carroto

Yeah this is me, too. Of course I do put in some key IOs that help a lot. So both +def uniques of course, and some of the ones in Health and Stamina to help with endurance management. Other than that it tends to be just whatever. At whatever point I can spare the slots I'll probably start in on adding some regen bonuses and uniques as well since there's no heal in the set.

I need to have AoE on my Stalkers. It just makes such a difference in the way it plays. I guess some people don't find taking out minions one at a time tedious, but I sure do. I enjoy being able to throw in some AoEs in between single-target attacks on the boss and the minions fall without any direct attention. Feels more powerful that way, too. The minions aren't worth my time, they are just collateral damage. I agree with people who say that you can contribute to a team even as a single-target focused character. In my experience on teams there are usually bosses left after AoEs have cleared the rest, and being able to burn down the bosses quickly helps the whole team move along faster. So really it comes down to personal preference. What feels good and fun for you. I don't consider sets with just a single cone to really have AoE. I mean, it's better than nothing and they can be worthwhile to use against multiple enemies, even if you have to reposition a bit. That's mostly when solo though. Fast-moving teams are different. Cones tend to be wasted there unless you have a tank bunching enemies up for you and can get in before everyone else's AoEs render yours irrelevant. I like having a cone to supplement a PBAoE when available, because they are nice when solo. It's too bad that Psi Melee didn't keep it's cone. Would have made a more solid set. I'm a big fan of damage auras on other melee ATs. It's too bad they are unavailable on Stalkers. There are precious few options for adding damage from the secondary. Between that and the more limited AoE options in the primary, there aren't that many interesting Stalker combos, unfortunately.

That's a good point. If you look at the number of votes it's really the top four, and then everything else. Those four are in a league of their own. Those happen to be the same four I voted for before looking at the results. It makes sense. Sentinels were undertuned, presumably out of fear of being too tank-magey. When I've tried playing one I haven't been able to stick with it. The strength of the attacks wasn't even the main issue. The lowered range and target caps kind of kill them for me. Masterminds have a number of issues, but one of the ones that kills them for me is the higher end costs. I know that supposedly that's to compensate for the fact that the pets are attacking at no cost to the MM, but I don't like to just sit back and watch. I like to do stuff too. However an active secondary can drain my end bar so fast I can't really. To make matters worse, the timing of the level shifts on the pets means I have to start running Leadership toggles pretty early if I want them to be able to hit. Long before I have enough slots to get endurance usage under control. So much of the early leveling experience is just watching my pets die and not doing much about it because I'm out of end. HEATs could use a pass at their animation times. Some of the lower-damage attacks have way too long animations. They feel clunky to play.

One per three days.

Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the Preventive Medicine %Absorb proc is effectively a global proc, which is to say that it doesn't matter which power it's in or whether or not that power is activated, but just that it's slotted at all. That being the case you could slot it in Health and free up a slot in DP, unless you have it there for the set bonus.

I don't think it would take much. Standardize animation times towards the lower end. Speed up the DOT. Either fewer heavier hits, or just faster. If they did decent DPA why wouldn't you want them? Immobilize is quite useful, but often not enough on its own to be worthwhile. Add in decent damage and it's pure win. Agreed. The other thing that I suspect would really change the feel of the set in a positive direction would be some tweaks to the sounds. The hit sounds are a little too high-pitched and sharp. They really grate on me. They also don't really seem to fit what I'm usually fighting. Maybe if I was punching an empty tin box.

I've had this happen but managed to get it working eventually. I can't remember if it worked after resetting the mission or not. I might have had to abandon it and re-get it from the contact. If you keep trying you should be able to get it to work.

Maybe. I greatly value AoE but I also need my Stalkers to be able to take out hard targets effectively. Comparing the numbers on Savage Melee single-target attacks to those of other sets with good AoE, it doesn't come out looking terrible on paper. However... Yeah there's that. I guess I should look at the numbers on those attacks to see why the set doesn't have secondary effects. Is the DoT a bonus, which makes it the secondary effect? Doesn't Spines get DoT plus slows/-fly/immob? Does the Blood Frenzy mechanic take the place of a secondary effect? If so I'm not sure how the lower than expected damage on hemo can be justified. Other sets don't get a damage penalty for having a secondary effect. Anyway, time will tell. I might come back to that Stalker at some point. I just got Hemo and was shockingly underwhelmed by it. Maybe I should get it fully slotted and give it another shot.

