Lazarillo

Not sure about Night Ward (I'll do it some day), but I'd lean towards Rad or Electric, with some support from the Leadership pool. Energy resistance is going to be the biggest boon. However, First Ward and late game Praetoria-related content (assuming you do those to) throw a nontrivial amount of Confuse at you, so grabbing Maneuvers and then Tactics for some protection against that is not a bad idea. That breaks down if Terrorize comes up, but I don't think it does...

Fortunatas have team support and solid controls as well. It feels like Sentinels are "trying" to be Fortuantas...they're just not versatile enough to do so. Which actually comes to how I think they're supposed to feel "in character" on a team, too. They're the lead-from-the-rear types, kinda similar to Masterminds, but with teammates for "pets". The ideas of marking targets and creating "opportunities" feels very much in line with that. However, this ability to provide support is far too weak to feel meaningful. Another reason why I think the key to fixing the AT is to approach it from the inherent.

Shhhhh...don't get the dev's looking too much at Faraday Cage.

"Jumping" jumping, or "oh, whoops, that piece of the cave map was 6 inches lower than the one you just stepped on" jumping? Honestly, I like this wings-when-flying idea, just for that reason. Running around certain maps gets hard to see when characters' wings do their animations so constantly.

I don't know if this is kind of a tangent or not, but I was running my Energy/Bio Sentinel the other day (the only really one I've really leveled) and one thing kinda notable hit me: Tankers used to have an inherent that would automatically put a small resist debuff on an enemy when they used their t1 ability. This was deemed generally kind of poor and Tankers ended up with buffed damage all around instead. The Sentinel inherent is that same debuff...but with extra steps to activate it. That probably says right that all about a big problem Sentinels are gonna have on top of everything else.

Yeah, this happened to me the other day, too. Kept meaning to post it and then I lost the image evidence I made. But Geode Shards are spawning at a minimum level of 35, it seems to me. Continuing that arc even up to 32 and 33, they were always 35.

I run a Claws/Willpower and it's pretty grand (heck, I'm actually making a second because it's my only alt that's hit Vet level 100 and run out of rewards!). Willpower has a lot of nice perks for Scrappers in that it has a taunt aura (so stuff is less prone to run from you) and it also comes with protection to Terrorize, which isn't all that common, but can't be obtained through things like IOs or pool powers. These couple of things mean that while it might not be the strongest choice, it is one of the most versatile. On the other hand, Willpower's very vulnerable to debuffs, so having something like a Destiny power from the Ageless Radial tree is going to be vital. Depending on your exact goals, that might be very helpful. And on the Claws side, it's grand. Stick a KB->KD IO into Shockwave, and the Critical Strikes proc into Follow-Up, and you're pretty golden, with quick, powerful attacks that can juggle even many of the tougher enemies while you take down their friends with Claws' rather potent AoEs. I've yet to find any other melee sets, really, that are really as grand for taking on an army as Claws.

Five if you count the potential proliferation of Envenomed Daggers to a "throwing weapons" set. 7 if you count the Shuriken and Exploding Shuriken options from the Scrapper/Stalker APP (which are slightly different powers than the ones in Martial Assault). Throw in a Widow's Poison Dart or some sort of minor control power and the only thing that would really need "work" for such a blast set would be the nuke.

"Mobile Dummy Combatant", basically, it's a Rikti Pylon you can summon to DPS-check your characters. It's essentially an accolade power tied to a hidden fight in the ASF that from what I understand, only appears at the highest difficulty rank.

I think this is one place where some of the "help text" could fixed up a bit. When the screen screams at you "NOVA FIST, BACK AWAY FROM MARAUDER" you basically know what's coming and what you need to do about it. When it tells you "DIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED", that is decidedly less helpful, especially when there's another "DISTORTED DIMENSIONS" that fires around the same time. It's, like, playing tells me that one of those is probably warning me that those one boss types is about to do the whirlypool thing, and the other is telling me that the whirlypool is already happening, but neither really queues me in to whether it can be prevented or how to stop it (and once I'm spinning around said NPC, it's kind of pointless to tell me I'm spinning around him). In fairness to whoever wrote these, it's not like we didn't already seen these unhelpful help texts in things like the Sutter TF, so this is practically tradition now. But it does leave one wondering why they bothered, just as it did before.

