ZemX

Riiight... I certainly don't recall a little kerfuffle over numbers called "Enhancement Diversification" back in "the good old days". No sir! It was a golden age of free love and zero concern over "real numbers" or AT balance! I remember there being a lot of Empathy among the playerbase. And a lot of people looking for Empathy in game. It was touching.

You have reached your final form?! 😮 Best use of a Stalker, in my opinion. I think most people are so focused on AoE in this game, they overlook the fact that bosses have something like 6x the hit points of minions and better resistance usually. AoEs kill minions instantly, LTs next, and bosses very much later. Having someone focus on bosses neatly complements any AoE the team is doing and simply ends the fight faster. Unless the team is just ridiculously overpowered compared to the content anyway.

To be clear, what I am criticizing is the idea that Stalkers were ever designed to hit with AS from Hide and then run away to Hide again. The first part yes. The second part no. This is very obviously true just based on the facts that (1) They were given five or six other attacks besides AS along with an entire armor secondary devoted to survival in melee, and (2) Using those other attacks AFTER hitting from Hide with AS nets vastly greater damage. And by that I mean, AS from Hide followed by waiting to re-Hide might be comparable to six-slotting Brawl and just putting it on auto while you have a sandwich. If you find hit and run "fun", sure. You do you. But no, it's not the design. Some people DO find it fun to six-slot Brawl and only use pool powers as a challenge. Lots of weird things can be fun but if we're waxing poetic and recalling the old days... These days never existed. If you played like this, you were a concept player cosplaying a sneaky ninja assassin or something (or you were PvPing 😈), not someone who was using the AT as it was designed to be used. That was hit-and-scrap then and it's hit-and-scrap now. It just works better than before thanks to much needed buffs in Issue 22.

Mother doesn't want you to leave.

I hear there was some loose dev talk back in the day that said something like this, but it never made sense to me. Tanking is not just surviving damage. It's directing it towards oneself. Anybody can do it, sometimes with the help of pool powers like Provoke, but if we're talking which red AT got the most tanking tools built into it, there is really no question that is Brutes. They got built in autohit area taunt, higher hit points, taunt auras, (then) tanker-exclusive armor sets, tanker res caps, and punch-voke. They got all but a sign hung around their necks that read "A mad scientist made this thing in a lab by starting with a tanker and a honey badger." They are only like Scrappers in that they are more offensive than Tankers. But everything redside was meant to be more offensive than blueside. That was the overall design philosophy. Stalkers didn't actually end up being more damaging than Scrappers originally (a clear mistake in my opinion), but they were definitely less defensive, less sturdy. They were clearly more tilted towards the Blaster's damage-only role than the Scrapper's off-tanking ability but at the same time much more survivable than a Blaster. There was no one AT that was the redside Blaster. No red AT was dedicated to nothing but damage. MMs were unlike most anything else in the game. They were one-man teams. Player teammates were just pets they could control even less well than their own.

I am mostly talking about teaming since that is what Snarky asked. Soloing, Stalkers definitely had some different options with built in Hide and Placate to choose only certain fights. That sort of thing. But any idea they should hit and run on teams was just weird to me at the time. I remember debating that with people who insisted this was the design of the AT despite it really not performing well at all. I'm not even talking about super optimized min/maxing here when I say "mathematics". It just didn't make even a little sense. It was that bad.

Same experience. Rarely out on the land area but it does occasionally happen. If I'm on a team I'll sometimes sail out over land spamming a find macro. Usually if she's at the big ball, someone has ATT ready.

They were always just stealthy scrappers. A lot of people didn't get this back in the day and held onto the flawed notion they should hit and run to return to Hide. That never worked out mathematically even on day 1 of CoV. I play Stalkers now pretty much the same way I played them from the beginning. They are just better at it now. The one difference you mention is probably the only one since originally you'd be more interested in using AS from Hide as an opened because you couldn't use it any other time except after Placate. And funnily enough, it never really worked out as a damage improvement to use Placate+AS in a fight vs. just scrapping ST attacks. It makes even less sense today, even with improvements to Placate, since Stalkers have much better in-combat ST dps with quick AS than before. Placate is just a big zero damage hole in any attack chain that is never paid back in the end. Use it as a control power... not a damage enhancer.

