New to Stalkers but...

I've leveled just about every other AT to 50 with multiple combinations of power sets. The glaring exception to my list of level 50's is the Stalker class. I have tried several different power combinations and can never seem to get past the mid-20's. That said I have a few observations and some suggestions for the Stalker class (note these suggestions are for PvE only).

1) Assasin's Strike: This power takes away an attack in your regular attack chain and generally cannot be used in combat with multiple opponents (see also Placate below). The problem, as I see it, is that once you've used AS you have less damage mitigation than any other melee class and are unable to use your premier power. Remove the interuptability in PvE and increase the fear effect (both number of affected and duration). This will allow Assasins Strike to actually be used in a regular attack chain and help mitigate damage from large spawns. To balance that out make critical automatic and give it a chance to double-critical while hidden but no critical while un-hidden, remove the fear effect while un-hidden and adjust the base damage accordingly.

2) Placate: Awesome...if you are fighting 1 target! Unfortunately on a team in PvE (or even solo many times) you have multiple targets and placating one of them does very little to mitigate damage or allow you to get another AS in. Give Placate a small area of affect (with a cap of 5 foes...like Taunt) and a short duration which allows the Stalker to mitigate damage and execute an AS without faceplanting in the middle of melee.

These 2 changes would make the Stalker class much more team friendly and a much better at melee in large spawns without changing the single strike capability.

Thoughts?

yes, you haven't used stalkers very much, have you?

Assassin strike can be put safely into an attack chain, you just have to watch for when the moment is right. Now, pre-20 you won't be running headlong into groups like their scrappy counterpart. But when you have a set of 3 on you, naturally you would hit the first, probably toughest of the 3 with AS, then duke it out with the second mob while AS cools down, then placate/AS the last one. (you've probably already have done this one eh?) Post-30, you can do this with larger groups because your defense from whatever your secondary is will help your interrupt time.

Placate would be nice as a cone, even a narrow one, but I still find it useful for bosses and such after I've wiped out the minions. I don't like how it's extremely necessary, but my stalker is nin/nin, so it fits

Try a /nin stalker. You get an AoE placate/blind.

also, one of my stalkers flies and thus has Air Superiority. Hit that then Assassin Strike. Works even on bosses. I even have time for buildup if it is available. Ideally I use Air Sup-> placate->buildup->assassin strike if I have everything up.

Yeah I used Air Sup as a sorta poor man's Placate early on. Its great if you are fighting spawns of 3 or less. What I'm speaking to is the Stalkers poor performance in a team environment or against large spawns in PvE (I appologize if I didn't make that clear).

I have NO trouble soloing a Stalker and I understand how to play them (lack of leveling comes from solo boredom more than anything else). I just find they are exceptionally ill equipped to participate in the team dynamic that is CoH. I run ITF's, LGTF's and Hami raids on a fairly regular basis and rarely do I see a Stalker. Those times that a Stalker does join the team I find their contribution less than average (to be kind).

The Stalker is a melee toon but if you are looking for melee on a large team which do you choose...Scrapper, Brute, Tank or Stalker...I bet Stalker is last on everyones list. The only time I found a Stalker to be marginally effective was when they had Recall Friend and could assist in stealth/tp on a mission. The suggestions I made are not meant to make Stalkers "super-uber" just make them more playable/desirable in a team dynamic.

that's true. My stalker doesn't team very much lol. Not too much of a teaming aspect I find. When he does, I give him the job of taking out anyone that's on the corrs or doms on the team so the brute doesn't have to worry about it.

Intriguingly, mob design seems to be the main thing that hurts Stalker teaming ability. Things like Tsoo Sorcerers that need to be taken out NOW are what a Stalker works best with but generally those are the mobs people avoid. An all Stalker ITF has been done but in general practice the mobs are a bit sameish to each other so they aren't as valued in normal teaming. I'm biased but in most situations I'd prefer a well played Stalker over brootsmash since higher level Stalkers can actually scrap pretty well.

