Kioshi

And sadly Hoarfrost is inferior to any other heal due to devs failing at giving Stalkers a decent HP cap.

Nice, thanks for the info. I actually have a WS that was self-PL'ed to 22, he's 28 now. I know, don't PL Epics, but it's a reroll of an old WS I had at 40 before the Kheld buff. He is tri form but if I decide to try farming with him it'll be human, I remember my friend (And another WS I saw long ago who I farmed along on my fire/kin) were REALLY fast, and both human-only. I don't want too much clicking when farming, WSs are clicy enough, my triform has so many binds I won't remember now because I haven't played him in 4 months lol.

It was kinda easy to get him to 22 alone. Level 1 locked ambush farm, from 2-6 it was a bit of a chore since I only had Orbiting and Sands of Mu as my 'AoE', after I got Nova it was almost (non SS) Brute speed to 22, just had to be sure I was at the defense cap all the time using binds for insps as you said. Since the farm was level 1 and I got my powers up to level 6... I don't think many ATs (Except Brutes, fury+damage aura+AoE attack is pure win) would do better on such a farm because Nova form is better than Blasters at level 6, good and fast AoEs.

Well with fire's heal and using binds to combine insps I got a SS/Fire to 28 in a s/l farm (same as the warshade I got to 22). As long as I am softcapped I am fine. My /fire broot also got some fire defense later from sets so I could run ambush fire farms with only 2 lucks (or one medium), made things much easier.

1) Don't compare blasters to corrs. Even my level 6 dark blast Blaster does crazy damage compared to most corrs (I haven't played blasters in a long time), even my DP/Fire who I find so lackluster compared to any other blaster I've tried (never got one to 50) does better damage than a corr at low levels, with maybe the exception of a fire/dark who is a beast. But most blasters starts out at level 2 two-shotting lts.

2) Don't compare fire to others, it's way too good in damage. I'm enjoying my Beam/Poison Corr but I try not to think how it would be if I made a Fire/Poison, which would have better AoE and no setup - Fire's that good, I actually like the fact I haven't played Fire/ in a long time so I don't have any active toon to compare (I have a 50 fire/traps but haven't touched her since my 2-year break so she's slotted like when PGT was broken).

Hey this seems like a good idea. I've been looking for the most carefree farmer but I don't want a slow one, even a fire/fire Tanker is not good enough for my tastes. I have a 50 SS/Fire, he has a planned permahasten build but... After incarnated I found out his AoEs are always up and he can farm +4/x8 easily with bosses, just have to pop two lucks (I have some fire defense on him).

But I hate the rage crash, besides hating remembering to click rage, and I want a farmer blueside. think I'll self PL one of those, do you find it too slow? A good thing about axe is that it can slot the FF rech proc like I have on Foot Stomp.

I was considering a Warshade but the reason my S/L softcapped firekin is shelved is the number of clicks required... Siphon speed, fulcrum, transfusion, transference... You know it gets boring after awhile.

I'm not sure how to farm on a WS tho, a friend of mine used to do it human only on the BM maps in the old times, but I never asked his methods because I didn't know anything about Warshades. I might as well get the last 5 levels on mine to 50, but if farming on them is 'Eclipse, Mire, switch to Dwarf, Mire, switch to Nova and THEN start blasting it might be a little boring for me. Plus I'm under the impression that due to Fury, Brutes are always much faster than other ATs, except maybe fire/shield scrappes and fire/kin trollers. Yeah I didnt mention elec/shield scrappers because I always read they're kind bad for bosses.

I didn't understand the past about Hasten. Do you think it speeds up the animations? Because it doesn't. I already have an almost seamless attack chain and it wil be seamless when I get the 26 attack, that on SOs so I'm not getting Hasten unless I fall in love with the nuke. But I don't think I'll get Hasten just because of one power, after all its recharge is not 60 seconds like rain of arrows (I actually don't know the number, I'm on my iPad so can't check the game now).

Anyway, Poison's debuffs are very potent. I found myself surviving and killing pink bosses in melee range because his def, res, tohit, dmg were nerfed.

Just don't think you'll be an AoE machine of death with Beam Rifle - but even with Poison I can see a Fire/poison doing well playing at x4 or more. IMO Beam seems like a set to play at +2/x1 or x2, I did quite well after I SO'ed in this setting. Very busy set tho, I like it, but maybe it's not great for everyone paired with BR since it's also busy (a Mind/Poison troller might be almost as nightmsarish as playing my purpled Mind/emp - I swear sometimes on big teams I regret putting so much recharge on her, always something to do - crowd control, damage aran setting up containment before that, Fortitude is ready way too often, and watch your teammates bars lol).

I'm also a bit torn on epics/ppps but I have a long time to go, leveling him the old way, if I get to incarnates and stuff like that too fast I might burn out again, I didn't play the last two months because of that - SS/Fire from 1 to 50 (self pl on lowbie AE arcs) and incarnated to everything +3 in 3 days.

