Jibikao

When I tested /Poison, I suggested making Poison Trap do much large Toxic Damage in the beginning and leave the DoT out because the tiny dot damage will 1. draw unnecessary aggro you (since Poison Trap can't be target, the mobs target YOU!) 2. interfere with Sleep powers.

I guess you can proc the hell of Poison Trap with hold set and pbaoe sets.

/Poison has no acid mortar or seekers to help you with aggro issue when you run in with Venomous Gas. I guess they can make Poison Trap a "targetable" pet with health? Who knows. The whole /Poison set is lacking for Corr. /Poison is better on Controller.

Stalker gets screwed even more by not having 1. Shield and 2. Fiery Aura.

I can sort of see the argument between Scrapper VS Brute but Stalker's inferior "raw" damage is balanced by having more Critical chance with more teammates so attacks that cannot score critical are imbalanced for Stalker (hint hint!!! 3 out of 4 Epic sets cannot critical).

I am not too sure if the argument that Brute should benefit from Fury buff even from secondary attacks (that cannot critical for Scrapper/Stalker) is valid enough because Brute should never out-damage Scrapper and Stalker to begin with. Brute has more HP Cap and Resistance Cap than those two. And Fury buffs Brute's damage way more efficient than the typical Build Up buff. Brute can increase Fury ratio on his own, while a soloing Stalker can never increase team-critical buff.

With SJ, Brute's fury buffs combo finisher base damage and then gets amplified again with 3 combo points.

So Brute fans asking to deal same damage as Scrapper (or Stalker) is just not going to work. And they shouldn't be surprised that Kinetic Melee works better on Scrapper because Scrapper should deal more damage than Brute, period. I never understand why Brute players think they "should" out-damage Scrapper and Stalker. They want higher survival, higher damage and better aggro management. The damage scaling disparity shouldn't be a two-way street. It should ONLY be one-way street that favors Stalker/Scrapper.

Sadly, Kinetic Melee is really the ONLY melee set that the dev paid more attention to the Stalker needs. They added build up refresh.

One advantage of Increased Critical Damage is that when it happens, it may be good enough to one-shot or two-shot a minion, which provides more safety. Ninja Blade, on the other hand, may need 3-4 fast hits to kill a minion but does more dps in the long run due to much faster animation.

By the way, Increased Critical Damage could be a good idea for Stalkers. :P

Broadsword just needs something more unique.

Of course Stalker is always left out. :P

A lot of melee set discussions always leave out Stalker's existence....


PS: But I agree Broadsword is quite boring. Ninja Blade has better animations and the mechanism works better. Broadsword is just another copy of Ninja Blade but slower. It really has next to no advantage or uniqueness. And I would think you need two-hand for a large sword? One-hand sword and mace just look very weak.

I PM Synapse about this issue when I tested SJ. He is worried that a full critical from a combo 3 is going to do too much damage (especially at early levels), which I kinda agree.

I also agree that Brute gets more benefit from SJ due to Fury increasing combo damage.

I guess the more logical way is to not allow Fury increase every damage! It's ridiculous that they allow Fury to increase Burn damage too. If they get rid of that, then everything else seems to be more balanced. :P


I think most people are happy with current SJ damage output so adding more critical damage seems to be too much. A full critical combo 3 Uppercut does more than a critical Assassin Strike.

The only problem I have with Stalker SJ is the loss of Rib Cracker. That attack just looks cool and the debuffs are useful. I really hope Synapse can increase Shin Breaker's damage a bit more to make up for the loss of resistance debuff. He said he may look into Shin Breaker later. I left this game right when VIP freedom came out and I haven't really followed up on new stuff.

This part is only half-true. That's what the dev wants people to believe by giving Stalker a 10/10 Melee Damage Rating.

If it's just against regular bosses, Stalker can kill him pretty fast but so is Brute/Scrapper/Blaster and even high level Dominator/SoA. Stalker can deliver pretty high raw "critical" damage but other ATs like SoA/Corr can buff team's damage or debuff mobs' resistance. Other AT's raw damage may not be as high but on average it's more useful than a Stalker with Assassin Strike.

