I22 Stalkers make me smile wide!

Because insulting my intelligence is a much better way to make me better understand your point, right?


That's assuming you have "hard hitters" to speak of, which not a lot of Stalker sets do. The hardest hitter Broadsword has that's a guaranteed critical is Disembowel, which isn't that hard, Katana's Golden Dragonfly is even less impressive, Electric Melee doesn't really have anything more interesting than Havoc Pucn and Dual Blades' best is Vengeful Slice. You can try to make an argument for opening with an AoE, but this is an argument I will simply never accept, because I am not interested in non-guaranteed criticals. I've tried to use them and failed to score a single critical enough times to not want to bother.

You're right, Assassin's Strike was never meant to be used in combat. And that was the problem which was fixed. Before, Assassin's Strike was just about a waste of a power pick. I don't care how good it is, it's still a power I can't use more than once per fight, and it's nowhere near good enough to merit that kind of uselessness. It was nothing more than a melee snipe with all the crap inherent in snipes, with the added indignity of depending on another highly interruptible effect. This power was literally only ever worth using once to open the fight, and even then only if someone doesn't aggro first and cause that Tsoo Sorcerer to fire off his Hurricane and break both your Hide and your Assassin's Strike.

This is hardly the first time people have wanted to play the "wrong" way and the game has been made to accommodate us. Feel free to believe it was a mistake. That doesn't make it true. As far as I'm concerned, NOT being able to use a power I give up a decent attack for in combat was wrong, and now it's been made right.

No, it does not. If I wanted to fight like a Scrapper, I'd make a Scrapper. Stalkers need to be different from Scrappers in a way more meaningful than how the fight starts. Assassin's Focus does this. You may not see it, but I do, because I've played plenty of Scrappers and none of them play like this. Not even Street Justice, which has a similar mechanic.

They could have been, but I'm not sure that would have been a better solution. An interruptible Assassin's Strike is *** regardless of the circumstances. No change to the power which left it interruptible would have been sufficient for me, because no change that left it interruptible would have made it useful in combat. And I will be damned before I run away from enemies until they lose aggro.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Because apparently what I got from your points before wasn't what you were trying to get at. I recall once upon a time Venture said something I took a different way. In an effort to browbeat people arguing ghosts could be of the Natural origin, he said "There's nothing natural about ghosts." I was inspired to interpret this to mean that the creation of a ghost is unnatural, a soul not doing what it was supposed to be, thus Ghosts were naturally not of the Natural origin. Venture later clarified that what he'd really meant was "You're stupid if you think ghosts can be of the Natural origin." as he tends to do, which I didn't specifically agree with.

It transpires that you what I thought you were saying way back when was something completely different from what you were actually saying. Having had a better view of what you're really saying, how could I NOT stop listening to you? I'm glad I understood you wrong, because what I took from your old posts makes for a lot more entertaining game than what it turns out you were actually suggesting. Obviously, it's my fault for misunderstanding, but here we are at the end of the day - you complaining and I satisfied. Considering how hard I've been on essentially every aspect of the game over the past year, I find myself greatly unmotivated to mind a version of Stalkers I enjoy playing greatly.

And yet you go on to restate essentially what I described you as saying. You have a specific idea of how Stalkers should play and the new changes don't correspond to it. That's what it boils down to.

And I welcome you to go ahead and prove that. I also warn you that not terribly many may care either way. So Stalkers aren't Stalkers any more. Fine by me. The old Stalkers sucked and the new ones are awesome. I quite literally do not care what they're "like" so long as they're fun to play, and the new Stalkers are fun to play. I've made it a point to stick with Stalkers ever since Castle made their original improvements, but I've always been too polite to say it in plain text - the AT was horrible, broken and gimped. Less so than other ATs, but gimped nonetheless. The best you could hope for was to have sub-par performance with much more effort and much more reliance on luck. The AT no longer sucks, and I honestly don't care what it turned into to get there. I wouldn't bat an eye if they turned Stalkers into Blasters if they played better.

As for how it's different? How are Scrappers different from Brutes? Not very, when you get down into the basic mechanics. What's different is the "feel" of it. Scrappers feel like "stand-and-fight" fighters who bring enemies down with constant, consistent, reliable damage. They're the characters who jump into the fray and keep hitting stuff until stuff stops moving. Stalkers, to me, have the kind of explosive damage and surprise attack edge that Scrappers don't really have, or at least don't have to nearly this degree. The ability for my team-mates to blink and miss all of a lieutenant's health disappearing is what makes the AT for me.

Clearly, you disagree, but this really isn't a subject we can argue about. It's a question of "feel," and to me, it simply "feels" different. My Stalkers still feel just as underpowered as they did before if I choose to scrap it out entirely, but luckily, I don't scrap it out nearly as often as you seem to think I should.

