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As much fun as I've been having with Ice Melee on a Stalker, it's been nagging me that I don't see Assassin's Strike's lovely orange ring light up as often as I do on my other Stalkers. I never bothered to check why until I happened to be looking at the power in City of Data and noticed it had only a 50% chance to add a stack of Focus. Quickly checking in game, this seems to be the case. It does not always stack Focus. I looked around other sets and can't find a rationale for this. Is it a bug? Can it be fixed easily? The chance to stack Focus seems to be related to recharge speed of a power and other 16 sec base recharge attacks, even ones with secondary control effects like Freezing Touch have a 100% chance to stack Focus.

Make a Dark/Rad corruptor and color the secondary black. Then don't tell anyone! "Gather for Accelerate... uh... Shadows... yeah!" But seriously, is it really going to be worse than the Blaster? I thought the whole reason that sustains got added was because activated powers tend to be more of a drain overall than toggles and blasters have a whole lot of activated powers in their secondaries. Not so much corruptors. Yeah, you've got two toggles that are about 0.5end/s apiece I think. So at least one endrdx there in each, I'd say. But the rest of the secondary isn't composed of relatively fast recharging activated powers. The heal is 8 seconds and if you're spamming that, your team has other issues. Yeah, it does a little debuffing too, but so do all your attacks. If no one needs a heal, I'd leave it at the ready. I have an AR/Dark and can't say it seemed like any more an issue than most. I did what I usually do and put at least the Panacea and Perf Shifter procs in Health and Stamina respectively. That and don't neglect putting an endrdx SO in attacks after acc and dmg slotting are done (until you are into IO sets) and you should be fine.

More than occasionally. It's really ONLY the ambushes that prevent you from starting off with a hidden Assassin Strike and even those you can usually pop at least one of the ambushers with a hidden crit normal attack by waiting to ambush THEM at a corner. In a lot of cases, even in Praetoria, the built in stealth and controlled crits are still very much a benefit. It rewards careful play. Don't just blitz to the end because you might be spawning location-triggered ambushes all along the way. If you know you're rescuing a hostage (or kidnapping one) be sure to clear a path first. It's good training for a Stalker. On the escort point, I don't think Praetoria has any greater amount of these than anywhere else. The main difference is the ambushes. Whoever designed most of the missions in Praetoria LOVES ambushes and thinks that if one ambush is fun, ten ambushes must be TEN TIMES as fun! Wheee! I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I'm having coming up with an answer to this is that I've only ever soloed Praetorian content 1-20. Running it on a team with larger spawns and probably more bosses? Could be a whole lot nastier. But if it's just more and harder of the stuff you face solo, then I'd say the -toHit debuffs will be nice. There's a fair amount of -def debuffing in gun-toting enemies. There's also -regen in a lot of clockwork attacks so healing is nice too. Control is handy for ambushes. Even my Stalker's Ice Patch makes a huge difference there. Tar Patch will be nice, though in those levels it will have fairly lengthy recharge if the team is moving fast. Okay here's one thing I don't think has been mentioned yet but I am always noticing it, even solo in Praetoria. The spawn placements are either careless... or sadistic. They are often VERY close together such that even solo I sometimes have trouble not getting a double spawn on me especially in underground tunnel rooms. I have to assume that's even worse with team-sized spawns so... think about stuff that handles that. Are you going to round up nearby spawns with a tanker/brute or will you want to cloak the team in Shadow Fall or use controls to put unwanted adds on standby until you're ready for them?

Conclusion from what? This poll that doesn't ask people what their intent is?

They did anyway... with Brutes, who both outdamaged and laughably out-survived Stalkers originally. There wasn't really a 1:1 analogue between the sides because all the ATs redside were hybrids of several blue counterparts and MMs were unique. The redside game back then reminds me of The Incredibles quote, "When everyone is super, no one will be!" except with damage. All the redside ATs were intended to be more offensive and so damage, as a role, became less "super". And yet Stalkers were, if anyone was back then, the "glass cannon" of redside sort of the way Blasters were relative to blueside ATs. Sturdier than Blasters, to be sure, but needing to be in the thick of melee where it was more dangerous. We were almost the floor-chewing meme that Blasters were. But it's a whole new game today and I say, screw the original design and whatever it was meant to be. Stalkers are in a good enough place and maybe could just use some powerset love whether that is revamping old ones to restore the lost AoE (probably won't happen because some LIKE their old-ass single-target powersets) or proliferating the outlier powersets. It is hardly any less appropriate for a Stalker to have an axe, mace, or Titan Weapon than it is to have a shield or a broadsword.