Thanks for that. I didn't realize it got such a huge reduction. Whether or not it is now in the "balanced" range, I think that's enough to warrant shelving my current project. There were a number of less-than-ideal things about the set, but the damage from hemo pushed it over the top into the worthwhile range. That's why I decided to roll one up. Now I think the balance has shifted back the other way. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

I usually either build for ranged defense (often with Hover), or play /Sonic to have full-time mez protection. I'm experimenting on a Blaster with using the Defense Amplifier (temp from P2W vendor) for this purpose, but it's quite expensive at level 50 (2.5 million inf per hour). So on that Blaster I've already started working an easy mid-level market niche to fund it. Not something that will scale well across a bunch of alts, but I'll see how it goes. I don't find break frees to be an adequate solution for me, but YMMV. There are some power sets that can muddle through well enough with them. Time with the large +def does okay, and Dark with the -tohit debuffs and the pet to debuff, distract, and heal for when the debuffs fail. Storm can do okay if you can get your Lightning Storm and Tornado out before you get mezzed. Traps is a bit risky because while the FFG will protect you, it's somewhat fragile and if it's destroyed (or if you forget and let it time out), suddenly any mez on you will shut you down. At least the Acid Mortar can tank a bit, and if you put Caltrops in the right location that will be a distraction as well. It's kind of a shame the way mez is done in this game. Most of the other secondaries available to Corruptors are basically off limits to me because of it.

It's not that it's a 50% chance. Placate works just fine 100% of the time. The problem is that you only get an extra 50% damage from your crit. So if a Stalker uses an attack that does 100 points of damage from hide, the crit does an extra 100 points. If a VEAT does the same, they only get a bonus 50 points of damage. So Placate for VEATs just doesn't add much damage, and so it's hard to justify the animation time. It tends to lower DPS. However it's still useful in other ways, so it's not a completely wasted power pick. It just depends on how much your value that utility. I don't bother with it personally but I'd certainly understand and wouldn't blame anyone who did. Actually now that I think of it, I think I did take it as a level 49 pick on one of my Stalkers, just because I didn't have anything else worthwhile to pick that would be useful without adding any slots.

I haven't confirmed it but according to this comment on the beta forums, now that i27 is live I guess hemorrhage does up-front crit damage instead of DoT crits now. So just a small update to this helpful guide.

I don't have it handy but at one point a dev stated that snipes and AS use the values for whichever variant of the attack you're using, fast or slow, to calculate proc chances. So your proc chances will be higher for the slow versions.

FYI I looked at this on Banes and it was clear that Placate was no good for damage there. I'd expect it to be the same for widows and any AT with less than 100% crits. If it's not worthwhile for a lot of Stalkers with their 100% crits, there's really no way that with 50% crits Placate will pay off.

If that's so then I have to wonder what the argument is against lowering the recharge on those powers. It wouldn't have any effect on 95% of people. Were those 5% up to something nefarious? I did admit that I play mostly red-side, so maybe this was intentional.

It has certainly happened to me but as I said originally, maybe I just need to adjust to the new way of things and I'll reach this point as well. So far it's not looking good. There may be be a bit of psychology at play here, I'm not sure. It may be that with some smart micro-management it's possible to have play sessions that are as free from restriction as before. However when I think of a limited number of charges given the amount of jumping around I used to do, I don't see any way they could bring it back. Maybe it comes down to a hoarder mentality. I remember discussions on the original boards about how many people struggled against themselves to use inspirations. They wouldn't want to use them now because "I might need them later." Maybe they'd use a few, but then they'd achieve an optimal load and wouldn't want to mess it up. I suspect that these are the same people who don't find the idea of limited transport charges to be comforting. Maybe that's a factor, or maybe some of us just move around more than you do. One extra factor that may cause my experience to be different I just thought of. I play mostly red-side. I switch to rogue early on so I can join blue-side teams. However they usually can't invite me unless I'm in a blue zone. So if someone advertises for a blue TF or other team, I usually tend to head to the appropriate zone before messaging for an invite. Sometimes the team will fill before I get there. Oh well, it happens, I'll just go back to what I was doing. Except that's two trips right there in seconds that uses two fast travel options. So now I have to weigh that in. If the team is already almost full, maybe I won't bother. Yes I know I could message them first to reserve my spot, but a lot of people who play exclusively blue side don't seem to understand how that works, why they can't invite me and it becomes a whole thing having to explain why it's failing. Much easier to zone in first and then it just works. You are free to believe that I and others "shouldn't" be bothered by the new status because for you it's fine. It's only now that things have changed again that I've started to become fully aware of how /EBFP changed things for me. Travel has always been a low-level annoyance for me. Like most people, I avoid things I find unpleasant. It may not be something that I consciously think about, but on some level there's an implicit cost-benefit analysis. If there's something going on over there I might like to do, the enjoyment I would get from doing it gets weighed against the annoyance of getting there and back. /EBFP tipped the scales for me. It caused things to be much more open and free. I ended up doing more, joining more. Now I feel myself drifting back to my old way of thinking about things. I've got to really want it or I don't want to risk ending up with no good way to get somewhere.

