ZemX

Hostage missions annoy me on any AT. On a Stalker, I've learned to deal with them. I clear to the hostage first, then watch chat for ambushers calling out. Hide. Wait to ambush THEM. Then unhide and move on. The really annoying thing about hostages is their total ineptitude navigating the map. I mean, explain how ambushes targeting the player NEVER have a problem quickly pathing to you for a beatdown. Never get hung up on geometry or inside walls. Never get confused going up or down stairs. Yet this happens ALL the freakin' time to escorted NPCs. It's like they intentionally chose a less-capable version of their AI pathing algorithm just to piss us off.

Not even sure which part of my post you're disagreeing with here. I said I don't believe you can wipe out an entire spawn before someone else can "wind up" an AoE. If you want to claim you can, nobody has to see that. You just have to describe the spawn, it's level relative to yours (including incarnate shifts), and which one or two attacks you executed that wiped them all out, because that's all the time you have before someone lands an AoE. i.e. Less than 3 seconds. Because I wasn't disagreeing that you can do the other stuff. AVs? GMs? Sure. But my point is: So can a lot of other ATs with a full IO/Incarnate build. It tells you nothing about AT balance. If you really want to see where you stack up against others that know how to min/max, just post your results in the Pylon or Trapdoor or AE801 threads.

People might take you more seriously if you avoided obvious exaggeration like saying you can murder whole spawns before anyone else can "wind up an AoE". Maybe you've seen this on a team where you ran ahead or something but it takes a few seconds to land a nuke and a common AoE is even faster. And a team should be bringing multiple AoEs landing simultaneously compared to whatever you're doing. Come on, man. Ease up on the propaganda a little. I'm sure the build is impressive, but DB/EA is not THAT much an outlier. Everybody should know you can build just about anything into a monster with the right IO build and incarnate powers. That doesn't really mean the AT is "fine". You can build a Sentinel into something that solos +4/x8 ITFs. Doesn't mean the AT is fine compared to other ATs. But someone always does try to say that, it seems. Don't get me wrong. I also think Stalkers are mostly fine, but they are not gods among other melee ATs either. You can build just as insane, or better, on a Scrapper or Brute. They will survive more than you can certainly no matter what you've done in your build. Sorry, that's just the math of it. If you see your Stalker wildly outperforming others on pick up teams, it's because your build is better. Not your AT. I see this all the time and I wouldn't even say my Stalker builds are entirely as optimized as I'd like yet. Next time you're on a team just have a look around. You might be surprised how few set bonuses you see on about half the team on average in the mid to upper levels.

Welcome to the history of CoH. People need to stop looking at the original concept of Stalkers like it SHOULD make sense on a team. Using Placate NEVER made sense, even from the very beginning. It was never strike-and-fade. It was always strike-and-scrap. The only use Placate had back then (and the only use it has now) is defensive. It's not a "do more damage" button and never was. The mistake the original devs made with Hidden AS and Placate was the same original mistake they made across all ATs and powersets. They just never considered the performance impact of animation time in their original design until players SHOWED it to them. They considered DPS to be a function of damage and recharge time only and didn't get that DPA was king from the get-go. So please everyone stop appealing to the original design of Stalkers like you're quoting scripture or something. That style of sneaky assassin gameplay works in one situation only: Soloing. Hidden AS is FINE for the soloist. Okay maybe two if we count helping a team stealth missions. Anybody can solo and anybody can stealth objectives of course, but I mean just the concept of it meshes particularly well with the theme of a sneaky assassin. On teams though in most other cases? Forget about it. There is boils down to more basics like who does better damage (ST or AoE), who survives better, who has control, buff, debuff, capability, etc. It's about what you can do in the spawn-to-spawn fighting that is a typical mission. And there we really are just stealthy scrappers and always have been. Deal with it. People who want to be sneaky assassins should solo. You can get your fill of that there. On a team, AS is just a melee-range snipe and even ranged snipes got the quick treatment when nobody used them on teams.

"Okay folks! Remember to stick together and NOBODY go near the steps to City Hall until we're all ready. Got that?"

If the people saying good things about Rad Melee were ALSO Brutes (or tankers) then it's worth remembering Stalkers don't get Irradiated Ground so we probably get less Contamination coverage than other melee ATs who use the set. Meaning you're getting a bit less healing out of Rad Siphon too. Atom Smasher will be the primary way to Contaminate large groups and even that will only do about a third of those hit on average. Proton Sweep is your only other AoE and has a decent 75deg arc, but disappointing 7ft radius. Unless stuff is really packed together, you're usually only hitting two or three with it and contaminating each target only 21% of the time. Irradiated Ground has only a 10% chance to contaminate but that's on every target in an 8ft radius patch, every 2 seconds. I can imagine the set shines on Brutes and Tankers in large-crowds that can (a) Be packed in and kept together by taunt/punch-voke/threat, and then (b) Contaminated more often with the help of Irradiated Ground (not to mention the added damage and spread of damage due to contamination). I haven't given up yet on my Rad/Rad Stalker, but not playing a whole lot either. Just got Atom Smasher and just got it slotted a bit at 33. So we'll see.

