ZemX

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.

Yeah, because you're doing a bunch of things no one playing blueside joining blue teams has to worry about. I already do this too. I don't even bother to message the team leader until I am in the same zone they are. Even if it means missing the team, it's more convenient for them not to have to deal with my issues when they'd rather just right click and punch "invite" to all the incoming tells. I also already avoid going to my base or Ouro when everyone else on the team is using that as a means to get to the next door faster. That's the entire point of this suggestion. Remove those last few annoyances so rogues don't have to tip-toe through a minefield to team blueside and maybe more people would consider playing rogues and thus be running more redside teams on occasion too. And it's no skin off the backs of anyone who doesn't care about cross-teaming or doesn't like playing redside because it doesn't affect them.

Wouldn't surprise me. Just the fact you don't always get booted from a blue team for visiting Ouro or your base means it's less of an intended behavior and more of a bug that depends on whatever corner case of team-makeup, current objective, or phase of the moon causes the game to say "you're outta here!" when it really shouldn't. The only time I avoid issues is when I am in the same zone as the leader. But if it's a PI radio team, even if I am standing in PI when I ask to be invited, it can fail if the leader is in a mission map off of PI. The "slap a band-aid on it" solution I thought of was to essentially make Null the Gull's rogue/vigilante swapping automatic when you travel between red and blue zones, but it's a bit ugly since it would constantly be swapping some of your badges too. You like to think of yourself as Positron's Betrayer because that guy is just a sappy hero right? Then you visit Steel Canyon and everyone is saying, "There goes Snarky, I hear he's Positron's Ally!" But it might be neat if it could be added as another Null option. "Automatic side switching for Viliglantes and Rogues".

Have you played a Rogue much? It doesn't take me more than a day as a Rogue trying to team blueside to run into "I can't invite you" problems even when I am already in a blue zone. Even people running ITFs (which is a co-op zone) say it's more convenient to be blueside and invite blue-siders because they don't run into issues inviting them as they make their way to Cimerora. These might seem like little things, but when they keep happening, they convince people, "Well... why don't I just be a vigilante instead if it's less annoying?" There is also the idea that it would benefit redside to have more people able to run contacts there whenever the mood strikes. Not having to visit Null to do that just makes it easier and therefore more likely to happen. It's by no means going to completely balance the sides. But any improvement would be nice.

I find that hard to believe, or else you have a different definition of "quickly" than I do. I am also on Everlasting. I was just on a Renault SF last night during prime-time evening central US hours that failed to fill the team. And it's the WST! We went with 5 and did fine, but the point is, we didn't fill the team and even getting five wasn't "quick". Some of us were practically begging in LFG before we just gave up and ran. I think there might have been a MSR and/or Hamidon going on at the time, but regardless, multiple DFBs and fire farms and other blueside TF teams scrolled by, filled, and launched as well while we tried to fill ours. There's just no comparing how easy it is to join OR launch your own team blueside vs. redside. Even on Everlasting. Just take a few minutes to watch LFG and count the number of blue team adverts vs. red team adverts some time. The population might be as much as 1/4 villains on this server, but the number of team adverts is easily ten-to-one blueside, if not more.

It makes a great academic argument, doesn't it? Let's all fight about something that has zero chance of ever being done!

I know you asked about ice/ice but I've been having a lot of fun with an Ice/Shield Stalker. If you're willing to branch out a little, any of the melee types can do this. Thematically, with the elemental->ice shield costume choice, the character still seems to be all about ice and not mixing in any other superpower. Looks very good with ice sword drawn and matching ice shield out.

Sure, but most of the stuff you run across redside is like this... "Oh, what has science wrought? I sought only to turn a man into a metal-encased juggernaught [sic] of destruction powered by the unknown properties of a mysterious living crystal. How could this have all gone wrong?" and... "She who lives by the cybernetic monstrosity powered by living coral, all too often dies by the cybernetic monstrosity powered by living coral. Fortunately, you have helped me to avoid this fate." Did you just spend a few missions repossessing body parts from people who couldn't pay their bills so she could build said monstrosity? Sure. Did I lose any sleep over the moral implications of this? No. No I didn't.

