Person34

I have a BS/elec armor at 43 current and just my 2 cents: BS hits pretty hard and has good mitigation through a knockdown (head splitter), knockup (disembowler) and you can cap melee and lethal defenses pretty easy with parry. Head splitter is also a 10' 20 degree cone (that accepts melee sets and not PBAoE for some reason) and can hit 3-4 mobs per swing with practice.

Some folks will complain that it's all lethal damage which is resisted by some mobs but since carnies can be fought till lvl 50 I just pick them every time (lethal does +20% damage to carnies, and with elec armor's +90%+ recovery debuff resistance I can mow through ring mistresses without worry of having my end bar sapped dry). Great set, never played it on a scrapper so was pleasantly surprised with its performance.

MA I don't have a ton of experience with. I know it has a variety of effects (an immob, a KB, 2 stuns) and has some wicked cool animations (I love crane kick) but MA seems to be the least played stalker primary. If you are gonna go with nin or SR I'd try MA, if you decide to try a resist based set or regen I'd go with BS. Or just try both =)

Electric armor isn't too bad now that it has a heal. Its heal also boosts your hp regeneration and grants an end discount for 30 seconds (nice for end heavy sets like broadsword). Elec armor has a good number of resists across the board too, to include protection vs recharge and recovery debuffs. The recovery resist is over 90% which is nice, it allows you to pretty much shrug off malta sappers and carnie bosses Mask of Vitiation.

Great to see someone making a MA stalker, they are a rare breed =)

Personally I like it being a cone because hitting 2 from hide in one shot = a single target crit from hide, not to mention if you can pull off hitting more than 2 plus manage to pull off a few of the 50% crits . BU + head splitter from hide can create some big hurt. If they change to to a PBAoE set you can slot two -20% res procs in it that stack (fury of the gladiator and ach heel). Either way it's win/win for us.

It crits from hide like an AoE, so 50% chance to crit from hide.

No it does not crit from hide.

Just logged on my 41 broadsword to verify, head splitter accepts the following sets:

- knockback

- accurate defense debuff

- defense debuff

- melee damage

So yes it accepts straight melee damage and not PBAoE sets. Which is kind of funny because it is a cone and not single target (I routinely hit 2-3 critters at a time with it if I line up correctly). What is confusing about this is the scrapper version is the -exact- same attack but accepts the PBAoE sets, but ours takes the melee sets. I wonder if this will be changed in game at some point?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I'm gonna roll a BS/Nin.



Care to join me?

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]

Gonna make a BS/willpower here, got the build already planned with soft capped defense vs smashing/lethal (and that's without using parry, which is only in the build for set bonuses), 55% resistance smashing/lethal, 20% global damage bonus and 85% global recharge. And it has reconstruction =D Might be an end hog tho, but I don't expect things to live long enough to matter

BS/nin would be a tough competitor tho... ggrr with so many choices I will prob end up making one of each.

This is the set I have been really waiting for, a hard hitting stalker melee weapon set. Now I can quit pretending my bane spider is a stalker and move onto better things (nothing against banes of course).

Broadsword's gonna be sweet. I don't care if it's A) "just a higher damage, longer recharge ninja blade" or B) it's a lethal set... it's frickin broadsword baby!

[ QUOTE ]
heheh....I'm staying away from this one. I can get behind Katana, Broadsword, and Martial Arts.....but bananas? Noty.

[/ QUOTE ]

According to BaBs there's gonna be 2 new skins for spines for i16 so there's still hope!

Edit: doh Helin beat me to it!

Hmmm, would spines work out? Secondary effect is -recharge, which is a reason why ice armor isn't coming our way.

Although spines would be a killer fun set.

I have a 50 db/nin stalker, I'll assume most folks that think stalker DB sucks is because they tried a brute/tanker/scrapper and didn't enjoy it. Stalker DB is a different animal entirely. I don't use any combos at all, after seeing the power of BU/1kcuts/placate/sweeping strike vs a group of mobs for the first time I was hooked.

Assuming the attacks are all slotted the same and it's against the same level mob with no resistances they all do the same damage.

at lvl 50 unenhanced:

claws does 139 +250 (if hidden),

dark does 97 smashing + 42 negative +250 (if hidden,

elec delivers 97 smashing + 42 energy + 250 (if hidden),

Etc.

Being the SoA board you'll find there a majority bias towards night widows and a minority bias towards banes. Bottom line is -both- lay things to waste pretty easily, both have team buffs and both have massive hard hitting attacks available to them.