And if you are fighting AVs, Stalker doesn't kill AVs faster than most counterparts. In fact, Stalker ranks the worst in high-level performances. When I say high-level, I mean when you have whole bunch of set bonuses, etc. Other ATs have set combinations that allow them to solo AV. Not all set combinations can do it but at least they have the great potential. High-level performances are probably "broken" because AV encounter is designed for teams, not soloing.

Stalker is the most "restricted" AT IMO. You can say Stalker's performance is probably the most "balanced" of all ATs because the only thing that really separates from this Stalker and that Stalker is ST damage VS AoE damage. Other ATs have huge gaps in damage performances, survival performances or all of above.

I would say if your goal is to perform well on a larger team, I would go with sets that have more AoE. Electricity Melee, Kinetic and Spines are great choices. I like Claw but your teammates may not like it. :P Dual Blade has a really good mix of ST and AoE too.

Edit: Stalker's performance is NOT weak. It's just not as "broken" as other AT's. If your goal is to solo things that are not designed for soloing, then Stalker will disappoint you.

This raises a question that I've wanted to ask. How does Beam compare with Fire Blast?

I mean I haven't played a Blaster for a long time and I am amazed by Beam's damage when Disintegration happens. Things just melt so fast at lvl 18.

Maybe the raw damage number for Beam is less but if you include -regen component, Beam can very well compete with Fire Blast?

(I, too, wasn't too impressed with Beam when it first came out on beta. I didn't even bother testing for it, but I think I really like Beam Rifle on Blaster. It does great damage at range and I like seeing Disintegrated text, much like I love seeing Stalker's Critical text)

Doh! I wish I knew about the spread chance before I chose /Fire! I can see a very good synergy between Beam/Energy. I chose /Fire only because I heard that Beam has bad aoe and I thought maybe I'll only use some fire aoe when I need to.

The in-game description does not explain how Disintegration spreads.

Oh..the 2nd gang war won't over-write the first? Good to know!

I actually enjoy the various "activation time" we have here instead of global cool down time because with activation time, we actually have very cool looking attacks rather than everything coming out in 1s. You can't create cool looking animations if you are tied with just 1s. Some attacks just look cooler with longer animation (IE: 1K Cuts).

Redraw penalty has different degree. Like I said, on a melee toon, you mostly won't be using your secondary powers much so once the weapon is drawn, you are not going to notice much of the delay.

However, the degree of penalty goes up if you are Corr/Defender who switch between primary/secondary often. And it gets even more worse if you have a weapon primary and a weapon secondary (trick arrow).

We do know that they made specific animations to bypass redraw for stone, fiery and ice swords. I wonder if they can do the same for Trick Arrow at least? So at most, you are only going to suffer one type of redraw from either primary/secondary.

And of course there are more redraw from Patron/Epic but that will just be too much to fix.

Some of the weapon sets were really bad before the changes. IE: Assault Rifle and Broadsword. After the changes, those weapon sets seem to be more "balanced". If they were merely buffed from "below average" to "average" that doesn't really seem like weapon sets were buffed to have an "advantage", does it?

Weapon redraw is ok on most melee toons but I find it quite annoying on Corr/Defender who use secondary/primary powers all the time.

And I wonder how much delay a Beam Rifle / Trick Arrow would suffer? hehe

I've played other games like Guild Wars, Champions, WAR, Rift, Allods and WoW and as far as I know, they don't have weapon draw delay. It's nice that this game wants to preserve some "realism" by "drawing the weapon" out but sometimes a game is just a game. Too much realism becomes hard to balance. It's like the dev have a problem with Stalker and a Shield (since you can't hide with a shield there, can you?) but in reality, Shield set can help out Stalker so much in aoe damage department and there is really only one power that needs to be modified.


I just find the delay annoying that's all. People have done a test with Night Widow using all claws VS claw with Gloom attack (since Gloom is one of the better dps powers) and throwing Gloom in the attack chain seems to slow down considerably.