UberGuy

You need to accept that that's never going to happen.

With old IH and other tools today, I could build a character with over 3000% regen, full-time. At it's very best, you can hit that rough equivalent on a softcapped SR who has 300% Regen. (300% Regen into 1/10 as much average damage is like having 3000% Regen.) But then SR has no Dull Pain equivalent. On top of that you get to layer +Def on the Regen, while the SR is capped out on that. So while the SR caps out around 3000% (3500% ish with Tough, a bit more with scaling resists), the Regen can cap out closer to 7000% (x1.36 for Dull Pain's pseudo DR and another factor of x1.67 for 20% melee/ranged defense).

If you consider that soft-capped defense is almost certainly something the Devs seem to tolerate but probably aren't fond of from a balance perspective, it seems very unlikely that they'd allow something that much more survivable back into the mix.

No one can argue with the notion of disliking having to manage the clicks. On the flip side, I enjoy playing Regen more because of the click management. (I'll note that I complained about it back when it changed.) When I survive something really rough on a Regen nowadays, I get to feel it's because I managed my powers well, in addition to things like having a good build. As opposed to, say, SR, where I mostly get to feel like my build was good and the RNG was good to me. What I do tactically has a lot less bearing on how a passive based set survives. For WP, positioning comes into play, but not a lot else.

Sounds like atrocious luck to me. I've never had that happen. I have been doing 5 alignment missions per day, plus the morality mission on the 2nd day.

I'm not sure I follow this logic. How do you think most people get the money to buy multiple purples?

Most of my builds use 3-5 LotGs, but something like 5-15 high cost purples. Halving the price I pay for my LotGs helps my budget only a little.

I play the game a ton and commonly fight on what I'll call "light farmer" settings (way, way higher than mythical casual players, but not as efficient as a hardcore farmer). I don't earn raw defeat/vendor cash at anything like the rate I want to to buy multiple purples. I get that money selling stuff on the market, some of which I produce with merits. Using Fulmens' estimate on Pool C+D price fall, I'll need something approaching twice as much fighting and/or task forcing to buy the same purples unless the purple prices also come down.

I'm with Smurphy. This change appears to me to worsen the wealth+performance gap, by dropping earning rates provided by selling Pool C+D rares while leaving purple and PvPO prices alone at best.

In the long term, that and the new money sink may provide a feedback effect that slowly deflates the high end prices. That depends heavily on what percentage of people buying high-end items afford them through raw (high-efficiency) inf farming rather than markeering. If there's enough raw inf farmers to sustain the demand at something like current prices, the prices may not fall that much.

Are we so sure about that? I didn't run the numbers, but some fairly expert Scrapper forum people posting in the beta thread on the changes were rating it's optimal DPS very highly.

It's kind of nightmarish when playing a Night Widow (either branch). You deal in slows, DoTs and now we know you compound that by having high defense.

Not really. The -resist proc is a flat % increase in the damage of all of your successive attacks. It's a multiplicative effect on your entire follow-up attack chain, so the equivalent damage proc effect would need to be huge and/or high-probability and attached to your fastest, most rapidly spammed attack.

The fact that the -resist benefit scales up with other things, like your damage slotting (including any actual damage procs) makes it even stronger.

Let me tell you, my Dark Melee and Martial Arts Scrapper definitely run around mowing down all the minions and LTs with just a couple of attacks all the time.

The reward level of using AoEs is broken in this game. It's been a fact of life here pretty much since day one, especially given that they orignally lacked any target caps. I love that they're broken for most purposes, because having them is a lot of fun, but when it comes to something like this, it's a limiting factor on interpowerset balance. It's not likely that Stalkers will get more AoE. It's not likely that Stalkers will get so much single target damage that they could come close to making up for their lack of AoE given how AoE works. It's not likely that AoE will be rebalanced to the extent that will make a single-target character attractive to reward efficiency pundits.

I did hope it was clear from the larger context of the post you quoted that I agree with you, at least to a point. I stated that if this was one's goal, then Stalkers are one of actually a fair number of AT/powerset combinations that aren't the optimal choice. IMO, it's OK for some people to play that way, and also for there to be sub-optimal choices for such people. As we often point out here in the Scrapper forum, a lot of us feel there's no such thing as a bad Scrapper powerset combo, but some some are still better than others at killing a lot of stuff in a hurry.

