Riverdusk

Failing to fully train up is something I've heard of over and over from others that leads to to failed respecs. I suppose it could be just a coincidence that a lot of people have experienced, but I always fully train prior to trying one after hearing of a lot of other people's issues.

Honestly, 35% is all you need (if you are talking base) if you do go barrier (+5 min) and have the inf to burn on P2W buff (another +5). Some people seem to have an aversion to using temp powers, but unless you are doing a master run, or are running low on inf, I'm all in to using temps to my advantage. Heck, you can also get +13 s/l defense and 22.5% energy resistance with a P2W kinetic shield temp (hour at a time) to also shore those up if needed. On the recharge side, the +35 recharge you can get from a SG base buff and the P2W vendor is also a staple when I run my doms (and most of my characters).

Just working on leveling up one of these myself, fun and effective combo so far. Have tried plant on so many things and like the set, but for some reason haven't found a combo to "click" yet. I'm hopeful. Some things: You can get away with two slotting hasten if you boost the IO's to +5. If you exemp a ton though, I can see maybe sticking with 3 slots. Personally I like slotting some damage in roots, it is actually a decent aoe damage addition when you do so. Even on a dom that doesn't need the damage as much as a controller I still find it nice. Then again you went fire epic and maybe have enough aoe there compared to me that went ice epic. Drain Psyche needs some accuracy imho, especially since you don't have a kismet slotted, or tactics, or something like sleet to debuff defenses that I see. Not sure how much in the way of acc set bonus you have, but it'd have to be a LOT for me to skip accuracy entirely. I do NOT want to miss with it when I need to hit that AV for that -regen debuff and sometimes AV's can have some very good defenses. I also of course want to hit as many things in general as I can for the regen. Also, it does not need any endurance mod slotted. It gives an insane amount of recovery even with none slotted and only hitting 1 target (100% which is equal to 4 x unslotted stamina). Speaking of, if you need slots you can also try cutting down the health and stamina slotting. Personally going to try just a panacea proc in health and a perf shifter proc in stamina and that's it. Drain psyche is that good. Carrion Creepers I can't imagine not 6 slotting. So many good procs to put in it along with the usual acc, dam, and recharge to work in. It also looks like you have a sudden acceleration kb to kd in there? I've never seen creepers do knockback, only knockdown (unless maybe you are fighting way under your level or maybe against clockwork). Not seeing the point of invisibility. You can just go with stealth + a celerity Stealth IO in sprint. You don't even need it for a LoTG mule as you are already at 5 as was mentioned. I'm not so negative on going the resistance route instead if you want. Defense is easier to build for, but It is also easier to get defense through team buffs, temp buffs (you can get +13 or so s/l def +5 more def to all from P2W on demand), or even purple inspirations (which are amazing compared to orange res inspirations, something I still think is unbalanced to this day). Good resistances combined with nice regen from drain psyche I could see working (worth a try anyway). I often go with charged armor (+res to s/l/e) on my controllers and I find it works pretty well at keeping them alive compared to the standard ice armor or scorpion shield epic choices.

Game needs a "new badge+" mode. Once you get them all, you earn a badge and have to start all over again.

MM's may not be the #1 min/max choice (but what is except maybe specific kinds of brutes? Or a TW/Bio scrapper maybe?), but I still feel they are easy street leveling up compared to a lot of other AT's. My MM's level up easier and faster than my corrupters, defenders, controllers, and dominators at the least. So far from "weakest" in my experience. Seem pretty middle of the road at worst. And actually most of the charts of the population brackets have them...also around the middle, both overall (#6 out of 15) and at level 50 (#7 out of 15) for "played time". I'm not sure where you are getting the "lowest population brackets" from. By the way, you'd be dead wrong about my brute and blaster vs mastermind ratio. I have more controllers than anything, MM's second, stalkers third. Stalkers especially a much less popular class than MM, constantly at the bottom of the popularity lists even. Stalkers must be by far the weakest AT out there except VEATS and HEATS by your criteria.

Agreed as well. I think they must be talking about that certain playstyle. I could see that belief that they are late blooming if you are one of those that spends their leveling up time jumping on high level teams that a lot of times are running at +4/x8 as Force Redux mentioned. You are then yourself -1 to the team lead and now your pets might be trying to fight +7/+6/+5 enemies depending on tier. Good luck on that one. Once you get to 50 yourself and especially once you get a level shift suddenly those are "only" +5/+4/+3 enemies your pets are battling. HUGE difference. However if you level up solo at a "reasonable" difficulty or on level appropriate teams, it shouldn't be difficult and as others have said, they are actually one of the more forgiving AT's to level. You can even be pretty lazy about playing them unless you push things.

