Assassin's Focus specifics

Thank you Devs. You've done a great job making stalkers interesting to me again, and believe me that wasn't easy. I've been playing DM/Nin and Spines/Nin and noticed I had a much easier time getting an orange-circle (OC) AS with DM. This made me wonder about the exact mechanics of AF, so I did some testing.

TL;DR Conclusion: AF is vastly easier to leverage with sets that have multiple fast-activating attacks. Quick activations = longer OC time = easier to get OC AS. Longer activations = less OC time and the player has a very short window to target/position/attack before OC drops.

The patch notes say longer recharging attacks have a better chance to grant AF, but I rarely saw it fail to appear even from Shadow Punch or Lunge. Activation time isn't factored in at all, so sets like Spines that use long-activating attacks will just have a harder time.

I've confirmed that each instance of AF lasts 10 seconds, independent of other instances of AF and independent of activation/animation times. The buff is granted when the NPC first takes damage, not when the animation begins or ends. This is actually decent for Spines with its damage-at-the-end attacks (Ripper/Impale) but bad for Shadow Maul because it starts damaging right at the beginning and then keeps me locked in the animation for several more seconds, wasting AF buff time.

Regardless, in order to make AF non-biased for specific powersets it should be altered to take activations into account somehow. The best solution would be a variable duration AF buff i.e. 10 seconds+activation time. I don't know if that's feasible given coding and server processing time contstraints. A simpler solution would be for each new instance of AF to partially refresh all previous instances i.e. my third attack adds a third AF with 10s timer and adds 2 more seconds to the timers of the first and second AF buffs (with all timers capped at 10s so stupid things don't happen). There may be better ways to handle it; I've actually been up all night so the greymatter isn't running at peak efficiency.


For reference

Patch notes:

This is already balanced by the fact that quick anmiation attacks have a lower chance to grant stacks of assassin's focus.

Really the right fix would be to make the length of the buff for each power 10 seconds + (Animation Time - Frames Before Hit), so that it lasts 10 seconds past the end of the activation. Otherwise long activating powers that hit near the beginning, like Shadow Maul, are at a disadvantage.

Blaster Defiance has the opposite problem -- there they simply added the activation time into the buff duration, so it lasts slightly longer than it should since the effect "hits" partway through the activation.

While these are all viable complaints and suggestions, I honestly have no problems with the Stalker at the time being. I'm just happy they finally made my Stalker the ST beast he -should have been since CoV launched-.

Besides, it'll take the devs another 8 or 9 issues to even re-look at us again anyways

The initial patch note was wrong. Focus generation is based on the "base recharge" of the powers, not "animation" time.

We don't know the exact formula but 1s base recharge is pretty much equal to 10% chance. This means if you use an attack with 10s base recharge (Crane Kick), you get Focus every time you land a hit. The formula should be quite close to this.

10% per second of recharge doesn't seem quite right - in my totally unscientific test, Body Blow (5s base recharge) popped focus 23 out of 25 times - rather extreme had it been a 50% chance.

Smashing Blow (7s base recharge), meanwhile, never failed to deliver Focus in about as many attempts.

If it truly scales linearly with seconds of base recharge, I'd pin it somewhere in the 15-18% per second range.

Body Blow has a 75% chance to give you a stack of Focus.

Ah, lovely - I was thinking it wasn't linear scaling, and that confirms it. Means the quick-recharge attacks aren't as shabby as I'd feared, either.