People Complaining About Stalkers...

So... I've been hearing chatter that a lot of people don't like stalkers or that stalkers aren't strong enough. Riddle me confused. I'll admit that I haven't read too much into the 3+ page long threads about people complaining about them, but the first one I saw was complaining about hit points.

Now I've made two stalker builds so far, and I must say that the survivability of those two toons is astonishing. They have better Defense/Resistances than most brutes, and dish out more than reasonable amounts of damage.

Fact is, I find the Stalkers to be one of the best archetypes in the game.
So let the trolling begin and someone tell me what the problem is here.

I can post those builds if someone says I'm on crack.

Thanks.

I started off with stalkers, my lovey started with his scrapper.

I LOVE my stalkers, my ubertoon right now is an electric/energy aura/electric. I think a lot of the dislike for stalkers is that many people try to play them as scrappers (my lovey is just now, after 4+ years, getting the hang of a stalker... evil scrapperlock, lol). *shrugs* It's all in how you play.

Or perhaps in the modern game the true complaint is too many melee DPS ATs.

Outside of anomalous builds currently I believe it breaks down something like this:

Scrappers - High damage, moderate-high survival, limited team aggro control (single target primary, some secondaries have a taunt aura)

Brutes - Moderate-High damage, high survival, team aggro control (multi target primary, every attack made primary, every secondary has a taunt aura)

Stalkers - Moderate-high damage, moderate survival, no team aggro control

Bane/Night Widow - Moderate-high damage, moderate survival, no team aggro control, heavy team buffs

Tanker - Moderate damage, very high survival, superior team aggro control (multi target primary, multi target every attack made primary, every secondary)

If you're looking for damage, why not take a scrapper? If you're looking for tanking why not grab a brute or a tanker? If you're looking for stealthing a TF why not grab a Night Widow or Bane (similar damage, buff the team to boot)?

(Lets disregard that an argument can be made that you can answer all of the above with 'why not grab an illusion/rad controller' )

(And my own personal 'like' order is Brute - Stalker - Tanker - Scrapper. While I have yet to get a Stalker to 50 they tend to survive longer before being deleted than my Scrapper attempts, and I'll never level a second Tanker to 50).

Okay let me start by saying my first character was a Stalker. My main now is a Stalker. Stalkers ARE my favorite AT, I have 2 50 Stalkers a Elec/Nin and a Spines/Regen.

I strongly believe that Stalkers need a buff.

1-30 Stalkers are just great, after 30 you hit the point where AS stops taking out LT's and then you have to start scrapping out fights. This is a problem because of the low resist cap for Stalkers on top of their low HP. But really this is a minor piece of the larger problem, that is once Stalkers hit 50. At 50 my IO'ed out Elec/Nin that has tier 3 in all his incarnate slots can run a mission at +0/x8 no problem true, but the issue isn't that Stalkers are weak so much as they don't really excel at any one thing. My Blasters can out burst damage my Stalkers with relative ease and outside of burst damage what does a Stalker bring? And how useful is burst damage in this game really when AoE is king OR you have a prolonged AV fight?

Stalkers aren't very good at any one thing which in a super powered game means that they are under preforming. So keep that as a frame of reference when people voice complains about Stalkers, it isn't that they aren't able to complete the game so to speak, it is that they really have nothing special about them and are in reality a weak Scrapper with the ability to hide.

I love the concept behind Stalkers.

I hate that my Scrapper equivalent can do so much more than the Stalker.

Now for me, my only complaint is the damage. Outside of PvP, I really don't see why a Stalker doesn't just match Scrapper damage mods. They'd still play differently, the Stalker would just dish out more damage.

The lower hit points? I can work around them.

Not to mention some of the powers they removed from the Primaries make me sad. Really, even before the MA buffs, I would have prefered Dragon's Tail to remain and Thunder Kick to be take out.

Now with the buffs, I'd like that change EVEN MORE!

Lol

It seems like conceptually, the melee archetypes should lie on a spectrum between damage and surviveability, looking something like this.

TANKER -> BRUTE -> SCRAPPER -> STALKER

The problem is that Stalkers are limited to Single-Target Burst damage, which is such a ridiculously gimped restriction that the surviveability scale still goes

TANKER -> BRUTE -> SCRAPPER -> STALKER

But the Damage scale now goes

TANKER -> STALKER -> BRUTE -> SCRAPPER.

Stalker is at the bottom of both scales. Meaning it's pretty much worthless for the purposes of staying alive and making bad guys dead.

Well, aside from staying alive and making bad guys dead, what else is there for a melee class?

With both scrappers and stalkers being melee damage-oriented, I was pleased to see AS changed to have -toHit and terrorize effects, since that differentiated the archetypes just a little bit more. Is more control or debuffing the way to go to make stalkers stand out? I don't know, but it's worth asking.

Stalkers aren't quite as gimpy as they used to be since Castle was forced to improve them when VEATs were introduced, or the Bane would've done everything a stalker does but did it better because Banes also brought additional benefits to a team...

But, the AT still isn't very good. AS receiving a buff was nice, but AS just needs to become an instant cast attack or something. I don't care about how it would impact lolpvp. Nobody lolpvps in this game. That, or make AS an inherent attack and give Stalkers back the AoE attacks which were taken out of their primary sets to make room for the AS. Or the overpowered idea to tag some Stalker attacks with an untyped damage so against mega-resistant targets they can punch through better than anybody else, because assassination is their job.

I'm one of the people that you usually see pop up in the "buff Stalkers!" threads - I even started one.

I also explained in my first post in it that I like playing Stalkers, and think that they do just fine in actual play. The issue that started the whole thread is that the devs made an attempt to balance the melee ATs - by lowering Brute's damage cap and easily-maintained Fury level, while also giving Tankers Bruising and a higher hp cap and leaving Scrappers as the apparent baseline - and left Stalkers completely out of the loop. This while Stalkers will almost always do less damage than Scrappers, while having less survivability due to lower hit points and a lower hit point cap. My issue with Stalkers is the devs' inconsistency in how they're handled.

I actually like how they play, at least solo, because a lot of the time I prefer planning out encounters and having success or failure dependent more on how I play than how I build. If I want to just mash buttons and watch things fall down, I have a (bunch of) Brute(s) for that. But numerically they aren't really balanced with the other melee ATs... they're just close enough for me to still enjoy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

Stalker's are great at focusing on the hard targets that give the rest of the team massive headaches, especially in the lower levels. From levels 6-40 I can excel on most teams. However I would have to agree that closer to level 50 stalkers lose a lot of value in many areas. Other AT's get much stronger and stalkers do not receive and added value imo. They are great for PvP though...

Any one of my doms can dish out more damage than any one of my stalkers in PvE at 50.