As to the OP, I think a lot of this can be attributed to Hanlon's Razor, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" which is what I think @jubakumbi was getting at. There may be a few actual trolls doing this out there on purpose, but I'd guess it is a very small number and you'd need some evidence they were doing it on purpose (and more than once). It if it just alts you can track their global name instead. If they are rolling in with actual multiple accounts yes that is hard to know for sure, but now I'd have to say they are really putting some effort into it.

I'd be happy with just making them non-solid so that I and teammates could pass through them and not be blocked by them. The same as was done for MM pets. Unlike MM pets (which was a great change!), a bunch of phantom army pets can still clog up sewer doorways, caves, or small rooms.

Different terms being used makes it confusing as well and I had this same conversation the other day in help chat. I said LoTG acted as a set bonus and the other person was insisting no, it acted as a "global". It confused me what they even meant by that. To me, it is both. It IS global as in the +7.5% recharge bonus is global because it affects your global recharge of your entire character and not just of one power. I'm guessing they were using the term "global" when they meant proc. And how it exemps basically comes down to just whether it is a set bonus or proc, it has nothing to do with it being "global" in my mind. An easy way to see if something is a set bonus and will act that way is Menu-Personal Info-Powers tab. It will list what active set bonuses you have there. LoTG shows up there as a set bonus.

Or solo where vigilance gives defenders the same basic damage as corrupters. Then you add that most defenders also have better damage buffs or -res debuffs and are safer doing it thanks to better defense buffs. So, now you have most defenders doing better both offensively and defensively solo than most corrupters. Procs just make it even more unbalanced. Hence my idea that they need a solo buff moreso than a team buff (just like defenders got).

Yes, can always go with thunderclap instead (which doesn't work well with hurricane anyway) as another means of control and ditch hurricane. Its stun should stack with tornado's stun. For knockdowns you still have gale, freezing rain, tornado and lightning storm. Probably what I'll try on my next stormy, especially once I get enough personal defense built up and then the tohit debuff of hurricane isn't as important.

Interesting. I've never gotten flack for steamy mist (or shadowfall or arctic fog that are similar). The only time it becomes an issue is after you rescue a hostage that you have to lead out you need to turn those powers off. Otherwise npcs can have a hard time following you (or anyone nearby) back to the door because everyone is stealthed. You might have run into that. I agree hurricane can be annoying (but visually and audially). Coloring does help a bit. Again though I have never gotten complaints about it for that, more just if you end up scattering mobs with it too much. I tend to use it intermittently, not constantly for both of those reasons.

Load up on 8 hours worth at level 1, at that point it only costs 1k per hour. As said, at end game you can earn more than enough inf to cover its cost or you can grab incarnate clarion. It is kind of just the mid game where it can be an issue (unless you have a bank of inf available from other characters).

Only AT I like electric melee on personally is a stalker so you still get a hard hitting single target attack to go with all that aoe. Electric/shield stalker is a classic. But all depends what you are trying to do with the character. Pretty much as you thought, electric would give you better aoe, katana would give you better single target (and some extra defense that is hard to get otherwise on a fire armor).

The amount of damage a beast/storm could put out I bet is amazing. It is on my list to try one of these days. Being able to slot the pet IO's in /storm is also so useful on any primary that doesn't have an extra "pet" to do that with, like beasts, bots, and mercs. Makes me think again that I wish you could slot pet sets into dark servant to open that set up as well for it. So annoying that you can't. I bet the devs original idea was they didn't want players to "waste" slots trying to improve servant's damage as it is so low and it wasn't its point. But now it'd be so useful.

Honestly one of the easiest and most powerful secondary's on a MM I've found is /time. It allows for a pretty chill playstyle while generally making your pets darn tough. Thugs especially as they really don't even need power boosted farsight, farsight alone should do well for them. Which is good since the devs have mentioned power boost as one of the things they are "looking at". Maybe your genius invented some kind of time control device. "Every thing has been foreseen and accounted for" actually sounds right on the nose for time even.

Tough for me to get too specific as mine is dm/SR and I also don't use mids for my builds (I use my own custom spreadsheet). Main thing is to make sure you get the two stalker ATO procs slotted (put the chance to hide one in your assassin strike, the "chance to recharge BU" can go anywhere). And as mentioned the guassian chance for build up slotted into build up. Those three procs alone make you a lot more powerful. If you aren't familiar with the stalker ATO procs you can find them on the auction house under attuned enhancements--stalker archetype sets. You can slot the "regular" non superior versions as early as level 10. They do tend to cost about 7-9 million a piece though so if you are brand new it may take a while unless you want to try your hand at playing the market. Travel powers are entirely up to personal preference, go with whatever is most fun for you. Also, most don't bother with taking placate anymore thanks to that chance to hide proc being better, so placate is entirely skippable now. Edit: Funny enough I looked and remembered I took mystic flight on mine as well (been a while since I played that character and I roll a lot of alts).

