ZemX

Thanks for the correction. I forgot to look up the minimum for Gauss. Also, not suggesting adding slots. Keep it at the default 1 slot with either recharge or end redux until 18. Then slot the Gauss proc. Stalkers with Assassin's Mark ATO proc don't really need to devote any additional slots to Build Up unless they plan to slot more of the Gauss set for the bonuses. Assassin's Mark will usually recharge Build Up before its natural recharge time elapses, even if you slot recharge reduction in Build Up.

Issue 28: The Coming FOG!

Great minds.... I was last night considering the same sort of thing. I'm getting a little burned out on the Ice/Rad Stalker. It's okay. It's just slow at level 35. Decent leveling when I duoed with Flea, but nothing like a full team. If I want to push to 50 with her, I'll probably start joining teams. But I got to thinking about a couple other 50s Stalkers I have on Everlasting right now. They could use a vacation. I made the original Critical Missy an Ice/Shield Stalker and it's been great on IOs but now I'm curious just how much that holds up on SOs. The thing you immediately notice making a SO build is that you're looking at the actual intended balance. Shield Defense is so highly regarded mostly because of the extras it offers while giving nothing up on defense thanks to IO set bonuses still allowing you to reach the soft-cap. Best I have managed after creating a secondary SO build and even adding Maneuvers on top of the already present Weave is about 31ish % to all positions. Not shabby, but a far cry from the soft-cap. So I added back the T9 power, One with the Shield. Something I never had much use for on IOs. Similarly, I have a Staff/Ninjitsu Stalker who might be even more interesting. Slightly better defense and a big heal. Some psi resist too. Plus I can switch builds and team for other stuff. See how the Excelsior scene is. Maybe I'll like it. I might still level the Ice/Rad but under a different alias. We'll see.

I've been on Everlasting since March when I got into Homecoming for the first time. I've only been on Excelsior the past few days with Flea's SO challenge, so grain of salt, but my impression is that there's more redside activity on Excelsior. It's honestly pretty dead redside on Everlasting despite what the server stats say about the ratio of players. You almost never see contact or paper teams and even not so often any SFs outside of the WST.

I should admit, for the record, that Karma was clearly listening when I laughed at @Bionic_Flea for not being able to kill my SO Stalker with his egregious room-pulling techniques on earlier missions. But Karma was also patient and waited for it to be a mission *I* owned and chose to run at +0/x6 in First Ward so that getting us both killed several times over with Talon ambushes would be entirely MY fault. 🤪 Lesson learned. ... Maybe. 😈

If it's not in your plan already, at level 8 Build Up one-slotted with the Gauss proc and at level 10 Assassin's Mark ATO proc in any ST attack. Stalker's Guile ATO proc in Assassin Strike. Then enjoy all the extra Build Ups you get to fire whenever Assassin's Mark procs, which can happen on any attack you use: primary, secondary, pool... anything. And the Gauss proc should be 90% chance every time you fire Build Up to give you an extra boost for the first few seconds. Enough for your next attack to be extra-boosted. If there's a downside to DM/Invuln it's that you don't have a lot of AoE. ANY attack can proc Assassin's Mark, so the more targets you can hit, the better. You might want to plan at least one more AoE from a pool or epic. Darkness Mastery isn't among the most popular epics... but it does have THREE very sizeable cone attacks that can hit up to 10 targets each. Something to consider. Anything that hits enemies, even powers that don't do damage, can proc Assassin's Mark and give you another Build Up.

Don't monitor stealth radius. I'm not sure what that wiki quote is on about but the "meter" (which determines whether you get a critical hit from Hide) and the stealth radius effect of Hide are both Suppressed by the same conditions: AttackedOther, Damaged, and MissionClickObject. Both for 8s so the Hidden status will appear exactly when the suppression ends on both stealth and meter. You can rely on "Hidden" to tell you "My stealth radius is up again". Incidentally, the translucent visual effect is also governed by the same mechanics, though it is less noticeable than the big green "Hidden" text. The wiki is probably just saying what others here have been saying. You can still be seen by certain high percep enemies like Rikti Drones and Rularuu Eyeballs. You can still be attacked if an enemy is already aggro to you or becomes so because of killing a linked ally or because they are a player-targeted ambush sent after you. That's it. If you're being attacked now, it's not because something saw through Hide. As to Placate, it's not entirely useless but... don't take it to obtain another critical hit. Whatever damage you gain from that has already been lost in the animation time of Placate. Take it only to use it as a defensive control. It will make an enemy stop attacking you. That can be useful if you get in over your head and need some relief. Maybe you aggroed a second nearby group and you can placate its LT/Boss while you mop up a little more. Still, it's uses are limited and power slots are precious in the lower levels. Almost anything else you chose from your primary, secondary, or power pools, would be better at level 12 than Placate. Unless you just like the "Jedi Mind Trick" aesthetic of it THAT much. Oddly enough, I have lately found the opposite power Presence:Provoke, more useful on my Stalkers. One issue you'll face is stuff running from you. Stalkers have even lower threat level than Scrappers and no aggro or taunt auras (in most cases, I think) to help keep things near you while you deliver them to the beyond. Provoke helps there. But it's also mid-build or later material, I usually find. And you may find you don't mind chasing your food a little and that's one more power slot for something more useful.

