ZemX

DoTs don't directly spoil the crit. That comes from the Hidden status conferred by Placate. A DoT that is still ticking from a previous attack doesn't count as another attack, so it doesn't unhide you. DoTs from pets don't ever unhide you. That's why Shield Charge and Lighting Rod don't unhide you. They are implemented as pets. What the DoTs or pets ticking damage DO do though is notify enemies. So they will spoil the placate effect and cause the mobs to attack you again, which if you haven't gotten your Hide crit yet means it will be spoiled if they hit you first. Shouldn't be a problem unless you are trying for a Hidden AS after Placate... and you really shouldn't be doing that.

I think for the most part damage resistances aren't a big deal in FW/NW but Lethal still gets the shaft more often than anything else. Still, it's 10-15% resistance usually. A few odd cases like the Resistance Heavy Barrel with 30% S/L will be a pain. Living Spells tend to resist the damage type they deal, so the animated weapons do resist Lethal but the elemental ones resist Fire, Cold, Energy, or Negative, etc. Spirits do resist Lethal a bit usually, presumably for being incorporeal and not having blood to spill. As for debuffs, this really depends on difficulty setting. I would say a defense-based armor is only really necessary if you intend to solo large groups. Then the stacking debuffs can be an issue. Might also be a problem if you want to solo +3/+4 or something because the Purple Patch increases the debuff magnitude, requiring less stacking to floor you. Resist/Regen based armors that don't have +toHit or toHit debuff resistance can be a problem at higher diff settings. I want to get into an SR Tanker next but.... struggling to do so myself. They're good... but after playing Rad Armor, also kind of boring looking. It's a set-it-and-forget-it set, which is a plus for many people. To me it's just a bit less interesting. Shield Maybe. I had a lot of fun with an Ice/Shield Stalker. Very tanky for a Stalker and decent AoE.

edit: Nevermind me. Thinking of a different "Force of Nature"

Ah ha! That explains it. Don't see it advertised very often and generally don't run it much myself. Even though that map with all the ice is kind of fun.

I feel stupid for asking but... what the heck is "FF"?

Assuming it's an existing mob and not a new one. Should probably be discussing anything like that on beta forum.

I posted this in your other thread in General, but here it is again: The only way I see someone with capped res being floored by debuffs is if they are unresistable. If anyone in the new Aeon TF, which I have not done yet myself, is using Tar Patch, that's your culprit right there. Tar Patch for NPCs is currently bugged (I am presuming) in that it deals -30% unresistable res debuff. Take that up to -40ish% for a +4 mob. Put a couple of them in a spawn and watch the Granite Tanker get melted. Other than that, some NPCs that use Enervating Field like Positron, Antimatter, and Bile, have the unresistable version of it.

Right, that's why I think the bigger deal with Staff on an SR tanker is the 13.3% +res(All) you get from using Sky Splitter with 3 stacks of Perfection of Body. Lasts 15s and is easy to keep going.

Sky Splitter followed by Innocuous Strikes. A.K.A "Stab them while they are down" combo.

Short of actually being hit with an unresistable resistance debuff, a Tanker/Brute with capped resistance can shrug off a whole LOT of debuffing. Scroll down this thread for some interesting examples.

I don't know. I still think building resist on top of a Defense armor is better than the other way around. I've got a SR/Staffer started to test that theory eventually and yeah, will be sporting Tactics and FA, especially with Staff's lack of a Build Up. But MoT plus Sky Splitter +res bonus + IO res should end up in pretty respectable resistance territory without having to lose too much health to get there. SR/MA would be better defense, but less resistance. I'm banking that SR with its uncrackable defense doesn't need that much. Still have the Rad/Staffer who has thumbed her nose at defense in favor of every other thing I could build in, so I'll see how that handles Hard Mode eventually.

