macskull

Task forces will lock at the level you were when you started.

What are your combat logs saying when you try to activate the power? I've noticed this happen with Tornado where the game will tell me the target is out of range despite practically standing on top of the target.

The reality is with the Assassin's Focus/out-of-hide AS changes from Issue 22, every Stalker is capable of good single-target damage, and that goes double with the re-hide ATO proc. At that point the sets with no or poor AoE have overkill single-target damage and nothing to help out otherwise. It seems a conscious design decision that any of the sets that were ported to Stalkers after the original sets didn't really give up that much (or any) AoE. I've seen it stated this way in a few other threads, but as far as the "melee ATs are stepping on each others' toes!" argument... not so much. Especially now with the Tanker changes, each melee AT has its own "flavor" and Stalkers are still very much different than Scrappers if only because they can get far more control over when and how they crit. The damage/survivability relationship is right where it should be right now: Stalkers deal more damage than Scrappers deal more damage than Brutes deal more damage than Tankers, and Tankers are more survivable than Brutes are more survivable than Scrappers are more survivable than Stalkers. That sentence may be a grammatical trainwreck, but it's true.

Adrenal booster boosts defense debuffs but not defense buffs. It's not intuitive but them's the breaks.

There's also the myriad of powers that have a "chance for" secondary effects (stun, sleep, etc.). Knockback/down isn't unique in this regard. Also, all Elec Blast/Elec Melee powers that drain end do so 100% of the time.

Err, what?

The concept of diminishing returns isn't too hard to understand, but the application of it is next to impossible unless you know the math and what attributes scale in what way on what AT. Even the in-game combat attributes don't correctly reflect DR for some things (recharge and damage are the two big offenders but there are several more). As an example, given 45% defense in PvE, that will DR to about 33% for melee ATs, 18.26% for all ranged ATs (including Sentinels, which means defense-based Sentinel builds get really hosed), and about 28% for Warshades (yes, they have their own DR curves for defense and resistance for some strange reason). Tohit DR's at the same rate for all ATs, and it follows the same curve as ranged AT defense. Also worth noting, accuracy bonuses apply after the 5% clamp in PvE as well. 45% defense is thrown around as a magic number because in the absence of enemy tohit buffs anything over that is "useless" but in reality even with 45%+ defense you're going to see most enemies will have hit chances above 5%, sometimes as high as 10.5% - and there's nothing you can do to make that any lower. Enemies get acc bonuses based on their rank and relative level to you, which is a way of ensuring defense isn't too good - as you fight higher-level or higher-rank enemies your 45% defense isn't as effective as it would be against lower-level/rank enemies. So, I guess, to answer the OP's question of "are player defenses too high?" - no, I don't think so, and the game already has a mechanism in place to ensure defense is less powerful when you're fighting more difficult enemies.

It is extremely hard to guarantee a 5% chance for another player to hit you - you likely couldn't get your defenses high enough, and accuracy is applied after the 5% clamp. If the enemy player had no acc slotted, no acc bonuses, and no sources of tohit, and you had 45% defense, your opponent would have a 5% chance to hit you. That being said, in order to actually get to 45% defense in PvP you'd need to have 77% defense in PvE because of diminishing returns. This is pretty much unattainable without either outside buffs or being in Elude, Overload, Retsu, or whatever other defense-based T9 you could be running. So here's where we are so far: You need 77% defense pre-DR to get to 45% defense in PvP. 45% is only a magic number if your opponent has no accuracy slotted in their attacks, no global acc bonus, and no sources of tohit. So let's figure out accuracy and tohit and how that'll work into the equation, but this discussion is going to be hypothetical since there are a myriad of ways powers can be slotted, some powers have a higher base accuracy, etc. We'll start with tohit, and we'll assume that the attacker is a Blaster running ED-capped Tactics (10% base, enhanced to about 16%) and a Kismet IO (6%). That's a total of about 22% tohit, which after factoring in diminishing returns gives us about 16%. With that 16% extra tohit you now need 61% defense (45+16) to keep your attacker's chance to hit at 5%. Not bad, right? Well.. to hit 61% defense after diminishing returns you'd need roughly 245% defense pre-DR, which is possible but you'd need a team of buffers or several T4 purple inspirations to get there. "But that's above the hard cap," you're saying, and you're right, but the game continues to calculate values past the hard cap and applies DR to that value. So here's where we are with some tohit in the mix: If your target has 16% tohit after DR, you need to add an extra 16% defense on top of the 45% you already have. In order to get there, you'd need to go to extreme lengths so it isn't practical for anything other than a minute or two here or there. Now we'll move on to accuracy. The PvP formula for chance to hit is this: HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × (1 - TargetElusivity) × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) where AccMods = the power's inherent Accuracy × (1.0 + the power's Accuracy Enhancements + all global Set Accuracy bonuses) As an SR character you get 10% elusivity in your defense toggles (but no extra in Elude). We will assume, for our purposes here, that your attacker has slotted 66% acc into their attacks and has 50% global acc bonus. I picked those numbers as reasonable guesses because most PvP-centric builds will build for enough acc to get 95% hit rolls against a ranged AT with a small amount of defense, and those acc numbers will make that happen. With that combination of tohit, acc slotting, and global acc bonus, your attacker will end up with a 9.72% chance to hit you. If you decided that you couldn't make 61% defense and stuck it out with 45%, your attacker would have a 40.82% chance to hit you.