I know. The trolls know that too and exploit it. Anyone wondering why the reception in this thread has been a little frosty should do some searching. There is history here.

The OP in this thread didn't ask a single question. I think a lot of people missed that.

Well you know what they say, "Garbage in. Garbage out." I notice you haven't said what, specifically, you don't understand about the incarnate system, the online tutorials, or even any of the "supportive" replies you've gotten in this thread. Curious!

In addition to @Sir Myshkin's points on Taunt, I would add that it's also autohit. Together with the generous taunt duration, it means it needs neither accuracy nor taunt enhancement. It doesn't need any added slots at all. Some people put the psi damage proc from Perfect Zinger in there, but I prefer just a single +5 recharge IO so it's ready more often. I use it to grab stray aggro while I am "in the pocket" with the bulk of a spawn. Repulsing Torrent sounds like a great opener though on a new spawn. The cone isn't terrifically wide, but it's super long. At 67.5 degrees arc on a Tanker, it is 68 feet across out at 51 foot range. That's enough to catch all or most of a loosely packed x8 spawn, so pulling up and letting that one rip from 30 feet away or so is a great way to start. On my Rad Armor tankers, I like to use Ground Zero w/ Avalanche Knockdown proc for this if it's up or Rad Therapy if it isn't. Rad Therapy only hits 10 though so it's not as good. A good-sized PBAoE is nice too, but it looks like KM's Burst is just 12ft radius on a Tanker. So Repulsing Torrent is a better way to knock down and taunt up to 16 targets in a new spawn. It just requires you to pull up and fire it from a bit of a range. I gather Fly is taken for concept reasons? You'll have to be hovering close to the ground for your KB protection to be effective. But also... human tornado without Whirlwind? Duuuude. 🤪 Spinning is winning! Neat ideas tho. If I was doing this myself, I might consider working teleport into this instead of Fly. Combat Teleport in particular might be very useful with a bind to BAMF you backwards 30 feet to set up a perfect Repulsing Torrent, then BAMF back into the pack.

It's not that bad. There are plenty of heavy hitters in other sets either as slow or less than a second faster than this. Most of the time, if you're doing it right, you're in Momentum and the attacks flow a lot faster than the worst case you mentioned. The grain of salt I'd caution people with on TW is that very Momentum mechanic. Rather than being an added benefit, it feels more like a penalty for not using the right attacks at the right time. Lag or just getting distracted by a chaotic fight can put you off your rhythm and result in a slow attack instead of a fast one. But even so... it's not all the time. It can feel pretty spry more often than not. But aesthetically, it also seems to lack the "crunch" that sets like Axe, Mace, Super Strength, and many others have. This is strictly a feeling thing. Some of the attacks feel like they have no impact. Like they are just sweeping this big damn weapon through empty air or something. May be a bother to some.

The tohit roll for procs is on the proc page, not the page for the power hosting the proc (in this case, Caltrops). e.g. This one you can slot in Caltrops shows the toHit roll in the effects on the lower right. @ForceHit, I think, is the StreakBreaker. Otherwise it has to roll to hit, even when placed in an autohit power. Traps.Caltrops is a 15ft radius AoE. As a pseudo-pet, it uses 10 seconds as the "recharge time" for calculating procs. That puts it at around a 21.7% chance for a 3.5ppm proc. So every ten seconds, I'd expect one of those 5 procs to go off on each target, on average. In other words, 5 damage procs would amount to 71.7 damage per 10 seconds or just 7.17dps per target. Caltrops by itself only does 2.78 lethal per second unenhanced, so that's certainly a big improvement but for that many slots? Probably not worth it. I don't have Mids in front of me at the moment but I recall there being some Math settings that affect how it calculates the damage it is showing you. You want it to use the proc chance to add an average damage value. If it's showing you max. damage counting as if all procs fired every time? Yeah, that would be through the roof. But you'll never see that in game either.