Apparently I am not familiar with this option, as I misunderstood what you meant. If that's the case, it sounds like it'd be perfect?

Yes, from what I recall of the post the OP is referencing, this was made in the Thunderspy community. It's also why, if you look closely, the Think Tank has a fish in it. I'm pretty sure we don't have that here, either (though to be fair, I haven't checked the Think Tanks lately).

The analogy I once heard on the old forums, I think it even came from Positron himself, was along the lines of "The Well is not what made Peter Parker into Spider-man, the Well is the reason you can be bit by a radioactive spider and become Spider-man in the first place." Prometheus gives a similar explanation of it in the game, IIRC, if you point out to him that you're of Natural origin and he'll comment that, yeah, nice claws you have there, ain't it funny how they're enough for you to go toe-to-toe with a thirty foot mech, or for Kheldians that the Well is the reason you're on Earth and not some other planet, essentially. The Well is the source of superpowers existing at all, but is not (or not necessarily, at least), the reason any given character has superpowers.

This is a neat idea, but won't the "flee, FLEE, FLEEEEEEEEEEEE!" AI kick in at some point?

Yeah, Mizz Libby (and the villainous counterpart in the LRSF) both do this TF-style storytelling reasonably well also. Not quite as well as the ITF, in my opinion, but close enough to keep them engaging.

This is more less incorrect with regards to the ASF as a matter of the facts, because a not-insignificant amount of dialogue is tied to talking to NPCs who despawn/change their dialogue after the first person speaks to them. Also, demanding your team stop to take time for you to read is at least as much an infringement upon the playstyle of others as them moving on before you finish reading. And this doesn't even get into scheduling conflicts or outright emergencies drawing people away from the game. In a story arc, you can put it on pause at pretty much any time. You might have to replay part of a mission but you don't lose out on any story just because you can't do things in one sitting. TFs, not so much. Or would you propose that TFs now not advance missions if a team member quits or DCs? That would certainly ensure that people didn't rush content that their teammates might want to see, too. TFs should have TF-oriented delivery. Story arcs should have story-oriented delivery.

Yeah, simplicity is a big part of why ITF works, don't get me wrong. That's kind of my point, in a way. There are stories that are "right" for TFs, and stories that better for solo arcs. You can also have it the other way around (see the Maria Jenkins "A Hero's Epic" arc, which is the opposite...a solo-able arc that would actually be better TF-oriented storytelling). And certainly, for the ITF, there's some context behind things that explains more...but it's in solo-friendly story arcs! But I think moves in "phases" pretty well. You're told to "Consult the Oracle" in the first main mission directive. Okay, you get there, and because nothing goes as planned (of course!) bad guys have taken her and her followers hostage. So you save them and what happens? A bunch of angry Nictus come at you saying you can't speak of them. So now you know they're connected. Building off the first mission, the Nictus obviously failed to stop you from learning about them, so because you know about them because of the future they tried to prevent you from learning about, you can know you need to go after them. You take down the Nictus and now Romulus is vulnerable, so you can attack him. Oh, whoops, the 5th are here, too! (Speaking of visual storytelling, that reveal is still one of the game's coolest moments as you round that corner...okay, yeah, I gushed about that already). It's a little weird but if you have the context from the aforementioned story arcs, it makes some twisted amount of sense. The fourth mission is probably the worst transition, since it's not clear that Romulus "gets away" at the end of the 3rd mission, granted (this actually gives me an idea on how they could make it even better...give Rommy a unique death animation where he gets teleported away by a Warshade-style Shadow Recall power!), and you now go confront him and his Nictus backer directly, who, thanks to the cutscene, you know have merged into one. While it certainly hopes to know about Requiem's connection to the Nictus and that "Romulus" was the name of the first human/Nictus hybrid (both from the Path Into Darkness arc, FWIW), you don't need that, really, to follow the story in terms of what you're doing and why, to my mind.

