Croax's Tier List and Build Collection

[TaxibotJoe]

are combinations an average of the tiers or do combinations create new tiers?

 

for example, would pairing one of the swords with a defense armor elevate both sets?

[Croax]

7 hours ago, Obsinious said:

Also didn't know Ice armor was actually this good on a stalker (checked some of your /ice builds), you might have convinced me to make an Ice/Ice.. After I cross check my other stalkers with your builds for improvements.

 

I have played a Ice/Ice Stalker from DFB to TinPex and had a lot of fun. Ice Armor caps S/L defense very early in the leveling phase, which was very noticable. But the endurance is a Problem until you get to Energy Absorption and Icy Bastion. I would use Icy Bastion first and try to postpone the use of Energy Absorption as much as i could, to make sure that i have enough endurance until Icy Bastion comes up again. This is the only thing to watch for Ice Armor. The special thing about Icy Bastion is, that it brings huge resistance bonuses to a set that is more about defenses. It is not permanent up but has a big impact while it is up. It does not end with a crash, which will get you killed. There are so many T9 Powers that can be skipped and never missed.But Icy Bastion is a must have.

[Croax]

7 hours ago, TaxibotJoe said:

are combinations an average of the tiers or do combinations create new tiers?

 

for example, would pairing one of the swords with a defense armor elevate both sets?

 

This is a very good question. I tried to make a table with primaries as columns and secondaries as rows. But it was a big ugly bunch of numbers. It was not easy to compare so many combinations to each other. Also some of the primaries were lacking something special, like area attacks. In such a case everything offering area damage from the secondary would be helpfull.

 

Unfortunately there is no easy answer to it. Best way i could imagine is to compare a few combos with each other, but not more than 4-6?

[darkfry]

I'm digging the love you give to the stalker, really insightful. I do have a question when it comes to your builds. On my blaster I've always aimed to slot for Procs, do your builds take that into consideration, or would you consider your current set up to be more optimized for newer stalker players?

 

Edit: I need to read more before I open my mouth about procs because you answered this else where. Doing some digging, will report back.

Edit 2: After reading your other thread of builds (godly btw) it would appear the cost benefit of slotting procs would be breaking up set bonuses and having slotting requirements. I think for the build I'm planning on running I shouldn't have to worry too much about this.

 

P.S. Rolling up a EM/SR stalker rn 🙂

Edited April 27, 2021 by darkfry
am dumb

[ZemX]

20 hours ago, Croax said:

In this Post here i made some judgement based on my opinion without beeing too gentle. 

The Tier List and Builds collection was aimed towards Players that like ratings and tier Lists. People that min/max their toons and respec multiple times, spend time on the test server to come up with optimal attack chains. I could have done it with my excel sheet where i give points for different fields, but kids nowadays like tier lists...so why not?

Okay, that makes sense.  Thanks.

 

Also, I don't want you to think I was giving you a hard time about Regen being a meme.  This entire AT was a meme, once. Still loved playing one, even then. 🤪

[darkfry]

Okay, so building this out for myself, I understand why you don't take some of the T9s, the full butt blasting that comes at the end of the duration is definitely a turn off. But wouldn't it be useful to have an "oh $h!7" button? For your EM/SR build in particular, I feel like I would benefit more from a button that lets me get out unscathed over laser beam eyes if things go sideways. Just wondering your thoughts on this.

 

My thought process on this is, if I am able to get away from a bad situation by popping elude, I'd be of more use then the occasional time I need to use laser beam eyes.

[Croax]

Hi @darkfry,

 

thank you for your posts here, i like this kind of conversations!

 

The EM/SR build uses Laser Beam Eyes as a Set Mule. The use of it is not intended. I had one Power and one Slot to spare. You can pick Elude if you want it, that should be no Problem at all.

