Rylas

I hope you realize that you're arguing against a point no one made. Endurance maintenance has nothing to do with -End attacks. If a Sapper hits you and drains you down to zero, how many +end/+recovery bonuses you have doesn't really matter. And not all sets have protection from said attacks. Your Stone Tanker gets a bit of a leg up since Rooted provides some End Drain resist. It's easy to scoff from using a specific example. But Fire Armor, for example, has none. Just the other day during a Numina TF, when the leader accidentally left it at +4 when they started it, my Rad/Fire brute didn't have much to stop a couple of Super Stunners from draining her down to zero after I'd already used Consume in a full group. Had she a clickie for mez protection, I'd have been able to at least pop a blue to run to safety and toggle back up. But she was held and flattened pretty quickly. Nothing in what you just said really seems applicable to the argument. I won't speak to all sets, because the topic at hand is Active Defense being a click power, and I can say that I've seen no convincing argument that it needs to be improved. That's nice and all about people's business philosophies, but improvement/progress for the sake of improvement/progress doesn't work if good reasoning isn't provided. And the only reasoning you seem to be providing so far is "I don't like the way this mechanic works" and "other sets do it differently." Those aren't great reasons. Do you have other reasons?

Seen a lot of great answers in here. Personally, I'd love to see what always made this the most fun game for me. More customization! More costume pieces. More color options. More hair styles. If it doesn't come around, I can live. But my favorite mini-game in CoH is costume design. Also, I get why they didn't allow for some colors for things like Ice Armor. But can we just move past those kinds of worries. The color selection for those sets are so.... *gags* Bland. Drab. Boring. If people really did make offensive costumes along the lines of "yellow snow" that are really that offensive, we can report them.

Sounds nice on paper, but I would have to wonder how good it would turn out in reality. Even if the undertaking wasn't a big deal, game AI for allies has never been... overwhelmingly great. I can only imagine 7 of my alts (since teams cap at 8 characters) running around doing things the way I wouldn't do them as those characters. I mean, it would be fun to see them, of course, but I don't think it would necessarily be great. Also, asking for them to gain XP is a bit lofty. You're basically asking to level 8 characters at a time with only the investment of time in one. I know they've made leveling incredibly easy to do, but I don't see it getting so ridiculously easy as that. On the bright side, you can easily make your characters in the AE and achieve at least part of what you're asking for. And if you're big on RP'ing, that's a really great way to enrich your character's story. And hey, cross over issues for your toons!

Oh snap! Called it!

Something to bear in mind, is that all sets have their "weaknesses" and varied developments during level progression. Not that I would call click mez protection a weakness. So far in this thread, I've seen more strengths listed for it, and no weaknesses that seem unique to SD or SR. If spending slots in recharge is a weakness, then so is slotting for KB protection in Fire Armor and Dark Armor. But that's not really a huge issue. If the problem is that you won't have perma-AD until SOs, well, most powers don't reach their full usefulness until SOs. Especially armor powers. But the strengths listed in the thread so far are good strengths to have. I've been end-drained out of mez protection plenty of times. And with end-game content like Malta, it's all too easy to fall victim to it. Especially if you're the one jumping into the action first. You don't seem to be addressing these strengths when making your argument that AD has a bad mechanic. Another thing to remember is that armor powers come in 3 forms. Auto, toggle, and click. And they follow respectively in strength: good, better, and best. Electric only has partial KD protection with its auto power. Toggles are click and forget. Clickies get stronger protection and can stack (useful in higher difficulty content). Though, SR doesn't get as many protections as SD and it's arguable that maybe it should receive more, but it's still stackable. Sure, you have to invest a slot or two for recharge, but again, that doesn't really set it apart in any meaningful way. Also, SD and SR get the highest defense-based powers in the game and reach soft-cap numbers very easily. And they require minimal investment to make the Incarnate soft-cap. On top of that, they receive the strongest numbers for DDR. If their biggest drawback is that you have to pay attention to your mez protection, that doesn't really sound like an awful trade off. Do you have any other arguments to change it? So far, I'm not convinced by "more sets use toggles than clicks". That's just confusing frequency as a standard.

Hmm, I think I'm going to need to do some Justin testing on all these builds. Glad I hadn't started reworking the build yet. Thanks for taking a stab at it!

Sorry it took me a while to get back on this, but I'll tell you what I think. I think that's a brilliant build! I'll miss have Choking Cloud or Oppresive Gloom, but the level of defense on top of the debuffs will make up for the lost mitigation. With AM and Dark Consumption, I'm not going to worry about two slots in Health and Stamina, so I moved those to Super Speed and Dreadful Wail. Moved the Celerity to Super Speed and got a bit more AoE defense in DW. Thanks a lot for the build, I'm looking forward to testing it out. 😄

Energy Manipulation Fire Blast Psionic Assault

Hey, I remember seeing BillZBubba on the forums back in the day. Welcome back! As Cix mentioned, it sounds like there are already some plans to make some changes to EM. What they would be is a guess right now, but hey, I'm just pumped they're taking a look at it. You're certainly not alone on missing how well the set used to perform. Just check out the thread in my sig; there's dozens of us. DOZENS!!

