Mythical Creature

oh nice, if the celerity stealth proc grants another 30 feet of stealth I think that brings VEATs to a possibility of 135 feet radius (15 shy of hide) with the combo of mask presence, stealth, and stealth proc.

It seems that mask presence now stacks with stealth. What are the implications of this for VEATs? Before only stalkers could stack hide with stealth but saw minimal benefit because it was overkill. As far as I can tell (mids doesn't allow stacking yet) this should get us roughly 105 feet of stealth. In comparison, Hide on a stalker offers 150 feet of stealth, so not quite the same but much closer than anyone else (apart from illusions). I will admit the stealth is a bit of a confusing stat to me, will this be enough stealth to allow us to walk up to an enemy and critical strike them without being seen? It seems we are now in a middle zone between stealth and hide. Trying to determine if it is worth it to respec into stealth from something else like CJ. Thoughts?

Awesome, I will have to give the office mission an attempt this evening. It looks like it is setup for +0/8x, well see how +4 works for it. Thank you.

I am glad that someone brought this up because the trapdoor test no longer serves my purposes, and I would like to brainstorm a good alternative. What I really liked about trapdoor test is that it helped me balance my builds between survivability and damage. Heather Townsend might work as a test of sorts, though it seems much harder to repeat it like trapdoor where you can defeat him and then reset the mission without talking to him. Maybe a Trapdoor test could be recreated in AE with road tunnel map?

Experimentation, Adrenal Booster. It boosts recharge, damage, accuracy, and secondary effects for 60 seconds. More importantly, it is something that you inject with a needle and causes you to rage. If you look up superadine, it is something injected that makes the trolls rage. I use this on my troll themed character to roleplay with.

I like Electric Blast because of the shock mechanic, it feels like I have a way of critting, which makes me feel even more like a ranged scrapper. I think Super Reflex is my favorite secondary because it is fully defensive based and is mostly fire and forget apart from the absorb, which is the crowning jewel of the set and also sentinel only. In terms of epic pool, I find link minds kind of annoying to keep up with how long it takes to cast, but from a numbers point of view, I can see why it is ranked so highly. For me (perhaps because of my first two choices) I like electric epic pool because it comes with a T1 aoe that immobilizes (nice without the blaster secondary to fill this gap) and has a damage aura which helps me since I tend to be up close with my frist two choices.

This is what my Electric/SR sentinel build looks like. I can do Trapdoor on max difficulty in about 7 minutes.

I enjoy shield and could totally see it being a feasible combo with ice melee. I like to think about Ice Patch like a bonus, it either works or doesn't but usually it's minions it works on which is perfect because it keeps them close by so that aoes can knock em out.

I opted against it mostly due to it potentially interfering with the hidden mechanic. I likely could remove combat jumping for it as it isn't needed to achieve soft caps. Survivability hardly seems like an issue though, whenever a team lacks a brute/tank I am able to handle alpha strikes without problems by cycling icy bastion and shadow meld. I am considering making an ice tanker after experiencing being on teams like that and I would definitely grab chilling embrace on a tanker.

I think Defenders should be able to use their shields on themselves and a large part of why I don't play many of these buff sets is because I want to be tough myself. My Time Manipulation Defender caps their defenses without even trying.

Dark Purple seems minimally intrusive on my rad tanker.

I rarely ever see ice/ice stalker mentioned in this forum, but this is a great combo that has quickly become one of my favorite ones. I attached my current build that I am pretty happy with. I can solo trapdoor on most difficult settings with ease. I think a big reason this combo is so effective isn't very obvious, it's Ice Patch (from Ice Melee) causes the enemies to keep getting knocked down. This solves a huge problem for stalkers in high level content, keeping the enemies from running away. Other reasons this is a winning combo are Icy Bastion and Shadow Meld. Ice armor always made me hesitate because it only easily caps S/L/E/NE defense and Cold Resistance. This is an illusion because the t9 Icy Bastion will give you 75% resistance to all but psi with no crash and some juicy regeneration and a faster recharge than most t9. If you also get Shadow Meld, you can cycle between them for when things start hurting. I am up to vet level 25 and don't recall ever dying on the character. The existence of Icy Bastion/Shadow Meld makes it so capping survivability is a cake walk. This is probably one of the more proc'd up stalkers in my arsenal because of all the extra slots. I highly recommend this combo, especially if you are playing it with a good build.

This is not a problem on my ice/ice stalker with Speed of Sound.

I have a strange lag/mapserver warning issue whenever the afk flag pops up and it seems when I ask in game nobody else has this problem. I don't generally experience much lag at all in game otherwise, but any time the afk flag pops up, the entire world will freeze and it will take 10-20 seconds to snap back to real time when I try to move my character. Since it only seems to pop up when my afk flag shows up above my head I wonder if there isn't some setting I have that is triggering this lag? It is almost as if the game goes into low energy mode or something when the afk flag pops up. I wonder if it is possibly something I need to change on my computer settings, or if there is a way to disable this in the settings for the game? Does anyone else experience this issue, what can I do to make this stop happening? Thanks in advance.

Energy Aura is a great defensive set with some resistances layered in and some neat abilities that are very helpful. The heal is also an endurance discount. The aoe end drain boosts your defense by every enemy hit (and is auto hit). There is also a good amount of defense debuff resistance 70%+ if I am remembering correctly. I am sure I will probably rebuild this eventually, but I wanted to make a tough energy aura brute (image build shown) and I was able to get close to 50% defense for S/L/E/NE/F/C on top of decent resistances, without doing anything really extreme with the build. Energy Aura is more than overkill for a defensive based brute and it isn't even an option for tankers. Apart from Energy Aura I think any set that has higher than average values would be a good choice for a brute, things such as Shield Defense, Super Reflexes, or Electric Armor. Regeneration has it's bulkiest option in brutes but I would hardly consider it worth playing unless you are wanting a challenge. Bio Armor and Rad Armor are also great choices for brutes because they increase damage and recharge, both which help with the general direction of brutes.