Tell Me About Touch of Fear...

Maybe my opinion is merely betraying my admitted lack of experience, but...

I think that pretty much any solid scrapper, IO'd or not, would only marginally benefit from Touch of Fear, and might easily benefit more from other powers. If you can laugh at bosses, I think you're much better off ignoring them or beating their face in than wasting time with soft controls. Touch of Fear then becomes VERY situational, and I'm not big on highly situational powers.

Now, I don't know what the average person does with their Scrappers. I personally level skipping TOs, then use DOs, then SOs. I slot a Steadfast Protection and Kismet in the teens. In the mid 30s, I respec into my final attack chain and frankenslot my attacks. And then I'm good to go to 50. I'm not all IO'd out while I'm leveling. I'm not soft capped. But I do devote a fair amount of my build to survival, and I do not have problems with bosses. I do not have situations where I wish I had some soft control I could use instead of beating someone's face in. If you gave me Touch of Fear for free, no power pick, fully slotted, I still suspect I'd only use it once in a blue moon. As with a rez, I can't imagine actually using a power pick for something I would use so rarely.

Am I an exception? Maybe. But I have to believe that the majority of Scrappers don't have a problem with boss fights. I would think that the majority of Scrappers would find Touch of Fear to be a highly situational power. They might enjoy it, or might use it to fill a survivability gap while they work on other aspects of their build, or what not. But I just wouldn't think that the majority would get a substantial benefit from it. I mean, I don't know, but I guess I'd hope not? That would make me a sad panda.

Eh, probably holes in my arguments. Like, OK, sure, you have no problem with that +0 boss. So that's why you crank up the difficulty. You keep cranking it up until you DO need Touch of Fear on that boss. And at that point, you're now beating a boss that's tougher than the person without Touch of Fear could beat. And that pretty much only ends when you're talking about AV soloing and massive protection from your status effects. Therefore, most people (non AV soloers) can get significant benefit from Touch of Fear. Dono. Maybe?

And again, maybe I simply have no clue what I'm talking about since I haven't tried it out. Lord knows a lot of people love it. Must be SOMETHING to it.

On a non-IOd scrapper I doubt fighting a single boss would be much trouble. Fighting a full spawn with bosses and LTs can be difficult on a non-IOd build, certainly not impossible. Much in the same spirit as Parry or Divine Avalanche, when fighting multiple targets, ToF was a great way to mitigate on threat (say a LT or 2nd boss) while you DPS'd the main threat.

Even against AVs where the To Hit Debuffs border on meaningless, ToF amounted to significant mitigation from the "fear" aspect of the power.

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The problem that I always had with ToF was specifically that it was single target. Sure, it's a great way to get rid of one guy hurting you, but the only times I actually needed some amount of damage mitigation to stay up was when I was surrounded by an inordinate amount of guys. Even a single boss wasn't going to make me start doing my immortality dance because a single boss didn't constitute a substantially large enough portion of my incoming damage to make up for the fact that I could have been killing guys faster with the animation time I was devoting to keeping that boss locked down.

The big problem with counting on ToF to mitigate AVs is that the fear aspect is only ever going to affect bosses for one-third of the time, thanks to the PToD. I never viewed the fear aspect as being that useful. When I used ToF against AVs, even though the debuff aspect got reduced a lot, it was still a larger contributive factor than the fear aspect in all of my experiences.

Well, from a Stalker perspective, you're dealing with enemies on a single target bases no matter what you do (talking DM here, one of the weakest AoE sets you can get). Unless you can drop a particular target *faster* than it takes to animate ToF, you're ultimately getting more survival than not using it. It's like defeating a foe...for 20ish seconds.

For me, dropping a target at the start of the fight and then mitigating 2 more for nearly the rest of the fight (ToF and Placate) add more survival than...well, just beating down things 1-by-1 as fast as I can...and for me, it's not a choice of one or the other but do the one at the start of the fight(where there is a higher chance of defeat) and then move onto the other tactic quickly after.

I suppose you can then consider it a situational power, but using it once or twice at the beginning of every fight adds up.