Samuel_Tow

It's not a question of being hard to do, it's a question of being hard to do WELL. Rain, for instance, is almost universally completely terrible in video games. I've seen instances of rain raining though solid overhands, rain not raining in particular places with open sky above, rain not changing direction as you look up, rain not having splash effects, rain having ground splash effects over water, lack of puddles, wetness and so on, rain disappearing from open areas when you enter a closed area, you get the idea. And that's just bugs I've seen in games in the past AND just having to do with rain and no wind. We also have to deal with snow, fog, thunderstorms, possible hail... Weather is a demanding process.

Would I scoff at GOOD weather effects if we got them or complain about having them? HELL NO! I'd be as happy as everybody else. But as long as we DON'T have weather effects, then I'm not going to support endeavours to add them, simply because it's not worth the effort in my eyes. And not because weather isn't needed, but more because the effort is just that damn great.

I have no problem with the world reacting to my presence as a Kheldian or anything else, if that reaction wasn't to put in cheap annoying enemies that do nothing more but make fights more annoying. So Voids no longer do unresistable damage. Woo-hoo. They still do ridiculous knockback, very reliable stun and STILL do a lot of damage. They are annoying to fight and serve as a drawback to an AT that doesn't need any more drawbacks than what's already built into its own powersets.

On the flip side, if I somehow became an enemy of, say, the 5th Column and had a 5th Column soldier show up in random spawns throughout unrelated missions, that I would have little problem with. As long as it's not an Achilles' heel enemy.

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but: I don't really have a problem with that. Well, not a big one, anyway. A per-kill damage buff to Stalkers feels like it skirts both Fury and Defiance a little too closely. As long as that's added to the inherent, then I don't suppose I can whine about Hide not being relevant, but there's something about a kill re-hide that tickles my fancy.

In fact, I keep thinking that this doesn't need to be a simple rehide, as much as an instant recharge of Placate (which REALLY needs a faster animation, by the way). Effectively, it's the same thing - it allows you to go back into hide... If you wanted to. Or it allows you to dodge one enemy more often, as well as escape easier. Though I'm not sure if it may not be overpowered.

Be it buff or re-hide, an on-kill benefit is something I think will really shake up the Stalker dynamic.

That's actually something else I meant to talk about before, but I completely forgot. If there's a way to make resistance-based sets resist the dropping of Hide, then that would... Should put them on a more even footing with defence-based sets when it comes to eking out that extra damage. I'm not sure how much the Dull Pain bug could help, since I think the programme was calculating current health vs. base health as opposed to current health vs. modified max health. It sounds like an easy mistake to make. Nevertheless, the idea is solid, in my opinion.

Probably THE biggest complaint I have against Stalkers right now is the disparity between defence-based sets and resistance-based sets. Completely independent of each respective set's mitigation qualities is that set's ability to pull off hidden criticals, and right at this moment, that ability does not appear to have even been taken into consideration for balancing equations.

This goes back to "bugs me" territory: Stalkers feel like they're balanced as though they were Scrappers, with performance judged by offensive and defensive qualities, seemingly ignoring the Stalker gimmick in its entirety for the purposes of inter-class balance. Each Stalker secondary is relatively balanced against the others... If it were being used by a Scrapper. As used by a Stalker, some sets are markedly better than others, and this is not a fault of the sets themselves. Accounting for resistance in the way specified is a good way to slash at least the bulk of the discrepancies. It still shafts Regen, though.

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Something more general I want to comment on: The notion that Stalkers should be boss killers. I agree with this, but where I disagree is with the notion that this has to be achieved by complete and utter focus on the boss. Even with an on-kill buff or re-hide, you are still free to wail on the boss like an angry Brute, just like you are free to do so now. I just want a better, smarter alternative to doing this, one that has the potential to be even more deadly. However, that's not something that can be dumped into static balance (Stalkers have pretty damn good single-target damage as it is), so it has to come from a gimmick. I just happen to enjoy the gimmick of looking to score kills.

No, not in the slightest.

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Carry on.

Pretty much. Some of us still insist on picking powers that make sense for the character concept even if they're not necessarily numerically superior. That's why it pays to have redundant strength.