Victory and Pinnacle, and I have Stalkers on both. Right now, I'm focusing on Kim on Pinnacle, who's just about to make level 31. I'd welcome the company, but I'm really not sure what you hope to achieve here. Do you just want to see what I do and how I fight? Can probably demo-record that for you. Do you hope to show me it's better to not use Hidden Assassin's Strike? Because I don't learn from example very well. Honest question - what do you feel will change if we play together?

DPS, DPS, DPS. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. I haven't run the numbers and I'm not going to run the numbers because, to be quite honest, I don't give a toss. If I were all about DPS, I'd play my Dark Melee characters without ever using Twilight Grasp or Syphon Life. I like seeing big numbers and enemies losing their health all in one go. It doesn't have to be optimal, it has to be good enough, and that's more than good enough.

Also, when do you start counting DPS? From when you enter a mission to when you exit? From when you queue up your first attack? Because, to me, it really doesn't matter what happens until the first enemy aggroes. If it takes longer to set up and thus I get less DPS, then so be it. "Longer" is still within the neighbourhood of seconds, nothing of the sort of what I'd have to set up as a Devices Blaster. About the only argument I could see is that I'm wasting Build Up time, but really, I'd take that for the return of being able to kill that Nerva Spectral demon in-between when he sees me and when he turns on his Chill of the Night or being able to take out that Sapper before he can sap me, or that Steel Strong Man before he can debuff me.

There's more to this game than DPS. And no, Stalkers are still not all about DPS. Like I said, you are literally physically incapable of ruining my satisfaction with Stalkers. It's not humanly possible.

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.

And that's really the rub of it, isn't it. You don't think stalkers were fine, so they should be changed into blasters because you like blasters. Why not, you know, just go play a blaster?

This is pretty much the Dominator change discussion all over again.

I like scrappers quite a bit, so I'm quite sure I will like the new stalker. I loved the old stalker though. Will I love the new stalker? I haven't had the heart the try it out yet... maybe I'll give it a shot this weekend. Maybe.

I think the crux of the issue is that stalkers and scrappers are really designed, more so than any other ATs, to do the exact same thing. Now that you can roll both on either side, having both of them doesn't really make a lot of sense. However, I think it's the scrapper, not that stalker, that is the superfluous AT. Stalkers, brutes and tankers all have their individual approaches to the "Melee Combatant" role.

I've said it before I22, and I'll say it again: "Why would anyone ever roll a scrapper?" However, I'm not going to advocate turning scrappers into blasters or dropping the AT for something more interesting. I accept that people that aren't me still enjoy them.

On a slight tangent: It's well past time Stalkers got their grubby little mitts on Shield Defence! (and don't even try the "shields aren't very sneaky" excuse.)

Because Blasters suck harder than Stalkers ever have, and there isn't a thing I can suggest that's going to fix that which has a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted. That was just an exaggerated hyperbole to say that I'm not terribly interested in what Stalkers are turned into, so long as they work. And they really didn't work before. Not on a comparable level.

People also loved the old, pre-Defiance 2.0 Blasters and argued incessantly that the new Defiance is for poor players who played wrong and that veteran elite players knew how to leverage the old Defiance by staying at low health and not dying. This doesn't change the fact that the AT sucked so bad that even the development team had to admit it was the worst performer in the entire game by far.

I'm sure you enjoyed the old Stalkers. I'm also sure that the way the old Stalkers used to play is impossible to make competitive in a game system where enemies can never lose sight of you short of running away past the engine's draw distance, even then not always. I'm sure there's no way to make that AT work in a game whose mission designers started adding ambushes and never stopped - ambushes that see through Stealth and interrupt Assassin's Strike. Since their very inception in I6, Stalkers have been trying to do something the game could never achieve - use stealth in combat. City of Heroes combat does not do stealth. There is no stealth in combat. The only purpose of stealth is to AVOID combat. You can mitigate Stalkers' inherent weaknesses, but as long as stealth and interruptibility do not work in combat, you're never going to fix them, not to a competitive degree.

And I remind you, a recent developer comment warned against commenting that "Snipes suck" in regard to the new Blast powerset because Snipes were slated for a review. It seems like someone's finally realised that long-windup interruptible powers just don't work very well. And I couldn't be happier for it.

The thing with Scrappers is they aren't underperforming. Arguments can be made about how Brutes can probably possibly gain greater damage sometimes, but Scrappers still have the luxury of being the game's most uncomplicated AT. There's no Fury to worry about, there are no controlled criticals to track... There isn't even any team role for a Scrapper. It's the AT for people who want to flip out and kill stuff, and it does that quite well.

