Advice for a broadsword stalker.

[Stitch 626]

Revisiting the game after playing for a small bit back in 2007. (Mostly spent all my time creating characters and costumes and entering contests so never got past level 30). I have a specific character idea utilizing a broadsword primary, and a dark themed secondary. I'm looking at either Dark Armor, or using a dark theme on Energy Aura or Invulnerability. Out of these 3 sets, do any have better synergy with the broadsword? (for instance the defense bonus on parry).  I know shield is usually recommended (or at least was in threads I've read from 2019), but it just doesn't fit my theme. Suggestions and build ideas would be welcome.

[ZemX]

Parry is melee/lethal defense so Invuln and EA, being typed, will only stack lethal defense.  Personally, I think melee defense is more often protective on a Stalker than Lethal, but none of your options listed are positional defense sets unless you want to give Ninjitsu or Shield Defense another look.  Shield does have some nice dark themed shields in the costume creator and Ninjitsu can be colored to look very dark/mystical just as EA can be made to look like dark energy.

 

Dark Armor has only very minor defense for Parry to build on and, more importantly, doesn't give any Defense Debuff Resistance.  You need either soft-cap defense and strong DDR -or- you need to be well over the soft-cap to be protected from debuffs.  Dark Armor doesn't get you either and, as primarily a resistance set, isn't as strong on a Stalker as it is on Brutes/Tankers.

 

Invuln I've not had any experience with on a Stalker but I know it lost the scaling defense/toHit power, Invincibility, and was given a flat defense/toHit buff in Reinforced.  This is due to the age of the set.  It hails from the "good" old days of Stalkers being thought of as hit-and-run assassins rather than melee combatants who might be surrounded by enemies.  Other ATs with Invuln get a nice boost to defense and toHit when surrounded.  Kind of makes Stalker Invuln a whole lot less interesting to me, but someone who has experience with it might tell me what I'm missing out on.

 

EA is probably your strongest option of those listed.  It doesn't need any synergy from Parry to achieve solid defense.  Energy Drain is very thematic for a dark theme because it's draining endurance from foes and giving it to you.  Solid choice you can't really go wrong with.

[Without_Pause]

Agreeing with ZemX. BS is slow so EA offering +recharge will help. BS and Dark would be good on a tank. 

[Stitch 626]

Thanks for all the good information. I have another idea for a themed character for sword and shield, That's the main reason I wanted to go for something else on this character. Energy aura seems like a good choice and the animations on EA look perfect for what I was going for on dark theme as well. Most of my information about why invuln might be good was from Shin_Rekkoha's Reddit post, but I don't know how much this info might have changed in the past two years. 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cityofheroes/comments/dcliwe/common_misconceptions_vol2_stalkers/

 

[ZemX]

I didn't read the whole post but I recall seeing it before.  On Invuln and EA I think it's still up to date.  The main thing that was changed for Stalkers on Invuln was Reinforced being a flat 10% toHit and 7.5% defense.  This is half the maximum that Invincibility can reach on a Scrapper when surrounded by 10 enemies.   I suppose it's arguable how often a Stalker is surrounded by 10 enemies vs. just 5 but that's down to your playstyle and what you intend to do with your Stalker.  The Stalker version can be seen as an advantage  if you're less often going to be surrounded because you get that flat buff all the time whereas Invincibility gets very little against a solo opponent, for example.

 

If you want to explore it a little further @Croax's build thread in this forum has builds you can load into Mid's and just compare.  This lets you see an example of where each might end up with a full endgame IO build.  It's easy to see where they start from but better to look at final stats like that.   Invuln, for instance, will take more to get to the soft-cap for defense than EA.  You can see what it takes to get there on a final build like that.

[Nemu]

This is a good read

 

Broadsword/Shields - The Thing that should not be. - Stalker - Homecoming (homecomingservers.com)