Solvernia

Yes? Ageless and Recovery Serum don't require you to waste a power pool choice. Ageless is an Incarnate power and Recovery Serum is a temporary power. You can swap incarnate powers in and out of your build freely in order to fit different situations. On my farmer, I have both Assault Core and Assault Radial, since Radial's doublehit is better if I'm already damage capped. You can't swap pool powers in and out without respeccing, and you're very limited in that you can only have four power pools at once. This means having a gap closer inherent to the melee powerset would make things better than being forced to pick a specific pool power and potentially lock yourself out of others.

Let's take a look in Mids. You can see that Assassin's Strike out of hide does 153.5 damage with a cast time of 0.67s. This gives it a DPA of 229.1. In hide, Asssassin's Strike does 389 damage with a 2.67s cast time. This gives it a DPA of 145.8. If you put the chance to hide ATO proc in Assassin's Strike, you can follow AS up immediately with a critical hit from your strongest attack. Quick form AS, combined with a critical hit from your strongest attack, would do far more damage in the same amount of time than long form AS does.

Quick form AS is more DPA than long form AS on almost every stalker powerset. On my KM/EA, quick form AS has twice the DPA of long form. It would not make sense for long form AS to have better DPA as the long interrupt and animation time is a tradeoff for having slightly higher damage to ambush an enemy with. This might have worked in 2007 but it doesn't work in 2022. DPE is irrelevant. Ageless exists, recovery serum exists, panacea/performance shifter/numina/miracle exists. Empathy exists, Kinetics exists. There are always ways to fix end problems.

No, I'm telling you that from an objective perspective of how much damage you do in the same amount of time, long form AS does not do as much damage as using your other attacks in the same span would. Feel free to do the math yourself. You are allowed to play any way you wish. Adding a gap closing element to AS would not change the way you play. If you don't like it, you can just jump into a group of enemies as normal and use AS at melee range. Nothing would be different.

You would do more damage in the same amount of time critting with your strongest attack out of hide, then using AS in quick form, then using the chance to hide proc you place in AS to hide so you can crit with your strongest attack again. I can kill a boss in a couple seconds with this, whereas long form AS would only take them down to half HP in the same period of time. Long form AS is objectively the weakest attack that Stalkers have. There is no reason to use it over the above rotation, except for RP purposes. Adding a gap closing element to its long form (without otherwise changing or removing the current functionality of the power) would make it actually somewhat useful, and more fun overall.

Are you really saying you'd rather spend all your time spamming taunt to get enemies to slowly walk over you, instead of instantly getting up in their face to do damage? It's a garbage power. No reason to take it except for RP purposes. Your epic pool targeted AoE does the same exact thing but is overwhelmingly better in every single way.

I'm not ignoring the -range component of Taunt. In fact, that's another reason why it should be changed. It's not a good thing to make enemies break off a pack to slowly stroll over to you. This makes AoEs less effective, and you still have to slowly move towards them as they slowly move towards you. It is not fun to wait for enemies to come to you, and it is not fun to run towards enemies at a slow speed. This is why gap closers exist, and this is why they should be incorporated into the taunt/confront powers that every single melee powerset already has.

The only thing that would change is that it would bring you to your taunted targets instead of slooooowly bringing the taunted targets to you. I'm not saying remove taunt entirely, although honestly that wouldn't change much -- given that Brutes and Tanks already taunt with every attack.

Spring Attack requires you to take two other Jumping pool abilities. If you already have Combat Jumping and Super Jump, that's fine. Unfortunately, the horribly long recharge and the absolutely worthless damage, and the fact that it doesn't even proc slot well, are not fine. Combat Teleport and Jaunt from Speed of Sound are great for this purpose but again they require you to spend an entire pool choice on what will be only one power. If you want to take Teleport Target and Fold Space on top of Combat Teleport, that's a better use of the pick, sure. But my argument is that a gap closer should be a core feature of the AT, like it is in every other game. Incorporating a gap closer into taunt/confront to bring yourself to the enemies you want to taunt would be a much better choice than making a handful of enemies slowly stroll over to you, or slowly strolling over to them. It would only be an improvement.

