Siolfir

Yay! Sounds about right to me.

*updates signature to indicate uselessness*

Except that it's not the undisputed king of single target damage if you add in pretty much any level of recharge. It's kindof middle of the pack for sustained single target damage, and only near the top in single target burst damage.

Insert any set with a taunt aura <here>.

Ehhh. It'll make a small difference that'll be barely noticeable with Fury. Brutes get the least benefit out of anything Shields has to offer. What it will do is offer you AoE burst to go with single target burst; and see my first set of comments about "single target damage king".

Energy Melee? Mitigation? What?! Okay, yes, it has semi-reliable, single-target stuns. And no reliable AoE mitigation at all, plus a power that - as has been mentioned in the thread already - can kill you. Energy Melee is either tied with Fire Melee (which doesn't have any mitigation but at least doesn't actively hurt you) or else behind it in mitigation.

And if you're going to say "well, I'll just not use Energy Transfer", then I'll politely suggest that you need to seriously rethink taking Energy Melee at all, if you're going to say that you'll simply skip the highest DPA attack in the set, and the only reason it's even remotely competitive in single target damage, because of the fact that it hurts you.

I have an Energy Melee(/ElA) Brute at 50. I made another (EM/EA) that I got to 38 and deleted. I can't say that I've ever been happy with the mitigation that EM provides, and for Shields I deleted my SS/SD Brute at 44 because I didn't want to dump as much inf into the IOs as I'd need to just to make it as survivable as my SM/WP (who, admittedly, is as survivable or moreso than the FM/SA I deleted at 50).

I haven't personally tried the pairing - I'm done making new EM Brutes (I did make 2 EM Stalkers since the changes) because the poor AoE in the set doesn't balance out the middling single target and poor mitigation. Shields definately would add in some AoE damage with Shield Charge, and if you want to go with the pairing then it can definately work, but I feel that you were heading into it with some assumptions that simply weren't true.

Autohit it may be (and it's on one of the Nictus Essences, not Rommie), but Ninjitsu has a heal, and it's not hard to cap Stalker hit points. My DM/Nin didn't tank Rommie - at least in the last encounter, but that was because of the annoying Brute that kept getting his attention while I stayed in melee the whole time.

I did tank Rommie and Requiem in the mission before that one, though, because the Brute decided that attempting to herd the entire platform they were standing on was more important than staying under the aggro cap and just getting parts of it, and Assassin's Eclipse tends to get a mob's attention. (See? Stalkers aren't the only AT that can mess up a team's plan!) While I'd like some more defense debuff resistance in Nin, having Caltrops and Blinding Powder will give you plenty of time for the debuffs to wear off.

And to the sidenote on MMs... they're both the easiest AT to play and the hardest AT to play well. A poor MM can cause far more issues for a team than anyone else - think of how much extra aggro fire imps can cause when left unwatched, then double the number and give them AoE attacks. A good MM makes the rest of the team irrelevant.

It's possible to hit, but it will drop before you get a chance to actually do anything with it. There was a bug a while back with some patron powers (and some other powers as well, Power Sink being one of them) that pegged your Fury on one use. At the time, it was jokingly brought up as a PvP fix for Brutes (this is before the 5 point bonus was tacked onto their attacks).

Generally speaking, I consider 80% to be "full Fury" and anything above that to just be a bonus, but some of the AE missions - with the multitude of ambushes, and staying at the aggro cap constantly - will let you average over 90% if you can stay alive that long. I generally assume 80% for the "fighting" average for things like calculating specific attack chains and 70% for a "mission" average for figuring out total amount of damage over time.

Then I completely ignore anything I calculated and just mash buttons until the mission ends.

To answer, in order:

Fury gain varies based on your current level and what's around you, so there isn't a true answer for "how much". Minions provide an amount based on your current "Rage" (the internal word used to describe the Fury level - poking at City of Data, "Fury" is the amount gained), Lieutenants provide twice that level, and Bosses and above provide triple the amount. I'd list the formula, but I honestly never bothered memorizing it and now City of Data has it hidden for ease of readability. At above 80%, the rate of gain per attack (either yours or an incoming attack) decreases dramatically.

With a minor exception, the amount you gain for each attack you make is twice that of the amount you gain from being attacked, so the answer to the second question is related to the answer to the first. So what's the exception? EB/AV/GM and/or PvP fights - each time you attack in those situations, there is a 5 point bonus added if you're at less than 70 Fury above and beyond the amount calculated. This was a pseudofix to help build Fury faster against hard enemies, since the theoretical growth rate isn't exactly reliable*.

The rate of Fury decay is constant - 2 points per second.

The damage bonus is exactly that - a +damage that's applied to your character for each available damage type. That's also why it works off of the base damage of the power - it, like any damage buff, acts as if it were a damage enhancement to each and every buffable damaging power you have (note that the vet reward attacks aren't buffable, which is also what makes them nice for Rage crashes).




* - it checks once every 10 seconds to see what's around you in a 10' radius, making it nigh useless in PvP and slow to respond at other times. The check also alerts everything you're within 10' of that it's doing so, which causes mobs to be alerted to your presence even if you're stealthed. Note that if you're in an "Only Affecting Self" status, this check isn't able to go through, so Invisibility will work for standing in the middle of a spawn as long as nothing has a high enough perception to see through it, but then it would attack anything with that stealth radius.

