ago so it's probably not new to WoodNimph. Hard to believe it's been that long, now I think of it.

This is something I'd like to see proven or commented on by devs or something. The only thing they mention in the patch notes is "team members".

What you'd basically have to do is group up with an MM or two, head to RWZ, and play whack-a-dummy with Hide off and nothing but their pets within range. Start HeroStats and collect a decent number of hits. Probably shouldn't take that many to tell the difference between the base 10% chance and an elevated one due to surrounding pets.

No I didn't. Staying alive isn't, by itself, a team role. Teams don't invite tankers just because they can keep themselves alive. If they were perfectly invulnerable but had no ability to gain and keep aggro, no one would ever want them on a team. Thus the role they fill is not "self mitigation". It's control.

Not at all. I am talking about "things that teams need to do" which is entirely independent of AT design. I could be talking about another MMO entirely and the same roles would still apply.

Obvious doesn't make it any less true. You were disagreeing with the criticism that Stalkers, in general, are fairly one-dimensional. This is not refuted by defining "one-dimensional" in a way different than the person making the complaint. It doesn't change their complaint. It's arguing semantics. Call it something else if you want. The complaint is that most Stalkers pretty much just do one thing for a team and they don't even do it best.

Intent is meaningless. It's kind of like when people go on about what Stalkers are "meant" to be (assassins, soloists, PvPers, whatever). I could care less. I care about what they CAN do. Caltrops may have been put there to augment my self-defense, but it can stop an entire 8-man team-sized ambush in its tracks. I frankly don't care if it's there because a dev threw a dart at a board covered with power names and it landed on "caltrops". I care what it can do.

Never said anything about being a "main" concern at all. I just happen to like a little variety. I think it's a little late to redesign Stalkers so that they ALL have the same utility as Ninjitsu unless the devs are pretty much willing to set fire to the cottage.

Really. And I say that as a fan of Stalkers. Ninjitsu and Dark Armor are exceptions but in general Stalkers really are pretty one-dimensional. They do damage. You can stretch the definition a little by talking about the "surgical strike" that takes down an annoyance mob like a Sapper or Surgeon, but I don't really see that as terribly multi-dimensional.

To me the "dimensions" are the big team roles like damage, control (which includes tanking), buffing/debuffing, recovery (healing, end recovery, ressurection).

In that sense Stalkers really are fairly one-dimensional. Caltrops and Blinding powder allow a Ninjitsu Stalker to do a fair amount of control. This is one of the reasons I have trouble playing anything BUT Ninjitsu. I may try out Dark with the new changes at some point but anything else feels to me like I'm really only good for one thing and when that one thing is something we aren't even the best at... well, some criticism is definitely warranted about the AT. Being brutally honest here.

I have even considered getting Provoke on my Nin/Nin and probably will once i19 hits. Off-tanking control is still something Scrappers will always be better at thanks to higher hit-points but a well-IOed Ninjitsu Stalker can do a remarkably good job of it too.

Seems like anything rendered against fog (atmospheric local fog or just distance fog) or war walls, etc. is not anti-aliased for me. I take it they haven't fixed that in the 10.9s then? Assuming it's even a driver problem that is.

Just 5-15 extra seconds? If you can say you saved the team that amount of time per spawn then you are contributing meaningful damage even if you are not contributing more total damage than someone who is mopping up trash minions by the bushel.

People make the same excuse about controllers nulllifying a boss. That's threat suppression, not threat removal. That boss still needs to die.

Depends. I find that on most teams it's the person in the lead... who leads. I say depends though because, especially with tanks, you can find some that will go left just because *you* went right so they can remind you to "follow the tank". This is one of the things I find less endearing about blueside now that I can take my stalkers there. I didn't find many prima-donna brutes redside who were such control freaks they couldn't stand someone else leading. Blueside? Some of them even have macros set up just to deliver their list of instructions on how everybody should do exactly as they say.

But thankfully even this is rare.

You don't really need to beat your team to the next spawn by a whole lot. Hide packs all that AoE defense precisely so that you have a good chance of delivering an Assassin Strike even if somoene else has aggroed the spawn. And if it's a tanker hopping ahead, so what? He's not doing much to that boss (usually) before you get there.

This will not happen. I know people don't like to hear it, but cast time is one of those things they can't change between PvE and PvP (as far as I know) and AS will not be allowed to be insta-cast for that much damage in PvP.

