I apologise for my earlier vitriolic post proclaiming your ideas as stupid, I have just seem too many classes/archetypes/characters destroyed by overly enthusiastic cries from the vocal minority that are angry that 'they cannot do it'
I will instead address the comments one at a time.
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1) When the Arena first came out, Positron said he wasn't overly concerned with the 1v1 battles because it was too much of a rock/papers/scissors affair. How do we reconcile the dev philosophy that 1v1 can't be balanced and yet make sense of a toon that is designed for 1v1 combat? How does one side-step 1v1 balance on one hand and then appropriately balance an entire AT for it on another?
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In what way are stalkers designed for 1v1 combat? in the arena, where there is a stalker, I pop two yellows and turn him into hamburger for two minutes. I play an ill/rad controller, arguably a weaker PVP build, and most stalker builds are like wheat before a scythe (The only exception for me is energy, but then I think that they should even out the damage of the sets a little, raise lethals a bit and lower energy a bit)
Tankers in a 1v1 battle? not a chance the stalker will win. 1v1 means you KNOW you are dealing with a stalker.
anyone that has played in the zones ALSO knows that you keep moving. I have yet to have a stalker be able to gank me if I kept moving, the few times I have died was when I chased one right into an ambush or screwed up and stopped moving. and controllers do NOT get any sort of defense against ANY status effects unless they take the (pool based) acrobatics ability.
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2) The Arena is a situation where neither toon can leave the battle. Players, blasters in particular, were using Phase Shift to effectively gank and escape and the devs put a stop to it. Clearly ganking was not to be tolerated. What is interesting is that the Stalker AT is predicated on ganking. Its speciality is the 1v1 battle with the escape. Why take that ability away from blasters in consensual battles but promote and endorse it in another AT in non-consensual battles?
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The issue was for a ranged character to be able to 'gank' with almost no risk of reprisal. As statesman has stated, 'range is defense' and when you have a flying character there are going to be many situations where a melee character has virtually no chance to reply. 'gank and escape' was not the biggest issue, the biggest issue was blasters that could lay on heavy fire with absolutely no chance of a reply in kind. Stalkers make themselves vulnerable and especially REACHABLE after they attack, and even with heavy inspiration use this will often result in their deaths.
Also there is NOTHING non-consensual about being in a PVP zone. if you are there, you are taking the risk. the badges can be gotten with a minimum of PVP risk and there is nothing in the game that says that you ever have to leave the vicinity of the police drones to continue a quest ANYWHERE.
Now, if you want to complain about people TPPing foes out of the police zones and ganking them, fine, that is a reprehensible tactic and could be considered 'griefing' nerf that all you like.
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3) I am unaware of any AT power that doesn't have some counter in another AT without resorting to power pools. Defender buffs are unresistable, but yet people can buff themseves beyond those debuffs a la Fort, Build-Up, etc. Blasters have some unresistable damage, but the majority of it is resistable. Every status power has some opposing power that resists it. Fear, Holds, Sleep, even Slows, have their counters within the players very powers themselves. Even Taunt in PvP is not 100%. And yet, nothing resists Placate. Yes, I understand you can knock someone out of it...provding you somehow manage to trigger an attack that launched before Placate takes affect and hits after (you can't honestly say this is an expected skill). Or, you can launch a PBAoE and hope to hit, provided you have one. But this isn't resistance to the statusing power like every other status power has. Are there plans to offer the other sets resistance to Placate e.g. Give Clear Mind, Integration, Practiced Brawler, Ind Will, etc?
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You seem to overestimate the effectiveness of placate. it is not an offensive power, it is technically a defensive one. it literally simply gives the stalkers the effect of invisibility for ten seconds.
yes, stalkers can take advantage of it, and use it as AS, or simply run like hell. but I have yet to have my teleport or defenses or toggles dropped by placate. if you get placated, run away for a second until it wears off.
Is there any defense against the toggle-drop effect of brawl? not that I have seen, and brawl has KILLED invulnerable tankers. trust me, I have done it.
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3) It seems that the AT's in CoH have their foils in CoV. And vice versa. Who is the foil for a Stalker? Who can consistently solo defeat Stalkers who do not want to be defeated to the same extent that they can defeat any solo AT that doesn't want to be defeated? ...I'm reading that Stalkers can one-shot tanks in BB and Siren's with enough Rages. No solo AT can achieve the invisilibty of Stalkers, so should Stalkers be the only set that doesn't have to constantly be looking over its shoulder for fear of some hero?