As far as who I won't be respeccing, that only includes characters who didn't have any fitness powers. While I have a grand total of ONE character with Stamina (in six years among 40-50 characters), I have a fair few with Swift and/or Hurdle, and at least a few with Health. Those are getting respecced, and I see no reason not to. I'd sooner take something and not use it almost ever than not take something and not use it ever ever.

Why isn't there a title for the annoying one? And in completely unrelated news: Where do I apply for that?

Yeah, that's half the reason I didn't want to get into those, with the other half being that I like Leo's idea more. I'm not sure how overpowering this would be considering you'd still take eight seconds to hide and it would still not be worth it, but just be less of a bust trying to hide and counter-attack. Again - if we can re-initiate Hide by killing, this isn't needed. Nor, in fact, are any changes to the Fear effect.

This is, in fact, false. An extra player on the team increases spawn sizes. If you are looking at a team which is already struggling, adding a player who increases difficulty but does not contribute enough is very much WORSE than not having invited an additional player at all.

In fact, oftentimes it's preferable to run with a smaller team even if you are, in fact, adding good players with strong characters. Sometimes large teams make coordination hard, lead to extra unavoidable aggro and generally drag certain missions out. The old Positron TF was a great example. Run it with three people and it's easy as pie. Run it with eight people, and you're gonna' die. A lot.

The whole problem is you're working off the mentality that the bigger the team, the better for everyone. This is provably not the case as a blanket rule, even if it's often true nonetheless. There are a fair few cases where deciding if you want to add another player at all is, in fact, a meaningful decision, and one that's harder to agree on unless you actually specifically NEED that particular character. Yes, good players can oftentimes override these problems by sheer awesomeness, but not all of us build for that.

All of that is to say that you cannot just brush Stalker desirability issues under the carpet as irrelevant. They are. In fact, Castle has told me to my face that in a new AT suggestion that unless that AT served some role on a team, it was unlikely to be accepted. Unless Stalkers serve some function on a team that makes them desirable in at least some situations, then there is a problem. Whether or not YOU in particular would choose to invite a Stalker or not is irrelevant. All that matters is numerical efficiency - if there is no situation in which adding a Stalker to the team is more efficient than adding a Scrapper or a Brute, then this testifies to a need for changes and improvements.

In the simplest of terms - just because one player can play one AT and one player will always invite one AT does not mean that this AT does not have problems or deserve improvements. In fact, hand-waving problems away as "it doesn't concern ME" is a significant disservice to both the AT in question and to game balance in general.

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What? A cell phone with a small, light battery is putting out as much energy as a power line hooked up to a major power plant and supplying an entire city? What kind of cell phones are you using?

It doesn't matter how close you put the thing to your ear. You live inside electromagnetic fields every moment of every day, unless you live out in the woods. Everything electronic puts out an EM field, and it doesn't matter if you put it to your ear or look at it from across the room. Your cell phone's radio is powerful enough to reach a comm tower outside of your house, through your walls and through surrounding buildings, and it broadcasts that signal in all directions. It doesn't matter if you're next to it, across the room or in the next building over. You're inside its broadcast radius.

Even if you don't own a cell phone, your neighbour probably does, and it's transmitting its signal straight through your head. Right now, in fact. If you have a wireless router in the room, that's broadcasting straight into your head. That satellite dish your neighbour has? It only picks up a broadcast that's coming down from space anyway, which means a satellite is currently broadcasting straight into your head right now. Do you have a GPS in your car? Same deal. Do you have a wireless mouse or keyboard? They're broadcasting into your head.

And on top of that, everything electronic broadcasts an EM field just by working. And those EM fields tend to not really decay by all that much over space. So it doesn't matter if you hold your lights to your head. They're broadcasting an EM field inside your head either way. It doesn't matter if you watch your TV from the other end of the room. It's broadcasting an EM field inside your head, unless you're watching it through solid lead or a large water tank. In fact, older cathode-ray tube TVs are basically emitters aimed at the screen, and with you on the other side, those are emitters aimed AT YOU. Those speakers you hear sound out of? They broadcast some serious EM fields, too. Hell, you get blasted by electro-magnetic waves FROM SPACE all the time just doing nothing.

I mean, sure, if you want to be afraid of these things, then I really can't argue with that. But to single out cell phones when they're one of the smallest offenders is just... Unreasonable.

