Zect

You do realize that ageless gets significantly weaker over time? You do not, in fact, have permahaste or anything remotely close to it. After just 10s, your global rech drops by 40%. Mids does not correctly calculate recharge time when rech bonuses are not permanent. Brutes should not take musculature, or assault for that matter, unless you really know what you are doing. The design of brutes is that they have a low AT damage scalar, which is compensated by the damage buff from their fury mechanic. A side effect of this is that +dmg% bonuses on brutes are, pound for pound, weaker than they are on other AT's; +10% damage on a brute adds less damage than it does on a tanker (Brute damage scalar: 0.75, tanker: 0.95). If you want DPS, take alphas that contribute rech, def or res (e.g. agility). Then, take slots devoted to rech, def and res set bonuses and invest them in damage procs instead. Brutes on typed defense armors should always consider splitting their Brute's Fury ATIO 3 and 3, getting the 5% SL def bonus twice. It is the most slot-efficient SL def in the entire game. For example, in your case you could drop the Underwhelming Farce slotted in storm kick. Slot storm kick and CAK with 3x Brute's Fury each (proc out the remaining slots if possible) and complete the 5x hecatomb you have in crake kick (what is it with forumites and going out of their way to avoid extremely powerful set bonuses?). This is far more efficient than putting 4 slots in resist physical for a mere 1.25% SL and EN def. More generally, the most slot-efficient sources of typed def are: SL: Brute ATIO, blistering cold EN: Hold, ranged ST, and pbaoe sets FC: Winter IO's, aegis Psi: None. You get 5% from 6x apoc, and that's it. Get resists instead. This suggests a general layout for a typed defense armor: ATIO's and blistering colds in melee attacks, aegis or unbreakable guards in resist toggles, and an epic blast/hold/taoe with such sets as basilisks, T-strikes, or winter IOs (an epic blast such as fireball or dark obliteration would also vastly improve aoe potential). You have no epic blast or aoe necessitating heavy investment elsewhere to get the bonuses you need. For example, you 6-slotted dragon's tail for 3.13 EN def and 6% FC res. 6-slotting a high-dps epic blast such as gloom with superior winter's bite would give 5% EN def, 5% FC def, and 6% FC res - the same res and 3x as much def. Sets such as bombardments and basilisks offer rare combos of rech and res that are otherwise extremely difficult to get for armored AT's while opening up new tactical possibilities - they should not be overlooked. If you are not taking an epic with a good blast/taoe, then you should fully exploit the potential of energy mastery powers by slotting heal procs and endurance procs. An invuln brute with energy mastery can fit 4 heal procs (panacea and 3x power transfer in stamina/supe conditioning/phys perfection), invaluable on a high-mit, low-sustain set such as invuln. Phys perfection is extremely weak (only 20% regen and 12.5% recovery - an epic blast with 2x apocs already gives 16% regen). It is only worth it if procced out or if it makes the difference between being eps stable and not. When using 4x shield wall make sure to include the proc in one of your sets instead of slotting it separately in CJ - this saves a slot. For example, your tough hide could be slotted def, d/e, d/r, proc because tough hide does not need end as an autopower. As a PVPIO, shield wall can be boosted +5 without losing enhancement value when exemplaring. Boost boost boost.

I think there is nothing bad about seismic (mechanically or conceptually): it's just rather conformal, very by-the-book. It's the kind of set I could design. While not every set needs to be wildly different, I do think creations such as storm blast are the ones that truly show the creators' mettle as designers.

Excellent read. I got a good chuckle out of the heated discussion surrounding the use of an Energy Transfer icon and a super strength animated gif as forum avatars, their relevance to game balance being obvious only to the posters.

I should have specified high sustained aoe dps. All the way back in issue 1, AR was the only set with a crashless nuke. All of AR's aoe's also do more damage than the design formulas specify, e.g. Buckshot "should" do 47.499 damage on a blaster, but actual damage is 56.931 - a differential of +19.857%. So from the start, AR offered a different strategy. Instead of one extremely powerful broadside of damage (classic nuke), it had multiple powerful aoes that could be chained one after another for a withering barrage of fire. Thematic, effective, different. Since then, crashless nukes have proliferated, and AR's identity as the sustained aoe dps set has been eroded. Giving it aim would've been the final nail in the coffin. Fortunately, since AR is now "the best set at clearing groups of enemies" as you claim (and I'm not disagreeing, mind), it is in no need of aim. Whew!

