I Don't Like Getting One-Shotted. (More Complaining About Stalker)

[SpiderWaifu]

I'm expecting a lot of "just don't get hit!" in this, and I'm tired of seeing it.

This nonsense just should not fly in a game like this.

 

The stalker should be a dangerous hunter that you have to fight using skill and really big weapons (or just a big weapon if you're Rhino.) He's almost that. The skill portion flies out the window when you're a 700shield, 500hp Volt with a max Armor mod, and you get one-shot by this goon.

Why is his bow allowed to do that? Stalker has perfect bloody aim, with a rather fast projectile. And depending on the tile-set, you may not have enough room to maneuver.

Being one-shotted is not fun.

Bloody hell, make it % based damage to keep him a danger to those who have beef-frames, but for the love of god, don't let him one-shot most frames!

 

Please no "hurr durr just don't get hit" comments.

 

Keep in mind, this happened more than a few times, and the Stalker after me was lvl30.

Edited June 18, 2014 by SpiderWaifu

[EverythingNagato]

It seems like the majority of skilled players often have no trouble dodging him and killing him, so..?

[ArkhamBatz]

Well I doubt there going to buff him considering a bunch of players were complaining he was to weak. 

[knightNeet]

I met the stalker once and he two shot me but I was on my 300 shield 300 health Excalibur with no armor mods

[SpiderWaifu]

I met the stalker once and he two shot me but I was on my 300 shield 300 health Excalibur with no armor mods

Yes. And I had 700shield 500hp and got one-shot by the Dread. Not fun.

[(PSN)MoriartyHaaaiii]

You shouldnt use steel fiber on a frame that has one of the lowest armor ratings to start with. Vitality would have saved you from getting one-shotted, most likely.

[Churpy]

I wouldn't beat yourself up about getting pwned by the stalker, it's pretty much the only thing that ever kills me. If you don't have the right weapons and/or the right team, he can be very pesky and can give you an extremely quick death.

 

Also..you're running a maxed Steel Fiber on Volt? Friendly reminder that the mods in the game work off of percentages. Volt has a very low base armor (15) so it will not scale very high - a maxed armor mod would bring that to just above 30. I main Valkyr, who can peak at around 2200 armor, and Stalker still makes me cry at night. The difference between 30 and 2200 armor is..well, it's a lot..more than you think. Volt is very squishy.

[SpiderWaifu]

-snip-

 

But the problem is, that squishy frames still have to deal with Stalker, the same as any other. I'm not beating myself up over this, I just absolutely hate getting one-shot by an enemy. It is not fun.

[Casardis]

It seems like the majority of skilled players often have no trouble dodging him and killing him, so..?

 

Skills doesn't matter too much to be honest. Sometimes, the Stalker can instant teleport to you without warning, cause a knockdown and one shot you with his Dread while you're still wiping your face against the floor.

 

Stalker has never really been about skills; it's just a game of who shoots first with their strongest weapons. That's why there's no way to savor the thrill of the battle against him for the most part. That's why there's no real strategy against his AI. It's all about being cheap to be effective in the end, and that's not my definition of fun boss battle.

[SpiderWaifu]

Skills doesn't matter too much to be honest. Sometimes, the Stalker can instant teleport to you without warning, cause a knockdown and one shot you with his Dread while you're still wiping your face against the floor.

 

Stalker has never really been about skills; it's just a game of who shoots first with their strongest weapons. That's why there's no way to savor the thrill of the battle against him for the most part. That's why there's no real strategy against his AI. It's all about being cheap to be effective in the end, and that's not my definition of fun boss battle.

 

Amen. Every time I post about Stalker not being fun, the first comment is "just don't get hit" or something to that effect.

[Churpy]

But the problem is, that squishy frames still have to deal with Stalker, the same as any other. I'm not beating myself up over this, I just absolutely hate getting one-shot by an enemy. It is not fun.

It is a good point, I definitely won't deny it. The Stalker should be challenging, but not downright impossible, regardless of which frame you like to play. I've went up against the stalker a lot as a Trinity, who has the same armor value, and yeah, take away my heals and I will be obliterated. However, the stalker is a helluva lot better than he used to be. Hopefully they will improve him even more. He's definitely the hardest enemy in the game at the moment, at least in my opinion, and that's partially due to what you have brought up - it's oftentimes impossible to fight him.