This is rare for me to do, but I will just say: This. Get rid of the things. They add nothing but still more problems for an AT that isn't exactly great even without them.

Yeah, I remember when Jack decided to be a ******** and posted in the Capes at 20 thread about how much it's a dead horse. Yeah, it's always fun when the lead developer of the product you're paying for tells you you're stupid, isn't it?

And, by the way, "Capes at 20" has been getting more ridiculous by the day. We've now opened the Omega Team Memorial, and more than that, we HAVE CAPES AT 1!!! By all means, keep the story and let us honour Hero 1's sacrifice. He was a great guy. But don't make the guy hoard all our capes!

And this goes for other costume unlocks, as well. I'm with "something" on this one, and something which puts them in character creation, to boot. Recipes don't cut it, since I can't use recipes at character creation, and recipes get consumed if I reroll. Global unlocks are the only decent way to do it, even if global unlocks take unlocking the badge on 10 characters or such.

I had the urge to post "I told you so" but I'd forgotten the thread existed

Let's hope we hear some more from David in his threads some time soon. I think his last post scrolled off the dev digest.

Please read this with as benign a tone as possible, but what you just said is complete and utter nonsense within the context of this game. No, heroes don't tend to choose their own nemesis. Heroes also don't tend to choose their gender, skin colour, origin and particular brand of super powers. Heroes also don't get to choose whether they will be kidnapped by aliens, have their parents murdered or just have really high IQ. We, as players, define these things for our heroes because that's what customization means in a video game context.

Unless you want to suggest that we build our characters by rolling on their stats and appearance, then suggesting that designing your own personal nemesis doesn't make sense... Doesn't make sense.

Let me put it this way: When I designed my original flagship villain, I designed him as the one true nemesis of my original flagship hero. If the eponymous Samuel Tow would have to have a personal nemesis, then I would very much like that personal nemesis to be the equally important Ezikiel Bane. That's how I wrote it, that's how I envisioned it, that's what I want. I don't want the game to generate some Captain Infindibular that not only do I care nothing for, but am probably going to hate the guts of, especially when I want a specific character with a sepcific background, a specific look and specific powers.

Designing a nemesis for your hero is no different from designing a villain and vice versa.

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Hell, why not design a nemesis OR a rival? For instance, a particular hero wouldn't really have any specific enemies, but would have another hero always trying to steal the spotlight and show him up, appearing in missions as a friendly but uncontrollable NPC from time to time. Or, hell, why not even as an enemy?

They are "a step" in the right direction, but it's far and away not a big one. In fact, it's more a case of spinning wheels. Animation customization is about having options, and the lessons learned from I19 should be that there's no point in adding in redundant animations, especially at the cost of NOT adding in new animations to powers that can use them.

I will still admit that the new animations are a step in the right direction, though. The animations themselves are good, we just need more of them, and given to more powers.

Sure, why not? Like I said, my prerogative here isn't to alter people's playstyles, but to make Hide more meaningful for a Stalker. If getting it by fighting is what it takes, then getting it by fighting it is. I was actually even coming to suggest something along the same lines just now.

My version was a little less reliable, in that each Stalker attack would have around a 5-10% chance reinitiate Hide (provided it lands) regardless of target death. However, I like your idea better. It encourages Stalkers to fight as a melee AT should be, it encourages Stalkers to want to finish off their targets, as it should be, and it encourages Stalkers to want to hide and attack from their Hidden status, as they really ought to. Everybody wins.

Which, by the way, brings me to another point I wanted to address: efficiency. We both cite how re-hiding isn't efficient, so on that we agree, but I don't want to force people into an inefficient tactic. I want to make re-hiding MORE efficient than Scrapping. More efficient than Scrappers themselves, perhaps. Your solution is a good one in this regard. In fact, let's picture a few scenarios.

Scenario 1: You are facing five enemies. Most Stalker veterans will tell you that you want to fight fewer, tougher enemies, but you're facing five minions nevertheless. You assassinate one, kill it, and are immediately re-hidden. Quickly you fire off your large-scale attack on the other, kill that and are re-hidden again. You turn to the third, hit him, but he doesn't die, so you hit him again, he dies and you are re-hidden. You hit the other one, he doesn't die, so you Placate, hit him again and he dies. You are re-hidden. One minion left, you are hidden and it's probably running away. You run ahead, queue up Assassin's Strike and cut him down as he's running away. A winner is you.

