macskull

It probably helps that most of the changes were reverted or seriously dialed back at the 11th hour so the net effect is a lot smaller than the initial versions of the changes.

Black Hole applies "only affecting self" so yes, you're stopping their buffs from affecting anyone.

Then you take the L and you only get to cage one of the towers instead of two, and it takes you a little longer to finish.

I can think of one encounter where intangibility is extremely useful provided the entire team is on the same page, so not something you'll run into with a PuG.

Eh, I’m not opposed to the idea at face value, or at least the idea of a better potential reward for spending more time on the content. I’d rather see that happen than have the encounter’s rewards nerfed, which to be entirely honest I’m surprised hasn’t happened by now.

This is not, and has never been, true. It's an idea that was floated by one of the devs. More on-topic: the ASF D-Sync rewards table was tweaked slightly sometime last year(?) so that the D-Sync enhancements which previously did not have a corresponding Hami/Titan/Hydra-O had roughly double the chance to drop compared to the ones that have the equivalent. When the hard mode LGTF was added the corresponding Hami-O's were created and those also have a higher weighting. It's part of why Provocations have dropped from 500m to 300m - there's more content that drops them and the weighting has gone up.

When discussing unresisted heals, the heal resist cap is completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter all that much in practice either, since there are virtually no critter powers that affect heal resistance, and in the one common instance where there is, Absorb/Share Pain will cover anything the unresisted self-heals won’t.

No? The set was already functional, if not particularly amazing, as a control set. Where it stood out was letting people clear through groups without having to roll yet another Blaster or Scrapper.

That’s not at all obvious. Clear speeds are slower than they used to be. The set is getting rebalanced to no longer be reliant on two powers to achieve its maximum performance, that much is true, but the result is the set’s maximum performance is lower. It’s an unfortunate set of changes that removes options for players.

Why, though? The only reason these changes are happening in the first place is because tester feedback said making armor set heals resisted would complicate certain content (namely Hami raids). Kheldian self-heals staying unresisted means nothing changes for them.

The funny thing is Plant Control wasn't even a good PvP set pre-Issue 13 when Controllers and Dominators were significantly stronger in PvP than they are now.

If you think the Plant Control changes (or any other changes in the entire history of this game save one) are because of PvP, well... lol.

Canonically it's at least 2023 in the game universe, so it looks like we already know what the city looks like 21 years later.

You could completely remove Fulcrum Shift and Kinetics would still be one of the better support sets for the reasons I outlined above.

While true, Faraday Cage is location-based and will require continuous re-casting every 15ish seconds if the team is moving.