Anyway, the setup thing is why people are saying the set is better suited for corruptors and loldefenders than blasters - blasters need to 'kill now' so they don't get killed, plus with the set's awesome damage and blaster modifiers you might end up killing stuff before making good use of Disintegration.

I like EA, I find it a good balanced set, inferior to Ninjitsu but I do like it. But since my /EA toons are 2 brutes and a DM/EA Stalker, I'm leveling a KM/EA to see how good it is without Brute toughness and Siphon Life from DM.

I didn't get the Stun Aura yet (and didn't bother to respec the others, when I take a break and come back I like to start new toons), why do you say it's worse than CoF? I thought it was an Oppressive Gloom clone, a 'ones slot wonder'. Ok maybe 2 slots because you may want an endred, unless you tell me it does not tick every second like OG. I like CoF and I think it's better than OG for a Brute but soo many slots are required...

You could always set up a Hackintosh, doesn't seem that hard, Lifehacker has some good articles about it if you wanna test drive the system. That said, while I enjoy OS X immensely (and even more with Lion because it puts a trackpad - or in my case the Apple mouse which is a 'mobile trackpad' - to good use), with all the copying MS has done from OS X and Apple has done from Windows... They're not that different to use unless you do Terminal-ish geeky stuff.

Btw Emberly, if you ever happen to really like OS X to the point of buying a Mac to use it as your main OS, I've been using Windows XP and later Seven since my reg date (when I bought my Mac Mini and started playing Coh, there was no mac client), and both of them worked wonderfully for me, never got a blue screen of death here (I skipped Vista), both on the old mini and the new imac. So it's totally usable a dual boot machine too, I spent months only on XP on my more Coh-addicted days

(answering on another post because of my wall of text above).

Emberly the client is sucky now, which affects me too because I really hate to reboot when I just want to play a lowbie, meaning no Mid's, no Herostats, things I like running on my high end toons. But maybe there's hope, there are some game clients that run well even using emulated technology (The Sims 3 and Fallout 3 run normally here and they're both emulated). Since I hadn't run the CoX mac client for 3 months and updated a lot of stuff when I tested it yesterday, I found it to run smoother than I could remember, it ran as well as the Windows one. The problem is that it locks up once every two hours - you can see that on the mac forums. But since I don't know the types of emulation used in different game clients, I don't know if the CoX engine they used has a 'fix'. From what I've seen from more knowledgeable people, it's a bad engine for OS X since it's from Linux, so perhaps they'd have to start it from scratch (yeah won't happen lol)

Well you are bashing for no good reason. The OS has nothing to do with bad software, you know there's plenty of bad programs for Windows, including games, as there is bad native OS X software too.

And the client for Coh is terribad. Yesterday I was on the fence about unsubscribing or not (nothing to do with the client). So I decided to play, in 2 hours the CoX client crashed 3 times. I got pissed off and rebooted into Windows (using the same iMac, wow who would say), played for 5 more hours, not a hitch, not a crash. That's not OS X's fault since there are games that run smoothly on them (again, see my comment about Blizzard, one of the few that has been making good OS X clients for ages).

It's just like Texas_Justice wrote (although I'm not sure what he meant later mentioning Brazil, I think he called me a nut since he posted right after me and I'm from Brazil) here:

I actually don't think OS X 'rules a lot'. I just think it's better for me, there's nothing I think W7 cannot do for my needs, I just like OS X better. And I actually think MS did an excellent job in Windows 7, even XP (although I didn't like XP very much, found it complicated to find some configurations - yes I could find them, it was just a hassle compared to OS X).

I'm no Apple fanboy, I've been using macs for 11 years because I prefer them and that's it. If you wanna find one, go for the people who bought the Apple bundle (iphone+macbook pro+ipad) last year and think 'everything is perfect' because they didn't know how to take care of Windows properly and ended up with viruses and crashes. I actually got flamed by my own friends who bought some Apple computer recently on facebook when I was with my prior mac (a 1.66 core duo mini) and wrote 'Wow windows 7 is great, it's running faster than OS X on my machine' (the reason was, that mac mini model was stuck to a 2gb RAM limit and OS X is hungry for RAM like Linux or other Unix based system). On my new imac, both systems run smoothly (and admittedly, since I'm an early adopter type guy, the new Mac OS X Lion has some annoying bugs because it changed the system core too much, I like the changes but like any system that does too much differently, it'll take 6 months or so to get better - before the first update I used Windows 7 as my main system for 2 weeks because of a very annoying and common bug that Apple fixed 1 month after releasing the system).