MMO players are kids: they will never vote to have less candy, even if it rots their teeth. Putting development decisions to a vote will also merely result in a tyranny of the majority, where only the dominant meta (and powersets that jive with it) ever get development effort. Terrible idea - let's all hope it won't ever happen. I'm so thrilled that Cat 5 isn't a standard "click 2 buttons and delete all non-bosses" nuke, and such an unconventional idea would never have been brought to life were it put to a vote. Players would've chosen the familiar over the innovative, the meta-friendly over the meta-breaking. I think Homecoming team has performed superbly this time round and I applaud their efforts to bring us something different and varied, because that's how you get replay value out of the game, not killing council or PI radios 5% faster, Finally, since the popularity of homecoming's homebrew sets was criticized: popularity and usage rates are a terrible metric to judge a set's success by (though it's certainly one that creators of all kinds can't help but value). Different powersets appeal to different playstyles. This means that a powerset that is only liked by a few players is still an asset as it brings enjoyment to a group of players who otherwise would not engage with the game at all, therefore, giving the game a larger audience than otherwise. There's a reason Baskin-robbins has 31 flavors on sale, with the associated logistical headache, instead of only selling peanut butter chocolate. Overall, I approve strongly of homecoming team's very measured approach to development, and this includes wisely not overtuning sets on release because compensating nerfs are very difficult to push through. It would've been real easy for them to just make "Fire blast, but with 50% more dps", and it would've been the most popular set ever. Instead, we get art. Maybe there is a God after all.

Brief post since I haven't had much time for coh lately, but I'm completely blown away by storm blast! Blast sets have been a stale, uninspiring affair for many years: sure, there are 2ndary effects and differences in DPA and proccability, but in general these superficial differences do not lend themselves to materially different strategies. Essentially, if you've played one blast set you've played between half and two-thirds of them. Storm Blast, however, is centered on a completely different paradigm of encouraging the player to fight within areas of tactical advantage - storm cells and category 5, rewarding the strategically minded hero. To top it off, we're seeing mechanics that have been de-emphasized or homogenized out of existence elsewhere, such as repel (the real thing, not reverse-repel). This is precisely the breath of fresh air we need - I didn't expect this dev team was capable of such creativity given how by-the-book seismic blast was, but this time they've certainly displayed what they're really capable of. Storm blast is an exceptionally powerful set that delivers formidable debuffing and soft control capacity, while not slouching at all on the dps front. It's clearly designed for a different paradigm than the current meta (speedkill/mass-aoe), which is exactly what Homecoming team must do: supporting and encouraging alternative playstyles to the dominant meta, whatever that might be, so as to develop a vibrant, diverse metagame. Bravo, bravissimo! P.S. A brief glance at beta forums tells me that one of the early changes was to replace AR's beanbag with aim, which would be a hugely negative change - further reinforcing the oppressive aim/BU/nuke meta. The fact that this change was walked back really tells me that Homecoming team does take feedback into account: listening to players when valid (maintaining AR's traditional identity as a low-burst dps, high sustained dps set), while rightfully dismissing knee-jerk/munchkin suggestions (storm blast's damage is "too low").

