Zect

Yes. However, the recharge is too long and the procs it accepts too few to make it a decent attack even maximally procced. You can fit 4 procs in it, for about 300 damage at level 50. And it has a rech that is over twice that of conventional nukes (300s vs 145s). You are better off taking advantage of its ability to slot basilisk and other hold sets with desirable bonuses.

Go all-out. Fire/storm. It's one of the few trollers that does actually good damage. /nature is okay but I don't think it provides all that different a play experience than kin. It's more defensive with less +dmg. Rad is neat and great for superteams, but it's also among the sets that cannot doublestack its -res power. If you want something significantly different - go storm and accept no substitutes.

Sounds great. Why not? However, we don't necessarily need more of the exact same robots palette-swapped. Think more ambitiously and introduce all-new crey units whose background is simply that they incorporate Praetorian tech.

This dates you as someone who never played CoH on live (or probably did so rather late, say circa 2012), lmao. Incarnates were a titanic grind to finish when they first released. i-xp was the least of your worries. You'd need to run khan, ITF, STF/LRSF, and LGTF just for components to make the starting alpha slot power because i-shards were rarer than empaths with a working brain slotted, and you were expected to run the entire gamut of i-trials every day to collect all the empyreans they dropped because getting actual drops from the reward table was like hoping for an SSSR character in a shitty, money-grubbing Korean gacha game. I have nothing in principle against long, epic grinds. However, making a grind that's fun is a skill neither Cryptic nor Paragon studios ever learned. This is a very well-studied topic in game design so I'll spare you the details, but briefly, 1) the game does not dispense dopamine in a frequent and reliable enough way, 2) there's not enough variety to make the grind engaging, and 3) there is no real sense of progression (kill enemies > get loot > kill bigger enemies > get more loot etc.). Till this day, the incarnate grind meta is to baf till you barf. So any revamp of the incarnate system needs to address these three failures in mind and answer the question of how to make a fun grind before deciding to make a long one. It's a pity you're getting so much backlash, because I do in fact agree with plenty of the gripes you and others have with incarnates (if not your proposed solutions). What's not to hate about this terrible system? The horrible UI, the atrocious balance, the awful power creep it brought that destroyed the "old" endgame, the scummy P2W elements (the only reason the Alpha slot has a universal level shift is to sell expacs), etc etc. Not to mention that they went with the LFR/alliance raid approach of "dozens and dozens of players" when coh plays horribly with that many people on the field. Or the whole thorny issue of tacking vertical progression onto an MMO that had been solidly rooted in horizontal progression for over 6 years by then. This last swerve in direction came so far out of left field that till this day, I suspect the idea did not originate from within Paragon Studios itself, but was forced upon them by Nexon's NCsoft's executive meddling. Should the incarnate system be burned to the ground? Absolutely! It's an objectively bad system, and I think the only thing stopping people from saying yes is munchkinism. Can't lose my +1 level shift and my degenerative procs. However, building something to replace it that's not only a legitimate improvement, but would be politically acceptable to the homecoming playerbase at this point, is impossible. Frankly, I'd rather look forward to a new, superior endgame in HM trials and abandon incarnates to the dust of the ages. Edit: NCSoft, not nexon. I got my shady coporate overlords mixed up.

Well, the quick form is what people usually compare. However, it does seem you have a point, because the 2.904s I remembered is the slow (out of combat) cast time. Cod claims that quick snipe is only 1.716s. Which, while still slower than many of the best snipes (compare zapp at 1.33 for eg) is not bad in absolute terms. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=blaster_ranged.assault_rifle.sniper_rifle&at=blaster So I stand corrected.

They run (it’s afraid, not terrorized). If you are on a team, the armored AT’s will be able to keep enemies in place nonetheless. This is the intended usage for support AT’s such as corrs and fenders. (Teamwork! The heresy!) You can then have an attack chain of burst > ignite > burst > snipe. Most blasters also have the option of replacing one of the bursts with their T1 immob from the 2ndary, in which case they can do it alone. The T1 immob does damage, and done correctly this is only a slight dps loss. (Creative use of multiple powers in combination! Impossible!) Though now I want to try the idea that popped into my head when I last demolished an “AR is terrible” thread: using the frozen blast immob proc in Ignite to see if I can get it to stick enemies in its own burn patch. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets.