See now, I'd disagree with the above. I think it is a good combo and I think the loss of soul drain is overrated. The one caveat is of course as long as you have the stalker ATO chance to recharge build up going and a guassian proc in BU itself which is going to have a lot better uptime on BU than on soul drain. Sometimes you can even have double BU's and double gaussian procs going. I played a Dark/SR stalker all the way up into the vet levels and had a blast. Can't say that I was taking out a spreadsheet and tracking it, but BU was recharging often enough with the proc that I didn't feel there was really a whole lot of difference between it and soul drain. Especially when you consider you need a big group of mobs to maximize soul drain and the animation time is pretty slow for it compared to how quick BU is to use. BU of course is also available for your initial strike whereas soul drain is not. As to something else you mentioned, if you've been gone for a while you may not realize shadow maul got a nice buff and its cone is now pretty huge. Shield charge really isn't the only AoE you bring to a group anymore. On mine I also picked up energy torrent from the epic pool (and of course the incarnate nuke) and its aoe felt fine on a "normal" team. I'd definitely aim for one of the AOE's from one of the epic pools though, there are several options. Also, this may change as I believe the devs are looking at more buffs to dark melee. Their original idea was to buff dark consumption and make it another good aoe "nuke" type power. It was pulled. Since stalkers don't get dark consumption that'd be a big buff to the set stalkers wouldn't get and sadly I think it would then clearly be better on other AT's and the stalker version would get left in the dust. It is why I'm still hopeful they decide to buff touch of fear instead (like changing it to a "chain" type power and add damage to it), which would help the stalker version as well.

As has been pointed out, corrupters do have the better base damage, especially at higher levels once the AT scales start to kick in, NOT at level 1. If you are solo though and have vigilance going the damage difference mostly kind of disappears. Then it comes down to the bigger reason, procs. You can proc up a defender to do better damage than a corrupter, honestly even while on a team and without the vigilance boost. You could say, "well the corrupter can proc up too", and you'd be right, but the defender tends to have more room/slots for procs with their buff/debuff numbers being better. Defenders don't tend to have to chase as many set bonuses to reach most people's goals. So it is easier to build a "proc monster" as a defender typically. You are then outdamaging a corrupter and you have better buffs/debuff to go with it. There are exceptions of course like ice blast not being bad for a corrupter because rains don't tend to proc very well and at the same time do scourge well. Or kinetics where you can try and take advantage of the corrupter's higher damage cap. But in general it is the one situation where I can understand the call of some that procs should be subject to the AT damage scale. Personally though I'd rather see corrupters get a bit of a boost, and the easiest one is to up the health point at where scourge kicks in as that is kind of their cool "thing". Heck, you could even limit it to just upping the scourge chance only while solo to offset the weirdness that defenders now solo better than corrupters do.

I see those every once in a while. Not just build but even to the point of powersets or entire AT's. I kind of brace for it every time someone asks "how is <x> powerset", usually on help channel. Just recently someone was asking about how was willpower for scrappers and I said it was pretty good. Someone proceeded to respond strangely somewhat aggressively "stop giving them terrible advice, WP is horrible on scrappers. " I just responded, "worked great on mine" and left it at that. For a while there anytime someone asked about sentinels there would be people on help raging on how horrible they were. That seems to have died down a bit at least.

I wouldn't necessarily be for "remove it entirely" either, but I'd certainly be in the camp of "don't waste anymore time on it" That'd be my "alternative".

Just a slight correction, WP has 17.3% DDR at level 50 for a scrapper (from heightened senses). Close to none, but not none.

Storm I think is actually a good match for them. Adds extra control, extra damage, and since the pets are all ranged hurricane works well to help keep them safe. Regardless if they wanted to do a quick and super easy improvement to mercs they could literally just swap out serum for gun drone. Thematically fitting and at least a place to put the pet IO's. Not that it is the greatest power in the world, but the bar is set pretty low with serum as the alternative. I'm also all for a more in depth rework though of course if they want to commit the resources.

Same. Beasts seem to get a wider variety of opinions about them more than most other primaries, including some saying their dps is terrible because their attack chain is buggy. Nice to see them tested like this. From playing them I also got the sense they were actually pretty good.

Very nice write-up. This isn't quite true. Necro pets don't have to die in combat in order to get a ghost. You can get a dead pet anytime you want to use soul extraction on, you just need to use /release_pets instead of dismiss. Then it leaves a body. Of course that ends up releasing ALL of your pets, so it really is something only to do at the start of a mission or in between battles and then as mentioned you have to resummon and upgrade everything again. I tend to just use it at the beginning of missions (and get a guaranteed lich ghost) as the ghost does hang around for quite a while. Even with that it is definitely clunky and I do agree I wish they'd revamp it.