Scenario 2: You are facing a +1 boss and a minion. You assassinate the boss, but he doesn't die. However, the minion is now cowering in fear. You Placate the boss and follow-up with a devastating attack. You are still not hidden. So you turn to the minion. You hit him several times, he dies, you are re-hidden and reply to the boss with another devastating attack. You are not hidden, but you Placate and repeat your Assassin's Strike. Boss goes down. A winner is you.

In both scenarios, the Stalker is in the thick of it fighting like a fighter should, but in both scenarios the Stalker is aware of his surroundings and is picking off targets of opportunity. Minions at low health now become less of a nuisance and more of a resource. Cut one down and it hides you, giving you more damage on your next attack. It improves the dynamics of play, it makes Stalkers even better fighters AND it has the benefit of letting them capitalise on their inherent to a degree comparable to how often Brutes use Fury.

I love it!

*edit*
I was also going to suggest higher defence values when hidden so that it's harder for enemies to interrupt you, or out-and-out making the Hidden status not break unless you attack, but not when you take damage (so as to clear the advantage defence sets have over resistance ones) but I like the above idea too much to want to detract from it at the moment.

I am, actually. Defence-based sets, when given sufficient nerve, have the tendency to be able to survive at very low health values for surprisingly long times. As such, having high resistance values added to those low health values helps survivability a great deal. A defence-capped SR Scrapper, be that from Elude or Set Inventions, has a much higher survivability at low health levels than a comparable Scrapper without them.

And Stalkers lack a good third of the scaling resistances, as far as I can tell. This'll make riding the line harder and less pleasant.

Yeah, I meant to comment on that, but I think I got called off to screw in a hard drive or some such and it totally slipped my mind. I have no problem with this, since that's what team-mates do anyway. With a decent Brute or Dom, re-hiding isn't actually difficult, it just takes so long it's not worth it. Which, by the way, is my key problem here - when it's not worth for a Stalker to hide even when he could do so unmolested, something's seriously wrong.

Of course, I would love to see something done for solo play, as well, like the longer it has been since an Assassin's Strike, the faster you hide or some such. I'm just stabbing in the dark here, though.

As you said, most people don't play at that (and most people can't, since you only get +0x0 if you never change anything and you normally can't go below x1), but the thing is that this goes out the window once you get on a team, face a boss or, heaven forbid, fight an EB or an AV. The one lesson I learned from Blasters is that there are certain enemies you simply CANNOT kill very fast, and so you need other tactics against them. In these situations, Stalkers get shafted because their gimmick requires periods of out-of-combat state and periods of complete lack of aggro. Which, to me, is a bad way to design it.

I keep thinking a faster-recharging Placate might help with that. But Placating one enemy out of a whole spawn doesn't really help pull off an Assassin's Strike, that's the big thing.

That's actually one of the most crippling aspects of it. I've lost track of the number of times when I'd say "Well, I tried to kill them fast, but they killed me first" and people would say "Have you tried pulling?" On a Stalker... You CAN'T. Well, you can, but it defeats the purpose since you have to break Hide to do it and, that's... Ugh.

On the flip side, what is there to do about it? I keep talking about a kind of single-target taunt... Call it "distraction"... Which would pull enemies without breaking hide, but it would still get you aggro and most likely prevent you from pulling off an Assassin's Strike. I keep wondering if there can't be some sort of decoy that would allow the Stalker to pull an enemy to a specific location without actually attaining aggro on himslef, but I don't know if pseudo-pets can work like that, and I KNOW the AI can't be made to do this.

What I keep picturing is... You know those ambushes that spawn on your location, but not necessarily on you? I like how I can sidestep the location, and they'll just go there and start looking around, allowing me to rip into them with full element of surprise. That's kind of what I'd like to have as a general tool, but it's probably impossible to do. Hmm... Or how about having some kind of decoy which would taunt enemies in a wide area to it without a line of sight check, but be easy to kill? Maybe for a new Stalker set or something? The Beret from Commandos, for instance, had that radio he could set down and turn on, causing enemies to cluster around it so he could knife them in the back.

Just... Something.

