Hopeling

Fiery Melee is a great set. Shield pairs well with almost anything, not just Broadsword.

It isn't a proc, it's a global bonus. You don't even have to activate the power.

I agree that's better for AoE, but then you don't get the crit bonus at all on your ST chain. Depends which you prioritize. Arc would make a good compromise between the two, and I put mine there while leveling, but if you want the 6-piece recharge bonus, you can't use Armageddon nor the Fury proc there, which is a bummer.

But... Steam Spray does dramatically more damage than either of these...? The ST definitely does not feel punchy; even a double Water Jet doesn't feel especially exciting considering that it's basically a 3s animation. Geyser and Steam Spray are where the punch is.

It's comparable to BA, maybe slightly better if you can really abuse the wider cone on Shatter. Crowd Control is Pendulum with slightly lower damage but a slightly faster recharge, Whirling Mace deals slightly more than Whirling Axe on the same recharge, and Shatter has a 45-degree arc to Cleave's 19 degrees (again with less damage and faster recharge).

Water Blast has passable ST, very good AoE, and a decent self-heal if you want to take it. With a ranged nuke and probably the best cone power in any blast set, it's well-suited to playing from range rather than being a blapper. The combo mechanic... is there, I guess, but it doesn't require much attention, and using it well or poorly doesn't make a huge difference.

I think PS procs give more endurance than 50+5 endmods, if you're only using one slot. It is less reliable though. Critical Strikes in Follow Through is good, but personally I'd put Armageddon in Arc and Scrapper's Strike in Whirl to get more out of the damage proc. If you pull a slot from somewhere else, you could grab the 6-piece Scrapper's Strike bonus for 6% S/L resist too. Avalanche might be better than Overwhelming Force in Titan Sweep, just because S/L is usually more helpful than E/N defense. If you also throw a Winter's Gift unique in Super Jump, you've got 50% slow resist, which is pretty nice. I think you might be better off pulling that Numina: Healing from Health and 6-slotting Preventive Medicine instead of one of those 5-slot Panaceas. Rend Armor already has a 75%ish chance to proc Achilles Heel, so a second proc in Crushing Blow probably isn't adding much. Tough seems underslotted for resistance, maybe swap the UG:End/Rech for the UG:Res? Gets you 1.7% more resist for .03 more end/sec.

Battle Axe is unpopular because it's basically War Mace, but slightly worse. It's still perfectly playable though, and the two sets are nearly clones, so an SD/WM guide will work fine.

LOL, good luck with that. There are, in total, 18 StJ/SD stalkers that have gotten to 50, and 14 Ice/Ice stalkers. Of these, let's be generous and say half are Incarnated-out min/maxers. That leaves 16 people who could even possibly respond to your question, but only a small fraction of the playerbase visits the forums at all, so you're probably looking at a low single-digit number of people who could even possibly answer. But most people who visit the forums at all just lurk without posting much. That's basically any stalker. For this, are you sure you don't want to play a scrapper or brute with the Concealment pool? A stalker can certainly be durable, but without any taunt effects, you can't really tank in a meaningful way. Ice/Ice may not be for you here. The AoE is passable but not great, and Ice Melee in general is not known for dealing great damage. /Ice offers no help with DPS. Street Justice is a great set and suits Stalkers very well. With two melee AoEs and Shield Charge, I'd call it at least 7/10 on AoE, and you can always take Fireball or Ball Lightning if you want more.

I agree, especially since the Willpower rez gives a large 90-second buff and makes you untouchable. I'm not sure if intentionally dying for the buff is a net gain considering the time spent retoggling, but it seems like a silly thing to allow. I'm OK with that. We can always gather more data later if we decide we need more precision.

I tried it again with Defensive Sweep. Got three runs at 5:08, 4:42, and 5:28, significantly faster than without (by ~35 seconds, average). This was primarily because I was able to survive a lot more herding, though: if I don't try to herd, it doesn't seem to improve my kill speed at all.

Whoops, yes, I copied the wrong line.

For Electric Melee, I think the number of boss spawns can affect the run time pretty significantly, since those are a bottleneck. Also, how much I can get out of each Lightning Rod depends on how many enemies I can gather (without dying) when it finishes recharging. For TW, I'm less sure. Mob placement is maybe a factor - if the whole spawn gathers nicely, I can blow them away with AoE, but if they're spread out and don't all aggro together, it takes much longer.

I edited the Punching Bags to take away their throwing knives. I ran with Electric Melee for a while. Without spammable knockdown, I died a lot even on single spawns, which is what made me think removing an attack was the right choice. After that change, I got times of 6:26, 6:07, 6:17, 5:44, 6:51, and 5:46. Very wide swings. Single-target was a very visible bottleneck, especially the EB, who would be at 2/3 health when the rest of his spawn was dead. I've also done some runs with TW at 5:26, 6:20, 5:52, 5:43, and 5:12. Also pretty wide swings, and the fastest average so far, although not by much. Even with no recharge bonuses, TW can actually spend endurance fast enough to run out, unlike every other primary so far. And man, without any recharge bonuses, I can blow all my attacks during Build Momentum and then have nothing to use for a solid few seconds. I did not take Defensive Sweep, because I don't usually take it in my actual builds, but I think it would fill out the attack chain nicely, and the defense buff would probably allow significant herding. Also got some runs with War Mace at 6:08, 6:19, 6:12, 6:01, and 5:38.