Assassin's strike doesn't take away a power in your regular attack chain. For most powersets, it replaces an AoE. Also, stalkers have the exact same defensive modifiers as scrappers and brutes, and not that much less HP than scrappers. Between placate, demoralize, and the minor defense offered by hide even when visible, I personally don't think that they're much of any worse off defensively than scrappers (aside from the ridiculously low HP cap, anyway).

In my opinion, stalkers are fine solo, especially once (like all ATs) they get into the 20s and their mitigation starts to mature. They have strong offensive and defensive alpha strike abilities, and enough damage and mitigation to scrap it out after the alpha. Sure, they do primarily single target damage - but if you're solo, you aren't *fighting* large spawns, and ST attacks are plenty enough to scrap down 3-5ish targets. (And if you're fighting more, why are you cranking up spawn sizes on a single target specialist? That's not the AT's fault.)

On teams, though, yeah I still think there's something missing. The scaling critical hit chance definitely helps, but I don't think it's enough given the big spawns teams bring. To really be noticable on teams, stalkers need something AoE. What I always thought was that stalkers should get some sort of effect that represented their ability to take advantage of the chaos of a large fight to sow confusion and disarray in the enemies. Basically, I would like to see stalkers get one or more of the following (or similar) abilities:

1) Faster recharge on placate, and/or hide coming back faster, and/or reduced interrupt time on AS, all scaling according to team size. In the confusion of pitched battle, enemies lose track of you much easier. In all cases it should be a pretty noticable reduction, at least halving the time on a full team. I don't know if any of them are technically possible in the game engine, but they would help stalkers more reliably deliver damage to critical targets on teams (and also the demoralize effect).

2) Attacks having a chance to confuse enemies, again scaling according to team size. How many times in fiction have we seen stalker type characters cause so much confusion that the opponents accidentally hit each other? Mechanically this would work by granting an autopower to the target similar to the demoralize effect, that would have a chance to confuse enemies in a certain radius for a short duration. The chance to grant the effect would probably be about the same as the chance to critical, and the chance to confuse and AoE radius would both be pretty good. This would grant some pseudo-AoE mitigation and damage on an ongoing basis.

Oh man auto-demoralize would be sweet. confusion secondary effect would be sweet too!
What set are you using, Filch?

As far as I understand things, it's a technical limitation, much the same as the one which stops the kinetics heal from actually healing if the target is defeated during the animation. Basically, both of those powers center their effect on the foe you target - the kinetics heal summons a pseudopet at the target which radiates the heal, demoralize actually grants the target a short-lived temporary power which causes them to radiate the debuff (which is how it gets around the purple patch). In both cases, if the central target is killed during the power (which includes being killed by the actual assassin strike), the enemy centered effect has no valid target and thus doesn't go off.

If I'm remembering correctly, when this was brought up back when everyone was testing the stalker buff Castle said he was aware of it but it would be a massive pain to fix. I personally don't see why, but then again I'm not a dev and don't know how the guts of the power system works.

One fun bit about the demoralize is if the mob is defeated but then self-rezzes, the effect goes off after they rez. One more reason fighting freaks is fun.

As for Stalkers' usefulness on teams...the biggest flaw in the AT's design (IMO of course) is that most of their AoEs get removed to make room for AS. Single-target specialists don't scale well. My answer these days is to only roll primaries that still have some decent AoE. Sadly there are only 2.5 that fit the bill. Now that I've got a Spines and Elec at 50, unless I want to repeat myself I'm out of options. My solution to this particular problem was to make a Bane my next Stalker.

My ideal fix would be to simply enlarge Stalker primaries to put the AoEs back in. They would no longer fit the standard 9 power progression but I'm sure it could be made to work. Probably the biggest impediment would be the incredible gnashing of teeth from players of other ATs.

Then there is the general way Stalkers are viewed by others. In my experience they are still viewed as mostly useless, last pick pity spots on SF teams. I see that much less on general mission PUGs, but for SFs and TFs it seems like you're lucky to get a spot if you're playing a Stalker.

