tarrantm

Get Surveillance. It stacks with Shatter Armor. You can lead off with Surveillance since it doesn't break your stealth. It's what makes Banes better than Stalkers to most groups.

Fire is adequate to lock down mobs once you haver enough recharge. It's not easy sailing like say Plant/ but it's definitely better than going Ice/.

Tremor is pretty horrible, not worth getting. Fissure is a severely nerfed version of the Controller power; 6 fewer targets hit and smaller AOE but still worth getting.

However, now that the NDA is lifted I can tell you that AOE damage from secondaries is NOT what you should be looking for with GR on the horizon. You should be going for a well rounded really effective single target secondary (Earth only gets the single target part, if you want well rounded, go /Fire or /Psi) because your Epic Pools have some truely phenomenal AOE in them (Ice and Fire).

I think it's like 30%, don't quote me on it tho.

If you want ranged powers, pick the ones from the Bane pool, not from the common Soldier pool.

Now that the GR NDA is lifted, I'm getting back to this and I can say that they no longer have the same cap.

I keep getting weird totals when I copy that into mids.. level 1 slot on Summon Spiderlings, blank second level 1 pick for example.. I don't know why.

Can u post the datachunk?

That it can be done doesn't equate to happens as frequently. As I said, I've hit that number once on my Brute and I don't recall how many Cold Corrs it took. On my Tank it happens far more often despite me playing him extremely infrequently.

I don't think you know what 'facts' means. He said DA had a higher cost than other sets for running its toggles and he proved it with actual in game numbers.

I double checked his numbers
1.4 End/Sec for the basic toggles for DA (leaving out CoF and OG which he included to give 2.0 End/Sec)
1.25 End/Sec for Elec
1.04 End/Sec for Fire

That's fact.

It's also fact that DA, unlike the other 2 resist sets, doesn't have an endurance recovery power like Consume or Power Sink.

Your experience is an anecdote. It's only factual in your own mind.

I know english isn't a primary language for some players. I sincerely hope that is the case here.

I hear it more about not being able to survive due to the poor S/L resists, but honestly I used to hear that on my /Elec Brute too. Pure resist sets just get no respect for the high end SFs. And then I end up surviving better than the Stoner against Psi damage in an LRSF. Of course, I get turned into a smear on the ground by BABs, but that's beside the point.

Controllers are one of the easier softcaps due to an AOE and a single target Immobilize being perfect for 2 sets of Enfeebled Operations. I think my Plant/Kin/Stone was my 2nd easiest toon to softcap S/L on right after my Ice/Kin Corr and neither of them took the Fighting power pool. And /Kin helps tremendously too.

It's harder for Brutes to hit the hitpoint cap because they start with about 350 less hitpoints than a Tanker.

As for them having the same hitpoint cap, I'll get back to this later...

No, you merely said har har, my opinion overrules your facts, so keep your facts to yourself. That isn't a valid argument.

It doesn't do anything of the sort. Tanks have more hitpoints out of the box too, and as such get to their hitpoint cap faster and easier than a Brute (I think I've only hitpoint capped my Brute once when I was the sole Brute in a group full of Corruptors), which makes his point on DR quite valid.

The guy presents a valid breakdown of endurance usage between resist sets and your response is to bury your head in the sand. All I can do is lol at that. It's classic and obvious denial.

True but misleading. A Brute will have a tougher time softcapping defense than a Tanker due to higher Def modifiers in both the Armor set and in pool powers. Softcapping toons play significantly different to non-softcapping toons; especially when it involves having to rely on a heal a lot more and being subject to non-autohit debuffs a lot more as well. The hitpoint difference also makes DR better functional for Tankers as has been pointed out before. As such, the experiences between the ATs differs significantly as does the playstyle.

Well there is the Combustion difference...

It's great when running solo at x/8.

Issues do come up in groups when you don't have aggro from well over the 10 mob-OG-hit limit to provide you with Fury, or there's another Brute/Tanker in the group or the Dom/Troller is doing too good a job. At which point it all depends on whether you have a buzzsaw like build or not. If you have a stacking mitigation primary like I have on my Stone/Dark, I'm looking at about a 15-20% difference in Fury generation (if you use your slow activating attacks) vs. say a DM/DA build.

That may be a larger concern across the game, but there are quick fixes to make resist sets work for Stalkers while the 2+ year fix to resist in the game is in the works. Giving base resists to Hide for the resist sets for example. Or making Placate auto-recharge the resist set heals, or add a hitpoint boost to the heals in the resist sets. There's plenty of options. And resist caps don't even play into the equation since it's rare to even hit them since significant IO contribution to resists is near non-existant.

First of all we didn't need to talk about defensive set bonuses favoring ATs because this is a discussion about it favoring powersets within this particular AT and not about it favoring one AT over another. But if that's something you want to talk about, we can. And I would agree about this on Scrappers, Brutes and Tankers because despite the hitpoint differences, they have enough hitpoints to last it out until their self-heals recharge. It's like all the mobs and their melee damage output have been tweaked with Scrapper hitpoints and resist set values as the bare minimum - oh wait, that's because they have because that AT has been around since the beginning of the game. However, when it comes to Stalkers, resist sets actually make you feel the low hitpoints of the AT all the time because the resist sets are getting hit all the time and faceplanting more than a Blaster. That's also the reason why Night Widows and Bane Spider ATs perform better than Stalker resist sets while playing just like a Stalker (in PvE, this whole thing is about PvE and I hope none of the upcoming Stalker changes translate into PvP because they really don't need that significant a leg up there). It's because they are based on defense and defense doesn't care about low hitpoints until you get hit. Resist sets care about low hit points because hitpoints are resists and if your hitpoints are lower than those of a Scrapper, mob damage and the game isn't designed for you to use a resist set.

As for other ATs being better or worse, other ATs have better mitigation in the form of control (Doms and trollers), or buff/debuff/heals (corrs/defs/trollers/MMs), or just higher hitpoints (Scraps, Brutes, Tankers), or range (Blasters). Stalkers are nowhere in the ballpark in terms of control off of AS and none of the other methods of mitigation factor in. Either Stalkers get something to boost their resists, or they need more controls or buffs/debuffs/faster-recharging-self-heals to deal with the lower hitpoints. The current status-quo of gimped resist sets whose only salvation is Shadow Meld if I don't re-roll into another AT or powerset in frustration before hitting level 44 just isn't working.

No, my argument was to measure Stalker performance by the global performance meter that dictates progression within the game, which is kills/time. Unless you're talking about improving Stalker resist sets, which are underperforming versus their defense sets, which again doesn't compare their playstyle to Scrappers.

Never said you were.

Well, Scrappers have well over Stalker hitpoints. We don't go around saying that Scrappers have a small but obvious amount better As for the critical damage, it doesn't have to be 200% damage, or even 150%, it can be 125% critical damage or any other extra damage within reason. But if Stalkers were the only AT to get a Chainsaw powerset, I just might play them again.

It definitely has made defense a panacea for PvE while resistance Stalker sets struggle for equitable treatment. I guess they could give every other group of mobs Vengeance to compensate..

So you play a Stalker like a Stalker and still can't out DPS a Scrapper. So why are you arguing with me about it?

The amount of the critical or bonus damage can be adjusted to bring them well over Scrapper damage. It's the mechanic of it that plays into a Stalker playing like a Stalker and not like a Scrapper.

I thought they couldn't do it even if they wanted to because it is a function of the mobs chance to actually hit a toon and not something that could be adjusted on the toon side.