luudo_EU

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but it is probably the best set for a "scrapperish" stalker. People have done scralpers (is that the word?) with Claws/Regen, but not sure how it would work with /EA

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I find my Spines/EA is easily capable of scrapping in PVE and occasionally finds himself having to do a little tanking in some of the extremely poor pick up groups I attract.

In PVP: I'm happy to scrap about after defenders and controllers if necessary, but won't try it against anything other than a poor scrapper or blaster as to hit buffs can cut through all my defences pretty quickly. I find it's not worth trying to scrap against a tanker as I can't make a big enough dent in them not to get bored.

Is anyone having problems with placate after the latest patch?

The change is described as: [ QUOTE ]
Stalkers' Placate ability no longer grants the same strength Stealth in PvP as Hide. It is now roughly 75% as effective as the stealth from Hide. This should reduce the ability of Stalkers to fade out of view of an entire group of players after attacking.

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The Americans have discussed the problems they're finding in PvP here and here.

Is anyone else finding it's changed in PvE as well?

Yesterday I was soloing and with my difficulty setting was coming up against two or three red and purple conning bosses within my missions although the spawn sizes were generally only two or three mobs. A nice challenge!

My normal tactic is to AS the minion, placate the boss, run off to allow things to recharge, return with built up AS then either scrap to the death or rinse and repeat depending on how things are going. This normally works well with the boss ignoring me for long enough to get out of aggro range.

Trying this after the patch is very different though. Now the minion drops, I placate the boss, he looks at me running away, thinks for a second, launches an attack then chases after me! This was happening repeatedly against Freak Tanks, Underbosses, Longbow Officers, Archons, Arachnos spider fellas; every boss that I came across. I didn't notice this happening against lieutenants or minions (mainly because here placate is used to set up a critical).

Is anyone else experiencing this?
Is this working as intended?

I told you! They started it!

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Anything but spines as primary, as spines is very tough at low levels because of the AoE, and lack of decent attack chain until high level.

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There's one AoE Spines Stalker power before level 26. You don't need to take it. The level 26 power is a short range (melee range) arc. I find it difficult to position more than two enemies to get hit by this when soloing i.e. it doesn't generate too much aggro.

I find impale (available at level 18) really good for controlling the playing field when soloing.

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I see his point when i had logged as i was about to die, but as said, stalemate going on for a long time and no end in sight.

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Don't mean to pick faults (and I wasn't there so your description might not describe the situation correctly) but if you were about to die it wasn't stalemate, and an end was most definitely in sight!

My */EA stalker survived to l30 without stamina.

He did it by thinking about which toggles needed to be up and only using the necessary toggles. In PVE it was painful but do-able. In PVP it was a pain in the backside.

The two earlier powers in the fitness pool (swift & health) came much earlier as I wanted to not need to use sprint, also had a power which had a speed penalty and wanted the quicker healing rate for survivability.

Best advice is to decide for yourself whether your play style needs it.

My thoughts on best travel power:

For PVE
For getting to and from missions it doesn't really matter.

Teleport takes some getting used to at first and does consume energy more than the others. It's also harder to use to run away when things go pear shaped in indoor missions due to camera angles.

I'm led to believe that superjump isn't great for escaping on indoor missions.

Fly can be a bit slow escaping indoors, especially in long corridors.

Super Speed is great for escaping with!

For PVP:
My experience is that 99% of blasters, controllers & defenders hover. Permanently. They think it makes them safe from melee villains. For a martial arts stalker it could do as you don't have a ranged attack (as far as I'm aware).

Sneaking up behind unsuspecting flying heroes can be quite satisfying if you've got fly (I had the jingle jet). Fly/hover is the only way you'd get an assassin's strike in against a flying hero.

You could launch normal attacks on them with Superjump by queing the attack and jumping into range. Similarly you could teleport next to them and launch the attack as you fall (this is proving lots of fun for me at the moment however I suspect it's quite hard with only melee range attacks.

With super speed you could wave at them from the ground.

Alternatively if you took tp foe instead of tp friend you could tp them next to you before attacking.

For the all important stalker pvp tactic of 'run away!' I find teleport is fantastic. I believe super jump is good as well. Not seen anyone use super speed to do so and confirm that a jingle jet (flying) is absolutely useless.

