Claws/WP, trying to decide on an Alpha...

[Lazarillo]

So as per topic.  My build at 50 is already pretty solid.  I'm trying to decide between three potential options, and I'm curious what others might think:

 

Option 1 - Musculature - Duh, it's moar damej.  The Defense Debuff is not unwelcome on slash, but more likely I'd go Radial for a little extra endurance and because I think the Run speed bonuses might even let me swap out of my travel power.

 

Option 2 - Cardiac - More Endurance would let me run Focused Accuracy pretty much always, which is nice but probably excessive compared to Musculature if I'm being honest.  The Resistance bonus is rather nice because it'd bump my build up to the cap on Smashing/Lethal from its current position of about 70%, which in practice means about 20% less damage.  And actually...for Claws, I feel like Range is kinda nice to boost Focus and Shockwave.  So there's a wide range of benefits.

 

Option 3 - Intuition - I'm actually leaning most towards this, but I'm not sure how well it'd work in practice.  No, wait, really!  The Radial path has the damage (and Def Debuff) from Musculature, and the Range from Cardiac, but at the sacrifice of any Endurance bonuses.  Still, unless I run Focused Accuracy all the time, I'm not sure I need it.  It's a weird little combination that could almost work, I feel like, though I'd not get any real benefit from it until I hit the Rare tier (but I expect that won't take long, by the same token).

 

I don't focus on any one type of content, so I'm not, like, building with farming (or anything else) in mind, or the like, I've just found this to be a pretty talented generalist, and want to continue that reasonable "general" aspect.

[Erydanus]

It was very contentious when I talked about it on the stalker forums, but my alpha slot choice on my psi melee/willpower stalker was actually VIGOR. In fact, Vigor Radial Paragon. Why? Well it's: 33% Healing 33% Accuracy 33% End Reduction, 33% Confuse Duration, 33% Sleep Duration, and 33% Fear Duration. 

 

So that put 1 more end reduction in every power

it put 1 more accuracy in every attack (which went into overkill to be honest but at the time I wasn't sure if I would have enough acc for cranked up incarnate content)

 

It also put 1 more heal in all my willpower abilities that can take a heal, and to be blunt I had run out of slots for some of these powers or wanted to pump them above the ED threshold. That meant 33% more healing in:

 

High Pain Tolerance - increasing max hit points further

Fast Healing - increasing regen

Reconstruction - increasing direct heal (You get Rise to the Challenge instead, still, this increases regen)

Healing - yes the inherent! It was full of procs it was nice to get 33% heal added to it

 

My stalker took Physical Perfection in his epic, so there was another regen power that got 33% added to it. 

 

Finally he had Boggle which is a confuse power that once again, I didn't enhance as much as I wanted so it got some benefit from it as well. Though, if I weren't trying to drop that 33% extra confuse duration in Boggle I could have gone with Vigor Core Paragon and gotten 45% heal as well as 33% end and accuracy. Since the final tier allows 2/3 of the bonus to stack on top of the ED cap it's definitely worth thinking about. At first I was thinking that the alpha was going to take me from o to 33 and 33 to 66 in a few powers but in Reconstruction I actually am over 100% in healing now so I have a stalker with a self heal that cures him for (in all seriousness...) 666 hp of damage ever 25 seconds.

 

Anyway I think it's great you're seriously thinking about doing something that feels good for your character instead of automatically going with musculature. If it doesn't work out so what, you can just craft some new incarnate powers and change what's in your slot.