Siolfir

But you can't spend astral or alignment merits on rent, bills, or at the grocery.

It's all a matter of perspective, priority, and tradeoffs.

Buy them individually. They're cheaper that way.

You mean that the graphics and story behind Yar's Revenge don't resonate with you even today?

But then you could Black Hole two spawns in order to really annoy your team!

a) It's still an extra click. A toggle just stays there.

b) Placate's animation time is 1.5 seconds, or 1.43 seconds for Dual Blades. Even accounting for Arcanatime that's under 2 seconds.

c) I didn't think you were talking about getting rid of Placate. I said that while the click Hide power is animating, you could be knocked out of hidden status. Currently Hide's animation time is 0.73 seconds, or roughly half that of Placate. That gives it an Arcanatime window of 0.924 seconds where it can be messed up before you can activate another power, relative to Placate's 1.716 (or 1.584) - you're not getting rid of the problem, you're simply reducing it.

A better way of reducing the chance of losing the critical due to getting hit would be have Placate set the kMeter (ie, Hidden status) "after 1.43 second delay" or "after 1.5 second delay", and have the Placate effect go off immediately. This would reduce the gap where it could be broken to 0.216 seconds for most Placates, or 0.154 for Dual Blades; note that doing the same with a click version of Hide gives you a gap of 0.194 seconds (89.8% of the gap if Placate is used).

d) All powers that can critical have the chance to double critical after a Placate now - you (general case) just notice it more with Assassin's Strike because that's usually what's used right after Placate.



I think this is thematically what the 30' radius for team criticals is supposed to mimic, without actually checking the mob's target to see who they're aiming at (which may be an engine limitation preventing them from checking a target's target and/or reading the aggro list for the target). Conceptually I like the idea, it's just that the mechanics they used get in the way of it dramatically improving performance like it could be doing since most teams are a bit more spread out than the radius provides for.

That's why I'd like to see the radius expanded to 80' (max range for most normal blast sets) or done away with and just use team size instead to base it on, with the (I have been told incorrect) idea that team size would be faster to calculate than how far each team member is from the Stalker.

I don't think I'll ever support any method of making Hide into a click power, especially not one that you want at as close to 100% uptime as possible - some secondaries (*cough*Regen*cough*) are clicky enough already with Reconstruction, Dull Pain, Moment of Glory, and Instant Healing, with Hasten, Shadow Meld, and the Demonic accolade thrown in for good measure. I certainly don't want to have to keep track of when Hide recharged along with that.

Besides, you're in the exact same boat you're in with Placate now in that something can hit you while Hide animates (which it will do each time you have to click it) and you'd lose the status. At least Placate (usually) makes one thing stop attacking you.




Neither would I, but the devs may disagree.



I think it forces an animation on them - the one where they look around as if they lost where you are - whether it has an effect or not. Power Sink has a similar effect in forcing animations on mobs, including ones that are phased out and not affected. That doesn't mean that it actually removed you from their aggro list, though. I'll have to double check on the animation forcing, but the good news is that 3 of the characters I'm leveling up are Stalkers so I'll have plenty of chances.

But... ...here's the line item. It's mag 4. Mag 4 won't affect an Elite Boss. I suggested bumping it to mag 6 a while ago.

They can already do this after Placate. That's actually how I came up with scale 9 - it's below the double critical that you can currently do (which is scale 9.5), but it makes it far more reliable. I'm also assuming that the only unhidden criticals for the new Assassin's Strike will be Focus-related, so you wouldn't get a scale 11.76 double-critical with the changes.

I got my token yesterday, and didn't get the points until this evening - I'm not certain exactly when, but they weren't there this afternoon when I logged on and the date shown in microtransactions when I check account info is November 25th. I'm in the eastern time zone and it's still the 24th here for another 30 mins.

Placate is a mag 4 mez, which isn't sufficient magnitude to affect Elite Boss class mobs. Since it's not covered by the purple triangles, you're actually safer fighting an Archvillain/Hero class mob, since they would be affected by Placate when you needed a breather. You just have a lot more hit points to whittle down and they're going to regen almost all of the damage if you actually need to use Placate defensively, so it's harder to kill them.

As for the calculations, they're in the Stalker section scattered around in a few different posts; one of the threads deals specifically with using Placate offensively and whether or not it helps the DPA of the following attack. Not counting the Assassin's Strike powers, there are 11 total powers scattered through 9 primaries (I didn't include APPs, so I left all pool powers alone) where the damage over time is actually helped by using Placate. For everything else, including Assassin's Strike once these changes roll out, the DPA of the followup goes down - whether due to a lower critical chance (most AoEs), lowered damage on the critical, or just Placate's animation time relative to the attack.

Edit:
Link to post #1 with DPA of the unhidden Assassin's Strike and current hidden Assassin's Strike.
Link to post #2 with DPA of current Assassin's Strike after a Placate, including 10% critical chance.
Link to post with the powers where DPA increases following Placate, including % increase.

Note that the first two were written before I read this thread and had to be edited, but I left the original text intact because it shows how I calculated the numbers.

That was a suggestion, not a fact. Unless I missed a dev digest post or something.

Well... there are a couple, but at least one dev has posted that one of them is a bug so it's safe to assume that the other is also.

Tell that to Energy Melee, which benefits the least from criticals due to the hardest hitting attacks in the set either not having them, or having them hamstrung by a really old and outdated decision to prevent criticals from going over scale 4.56. Plus the attacks - especially once you add in Assassin's Strike - completely fill a Build Up window.

The proposal is also completely broken by Kinetic Melee, where the critical on the heavy hitter is to recharge Build Up - so you hit Concentrated Strike again during the window and viola! Instant recharge, and CS is the only attack that ever doesn't critical.

Smoke Flash is available as a temp power that anyone can get and use. It's not targeted directly, but that's just a timing issue between you and the AoE-KB-happy victi... er, teammate.

Getting one thing to stop attacking you, when solo, is useful occasionally. It would be really nice if Placate always did that, but some of the secondary effects cause it to break and the magnitude isn't high enough to work on Elite Bosses at all (ironically, it works against AVs, making it safer for a Stalker to fight against AVs than EBs, albeit harder to actually overcome their regen and win). So I use it offensively in those situations - currently with Assassin's Strike - and wanted to see what else would benefit given the changes coming in i22 to Assassin's Strike.

I mentioned reducing the animation in a PM to Synapse since he's looking at Stalkers already, but I'm not expecting anything other than putting it out there as a possibility because animation changes aren't really his department and the resources may not be there - especially with each AS needing another animation that skips the windup.

There were a variety of options attempted on the test server that used enhanceable and unenhanceable damage that was based on the target's max hp. I think it started at 10%, unenhanceable, and changed from that point. At one point it was 4%, fully enhanceable - I remember that figure because I popped inspirations to get the damage cap (20% of the target's maxhp) and soloed Deathsurge fairly easily before they wore off on my DM/Nin.

In addition to the ease of killing hard targets, there was a huge uproar about damage types, as the exotic typed Assassin's Strikes had a huge numerical advantage against the targets you would want to use them on. I'm not sure the exact reason that it was scrapped, but it was a legitimate attempt - then, later, the last round of Stalker buffs came out, and now they're looking at them again.

Sure it does. It deals lethal damage.

Feeling like I was just scraping the paint on robots, turrets, and longbow body armor is what shelved my Spines/Nin. My Elec/Nin has been 50 for a while. >.>

So, people are looking for sewer teams and trying to sell inf and PLs?