Nogala

It's not a question of stalkers being overpowered. It's a question of whether the way the devs designed the Stalker archetype makes the overall PvP game more fun, or less fun for everybody, not just stalkers. I don't think we know the answer to that yet. If the PvP zones start to become ghost towns then we'll have a pretty clear answer. If they stay populated then at worst stalkers are considered acceptable.

Nogala

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I also noticed that one time "Critical" came up twice when I attacked out of Hide. I have no idea if this was actually twice the critical damage, but I since I had seen people mention this before I thought I would mention it.

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This has happened to stalkers without Shadow Fall or Arctic Fog present. Some Stalker attacks have a baseline chance to critical regardless of hide. For now that can go off at the same time as the hide critical. Thus you see two criticals.

I've noticed that my stalker can start his AS animation before hidden shows up on my screen. As long as it goes off after hidden shows up I will critical. I'm guessing that this is what you were seeing. In a group this is more likely to happen since you can attack mobs whose attention is on somebody else.

I would expect Cold Domination/Arctic Fog to retain it's defense bonus even when unstealthed just like Dark Miasma/Shadow Fall, and Storm/Steamy Mist do. I'm not quite high enough level to test this out though.

In addition to the melee/range defense the above powers provide, they also have a typed defense component: Lethal,Smash,Fire,Cold, Energy, Neg. Energy. So essentually the only things they don't provide defense for are AOE psychic, AOE toxic, and AOE untyped.

It's probably also worth mentioning that Shadow Fall, Steamy Mist, Arctic Fog all provide defense to all allies within a given range of the source. I'm not certain what constitutes an ally in the PvP Free for All zones. Manuevers also provides AOE defense but it claims to be team only.

Nogala

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You don't need to skip any missions if you stick to solo play on villainous and concentrate on the mission objective rather the defating all enemies on a map by default.

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I've tried this and been unable to complete all of the missions from all three contacts. Once you hit level 10 the contacts will let you finish any existing story arc but you lose out on any additional missions that they have. This can result in such undesirable things as losing out on the Loa Bane from Bocar since that is a standalone mission that sometimes is given after the story arc missions.

Nogala

It's a bit early to cry gloom and doom over a hp enhancement. If you look at the hp generated per second it is a lot lower than any other self heal or single target heal. It's biggest aid will be for taking alpha strikes and surviving big Hero hits. That makes it good power for thinking players but nothing overwhelming.

Nogala

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I remain quite puzzled as to why this already great power got a buff, esp given the devs penchant for nerfing the hell out of things. If this is only to alleviate the woes of some tankers (on the CoH side), then there will surely be calls from other tankers to get their own buffs, possibly just resulting in the recall of this upgrade.

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I would suspect they want to make it something you can put six slots in like the other heal powers. HP increase was the theme of the power so they went that route rather than more healing power. Frostwork was probably drawn up to work this way but the code wasn't ready in time for release.

I suspect we will see a general trend where more and more powers can be six slotted to useful effect.


Nogala

On the test forums there was some indication that the heal enhancements in Dull Pain were causing more than just the hp increase in heal points to be healed. Can you test on a damanged Brute to see if there is indeed an additional heal component?

Nogala

I don't get this. Give pushback resistance to melee sets, when melee sets are the only folks that pushback powers are useful against. Why bother having pushback powers?

Nogala

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They really do need to fix this for kidnapped NPCs too. We're Stalkers, we hide, there's no reason for the mission to penalize us for not being another AT. It's bad enough that we're constantly forced to go on vault missions in which the enemies can see us through Hide, and we aren't even allowed to scamper out of there when we're done.

Ok, sure, maybe the kidnappee can't see us when we're hidden, but can't we at least pretend that we're dragging her along by the arm?

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Stalkers already have it way to easy in many missions. They can survive having to clear a path to the door for the kidnap victim like everybody else.

Nogala

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One of my favorite tactics, actually. Nice to see other folks using it.

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I think Focus is a good power but I sure wish my Martial artist didn't have to wait until level 32 to get anything remotely close to as good.

Assistant implies that it might be tied to number of times you do something as a sidekick. They do have something that unlocks after a certaint amount of Exemplaring, so why not the reverse.

Nogala

I've also had this happen to me in Port Oakes. I had a kill 10 Hellions mission (very tough on a level 7 toon). This one purple Family minion picked up my trail and followed me the next 15 minutes. The only way I could shake him was by taking him to the Ferry drones.

No way that I would get a Purple Family minion as an ambush.

Nogala

In addition there is the factor that -recharge only affedcts an attack after it's first discharge. So there is no mitigation to an alpha strike, and if a mob has more than one attack then that 2nd attack can go off right away as well. It also suffers the same weakness as resistance, status effects such as endurance drain are not evaded. So defense by -recharge is not as effective as other methods in several ways.

Nogala

Welcome to the family Arctic_Sun

Nogala

While I don't much like the reduction to Enervating field at least it's recharge time didn't get doubled to the point that the power is often not available when you are ready to use it. It's getting really old twiddling my thumbs before engaging a new group because my powers aren't rechaged yet.

Nogala

The return on investments for slotting defense on Wet Ice with those numbers is so trivial that a player would be gimping themselves to slot it. Yet many uninformed players will do exactly that. The thought that this game could go from powers like Combat Jumping having secondary defense benifits of 5% to a game where the defense benefit to a Tanker Primary is only 0.5 % (10 TIMES LOWER) makes it pretty clear that the "Super Hero" concept has been thrown into the shredder.