As was pointed out up-thread when this was offered as a solution, using the day job portals as a regular solution means logging out in an appropriate location to charge them up after every play session, excluding progress on all other day jobs. I guess it's a good solution if you don't care about that.

I'm still waiting to see how I settle into this new game world. So far I'm finding myself hesitating to go places or do things that I would have before because it would use up one of my fast travel options, put it on cooldown. Too many times already I've done that and then when I need to go somewhere else, none of the options are charged. Maybe I'll adjust, find better and more efficient ways to use the options available. I suspect that instead I'll adjust my play style to be less free. To do less. If someone is advertising a GM is up and wants help taking it down, well that will take one 10-minute cooldown to get there, and another to return. After that I'm out of most good options for getting around for 10 minutes. Might not be worth it. Same if someone is asking for help taking down a tough AV. Sorry buddy but if I help you I'll be hoofing it out of there after. I've got my own business to handle. I don't have tens of millions of inf to grant to each of my alts to gain all the fast travel options, so they'll probably just get the 1 million ones. That means mission TP at 30 minute cooldown, and base TP at 10 minute cooldown. Plus LRT that's two options per 10 minutes.

Had the same thing happen on my /Dark Corruptor yesterday, multiple times. Never saw it before, but I can't say for sure that it's new, since I don't know how often I tend to get defeated mid-heal. I figured it was a cool new feature that got left out of the patch notes.

I wonder if I'm the only one still using etoh-downloader as my updater. Works fine. It took a lot of experimentation (and an OS reinstall) for me to get the 64-bit client running, but that's probably mostly because I'm not very knowledgeable in the applicable areas. So I'm inclined to not break what's working. Anyway, thanks for these detailed instructions. When the time comes that I need to redo my system I'll give this a try. Running KUbuntu 18.04.

I can't say about the Ragnarok proc, but I believe it has a high base chance, so it might be decent. However I think the Annihilation has a lower chance to proc. Couple that with the low proc rate for Caltrops and I'm guessing it won't fire off enough to be worthwhile. Definitely. I try to get some procs in the hold on my Controllers as soon as I can. Really helps out their usually low damage. Once I started doing this I regretted not doing it sooner. Too much time wasted whittling down enemies.

I remember back in the day people really hyping up the Blinding Powder/Contagious Confusion combo. Supposedly it was amazing, a poor-man's Seeds of Confusion. I'm not sure how far back that was, probably pre-shutdown. I think what prompted the creation of this thread was disappointment over the reality relative to the hype. I'm not going to take the time to track down all the old patch notes, but I've been wondering if the proc maybe got nerfed somewhere along the way. Maybe it did actually used to be good. Maybe I'm remembering glory days of old that will never come again. If so I'm disappointed that I took so long to finally level a /Nin toon to 50 to try it out and missed the chance to experience it in it's proper glory. On the up-side, people also used to talk up Caltrops as well, and although I've had a number of toons with it, I never really used it much. Now that I'm working it in more I'm seeing where the love comes from. People also talked up procced up Caltrops. It has a low proc rate, as all pseudo-pet AoEs do, but with enough procs in it, I get one now and then. Since I'm using the power anyway, it's nice to get random hits of damage every so often. It's a bit situational, but it's definitely growing on me. So it's nice to have discovered something to enjoy in /Nin after finding BP to be such a dud.

Probably Siphon Life/Life Drain. Something about the animation and sound, and the reaction from the mobs, it just feels so powerful. Even more so if the attack defeats the mob. Even more so if it's on a Corruptor and it scourges, and defeats the mob.

Supposedly 50% chance for mag 2.

I wonder if this is related to the issue I've seen with Assassin's Strikes on Stalkers, where the Stalker becomes unhidden a moment before the strike actually happens, giving the target time to see it and react, including activating an attack. I don't remember this happening back on live. Seems like maybe a timing issue. I wonder if it's possible that the new servers are just that much faster.