Okay, so upgrading from TE Acc 21 to 26 cost 31,104 inf. Which is a little odd. That's what a normal level 26 Acc SO would probably cost. A level 25 Acc SO is 29,952. So maybe they just price like normal SOs to the upgrade button once past level 20?

Anyone else having a go at this? My Ice/Rad Stalker is 20 and Flea's Tank is at least 22 last I saw him. I do miss Kismet:Acc. It's been so long, I'd forgotten it was usual to do two Acc SOs in an attack.

No, I think you pretty much said it. Whether for profit or not, the game still lives or dies by how many people are interested in playing it. Sure, you could have a little personal server for just you and a few friends, but what fun is that compared to this? Either way, your motive is to give the players enough of what they want so they'll stay.

Interesting. I tested this just now with a level 20 TE Acc. I had just slotted all level 20 SOs at level 17. I am now level 18., so when I hit Upgrade it tells me the price of upgrading to level 21 enhancements. I changed out one of the SO Acc with a TE Acc, same level 20. Punching "Upgrade" gave me 32 enhancements that could be upgraded. Exactly how many I had including the TE. Used an unslotted on just the TE and it came down to 31 enhancements. The difference in cost of the upgrade (level 20 to level 21) was 25344 inf. Which is exactly what the wiki said an old level 21 TE acc should cost. So I guess it does auto upgrade TEs. I'll leave it in there and see if it will keep offering to upgrade it as I earn a few more levels. You would normally be able to 100% chance upgrade a Level 20 TE using another level 20 TE. If it still allows this for Level 22 then it's offering an upgrade you can't normally do by hand. Loophole? 😁 Edit: Got to 20 and it was still telling me it would upgrade TEs. I'll check on the cost again with another unslotter next time I'm in and again when I'm at 22. But it does look like it's just charging a single TE's worth of inf per enhancement to upgrade. That's astronomically less than it would cost to do the upgrade by hand, of course.

I'm not sure I do. It looked to me like @Luminara's point was that the more complex, more involved, and more challenging content and enemies of Goldside simply aren't a draw for most players. You then appear, to me at least, to be providing a second example of that same point. Redside is newer and generally better content than original blueside, with a few more challenging enemies. It's again less played. It's not that there aren't people who value that kind of content. I'm certainly one. It's that there are few of us compared to the whole population. What you see in global chat channels more than anything is people running repeatable easy content like fire farms in AE, DFBs in Atlas for newbies, and PI radios for easy enemies that can be wholesale stomped repeatedly for easy XP and leveling. Mothership raids. "Kill Most" ITFs. We all see that stuff 10x more than anybody saying "Who wants to join a mission team in Night Ward!?" I'm not saying don't try it. I think the devs have the right "add, don't change" attitude here and if that's what you're saying too, I don't have a problem with it. More options are better than fewer. I just don't see it as solving some game-wide problem. It will make people like me happy. The folks sitting inside the door of a fire farm won't even notice.

Enemies like this already exist and most people actively avoid them if they can. I once asked why it was so much more common for people to run radio teams than tips teams, given the tip missions seemed so much more interesting to me. The answer I got? "It's not as easy to control what enemies you get." And that tracks my experience. I see plenty of people advertising for "Council PI Radio" teams. About nobody saying, "Come join my Carnie radio team! Find out which of your teammates has no psi protection!" As far as I can tell, the problem with your whole proposition here is that this sort of challenge is not what people are seeking. Pre-50, people seem to be looking for one thing only: Getting to 50. The only place new and interesting challenge content will be welcomed by all is at the Incarnate level, I'm afraid.

I guess that depends on how the "Upgrade" button works exactly. Does it even work on TEs or do you have to manually combine them still? If it does work, does it ignore the fact that you can't buy higher than level 20 TEs or does it stop working at level 21? If you do need to manually combine to go over level 21 then each level above that adds another 5% chance of failing since you have only level 20 purchased TEs to combine with the ones you have slotted. But I suppose you can just consider that the cost of buying each new level of TEs. And you're paying that every level on every slot. Not every five. At 40 you have zero chance to upgrade further. Well... unless you unslot all those 40s and repeat the whole upgrade process. Then you can combine your full set of slotted 40s with your unslotted 40s to produce 41s with a 100% chance of succcess. You can imagine the cost from there. 🤪

Isn't that whole section what was added with the new Vahz story arcs? What I learned there is that I need to update my Vidiot Map. 🤪

Okay, so you can go as far as 23 before they all disappear and they only cover acc, dmg, endrdx, and recharge? As challenges go, that certainly would be one. You'll have no def/res/health enhancement in mitigation powers for a melee AT. I'd suppose it might work best (or least bad?) on a Blaster then. Archery or Gun primaries. Dev, Martial, Ninja, or Tac Arrow secondary? You'd still have some powers that can't be enhanced meaningfully but it wouldn't be as bad as unslotted armor toggles on a Scrapper, I'd think.