Scrappers do not underperform, not on teams, not solo. There might be a few odds and ends to improve on the AT and wouldn't really be against it, but Scrappers don't have a problem in need of solution. Stalkers, by contrast, did underperform, and significantly. I'm sure plenty of people were OK with the whole AT underperforming just as I know for a fact that plenty of people like Blasters for being "hard mode" (which is code for "I have to try harder to get the same result"), but that really doesn't reflect on the AT's overall performance.

Like Dominators, Stalkers were seen to underperform and improvements were made. None of their tools were removed, so if you really wanted to, you could still play Stalkers exactly the same as you did before. Simply don't use Assassin's Strike out of Hide. But you wouldn't want to do that, would you? Why gimp yourself by not using the AT's strengths to their fullest? My point exactly.

Certainly, I have no problem with it. I'm also waiting for Stalkers to get Titan Weapons, Battle Axe and War Mace.

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.

Comparing to the top heavy hitters of Eagle's Claw and Midnight Grasp (Crushing Uppercut is probably the best but the set is an outlier, IMO. Every set isn't going to have a Crushing Uppercut), some powers of choice would be:

Katana's Soaring Dragon is only 58% of the damage of EC or MG but animates practically a second and a half faster than EC and half a second faster than MG. On the other hand, Golden Dragonfly does 78% of their damage but can hit multiple targets.

Electric Melee has Thunder Strike which will hit a target for 62% of EC/MG's damage but will also hit up to 10 more foes.

Dual Blades' Vengeful only does, like, 40% of EC/MG but One Thousand Cuts does over 80% of EC/MG's dmg and in an AoE...it's basically like using Disembowel on 10 foes.

As for the non-guaranteed criticals, you seem to contradict yourself since earlier you state:

"The 60% chance for a critical hit? I can live with that."

Which is far and away better than what Scrappers get, 10-15% at best. (by the way, I don't believe hidden critical chance is affected by any outside buffs...it's flat out 50% while excluding Stalker's other buff states while hidden.) But then the point isn't if you have a hard hitter or not...it's what can you do to exploit AS to its fullest and to do that, you do not use it from hide.


This circular logic of yours doesn't really leave me with anything to even reply to...and not in a "you covered all your bases in this argument" kind of way. It's like this:

-1. You say AS problem was it was a 1 oft used power at the start. That it was interruptible. That beyond that, it was a waste. That it wasn't very usable because there's ample opportunity to be dropped from hide. And the new changes fixes this.

+1. Not only has nearly none of that changed, but you go on to accuse me of saying these changes as being 'bad' or 'wrong' when I simply just don't think they're 'right'. Morally, you can make a decision that isn't right but still it not be wrong.

++1. You then go on to *ignore* that the changes I was shooting for won't make AS from hide interruptible, will give the foe less opportunity to drop you from hide and would be seen as a boon when you regain hide rather than a *bug* like the ATO proc.

-2. With a straight face, you say this change makes Stalker more unique, much different from Scrappers. That they're fun to play now and rainbows and cupcakes.

+2. I'm sorry to invoke him again, but it was his argument against my ideas back in the day. Angry_Citizen called gimmicky for what it was and this just adds more complexity to the AT, and not in a good way.

++2. The gimmicks Stalkers have were not improved, just more added ontop. This means, the gimmick that works best is what will be exploited and everything else ignored or downplayed. This is also not good.

Catalyzed ++2. No one apparently sees this as a problem. They only see what they want to accept in front of them. Rather than *improving* what they have, more junk is added an everyone's happy. But this isn't like a powerset with a specific gimmick that if you don't like it you can just play something else. This is like adding combos to Doms where, the only way they can click Domination is if they hold a foe, spank it twice and *then* domination lights up. The key difference between set combos an AT combos is *YOU CAN'T IGNORE IT*. Instead of leaving to play a new set, you have to leave and play a new AT.

-3. You keep saying I have an apparently limited and specific view of how Stalkers should be. That what I said before, that Stalkers should stay and scrap, had some sort of double or alternate meaning.

+3. No, my view of what Stalkers should be is what they have always been. Yes they should stay and scrap because *running* should only be a tactic if you're *dying* not fighting.

++3. The main point I've had all along is what constitutes as 'Stalking' should have been improved which it was not. The change we got for Stalkers now improves their scraping to a point that doing any type of surgical striking is superfluous. There was no alternate meaning to what I said before and what I add to that now is this change has practically altered the very DNA of the AT.

Catalyzed ++3. That you don't seem to care what Stalkers have become is the entire reason I bothered posting in this thread. How many actually care what Stalkers used to be about, currently? In the face of what they are now, it's too late to overturn. I'll just go on to say what they are is what they are and if you try to pass off what used to be favorable as passable on current stalkers without some sort of disclaimer, I'll pull a Venture and just browbeat these changes into whomever misinforms.


