Ice/ but what secondary?

[Roxz7]

Hi guys, I'm very certain that I'll be making an Ice/ stalker but I'm quite uncertain on what secondary to go with it, the clearcut top tier choices after doing some digging seem to be Energy, Invuln and potentially Bio?

 

Is there any real advantage or specifics I need to be looking at before I make my secondary choice? At this point it really is less about being thematically correct and more about synergy since you can more or less change the appearance of them all to fit the characters theme.

 

Also Inf is not an issue in regards to Enhancements so recommend away 😎

[Hjarki]

I'd go with Bio. Aside from being probably the most universally top tier set across all AT with armor sets, it meshes with Ice better. The major weakness of Bio is the S/L defense and lack of DDR - which Ice Patch nicely covers in many ways. You also get the stacking Sleeps (although I wouldn't depend on this too much since Frozen Aura breaks the Sleep from Genetic Contamination and the latter only has a 85% chance of applying non-stacking Mag 2 every 4 sec).

[Roxz7]

Thanks for your input 😄 I might just try level a few different Ice Melee stalkers up to a certain level and see for myself, but if I remember right isn't Bio a secondary that mainly shines later on when you got most of the powers and get IO'd out?

[Hjarki]

7 hours ago, Roxz7 said:

Thanks for your input 😄 I might just try level a few different Ice Melee stalkers up to a certain level and see for myself, but if I remember right isn't Bio a secondary that mainly shines later on when you got most of the powers and get IO'd out?

Not on a Stalker. Genetic Contamination isn't a damage aura, so it's not nearly as essential as it would be on other AT. DNA Siphon is certainly nice, but it's not something you generally need for your build to operate. Parasitic Aura is marginally more useful than most T9 from Armor sets but it's still not a power I'd bother taking. So by level 20, you've got the core of the set.

[aethereal]

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.

[Roxz7]

42 minutes ago, aethereal said:

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.

 

A counter argument! thank you 😄 But yes that short of an attack chain I'm particularly feeling now that my current Ice Melee stalker is at 12, but what do you mean with the invisible lock out chance from the hide proc? I've yet to play with the ATO yet so this sounds like something pretty important.

[aethereal]

12 minutes ago, Roxz7 said:

 

A counter argument! thank you 😄 But yes that short of an attack chain I'm particularly feeling now that my current Ice Melee stalker is at 12, but what do you mean with the invisible lock out chance from the hide proc? I've yet to play with the ATO yet so this sounds like something pretty important.

 

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.

[Hjarki]

6 hours ago, aethereal said:

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.

Claws can do a sub-5.25 sec attack chain.

 

Ice can do a just-barely 1/2 attack chain with Ice Sword, Fire Blast, Assassin's Ice Sword and Freezing Touch.

 

Trying to do a 10.5+ sec attack chain is almost always going to yield poor results because there's just too much filler you're packing in. You do gain a small advantage as you head towards 10.5 because you can use a Sniper attack in your rotation (normally the recharge is too long) but it's offset by the enormous penalty of your heavy-hitting attacks being such a small part of the rotation.

 

Edited April 9, 2021 by Hjarki

[aethereal]

1 minute ago, Hjarki said:

Trying to do a 10.5+ sec attack chain is almost always going to yield poor results because there's just too much filler you're packing in. You do gain a small advantage as you head towards 10.5 because you can use a Sniper attack in your rotation (normally the recharge is too long) but it's offset by the enormous penalty of your heavy-hitting attacks being such a small part of the rotation.

 

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.

[Lazarillo]

You know, this is actually something I've been weighing a lot myself, since Stalker is the one non-epic AT I haven't made to 50 with yet since the game came back.  So after like, four others of various primaries scrapped in the 30-40 range for various reasons, Ice came to mind as the next "okay, no, really, I'mma do it this time" primary.

 

With that in mind, I played around a little with Ice/Shield on the beta server, and really enjoyed it.  It's kinda cool thematically with the ice sword attacks (and I used the pointy tech shield, so Frozen Fists looks blade-y too), there's the whole soft-capped defense thing (I didn't quite hit it, but I had other goals and it was still very survivable at the difficulty levels I like), and Shield Charge + Frozen Aura makes a hell of an entrance.

[Hjarki]

13 hours ago, aethereal said:

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.

I haven't worked through every possible rotation for every set exhaustively. However, almost all 10.25+ sec rotations that deliver strong dps tend to be of the form:

Some Basic Attacks, Assassinate, Big Attack, Shorter List of Basic Attacks, Assassinate, Sniper Attack.

 

You can either view these as 5.5 - 7.5 (or thereabouts) sec rotation where you're just swapping out Big Attack and Sniper Attack to deal with their long recharges, or you could view them as one 10.5+ sec attack chain. I tend to take the former view.

 

In terms of procs, internal recharge is only a disadvantage when you have too much total recharge for that power. That's why you tend to 'proc monster' your faster powers while straight slotting (more or less) your slow ones - you're looking to build a rotation where each power recharges exactly when you need it.

 

However, Stalkers have limited incentive to use procs (much). Consider Freezing Touch. A damage SO yields +63.7 damage per attack. A standard proc would be 64.575 damage per attack. Once you account for critical strikes, this means slotting Impeded Swiftness into Freezing Touch will not only make your damage less consistent, it will also make it lower on average than the alternative of just slotting for damage.

 

Stalkers also need those set bonuses because their defenses/recharge/endurance is going to be woefully inadequate unless you shore them up with set bonuses - and most of the best set bonuses require 5 slots (only one of which is likely to be a proc). You simply don't have the slots to pull tricks like the Broadsword Tanker with his 5 procs + LotG in Parry.

[Toxurion]

Ice/Shield has been a blast. With the current patch notes saying they have fixed Frozen Aura, which after the update will give a stack of Focus its going to be even better. Ice Patch is having its cast time reduced by 1.9s in this update as well, and I am looking forward to using it again. (Tried out the Aura fix on test server, its going to make my chain so much smoother. I can chain Aura, Touch, Frost into Focused AS -repeat- . Prior to test I would have to throw Ice Sword into the chain for the 3rd Focus stack.) 

 

My main concern with /Shield is endurance, I have taken Body Mastery for Physical Perfection/Superior Conditioning both to slot +End & +HP procs which makes the build quite stable without the use of Destiny. After the new update drops I will likely try out a snipe patron pool and see how I manage without Body Mastery, but I am not sure its going to work too well. 

 

Please note that my perspective is from playing a build that is IO'd to the max.  I never have the best builds but I always tune my ideas to the best of my own abilities. (AKA throwing inf at the AH) 

 

On 4/9/2021 at 9:19 PM, Lazarillo said:

"... Shield Charge + Frozen Aura makes a hell of an entrance."

100% this. 

 

I have tried Elec/Shield and though it's awesome, I think I prefer having the attack chain with Touch, Aura, Frost, AS. Being able to combine an ice sword with an ice shield and use the coloured sprint power to look like I'm sliding around is very fun too.