Majority of the time, PuGs are not challenging themselves. I would say most teams I see advertised are either speed TFs (most often WSTs) run at +0 or they are L54 teams (radios or iTrials) where you can expect enough horsepower to face-roll and it'd be rare for things to really go bad. Outside of specific challenges like L44 ITFs, AE801, or the upcoming Hard Mode... the only thing that sometimes results in failed PuGs for me is Posi 1. Low enough level that it can easily go bad even on +2 with those CoT debuffs and that relentless serial ambush at the city hall doors if sprung before anyone is ready for it. Night Ward is a good one too. Easy to take a full team in there, set it a little too high, and get obliterated by stacked debuffs. I remember a PuG where we were repeatedly being wiped by the Living Spells at +4/x8. We're also having a bit of fun in the Tanker forum with the First Ward mission to the Shepherd compound to collect Anna. Her Prophets have the dreaded unresistible Tar Patch and everyone else packs toHit and defense debuffs in quantity. Go in there with a full team (or solo) at level 29 and +4/x8 if you dare. Or any Talons of Vengeance mission on +4/x8. Can be nasty in numbers like that.

Doesn't matter who you hit with Placate. The 50% crit chance on the follow-up AoE comes from the Hide status Placate confers to the Stalker, not the Placate effect that lands on targets. Placate being an AoE will only reduce the incoming attacks and lessen the chance your Hide is spoiled. But there's not much chance of that happening anyway with a shortened Placate animation and a quick follow-up attack that isn't Assassin Strike. Soft-capped defense helps too. The reason you might not want to use an AoE with Placate is if you're on a full team. There you already have a 31% chance to randomly crit outside of Hide. With Placate and an AoE, you only get 50% chance. Coupled with the longish recharge, that's not that much of an improvement for the cost of a power slot. Better to use it with a ST follow-up attack to get a 100% crit. Still don't think I'll bite. I can't think of a power in my build I'd drop where Placate would bring more to the table. Maybe Hard Mode will change my mind.

Not weird at all. You don't have trouble finding a solo challenge these days. It's teaming at level 50 that's become a joke, mostly. So yeah, I am totally looking forward to being able to play at 50 on a team and not have it be just a rolling explosion that obliterates all in its path. Fun to watch the first time. Boring as all hell afterwards.

There are probably exceptions, but generally speaking, powers that affect enemies root you for the duration of the animation. Powers that affect only yourself and/or your allies usually don't unless it's part of the theme of the power (e.g. Hibernate). Powers that summon pets, including stationary pets like Spirit Trees or Triage beacons that only buff/heal allies, still root you for their animation. So... look for buff/heal sets among support powersets and self-defense/passive armor sets among melee types. e.g. Super Reflexes has nothing that roots you. But sets that have accurate heals/endurance drains like Radiation, Bio, and Energy Armors (to name a few) have a power or two that can root you. Toggle heavy armor sets will only root you if the toggle can affect enemies and then only when you activate the toggle... not when it is later affecting enemies while enabled. So Dark Armor for example, despite having a lot of powers that affect enemies, only really roots you during combat when you use the AoE heal since you're probably leaving the other toggles running. It's a bit different with attack sets. While you are running an attack chain, you're rooted, whether that chain is composed of many light/fast attacks or fewer slow/heavy attacks. The difference, I suppose, is that the fast chain gives you more opportunities to break off, change your mind. A good example is found in the DFB trial. It can suck if you just started a long animation power at the same time you notice a green bubble forming beneath you while fighting the Hydra heads. You're rooted for maybe three seconds doing Sands of Mu instead of 1 second doing a tier 1 fast attack, say. So if that's what you mean, go with fast attack sets for the most chances to move if you need to move. Sets like claws, katana, savage melee, I don't know the blast sets as well. Archery probably? There's a mix of long/short animations in most I think. Snipes and Nukes being long rooting powers. etc.

Coincidence?!