Other games wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't for good reason. You remember how boomers would tell you "if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it?" The answer is yes, I would, because people generally don't jump off bridges for no reason. If everyone's jumping off a bridge, there's a very good reason they are doing it, one that everyone agrees would be preferable to the alternative. Every modern MMO has gap closers for their melee characters because melee characters are objectively more fun when they have gap closers. They're not doing it just because everyone else does it, they're doing it because it's a good thing to do.

I've been playing since 2007. I understand how to play melee characters. I almost exclusively played melee characters on live. That doesn't make them any less frustrating or annoying to maneuver in combat. The addition of Combat Teleport and Speed of Sound was fantastic and alleviated a lot of the problems I had with combat mobility, but it's not enough. They still require you to waste one of your four pool picks on a single power. It would be far better to replace the useless taunt/confront with a useful gap closer. There is a good reason that melee classes in other games have this functionality and that's because having to slowly run up to a group of enemies in order to use your abilities is not fun, no matter what game you are playing. Your argument seems to boils down to "I don't want this game to be like other games", which is fine most of the time. Games should absolutely have their own identity. But "I want this game to be frustrating and unfun because I don't want this game to be like other games" is a shitty argument. I don't really care if the mechanics are different from other games. That's fine, they can be different. But there's no reason to resist a change that would only objectively improve the quality of gameplay and make more people comfortable using melee ATs.

40-50 mph is the best you can get, which is painfully slow. Speed boosts from allies are more of a hindrance than a help -- why do you think Null the Gull has an option to remove them in the first place? Combat suppression is still incredibly, horribly obnoxious. Constantly going between 40mph run speed and 120mph run speed makes the game very frustrating to play. I would advocate for its removal entirely, but it still wouldn't solve the issue of people playing most melee powersets having to gimp their builds in order to have more efficient combat mobility. Giving melee ATs the ability to close the distance does not fundamentally change the game. They can already do this albeit at the cost of having to waste a power pool selection to do so (Experimentation, which is a set that is 80% useless, or Teleport, which is 60% useless.) If you pick Speed of Sound, you can't pick any other origin-based pool sets. Taking a gap closer as a melee AT requires you to sacrifice other pool power selections to do so, which is not fun. Making it a core feature of the AT by replacing the useless taunt/confront would give them better options for pool power picks, which means more fun.

It forces... five mobs to come to you. That's it. In fact, it only makes things worse since it breaks up the pack, reducing AoE effectiveness and making the game harder to play. The only reasonable use for Taunt right now is to take aggro from your allies. Which is a great use, but not when it's limited to only one, or only five, enemies. A gap closer would be better as it would allow you to immediately follow up with an AoE attack to take all the attention off your allies, not just the attention of a single enemy. Why do Scrappers have taunt in the first place? They are not tanks. They literally can't tank because they can't hold aggro. Confront does not help with this. Nobody takes Confront. Replace it with something better.

"Other games do it" is a very valid argument. Why do you think other games do it? Because every other developer realizes it makes the class more fun to play. Reloading would not make melee classes more fun to play. 'En passant capture' would not make melee classes more fun to play. What would make melee classes more fun to play is to give them the ability to close the distance with a main powerset power. It's not that hard to understand.

The ranged power in these sets aren't super useful except either as a filler attack or to catch enemies running away from you. They serve no purpose when it comes to quickly and effectively closing the distance with a group of enemies so you can actually play the game. The ranged attack from epic pools also significantly outperforms them, which is honestly an issue in itself, but not the issue I'm discussing now. The issue I'm discussing now is that melee ATs are frustrating to play because of their outdated design and lack of a gap closer (unless you waste a pool power pick on one), and it would be very simple to replace the useless taunt/confront with something that does the same thing but is much less annoying and unfun to use.

Just because a game isn't modern doesn't mean you can't modernize it. Sprint+Swift+Hurdle+CJ only confers about 40mph run/jump, which is horribly slow in the distances involved in gameplay. It also requires taking Combat Jumping, which not every build wants to do. Why should I be forced to take unnecessary pool powers to do something that should be a core feature of an AT, like it is in every other game that features melee-oriented classes?