A character should not be so ineffective that it's not enjoyable. At some point, it intrudes on the perceptions of even non-power-gaming types that a particular character is slower to progress than their others. I think the original designs of Controllers and even Tankers are poster children for that situation.

I don't think Stalkers are in that place, at least any more. I think they were close to that place originally, but the performance buffs they got seemed to create a pretty broad improvement in how people perceived them, at least on the forums.

No matter how much I dig powergaming, I can recognize that letting one attack get you more than 1/2-way to victory over a boss-level entity from a no-aggro condition is just dumb. The idea that this is what it takes to be "useful" is not a remotely sensible position, and suggests to me a narrow-minded focus on damage as king.

When it comes down to it, if someone is out to earn the fastest reward/time, I'm well aware that damage is king. Thing is, understand that not everyone plays with that goal, and it's not critical that the devs optimize everything for that goal.

If you want to kill the most stuff per time (and thus level as fast as possible) a Stalker may not be for you. If you are willing to give some of that up for a rather different playstyle, I think Stalkers perform fine in both absolute and relative terms, especially when you compare them to fairly single-target builds in other damage ATs. Before some of their recent AT-wide improvements, I didn't think they were fine. As a whole, I now think they are.

Uh, you realize that with Build Up this would more than 1/2 of a +2 boss' life in one hit, right?

I'm all for the position that AS takes to long to wind up (as do ranged snipes), but that strikes me as excessive. I'd rather see the DPA improved by shortening the activation+interrupt time.

If you're not being killed by Fakes, then I believe you. If you're being killed by Fakes, I do not. The Fakes are, barring stacking, I believe the only thing with more than four points of KB mag. (They start at 12, and do more if higher level than you.) If a Fake knocks me down in the middle of a spawn when I need to heal in, I very commonly die.

This is my experience on a MA/DM Scrapper, and DM, broadly, can muster a whole lot more survival than a FA can. But if you play either powerset efficiently (or really any powerset with a self heal) you let yourself get to where you have lost just about as many HP as your heal will recover. Since DA has such a massive heal, I usually just go for about 40-50% HP. (Waiting till I'm at zero HP to heal wouldn't work so well.) Now if you do that, and you get knocked on your can when you really needed to heal, you may have a problem. If you get knocked down again, you're probably dead.

I'm not imagining this. I've played it. I've experienced it. It's not a happy place, and I strove to fix it when I was able. Back in the day that meant I took Acrobatics on melees. Since I already had it, I kept it in the IO world and skipped using the IOs. Then it got reduced to 9 points, and I compromised and used Acro plus an IO or two. Nowdays, I'm actually looking at PvPO resist sets since they don't cost extra slot, though they do represent an opportunity cost for other sets I could put there.

What that says is that your Tanker, and possibly Tankers in general, aren't significantly threatened by those foes at presumably +1. Again I'll repeat - this is about high end solo play. This is playing at levels where doing the wrong thing - or being prevented from doing something you planned to do when you planned to do it - probably means you die. You clearly aren't at that point with the four Fakes and friends.

As mentioned in the previous post, I don't think it's so clear to separate what's a problem from KB (when pertinent) and what's just due to lowish mitigation. If you don't regularly play FA in these kinds of stress conditions (and I mean that in terms of relative stress, not absolute stress your Tanker can survive but my Brute can't), and it sounds like you don't, I question your justification for the claim that you do know which is responsible. I play my FA on +2/x6, and it's hard. Not being able to heal when I need to is very likely certain death, or extremely high risk of it at a minimum. Being knocked around, while not an issue with every foe, just isn't an acceptable risk.

I haven't been trying to move the goalposts, but if they've moved, I think it's because they weren't somewhere useful to start with. Discussing how much KB protection one needs on a team is pretty hard to pin down. On a team, you could argue that no one "needs" IOs at all. Having them can sure as hell help, though, because they improve on what you can manage with no help from your team. If your team is there to help you and make your KB no problem then that's awesome. I live for those moments when my team couldn't help me and I pulled something off anyway. Being knocked around in that moment doesn't trip my hammer, and avoiding that on FA and DA (and maybe ElA) means investing in more than four points of KB protection. (I personally shoot for 12, not 16. And PvP is a radically different beast of course.)