Half rhetorical. It does feel a bit to me like it's not much different than x4 if I am splitting spawns, aside from the total number of mobs you have to get through to complete it. But I was also curious what others thought of it. So thanks for that. It is completely up to the people who run challenges to agree on a set of rules if there's to be any competition on it. This one seemed more to be like an exploratory "Can you do it?" and nobody was hiding HOW they were doing it. So no foul, in my book. If this ever progressed to the point where people were competing, like Trapdoor or Pylons, there'd probably be clear times added to the mix and that would sort who is having to pull and split vs. who can hop in and handle the entire spawn at once.

The Yin and Yang of PuGs for me is that I put up with the bad ones in order to get what I really want out of them: Something different every time. I rarely run Incarnate level content. Super boring to me. Mid-level TFs and mission teams, preferably at as high a difficulty level as the team can handle. These end up NOT being teams where whole spawns vaporize in a couple seconds. These are teams where it actually matters that team members are doing something reasonably approaching tactics. It's not super difficult, but it's not face-rolling either.

Fair point. Maybe for something with an already lengthy animation or a big AoE.

While my Rad/Staff could do it at +1/x8, it wasn't going to happen at +4/x8. Not without picking each spawn apart with careful pulls, at which point... am I really doing x8? The problem wasn't Tar Patch since I can just run away from it. It was the toHit debuffs. No Focused Accuracy exemplared to 29. I had Tactics and a Kismet IO only and that wasn't enough. My Last Hit Chance was floored around 11%. And that's the ballgame.

Unless I'm doing something wrong, no it won't. Placate + Stealth AS is going to be around 4s ArcanaTime and will deal scale 7 damage. Quick AS, even without the crit, is scale 2.76 damage in 1.188s cast time. And it gets better from there with crit chances. Placate may see some use in strictly solo Stalker builds, but it's no use on a team or in improving the Stalker's damage output. The entire idea of Placate hails from the original faulty assumption in the creation of the AT that it would be some sort of hit-and-run assassin type. Yet even way back then you were doing better to stay and scrap after your initial AS. Nowadays when you can build a Stalker to be tremendously sturdy, I usually try to fit Provoke into the build somewhere as getting things to attack me ends up being a bigger problem than stopping them FROM attacking me.

Oh wow... do a search on Enervating Field over at CoD. Positron, Antimatter, and Bile all have unresistible 30% res debuff. The kicker? That includes the Positron Signature Summon! 😈

Ah ha! Figured out why I missed this the first time. I had turned off "Show PvP Data" in the top margin of City of Data. This unresitable -res effect only affects players. All player accessible versions of Tar Patch were changed at some point to something that redirects to "Dark Miasma.Tar" which does not contain the unresistible effect. All NPC versions are still the old Pets.TarPatch which has the unresistible (against players) res debuff. So just Prophets, Desdemona, Decay Murk Eidolons, and AE. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=vahzilok_decay_murk_eidolon_boss Interesting to note the Mission Maker version is unresistible. I've never done any of the AE801s but now I wonder if this features in any of them.

Okay, completed normal +1/x8. I am ordinarily built well enough for level 29 but that Tar Patch nearly sent me to the hospital a few times. Mainly, don't want to be surrounded and def floored WHEN it hits. Because then you have a couple seconds to run and hide around a corner. Well.. I did anyway. Safest to pull and get into a bit of a retreating fight until the Prophets drop their patches. Then I can stand and fight. Staff did okay with it's two AoEs at this level. I don't even have Ground Zero and Radiation Therapy procced up.. though I plan to soon probably. That would have made this slightly easier.

Confirmed. The dang Tar Patch is bugged. No wonder these guys are so mean! This is my Rad/Staff who even at 50 is not built for capped resistances because I left room for MoT and Sky Splitter's +res bonus to cap me, which they easily do. Except here I don't have access to Sky Splitter... oops. There's +13% res down the tubes. Then I get hit by unresisted Tar Patch. I got very close to dying on the first couple fights. But yeah... it's just a matter of moving out of the tar patch quickly enough and I can take each spawn. Not done yet but if I'm careful, the normal +1/x8 on Rad/Staff should be no big deal. By the way... here's the old bug report. I wonder if it got fixed for Player cast Tar Patch but not all the NPCs that can do it: