Microcosm

It needs to lose Smoke Flash, perhaps the most useless power in game, but otherwise nin is doing just fine. Caltrops in the set is often overlooked but one of the biggest sellers to me. I once killed a group of 52 rikti bosses on test with just procced caltrops to see if I could. It took a while, but stacking it with the knockdown proc made it extremely safe. I can do that and still get access to other patron powers unlike the scrapper version. I'll take either of the scrapper additions over smoke flash though.

I think you end up not having room for the shields/other toggles because they aren't worthwhile for the very reason that they detoggle. Self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're pre-Eclipse levels (which is most of them), flying around in Nova and you decide to switch to human to mire in a group or smack someone with your siphon heal or gravity well, it sure would be nice if your shields were actually running when you're suddenly in melee. I would unquestionably take and use Inky Aspect and Orbiting Death regardless of if I have Eclipse if the toggles suppressed.

Maybe go with Prock Lobster, by the Kheld-52's 😉 I don't know how familiar you are with PBs, but there are a couple things you might want to change about that while keeping the overall build. One of them is you might not need to slot as much Acc, because you'll have perma Inner Light giving extra tohit. This is especially the case in your Nova attacks, as Nova itself also gives more tohit while it's on. So for example you could change the Acc/Dam/End in Nova Blast to the Dam/End and still be fine on chance to hit while increasing the other two values a little. For the same reasons I wouldn't take Tactics at all, but swap it for Assault unless you never see yourself toggling either on. Unless you want it for confuse protection? Another thing, I wouldn't slot Nova Bolt at all. Just slot up Glinting Eye since you can use it in Nova for higher damage (and also in Dwarf form, which Redlynne happened upon). Same for Gleaming Bolt, which I'd drop altogether and just get Gleaming Blast to help the human chain out. Also, you have the +Res uniques, which you won't need if you're using perma Light Form. I'm guessing you want those for either exemping or the Psionic res? You'd get 1% more Psi resist by swapping Shieldwall's slot to Incandescence or Essence Boost and putting anthor Impervium Armor Psi resist in there. Lastly, omgslotphotonseekers. 😉

Thanks 🙂 I'm not Abe enough to try this on my warshade. It feels like my pets fall to a stiff breeze anymore, and the single target damage is rough without them. I might try it again with t4 incarnates, but considering how little I actually play outside of test that will be a while. Are we allowing lore pets in this? I'm guessing no on that and inspirations.

I chose to forgo Tough in favor of Aid Self +Field Medic. The endurance gain from that and +5ing end mods in Stamina make it just almost sustainable without Ageless if I keep Aid Self going (which I'm not going to do against the pylon unless I have to). In a group of 54 rikti he was able to stand there just fine, using Aid Self as needed, until two bosses hit simultaneously with their swords. Definitely not as sturdy as other things I've tested, but maybe about the same as an SR scrapper I'm guessing.

So I decided to try this because of you guys. Did it on my PB, who has t3 incarnates except for hybrid which is t1, and no lore pets as yet. You're going to just have to trust me on the no temp powers thing, as I didn't set any rules when I started it. I also realize I should have just grabbed a screenshot of the entire screen... but you can clearly see light form recharging there as proof it's my pb 😉 I have not solod a tf before, and have to admit it wasn't all that fun lol. Would much rather do it with a team and not take so long.

I just tried a nightwidow for comparison and got 1:38, 1:41, 2:01 and 2:10. Two of those times I tried to use the pet, but it died almost instantly as it rushes to the pylon after a couple attacks and absorbs the aoe damage shot at me. I think a gloom build might work better than the shatter armor since I can't get the pet to live, but don't feel like redoing it now. I'm also not an expert on widows though; sure someone else can do better.

Before you get too excited, doing it this way causes "Recharging" to fly above your head constantly while that power bound to W is on cool down. May not bother you, but I found it super annoying.

You're saying the pet itself (boosted by your buffs and -res) is doing 100dps then? I'd keep that sucker. The "no pets" thing is about lore pets unless you've got your own vendetta against them. If you can keep the epic pet alive that should be fair game as part of your dps. If you've got the recharge to make it perma or nearly perma that's hard to make an argument against.

What are you saying about pbs!?.... Just kidding. Thanks for posting your build by the way. I had a wm/rad from a long while ago that I couldn't get past 1:36 at best. Looks like your clobber slotting was much better than mine, so I'm going to try again. Edit: And a new best time of .... 1:35. Sigh.