I think it's more that the builds you typically see posted are trying to maximize things like Defense, Resistance, and Recharge. CJ, Hover, and Combat Teleport are all sort of competing for the same spot in your build: Combat Mobility. CJ and Hover give a little extra Def(all) and let you slot LotG:Def/+GlobalRecharge IOs. Combat TP can't and doesn't really let you slot anything else particularly exciting. Gaussian's BuildUp proc is maybe the most interesting, but Build Up is probably the best place to put that on a Stalker. Yeah, you can take both CJ/Hover and CTP but... extra power slot. Though if anyone has room for that it's Ninjitsu Stalkers. Smoke Flash is skippable (and always should be, IMO) but I'm one of those weirdos who always takes Caltrops and stuffs a Ragnarok:KD proc in it, then six-slots Blinding Powder with Coercive Persuasion. 🤪 Teleporting Ninja sounds great as a character concept, but people posting builds are mostly min/maxing, not doing cool character concepts. But if I'm missing anything great about Teleportation, let me know. I have a Staff/Nin stalker I am not sure what to do with build-wise as well. There are definitely one or two power picks I could change... I just don't have many (any) slots to give the replacements. I wouldn't drop CJ, but I already have Teleport Target, so that pool is available. Maybe I will just try it and become a convert myself.

No? Look, it's great you get into being a villain that much, and I do that too sometimes, but mostly I play this game to run around in teams and hit things. I can do that anywhere, but redside is content fewer people are running and who doesn't like a change of scenery from time to time? The entire point of Going Rogue and Freedom was to let all the dirty capes run all over your lawn, Snarky. Sorry. But it stopped short of making it really easy. It inexplicably allows a vigilante to join villainous contact missions... but not to run them. Why? What's the difference? Why not go that one more step? If they just let anybody run any content, how much skin off your back is that really? Meanwhile, bored heroes can go run papers in Grandville as easily as radios in PI and you can sneer at them while they do it. Everybody wins, right?

Who said anything about obligation? This thread is about suggestions. Nobody is making demands. Nobody is telling you what to like or taking anything from you. How on Earth does anything suggested in this entire thread "redo" anyone's choices? If you're trying to suggest that giving rewards for villain play is "redoing" their choices then why aren't you beating the war drums to have ALL rewards in the game removed? Isn't the point of any reward to incentivize that particular activity?

That game had the best bugs I've ever seen. I once watched a Great Lord (max reputation) give a coin to a beggar and be instantly executed by a teleporting guard because reputation was an 8-bit number and it had just rolled over with that last act of charity. Speaking of Great Lords (and Dread Lords) they all got a nifty shield for their accomplishment which would also punish them if their alignment ever fell from max (or rose from minimum) by exploding and killing them. Except there was a magic spell called Incognito that would make anyone temporarily neutral. Only it REALLY made them neutral so... boom! It wasn't even a crime because it was a non-combat spell. Exploding Great Lords Day. *sniff* I miss it. And then there was The Day the Earth Stood Still... a bug in stamina regeneration caused literally everyone to grind to a halt. Even the teleporting insta-kill guards couldn't move. So people starting committing crimes everywhere until their screens were full of absolutely immobile guards... and then the server crashed. And of course who can forget the time Lord British himself was assassinated during an in-game appearance because someone forgot to turn on his invulnerability flag? Ah... good times.

The problem, as stated, is that more people choose blueside than redside. It's not a solution to simply say, "Well then, more people should choose to play redside! That would fix it!" More people should choose to eat vegetables. More people should choose to safeguard the environment. More people should care for one another. More people should push for world peace and equality. They. Don't. Individuals do. Populations don't. Populations need the carrot or the stick (or both). And the stick is usually bad for business.

Must be something like that. I have started quite a few of my new alts on goldside and it always seems like I hit 20 faster than running contacts blueside or even redside. It's not by much though. I am going by the fact I buy 8 hours of 2xp in the tutorial and it lasts me until I get to Primal Earth with some to spare usually. But yeah, it's got nothing on the DFB and Posi 1 and 2, I am sure. And I even see people running low level mish/radio teams blueside sometimes (which means starting one would probably get at least a few joiners and be faster leveling than solo by a mile).

