Rigged

I've long ago gotten tired of your constant sealioning, Rudra. Kindly stop responding to my comments.

I have no particular opinion on a taunt aura for SR specifically, but personally I think SR really needs some kind of additional utility. Overdosing on +def is not particularly useful considering the options other defense sets have to achieve *practically* the same defense softcaps while keeping their additional mitigation options and utility tools. Even if not a taunt aura, perhaps a much higher +recharge buff (I mean really, EA gets the same buff with 4 enemies in range of Entropic Aura - 20%, and with 10 enemies it is twice as much at 40%), or endurance recovery, or something at least to make it stand out above the other sets. As it is, SR's only gimmick is that it can reach the defense cap easier, gets very high DDR, and has scaling resists which kick in only when you are seriously at risk of dying... but on a scrapper getting punched twice by a boss will still likely kill you when your resists cap at 75%. In exchange for these paltry advantages it has no self-heal, no end management, no base resist, no taunt aura, no stealth, no damage buff, and an extremely weak t9. I'm not even really counting the mez resist you have to click because some people actually like it that way (even if most do not). And the issue is that SR is an iconic set, a set that people who read comics would really love to have for concept reasons. Seriously, the problem is that just about every other set offers almost the same defense, which can be softcapped with some effort, plus other mitigation, utility or damage. In the very least, every other defense set besides shield has a self heal as a "Oh S**t!" button, and Shield at least is compensated for it by getting some of the best damage in the game, especially for a secondary.

Scaling, not cap. A Brute has 75% the mitigation scaling of a tanker, which is the same as a scrapper. A power that gives 10% resist to a tanker will give only 7.5% resist to a brute.

The same AMA revealed that the plan was for earlier tiers to become a new baseline you get for automatically. They did not intend for people to grind upwards from nothing for every character. The idea was to produce a content treadmill, much like most MMOs have these days. It's actually a very good idea for game longevity, because progression content and goodies are what motivate the majority of customers. People who play MMOs solely for story are actually a minority, and the giants like WoW and FF14 know this - the majority of their actual gameplay content is a progression treadmill that they disguise using story. There are in fact a lot of people who skip through cutscenes in those games because they just want to get to the killing.

Min/maxing can allow you to get Soul Drain to 100% uptime, and/or use it as a proc bomb. Soul Drain is in fact a very very good power, more useful than Build Up in many cases. Especially for a blaster who can also get Aim to stick the Gaussian Proc into. There are several blaster builds relying on non-cone AOEs in the primary to do heavy close-range blapping, and /Dark is pretty good for them. Dark melee has some issues compared to Dark Manip, because you pay for Soul Drain by losing large AOE options. But Blasters can get lots of AOE in their primary and the synergy with Soul Drain from secondary is very good. This is more so since many blasters have more attacks than they really need. In fact, I have blaster builds where I skip the secondary PBAOE if they are particularly weak. The real problems with Dark Manip do not lie with Soul Drain. The problem is more the way Touch of Beyond works as a sustain making Dark Consumption usually superfluous, and the very meh AOE disorient.

As much as this might be difficult I would really love the option to play a Robots MM with Praetorian clockwork, or Council Mek men/valkyrie/wolfpack robots. Perhaps a cloned set might be a compromise? Remove the special animations for upgrades, and genericize the attack animations? Am not sure how feasible this is, though. Adding new powers seems ridiculously complex. Anyone with experience on the back-end can comment?

