Broadsword Stalkers?

1) What is the general consensus on the newish Broadsword stalkers?
I know they don't do as much spike damage as was expected, but expectations aside how are they?

2) Does parry give you more staying power? and if so what is a good pairing? (WP?)

3) EM may do more damage with Total Focus and Energy Transfer, but the Animations are damn slow. So if you are with a group wailing on someone and dont need to get back in stealth, would the faster BS attacks be better for doing more damage, instead of jumping in the air for 15 sec to hit TF while someone else gets the kill?

Thanks all
Titan

Both elec and em are better than bs. It's damage is sub par and the animations are slow. Personally, I'd go ma over bs.

Parry is pretty much a worthless power in pvp.

TF is still a decent attack from hide. That coupled with the high damage from ET without having to be in hide make it much better than bs.

Multimedia Genius Submission

just stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

there are plenty of near-optimal choices for stalkers available at this point:

spines/nin
spines/regin
spines/wp
spines/ea
elec/wp
elec/nin
elec/regin
elec/ea

for ****'s sake, substitute any of those for dark/* if you just wanna KS people in zone with midnight grasp.

stop trying to find your own ******* unique butterfly.

The reason to go against broad sword is because elec melee, spines and EM are all better. If you want a mediocre set, bs will do just fine.

Multimedia Genius Submission

As far as a stalker goes, you pretty much need BU Placate AS, and one or two good follow up attacks. (Usually a heavy hitter + Sharks unless you are Spines, then impale + Shadowmeld)

Right now, Thunder strike is great because of the chance for a double crit from hide, that and you can easily slot 3 damage procs in it.

Imaple may not hit as hard, but it makes a great follow up with the range and again, you can get 3 damage procs in it.

Everything else pretty much falls below those two.

With BS, head splitter is doing less damage than TS. Parry there is a few problems with, first if you are out of hide long enough to stack this power up, you're doing something wrong. Second if you are worried about melee damage its likely you are doing something else wrong.

Thanks Liberty.

So when you guys say double crits, do you mean on one person, or you can crit on 2 people if they are both on you?

Thunder Strike crits once for each damage type, so it delivers four packets of damage instead of three like other attacks (Total Focus, for example, delivers the smashing and energy portions normally and then a third energy (?) portion as the crit). It's nice because it means a Stalker can actually put out damage outside of AS and Sharks reminiscent of how Stalkers should work (AS nerf meant that a solo Stalker will never get solo kills against a target that isn't AFK or a downie).