Grab a build from Croax's big build thread in this forum and start playing with it in Mid's to suit your tastes, would be my advice. It's easier to modify his slotting than to come up with in on your own. As to fun... obviously that's subjective so take this with a grain of salt: So far I'm not having fun with Rad Melee. Maybe it just gets better much later but up to 30 so far and it's just... slow. It's difficult to see Contamination doing much except when I get a heal from Rad Siphon or happen to notice some tiny dots added on to a group of enemies. But aside from that, maybe I just don't like slower, bigger-hitting sets. As fast as Staff Fighting is, the one attack in it that constantly annoys me is Sky Splitter, which I figure is very appropriately names because on a team I often end up hitting only air with it as my target ends up dead before I'm finished animating the second strike. And my experience with Rad melee is similar on teams. "Powering up this long animating attack and..... oh... someone killed it already. Next? Ah ha! I'l... nope. That's dead already too." *sigh* Not a problem for you solo, obviously. My tankiest pair of stalkers are twins: Ice/Rad and Ice/Shield. I'm starting to prefer the latter but both are really sturdy in different situations. Ice Melee isn't the fastest attacking set either, but it has a very nice 10ft 90deg cone and a frosty foot-stomp 10ft radius PBAoE. But the crown jewel is Ice Patch. Your own little dance floor of hilarity. At least for things that must stand on the ground anyway. It doesn't do anything to fliers. But it adds a crap-ton of mitigation in a crowd of melee enemies and you will laugh at incoming ambush lines. I even add on Provoke, which is starting to be must-have on all my Stalkers even if only for keeping stuff from running away while soloing. But on teams, I have literally found myself tanking on pick-up groups when there's no brute or tanker. I am sure it would pair just as well with Bio Armor. But like I said, maybe I just haven't given rad melee enough of a chance yet. I don't have its PBAoE yet, which might make a big difference spreading contamination in larger groups. It could end up being fun with lower +level setting and higher xTeam setting when you solo.

Stalkers are the least played standard AT of all of them. We're not some well-kept secret. If we were actually OP, the min/maxers would know it and be all over it. What you're missing, I think, is that all the tricks with controlled crits, even the ATOs which are absolutely wonderful (not denying it) serve only to bring our damage output UP to Scrapper standard. We burst better. That's about it. Scrappers have a higher base damage modifier which means better starting damage, better enhanced damage, and better damage buffs. And they have a random crit rate (lower than ours usually) and their own crit-enhancing ATO too. All that taken together, Stalkers and Scrappers are really pretty close to one another. And that's probably fine. The difference comes down to a slight advantage to Scrappers in durability thanks to higher hit points and a slight advantage to Stalkers in burst damage thanks to controlled crits. I certainly prefer the latter and that's why I play Stalkers. I don't think we need a buff, but overpowered? Hardly. What I would like done is probably something the devs won't do which is revisit all those old melee sets and exchange one of the too-many ST attacks for the AoE most of them are missing. When you look at Martial Arts, there's just no need for SIX single-target attacks on top of Assassin Strike. Even when Assassin Strike was only usable from Hide, this was a dumb decision. Nobody needs more than 3 single-target strikes added to AS and that always leaves room for at least one cone and one PBAoE if the set has it on Scrappers, Brutes, and Tankers.

Cold Iron Ninja hit level 18 in Neutropolis last night after finally finishing Imperial City's Responsibility and Crusader arcs on No XP, which took seemingly forever. And level 18's Ice Patch came not a moment too soon, because I then had Neutropolis's "Battle at Junction 221" Crusader mission with waves of Loyalist clockwork, PPD, and T.E.S.T. coming at me through the sewer. Iced a doorway chokepoint and they didn't stand a chance. The end of those waves came piled one on top of the other so it's a good thing they spent most of the time flopping around on the patch or stuck on the other side of the doorway. Vanessa Devore was a bit a challenge in Mother Mayhem's arc since Assassinating her doesn't finish her off but just causes her to spawn decoys with herself, back to full health, hidden among them. All orange bosses (though most one-hittable except for the real Devore)... they still hurt well enough when they landed hits. Again, hiding behind a pillar to pull them together onto an Ice Patch helped immensely. Still ate half my tray to stay out of the danger zone. I know I'm going to regret going defense instead of resistance at some point. It's fabulous... once you're nearly level 50 and soft-capped with some resistance bonuses and Tough backing it up. In the meantime it can be dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge.... dead if you run into someone that hits hard enough.

