Alexis_NA

The devs made casual PvP un-fun. Casual players don't want to learn a whole new set of rules for how their powers work.

Getting held through your mez toggles, then beaten down by a defender you can't do any damage to as a brute isn't exactly intuitive.

This sounds awesome. I'm excited!

Even with "overpowered" elusivity, it's trivial and fairly inexpensive to build to counter that defense and elusivity to the point where you have a virtually guaranteed win even with someone in a tier 9. At least in RV.

No matter how much you spend on defense, though, you can't counter that +tohit/+acc. DR hits defense harder.

That's what players and the devs don't seem to get: That kind of imbalance doesn't exist for any other form of mitigation.

huge -regen/-recovery confuse, fear and other goodies.. Well, I guess EM is going to have a competitor.

However, giving PSW to blasters is just insane.

Hooray! Issue 11.. How much do you want to bet that this bug -still- isn't fixed when I11 goes live? It's been, what.. 4 issues now?

Sad indeed, when the devs hate an AT enough to use shoddy logic to justify not fixing one of the core powers for over 10 months.

I love how there's been absolutely 0 dev response to this thread. Known bug. No fix in sight. Justified by PvP stats taken out of context.

Awesome.

I am going to go on a dev PMing frenzy if this bug isn't fixed in I10.

It's just plain dismaying that Castle has said datamining supports stalkers as performing fine in PvP and that while this is a known bug it's low-priority. Angry Citizen can likely dig up the exact quote.

That sort of statement is quite sad from a customer service perspective.

It's also worth noting that they have similar attitudes about other powersets: Oil Slick has been bugged since TA was brought to the game; it causes controller and MM pets to flee from it in terror when it's lit as if it were an enemy burn patch, often with said pets running into other groups and getting the owner killed.

After a back-and-forth conversation with a dev who will not be named, I was told, "Trick Arrow is in dead last place as a defender primary, controller secondary, and MM secondary, so it's low priority."

It's been over a year.

Things like this make me seriously question this dev team's commitment to quality.

We PMed Castle, but he seems to have misunderstood the problem. Hopefully follow-ups will get the idea across.

I think you're likely right about the breakfrees, as EM/stun is probably the most conspicuous example of this issue.

I was the friend who helped him test.

When K says "busted" he means that any kind of attack which produces a status effect icon allows the placatee to target and attack you during the period where placate should prevent it.

This is, naturally, quite problematic, even if the attack doesn't take effect.

E.G. if you produce a stun icon on a scrapper with mez protection, the placate bug still affects the scrapper and allows him to attack you during the placate period.

Since many of the stalker primaries produce status effects, this essentially renders placate useless.

Excellent guide, K. Personable, informative, and comprehensive.

Guess I should do an EM/EA teleganking guide now.

It should be noted that I7 brought some changes to the "Prefer Ranged" and "Prefer Melee" AI aspect of MMs which may or may not be intended by the devs.

I've sent several PMs to devs on the subject which have yet to see a reply, and can only speak with expertise on the subject of Robots and Mercenaries.

Mercenaries were, prior to I7, almost exclusively Ranged. You needed to tell one of your spec ops to move forward into melee range to get him to use his rifle butt power.

Since I7, though, brawl has been added back into the attack chain on mercenaries. Whether this is responsible for the sudden tendency of -all- mercenaries to dart suddenly and without direction into melee from -any- distance I cannot say.

However, 1 or more of the mercenaries will now choose to (in some cases, foolishly) engage the closest enemy in melee.

Again, this behavior is NEW SINCE I7.

Yes, prior to I7 the MEDIC and the MEDIC alone would sometimes close to use his shorter range frag grenade, but not into actual melee range.

That is not what I am talking about.

Now, the worst part of this for me, personally, is that prior to I7 I had remarkable synergy: A set of pets who would not only stay tight within my shadow fall (DM) and within range of my AOE heal, but because of this would rarely cause the hassle of additional aggro from groups other than the one I was fighting, due to remaining in the stealth.

Since I7, however, I have to deal with constant attrition of my pets due to random acts of scrapper-attempt, and due to them suddenly deciding to leave healing range, stealth, and engage mobs forward of my position no matter what mode I have them in.

If this is a deliberate AI change, I do not see how it could be seen as beneficial to ANYONE.

I've heard rumors that they tried to rewrite the entire MM AI so that all the primaries used one single code branch. This is completely unconfirmed. But if it is true, I would call for the old AI to be put back in. It worked. The I7 Mercenary AI does not work, and often results in pet-wipes.

Robots seems relatively unchanged since I7.

Bear in mind, I am an experienced MM, who uses binds to micromanage and macromanage my pets.

Something has changed, for the worse, and I would like to see it addressed or fixed.

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I took only "falling" damage and still got debt. So I think ANY outside damage will produce debt.


There goes Fly is a travel power in PvP.

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... Ok, now that's just wrong.

Further testing on my end indicates that there's a "timer" of some kind on the debt. Seems to be 60 seconds or 2 minutes. After that, no debt.

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And, if I'm back to full health at some point after taking damage, does the 'debt counter' reset and start figuring the percentages from scratch again?

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My experience indicates that -all- NPC damage is cumulative, and healing naturally and by powers doesn't remove it.

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that, my dear, is what phase shift is for

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Nope. The animation, then final activation of phase is way too slow to be used to counter TP foe attacks. It's trivial to queue attacks before phase can take effect.

I've died through phase even when I had plenty of warning that attacks were coming. A complete surprise would be impossible to react to in time.

Remember also, phase has a timer on it, so sitting in phase constantly isn't an option, either. Not to mention that it would make it impossible to command/buff your pets and your team.

After testing: Bodyguard is infinitely helpful in PvE.

But, as I predicted, it's easily bypassed by players in PvP.

TP foe easily removes the MM from Supremacy (and therefore Bodyguard) range into mines/stalkers/blappers, etc for an easy kill.

This will become a critical issue in PvP.

Hey.. How about instead of more and more nerfs, which you devs always seem to have time for, you fix some of the bugs and QOL problems which have existed since the game's release?

Here's just one example: The ability of any disoriented mob to leap 2 stories in one bound, or ignore slows/immobs.

This particular bug made my low-level MA/SR scrapper miserable. I had to be extremely careful about using my disorient powers, lest the mobs get away from me then go ranged.

It's *LUDICROUS* that we get nerf, nerf nerf nerf nerf, yet basic stuff like this isn't fixed.

It really adds to the feeling that the devs are the enemies of the players.

What nobody's mentioned are all the Defiance exploits already being used on Test. (I won't mention them here, but I've bugged 4 already.)

If the devs don't change it radically, they've just created another way to PL.

This shows, once again, how clueless the devs are as to what the players are doing. Apparently it takes them 16 months to figure out that people with multiple pets are "too powerful" and that herding is bad.

Wonder how long it'll take them to figure out that Defiance is exploitable, and come up with an idiotic, drastic solution which does nothing but ruin people's fun?

Winterstorm Ice/Storm/Ice controller extraordinaire.
Pinnacle server.