ZemX

I'm not convinced this thread isn't a troll job. Robot players? This can't be serious.

I think there are several empty buildings you can walk into in KW. Ran into the same thing ToTing last couple nights.

On my Rad/Staffer I used the other stances a bit while leveling but I hardly ever am out of Form of Body these days now that my build is complete. Form of Body's Sky Splitter bonus gives +13.3% res(ALL) to a Tanker for 15s making the "damage" stance for Staff, ironically, the most defensive. And it's easy to keep that rolling if you want. I put MoT in Eye of the Storm and use it as a builder instead of a finisher. So MoT procs two or three times reliably for 12 to 18% res(All). That's a whopping 25.3 to 31.3% +res between them. On my Rad/Staffer this caps everything but Cold resist and makes it that much harder for anything to eat my Absorb shield before it refreshes. Gauntleted Fist went in Guarded Spin, so it too has a decent chance to add a bit of absorb to what I already have in Particle Shielding. Staff's AoEs were generously sized to begin with so the Tanker inherent just makes them huge (for melee anyway). Eye of the Storm is as big as Foot Stomp, a little faster to recharge, and available at 16 instead of 38 which I love because I exemplar a ton. Easily gets and keeps the attention of an entire spawn just by itself. And if used as the finisher it deals -10% res, so while I leave my Staff Mastery set on Form of Body all the time, I kind of switch between offensive and defensive "mode" just by deciding which one to use as the finisher. Sky Splitter if I want to be tougher. Eye of the Storm if I want to deal more damage. I think what keeps a lot of people from trying Staff is it just doesn't "feel" like it's doing a lot of damage. It's not a slow set that deals big orange numbers. It's fast and tends to deal it's damage as short duration DoTs. It's decent damage. Maybe middle of the pack. But it feels like less.

Parry is melee/lethal defense so Invuln and EA, being typed, will only stack lethal defense. Personally, I think melee defense is more often protective on a Stalker than Lethal, but none of your options listed are positional defense sets unless you want to give Ninjitsu or Shield Defense another look. Shield does have some nice dark themed shields in the costume creator and Ninjitsu can be colored to look very dark/mystical just as EA can be made to look like dark energy. Dark Armor has only very minor defense for Parry to build on and, more importantly, doesn't give any Defense Debuff Resistance. You need either soft-cap defense and strong DDR -or- you need to be well over the soft-cap to be protected from debuffs. Dark Armor doesn't get you either and, as primarily a resistance set, isn't as strong on a Stalker as it is on Brutes/Tankers. Invuln I've not had any experience with on a Stalker but I know it lost the scaling defense/toHit power, Invincibility, and was given a flat defense/toHit buff in Reinforced. This is due to the age of the set. It hails from the "good" old days of Stalkers being thought of as hit-and-run assassins rather than melee combatants who might be surrounded by enemies. Other ATs with Invuln get a nice boost to defense and toHit when surrounded. Kind of makes Stalker Invuln a whole lot less interesting to me, but someone who has experience with it might tell me what I'm missing out on. EA is probably your strongest option of those listed. It doesn't need any synergy from Parry to achieve solid defense. Energy Drain is very thematic for a dark theme because it's draining endurance from foes and giving it to you. Solid choice you can't really go wrong with.

Then give it to someone else. I up front acknowledged that it depends on the team whether doing this shit slows anybody down, so if it's not slowing you down then I was never ranting, angrily or otherwise... at you. You're the one who had to pretend like it's never a significant problem. You're just wrong. It's not never a problem. It's just never a problem in the teams you choose to run with because you're 4x overkilling spawns anyway and so it doesn't matter you're only hitting one fourth of the targets with an AoE. How nice for you. For the record, I NEVER bitch at people in game about this. And this is why. It's never going to be well received. And I agree with you there. it just wastes more time if you try. But I might politely excuse myself after the mission if it's killing the fun factor for me. That's fair. It's a game. People should play it to have fun. Not to please anyone else.

