Calhou

I'm wrong on the specifics, as I just plugged in the old total non-crit damage (2.5 scale) instead of the new (2.76 or somesuch?), meaning it might just edge out Storm Kick, but the vast difference between the sets remains.

I'm not saying the change as such is bad - of course not, I welcome all stalker improvements.

Just, when trying to work out some attack chains, I despaired at the differences. Using rough values, this is what I found:

Kinetic Melee ends up with a monstrous 228 DPA. That's crazy awesome, and beats even Blaster Blaze as the without doubt strongest single-target attack in the game.

The baseline sets fall well behind, but still looking good, at 152. Behind the Blaze up there, as well as things like Scrapper Clobber, but well ahead of most single-target attacks.

Street Justice... about 130. That's fine, I guess - still among the strongest single-target attacks.

What's that? You want a broadsword? Enjoy your 92 DPA, weaker than even some regular stalker attacks. (Say, Storm Kick and Crushing Uppercut.)

Assassin's Strike outside Hide casts two seconds faster for all sets.

.67s: Kinetic Melee
1s: All the others.
1.17s: Street Justice
1.67s: Ninja Blade, Broad Sword

They all deal the same damage.

I can no more bring myself to play the sword sets on a stalker than I could before, and this is terrible.

On the other hand, Kinetic Melee is now absurd.

Ah, lovely - I was thinking it wasn't linear scaling, and that confirms it. Means the quick-recharge attacks aren't as shabby as I'd feared, either.

Let's see what more we have.

Kinetic Combat: Chance for KD is 2.5 PPM - this means we need a recharge of 24 seconds to guarantee it firing. Sadly, not many attacks match our requirements, and most that do already have knockup.

Some pool powers - like Defender Total Focus, or Controller Seismic Smash - could use it, but it's not something to build around.

Anyway, we have... Debilitative Action: Chance to Stun, among the immobilise sets. It has a rather low 1 PPM, but let's see if we can find somewhere to slot it...

The patron immobilises seems solid enough - 33% chance to stun any minions you hit. Jamming it in Mud Pots might also be handy, I guess.

Not much fun there, sadly.

Now that's interesting. Let's have a look at some of the other procs from the store.

Performance Shifter: Chance for +End is at 3ppm.

If it counts the every 10 seconds trigger possibility in Stamina, that should be roughly... 50% chance?!

...that can't be right. Can it?

Swiftly slapping it in Stamina on a character, it does indeed seem to be going off half the time, rather than the 20% of the regular version! Great success!

Now onwards, for glory.

Theft of Essence +End, say. It goes in Dark Regeneration, of course, so let's see how that works out.

3ppm, 30 second base recharge... 150%?!? Guaranteed endurance back?!

Let's give it a spin... aw. It actually mentions a 20% chance right in the description, and it seems to hold up in practice. No guaranteed free Dark Regeneration. Still, one good find!

10% per second of recharge doesn't seem quite right - in my totally unscientific test, Body Blow (5s base recharge) popped focus 23 out of 25 times - rather extreme had it been a 50% chance.

Smashing Blow (7s base recharge), meanwhile, never failed to deliver Focus in about as many attempts.

If it truly scales linearly with seconds of base recharge, I'd pin it somewhere in the 15-18% per second range.

I'd love to see something along these lines, mixing Martial Arts with a bit of Ninjutsu-

I very much doubt you have a Willpower/Stone Armour Brute, but, uh... Spring Attack should work, and while it's not much of an attack (mostly due to the long recharge), at least it's better than always hopping in with Teleport. If you're starved for AoE, though, I'd look into Mu Mastery for the one-two punch of Electrifying Fences and Ball Lightning, and even Static Discharge in a pinch.

Certainly viable if you want health and smashing/lethal defence - I can see it being the go-to solution for Willpower builds, for example.

For others, the 10% recharge is just too shiny a prize, and there are some high-end resistance builds that will want that rare six-slot shiny.

I'm generally wary of taking heavy-duty resistance sets on scrappers - Invulnerability scrappers, for example, can go sort-of-but-not-really Unstoppable, while brutes can go full-on tanker-level Unstoppable.

Willpower is scrappier, certainly, though if you're a fan of Strength of Will, you'll again hit your head on the resistance cap. Also, regeneration likes health.

This doesn't apply (or applies to a much lesser degree, as brutes are able to push 80% smashing/lethal resistance with Invulnerability) if you're not a fan of the crashing T9s, of course.

Putting the secondaries aside, TW feels like a rather brute-friendly set to me - simply because it rewards you for hanging out with lots of enemies (by letting you swing at all of them, and by building momentum if you hit any of them!)

Incidentally, this also meshes beautifully with both the Willpower and Invulnerability auras... meaning I'd go brute to get triple rewards from the "hang around as many enemies as possible" style of fighting.

Looking at mids, completely overslotting the defense powers can get to the 95% point on a /SR stalker, but we're talking four powers six-slotted with +defense IOs and one six-slotted with Enzymes(!). Not worth it.