Not a bad idea. One of few in this thread that might actually have a chance of happening.

Yeah I didn't read that carefully enough. I saw you were talking about this other limit the devs seem to have had that other powers are breaking but wasn't intending to change the subject. My bad. Even raising TF/CS above that level on a crit will still leave them lacking on the critical. A full crit is the only thing that balances it against other powers that also have a full crit and are otherwise balanced against the heavier hitter by recharge time and endurance.

And I just don't see them allowing CS/TF in their present form to deal double damage on a Hide crit.

I'd rather see them scale CS and TF back to EC levels. They hit too hard for their own good. The point of having a heavy hitting slow attack on a Stalker is to use it from Hide or after a Placate. If it only hits as hard as EC from Hide... what's the point? THEN, sure... give it its critical at full strength. Not sure there's a place for the BU refresh at that point though. Unless the set as a whole needs a buff on all ATs.

Nope. I just mean it won't have a full damage crit. It's balanced against the faster ST attacks by the usual formula *outside* of Hide but when used from Hide its performance is *less* than that of the faster attacks. Even if it did the same damage on a crit as EC, for example (as it used to) it would still not perform as well from Hide because it still is saddled with longer recharge and higher endurance cost.

In other words, unless it crits for full damage every time from Hide, it won't perform as well as the faster ST attacks like EC. But it won't be allowed to crit for full damage because then it would do as much or more damage from Hide as Assassin Strike and I am assuming that limit will still be respected even if others are not.

It's an AoE. One could argue that as such a small/narrow AoE it should maybe get somewhat better than 50% but that's a different argument. I am talking about TF (and hypothetically CS if it had the same crit values) lagging behind faster ST attacks like Eagle's Claw when used from Hide. As such, I am not all broken up they ditched the small crit when they made CS and replaced it with something that is at the very least more interesting.

I need to stop looking at CoD.

It would still lag behind because it won't be allowed a full crit.

I probably mentioned it because you said "probably".

Yeah, this is the default in Mid's. It shows average damage by multiplying all chance-of-damage effects attached to the power by their chance of happening and adding this in. This includes both stalker crits and any damage procs you have slotted, for example. I suppose it is useful in DPS calcs but even then for Stalkers it is going to be wrong by the amount your controlled crits add solo and by the amount that sliding team crits add on teams (it assumes 10% for Stalker crits).

For those who don't know: this can be turned off on the Options->Config->Effects&Maths tab. Check "Ignore Extra Damage (Show Minimum)". You can also hover over the damage graph below the power detail and a pop up will display the actual list of damage effects.

I've actually always assumed that the reason TF didn't have a full crit was legacy PvP-related but looking at it again produced one of those /facepalm moments. Yeah... it'd crit for more damage than Assassin Strike. In all seriousness though this has always made me think very little of TF's crit anyway. It may hit like a truck on a normal hit but it only crits for the same total amount as Eagle's Claw but it's on a longer recharge and costs more end. Yay? And it doesn't average more damage over time than other T9's either so what's the point? I'd rather TF and CS were EC clones (stat-wise), then we could talk seriously about its critical hit capability being "lost".

But as it stands now, I really don't care that they replaced it's tiny-crit with some other mechanism. It at least has a chance of not sucking as bad.

I agree it's wasteful. Heck, I've seen melee types with their self-heals on auto. Just not a smart thing to do. Still, I don't think you need to have it on auto to get a lot out of this recharge feature in CS. Just get in the habit of punching BU whenever you think it might be a good time. e.g. Right before a second Burst in a long fight. Rather than try to monitor its status, just punch it. Maybe you get a BU. Maybe you don't.

In fact, this is probably not a bad idea in general for any Stalker. I know I am guilty of "saving" BU for "the right time" and I end up not using it probably nearly as often as I should. Because I want to always have it ready for that first strike, I avoid using it when I still have plenty of time in a fight to get full value out of it.

Why would they do that? They gave it the Build Up refresh in place of the crit. There is nothing to compensate until someone proves that the Build Up refresh is itself lacking.

I tend to think this has to be some kind of experiment. If the 100% crit chance was a simple oversight then it was pointed out with plenty of time early enough in beta that they could have fixed it any number times. It can't be that hard to change one line in a database entry somewhere.

So I figure they are going to watch and see how much it contributes to Stalker damage. Whether it ends up being overpowered or not. And if that looks good yeah, maybe they will up the chances on other Stalker AoEs. But it has to be all or nothing or it's not really fair.