I've a l28 */EA stalker. I've currently got Kinetic, Power and Entropy shields from EA, with Kinetic and Power shields 3 slotted with defence SOs.

I do alright in PVP and find PVE generally easy.

In PVE I choose the right toggles for the mob and find that I can scrap through about six or so even level minions when soloing. Any more than this and I start to have endurance issues. However there have been a few evenings when I've played for a substantial amount of time without any toggles. I've not noticed too much difference between having toggles on and toggles off, however I don't usually manage to aggro more than one spawn at a time, and therefore don't expect to have noticed too much of a difference.

In PVP I normally run with all toggles on, so can't comment on the difference. However I don't find EA sub-par for PVP. My defences do get tested in PVP though as although I use AS wherever possible, I don't run away as soon as I realise it's not a one shot kill, preferring to try to scrap it out until I realise that either I'm not going to take them down by scrapping or that there are enough heroes attacking me that I can't survive the encounter.

There've been plenty of times when I've been able to survive the attentions of a couple of heroes whilst I take two or three attacks after the assassin strike to make the kill.

More importantly on recent nights the defences have allowed me to concentrate on the player controlled targets as the critters at Siren's Hotspots havn't been hitting me often enough to interrupt my hide or follow up attacks.

My point? That there isn't a 'must have' secondary set for stalker PVP, just a need to find a style that works for the power set.

P.S. One reason I run all toggles is that when I get detoggled there's less chance of one of my key toggles being knocked off.

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Don't overestimate the Hide ability its not as great in PvP as people make out. With the amount of Heroes with perception based abilities its a rare day when you can move across a zone without being seen at distance. I find most of my AS strikes come from using Placate as I'm rumbled fairly early on, the remainder comes from a painstaking hunt trying to approach out of my prey's line of site. In most cases the only purpose of hide in PvP is to generate our crit for AS.

Requires a fair bit of skill to be a Stalker in mass PvP especially considering the Hero to Villains ratio. The only times we have it easy is in a one versus one scenario where we have the luxury of total surprise....doesnt happen often though

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Good call!

As I come up against better skilled heroes in PVP my stalker finds it more difficult to make an AS successful.

On 4/1 in Union Sirens it became pretty clear that the majority of heroes in the battle were either able to see me through hide & stealth or had a personal based power that interrupted my AS.

Didn't stop me having fun though

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So where can I get my hands on the s4 demos?

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Some of the Union bantamweight ones are at:
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here

as zipped demo files.

Coin probably has a wider selection.

I like it when they run. It means they're not fighting back...

I'm not sure I agree with you on the stalkers are over specialised thing Animal Mutha.

Sure AS is a big part of the repertoire, but it's not the only part. During the event on Wednesday night I found the lag, sheer number of heroes in a small space and the constant movement of heroes made it difficult to stick to this 'specialism'. My AS was constantly being interrupted, or I found it difficult to time launching the attack appropriately.

However this didn't make me useless. I found that one of my 'normal' attacks with build up and the critical from hide was enough to take a squishy to around half his hitpoints. Placate and repeat and you've a squishy in trouble.

This attack is described as moderate damage. My next attack will have 'massive' damage

So you're complaining that stalkers are overpowered because they can go invisible and kill things with one or two shots, and that when you went invisible and tried to kill a stalker in one or two shots (because with an en/en blaster you probably would have) you missed?

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So when against Spectral Daemons ( who have a large resistance to Spines )

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Really? I'd not registered spectral daemons as being particularly more difficult for my spines stalker than for other heroes/villains I've played. I'm pretty sure that the lieutenant versions of spectral demons go down with a build up - AS - Impale combo, but could be wrong. I'll have to test that tonight

What Unthing says!

When soloing start with the biggest mob. If there are two lieutenants and a minion, As the lieut, scrap the minion, placate the second lieut.

Also think about any secondary effects your attacks might have. I regularly use the immobilise effect of Impale to keep a mob out of the immediate combat (get out of line of sight so his friends come to you - as you finish them the immobilised mob usually comes round the corner.

