Nemu

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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 Following the build goals of recharge, slow resist and procs this is what I came up with. Perma-hasten with a FF proc trigger, global recharge upped to 100+%, healing flames recharge in 11 seconds compared to 16, shadow meld in 24 seconds compared to 36. Both of these are cornerstones of your survival. The build doesn't have any answers to blind, so you are going to have to rely on yellows or base buff craft/teammates with tactics to overcome that effect. And if you care about blind a lot then swap out the stealth pool for leadership - Maneuvers and tactics and lose out on 7.5 global recharge which in the grand scheme of things is not a huge loss. If I were to fine tune I'd start with rearranging power pick progression. if exemping is important then I would fit super speed in earlier, before level 30, and pick up Shadow meld asap at level 38. Since you don't have a lot of defenses getting the first drop on your opponents is preferable and having a travel power is a QoL improvement that some folks can't live without.

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.

Holy necro! This build is no longer super cool because of the BA rework. If you want to be super duper cool you should really make a staff/regen brute with whirlwind. A few comments: Kismet in retsu means you won't get the benefit until you have the power at 49. Put it in a toggle that you can get early game. Full Gaussian set goes into build up not tactics. The build up proc fires much more reliably in build up and the set also benefits build up recharge. Tactics is a one slot wonder and you can splurge a cyto in it at best. Kyoyo, despite being a click, can solve your end problems. This means you don't need to go the conventional way of slotting health/stamina with uniques. It comes down to personal comfort of relying on a click for endurance every 20-30 seconds vs the standard miracle/numina/passive slotting, but I prefer to squeeze a few more set bonuses into a fully slotted kyoyo. Edge case where kyoyo is superior to passive endurance gain - Hamidon. The endurance gain by kyoyo is not suppressed by mito blasts (nor the heal from kuji sha). No slow resist. Ninjitsu is almost like fire armor or regen. The clicks are integral to your survival. If you have the budget I highly recommend getting more slow resist via winter IOs. That also opens up opportunity to re-tune the build and add more procs. Speaking of procs, this build doesn't really need hasten unless you are trying to get maximum uptime on Retsu and alternate that and other godmodes/incarnates for a specialized end game build. A good density of FF procs can be an alternative to just cramming hasten into every single build and it's one less click to manage since you'll most likely be putting Kuji rin on auto. If you really want to be goofy you can make any battle axe build a hover blaster build like I did with kinetic melee here . I know @Yomo Kimyata has a soft spot for BA blasting. An updated build for i27 p5 doesn't look all that different from the original post. A few powers get shuffled around but their properties and how they can be slotted remains the same. Ninja Firefighter VI i27 p5 - Hero Scrapper Build plan made with Mids' Reborn v3.6.6 rev. 3 ────────────────────────────── Primary powerset: Battle AxeSecondary powerset: NinjitsuPool powerset (#1): LeapingPool powerset (#2): FightingPool powerset (#3): TeleportationPool powerset (#4): FlightEpic powerset: Body Mastery ────────────────────────────── Powers taken: Level 1: Beheader A: Superior Scrapper's Strike: Accuracy/Damage7: Superior Scrapper's Strike: Damage/Recharge9: Superior Scrapper's Strike: Accuracy/Damage/Recharge9: Superior Scrapper's Strike: Damage/Endurance/Recharge11: Superior Scrapper's Strike: Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge11: Superior Scrapper's Strike: Recharge/Critical Hit Bonus Level 1: Ninja Reflexes A: Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Global Recharge Speed3: Reactive Defenses: Defense3: Reactive Defenses: Defense/Endurance47: Reactive Defenses: Scaling Resist Damage Level 2: Chop A: Superior Blistering Cold: Accuracy/Damage/Endurance23: Superior Blistering Cold: Damage/Endurance33: Touch of Death: Accuracy/Damage34: Gladiator's Strike: Chance for Smashing Damage34: Touch of Death: Chance of Damage(Negative)34: Achilles' Heel: Chance for Res Debuff Level 4: Danger Sense A: Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Global Recharge Speed5: Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Endurance5: Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Endurance/Recharge7: Luck of the Gambler: Defense Level 6: Shinobi-Iri A: Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Global Recharge Speed Level 8: Pendulum A: Force Feedback: Chance for +Recharge13: Superior Critical Strikes: Accuracy/Damage15: Superior Critical Strikes: Damage/Endurance/RechargeTime15: Superior Critical Strikes: Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/RechargeTime17: Superior Critical Strikes: Accuracy/Damage/RechargeTime17: Fury of the Gladiator: Chance for Res Debuff Level 10: Combat Jumping A: Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Global Recharge Speed13: Kismet: Accuracy +6% Level 12: Kuji-In Rin A: Gladiator's Armor: TP Protection +3% Def (All) Level 14: Kick (Empty) Level 16: Seishinteki Kyoyo A: Synapse's Shock: EndMod36: Synapse's Shock: Damage/Rechage36: Synapse's Shock: EndMod/Recharge36: Synapse's Shock: Damage/Recharge/Accuracy37: Synapse's Shock: EndMod/Increased Run Speed Level 18: Swoop A: Force Feedback: Chance for +Recharge19: Superior Blistering Cold: Accuracy/Damage19: Superior Blistering Cold: Damage/Endurance/Accuracy/RechargeTime21: Touch of Death: Chance of Damage(Negative)21: Hecatomb: Chance of Damage(Negative)23: Superior Critical Strikes: RechargeTime/+50% Crit Proc Level 20: Kuji-In Sha A: Panacea: Heal/Endurance43: Panacea: Endurance/Recharge43: Panacea: Heal/Recharge43: Panacea: Heal/Endurance/Recharge45: Panacea: Heal Level 22: Axe Cyclone A: Force Feedback: Chance for +Recharge40: Armageddon: Damage40: Armageddon: Damage/Recharge/Accuracy42: Armageddon: Recharge/Accuracy42: Armageddon: Damage/Endurance42: Armageddon: Chance for Fire Damage Level 24: Build Up A: Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control: To Hit Buff25: Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control: To Hit Buff/Recharge25: Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control: To Hit Buff/Recharge/Endurance27: Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control: Recharge/Endurance27: Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control: To Hit Buff/Endurance33: Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control: Chance for Build Up Level 26: Cleave A: Force Feedback: Chance for +Recharge37: Superior Avalanche: Accuracy/Damage37: Superior Avalanche: Accuracy/Damage/Endurance39: Explosive Strike: Chance for Smashing Damage39: Obliteration: Chance for Smashing Damage40: Eradication: Chance for Energy Damage Level 28: Tough A: Unbreakable Guard: Resistance29: Unbreakable Guard: Resistance/Endurance29: Unbreakable Guard: Resistance/Endurance/RechargeTime33: Unbreakable Guard: +Max HP Level 30: Weave A: Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Global Recharge Speed31: Shield Wall: Defense/Endurance31: Shield Wall: Defense31: Shield Wall: +Res (Teleportation), +5% Res (All) Level 32: Bo Ryaku A: Steadfast Protection: Resistance/+Def 3%39: Steadfast Protection: Knockback Protection Level 35: Focused Accuracy A: Invention: Endurance Reduction Level 38: Laser Beam Eyes A: Nucleolus Exposure Level 41: Blinding Powder A: Coercive Persuasion : Confused45: Coercive Persuasion : Confused/Recharge45: Coercive Persuasion : Confused/Recharge/Accuracy46: Coercive Persuasion : Recharge/Accuracy46: Coercive Persuasion : Confused/Endurance46: Coercive Persuasion : Contagious Confusion Level 44: Physical Perfection A: Power Transfer: Chance to Heal Self Level 47: Energy Torrent A: Superior Frozen Blast: Accuracy/DamageA: Superior Frozen Blast: Accuracy/Damage/Endurance48: Positron's Blast: Chance of Damage(Energy)49: Bombardment: Chance for Fire Damage49: Annihilation: Chance for Res Debuff50: Force Feedback: Chance for +Recharge Level 49: Combat Teleport A: Winter's Gift: Slow Resistance (20%) ────────────────────────────── Inherents: Level 1: Critical Hit Level 1: Brawl (Empty) Level 1: Sprint (Empty) Level 2: Rest (Empty) Level 1: Swift (Empty) Level 1: Hurdle (Empty) Level 1: Health A: Panacea: +Hit Points/Endurance Level 1: Stamina A: Performance Shifter: Chance for +End Ninja Firefighter VI i27 p5 - Scrapper (Battle Axe).mxd

