GavinRuneblade

level 17 and IOs gets you virtually the same leap quite a bit earlier.

My understanding is that you need the level 24 duals because a 25 gives exactly 20% and that gets hit with the exemplar reduction.

If you're willing to use boosters, the absolute best is level 50+ quad, 43 triple and 24 dual.

But don't go 50++ or higher or you get over 20% and then are hit with the penalties when you exemplar down.

I've not had this trouble on 11 different characters. Most are exemped through oro in first ward. Good to watch for though. Do you see the day job buff icon appear and not get credit or does it seem that the system doesn't know you're in the right area?

I will caution against Dual blade on stalkers. Of all ATs that can use it, it has the worst performance for us. It is fun if looked at in isolation, but if you have played it elsewhere it is not as "good" (ie damaging, powerful, etc) on a stalker.

Claws loses eviscerate as an AoE, and lacks spin. So again, brute or scrapper have a better version. I've played it everywhere but on tanks, and I gotta say if you want claws, go brute. Just trust me. Go brute.

Electric Melee is best on Stalkers out of all ATs that have it. Can't go wrong.

Kinetic is great. Again, can't go wrong.

Spines, well, I'm a downer about spines but many people love the set. I have a 50 spines/nin who is slowly getting his incarnate powers. He sucks. He doesn't just suck he swallows. He's my second gimpiest level 50 after my merc MM. Buildup + Spineburst can't kill +1 minions and I have it with 98% damage after ED, plus assault, plus 9% damage from sets and the obliteration proc. I really don't like how low the damage from spines is.

Dark Melee is one of my favorite primaries. I love how I can two-shot almost anything, even lieuts reliably. I just run all over and death follows. It's reasonably fast, hits very hard, and is a low resisted set. Built in heal for 140+ (depending on slotting, mine gives 170) on a fast recharge as part of your attack chain is just awesome.

I haven't picked up street justice yet, but hear good things.

Martial Arts, again I haven't tried it, but teamed with MA/Nin quite a bit and it is a very solid set. Does bad things to good people plenty fast. highly recommended.

@the OP, I'll also back Klaw. Don't worry about hide. Yes it is great, but don't let the timer get you hidden. Fight it out. Stalkers are a bit more fragile than scrappers, but we are still melee fighters with a secondary that keeps us alive. We have a boatload of tricks. Learn to cheat and profit. That's what we do and we are good at it.

Placate is an awesome power with many more uses than just setting up Assassin Strike.

You can pull two and send one back (great for the end of statesman's taskforce if you're blueside). You can get a mob to aggro onto your buddies for giggles. You can guarantee that you'll never get rings in the BAF trial. You can jump into a group of three, AS the first, pacify the second, and now you're just fighting the third, oops, you auto crit thanks to pacify and he's dead, you're only fighting one person and he's going to stand there picking his nose until you attack him. You can pacify one of the MOBS that is immune to staelth to get past (rikti drone, knives of artemis, rularuu eye, etc).

Threadjacking

Can you post this long-form? Some of us are on Macs and Mids only exists for the PC.

Short version, however, if you want a villain with claws, go brute. Brute claws is slightly better than scrapper claws. Also, claws/regen is a bad mix. You will much prefer claws/wp. ESPECIALLY on a stalker. Stalkers have the same HP cap as blasterrs so can't benefit from the +HP in dull pain. You can hit the HP cap just from your accolades and two "large hp bonus" set bonuses. That makes one of /regen's best powers only a strong heal on a slow timer. Good, but no where near as nice as it is for scrappers and brutes.

Also /regen has a lot of redraw issues. /WP heals faster, has no redraw, doesn't gut one of its best powers on the hp cap, and has some DDR to let you keep your s/l defenses whereas /regen does not.

I don't think the playerbase is smart enough to save up emps for PvP recipes. Of the ones who do I think about half are still dumb enough to pick something other than the big three.

I was gonna guess at day jobs myself, because I have a habit of taking the Oro one and I know I get double recipes fairly often and love it. I've only seen a few double drops on mobs like you have here. I'll try a few farm runs over the weekend and see but I gotta agree with the person who guessed it was an unintended consequence of tweaking the drops for free/preem/VIP.

