aethereal

Inspirations are powerful! A small purple inspiration is better than almost any defensive power in the game, during its duration. It is negligibly cheap: killing a single minion at level 50 gives you like I don't know, enough to buy 100 or so of them? If your inventory of insps were infinitely large, you could simply cap to-hit-chance, defense, damage, and damage resistance all the time for non-meaningful amounts of money. So the balance point around insps is some combination of it being a little obnoxious to activate a bunch of them, and sharply limited inventory space. The email trick vastly loosens your available inventory space, in a way that it seems very unlikely to have been intended for. I'm not deeply invested in defining whether or not things are exploits, but it wouldn't be at all unreasonable to regard this as one, and, if one felt that it was a sufficiently commonly used exploit, to stop it (perhaps, as @Wavicle suggested, by disabling taking things from inventory while combat-flagged).

Enhancement set names: Cold Snap Boreal Flash Freeze Frostbite Glaciate Chilling Wave Brittle Transition Shattering Freeze Deep Freeze Benumb (slow set) Rapid Condensation Negentropy Polar Express (j/k) Frigiate Icy Tomb (hold set, not that holds need more damage procs I guess) Ithaqua's Breath

Can you stack knockback? I think it's an instantaneous effect, so different sources can't stack it (one power activation can potentially stack, so if you have a knockdown power and then you add a %chance to KD proc, I think that can stack up into knockback). But I've never seen it stack from different sources. As far as I know, once you're in the KB/KD cycle, you're immune to other KB.

This is a persistent myth. Sentinel resistance debuffs are not unresistable.

Sometimes when I get the Arcane Power proc, Arcane Bolt does not recharge. Here's an example in my combat log: You Immobilize Button Man Buckshot with your Ring of Fire. You hit Button Man Buckshot with your Ring of Fire for 3 points of Fire damage over time. You hit Button Man Buckshot with your Char for 3 points of Fire damage over time. You hit Button Man Buckshot with your Char for 3 points of Fire damage over time. Arcane Power bursts through your body! Arcane Bolt is still recharging. You hit Button Man Buckshot with your Char for 3 points of Fire damage over time. You hit Button Man Buckshot with your Char for 3 points of Fire damage over time. Arcane Bolt is recharged.

This has now either been resolved or resolved itself.

I get a client/server version mismatch error when trying to log into Brainstorm. I'm on a mac with Island Rum. When I restart Island Rum, it does not appear to detect any new client version.

If you want to aim for a just-north-of-5-seconds attack chain for Ice Melee, you need 200% recharge on Assassin's Ice Sword and Freezing Touch, which does probably mean slotting them both for local recharge -- sort of a bummer. Aiming for a 10.25 second attack chain isn't by any means a bad idea for many Stalkers: you'll proc better by forgoing local recharge, you can use the snipes, and remember that getting a near-guaranteed crit on your biggest power is like adding another big hitter power in your rotation. However, I've never sat down and tried to build an ideal chain for Ice, and with only Freezing Touch with its 1s animation time in the mix as a very attractive ST power from your primary (plus AS of course), maybe it's not a good idea. That said, what I did with my ice/bio was just use Assassin's Ice Sword, Freezing Touch, Moonbeam, and Ice Sword, and the thing was that between Build Up, DNA Siphon, Parasitic Aura, Ablative Carapace, Ageless, Hasten, and... I'm blanking on the name, the big +defense power in Soul Mastery... I just generally filled any hole in my attack chain with my plethora of defensive/utility clickies. Which maybe wasn't ideal, but there are a LOT of clickies in bio. Which I found more fun than the armor-and-forget powersets. Anyway, the point here is you can aim for 5-6 second attack chains, or you can aim for 10.25 second attack chains, but don't end up in the 8-10 second land, when the lockout will really screw you.

