How many times must I die to ambushes before I can re-complain?

Uphill both ways, in the snow?

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Are you trying to make me feel old?

The difficulty issue and the ambush bug negatively affecting stalkers more are all interrelated but separate issues. (I'm calling it bug as I don't think the ambushes are supposed to work the way they currently do.)

No. That's my schtick. And Stick.
Get orf moi lawn!

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Scrappers don't actually have a higher critical chance. I can't check Staker critical chance since it's listed as "Special" anywhere I can check, but I believe they have the same 5% base chance plus some percentage extra for team-mates in range, out of hide. Scrappers also don't really have better defences. Scrappers and Stalkers have the same defensive numbers, and Scrappers often have better Defence numbers (by a bit) due to Hide. In the case of Energy Aura, the Stalker version is actually superior to the Brute version, believe it or not.

That said, Scrappers have a slightly higher base hit points mod (Stalkers have Blaster hit points) and a 1.125 melee damage mod to Stalkers' 1.0. The differences are there, they're just not very meaningful. The biggest drawback Stalkers suffer isn't in survivability, it's in their lack of AoE, since they typically trade a PBAoE power for Assassin's Strike, Electrical Melee notwithstanding.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I was asked, since ambushes can negate your AS, why bother with the AT at all. I answered that. AS isn't the only thing Stalkers can do and just because ambushes can make its use a hassle, doesn't take away from its usefulness in other situations.



Placate doesn't hide you from one mob. It hides you period, because it grants you stealth just like hide grants you stealth when it isn't suppressed. That is, you have 10 seconds to keep out of sight while Hide unsuppresses which takes 8.

If you run, the other spawns you run by won't see you. Of course, if you want to have an AoE placate, you can craft one.


How long does rest take to bring your HP back up? I don't recall it as very long the times I actually used it in time sensative situations.

Well, it's pointless for anyone that will be seen, yes. If you're about to die, and can manage to escape their fire for long enough, no one else will kill you. Buying time to recover and regenerate and for powers to recharge is not pointless. And that they will follow you just means their path is predictable, giving you the chance to drop a critical hit before they turn the corner and take it out quickly (if your inherent allows it).

Is it pointless? Or just a tactic you're unwilling to exploit? I admit running out of an instance is pretty cheap and I try not to resort to it. It's usually the last option right next to dying and using an inspiration to come back to get them off my back. Somewhere else on that list is 'placate Lt/boss and run to a far side to kill the minions' and 'placate minion then run a circle on the map to catch it by itself'.

Ahh, that would be it. I knew there were differences, but I've never been much of a numbers person.

I just notice when I go from decent levels of play to suddenly munching concrete flooring an inordinate ammount of time.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Just for clarity, Stalkers actually have a higher base crit chance that increases with teammates:
Scrappers = 5% vs minions and 10% vs Lts/Bosses/etc.
Stalkers = 10% vs all and +3.something% for every ally within 30ft of you.

Their defensive values are indeed the same but their buff mods are different. Self dmg buffs are higher on a Scrapper. Stalkers do get additional crit chances thanks to Hide/Placate as well as the opportunity for a double crit on attacks after placate.

It's not a tactic I "refuse to exploit" because that's precisely what I did. And that's precisely why I say it's pointless. Placate doesn't "hide you period." It gives you stealth radius, but that stealth suppresses if you're hit. Since the dozen or so enemies around you at the time don't lose aggro when you placate just one, you WILL be hit.

But it's not a question of being seen or not being seen by enemies. Most of the ambushes that pissed me off took part in empty instances that I'd cleared out before. It's simply the fact that enemies don't give you enough time to rest, especially if you need to rest from low health. You can't pull enough ahead, or at least I couldn't with Super Jump thanks to narrow doorways and low ceilings. I'd always be no more than about 10 seconds ahead of the ambushes, and Rest eats up 6 of those just activating. And that's when it's even recharged.

Furthermore, it's imperative I defeat ambushes FAST, because the next one will spawn on a set timer, not when I've killed the previous one. If I dilly-dally, I'll get mobbed by 20 people, as I have on multiple occasions. At that point the only thing I can do is hide around the corner, score one critical and run away, at which point a Repair Companion will just heal the damage I did and they'll keep chasing me. If I do manage to down one, a Construction Companion will just rez him. Again and again.

Even when this tactic is successful, it takes FOREVER, and at that point I already consider the mission a failure. If it were just one mission I'd shrug and move on, but when three arcs back-to-back had ambush spam, that got to me.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

No. No, it really does not work that way. I've played Stalkers, I've used placate a crapton, and it does NOT work that way.

Placate
Ranged, ST, Foe Placate, Self Stealth/Hide

The Placate effect is an ST effect. It affects one (1) Target. It will NOT affect any other targets, and if you have aggro they will continue to attack you. As SOON as you take damage, from any source, your hide/stealth is broken, even to the foe you previously placated, and you can be attacked by them again. Since the other enemies are not effected anyway, they can keep attacking you for as long as they need as soon as they come into range.

