Frosticus

The only damage proc I put into my demon/storm (at least demon side) was the slow - smash damage into the prince. you "could" put all the pet bonus procs into hell on earth, but I personally feel that is a misguided approach. it is a strong buff for the prince, who already wrecks stuff, and you can have - I'm gonna say 9 imps - out at peak. I've counted 7. It isn't that hard to perma the imps so you always have 1 out. when everything is out in full force and all your demons are laying their -res the damage is unparalleled. It may be counter intuitive, but I put the " chance for buildup" proc in my hell on earth with the thought being there are so many of them running around that is should fire a lot. I honestly never monitored it though, so ymmv.

generally take them on my troller, rarely if ever on doms. I vote for more of their damage to be front loaded though. Often times a huge portion of their damage is wasted and in teams their is little reason outside of AVs to cast them. edit - except gravity. I dont take it on my grav trollers. Singy will immob them when it matters.

A lot. It may be easier now with the new pet ai but a ton of constant goto commands, lots of shifting from bodyguard to offensive. I play the toon more like a storm tank though so I generally lead the charge. Lots of herdicanning to pack them tighter for the small-ish demon cones. But in truth, between hurricane, freezing rain flop and gale kd, not a lot of damage comes out of most mobs after the initial foray. I went /fire app as well for bonfire to add even more kd to the bubbling soup of destruction. It is a carpel tunnel build for sure. Extremely active storming, attacks that are definitely worthwhile using, and active pet positioning and commanding. Very high ceiling though when it all clicks

I have a 50 sav/bio that is t3 incarnated. I open with an epic aoe. When I switched to a shadowmeld build I just opened with savage leap. Who cares when it does so much damage whether it crits or not? Given that you should ideally have 3-4 damage procs in the power there is no reason to hold off using it mid combat. It still does a lot of damage, plus often resets buildup. If I desire I might combat jump+hurdle straight up, or back and then fire it. Given that it is nearly instantaneous it works pretty well. But more often I'll just fire it point blank if I need it mid fight. That said, I personally didnt feel my sav/bio was sturdy enough, partly because I built it too aggressively and partly because sav offers no mitigation beyond great aoe. I feel bio really benefits from an attack set that can mitigate even a little bit of incoming damage. Ultimately I rerolled as sav/shield, which is now T3'd as well. It is beyond compare how much sturdier it is than the sav/bio. Which I dont view as a shortcoming of bio really as even a little bit of breathing room makes the set very tough. I've never played psi high enough to really comment on that aspect.

ill/traps is a top tier big game hunter. There isnt much it cant kill. In teams it is one of the best alpha breakers that a squishy can do. PA and seeker drones both soak alphas very well. Just get out in front of everyone and set the pace. It is a bit non traditional tactics but works well.

grant cover is fairly important if you want to have even performance in the face of debuffers. with double stacked active defense, deflection, and grant cover you have 70% ddr. A small purple can protect you pretty well when the -def starts to roll in. Without it you may need 2 to keep you from cascading. additionally, the above plus ageless radial gets you pretty close to /sr vs debuffers

I don't find my sav/shield wanting for damage. Yes musculature is nice, but not as nice as being able to steam roll almost without pause. I went cardiac I went melee core hybrid because you can rotate it with OWtS for very high levels of survivability. Rebirth was my initial inclination, but I ended up going ageless radial. Global rech is always welcome as is the full end bar every couple minutes as I can still burn through it even with cardiac. But the reason I took it is because if you double stack active defense you have 70% DDR. With ageless radial that increases to cap (95%) for 90 sec and 91% for the remaining 30 sec. For me, nothing says cascading failure like watching your defense get stripped away due to a lack of DDR.

They flee because your break their moral almost instantly. Try a different order of your aoes. leap>AS boss> rending flurry>shield charge. That way shield charge should knock them all down around the time they are looking for the exit. You can more easily kill off survivors before they get back up. Plus leap will almost always apply the -res proc, which your follow up aoes will benefit from. Part of what you are experiencing is why I like to add an epic aoe and at least some ranged attack option(s). More aoe output so less survivors running and ranged to tag them easier when they do. You could also try out the right side of melee hybrid. That aura taunts. Or a proc'd epic hold will one shot hold bosses Tenebrous tentacles proc'd can deal a lot of damage form hide and keep most of the group planted. Especially with the superior frozen proc as that will plant bosses too. Paired with kd converted torrent, they aren't going anywhere.