I just did a little bit of qualitative lowbie testing on a fire/kin controller with Arcane Bolt and Mystic Flight, levels 1-7. Planning to continue to level the character and grab more Sorcery powers and see what it looks like holistically. I used a Controller on the theory that Arcane Bolt was best for Trollers. Mystic Flight I mean, it's fine. The flight definitely feels faster than it does on live (presumably because it is much faster, especially for a lowbie). Trying to use the teleport to speed travel time still feels like a bit of a wash. Only marginally faster than just flying in the straight line instead? Arcane Bolt It was definitely nice to have a solid damaging power for a lowbie 'troller. One reason why I've tended to bounce off this AT has been that it's just so frustrating to actually kill shit in the early game. Arcane Bolt felt pretty chonky and damaging at least at this very early part of the game. It felt especially chonky and damaging with arcane power, of course, but I did note that if you want to use AB as a mainline power in constant rotation, the random yellow circle business wasn't well-aligned for that. I had to train myself not to wait for Arcane Power and just use it on cooldown because, like... that was the point. I wanted an in-the-rotation blast. So, for this character, in this point in their evolution, I probably would've quite happily traded the arcane power thing for a further reduction to cast time.

The chance to hide proc can only fire once every 10.25 seconds (regardless of its proc chance with the PPM calculations). After each time it hides you, it simply will not proc for 10.25 seconds. So if you have an attack chain that takes, say, 9.5 seconds to completely, what happens is: Attack chain 1: You get presumably around a 90% chance of hiding yourself after your Assassin's strike. Attack chain 2: You're still in the lockout, so 0% chance to hide. Attack chain 3: You're now out of the lockout, so 90% chance to hide again But since nobody has a really, really, really short attack chain of say 5.125 seconds, your 9.5 second attack chain actually means that there's 19 seconds between chances to hide. If you instead had a 10.5 second attack chain, you'll have a chance to hide every 10.5 seconds. This is really important when you're using your guaranteed crit from hide on a monster hit like Frozen Touch (or Energy Transfer, or Crushing Uppercut or whatever other Stalker attack you built to take advantage of your free crit), it can be a big chunk of your overall damage.

I played an Ice/Bio stalker through to the endgame. It's a powerful choice (as in: I soloed TFs and probably 20 or so AVs). Bio lacks in pure mitigation. I disagree with the previous poster about the essentialness of DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura (I mean -- if you want to play at high difficulties. If you want to play at +0/x1, I presume you can do whatever you want). You'll certainly want to invest in power pools and sets to turn the mediocre resistances and defenses that it gives you into something better (especially in offensive mode). But it gives you a damage bonus, good heals/absorbs, and powerful endurance tools. Getting the accolades helps everyone, but it particular helps heal/absorb/regen-based sets, which Bio is properly thought of, so you may want to consider how much you like/dislike getting them. One issue with the damage output of Ice is that it's actually too easy to build too short of an attack chain. I could pretty easily just use Assassin's Ice Sword, Frozen Touch, Moonbeam, and Ice Sword for filler, but if you do that, you run into the invisible 10.25 second lockout of the chance to hide proc (which I hate) and only get your crit-from-hide every other attack chain.

The way it "should" work to my understanding is: On cast of the power, it should proc as a ST-power of its actual recharge time, for any procs that are applicable to the target or caster. With each drop of the patch (which is a pseudopet), it will have a chance to re-activate procs, with an effective 10 second recharge time, and the appropriate area factor, per target. It won't be subject to the "only once every 10 second" rule because each patch is a new pseudopet that doesn't "know" about previous castings.

Inspirations are powerful. Having 33% uptime on two different inspiration effects with no slotting needed is being interpreted by some here as though it were obviously bad, but it's actually not obvious at all.

These are really exciting changes (more exciting, to me, than anything in the first three builds), and I think it should be a big counterexample to people who are concerned that feedback is not being heard. (Er, speaking of in general all the changes in build 4, not just the ones excerpted above).

You could set a passcode for your base (you don't have to tell it to anyone) and then set up a macro or keybind to enterbasefrompasscode for your own base. That should get it to one keypress, albeit not by clicking on the portal in your view.

That makes sense. But, vice-versa, it seems like you're tacitly acknowledging that right now, RoP does carry three power picks. If the RoP nerf came alongside a revamp to the Sorcery power pool, and you could make the case that nerfed RoP was carrying its weight as a T3 power that has good, solid T1 and T2 choices leading up to it that it doesn't need to carry, that's one thing. But if you're saying, "RoP is now balanced if you imagine a world in which the T1 and T2 sorcery powers were good," aren't you admitting that now in the real world RoP is bad? Not balanced, but bad. Pools have to balance as a whole. Of course the presence of Hasten, or, to a lesser extent, Combat Jumping, or the manifold defense choices in Stealth play into the balance of each power in those pools.