In teams don't feel bad about not staying to scrap. I'd think that most teams would prefer you popping up every 10 seconds to take out the bosses and lieutenants, rather than spending five minutes scrapping to take out a minion.

My stalker doesn't have stamina at level 26.

Up until recently he functioned quite well, although he'd usually have the least endurance of the team. Depending on the team make up he might or might not have to stop for a breather.

Then I forgot to turn my defensive toggles on for about half an evenings play and didn't really notice the difference other than my endurance useage was much better.

Moral of the story: if you manage your toggles you can survive perfectly well without stamina (certainly up to l26).

However, I'm probably going to pick it up in the near future because:
- I use teleport as my travel power
- I wanted swift so I don't need to use sprint so often
- I wanted health to give me a little more survivability when I have to scrap.

I've yet to experience either of these two bugs.

When my AS get's interrupted I can usually find a reason for it (most often activating the power whilst the server thinks I'm still moving).

When I get spotted by mobs I can't be certain of a reason, but it seems to be the same types of mobs that spot me; therefore I assume that it's something to do with their power choices.

I'm not saying they don't exist, but havn't experienced them yet

Some guides:
Guide 1
Guide 2



Neither of give a level range, but state what level they were. I'm guessing it'll be the same level range as CoH.

If I'm around and have caught up when you're doing this, let me know, I'd like to see it.

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My other sugestion would be to give PC's a cone of vision. So that their perception is much higher to the front. It could make sneaking and searching more fun, would benefit active clever players and makes ''intuative sense''.

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I'm pretty sure one of the developers has already confirmed that this is in place. Something about the centre of the zone of perception being off centre towards the front.

If I recall correctly mez resistance has scaled for quite a while. I think it was I3 that introduced the idea of a hero's resistance to status effects scaling as they levelled. At the time they capped out at level 35. This was certainly the case with Unyielding, if not the rest of the status effect protection powers.

However I can't be bothered to find the patch notes for I3 on the new US site.

My interpretation of the comment 'In most situations, this change shouldn't actually be noticeable to the 'average' player.' is that Geko's trying to say that most players won't see a difference to how many status effects are needed to hold them. If I were cynical I'd say that he's right. Blasters, Defenders, Controllers, Corruptors, Dominators, Masterminds and some Kheldians won't notice a difference; they'll still get held by one application. However if I were being charitable I'd say that he means that in most situations, most players will only get two or three status effects stacking on them and that they've intended that this won't break status protection. If I were being a smart alec I'd add to this by saying, 'and if you are facing a situation where you're getting more than two or three status effects then we've found another way to nerf you herder!'

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Or the Tar Patch, which is superb in PvE but seems completely unworkable in PvP (as people simply walk out of it). <- NO DAMAGE

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Sure, people are going to try to get out of tarpatch once it's laid down, however try tenebrous tentacles + tar patch and you've partially solved some of the problems you're complaining about: people walking out of tar patch and tenebrous tentacles doing no damage.

Don't be so obsessed with doing damage. Find someone who does do lots of damage to team with. Your defensive powers combined with their firepower can rip through opponents.

In the arenas in CoH, at some levels the Dark defender is considered one of the biggest pains to deal with.

I used Darkest Night frequently in the Union S4 Bantamweight competition. I think it severely annoyed the scrappers that I chose to use the debuff on. However, the to hit chance is phenomenally high in pvp (75% I think) and therefore Darkest Night on it's own doesn't floor their accuracy. Doing a dance in front of your opposition might not get the results you hope for!

I'm planning on 3 dam, 2 acc, 1 recred.

In small teams it recharges fast enough for me without any recharges. However this might change as I work placate into my fighting style.

But rooms can be tricky to delete if more than one other room opens off it (You can't have rooms in bases that are not connected to the rest of the base).

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I think teams of Stalkers could do well.

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They do!

Due to pure chance (the villains of the right level that were looking for a team at the time) I spent tonight teaming with various combinations of stalker teams. Specifically 3 stalkers; 4 stalkers; 3 stalkers & 1 mastermind; 2 stalkers and 1 mastermind.

Between levels 10 and 13, smallish teams heavy on stalkers are quick and a lot of fun. Adding the mastermind seemed to remove a lot of the risk factor.