Prince_Gwydion

this post is a little silly, ive been one shotted by stalkers before but that was only because i was unaware and not ready. Nowadays it rarely happens if anything the stalker has a problem

DPS was already nerfed with ED and non perma hasten, anymore damage nerfing and the game will bog down even more....these nerf calls are frankly getting ridiculous

most people here have been pvping since i3 in the arena and have learned to deal with this supposed "one shotting"

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Believe me,your experiences to date are only because you must be new to PVP. ANyone who has been out there fighting has already nerfed the one trick pony that are stalkers....

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Sorry, but that can also be easily rewritten as:
You must be new to PvP in CoV. Everyone else who has experience has realized that to PvP you must design your characters so that they can fight Stalkers.

In my opinion, when one AT is forcing the other ATs to either set up their power choices so that they can handle the one AT, or else to avoid PvP, something is broken.

You say that there are methods to deal with Stalkers? Fine. I disagree with the contention that these methods are great, but certainly there are methods that make you a relatively difficult target.

My problem is that we have to redesign characters for these methods. We do not have to redesign to deal with Tanks, or Brutes, or Scrappers, or Dominators, or Controllers. But we do have to redesign to deal with Stalkers. And by "deal", I do mean "to not be an easy one-shot kill". Not necessarily to defeat. You can redesign all you want, if a Stalker wants to get away, they will get away. But at least you can redesign to survive.

That's broken. When Controllers were in a situation where other ATs would have had to redesign in order to avoid being perma-held until death, the problem was solved by the Devs.
...Break Frees
...Suppression

Where is the Dev solution to the Stalkers? There isn't one. The only solutions are player-made, and that means that in order to survive in PvP, you need to design your character and/or your teams so that you can survive Stalkers. Doing anything less is just invitation to being repeatedly one-shotted until you give in and either redesign, or give up PvP.

There is something broken in Denmark. And it's rotting.

The purpose, design, and goal of the AT is bad. The AT is designed around one-shotting opponents, around avoiding opponents when they want to avoid them. That design is completely broken in PvP. So either it's allowed to continue according to design (which is unfair to the other ATs), or it's prevented from continuing according to design, which is unfair to Stalkers. When a design is set up so that it's either unfair to the AT or to the other ATs, something was designed wrongly.

IMO, Stalkers need their concept re-examined. Invisible one-shotting character is not a concept that works in a PvP game.

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Wow, so you propose changing the whole game as well? Should stormies not have hurricane bubblers not have force bubble? why do u think certain archetypes took range attacks in the first place? this is the nature of pvp, use friggin insights to see a stalker instead of nerf calls

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We've all seen a lot of back and forth in the PvP boards about Stalkers. We've seen complaints in the Stalker threads about needing improvement...I've noticed you seem very receptive to the idea that Stalkers might not be good enough. There's no point in debating about overpowered vs underpowered because it is largely a subjective discussion and offers little clarity.

One thing I think that has to be put on the table is that it would seem improbable for the devs to 100% nail the "balance" of the Stalker AT in PvP right out the gate nor would I expect them too. I realize there was internal testing and beta testing, but I do not believe the devs would contend that the data was conclusive or complete under those circumstances.

However, I am intereted in the devs providing the player base with a statement about how they perceive the risk vs reward for stalkers in PvP.

1) When the Arena first came out, Positron said he wasn't overly concerned with the 1v1 battles because it was too much of a rock/papers/scissors affair. How do we reconcile the dev philosophy that 1v1 can't be balanced and yet make sense of a toon that is designed for 1v1 combat? How does one side-step 1v1 balance on one hand and then appropriately balance an entire AT for it on another?

2) The Arena is a situation where neither toon can leave the battle. Players, blasters in particular, were using Phase Shift to effectively gank and escape and the devs put a stop to it. Clearly ganking was not to be tolerated. What is interesting is that the Stalker AT is predicated on ganking. Its speciality is the 1v1 battle with the escape. Why take that ability away from blasters in consensual battles but promote and endorse it in another AT in non-consensual battles?

3) I am unaware of any AT power that doesn't have some counter in another AT without resorting to power pools. Defender buffs are unresistable, but yet people can buff themseves beyond those debuffs a la Fort, Build-Up, etc. Blasters have some unresistable damage, but the majority of it is resistable. Every status power has some opposing power that resists it. Fear, Holds, Sleep, even Slows, have their counters within the players very powers themselves. Even Taunt in PvP is not 100%. And yet, nothing resists Placate. Yes, I understand you can knock someone out of it...provding you somehow manage to trigger an attack that launched before Placate takes affect and hits after (you can't honestly say this is an expected skill). Or, you can launch a PBAoE and hope to hit, provided you have one. But this isn't resistance to the statusing power like every other status power has. Are there plans to offer the other sets resistance to Placate e.g. Give Clear Mind, Integration, Practiced Brawler, Ind Will, etc?