First of all, you need to understand the current 4-star pug hard mode meta. Note: this is for pugs that recruit publicly, and allow any average joe to join. If you're running your own superteam or doing special challenges, you should be knowledgeable enough to adjust your build accordingly. The meta is for each team to have: 7x barrier destiny 1x incandescent destiny, carried by the leader/most skilled player, which may well be you - though I don't recommend that the leader also be the tank. This person will speed/stealth what is to be stealthed and teleport the team around. As many tactics and tohit buffs as possible - HM creatures and AV's have very high def. Respect it. One def buffer: cold or FF preferred. Time manip, forts, etc. easily miss teammates with their long-recharge mind links. One healer: kin preferred, for its very powerful spammable transfuse, and because FS/SB are an easy panacea for clueless dps players with no clue how to optimize dps. However, elecaff, nature etc. are all strong candidates in this role. One tank (the MMO role, not necessarily the AT) with taunt: that's you! The 7 barriers will be run continuously whenever the team is in combat. No effort will be made to stagger them - average players are not capable of that level of coordination. Because barrier core T4 is permanent, 7 barrier core epiphanies is, at minimum, perma 35% def to all and 35% res to all. A single cold corr on top of that adds about 29% def to all. Then on top of that you stack maneuvers and miscellanous def/res buffs, etc. In this buff-heavy environment, all tanker primaries, even SR, will be res hardcapped and def softcapped. This means that excessive build investment in mitigation and especially defense are wasted. I often see people fuss about hitting the incarnate softcap, thinking this will help them survive. Extra defense may provide comp flexibility or some buffer against mistakes (eg. someone slow on refreshing barrier), but does not actually translate into more survivability because you will already be operating at your mitigation caps after buffs. Secondly, the fights are quite long. It takes a good pug team about 5 mins to kill the 8 vanguard heroes; a bad one may take closer to 15 mins. It takes a good pug team to triple-kill nictus romulus in 1 cycle of barrier nictuses. A bad one may take many cycles, even assuming you don't wipe. The AV's must be tanked for long periods of time, often with no healing except what you can get from the kin spamming transfusion. You will take hits, and the AV's do enough damage to kill a tanker through 90% resist in just 3-4 hits. This means that sets with high mitigation but low sustain, such as stone and invuln, are not necessarily the best for hardmodes. Hence, in 4-star hardmode, armor sets are differentiated less by their base def and res, and more by: Sustain - you need to be able to take care of yourself for long periods, as not every team can afford an emp to babysit you. Even if they can, given the average skill level of emps, do you want to take the risk? DPS - you need to kill things quickly. The longer you take to kill the AV's, the greater the chance for something to go horribly wrong. The longer you take to kill trash, the more debuffs you eat. Debuff resists - Hero 1 and the vanguard octet drain end (and it's a really nasty drain too). Nictus Romulus slows, King Midas slows. Sustain, mitigation and dps are dependent on rech and end to function, so you want debuff resist to keep them. My #1 tanker primary for tanking anything outside of Hami is Rad. Rad armor is overpowered by any measure with its combination of strong debuff resist, advantageous resist profile, vast amount of end, 2 very strong click sustains, and a rech buff. The only thing it lacks is +maxHP, which it kind of gets around by having particle shield give absorb instead of the more conventional heal, and cold resist which is not (yet) significant in the game... At least, until we get HM Manticore with super Crey cryo lasers. #2 would be a toss-up among fire, bio and shield (shield favored more for ITF, fire and bio favored more for aeon). #3 would be all other tanker primaries that have strong sustain, either a low-rech click such as dark or from toggles such as WP. #4 would be all remaining armor sets.

Mobs don't like to be kited. You hover, they spaz out and jump all over the place in an attempt to get you. This is counter to the current meta, which is tightly packed mobs that stand still in burn/debuff patches and die. The best aoes are still all pbaoes. Foot stomp, burn, spin, whirling smash etc. Hovering means not taking advantage of auras such as invulnerability, rttc, aao, beta decay etc and less saturated buff powers and heals such as soul drain, dark regen etc. Hovering means not taking full advantage of ally buffs and heals such as FS, overgrowth, transfusion, world of pain, etc. Few tanks can muster a full aoe attack chain from range. Not mixing in your best ST attacks like KO blow is a dps loss. Power creep has resulted in so much defensive power in the system that hovering as a means of mitigation is superfluous. It would be like putting a hardhat on Superman to protect him on a construction site. If you need to hover to survive on an IO build, that is a symptom of severe build design errors. Stop flying and fix your build. There are certain niche uses for hovertanking, but these are specific strategies for particular situations. One is to separate flying mobs from non-flying mobs. For example, in 4-star hard mode aeon SF 8 vanguard heroes encounter, only incandescent and hero 1 fly. If you attempt to brainlessly facetank all 8 heroes in a big mob, hero 1 will taunt, prevent the team from focusing down incandescent, who will then wipe stupid players with her lambent light. If you attempt to tank hero 1 and the other 7 separately, it's very easy to miss critical buffs and heals - and you won't survive without them. Hovertaking hero 1 on top of the party easily allows enough separation that hero 1 cannot taunt the other players but the tank can receive buffs and heals such as transfusion. P.S. they fixed the MLTF lord recluse hovertank cheese, too.