No, but frankly FA has as many of or more than the other limitations of other mitigation sets, plus the knockback hole. It has no fear protection, which used to be fairly typical. At least two newer sets have fear protection and no weakness to knockback. It lacks Psi protection, which at least DA provides, as does Ela, at least conditionally. Invuln has a Psi hole, but no knockback hole, and generally, I find the Psi hole more manageable (on Invul and FA) unless faced with truly extreme Psi damage, such as an AV or spawn of my full usual difficulty setting that does only Psi damage.

Again, it's completely binary. Against anything that won't provide more than 4 points of knockback, 4 points might as well be infinite protection, and the hole can be considered closed. As soon as it's more than four points, the hole is wide open again. Nemesis on anything above about +2/x5 is a no-no here, because you start getting bosses in every spawn, and every Fake is guaranteed to send you flying any time he rolls a knockdown with his staff. Let that happen while his buddies are surrounding you and that's a real bad day.

"But UberGuy, why not just avoid Nemesis?" Well, if asked that I would counter - why not just avoid FA, or maybe DA? Then I don't have to worry about that particular limitation. Sure, on other characters I might avoid Nemesis for other reasons. My Nightwidow doesn't like them much since stacked Vengeance makes short work of her softcapped defenses, but I'm willing to accept that since capped defenses are so damn awesome in so much of the rest of the game. What's FA giving me that's worth its weaknesses?

Edit: Council bosses - the human Archons and the Warwolves, also regularly do more than 4 points of KB with their ranged attacks, at least at +2 and higher. I know, because they flip my afore-mentioned flying buff/debuff/control characters, who all have 4 points of protection.

People often discuss things like mez and high-mag knockdown as though them being low frequency when averaged across all mobs means that they are OK. That's not how it ends up working in practice, because the game doesn't just sprinkle the sources of the weakness in a distributed way. You tend not to meet the problem mobs at all, or you meet a mission (or whole story arc, or whole series of arcs from a contact) full of them. I don't appreciate having to worry about things that work that way. Since I don't like to avoid powersets completely, that means I want to close their binary weaknesses as much as is reasonably achievable. The fact that I also like to be able to unconditionally attend things like Hamidon or ship raids helps further justify the slot or power expenditures needed to give me the KB protection levels I seek. But while doing that, I know that I could just avoid the issue entirely by playing something else.

I don't think you see the perspective of what I and others are saying.

If you don't want to die solo against foes for whom KB is a real part of their fighting style, KB protection is critical.

Here's an example. I recently ran into a Carnie mission on and old MA/DA of mine who I respecced for the MA changes. She's still primarily slotted with SOs, and her only KB prot is Acro. I wasn't expecting to need Acro, and ran into some +3 Carnies. Nothing special - minions and LTs. I died, badly, because I forgot that the Strongmen use KB. They bounced me around and I couldn't heal.

Now, to part of your point, one KB IO (or turning Acro on) would have protected me from that. But the crux of what we're saying is that the binary nature of KB protection - either it's adequate or it's basically non-functional - means that you can either choose to, bluntly, die more often or close the hole. Builds with no meaningful hole don't have to make that build choice. They don't have to sacrifice either a power or any number of slots to avoiding those defeats.

When I build a high-performance build, I agonize about how I place pretty much every slot. There's always some stat I could squeeze just a bit more out of if I moved a slot or chose a different power. The knockdown hole for FA and DA block out slots or powers in ways that don't proactively increase performance, but rather proactively avoid performance degradation over baseline. That's just not appealing. I think that, in the realm of high-end builds, it's a defensible position that DA and FA don't buy their users enough unique or extra performance to compel a user to choose them despite this requirement to dedicate slots or powers to closing the hole. (Edit: Note that's purely a performance statement- not one about concept or playstyle.)

If you're playing with teammates and they're effectively closing the knockback hole for you, then that's fine. From at least a certain perspective, there a cost associated with that method of closing the hole - having teammates.

No one's saying the sets aren't playable or anything like that. We're saying the sets aren't as optimizable (not a word?) as their peers, and one of the reasons is that KB hole.