Seriously, what did I write that you think is condescending? I'm disagreeing with you that anecdotes are evidence. That's pretty straight-forward. And I have absolutely no idea what you know about statistics, so I am being completely sincere when I say if you don't know what "self-selection bias" is then do read up on it. It's good to know whenever you're looking at the results of an online poll, particularly if it's for something more important than a video game. But it also applies here. A really great example, btw, is a poll I heard about a few years back for "World's most evil company". It was asked online and the answer that came back was not an oil company or hedge fund. It was Electronic Arts. Outside of the crowd of gamers who obviously bombed that poll, does anyone in the world really think a game company is the most evil corporation out there? But okay, aside from that, you accused me of having a "slant" about SWTOR, which applies equally to you then, and I said as much. If that's condescending then we both did it. I am attacking arguments here, not people. Okay? But this is another anecdote. Why you can't play villains or why I can has no bearing on whether or not that is the reason MOST people do or don't play villains. All that tells us is what our reasons are. So instead of telling you what my reasons are for being able to play redside, I am looking around and trying to see what evidence does seem to exist supporting the idea that content matters to people more than an avatar's morality. I mean, how often do you even run into people who are in-character? Assuming you team at all in CoH? I am on Everlasting and I would still put it at less than 50/50 for pick-up teams. The idea that any great number of people is getting into their characters to the extent they CAN be disgusted by the text of a mission brief is really questionable to me.

The word anecdotal literally means "not necessarily true or reliable". But if you don't like having a dictionary thrown at you, just take a step back and consider we're talking about (at the time I am writing this) some 18 likes of the first post. That isn't even a representative sample of the 1,366 people who are logged on and playing RIGHT now, let alone the whole active base of players on Homecoming. It's also what statisticians refer to as a "self-selected" poll. If you're not sure why that isn't considered reliable, I suggest looking it up. It has far more serious real implications for politics than to does for gaming, to be sure, but it's the same principle. There's also my last post which you might not have seen yet which asks how this "people don't like bad guys" explains the differences in villain populations even among the various servers of Homecoming. So if you don't like the SWTOR example, try that one instead because that's comparing this game to itself on different servers. Still though... Back at ya. Your villain thinking of themselves as a good person is a great way to roleplay. It's one of my favorite quotes from an actor, in fact. During an interview, Willem Dafoe was asked if he liked playing bad guys or good guys and he answered something like "Good guys, bad guys, makes no difference. Everyone thinks they're righteous." But... it's a bit of self-delusion too. He wasn't saying the villains really were good guys. Just that they thought of themselves that way and that made it just as enjoyable to get into them as an actor as with the real good guys. In SWTOR, your lightside Sith, for most of your career at least (as I recall) isn't really good or charitable or interested in making the Sith Empire NOT evil. More like just being less cruel or more interested in the good of the empire than of personal glory and power. That's certainly less evil than a power mad Sith who likes choking people that disagree with him but.... you're still part of an evil empire... c'mon. The only really good choice is to join the other side. And if that's a thing, it's new since I left.

And yet people run ten times more Positrons and CItadels as any redside SF I've seen and that's on Everlasting where you'll also find the highest (or maybe better to say least lowest?) ratio of villains to heroes among the HC servers. Speaking of which, maybe someone here who still believes the population imbalance is due predominantly to people not liking to play bad guys can explain WHY the ratio of villains to heroes is double on Everlasting, the unofficial RP server (where people should theoretically care about in-character issues like this more than anybody), what it is on Excelsior. I just want to see if "Excelsior players are twice as emotionally sensitive to being the bad guys as Everlasting players" is the hill anyone wants to die on. 🤪 And just to be totally clear, this can be YOUR reason for not playing redside and that's perfectly valid for you. The only thing I dispute is the notion that anything approaching a majority of players overall cares one whit about the pretend morality of their pretend characters in this MMO.

It's aesthetically annoying but I don't know that there's an actual delay between activation and damage application or if it's just an animation goof. Haven't timed it. If I think about it, I usually try to draw the staff by hitting AS early, before I reach the enemy, if I plan to AS from Hide. I did notice yesterday my rad melee stalker was sometimes not properly animating AS either and there's not even a weapon involved in that case. Not sure what's up. When it happened, I'd just stand there with glowing green fists until the hit landed. Can't say I noticed that before, but it's been awhile since I've played that one.

I mean, I did try to google it and I found the game show reference which sounded like a joke about people who make up nonsense with numbers so... it didn't SOUND like a compliment. 🤪