It appeals even to people without much disposable income, because P2W games use decades of intensive research into human psychology, manipulation, and addiction in order to coerce their players into continually forking over money. You're right that there is a pathology, however, personal wealth and personal goals in-game are not a factor because the techniques used rely on weaknesses in human nature that we all have. If I inject heroin into your veins daily for a month, you will be addicted regardless of your moral virtue or character, and this is the same thing. Here is the best explanation (YouTube link) of the unethical techniques involved in these games I could find on short notice, often straight from the mouths of the soulless execs behind them, and backed up by testimonials from current, recovering and former addicts that reveal how they do not fit your stereotype of "people with a ton of disposable income who enjoy being "the best" in games so they can curbstomp everyone". Warning: large amounts of profanity and coarse language.

Holy trinity is fine, provided that your game is designed around it from the ground up (coh is not, though a coh2 could be) and the concept is well-executed. The problem is that since the majority of games out there are trinity games, and by Sturgeon's Law 90% of them are shit, that results in a lot of shit holy trinity mmo's. Well-made trinity games can provide superior gameplay to what we have on homecoming right now, which is Holy Unitary gameplay - everyone is a tankhealdps. I'm puzzled that you cite DDO as an example as it is not a very strict holy trinity game. You sometimes need specific character types to pass specific challenges in missions, e.g. a certain quest might require a fighter or other high strength toon to push a lever for a bonus chest, but I recall it's typically only the raids that need a tank and a healer to take care of them. You don't need a healbot when you can get healing SLA's or read a scroll, nor do you need a buffbot when you have deathward armor and boots with charges of Freedom of Movement. NCSoft may not have been the best corporate overlords, but Coh's lack of success was fundamentally due to the flaws of the game itself and the mistakes made by its developers. Lack of effective balance testing; any competent testing would identify enhancement diversity as an issue very early on, for example, not allow it to fester for multiple issues. Lack of effective dev tools to quickly produce content; early missions were painstakingly done by hand, and this was not remedied until Paragon developed the internal tools that would later be released as AE. Lack of clear design vision; tacking on incarnates onto a horizontal progression MMO, really? Failure to effectively monetize the game; the F2P trend hit coh in the middle of its lifespan, and it failed spectacularly to adapt. DDO, which did, is still profitable enough to keep going till this day. I'm also going to be blunt and say that the gameplay in this game, the actual combat and missions and so on, are lackluster. It's a superhero MMO, yet I can't even pick up a car or barrel and hurl it at the villains, nor even move and shoot at the same time. These are the kinds of issues I'd expect a coh2 to fix.

The answer to this will depend on what attacks you are picking in place of tough/weave, as well as what attacks you currently have. Taking more attacks increases offensive power if you are replacing low-dpa attacks with high-dpa ones, or if the new attacks fill up your attack chain (i.e. prevent a situation where you are stuck doing nothing for a few seconds because all your attacks are recharging, resulting in unspent animation time - this is a sign that you either have too little rech or too few attacks). They may slightly increase offensive power if they can mule offensive set bonuses (usually rech). Taking more attacks does not increase offensive power if you already have fully developed attack chains using all the highest-dpa attacks. Blasters typically have "too many" attacks available to them, and a common build error is taking more attacks than effectively contribute to offensive power. Well-slotted attacks are very slot-intensive, and you only have 67 to assign. With that said, challenge or concept builds that trade combat power to better express a concept as a thing. I do have toughless weaveless blasters - but I don't pretend they are a performance improvement.