Honestly I think a lot of the survivability issues with SR could be alleviated by giving it slow ticking absorb, possibly in practiced brawler. Seriously, I am running ranged ATs with more passive survivability than SR. Not a bad idea, but will benefit mostly lowbies. Won't change anything at the endgame where everyone packs ageless... Energize in /EA for example does not really help much on the END front - the real END power in that set is Power Sink. Mind you, SR's toggles are already very light on END. Nothing wrong with this idea, but really, this is not a big deal at all. At the earlier levels it is in fact quite rare that you really need it up 100%, since you only need to click it when a mez actually gets past your Defense, so a single SO (or two later on) will get you all the uptime you need, especially since HC hands you SOs right at the start. I don't exactly object to it, but maybe we should conserve buffs for elsewhere. The issue with increasing scaling resists is that it is in fact very easy to get another 8% resist across the board with two global IOs and another bunch for smash/lethal using Tough, a whole lot of set bonuses with fire/cold resist, leaving the only real slightly-harder hole on resists at low health as energy/neg. Look, I'm not saying it's a bad idea (and in fact it is a very good idea for tanks/brutes). I'm saying that we might want to address that in a different way because it is not going to help a lot for scrappers/stalkers once they get low, and a big problem with SR is that a single attack hitting at max health can drop you to 1HP. I do expect though that some purists will object to the idea of SR getting better resists. OK true, but the thing is that if you compare the sets purely on their performance without IOs, SR is actually one of the best. You can softcap (or more practically, come close to softcap) everything without IOs, giving you a solid 90% (or 85ish%) mitigation to all damage. This is more than many of the other sets with no egregious holes except for the fact that you lack a heal power, which can be alleviated using a pool or an offense powerset with a self-heal. It is a far better argument to compare the performance of SR with just a small amount of IO slotting - one of SR's biggest problems is that it overdoses on defense that other sets can use IOs to equalize, meaning that their other mitigation such as resists and self-heals put them ahead on survivability. Look, I am all for buffing SR or at least making its mitigation more consistent, but the argument for doing so is much better when you consider the practical modern IO environment, is what I'm saying. Completely true that that power seriously needs a revamp. In many cases it does nothing but give you a bit more defense debuff resist- which is pathetic for a t9. At least for resist sets, the T9 will often at least partially cover resist holes. Now I know this is going to be controversial, but I seriously think SR should get more offense in order to compete with /Shield or the sheer utility spread of /energy aura. Would it really be so overpowered to remove the crash and give Elude a sizable damage buff (or the recharge buff OP suggested) for the 2/3 uptime at the practical recharge limits, while reducing the superfluous defense a bit? Overall, please don't mistake my critique of your suggestions as trying to pooh-pooh them. If nothing else, I think you are in fact being too reserved in your buff suggestions.

That's fine, too - but I am giving a suggestion on how to go about buffing brutes in the event that a tanker nerf is not on the cards, which is in line with the OP. I have no objection to tanker nerfs, but it is hard to say whether that will be the avenue chosen by the devs, especially since the main tanker buffs have been allowed to continue for three and a half years now. My point is that doing the buff/nerf treadmill on pure damage is not the way to go for balancing brutes. If brutes must be buffed, we should look towards AOE or mitigation as possible other avenues for balance, because raw melee damage is the schtick of stalkers and scrappers. The issue is that, since Brutes and Scrappers and Stalkers all use the same mitigation scale, the main way they are currently differentiated is through their damage output and HP. Brutes need some buffing in the direction of the tank role to better differentiate them from the others and HP alone is honestly not enough. Even if tankers are nerfed, consideration should be given towards increasing brute mitigation at least marginally or giving them a mild buff to AOE radii/target caps. Do consider that your kneejerk aversion to power creep and relentless harping about it in this forum belongs more in an i24 purist server rather than HC, which has long ago abandoned the Live balance status quo. HC has upended the entire balance equation in multiple ways, which are now going to be very difficult to revert, especially since they have allowed them to stand for long enough to seep into the status quo. We have power creep in multiple high-performing ATs which the rest have to work alongside and quite frankly the pace of range AT buffs do not look like they are going to slow even though it is clear that those ATs were overbuffed entire issues ago. If you want to complain about power creep, kindly direct that at the dev balance philosophy and not player suggestions to keep up, because it is very clear that avoiding power creep is not in the dev priorities. Like I said earlier, shutting down discussion by wishing for a tanker nerf is not going to be productive considering the HC devs have let those buffs stand for three and a half years now. This is longer than the lifespan of some MMOs. If you do not mind, you can go on wishing for them while the rest of us work with the reality we're in.

If the devs are very afraid of clipping, may I request that they consider allowing the bolero to be used with short capes, where the clipping issues are minimal. I would also be very much in favor of any option that allows us to use backpacks with the bolero, since those largely do not clip, as well as the addition of the Arcane collar to backpacks, for those of us who want it without the cape.

