ZemX

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.

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?