And sometimes it's easy... if you have a look at their post history.

I imagine you'll also have a debt badge progress bar in the badge window somewhere, no? ETA: Now I think of it, there are situations you don't earn debt for a death aren't there? I noticed this by chance when I didn't recognize an icon in my buff bar. Clicking on it, it said "100 debt protection during this event". I think I was near a zone event location in Praetoria. Also you have debt protection in the first 10 levels, right?

On this... I just last night went ahead and set up a base for my IMer. Nothing fancy. Knocked out a room for each "side" and colored them red, blue, yellow for teleporters. Set up a teleporter for Praetorian zones. And then a fourth room as a workshop. If this guy dies, I plan to keep him as a caretaker of the base. I'll clean out storage and send the proceeds off to my non-IM alts and then create a new challenger to add to the SG. He won't get anything from the previous incarnation but the convenience of not having to edit up a new base. Just the teleporters, NPCs, worktables, and a bunch of empty bins to fill with stuff he earns new. Figure that's fine. I haven't decided yet if I'm leaving Praetoria or not. I may just hop straight to First Ward and keep going. Never done it that way before.

I don't think so. It was started as something for a group of streamers to do, so I don't think anyone is going to be finding the fastest route to 50. It just wouldn't be interesting to watch because it would probably involve farming some repeatable content that you build yourself to survive easily. But if you got there first running varied mission arcs at higher notoriety settings, that would definitely be an accomplishment. Although the stat I'd go by is played hours, not calendar date, so alt-itis wouldn't be an issue.

Good to know! Other nice thing about Ninjitsu is that in a couple levels I get the clicky mez-protect which comes with 22.5% psi resist (which is now enhanceable), so between defense for typed psi-attacks and a little resist for the ones that aren't (or that get past defense), Ninjitsu is pretty good brain protection. Most other typed defense and resist armor sets have a weakness to psi that's a pain to patch with IOs.

Escorts are strange. Occasionally even combat escorts seem to have the low perception of non-combat ones. I usually just un-hide so I can move faster and then re-Hide if I reach combat. If an ambush is coming, wait around a corner and re-Hide then pop the first one to round the corner with your heaviest non-AS attack for a free critical at least. I'm not streaming either but it seems like a good goal to have at the beginning of a session so I'll shoot for it if I can. I leveled once last night to 14 and then got halfway through before I realized I needed to stop XP to finish Imperial. I am not doing ALL the arcs, but here I am doing three of them I think. I would need to flip back to Loyalist to do the Power arc here but I am staying deep-undercover Loyalist (meaning Resistance faction aligned for now) so I can run Crusader stuff while snitching to Marchand. I just ran into a conflict though because doing Interrogator Kang has made Dr. Sheridan disappear. Turns out I killed him in one of Kang's missions... oops! That can happen in a couple places. I remember this being a problem with Crow as well. Anyway, I've got the mission where you go into a seer's mind to destroy an aspect of Praetor Tillman. I remember that one being another annoying string of ambushes... this time with groups of seers slinging psi damage. Hope that stuff is range-typed!

Okay, thanks. I should be okay by the time I get to them. Okay that one turned out not to be so bad. I DID clear the way first. Good idea on any rescue mission. I got out with only about three clockwork ambushes. The last one was a LT clockwork that showed up late. I could have punched out of the mission but I was in good shape so I took him out before leaving. But I can see how that one would suck if you had to fight your way out while being ambushed. And as a Stalker you can't lead her out stealthed so it takes away your free "kill one LT or minion" card to start off a fight.