This is actually a very good point - I am not particularly affected by this because I run a lot of procs, but top-end Crey have very poor mob diversity which is very clear when you do the missions only to find a sea of grey. A much better solution than nerfing their resists might simply be to create high-end crey agents and scientists so that not every Crey enemy in the 46-50 bracket is a tank.

With respect, I am actually convinced that the way to balance brutes is not by increasing their damage - this is a futile endeavor because there are four melee archetypes (not including EATs) and the bare second one outdamages any of the others all of them will complain. Instead, because Brutes are supposed to be a hybrid of Tanks and Scrappers, I really feel that the correct way forward would be to provide some of the overpowering advantages that tanks are getting to Brutes. Consider: Increasing the cone/AOE radii and target caps to match tankers. Increase the base brute mitigation scaling from 75% to 85% (a bit less than halfway in between scrappers and tankers). But no increase to the fury buff numbers or base damage. If you feel that fury drops too fast (been awhile since I played a brute), perhaps we can reduce the rate of decay so it is more consistently on the high end. This would make Brutes the king of large scale melee AOE in a way that scrappers would never be able to compete against while allowing scrappers and stalkers to retain their position as the top single target and small-group DPS. It would also improve Brute resist and defence base numbers to help reach breakpoints easier. If we meddle solely with raw damage, the only result is that brutes would end up being nerfed back down when scrappers and stalkers complain.

I suspect it is because Dark Blast has an unusually large number of cones, and they want to increase the synergy. Regardless, it is not so cool for people who are not Dark Blast and are not already lining up the cones as part of their normal attack cycle. This is particularly pronounced for Blasters, who get Soul drain from their secondary (rather than the APP/PPP like Defenders and Corruptors) where there are likely to be lots of people who take the Dark secondary without the Dark Blast primary. Blaster Dark blast also has one less cone, so there isn't that much synergy for them. So for Blasters at least, where you are supposed to blap for maximum effectiveness and the synergy is not so much a factor as it is for defenders and corruptors, I hope they do not change it. There is a bit of an argument for changing the Soul Drain in Defender and Corruptor Soul/Dark Mastery though, since it does force a ranged defender to close where they may not otherwise have to. Few Defender/Corruptor APP/PPP powers require you to close - although Dark Mastery specifically has all the powers other than the armor being PBAOEs. One possibility is to change the Soul Mastery version (since the rest of the powers are ranged; also the Soul Mastery version has twice the cooldown) to a cone while leaving the Dark Mastery version as it is, which would provide greater distinction between the Dark and Soul Mastery sets. I myself have no opinion for or against changing this.

I hate to jranger this idea but having seen what it does to every community, I feel I have to. I get that elitism is already a problem here, but that's precisely the issue: I am against any idea that would encourage it. That elitism also encourages a defensive attitude in the opposite faction, those who are proud of how unoptimized their playstyle is. This division does not need to be exacerbated. The only game I have played where it doesn't come up regularly is FF14, because it is strictly against the rules to even use a DPS meter - though unofficially the GMs close a blind eye unless you try to whine about another player's performance using one. And while correlation does not imply causation, FF14's community is better than most and I cannot help but think this is at least one of many reasons for it. It pains me because I myself am a massive min/maxer and build tweaker and would love to be able to see statistics in a group setting. But I have to content myself with timing solo runs instead. Apologies to those who support this with the best of intentions, but there has been a demonstrable history of how DPS meters affect player psychology.

Y'all know that frankenslotting and boosting set IOs will get you to almost the same values as most hami-o's, right? There are only a very rare few powers that benefit fully from a hami-o, mostly those that have multiple control effects or both tohit and defense buffs/debuffs.

Sadly I do believe that with the current antiquated tools for creating animations (from what I understand COH's engine is not compatible with ANY modern animation programs) a single second of animation takes days of active work to create. The example given was the innertube emotes. The devs have said this is not an efficient use of their volunteer time. Hopefully a better solution is discovered so that we can import or create new animations more efficiently. Until then, recycled animation are the best option.