Samuel_Tow

Most of the people you're referring to, I assume, don't enjoy the honour of having been called "perverts" by her, or having received a collection of other insults as I have.

That's the elephant in the room, I think. Having corner cases that offer such incredible benefits just as a side effect of offering not that significant a functionality is something that has a huge potential to backfire. For instance, what's to stop Hide-enabled Stalkers from ghosting any mission and escaping from any fight at the push of a button, with no-one really able to stop them? All you'd need to do is fire up Placate once and you're effectively untouchable. Granted, that's what Elude used to be back in 2004 (I still have the original manual which describes it as such), but giving that much protection to Stalkers just doesn't strike me as a safe bet. In fact, giving them almost perfect AoE defence in itself is a kludge.

I feel a much more direct solution would be to simply make the Hidden not suppress when you receive damage (though the invisibility still could) and only suppress when you attack, and to make Assassin's Strike uninterrputible. That way, Stalkers gain the ability to assassinate in combat and the ability to score much more reliable Hidden criticals with much more room for error, which is something I'm finding they have very little of for being as mediocre fighters as they are.

Assassination and Hidden criticals should not be considered the exception for Stalkers. They should be the norm.

---

I also wanted to go back to something Leo suggested - longer Build Up instead of more frequent Build Up. Initially I disagreed with this, but I neglected a very important problem. If a Stalker wishes to assassinate with Build Up, then nearly half the buff time of the power is used up just charging up that Assassin's Strike attack. The only other powerset type where this is even an issue is Blast sets for Blasters, Defenders and Corruptors. Trying to use Aim + Build Up + Snipe is probably the WORST use of Build Up time available, but at least for these ATs, that's actually a provably bad move. For Stalkers, that's what they're supposed to be doing...

I'm starting to wonder if it might not be a better idea to assassinate bare and THEN use Build Up even on targets I can't one-shot.

*edit*
After running a few numbers, it turns out that... No, I'm really not better off using Build Up after I assassinate, as an Assassin's Strike constitutes both the highest DPA and the highest DPS of at least Ninja Blade, and with other sets being slower, I have some degree of doubt things will be different there. However, even on the best day, Assassin's Blade's DPA of ~106 isn't all that much higher than those of Gamblers cut and, crucially, Golden Dragonfly. This tells me that assassination powers are either too slow or too weak, or possibly both. And I'm not even looking at DPS since proper Assassin's Strikes are next to impossible to pull off in a melee.

I don't think any of this is necessary. The game currently allows buffs marked as "does not stack from the same caster" to simply refresh their duration when a new one is cast before the old one expires. Something as simple as Deflection Shield does exactly that, only it buffs defence as opposed to Stealth radius.

The bigger problem is that such a buff cannot be turned off, meaning people would never actually stop being transparent, which would be a pretty big problem. I suppose the buff dispelling tech in I21 might help with this, but I agree that it's a ham-handed approach.

I always feel it's best to try and figure out what kind of practice in gameplay any change would inspire, and a change which causes dying enemies to buff Stalkers for so much as being dinged would encourage Stalkers to focus less on killing things and more on "tagging" everyone in sight so that they may get more buffs when their team-mates start taking them down. That is not, in my opinion, a good practice to promote for Stalkers as that's not how the AT should work. Stalkers should focus on killing things fast, not on tagging many things for mediocre damage.

I suggest fixing this by requiring a Stalker to have dealt more than 50% of the total damage against a defeated foe before that foe buffs the Stalker in question. This would encourage Stalkers to actually deal damage, as opposed to just attacking things, though I'm not sure if it may not cross over into tagging, as well.

I'm not sure I agree with you here. Between Assassin's Strike, Placate and general purpose scrapping, I'm not sure fighting bosses is where Stalkers falter. They actually seem to do pretty dang well against those from what I've seen. Where Stalkers really falter is precisely when they're made to fight multiple small targets. In these cases, rare hide helps very little, as while you may be able to insta-kill a single minion, this helps very little when you happen to accidentally aggro two +0x2 spawns and get beset by 10 people at a time. These are the situations where I feel a Stalker will essentially blow his load in the first 10 seconds and then be left duking it out like a limp Scrapper, if you'll pardon the disgusting metaphor.

