Is my stalker gimped now?

So I've been away from the game for about a year and a half. I came back recently and love the new additions to the game. However, I ran the RSF for the first time since I came back with my Stalker (claws/regen). I knew /regen had it flaws before I left. However, it seems like it's gotten worse. I've looked through the forums and haven't had much luck find anything on /regen for stalkers. Could someone fill me in on why my stalker is having a harder time now?

Need more details.

Solo? Teamed?

What kind of build are you running?
What happened that made you feel weak?

Just going to throw this personal experience out there. Take it for what it's worth.

Long ago, my warshade was my favorite and most often played character. He was awesome, unstoppable, and downright tankmagey. Then I stopped playing him for a few months.

Time passed, but I came back to my old favorite to do some TFs and generally lay waste to enemies like the old days.

I failed. Hard.

Taking time away from a character will not only lower your ability to play that character, but it will distort memories of said character.

The same problem happened to me with my Broadsword/Regen Scrapper. I would demolish the world with him. Stack Parry, fling my Taser Dart into another group, stack more Parry, and then go ape**** on the entire cluster.

I stopped playing him for about 6 months and dedicated myself to my Fire/Fire (now 50) and my Bots/Pain (now 48). I came back to him and got my buttocks handed to me on a not-so-silver platter.

You just gotta get back in the swing of playing your Stalker, is all.

Thanks! Glad to know that the devs haven't done anything to /regen to cause me this headache.

By the way, did you notice a lot more critical now?? If you haven't played Stalker for a long while.

I typically don't pay attention to the damage numbers or crits when playing any of my toons. I'm assuming that they have made a change to that for stalkers? It's good if they have, just means that I should be able to kill a bit faster.

What exactly made you feel weak on the RSF?

Getting one shotted, Dying Alot?

Thanks for the info everyone. I don't hate her. Never have. I'm definitely on the "love my stalker" bandwagon. Just wish she was a little less squishy. Until the devs give us some love I'll just need to IO her up and hope for the best.

Do you have the Fighting Pool with your Regen? Regen is really powerful with all its heals and regeneration, but all that power is not instantaneous: you need time to click your attacks, etc. I noticed a big difference for my guy when I picked up Tough, and when he got Weave and a decent amount of defense (from IOs), he usually doesn't need to have Tough on unless I have the difficulty way up or my team is facing something rough.

Regeneration is usually considered a higher skill secondary by a lot of people, as it isn't a fire and forget secondary like Willpower: you have to know when to use what powers, etc. I'm guessing Regen also hurts a bit from Stalker's lower HP cap (when our base was increased, the cap was not also increased). It should be easy to be at or close to the cap before using Dull Pain, and increasing your HP is a big boost from Regen, or it should be.

I actually hadn't considered the Fighting Pool. Piper needs to go through a respec anyway. That may be something that I pick up to replace unused powers that I have currently. Thanks for the suggestion.

My regen is a scrapper but I can say that Grey Pilgrim is right, going from zero defense to 20% made an enormous difference for me.

People can say all they like about "ooh defense doesn't matter if you don't have DDR because the romans will debuff you blah blah blah". Doesn't happen all that often in reality. Yes, the romans, the PPD, and a few others can cause cascading defense failure. But as someone wiser than me said, we have a name for it because it is rare, if it happened all the time we'd just call it "dying".

If you can get 15% defense (I recommend S/L) you will notice a difference. at 20% you will really feel it.

The other thing I found is that many times oranges are just as handy as purples. All you need is to slow incoming damage. psi attacks for instance, and moment of glory gives no help either. An orange goes a long way against carnie bosses or rikti.

What, did you just list every enemy group you could think of? Because I'd really like to know how you managed to die to cascade failure against Rikti, of all things.