Possible I22 Stalker improvements

No, you (the player) need to man up and get over this idea that steamrolling makes ST damage pointless. When I started playing this game, I got on a "mostly solo" kick pretty early on. By the time I found a group of people I enjoyed playing with, it was with a group of fellow min/max-heads who mostly play 50s and who make a point of steamrolling everything. "Speed", "fast" or "quick" TF/SF of choice is our default play.

I've been playing with those people for something like five years. Most of my characters are heavily single-target oriented, especially my melee ones. Sometimes that's an accident of early powerset choices, sometimes it's an intentional decision. Yet I have never had a meaningful issue finding a target someone else wasn't killing, even on our ridiculously fast killing teams. I am one of the people in the fray first beating on something, and my doing so is what's contributing to it being dead as fast as it ends up being.

If you're worried about steamrolling small team content that's not a TF or trial such that there's a low percentage of boss (or higher) foes but your team has powerful AoEs, OK, maybe that creates an issue where ST damage is especially limited in ways to add value. That sounds like a pretty narrow focus to me. I don't see an issue.

Would I love the sets that had at least one AoE to get it back. Abso-damn-lutely. That's not the same as this "oh noes, I has no AoEs!" spin.

Wow, I must be in some kind of topsy-turvey world...or maybe it wasn't you, UberGuy, who always complained about Stalkers being ST focused.

So not only is it the powerset that's either ST or AoE focused, but apparently its 'good' to use hidden AS and no one will ever complain about it being interruptible. It's fixed apparently by...frankly, I don't know. AFAICS, nothing has changed for hidden AS and yet it's fixed.

Don't get me wrong - I agree that AS in particular had a real problem teams. Before this I22 change, (most) Stalkers brought neither strong AoE nor ST DPS as high as other melee ATs could bring.

Now that Stalker ST DPS is very competitive with similarly built Scrappers and Brutes, they have one less thing counting against them.

My railing above was against the implied notion that being single-target focused anything was something to curl up and die about.

I haven't always complained about it. I have always included it under a list of things that counted against them. I can't possibly have the grasp I do of this game's mechanics and claim that pure single-target focus is as efficient in terms time to task completion or reward/time. The math makes that pretty provably not the case. The question I care about is: how big of a problem is that in practical play. In my experience it's just not that big of a deal on real play with all the other factors that make real play deviate from idealized play.

However, when its one of many things that count against them, the AT can have more significant issues overall. So while I would have mentioned it in context of Stalker issues, I wouldn't have made it a sole focus. So you may indeed be confusing me with someone else here.

I would not use AS now after a fight is started. In truth, I didn't do that much before this change. I would still use it as an opened when solo. On a team I almost certainly would not.