Siolfir

Did you even read the first part of what you quoted, or are you too busy trying to act like you're the only one allowed to express an opinion on the forums?

I thought about mentioning this in my previous post, but the inside teams are still AoE-happy mass destruction, I haven't been on the outside teams to know if you really need a lot of ST to take out the telepathists, and it's not like Stalkers have a monopoly on single target damage. The one TPN I was on had 1 Brute, 1 Stalker, and the rest Scrappers on the outside team. It does make for an interesting wrinkle, but then you have all the pet ATs feeling useless because you can't control what powers the pets are using.

Energy Aura will notice also (Overload).

And even Arcanaville said that the analysis doesn't take into account everything and shouldn't be the end-all-be-all of rating armor sets. How much more endurance are you using with just SOs when you have to plug that KB hole with Acrobatics in order to effectively use Dark Regeneration, for example - it does no good if you're thrown outside of its range when you need to use it.

Like I said, I don't see it in need of buffs, but I certainly am not going to argue so much to maintain the status quo - that's what the devs are for. If they feel the requests are out of line, they simply don't have to do them and hopefully would explain why if they're feeling really nice. The set isn't so far out of balance that asking the devs to look at it is going to generate overwhelming nerfs, so what's the harm?

IO Armor is a top performer. Dark Armor is about average. Do I think it needs buffs? Nah.

What part of "each tick has a 60% chance to go off, meaning a 40% chance to fail" do you not understand? Yes, the chance is pretty miniscule that none of the ticks will happen but the chance mathematically exists - just like there is a theoretical chance that all 75 ticks of Rain of Fire will miss over its duration if the streakbreaker doesn't kick in (which, btw, won't happen for the ticks on Hail of Bullets since they aren't separate tohit checks). But you apparently don't understand how math works and are incapable of viewing the difference between theoretical possibility and realistic probability.

No, he's saying that your example doesn't fit because your numbers are completely out of whack with other attacks relative to Dark Regeneration's value compared to other heals.

But if you really want to be obnoxious about it, there is an attack that has a small chance of doing no damage in an AoE even if it hits. Hail of Bullets has a small chance of doing no damage, even if the tohit check succeeds. Going with tohit-check failures (which is what you're talking about for Dark Regeneration), every attack that isn't autohit fits the bill. But those are powers that affect other things and so are balanced differently.

Dark Regeneration isn't even the best heal with a tohit check in the game - that's debatable between Transfusion and Twilight's Grasp (specifically, Defender Transfusion or Corruptor/Defender Twilight's Grasp since they heal for the same amount) with most that I've heard from leaning to TG since you don't have to stand next to the mob to get the heal, and they both hit a larger number of players at a much lower endurance cost and faster recharge to heal for significantly more than just one person's health bar.

Nah, last night I was on a team of 8 with Trouble (DM/Regen) for a couple of radio missions before I had to log out. I routinely got off multiple Assassin's Eclipses per spawn since we were fighting +3/+4 Council and Freakshow, sometimes with multiple spawns rushing in and I wanted the demoralize debuff to go off.

It can be limited at times, but it's certainly not impossible to use in a fight even for sets that don't have significant defense.

No, hitting Self Destruction and nuking while dying, then nuking while rezzing is your greatest contribution.

Irrelevant - the Thugs Bruiser rides in on a motorcycle, so the clowns can come in on their own car without a need for player vehicles.

The same reason the Pylon thread exists... bragging rights. At least sustained single target damage has a use in some encounters, as opposed to single target burst damage.

The scope of inter-AT balance comes into play as well, since right now Stalkers are 3rd among melee ATs for sustained damage and last for hit points - but that's a metric that's highly dependent on powerset choice and intra-AT balance makes a larger difference.

Do I think that suddenly people are going to say, "hey, we need a Stalker for this"? No. But that ship sailed long before Stalkers even existed with how the AT structure and pool powers were created.

None that I know of. But can you really see the devs ripping out 6 ATs at this point in the game and combining then into 3 that serve the same functions, with the powers chosen determining the focus? That's something that would need a whole new game title to justify.


Right, but you'd be more likely to get a larger value from the -resistance debuff because the devs seem to have some artificial inflation of how good -maxHP is. Otherwise why is there a cap on Degenerative?

Feasibility sucks. They should drop everything they're doing and work on what I want.

