Moonlighter

One other thought; if the Devs are really on the ball they will use this opportunity to add in a couple extra brand new power pools.

Love it.

First, this is great for low level play. I level a lot of alts, even to the point of deleting and re-rolling, and it's a shame before now that powering through cool Praetorian content to get to 20 for Stamina really hurt my enjoyment.

Second, while getting three new power slots with no added slots isn't *that* big of a deal freeing up a power pool choice is huge.

First, don't drop the Fighting pool. The overall boost to survivability it represents for a well build WP is tremendous.

Second, Hurdle is great for vertical movement but I believe with the update to Sprint speed that Ninja Run + Sprint + Swift is actually faster than Ninja Run + Hurdle. I am on a Ninja Run + Hurdle character right now and with no Swift the movement values for running (with Sprint) and jumping are approximately the same. With Swift it seems like I would run faster.

Of course you might still want Hurdle for the vertical movement and bouncing.

The more I look at builds in Mid's, the more I think Regen + Shadowmeld will be one of the best defensive sets for scrappers.

Before the last issue, Willpower with it's ability to cap was much better barring Divine Avalanche or Parry. After the latest issue Regen with Shadowmeld will be slightly better until they change Shadowmeld. While most of the other top performers already cap or near to it and can't leverage a large defense boost on some of the time, Shadowmeld plays wonderfully into Regen. Soooooo good.

Shadowmeld, on the other hand, does nothing for my capped SR, Shield, WP, Dark Armor, or Invuln scrappers.

Regen is now one of the best secondaries if you are willing to temporarily go villain side to pick up Shadowmeld.

Edit: Changed language. I used overpowered but I meant slightly better than Regen, not in need of nerf.

Regen could use some love. Not only is it dependent on clickable defenses and recoveries that simply run out at the extremes, but all those clickables require animation time and cause redraw so you are killing your DPS to get inferior protection.

That said, Regen does have defenses that work despite -Regen. Moment of Glory can give you 15 seconds of reprive. Reconstruction isn't affected by -Regen either.

Also, Regen probably benefits most from the new Shadow Meld. In a high recharge build with even moderate amounts of defense it looks like Shadow Meld will fill that hole Regen had very nicely. It's too bad you have to go through so many hoops to go to the villain side to get it.

The easiest way to soft cap SR that I have found is in addition to well slotted SR powers is:
~ Tough with the Steadfast +3% Def
~ Weave
~ Combat Jumping
~ A full set of Gaussian's in your Build Up, Tactics, or Focused Accuracy.

That said, if you are willing to use sets you can soft cap SR with Maneuvers instead of Weave-Steadfast and save two powers (Boxing, Tough).

The thing I like about Shadowmeld is it fills that last hole on Regen; I can actually make a Regen character without as much defense stacking.

It's not that I have a problem per se with Defense stacking, it's just that I'm sick of building every scrapper in one of two ways. (Typed or positional)

As for SR, I'd really like to be able to slot resistance sets someplace for obvious reasons; either in Quickness to boost slow resistance or in the passives to boost the scaling resists.

As for actually changing power order, I don't think you'll see it or if you do it will be very rare. I suspect the devs have a good solution about what to do with slotted IOs if they change the order of powers. They would have to unslot those somehow, and then deal with characters who log off with a full enhancement tray before the patch. My guess is that the IO removal also has to be hand programmed.

Although perhaps in the case of Lucky and Evasion they could just give a free respec and leave things slotted as is since both are defense powers, but combining powers or adding new powers is probably a giant pain.

I think this is the only board I have ever been on where people playing a particular set step forward and say that something isn't right and their own set is too powerful.

If /Shields is going to be adjusted again right after the Shield Charge nerf then I would rather see a simple change to the maximum targets that will affect AAOs to the top end isn't quite as abusive rather than some of the other nerfs.

A few things. With CAK being such a heavy hitting attack, it actually boosts Eagle's Claw since you now have an obvious follow up; either CAK or for AoE Dragon's Tail.

As for attack chains, the Eagle's Claw attack chains are only slightly behind the top chains. At least using the attack won't be gimp and adds some AoE love. Since my post on decent MA attack chains was quoted earlier in the thread I won't repeat it here, but there are decent attack chains with EC in them.

As for MA/DA, an EC -> CAK -> CS -> SK chain should be able to keep a boss stunned like 90% of the time and gain even more mitigation from the fact that the aforementioned attack chain will kill the boss much much faster than any current attack chain. With it's much longer recharge and the badness of EC the MA/DA stun chain previously was just bad and had a much longer time to kill over a new and improved chain.

The sets that require typed defense give up a lot for that because the sets that give typed defense pretty much suck otherwise. Other than a few +HP bonuses, none of the sets that are used to cap typed defense offer any other benefits. The typed defense sets aren't even available at the higher levels, so the overall bonuses are lower and make it harder to slip in procs and the like.

Soft capping other sets requires a lot of powers. It basically requires Maneuvers, which pretty much negates the option for Hasten. Unlike SR these other sets can't devote sets to secondary effects.

With the *gratuitous* amount of -Def in the end game, the set's DDR is really good. SR really doesn't fall that far behind. Even Family and Council have -Def with the machine guns. Heck I cascaded -Def grinding Council a couple of times on /Dark. I had to SJ away while clicking pills. Against Council?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to be able to slot up Slow resistance into Quickness, or maybe get the Recharge up a bit, but SR is not that far behind the other sets.

If you really want to be obnoxious in PvP, go for an EC - CS involved chain for maximum stun and concentrate on Recharge with a smattering of defense for your build. Go down the Stealth tree to grab Stealth, Invis, and Phase Shift in case your multiple Regen hot buttons aren't enough. Stick with SJ for movement.

Whatever happens, I prefer Stalkers to play more like Blappers with some defense and mez resistance rather than increase survivability to make a Scrapper clone.