And there's my rendition of "Everything You (n)Ever Wanted to Know About Fury (But Were Too Busy SMASHing to Ask)".

So basically, it'd be just like every other pet in the game?

Hrm... I'll go with 3.

Flashback, and everybody gets merits on either - with no diminished returns on the story arcs, only the task/strike forces. And several of the hero story arcs can be speedrun as well, for better than a one merit/minute rate.

Just sayin'.

And as for the experiences... Citadel and Manticore can be kindof fun if you try to see how fast you can complete them, since then it turns into a race. Posi and Synapse are still boring, but at roughly 2 hrs, give or take, not a complete waste of time for the merits, and the Dr Qs I've been on were actually kindof fun despite the number of missions - and they only took around 3-4 hrs, which puts them at a slightly better merit/time ratio than Posi or Synapse.

If you run the Task Forces the same way people ran the Strike Forces - that got the rewards for them cut to roughly half of that of a Task Force of similar length (counting time, not number of missions) - then most of them are roughly an hour or less. That gives you much better than the expected merit per hour rate that the rewards were supposed to be set for.

If you run the Tarikoss without speed running it, you're not going to finish in the "median" time that the reward is based on (which is 39 minutes). The second mission alone, with all the obnoxious CoT spectrals and Ruin Mages in overlapping spawns, will take care of that. The Longbow mission can, too, if the person who gets the tech doesn't listen and tries to fight off all of the ambush waves (what are there, 6? 8?) rather than just hitting a few Lucks and running straight to the computer. And I'm willing to bet that the "median" time that they based the reward off of was from people softloading the map for 1 person, before the changes that prevented you from being able to do so - which hasn't been accounted for in the reward, either. If I were setting a value for it, it'd probably be around that of the ITF - both are capable of being speedrun very quickly, and still capable of taking a while if you get stuck on a particular mission.

Edit to add: yes, I'm also one of the people you can blame for the low reward due to speedrunning this - I know that it's possible to finish in under 30 mins (I would've soloed it in under 20 with the softloading if I wasn't waiting for people to log on a couple of times). But those aren't exactly your "typical" team, and shouldn't be viewed as such when determining the reward. The ITF has been finished in 20 minutes as well, but it's not worth 10 merits...

fixed

I've PM'd Castle about it a few times already, but it's been months since the last time I did, and more people couldn't hurt.

It's because that particular aspect of Fury is set to "Always" Notify Mobs - since it checks every 10.25 seconds in a 10' radius, you can probably get away with it for a little bit - as in, less than 10 seconds - and then things look at you and start swinging.

^
This.


I may end up swapping my Ill/Rad over just to giggle maniacally on a LRSF, though. Something tells me that perma-Phantom Army will make the final encounter there just as much of a joke as it makes the last mission of the STF (or, for that matter, a perma-dom Mind/ with Mass Hypnosis makes it).

Stalkers team well; they - like Scrappers, honestly - just don't bring much to the team except damage.

Like every AT, what they bring to the team is dependant on the player far more than the build. For example, Corruptors are considered great for teams, but is that /Rad who has Radiant Aura on auto and stands 50' behind everyone else in the group pretending to be a h34lz0r really doing anything to help? One of the reasons why people say they don't team well has to do with a "must stay hidden at all times" mentality that a lot of Stalker players settle into, and an insistence of some people that Assassin's Strike must be the first attack in every spawn and have to wait for the interrupt each and every time. Another reason is the aforementioned tradeoff in AoE damage (not that most of the sets don't have some form of AoE).

There were also a lot of idiots who thought that playing a Stalker meant "hit Assassin's Strike, run away, come back when rehidden". Some still think that, sadly. You can kindof guess how that leads teams to feel about Stalkers.

No, the worst Brute to hold aggro with is Energy Aura, which not only doesn't have an aura which constantly taunts everything around you, but also has stealth to reduce your threat multiplier and make it harder for other mobs to aggro on you at all.

For sets that have taunt auras, Rise to the Challenge is worse for holding aggro than Evasion, for reasons mentioned earlier in the thread (lower magnitude, less than 10% of the duration). After Rise to the Challenge you have to check and see if you're hitting the mobs, because the damage auras - if they hit - will work better than anything else (damage + taunt > taunt alone), but if they don't hit then the autohit auras are better and Evasion becomes better than Blazing Aura, Death Shroud, and Lightning Field.

Sure, Evasion doesn't have a debuff, but neither does Invincibility. Or are you saying that Invulnerability can't hold aggro?

And perhaps you could enlighten those of us that aren't complete idiots and already understand what we're talking about as to how one is supposed to have an Empathy Defender that also has Dark Servant? Or how the secondaries which are available - which is what was being discussed - provide your single-target buffs with any usefulness while solo simply because some of them provide (nontargettable, unbuffable) pseudopets. Sure, Traps and Dark Miasma offer buffable pets, but those aren't exactly available in Empathy now, are they?

Or just take your own advice, read the discussion going on in the thread, and stop making a boob out of yourself.

Ah, but then you get into the philosophical questions, such as "are you really playing a game if all you do is watch the screen and cackle maniacally, or is it merely an interactive cut scene?"

That's why the only MMs I kept were the ones with ridiculous backgrounds and/or names... I had to find something to do with them other than watch pets clear maps for me.