Daemodand

Get some +Damage set bonuses on your build and find yourself asking "What Lethal Resists?"

Mace gets a KO Blow (Jawbreaker) and a Headsplitter (Clobber).

It's a nice set.

I've tested this with very low level builds. No IOs, no Tough, nothing extra. Still a problem.

You are my Eviscerate,
My only Eviscerate,
You make me happy,
When mobs are dead.
You'll never know Eviscerate,
How much I love you,
Please don't take,
my Eviscerate,
away!

AAAAAA-WAAAAAAAAAY!

Dun, dun!

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Whats even worse, is when this bug hits, I can't use the down arrow for moving back. So if i don't realize there is hidden text in the chat window blocking the down from working and I'm getting my booty wooped cuz i can't move backwards......................................... .................................................. .................................

need i say more... the fix is to hit enter twice and the down arrow starts working again but its irritating as sin.

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"Move back! Move back! NNNOOOOOO! Why did I roll a Blaster!?1?"

It should be like the supermarket where you step on the rubber square and the doors open for you. In fact, if you get too close to the AE building you are forced inside and automatically queued into the very worst MArc ever made.

I call it the Awesome Button.

Crossover does present some PvP problems, most notably homogenization. Stalker/Blaster vs. Stalker/Blaster. Hilarity. Right now each side is forced to bring a selection from two different sets of Archetypes. Post Going Rogue, many Archetypes currently seen regularly in PvP will become a rarity. Heck, Villains overall will become more of a rarity as people take their Brutes and Masterminds and leave for bluer pastures.

I do have fun in the current PvP. But yes, in the final analysis I had more fun in I12 PvP. My Bane especially who last time I checked is royally screwed in the PvP 2.0 environment. He wasn't exactly uber in I12, but was surprisingly playable and got some good kills in. Not these days.

And Super Reflexes. Don't get me started on Super Reflexes right now. It was actually better in I12 PvP. And that's sad. Very sad.

I'm not giving up on PvP though. What else are my 50s gonna do? Farm Behemoths? I'm adapting as best I can.

And LOL squishy bonus resist.

QR
All this talk about people who aren't skilled at playing PvP. All I know is that if someone is in the zone, doing the best they can, skill or no skill, I say more power to them.

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SS but im not sure if FA is good at pvp i could be wrong though, don't have a FA brute.

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FA is one of the better PvP sets. SS/FA is quite a good combo. Brute DM is to be avoided in PvP due to the lack of Build Up.

P.S. You know I always found it a bit ironic to have powers that grant you ToHit, but themselves need to hit in order to grant the bonus. Those powers are useless when you actually need them.

In PvE, Defense works wonderfully well. In PvP, currently, it is borked.

Why? It's due to the 1-2 hit of Defense getting severely curtailed by Diminishing Returns, and Elusivity being reduced to currently brokenly low levels (10 points of Elusivity...it may as well not even be there. The whole point of Elusivity is to balance out the plethora of ToHit available. At 10 points...it just doesn't do that. Nowhere near.)

It isn't as bad for Stalkers as it is for, say, Scrappers though. This is because for Stalkers in PvP, their true, first-line of protection isn't the secondary, it's Stealth and having the ability to choose when and where to strike. As a Stalker in PvP, your secondary only comes into play when you've made some kind of mistake, or went against what you should have known were overwhelmingly bad odds.

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MAs spend most of their time chasing their enemies around.

Plus doing a flip in the air and bouncing off of someones head when you finish them off is just NOT as satisfying as splitting their head in half with golden dragonfly or crushing their head into their neck with total focus.

My favourite however, is eles Lightning Rod. I like to pretend that I am raiden

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I acknowledge Knockback bothers some people. Personally, I find it to be a staple of comic book combat and lots of fun. "Chasing down" your target takes all of a second-and-a-half, and Knockback enhanced Dragon's Tail on a Scrapper is downright hilarious.

However, given that KB isn't that well designed in this game (thus the commonplace hatred of it) it's a perfectly valid point of view to hold. Me? I prioritize fun over numbers and efficiency. For others numbers and efficiency are what's most fun, so that too is valid.

Perhaps KB could be reworked in this game to make it desirable. It's desirable in PvP, but in PvE it could use some help to get more people to use it. It's a comic book staple, and deserves a second look. But that's for another thread.

In short, MA is a good second choice for those who already have umpteen EM Stalkers, and it has thematics that make it something special. Every Stalker/Scrapper player is well advised to take a second look at it with an open mind.

Nothing's wrong with the market that a viable alternative source of IOs wouldn't solve. (And no, Merits are not a viable alternative source. Not at current Merit pricing.)

Detonator is one of the most Villainous powers in the game, especially when used with human henchmen. Get it!