Now, one could argue that a Stalker shouldn't be fighting +anything spawns, let alone multiples of those, but even were I content to play my Stalkers on an easier difficulty setting than my Scrappers, the fact remains that when on a team, you WILL be fighting precisely that, if not more. Think of your average ITF, Admiral Stutter or Tin Mage - nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is going to sit around and wait for you to hit and run. As a random example, I've tried using Time Bomb on the ITF, and out of about two dozen tries I only got it to connect once. No-one wants to sit and wait for me to set it up and I can't set it up once the fight has started because I keep getting interrupted. Assassin's Strike is much the same way.

Stalkers do pretty well against bosses right now, and if they need to do better, they just need a better Placate power and a faster or heavier Assassin's Strike. It's loads of minions that cause a big problem as Stalkers are very bad at delivering AoE damage and their lower damage mod makes it hard to kill enemies one at a time fast enough, and the way the game is designed, you WILL fight loads of minions, and not very rarely. I mean, run a Stalker through Praetoria and you'll see what I mean

Now, I don't know that divorcing the Hide mechanic from the Placate mechanic in the actual Placate power is necessarily the way to do this. What I DO know, however, is that one of the things that needs to happen to Stalkers is for them to have a much better chance to achieve Hidden status much more often. I don't know how this should happen, and whether it should be through one of my suggestions, one of the others in the thread or something else entirely. But Stalkers need to be able to Hide and score Criticals much more often.

*edit*
Incidentally, I do feel that Assassin's Strike SHOULD hit a little (or a lot) harder. In the lower levels, one-shotting stuff with it is easy, but in the higher levels... Not so much. Right before I came to post this, I used Assassin's Blade on a +1 Crey Crisis Unit - a standard lieutenant for any reasonable difficulty - and I took off no more than half of his health because of his Lethal resistance. And mind you, that's an Assassin's Blade 3-slotted for damage with SOs and using Build Up and I still didn't really do all that much to simple lieutenant. Not good.

And then a while after that, after having engaged one spawn while an unannounced ambush hit me, the one power which saved my *** wasn't Assassin's Strike at all, but a Hidden triple-critical Golden Dragonfly. Assassin's Strike really needs to have something happen to it if even I'm starting to criticise the thing, and I'm generally a fan of the power.

I know that's not what you're saying, but this is something I wanted to pick up on. Once upon a time, Stalkers were called "hit-and-run" fighters, and this was taken literally. You would assassinate a target, then run away and lose aggro, then do it again. The Stalker Fix took care of most of that erroneous thinking by making Stalkers a lot more solid in terms of scrapping power, but the notion still persists even to this day, and it lives on in the Stalkers' basic design. With the slow recharge on Placate and the finicky interruptibility of Assassin's Strike, Stalkers really do lend themselves best to this sort of hit-and-run tactic.

Except in this game, that is not and has never been a viable option, because it takes bloody ages to accomplish anything, and, crucially, because it utterly fails on a team. One of the earliest complaints about Stalkers back in the day was that they spent a lot of their time doing nothing just waiting for Hide to come back, especially during AV fights. If we are to help Stalkers, the first thing we need to do is get away from the unreliable, sporadic use of their inherent gimmick. Which, by the way, your idea seems to do

I actually like this, to be honest. It gives Stalkers a more controllable means to abuse their Inherent, and that's the one thing which could set them apart from being just stealthy Scrappers. I wonder, though, if its still random nature won't be better served by something more predictable. I mentioned killing enemies causing you to hide before because it's slightly easier to plan for when an enemy you've damaged will fall... But it's not all that much more controllable, actually.