I think when we started getting 500+ dps on certain combos we began to forget that reaching 300 dps used to be a huge deal. It still is a big deal for most combos, and 3:30 on a fort is solid. To put in perspective, the best time I ever got on a bane (without hybrid toggled) was 2:49 and on a pb was 3:13, so it's not horribly far off from those.

I agree with this. Dawn Strike's kb is thematic and appropriate. Radiant Strike's is like trolling the player that made the kheld. There are ways to get around it, but it's a clunky mechanic that doesn't pan out for a melee power the purpose of which is damage and not "omggetoffme". Related note, if the kb to kd procs that have been added could be turned into kb to knocktoward effect mentioned earlier in this threat that would give khelds (and other high kb sets) an option which could be highly desirable for teams and solo play. It's also a dangerous option that would have to be weighed by the player, as it would actively bring more threats closer, making it a fairly balanced trade off in my mind. I would gladly throw one of those procs in all my pb powers, whereas I begrudgingly do so now to stop trolling myself. Edit: or make it a null the gull option, so as not to interfere with people using the current procs. With the gravity them it definitely makes more thematic sense for Warshades at the least. Or you could roleplay your PB as magnetically powered if you wished, which otherwise hasn't really existed in game.

This is usually what I do as well. I put the Acc/dam, quad and proc from the set to get the hide chance in there but modify the recharge as little as possible. The other slots are 2 procs and a straight damage io.

The one you landed on making it a team effect is interesting. I honestly don't find Dark Sustenance very useful at all because a) Cosmic Balance is better for patching holes in the team and b) at higher levels both khelds can cap their own resistance, a Warshade can cap its damage, and you can't count on getting enough controllers/doms to give meaningful mez protection so you build for other methods anyway. What you are suggesting would give a better inherent experience and make khelds sought out for teammates like SoA or buffers, which could be a good thing. I'm not against it. I would bet the live devs did little to khelds because the kheld population was low, and the return on dev time would have been very little compared to making something else for other classes. Unfortunately, that became (as it often does) a vicious cycle where kheld issues weren't fixed so fewer people played them. But yeah, toggle suppression did not exist back then in any form to my memory.

Pretty late to this party, but count me in for toggle suppression 120%. The toggles dropping never made any sense and makes lots of powers useless outside of human-only builds. I honestly think it was just easier to code that way originally. I'd be willing to help the homecoming team with this change to help push it along 😉 Otherwise khelds are largely fine, though I wouldn't mind some other QoL things like the taunt aura or redlynne's old recommendation of making the pb kb to ku. I definitely cannot get behind removing the crash from light form; the crash was already lessened to make it one of the best armors in the game as it is. I wouldn't mind a small bump to their single target damage, as it's pretty weak, but can live without that given the rest that they have.

Ya, I'm normally of the same opinion of not removing a power because someone out there may actually like it and have found a use for it that I just haven't. But since in this case there is a highly available temp power that is a carbon copy of it and it's not even something people could put set bonuses in, I say toss it. This isn't new to homecoming anyway; I remember that temp power being around on live as well and always warning people about it when I saw smoke flash in a build as it's the most wasted power pick possible.

You can actually swap those builds on the fly without going to a trainer, by the way. The command is /selectbuild n, where n is the number of the build. Picked that up from some guide somewhere.

I honestly forgot about that, though it's a hard sell for me cause that means giving up either Waterspout/Hibernate or a snipe... Talking about Scrapper nin makes me want to start a petition to remove Smoke Flash from Stalker /nin in favor of getting Seishinteki Kyoyo or Bo Ryaku. It's an extremely useless power to begin with, and to add insult to injury there's a repurchasable temp power that does the same exact thing.