Like I said, MA got a buff and people still hold opinions of it from before the buff. It's way better than anyone gives it credit for. I find it especially good on Stalkers in fact due to the reliable crits Stalkers get. AS>Placate>EC is a very damaging attack sequence. One of the best available to Stalkers.

In I16, it just might be any color you want.

Stone Melee is good in PvP, Stone Armor is lousy. You're hard to kill in Stone Armor, true, but your mobility is heavily compromised and the PvP game is all about maneuverability.

For PvP go with Stone/Fiery or Stone/Invulnerability instead.

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What if the passives had def debuff res and powersink was tweaked give a defense buff, like energy absorption?

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Not a bad idea but I think that's a bit too much like Ice Armor (and that approach might be overpowering given the Resists the set has). Scaling Defense is something no set in the game yet has, and it would make Electric Armor all the more unique, but not overpowered.

I know.

I'll be building +Damage on some of my Doms and +Defense on others.

If you read my OP you'll see I'm proposing Defense of 37% @ 5% Health, with 74% Defense Debuff Resistance.

I don't see the set getting 95% Defense Debuff Resistance (especially not as an always-on feature), as that might be overpowering and steps on SR's toes. Scaling up to 74% would more than likely get the job done without being overpowering, but the only way to really be sure is to test it in actual play.

Well, actually I could see Power Surge granting a flat 21% Defense Debuff Resistance to bring the total Resistance up to 95% while Power Surge is up. With Power Surge's Health crash, I wouldn't consider that overpowered, and it would let you start with 21% Defense Debuff Resistance even when at 100% Health while in your godmode. Yes, that could work quite nicely.

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It's a good idea in theory, but there are just too many defense debuffs around for it to work as an "after you've already been hit" sort of thing. Maybe if it started from a higher health percentage, and the debuff resistance scaled from 100% all the way down...


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IIRC, if you have a Defense Debuff on you, then have a Defense Debuff Resistance added to you, the Debuff on you is mitigated. Not 100% sure about that but I think it works like that.

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For some reason, and this might sound odd, but I just had a thought that instead of scaling defense, if we had scaling regen :-D


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Not a bad idea, but I think the +Regen makes it a bit too much like Willpower. The +Defense would be a very unique approach.

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It is not a bug. I have seen deflected, dodged and absorbed. I think it has something to due with how badly the mobs missed but I could be wrong.

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I'm very confident it's a bug. It reports "Deflected" far too often and it never used to do that. I rarely if ever see "Dodged" at all anymore.

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One other thing deflected is used for is Set bonuses. So if you're SR is deflecting things now instead of dodging, it's because you're trying to soft cap with +def set bonuses.

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This affects all build types, from TO to DO, SO and IO.

Much like Super Reflexes relies primarily on Defense, but as your Health goes down you get Scaling Resistance. Well, what if Electric Armor, as as your Health declines, gave Scaling Defense?

If we replicate the Scaling Resist from SR exactly (per damage mitigation), you'd get .15 * 3 (assuming 2:1 Defense:Resistance ratio) per point of Health below 60%. So at 5% Health on a Brute, you'd get approximately 37% Defense. A scaling Defense Debuff Resistance could also be granted right along side this. I'd think twice the Defense value to make sure the Defense you were getting was actually helping you to some degree in a stressed environment, so 74% Defense Debuff Resistance at 5% health.

The Scaling Defense/Debuff Resistance would be spread out over 3 powers (each power granting 1/3 just as in Super Reflexes Scaling Resist).

So Electric Armor would turn out to be much more survivable. It'd be a kind of inverted Super Reflexes where you relied on Resistance for the majority of your mitigation, but got a scaling second layer of protection the closer you got to defeat.

P.S. The Defense would probably be Typed, and would grant an equal amount of Defense to all Types save for Toxic which of course has no Defense in the game. So you'd have 37% Defense at 5% Health to Smash, Lethal, Cold, Fire, Energy, Negative Energy and Psi, but have a bit of a Toxic hole.

Wouldn't it be cool if for each face in the game there was a neutral, grinning, frowning and scowling variant?

(Personally I'm a fan of the expression faces. They're much more fun than the neutrals IMHO.)

People forget MA has been buffed since the old days. It has two 100% Mag 3 stuns now and its damage output is actually very nice. Probably only Energy Melee beats it out now for single target burst.

My MA Stalker is at 41 and is moving along nicely. But then I've been a MA fan since I6.

But seriously, the set is better than it ever gets credit for (it's like the Invulnerability of melee attack sets; Inv, especially the old Inv, rarely got the forum recognition it deserved as being a very solid set).

People who don't like it probably make build mistakes like skipping Crippling Axe Kick and taking Thunder Kick.