AE has really helped my mission Stalker

Lately, it has seemed to me that the majority of the redside player-base has been involved with AE stuff. Occassionally I will see a SF or respec form but for the most part a lot of the population is on Cap. Just today I was searching for a team and excluded from the search window the Cap's map and saw significantly fewer villains.

Anyways, being that i run primarily PvE missions and prefer teaming (it is an MMO afterall), I am finding that the invites to missison teams have really picked up. My impression is that those who want to run missions have less to choose from and so stalkers are just as desireable as any other person.

Once i am on a team I more than pull my weight so I figure these teaming moments where I may have been little more than a warm body initially are an opportunity to show what a stalker can do.

Has anyone else noticed an increase in invites to their stalkers?

Congratulations! You get the "blind regurgitation award" of the day!

All in all I think you managed to hit all of the "Stalkers are useless" stereotypes that haven't been true since day one and are less true now. With attitudes like this being spread around, while ignoring tiny little things like facts in order to make a case, I can't imagine why you'd think that Stalkers will have a hard time getting teams.

You're welcome to have the opinion that Stalkers are worthless on teams, but you may want to at least base it on something more than "I read it on the internet so it must be true" if you expect anyone to take you seriously on it. The only point you mentioned that's still true after the Stalker buff is that Stealth is irrelevant on teams.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

I run a spine/wp stalker. To a degree, I think there is a 'warm body effect' going on, especially if you are a 50.

However, being that I am a spines, I find that I do contribute pretty good AoE damage to a team. 'Pretty good', but not enough in my opinion. I still find that I am lagging behind some brutes. Now for an AT that has about half the survivability of a brute, I think I should be doing more damage than a brute. I think they should increase the team crit rate, and/or crit dam.

There were days when stalkers were pretty dominant in the pvp zones with attitudes to boot that some people learned to dislike them, from then on, stalkers tarnished and tainted had these same people exclude them from pve teams one way or another. They had no fun in pvp so stalkers can solo pve for all they care.

Long time ago that and stalkers have been buffed so a change of heart is due, not to mention people should be judged on their own merits rather than class. If I end up choosing one AT over another or a powerset over an other (as opposed to who asked first) then I would of become the type of person I dislike the most.

Luckily you don't have to have an optimized team to play CoH. None of the content really need a certain type of team composition to get thru. Sure, some AT's make things easier, but if you got a healer or a tank, it doesn't matter what the rest of the team is made of.
And you don't even absolutely need those, either.

I've been playing in all kind of strange teams, with 5 trollers, 8 MM's and stuff like that. We've always had fun, and we've always completed our tasks.

So hearing stuff like "Stalkers do 0.2% less damage than scrappers!!", makes me just shrug. So? If the guy playing a stalker knows what he's doing, it doesn't matter one bit.

I think being a bit too optimistic with those calculations is more than justified considering that factors like guaranteed crits from Hide were left out. Keep in mind that - even in those "plain without extra crits" calculations - just because one team member is lagging behind or afk or whatnot stalkers crit chance is not reduced so much that scrappers would suddenly omgwtfpwn them dps-wise.
And the problem with additional overkill damage by the higher crit chance is well taken care of by the fact that the very same crits lead to more cases of "premature kills" where your crit saves you another attack.
So, following the calculations and personal experience stalkers are still able to out-dps and most definitely out-burst scrappers in many, many team situations.
The main difference is that stalkers have to consider more variables to reach those numbers than scrappers who basically just have to stick to their attack chain.

Well, in a best case scenario crits don't save you two attacks. They save you one attack. That's already considered in the math. So, yes, overkill does matter in actual gameplay, leading to lower numbers than the above math. It's simply not possible to never overkill on an extended period of time.

Now, I can't really understand why would someone talk about "best damage" and a specific team with all 8 members standing in 30 feet - variables that you can't just *consider*, by the way, unless you mean "take the star and kick everyone who doesn't conform to the very specific playstyle you need to have to obtain maximum offensive output"... and then mention Hide crits. If you're taking 8 seconds to travel between each group you're losing a lot of time. I like Hide, but in any competitive comparison it won't be much more than one additional crit per mission, unless in a cave map or something where you will have longer travel times. Placate is a net DPS loss in most situations as well (assuming it works - if it fails because of being hit, it's a complete disaster in terms of DPS).

This isn't even going into the unrealistic notion that everyone is going to be in a 8 player team at all times. That's the truth for some people (although somehow nobody mentions the time they spend sitting around waiting for a full team), but not everyone. Another point I can't agree with in Siolfir's math is using a 80% fury brute. Staying at 90% Fury is much easier than making your 7 teammates stay in a 30 feet range all the time, and this isn't to say maintaining 90% Fury all the time is easy, it's just easier than the stalker alternative.

