Most Scrapper-ish Villain?!?

I think you're under the misconception that the recent buffs were made to make them similar.

This is exactly the *wrong* way to play a Stalker. The only reason you'd need to stop fighting in the middle of combat is if you want to do something to aid the team (good luck doing that on a Scrapper) by using a mid-fight Assassin's Strike to demoralize all foes. You don't stop on regular intervals to get the most offense from the AT, you stop on regular intervals to get the most *defense* from the AT.

Kind of unfair to compare the survivability of Stalkers to an AT *more* survivable than even Scrappers...

Not exactly. If it was a resist based Stalker (with no +def bonuses) then perhaps. Defense based sets can capitalize on demoralizing the mass with an unresisted -7% ToHit and a chance to fear *any* of them 25% of the time. It's an alpha killer. How it's handled from there depends on the set and players. Not every scrapper can solo +4/8x spawns either.

Kind of unfair to Stalkers, as their specialty is misdirection and what-not. But yes, I remember seeing a video of a Stalker performing this challenge (Energy Aura too). She kept the minions around to feed the heal in Energy Drain. Eventually, she drained everything and they couldn't fight back.

Jade_Dragon is probably the only person to post a truthful, unbiased, well thought out and logical post on this. Scrappers are the generic melee with the others being more specialized (Brute being generic melee too but not as generic). Basically, *any* melee AT can be a 'Scrapper' because the only thing that defines a Scrapper is a melee type that dishes it out and takes it too. Brutes just take a little more and need to be mad to dish it out. Stalkers are everything Scrappers are but take less with opportunistic Sneak attacks added in.

Nope. The buffs were to make them more team friendly in PvE. But I have had several stalker players tell me to give them another chance since those changes went it from players that know I predominantly PvE.

I have. I still found the hide mechanism annoying and the low HP made them too weak for my liking.

Far as I can tell, stalkers are still more closely associated to melee blasters (plate glass short range canons, in this case) than scrappers or brutes regardless of their sets.

It's definitely the point when it's specifically answering someone's else comment claiming the difference in survivability between stalkers and scrappers is negligible. Let's try to not make it look like people were saying things they didn't.

*shrugs* My stalkers' M.O. against (solo) bosses and up is to placate -> BU -> AS whenever possible. That is stopping at regular intervals to get the most offence, as placate effectively stops the fight, albeit briefly.

In teams I play all three AT's in pretty much the same way: Jump in and flip out. Helping squishies optional yet encouraged.

I was thinking about this earlier, and this IS the point of the OP -- and it sounds like your experiences mirror my own. "When you learn to play a stalker, you can play one like a scrapper...." For my stalker, there was a learning curve, with a different playstyle (and one that I didn't like as much.) With my brutes, I rolled them up, saw my contacts, and went and played just like a scrapper -- with the addition of the rage bar. Plain, simple, and (for me) tons of fun.

Yeah, I fell victim to the flame war and got away from the original post. The point I think I was trying to make -- and missed -- was that sometime, somewhere, some SCRAPPER decided to see how much abuse they could take while soloing Rikti, which is sometimes indicative of the scrapper mindset. If a stalker had come up with it, we'd have the RWZ Stalker Challenge, which would probably require more cunning and skill than just diving into a pile of Rikti with a scream.