Nihilii

All my toons with it kill slowly, so they often get to use the 40s duration while solo on team spawns.

On teams, I like boosting my teammates' damage in a tough spot.

I'm not sure there's much more to it. The power takes a second and a half to cast, boosts my damage by a bit and opens up Fireball.

In your situation it seems like it wouldn't be so good (not a prereq for anything cool and dropping BA for it would, as you say, lower your damage output significantly, more than what the boost Melt Armor would give).

It seems you have a very binary way to think.

I never said other ATs don't do overkill. I said stalkers do MORE overkill damage.

I never said travel time doesn't exist. I said taking 8 seconds to travel from one group to another is LONGER than what competitive teams going for speed would take.

I never said stalkers weren't useful on a team, I said their damage wasn't AS high AS your math would imply.

You're completely living in your little forum bubble if you think everyone can stay within 30' all the time. It's possible MOST of the time, for a competent team, NOT the average PuG. NOT all teams are competent. The ingame teaming reality is you will team with incompetent players unless you leave / kick them / play with friends only.

A team isn't ALWAYS a 8 man team. A team is compromised of 2 to 8 players - and many teams have LESS than 8 players.

I could go on and on, but arguing with someone who sees everything in 1s and 0s is a pointless exercise, as you won't be able to understand any of the capitalized words above. You really shouldn't be participating in forum discussions if you're not able to discern nuances between "best" and "worst", it's misleading to people who actually play the game and come here looking for information.

It increases the defense you give to your allies. Your defense debuff resistance is unaffected.

As far as I remember Ultimo_ already posted the same kind of concerns, and people proved he was lying about his reported numbers. He then backpedaled... and proceeded to repost the same original wrong numbers in other topics.

Well, in a best case scenario crits don't save you two attacks. They save you one attack. That's already considered in the math. So, yes, overkill does matter in actual gameplay, leading to lower numbers than the above math. It's simply not possible to never overkill on an extended period of time.

Now, I can't really understand why would someone talk about "best damage" and a specific team with all 8 members standing in 30 feet - variables that you can't just *consider*, by the way, unless you mean "take the star and kick everyone who doesn't conform to the very specific playstyle you need to have to obtain maximum offensive output"... and then mention Hide crits. If you're taking 8 seconds to travel between each group you're losing a lot of time. I like Hide, but in any competitive comparison it won't be much more than one additional crit per mission, unless in a cave map or something where you will have longer travel times. Placate is a net DPS loss in most situations as well (assuming it works - if it fails because of being hit, it's a complete disaster in terms of DPS).

This isn't even going into the unrealistic notion that everyone is going to be in a 8 player team at all times. That's the truth for some people (although somehow nobody mentions the time they spend sitting around waiting for a full team), but not everyone. Another point I can't agree with in Siolfir's math is using a 80% fury brute. Staying at 90% Fury is much easier than making your 7 teammates stay in a 30 feet range all the time, and this isn't to say maintaining 90% Fury all the time is easy, it's just easier than the stalker alternative.

I mean, I'm sure there's possibly a few folks who only login with 7 of their friends all at the same time, who then all stand in a 30 feet range all the time without anybody AFKing, getting killed, whatever, but when you look at the level of coordination required to do this you might as well go with 8 controllers and wreck everything ; in either case, it's simply not representative of your average PuG and I doubt the average stalker will have anything like this experience most of the time.

You may think you can handwave these concerns away, but the difference between the top melee damage dealers isn't that large on paper with everything stacked to the stalkers' advantage. Stalkers have the highest burst, and they have the highest potential DPS under perfect conditions, but that doesn't translate to highest actual, effective damage ingame.

@ClawsandEffect -

The way I read his post, he's not talking about people like you, but rather about the folks who choose to complain about farmers and marketeers.

There's people who play normally and enjoy it, and that's fine ; then there's people who're performance oriented yet choose to play normally and blame other players rather than change their playstyle to meet their "needs".

--

On another topic, there should be a forum rule stating drama queens shouldn't be allowed to change their name to something completely different. This gets rather annoying, thanks to the forum migration purging ignorelists.