War said "all". If even one thing can be run solo, then it is not "all". And while teams can run the solo stuff, that's not the point and never will be. If you want a solo game, go buy a console, this is a MMO. It assumes teaming just like all others in the genre. It also has lots of activity for people to do solo. Some soloists have managed to do team stuff (like the people with solo master of badges, including the Doms who get solo master of recluse and Statesman TFs).

I duo'd the haloween trial after two left. and my partner could have solo'd it. I dunno, I play 90% solo except for trials and stuff and when my buddies are online (I'm 9 hours off from their timezone so we don't see eachother online a lot) and I still have no problems witht eh mix of team vs solo content.

Not true at all. If you "frankenslot" you can get vastly higher total bonuses than if you slot just level 50 commons. And frankenslotting can let you keep those bonuses all the way down to level 20, whereas the level 50 common IOs get halved.

For example, let's pretend that you have three slots and you put 1 common level 50 Acc, Dam and recharge into it. You have 42.5% a/d/r. If you exemp to level 20 you have 24.7% A/D/R.

Now, lets instead pretend that you put in three level 43 triple IOs each giving 19.7% A/D/R. At level 50, instead of 42.5% damage, you have 59.1%. At level 20, instead of 24.7% you still have 59.1%. Higher at 50, higher at 20. And no set bonuses involved.

By build I do mean having above a certain level of defense enough recharge in all your powers, etc. Not talking min/maxed. But, for example, my doms are built with less than 1/10th the recharge needed for permadom, and less than 5% to any defense. I survive via holds. I have a chance to hold proc in everything that will take it, and that especially includes the Grav Anchor in my AoE Immob. If I run into a mob and try to get off Drain Psyche, I'll be dead before I'm even within melee range. If I hit smoke->firecages->ST Hold a boss->Drain Psyche, it's a totally different story. Drain Psyche gets me up to 48hp/sec as the best I've ever managed to pull off. With functionally zero defense, If I'm not locking down the enemy completely, three minions can kill me fast enough that I'm not comfortable with it. 48/sec is just not that much as the *only* defense. Layered with something is it extraordinary. Alone, it's the reason people think /regen sucks and regen can get to over 170/sec not counting incarnate buffs.

With my warshade, she's got ~20% def v range and a bit of AoE. No accolades. If I try to get off eclipse or mire in a big group, and I'm alone, she's dead. I did some testing with Cims, Rularuu, Malta, and Carnies. Even with capped 85% resist all she can't survive more than 8 seconds (Carnies) against any of those groups alone. (Test was: Pop three med purples, wait until they start flashing, jump into middle of +1x8 spawn, pop eclipse. Take hands off keyboard and count until dead). Now, I've tweaked her a bit since then, not a lot but maybe enough to make a difference.

Obviously in play I'm attacking, and killing them so getting access to stygian fodder. However, my reflexes are crap, I often die THEN try to heal. Doesn't work so well.

I play dark armor primarily on my stalker. I have exactly one mob-based power, the heal. I have it 6 slotted and need 3 to get to full hp, or most of the way off of 2. My warshade I run at -1/x6. Anything less than x6 and she's too hamstrung to work right. Anything more than +0 or x7 and she's dead over and over and over even with capped eclipse and a small purple going. I do plan to give her the latest FOTM two nucleus and two recharge into eclipse. I hear that you need a lot fewer enemies to cap resist that way and it will be up faster than what I currently have. I also run an axe/dark brute, I took a claws/dark stalker to the mid 30s and a DB/Dark stalker to the 40s and a fire/dark scrapper to the 40s. But /dark is very different from dark/.

I love the onion-like layers of /dark. I love how easy it is to frankenslot, to build for any bonus you want, and to just run on crap common IOs. But dark/ I have a hard time with except on stalkers. For me, the reliability of buildup beats the peaks of dark consumption. Just like why my peacebringers both outperform my warshade even with crappier builds and a weaker AT.

/elec brutes/tanks too. My understanding is that even on SOs they can hit 80%+ energy resist, have a heal that's solid (but not as good as fire's), and have a godmode that lasts longer than most ambush farm maps have enemies to spit at you.

Also a -threat effect. Subtle, but handy.

Hmm, didn't know those were options. I didn't see them last time I checked. those will probably sell.

Do you know how they work if you exemplar below the "minimum" level of the set? Like down to level 1?

The short version is that both of those options are a catastrophic waste. Except in some very weird circumstances, you will always be better off using straight, unboosted level 50s.