That's kind of the problem, though - Stalkers are worse at scrapping than Scrappers are, both offensively and defensively, and they really don't compare to Brutes. If that's all they are, then Stalkers really ARE gimped. And, frankly, I wouldn't want Stalkers to be better at stand-and-fight tactics than the actual stand-and-fight fighters. That's why I feel they should get more perks with their hiding mechanic, not better combat stats. They fight well enough when they can leverage Hide. It's just that they can't leverage Hide all that often because they're simply not designed to.

I'm not sure how useful Smoke Flash is for that, personally. I guess if you use it like a Sleep... Personally, I tend to use it to get an easy critical, possibly an easy Assassin's Strike. If you smoke an entire spawn, this allows you to run around a corner and regain your Hide status before they awaken. And if they awaken and they don't see you, they should lose aggro entirely.

It's basically a pause and reset for a battle. Given that Stalkers do their best damage right at the start, that helps.

Yeah, I know. Line of sight doesn't play as much of a role as it should. I keep wondering about using some kind of easily-killable decoy to serve as a "last known position" that you can put around a corner for enemies to attack and let you run away...

You know what the biggest problem is? Hiding, or rather re-hiding as a Stalker is not worth it. And it should be. You spend eight seconds sitting on your hands doing nothing, potentially getting interrupted and generally just wasting time. I could do the math, but I doubt even 8 + 4 for Hide + Assassinate is worth the time you could have otherwise spent just scrapping. That's the central problem of Stalkers as I see it - their gimmick is only ever actually usable once per fight, twice at most. You CAN use it more than that, but it becomes badly inefficient.

Now, I play my Stalker with a Dominator on a semi-frequent basis. What this means is that the bulk of the time, I don't have to worry about having my re-hide interrupted. Enemies are either confused, immobilized or outright held and unable to hit me. Even then, I feel like an idiot watching my character sitting on my hands while the Dominator - for whom damage is a secondary - outpace me in kill speed. And not because I suck as a fighter, far from it, but because I AM NOT FIGHTING. Any mechanic which encourages a person to not participate in a fight which is already happening I will always have problems with. And this is precisely what re-hiding is.

The cornerstone of my vision for Stalkers isn't line of sight, running away or other such gimmicks. It's basing Stalker fighting styles around hiding and re-hiding. As it stands right now, re-hiding is an aberration on the order of using Blaster snipes in the middle of a melee. You CAN... But it's really not the best thing to do. By FAR. And this, in my eyes, is what's wrong with them. Without a decent, controllable, reliable means of re-hiding, Stalkers cannot help but be reduced to slightly less impressive Scrappers, because they are reduced to Scrapping and nothing else. Yes, they get one big hit on an elite boss or an archvillan, which helps... For a while. But this returns me to my previous question: And then what?

Seriously, this is the question I think we need to answer. As a Stalker in battle, you assassinate... And then what?

Running away to hide around the corner is a cool idea... If it didn't take eight seconds anyway. Imagine fighting around a large container. Assassinate one enemy, run around a corner, critical-hit another as he comes around, run around the next corner, critical-hit again and keep moving. It doesn't take long, and it's an efficient way to fight. It takes the right terrain, however, and thinking on your feet. It's also impossible in the current system, but that's besides the point. Can't let Stalkers regain hide in two seconds, after all. That would be overpowered. Right?

Placate is a good idea, only the point of Placate is not to hide, but to cause one enemy to stop attacking you and, crucially, you can't do it from around a corner. Besides, it has, like, three seconds of animation or such, and it recharges in a minute. If it didn't require line of sight and recharged faster, I feel Stalkers would be a lot more fun to play, but again - might become broken in some people's eyes. Not in mine, but I'm usually a minority in everything.

Giving Stalkers some kind of single-target taunt might help, but one which didn't break Hide when you used it. If I can't hit and run in-combat, then at least let me separate spawns without giving up my one defining advantage.

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Let me sum up. I don't feel Stalkers need to be any better at Scrapping than they are now. They're good enough, just about. What I feel Stalkers need to be is better at hiding, since that's what defines them.

Yeah, that's basically it in a nutshell. I don't lose out on AoE defence, but I lose out on scaling resistances. I guess it's something I'll have to live with. I never checked defensive numbers... Because I forgot, but it makes sense Evasion would include Lucky. I kept thinking Agile would include Lucky for some reason