It deals less damage, but not by much. And it's still a 15-foot radius, 16-target AoE, so it's pretty good. The snipe is cool too. The other powers, eh.

So far, the only set that seems to be at all limited by endurance is TW, at least out of the ones I've tried. The blue bar got kind of low a couple times with War Mace, but never so low that I actually had to stop attacking. I'm sure that will change with more recharge and/or more toggles though.

Yes. I'm... not super happy about this turn of events, because I had hoped to benchmark pure damage separately from damage-slash-mitigation. But I don't see a great way to avoid it; too much herding disrupts what we're trying to measure. Right now, it looks like a single spawn is basically always survivable, but double pulls get really sketchy. Maybe if I reduced the damage slightly, but didn't go all the way down to a single t1 attack...? I could try taking away the ranged attack and see what happens.

Not -res, but the big robot does have a -500% regen debuff on one of its attacks. Basically any Lore boss pet is a wrecking ball that adds a couple hundred DPS, as long as you can keep it alive. The lieutenants are meh. The buff pets vary widely, most of them offering some kind of short-recharge heal, plus some kind of watered-down buff power; they're not super exciting, but at least they can't die like the boss pets do.

Not the only - shared with Blasters. But yes, the low defensive numbers seem strange. Lower base HP seems like enough of a tradeoff for getting to attack from range. I don't think the Ward proc is underpowered per se - tankers get the same proc, and 181 points of absorb at 5 PPM is actually pretty substantial (if none of that absorb goes to waste, that's roughly equivalent to +200% regen), although it's weird for it to be affected by the purple patch. Defensive procs in general are just kind of unexciting. The Opportunity Strikes proc is basically garbage in its current state (PPM 1, and wasted half the time it goes off? Really?), so I absolutely would not mind if it changes to something completely different.

There was a thread in this subforum just a few days ago, in which someone said they prefer to be a 'real tank', ie, don't take any attacks and just spam Taunt and Provoke. It's not common, but it exists, like the "heals only" Empathy defender. I've never played a game where this was literally the meta, but I'm sure there are some out there. In eg World of Warcraft, tank damage used to come primarily from high-aggro debuffs (Sunder Armor); it wasn't until later expansions that tank damage became significant.

@TheAdjustor and @Sir Myshkin, thanks for the data! TA, are those timestamps on the first and last power used in each run (ie, clear times of 7:30 and 6:55 with WM/WP)? Since we're looking to compare primaries here, I'm less interested in the secondary as a package and more in testing how the components of each secondary contribute. For example, it would be silly to test Quickness and Lightning Reflexes and IO recharge bonuses as three separate things; those can all just be folded into testing at various levels of global recharge. Similarly, while Power Sink + Energize is not identical to Quick Recovery or Consume or Energy Absorption, an endurance-heavy primary is going to benefit about equally from all of them, so comparing (a set with endurance) vs (a set without endurance) should roughly cover it. Repeat again for taunt auras and damage auras, and we've covered the majority of non-defensive differences between sets. Some secondaries have truly unique effects, but things like Fiery Embrace or Against All Odds should be mostly agnostic to the primary. The big one to worry about, it seems to me, is Burn, since that becomes part of the attack chain. I consider this one a feature, not a bug. ST should matter, but AoE should matter more, just like it does in most missions. It looks like all the runs so far have also used sets that are at least as good at ST as they are at AoE; multiple bosses and an EB might cause more slowdown with a set like Electric Melee. I'm going to try that later today. I agree this won't simulate actual gameplay. The goal is just to get a metric that is less removed from actual gameplay than the existing ones. It won't be be perfect, but will (hopefully) still be more informative than no data at all. Investigating the effects of tohit, recharge, and varying amounts of incoming damage is already on the agenda, and me, Galaxy Brain, and TheAdjustor have talked about some ideas for testing how much each set is affected by disruptions to its attack chain.

It's a nice buff for non-stacked Rage. Double Rage looks way worse now though, yeah.

I'm OK with just excluding runs where you die or otherwise lose a bunch of time for some reason.

Whirling Mace is a pretty feeble imitation of Whirling Smash, but the jewel of War Mace's AoE is Crowd Control and Shatter. Shatter requires knowing how to abuse pencil cones though. Yep, it starts clicking around the time you get Whirling Smash and Arc of Destruction and can slot them. At 28, you don't have the latter, and only 3 slots in the former. Very late-blooming set.

I did with a scrapper. Took a lot of inspirations, and the stun made it sketchy, but on ×1 and with enough DPS it didn't take long enough for things to fall apart.