Frosticus

Enemy tohit buffs can be troublesome for defensive builds. Your typical "softcap" build will quickly find they have little protection. Fortunately they aren't "that" common and similar to heavy psi damage from the previous demonstration you can just avoid the content, or stack inspirations, or rely on a team if that floats your boat. But what if you didn't? This is 40 mins of continuous fighting against: +4x8 Nemesis - each cast of vengeance adds +30% tohit to the spawn Lvl 54 Positron AV and Nemesis ambush - crazy strong debuffer that uses radiation blasts and radiation debuffs for reference each attack debuffs def by 26-39% . Tohit floor of 9.75%, so he will hit you and potentially strip your defense. He also has his own version of "Overload" that gives him a ton of defense and a huge hp buff. Lvl 54 Manticore AV - he has some of the TA debuffs like acid arrow, but is surrounded by upwards of 100 nemesis mobs that constantly join the fight. His tohit floor for attacks is 11.26% and he also has a 10% tohit buff toggle. I go through 10 overload crashes. Some I'm paying attention to, some catch me by surprise if a lot is going on. Even given the above situations, I'm never in danger from the crash. As always: no insp/temps/amps/lore pets Also, No deaths

If you have a decent amount of procs in your attacks you should just keep attacking as normal.

Hey I get it. I like /EA, that's why I'm showcasing it. If I'm anything, I'm objective about the strengths and weaknesses of the builds/combos I'm playing no matter how much I enjoy them. Honestly, there is little in this game that can't be countered by teaming and/or lowering the difficulty, but that doesn't feel very super to me most of the time. I like teaming for big stuff, but by and large I don't love it in this game since the proliferation of incarnates and rare IO's, but that is a different converstation. /EA has 3 primary weaknesses. Psi, Toxic, and significant def debuffs. How you overcome them, or if you even do, is going to be up to each player. All I've been showing with the last couple posts for my /ea stalker is: 1. The advantages of placate - which is still often auto-skipped without consideration 2. How to incorporate the best t9 in the game in to your build and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. /EA crushes run of the mill content, how it handles more obscure stuff is my interest. Next up I'll be demonstrating /EA vs mobs with significant tohit buffs, which is really going to highlight #1 & #2. Most def builds get a bit squirrely in that situation. If that is something your build can already handle, then hopefully you get some entertainment value at the very least.

Ya EA is pretty naked vs Psi and those seers don't seem to get knocked much, or want to come close to get pummelled. You should run it again post 50. It is nice going back and beating on things that were troublesome earlier.

Ya for sure. I fully agree with you on psi epic. I run it on my earth/psi/psi for me and to help stoney. Like you say he taunts, but he needs help against non-psi AVs. I still think ice/psi is a bit of a square peg into a round hole in terms of being a single target killer, but I respect what you are saying and I've done plenty of builds that color outside of the lines only to have them turn out better than I'd hoped.

You should be able to eventually cap your stoney to every damage type with /sonic. My stoney is only capped to psi/toxic and he can very easily tank lvl 54 psi AVs with spirit ward. Yours will be extremely resilient. You'll wish he could aoe taunt!

Haha ya, doms and stalkers are my two favorite ATs and neither of them are getting voted homecoming queen of hardmode anytime soon. But it could change. Team strategies change and what was once challenging is no longer

It is pretty easy to get thru. Just click unleash and melee core before it goes down. You will be fairly well protected You are right about AS and I should have added a caveat. Fast ET has better dpa unless AS crits, so fast ET is priority on this build and ET recharges so fast. It is a bit more black and white on most other stalkers where the heavy hitter takes longer to cycle. Other than that I will sometimes squeeze in bonesmasher before AS if I'm confident that both attacks were going to happen either way. I dont have the hide proc in AS on this build, or I might reverse that again haha. Sometimes my brain turns off too and everything I planned for an encounter goes out the window and I start using total focus before placate, or buildup before placate haha. Doubly so if my health is in the red!

A lot of the armor sets have a weakness to Psi damage. But after you have scraped the bottom of the barrel and think it can't get any worse EA emerges. EA - all psi attacks hit because it has no positional def and no psi def. Full psi damage is taken because it has no psi resistance. No +hp and only a weak heal on a long timer. It's only source of psi protection comes from energy drain and hide, so you may as well be naked. A LOT of players pretend this isn't an issue. When I asked on discord I got feedback about players getting through entire missions on elusive mind (60 sec of 7.5% psi res, 25% psi def, 600 sec recharge) or Rune of Protection (60 sec of 25% psi res, down for 120 sec), or Barrier (gives about 30 sec of great psi protection and 90 sec of being a pinata) That all sounds great, but at the lowest point in this video I have 33% psi def and 25% psi res. You can see how that goes (Mother kills me in less than 10 seconds) so the above advice is definitely "ymmv". Like it or not, you are probably eating a steady diet of inspirations in psi heavy content. Anyway, this is an overload build going pretty smoothly through +4x8 Seer Psi Mobs and also lvl 54 Malaise and lvl 54 Mother Mayhem. In other words - a LOT of psi damage. I go through quite a few overload crashes. It is pretty easily mitigated by unleash potential, melee hybrid (zero end so doesn't detoggle) and ageless radial (zero end cost to activate after the crash). As always: no insp/temps/amps/lore pets. edit: I forgot to disable temps, so there are some mayhem buffs up. Sorry.