Think about what you are doing! With 6 enhancements to an offensive power I can use that power to arrest somebody 3 times faster. With a defense buff of 0.5 I can use 6 enhancement slots to avoid less than 1 shot in 20. The complete and utter imbalance there astonishes me.

For a more similar example Clear Mind and Fortitude can be used by an Empathy defender to give anybody the same protection that Wet Ice gives an Ice defender. Fortitude provides over 20% defense compared to the Wet Ice+Glacial Armor+Frozen Armor defense of 16% and Fortitude also works against Psi and Fire. Clear mind provides roughly equivalent status protection to Wet Ice. The imbalance here means that teams will be much better off with an Empathy Defender than with an Ice Tank. I sure hope that is not your goal.

Nogala

There are two issues with Ice Defences. The first is the odd scrambling. Ice tankers on I5 do not get defence against Psi, Cold, Fire, or Toxic. They do get wildly varying resistance to Fire, Cold, and Toxic. No other tanker or scrapper has weaknesses to as many different damage types.

The other issue for the defense oriented Ice Tanker set is that Defences scale terribly while resistances scale well. This hits Ice tankers in multiple ways. A lower level tanker with no SO's and few slots will only have about 15% defense. Against an even level minion that means about 30% damage mitigation which is comperable to a resistance tank. Take on a red minion and the low level Ice tanker has about 3% damage mitigation while the resistance tanker keeps her full damage mitigation. When you consider that group play can definately result in red minions that is a huge imbalance. This comes from my current understanding that a mob gets ~6.5% accuracy improvement for each level above you.

Now lets look at the Arch Villian end of the spectrum. A low level Ice Tanker verses an even level Archvillian only gets a 20% reduction in damage compared to somebody with no defenses. An fully slotted Ice Tanker can get a 40% reduction in damage, worse if the arch villian is fire, Psi, or Toxic. This is much worse than what a fully slotted Resistance Tanker will achieve. If the Arch villian is a higher level then that damage mitigation drops dramatically.

This all results in a situation where if a team wants a tanker to help with bosses and Arch Villians then the last tanker they want to get is an Ice Tanker. Unless the underlying scaling is changed the only solution I can see is to make an Ice Tanker better in many group settings but worse in large groups with higher level mobs.

What you have now is a situation where the Ice tanker is only better in Solo Heroic Missions with no Bosses and no fire, toxic, or Psi damage. If the mission throws any yellow mobs at you then even that slim advantage goes away.

Others have mentioned the benefits of resistance in other areas. Lower probablility of getting one shotted with resistance means your team can help out with a heal. Mixed resistance and defense means a greater chance that buffers will be able to cap you in one or both categories.

One final area that gets to me personaly is that many defender types can give anybody much better defenses and to more damage types with a single buff than my Ice tanker who is dedicated to self defense can obtain. If my defenses are considered to make the game too easy then why won't more powerful buffs trivialize the game?

One final note is I don't see how you can keep the game challenging for a high level and not too tedious or hard for a low level player if high level powers can double the defensive effectiveness of any power with SO's. I just don't see how this is ever going to be possible.

Nogala

I don't think CoH PvP will do much for most players. The power sets where not designed or tested for what would be fun in PvP. When you start from a design that wasn't meant to be fun for PvP then your unlikely to reach a point where PvP will provide long term fun for the majority of the playerbase. The prime example of this are control powers. I've never played a game where being helpless was fun for the target. But with CoH you can't take that away and still have functional controller powersets.

I take the arena to be an occasional distraction that lets me enjoy a different type of play. I don't ever expect it to be a mainstay for my CoH gaming experience.

Nogala

While I certainly wouldn't argue that Invulnerability Tanks have better defense I don't want Ice to be an overpowered set like Invulnerability. But if the Energy Absorbtion change means that only 5 mobs are getting endurance drained then that does need to be changed. If only 5 mobs are getting aggro then that should be fixed as well.

I do like caps though because it allows situations such as fighting DE where you have to pay attention sometimes and change tactics to be effective. Being able to jump into a group of mobs in every situation without thinking just gets old after a while.

There also hasn't been much mention of what Ice does better than Invulnerability. We have great Energy defense so sappers are much less of an issue. Energy Absorption being a click power also gives us some protection in cases where toggles do get dropped and without the negatives of powers like Unstopable. And on days when things just don't go right Hibernate can let you sit there and meditate for a moment on just how cool life can be. I also love not having to chase runners for five blocks because with Chilling Embrace they aren't going anyplace fast.

When it comes to Arch Villians I love defenders. Kinetics, Dark, and Radiation Defenders can all put Archvillian damage output to something manageable no matter what the type and frequently a Storm Defender can also help in many cases. To me the game isn't about always being the best. It is about being damn good and my Ice Tanker is definately that. This change doesn't really affect that and except for the bugs of secondary effects no longer hitting all mobs in range I don't mind it at all.

Nogala

Lot's of knee jerk reaction posts here. I'm not sure I'll ever come across a situation where having Energy Absorbtion suck power from more than 5 mobs will make any difference. And if I do it's not that hard to add more defense SO's to the power.

Nogala