Yeah, it's an i7-8700K. I don't do CPU upgrades very often because they historically haven't made that much a difference in games until they're at least 5 years old. The CPU before this one was a Sandy Bridge i5. It's the GPUs I update more frequently... or at least I used to before they became impossible to buy. This 1080ti might be the oldest GPU I've ever had in a PC. 🤪

And my point is that this simply isn't always true. Maybe for you it is, but not on the teams I play on. AoE Immobs cover a 30 foot radius area and very few AoEs damage powers are that big. Most of the common ones used to wipe a spawn are 10-15ft radius. Or to put it another way, the AoE immob is covering four to nine times the area of common AoEs. The difference between hitting 16 targets with a Fireball and just 4-5 is huge. The only time it doesn't matter is when you're on a team so overpowered compared to the content it doesn't matter that they are doing a third or a fourth of their AoE damage. And I don't play on teams like that if I can help it. The irony here is that it might just make careless AoE immob usage that much more detrimental even to teams that would otherwise steamroll content. For one, it could much more likely kill the person doing it, but even if it doesn't it sounds like you'll be wanting that team AoE efficiency all the more. We'll see, I suppose.

What you want to look for in LFG is a mission team or contact mission team. Or even a radio team that ISN'T in Peregrine Island. These tend to be less over-powered steamrollers of exploding suns and more just normal teams moving through a map. You still aren't going to see a lot of pulling or herding. You might see someone jump ahead to gather up a loose spawn into a tighter formation but that's about it. Mid-level teams like this also often run at higher difficulty settings than a speed TF does because the point is earning XP, not getting to the end quickly for a merit reward. Radio teams will also usually be easier to follow because they will all be in the same zone so you aren't dealing with trying to follow a team full of people that already have every temp teleport power at their disposal. But again, even contact mission teams are a little more relaxed because there's not as much pressure to get through things quickly as on a speed TF. Acronyms... nothing to do here but learn em. People aren't changing. Ask in /help channel what they mean. Nine people will reply. /help is pretty good about that.

Remind me why you play if that's really every team for you. I mean, think about it. You're telling me tactics don't matter. No matter how badly someone is playing it has "negligible" effect on team performance. So why play then? Sounds like a completely pointless game. I wouldn't be talking about slowing teams down if I hardly ever saw it happen. But I also only see it happen because I choose to spend most of my time on mid-level random PuGs that are playing for XP, not speeding TFs at +0 for merits or doing kill-most ITFs on No-Challenge settings with a bunch of IOd Incarnates. Often I am one of the only heavily IOd characters on one of these teams and nobody is Incarnate because we're below 45. We'll have a few people who are side-kicked and the mission will be on as high a setting as doesn't wipe the team. So no, we are not just face-rolling every spawn. And yes, it DOES matter when people are doing certain things that prevent the team from doing its best damage. Doesn't mean it always matters on every team. What I said was... it depends on the team.

Paraphrasing your argument here a bit. 🤪 (<-- wonky smiley face makes it okay).

Simply put: What you are doing on a team is either speeding that team up or slowing it down. There's no way to theory craft which that is here on the forums because people will always trot out the team composition that makes them right and everyone else wrong. But there ARE situations where knockbackers slow the team down. There are situations where AoE immobilizers slow the team down. And yes, there are teams where some tanker insisting on rounding up a spawn will be slower. But which, if any of these, is true depends on what kind of team you have. About the only thing that keeps me playing this game is joining random pick up teams and then figuring out how each new team works. If every team I joined was the same level 50 incarnate steamroller it seems everyone on the forums always claims is the case? I'd have quit already. I cannot imagine anything more boring than that. I spend more time exemplared below 45 precisely to avoid this kind of team most of the time. Can't wait to see if what the devs have planned for "Hard Mode" can help.

I used to have a ninja blade / ninjitsu stalker on Live. The KoA costume was perfect at Halloween. I had the sword, Hide, and of course... caltrops!

Out of curiosity, I ran Health Check on my gaming PC last night and this is what it ran into. I don't recall consciously turning that off so maybe it was just the default on my motherboard. I suppose if I enable that it will tell me the next problem if it sees one? I bought this mobo and the CPU three years ago along with memory and NVMe flash drive, so if it's already considered "too old" for Windows 11, I'm just going to sit back and laugh at Microsoft. What are they aiming this at? 5% market share?

Sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Stoppable" button because of that crash. 🤪 For future reference, City of Data is a great resource for things like this: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.invulnerability.unstoppable&at=tanker Look in the effects list for those that say "after 180s". That's the crash. In this case it can be a little confusing. There's a Global Chance thing in there that involves using Unrelenting together with powers that crash. But the other stuff mainly says you lose all endurance and nearly all health. The health part is odd to look at in CoD because "-100% max health" sounds like it ought to kill you but obviously doesn't. But the main thing is what you already saw when you tried it. That crash makes you super vulnerable if you are still fighting. The idea is to use it to carry you through the end of the fight. But that's also the problem with it. Few fights last that long. Maybe if you're trying to solo an AV yourself. Otherwise, using it means you survive the fight you're in but then have to watch that icon like a hawk for the next several fights until it starts blinking to tell you "You'd better not be in the middle of a fight when this stops blinking". Or else just be ready to pound a few inspirations, I guess. I agree, it's probably more use earlier or just as a mule later.

I've seen it too. I don't imagine the GMs are joyriding our toons when we're not looking so, more likely, there's just some server process that "touches" their records and causes the date to be updated occasionally.

Don't use it from range. "/powexec_location self Shield Charge" Now it's a PBAoE! Might even be better that way since I'm not sure AAO has a chance to tick and increase your damage if you teleport attack into the middle of a group of enemies. It only ticks once per second. It's a bit less fun looking that way but if it's making you sick...

Soon.

Not because of the i7 tho. Must be something else on your laptop hardware that's not supported by Windows 11 drivers.

Rogue Isle Villains! Yes, they are a "group". You can look it up. It's like an NPC VG in game. Any unique super villain would fit right in. C'mon! Misadventure? Sardonic? Bad Penny? These guys are great! And they've each got their own style. They're not just some bunch of expendable minions all wearing the same outfits!

Arrrrrr you really? But seriously, I did not know about this so thanks @Snarky! Nobody said there would be reeeeding!

TRICK! *another nine pages of this thread pour out the door and attack you!*

Shield Defense Stalkers get a scaling damage buff in Against All Odds. It's really more of an old-think vs. new-think thing. The original power sets reflect the old idea that Stalkers were nothing more than melee assassins who should strike from the shadows and then go back to the shadows to do it again. It was a bad idea and it made Stalkers the least played standard AT in the whole game. Issue 22 made Stalkers much more akin to stealthy scrappers than the one-trick ponies they were originally designed to be. It was a change the acknowledged how the game was being played and made Stalkers useful playing it that way. Newer powersets and ones like Shield Defense that were proliferated to the AT much later have things the original design assumed would never apply to Stalkers... for example, being surrounded by enemies. Hence OG Stalker sets lost AoEs and didn't get things intended for the sturdier melee sets that were expected to scrap or tank toe-to-toe with multiple foes. Ice Melee is a good example of a set that was proliferated late enough to benefit from the newer thinking about Stalkers. Instead of losing an AoE, it trades the terribly bad Greater Ice Sword for the terribly good Assassin Strike. It's honestly a better set on Stalkers than it is on Scrappers because of that.

Well, YOU don't become a villain. These "personal story" things got sprinkled around at some point to flesh out a story not involving the player character. I'm not really a fan of them either because you get put in someone else's skin, they have crap for powers, typically get to jog around the mission at non-sprint speed, etc. I'd rather watch a cutscene, tbh.

Halloween costumes? I think so!

One of my first villains was a rad/rad corruptor. I've also done a Ninja Blade / Ninjitsu Stalker. Haven't been tempted to do it yet on a Tanker, mostly because after doing a Rad/Staff I wanted a defense-based Tanker. And I'd sooner go Shield/Ice than Ice/Ice. Can pick the ice shield customization and feel like I'm a full ice-themed character without having to take Ice Armor.