MTeague

Probably maps where 1/2 of the minions use Tactics, 1/2 use Freezing Rain, and both types use Dominate as their bread-and-butter attack. Anything that rips your defense apart, hurts your resist, and stacks the heck of the Hold magnitude. Then sprinkle in anything else. Maybe Lieutenants with Darkest Night or Hurricane to savage your own to-hit? Along with some Master Illusionisst bosses for pure cruelty?

For a zero-influence option, there's always the Shivan Shard available in Bloody Bay. My Mind Controller picks one up on a regular basis, so even low DPS builds can totally nab them. You just have to weaken-but-not-kill the firebase turrets, and then when they're all low, you zip around popping each one in rapid fire. Technically you're at risk for being pvp ganked when you go to Bloody Bay, but on both Excelsior and Everlasting I've never been attacked in Bloody Bay. Not ONCE in years.

All I can say is "One man's trash is another man's treasure." I will not argue against the effectiveness of the crab spider builds, but I have always hated the look of it, and because of that, I have never created a single Arachnos Soldier. Widows, yes. Soldiers of Arach, no. (yes, there are non-crab options for SoA, but for those, I prefer an honest-to-god Stalker). I'm glad you're happy with it, though.

Also, not everyone wants every one of their characters to become a small-g god. Sure I've got a few with max incarnates kitted out. I've also got some friendly-neighborhood heroes who aren't supposed to be "super" to any degree, and who have no interest in a faustian bargain with a sapient Well of Furies, or any other indirect route to touch that power whatsoever. There should be room for Hawkeye or even a Daredevil alongside the Thor's, Bobby Drake's, or Clark Kent's.

Trying to sift through the chaff of 18 bazillion fire farm maps to find AE missions with actual stories.

The entire Twinshot ordeal. All three story arcs. A fair bit of the Dr. Graves content, as well.

I accept that that is your position. But I didn't think the recent big patch (Plant, Regen, Adaptive Recharge, etc) was done poorly. Nerfs occurred, but at the end of the day, sometimes nerfs are necessary, and I've been happy with how my characters perform in the new codebase. Your experiance, quite clearly, does not agree with my own.

For rationale, I'd guess existing AT's got the choice so existing characters could keep IH if they wanted the higher spike regen that's not always up. Whereas there was no such thing as a regen tanker before, so the devs probably decided there was no need to offer a partially backwards-compatible option. Still. I see no harm in offering the same choice to Tankers. Respecs are readily available if anyone decides they made the "wrong" choice later. Why not?

All things are possible, if they catch the developer's fancy. But I would not hold my breath for any new AT's to be introduced. Bring in a new AT, you have to cook up several powersets, along with their animations, and make them work for all body types, and balance them against all existing AT's/Sets and cook up new ATO's and balance them, and make it something that can plausibly be played by anyone of any origin. "Technololgy" or "Science" based Mu are practically a contradiction. I honestly put that at "winning big on powerball" kind of odds.

This. I get nostalgic for some things from the Elder Days. I find myself soloing from 45-50 because I'm sick of teams where Incarnate Powers are flying around willy nilly in content that was never designed for them. I think it's crazy that Empathy or FF sometimes get derided as "useless" because "everyone will have capped defenses anyway." I miss feeling like my controllers made a difference against Malta. I miss when Blasters (except for Assault Rifle) had to decide if the situation was dire enough to unleash a T9 nuke. But. I am fully aware of how quickly players would drop the game like week old roadkill, if we went there. We would stop being able to raise the necessary donations on a regular basis. City of Heroes would die a 2nd death. Not because of an NCSoft snap, but because players would say the game was no longer worth playing. I'm also aware that I'm a raging hypocrit. Every one of my alts gets a Panacea proc slotted at lvl 7, without exception. They get a Blessing of the Zephyr knockback proction shortly after, once they can fit in a travel power. I rarely use "proc bomb" powers, but I am a set bonus FIEND. Even while I bemoan players scoffing at buff-centric support sets. Ultimately, it was like when I tried Project 1999 to go back to truly Old School EverQuest again. Nostalgic as f**k. Glorious to see. And I logged out 1 hour later, and never went back again. Because I'm 54 instead of 29, and because quoting a line from Netflix 2015 Daredevil, "Growing to love something is simply, slowly forgetting, what you dislike about it.". When I actually went back to the P1999 EverQuest game... I knew I could not mentally face that grind again. I knew I would never choose to spend that many hours on a loot treadmill again. Never choose to sign up for a regular guild/supergroup situation where to make any meaningful advancement, I would have to tie my fortunes to regular teaming with others and start planning my life around particular game-time hours to make that happen. None of these changes are ever going to happen. Because the devs don't want to have to smile sadly and turn off the lights as they walk away from an empty server.

If I wanted a defense based set without a shield on my arm, I'd play Super Reflexes or Ninjitsu. Probably SR because I love the sky-high DDR. That said, I could perhaps see something along the lines of a Wonder Woman style bracer, or a thin buckler such as Cap wore in Wakanda, to provide some options less intrusive than the full Tower Shield, etc. But I do think there should be something. No Broadsword or Katana set without a blade. No Archery set without a bow. Shield Defense should have something on your arm, even small, because all of the animations are going to be assuming some kind of shield.

I always liked the Syndicate for style points. For a long while I hoped for them to re-form and become a threat on Primal Earth. The combination of psychic powers, martial arts, and corporate hardball always struck me as something that had good potential for future stories, especially if Wu Yin were to co-opt the Primal Tsoo and displace the Family.

And are you going to let that chance scale up, if there's an equal number of players to foes? Or if there's just one elite boss against 2 players, will you allow it to have a much better chance to detoggle than the players? The power should have the same effect. Anything we can do with the power, they should be able to do with the same power. Heck, I still want enemy mobs to show up using Incarnate Judgements against US.... [EDIT: Kheldian/Quantum style. If you have incarnates slotted, your maps will have at least one foe with incarnates]

Especially given how often I've seen requests to remove that Repel effect from Hurricane.

That's more Wind Breaking than Wind Control ....