Defensive sets feel very squishy before SOs, no matter if it's a Stalker, Scrapper, Brute, even Tanker (I cursed Chilling Embrace numerous times when I was in my teens because it held aggro so well on my Ice Tanker, more than I could handle at the time on big teams).
So don't up your diff until you've got your defenses slotted with SOs. On my EM/Nin Stalker, I didn't sneak through a lot of missions, and that was before the Stalker buff. The tools that helped me immensely were BU, Placate and AS for early soloing. You can BU+AS someone from Hide, placate him (or other if he's dead) and land a critical while in BU duration on another critter (or the same if he's a big threat). That's why in my guide I advise getting AS at 6, BU at 8 and placate at 12, even if you have to delay your travel power and/or fitness.
Since you're MA/ you might as well get Cobra Strike at least until you have Eagle's Claw, some mitigation may help you a lot especially since /SR has no self-heal like /Nin. Then later you can do a respec to take Cobra Strike out, maybe rearranging your build to accommodate Stamina earlier if you delayed it like I always do, etc.
You can sneak past missions too but I never found it very fun except when I wanted to clear them quickly for a mayhem or something. And IMO, teaming is your best option especially before SO levels... I only play on Freedom and Virtue but even on my 24 DM/EA Stalker I got plenty of invites, although I was just logging her to change the color of her powers. I heard that redside is kinda deserted on other servers, with Infinity being a little better, but teaming is the way to go for fast XP, and in my case, more fun.
Don't ghost. Enemies are full of Inf and drops. All you have to do is take it.
The strategy I use:
Level 1: +0x0
Level 8: +0x0+Boss
Level 16: +0x2+Boss
Level 24: +0x3+Boss
Level 32: +0x4+Boss
Some are less aggressive than that, some more. Use what you have the most fun with.
Increasing enemy levels is more or less a waste in the new difficulty system from an efficiency standpoint. It should be done only if +0x4 is too easy for you.
Scrap. Don't hit and run. Especially on teams. Makes all Stalkers look bad.
The best comics are still 10�!
My City of Heroes Blog Freedom Feature Article: "Going Rageless?"
If you only read one guide this year, make it this one.
Super Reflexes: the Golden Fox of power sets!
WARNING: I bold names.
I rolled a MA/SR stalker last week and I'm enjoying how it plays but I'm noticing I'm having a much harder times with missions than I was with my Bot/Therm MM. Unable to shake the feeling that I'm just doing it wrong, I have a couple of questions about just how I should play this class.
1. Should I do what I did with my MM and just engage every single mob for the xp? Or just sneak right ahead to the mission objective, relying on the xp awarded for completing the missions to level?
2. When can i get away with increasing the difficulty on my missions? right now it seems anything higher than +1 to my level or setting me greater than 2 villians makes every mission a struggle (and god forbid if I have to face an elite boss or higher).
Tl;dr when can I crank up the difficulty?
Any further advice on just how to play this class would be greatly appreciated, thanks!