Ran another Windfall farm. This time around, I decided to better track exactly how much inf would be gained from the 1 hour (for science!), so I cleared out all influence, recipes and salvage before starting. As well as let all my transactions finish on the Auction House. Mainly because I'm too lazy to add and subtract it all on top of what I already had going on. I completed 3 Comic Con Arcs, and dumped recipes onto the market to make room for more drops as I went along. This time around I picked up 3 Purples and 3 PVP IOs again. Seems like the average for very rare drops is sitting at around 6 an hour with Windfall going. Picked up enough salvage to make most recipes I crafted and sold (and used what I had in base storage for the rest). Earned just over 42 million in inf. Sold common recipes (which off set the listing costs). And after a few days sold all the loot, walking away with 134 Million from one hour of farming. Could have been more, but I left experience on and farmed at level 50. Pics below for details.

I don't think elevators actually take you to "another floor" on mission maps. I mean, the illusion is that they do, but I think they connect you to non-continuous parts of the same flat level of the same map. So you wouldn't be able to get another floor, or in this case, another plot to build on. That said, having elevators that connect different parts of the base to give the appearance of floors would be cool.

Gravity Control (thought you might like this set, @biostem) Dark Miasma

I've gone back and added names under the icons. I'm also going to hide icons when posting them in sets to keep the page from being a scrolling nightmares.

All super valid questions. First; yeah, it's a bit heart shaped. But I'm just following the icons as close as I can. Which in this case, the Placate icon does actually have a bit of a heart shape to it. Second; this is the curse of only having low res icons to reference. I pulled icons from the icon legends page of Paragon Wiki and used two ways of looking at them before redrawing the icons. I would keep one at original size, and make a copy that I would blow up to 100x100 pixels in the hopes of pulling some of the details out. I originally thought it was a fade as well, but as you might agree when seeing them larger... ...there's definitely some trailing dots. I'm dedicated to preserving the original artwork as best I can. That said, I also wanted to keep a tighter consistency between icons with shared graphics. That's why the Barrage icon has two trailing dots even though its hard to tell if there's one or two trailing dots from the original. Third; no idea why that's happening when creating the PNG files from Photoshop. There's definitely no white lines on the artwork. If there's a setting I can adjust for that when exporting that someone's aware of, I'm all ears. Fourth; THANKS! I'll keep them coming as frequently as I can.

Electric Armor

I farm for inf and drops. Ticket rolls never pay off well for me. Besides, you can't get purples from tickets.

You mean like when I saw this guy asking for Kinetics to get buffed?

While over sensitivity is surely an issue sometimes, I think it's always safe to assume dropping the P-word, C-word, F-word or other C-word (think "rooster") are going to have iffy reception. I could tell you weren't trying to be derogatory when you used it, but that's just one of those words that's going to cause a "record scratch" moment in a forum that's generally family friendly.

That's the thing, passive powers don't tend to offer all the same coverage as their toggle counterparts. That said, it would seem an odd choice not to offer quite the same level of protection in Grounded (when feet are on the ground), if there's only ever one place that it would matter — Lord Recluse. My guess is that it's an oversight, and that it could get corrected now that it's been brought to light.

Relax, friend. I was merely pointing out (rather tongue in cheek) the reason someone would have to ask for civility. One would think pointing out that blind spot would be productive. And if not, would my following comment after that not show I intend to be productive in the conversation?

Something that I didn't notice mentioned is that Grounded is a passive power. It could be by design that KB resistance is weaker because the power cost no endurance. Not that it necessarily has to stay that way.

Said the guy that dropped the word "p*ssies" into the conversation.

I've gone through the icon legend and redrawn all the icons and borders to help make the process faster. So here's the first full set I've been able to redo. I chose Energy Melee because, well, personal bias. I'll be going through when time permits to start working on whole sets. Perhaps rotating by AT and choosing a set from each. We'll see. Energy Melee

While the FotM charts are fun to see and, to a certain degree, informative, using them as a basis to see which powers need adjustment is a poor basis for decision making. It's just an appeal to popularity which isn't a logical way to determine if a power is broken or needs adjustment. Empathy is by far the most popular set for defenders. I like Empathy. I'm always happy to have an Empathy defender on the team. I don't have anything bad to say for the set. But it isn't the strongest set out there in my opinion as far as capabilities go. I'll upset some Empathy fans with that, but it's not a diss towards the set. I'm just pointing out that popularity, doesn't really mean anything on its own.

Oh, I absolutely only build teams with zero support or control powers, and only people who don't like to work as a team. *eye roll* Thanks for the leading and insinuating question. Look, whether Aid Self received any kind of change or not, I'm not worried about it. But as a power selection, it lacks a lot of appeal for tanking, and makes for a poor fill-in for a self heal. For squishies and other types that do more to avoid direct incoming damage, I can see how it works well for them. But melee characters, let's not oversell it's "easiness" to use.