Replacement

Fix Regen first. Then we talk about a Tanker version.

I'd been waiting for you to come back to that and ditch the spreadsheet db. But I was reasonably sure your projects murdered you in your sleep for a while.

+1 to sound editor. Especially if it's like some game modding software where the original files are backed up every time you replace them so it's painless to restore default sounds. I was just thinking the other day about how I really want to play a psychic blaster, and how it's only possible if I swap in psy melee sfx and... That sounds like a project. (He says, completely oblivious that he's asking for a program that could easily take over a hundred hours of development time).

Just a quick aside, Guardian is a Rebirth thing. Pretty sure we have a post somewhere from Homecoming folk somewhere saying "it's their baby, we wish them luck with it, but we're not interested in pursuing it." Striker, OTOH, Cap-o-the-Pow has expressed interest in reviewing, though I will personally be quite bummed if it resorts to gestalting in (or to put it negatively: bastardizing) a bunch of armor powers to work.

I would be absolutely happy with this, but it would need to come with one significant change: Buff Provoke (presence taunt) to be at least as good as current Confront. In fact, slightly better to make up for the fact that players can no longer take both. That means no accuracy check, -75% range debuff, low cooldown, and the higher of the 2 mags (I'd go even higher, since I stand by my belief that this should be capable of rescuing Tankers). All of that should at least make the inevitable "cottage tears" a little more manageable. I really do think we're in an era where Scrappers mostly exist as a thematic choice, or perhaps a vehement way to convey to a party that you don't tank. The notion of trading Confronts out for gap-closers both addresses the new reality that you aren't a Hami Tank, and returns you to the king of the "aggression" hill, giving you some distinction from your other "why are there 4 of us" melee ATs. Edit: @Haijinxif Provoke had some set-awareness logic added in so that it could broadsword Confront if you're a Broadsword too , etc... You'd have your cake and eat it too.

Random thought: What if Deadeye Aim totally removed the cooldown on your snipe (set it to 0.5 seconds or something) but also disabled fast-snipe during the window? Just as a way to get 2 (maaaaybe 3?) Slow Snipes on a spawn every once in a while. It's minor, but it would shake up how the AT is perceived, in a more mechanical space.

@Tyrannical I like your updated Trickery options (sidenote, I don't know that "Trickery" really fits the rest of the AT image, though that's obviously a pretty easy thing to play with and focus test if this were to be built out). About overall "justification" of the AT, and I'll go ahead and @Bentley Berkeley on this, I can say anecdotally, myself and all of my friends have at one point wanted to build a sniper specialist and found other Blast options too limited in the space to really be happy with the final outcome. Now, that's super niche, but I don't know that it's much different for a lot of players and Stalkers. There are, of course, certain players who "always play Rogue" and they have ID'd Stalker as their surrogate, but outside of that group... I would wager a large degree of Stalkers are made for metagame reasons ("I want this power set, and it's most optimal on Stalker", built for PvP, etc) at least compared to other ATs with a larger portion of "theme first" toons. This is, again, entirely "hunch" on my part. So anyway, I'll try to wrap this up: I like this AT in a world where we're adding several new ones. I think melee/support and another AT with Manipulation is more important, but ultimately my approach is to vet good ideas, give decent feedback, and let Homecoming decide which of those ideas best meets the cross-section of "viable to implement" and "will have a good community impact."

I'd settle for just a temp speed buff to player as something of a gap-closer helper.

I'll be honest, I just wanted to start a post with "I'll be honest" to keep up the pattern. I like this, I'd totally dig seeing this added in a universe where we're adding multiple new ATs (PRAETORIANS REPRESENT). Critiques: Do not like the mez protections. These guys are ostensibly the least affected by mez in the game so far, so this doesn't make much sense. Would remove AoE blast from Epics (and maybe even aoe melee). This, I feel, is where Bentley's comments are really worth heeding. Once you get to epics, if you can get a chain of 3 decent aoes, you're in serious peril of stealing a blaster's gameplay loop. I'd push it slightly more towards always trying to stay away from enemies, and would consider giving them inherent +range instead of including it in their Aim.

I use the following binds (pulled from bindloadfile with manual front-end additions so you could copy/paste this and change the keys to your liking) /bind BUTTON5 "powexec_location target Burst of Speed" /bind SHIFT+LBUTTON "powexecname Burst of Speed" First one is a thumb-button on my mouse, to just teleport to what I'm targeting. WARNING: you will appear behind running targets due to location being decided at the START of animation. Second one simply sends me wherever I shift-click, without the extra layer of the normal "targeted" glowy circle of slow-itude. PROTIP: It will probably get nerfed at some point, but Burst of Speed has Snipe ranges. You can start a slow-snipe and hit your powexeclocation button any time during the slow-snipe animation. As soon as the Snipe plays out, you will teleport to your target. Result: you will appear to be shooting yourself at the enemy to earn optimal bad ass points.