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controllers can consistently defeat stalkers. they don't do it the same way, but controllers typically tear through stalkers easily, or at least I do. in two days I have torn apart 23 stalkers in siren's call and only died twice to them, both times to the same one, both times because I was standing outside his base taunting him to come out and play and forgot to pay attention to the water ripples, my own fault.
and on the second factor, yes, plenty of AT's can still stack invis. Group invis/concealment is a perfect example (yes, my stalker hunting build) and seems to work quite nicely even after I drop a pack of decoys. yes, I have to click in superior invis, but I reconceal a LOT faster than a stalker ever can hope to.
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Again, my question is not about is this too much or not enough, but how you and the devs perceive the balance and most importantly, how the off-setting weaknesses are actually substantive. What do I mean by that? Geko stated that one of the reasons that they turned IH back into a click is that they could not balance it as a toggle. They had meant for it to have a great healing benefit, and thought the huge endurance drain would compensate. But players proved they could avoid this penalty by six slotting QR and Stamina. So the penalty, though substantial...was not substantive. The same thing was said about Perma-Unstoppable. People were compensating for the crash, so there was not substantive penalty. It existed on paper, but was easily compensated for in-game. People talk about toons with damaging auras are proof against Hide...but I recall you explicity saying you were able to crit a Fire Brute...through BA and defeat him.
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No, just because you conceal your point within the bounds of aquestion that you are clearly using to point a certain direction, does not mean that people on this board will see it as anything other than a blatant call to the devs to nerf something that you, yourself, find daunting, the task of defeating an invisible killer. Do you use cheats on a game you just bought? Do you find and exploit every loophole within the game to make yourself overpoweringly potent without ever trying to do things the 'hard way'? I know I don't, and I certainly hope you don't. Stalkers are exactly as challenging to certain builds as tankers are or blasters or scrappers or anything else. I have never been able to beat a regen scrapper one on one (although I can fight them to a standstill or run them so low on end they run, if I have my wits about me ) Tankers are just a waste of energy, and fellow controllers are just an exercise in who popped the most purples and yellows before we start chucking holds. first one hit, loses. blasters I can take pretty easily, defenders are another exercise in popping inspirations, dominators are my praying they are not full of dominance, corrupters are just like blasters, and stalkers are a fun and interesting challenge.
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I think it would help a lot of the players if you explain how the devs perceive the AT is balanced in PvP and how that actually plays out in PvP...not how it plays out theoritically.
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meaning you think that the devs have absolutely no clue as to how a given archetype operates. please, really.
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For all the Pro-Stalkers posters out there. I like Stalkers. I like the element that the AT brings to CoH. The joy in defeating them is almost as enjoyable as beating blasters. I also have defeated Stalkers with my Scrappers 1v1, so I'm not even protending that Stalkers are invincible. My lvl 33 has defeated a lvl 40 Stalker in Warburg...several times. But each and every defeat of a stalker was only a result:
1) they simply chose not to use enough Rages to one shot me.
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Yeah, and the blaster behind you didn't either
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2) They stuck around for the fight.
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You chose to stick around for the fight. everyone can run, not just stalkers.
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3) I was playing a /regen
In absolutely none of those situations could I have defeated the Stalker if they had decided to check out early. And ...I was defeated far more times by Stalkers that stuck around than I defeated. So it wasn't like I sailed to victory. I'm not asking for any changes. I'm asking for an understanding from the devs for how this AT fits within the context of PvP from a substantive Risk vs Reward model.
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if you are asking for understanding from the devs, how about you ask for an explanation of how stalkers are supposed to work, instead of this, 'does your mother know you prefer your own sex?' type of question?
What the whole post boils down to is you saying, "apparently if you actually PLAYED the game instead of just building it, you would understand how incredibly overpowered stalkers are... Can you explain what made you come to the obviously false conclusion that stalkers are balanced?"
I think you'd probably have been better off leaving off the flowery language and making your point directly, instead of trying to conceal a huge nerf request within a smokescreen of intellectualism and psuedo-factoids.
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I don't believe for a second that it is an easy task to balance this type of AT for PvP, so I'm certainly not recusing the devs even one bit, I am trying to understand it from their perspective.
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meaning 'I want to see things from your point of view' but in the context of this entire post 'but I can't get my head that far up my butt'
Please just say it. or better yet, PM it to a dev so the rest of us never know that you are trying to sell us up the river for your personal aggrandizement.