Sure thugs are probably more survivable. I can't say how often one would need to resummon as that largely depends on how good of a storm player you are and whether you lead or expect your pets to. My experiences with def based builds that have no DDR is not as glowing as many people portray. Whereas the layered mitigation of demons is pretty consistent against most factions. It's been awhile since I've run the character but the -res output eclipsed my storm/sonic defender with everything summoned. While my petless pylon runs showed personal damage north of 300dps, you get to add all your pet damage on top of that. Against real enemies a passive thug/storm would certainly be easier to play and could probably outperform a passive demon/storm. I dont see that happening once the mm itself gets into the action. At least not from a damage view especially once you look at exotic damage types.

trollers. containment+impact makes them feel like a blastroller. Doms dont need the attacks generally speaking. that said, Singy is pretty great and can let a dom just focus on attacking.

I think it is pretty skippable for non-stalkers (stalkers need this power as it is can do more than hidden AS). That said, depending on how you build it may be worth considering. It rolls procs very well. So depending on your build you may have more recharge than you need to run both low tier attacks, in which case hemo could work well. The dot is pretty slow on it though.

Feral charge is perhaps the most fun power in the game. Savage leap is perhaps the best aoe in the game. Savage leap is a big aoe, rolls procs exceptionally well and hits 10 targets. Feral charge is also a big aoe, but doesn't proc well at all, but hits 5? targets. *for clarity feral charge procs decently on the main target, but the aoe rolls super low probability. I wish very much that I could have both on my savage stalker. Very much. All the teleport attacks can behave strangely at times. Often my shield charge doesn't actually go anywhere if my target goes around a corner (I use the target enemy bind for it). Savage leap and feral charge will roll their procs even if you miss with the attack itself. Losing line of sight with the savage tp's causes the aoe portion to fail.

Sort of. Most people don't use AS from hide. It is too slow. But it allows you to open with thunderstrike for the aoe crit chance, which you could have just done after a fast AS+rehide too and probably have a tighter spawn, but that is what most do. I think the best thing about them is they allow hide to kick in even while you are dealing damage. So if you time it right as you move from spawn to spawn you can initiate a bit faster and still get off a hidden attack. I personally open with an epic aoe before shield charge. they are bigger than the melee aoe's and have a higher target cap. melee aoes tend to be pretty small, so it is better to wait until the spawn gathers around you a bit, Fast AS+rehide then melee aoe. Excepting of course the times that a spawn is already packed unusually tight.

I think most people have dismissed it for most AT's. I know I've been championing it hard for stalkers and dominators. Granted their versions are a bit different than the heavy melee AT's. A large part of the issue is the game doesn't even display a good number of the attacks. No casual person is likely to roll a savage melee when the two aoe attacks show no damage and the heavy hitter looks like it does less than a tier 1 attack. I'm not sure why the game can show the different damage levels of the combo system for street justice, but not for savage melee. They must be different enough. Who knows. The second is 99% of users don't seem to understand how savage leap works. Plus it is a pretty finicky power at times. I rolled savage melee on a stalker on a whim. Only to discover it is actually ridiculous. I think there was a sav/fire brute in one of the farming threads that was right up there in clear speeds.

If you do only one thing with savage melee - put as many procs as you can in savage leap. It is hands down the best power on my sav/shield stalker...and that is saying a lot without procs savage leap is more or less just a zippy gimmick and I'd way rather have feral charge for that purpose. With procs it is one of the best aoe powers in the game.