I think the sheer prevalence of mindless steamrolling has led to many basic skills being atrophied, such that when those rare situations crop up where a modicum of strategy and thoughtfulness are required, the playerbase fails to perform, even though this is objectively an extremely easy game. When I say basic skills, I don't mean designing builds in mids or speedrunning TF's. I mean things like following a player around the map being aware of whether you are with the team or alone reading and obeying simple chat directions ("come to me"/"stay put"/"fly") using a specific power when directed or on cooldown I am reminded of one kill-most MLTF I did where I was playing an illusion controller. The tank bragged that they were very geared and should be able to tank lord Recluse easy. They arrived at the towers, and Lord Recluse instantly turned the tank into a red smear with his channelgun while I cackled in glee. Can I just say - I love debuffs, and I love watching heroes getting humiliated. Anyway, I instantly concocted a solution to get us out of this debacle. I was levelling (hence my presence on a kill-most TF) and did not have my purples slotted for perma-PA. However, there was one other illusion troller on the team. If we could alternate using PA, we could tank Recluse indefinitely despite neither of us having perma-PA. However I was either unable to effectively communicate this concept to them or they were not intelligent enough to comprehend it. If they would just use their PA after mine, when I verbally told them to, we could complete the TF. Alas, they did not, and we did not, and somehow, that team invented a way by which infinitely, instantly respawning superhumans may still fail a mission. I still remember that encounter fondly as one of the precious few times the game stood up, grew a backbone, and said to the players: "No; that is not good enough. You do not pass; there will be no reward; you must do better."

Define "good". With that said, here's an analysis of possible synergies with illusion. Illusion is defined by its phantom army which are untouchable pets that require high recharge for full uptime. There have been two schools of thought as to how to maximize illusion's performance. The dps school of thought views PA as a source of dps and holds that since the pets are unbuffable (specifically, untouchable, the same status that some self-rez powers give you; imagine an impervious wall dividing the PA's from other entities, through which damage, healing and buffs all cannot pass, however the PA's are able to use their own powers on themselves, including any self-buffs they might have e.g. build up proc), weakening enemy resist with debuffs will achieve high performance. In particular, debuffing sets that also feature self rech buffs to help perma-PA such as ill/rad and ill/time were popular on live, however, homecoming power creep has introduced enough global rech that modern builds trivially perma-PA without the help of rech buffs from the 2ndary. This shifts the balance towards heavy-duty debuff sets such as ill/cold and ill/TA that output superior -res, since rad and time are only average in -res output. The support school of thought views the PA's not as damage but as tanks (the MMO role). From this school of thought we get combos such as ill/emp and ill/kin that attempt not to maximize PA dps, but rather to bring complimentary support powers that either defend the team from any circumstance or provide offensive support to balance the mitigation provided by the PA's tanking. This philosophy has cratered in popularity given the massive amounts of power creep the game has experienced in recent years; however, in the right circumstance it is still worthwhile. An ill/kin on 4* hardmodes for example is not too bad since there are situations where PA's offtanking is valuable and kin makes up for the dps loss that is bringing a controller.

You do you, obviously, but if it reassures you, my experience is that forumites may complain but people never confront me about it in-game. I'm certain I've committed every sin being shellacked in this thread and got complimented for it! The purpose of the tank - the role, not always the AT, though it does get tools to facilitate that mission - is simply to set up good engagements. That could be anything from carefully pulling with a snipe (while knowing precisely which mobs in the horde are linked and will come when one of them is killed), to a surgical strike killing all 4 surgeons on top of the sybil temple perfectly timed such that the angry romans follow you to the steps just as the team finishes cleaning up the group before it. You have a blank canvas; now paint with the blood of your foes.

Sometimes, I can't help but suspect provocations are a mistake. The dev who made them may not have realized that unlike set IO's, these are not restricted in what category they can go in, and acc/rech significantly benefits certain powers that cannot get that combo from set IO's. It's a cautionary tale of how new enhancements have to be very carefully balanced, subject to comprehensive testing, and swiftly nerfed or adjusted if unintended uses surface. In any event, I'm satisfied with the price as-is and think it serves as a well-deserved boost to ASF participation. It's pretty good, but a 7 mission SF (with one mission that sends you to 3 more instances) in 2023 needs a hefty payoff, and merits don't cut it.