It's up to anyone doing the challenge to make their own rules. You only need to agree to common rules if you're teaming with others doing the challenge I suppose. For me personally, I am okay selling stuff I earn for current market value and that includes stuff I can buy at the merit vendor using merits I earned myself. What I won't do is buy low and sell high. That's pure marketeering and that includes buying an IO or recipe, converting it, and selling it at a higher price. I don't think I'll even do that with recipe drops I earn myself. I WILL use converters to create IOs I plan to use and I might sell them on the auction house, but only as a means of getting the attuned version of an IO I will slot in my build. We'll see if that ends up being too easy to buy a whole build full of IOs. I doubt it, but maybe I am underestimating how many merits I can earn solo while leveling. I haven't really ever done that since I eventually get into teaming around level 20 when I have a decent handle on my character. And then the merits really start rolling in. So this'll be different.

This right here. According to City of Data the "Activate period" on the pseudopet for Dimension Shift is 2 seconds and the phased effect, once you're hit by it, lasts 2.25 seconds. That's a LONG time in combat. You need to leap into the field and begin counting "one-and-two-and---fire!" or something like that. Maybe even to three to account for server latency.

The whole modular armor system seems more trouble than it's worth. How you mix and match with it has more to do with what you want. Do you find yourself short of ammo? Pick up pieces that add that. Not taking too many hits? Don't worry as much about health. There's no helmet hide option that I know of that won't hurt stats unless someone has made a mod to do it. What I usually did was use the Kuwashi Visor, which added headshot damage. Good, since I like Infiltrators and mostly leaves your head uncovered. But it still costs you health vs the standard helmet.

Good time! Missy recently got the Sister P badge, I think, but I'm sure one of my other too-many Stalker alts hasn't. I'll do my best to attend if I am around and available.

Same, and the added benefit is that Mark's proc is then available to you at ANY level you might exemplar to in the future if that's something you do often (which I do). Provided you also have Build Up available at that level too, of course.

Yep, considering what to spend the 6 million or so I've amassed so far on. Panacea, like you said, is a good one. The Stalker's Guile Hide proc is another since is basically gives a free crit after Assassin Strike. But endurance is more important. So far hasn't been much an issue because I can't attack that fast but now that I have Assassin Strike and several other attacks it will become more of a problem. Endurance is particularly an issue in Ambush-aetoria because there's sometimes no taking-a-knee if you've gotten into one of those "wouldn't NINE ambushes be nine times more fun than one ambush!" missions they seem to be so fond of. The only applicable rule would be trying to level at least once per session so if you're just slowing it down, but not so much that you don't level for an entire play session, I'd say you're good. The rule will be interesting the higher you go because leveling slows down and, I suspect, the whole point is to make this interesting to watch for those streaming. If you need to crank up difficulty to get faster XP so you can meet that rule, it cranks up the risk. But you also have to interpret what's a reasonable session time too based on the time you have available to play. It's not necessarily reasonable to say you'll level if you only have an hour or two to play that day... at least in the mid to upper levels certainly. Still wondering if I made the right choice picking defense over resistance. It's the conventional wisdom for Stalkers, but conventional wisdom usually only considers the end-game performance. And the problem with defense, aside from the much more plentiful defense debuffs, is simply that you can go from full health to chewing pavement REALLY fast whereas resistance and/or hybrid armor sets give you more time to make that fight or flight decision (and usually more hit points too). If this guy eats it at some point, I will probably remake as Rad or Bio armor. I am more familiar with the former but either one may be a lot more safe at lower levels. My hope though is that Ninjitsu not being a pure defense (offers self heal and some other mitigation tricks) is enough to get me through. That said I'm already pushing out Caltrops because of other stuff I need to get. The travel power certainly delayed that. But it's going to really turn the tables on ambushes when I have Caltrops and Ice Patch (level 18) for them to pile into.