My advice is try both out, both solo rather easily (most stealth classes do). Folks tend to say banes are squishy, but since they can have soft capped defenses just like a widow (gonna take some IOing to make happen of course but isn't that tough to pull off), higher hit points through armor passives and decent resists (mine has 41% lethal/smashing and 20-25% all else) in the end they are IMO more durable than widows in the high end game. Not only that but they have a ton of mitigation through knockdowns in crowd control and shatter and access to pets to help with hard targets.

Am I biased against widows? Not really, it's just everyone plays one and I find them a bit boring myself. I go in with my widow and a few slashes later things are dead. Then I click mind link again and repeat. I go in with my bane and a few swings later bodies are flying all over and things are dead (if you've ever played war mace this is basically it, but with crits from stealth and toxic damage added in). Just my preference.

Widows are a bit more straight forward: no glamor, no announcing to the room that they've arrived and everyone should make out a quick will. They just kill. What makes them so alluring is that it's stupid easy to cap defenses on them. Both ATs get mental training so your attacks are quicker, both get access to veat-specific leadership pools. And both can be a lot of fun to play.

My advice again: make one of each .

Thanks for the feedback guys, yeah spines looks like a ton of fun. Just got lvl 18 this morning and impale is a pretty good attack (animates slow but high damage, immob and -fly? Yeah baby!). Can't wait for ripper, by the #'s it does more damage when its toxic dot fires than all but three stalker attacks (midnight grasp, total focus and of course energy transfer), plus it's also a cone attack that slows, knocks back and immobilizes. I like your idea about following it up with sands Wail, I just need some more global accuracy to pull that off I think (well, need more levels first heh).

Thanks again guys !

Hey guys, I'm thinking of trying out a spines stalker but it dawned on me that I -never- see them being played. Is there something about them that makes them lackluster? Or is it because of the weird spine graphic maybe (who knows, maybe the power cutomization in i16 will offer a different look)? I like the #s on impale and ripper, throw spines seems a bit wonky though (a ranged AE?). Am considering pairing it with SR and see how it does.

Seems this would make for a crazy AE toon, spamming crits and AE attacks and hopping in and out of melee like an unchained rabid monkey!

[ QUOTE ]
I'd like to say I adore Crowd Control for its mitigation and stealth.

[/ QUOTE ]

Crowd control is frigging awesome. 180 degree arc, high damage that can crit from hide, knocks down all targets and has a target cap of 10. One of my favorite moves in the whole game.

Well one of the things about veats is there are a lot of different ways you can put one together: just take a look at other player's builds and you won't ever see two that are perfectly identical. Yet they can all still be effective in their everyday tasks. This is especially true for widows IMO because they are a bit more linear in design (basically a ton of defense coupled with either a control set or an attack set).

Looks like Biowraith beat me to the punch, both foresight and TT:maneuvers are prob better picks in your build. Foresight is a killer auto power, it adds 20% resistance vs psi damage, a base 7.5 defense vs all and introduces scaling resists to the mix. TT:maneuvers is nice as well, it both is higher in defensive value than the pool power (5 vs 3.5) while costing about half as much end to run.

Experiment around on mids a bit and you'll see all kinds of ways to build night widows. I even at one time monkeyed around with one that did away with mind link and still had capped melee and ranged defenses (AoE was in the mid 30s). Yeah yeah I know that is considered a widow taboo but I wanted to see if it were possible to remain effective without the constant "must make sure mind link is always on" mentality (seems it would always drop in mid widowlock). GL with your widow =D

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I'm really no Widow expert, but I'd probably go with something more like this:

[/ QUOTE ]

Not getting snooty, but if this is the case then wouldn't if have been more beneficial for you to not offer feedback?

[/ QUOTE ]

Sheesh, I'd hate to see your snooty side then.

Ty Kahlan and Turboski for the quick responses =D

A few months back my son and I started a duo that has worked out pretty well so far (him a stone melee/ SR brute and me an ice/cold corr). It has been a side project of ours that meshes pretty well: for example with only my ice shields + his SR toggles he is soft capped using just standard IOs. Also both of our toons are a bit end heavy but /cold gets a "ranged consume" at lvl 38. This synergy has made the journey all the more fun.

Last night I dinged level 38, so I went and picked up this "ranged consume" called heat loss. +End powers are always welcome so the first thing I do is run over to critter and try heat loss out. My first surprise arrives in that it has a pretty cool graphic and then I noticed I had a small recovery buff on. Yay!

