Having a real personal dilemma with this one....

[SirBronco]

I just got my fire melee/super reflexes stalker to 50. I am not good at builds. However, I think I may do two builds: the idea of hitting things and then grabbing a sword out of nowhere doesn't appeal to me. I would rather do one for punching and one for swords. Would that be feasible? I know for super reflexes you don't need many slots. Am also thinking for the sword build I would try shuriken's also since I have never tried them out. Any help with builds or comments on this would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

-Bronco

[Groovy_Ghoul]

I would not recommend skipping the sword attacks. All three provide a -def, none of the punching attacks do that. The only AOE is Fire Sword Circle.

Assassin's Blaze is not a sword attack so going either/or would exclude it and skipping your class defining attack is also not recommended.

 

Weapon Mastery is a great Epic Power Pool. You can absolutely make shurikens work. Take Physical Perfection, Shuriken and Exploding Shuriken.

[SirBronco]

Like I said two different sets: one punching and one swords makes way more sense to me. Combining them together doesn’t make any sense to me. Why I said swords with shurikens….seems like it will work. Fire melee may work with the pool punching powers. Not sure what to take for epics with the punches though. 
-Bronco

[Kaika]

I mean, you are completely hamstringing the set by doing that, the fighting pool powers are very weak by stalker standards, and especially by fire melee standards, you would have better luck doing this with  scrapper honestly but even then, not taking greater fire sword is a massive hit to your DPS. Exploding shuriken is great but normal shuriken is very weak, and not really useful as anything other then a back up ranged attack. Going either all sword or all fist though, would pretty severely handicap your damage in both AoE and single target, I wouldn't recommend. All fist you could do, but it would be very inefficient, and all sword would just not be feasible as you would only have 3 attacks and would be missing core parts of your kit like assassin's blaze. If you don't like the swords just play NRG,StJ, or Rad and color it orange and say it's fire, otherwise you are really hampering your effectiveness. If you want a fire sword only, katana, Broadsword, and Dual blades all have fire sword skins that you can use.

 

 

Edited Monday at 07:32 PM by Kaika

[SirBronco]

I want to do fire swords and shuriken's and fire melee with pool powers, I think.  I don't think the fire melee goes with the swords. I wanted to do fire melee in honor of my first fire/fire blaster, Sir Bronco, that was my first 50 on live. I might be making it weak, but I see the melee and swords as two different sets. My two cents anyways. Thanks so far for your opinions on this topic. I guess Bronco will be Bronco.

-Bronco

[SirBronco]

Maybe they could separate the melee attacks from the sword attacks and add more attacks. Do it for fire and cold. Not sure if that is feasible or not though. Would better suit what I am looking for. Thoughts?

[aethereal]

16 minutes ago, SirBronco said:

Maybe they could separate the melee attacks from the sword attacks and add more attacks. Do it for fire and cold. Not sure if that is feasible or not though. Would better suit what I am looking for. Thoughts?

People complaining about the fire/ice swords (and/or wanting just the swords) is a tale as old as time.  Like, I'm pretty sure that people mentioned it in issue 0 and every single issue since.

 

But the dev team across both live and homecoming have not seemed to have any appetite to take it on.

 

I think that there are a few issues with trying to get rid of the swords:

 

1.  Homecoming seems to have pretty limited capacity for creating new animations.  I don't know that it's no capacity, but they don't seem to have much.

2.  They've now leaned into the sword-theming by giving the sword attacks -defense (like normal swords have in things like broadsword/katana), and I think that makes them more reluctant to break the sword theming.

3.  It's just not super clear what you'd replace the swords with -- there are only so many ways you can punch someone with fiery fists while differentiating the attacks.

 

So, I don't know, maybe the devs are like inches away from creating swordless or all-swords options in fire and ice melee, but we've had 20 years of people complaining about them with no effect, and there is no sign that I can see that that status quo will change anytime soon.

 

Sorry!  I also would like some more options here.

[SirBronco]

Well you could put the fire melee/ice melee/ maybe some other type of elemental punches together. Then the same thing with swords. Have them be two sets instead of four. Kind of like they did with the dual pistol (?) set. Just an idea.

-Bronco

[aethereal]

59 minutes ago, SirBronco said:

Well you could put the fire melee/ice melee/ maybe some other type of elemental punches together. Then the same thing with swords. Have them be two sets instead of four. Kind of like they did with the dual pistol (?) set. Just an idea.

-Bronco

 

There's a suggestions and feedback forum if you want to put it somewhere where devs might read it.  I do want to reiterate that various suggestions around allowing swordless/all sword (and other various suggestions around swords) have been made and made and made again, with no apparent effect so far.  But if you want to throw in your two cents, it won't hurt besides whatever time you want to invest in it, and again the Suggestions & Feedback Forum is the place for it.

[SirBronco]

Thanks for your time aethereal.

 

-Bronco