First of all: I commend you for actually attempting to elucidate the problem your proposed change will solve. We must correctly identify the issue at hand, then only are we able to proceed towards finding a solution. However, I don't think discounts on super packs will help in the way you think it will - even though I have no objection against the idea. If they are discounted, the supply of the things in them goes up and the value of the things in them correspondingly goes down. Ultimately buying super packs will be little more profitable than it is right now, at least as far as helping less-grindy players goes. I think that you really need to look at the root of the problem, which is that 99% of the fucking game is not rewarding enough. For an illustration of what I mean, just look at the rates for merit rewards. Per i25 patch notes, merit rewards for all content are standardized at a rate of 20 merits/hour. This is what SCoRE, and hence by extension Homecoming team, thinks is fair for you to earn. FYI, that's a pitiful 4 million inf/hour at current market prices. This is why people have always turned to things like farming and marketing, because nobody wants to earn currency in the game at this rate. The game does not dispense dopamine frequently or reliably enough. For starters, I propose increasing the merit reward rate tenfold, to 200 merits/hour, with a floor of 50 merits for any TF's that award less than that. Yes, you read that right, 200. That's roughly the rate that a decent tinpex team can manage (tinpex gives empyreans and i-salvage too, but we can leave that alone since they are not leveling TF's), so there really should be no problem extending this to the rest of the game. This way, you can log in, do whatever for an hour and and come out of it with the majority of a rare set. You can hop on a TF, any TF, and come out with at least enough merits to buy a single rare. That sounds very fair to me. Rewards in this game have always been the most puzzling aspect of it to me. What's the point of making me login all three of my fire farming brutes so I can triplebox afk farm or get 3x merits from soloing a TF? It seems like a weird half-measure - as though the developers don't really like multiboxing but cannot afford to offend the multiboxers too much. What does me creating 3 accounts and logging them all in really add to the game experience? Why not just triple the droprate and ban multiboxing?

The only truly slow non-nuke powers are the snipe (2.904) and flamethrower (2.508), and the latter is compensated for with ridiculously fast cast times on buckshot. If anyone thinks AR is slow, try playing BR. People claim that AR has poor damage typing and no T3 blast. However, AR has always had a T3 blast, and one with the best damtype (fire) at that: ignite. If it catches even 1 extra mob in the patch, it gainss a massive dps advantage. It is left up to the player how to leverage Ignite so that it is an effective T3 blast, making AR a skill-dependent set that offers a different playstyle (a good thing!) This is why I say people do not have a good understanding of how to play AR if they think it's bad. Before asking for buffs, it's critical to first gain a correct understanding of how a set functions, and learn how to play it effectively. The one valid gripe with Full Auto is that it does not fit neatly into the current, oppressive dps meta. And that's not as much a problem with AR as it is with other sets. Essentially, a lot of formerly crashing nukes now sit at an optimal breakpoint where they recharge almost within every-spawn usage range, with 145s base rech. AR, as a set without aim and without such a nuke, does not wipe screenfuls of mobs with a click, leading to misconceptions that it is bad. What I would like to see is these formerly crashing nukes have their rech scale tweaked so that they are pushed sufficiently far out of this range and the damage scale either increased or decreased to match. They should either be available no more than 1/3 spawns on permahasten builds, or have comparable rech and damage to full auto.

Mu Mastery. Also, it doesn't matter for easy content such as farms, but in general don't go Agility on a blaster unless you are taking a def epic shield (in which case you are more likely to gain enough slot-efficiency for the tradeoff to be worth it). Agility core paragon on a non-def-epic blaster is roughly +1.4% def, and the rech is easily found elsewhere. That's rarely worth an alpha slot.

I've speedrun 4* HM ITF on a team of 8 corruptors. Try that with blasters. Don't get me wrong: blasters are still an extremely good AT. They have come a long, long way from the days when fire/MM/mace was the only viable endgame blaster. Arguably, they are probably overpowered now due to how nicely they mesh with the oppressive high-dps meta. They have an unbelievable amount of build flexibility compared to every other AT, and while they generally only do 1 thing well, it just happens to be the most valuable thing in the current meta, i.e. damage. It's just that in CoX the most powerful thing anyone can have is a support powerset.