Now i do not have mids right now, but if i remember correctly you should be a little bit over the defense cap and weave is turned off. With ~50% Defenses and a toggle that can add a few more % if the situation would call for it (ITF?), You should not be worried about Cascading Defense Debuffs. And if you play in teams there will be maneuvers to push the defense even higher. If you think about that, you should ask yourself what Elude brings to the table? It just increases your defenses even more. You will push the emergency button but your situation will still be the same.

SR has a couple of Problems for a secondary. It gives no damage option beside 20% recharge bonus, it does not have endurance fix, it has no healing and only scaling resistances. The Endurance is best countered with the Body Mastery, you could also go for Mu and Soul by relying on Ageless to fix your Endurance. I tried to cover healing with the Health Pool which is something the top Claws/SR scrappers tend to do. And to get high resits at 60% Life you have to increase your base resists a little bit. I tried that with laser beam eyes, because i could do nothing about the rest. 

My real concern with this EM/SR would be the sitiuation where your build is so powerful that you become your own enemy with Energy Transfer doing so much damage to yourself, that the passive healing is not enough. Imagine having high recharge and tossing out ET very often. It will not crit often enough to keep your HP stable. And since you deal true damage to yourself, the resists are useless. Maybe the Radial Rebirth Destiny is best in endgame situations?

And a lot of people forget that you can just pop some inspiration which is also a very good option. I do it a lot with macros to combine them.

 

(Lets take this opportunity to bash regen)

There are very funny memories i have about EM/regen Stalkers killing themself during Momemt of Glory.

 

 

Edited April 28, 2021 by Croax

[drbuzzard]

This is a very impressive effort. Kudos. 

[Primal_Dark]

I know much of this is subjective but having played an elec/EA stalker to 50 I don’t think EA belongs in the tier it’s in.   The psy hole becomes significant in the end game.   The set is great and I love it but I struggle at times with so much psy damage from so many groups that just blow through my defenses.   My SR feels much more durable.   I’m sure IOs will begin to close gaps as I slot them.   Thank you for all the work you did.

[Croax]

That sounds really different than what i have heared from other players. They wanted me to put EA in the S-Tier because it is so powerfull. I have not been having Problems with the Psi vulnerability, because i get used to play around it. SR had the problem of lacking endurance and the click mez was annoying me after a while, like it was with Nin and Shield. But as you said, a lot of this is subjective!

[arcane]

I notice you put Armageddon in Lightning Rod. I thought damage procs were pretty much useless there because the pseudopet functionality kept them from working? Have you actually seen that go off? Often? I once tried to proc bomb Spring Attack and it was a spectacular failure.

Edited June 3, 2021 by arcane

[Croax]

It does go off, but not very often. 

Very often i pick Musculature with the Stalkers and therefore i have a lot of +Damage on Powers. If i have to choose 5 out of 6 for Set bonuses i discard the pure damage one for the best efficieny on powers.

You can freely put the damage procs elsewhere.

[ZemX]

1 hour ago, arcane said:

I thought damage procs were pretty much useless there because the pseudopet functionality kept them from working?

 

It's not that they don't work at all.  They just don't work well.   Psuedopets follow a formula for proc PPM as follows (courtesy of the PPM thread😞

 

Probability to Proc = PPM * ActivatePeriod / (60 * AreaMod) 

AreaMod = 0.25 + 0.75 * AF

Sphere (PBAoE or Target AoE):     AF = 1 + 0.15 * Radius

 

The problem is what to use for ActivatePeriod.  The pet itself lists 100 seconds on City of Data for LR and Shield Charge.  But that would work out to 185% chance or so for Obliteration:Smashing's 3.5PPM proc (if I did all the math right) which gets capped at 90%.  That's good!  Except... I just tried it since I have that slotted on shield charge.   It's definitely not 90%.  Not that I tested it extensively, but for a few spawns (remember to turn on pet damage and combat in chat).  I can see Obliteration Chance of Smashing only fires on one or two targtets out of 8 or 9 that I hit.   This suggests the ActivatePeriod is the standard 10 seconds for all pseudo-pets, toggles, and auto-powers that use procs.  Chance to fire then works out to 18ish% which is more in line with what I am seeing.