Actually, how about this:

Hide is no longer a toggle. It is, instead, a fast-recharging click power with an infinite duration (99999 seconds, like Mastermind pets). If you have your Hide broken or you break it yourself, you can re-hide immediately, but would then have to wait another, say, 30 seconds if you want to re-hide AGAIN. This moves the waiting time to immediately after you've hidden, instead of putting it down as a buffer between breaking hide and regaining it. It also means that, if you can stay hidden for long enough to have your timer expire, you can re-hide again immediately after breaking hide, and that's without the use of Placate.

Ideally, what I want to happen to Stalkers is for them to gain the ability to hide in plain sight at a moment's notice and do this very frequently. Placate can't really do this, because making it recharge too fast would add too much soft control, like what Touch of Fear delivers, and that's not my point. That's why I spoke about divorcing the placate mechanic from the ability to re-hide.

Eh, I'm not so sure about that. Speaking purely for myself, I don't think I have that many "altruistic empathy drives" as you describe them. Sure, I've always enjoyed helping people in need, but I've always equally enjoyed letting people who mouth off at me stew in their own mock. For instance, at work I'm pretty much the only guy who knows how to work computers in a faculty mostly comprised of biologists. I'm always happy to help my colleagues when they need assistance, and I'm always happy to let them mess their systems up when they feel they know better than I do. Fine, go ahead and install crap on your PC. I'll get paid to reinstall your OS later anyway.

Basically, the way I make my villains is by capitalising on the negative emotions and unacceptable urges I tend to have just going about everyday life. Someone on the Internet is being an *** to me and I want to reach through the screen and slap him. I can't do that, of course, and I wouldn't do it even if I could, but Cedric so would. He'd track the person down and make an example out of him. That sort of thing. I'm not aware of any perfect saints who never get any evil thoughts, most of us just know better than to act on them. But what if you could? What if you had the power to do pretty much whatever you wanted with no consequence? Would you? I know I wouldn't and I know a fair few people wouldn't, either. But I know - personally know - at least a few people who would.

In the real world, doing evil things is wrong and most of us know it. Even when we feel like we want to do evil things, we know better than to turn thought into action. This is where fiction comes in. If I can take those negative emotions and evil thoughts, expand on them and condense the result down into a single character, I have a ready-made villain just waiting for a name and a look, and often not even that. I don't make psychologically damaged villains, merely villains who respect the written and unwritten rules of society.

Well, unless I'm psychologically damaged

Let me put it this way: If we had only one melee AT and had to customize it into Tanks, Scrappers, Brutes or Stalkers with these stats, I'd like to see it done this way:

You have a choice between Damage, Survivability and Stealth, and you can pick only two options, or the same option twice. No points, no stats, no maths. Just direct, large-step discrete choices.

To me, the larger the steps and the more monolothic and unique the choices are in a game (and the few of them there are), the easier it is to play without having to alt-tab and figure stuff out.

I believe the implication was that NO powers would work while this were active, like is the case with Walk.

Ah, OK, I see what you mean, You're talking about binding actions to the left mouse button that only trigger if you're not hovering over an interface item. This I can support. I do, however, have to bring up likelihood on this point more than most others, however, as having slash commands actually read the cursor location and cross-reference that with your menu button locations is a functionality that the game plain doesn't have. The regular left click is rigged as its own special system, but anything you attach to it doesn't use that system. It just uses the basic bind system which activates a command at the press of a button.

The reason I keep bringing this up is that you're speaking about some very core systems that I've never gotten the impression are tweakable in the slightest. Anything is possible, of course, and you're welcome to suggest this, just keep in mind that of all the things you've suggested, this is probably the most sinister to actually programme.

