Duality_EU

by any chance do you have a widow Effy?

Elec/Shield is pretty good, can't remember if Thunderstrike would be single target or AoE atm but still fun. However my personal choice would totally be with DM/Shield, yes shield is more Defense then resistance, but AAO is still a damage reduction. Shield's not that bad to defense cap, I managed it quite early on, all makes up for it when you put Fury, Against All Odd's and Soul Drain together. I'd say make friends if you do plan on going shield, as you'll need 3 people within 8ft for the 10-11% defense phalanx fighting gives.

heh well, I won't have that problem long.

Many Lulz for that comment, but you know someone's going to. with IH going you can achieve well over 1700% healing rate wonder how many heroes that would take ganking one person...

Dissension my dark/cold/psi defender is now around 42-43, also added a TA/Archery to the family, but my SG needs to liven up a bit before I start really leveling it.

Aye that is the annoying thing pvp zone's forcing defense to drop, and shame about phase. Imagine that was because people had screamed "OverPowered".

Someone was saying to me about getting intangable bonuses somehow, but i'm not really sure where he's gotten that from. I do find it quite backwards that a stealth class could be made so weak in a PvP situation, After all should we not be the one's dropping in behind the dangerous hero's and removing them?

I finished laying out my NB/Nin stalkers build last night and must say its looking nice. Above the defense softcap, defense debuff resistance could be higher but 40% is enough for me right now. There's some +stealth bonus, opted into the concealmeant set for stealth/invis for sneaking up on people and Intangable to get away (also slotted to recharge before it wears off).

On top of this I figured I'd use defense debuffing sets in some of my attacks, because some of my friends blue side like to slot ranged defense on their blasters/defenders (nice little suprise for them). There's a few things like blinding powder and -tohit that i'll be using on blasters, couple of chance on hits to -recharge, psi damge.

As for leveling it solo, yea its not easy atm as a level 15 but i'm getting there

Heh, I've actually started playing my ninja blade/ninjitsu stalker again, well last weekend really and managed to solo to level 14 in that time, keep in mind I took AS at level 10.

Still finding it good fun, its all about knowing where to put yourself in relation to the enemy you're facing.

Totally agree, everyone has they're own way of doing things.

Can also be fun to try experimenting with something new or just different playing a character less effective then you usually do like you're saying. Actually having to think about what you're doing rather then running around like you're on autopilot.

As for
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This is why people will look at my own personal builds, despite what I can build and cringe...but I don't mind.

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Someone is always going to be looking for easy answers and just want to copy.

Don't have much time to post, but while I can. I suggest you listen to Shannon comments.

She isn't telling you how to play, or telling you what you're doing is right or wrong. I've recieved help before with one of my tanks.

You'll just get helpful pointer's you may not have noticed, She really knows her stuff and really helped me to start thinking differently about how I slot my characters.

I'd been considering doing this build myself, but I couldn't justify taking a melee set for the one AoE that I like in it. So it will be a fire melee/shield defense Brute for me.

First defender I've made, Dark Miasma/Ice Blast Lvl 33 as of last night. Good fun too ^_^

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Dark/Ice/psi

[/ QUOTE ] Haha I've started a build for this spec. I really like all the debuff's, there's plenty of To-hit debuff's, Slow and the Psi epic set's just nice. Can't wait to level it up some tonight and tomorrow xD

You all poo-poo on the stalkers weak spots, but one point of credit for them is when it comes to ghosting a mission ^.^ no one ever mentions that do they :P

granted they do have a couple of weak points, but then it just makes people strive to make more solid builds for the AT.

RttC is pretty poor for agro, can go very wrong if your team decides to jump in early when you're herding. Will always say take fighting before fitness as it does give you that survivability against smashing/lethal.

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Regarding secondary while I love how Dual Blades looks and plays if I could do it again I might be sorely tempted by Super Strength.

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You end up waiting ages for footstomp but worth it I do enjoy the set. Dark melee could be fun too, especially with soul drain, increase your tohit and damage, which reducing foe tohit further then what RttC would do on its own

As everyone is talking about the passive's I was wondering. Resist Energies... Does the damage reduction against energy based attacks like electricity also reduce the amount of endurance drained when hit?

Maelwys giving great tips as always. I'm working on a stalker myself at the moment, though it is MA/regen. Made more sense first time round to go with lots of healing to get a grasp of how to play this AT.


The things you've listed shouldn't really cause you a problem though. Anyone with a half decent personality can easily make friends with people on this game. Being an MMO as well it does pay to make friends with people, either just to work with in duo's, trio's and what not or even if they just get you invited to a team.

Btw look at the inherant buffs, straight away you have a 10% chance to crit, +3% for each member in your team which with a full team should be about 31% chance to crit with any attack. Chance also to demoralize when AS land's so you also terrorize groups around the foe you've attacked buying you time, and you also debuff the foe's tohit.