I'd absolutely go with Katana/. To begin with, it complements /Fire mechanically, offering defence to go with your resistance and heals, as well as some knockup mitigation. The animations are lightning fast, with Gambler's Cut making attack chain construction easy as pie. It also offers you a second damage type, though fire-resistant enemies aren't terribly common. The Fire/ swords aren't bad - Greater Fire Sword is a good attack, as is Fire Sword Circle, but the regular Fire Sword is lackluster. Still... well, it's all damage. And you already have 'all damage' covered in your secondary.

I'd say...

Brute likes Fiery Melee, Claws, Katana and Spines*.

Scrapper likes Super Strength*, Dark Melee, Kinetic Melee and Electrical Melee.

Brutes like damage-over-time additions more than Scrappers do, because fury works on these, while critical doesn't. They also like sets with good fast-hitting attacks for building fury, and they have fine numbers for Claws.

Scrappers like large damage buffs along the lines of Rage, Soul Drain and Power Siphon, and also enjoy pseudo-pet attacks like Lightning Rod.

*: These sets aren't available here... yet.

Sounds like you want a Corruptor - I'd personally recommend Ice/Kinetics.


- It's a ranged attacker, with no melee abilities
- It has decent CC abilities between the freeze-beam holds
- It has a tiny bit of support in Speed Boost, a great fire-and-forget power, and your heals, endurance recovery power and super-self-buff all happen to boost your team as well.
-It has great AoE power between Ice Storm and the great Blizzard nuke coupled with the aforementioned super-self-buff, Fulcrum Shift.

While it's not a burn 'patch' so much as a burn 'neighbourhood', a corruptor's Rain of Fire is awesome. (It deals triple damage when scourging, rather than the standard double.) And, again, while it's not an ice patch as such, Sleet (or the clone, Freezing Rain) has a similar function.

Together, they don't just melt everything in a small area about the caster - they melt entire spawns into delicious paste, all from a safe distance.

Another option to look at is the Ice/ or Earth/ Dominator, both coming with ranged bounce patches - you can pair them with /Thorns/ if you like for the burn-patchy Thorntrops, or just add //Fire Mastery for Rain of Fire and Fireball.

If you're not aware, note that the PvP IOs (Panacea and the 'Gladiator' series) are horrendously expensive - expected to pay billions and billions of influence for those sets.

As for other notes, when making an IO build, you want to put down goals to work towards.

For example, if you want defence, go all-out and get at least 32.5% to the types or positions desired. You're a bit wishy-washy, picking up a single set of Kinetic Combat, which is both very expensive, and clashes with the Obliteration sets you have elsewhere.
The most popular defence option is to aim for Smashing and Lethal defence with Kinetic Combat, Reactive Armour, Rectified Reticle and similar sets, so look around for other /Fire builds for suggestions if that's your goal.

You could also aim for maximising damage output, looking mostly for recharge bonuses - get five 5% bonuses between Crushing Impact (Five pieces!), Obliteration (Five pieces!), Doctored Wounds (Five pieces!) and Positron's Blast (Also five pieces!), fit in as many 7.5% bonuses as you can find - mostly Luck of the Gambler IOs and four-slot Basilisk's Gaze in Char, five-slot Panacea if you can afford it - and as many five-slotted purple sets as you can afford and find space for.

Further, bonuses like +maximum endurance, +recovery and +maximum hit points are always useful, but you usually end up with a pile without even trying - I'd recommend going for one of the above approaches, rather than looking to maximise these, and aiming for these with any spare slots left over once you're 'done'.

And finally, most endurance-heavy builds want to put an additional slot in Health, putting the Miracle +Recovery IO and the Numina's Convalescence +Recovery/Regen there - for only one added slot, you improve your endurance recovery by a very noticeable amount, losing only a smidgeon of regeneration. (And, being /Fire, regeneration isn't especially important next to the awesome Healing Flames - so no big loss.)

Being a chain power, the effects that only help the caster (self heal, recharge, build-up) should only go off on the initial cast, rather than at every jump - though when you're using it every four seconds, that might not be too shabby.

Gravity... they put a single-target control pet in the single-target control set so the controller can control single targets while controlling single targets.

And the pair of them are still worse at it than Mind.

Add to this sub-par damage despite a dedicated damage power, a dud in Dimension Shift, and the fact that the one (late) fast-cycling AoE control trades area-of-effect for a tricky gimmick.

That build is... utterly hideous.

For the most glaring issue, you're wasting hundreds and hundreds of millions of influence overslotting Knockout Blow for damage with *Hecatomb*, of all things - you're slotting over 160% damage enhancement, and getting only about 100% out of it.

You can't seem to decide if you're going for typed defense (Kinetic Combat) or positional defense (Gaussian's, Obliteration, Titanium Coating).

You're spending slots on things like bringing your psi resistance up from 1.3% to 4.3%.

(Also, you don't need to grind to incarnate - you run a brief arc of missions, then the shards start dropping in, giving you alpha slot stuff as you play. Skipping the grindy stuff is fine, but a basic alpha doesn't involve grinding.)