Lightwave

What the...?

Wall Partitions
Category: new
Customizable? Y
Type: purchased
Description: Floor-to-ceiling wall partitions, some of which should include doorways, for separating rooms.
Limitations: None. Unlimited number allowed in bases.
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I guess it helps to include the URL I mentioned:

http://tinyurl.com/aps7t

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SG Name: The Pantheon
Recruiting Officers: Lightwave, Liberty Soldier, Brown Recluse, Gilded Bat, Sear
Preferred method of contact: Forum PM or in-game tell
Guild description: We're a small group of friends who play actively yet still consider ourselves casual players. We enjoy both PvE and PvP content and are working on getting our base raid-capable. Mostly we just want to team with other mature players who know how to have fun!

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We now have a site on Guild Portal! It ain't much, but it's a start. If you're interested in membership, start a thread in the forums.

SG Name: The Pantheon
Recruiting Officers: Lightwave, Liberty Soldier, Brown Recluse, Gilded Bat, Sear
Preferred method of contact: Forum PM or in-game tell
Guild description: We're a small group of friends who play actively yet still consider ourselves casual players. We enjoy both PvE and PvP content and are working on getting our base raid-capable. Mostly we just want to team with other mature players who know how to have fun!

You just have to learn how to use them effectively. You won't likely get off another AS because of the aggro, but you can Placate and hit with your heaviest attack for the crit without worrying about being interrupted.

Ninjitsu us light on defense even when fully slotted. Caltrops really helps break up the group so they aren't all attacking at once.

I've found the slow effect in PvP to be quite useful myself. Certaily long enough to Placate and fire off a built-up AS. I don't doubt TP Foe will be seeing some changes to make it a little less powerful, but I'm sure it will always remain useful.

Au contraire...Caltrops is amazing for a stalker. I never realized how useful they could be until I tried them for myself.

Throw them down on a group of foes after your AS takes out the first. They tend to try to run off the Caltrops, keeping them from attacking you for awhile. Lay them in doorways and next to corners to bottleneck groups, letting you set up for better hit and run tactics.

In PvP, TP Foe and Caltrops is a deadly combo. Lay out Caltrops, then TP your foe onto them, then Placate, Build Up/Focus Chi and AS.

Never thought much of them before, but I've come to the conclusion that Caltrops is one of the best powers in Ninjitsu.

I agree. A better way to determine perception and stealth would be great. Make it a to-hit roll of sorts.

NRG/NRG blasters can hit anything, dish out a lot of damage and have several reliable stuns at their disposal. If I don't see them coming, they're death on wheels.

Super Reflex scrappers can be frightening. One-on-one mine will sometimes get owned, but in groups where I'm not the only target he's amazing. With Elude up, he's a virtually unhittable killing machine. SR scraps also make my stalker break out in a cold sweat. They can see me coming and they have a good chance to dodge the AS even if I can set one up with a Placate.

I hear Ice/NRG blasters were a popular flavor last month or the month before because of their combination of damage, holds and slows. Though I can't speak from experience it sounds like a deadly combination.

Regen scrappers are still very difficult to take down in a one-on-one fight. Basically any scrapper is a force to be reckoned with. They have solid defenses and status protection and a killer offense. They really have the best of both worlds and if played well they have complete freedom on any battlefield. No waiting for the right target at the right time, just autotarget the nearest enemy and go for it.

Illusion/FF controllers. There was one at the villain hospital in Siren's Call last night with several force fields running. He was completely unhittable. Nobody could touch him. I think he might have been hit by one or two turret shots maybe, but it was hard to tell. They didn't really do any damage. The only downside is that he couldn't attack at all, but being exemplared to 38 he didn't have his pets. If he was at his full level of 50, it sounds as though he could attack through his Phantom Army while remaining completely untouchable.

Good point. I've read about /dev blasters setting up several trip mines and laying out caltrops before using TP Foe to pull an opponent into their trap. I'm told that death is quick and painless. And largely unavoidable. Essentially this is a ranged stalker. It requires patience to set up this trap, and at times your prey will move away, wasting all the effort...but when it works there's little anyone can do about it.

My stalker has a helluva time against tanks and scrappers. I can't even one-shot a squishie yet, and those melees are left with a ton of health and usually a couple of respites later I'm facing a really angry hero with full bars while I just blew my best shot.

I've got status protection on my stalker, and it's perma. Someone still managed to punch through it yesterday. I think it was a two-controller team with a scrapper in the front. It helps, but it's not perfect.

Right now I pretty much have to take out my targets in 2 or 3 hits. If they start healing through powers or inspirations I know I don't have the endurance or damage to take them and I bolt, because it's really all I can do.

There are lots of builds that seem pretty uber to me in PvP. I wouldn't even put stalkers at the top.

It's cool, sorry for jumping on you.

