BasiliskXVIII

I like bringing them out in the last mission of a Synapse. Yeah, they die quickly, but you get to be responsible for a mini rebellion against the Clockwork King.

Just to set expectations: I didn’t want to “race” this character to 50. I’m deliberately taking it slowly, mostly soloing through story arcs, and I didn’t touch Sonic Melee on Beta at all. The concept didn’t initially grab me, but then the name Treblemaker came to mind and that was that. This isn’t a full guide, just first impressions of the set so far. I’ll update as I level if people are interested. I’m level 21 at the moment, so we’re not talking 4 Star ITFs yet. I only a handful of low-level IOs that have dropped or which I had in storage, I'm mostly running SOs. This is my experience as a Sonic/Dark stalker. Attune This is clearly the most contentious power in the set, and I understand why. It doesn’t completely ruin the experience for me, but it has both real strengths and real friction, so YMMV. Attune is a single-target toggle that does a slow but significant DoT and amplifies your other Sonic attacks against that target. It suppresses while you’re hidden, so you can put it on an unaware enemy without breaking stealth; the damage only starts once you’re revealed. What’s good about it? It’s surprisingly effective at disrupting enemies who have interruptible abilities. Sky Raider Engineers are the easiest example: you can drop Attune on one, AS the boss, and the Engineer won’t get their FFG up because the trickle damage keeps interrupting them. It feels very proactive in a way that the game doesn't often encourage, so this stands out. What’s less good? It’s still a toggle. You want it up constantly, which means dragging it from target to target as things die or scatter. Without Attune running, your ST damage feels slightly below average; with it, slightly above average. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the lack of it is noticeable. I don't usually enhance until level 12, because it normally goes so fast, but because I held off on grabbing Attune immediately, my damage felt lackluster in a way that was unpleasant. So you’re encouraged, pressured even, to get it early and keep it rolling nonstop. The sound effect is also loud. Very loud. If anyone knows the internal name so I can silence it, you’ll have my eternal gratitude. There’s also a build-pressure angle. Stalkers already want early AS, Placate, Build Up, status protection, and their main defensive tools. Needing to wedge Attune in early too makes the low-level power curve feel even more crowded. Playing without it feels anemic; playing with it feels like one more spinning plate. There’s another issue with Attune that becomes obvious once you play around with it for a bit: it demands animation time without paying that time back in immediate impact. In most melee sets, your T3 power is either a heavy single-target attack or a cone; something that justifies a bit of animation with a meaningful chunk of damage delivered as ST or AoE. Attune does neither. It’s a setup move, and setup moves only feel good when the set rewards you for using them. The damage it offers accumulates to be significant. But that's very much outside of the Stalker philosophy. The rest of the set The yellow “-res(debuff)” visuals still look strange to me, but the mechanic is interesting. Stalkers get a baked-in -ToHit in Assassin’s Strike, so technically you’re getting at least one boosted effect, but at only 5–6% extra effect per stack, the benefit isn’t huge, to say nothing of the unlikeliness of performing a slow AS after having hit them with other attacks. Generally, this will be more of an incidental team play bonus than something you'll benefit from solo, except with a few specific armour sets, and even then the debuff is small enough to make it mostly irrelevant. It feels like it's mostly just there because Sonic's thing is -res(damage), and the devs didn't want lots of that in a melee set, you do still get to apply that with your AS, though. What’s more notable is the status effects sprinkled through the set. • T1 has a chance for knockdown. • T2 has a chance for hold. • Assassin’s Whisper is a Mag 5 sleep, so anything you AS and don’t kill will most likely be asleep unless it has purple triangles. Unfortunately, Assassin’s Whisper does not allow sleep sets, so you can’t slot Fortunata’s Hypnosis: Chance for Placate, which would have been probably the best possible use for it. The proc chances for the status effectsare low, so you’re not turning into a miniature Stalktroller (Stalminator?), but slotting a Lockdown +2 Mag proc in one of the early attacks might be an interesting experiment later. In closing That’s where things stand at level 21. The rest of the set has charm, but Attune is the piece that isn’t landing. It’s an “attention tax,” it doesn’t move with your target, and it eats animation time without giving you the kind of immediate impact every other melee T3 offers. The delayed payoff is real, but it doesn’t feel good in the rhythm of a Stalker’s chain, and the damage bump doesn’t quite justify the micromanagement. If it behaved more like a PBAoE buff, or simply auto-shifted to your current target, the whole set would breathe better. Even so, the kit has enough texture (status effects, utility moments, and a distinct identity) that I’m curious to see how it develops with a full chain and proper slotting. I’ll keep levelling Treblemaker and update once I can see how the set performs in the 30–40 range, where melee sets usually reveal their real shape. Edit: I decided to test the volume of attune with a dB meter on my phone at about 1' from the speaker. Not the most accurate thing, but good enough for my needs. I was getting a baseline of 53-55dB when just getting ambient noises. Most of the other powers - Sonic Thrust, Strident Echo, and Assassin's Whisper took me to between 60-63db. Attune? Maxed out at 72dB. So, from your ear's perspective that's about twice as loud. Very disruptive when you are expected to reapply it 2-3 times per fight.

