Nemu

Everyone tends to ask "what's the best" when they start. But make sure you learn to crawl and walk before you run. People that post builds and suggestions typically do not look at their suggestions from your perspective as a new player, most just espouse their favorite build tweaked to optimal performance with expensive builds and incarnates. You don't have those resources when you start the game, keep that in mind. It pays to ask some smarter than average questions like: What can I expect leveling this up/when does it get fun? What are some elements I should prioritize/be mindful of? What kind of investment do I need to take this build to the level of performance as it is posted? Otherwise you might very well start that character and abandon it 10-20 levels later because no one told you what it's like to level that build. For example Invuln/Super Strength. Footstomp, the only AOE of the set, is available at level 30, so that means you have to wait 30 levels to a point where the build actually becomes fun, meanwhile you'll be riddled with poor damage and endurance issues. As a new player with no funds I struggle to see how you would stick with it that long before you jump ship into something else that is more fun from the get go.

"Board Transit" missions require you to go to a train station or a portal that allows to travel to other zones. For your case I'd imagine you are in atlas park, go to the train station (Marked with a T on your map) and the mission will be listed as the first destination at the top of the list.

Leadership,-resist stacking and being overall self sufficient are its strengths. Its weakness - lack of alpha strike capabilities and no resistance against debuffs. The lack of alpha strike capabilities really shows when facing enemies that pile on debuffs. You can't kill them en-masse fast enough, debuffs starts stacking - cascade failure - dead bane. For that reason I advocate that for all banes the most complimentary patron is leviathan for a proc-monster arctic breath, not black scorpion (shatter armor). Banes have enough ST, they don't need another ST mace attack even if it has more -res. Arctic Breath also has -res and comes with a host of other benefits when you look at what Banes need the most. Frag grenade + Venom + Arctic Breath is enough of an alpha to kill enough mobs to start triggering mob fear/run AI and that buys you time to recover/kill those problem targets still alive. People are still sleeping on arctic breath, time to wake up.

I don't recommend any melee AT to start. Those require you to engage in melee and melee can be pretty dangerous early game when you don't have your defenses/mitigation fleshed out (think being put on the spot to tank/take the alpha running troll missions, ruin mages, etc...) The survival for most melee ATs also very much depend on IOs. Most melee ATs also suffer from poor endurance management at early levels due to the need to balance offense and survival toggles. For a beginner with no cash flow it'll be a long road for you to get from where you are to those builds and performance levels that people post on the forums. Criteria for an easy beginner build: Good endurance management - no endurance = no fun Decent survival - dying all the time = no fun Playstyle that doesn't feel too restrictive - melee ATs force you to be in melee even if you are put into a situation where it's not advantageous to be in melee (ruin mages). Ranged attacks are more versatile, nothing preventing you from shooting stuff in the face as well as from afar. Even though I'd encourage everyone to start with a blaster to learn all the nuances of the game, it's definitely not the easy path. But if you are genuine about learning, go blaster, experience all the shortcomings/holes that you need to be mindful of. No other AT will give you as much insight into fundamental game mechanics such as proper threat assessment, positioning, aggro management, line of sight, movement, inspiration usage, mez awareness, etc.. as blasters. If you want a more relaxed, easier experience, I recommend sentinel. Good AT to pick up and just have some fun with a lot more room for error.

Listen to Pandas. They are berry berry wise.

Started a thread on the stalker forums after I realized burn no longer crits Got confirmation from all 2 other fire armor stalker players that burn did indeed crit in the past and I was not taking crazy pills. There wasn't anything in patch notes that highlighted removal of crits from burn from what I can see. So I'd like some confirmation that this is either an unintended "fix" or a proper fix to the power.

I tested scrapper irradiated ground which has similar properties to burn since both spawn a pet. IG also doesn't have the crit tag, and this is what I saw: [11:37] Burn Flames: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Burn for 8.37 points of Fire damage. [11:37] Irradiated Ground: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Irradiated Ground for 11.56 points of Fire damage. [11:37] Irradiated Ground: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Irradiated Ground for 11.56 points of Fire damage (CRITICAL). [11:37] Burn Flames: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Burn for 8.37 points of Fire damage. [11:37] Burn Flames: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Burn for 8.05 points of Fire damage. [11:37] Irradiated Ground: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Irradiated Ground for 11.12 points of Fire damage. [11:37] Burn Flames: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Burn for 8.05 points of Fire damage. [11:37] Irradiated Ground: You hit Rikti Pylon with your Irradiated Ground for 11.56 points of Fire damage. Not apples to apples but at least I now understand that IG can crit. On the contrary fiery aura doesn't crit but pool powers like boxing/kick can crit. I dug around COD a bit more and it does look like damage powers from scrapper/stalker secondaries don't have crit flags so the burn crits I saw a year ago may truly be unintended. Still, BOOOOO. That was the schtick that made fire armor fun on a stalker - controlled double build up burn crits.