Some people in this thread need to read more good old sci-fi books.

I'd rather do something very wrong than taking that much of a hit to my DPS. That, in my mind, would be very wrong.

Good guide, but I have some suggestions.

Missions 1 to 3 is perfect, I agree with your strategy.
In mission 4, I'd suggest to do the following :
- Charge and kill everything.

I use them using the slotting you suggested, if I can find the extra slot. Otherwise, I stay with 1 lotg +rech, 1 lotg def, 1 lotg def/end.

FB dots don't crit, only the main part does.

Using Smite instead of Fire blast would imply replacing Fire blast with Melt Armor, which should be a 15-20 DPS increase at 300 DPS.

I hear you, OP. CoD is the reason I don't play DA.

He's not planning to use Smite, though.

However, your numbers are off, Combat. Unslotted Fire Blast does, at level 50, 62.56 damage with 4 80% 6.26 ticks. Smite does 82.58 damage and gets a full crit, with a faster animation. Smite is easily the superior choice.

It might fall a bit in the "upgrade, noob!", and not everyone might have $30 available, but I'd recommend picking up a 2gb RAM stick for anyone on a low end machine. Going from 1gb to 2gb dramatically improved performance on any system I've played CoH on.

Turning player names, health bars, archetypes and buffs indicators off can also help with network performance. Of course, the best option is to just use an ethernet cable (which is included with any router in my country, but I don't know if it's the same everywhere).

It's not so much that it's not worth it, but rather that regen users get less from it than any other secondary, and there might be other, better choices depending on your build and playstyle. If you were going to get CP or FA anyway and have a free power pick, it's probably worth getting (keep in mind you have to take one of these two first, so you won't be able to get PP before 44).

Of course, you could also get QR + Stam + PP all 3 slotted for end + the chance for end proc, and CP 3 slotted for recharge, and forget slotting any end reductions in powers.

Doublestacking rage is actually better for damage even considering the crashes, and the recharge going towards this also brings your big hitters up much more often boosting damage further.

There's not much point *not* to doublestack rage unless all you're doing is solo farming. Of course, there's situations in which you may not want to stack Rage - i.e., teaming with a kinetic using FS properly, or to a lesser extent anyone with strong damage buffs.

If anything, I'd say doublestacking Rage is underrated, not overrated.

Now, the crash is terribly annoying to deal with, even with procs, veteran attacks, taunting and travel time, but that (big) QoL issue doesn't change the above. That's the whole design of Rage, an overpowered buff balanced by annoyance.

Well Ghost, first let me say I agree with your points. For your playstyle, melt armor doesn't seem like it'd be worth it.

Now consider this : I'm planning to run with the team setting set for 6, 7 or 8 in I16, and my builds tend to be mostly ST with some AoE, so it takes me more than 40 seconds to kill a full group by myself (hence I get to maximise the whole duration of the power). When I team, it is with friends or in pickup groups and I don't recruit specific ATs - it's pretty rare I end up with more than one debuffer on a team of 8, for example.

Of course, I'm not saying it's gamechanging even in these situations. Against +4s it's only -5% afterall ; but it lasts 40 seconds and takes less than 2 seconds to cast, with a 70 feet range - which means I can cast it while I'm traveling from a dead group to a new group, not wasting time at all. It also fills one of the two prerequisites needed to get to Fireball. To be honest, the other powers don't appeal to me that much, which might be why I like Melt Armor so much, as the choice would be to either pick a power I wouldn't use or this. It's a nice little boost that I don't trade anything off to have on my way to fireball.

I guess it is so, people never look at the big picture...

I largely notice it, so do my friends ; but I'm also one of these crazy guys who pick the leadership pool on scrappers and Grant Cover to buff my teammates.

Kioshi - Oh yeah ? Well, YOU suck for scrappers. So there.

Poor, poor Melt Armor, you're underappreciated.

SR pros :
- While leveling, DA on top of your toggles softcaps your melee defense rather easily.
- On a high end build, getting to the softcap is trivial so you can focus on recharge. Between this and Quickness, you can build to use the best ST attack chain (GD - GC - SD - GC), or just use your AoEs more often.