The irony here is that the very thing you’re “correcting” me about, that American English isn’t a single uniform accent, applies just as strongly to French. Parisian French isn’t Occitan, isn’t Bretonnais, isn’t Lyonnais, isn’t Réunionnais, isn’t Algerian Maghrebi, isn’t Québecois, isn’t Acadian. No major language is a monolith. But that diversity is beside the point. My argument wasn’t “there is only one American accent” any more than I’d claim “there is only one French accent.” The argument is that no accent in any variety of French produces the kind of orthographic butchery shown in the original text. It’s not dialect, it’s not idiolect; it’s just anglocentric misuse of a diacritic as decoration. Every "é" in the original text, if we read it as French, sounds approximately like "ay" (there's no y-glide in French, so it's not entirely the same, but in IPA terms we're talking about [e] as opposed to [ei]). So what you should be reading is: That isn't a French accent. It's also not the accent of someone speaking any language that uses "é" differently, such as Gaeilge [e:], Portuguese [ɛ], Vietnamese [e˧˥] (tone-dependent) or Icelandic [jɛ]. It’s the same kind of anglocentric disrespect you see when people throw Я, Ф, or И into English words to make them look “Soviet.” The creator isn’t thinking about language or phonetics. They’re treating someone else’s writing system as a novelty font. It doesn’t resemble Russian, it doesn’t resemble French, and it doesn’t resemble any real accent. It’s just aesthetic appropriation of symbols they don’t understand.

If they're going for a French accent, not like that. This is the equ'alent of try'ng to simulate an Am'can ac'ent by sim'y d'pping ran'om le'rs and re'acing them with apo'rophes. The result isn't anything like the American accent and kinda makes a vaguely offensive caricature.

Not sure if this is actually a bug or just a really strange decision for the animation, but when you use the interruptible version of Assassin's Whisper, shortly after going into the "charge up" phase, a sonic wave effect flies sort of diagonally up and away from you. It doesn't do anything to the enemy, it's just kind of present. Then, about a half second later the attack proper fires and you get the power animation.. I don't know if this is a a power effect that's being called at the wrong time, or aimed at the wrong place, but it looks unintentional. (starts at about 1 sec into the attached clip) Assassin's Whisper.mp4

You're thinking of a satyr. Satire is a heraldic symbol consisting of a diagonal cross shaped like an "X".

Or you could slot the Overpowering Presence: Chance for Energy Font or Dominating Grasp: Chance for Fiery Orb ATO into Mass Confusion, Mass Hypnosis or Total Domination.

Because it’s unethical to sell something when the buyer has no genuine rights over what they’ve paid for. It doesn't stop a lot of companies, but that doesn't make it right. ...I swear, some people want to buy the cross they'll be crucified on.

The PVP sets drop infrequently but with enough consistency that you should see at least a few as you level. The recipes sell well, so you can just sell them and use the proceeds to buy the part you want. But another alternative is that you can craft them up and use enhancement converters to convert to the set you're interested in, and then convert within the set until you get the piece you want. Depending how lucky you are, this can be either a cheaper or more expensive option.

Huh. TIL!

Well, I mean there was this one guy I know who tried to build a castle in a swamp. I told him he was crazy.

It's pretty easy to see there's no difference in run speed between land and water: (SS increases jump speed when you're running, which explains the difference there, though it isn't relevant in this case.) Any perception that there's a difference is probably due to their being fewer nearby references. You don't see buildings flying past at high speed because they generally don't build buildings in the water.

Oh, jeez. I do have 2 Sentinels, no 50s. They're in the main list, but totally forgot they existed when doing my calculations at the end. I guess it comes down to a question of whether you think apathy or antipathy is worse...

This prompted me to go take a look: Certainly paints a pretty definitive picture of my playstyle preferences. The answer would definitively be Kheldians. Worst AT and it's not close.

There's a blue Tardis surrounded by Weeping Angels in the RWZ, as well as one on top of Pocket D, from what I understand.