Jade_Dragon

It's my understanding that this is still two mutually exclusive options; you can't colorize both weapons and the attacks they make. But as this is a new thread and new redname, that would be a REALLY good feature to add. (Or rather, a limitation to remove)

I've got some old suggestions for Power Pool alternate animations:

Super Speed/Hasten - a "blurring" or "visual echoes" effect (like Flurry)

Stealth/Invisibility/Cloaking Device/Cloak of Darkness - a "shadowy" blackening of the figure, aka the Shadowy Presence temp power

Medicine Pool - various alternatives to fit magic users or high tech/nanobots concepts.

Teleport - "puff of smoke", dark clouds consistent with Dark Power Sets, electrical theme consistent with Lighting Rod

Tough - something other than "gorilla chest pound/scream"

Agreed on that, and kudos on picking such a cool character as your (heroic? villanous? standard resistance freaky?) alter ego.

Heh, now if I had any of the boxes for my old Atari 2600 games...

Heheh, the only thing missing is the little green dog costume.

Basically, the discrepancy is between those who say "X%" to mean the enhancement, and those who say "X%" to mean the final damage.

100% base damage + 100% enhancement = 200% total damage. Or, the damage cap is either +400% damage or 500% total damage.

For consistency, I always put that + sign before the number if I'm talking about enhancement to the base.

[edit] Also, what Aett_Thorn said.

Actually, that's another point. I mentioned the reduced recharge above, but Brutes also get a benefit from reduced End cost, as that enables them to maintain Fury longer relative to other Sets with the same damage levels. That's probably honestly still the case despite the tweaks, it's just been toned down a bit from their initial testing.

Maybe it could get the Eagle's Claw treatment. The damage is actually greater than Scrapper Eviscerate, (unless CoD is out of date) but the lower base damage and Scrapper's higher chance to Crit may balance it out.

I think the devs were trying to go the same route as Eagle's Claw, but didn't take it that far.

Truthfully, a Stalker that has ANY AoE at all, particularly one with a respectable size, is a step ahead.

That argument always ignores that the Stalker does greater burst damage. It is always a comparison between sustained damage between the two ATs, and survivability.

There is also the tendency to underestimate the survivability of the Stalker. For the purposes of the argument, it always seems to be assumed that the Stalker is as fragile as, say, a Blaster.

Adding the two together, it has never seemed to me that "the Stalker is a little worse". My perception is and has always been that "the Stalker always defeats foes a little faster at first, and then over time the Scrapper catches up." The lower hit points balance out because, as Dechs said, defeated enemies don't do much by way of damage.

[edit] So is your picture how much HP the Stalker has left, or how many enemies the Stalker has left? Or, perhaps even both?

This isn't really an issue, unless you are dealing with high damage boosts. (At which time you would have different values stacking with your reds) Overall, the Scrapper will do more base damage, but the Stalker will Crit more often. Assuming the Stalker is pulling ahead on damage (i.e. sufficient allies in melee to provide random Crits) the reds will be doubled along with the Crits.

Because of the way Crit works, Scrappers behave as if they have a 1.125*1.075 base damage, and Stalkers behave as if they have a 1.0*1.1 base damage. If Stalkers had a 20% Crit rate, they'd do the same damage as Scrappers. Single target damage, but the same damage.

Scrappers do not "pull ahead" of Stalkers, the way they do with Brutes. They remain at exactly the same ratio of damage relative to the number of teammates in melee.

This I can't argue with. But you're basically talking about a difference of maybe 10% of the fight. And that's assuming the Stalker is actually doing badly enough to be dying///////defeated.

It depends on what you mean by "sacrifice".

By "sacrifice", do you mean a loss of DPS? Because Assassin Strike has the highest DPA of any attack a Stalker can use.

By "sacrifice", do you mean being in Hide? Because a Stalker should always be in Hide as a combat starts.

By "sacrifice", do you mean being knocked out of Hide by AoE attacks on the tank? Because that's just a matter of timing and having good Defense. Heck, if you are in Hide you should have at least 37.5% Defense.

There are plenty of opportunities for a Stalker to do burst damage, both with his first attack, and subsequent ones. The Stalker even has a higher chance of random burst damage. The burst damage doesn't have to end after 10s, although perhaps the Stalker won't be doing more burst damage than the Scrapper any more. The point is, though, that the Stalker is already ahead...

Build Up+Aim for a Blaster is a damage boost, which means for 3 slotted attacks it only gives a +78.75% increase in overall damage. If you are being boosted by the team, that is even less. A Stalker by contrast will do +175% damage with a Placate+Build Up combo, and Placate is up more often than Build Up. So even with a Blaster's best single target damage attack, Total Focus, the best it can do at level 50 is 707.75, while an AS with BU does 1070.52. (please correct math if incorrect...)

The Blaster will DEFINATELY do more AoE damage, particularly with the Tier 9. That's really what will come close to the damage of AS, and easily exceed it, with more than one target. But the Blaster's single target damage will not be able to spike that high.

Again, I'm not saying that Brutes ALWAYS out damage Scrappers. I'm saying that Scrappers do not ALWAYS out damage Brutes. Even with the Brute changes, Brutes still outdamage Scrappers on the edge case where they have 75% Fury, and no external or stacking damage buffs.

Since the claim is that Stalkers should ALWAYS outdamage Scrappers, I'm pointing out that Scrappers do not ALWAYS outdamage Brutes. To be balanced, Scrappers should outdamage Stalkers as often as Brutes outdamage Scrappers.

If this is true of Brutes, it is also true of Stalkers. The ratio between Stalker and Scrapper HP is the same as the ratio between Scrapper and Brute HP.

It can be argued a Blaster doesn't do more damage than a Scrapper either, unless he is a Blapper. The difference is, the Blaster has an option to do way more AoE damage than the Stalker. So this is another point where the AoE issue comes up in a major way.

I personally feel the Demoralize effect is an attempt to address this, the Stalker does not deal AoE damage, but has an AoE debuff/control effect. But this wanders into cross-AT capabilities, and appears to be implemented in such a way that it is a situational power. (It is for use only against high HP foes that can survive the AS)

If we had some idea why that was implemented that way, and how some of the comparable Inherents are implemented, it might help. We can assume, for instance, that the Kheldian buff has such a large radius because it is tested for infrequently (relatively speaking) but the Stalker Critical chance must be calculated every single time a Stalker makes an attack. If we further assume the chance must be calculated while the player is waiting on his attack to hit, too large a radius might mean introducing long pauses in the Stalker's attack chain that would be unacceptable.

OTOH, that's a lot of assumptions. We don't know. Personally, if the Defender Vigilance is implemented in such a way that it doesn't require a "scan" for allies, but merely checks that such allies EXIST (in the team list, for instance) then I think I would prefer that. The Stalker would then merely require a team of four to match the single target damage of a Scrapper, whether his teammates were meleers or not.

As an alternative, I've suggested raising the chance of Critical more rapidly, but "cap" it at four allies, similar to how Vigilance works. Thus with one teammate in melee, the Stalker will Crit 15% of the time, with two allies, 20% of the time, and with three 25%, but with four or more it would be 30%, the current maximum. This seems more reasonable to me if you are trying to make the criteria that the Stalker has other allies in melee to "distract" his foes.

Neither suggestion would change the values of the Crit bonus or make the Stalker do more damage, he would just do more damage UNDER MORE CONDITIONS. Which seems to be what is needed here.