Identically slotted, corrs and solo fenders are intended to do equal damage. Fender ranged damage scale: 0.65 Corr ranged damage scale: 0.75 Vigilance solo is +30% damage. Fender enhanced damage: 100% base + 95% enhancements + 30% vigilance = 225% Corr enhanced damage: 100% base + 95% enhancements = 195% Fender final damage: 0.65 * 2.25 = 1.4625 Corr final damage: 0.75 * 1.95 = 1.4625 Odd coincidence. Almost as though someone designed it to be that way. (The fender has stronger buff/debuffs, but the corr has scourge.) In practice, for those sets where I have the same combination of powersets on corr and def, the corr has always outdamaged the def solo. I chalk this up to 1. certain corr sets still being bugged and using the fender scale pseudopet for debuffs, 2. killspeed being bottlenecked by the highest-HP target, and scourge shines against high HP targets. The real difference between corrs and fenders is that fender dps is more proc-dependent. For optimal fender builds, agility alpha is often a dps loss. They need to use their superior base stats to meet rech build goals without relying on 5x and 6x set bonuses and agility.

Here are some ways to stay tactful. Criticize the issue or action, not the person. Briefly provide sound reasoning for your comments; the goal is instruction, not compliance. If people do not listen, shrug and move on. I suspect that #3 is where a lot of people struggle with, and it is the key difference between a tip and an order. If someone does not listen to what I have to say, I am not going to harp on the issue. As far as I am concerned, it's their loss and I am not going to throw pearls after swine. Being tactful does not mean you need to sugarcoat everything. Tact does not preclude us from being passionate about a subject or confident in the strength of our reasoning and experience. There is no need to wrap everything in a plastic shell of saccharine, insincere pleases, maybes, could yous, and so on. It makes you sound passive-aggressive and condescending (you treat them as though they cannot handle the facts). I'm personally the opposite of you - I deliberately try to be somewhat blunt and forceful when dispensing free advice to people. One of three things will ensue. 1. They will get defensive. These are people whom knowledge is wasted on. 2. They will be appreciative. These are people who deserve to gain advantage. 3. They will counter with reasoned arguments that point out genuine flaws in my reasoning or expose my own lack of knowledge. This is the best outcome because I came, hoping to give; but instead I received. I find my approach a great time saver because it swiftly gets people to self-sort into the above three categories. Then I can easily decide if I want to engage further with them.

Solo leveling is still a very broad term. Do you want to solo to 50 as efficiently as possible or is your goal to experience a wide variety of arcs on the way there? How okay are you with deliberately avoiding particular enemy groups or racing past problematic level bands? What's the desired difficulty setting (bosses on/off in particular)? etc. That said, saying you want to stay at range narrows it down a little because the only 2ndary that loses literally nothing from staying at range is /TA. It's one of the most flexible and easy to build for, too, so that's likely a good place to start. As for the primary, you can probably pick whichever you like. Given crashless nukes and quick snipes, the blaster primaries are far closer to each other in ST and aoe output than they ever were on live. Even the damage type is not an issue as long as you can avoid groups with resistant enemies. People used to rag on psi all the time because of that spreadsheet that said it was the most resisted damtype, but I recently took a psi blaster 1-50 and absolutely shredded all the clockworks, ghosts, freakshow, DE etc on the way there. It only gets tricky in the 40-50 range where many big enemy groups have psi resistant bosses.

I've said it elsewhere, but elecaff is not a good sapping set. Look at the amount of -end in its powers. It has a lot of -recov, but does not floor blue bars quickly. If you are looking for a good sapper, especially one that is also useful outside of sapping, you should try... wait for it... A blaster. Elec/energy and elec/elec are both perfectly capable drainers. The former has only 60s base rech on power boost (half of corr/fender power boost) allowing you to engage every spawn with power boost. The latter has power sink. They both get this without an epic, meaning they mature far earlier and drain far more reliably. The best thing is that, unlike fenders messing around with transference and whatnot, or elec trollers patiently twiddling thumbs waiting for something, anything to happen, sapping on blasters feels more like something that happens naturally in the course of massacring stuff rather than a distraction from other, better things you could be doing with your time.