But having not paid much attention to the power's info I started to realize something pretty quick: heat loss is a bad [censored] of a power. It isn't just giving me a small recovery boost, it's crippling whatever it lands on. So I mess around with it a bit and now have a few questions.

- will slotting it with end mods only affect the amount of end that is drained on the mob or will it also increase our recovery rate?

- its it listed as a targetted AoE, are all the mobs in the radius affected by the -rech and damage resistance debuff, or is it just the end drain part? I have been trying to pay attention to this but seconds later his brute has them squashed.

- finally, is heat loss good enough to replace stamina with? I have never before considered this, not even my drain psyche dom or claw stalker has me convinced that stamina is replaceable. And ice corrs suck through end like it's going out of style (well, I do anyways and that's -with- stamina). On a very high rech build I can get it to around 5 seconds downtime on heat loss between buffs. Has anyone ever tried this?

What an awesome power!

[ QUOTE ]
As for being accused of being a PowerLeveler, the accusation is sound. You say that you have two level 50 vllains, which is only available after obtaining a level 50 villain. That means you have at least 150 levels of experience to draw from. If you haven't learned much to be able to make an educated overall comparison between your two level 50 VEATs, then that means you PL'ed most of the way on your toons, you are unable to be aware enough to learn while playing, or you just basically didn't want to learn. There could be another explanation but then I would be just aimlessly speculating by that point.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're aimlessly speculating regardless. Again, was asking about scaling resists as it -nowhere- outlines what the values are or even if they existed at all. It has been posted countless times that they do in fact have scaling resists, yet no proof existed that they do (I hadn't seen any that is). So by my asking makes me a noob or a PLer.

And now you say the resists don't exist at all, another mindless speculation? I just confirmed earlier that widows resists -do- scale, which was further confirmed other posters. If you continue to argue this then log on for yourself and see.

Anyways, again thanks for the posts guys.

[ QUOTE ]
Dont know where you getting that 40ish% number from but its way lower than that

[/ QUOTE ]

With tough and the 2 passive armors it's around 38% for smash/ lethal: 23% tough, 12% bane armor and 3% wolf spider armor. That looked pretty good until I ran the widow to a mish in GV and tested out the scaling resistances firsthand a minute ago. I ran to a boss room with all toggles off and all resistances scaled to 54% before I croaked. I would say this was at around 5% health when this happened (dang, should have taken a SS) but it was a greater # than I thought it would be.

And yeah, it would have be an easy choice if banes had a 20 sec placate. Honestly the only thing that really kind of drives me nuts with banes is the constant redraw between gun and mace. Oh well, still have some testing to do, thanks for the insight.

Well , the widow seems squishier of the two but I haven't put in a ton of IO sets in either toon. Guess I'll copy to test and experiment around a bit. I've had the widow since just after i12 and has all the + hp accolades, I think her base is @ 1312 vs the bane having just over 1500 with just invader and high pain threshold. My question was about the "Scaling resists" that everyone says widows have, where does it list the values? I'm trying to determine if it even will make that much of a difference considering how low a widow's base hit point are.

[ QUOTE ]
Hmm, sounds like someone has been in Architect because had you actually leveled them up you could easily answer thsi question

[/ QUOTE ]

So because I have a few lvl 50 toons and a question about scaling resists I must have PLed them? Rather than post a useless assumption why don't you be productive and attempt to A) help the poster out or B) simply just not post at all

Hey folks, had a few questions about the two veat melees. I have one each at lvl 50 and was curious which is more durable. I noticed the general outlook around here is "NWs rule and banes drool" , but I have been looking at a few builds I've put together and it appears that banes have the edge in survival if enough inf in pushed their way. They can have higher hitpoints through bane armor upgrade and, coupled with tough, can have @ 40ish% vs lethal/smash and @ 25ish vs various other damage types (this is off of an IOed bane mind you).

Yes widows can cap defenses for probably a ton cheaper, but both are capable of soft capping. Widows are suppose to have scaling resists but I cannot find info on this anywhere; what is the % and when does it begin to scale? Also, with their low hit points is it even noticeable?

I'm just looking at defenses really, yeah I know NWs can dish out more hurt but crowd control is sexy enough of an attack that I will overlook the bane's "I just crawled out of an icy lake"-like slow mace animations and constant redraws (read: I'm taking venom grenade and surveillance). Thanks in advance

Edit: I've noticed a few other bane vs widow posts but the main question I have is about the widow's scaling resists, I'll base my decision probably on that information. Trying not to beat a dead horse here with the constant comparisons. Thanks!