(Btw, Assault offers no usable protection against Placate. Don't know if it is a bug, but I stood there and let one placate me...and I was not able to target them at all...and certainly not within the time for them to launch an AS after running around for a few seconds...and no...Assault wasn't detoggled).

3) It seems that the AT's in CoH have their foils in CoV. And vice versa. Who is the foil for a Stalker? Who can consistently solo defeat Stalkers who do not want to be defeated to the same extent that they can defeat any solo AT that doesn't want to be defeated? ...I'm reading that Stalkers can one-shot tanks in BB and Siren's with enough Rages. No solo AT can achieve the invisilibty of Stalkers, so should Stalkers be the only set that doesn't have to constantly be looking over its shoulder for fear of some hero?

Again, my question is not about is this too much or not enough, but how you and the devs perceive the balance and most importantly, how the off-setting weaknesses are actually substantive. What do I mean by that? Geko stated that one of the reasons that they turned IH back into a click is that they could not balance it as a toggle. They had meant for it to have a great healing benefit, and thought the huge endurance drain would compensate. But players proved they could avoid this penalty by six slotting QR and Stamina. So the penalty, though substantial...was not substantive. The same thing was said about Perma-Unstoppable. People were compensating for the crash, so there was not substantive penalty. It existed on paper, but was easily compensated for in-game. People talk about toons with damaging auras are proof against Hide...but I recall you explicity saying you were able to crit a Fire Brute...through BA and defeat him.

I think it would help a lot of the players if you explain how the devs perceive the AT is balanced in PvP and how that actually plays out in PvP...not how it plays out theoritically.

For all the Pro-Stalkers posters out there. I like Stalkers. I like the element that the AT brings to CoH. The joy in defeating them is almost as enjoyable as beating blasters. I also have defeated Stalkers with my Scrappers 1v1, so I'm not even protending that Stalkers are invincible. My lvl 33 has defeated a lvl 40 Stalker in Warburg...several times. But each and every defeat of a stalker was only a result:

1) they simply chose not to use enough Rages to one shot me.

2) They stuck around for the fight.

and usually,

3) I was playing a /regen

In absolutely none of those situations could I have defeated the Stalker if they had decided to check out early. And ...I was defeated far more times by Stalkers that stuck around than I defeated. So it wasn't like I sailed to victory. I'm not asking for any changes. I'm asking for an understanding from the devs for how this AT fits within the context of PvP from a substantive Risk vs Reward model.

I don't believe for a second that it is an easy task to balance this type of AT for PvP, so I'm certainly not recusing the devs even one bit, I am trying to understand it from their perspective.

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just from the tone of this post you obviously dont pvp a lot...

There are many powers out there that don't have foils in 1 v 1 in the arena. Stalkers arent the only one... As a katana scrapper how do u kill someone with hurricane in a 1 v 1 ? how do see a invis blaster witout tactics?

The way to deal with stalkers is to use iinsights you have a huge inspiration tray for a 10minute 1 v 1 that serves this purpose...the stalker will most likely not hold u...

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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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damnt the games fine we've been dealing with one shot kills since coh if a stalkers gonna do that ill deal wit it and kill him too...stop changing the game

me too!

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You know the interesting thing is they are saying we're lying by saying that it never had Psi Defense aren't they? I mean I've yet to see a regenner post anything but that it most certainly did have Psi defense and yet here they are saying it never did. Interesting.

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Just popping in to clear up a misconception. This bit is really a semantic issue. We have an Attribute that applies +Defense to Psionic. We usually refer to this as "Psionic Defense" and do not consider other forms of +Defense that MAY cover Psionics. Turning on The Way Back Machine (thanks to Mr. Peabody and Sherman for allowing its use!) to the very first Live version of the data, I see that Moment of Glory did, in fact, offer +Defense to EVERYTHING because it modified Base Defense. Smashing, Lethal, Ranged, Hamidon -- everything. That was TOO effective. So, at some point (I'm not going through hundreds of revisions to fin out when) MoG was changed so that it only covered the bits desired.

So, if we were lying to you, it was an error of omission, rather than an act of malice. When we get a PM saying "Why did you remove Psionic Defense from MoG?" we check specifically for +Psi Def. Sometimes we have the time to do more in depth reseach into changes, but most often we do not.

Whether or not the 'Hole' in Psionic protection makes the power 'gimped' isn't a discussion I am going to get into, however.

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Fine fine this is all good and all, you just figured out what we've all known for several issues, But what I would like to ask you Mr. Castle is whether or not MOG was intended to have zero defense against kinetics, in fact all kinetics powers are autohits on MoG, also before issue 6 char was an autohit as well. I have not checked the other sets but char at least does not seem to autohit. Another problem is to the autohit rad debuffs but this applies to elude as well.