I would still drop it. Illy has behaved just fine in this thread and I'm not curious about what they've done in others. That said, @Illy, I do think you should check out Rebirth. A lot of the old hurdles were intentionally left in place (I could be wrong, but I think they even went out of their way to reinstate some) over there. It's definitely more of an "earn it" environment from what I've read.

I suggest a powexeclocation macro. You guys are missing out on a fantastic power.

My preferred wombo-combo (particularly in the early levels) is: Ki Push -> queue up Storm Kick -> queue a blast once Storm Kick starts. (do NOT use Eagle's Claw for this. It functions mechanically but it looks stupid as hell) Gives a really nice flow of kicking them away from you and then you exit the spin right into a shoot animation, shooting them out of the air Devil May Cry style. Follow up with Burst of Speed -> Dragon Tail if necessary.

Tbh, I wouldn't be opposed to granting new powers for choosing others, at this point. E.g. Choose Focus Chi? Also gain access to Burst of Speed. One use before going on cooldown. Choose Warrior's Challenge? (Gasp!) get Burst of Speed. If you also have Focus Chi, you can use it twice before it goes on cooldown. Choose Eagle's Claw? You get the idea! 3 uses before it goes on cooldown if you collect 'em all. Ok, even I have a hard time taking myself seriously about the "Warrior's Challenge" part but I'm still super OK with this overall approach.

I just recently silently edited the OP of operative. I very intentionally underdeveloped the Inherent specifically because it would need a lot of testing and tuning. This is where I point to Stalker, which took something like 18 issues to become good, and now its Inherent reads like Scrapper Fanfiction. I wouldn't want a repeat of that. It's best to have the bones in place and leave room for definition.

Wow. I guess over the years, I've just become incredibly good at writing off entitled forum bitching.

I choose to believe the entries were already there from i24 and Cappy Pow-pow just updated all entries that would be affected. This way I can still be amazed and surprised when they release it for real.

I have been screaming in slightly larger text all weekend that we need 100% KB proc for immobilize powers, at least. This has made leveling a controller genuinely fun for once.

Unoptimized players like me grab Placate. I don't care to get into a debate about whether or not it's useful and that's the problem: there is a debate to be had. Excepting Lazarillo, here, no one's really saying "oh, I always not only grab Confront, I use it entirely for game mechanical reasons." No. At most, you get some oddballs and Roleplayers, and it is never the optimal pick.

No, not terrible. A bit cottage-y, but not terribly so. It would remove a pulling tool but clearly, no one's using it for that anyway. -- As always, this is something where I feel the need to mention: We are serious enough about this that down the road, it could be tossed onto the test server to find out. If it's found to be upping top-performing builds on Test, we reel it back. If that means reeling all the way back to what's currently Live? So be it.

I want to reiterate the notion of Opportunity Cost. Scrappers simply don't have room in their builds, but that doesn't excuse the fact that they can count on only having 8 choices from their primary. No other AT can count on that (And @Fortuneteller, this is worth mentioning to you as well -- certainly there are bad/pointless powers in other powersets, but there isn't an AT-level "schtick" you can expect to see in every one of an AT's sets that are all as skipable and pointless as the rest). You can buff Confront, even having it add some straight +performance, and tune it to be good on some builds but not all of them. That's just business as usual. It's not a buff to scrappers overall if it has no impact on the top builds. One could imagine it being good enough a power pick to rationalize grabbing it on some underperforming sets, while ignoring it on the DPS champs.

Has no one tested the Brute stuff yet? Am I in the wrong place to see the results of everyone else' testing..?

Bad news (or great news, if your name is @Captain Powerhouse) On Pineapple, Might of the Empire (Prestige Knockdown enhancement) is no longer causing my Controller>Plant Control> Roots into a 100% aoe knockdown. In fact, is the proc rate of this normally very low? Because I just got it to only proc once in about 10 casts (~5 targets per cast). Edit: Oh duh. I'm testing that wrong. 100% KB chance for one day and I totally forget this game uses PPM instead of % chance. NEXT Edit: Yeah, about .6 PPM seems about right (that's what the paragon wiki formula gives me, and matches up pretty closely to what i'm seeing. In other words, I just got an education in PPM and it seems the KB enhancement fixes worked.

Confirmed: Currently occurs on Pineapple as well. Just want to confirm you're not running any Knockback procs in this? Water is a new enough set that I wouldn't be surprised if this is using a "proc" under the hood and is being affected the same as the KB enhancement bug.

While Presence pool could use its own buffs, I was specifically looking at Scrapper Confront (and clones -- note that several sets that came over from Tankers/Brutes still have Taunt, and those should either be swapped out to Confront or simply not receive any buffs). At this time, I am firmly against any buffs to Taunt (the power).