 

EDIT: Also yes the "just don't get hit" is a load of BS, he teleports, strips you of buffs, and has a wide range of attacks, pretty much the strongest tactic is: YES stay mobile of course, but you have to nuke the crap outta him or he will eventually outmanoeuvre you.

Edited June 18, 2014 by Churpy

[(PSN)Bobtm0]

To preface what I'm about to say, I don't feel that the Stalker is either a well designed or interesting foe.

 

Anyways, the Stalker literally can't lead his shots for crap.  Just use a simple circle-strafing pattern, generally doing so with a bit of a retreat is easier, and then jump whilst doing so.  He misses like crazy, I'm talking like an old lady who's never played a video game before type accuracy here.  If you get hit it's solely because you messed up (barring lag obviously).

 

That being said, he's still boring design and an uninteresting fight, one that definitely needs looked at and heavily reworked.

Edited June 18, 2014 by (PS4)Bobtm0

[ScienceFerret]

A good stalker strategy is to roll. A lot. But even then, you'll still die if you have low level equipment, which the stalker seems to be extra annoying with. I think the stalker and other stalker-like bosses are quite poorly designed as they punish you for making ingame progress. Fun boss fight? Don't play it too much or you'll be randomly attacked by SlashDash McOneshot! Want to play with low level weapons and warframes? Well, the stalker doesn't like that! Enjoy soloing missions and going at your own pace? The stalker doesn't!

 

That, and the stalker has a pretty annoying design in general. "I AM EDGE INCARNATE. 12 YEAR OLDS THINK I'M REALLY COOL BECAUSE I NAME MY WEAPONS AFTER NEGATIVE EMOTIONS AND AM BLACK AND RED IN COLOUR." But if he is supposed to me so cool, then why does he take the most cowardly options, like as I mentioned before, attacking more often in solo missions and when the player has really low-level equipment? And don't get started on the Gustrag 3.

[Vargras]

Why are you using Steel Fiber on Volt?

 

Honestly, that's my biggest question. It's easy enough to just camp Stalker's spawn and one-shot him with a bow or something before he can even do anything. Or just dodge him.

[fatpig84]

The only time I get killed by Stalker is if I can't find his location fast enough.

Anything else, I one hit him.

[CaptainohCaptain]

Well, it's pretty much like this for me:

Without sentinel: 

With sentinel: Eh, where is he? 

[Mastikator2]

Stalker is dumb enough to announce his arrival and makes a big lengthy show when he does, he uses only projectile attacks and attacks that can be easily avoided. The only way he can kill you is if you're soloing and getting overwhelmed by the standard enemy OR if you fudge up.

 

IMO he's fine as it, but should spawn away from the players and move it to kill them from a distance, like a stalker.

[CaptainohCaptain]

Stalker is dumb enough to announce his arrival and makes a big lengthy show when he does, he uses only projectile attacks and attacks that can be easily avoided. The only way he can kill you is if you're soloing and getting overwhelmed by the standard enemy OR if you fudge up.

 

IMO he's fine as it, but should spawn away from the players and move it to kill them from a distance, like a stalker.

Eh? Most of the time I see him appearing, then teleporting to me and bam! - insta-slash dash.

[Mastikator2]

Eh? Most of the time I see him appearing, then teleporting to me and bam! - insta-slash dash.

Just keep moving irregularly while shooting him and he'll be down in a jiffy.

[notlamprey]

I'm a little disappointed that so many people saw the OP's prediction of the kind of response this thread was likely to generate, and went right on in with the #skeelz angle.

 

Where were the skills to carefully read the original post and attempt to understand the sentiment expressed? Where were the skills to resist posting the first mental rough draft of "you're playing the game wrong, dog?"

 

This thread is about how the Stalker often kills players so quickly that they can encounter - and be mopped up by - him many times without getting the chance to glean any useful information about how to defeat him.

 

For the sake of argument, I'll assume that at least one of the strategies put forward here works 100% of the time. That doesn't make the Stalker's implementation acceptable. I'd argue that an otherwise-punishing boss who can be cheesed is even worse.

 

The fact that players have found a weakness in his AI does not make the Stalker fine. The fact that such a strategy must be stumbled upon because the game gives us no way to learn about fighting him aside from pure rote should indicate that he is decidedly not fine.

 

I think fights as difficult as the current iteration of the Stalker would be completely fine, as long as the game included systems we could use to learn about the real-time combat behaviors of our enemies. I won't hijack this thread with my old "we need a more informative HUD" spiel, but I think that may be the problem we need to solve first.

