I agree. Defenders and Corruptors have similar power sets, but they play very differently in spite of this.
* Defenders, if played more-or-less correctly, are there to mitigate damage with debuffs and/or support the team by amplifying damage.
* While the Defender's secondary power set can deal damage, the primary role of their secondary is to apply debuffs.
* Corruptors are focused around dealing damage, and work very well with primaries that Defenders usually avoid; Defenders are looking for good debuffs, while Corrupters are looking for good damage (especially damage over time).
* While the Corrupter can support their team, the primary role of their secondary is to apply low-maintenance buffs and/or high-impact debuffs as necessary. They're not babysitters like Defenders are.
* Defenders have higher base values on their buffs and debuffs. Corrupters have higher base values on their damage.
* Defenders effectively have no inherent power - or, at very least, you can ignore it because it's never something that you have to think about. Corrupters play around their inherent completely, focusing on injured targets.
* Defender Primaries are all very different from each other, and complement each other well. You can stick 3 Defenders on the same team and have zero overlap in what they actually do. Same applies to Corrupters.
* Discussion of Defender vs. Corrupter belongs in its own thing, and doesn't belong here at all. It'll just get lost and/or distract from the actual purpose of the thread.
Tankers and Brutes compete directly for the same role - to pull aggro while dealing damage. There's nearly 100% overlay between the two. If the two ATs have the same survivability, then it's pretty obvious that the AT with the higher damage output is going to be superior.
Here are the facts that people have acknowledged so far in this ridiculously long thread:
* Tankers and Brutes have nearly identical survivability.
* Tankers and Brutes have nearly identical ability to pull aggro.
* Only one person can pull aggro at any given time, so Tankers and Brutes directly compete with each other in the middle of combat.
* Brutes deal more damage than Tankers.
* Adding an extra Brute to the team always contributes more value than adding an extra Tanker.
If you genuinely want to make them equivalent, then you need to nerf Brute's aggro generation abilities (and possibly survivability) and buff the Tanker's aggro generation to make up for the fact that they do less damage. The people here seem to hate any possible idea of nerfing Brutes, though, so I guess we should just stick with looking at Tanker.
It is my opinion that Tankers simply do not do their job well enough. I generally agree with the OP that there should be two changes:
* Bruising should be renamed 'Distracted', and should apply to all enemies that currently have aggro on the Tanker. This encourages Tankers to aggro as many enemies as possible, whenever possible.
* The Tanker's T1 secondary should apply extra aggro rather than inflict Bruising.
I'm not fully educated on how the Taunt mechanics work specifically (are taunts forced attacks, or are they simply extra aggro?), but in my mind this is how things should work:
* Tankers should taunt every enemy that they hit. No splashing aggro on single targets - they have the AOE powers for a reason.
* Brutes should taunt enemies that they hit with single target attacks. Their AOE powers should not have any extra taunt.
* Scrappers should de-taunt nearby enemies, other than the one that they're actively attacking
Anyway, that's my 2 cents