Unless you think this would kill the bosses just as fast (which it won't) then you're missing why I even said it. Basically, the situation where it makes sense to switch from AoE focus to ST focus as a Stalker is the one where you notice the team is always hanging around mopping up bosses last. It means the team has plenty of AoE to wipe out the trash and could benefit instead from someone focusing damage on those big bags of hitpoints. You can still forgo the hidden AS and rely only on the quick-AS later in the chain if you want, but all you have to do is leave the last spawn two seconds early to make hidden AS worth it. You get scale 7 damage as the first attack and an almost guaranteed follow-up crit from your next best attack. You can at that point even just switch targets and the team's AoEs will likely finish it off for you while you go lay into another boss in the spawn. The goal of this is to knock off enough boss HP that the AoEs finish them along with the rest instead of the whole team having to focus the bosses last.

One thing I wonder on my Ice/Shield is this... should I really be using Shield Charge from range? It's fun to zoom in and knock em all down of course, but wouldn't it be better to hop (or CTP) into the pack first, wait a beat, then Shield Charge zero distance? This would give AAO a tick to boost your damage before you Shield Charge. And SC doesn't seem to have any mechanic to boost damage from range like Savage Leap does, for example. As far as that goes, the oft mentioned "it doesn't break Hide" thing doesn't seem to be a big deal to me. Seems you're better off doing your Hide crit first than chancing someone breaks Hide on you after a Shield Charge / Lightning Rod, no? So... hop into the middle of a spawn. Build Up. Fire your Hide critical attack, whatever it is, then your Tele-attacks. Wouldn't that make the most of AAO? Tricky. It probably does a little better than just using an EndRdx but probably not a whole lot. But you'd have to do all the annoying math to find out, which for the AoEs is even more annoying. I just ran through it quick for Charged Brawl and assumed you had already slotted it for 33% EndRdx and 33% Recharge with some IO set (I didn't actually try a specific set so this could be way off). But for the sake of argument, this worked out to about a 15% proc rate. Perf Shift gives you 10% end. So assuming you've not increased your Endurance, that's 10 end times 15% or 1.5 end on average each time you activate the power. That's more than the ~1 end a second SO EndRdx would give you. But again, not by a whole lot, and it goes down the more recharge you have in whatever set you've slotted in those powers. And down again if you plan to use an alpha that enhances recharge. Whereas slotting an EndRdx there is both cheaper and saves you the same endurance amount every time you activate the power no matter how much recharge enhancement it has (note: global recharge doesn't hurt the proc chance either though). tl;dr It's a lot of annoying math to figure this out for all the AoEs in particular. I generally just go with the procs in Health and Stamina and let the endrdx in IO sets do the rest. If I'm hurting for End at endgame, I'll get some help from the alpha slot.

On Live my favorite was a Nin/Nin (Ninja Blade / Ninjitsu) Stalker. I figure that counts. But my first 50 was a Rad/Rad Corruptor. Also great. On HC now I've tried reincarnating that Corruptor as a Rad/Rad Stalker and... meh. Not liking Rad Melee. At least not yet. Maybe a Rad/Rad Sentinel instead? My fav here is a Ice/Shield Stalker which is KIND of in the spirit of themed x/x because the Shield is made of Ice. 😛

Not at all true. The thing about AoE is that it hits everything the same. That means it kills minions first, LTs second, and bosses dead last. By a lot. Bosses have several times the HP and more damage resistance. If the team has AoE covered, most Stalkers should switch to ST mode and go after bosses first. That complements the team. And the slow AS can still be used here if you run just 3 seconds ahead of the team. Tankers already know to do this when they want to begin bunching up the next spawn for the nukers. Just go with them and assassinate a boss. Animation time doesn't mean diddly if it happens before the fight starts. If you've done it right, the team is arriving to drop their bombs just as or after your AS is landing. ST chain some bosses, then leave for the next. It works. But that said... good grief is it boring. When people on forums tell me "every" team is like this, my only thought is... why? Find different teams folks! Exemplar. Do weird stuff. Don't you get bored of just +4/x8ing radio teams or ITFs all the time? At some point that ceases to be playing and just becomes Progress Quest: The Search for Rewards. Maybe it's me, but I have to break that up with oddball mission teams at lower levels. Weird pick-up team composition? That's a feature, not a bug! Or take a break soloing/badging which Stalkers are also fantastic at. I've tried to play Scrappers and they're great too, but just not as interesting to me.

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.