Not having such options are by design. You're not supposed to be able to be an Arbiter (terrible Barracuda SF writing aside) for story reasons. Otherwise Recluse would have to personally smack around every single NPC who messed with you.

Nobody in-setting does it legally, at least. Arguments could be made that certain factions such as Crey or Longbow will give you a super serum as a signing bonus, or as others have mentioned, certain gangs deal in artifacts or drugs that can grant super abilities. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't make something up and do a character concept or AE story arc based around a more above-board service doing it, though! They sell the heroics, but won't perform mutation surgery on a non-powered person.

Can I just say @Vanden I don't think I've seen your proposed changes before but I think they'd be pretty danged close to perfect at maintaining the feel of the set and bringing it up on par for both ATs. I regret that I have but one thumbs up to give!

Mind Control could be better. In general, it has problems compared to other control sets for Controllers because of a lack of maintainable, consistent sources of containment. Thus, while it seems to have been intended as a more "direct offense" set (and probably was, before Containment, but that was well before even I joined the game), it ends up falling behind. I also feeling like it's lacking on a Dominator because I find myself thinking when I play my Mind/Dark, "anything I can do on this character, I can do better on my Fortunata, who also has a nuke, and mez protection, and team buffs, and defense, and....". That said, I am firm believer in ye olde cottage rule, and wouldn't want to see the set get a pet. Buffing Mass Confusion would be a good start. Maybe making Terrorize flag for Containment (although from what I understand, that would be...difficult), and boost up Telekinesis to make it more broadly useful (it's a neat power, but mostly only works as a gimmick right now). Take the tools the set has and make them better, essentially, don't replace.

I don't think all the blame here can be assigned in a "kids these days!" sort of way. Everyone has a different reading pace, things like that, and teams can't necessarily compensate for that. Doubly so when some of the content like Becky or Psicurse in the ASF, speficially, only converse until the first person to talk to them is done. Plus, even if teams were more tactically-minded as you described, that's still time that those players are going to be spending on working together, not going off on their own to read story stuff. A lot of it is in how the story is told, I think, too. ASF is extremely wordy and info-dumpy, and filled to the brim with fairly complex stuff showing up even in captions or talk balloons that can disappear quickly or get hidden under various system text (or even under the next round of captions/NPC chatter!). It's very "tell" over "show", for lack of a better way of putting it. That's not inherently a bad thing in a game like this, but it doesn't fit the teaming experience. Compare it to the old ITF, for example, where the story is much simpler and told through visuals and through actions. You learn about the Nictus involvement through the mountain of ambushes in the first mission, and the 5th Column causing trouble when you turn that corner for the first time and get that maiden-run-magical "wait, what!?" when you see the mech. Of course, the reasoning behind the story is also much more straightforward. It can afford, more or less, to tell the story that way, because the inherent issue of "Cimerorans good, traitors bad" is pretty much the whole driving force. The ASF by comparison involves the Goldbrickers doing something involving alternate dimensions but what they're doing, what you're doing, and why, gets buried deep within text blocks that some team members won't even have access to when playing with others.

Stick the Councils on mounds of trash so when we flatten them they can land comically under spoiled banana peels or the like?

I finally got around to doing one yesterday, though I was on a /Willpower character. But amusingly(?) I ended up having to deal with both of those at once! There was a situation where the tank kept getting Confused against Ripplesurge while taunting, so I had to spend half that fight limited to a PBAoE because I was being forced to attack a teammate I couldn't actually attack. Got the badge for that fight on my maiden run, though, so can't complain too much.

Hrm, that definitely didn't used to be the case. Out of curiosity, were they the old Elites (Fire, Dark), or the new ones that HC added last patch (Rad, Psy)? If it was only the latter, then it may be the new mobs just aren't properly flagged. If it was the former, or a mix, then that sounds like a bug.