[Mastikator2]

Dude, "dodging his attacks and not standing still" isn't a weakness in his AI that you need to stumble upon. It's an obvious fact. He can easily kill you, and you can easily kill him. Most shooters are like this. Ever play Unreal Tournament or CS? You die incredibly fast if you just stand there and let him kill you in any shooter.

[Tarille]

Stalker can F.O.A.D. as far as I'm concerned.

 

His damage output is ridiculous - Having him spawn vs my Valkyr at full health with high ranked Vitality, Steel Fiber and Vigor on, he has the possibility to one-shot me.

 

A tanky frame (Valkyr is one of the tankiest frames outside of Iron Skin spam or Link + Blessing spam) - With survivability mods on (It makes sense that a frame with no defensive mods is going to get one shot) - Getting hit from 100% health and shields to 0 in one hit.

 

That's just stupid and poor design.

 

The Stalker does scale with level depending on what rank your stuff is though, meaning if you're running around with a bunch of unranked items and your 1 OP rank 30 10 Forma'd perfect gun, you can absolutely destroy him before he can even stand up (Provided he spawns close enough to you that you can actually find him while he's sat down rather than your first hint of him being him teleporting to you and insta-smacking you in the face)

 

I've fought him on my Valkyr while I was leveling some weapons so my stuff was level 15-20 so he showed up as a level 27, he took 3 hits to kill me instead of 1 but at the same time my guns did bugger all to him (It was in the middle of an invasion on Ceres - So not only was I shooting at him with my rank 19 double forma'd Sybaris (I unloaded about 2 full magazines into him), but there was also about 4 Fusion MOA's, 2 Techs and about 5-8 Crewmen ALSO unloading into him the entire time) so he killed me while I was doing all sorts of crazy maneuvers to live long enough to pump damage into him and by the time the 3rd attack finished me off, he was at 50% health...

 

It's pretty annoying... Especially when looking at it objectively, the fight does seem interesting - The stalker has a 3 weapons that he swaps between that change how he moves and attacks, he has a sample of abilities from multiple Warframes that give you a varied attack pattern to deal with (Gotta keep moving for the Slash Dash, gotta get out of range of the Absorb etc) and he has his own unique ability that provides him with an edge to deal with certain abilities in the form of Dispel.

 

But for the most part it comes down to "Murder him before he can do anything with an OP weapon" or "Get hit once during the entire fight and die" which completely takes away from the experience (Also with how many weapons I'm leveling, I don't often get to run around with my OP guns so I just have to accept that Stalker appearing = 1 revive gone)

[Naftal]

I just melee him to death. If I die it's most of the time because the screen is filled with a thousand effects and I notice the Absorb too late.

[XenoRanger]

To be honest from a lore perspective... it makes sense. He isn't there to piss around and lose, he's there to murder you. I struggle a lot with him especially because I cycle my gear regularly to level new equipment (So bloody hard with level 10 gear >_>) but I do reckon the angle of low level players dying to him early then getting strong enough to kill him is cool (I was ecstatic when i first killed him) but there needs to be a limit or better level system for when you are leveling gear or soloing (even though it makes perfect sense lore wise for him to strike you when you're weakest) but to be honest... it's his dispel ability that really get's me. If I could use my abilities I'd have at least one weapon against him but most damaging abilities are too weak to do much and my low level gear is still crap.... It just gets frustrating being cornered like that. Although, again it makes sense lore wise.

[notlamprey]

Dude, "dodging his attacks and not standing still" isn't a weakness in his AI that you need to stumble upon. It's an obvious fact. He can easily kill you, and you can easily kill him. Most shooters are like this. Ever play Unreal Tournament or CS? You die incredibly fast if you just stand there and let him kill you in any shooter.

 

Your argument begs the question, and yes, I played both UT and CS. Unreal 2k3 and 2k4, plus a brief bit of CS:S before I got bored with it.

 

At some point, we need to ask for a more nuanced experience in games than what you're describing. I was a bratty teenager when I played those other games, and I'm all grown up now. I can think more deeply about the mechanical underpinnings that create the current dynamics of the Stalker encounter, and that's what I'm going to do.

 

It's a shame that you don't seem to want to, but that's your prerogative. What you need to understand is that no one can agree with you unless they already believe the truth of your premise, and the technical term for that kind of argument is "yucky."