I think Hide by itself is fine, but there are so many ways to trump is that its usefulness has been pretty severely compromised. As a result, many stalkers seem to feel their only option is to pick up Stealth to one-up the perception bonus of powers like Targeting Drone or Focused Senses, which means a lot of players want yet another way to boost perception, so there are temp powers.

It's all getting a little out of hand, if you ask me.

Stealth from the Concealment pool seems to work well for PvP. It allows you to move around with some degree of safety, but won't be of much help once the fighting starts. Invisibility grants you additional safety from being seen at the cost of your ability to attack. The problem with Hide is that it's all or nothing. You either see through it and completely negate the stalker's advantage or you don't and get killed very quickly.

As I understand it, stealth powers subtract from the base perception range of their targets. If you have a base perception range of 300 feet and Hide reduces that range by 300 feet, a stalker can stand right next to you without being seen. If you have a +perception power that adds 100 feet to your perception range, you can now see a Hidden stalker 100 feet away. If Stealth subtracts 100 feet...you get the idea.

I'm rambling, I know. Sorry. As a stalker, I don't want to be forced to take Stealth. Not sure I can afford the power slot anyway. I'm willing to accept that my ability to remain unseen might be less consistent than someone who's willing to stack multiple concealment powers, but I'm still a stalker and I kind of think my ability to hide should still be pretty solid. Maybe a different system of perception would work better? What about something like an accuracy check? The perception bonus of the power(s) against the stealth bonus of the power(s)...like accuracy vs. defense? Maybe diminishing returns on stacking concealment/perception powers?

Just throwing out ideas.

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I wouldn't say the majority of players have +perception, but probably at least a third of the ones I encounter have no problem seeing through Hide

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Then you aren't setup very well as a Stalker.


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How could I not be set up very well as a stalker? Is MY Hide power somehow less effective than any other stalker's? Is there something wrong with my playstyle that allows others to see through my Hide?

Don't just throw out "you must just suck at your AT" insults. You don't know what those other stalker's you dealt with were running. They may have been using a temp stealth power or maybe they chose to stack Stealth on top of Hide, or maybe they got a dose of Grant Invisibility from a friend. All valid tactics, but I prefer to discuss balance based on what my character can do on his own, and Hide is not the end-all-be-all.

And for every ability in the game there IS a player with a counter, but that player isn't always you. No one character can counter every ability in the game, but as a devices blaster I can tell you that Targeting Drone alone is enough to see through Hide unless it's stacked with something else.

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Oh, I understand that it's not easy to set up an AS on someone to kill them.

But you don't understand, that it doesn't matter. The Stalker spends 5 min, and kills the target. Sometimes. Meanwhile, the target is dead, and the Stalker goes on to another target. During those 5 mins, the Stalker was practically safe. 5 minutes of safety for a kill, seems wortwhile for the Stalker. And no, this isn't my opinion speaking, this is the counts of the Stalkers who are actually out there, spending 5 minutes to stalk and kill someone. Obviously it's worth it for enough Stalker players.

Now, take the other player. He's in a zone, doing something for a while, then BAM... he's dead. Doesn't matter to him if the Stalker spent 1 minute or 10 setting it up. What matters to him is that he's dead, and never had the ability to do anything about it. So he gives up on PvP. Another player who could have been involved in PvP, who either makes a Stalker for it, or gives it up.

The time involved does not matter when we're looking from the point of the victim. The end result is the same whether the Stalker takes 10 minutes to kill me, or 1. I'm just as frustrated and angry, and just as likely to give up on PvP. That's the problem, and the time spent by Stalkers doesn't really matter to that problem.

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BlackSly totally has the permission to speak for me on this subject from now on.

I've pretty much just given up, the stalkers think it's hard for them cause they have to chase someone around for awhile. I'm almost willing to bet that the time it takes for you to find your target, it takes me about the same amount of time for a target to get me.

Very few people come up and engage me the only ones that do are stalkers and there is no counter for them, unless they attack me in the middle of a group of 7 heroes. Those of you that think stalkers are a one trick pony don't use your sets fully. Even Ninjitsu has a good amount of defense, atleast enough to keep me from hitting them with any proficiency. All my attacks have 2 accuracy SOs and I have tactics running.

I was told last night that most of my problem was just that I'm a invuln, so maybe I just need to go beg for buffs there. Either that or reroll a regen scrapper.

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If changes were made to appease the "victims" of stalkers, changes would have to be made to reduce the risk of stalking. It rarely takes five minutes to follow someone before finding an opportune moment to strike, and the stalker is anything BUT "safe" in that time. I wouldn't say the majority of players have +perception, but probably at least a third of the ones I encounter have no problem seeing through Hide, and when they see a stalker trying to hide it's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I spend more time running from these people than I do stalking my prey, and five or ten or thirty minutes of perfectly good stalking can be shot all to hell in the process.

I get that it doesn't matter to the victim of an AS how much work went into that kill, and I'm willing to concede that everyone should feel they had a shot in most situations, but you have to consider BOTH perspectives in making any sort of change to stalkers. Reduce their frontloaded damage, and you'll have to give them something else to compensate.

