Jorlain

One small pet peeve of mine. Make sure that when you're assessing "damage dealers" you're counting brutes as only slightly above MM's. Because for the purpose of forge and other damage buffs, they are. If it was fortitude, then, yeah, brutes all the way. Brutes has like the second lowest base damage though so please buff them last and pass it on.

As far as grouping goes SB is the same in all the iterations of Kinetics. So from the PoV of the "SB please" populace, it doesn't matter which one you pick.

Though if they ever give /kin to MM's I think all others will fall to the wayside of the "Kinja's" (tm).

I was only half in love with my DB/nin until I realized what happened with an achilles heel proc in ablating strike.

Ablating strike on the stalker version has an aoe attached to it that hits on a separate roll from the ST attack. The aoe is always there for coding simplicity. However it only deals damage/KD when part of a combo string. The -def debuff doesn't transfer to it, but procs do.

Achilles heel was the beginning, now I have that, shield breaker, touch of death, lady grey and a kinetic combat proc. If I get hit with a lag spike I know that all I have to do is just spam that and 1k cuts and everything will be fine. It's cheap, recharges fast and haxxors.

If that stacked into the weaken combo doesn't make you feel more like an aoe machine then go reroll spines or elec melee. In fact I rolled this toon to be a more single target focused toon, then discovered how broken ablating strike is and haven't really touched my elec/EA stalker since.

I have a thugs/stormie atm who is causing all sorts of "can you not use that..." tells. She fills the screen with pets, auras, more pets, more pets...yeah. Kinda miss the KB on the bruiser's handclap though.

I like ignite for AV's after I've already applied my patron immob enough times that they sit still and I've made sure that everything else is clustered up on the AV and rooted too. Also Toggles and debuffs are all in place. Making sure the AV and all his friends are still immobilized.

This is usually when I look at the mob and just hit Full Auto because the time it takes me to line up a useful application of ignite is about the time it takes FA to recharge on my AR/Rad corr. It's still good for AV's as it's one of the hardest hitting attacks in the game, but having a super hard hitting attack with a stupidly short range, long cast time, small area of effect, that also causes afraid/avoid on mobs, just isn't as cool as the devs seem to think it is.

Going by the description, the first time I used ignite I expected my toon to spray an arc of fuel out of the flamethrower and then either fire a single jet of flame or toss a lit zippo at it and it would to "fwoosh" and set a target on fire.

If ignite was more "Ima set that guy on fire" and less "Ima set that piece of carpet on fire and hope that guy on that piece of carpet doesn't move" I'd probably find more uses for it than just on AV's. Like if the animation time and range were the same but it was made a dot on the target that also gave the target a radius 4 aoe effect attached to their person that'd just be...hot.

Edit: I know a targeted foe-aoe DoT that isn't a toggle is not only a violation of the cottage rule but something that might be impossible to code, but it would fit with power balance based on what the ability is now and would make it worth the cast time and range. Which it is not now.

To answer your post title: I love the riffle, it makes my chips dippin champs. Go riffle.

First off I think you meant fissure. Tremor is correctly using a 15 yard radius that is (now) pretty standard for a dominator pbaoe.

I said that at some point, though I don't know if it's me you're referring to. All dominator sets seem to be balanced around having one cone and one pbaoe attack. With some exceptions that have reasons for those exceptions. This, the target cap and the radius on the ability lead me to conclude that fissure is placed on the cone table for certain calculations.

The ability has the functional range, area and target cap of a mid-sized cone. However it has the ease of use of a targetted aoe. It's damage still feels low, but looking at the set it seems balanced around having three pbaoe attacks and a strong melee focus so this ability being limited in this way doesn't feel (to me) as weak as it looks in a vaccuum. Consider the whole set.

Edit:

The secondary effects are great IMO. Fissure takes disorient sets which means you can slot it with immobilize to fill in somewhat on control gaps in sets like Grav or Mind. Almost all of the attacks in the set take KB sets so you can dump lots of kinetic crash or force feedback procs in em. Also as far as the end cost goes, it's still the cheapest targetted aoe attack in any of the dominator sets.

I made my fire/earth dom an insane artist who wraps people up in globs of magical paint and wields weapons of colored clay and glass.

Power Spectrum ftw.

