Polecat7

The pack looks good, tho I'm slightly disappointed there's no love for the rodents (Mice & rats). But I AM glad we got some bird types in there. The eagle looks awesome, and I hope the variety of beaks they spoke of in the Informer will allow for some other variants, like hawks and possibly even non-predatory birds like ravens.

As of Dec 1st, 8:30 PM EST, there is no banner ad to click on.

Okay. That answers the question I was posing, and was part of my concern. That means it's likely an experience gap, and I don't mean character experience. More experience playing the AT. I've admitted I'm not an experienced Stalker, and those who seemed to have a relatively easy time of it are experienced Stalkers (tho do correct me if I'm wrong) or at the least found it easy to get into that mindset.

Wow. I mean seriously, just wow. That entirely litanty on making money never would have occurred to me, and I've got a lot of experience on CoX and other MMos. I can also state that sort of market playing not only doesn't really interest me (Frankly I think the market was a bad idea from the get go). Literally, I just sell all the salvage I have, and move on.... this sort of litany about how to make money is downright painful.

Now step back a moment. How many inexperienced players do you think will have that figured out? Seriously, if that is what it takes to play a stalker, I'll just re-roll. That is just.... words cannot describe it. I know my perpetually broke self can survive as a scrapper or brute....

To throw a thought into the mix, how many folks are running with a lot of IOs at low levels? I know I don't have any more then the one I made from the school, but it struck me suddenly that people with a lot of IO bonuses and doing "Money is no object" type builds may be having a far easier time then people like me, who were lucky to have a handful of DOs come the end of Praetoria.

In Praetoria I found most Ambushes target you specifically. In one of the cases, you can avoid subsequent waves of the ambush by moving, but the first wave literally spawns around you and the guy you were talking to. Hell, they even get first strike because you have to click out of your dialog with the person in question before you can start attacking, the enemies are already attacking you during that process.

And I'm not sure being a Resistance Stalker will help you. They were far FAR worse about giving you escort & ambush missions then the Loyalist side was.

I came across at 3 missions like that first one you mentioned Seebs. Everything is unattackable until you reach the end, then everything goes suddenly hostile. I had one with a computer at the end I had to hack, another talking to a guy, and a third with a different guy. Don't wanna give the latter one away, but a totally empty mission, but when he's finished talking you have to handle 4 waves of enemies (All auto-aggro on YOU. Hiding doesn't work) followed by a "boss" (Thankfully not an EB).

Well, I finally finished the Praetorian arcs and got let out of the Portal in Talos (Yeah, I'm a blue-sider stalker). This means I can look back on the path I chose and relate my experiences.

My path went: Loyalist - Resistance - Loyalist - Loyalist - Resistance

In all cases I kept to the Responsibility & Warden arcs. I'll refrain from being too specific as I don't want to give any spoilers to those who don't want it. But when it comes to missions as a Stalker, there were goods and bads.

Oddly I found the Loyalist missions the most friendly to stalkers. They were focused and very specific target based. You knew exactly what you were being sent to do, and very rarely did it change. Even more rare were the escorts. This isn't to say you didn't get a good share of ambushes tho, but it seemed less to me. Plus those "you have X amount of time before back-up comes" type missions are a breeze for stalkers, since they can stealth all the way to the mission goal, and get out before that timer is even close to run down.

The resistance mission sides I found myself saddled with far more escort missions. Also they didn't seem quite as focused goal wise, and tended to shift the mission objectives mid-mission at times. They were quite often very frustrating and infuriating, and seemed far more difficult then the loyalist sided missions.

Finally I found the late game arcs on BOTH sides to be hell for Stalkers. Specifically due to the proliferation of EBs scattered about. I found out the hard way that (at least at low level) stalkers can't handle an EB very well Solo. While when they fixed Seer 0001 she became far more easy to handle (You could hide and take a rest between phases of the fight if needs be), other EBs were an absolute terror to handle as a Stalker. I'll specifically note Devore (Ill/Emp controller with a bad habit of self healing herself AND her illusionary doubles. I had to call in help from a brute with some AOE to handle her effectively) and Noble Savage (I THINK an SS/Invuln tanker, but possibly a brute. Either way he'd constantly pop "dull pain" and take himself from half health to almost full again, and his damage output could flatten my stalker in 3-4 blows. I blew through an entire tray of 10 green insps trying to fight him, and still got taken down.).