Yes, and all of them are troublesome to use in RP. This is a purely QoL change that would not confer any mechanical advantages or allow people to do things they can't already do (after going through the unnecessary trouble to do so.)

I'm not arguing for the taunt effect to be removed, rather for it to be incorporated into a gap closer that is shared by all powersets. This would not change anything in terms of power choices or homogenization -- all powersets already have a taunt even though it's useless, why not make that taunt actually worth taking instead of a being waste of screen space? Electrical Melee and Savage Melee are currently the only melee sets that have a gap closer, and they could honestly stay as is. Shield Defense is not a melee set. Ninjitsu is also not a melee set, and does not have a teleport. Speed buffs are still annoying to close the gap with.

You can already walk through players with Speed Phase. Again, the problem is the obnoxious graphical effect and the fact that you have to specifically take Super Speed to use it. This requires RPers to either incorporate it into their build or waste a second or third build slot specifically to have an 'RP toolkit'. It's not fun.

You can already walk through people with Speed Phase. Again, the problem is the obnoxious graphical effect and the fact that you have to specifically take Super Speed to use it. This requires RPers to either incorporate it into their build or waste a second or third build slot specifically to have an 'RP toolkit'. It's not fun.

Wide hitboxes make things hard for RPers. They can't get close together, they can't walk through gaps between characters that would otherwise be reasonable to do so. It's just not fun. The phase effect does not make you invincible. It makes you pass through hitboxes at the cost of not being able to attack or order your pets. There would be no way to use this to your advantage in combat, especially considering that Walk disables travel powers and reduces your speed to 3 mph. This can already be done with the Speed Phase component of Super Speed. The problem is that this requires you to take a power specifically for this purpose, and it has an obnoxious graphical effect that cannot be removed. This is not fun. There's no reason that phase can't be incorporated into the Walk power. There is no possible way to grief or cheat with this that doesn't already exist elsewhere. It would only make things more fun overall. Non-RPers do not need to worry about this change as they have no reason to use Walk in the first place.

Considering how travel powers are suppressed in combat, this makes moving from group to group incredibly frustrating. 40mph run/jump is not fun in the middle of combat when enemy groups are very far apart. It also makes it difficult to control your character when travel suppression suddenly ends and you're sailing far away from your intended target. This is ancient, outdated game design and it is not fun. I should not be forced to take a pool power in order to do something that should be a basic function of melee classes, like it is in every other modern MMO. There is absolutely no reason to take taunt on scrappers no matter how hard you try to justify it, and it's much less useful than, say, a targeted AoE attack for grabbing aggro on brutes and tanks, so repurpose it into a power that does the same thing but in a way that doesn't make the game unfun to play.

DPA on long form AS is terrible. The only reason to use it is for RP purposes. You're better off getting an immediate crit with your strongest attack, using AS right after, and using the hide proc in AS to crit again with your strongest attack. Much more damage in the same amount of time.

Super Speed now has Speed Phase which lets you indefinitely turn your hitbox off for RP purposes, but unfortunately it lacks a minimal FX option and requires a power pool pick. Since trying to work around the giant player hitboxes is a significant issue in RP, and Walk is a power designed exclusively for RP that detoggles your travel powers and removes your ability to affect others, incorporating the phase effect to let you walk through players would be a very good addition to the Walk power.

Modern video game design ensures that all melee class players have a chance to quickly close the distance to attack their target from afar, reducing frustration and making the game far more playable. Right now this is doable with Speed of Sound or Combat Teleport on every character, but it would be better to make this a main feature of melee ATs. There's no reason to waste a pool power pick on something that should be a basic part of an AT. Scrappers should have their objectively useless single-target taunt augmented with a quick teleport function that teleports them immediately to a nearby target. Since long-form AS is not very effective on Stalkers thanks to its terrible DPA, it would also be a good idea to incorporate a teleport component into AS to make up for this -- especially since their taunt is already replaced by a placate. No adjustment would be made here other than adding a teleport and damage component to Confront, and a teleport component to Assassin's Strike. This would make Confront actually worth taking, and give Scrappers/Stalkers an easier way to engage specific targets in melee, increasing their value and helping to diverge their playstyle from Tanks and Brutes.