Siolfir

The specific question you had was answered already, but if you have other questions about powers you can check out City of Data - it's a bit more detailed than what you can get from Mid's and has a lot of things you don't necessarily need to know but are really informative to explain certain nuances such as which powers work by summoning a pet, what the different radius sizes are for some powers like Lightning Rod, and - the relevant part - what duration is for each individual effect from a power.

I will try to be on, but I have no idea who I'll bring.

For just beating things up without having to pay a lot of attention as a Stalker, you want to soft-cap. So the answer is dependent on your budget, and then on how well you manage your click powers. For the most part I agree with Microcosm earlier, but I'll throw in a few other notes.

The cheapest and easiest to soft-cap is Super Reflexes plus it gives a passive recharge and speed increase, very high defense debuff resistance, and limited scaling resistances as your hit points disappear. But that's all it has going for it, really - it's great if you're on a limited budget but other sets can do a lot more.

Energy Aura has a Psi and Toxic hole, but it's also fairly easy to softcap to everything else - especially with Energy Drain stacking +defense - and has some basic passive resistances, a recharge boost, a stun PBAoE toggle, great endurance management, a self-heal that provides +regen as well, and Overload has +hp as well with an easy-to-avoid (endurance-only) crash.

Ninjitsu isn't too bad to soft-cap and has a lot of extra tools including a self-heal, cone sleep/confuse/-tohit that takes the Contagious Confusion proc to turn it into a weaker version of Seeds of Confusion, and Caltrops to provide area denial, some extra damage, and an afraid effect that causes most mobs to spend more time switching AI states than actually acting. It has some limited susceptibility to defense cascade failure, but if you use those extra tools there shouldn't be many cases at all where you don't have at least one answer to the problem. The biggest issue is high to-hit buffs, since you don't have any resistance for when you do get hit.

Which leads to Ice Armor, which I haven't personally played because I didn't want to reroll someone just to play it and haven't made any new Stalkers since it came out, and the resistance sets which - if softcapped - are better than the defense sets because let's face it, softcapped defense + capped resistance (Elec running Power Surge) is better than softcapped defense + good resistance (Dark, Elec), which is better than softcapped defense + decent resistance (Willpower, Ice with Icy Bastion*), which is better than softcapped defense + extra "panic buttons" (Ninjitsu), which is about equal to softcapped defense + token resistance (Energy Aura, Ice without Icy Bastion**), which is better than softcapped defense alone (Super Reflexes), which is better than anything which isn't softcapped***.

It's up to you to decide if the extra cost associated with softcapping the resistance sets is worth the survival difference; for me it's not and I tend to not bother and select defense sets. Alternatively you could play whatever set you think looks the best, use Barrier Destiny to cover any survival holes, and avoid exemplaring.


* - it's good resistance but not with a 100% uptime and it uses animation time, so I'm calling it "decent"
** - the -damage aura is effectively resistance but only to melee-range threats and the high cold resistance is mostly useless due to lack mobs using cold damage
** - debatable, but I'm lazy and it's mostly true

As mentioned already in the thread, Fury breaks stealth... anyone that says that they're standing next to a mob that would normally aggro on them* needs to post video evidence of them standing within 10' of a mob for over 10 seconds - which is the activation period - without an "only affecting stealth" state or I'll simply say that they're either mistaken on the distance (ie, unintentionally incorrect) or simply lying (ie, never checked). I've personally seen far too much evidence by my own testing to believe anyone else without definitive proof and I'm tired of testing claims that it's been fixed and finding out that the person never bothered to really check.

It's been this way for years, and I can't think of a single reason why it has to be. All of my bug reports and PMs on the subject have amounted to nothing, but it still crops up every now and then. Given that this still crops up every now and then, there should probably be a sticky thread with a subject making it obvious to prevent some of the questions.



* - obviously you can stand in a crowd of greys and they'll do nothing without taunting them, so that sort of "evidence" is utterly useless

In PvE a stealth proc is completely useless for a Stalker. The stealth from it suppresses in every case where Hide would be suppressed, and anything in PvE that can see you through Hide ignores any level of stealth that you have stacked.

The only instance where a Stalker sees any benefit from slotting a stealth IO is in PvP.

Given the changes that are on beta, Placate is a mild survival convenience for most powersets, and rarely useful. Depending on the powersets you chose, it's possible to help your damage but very unlikely to do so - you'd get as much (or more) help just from slotting the Stalker ATO enhancement proc in Assassin's Strike and using it as it recharged.

If you want to skip it, I doubt you'll miss it.