PleaseRecycle

You can't single pull things with taunt. You can single pull things with confront. You can also pull whole spawns with confront. The choice is yours if you are observant enough to take advantage of AI behavior. The only way taunt is better is as a ham-fisted cudgel for those who simply don't care enough about their scrapping.

Confront is a great power. On my brute I find myself wishing taunt were single target because it isn't as versatile as confront is. I considered taking challenge on my stalker but unfortunately it isn't half the power confront is. Regardless, we needn't worry that the devs will nerf confront because, I suspect, they understand what it can actually do.

What a surprise! Staff fighting isn't even on the market yet and already we know that the devs will be charging us twice: once for staff fighting and again for staff leak sealant. I'm sure it'll be a consumable, no less: don't forget to apply liberally each mission or your floppy bo will be about as deadly as a furyless tanker. Who called it before freedom was announced? Me. Another slap in the face.

Haunt is approximately perma on my dark/time with perma chrono shift for 230% global recharge. "Approximately" because half the time I fire off a quick /petcomall dismiss after my intended target is down so that aggro isn't spread around or the shades get defeated before sixty seconds elapse. I value its permanence less than the fact that I can frequently recast it on new targets, but on hard targets the damage is definitely pretty nice. I think it's something to keep in mind when you're building for recharge, but as a central focus? You should probably target a more important milestone and if haunt ends up perma so much the better.

Honestly I was just trying to make a stupid joke and at this point it is not only dead on arrival but is stinking up the place.

Your initial suggestion was that scrappers be able to see NPC real numbers. Your objection to Grey Pilgrim's objection to your-

You know what, never mind.

Banes can already kick butt, fall into scrapperlock and scan things' real numbers. You've undercut your own case.

If nothing else, can we all agree that blasters should be nerfed?

Actually I was trying to be sarcastic rather than condescending. Surely we can agree that there is a difference between having half a league of +0s and having any +0s at all? Surely we can agree that not all characters on a trial are to be valued purely for their DPS? By the way, if you want to easily beat Diabolique with the badge condition and no deaths, put two or three essence hunters on their own team and mix the squishies evenly among two other teams. Maybe half the league's worth of rebirths and barriers at that point will easily carry even lower level characters through if they huddle up tight and everyone uses all their buffs.

Well I'm glad the server I play on is so totally newb-free, I guess, that's the one remaining difference I can think of.

On the subject of the OP, it's certainly true that TFs this past week have been both heavily weighted toward the mid-level and less trivial than normal to roll through. For the most part I'd call that a good thing. I had no idea there were so many people who still had never run a STF or RSF, for example. Nice to be able to give "tours," if you will, rather than just blitzing to the end at maximum speed. There may well be a few complications along the way but it would be a shame if it were impossible for newer players to get any of the authentic old-timey experience. Not that struggling a little bit with Recluse's lieutenants is directly comparable to the good ol' four hour failed STFs of yore.

Why do you require +3s when you acknowledge that +2s could easily be qualified for these trials even in this weird world of mostly first-timer pick up teams? I ask because I don't join trials where the recruiter stipulates a level or AT requirement (beyond +1 on DD, which is reasonable). The reason I mention that is that if you somehow only ever get total novices when you recruit, perhaps you're turning off some veterans who would be more able to help you with the hard parts in the first place.

The people I trial with don't stress about any of this and it works just fine for us. On my mere level 52-at-the-time fort, I was on an eight person league that completed MoM, a fourteen person league that completed MoDD, several UGs that were filled on public channels with no regard for composition beyond the initial few people, and so on and so forth. The last trial I've actually failed was a pick up DD on the first day of I22, which I joined with no expectation to win. If you can beat these trials with empty seats, you can beat them with 50s. I find it hard to believe that Triumph has such numerous yet inattentive pick up trialers that giving them the slightest amount of leeway guarantees a loss.

The point, I think, is that demanding a full +3 league for DD, to say nothing of MoM or UG, is fairly bizarre. Brand new unshifted incarnates may be marginalized somewhat on DD and MoM, but two thoughts spring to mind. One is that UG is incredibly easy if you have the handful of in-the-know people required to make the lichen infested war walker fight go smoothly, regardless of anyone's level. The other is that there's quite a broad spectrum between no shift at all and +3. Anyone who can't lead a successful MoM with some 50-52s on the league may want to reconsider their approach.

Plant/storm is very effective but it's a bit too fire and forget for my tastes. That is, once you've got your defense, recharge and procs sorted out all you really need to do is run up to a large mass of things, start dropping pets on them and soon they'll all be dead. Or, for a single strong thing, do that but use the single target immob instead of the aoe. It's not that it doesn't take any thought at all, but every fight tends to play out in a pretty similar way in my experience.

I agree, Sam, but I think that what you quoted there is why this has been coming up so often lately. I don't dislike the stalker change for being a gimmick at all. It's fun and it works, inelegant as some may feel it to be. If that's what it takes to make people happy with an AT, what's wrong with that? The new scrapper bonus power could be a ten second long emote on a five minute timer that makes you foam at the mouth before lashing out wildly in the direction you're facing, that'd probably make someone happy so I wouldn't object to it.

If you wanted to work thunder strike in it would greatly alleviate the amount of recharge needed for the rest of the chain to be smooth. Thunder strike itself would need a fairly huge amount of recharge to follow AS every time, you might have to insert another charged brawl or two. However just using it every second time through a chain would give all of the other powers some serious breathing room, with that three and a half second animation time.

I think CB-JL-CB-AS-CI has the edge since it follows AS with a single target attack, whereas JL only has a 50% chance to crit from hidden state. Not that it would be bad the other way, and perhaps that is superior if you have more targets within the cone already. Both chains clearly take the same slotting so it's no trouble to test them back to back.

Okay I'm not sure if I'm just not observant or if the patch changed how the proc worked but I distinctly recall shadow field not proccing all that often on double exp weekend, whereas today it not only procs WotC on almost the entire spawn upon cast, it hits most of them twice since it has two initial hold components. Or, perhaps the superior version really is that superior? Suffice to say, that one proc in shadow field does amazing things.

I was thinking of posting something along the lines of your first post here, Madadh. While it is true that inspiration use can inform one's building process and vice versa, I had a hard time thinking of many examples where I made a concrete build decision with inspirations in mind. A different power pick, a different approach to slotting, what have you. I think that's where the disagreement is coming from. Despite that, my "building process" absolutely involves consideration of what I'll do with inspirations.

It's worth noting that NPCs cannot use target location powers. Obviously they still get things like ice storm and force field generator, but they're only capable of targeting another actor or their own location. Thus, if an enemy were to target you with recall friend or teleport foe it would have to teleport you to its own exact position. Not only would this look stupid, for those of us who fondly remember Quake it would bring up serious questions about telefragging.

What comes to mind as a way to make this work is a new type of enemy that looks like a trap or prison of some sort, and upon being teleported into it you would be held there in some way. I would question the feasibility of getting that to work properly most of the time and also echo the concerns of others in this thread about the massive annoyance factor, especially if you ran into something like that while soloing.

Not true. Tankers have Johnny Butane.

I think Shred means that melee in general loses on pylons.

Back to the subject of the OP, since issue 22 came out what I've noticed is that I've gone from thinking "Ooh, a stalker!" when I get one onto a TF team because they're such a novelty to thinking "Ooh, a stalker!" because I know that we'll be having no trouble with the AVs. That has basically no impact on the fact that I like having scrappers around for the same reason plus they tend to be good at clearing spawns (but if they aren't, that's fine too). If I were the type to worry about this, the AT that I would be worried about post-22 is blasters.