I won't argue with you that a game with *** backwards controls isn't going to keep my interest for very long unless it's absolutely awesome, just because I can't become invested in a game I can't play. Granted, when I first started playing City of Heroes, my mouse skills were so crap I couldn't even hope to climb up a fire escape, thanks to the jump physics we have here. I'm a lot better at it these days, having even perfected jumping between hair-wide chain link fence tops

At the same time, though, a lot of these suggestions you're offering strike me as less about making controls better or more convenient and more about making controls like what other games have set up. I don't have any real problem with having out controls be consistent with other games, but at the same time I DO have a problem with the significant, dangerous levels of stagnation that plague the MMO world these days. Almost every other MMO I try, I have to ask my WoW-playing friend to explain the interface to me because, even though he hasn't played the game in question, he's played WoW and therefore knows the interface of 9 out of 10 MMOs made since 2005. In essence, I don't have a problem with more customizability and accessibility, but I'm not sure we really should make City of Heroes "like" anything that isn't City of Heroes.

I don't actually disagree with any of your ideas, though. Just wanted to point that out

It does. However, running a /showbind esc in game right now shows me that the Esc key is bound to the "unselect" command. Simply bind the Esc key to "menu" and bind something else to "unselect." Like the tilde key or the backslash key which is bound to opening the menu right now.

None of the StarCraft games use the Esc key to access the menu as I remember, but instead use the F10 key. If it's not StarCraft then it's either Rise of Nations, Age of Empires or Empire Earth. MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator binds escape to exiting the current game and uses the Tab key for the menu.

Also, just because other games do it does not make it a good idea. Game designers have a bad tendency to repeat the mistakes of the past just because people are used to expecting things to be done the wrong way, and City of Heroes has suffered and suffered greatly by trying to emulate other MMOs. Within the context of interfaces, most RPGs I've seen tend to want me to open my map with the M key, which sucks and is a terrible inconvenience for someone like me who likes to toggle his map on and off all the time, which is a habit I picked up in the original Diablo where the map was bound to Tab. I rebind my map to Q every time.

Furthermore, not all MMOs have to work the same. Hellgate: London, for instance, doesn't even show you a mouse cursor unless you hold down the Alt key and instead has mouse-look enabled constantly without ever giving you an option to change that. I hear DC Universe Online does the same thing.

Accessibility, comfort and customizability are important, I agree, but just because something is tradition and convention doesn't mean we should repeat it. Just because people are accustomed to making a particular mistake doesn't mean it's a good idea to make it all over again. Evolution of game design does not happen by always recreating the ways of the past. Sometimes, you just have to ask your players meet you half-way and actually try to learn your controls, rather than demanding you make them like what they're used to.

In other words, it's not a case of a complete mission or half a mission, but rather failing half the mission replaces it with another half mission from somewhere else... I like that even more!

Personally, I'd settle for letting Thugs Masterminds use the slider-enabled pistols that Dual Pistols got. Have a close look at, say, the Dual Pistols Autos as they fire. Notice how the slide jumps back with every shot like in the real Desert Eagle? Now do the same on a Thugs Mastermind and notice how not only don't their pistols' slides animate... Their pistols don't even HAVE slides!

Ah, in that case I agree. Tentatively. Personally, I've grown fond of the channel colours we have, but I can definitely support the option

This remains a problem for a few reasons:

1. Clicking on the game world takes you out of the chat like if you're typing, but does not discard what you're typing and does not chat it. I type in combat all the time, usually four-word sentences while a slow attack is animating with the next one queued up. Sometimes I'll need to stop typing FAST but not want to lose what I've typed.

2. "Mouse chord" movement, that is to say holding down both left and right button, is convenient, but usually causes you to hit one button before the other if you're not very precise.

3. I'm a sloppy clicker. Sometimes my finger slips, sometimes my hand misses the mark, and a lot of times I can't even see my mouse cursor and end up clicking where I'm not supposed to. Either way, my mouse pointer aim is bad, and I hate things deselecting themselves for me on a misclick.

I'd disagree in saying the main menu is "rarely" used. However, I agree with you in believing the ESC key should be a multifunction key for closing windows, opening up the menu, and deselecting the target. This is on the same level of frustration as Firefox's Bookmarks menu which closes itself every time your pointer goes even slightly out of bounds for a fraction of the second when you're trying to move a bookmark around. It's very annoying when the menu self-closes when I'm three levels in.