Ice (and a few others) is a primary that I'd say that agility is a solid contender. The set relies on 2 good single target attacks and the fast AS is the slower animation (shared by the swords). You can slot 64% rech in Assassins icicle and still proc 90% (hide proc+agility = 56.19%) You can slot 45% rech in freezing touch and still proc 90% (with the 2 purple damage procs). Frozen aura procs ok at base rech and not much worse with agility. In the case of /nin it would help bring up your heal , caltrops, and the confuse faster as well as give you a bit of a leg up on defense. Additionally it would help your endurance a bit (though probably more than offset by the faster cycling heavy hitters). Those are worth considering. You can't go wrong with hitting harder though, so musculature is a good choice too. That said, I'd personally don't slot sets in my 1-2 heavy hitter attacks. Instead heavily favoring procs and zeroing in on the right balance of rech for optimizing the attack. But ymmv.

Get yourself some +binds so you can use buildup before your main aoes, because like Naraganeun says, it procs assassin's mark very often.

4 stack chain may be optimal for hemo, but it doesn't necessarily translate to the best for AS because it generally means firing off AS with 2 stacks of focus. A chain of hemo, strike, slash, strike, AS will have much better chance of full focus for AS crit, but puts you at 5 stacks of blood...so exhaustion. It could well be more damage than a 4 stack chain that lowers assassins focus. I dunno. I've seen a st chain that used shred as well. I can't get behind that as I hate long animations, but it could work. I use hemo, slash, ring of fire, slash, AS. Sub char in for rof when up. Sub savage leap in for one of the slashes when up. There may be better chains, but for things that live long enough to need it to cycle the immob is actually pretty handy to stop them from running.

Looks like a solid enough build. I went a bit different direction on my sm/shield in that I use fire app. Ring and char fill in my st chain and give me some more ranged options. They both do good/great damage with procs and char procs buildup often. I also use a lot of procs in all my attacks, so I need at least 1 more attack than some other builds. Endurance is of course an issue as a result, but cardiac has solved that and plays nicely with further boosting the spectrum of resistances and upping my range (and telenukes). Your aoe chain would probably best be Savage leap>AS boss>rending flurry (5 stacks means 15ft)) >shield charge. you could flip shield charge to right after savage leap if you wanted. Just depends when you want the mitigation of the knockdown. In my case I lead with fireball and after great deliberation I dropped rending flurry. Although I miss it sometimes. Single target just make sure you use hemo after AS. Exhaustion isn't a debuff, it just locks you out of the blood buffs. Semantics. Continuous 4 stack hemo is probably best, but crafting that chain isn't as easy as it sounds.

chilling should work the same as AAO and genetic corruption from shield and bio respectively. hide suppresses them. I havent had issue with either of those powers interacting with the hide proc so chilling should be the same. as for /ice itself if you can get past the fire and psi weaknesses it is a very good set. Immunity to slow/ -rech and unlimited endurance are valuable. I've only ever played it as a tank though so ymmv.

I want a stone melee stalker

No to aid self. Shield has pretty decent resistances and the +hp all work together to make you quite stable. If you really want to tackle hard late game content you can cycle melee hybrid and one with the shield for 6 out of every 8 minutes. Very robust. if you go stalker suppressed hide is 1.8% def (all). I personally wouldn't go savage scrapper. Nothing wrong with it as the aoe is still quite good and the critical strikes proc can get a bit crazy. However, blood thirst isn't as good as build up (instant 5 stacks is actually kind of annoying imo and the damage buff is tiny) and the st damage of the stalker version of savage is leaps and bounds better than scrapper. my sav/shield stalker just hit 47. It is quite good.

I'd do savage/shield. And then I'd unselect scrapper and pick stalker. I'd pick either mu or fire app. 2 teleports, more aoe than you can shake a stick at. Terrific single target. dodgy. you only fail to see your character when you choose. I dont wait for hide to kick in on mine, it has little impact on my ability to mow stuff down. It is nice for reaching g objectives though sometimes. in fact you could shut hide off and as long as you have the proc is AS I'd still highly recommend it.

were it me (I have a sav/shield, so not that different in the end). I'd consider fire epic. proc'd char is a great st attack and triggers decimation build up well. The small crit doesnt matter as freezing touch is your hidden st attack anyway. fireball is great, best epic aoe. even ring of fire is better than most think for st dps. Just a thought

I'd consider mu. lead with ball lightning > sc> AS boss > frozen aura. More targets, faster, more aoe.