Right. Of course. That's absolutely what it's all about. Right guys?

Powers were balanced on recharge time so the fast refreshing ones did indeed do less damage than the long ones, but that's it. Devs didn't understand the impact of animation times until players showed it to them by analyzing attack chains. Hence you had slow animating sets putting out less damage than fast animating ones once players put together complete attack chains. Fixing it after that would have been a big pass over all attacks in the game to factor in animation time. Could have been done. Never was. Same sort of thing could have been done with highly resisted sets like lethal. Just give em an x% boost to compensate for it being the most resisted damage in the game.

Right there with you man. Anyone else might have wondered if punching "bow that shoots guns" into Google would come up empty... but I live in Texas. I knew.

Maybe the two biggest mistakes the original Live devs made in the design of this game were not balancing the game around (1) animation times and (2) damage types. Animation times were literally decided by how long the artists' animations for each attack happened to take and this had a direct effect on performance. Similarly, damage types and damage resistance were determined by aesthetics, not with any concern for game balance. There was no plan to ensure each damage type was evenly balanced against enemy resistances. Stuff that was flammable just got no fire resistance. Things without blood got high lethal resistance. Etc. I don't know who decided late game enemies should be more "strong willed" or whatever the reason is for their higher psi resist, but I assume it was something like that. It wasn't any conscious attempt to ensure that the damage type was being fairly treated. Nobody got that consideration.

Yeah, I would never claim to be immune to perception bias. I am mostly playing Tankers these days so I am hyper-aware of other tankers mostly. I am most often the only tanker on the team. Sometimes there's a second. Rarely more than that. It's far more common for there to be two or more blasters or two/three controllers. I probably don't take as much notice of Scrappers and Brutes unless one of them runs off ahead of the team to die gloriously.

Ah, but you see... these are the forums and on the forums nobody fights a single enemy! Everybody is soloing +4x8 proc-monkey Incarnate builds and we must balance around this! I do get a kick out of it. I can come to the forums and read how nobody should be playing anything but tankers and then I can go actually play the game and hear teammates tell me, "Oh wow, a tanker! I hardly ever see you guys on teams! Doesn't seem to be much point anymore!"

The Tanker AoE radius and Cone Arc bonuses apply. But as far as I can tell, APP/PPP powers already have the higher target caps for any AT that uses them (i.e. 10 for cones, 16 for AoEs) so these are no different on Tankers than anyone else. Weird thing I just noticed... Shiver has a cone arc of 135 degrees. Normally, cones this wide are explicitly disallowed from the Tanker arc bonus, but I don't see any such exception in City of Data for Arctic->Shiver. 202 degree "cone"? I wonder if that actually works or if the game limits it at 180.

Interesting. Betting it's the melee defense then. Recluse only has one -def attack, his Arm Lash. Depending on how often he uses it you might only have -10 or -15% melee defense on you at any given time. And he has a fair number of melee attacks. I generally ignore defense on my Rads but now I wonder how much better my alternate Samurai Houston (Rad/TW) or my Rad/Staffer would do. They can both generate a lot of melee defense with defensive attacks in the rotation. Something to think about...

Respect. He seemed able to do more damage against my Rad/Axe later in the fight than I saw you taking when you were keeping him busy solo. Not sure what I do that makes AVs so mad, but they do like my Rad tankers even in a crowd of other tankers. 🤪 Maybe it's the -regen in Rad Therapy? We definitely make it "interesting" when we didn't take out the red tower. I remember someone said something like "Bah! Red Tower? We're tankers!" Three or four Witty deaths later, we were victorious!

Ah, now I get it. Thought you were talking about inspirations. Hence my confusion.