Your attitude is extremely admirable. I need to emphasize there is zero shame in admitting one is not particularly skilled at build design or play. On the contrary, one who knows one's limitations shows wisdom which is a far rarer and more precious trait than mere skill or knowledge. With that said... If you want to stretch your toes a little, try rad armor. It is currently extremely strong in the 4* HM ITF meta (which, FYI, is a tank, a kin, 3 or so colds, and half a dozen barrier cores). It has lower defense than Inv, which matters less in such a def-abundant environment, but more sustain with particle shield. High-end rad armor tanks easily cap all resists except cold/psi, particle shield every 30ish seconds for gigantic amounts of absorb, and have 90-100% slow resistance. They easily shrug off the colossi's -recovery/rom's -recharge. Building and playing rad armor also teaches valuable lessons in how to construct res/rech builds as a contrast to turtle builds. An option for those who want something different. A rad armor with a parry 2ndary that stacks double -res procs on AV's and can i-cap its own def in melee is simply the chef's kiss.

Excellent! Some people, when challenged, chose to respond by getting defensive or making irrelevant nitpicks that evade the issues being discussed. On the other hand, you have shown an openness towards new information that can only benefit you. Even if you don't build the way I do, you now have another option in your arsenal of tricks. Open, flexible minds will always have the advantage regardless of circumstances. I want to emphasize how severe the dropoff in slot-efficiency can be with an example. Say you're going for a high-rech permahasten build. The first 32.5% or so rech is basically a freebie, from 5x Lotg. In fact, you probably don't have to spend a single slot on this, since the lotg global fits nicely in the default slot of all your +def powers and mules. The next 50% rech? Not too bad. ATIO's and purples provide high slot-efficiency with strong enhancement values, powerful damage procs and desirable set bonuses. Note, however, that 10% rech is usually a 4-6 piece bonus. Getting this 50% is going to cost us ~20-25 added slots out of 67 total. It's still a good deal, but no longer free money. At this point, with Hasten, you are at 152.5% recharge. You're still 25% or so off permahasten. But this last 25% is going to be expensive indeed. The major recharge bonuses (5%, 6.25%, 7.5%) are typically also 4-6 piece bonuses. Depending on what set muling options you have available, this last 25% could end up costing nearly as many slots as the previous 50%. Our slot efficiency has dropped by up to half, and we've already spent a third or so of our slots - and we still need to build for def and res. The same thing applies to defense, or resists, or anything else. With defense, especially positional defense, the dropoff is even more severe. The first 6% costs only 2 slots. The last 6% could be two 6-piece bonuses. The moral of the story: the more you try to squeeze one particular thing from your budget of IO sets, the lower your slot-efficiency gets. A colloary is that it is far cheaper to get 80% of two things, than it is to get 100% of one and 0% of the other. Remember that freebie 32.5% rech from 5x lotg? Well, it turns out that the defense powers you took to get it provide a fair bit of defense, too. Did you spend 5 slots on Oblits to get 5% rech? For the low, low price of only one more slot, you can have 3.75% melee def! etc. Relating this to the topic at hand, i.e. being how to build for dark, there are some armor sets that can get away with turtling it up, WP and Invuln being classic examples (another reason why they're beginner-friendly, non-skill-dependent sets). Other sets, such as rad, fire and dark, should always ask if a hybrid approach delivers potentially more performance instead. P.S. I found my dark/dark build, and it has similar stats, being about 7.5% undercapped to E/F/C by design. The big difference is only 160% rech instead of 170%, due to slots spent on a procced-out ToF. Superior defensive and offensive power, people.

I'm going to say what I always say in these types of threads: Define "best". You've vaguely outlined "best" as a "turtle build" (i.e. mitigation only, discounting the value of offense and support), which is a start. However, a 4* HM TF and an incarnate trial are very different environments. The interaction with support sets and dependence on player skill also needs to be considered. With that said: inv is always going to be a high contender in most environments as far as turtle power goes, not because it provides the highest theoretical performance, but because it is so hard to screw up. It's not a recharge dependent or click heavy set, it does not have difficult to patch holes (energy) or imbalanced mitigation profiles (such as depending on res against some damtypes and def against others). Its near-cap HP, wide spread of debuff resistances and high mitigations provide a strong foundation on which to layer more defenses and amplify the value of sustains. And its weaknesses, being comparatively low sustain and a very mild psi hole, offer many options to patch them up. Inv is not a skill dependent set to build or play, which is its own very underrated strength. Of far more value than a measly 25% DDR is inv's capped resistance to the Player Stupidity debuff.