I mean, I'm sure there's possibly a few folks who only login with 7 of their friends all at the same time, who then all stand in a 30 feet range all the time without anybody AFKing, getting killed, whatever, but when you look at the level of coordination required to do this you might as well go with 8 controllers and wreck everything ; in either case, it's simply not representative of your average PuG and I doubt the average stalker will have anything like this experience most of the time.

You may think you can handwave these concerns away, but the difference between the top melee damage dealers isn't that large on paper with everything stacked to the stalkers' advantage. Stalkers have the highest burst, and they have the highest potential DPS under perfect conditions, but that doesn't translate to highest actual, effective damage ingame.

To the person who wanted educated on why to invite a stalker:

Im not trying to be snarky, but, how about fun as a reason? If the person playing the stalker is fun to have on the team, has fun playing his character, uses interesting tactics and strategy you don't always see, finds a way to use an underused power to full effect, helps you to complete your missions and stays around to help you complete multiple tasks, how is this not useful in a team? These are all just general attributes I would love to see everyone who plays this game have. It matters not really what archtype the player is, if he plays it well and has fun and lets you have fun, isn't that a good teammate?

To address the points:
Everyone staying within 30' isn't an abberation on a competent team, especially with a /Kin along - everybody wants that large FS bonus, and guess what the radius is?

Overkill exists on every AT, and you're a liar if you say you've never wasted damage on a Brute or Scrapper. Overall, I'd say Brutes probably waste the most damage.

As for it being on a team environment or someone lagging behind - true, sometimes that happens. But you also don't need all 7 people to have the highest damage: Stalkers pass Scrappers with 5 others in range and Brutes with 6. Since the whole point was "team performance", I just went with a full team.

The differences aren't that large: uhm, true? That's called balance. And not everything was stacked to the Stalker's advantage - the only "advantage" I was giving was assuming a competent team.

"Competent? But not every team member is going to want to melee!" Dominators will so they get their harder hitting attacks, as will Brutes and other Stalkers. Corruptors will likely be close by for two reasons: first, to scrape off inadvertant aggro; second, to minimize time needed for a heal/rez/etc. Yes, they'll likely be a bit further back so they don't get hit with splash AoE damage, but you don't exactly need to be on top of everybody to stay within 30'.

As mentioned previously, I'm completely ignoring hidden criticals. You may like to pretend that in your own little world that there isn't any travel time between spawns, but the rest of us deal with the game as it's coded, and outside of the AE and setting up repeated ambushes, that means time between spawns. You think I'm handwaving team competence, I think you're handwaving extra damage over what the calculations show.

"So what? I don't believe anything you say anyway!" You don't have to. But you shouldn't be lying to everybody about Stalkers and their usefulness either. If you want to be completely frank about it, a good AoE-oriented Brute with a Kinetic along can clear a map spawned for 8 in roughly the same amount of time with or without any other teammates, so everything is irrelevant at that point and nobody ever needs to team with more than a duo at most. But for people who like teaming, and want to team on Stalkers, people who won't shut up and lie about the usefulness of Stalkers should just stop answering any questions related to them and go off in their own little world to solo to their heart's content.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

It seems you have a very binary way to think.

I never said other ATs don't do overkill. I said stalkers do MORE overkill damage.

I never said travel time doesn't exist. I said taking 8 seconds to travel from one group to another is LONGER than what competitive teams going for speed would take.

I never said stalkers weren't useful on a team, I said their damage wasn't AS high AS your math would imply.

You're completely living in your little forum bubble if you think everyone can stay within 30' all the time. It's possible MOST of the time, for a competent team, NOT the average PuG. NOT all teams are competent. The ingame teaming reality is you will team with incompetent players unless you leave / kick them / play with friends only.

A team isn't ALWAYS a 8 man team. A team is compromised of 2 to 8 players - and many teams have LESS than 8 players.

I could go on and on, but arguing with someone who sees everything in 1s and 0s is a pointless exercise, as you won't be able to understand any of the capitalized words above. You really shouldn't be participating in forum discussions if you're not able to discern nuances between "best" and "worst", it's misleading to people who actually play the game and come here looking for information.

Did you just ignore everything Siolfir just said?

I am not comfortable with calling other people liars or saying they speak part truths. People speak from the heart with how they see it. They're are telling their truth. I also feel that things are heated from not quite getting eachother's meaning and so with that you can understand I am not communicating with anyone directly. Things are looking too personal.

From this thread so far one should gather that Stalkers are viable in teams and that is all that is needed. Really, it is a game in which people overly optimize to get things done anyway.

We are all players behind a character logging in to have some fun with hopefully, the knowledge that there is more than one way to play and that a team is essentially a group of people who work together. Most people should know that by now.

Half the people who play are looking to relax after a days work not know the ins and outs of the CoH/CoV encyclopedia. No need for numbers. A great player should in theory be able to get the content done with practically anyone on board. Making optimized teams excludes people, they may sometimes achieve speed runs, but half the time they're making up for peoples, namely the team leaders lack of experience, lessening the challenge and making things a damn sight easier.