Yes. 😄

The best answer is a stalker. Typically, it's bosses and EB's that survive the initial broadside of aoe's and need to be cleaned up. A well-played stalker can often ensure that these hard targets die soon after the smaller critters. Alternately, since it's monotonous to play stalkers all the time, the next-best way to deal with stragglers is to pull them along with you to be killed with the next spawn. I often see players stay behind to attempt to deal with surviving hard targets. If you do not have a means of killing them quickly and the wavefront of the team is already departing, dragging them forward to get nuked with the next group upstream (or herding the next group back) can be more efficient. I'm amused this thread has spawned 4 pages of people talking past each other on how to tank, what pace the team should move at, and who is and is not being a team player. If pressed, I couldn't give an answer to any of these questions that's not "it depends" followed by a 5000 word essay. Sometimes I stick with the group, other times I'm halfway up the map. Sometimes I'll make every effort to keep everyone alive, other times I'm indifferent to their deaths. Sometimes I'll ensure every critter is dead before moving on. Other times, I'll run in and aggro the next 3 rooms while you clean up the one behind me. It all depends on my assessment of the tactical situation and my own as well as the team's capabilities, while always keeping in mind my knowledge of the content, terrain, mob behavior and the group's goals and declared strategy. The most I can say is that if I took the effort to join a team I am explicitly not playing as a solo player, even if the payoff for what I am doing may not be immediately or easily apparent. I do sympathize with the people who feel that the game has got far too lolzerg since the beginning of the incarnate era, which is why hardmode has been such a breath of fresh air.

A stone tank using granite is able to devote many slots to procs while maintaining superior defensive ability. Here is a build (not by me) that demonstrates the concept; it's one of the few high-quality builds (of any AT or powerset) on the forums - see the "in-granite proc build" section. The key takeaway is that granite provides a large amount of defensive power, allowing build capacity that would normally be spent on obtaining resists or def to be traded out for dps.

IO sets, and which categories of sets have what bonuses, are a very finely tuned aspect of balance. Resist/defense sets in general have weaker bonuses and lesser slot-efficiency, for example, because otherwise it would be too easy for armored AT's to stack up on powerful bonuses. I have many of my own speculations as to why healing sets have no purple set, but the most obvious one would be the existence of spiritual alpha: notice how dps AT's are carefully prevented from having a dmg/rech, dmg/acc or even dmg/endrdx alpha, for example, but healing AT's are allowed to get rech/heal (in fact, the only alpha with rech as the schedule-A enhancement). The slot-efficiency afforded by a purple set added on top of that would be overpowering. To answer your question, the way you squeeze slot-efficiency out of things such as heal other and heal aura is not to heavily slot them. 2x 53 D-sync reconstruction + spiritual core paragon provides more rech enhancement and only 14% less heal enhancement than 6x preventive medicine.

Rad is not bad in hardmodes, especially since hardmode AV's are one of those targets where all of rad's -def is not overkill. I would not read too much into what combos you see; concept is king for most players (and that's perfectly fine) which is why fire/ice blast are common. 45% tri-vector def on a fender is pretty easy to get at the cost of serious procbombing. That's fairly okay on rad, since rad is only a middle of the road procbombing set (+2 procs per power over standard) albeit with the ability to fit 2x -res procs. Furthermore, as a cold, you are the most vulnerable one on the team because you cannot shield nor heal yourself, and inevitably, some people slack on refreshing their barriers or other buffs. So in the specific case of cold in hardmodes, it is usually worth building more defensively; but for babymode content, you can trade out the defense for other things. Note: when building for hardmode, def is less about strictly softcapping (you won't softcap with set bonuses alone), and more about providing a hefty layer of base defense that other people's buffs can stack on top of, so that you are constantly at 100%+ to all even during the tail end of the team's barrier destinies. Don't sweat it if you're a hair away from 45%; it's more important to have a relatively even defense spread without expending unreasonable amounts of slot-efficiency. The poorly-designed build above is a great example of how not to make a cold: Low SL resists heatloss over 43s from permanent (67.6% uptime - significantly less -res output and less +endurance) benumb over 24s from permanent (55.0% uptime - atrocious anti-AV debuffing output) pitiful 27.6s rech on sleet Critical design errors are the lack of hasten for double-stacked sleet and perma-heatloss/benumb, and eschewing a resist toggle only to spend tons of slots on minuscule resist bonuses - paying pounds to pinch pennies. Procbombing is great as a build strategy, but not when it comes at the cost of core competencies in your powerset. A 4* AV will easily regen more damage in those 24s your benumb is down than half your procs can do. Here's an example of how to design a cold with superior supportive and defensive capacity without sacrificing offensive output: Assigning the remaining 12 slots is left as an exercise for the reader; I do not provide complete builds on principle. Notice that despite all the silly little res bonuses the build upthread wastes dozens of slots chasing, my build still has superior resistances due to a focus on areas where assigned slots will make the most impact: taking a resist toggle and slotting the resist powers well, while using superior slot-efficiency to win back defense bonuses and twice the global rech. Note: if you want a different epic, you can put the oblits in irradiate instead of soul drain. By the way, you might want to compare the damage done by some of this build's attacks with those of the build upthread (turn off the decimation proc first). See how much dps the procs are gaining, then consider that my build outputs almost twice the -res.