Both the storm pets are untargetable. You can always rely on the old stadbys of ageless and your alpha slot (cardiac or vigor, depending on how much you need acc) to resolve end issues. However, well-played stormies often still run short on end. There is simply no getting around the fact that its powers are extremely costly. If you want end, why is there no numina's unique in your build? There is a guide to maximizing recovery using the health/stamina procs and uniques on a very limited slot budget. Consult it here. This is your build with vengeance turned off: You have an absolutely pitiful amount of recharge, nonexistent survivability, no coherent mitigation strategy, and too many endurance-hungry powers. You need focused, informed build goals and more directed effort towards areas that will improve your build: recharge and preferably some form of defense (since you're not taking soul drain nor have any melee-centric pbaoe powers, ranged is the easiest to build for). A stormie is defined by freezing rain, lightning storm and tornado. It displays its full potential only with permahasten+ levels of rech (~175% or more global rech) allowing it to shit out nearly 3x lightning storms and 2x tornadoes nearly permanently while double-stacking freezing rains on foes. It is absolutely critical that you increase your amount of global rech rather than putzing around getting minute amounts of exotic resistances that will not ultimately increase your survival by much. It will not be easy to fit enflame into your build, since it is very costly on power choices. The easiest option, in terms of reaching recharge goals, is to drop teleportation for sorcery. In that case a possible build might drop SJ, Teleport Target and Assault to take 3x sorcery powers including enflame. However, this does cost you the ability to port singie around with teleport target. Another option might be to drop Leaping instead. However the loss of an lotg mule essentially costs you 7.5% rech and a substantial amount of defense - 60% of a steamy mist's worth. It is up to you to decide which you value more. Controller ST holds should be 6x damage procced where possible. Slotted like this, they are the highest-dpa attack most controllers have access to, even competitive with good attacks from dps AT's In your case, since you have the apoc set in another of your ST blasts, you can also consider 5x damage procs and 1x frankenslotting: neuronic shutdown, GW embrace, gladiator's net, unbreakable constraint, 2x gladiator's javelin (proc and A/D). Will of the controller can go in your aoe hold instead. It's not recommended to put the full set in Wormhole, because the damage proc cancels the ability of wormhole to not alert enemies. This should be 5x decimation for the recharge bonus (alternately, thunderstrikes for ranged defense is also a good choice, depending on how much rech and def you have). Note that the decimation proc is very underwhelming anyway. It's only a 1 PPM proc, and has a duration of only 5.25s. It is rarely worth slotting on its own, especially on low-damage scale AT's. You have many 3x and 4x purple and winter sets like this, seemingly only for the 6% F/C res bonus. You don't need to go out of your way to accrue 6% F/C res bonuses; you will naturally get 4-5 of them just from purple sets if you are making a recharge-centric build, as you absolutely should be. Furthermore, you already have a hilariously overcapped amount of cold res (88%, capped at 75%). Unless you are farming enemies that only deal cold damage for some reason, a focus on ranged def + S/L res provides more survivability against a wider spectrum of enemies. Why is there no LotG global here? The D/E is not necessary as this power does not use a significant amount of end. Dropping the D/E loses only 0.36% def to all while saving a slot. Controller aoe immobs are usually 1) proc-bombs or 2) grav anchor mules, rarely enfeebled operation mules if you need S/L def desperately. In this case, you don't need a proc-bomb as you should have decent aoe damage already with your storms, water spouts, and tornadoes. Adding just 1 slot and changing the slotting to 5x grav anchor would gain a huge amount of recharge and acc. An alternative middle ground is 5x posiblasts (all but D/rech), giving a good rech bonus, 1 damage proc and a good amount of damage enhancement; especially worth considering if you are already capped on 10% rech bonuses. Freezing rain needs a high amount of recharge to bring its recharge time as close to 15s as possible so you can double-stack it. I love how you have -res procs out the wazoo but somehow not double-stacked freezing rain. Double-stacking freezing rain on hard targets gives guaranteed extra -res. Forgoing rech bonuses and rech enhancements here, only to slot -res procs elsewhere, is paying pounds to pinch pennies. 