But it does matter which level you exemp to:
32 or higher = Use boosted 50s for enhanced benefit. There is no penalty for examplaring to this level.
20-31 = Use unboosted level 50s the boosts will be wasted.
1-19 = This is a mess. Use unboosted level 50s and call it close enough for government work.

Two rules come into play if you exemplar below level 31:
#1 Any bonus higher than 41.5 is reduced to 41.5
#2 at level 21 all your IOs are reduced to 58% of their full value (or 41.5 if they were reduced to that).

So, let's say you want to exemplar to level 21. A normal level 53 SO give 38.3% at level 50 it gives 22.21% at level 21
A level 50 IO is reduced to 41.5, then reduced again to 24.07%
If you use 5 boosts on the level 50 IO it goes way over 41.5, then gets reduced to 41.5 anyway, then reduced again to 24.07 so you gain absolutely nothing from the boosts.

Is it the same player because I haven't seen that. I mean are smiling Joe, twoheadedboy, alienone, dechs kaison et all the ones saying they underperform?

And if so, look carefully at how they word it. I've seen people with extremely powerful builds say that the AT or the powerset isn't up to par overall. And both can be true. A very few people were able to solo AVs on all SO builds. These days that caliber of player can take the worst performing sets and do amazing things. Doesn't mean the set isn't weaker than it should be, it just means that the right build can do amazing things even with crap to work from in the hands of the right player.

those are the players who know the best. They have the experience with the AT and the powersets to really know if it is up to par or not.

I have 11 characters at various levels of incarnation. I paid a little bit at first to convert threads to xp, but since then it's been free. Well, actually it's had a negative cost. I tend to earn 1.5-3m per pair of BAF/LAmda runs, and my four UG trials have earned me over 10m each combined from inf from kills and decent drops.

But even then, it was the only exception, overall City has a design that rewards you the same however you want to play. Solo vs team is the big differntiator here, not killing A rather than Killing B.

Would be if they had better options. Red fortune is the one that will probably get the most play of the ones they do have.

Well, many other ones balance it by also saying "you can only get this uber reward by killing one specific strong thing". City combines a relatively low value of X with killing anything gives the same potential reward.

Note: yes I'm aware only Hami "drops" hamios, and only 47+ give purples and only players give PvP recipes, and there is a split between arcane and tech salvage. But its not like you have to hunt robots to get end mod sets, or only the nightwolves in striga drop triage and no other mobs anywhere else in the game world. Many other MMOs do that sort of thing.

Four (in order of least to most):

1. guide forum has many builds and the occasional request for builds
2. generic AT Questions Forum has a reasonable amount of builds and requests
3. the new build forum is pretty active
4. AT specific forums still have the most

Please look a bit more carefully at what I posted. I didn't say the powers were bad, I said I wasn't able to get the same level of benefit out of them that others do, so I'm not so impressed.

Yes I have seen the ingame numbers. Yes I know they are better with more enemies around. But there's also a balance that needs to be struck between enough and too many and it depends on build (slotting), reflexes, and whether they come up again before wearing off (been killed many times trying to get eclipse off when I had no resists, much safer to do it while the previous one was still up). And Just like not everyone prefers the go-go-go of chasing fury, chasing the endless buffs to keep up performance is not optimal for all players at all times. As they say warshades have higher highs and lower lows. they're not just flat "better".

And all of that is to say, you aren't always surrounded by enough people to make AAO from shield or the dark melee buff or eclipse/mires work to full effect. What I was saying is that I have been partied with other players using the brute version of dark melee. In big groups yes he was better, on EBs and AVs, my buildup and autocrits let me keep up on the damage. It's not just a clear cut case of X has higher potential in large group circumstances therefore it is better for all players at all times.

@Person34, the big difference is the reason that some people find /regen awesome and some can't figure out how it can survive at all. The right build helps a lot. But not all ATs and not all powersets perform equally well in the hands of all players. Iggy Kamizaze does things with his characters that other people using the exact same build can't. Just because some powers work great in the right circumstances, doesn't mean they are "better". Just like when someone asks for the "best build" you have to ask "better at what" or "better in what circumstances" or "best on what budget". There are no SO-only human form warshades farming at +4/x8 that I'm aware of. And I can't even using the same build as one posted by someone who has solo'd AV's.