This HAS to be an option because forcing this functionality in me will not be appreciated in the slightest regardless of what I can click without deselecting my target. As far as I'm concerned, there is no situation at all in the game where deselecting your target is actually important enough to warrant the random chance that I might click the wrong button and lose my priority target in a crowd.

As an option, I can support this. As a basic functionality change, I don't want it.


The thing here is that you're speaking as though I'm supposed to know what you're talking about and I honestly don't. I don't know what "this" is and apparently I don't play a great many popular games, because I genuinely don't understand what this suggestion is trying to achieve, aside from left-mouse-button camera control.

I mean, I can support left-mouse-button camera control, but there's something you need to remember about City of Heroes - the way the game is rigged, left mouse button is permanently rigged to clicking, so no matter what else you rebind it to do, it will always also click. There's also the lack of functionality for the game to tell what your mouse is over short of clicking it. I'm not sure what the technical side of this might be, but I suspect you'll be seeing some mechanical and programming challenges there. I'd support it, obviously, as it's a positive change, but it's one of those... Iffy things that I'm not sure we'll be able to convince the development team to mess with. It's like trying to get content added to the Shadow Shard.

You misunderstood. With Free Camera Movement disabled, your camera will always rotate to follow your model's orientation. If there is an enemy to your right and you attack it, your character will rotate to the right very quickly and attack. Once your character rotates, your camera will whip around to follow, and it can be quite disorientating, to say nothing of ugly. Enabling Free Camera Movement means that you control the camera directly and your model can move independently of your camera orientation as long as you don't call up mouse look or initiate any movement. You can, for instance, start running and rotate your camera 180 degrees back and your character's direction of movement will be unaffected. Pressing a movement button or the Mouse Look key thereafter, however, would reset your character's orientation to that of your camera.

Again, I didn't quite understand what you were trying to achieve with this kind of camera control scheme because I haven't played WoW and I genuinely don't understand how things work there. I may be speaking of something completely different than what you had in mind, but I simply lack the context you're working in. The thing is... I don't know what "common MMO features" even are since this really is the only MMO I've played for more than a day, and it was also the first MMO I ever played.

This is already an option in the game and has been for about five years. Ever since Global Chat came out, in fact. It hasn't always worked properly, but it has always existed. To use it, chat in any Global channel, then click on the name of the channel in your chat tab and select "Set Color." Done.

This only works for global channels, however. There is currently no option to recolour the server-specific channels like Help, Local, Team, Tell and such.

I've played games where this was the only way to switch channels and honestly hated it. I'm not sure how people manage to chat between channels WITHOUT swapping channels, but I find that the answer to your problem is quite simple - left-click on the channel name in your chat line and you'll get a long drop-down list of all channels you're a member of. Select the one you want and your character will be set to use this channel forever and ever until you manually make the switch.

If this exists, this has to be an option, because accidentally deselecting my target by mis-clicking on a power is something I do not want to have to deal with. Ever.

Considering how rarely the main menu has any use in this game - largely for quitting the game or in the very rare instances when you need to adjust options - this would have to be highly optional. What I DO want to see the Esc key do, however, is close full-screen menus and vendor windows. If I'm in my Enhancements Management screen and I hit Esc, I want that screen to close down and return me to the game, instead of having to fish for the Exist button with my mouse. This serves to add more functionality to the key without interfering with existing such.

I'm pretty sure you can already do this using bind files, but you'd need someone who's better at this to explain. Personally, I would like to see us being able to add different actions to button press and button release. Right now, the only way to do this is to have buttons toggle options with the + sign. Look at any of your movement binds and you'll note they all say things like "A +left." What this means is "On button press of A, do 'left 1'. On button release of A, do 'left 0'." That's because all of our movement directions are toggles that our movement buttons toggle between 1/on and 0/off.

I'm honestly not a fan of this suggestion since I've never had any use for keyboard rotate (that's what the mouse is for), but if the binds system were powerful enough to support it, I would definitely support the suggestion, as well.

