Send me a Stalker to fly through Praetoria

[Heraclea]

Finally starting to get semi-interested in building a solo character to work through Praetoria.  Figure a stalker might be good for the zone since my existing hero stalker is a mission completion specialist and the main Praetoria payoff is the story lines.  Criteria I am looking for include:

 

* ASAP mez protection.  This is Praetoria we're talking about, and I don't see this having much entertainment value without it.  Toggle mez protection is best; click protection is a definite turnoff.

* Attack set I haven't used before.  Prefer not to reuse Dark Melee, Staff, StJ, Fire, Kinetic, or Radiation; have high level characters with those.  Prefer something more exotic than smash/lethal.

* Toughness versus Praetorian mobs.

 

So what combo should I roll?

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

Ha!  I had the exact same thought process, and ended up picking stalker for the same reasons.  My feel for Praetoria is that it's a lot less cartoony than either Hero or Villain, so I wanted to pick something that also felt more "real", power-wise.  I ended up going with a Savage Melee/Electric Armor stalker named Nervous Breakdown, with powers that stem from, well, his name.

 

I only got him to level 5 before parking him for other projects, but this reminds me to dust him off.  Good luck!

 

 

[Coyote]

I went with Psy/Dark in Praetoria. It seemed to fit the milieu, and Dark Armor's high Psy resists should help a lot against the most annoying enemies there (Seers). SR would also do well since it's type-independent, but it has a click mez protection.

[eknudson]

I asked this question recently! 

 

I'm in Neutropolis now, and I think that especially if you're planning to run through all or most of Praetoria that a stalker is an excellent choice!  Regardless of what you do, you're going to outlevel zones since there's so much content.  As a stalker, you can of course stealth a lot of missions, and there are many "click glowie" or "defeat boss / boss & room" missions. Even doing that as much as you want you'll have to turn off xp.

 

My stalker is currently level 18, almost level 19, in Neutropolis, early in the resistance crusader arc. I still have both loyalist arcs to go, so I'll be turning off xp pretty soon.

 

Electric armor has worked very well for me.  You get mez protection at 10, which isn't bad. Knockback protection at 16 which is a little annoying but not terrible. And you're strong to electric damage (all the clockwork), good to psi damage (seers) and good to s/l damage (police, syndicate, etc.). No significant holes to the damage types you're likely to face.  I went kinetic for my primary since I hadn't tried it before. 

[Heraclea]

Right now I'm looking at Electric/Willpower or Electric/Energy,  Willpower seems like it would be very different on a Stalker.  But its mez protection offers protection against terrorize and confuse.  That's only available come level 16, though, which seems to be the same as most sets. 

 

Energy looks attractive on paper.  It gets a more basic protection at level 10.  And it's a toggle.  But it's a defense set, and those tend to be late bloomers. 

[eknudson]

Energy has no psi defense or resistance, though.  I had a StJ/Energy scrapper goldside, and you definitely feel it fighting seers.  Willpower looks weak to energy attacks until level 20... which is a bit late, isn't it?

[Avilister]

A note on the xp - if you're in Praetoria mostly for story and not for challenge, I've found that you can grab the double xp booster, set difficulty to level-1 and you pretty much keep pace with the missions you're getting. You may actually fall a bit behind as a Stalker if you're skipping a lot of combat.

[KaizenSoze]

As always I suggest, ice/ninja.

 

You get the three positional def early.

 

Mez protection isn't till 16 though.

 

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

Also, your post title reminds me of:

 

 

[Heraclea]

That was an intentional reference... 😉

[Coyotedancer]

My very first Praetorian back in the Live days was a KinMelee/WP Stalker. I soloed her through with absolutely no problems.

You may not be keen on repeating the KM set, but it really did work pretty well against everything she ran into.

 

 

Edited February 27, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Mister Mass]

My first Praetorian on Homecoming was a Stalker, under the assumption that the combination of superior damage, good defenses, & Hide would take most of the bite out of the (what I remembered from Live to be quite annoying) Praetorian mobs.  My choice was to reroll Gengetsu, my Dark/Ninjitsu Stalker from Live.  I was concerned about the lack of mez protection until Level 16, but stealth & the ability to Assassinate the most annoying mob at the start of the fray (which I used to target mezzers when necessary) rendered most of my concerns moot.  I carried some extra Break Frees just in case, but I really had few problems  - I don't believe Gengetsu has even earned the first badge for being mezzed, & he is Level 33 now.  I felt unconcerned enough about mezzes that my 3rd Praetorian is an Ice/Cold Corruptor, who uses holds as his preemptive mez protection.  So my advice would be to go with the armor that you want to play the most, & not feel constrained to play one with early access to mez protection.

 

In terms of primary powersets, I can't really argue that any one set is any better for Praetoria than another. I haven't noticed that any particular damage type is inordinately resisted.  But my opinion may be biased by the fact that my 2nd Praetorian was a Sonic/Sonic Corruptor, so he debuffed any RES the mobs had anyway. 😉

[eknudson]

2 minutes ago, Mister Mass said:

In terms of primary powersets, I can't really argue that any one set is any better for Praetoria than another. I haven't noticed that any particular damage type is inordinately resisted.  But my opinion may be biased by the fact that my 2nd Praetorian was a Sonic/Sonic Corruptor, so he debuffed any RES the mobs had anyway. 😉

 

The only thing I've noticed is exceptionally heavily resisted in Praetoria--unusually so-- is psi damage. Seers and Syndicate resist it pretty noticeably. So I'd avoid psionic melee but otherwise I don't think it matters a lot that it's Praetoria. Some s/l resistance but about the usual amount if not less. 

 

For the secondary, most damage is s/l, energy, and psi. With a bit of fire, very little cold negative, or toxic.  A secondary that doesn't have a significant weakness to s/l, energy, or psi seems best if you're going to do most of the 3 zones. 

[Mercurias]

The quintessential Nin/Nin Stalker is actually really strong in Praetoria. Your Defense builds up fast, and it's largely based on positionals. You also have a little bit of solid utility in the secondary without even trying.

 

I enjoy my Psy/WP Stalker a lot. It's solid and tanky as well as brutally efficient. 

[Haijinx]

Staff/EA and Savage/EA are both really good 1 to 15 goldside.

 

KM/EA seemed good in  DFB when I tried it out but I never tried it goldside.  

 

 

 

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 2/27/2020 at 4:14 PM, Heraclea said:

That was an intentional reference... 😉

Nailed it!