 

On top of that, it's hitting for only about a third of what Shield Charge does by itself to the outermost enemies (it does more just around the point of impact).  So something less than 33% more damage total on 18% of the hits?  That's only about 6% more damage overall, at most.  So weigh that against whatever else you might put in that enhancement slot, I guess.  Armageddon's proc is 4.5ppm so it will go off a little bit more often (around a fourth of the time) and it will also do about 50% more damage than Obliteration's proc I was testing.  Not bad.  But not great either.  It won't be too bad a trade off if you really need that slot somewhere else in your build, I think.  I'll be keeping mine in Shield Charge mostly because I want the six-slot bonus to melee defense of the full Obliteration set. 

[arcane]

Ok that’s pretty much what I thought. Verifying I’m not exactly screwing myself out of much if I put, say, Superior Avalanche or the ATO set (the one that doesn’t need to go in AS) there.

Made an Electric/Ice Stalker yesterday and studying your threads. Stalker is one of my most neglected AT’s alongside Sentinel. Each AT currently accounts for only 2.6% of my level 50’s 😉

[ZemX]

Only thing to remember with the Assassin's Mark proc is that while you can put it anywhere and it still gives all your attacks a chance to recharge Build Up, it also follows the same rules as any IO when it comes to exemplaring.

 

That is, its benefit will disappear if you don't have access to the power it's slotted in.   Good news for Lightning Rod is it's in your primary on a Stalker, so you will have it down to level 27 (5 levels below where you naturally take it at 32).   On the off chance you think you'll miss it when you (and if you ever) exemplar below that level, consider putting it in a lower tier attack like Chain Induction.  Or at least the proc IO for it.

[txdragoon912]

@Croax

 

If you dont have time for individual questions I understand...

 

For StJ/Inv you have energy mastery. If I wanted to replace that with Mu (for theme's sake of course) would that just kill the builds endurance regen beyond use? Is there some alternative slotting you would use?

 

Thanks a lot for your hard work.

 

[Croax]

Hi @txdragoon912,

 

i am happy to see that this thread helps players!

 

StJ/Inv is a nice combo but will be very endurance hungry, especially with such high recharge values. If you drop the Body Mastry to get Mu, you will be very sad whenever you don't have ageless or any other means of endurance buff, be it from other party members or temp powers like the adrenalin serum.

 

Other thing is that if you pick up the Mu Mastery i guess you would be using Ball Lightning and Zapp. You could use all the slotting from Laser Beam Eyes (just a set mule in the original build) to use it on Zapp but for Ball Lightning you need some more slots. You can get these slots by taking away the procs of your attacks, lowering you damage. You can get these slots breaking up set bonuses, loosing recharge or other bonuses, lowering your damage and/or survivability.

 

At this point i would suggest making the whole build new and setting up some goals to reach. knowing that you can not reach all of them.

 

StJ does not need any other attack on stalkers to function properly. No need for epic snipes or Cross Punch shenanigans. Ball Lightning can be handy for Area damage but you have to be aware that StJ/Inv has some restrictions, that other combos do not have. Maybe /Bio or /Ice  could be something for you? These two builds manage to reach a lot of goals but struggle on other fields.

 

I guess you could take the build StJ/Inv build to the homecoming discord and ask for other peoples advice and opinion. Maybe i am just too much caught up in my ways...

[txdragoon912]

4 hours ago, Croax said:

Hi @txdragoon912,

 

i am happy to see that this thread helps players!

 

StJ/Inv is a nice combo but will be very endurance hungry, especially with such high recharge values. If you drop the Body Mastry to get Mu, you will be very sad whenever you don't have ageless or any other means of endurance buff, be it from other party members or temp powers like the adrenalin serum.