No. Heres what it looks like in Stone Melee slotted in Seismic

So you would recommend building an ice/psi dom for prolonged endurance usage vs a single target?

It is a "soft" crash. 50% of your bluebar, no impact on recovery.

FA lets you do more interesting things with your build and the debuff resistance is nice. CP can be pretty nice for some niche cases. Less applicable to WP, but it can help builds that experience t9 crashes. Or if you use a lot of endurance to the point of needing ageless it can let you switch to radial and get that sweet debuff protection.

/psi only needs to worry if they plan to face 1 tough target, or assume they never miss with drain psyche in that scenario. My earth/psi ended up needing cardiac, but in practice an ice dom is probably avoiding solo AVs/gms, so it likely doesn't matter. Or they just load up on temps/ insp.

Generally: low target caps on damage powers, low "burst" damage, limited access to tohit buffs, mobs that can be very resistant to controls, usually need to be directly in melee to deal good damage, very limited debuff resistance/protection, very limited team buffing ability, heavily reliant on others if any aggro is pulled. It's an uphill battle for them, but one certainly won't prevent success.

just an inf saving piece of info: the HO's in mind link and ice slick don't boost the recharge and slow respectively. If a power can't take a SO for the aspect you are trying to improve, then HO's will ignore it. Set IO's use different rules and will improve multiple aspects as long as it isn't flagged to ignore boosts and enhancements. You could probably still improve the -speed of ice slick via your alpha though if desired. ie. Intuition Radial or Spiritual Radial.

I dont worry about focus on my ice stalker. But I don't worry about it on any of them. Most sets suck you in to a trap of cycling low tier attacks that don't even generate 100% focus, while your AS sits unused. Ie icesword = 80% chance of focus If fast AS is up, I use it. It will be up ~4 seconds later and maybe I'll have more focus built by then.

Ya, it is even worse than just lower relative damage and no taunt. The cast times of all their attacks were lengthened, so they can't chain attacks nearly as quickly. They also prefer standing back and throwing water balloons, using melee much less than the troller version. That means less attacks completed when they trigger soulbound buildup, but also less frequent firing of it. There was a lot they could have done to PA, but they did it dirty imo. I think it warranted a different power name.

It gives up a lot of damage - no spec wounds, Dom PA does much less damage than Troller PA It gives up the complete small group control that troller PA offers through taunting PA and taunting Phant- Decoy It gains much better x8 control in gleam, which is a very good ranged stun. Overall your illusions - PA and phant - aren't very convincing compared to the troller versions, but gleam is very pretty.

Ya, as a damage debuffer, when an AV hits unstoppable it lives up to the name.

Hopped on test. *used auto enhance *emptied seismic and put Crit Strikes in *No scrappers strike slotted Seismic>Heavy Mallet> Stone Mallet

No dog in this race other than to say this should be an easy one to test. It should be apparent pretty quickly if that second mallet is being boosted.

Ya the 5% (and 50% vs naked) hit rate is only for even con minions and can be extremely disappointing when you start facing harder content. Most def sets have pretty low ddr, so that takes a hit due to + cons hitting more frequently, but it is also hampered by the debuff strength being higher due to the purple patch. But as you noted, that same + 4 boss hits pure resistance based builds 91% of the time rather than the 50% that gets thrown around often. All that said, resistance is nice in that it is predictable and allows ample time to play reactively. Defense is mechanically stronger and will often sail thru content that resistance struggles with, but by the same token you often faceplate in mere seconds and have a tiny window to prevent it.

Can't speak for all of them, but in the case of Stone it has a flat 20% crit chance on seismic, so that is notable. EM can gain double energy focus, which is pretty bonkers when it happens and both the heavy hitters have a slightly boosted base critical chance of 10% EM is quite popular, so it isn't holding it back imo. I'm not sure why stone isn't more popular. I'm not sure why I haven't played it yet. Seismic is a perfect spot for crit strikes, you can probably get heavy and regular mallet into the window and tremor offers good control, ffb proc and is a nice 15ft aoe. I think if anything it competes with buffed axe, but maybe doesn't win in that department, so you see more axe being played.