5x bombardments is a better option to pick up a rech bonus while also gaining high recharge enhancement (and even a damage proc). You can still fit an achiles' proc in the 6th slot if you really want. This is funny because I've never seen someone go out of their way to avoid useful set bonuses before. Specifically, the 5% recharge from 4x DWD in this case. 4x DWD boosted to +5 (all except R/E and the proc) would gain a 5% rech bonus while offering superior -tohit and endredux enhancement. You may also consider skipping hurricane entirely, since modern builds can muster enough def that you are less dependent on the -tohit and -range from hurricane, and things die quickly enough in the current meta that you don't really have a lot of time to corral them. Hurricane is not a bad power, but there are successful stormies that skip it. You will likely not have enough end to run assault. Tactics is useful, however on your build, skipping it (or at least running it situationally - you may not be able to afford to loss of vengeance as an lotg mule) may be a net gain. You already have -def from freezing rain making the tohit from tactics less critical. Look at the base endurance costs of your powers. Tornado is 20 end. Waterspout is 26 (!!) end. Lightning storm is 31 end. You do not have the end to run 3 leadership toggles, hurricane, steamy mist, enflame, and still shit out freezing rains and lightning storms as a good stormie ought to be doing. Something from this list (likely multiple things) will have to go. If you are certain you want enflame no matter what, then the most obvious candidates are one or more leadership toggles and/or hurricane. Changing this to 5x absolute amazement would give a large rech and acc bonus while replacing one of your precious 6% FC res bonuses from elsewhere. You do not need the 8% mez enhancement bonus from Underwhelming Absence since unlike dominators (which are really balanced around domination), controller aoe mezzes generally have good base durations. As for the ST mezzes, just cast them again. The FF proc in a long-recharge power like wormhole is not bad, but does not make a huge difference. FF proc shines in a fast-recharging aoe power, say foot stomp, where it can be maintained with high uptime. In a long-recharge aoe power such as this, you may consider it a luxury. Why are these not boosted? To input boosted IO's in mids, right-click on the slot, select the IO, press + on the numpad to boost, then place as usual. These uniques are really designed for masterminds, for whom losing pets is costly (both the lost dps from the dead pet and having to resummon and re-upgrade the new one). Your lightning storm and tornado are untargetable, and if singie dies, just re-summon it. A much better slotting is 4x expedient reinforcement for a recharge bonus. This should be 5x ragnaroks for the recharge bonus. -res procs are luxuries, but you can still fit one in the 6th slot if you really want. Note that the water spout does knockback. Some people put a KB2KD in it for this reason, though as a controller you can also use your aoe immob to control the knockback. The performance shifter proc gives +end to the caster of the power. It will not give you end when the lightning storm fires, but when you summon it, so it is somewhat less effective than it seems. The KB2KD is a worthy choice in this power, but the rest of Overblown Farce is not. Consider thunderstrikes or apocs in here, mixing and matching pieces to max out rech enhancement. If you are going for defense as the GA +3% def suggests, why is there no steadfast +3% def anywhere in your build? (The latter even gives res enhancement while the former does not.) If you want def, pick a defense vector (ranged, S/L, all) and target (usually 32.5%, 40% or 45%) and build for that. Random uniques and miniscule bonuses, without coordinated effort, are not better than placebo. Tornado notably takes expedient reinforcement (despite not being a targetable pet). 4x expedients 1x frankenslotting (to max out rech) and optionally a KB2KD is an easy way of picking up some much-needed rech.