So my overall opinion is this: Praetoria is fantastically made with wonderfully varied missions. More I was impressed how late NPCs picked up on your primary decision paths and would comment on it (They noted my tendency to the Loyalist Responsibility arcs). However, as a stalker, the missions were often like pulling teeth. Between insane waves of ambushes that come directed to YOU (often in waves far exceeding the traditional 3-5), the oversized spawns (averaging 4 minions a spawn, sometimes 3 minions and a Lt), and of course the dreaded escort missions, Praetoria is NOT very friendly to Stalkers at all. If anything, praetoria seemed to favor brute/scrapper archtypes, and possible Blaster/Corruptor types who had a means of keeping their distance (Like flight/hover. Very few Praetorian enemies seemed able to fly).

That's my take on things, anyway.

I had it.

Windows 7, 64-bit
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX

I fixed it by turning off Anisotropic Filtering. I defaults at x4. Turning it completely off killed most of the flickering for me (It's still there in some spots, but it's far FAR reduced from where it was).

I am really not doing well here. After 3 escorts I got a mission that placed me against a constant spawning ambush (I think 8 or 10 waves, I lost count). It was enough the NPC group that was supposed to be helping me died and left me alone... I died at least 4 times during that.

Now I'm stuck on "Katie's Mom" and that quest-line. I have to escort a trigger-happy psychic blaster to an elite boss... To make it worse, the EB summons a LOT of help. 5 waves of ambushes came running at once, not to mention her "pet" summon. If this is supposed to make me want to come back to CoX, it's doing a piss-poor job of it.

And I'm only at level 12, and on the "default" difficulty.

Am I the only one having this problem? I'm running into a LOT of escort and missions with ambushes in them in the Praetorian arcs, both of which are making stealth completely useless. For the escorts, they loose sight of you when you go "hidden", and the ambushes come right to you and start attacking even if you're hidden.

Now these are old problems, but usually these quest types were far more spread out. But in Praetoria I'm getting them one after another and leading to multiple deaths for my KM/Nin stalker (The worst being a constant ambush wave of Ghouls in a hospital, which lead to so much rage you'd think I was a brute.). Before folks ask, I'm a very old player (pre-issue 1) that came back to try out GR. Unfortunately I never managed to get a Stalker very far in the past, as I found how squishy they were at lower levels an extremely difficult hurdle for me to overcome. GR is not helping matters any right now....

Widow: Widow Makir
Crab Spider (to be): Agent Webb

- Polecat

As a player and builder in Second Life, that's actually not quite accurate. The in game hair isn't flexible. You literally have to make a separate object and wear it like a wig, plus it doesn't do something CoX's flexis do... Collision Detection. 2nd Life flexis (Be they skirts, wigs, or anything) cannot detect if it's interacting with another object or player. Thus if you wear that hair and walk backwards, it'll all go right through you and end up sticking through your chest. While the capes will sometimes do this in CoX, they try hard not to. Completely different systems, makes it hard to use one to say the other "can do it".

- Polecat

Y'know Jock, there's one tale you haven't told that I'd like to see you translate through your lens. Has to do with our favorite of Defender's children, Darkity. Now you told the story of how she took away her powers from the controllers, but I'm curious how you'd translate, through your lens, how she came to bestow her gifts on one of the children of SCRAPPER (Dark Melee/Dark Armour has a lot of tricks right out of the dark defender pools).

Just a thought to maybe get your mind working. Absolutely LOVE the stories to date.

- Polecat

[ QUOTE ]
A hover without movement isn't exactly unfair. Being able to move is rather important during combat and my Teleport suggestion wouldn't have that. My request is rather fair in that regard. It could also be easily explained logically in that the user is simply teleporting to the same location to stay at his current position and that there's no viewable effect because it requires far less energy to do so.

[/ QUOTE ]

Again, I personally agree with you. But at the time it happened, the Devs shot down this idea because it would be, in essence, gaining the hover ability for free (of course, back then, Hover was incredibly slow flying around. it's 2 or 3 times faster now). I personally would like to see what the devs say now about it, but because of the past events/abuses, I wouldn't be holding my breath on something even remotely close to this happening.

- Polecat