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Or does your -valueless- post indicate acceptance with everything aforementioned, excepting of course that most trivial sentence?

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Not really, i just didnt think it was worth commenting on because Castle has already stated that they are changing the coding in game so that any PvP attack that would kill a player in one hit will instead leave them with 1hp. With that in mind almost the entirety of your post was better off ignored.

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Correction here. The 1hp threshhold is only one of the ideas being considered. We've still not determined exactly how we are going to deal with 'One Shot Kills' (and the final decision will almost certainly apply to both PVE and PVP -- so no more AV insta-kills.)

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Okay.. question.

I'm not going to argue the merits or drawbacks of playing a stalker, all in all, I feel they're quite balanced for what they're designed to do. If anything, their weakness lay in their lack of versatility strategically, but are massively good at the "thing they do".

Now, on more than one occasion in PvP, I have been in the middle of a PvE combat in a PvP zone and get ganked by a Stalker. I get that it's all in fair play and fun- after all, that's what they do best. If I'm distracted by a mob of PvE opponents, that's a great time to sneak in and whack me, strategically speaking.

The downside is that if they don't kill me right off, then there's a big chance (and it's happened more than once now) that the damage is so extreme that the next hit from any one of the PvE opponenets I'm in combat with smacks me, takes me out, and I get debt.

I don't care that the Stalker "ganks" me when I'm at a disadvantage like that (I would gladly do the same thing if I were playing my Stalker-that's how they work best) but I really don't like the idea of getting debt because, in essence, the Stalker didn't finish me off first.

If that 1hp threshold comes to pass, then this will be an even more frequent complaint, and while some Stalkers will cause debt unwittingly, I can imagine some would do it just for "griefing" purposes (I have already ran across one that was doing it purposely for just that reason- and a few others that "may" have been, but am willing to count them as "accidents")


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I will be that stalker. If AS takes you down to 1% life it's not going to save you from dying, 1 more strike (which is probably not going to miss due to the fact that you just lost a ton of health, 2 toggles, and I have buildup on) is going to drop you. However this gives me a new griefing tactic... I can take you to 1%, and tp you into a group of mobs... I fully plan on abusing this ability to cause as much debt as possible if they make this change.

I hate to break it to you, but I am pretty sure I am not alone in this. So you morons keep asking for nerfs without fully understanding the patience it takes, and downsides of showing yourself as a stalker in PvP.

90% of you goofs have yet to face stalkers in war, where I went the other day and missed 50% of my AS, in SC I miss maybe 5%. So you havent even seen 50 stalkers vs 50 others and already you are calling for a nerf.

Also in War, my HP don't seem to scale up nearly as much as the damage output of myself and others, making me even MORE vulnerable to dying before I can escape.


My character is not 50 yet, as that is not even an option, so I don't have the extra bonuses in PvP most heros do. I don't have millions of inf saved up, rarely are temp powers even availible to me in SC.

Life as a Stalker is alot harder than you seem to think, and I am pretty sure it's just going to get harder and harder as we enter higher and higher PvP zones.

Missing 50% of my AS using buildup, in war is insane. With the extremly low HP I have showing myself in MELEE range of an enemy and missing my main source of damage is a really RISKY situation for me.


Lets stop crying for nerfs before we even have a single level 50 stalker. It's so stupid that the few classes that we are the papper to thier rock for are crying about us.

[/ QUOTE ] Man this is GREAT. I have a lv 36 stalker at the moment. And i understand everything this person is trying to get across to you people who are asking the dev's to nerf us.

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Ditto. It's way too early to be talking about nerfs to stalkers. The people asking for them aren't the ones playing them. All they see is a guy appear out of nowhere and hit them hard. They don't see how long I have to actually follow that person around waiting for him to make a mistake like isolating himself from his group or from friendly mobs and standing still long enough for me to spring my trap. Or how many times I miss with one of the several checks I need to succeed at to get that kill.

My scrapper can run around in Warburg without any thought of stealth, attacking any target at all, grouped or not. My stalker has to be very cautious and selective, and very, VERY patient. People who don't play stalkers don't get that.

I agree. I spend so much time just following my targets around waiting for them to stand still for a split second, and when I do catch up with them I often blow the kill because I missed my AS or they reacted with a tray full of greens before I could fire off another attack. A Blaster or a Scrapper can just find an opponent and engage, but a Stalker has to be very patient and careful. Miss that initial AS and you may as well start running, because you don't have the offense to make up for that damage and you don't have the hit points or defenses to even consider trying.

This is cool. I can't believe Mark Waid's on board. I'm looking forward to the comic.

Even with a story arc, you should be able to cancel the mission and pick it up from your contact again later. I'd understand if timed missions couldn't be abandoned, but the timer shouldn't continue to count down while you're logged out/disconnected.

Every day is a holy day to someone man. What's today's?