Wednesday Weigh In - Stalker (re)Revealed

I forgot that I hadn't written this yet, and I've been drinking, so this should be fun. Don't fail me now little squiggly red lines!

Because of the american holiday tomorrow Wildstar Wednesday came early, so I've had plenty of time to pour over the intricate details of the fantastic dev speak on the Stalker.

What did we learn? Let's start with the elephant in the room. Up until now I thought the Stalkers had the most ridiculously over-sized and impractical weapons, then they showed us some more of the Brofesional story featuring an unrevealed class.

What the butts are those!?

Previously we had this image from the Ability Mechanics Dev Speak, it seems REDACTED will have the monopoly on impractical and silly.

Is that giant gun on the right going to get bigger too?

But anyway, the Stalker!

The video actually doesn't tell us much that we didn't already know except for Stalker is clearly Frost's favorite class; this video oozed with love and care. Actually, not true. I didn't know about the gadgets, that's new to me, I don't know what those floating thingies were, but they better be important if they are going to follow me around while I'm trying to be sneaky. Fortunately the AMA on reddit dug into some of the deeper nuggets.

Stalkers will be able to permanently stealth outside of combat.

They went into great detail on this. Outside of 15 feet you are undetectable by other players. Inside 15 feet perception checks are rolled, if detected you will appear as a distortion, like a predator. Additionally environment details will give you away: grass and leave will move, water will ripple. That's pretty cool and will benefit players running with higher graphic settings.

It sounds like Stalkers flavor of tanking will be in evasion and self healing. This would be RPG evasion. All tanks are going to have to do some action combat evasion if they expect to live, but Stalkers will have a high deflect chance. Its a tanking model I've never been a big fan of because RNG can make it very hard on the healers to keep a low mitigation tank alive if they end up eating 3 or 4 hits in a row, but with the combat style being a unique monster it is going to take some hands on to truly understand.

A question about movement resulted in this tidbit of information: "The Stalker has no abilities that require them to be stationary" - [CRB_Merkal]. I don't know if that is true about Warriors, or if either of the remaining "secret" classes are melee only. (Given that one has a giant bazooka on his back I think we can rule out at least one.) This may be a unique feature of the Stalker.

And a final note, scanbots do not stealth with their Stalker masters. 

I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend. (224.6 pounds btw, I didn't forget.)