Spaghetti Betty

Looks great! I appreciate the flattery!

The easiest Tanker to play in the game is probably SR/Dark, IMO. You'll be pretty much invulnerable to damage by 35. Super Reflexes Tankers will have soft-capped positional DEF on just SOs. Simple IO slotting will put them near the Incarnate softcap. Dark Melee will bridge that gap with -Tohit, plus Siphon Life for a little bit of sustainability. Building for damage is also very straightforward, since your goal will be to build recharge for Soul Drain uptime. It's also extremely easy to build RES because Tanker things. And SR has built-in scaling RES bonuses if you start taking damage!

Cheesed to Meet You, Dual Pistols/Martial Combat Blaster

I love Fold Space! And this is coming from someone who got used to doing a lot of old school herding. It's definitely a misunderstood power and often utilized incorrectly. Communication (or godlike awareness) is key! Me and some buddies of mine have created some absolutely massive balls of chaos when using herding and Fold Space efficiently. It's one of the reasons our small-team beta testing of the Labyrinth went so well! It boils down to "something something great responsibility", or whatever the guy on the box of rice said!

I'll throw a +1 for a Dominator! Since you're supposed to view controls as mitigation, you shouldn't feel pressed to use them if mitigation is already being taken care of! Some Dominator secondaries can really dish out some hurt if you invest in them correctly!

I could argue this is the symptom of a different problem, and that's that all of the goody two-shoes heroes are too afraid to hop over to redside and get Invader instead!

Maybe they should nerf Brutes so that Regen isn't an outlier for them!

No thanks! I'll just keep smashing the F keys when I finally notice my tray is full!

Regen, for sure! It goes from being a middling to underperforming set on a Scrapper, to feeling like godmode on a Brute. Trust me, I would know!

It's kind of hard for me to have a solid answer to this, mainly because the proposed issue stems from a solution that was introduced due to the root cause of said issue that is being proposed. Words are difficult! A lot of that legacy contact stuff (and even some of the newer contacts, e.g. Twinshot, the KR arcs) is a drag to run in a team. No amount of reward is going to change that. That's why things like DFB, DiB, the revamped TFs - and to a further extent, why iTrials are the way they are - were introduced. It was to give very clear cut content for any group of thumbed beings (and cats) to smash their keyboards at to gain decent rewards in a reasonable timeframe! It would be a little funny to double back and try to incentivize making players run content they think is boring and/or contrived!

It's all fair game! Leave your PvE pants at the door! That being said, there have been plenty of times I have just blatantly stood around under the globe in RV just to chat with the PvPers and convert IOs without a scratch on me. Maybe they saw me as some kind of weird mascot!

No!

Charts in a vacuum are not the same as actual gameplay. I have many debuffers that already turn +4 mobs into paper. Hell, my best AV/GM soloer is a Necro/Dark with no inherent armor, but once the -tohit starts flying, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference! And it can drop targets in a handful of seconds! I think buffing that any further would be extremely unreasonable!

It's a little tough for me to answer this question, because I hardly PuG nowadays. When I do, I'm definitely paying attention to what everyone else is doing, mostly because it gives me ammo for talking trash to my friends!

Um, are we playing the same game? Debuffs are the only way to solve some encounters, because mobs are simply too strong without leveraging them. You know what? Screw it. Buff Cold Dom more!

This was an all Ice team. If we were all running at level 8, the only real aoe control either the Dom or Troller would have access to then is Cold Snap. I love fear as much as the next guy, but even then, that would mean hitting any of the mobs once will let them get buffs out! Regardless, we triumphed with another insanely valid tactic: money!

We were running it at level, so no group holds. Our initial strategy was to try and get the jump on at least 1 of the mobs with Cold Domination and it didn't pan out. So, after the double Cold buffs went out, it was impossible to deal any real damage to them without 12 or so Precise Imbuements.

This isn't a PuG story, but I do have my own Posi 1 moment to share! It wasn't too long ago that I took my group of buddies on an All Ice Superteam. IIRC, we were 3 melees, a Dom, a controller, a corr, a defender, and a blaster. My stipulation is always that we run everything at +4. So, what follows shouldn't be that surprising! We make it to the end of Posi 1 and get wiped out by our godmode shadows in very short order. I think it took everyone unloading full trays of Super Team Duals to finally take it down! It was probably the most challenging and expensive Posi 1 I've ever ran!

You know where to find me!

I can also chime in as someone who has done meta and (severely) off-meta runs in Hard Mode. Anyone familiar with EV knows that his schemes are borderline torture, and while satisfying to complete are not fast in the slightest. But, can a 4* ITF be done with 7 Blasters and a Kin? I can personally say yes, but you might want to clear your day for that one. In comparison, a meta speedrun will clock in at sub-25 at the most optimal end and sub-45 with bad luck or a hodge podge team. Which run sounds more convenient? Also, I'd like to request runs be scheduled at 3 am CST so that I may join! Thanks!

Pudding Potpourri, Invulnerability/Psionic Melee Tanker

This isn't really a big surprise to me. Fire Control has fantastic DPS for soloing big targets, and Nature is a meta pick for a reason. Having -RES from Enzymes and the -Regen from Spores is enough leverage to make any general AV a cinch to solo! Toss a heavy-hitting epic on that like Earth or Mace (Poison Ray and the Toxic rantula are really good) and I can see a wimp like Duray going down easily. There are plenty of great combos that can solo AVs without any kind of help! Most of them just aren't melee toons, believe it or not. My best AV/GM soloer is a Necro/Dark/Levi MM! I just demolished Eochai in a little over a minute with him the other day.

Argh! If life wasn't so complicated this year, I'd make more Tuesdays! Glad to know @PLVRIZR is holding things up for me!

Red Over Black, Staff Fighing/Stone Armor Stalker

I personally wouldn't say CoH at a base level is anywhere approaching difficult. I would call it "deceptively unintuitive". It's very easy to target bad guys and click powers, but the game is so much more than that! There are so many systems and nuances to learn, that it really just the gift that keeps on giving for nerds! I'm used to playing games with high APM. I've raided back in the olden days of WoW. Some of my other favorite games are Dark Souls, Devil May Cry, and Tekken. CoH, even at its highest level, doesn't really come close to that level of intensity . But that's why I like it! The game is what you make of it. It's easy to forget that some of us have the upper hand by being years old vets. This game isn't very hard to learn, but it is challenging to understand!