Siolfir

The problem is more of a perception issue than a huge performance concern for the Stalker AT as a whole, but the perception is based on a numerical reality.

Will they hurt a team? No - or at any rate, no more than a bad player on any AT would hurt a team. And they can often help quite a bit. But they aren't ideal at anything, so people don't come up with a task and think, "We need a Stalker for this." You would bring a Stalker for the same reason you'd bring a Scrapper or Blaster: purely for damage.

Stalkers can deal better single-target damage over time than Scrappers, they just aren't likely to - it's based on how many teammates they have within 30' of them and in mobile situations it's probably not going to be there. But they will almost always die before a Scrapper with the same secondary and investment due simply to lower hit points and hit point cap with the same numbers otherwise. For AoE damage, the Scrapper will almost always win out because Stalker primaries - with the notable exception of Electric Melee - lost an AoE attack which was replaced with Assassin's Strike and a few Scrapper secondaries get damage auras. So the Scrapper will pretty much do more damage than the Stalker, plus is more survivable. With sufficient buffing available to ignore survivability issues, a Blaster will probably outdamage either the Stalker or Scrapper.

Since it's derailed anyway, I actually had an argument with someone in the Stalker forums a while ago where they claimed their Blaster was more survivable than their Stalker. They were told that they're doing it wrong, but they insisted that with a ranged hover-blaster they could do more damage with better survivability than a Stalker.

So based on one person's uncorroborated claim, Stalkers are less damaging with less survivability than not only Scrappers, but Blasters as well!




*runs away from thread after throwing out troll bait*

My thoughts: it's about to get really slot-hungry since Energize needs slotting and Conserve Power not only doesn't need extra slots but was often skipped as irrelevant. It'd be nice if the Stalker version of Energy Protection had all of Dampening Field rolled into it also, what with them increasing the resistance and adding extra stuff to the auto powers. A bit more defense debuff resistance would be nice, but I didn't see that anywhere.

So... meh. Overall it's probably better but the only thing that would cause me to make another Energy Aura character is that it was ported to Scrappers - and the changes are more likely to prevent me from making one than cause me to, since I can't simply convert my current DM/EA Brute.

I don't even have Lore unlocked on anyone yet, so I don't have a favorite. But in the thread in Player Guides that's supposed to calculate the damage capabilities Cimerorans were the clear "winner" in terms of ST DPS.

It comes as no surprise that this thread has one-and-a-half times the views as the one showing Slax's junk...

The other one is funnier tho.

The stealth cap is lower than 150' for the first levels, and you can be seen by turrets (100' perception) even running Hide (150' stealth). On my sneaky characters I monitor PvE stealth radius, and I don't remember offhand when the cap is over 150' and Hide works how it's supposed to but I think it's around level 15 or 16, and somewhere around level 9 or 10 that it's over 100'. That can explain some of the issues people may have reported about being spotted by turrets.

Once the stealth cap is over 150', nothing in PvE will see a Stalker with Hide active (ie, not suppressed) that doesn't ignore any amount of stealth. As mentioned before, those are any character-targeted ambush (since you're already on their aggro list, perception is never checked), Rikti drones, Knives of Artemis (unless you have to escort them out to the door... stupid/horrible tip mission design), and Rularuu eyes.