Have you tried Dual Blades on a Stalker? That's pretty AoE-tastic. You get 2 wide cones (one which is rather long range than normal cones) plus a PBAoE auto-hit combo. Also, don't forget your procs in Ablating Strike as they will always proc in a PBAoE around you despite Ablating being a ST attack. Claws has a bit of AoE too but they nerfed what AoE the set had which I was against despite having no claws stalkers.

I'd start waiting on Proliferation. What other sets can we get that don't have AoE? Super Strength? I guess Stone Melee but then we'd have to get Stone Armor too >_>

All I can say is it's painful to wait on Ice and Fire melee and getting my hands on Mace would just be a sin. I wouldn't mind me some Super Strength either but I'd much rather Ice melee. It's right up our ally, tactic-wise, and we'd have, like, the highest damage ice power in the game. It'd be ridiculous.

Good points. Thank you for the feedback.

I still think AS should have it's interuptability removed in PvE. Play a Bane Spider sometime and you'll understand how it would work.

I like the idea of changing the Fear effect to a small AoE Confuse. That, and the removal of Interrupt, would make AS infinitely more usable in a large melee environment. In fact if this was done it would give the Stalker a secondary role on a team (of damage mitigator) and remove the need for an AoE on Placate.

I didn't consider what would occur to the rest of the party with multpile foes being Placated. I guess it might represent a problem for squishies. Another resolution might be to make Placate like Parry. A minor damage attack that has a Placate effect attached. That way it can be added to the attack chain (possibly lowering overall DPS) and allowing for a follow up of AS (modified as above) giving a Stalker the option to go for a high DPS ST attack chain or high burst damage with damage mitigation.

Thoughts?

Here's the thing. The devs aren't going to redesgin Placate, or Stalkers in general, at this point. There are several reasons that Stalkers work "good enough". The devs don't change things just because they could be better. They change them when either data mining and maybe popular sentiment that something is poor, usually in terms of average leveling speed.

First, Placate/AS works fine with defense-based sets. You get interrupted far less if stuff misses you most of the time, even when the fur is flying in a team setting. If you are playing a non-defense-based secondary, you can improve on this with +defense bonuses.

Second, recent changes to the AT make it far less dependent on AS, primarily by increasing the AT's base damage and also by making random criticals independant of any status or conditions for either the Stalker or their target. Moreover, this actually improves on large teams, because the chance for random critical increases with team size. This effect is dramatic; a Stalker's criticals flow quite freely on 8-man teams. Admittedly this factor takes a while to mature, as many Stalkers don't get a full attack chain until the mid-to-late 20s.

And who's to say we don't get the Tanker version if FM and they drop Combustion instead for AS?

For Ice melee, I can see the devs going the same route they went with Elec Melee and drop the non-dmg power for AS. Sure, losing Ice Patch would be a hefty loss but I'd take it to keep the set's damage.

Speaking of Ice Patch, Ice armor has 2 PBAoE auras, a dmg one and a slow/-dmg one. Of course the dmg aura gets replaced for Hide. I'd actually argue vs putting in the slow aura and replaced with Ice Patch. But thinking about it, DA has 2 PBAoE auras for the stalker version...but then it had a stealth and dmg aura to replace and few options else to replace them with. The only PBAoE auras stalkers have are soft control (CoF, OG and Repulse) and a debuff aura wouldn't have precedence.

As for Mace, it doesn't *have* to be a great AoE set to be a great set. Overall, the set would have decent AoE *AND* good ST. It'd be like mixing DM with DB and that's a *GOOD* thing. WM would have nice control through KB/KD and stun with some AoE cones. What's not to like about that?

I see a lot to look forward to with proliferation because all of those (Fire Melee, Ice Melee, WM/Axe) are different from eachother in how they fundamentally play *AND* are nothing like what we have now. We'll be getting new play styles on a stalker which we haven't gotten since Elec Melee was ported (and everyone *LOVES* that set!).

When we got broadsword, it was like only getting half a set because, fundamentally, it was the same as ninja blade. You're probably still feeling the numb from that prolif.