MA's biggest selling point is its +def all power. It also has good low-level aoe for a tanker, although it can no longer laugh as hard at Inv/SS tanks who used to wait till level 38 (lmao) before getting foot stomp. So the two approaches that come to mind would be to either pair it with 1) a high-damage armor set that needs survivability, or 2) a pure resist set that will benefit from having another layer of mitigation. Fiery aura ticks both boxes. Just take your SR concept and say you're moving so fast, you're on fire.

I find Posi 1 rarely worth doing with pugs. The chances of getting unintelligent players with no idea how to do the last mission is simply too high; most players lack situational awareness to avoid the unecessary mobs, pay attention to the location of the team, or notice when and where new spawns are engaged. They then have the temerity to accuse others of "rushing ahead". My friend, if you're still trying to fight a random ruin mage with your unslotted (of course) powers while the rest of us have already freed the 4 heroes and arrived at city hall, because you have neither eyes to see we've left nor a jetpack to follow, we're not rushing forwards; you're rushing backwards.

You're completely correct. Tanks have been repeatedly buffed to placate the dps-heavy meta, to the point that in many cases they now have a more optimal ratio of survivability : offense than brutes do. You're also completely correct that the right solution is to nerf tanker damage. Specifically, they should not have 0.95 melee damage scale (increased from 0.80). That is far too high and there is no world in which an armored AT with tanker defenses should have 95% of a blaster's base melee damage.

Of all the problematic suggestions in your list, this is by far the most awful one of all. This is going to disproportionately benefit powersets/AT's that can slot sets from many different categories, and harm powersets/AT's that can slot a much narrower variety of sets and/or have a limited number sets available in their categories. Your changes will result in a different meta, but not a more diverse one. Basically, your vision will force different sets to be present in a build, but you will have shrunk the overall size of the design space for making builds. You make the same mistake that a lot of players do: assuming that just because something is less common means it is problematic. While there are duds in the IO system, many of the 1st-generation sets in particular, in general it's not an issue that some sets are only worth slotting in very niche cases, nor is it a big problem that 90% of builds contain 5x lotg's (which is really an issue with power pool balance, not the lotg itself) and a miracle. Lotg's and purples provide low-hanging recharge bonus fruit. They are a strong counterbalance to turtle builds for armor sets that dump everything into def and res - basically an attempt to reward not completely minmaxing for survivability. The same can be said of the res uniques and +3 def uniques - they are basically an enticement away from dumping every single slot into +rech. Miracles, or more accurately the ability to not slot a miracle proc on some very high recovery builds, allows such builds to convert excess end into slots. These are all different levers that a skilled build designer can tweak tailor a build to specific goals; your suggestions will not only result in a smaller number of levers, but a narrower range over which they can be pushed. I encourage you to modify a mids' database with your proposed changes and see how they pan out in reality and how builds are potentially affected.

The basics (permahasten, 3x LS, soul drain) have been mentioned, so I'll just fill in the missing details and correct some misconceptions. Hurricane is no longer a set defining power. It was in the days of live, but with the levels of def, rech and damage power creep has given us on Homecoming, it is no longer as central to the build as it once was, even with a KB2KD. Corraling trash in a corner is cool where the terrain permits, but the trade off is that while you're maneuvering to use hurricane you are not blasting, resulting in DPS loss. And you don't usually want to repel the enemies, you want them tightly clustered where your rains and storms and soul drain shred them. It is still useful, but there are also successful stormies that do not take it. I consider it playstyle-dependent. The set-defining power is freezing rain. It's a knockdown patch, it debuffs res and def, and it can be doublestacked on AV's to really melt them. You can never go far wrong with a quickly recharging freezing rain. Whether to take soul drain, and which version of it to take, will define your build goals for you. If you take the one from dark mastery which costs 3 power slots, you don't have a lot of room to play with things like thunderclap. You need to skip almost everything that can be skipped to afford all the powers in that case. You also should consider melee def if you are taking soul drain, and especially if you solo - melee def will help a lot in getting a highly-saturated drain. Well-designed storm corrs can cap 45% to melee + ranged, or 40% to all 3 defenses (using a defense amp to softcap - but note that the amp does not work on anything above 2*), on top of high recharge. I don't post my builds since I consider it unsporting; but there is a nice water/cold build thread on this forum that you should be able to consult for ideas as to how to build; they are both sets with a defense aura and strive for similar levels of def/rech.

Define "good". What criterion do you use for gauging performance? What are the metrics for each? Determine those, then we can start talking about good and bad.

If they tell you it's bad, they do not have a deep understanding of the game.