EA already outperforms SR because it gets almost as much defense, some decent resistance right out of the gate, and Overload gives extra elusivity (it is the only t9 that does this). EDIT: There's also a balance aspect to defense in PvP, and between elusivity and diminishing returns I don't think it's in a terrible spot. Elusivity values could probably use a bit of tweaking - they're currently at 10% and I think they were originally at 20% or 30% when I13 dropped and it made defense-based builds way too good. You can't just have so much defense that you completely floor your opponent's chance to hit because at that point you're basically unkillable, but anything less feels weak to the player with the defense-based build.

Defense in PvP has the unique problem of being at the mercy of luck far more than resist-based or regen/heal-based builds.. Someone playing a resist-based build knows they're probably going to get hit most or all of the time but they'll reduce that incoming damage by a fixed amount. With a defense-based character, your attacker could have a 40% chance to hit you and get lucky four times in a row, or they could whiff all four times. It isn't as reliable a form of mitigation as resistance/regen/heal/absorb in PvP because unlike in PvE your opponents are going to have lots of acc and tohit bonuses. That being said, elusivity does make a pretty noticeable difference, and the effective DR cap on tohit bonuses for any AT is way lower than the effective DR cap on defense for melee ATs.

Blast from the past here but... you can activate AD while you're mezzed and since toggle dropping hasn't been a thing since Issue 13 you're probably going to be fine.

It seems like the "how often are you off the ground though?" camp has never run missions in caves, where all the geometric oddities make the game think you're off the ground way more often than you actually are. Building for extra knockback protection can be done, sure, but that brings up two problems: if you build for additional knockback protection for while you're not on the ground, it will be redundant while you are on the ground, and you're now spending three or four slots on knockback protection that only a few other sets have to deal with (except theirs isn't made redundant by whether they happen to be on the ground or not). Or maybe you get Acrobatics, but that still means you need another 1 or 2 -KB IOs to match the protection you're getting from Grounded, and you have to invest three power picks to get there. That might be fine in later builds, but early on you're getting Grounded at level 16 (8 on a Tanker) and you don't have the power picks to devote to Acrobatics unless you want to seriously skimp on your primary and secondary.

Oh, with context this makes more sense.

How is this a bug?

An even-con or lower minion will have a 5% chance to hit against any amount of defense 45% or greater. Higher-rank and higher-level enemies get an acc bonus - to figure out their chance to hit if you're at softcap, multiply 5% by the rank and level acc multipliers (example: +4 boss is 5% x 1.4 x 1.3 = 9.1%). Here's the wiki link to the relevant data tables.

So, just like... every other melee AT in the game? "Some changes to Stalkers over the years" completely redefined the role, playstyle, and abilities of a Stalker. Prior to the Issue 12 Stalker crit changes a Stalker had decent first strike capability and was after that point a shittier, squishier Scrapper (and since the two ATs use the same values for their defensive powers that squishiness was simply the smaller HP pool). After the Issue 22 assassin's focus changes, and combined with the two ATO procs, today's Stalker behaves almost nothing like the Stalkers of Issue 6 except that they can still get guaranteed crits from a hidden status (oh, and two other ATs can do that now too). Only in the rarest of circumstances were Stalkers ever really about "hit and run, stealth tactical play" and that's pretty much not at all true these days. Stalkers weren't the redside equivalent to Blasters since Blasters don't have an analogue with the redside ATs. Arguably the closest thing is a Dominator. "As long as it gets used" is a really shitty argument to think a set shouldn't get a buff. Regeneration is one of the most popular Scrapper secondaries in terms of characters created, but you can't seriously argue that it's a good set relative to the other options. That being said, I'm going to take this opportunity to exit this discussion. It's clear to me based on what I've seen in other threads that you're very opinionated but usually wrong (I seem to recall a quote something like "I'm Bentley goddamn Berkeley and I don't care what you think") and your grasp of how the game is actually played is tenuous at best. Does the set need Grounded fixed? No, no set in this game needs anything - but there is no good argument against making the change. "It's a thematic weakness!" No, lower negative energy resists is a thematic weakness. "That's how electricity works though!" No, it isn't, and even if that were the case then the other aspects of the power, or even other powers in the set, would work the same way. "It'll make all the sets the same!" No, it won't.