I honestly don't know what this would even accomplish, considering the only reason /camrotate and /playerturn exist is to support the Free Camera option they introduced with either I6 or I7, and the only reason they introduced this was to support the ill-fated "click to move" feature that was deemed imperative to the success of the horribly failed City of Hero.

Wait, when I said "camrotate," I may have been thinking of /cameraturn. My bad.

Either way, I'd suggest simply using Free Camera (that's Menu -> Options -> Controls -> Mouse -> Free Camera Movement) and be done with it. What Free Camera does is it DOES NOT rotate the camera to follow your character model, meaning if you attack an enemy to the side or behind you and your model turns around to attack, your camera does not snap to follow. What it also means is that every time you engage mouse look, your character model snaps to your camera direction.

These two features combined allow you to pan your camera around the battle field using your middle mouse button so as to view your character from a direction other than behind, it means that you can attack enemies in all directions without your brain getting whiplash from violent camera movement, and it means that even if you flip the camera completely around, engaging mouse look will still centre you to where you're looking.

What are you actually trying to achieve with this suggestion, though?

I wasn't even aware these suggestions were related to WoW, and would not have noticed had you not said so. Could you explain what the actual functionality you're after is for those of us who've never played WoW? Because some of those suggestions don't really seem like they'd accomplish anything that I can understand.

On the contrary, I so would! Now, please understand that I don't believe people in wheel chairs are weird, but the I love weird concepts like the OP describes. The idea that a hero in his/her secret identity is an actual invalid, yet is able to become a strong and able crime fighter via super power handwaving is amazingly cool, I'd say. Actually, that's pretty much who and what MechaMaid from the Spinnerette comic is.

We already have a Rocket Board, I'm assuming a wheel chair might be able to use the same tech to disable our powers, keep us moving at a set speed and disable jumping. I'd pay for such a power. Not much, mind you, but I'd pay for it

I don't think adding more consequence for failure is the drive here, Cap, and I'm saying this as someone who came in saying much the same at first. This sounds to me like it would lead to LESS failure, not more of it, since even if you fail, you could still recover with this system. Any failable mission you fail now is lost forever and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it, but any failable mission with the Lemur's system in place you could still work to recover.

That alone makes me like the suggestion

You've said that a couple of times, and in general I agree with you. However, I'm starting to feel that Stalkers are right about due for an actual revamp. Here's the thing: A Brute can make use of his Fury all the time, a Scrapper gets a critical chance on every strike, a Blaster gets Defiance buffs with every attack and gets to use his first two powers from every status effect. Stalkers only ever get to use their toys once every minute. Why?

Honestly, it feels to me like whoever designed Stalkers initially (Castle?) was deathly afraid that the ability to score controlled criticals from Hide was so overpoweringly strong that he effectively Crippled Stalkers' ability to do so. In effect, we have an AT primarily built around delivering shock damage, which has its ability to deliver shock damage severely hamstrung and is then thrown into prolonged fights with multiple opponents where rare occasional shock damage constitutes a very, very small part of the overall fight contribution.

I honestly can't think of another AT where the AT's Inherent plays such a minor, insignificant, ignorable role in the AT's overall performance. I guess Scrappers come close, but at least those guys are a solid, strong AT even without an Inherent whereas Stalkers are built on their Inherent. Basically, for how much Stalkers depend on their controllable criticals, it's a crying shame how much the game cheats them out of said criticals. If a revamp of the whole AT is needed to either make Stalker Hidden criticals more frequent or otherwise make Stalkers less reliant on them, then I'd support a larger-scale revamp. What that revamp may look like, I cannot say, but one might just end up being necessary.

One only hopes. I've had quite a few AT ideas over the years and have always been told that new ATs would not be made unless they had a unique role on a team. I was specifically told this by Castle in a PM, in fact. Though the AT I suggested had technical problems, Castle's biggest concern was that said AT didn't really seem to have any role on a team that another AT couldn't do better.

