aethereal

You didn't "imply" it was one, you directly stated it, suggesting that, "all the set's AoE are spenders." Of the three AoE powers in the set (Rending Flurry, Shred, and Savage Leap), only Rending Flurry is a spender.

Shred does not spend Blood Frenzy, it builds it. They at one point contemplated making it a spender, but as far as I know it never has been a spender on live. It certainly is not one now.

Well, who knows. I mean, maybe just a mistake to build that way, or maybe his build just didn't have enough recharge to drop Vengeful Slice from the attack chain. The classic non-Stalker DB chain uses Blinding Feint, which obviously isn't there on a Stalker. Assassin's Strike has a much longer recharge than BF, so you can't just sub it in. I'm a little surprised that he couldn't drop VS with both Zapp and AS, but... who knows.

I don't have any direct experience with DB Stalkers, but... I don't think so? It doesn't seem any different from Vengeful Slice on other ATs, and it's not generally one of the good moves in DB. Decently high damage marred by long cast time, with Ablating Strike and Sweeping Strike and Assassin's Blades all being superior in DPA.

This is extremely not true.

Regen: Level 4 Quick Recovery. +30% recovery Bio: Level 1 Inexhaustible. +25% recovery, +add'l 10% with Efficient Adaptation available at level 10. Radiation: Level 1 Gamma boost. Complicated recovery that's based on your hit points, don't know what it cashes out to. Bio at least is pretty straightforwardly better. You're right that most other sets don't come in to their endurance tools until more like level 16 or level 20, but also level 4 is in fact too early -- nobody has endurance problems at level 4. I tend to find that endurance problems come on in the late teens. Again, back in the day, these powers would come later -- you'd get them at level 28 or something, and in particular I find that the early 20s, when you often have bad end redx slotting, are a brutal time for endurance. But with the earlier primary/secondary powers of a few issues ago, Regen's advantage has again eroded here. And while in some cases those powers do come late enough that there is a slightly awkward gap, it's also the case that they are mostly better endurance tools than Regen's pretty small recovery bonus. Even for a newbie, the first 20 levels go pretty fast.

I really want to disagree that Regen has particularly good endurance management, and I frequently found myself in endurance binds when playing Regen characters. Yes, Quick Recovery is something. In the old days when Stamina came at level 20 with a painful two-speedbump prerequisite and far fewer armor sets had endurance tools, Regen had premiere endurance management. But the game has moved on. Now, armor sets with endurance tools: Bio Armor Dark Armor Electric Armor Energy Aura Fiery Aura Ice Armor Ninjutsu Psi Armor Radiation Armor Regeneration Willpower And it's hard for me to say that any of those sets has unqualified worse endurance tools than Regeneration (I haven't tried Obscure Sustenance, in fairness). Yes, there are nuanced questions -- like Electric Armor has great Endurance economy but it breaks late and that's legit a tradeoff. But I just wouldn't call out Regen as having a particular strength in Endurance management. It's not an actual weakness, like Invul/Super Reflexes/Shield/Stone, but it's not a particular strength.

Yes, it stacks with itself. -10.5% to-hit for 20 seconds (Tanker numbers).

Perfection of Body has a damage bonus.

Moment of Glory has +damage.

Ice melee clearly has good mitigation and AoE. Its weakness is ST (it has Frozen Touch --great -- but then GIS is mediocre, IS is mediocre to bad, and Frozen Fists is atrocious).

Well, the good news is that you're significantly before the ratification of the Geneva Convention.

I think that lots of people would argue that Kinetic Melee is the worst melee set on Scrappers. Staff isn't great. But OP, this is a pretty easy game, and your first character is very unlikely to end up with the dubious honors of setting performance standards for this old, mostly-dead, easy game. I wouldn't sweat it. Play what seems fun to you.

Why do you think it doesn't receive global bonuses? Boosts are copied to the pseudopet.

"Never" is a long time. Who knows, maybe in a few years we'll be able to ask superintelligent AI to create infinite content for CoH including dozens of new arcs leading into the whole Battalion story or whatever it is. But I don't think that the incarnate system will be "finished" in the sort of default forward-looking environment of Homecoming as it stands.