The Performance Shifter and Theft of Essence procs both stack with themselves, so you can get multiple +end procs in a single cast of a power. Power Transfer specifically doesn't stack, which has the unintended side effect of not working at the same time from multiple sources in the same server tick. I don't know whether that's an unfortunate and unfixable result of the way the proc works, or if it's not working as intended, but that's why it acts the way it does.

The results people were posting in the thread I mentioned were all done using a script that ignored streakbreaker (easy to do since the way it appears in combat logs isn't the same as a normal hit). I ran my results through that same script but the sample size was small so the results weren't super accurate - some of the posters in that thread had months of logs they could dig through but all I had were about 3000 attacks over a six-hour period from the aforementioned proc testing I was doing. The 95.02% was including streakbreaker, though my sample size was only 2732 attacks. I'd need more data to nail down a final number, but the issue with running through months of combat logs is that things start to get skewed. It's easy enough when you're running through logs and only using one power that you know shows hit rolls for hits and misses, but there are a large number of powers that don't show hit rolls in the combat logs unless they miss so it's extremely difficult to get actual numbers unless you go through and ignore every hit roll from those powers.

There's a thread somewhere around here where the OP's premise is about how the game's RNG seems to be broken and weighs rolls above 95 more heavily, based on parsing combat logs... but two things came from other posters there: The odd results only happened for players and not NPCs (even though they use the same functions) Some powers do not show a hit roll in the combat logs unless they miss, leading to rolls above a 95 being incorrectly over-represented Based on those observations I'd say it's working fine and it's all in your head. For another data point, a few months back I did some testing in response to a Discord user who thought a certain proc was firing less often than it should. I loaded myself into a test AE mission and let it run overnight. Not only did my testing show the proc was firing at the expected rate, but it also showed that 95.02% of my attacks hit.

I mean, this isn't entirely true. If you're just messing around in zone PvP you definitely don't need voice chat and I don't remember the last time I was actually in voice while zone PvPing. Team arena stuff is a little different but even then as long as you're at least listening to the other players you can use game chat to communicate.

What is this change supposed to even accomplish? Higher-level enemies don't present any specifically harder challenge other than taking longer to kill.

Literally laughing out loud that you think any of this is true

Using the /maxinactivefps command/launch parameter helps too, it'll cap any inactive instance at whatever framerate you specify so it uses less system resources.

From what I can tell based on City of Data info, each scaling resist power gives 2% resistance for each % HP below 60%, so at 24% HP you'd be looking at capped resistance. That's assuming no resistance from any other sources, but if I'm on an SR there's no way I'm not slotting the Shield Wall and Reactive Defenses uniques, and you're probably also running Tough because why not. The resistances take a little bit to kick in so you could still potentially be two-shot in rapid succession but it's not likely and as a Tanker you're looking at about 2250HP at level 50 with only the +HP accolades and no other set bonuses, or about 2390HP with the accolades and the Unbreakable Guard unique.

SR was historically considered a "late bloomer" because Scrappers and Stalkers don't get the AoE defense toggle until level 35. When the set was ported to Brutes the power order was changed a bit to address this (Brutes get the AoE defense/taunt toggle at 20 and Tankers get it at 12). SR has the potential to be exceptionally powerful on a Tanker because as other posters have said you can softcap to all three positions relatively early in the game without any IOs, and the sliding resistance passives combined with Tanker AT scales mean you get some impressive damage resistance as your health dips low. This sometimes ends up in a weird situation where you are more survivable at 20-30% HP than you are at 100% HP, but at low HP an SR Tanker with all 3 scaling resistance passives is nigh unkillable outside of psi damage. You are correct that the majority of SR's mitigation is defense and other sets can get that as well - but SR is the only one that can easily reach and maintain capped defense debuff resistance, so other sets that just happen to build for defense have difficulty when subjected to cascading defense failure. SR shrugs it off and keeps on going. SR's real weaknesses are multiple rapid attacks getting lucky and landing, no self-heal, and no +max HP power but since SR is so trivially easy to softcap (especially on a Tanker) that frees you up to chase whatever other set bonuses you want.