It's rather hard to say my favorite AT is Scrappers when I have more Stalkers, my most powerful character is a Corruptor and I'm currently playing a Dom. But Scrappers are my favorite because my main is one.

That said, the basic difference between the ATs is very blurry as Brutes and Scrappers generally have the same performance and similar feel. But the main point is that it's similar. Brutes feel a bit different because they have fury, Tankers feel different because they have better mitigation and Guantlet and Stalkers felt different because they had hide and AS. The only thing that made Scrapper feel different was decent DPS but beyond that, they only feel different by what they *don't* have and that's extra gimmicks.

Now that Stalkers can push toward that DPS, that's one less thing that really makes Scrappers distinct. Even if regular damage was pushed up a bit to help Stalkers compete, Scrappers would still have that place. But that's not what happened at all. What was changed was being rewarded for scrapping...and not just on top of what you got. You have the burst you could do with Stalkers before with lower DPS in one hand and better DPS but lack of demoralize in the other and you have to choose which, to stalk or scrap. The obvious answer is scrap since to stalk wasn't made any more attractive and kept all its shortcomings.

I haven't seen if a Stalker can eventually out-scrap a Scrapper but I'll make danged sure, since that's what everyone wants, that's what you'll get. Apparently that's what the dev's thoughts were with this change, anyway.


Not trying to change anything, really. I just stand by my statements then and now. If anything, it's simply the chance to prove to myself what Stalkers have truly become. I know, deep down, what they used to be and what they are now but that's mainly in thought...putting my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I don't think I've asked anyone to change anything and I'm not going to do anything new except play.

Pinn it is. I've got a DM stalker I've been meaning to brush off. I'll see if I can log on this weekend some time.

THANK YOU!

When I speak of that whole power creep thing, Dominator is one AT I had in mind. Not that they're too powerful, they're just dang powerful. But my issue with them is, their whole identity was the Jekyll and Hyde duality of it...

How many players actually /keybinded a costume change with the press of Domination? I know I had a few...because that was one of the reasons I really enjoyed the AT. But now domination doesn't feel quite as important, most of its buffs were just stacked onto the base of the AT. I don't even incorporate it into the character's concept anymore; domination is just an extra-mez button.

I say you should give Stalker's a shot. Just don't go into it with a 'ninja' concept or anything. Just think of it more like a 'killer' or 'bloodlust fighter'...which is a shame because that's what a lot of my scrappers pretty much are: guys that love to fight and are good at it, pure and simple. The simplified Stalker is much better than the original but it can still be fun if you give it a chance.

Yet the main difference with that and this is...Blasters were changed because they had trouble competing. Stalkers were changed because people were jealous of Scrappers or disliked being bullied with names (I never minded lolstalkers...only when it got in the way of my proliferated sets did I mind) not because they couldn't compete. Worse yet, they were changed to compete better by dismissing things they used to do, basically proving the idiots that go spouting 'lolstalkers' were right. I hate letting idiots think they're right but what ya gonna do?

I think you haven't come up with good "role play" explanation for the difference in Stalker and Scrapper mechanics. The way I see it, Stalkers are weaker physical combatants than Scrappers. That doesn't mean they can't do a lot of damage - obviously the whole point of this change is that now they do. However, they don't achieve it through the same manner as a Scrapper. They are more physically fragile in the sense of lower HP, and they don't usually hit as hard as a Scrapper per blow, but they can make up for this in mastery of leading the fight where they want it to go. Assassin's Focus isn't some poor-man's fury - it's the Stalker using their other attacks to set up their opponent for an Assassin's Strike in a critical area. A Scrapper is also masterful, but simply a more direct fighter. They tend to hit harder, occasionally getting in dangerous hits through sheer strength, skill or instinct rather than how the Stalker's more methodically leads the foe to a deadly checkmate.

The two don't really play alike, even for like sets. Sure, they play similarly - I don't see that as a bad thing, as long as they aren't actually the same.

I'd like to know what you think "couldn't compete" means. Because I don't see how you can tell the difference, and how you know with certainty that Stalkers could "compete".

Actually, just like Dominators, Stalkers were changed because the devs perceived that players were unhappy with a certain aspect of the archetype's design: specifically the focus on stealth and damage mechanics connected to stealth (and the hidden state specifically, which is something a bit different). Jealousy or nomenclature probably had nothing to do with it. In this case, the devs thought about the complaint, decided that they agreed, and then decided to change things.

Dominators were changed under the same auspices. While some players did like the "Jekyll and Hyde" aspect of them, the devs felt that a majority of players did not, and that it was causing players to believe that perma-dom was a necessity rather than an option. That caused the devs to reduce, but not eliminate, the advantages of Domination and redefine Dominators as explicit damage dealers by role, increasing their damage modifiers to grant them that damage dealing strength all the time instead of during Domination only.