I'm not sure if I'd play SS with BU instead of rage. Also You just know they'd drop KO Blow for AS since stalkers don't get attacks in their primaries that trigger holds.

Pro's to elec on stalkers vs Brutes.

1. Higher base damage on the AT. This means no waiting around for rage buildup or always having to have a /kin follow you around to maximize your value to a group. You just are awesome. This also means that damage buffs from BU and your enhancements go further. You will be doing more damage per attack over time than your brute friends.

2. Controllable criticals on higher base damage attacks

3. Critical chance scales with the size of your party and goes nuts when you run with a dominator or two. Critical damage does not count toward the damage cap so in very rare occaisions (2 domi, 5 MM teams) you'll have a higher damage potential than any other form of electric melee.

4. It's diffucult to test, but from my observations over a pretty decent amount of time, it also seems that psuedopet powers count as party members for the purpose of determining critical chance. More benefit to solo stalkers than teamed, but still significant for teamed stalkers.

5. First two attacks proc sleep which allows for assured critical hit on the next attack. This mostly affects solo players though as teamed you will most likely fail to line up the BU+thunderstrike before the sleep is broken.

Cons

1. Lower damage cap.
2. lower general survivability.
3. Psuedopets do not inheret critical capability (LR and Chain Induction proc.)

Biased conclusion: Elec is better for stalkers than for brutes.

I couldn't say what is best though. That's such a subjective term. Do you want the most damage over a full mission? Just right now? For 5 packs or 15 packs? Do you want to be able to survive alpha's or just follow someone else in? Is this maximum AOE for farming or missions? If farming, then Farming what?

"Best damage" doesn't really exist in an absolute sense. There are just a ton of factors that make one combo better than another.

If I were asked to just toss out a combo I'd suggest a Spines/Elec Scrapper for blueside or an Elec/Nin Stalker for redside. Spines/FA may have more theoretical damage, but Elec Armor have much better protection in the form of higher resists and better mez protection. Elec armor also have a better End recovery power and an overall more useful heal button. Elec's t9 is also better to cover "oops" moments than FA's.

Doms and Fenders get a base 16 Mag power push. Corrs and Blasters get a mag 13 base.

Spiffy, ty

What I understand of the pvp zones and how they affect powers are encapsulated in what mids shows me. I understand that mez is shortened, damage on a lot of abilities goes funhouse mirror, resists (for the most part) are increased and recharge goes down.

What I don't understand, and would like to, is how ellusivity still affects things. How mez and debuff stacking work (or don't work). Whether there are diminishing returns on things.

Do debuffs and mez have diminishing returns?
Is elusivity still implemented?
Does it only affect defense toggles?
Does Mez have diminishing returns?
How much recharge do you lose in pvp?

I know that people are going to want to toss in their opinions about how "this or that" part of "this issue" that did "that thing" ruined the world of pvp forever and ever, but it's really not necessary. I'm just looking for details to add to my model so that I can more effectively know how my toons funcion in zones and arena's.

Oh and do zones and arenas have different under the hood penalties/buffs (so not the zone buffs that show up on the bar)?

I'll toss my two cents in, as usual, for a combo that was not mentioned or considered. Arch/Kin. Archery has heaps of ST damage for soloing and has lots of buffs and AOE for teaming. You don't get the sechse dark pet, but you do get some pretty ridiculous slotting choices. If you're stuck on /dark though I'd suggest Rad/Dark. After having played if for a few weeks now and having dumped about 3 billion between the four respecs that I've done in that time, I'd say that it's arguably the best matchup for /Dark on a corr.

that does help, thanks

The info I've seen is inconclusive and the new Mids isn't clear on it either. Is energy Aura getting Energize? Are stalker defense sets getting energize. I don't have time to play on test or I'd just find out myself.

The reduction to abilities of fissure from the troller version is probably to put it more in line with a cone. Since all dom sets but and thorns get one pbaoe and one cone. NRG getting no cone and thorns getting two and a drop. These are cone stats on a targetted aoe. I think it will work out well being essentially a short range aoe that doesn't require lining up targets like every other dom set.

They also decided to nerf super strength in a non-specific way. The details of this nerf will be kept under wraps until a proper frenzy has been stirred in the rumor mill.