Neat. If you are planning to use a small purple insp to keep yourself at the s/l/m softcap you would be solid as a mountain (except to toxic). However, if that is not your plan you'd be better off building for s/l defense in most cases, as with the softcap to those and your elec armor shields completely unslotted you would take less damage from attacks that have a s/l component (most of them) than your build above. Example, to a machine gun attack (ranged lethal), you would take 4.025% of the damage. To a melee attack with an s/l component (again, most), you'd take 3.15%. A build with s/l softcap and absolutely no slotting in its resist shields would take 3.685%. Add SO slotting to charged armor makes that 2.95%, which is a little over a quarter less the damage that your build takes for ranged/aoe, and a smidge less for melee. Of course, to an attack that is pure fire or something with no s/l component (pretty rare), your build is much stronger unless the softcapper leverages Power Surge effectively. Moot if you are using purple insps, but otherwise food for thought. On a side note, it makes me sad to see 1k Cuts not taken 😞

You can actually slot Ribosomes in Kuji-In Rin to enhance the psi resistance. Two +2 Ribosomes plus your slotted Bo Ryaku will put a scrapper at the psi resist cap if you can double stack Kuji-In Rin (not super hard). Side note on that, it's also possible to be at the toxic res cap with high recharge and the Shield Wall or set bonuses if you use Kuji-In Sha every time it's on cooldown. Nin covers both the damage types you are likely to find without positional tags. If it had Caltrops on scrapper I'd be all over it.

I've played both sides of this, but not together as caltrops with the Ragnarok proc is the only way to travel but redundant with ice patch. On my ice stalker(/ice) I don't use cross punch, but include Frost in the single target rotation with a -res proc in it. It is end heavy, but I've got energy absorption and icy bastion to help with end, so it works out. The only thing I could really tell you in your case is if you could figure out a way to proc AS and Freezing touch you'll increase your damage a fair bit as they have high proc rates. Additionally, taking only the half of stalkers guile in AS that provides the least recharge will increase the fire rate of the hide proc, after which you should def use Freezing touch to get the best crit you can.

As someone who has used Ice armor on stalkers a lot (not exactly the same, but close enough), I'd like to just add some commentary in case it can help anyone. Ice armor is both a bit backloaded, as someone mentioned, because of Icy Bastion and really wants large investment for the same reason, but it is perfectly serviceable until that point. Once you get that investment it really takes off because of all the layers of protection it provides. The amount of regen it can provide for it's 30 second window is fantastic. The f/c defense is a bit of a red herring, because the s/l defense takes care of most of those attacks. You have to be facing purely fire-typed damage for that to be a problem. You will face a lot more pure e/n attacks, but you are covered there. In those rare circumstances where fire could be a problem, Icy bastion takes care of it with both res and regen. Now there is a psi hole, but honestly icy bastion is the panacea. Last week I was trying to get the freedom phalanx accolade on my ice/ice stalker and soloing all those AV missions. I got to the mother mayhem one, where every enemy does all psi damage, and started constantly face planting (was set at +3/x8). I was pretty annoyed; then I realized it had been so long since I actually needed it that I forgot about icy bastion's regen. I started activating it right before each mob and ended up sailing right through the rest of the mission. You will need great recharge to pull that off, but once you have that it's pretty terrific. If you tried to farm pure psi mobs where you have a constant stream of aggro capped enemies, then ya, you're going to die. But I wouldn't expect to do well in that circumstance with anything other than dark or elec, and honestly I have never seen such a scenario. Now one thing to watch out for on sentinels I imagine is the defense debuff, as the resistance is lower than the stalker version and you also don't have the ability to add extra defense buffer via saturated Energy Absorption. Cimerorans and the like might be more of a pain for sentinal ice armor than for the other versions, as the extra absorb isn't going to help if you do end up in cascading defense. Icy Bastion will cover you some of the time, but it depends on how long it takes you to neutralize the -def mobs. Someone also mentioned hoarfrost puts you at the hp cap before accolades. That was also the case with stalkers when the set was applied to them back in the day, and it directly resulted in (with gentle pushing from some of us forumites) in an hp cap increase for the AT. I don't see why that couldn't be the case here, as that clearly makes the power unreasonably less valuable.

Tw/elec worked really well for me, with the same infinite endurance and solid survival. I would put it above Ena because the +def from tw can stack better with a resistance set and because it has a damage aura. That said, you don't get def debuff resistance, so either need to pack an extra luck insp or use ageless radial in those situations. Luckily Tw also provides a good amount of kd. I would say this is not the easiest combo to level though, and it really wants to get to 35 for power sink. However, with significant investment you're looking at a devastating character.

I recently compared Zapp and Moonbeam on a stalker on test and found they did almost exactly the same damage against the same mob (single digit difference, maybe due to damage type resistance), so I'd say no. Negative damage is less frequently resisted than energy though, so there is that.

I just tested the hamis for completeness sake, and they did not work, unlike the posi dam/range.