Use inspirations and lead with your alpha strike/nuke. You don't need fancy IOs (though they help in other areas like recharge). Combining inspirations into useful ones during downtime should be second nature. Area mitigation also helps you "lead." My fire/elec has been diving headfirst into mobs since the teens when it picked up thunderstrike. You don't need build recommendations, you need to embrace the blaster playstyle.

Unfortunately it's not very reliable but I stuck with theme. I have never just let rain of fire kill stuff by itself so I could have re-allocated the procs to other powers. I would have preferred fire breath because it's much more spammable and a bit more proc friendly, but that introduces play style adjustments if one wants to really take advantage of the cone in their otherwise PBAoE attack rotation. yeah I tend to stick the blaster defiance set in the T1/T2 so I can use them when mezzed and hope for a proc.

I'd rather slot this into aim or build up for more consistent BU proc and better recharge on said powers. The BU proc won't trigger consistently in tactics although your chances do go up if you are on a team. Still, I'd like to have control over when the thing procs so I can take full advantage of it. Tactics gets an end reducer or best case scenario a cyto-hami O. 30% ranged/AoE defense works as a good baseline for pure range blasters. But it can also be a good baseline for blasters that don't completely ignore their secondary and go into melee from time to time when the opportunity presents itself. However I find the investment in AoE defense for most combos really takes away from the ability to make a build with respectable offensive output by taking away the opportunity to build for recharge/other offensive bonuses or slotting. Which is why powers that slow are really good for building up AoE defense because ice mistral's set is amazing and slept on. My Ice/TA takes full advantage of that set and the build has real synergy across the board with how each of the set bonuses in that set work together towards my game plan (recharge, slow resist, procs, and enough acc bonuses to skimp on acc slotting in powers so I can fit those procs in.)

Kinda defeats the purpose of leaning in on jousting when you can sleep the whole group and pick stuff off. Dark/Earth The most difficult things to jump joust are PBAoEs that require you to be on the ground. If you can jump joust tremors you can joust anything. Dark blast with its cones force you to be mobile and force you out of your comfort zone. But on the other hand abyssal gaze + seismic can help hold bosses.