I've seen it worked out before and as I recall the break-even point (at least ignoring AoE differentials) is around 5 or 6 teammates. So most of a full team has to be joined-at-the-hip with you on EVERY attack, which is all but impossible. That's not true of every stalker, of course. People who lead off with AoEs from Hide are going to skew that a bit more in their favor if all you're looking at are total damage output numbers.

I keep meaning to set up HeroStats for a Task Force or something and just record my total crit rates for all attacks on a full team. Won't be able to break out Hide crits that way but I'd get a total that includes all crits random or controlled which is really what we're after anyway.

It's all kind of irrelevant though. When they devs go to tweak the dials again, they will have the actual historical data to look at that tells them how well Stalkers are doing on damage compared to Scrappers.

There is little chance that Stalkers will be redesigned to such an extent. Look at what happened between Brutes and Scrappers just now. THAT is the sort of tweak you can expect. A numbers tweak. They are going to turn some dials.

I don't see why that is a problem. If AoE is your bag then there are AoE stalkers to choose from. New powersets and proliferations all seem to have tried to keep some, if not all, of the good AoE in the set. Buffs, debuffs, and controls all sound good on paper but you have to remember that they can't be too good without encroaching on the territory of ATs for whom that is their specialty. Stalkers are set up to be damage dealers, not melee controllers. Attempting to tack that on at this late date... I dunno. I just can't see that going very well.

But nearly everyone did. So nearly everyone who plays the game will have three more power picks to make and unless they all pick the same thing in the same numbers as they did for Stamina there will be more variety, not less.

No, nothing has to become the new 'must have' power. There will be a new 'most popular' power, but that's not the same thing. It only becomes a must-have power if a majority of people take it and it only becomes less variety if that majority is LARGER than the one currently picking Stamina for their builds.

The only power I see coming even anywhere close to Stamina's popularity is Hasten and that would be only ONE power pick. Leaving two more for that "Variety" you're talking about.

The math isn't hard but it rests on an assumption that is difficult for us to get right: What is the average crit rate of a Stalker on a team of size 'n' over the course of, say, an entire mission? This is going to vary based not only on how YOU play your Stalker but how everyone else on the team plays THEIR characters. Team composition. How spread out spawns are (thus tending to spread apart the team attacking them), etc.

Yes, but it tells them by how much they need to tweak. They're the only ones who can tell how much the sliding team crit is really doing for us.

I agree that is the most likely thing to happen. Either that or an increase in the team crit radius, though that would be less predictable as to the outcome. Assuming they are not interested in tweaking Stalkers every few months, I'd guess they would really want this to be the last time for awhile so they will go with something relatively simple and easy to forecast.

Could swear I saw somewhere that KM's -dmg isn't resisted in this way. Any truth to this or was it just plain wrong? Can't remember where I saw that. Might have been the beta boards.

Divine Avalanche. Siren's Song. Freeze Ray.

And it does damage, which not every mitigation power does. What's your point? There is no hard and fast rule about what "the mitigation power" of a set should do, or even that an attack set should HAVE a power that is devoted more to mitigation than damage. Not every set does, in fact.

Deviation from what? Something that isn't even a rule that all other powers currently follow anyway?

Don't kid yourself. They didn't go to the trouble of designing the whole IO system without wanting people to use it. It represents content. They WANT us to use it. They just didn't raise the bar content-wise to *require* it, in order not to alienate their casual players. They still very much hope we will spend countless subscriber-hours messing around with IOs on as many characters as we have.

You have this part backwards. Today almost everyone takes Fitness. That means it represents pretty much the opposite of "variety". The only way we'll end up with less variety after this moves to the inherent is if even MORE people than previously took Fitness all decide that the new "must-have" power pool is __________ (fill in the blank).

Some have suggested that Leadership will be the new Fitness and while it could certainly be popular, I just don't see as many people convincing themselves it is "needed" as they did for Stamina. As good as having 8-stacked Leadership toggles would be on every team, it just won't be as ubiquitous as Stamina. Many more people will be able to convince themselves that there are other powers they've always wanted to take but never had the room for previously. Hell, I have a Stalker who is going to take Provoke, if you can believe that.

With NINE remaining power pools, leftover primary/secondary powers, and extra patron/APP powers you never had the room to take before, I see little evidence that additional power pools are inevitable. Not saying I wouldn't welcome more, but it's hardly a given.