Perhaps if we start paying for them, there might be a good chance of getting those more eccentric ATs. I wouldn't hold my breath for it, however. This is one of those pie-in-the-sky dreams that's not very likely even with Freedom.

I'm sorry to break one of the OP rules, but I really, really hate the Strength/Dexterity/Vitality mechanics that plague so many RPGs. For the most part, any given class benefits the most from one or two of these (whether you intentionally design it that way or not) and putting points in the others just makes me gimp myself. I've gimped myself in so many games already... Diablo 1 and 2, the various D&D and aD&D games, Hellgate: London and so on.

This sort of system is made to foster some kind of in-between customization where players can pick a mid-point between two traditional classes, and that's what it ends up doing even if that's not what it's intended to do. The problem is that this intermediate point is usually just not very good and creates weak jacks of all trades.

---

Here's what I WOULD do if I were designing a brand new RPG from scratch: Not make it percent-point-based. There's nothing I hate more than fine-tuning optimisation via fractions of percent points from a zillion different places, where you can only deduce that your performance has increased if you run a statistical evaluation on it. "Little numbers" are the bane of my RPG existence.

Instead, I would break the game down into a much smaller handful of MUCH larger choices. If you were allowed to boost your overall damage, you would have anywhere between one to three levels of this, each of which constituted a major step. If your character had access to tool with which to, for instance, debuff enemy resistance, your character would only ever have access to ONE such debuff, possibly with no more than three set levels of power and nothing in-between. If your character could resurrect himself, you'd have access to a single resurrect power that would simply return you to life with full stats.

If I were designing an RPG, I'd strive to make players bother with numbers, calculations and statistics as little as possible by just not giving any options where those are meaningful. You can only ever have one instance of any effect the game has to offer, and that effect can only ever have up to three levels of power. I'm sure numbers will still enter into it, but it should still make character building into a much more discrete science.

Yeah, this is a problem I very quickly remember every time I sit down to play my Stalkers. Hidden criticals are awesome, but I get so few chances to use them that I'm not really sure how much they help. In regular spawn-to-spawn action, I tend to get a couple - one Assassin's Strike and one Placate critical, and then more on the next spawn. When I get into a prolonged fight, though... Well, I'm essentially playing a Scrapper. No Placate for long periods of time, no Assassin's Strike practically ever, just scrap scrap scrap with little to no AoE and a lower damage mod.

I honestly feel that if we want to make Stalkers better, we should let them use their gimmick a lot more.

I agree with you on this point. I'd completely forgotten about this since I hadn't played my Ninjutsu Stalker in three years, but with Smoke Flash and Caltrops, that one particular Stalker is able to fight at a significant advantage in survivability by keeping enemies out of the fight. Having that as a consistent tool, rather than a deeply sporadic one like it is now, would make a HUGE difference, and may indeed reinvent the AT.

It's getting to the point where I feel it may be best to divorce Placate and Rehide into two separate powers, or at least two separate effects. Placate is a good form of aggro control, and Smoke Flash placating in an AoE range without actually hiding me makes a BIG difference. Even if I'm fighting 15 people, I can smoke them all and then proceed to fight them one at a time. Even the basic Placate is a powerful tool if you manage to snag a particularly dangerous enemy.

It's interesting that a lot of people seem to see Stalkers as a one-trick pony and cite Assassin's Strike as their one trick. Realistically speaking, Stalkers actually have two tricks - placating enemies so they can't attack and achieving Hidden status so they can deal enormous damage. It's just such a shame that both of their actual tricks are so limited in their use when they can be made into the staples of the AT.

Look at it this way - a Brute without Fury is garbage. A Stalker without Hide as Stalkers are right now is worse, but still playable to a similar level, largely because Hide has such a small impact on most real, prolonged fights. And it shouldn't be like this. Stalkers should breath Hide (the Hidden status for Criticals) and live on Placate, not have them on just occasionally so we can still say they exist.