Lazarillo

I'm not really sure I like the idea of running into someones leftover ToT EB, either. If anything, I've seen people miffed in past years about ToT "leftovers" that were just the normal classes of enemies.

Not super thrilled about the idea of EBs spawning in randomly when Trick-or-Treating. Some of my characters aren't really built for that.

A "sleeveless trenchcoat" category that allowed wider glove options by enforcing no sleeves (like the current sleeveless jacket and sleeveless robe options) would be nice. I mostly just want to take a page from Dark Watcher's book, admittedly, and make a Vanguard uniform that uses the coat and Vanguard gloves...

Have you maxed out her contact meter? If so, then that's normal, not a bug. Contacts introduce you to the next tier up when you hit that point, even if you aren't of sufficient level to get missions from the new contact yet.

This was more meant to address the idea of mez protection on squishies in general being lacking: make it an option for function (at least at max level) without impairing form. As it were.

If they'd just give us a Minimal FX version of Clarion, all mez protection issues would probably be solved...

Pre-"page 4" wasn't compel either. The fact remains that nothing about taunt was changed until/unless you go over the aggro cap.

Taunt wasn't changed, though. It still has its -Range component and still tends to incline enemies closer towards you. The aggro changes should only cause enemies to peel off and stick to ranged if you're already at max aggro, which under the old rules, would still mean they'd be attacking your buddies instead of you.

I feel like, given the nature of Time's Juncture helping to make you surprisingly tanky (especially on a Defender, but on other ATs as well if well-supplemented), pretty much anything involving Time Manipulation is gonna do you pretty well as a sort of front-line support. The big weakness it has is mez protection at least until endgame and Clarion becomes a thing (and even then if you don't like being covered in rings, I guess). I suspect Faraday Cage might mean similar with Electric Affinity, especially since it does have mez protection built in, but I haven't played much of said set. Also, this might be blasphemous to suggest around here, but it might be worth noting that the Rebirth community also has the Guardian AT, which is basically an attempt at a sort of wide-range emulation of VEATs (combining Assault sets and "defense" powers that incorporate benefits to your team), and fit the roll you're thinking of fairly well, to my mind.

It does more or less have one, it's just not really fully explained except in the final clue (which disappears quickly 'cause you have to read it between the last AV, and the final mission getting turned in), and a little bit in the final mission turn-in (which only the leader can see). As mentioned, it kinda suffers from the way story interacts with SFs, but it's kind of an amusing turn of events. Throughout the SF, Tarikoss makes it clear he is, like, super, puppy-kicking evil and he only wants to do business with people who share his decidedly negative take on morality, but that if you can get on board with a guy like him, he'll share the power you can all gain by helping him bind the demon. It's made pretty obvious that you shouldn't trust a guy like him and even the "heroic" NPCs warn you that you shouldn't let him take you for a ride. So it's pretty obvious that he's planning to use you to tap all that demonic power for himself. And then at the end...

Clones/Duplicates of my MM. Probably with a preference for Thugs or Demons, maybe Ninjas.

Hero TF has gotta be Moonfire for me. It's got a great level range where you've just got your primary t9 and there's a feeling of having really come into power. It's all Council, and who doesn't love nazi-bashing? Plus, it's all that with a Nictus and Striga bent, two bits of the setting that I find particularly neat. Plus, hey, lotsa badge credit. Atlas approves. Hess is probably the second best, for more or less the same reasons, but not quite as good, IMO. For villains, I voted Morty Kal. It's decently fun and straightforward, although it being relatively short tends to kinda snowball into people heavily speedrunning it, and I think it's one of those that's kinda fun to go slow and savor the destruction. Oh well. Tarikoss is probably 2nd-ranked, being generally fun and having a pretty amusing "twist" at the end (not that a lot of people catch it, given TF-style storytelling). Being lower-level, and particularly, lower-level with a fair amount of CoT can get rough, though. Co-op, gotta be ITF. It's the perfect example of how to just do fun team content, and even team storytelling, where everything is quite clear simply due to mission objectives, visuals, and very occasional smatterings of generally quite brief dialogue. Not perfect, but better than you see in any other TF, really. Haven't tried (and probably won't try, if I'm being honest) the new versions of it, but the original is classic for a reason.