 

Other thing is that if you pick up the Mu Mastery i guess you would be using Ball Lightning and Zapp. You could use all the slotting from Laser Beam Eyes (just a set mule in the original build) to use it on Zapp but for Ball Lightning you need some more slots. You can get these slots by taking away the procs of your attacks, lowering you damage. You can get these slots breaking up set bonuses, loosing recharge or other bonuses, lowering your damage and/or survivability.

 

At this point i would suggest making the whole build new and setting up some goals to reach. knowing that you can not reach all of them.

 

StJ does not need any other attack on stalkers to function properly. No need for epic snipes or Cross Punch shenanigans. Ball Lightning can be handy for Area damage but you have to be aware that StJ/Inv has some restrictions, that other combos do not have. Maybe /Bio or /Ice  could be something for you? These two builds manage to reach a lot of goals but struggle on other fields.

 

I guess you could take the build StJ/Inv build to the homecoming discord and ask for other peoples advice and opinion. Maybe i am just too much caught up in my ways...

 

Thanks for answering. I was afraid of the endurance issues for sure. I can always get my lightning fix from Ion. I just dont know builds enough to know if there was some magic answer. 

 

Appreciate it.

 

[macloudgr]

Congratulations for the guide, i wish all archetypes had a similar post like this one. I've been looking everywhere for a psi/energy aura build for scrapper and couldn't find a thing on the forum but here you have everything covered for the stalkers so i had to try one of your builds even though i'm more of a scrapper type, good job. 

[Without_Pause]

Currently using the SJ/ea build, and enjoying it a lot. Just kind of seeing what it can do now with IO sets slotted and working on getting everything to T4. Working on getting the IOs for a Elec/sd just to see how that feels although that is only currently level 27.

 

If you ever get the urge to do other ATs, by all means do so. At least with melee ATs there is a bit of copy/paste.

[Chelsea Rorec]

I normaly avoid threads like this as they are opinion based.

All those rankings are the opinion of the author and i disagree with most of the original thread.

The builds as stated are middle of the road builds and not how i would build a stalker which could alter how it performs.

 

As there are no stats or any figures of any kind to backup those rankings it is best to take them as the opinion of 1 person and not to take them as gospel.

just my 2 pence.

 

I'll go back to my  BS/Shield stalker now because 1 shotting NPC's is fun.

[Croax]

You exactly repeated, what i wrote in the beginning/disclaimer but when you say it that sounds so negative. 

I am not offended in any way but i do not understand your post.

 

Anyway have fun playinig the BS/Shield, i liked mine too. That was one of the first Stalkers i played on HC. Really like the style of sword and board, even though it is not the most powerful combination.

[Without_Pause]

At least we know who pees in their neighbor's pool. Maybe don't dump on the person who literally wrote a beginner's guide to be a stalker, and then now has gone and made a list of every possible Stalker build with full slotting and gave a listing of what they feel are the best primaries and secondaries based on their experience and giving logical reasons for it. You complain about lacking data and then provide none yourself or even logical reasoning for why his choices were wrong. But right, you can one shot a NPC. We don't even give out cookies for that.

[StriderIV]

On 9/19/2021 at 10:43 PM, Without_Pause said:

At least we know who pees in their neighbor's pool. Maybe don't dump on the person who literally wrote a beginner's guide to be a stalker, and then now has gone and made a list of every possible Stalker build with full slotting and gave a listing of what they feel are the best primaries and secondaries based on their experience and giving logical reasons for it. You complain about lacking data and then provide none yourself or even logical reasoning for why his choices were wrong. But right, you can one shot a NPC. We don't even give out cookies for that.

I wish I could upvote this more 😂

[aethereal]

On 6/3/2021 at 9:32 AM, arcane said:

I notice you put Armageddon in Lightning Rod. I thought damage procs were pretty much useless there because the pseudopet functionality kept them from working? Have you actually seen that go off? Often? I once tried to proc bomb Spring Attack and it was a spectacular failure.

It will act as though it has a recharge time of 10 seconds.