Btw, since Apple is growing fast on the notebook sales (everyone seems to like notebooks now, including my gaming friends, they're all buying high end laptops from Sager, HP or Dell instead of desktops, I'd buy a cheap notebook and a desktop, it'd be the same price and I could upgrade everything later but well, just what I'd do), there was even a quite large virus infection on OS X recently. IMHO, in 2-3 years every mac os x user will have to use antivirus programs too, if the 'Apple conversion' continues to grow like that. This also means that companies should pay attention to their Mac clients, many people won't install Windows on their macs, I'm a geek and like to have both, plus it's the only way to play Rift (who would say, my non-gaming computer runs a 2011 game at max settings - I know it won't last long but for now I'm enjoying new games at great settings, not bothered that I won't be able to do it in 2 years because I'm not a huge gamer, only CoX grabbed my attention for long in the last 4 years).

Fact is, dude, except for running OS X without tricks, I'm running the same hardware as most of you. When I bought my new mac I knew I was buying it because I like using OS X and I loved the iMac's design, build quality and design more than any other computer (I always wanted the 27 inch IPS screen). I prefer it enough to be willing to 'suffer' with Apple's stupid decision to not include usb 3.0 ports because they believe 'Thunderbolt is the future' (it may be, but where I live it's still hard to find Firewire stuff, so not too excited on having only usb 2.0 ports on a new system).

I find this 'system wars' kinda funny. A friend just asked which notebook she should buy the other day (on facebook too), specified she didn't want a macbook because she didn't want to learn a new system and didn't have the money for it and even then half the responses were 'MACBOOK PRO' or 'MACBOOK AIR IS THE BEST STEVE JOBS IS GOD OMG'. I was the first to actually send her some links on good deals on Dells (I don't like HP, didn't send her Sager/Clevo suggestions because she didn't care about gaming).

But heck, I even have an Android phone because I prefer it over iOs

This. He'd have at least told us what OS version he's using or what Mac model he has, he wanted to start the good ol' 'We hate macs' argument.

That said, the Mac client is really bad. Had it close on me thrice today, did some more testing since I usually play on Windows. While it ran smoothly, more than I used to remember, it just closes randomly. The Windows client (on the same computer, my iMac) is just fine, I played for whole nights with no freezing issues.

Well it all comes down to what Kitsune Knight said:

And we all know how emulation sucks

Actually Warshades' 'lows' are quite noticeable, since they have much in common with Dark Armor - they love being around mobs, WSs more than /DA. That's why they can do everything but solo GMs (maybe AVs, I'm not sure).

High end WSs' performance float way more than other ATs - you're dependent on other mobs for your godmode, your self heal/endurance, your mires, even your self-rez if you pick it. So when you're in a team fighting a single AV you are usually not contributing as much as in the middle of a big mob.

And well, subjectivity is important. Bots/Traps can be the 'i win' button, but is the toon enjoyable for you? I hate MMs so I'll never make one but they can basically do anything. Same for Ill/Colds (well not farming) but they also require more strategy than a SS/Fire brute.

I'd go with two toons: a SS/Fire Brute (for awesome damage, farming, melee fun) and if you wanna solo everything (like GMs) and also be more strategical in play style and like to contribute on teams on ways other than just damage, Ill/Cold (with perma-PA) or Bots/Traps. I know you asked for one, if I had to pick one only it'd be the bots/traps - although I'm not sure how well they farm I've seen they do everything else, but even if they farm very well they won't get close to Brute speed. Especially since it's so easy to self-PL a SS/Fire, claws/fire or claws/elec broot to get you the shinies, my SS/Fire hit 50 in two play sessions (like, 8-10 hours I think). And like Nihili said, he was doing well on TFs and teams and any other stuff with a cheap build. I didn't solo AV's with him since he farms so well on his current build and incarnate powers that I didn't bother, but it can be done, just look at Fiery-Enforcer's videos.

Well /EA has nice defense numbers, and once you are soft capped you won't be needing the heal all the time. Sure it's no reconstruction which /nin has a clone, but after softcapping Energize should be good enough.

The stun aura provides mitigation the other sets you mentioned don't have.

The godmode is potentially the best one available, but hindered because of the low hp cap (why oh why can't Stalkers have the same HP cap as the epic ATs who have less base hp than Stalkers), but that also makes Ice Armor's Hoarfrost far less useful than it could be.

There's also the recharge bonus. All in all I think it's a pretty balanced set, but as always I'd recommend /Nin for anyone trying Stalkers for the first time, I don't think softcap+fast recharging heal can be beat (and toys which I always forget to use but they're cool).

Of course that's my opinion, if Energize is not enough for you after soft capping you may not like the set later too. It's good enough for both my Brutes but ya know, Brutes can manage to get hurt a little. My /EA stalker is DM/ so I won't compare because she has Siphon Life, made her long before the /EA changes. Plus I'm a little masochistic, I have a ELM/Regen Stalker on her 40s even after all the nerd rage from dying in the middle of Thunderstrike (low hp+no defs+no resists = blapper with mez protection) and using Dull Pain just as a heal with a little +hp.