Additional incarnate powers would only be a positive thing if they are exclusive with current incarnate slots. So e.g. you could have either genesis or destiny, but not both (slotting one power would unslot the other). That would at least have the potential to create interesting tradeoffs and new, refreshing playstyles, while not contributing to power creep.

First of all, the T whatever is absolutely meaningless outside of T1 and T2 (usable-while-mezzed, animation-time-normalized standard blasts across all blaster blast sets) and T9 (the nuke). A T5 is not necessarily stronger than a T4: you just get it later. You do not compare powers in the same tier to other powers in the same tier. You compare powers of the same function: nuke to nuke, taoe to taoe, cone to cone, aim to aim. Don't look at the absolute damage. Look at the damage per animation time. Water jet has 77 DPA. That's higher than either the T1 or T2. In terms of DPA, 77 DPA on the strong ST blast is on the lower end, along with such sets as pistols, energy and archery. The good sets have about 100 ish. Fire gets 140+, or something ridiculous like that, because it's fire. Why? Because it has strong aoe; a bevy of useful effects such as -def, slows, knockups and downs; varied damtypes that reduce the risk of running into strongly resistant enemies; ample procbombing opportunities, which need to be factored into a set's balance budget; the ability to self-heal, which only one other blaster primary does. To compensate for this strengths, it has a slight ST weakness. Extremely fair.

Seismic/storm/fire classical elementalist. It used to be that only controllers could get all 4 elements - earth/storm/fire or fire/storm/earth - but now fenders can be an elemental master, too. And fire epic is not bad in 4* aeons and ITF; being able to self-rez is very beneficial, because occasionally you will just roll low on defense and die, or someone forgets to refresh their barrier. GFS lets you kill the yellow nictus effectively, along with providing a high DPA attack and much-desired set diversity (fenders normally lack good access to melee attacks).

I revise my builds a fair bit. It's one of the great pleasures of the game - the actual combat is fairly lackluster, and I usually find it more fun to play mids (even if that activity is firmly grounded in my extensive amount of in-game combat experience). Some people believe there is no such thing as a perfect build, or no single correct way to build, but that misses the point. Perfection cannot be attained, but chasing perfection is where the fun lies. However, I have never had the experience of looking at an old build and thinking I must've been drunk when I made it. I can always retrace my line of thought, and see what my priorities and assumptions were when the old build was made, even if I now disagree with them or have since expanded my knowledge.

Kin requires little slotting to shine, while providing you with ample amounts of rech and end. It can support any primary well and offers immense build freedom. But if you are looking for uber builds, there are traditionally three roads to go down. One is to pair it with a very high DPA set (usually fire, because blaze is just that good, and rain works well with the scourge mechanic) and do lots of damage. Another is to pair it with a procbombing set such as DP or water. Kin can cap damage on its own without you needing to slot any damage in powers, freeing you to load a ton of procs on top of that for fairly ridiculous damage. The third is the old standby of sonic attack. It can no longer stack nearly -100% res on its own, but it is now a better blasting blast set.