Dusted off my staff/fire stalker and I noticed that burn no longer crits. Searched patch notes for any mention of this and couldn't find any changes specific to removing the ability to crit from burn. Hoping this is a bug and not a stealth "fix" related to the change to multiple patches, etc... Can any other fire armor stalkers out there (all 2 of you) chime in?

The pool selection helps you hit 45% defense to all when shadow meld is active. I was looking for a way to fit 5 lotg 7.5 in the build, and stealth is the easiest pool to rack up those single slot wonder powers. Since Stealth is more end heavy than your standard toggle, tossing a few more slots in there for the reactive defense unique and end/def made the most sense. As for my overall take on shield wall and reactive defense, I see a lot of people slot the single uniques in defense powers like combat jumping while they have good defense toggles like Weave 3-4 slotted with Defense IOs. And If you are going to dedicate a slot for the unique why not slot them in a way that you get some set bonuses from that set? My standard for weave is 1 lotg7.5 and 3 piece shield wall including the unique. It's still 4 slots, but now you get the 3 piece set bonus from shield wall. Also, since Weave is +def all, it's the perfect power to +5 boost the PVP IOs since they retain set bonuses no matter what level you exemp. As you said, you care more about damage, thus I didn't chase melee defense or S/L resist. For this build the burst defense you get with shadow meld is going to trump any incidental and small survival bonuses you get from slotting sets. Your focus is recharge, recharge, recharge, so you can use shadow meld, healing flames and recycle your attacks as much as possible. Diverting slots away from that goal just to get 6% S/L resist or 6% melee defense will dilute the build goal and weaken the build. That's all there is to that, maximizing slot efficiency and jam a little more set bonuses into those slots.

Inferna revision (Battle Axe - Fiery Aura).mbd Not sure what happened. Try the attached build instead.

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At a quick first glance I believe a KD proc in burn might actually produce knockback instead of knockdown due to how fast the dot ticks and how that builds up KB magnitude. if going all out on offense I’d look to focus on recharge, slow resist, procs. Survival is still important and you’ll have to rely on healing flames, shadow meld, and the lastly soft controls in you toolkit that is not 100% reliable. Procs in powers that recharge in 8 seconds or less is a luxury that you splurge on only after your other build goals are met, and those powers would be the first to consider slotting for set bonuses vs procs.

I paired my dark/atomic with leviathan because I love spending ~3 seconds on Positronic Fist and another ~3 on KO Blow, and another 3 on Atom Smasher, and another 3 on Blackstar. Now that I think about it how could I omit Flurry? Another 3 seconds. You don't need hasten and you can still have a smooth attack chain. I'm going to rename him 3 second man.

That's ok, I'll be your friend again for tree fiddy.

You can't slot energize with end mod sets even if you wanted to. I did qualify my comment with "toggle sustains" 😁 Energize gets 6 piece prev med for my builds. The set bonuses and the absorb proc are too good to pass up.

Imagine a new player who's being indoctrinated to think that blasters are super squishy, lacking survival, and that melee = death. Then they see a few powers in the blaster toolkit that have a heal component like life drain or one of the blaster sustains. What would be your first thought on how they would instinctively slot those powers? There was a time when I would have made the same slotting choices. Over time l dug in deeper and learned to play blasters and got better. I find my blaster builds use very few of those, but they are undeniably budget friendly options that can easily get you to the range defense softcap. Those builds that cram a lot of these sets in usually have very little recharge and slow resistance though, the latter I feel is another hole that should to be plugged for many ATs in high end expensive builds.

This is the only accepted secondary and epic pairing for Assault Rifle. If you deviate, the RAMBO squad will get you.

If you are going to venture down this path and learn the tricks of the trade and apply melee attacks with success then you might want to take a look at this Others have discussed the benefits of combat tp and burst of speed to get you in and out of combat. I'll tell you why it's not my top choice for combat mobility. Those powers still need to be queued before they execute and as such mezzes will shut you down if they land while the powers are in queue. And due to the nature of powers and how they activate you can't simultaneously fire off eagles claw and teleport away. This will be problematic for powers with long cast times because during animation you are a sitting duck, not just from mezzez, but from all melee retaliation. Jousting via combat jumping or Super speed or both gives you the benefit of momentum that can not be suppressed by mez, so even if you get mezzed during eagles claw animation your momentum will carry you to safety. Among the choices you listed I'd go energy manip. Power boost also boost dark's -to hit and life drain's heal. The melee attacks are all single target so there's nothing super spectacular that compels you to go into melee all the time to use them. The only problem is that it's very clicky, Boost range is optional, it helps with tentacles but you'll find yourself tagging the next 2 groups if you are not careful with torrent. I'd put energize on auto and click hasten and power boost manually. If you want something more gimmicky sonic manipulation is proctastic since every attack can hold. The sustain doesn't aggro and I find that I get slept more than I get stunned on my high defense builds in regular game play and the sustain protects against that status effect. The -res toggle is a trap though, a late pick for me because early levels it's an endurance sink and you'll do enough damage without it. You get used to dealing with mezzes after a while and combining inspirations should be second nature, but if you are super paranoid about it then follow enjoy the journey suggestion with /energy and acrobatics etc... that'll give you pretty thorough coverage against two of the more common hard controls. One more thing. I see this in a lot of builds. I'd recommend not slotting any toggle sustain for heal, go all in on end mod, I prefer a full set of preemptive strike for the beefy range defense bonus. If you look at the numbers slotting those for heals doesn't give you enough return on investment, you are still going to die quickly whether you have 20 hp/sec regen or 40. For that matter please don't slot life drain with a heal set, that's the kind of stuff that people that don't know how to play blasters would do.