I walked through, I dunno, ten or so AVs solo with my ice/bio stalker, and only a few of them ran from me. Like, it definitely happened, it's not like I was a tank, but lots of them just stuck around to fight it out, and it was only rarely the case that there was much running.

You can't really proc out lightning rod or shield charge. They both summon pseudopets, which means they proc as though they had a ten second recharge instead of a ninety second one. Caveat: at least, that's how it used to work, haven't checked to see if the powers were reformulated to avoid pseudopets in recent builds.

There seems to have been a lot of confusion about this. Dark Consumption was never going to be a teleport attack. It was going to be a PBAoE with damage similar to Lightning Rod -- that was the comparison they were making -- but not a teleport attack.

The powers I identified -- the non-free P2W powers -- should get a benefit over the free P2W powers. Right now, they're largely worse. And the free P2W powers are getting the ability to stack with actual travel powers, which the non-free P2W powers don't get because they're exclusive. So, while panther form shouldn't be as fast as Superspeed of course, or jump as well as Super Jump, it should be better than Athletic Run -- both because it costs money and Athletic Run doesn't, and also because Athletic Run can be run alongside Superspeed (to get the jump of Athletic Run and the run speed of Superspeed) or alongside Super Jump (to get the run speed of Athletic run and the jump of Super Jump), and panther form can't. These are not powers that I think we need to worry very much about the balance of. Just the fact that they detoggle you, and can't be used with any attacks, is going to keep them niche choices. They shouldn't be The Very Best travel powers, but making them solidly better than Athletic Run or the jetpacks is fine.

It'd be nice if the various P2W travel powers (panther form, coyote form, void skiff, rocket board) got a buff here to be midway between the free runs and the full-on-for-real travel powers.

A level 50 character with super jump can get substantially above the roof of city hall on live, albeit not vastly higher. 127.8 is my jump height per combat attributes on a rando level 50 character. A level 50 character on brainstorm gets similar jump height to me, 122.27 feet (I probably have a jump enhancement in hurdle or something on live). Seems to me like it's working as intended.

Sure, but who cares what its damage is now? It's like fifth in Ice Blast's DPA rankings. Cast BFR and one of Ice's good powers in the same amount of time it took to cast just BFR before, win-win. Long recharge so you have to think about it, fast cast time so that when you want to hold something, you hold it now, not after you take another 25% of your health. It wouldn't be anyone's favorite power in the set, but it would have a role (available to stack onto FR when needed), put one accuracy in it. And the point is, Ice Blast doesn't need another mainline, "holy shit this is amazing" power. Having a marginal power that nevertheless has a role sounds like an improvement. Edit: Current listed (ie, not arcanatime) DPAs for ice blast, blasters, level 50: Ice bolt: 62.56 Ice blast: 61.44 Frost breath: 32.80 Freeze ray: 137.64 Ice storm: 57.53 Bitter ice blast: 133.31 Bitter freeze ray: 69.07 Blizzard: 205.46 So, it's really the 4th, not 5th, and one of those is the nuke. But it has 2.5s animation time, so if its animation time was reduced to 1.25 seconds or so, you could literally cast new BFR and one of Ice Bolt, Freeze Ray, or Bitter Ice Blast in the same amount of time that it used to take to just cast BFR. It's not as bad as I was remembering (especially once you take into account arcanatime, which will help it against all the other powers). But by the same token, I don't think we can just give Ice Blast another fast-animating, high-damage hold when it already has Freeze Ray and Bitter Ice Blast. Edit2: The corruptor version doesn't really do 230 damage, just in-game help counts corruptor scourge damage -- BFR's base damage is half that, 115.

I get wanting to make BFR better, it's certainly not very good right now. I think that maybe something like "decrease cast time to somewhere around 1.25 seconds, give 30 or 45 second recharge time, damage = 0" would give it a role -- you could hit dangerous bosses with FR/BFR and quickly hold them, but you wouldn't get incidental boss-level holds throughout your ST rotation just "for free," which I don't think Ice Blast needs.

Not 100% clear what you're suggesting. Basically faster animation (assuming you're in combat) + more damage if your to-hit bonus is higher? Ice is quite a good blast set already, albeit perhaps not at fire's tier. Not sure it needs a buff that makes it trivial to stack holds on a boss with no or little ST DPS loss.