My main is a Claws/WP Scrapper, a Time/Rad Defender, a Thugs/Traps Mastermind, an Energy/Bio Sentinel, a Street Justice/Invuln Brute, a Dark/Dark Dominator, and more, whose true in-character "super power" is that all rumors about him become true. So that gives me a whole stable of alts named "Lazarillo" (or vaguely equivalent names) that represent different beliefs about them. Because my own real life super power is altitis.

Whelp, having the difficult slider available to change at any time was nice, but I guess we're going back to the old contacts.🙃

Sure, as long as we can also raise the level caps on the individual arcs. Right now it's hard enough just not to out-level stuff and mess up story progression when solo. And frankly, given the...unique degree of "balance" that most of even low-level Praetorian enemies have, I feel like there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. But who knows. But yeah, otherwise, there's little point in adding a bunch of TFs that require turning off XP anyway.

Definitely Willpower's big hole. Although at endgame, one can Ageless one's way through a lot of those. It's only a band-aid since it doesn't have any sort of base to work with, but I find it works decently on that front, at least. Versus the previously-griped-about Mez hole that other sets have, and WP does not, I feel generally better about WP+Ageless than, say, about Elec or Invuln+Clarion when fighting Knives and Longbow (the latter of which is a lot, because Redside Bestside).

Scrappers have less HP to benefit from its massive regeneration, but still, Willpower is one of only two sets that (the other being /Dark) that can get full mez protection from toggles, and it gets a taunt aura (which a few other sets share, in fairness) to keep enemies from running away. Those might be "small" but personally I tend to feel their absence pretty strongly; at the very least, it's weird to see sets that lack those aspects considered "S-tier" to me.

Working as designed. Tedium is difficulty, didn't you know?

This feels quite backwards. Reward Merits can be earned super fast and in greater numbers across lots of different content. Empyreans themselves are much more grindy to obtain, and can be sent to alts and used for Incarnate stuff that Reward Merits cannot. I kinda shudder to think how much more I'd have had to grind many of my character if I'd blown Empyreans effectively on stuff that I can buy from the AH...

I'm not 100% certain this would work, but I feel like I recall that you can bind multiple "powexec" functions to the same bind, it's just that the game won't execute any but the first/last on the list. However, it might be worth checking to see what happen if you used a bind like this with two powers in the the bind that were mutually exclusive. So if you did, like a "powexec_name Ageless Destiny$$powexec_name Rebirth Destiny", might only fire off the active power, since you couldn't have both powers to activate at the same time?

As is Penny herself. One reason I will always and forever insist that her Superhero codename is Pitstop.

...most of which is not viable to experience in a TF, though, since mission text is can often only be experienced by the first person to click on certain things (who in many cases, must be the team leader). There's not much rich to the Aeon SF when I have to lag behind a team wondering what the heck is going on, and just being assured that yeah, it's somehow important. This is a big point of why for TFs, shorter tends to be better, because team content, and story rich content, are very highly mutually exclusive, just due to the nature of the way the game handles things. And why Aeon still needs a SSA mode.

I don't think it's as fine a line as "yes" or "no". We're in Praetoria. There are shades of gray (even if it looks awfully blue to that one silly Circle of Thorns guy). There's a degree to which I think this idea "claims" the game, which is where I think the problem comes about. The game belongs (or, at least, "should" belong) to the larger playerbase, not to the development staff of any one community. And in that regard, player characters shouldn't really feel held in any different a regard to server-team characters, as I see it. Plus, as noted, they did try this already, and it fell really flat, to me at least (doubly so since the team member who did the arc left anyway, maybe?). Doesn't mean there can't be story potential, but it needs to be approached in a way that doesn't commandeer the characters or the game world in too great a degree. The Vigilante and Rogue arcs were both good examples of how to do new content right, IMO.

I'd really rather not. Piecemeal tried it and it honestly felt kind of unfulfilling when I realized I was just playing their character's origin story. On top of that, I dunno, it just feels...incompatible with the game's true form. Like, for better or worse, this game doesn't really "belong" to the current dev team. Trying to make it "theirs" might give a sort of misappropriated in the same way that, say, having them take on preexisting canon character names (like the original dev team did) wouldn't really feel right, either (and to my understanding, is deliberately avoided by the HC team in part for that reason).

Out of curiosity, had you just pulled them out of storage, and was the storage window still open? I ran into this bug at some point a while back, where every time I used a Catalyst, I also ended up putting one back into storage. So they were depleting from my personal inventory twice as fast, but weren't actually getting used up.