Taking and using your melee toolkit doesn’t mean staying in melee. That is a false equivalency that I see a lot of hover blasters use to justify their aversion to melee. Even micro movements of a few feet can keep NPCs in pursuit or range mode. Staying at range doesn’t need to be as dramatic as hovering 50 feet above in the air. Having said that the combo is tedious. It requires a lot of maneuvering to use the cones and the melee stuff and hover is pretty awful for combat mobility. If you want to most of this setup you’ll need to joust a lot. One benefit of hover blasting with dark blast is that at an angle you can psuedo normalize the range of torrent so it doesn’t tag the next group. But you can also do that by jumping up and firing it at the apex of the jump. Still, if you don’t want to move a lot or have old man reflexes then the armored ATs are more conducive to that playstyle. Based on what I read, it seems that survival trumps offensive numbers to you. Go sentinel, enjoy having better survival, mez protection and using your nuke every encounter.

If being the last man standing is your true goal play a tank. Shield tanks are much easier to build towards certain thresholds such as softcap defense which means you can dedicate more resources to shore up resists and +HP. Tanker ATOs are also vastly superior to Brute ATOs. Finally, with the tanker AoE and Damage changes they are not too far behind brutes in terms of damage output in normal scenarios either. If you lament the lack of a self heal then try Shield/Dark melee tanks. That's a lot closer to what you want based on what you've written. Most shield builds don't rely on Agility or having teammates and leaning into phalanx fighting to get to softcap. In terms of regular game play achieving positional softcap should be priority number 1 for shield builds. If you exemp regularly, power pick progression matters. Optimized IO builds should have their survival fairly matured by level 40 and it's not uncommon to see some builds getting close to softcap by level 30. That means you don't want to wait until level 49 to get that last 2.5% defense from combat jumping, If you plan to exemp, take it way earlier. Same rationale goes for the panacea proc, that goes in health which you get at level 2, not physical perfection which you get at level 47. Laser beam eyes has a recharge of 6 seconds. procs will rarely fire in it. Don't waste the heal proc in it if you have extra slots. In short proc chances are affected by recharge time, the shorter the recharge the less the chance. Proc chances are also lower for AoE powers but the proc will check against each target (but fires only once). Typically powers with a recharge of 12 seconds or more are better candidates for procs, and those powers typically are not enhanced for recharge either, because enhancing them for recharge would negatively impact proc chance.

There are a lot of MM players that just summoned the henchmen and let them do whatever without ever issuing them commands when MMs were first introduced. I still see those players today. The other day I met one that summoned the henchmen and immediately put on Personal Force Field and then ran those henchmen around aggroing stuff. Works ok for lower levels but he's going to be in a for a rude awakening when he gets to higher levels and more dangerous mobs.

Yep, Sandolphin's binds are overly complicated imo, it's a technical showcase of what you can do with binds but in no way practical. Of those 6 binds you listed, I don't even use petcomall aggressive and petcomall passive (If I really need them passive then most likely I'm stealthing and I'd dismiss them instead). I find focusing fire to be the most efficient so instead of petcomall aggressive I just string petcomall attack target to one of my MM personal attacks. I also string petcomall defensive follow to sprint.

Footstomp does KD unless facing lower level mobs or mobs weak against KB like clockwork. You typically do not need to pay the kb tax in footstomp unless you constantly fight mobs lower level than you. Hand clap on the other hand does require that you pay the tax if you decide to take the power which a lot of people don't because iT dOeSn'T dO dAmAgE. resist vs regen really depends how how many slots you are sinking into those bonuses and the opportunity cost of slotting powers that way and how that synergizes with the rest of your build. In a vacuum both you can take either and it won't make a significant difference.

YEAH!

Have you considered playing a blaster combination that caters much better to your pure range approach? Ice/TA, Beam/TA, AR/TA, Archery/TA are all combinations where you never have to get close. Also on melee opponents - How much risk they present depends on your play style. If you joust your attacks melee retaliation is the least threatening thing you need to worry about. It'll always be the ranged reaction/retaliation, especially the ones that mez/debuff, that will get you. If you stand still and expect to trade blows with said opponent like a melee AT then stock up on awakens. Below is a demonstration that debunks the "melee fallacy" that I see in some blaster builds that aims to build up melee defense because they want to use melee attacks in their arsenal. When you master movement melee retaliation is the LEAST of your concerns.