Well, it could be amusing if it applies the -maxhp debuff and then applies the damage, because it would effectively boost its own damage by the amount of the debuff (ie, a 10% -maxhp would effectively increase the damage by 10%). If it's a short-duration debuff it wouldn't be that great, though - see all the threads on Degenerative vs Reactive Interface for why.

It's still another gimmick, though. I agree that there really isn't a great place for Stalkers in the game, but right now they aren't even tops at what their specialty is supposed to be among the melee classes. I don't forsee the drastic changes that would be needed to fix the issue until CoH2, but IMO the game could use a few less ATs with the abilities of some rolled up via skill trees and mutually exclusive powers a la VEATs.

Fair enough - but I already had run the numbers for Stone vs Dark earlier in the thread, so I knew that it was only Mud Pots that really made the difference in a "typical" configuration; Stone Armor was cheaper otherwise.

Another issue with the endurance consumption for Ninjitsu, SR, and Shield is that the mez protection isn't accounted for in those numbers but is for the other sets - which makes them also seem a bit cheaper than they are. But you did mention you ignored clicks, and how you account for them is iffy since some Shield characters try to double-stack it for the extra DDR instead of taking Grant Cover - that makes it fairly expensive.

In any case, Dark Armor gets a minor discount on its toggle costs but has more toggles to run and isn't a bad set - but in a typical configuration it's one of the most expensive sets and the only ones that typically cost more have endurance refill powers (Energy Drain, Energy Absorption) and one also has an endurance discount power (Energize). I wouldn't be adverse to an increase in the negative resistance but don't see where it's really hurting.

It's on City of Data here.

Powers are:
Defensive Sweep
Crushing Blow
Titan Sweep
Follow Through
Build Momentum
Confront
Rend Armor
Whirling Smash
Arc of Destruction

Which means it will likely be like the difference in leveling up by fighting +2/x8 vs +4/x8 for incarnate XP... you get less reward per enemy but kill them so much faster and more than make up the difference (because you're not waiting around for trials to start). Of course the drop rate will be the real issue - if you can get incarnate salvage faster on trials even accounting for the dead time, that's probably going to be the way people go. Fortunately, you can get incarnate salvage on any of the trials, including the easy ones - which is why they're run so often.

The t9 revival power also has the possibility of not even being able to work at all, and I was assuming you meant Dark Regeneration because that's what everyone else was talking about refilling their end with since it didn't involve dying in the middle of a spawn while things continued to stand over their corpse.

And stating that "and [Dark Armor] has drain resistance and [...]" seems to imply that Invulnerability doesn't. Had you said it has "more drain resistance" that would indicate that you were aware of the drain resistance that Invulnerability was given but your word choice indicated ignorance of it, not dismissal.

Edit: It's also 25% regardless of AT or level for Invulnerability since it uses melee_ones - that 86.5% you quote is only for Tankers at level 50; other ATs get 30.0%-69.2% as they level up. Yes, it's more but it's not always triple the value and the drain resistance cap is stupidly low when a character starts out.

Just fixing this for readability.

The devs hate Stalkers.




Well, that or else none of the other criticals in Spines are Toxic damage, and the pattern is to copy the damage type from the other criticals. But the first line is funnier.

Using SOs, Dark Regeneration does not refill endurance. Against a limited number of targets, it does not refill endurance. And Invulnerability has end drain resistance as well.

It is manipulating the numbers, since you said you didn't but then included Brimstone.

Rock Armor = 0.26
Crystal Armor = 0.26
Rooted = 0.208

That's 0.728. Which is less than the Dark Armor number you have listed without Cloak of Fear.

Brimstone adds 0.26 to make it 0.988.

Against All Odds is a defensive toggle. It has -damage, and is extremely common among Shield characters.

And as mentioned, Cloak of Fear was "fixed" to only be mag 2 for Brutes sometime around/after it was ported over to Tankers. Prior to that, it was mag 3 for Brutes and 2 for Scrappers and Stalkers.

The numbers for Shield are very low because you don't include Against All Odds, but you included Chilling Embrace for Ice. They're both -damage, and don't even try to say that most Shield characters don't use it. If you run all of Shield's toggles, you're at 0.78; if you skip Grant Cover you're at 0.624.

If you're listing "common" configurations then drop Brimstone from Stone which takes it down to 0.73; Fire and Cold damage isn't common enough to make it necessary and it's not even on most of the Stone Armor builds I've seen.