These inherant bonus's are always there too, unlike scrapper's who have to fight foe's much tougher to increase their chance to crit.

All have Pro's and Con's

Thats somewhat defensive of people that are clearly playing like they would soloing, if they don't want to communicate and don't wish to function are part of a team they might as well go and solo.

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Because that's how they've always played and somehow been alright..nvm the bubbler...

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And just because they've somehow been alright behaving that way doesn't mean a team wants to see them doing it.

Lets be honest OG is hardly useful in fights as the mobs will always move away when stunned, which means they can wander off and take up agro on another team member.

CoF could be of more use, but would need a lot of mobs around for it to make a great difference to a fight. Take into account your own fire aoe's and DoTs from them, add the rest of the teams AoEs. Every mob will try to retaliate when attacked temporarily breaking that fear.

I think someone mentioned in this thread you'd be using for PvE, yet talking about both them abilities which would be more useful in PvP tbh.

Difference here Shannon is we know you're more then capable of playing your Scrapper that way, but not everyone is as experienced.

The Scrapper can have enough survivability to do it, But the Tank has better tools to control a fight. Which is what the Tank's job is.

I agree it's great if the scrapper wants to tank when there's no Tanker about. However if there is no need to, they shouldn't. It's good to get away from the crutch where people cherry pick teams because they think those sets are best, and totally agree about the Trick Arrows needing more love.

I just don't think this thread addresses the real issue that is effecting most people's ability to tank, in most case's you don't have enough opportunity to shape a battle the way you want to. When you look at why it is almost always because of a trigger happy team acting before they are given the all clear to do so. Why the hell should a blaster speed off ahead and start attacking when no one asked them to pull? why did the controller lock down a group thats all over the place?

That wouldn't take much, you get recharge bonus from quickness which means you'll be getting Confront out more often, not even mentioning sets bonuses. The defense on your SR scrapper is a constant, on an Ice tank you need to use EA to push yourself over the defense softcap.

On the other hand Ice has slow effect, Endurance recovery, Damage aura, hp buff and a small buff to perception. Both have resistance to defense debuffs. I do agree you could probably out tank me in an AV fight, but I designed my ice tank with the intention of having short lived group fights.

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how many classes out there have a power that just isn't useful?


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Scrappers/Night Widows: Confront.

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Well thats just not true, they have confront to annoy the tank, agro an AV and die ^_^

Now that I understand the will reduce your foe's range, I'll say it sounds alot more useful. Initially thought the power was getting nerfed from the i13 thread.

Funny enough, Duality of Man my first tank is Stone/Energy. Look mainly at what you have to work with, a few of the Stone Armors will give a fair amount of defense. The thing is with Brimstone armor, unlike the rest you get resistance to damage instead of defense.

You'll want to reconsider your build, add some defense through the fighting pool maybe, steadfast prot. in stone skin. Possibly try to raise your cold/fire resistance through set bonuses a bit more.

The animation/activation time for ET and TF are both pretty slow. Also Fossilize and Stun? not entirely sure on your intentions but for PvE you could stand to drop these in favor of taking the fight pool, especially if you do choose to keep ET as it deals more damage then TF.

That will keep you out of granite most of the time, which means faster recharge, more accuracy and more damage. Hasten, lasts two minutes, and after the -recharge from granite which from your build I'm assuming you'll be in perma, will only bring you back to normal recharge level for 2 minutes, resulting in a 7min30sec wait for next use.

Superspeed as a travel power for stone tanks isn't really something most would do. Again assuming from your build you intend to be in granite armor you would move around faster with teleport.

Slotting whirling hands with just Dis. I find strange, it is your only AoE, so surely it would be better to slot 2xAcc 1xDmg.

Hope you find it as fun as I did.

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Heh Shannon talking about me

IMO you could probably find something far more useful then provoke, I assure you there's something. It's far more sensible to have recharge slotted. Taunt and Provoke have the same accuracy and recharge time yea, but Provoke has a base duration that is 1/3 of taunt, Ignoring your primary set.

Intimidate...30sec recharge, 10.4sec duration. You're more likely to use a epic power to control a single target instead.

Invoke panic 22.8 endurance, 60sec recharge and 10.4sec duration with a magnitude of 2. Most groups will be using alot of AoE by the time you can get this power. It would be extremely rare that you find it useful.

Probably would benefit that bit more from taking the stone epic set for the foe defense debuff.

I agree, need to see how it actually plays after release. You can't really plan a class like this because it may still change, actual changes in the patch to game mechanics too may also have impact on the way it plays.

Most importantly from low level you need synergy. Alot of you are talking about making a specific single build even though in other threads that you're posting on we mention the new alternative slotting system.

I'm not going to be playing this set before I tire of spore tbh

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Due to the nature of the buffs its viability for soloing is utterly dire at best.