So, sure, you can still run. And the ambushes will follow you. You can run past other spawns just fine. That will not magically stop the ambushes from following, firing on you as soon as in range because they flat out ignore stealth, and getting to you. End the hell of.


Fairly fast. And then what happens if you need it again? You have to wait for the inordinately long recharge. And if thats your only option left, you die.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I suspected it was 10%, but I had no way to verify this. Thanks.

That I forgot, yes. Stalkers share the same self damage buff mod with Brutes and Tankers, which means Build Up is an 80% damage buff, as opposed to Scrappers and Blasters, for whom it's 100%.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Tongue in cheek counterpoint: HALO and Call of Duty are really popular but I get my butt handed to me regularly even by the AI. Doesn't stop them from being massively played though.

Tongue in cheek indeed. My understanding is that PVP multiplayer is the biggest reason by far for the popularity of those games.

CoD tends to suffer from really derpy A.I. allies and ludicrously intuitive and infinite spawning Enemies, so that's actually a good parallel for Praetoria

If your dying that bad on Halo on Easy-Normal...eh...sorry to break it to you, but you just plain suck
(On Legendary though, that's to be expected. Legendary is eeeeevil....)

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

True. Theres a lot of people who buy them only fpr the PvP, and never touch the single player. I was actually one of those when I got Bad Company 2, because I wasn't overly fond of the PvE (Cheating A.I.) but I loved the PvP

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

OK, you get major points for that one, Tech

Call of Duty, Halo, UT3 as I mentioned earlier and so forth tend to be famously played for their competitive PvP, something that never seemed to catch on in City of Heroes even in the heyday of PvP. That's what these games are played for, but even then there are people like me who don't play them for precisely this reason. Hell, I no longer play Battlefield 2142 these days, either, simply because people started getting too good.

Not everything needs a huge challenge, however. I never found Spore to be all that challenging, for instance, and I don't think a "hardcore" mode would have made the game suck any less... I mean, would have made the game any more popular.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think MMOs appeal to a different audience than FPS's, or at least gamers have different expectations of the two genres.

MMOs to me are mainly a storytelling environment- I have this character and it's on this journey, and I tend to resent and be annoyed by any overly difficult terrain or dead ends that crop up. I'm more interested in seeing what happens around the next corner or over the next hill than I necessarily am in the process of getting there.

FPS's I approach primarily as an obstacle to overcome. I don't mind getting my *** handed to me as long as I also perceive improvements in my own performance, however incremental.

I played many, many hours of MW2 without once booting up the single player component. This has been my usual treatment of whatever my current FPS game is- the single player is irrelevant, I buy and play based entirely on the quality of the multiplayer game.

Bolded for emphasis. With FPS, it is something you can 'train' for, learn up on and improve every time. Your reactions will get faster, you get better at spotting things out of place, you learn the maps, etc etc.

With an MMO, you can do all that, I mostly have done all that, and it still won't matter; I'm entirely at the mercy of the RNG. And in Praetoria it doubly doesn't matter, because the NPCs simply have better numbers than I can have at 1-20.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

While DC and, from what I understand, Tera, are blurring the border between action game and MMO, ours is strictly the click-and-kill kind. It's a very elaborate, fast-paced click-and-kill RPG, but it can't be something it's not. What that means is that most of a player's "skill" goes into preparing for fights via research, character building, experience gathering, gear acquisition and so forth. There really isn't a whole lot a player can do once he's in the fray, other than whatever strategy said player has prepared in advance. I do appreciate "Press X to not die" AV fighting mechanics such as seem to be popping up recently, but they do little more than complicate the process.

That's not to say action games are all about fast reflexes and situational awareness and thinking on your feet (I played co-pilot in Battlefield 2 with one hand off the keyboard supporting my chin), but by and large what defines action games is what you do on the spot, then and there. Some may involve limited preparation, such as if you managed to bring enough ammo, get the right gun or heal up beforehand, but when games like Halo start giving you regenerating health and unlimited ammo on some guns, that begins to wane, as well. For the most part, preparation isn't as important as what you do when the fight starts. The fight is decided on the spot.

Your typical MMO actually time-shifts its "combat" in the past. You do your "fighting" in the spreadsheets, on the Market, in character planning, in crafting, in team compilation, such that by the time you're ready to go, you've already just about won. People very rarely go boldly into fights that they don't have a good faith that they're going to win. That's not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not common.

That's why I have a problem with challenge. "Don't you want to be challenged?" people ask me, and my response is "No, I don't." Why? Because being challenged just gives me more homework. It doesn't require me to be a better player, it requires me to bring a better build. Can I fight multiple ambushes? Yes, I can. Can I fight multiple EBs? Not at present, but if I made a better build and snaggted some Inventions, I would. Can I fight +4 enemies for the new TFs? Flat no, but I could, with the right build, temps and team-mates. But that's not because I'm DOING anything special, it's because I'm simply forced to bring a bigger gun.