Uh oh... I'm 12 too! So curious as well. I've had plenty of ambush missions so far but none were "endless". I started a Praetorian Ice/Nin Stalker ("Cold Iron Ninja" on Everlasting). I know both powersets and the AT is my favorite so I am not exactly outside my wheelhouse here. I am angling for lots of mitigation with Ice Patch, Caltrops, and Blinding Powder eventually (if I get that far). Still... I nearly died in the tutorial! Heh... a Stalker at level 1 might just be more fragile than a Blaster with nothing but Hide for defense and a need to be in melee combat to get stuff done. I was trying to fight alongside the PPD in the room to help avoid the Ghouls focusing on me and swarming but they did anyway and I ended up being chased around with 1/4 health while the PPD mopped up. Not a very noble beginning but I survived. I am doing an undercover Loyalist. I did Nova's Warden and Loyalist arcs in parallel to begin with, phoning it in to Marchand to rat out the Resistance whenever getting the chance. At the end of all that, Marchand tells me to go deep undercover in the Crusaders, so I flipped to Resistance in the Fixadine mission with the doctor. This was neat. I've done several runs through Praetoria but never this particular route. The one where you're asked to collect "food" for the Ghouls allowed me to sabotage my ghoul escort and then non-lethally take out all the PPD in the mission, who were then mind-wiped by seers to forget me. Pretty decent writing! Impressive! I don't have that kind of patience so I went with Mystic Flight (this one is a magic themed ninja). I know what you mean. I have cleared probably 7 million inf so far this way and just upgraded everything to level 15 SOs. But this is my read of the past posts in this thread. It's allowed. The way I figure it, as long as I am just selling, for fair market value, what I earn by playing, it should be cool. And I am not buying what my IMer sells with any alts so I am not afoul of the sending cash from alts rule either. In any case, I can make millions this way, but not billions. I would consider playing the market (i.e. flipping) to be against at least the spirit of these rules. This challenge is about playing and surviving the game content, not playing the market. I've had a couple close calls so far. Praetoria is a fun challenge for a Stalker though at least getting started. Especially one that relies on Defense since so many enemies have defense debuffs. The P2W restriction means the build is that much tighter in the low levels as you can't easily put off a travel power unless you just love slow jogging everywhere. And no free jetpack from Safeguard/Mayhem either in Praetoria. Keeping a MUCH closer eye on my inspiration tray in this run than I ever do and making sure it is stocked with a few greens, a few defense, and maybe one break-free. Silver lining: Don't need to waste space on a Revive. 🤪

I have never bothered to figure out how you get that badge without flying since P2W made temp jetpacks ubiquitous. I don't recall seeing any doors up there.

Only thing to remember with the Assassin's Mark proc is that while you can put it anywhere and it still gives all your attacks a chance to recharge Build Up, it also follows the same rules as any IO when it comes to exemplaring. That is, its benefit will disappear if you don't have access to the power it's slotted in. Good news for Lightning Rod is it's in your primary on a Stalker, so you will have it down to level 27 (5 levels below where you naturally take it at 32). On the off chance you think you'll miss it when you (and if you ever) exemplar below that level, consider putting it in a lower tier attack like Chain Induction. Or at least the proc IO for it.

It's not that they don't work at all. They just don't work well. Psuedopets follow a formula for proc PPM as follows (courtesy of the PPM thread😞 Probability to Proc = PPM * ActivatePeriod / (60 * AreaMod) AreaMod = 0.25 + 0.75 * AF Sphere (PBAoE or Target AoE): AF = 1 + 0.15 * Radius The problem is what to use for ActivatePeriod. The pet itself lists 100 seconds on City of Data for LR and Shield Charge. But that would work out to 185% chance or so for Obliteration:Smashing's 3.5PPM proc (if I did all the math right) which gets capped at 90%. That's good! Except... I just tried it since I have that slotted on shield charge. It's definitely not 90%. Not that I tested it extensively, but for a few spawns (remember to turn on pet damage and combat in chat). I can see Obliteration Chance of Smashing only fires on one or two targtets out of 8 or 9 that I hit. This suggests the ActivatePeriod is the standard 10 seconds for all pseudo-pets, toggles, and auto-powers that use procs. Chance to fire then works out to 18ish% which is more in line with what I am seeing. On top of that, it's hitting for only about a third of what Shield Charge does by itself to the outermost enemies (it does more just around the point of impact). So something less than 33% more damage total on 18% of the hits? That's only about 6% more damage overall, at most. So weigh that against whatever else you might put in that enhancement slot, I guess. Armageddon's proc is 4.5ppm so it will go off a little bit more often (around a fourth of the time) and it will also do about 50% more damage than Obliteration's proc I was testing. Not bad. But not great either. It won't be too bad a trade off if you really need that slot somewhere else in your build, I think. I'll be keeping mine in Shield Charge mostly because I want the six-slot bonus to melee defense of the full Obliteration set.