And they call @Snarky a villain?!

I don't think they meant harder as in difficulty. Harder to maintain interest is how I read it. But it's also an odd thread. I don't delete a level 4 character and then wonder why I've done it. If it really was repeated defeats wearing you down, you'd know that. If the oppressive gloom was getting you down, you'd know that. Or the villainous story arcs annoying your heroic sensibilities. If it's simply not being engaged by level 4 on a new character in Mercy, I can see that. But I'd say the same about Atlas's original contact missions too if I had to judge them by the first four levels. The only starter area that has grabbed me from level 1 all the way to 20 was Praetoria. It obviously took that long for the Live devs to really figure out how to stretch this mission framework to its limits. It's hard going back to the old content. I gravitate to the newer additions blue and redside as well because of this.

That would make it easier to track people's levels when they're not on their SO characters, yeah. I created one for myself last night, since I have no other alts on Excelsior, called "SOLucky" and put in a few basic items. As for common IOs, I will probably slot a mix of 25s and 30s when I get in that range. I'm not so nostalgic that I want to maintain and upgrade SOs all the way to 50 just to experience the up/down and occasional red-out while on a mission. Though these days I guess it's as easy as visiting the enhancement window with cash to fix that.

I don't know if it will end up being a regular time thing. I'm central U.S. and work during the day. Might be just a "soloing unless people are on at the same time" thing for me.

Judging by the quality and reputation of the people on your ignore list... thanks?

I started an Ice/Rad Stalker, "Critical Missy" on Excelsior (variant of my Ice/Shield Stalker on Everlasting). Teamed up with Flea for a short bit at 7-9. I used 2xp to catch up a bit and gave myself a 1mil starter bonus. I am interested in the SO-only build and not really any other challenge stuff. I'll probably at least sell off converters for cash when I need it.

Yeah, but a generic IO build isn't what people are talking about when they say "balanced around SOs" anyway. It's really about IO set bonuses. This is what gives you stuff like soft-capped Blasters. I think as long as you're not allowing set IOs, you're probably exploring the question of "balanced around SOs" fairly well. I've just been reviewing powersets and it's really interesting thinking about this from the standpoint of NOT having set bonuses. Some powers become a lot more valuable. I'm seriously considering sets that have recovery or regen since you can't just plop in the usual procs to solve endurance problems. On the other hand, you can't slot recharge set bonuses and LotGs all over the place either, so we'll all be using a bit less endurance there too. In any case, I'm not particularly interested in a leveling challenge or classic challenge. If this is just limited to SOs, I'm good. I just want to know now because I'd probably like to team with other people doing it and it's only fair everyone on the team is following the same rules. I'd seriously consider @Rathulfr's suggestion about common IOs too. Up to level 35, you're not exceeding what SOs can do. You're just removing the tedium of upgrading them. PvE, it's the same. You're only enhancing what the AT and its powersets can do. You're not giving them stuff they don't normally get, which is what set IOs and procs can do.

I may roll something up, but I'll probably use P2W. Maybe not 2xp or the temp buffs but definitely the prestige attacks and most definitely the travel powers. That just relieves some tedium. It doesn't affect, in any major way, how the content is balanced around SOs, I think. As for what...hmmm. I know what I DID play back in the SO-days and they were: Ice/Rad Controller, Rad/Rad Corruptor, Nin/Nin Stalker, and AR/Dark Corruptor. At least those were the ones I remember playing most. The Stalker worked surprisingly well and that's back when Stalkers were terrible. But its main advantage was the +def in Divine Avalanche allowing for soft-capped melee defense from level 18 on, a decent self heal for what got around the other defenses, caltrops and (eventually) Blinding Powder for further mitigation, But... I'd be sorely tempted to re-create my Staff/Nin or Ice/Rad stalkers for this. The Ice/Rad in particular I'm curious about. Or maybe Ice/Bio. IOs right now make defense builds king for Stalkers and Scrappers but Resist/Regen hybrids might measure up more evenly if the defense sets can't as easily soft-cap. I'll have to roll that around in Mid's. Can't promise I'll be around for a regular team up, but if I'm around, I'd be up for an SO-only team. I'll post here when I have something started. Hammi-Os? Titan-Os? Hydra-Os? SHOEs? 🤪

Well, sure... if you're not allowing yourself even to sell converters on the market. For this SO-only thing being talked about here, I wouldn't even consider it if it was wrapped up in some type of classic challenge too. If the point it to see how the game is balanced with SOs, I think you can answer that without other restrictions on HOW you get the SOs.