I don't mind challenging content as such, but when people tout it as factually challenging is when I roll my eyes. All "challenge" does for the most part is raise the "You must be this ---> tall to ride" bar. It doesn't make me feel like I'm DOING something special. It makes me feel like I'm doing pretty much the same thing, but my gun just shoots bigger numbers.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's actually a fairly interesting way to look at it and is something worth chewing on.

I will say, though, that the quoted bit is applicable precisely because of the nature of City's gameplay, which the Incarnate trials theoretically will change. Even the fight with Battle Maiden is different. It doesn't require that you have sufficient power to bull through, it requires that you be alert and aware of the attacks coming at you so you can dodge out of the way. Power isn't as important as skill in that case. It's not much skill, true, but it is undeniably something you can't achieve by buying a set of purples.

I don't think this is correct. There's some truth to it, but it's not the whole story. During Issue 19 beta, people told me over and over than the Honoree mission wasn't soloable unless you had a IOed out build and/or were playing a melee AT. I didn't buy it. And thus I and others proceeded to solo that mission with a collection of Defenders, Controllers, MMs and other squishies. Basically anything people said they couldn't do it with.

And I wasn't doing it with an IOed out build. I did it exclusively with SOs on base difficulty (didn't even cheat down to -1). It was mostly by learning the encounter. Paying attention to what the EBs were doing and how the mission spawned the enemies. I figured out a lot about how that mission worked and was able to use that to my advantage so by the 3-4th time it wasn't difficult at all. It wasn't the build, it was strategy, reflexes, all the things you're stating doesn't matter.

But you have to be open to the idea that those things matter.

EDIT: By the way, it was a hell of a lot of fun too!

1. Quartz summons are not interruptable.

2. Quartz summons have a +100% tohit buff.

3. Quartz summons are not exclusive of Cairns, which have a 50% resistance buff.

4. In a multiple Guardian spawn, the guardians will cast quartz eminators one after the other if the first is defeated

5. The DE in those tip missions have base 64% tohit to start even without the enimators.

6. Devouring Earth bosses don't downscale to LTs in these missions.

7. Devoured are also immune to knock and have mez protection to sleep, stun, fear, and immobilize. They have resistance to hold.

8. Devoured also have a lot of toxic damage.

Unless you decide to pull every spawn with a guardian, if you're relying on defense like SR, FF, Ice, or EA, you're going to die. If you have a way to consistently survive such spawns that doesn't involve pulling rapidly and continuously away from the enimators, your tactical genius exceeds mine. Pulling is not supposed to be a continuous-use melee tactic.

Furthermore if you're SR specifically there exists no standard content mission of any kind at any difficulty setting that matches the difficulty of this mission for any other kind of melee character. A regen running into a 0x8 mission full of nothing but Malta Hercs running tactics would not come close.

Lets ignore the quartz for a moment and examine two cases: SR with CJ, and soft-capped SR. SR with CJ running just SOs is about 33.3% defense. Normally, that is 66.6% damage mitigation. Against Praetorian DE, that drops to 52% damage mitigation. Doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that means you are now taking 84% more damage. For everyone else without defense the heightened tohit amounts to increasing damage from those critters by 28%.

28% more damage is what happens when you increase your difficulty scaler to +1. 84% more damage is what happens when you increase your difficulty scaler to +3 and decide to debuff your own resistance by 6% just for fun. This is what the casual players see.

Take a soft-capped SR in there, and damage increases by about 280%. That's what happens when you set your difficulty slider all the way up to +5, break the handle off, and fight naked and soaked in gasoline. That's what *I* see.

And that is before something gets the bright idea to drop a quartz. That assumes you never see a quartz eminator ever. The moment one of those pops into existence:

1. SR with CJ's damage jumps to 469% higher. The equivalent of fighting something between +8 and +9 factoring in the fact that above +5 critters start to get tohit buffs again.

2. Soft-capped SR jumps to between 1462% of normal and 1900% of normal. Every minion in the mission now has twice the damage potential of a giant monster.

At this point trying to do anything but run for your life is different from trying to solo Hamidon only in that Hamidon can't chase you.


I solo everything. The only thing I haven't tried to solo yet that I know is mathematically soloable is Lusca. I even solo these missions. We got rid of excessive tohit buffs in the standard content for a specific game design reason: it makes me angry.

That's why those missions are so full of awesome-sauce. Normally my Fire/Shield can run around at +2/x8 and maybe have to pop a green once in awhile. Try that crap against a mission of DE and they will instruct her about how much that shield really can take.

But that's just compensation for being able to trivially soft-cap don't you think?

SR has had that ability for four years. Almost 4x longer than Regen's heyday with toggle Instant Healing. So you got what's coming to you my dearest Queen O' Maths.

STAY STRONG TIM!! Your bud with the scaly skin has your back!