TheMoneyMaker

I find this to be a major shortcoming in the emote system.

I'm going to agree with Rudra on this one. The original window to earn the badges is passed and they chose to make them available to buy. And we have another precedent to consider with the ski chalet being open all year long and allowing anyone that gets the candy canes (plenty available on AH) to purchase the winter event badges all year long. As for the anniversary badges, only the old badges are purchasable......a newly introduced badge shouldn't be added to the purchase list until the following year, so that can give the people that feel a need for badges to be special to have a whole year of showing off theirs before those that couldn't log in or didn't have time to log in all their alts get to buy it.

I haven't tried anything new in a while, so I made this stone/psi tanker

I'm not saying it makes sense. I only suggested it because if we're looking at balance and we're not going to let some sets benefit the user while others can, then take away from those who get the benefit. Then people will complain more about the loss than they are about lack of gains. Also, there are plenty of sets with powers that don't benefit the user, not just Empathy.

Maybe we're looking at this all wrong. Instead of insisting that powersets that have others-only effects should also affect the caster, maybe we should look at the debuff sets and insist that affected enemies don't suffer the debuff against the caster.

Yeah, I didn't really try to do any detail stuff in the prompt, but you can tweak your stuff as you see fit before you click enhance

Enhancer | Krea

Some support sets provide benefits to the team only, not the user. Some support sets debuff the enemy, which benefits the entire team including the user. All support sets are great for team play. Only some are useful for solo play, or even to keep oneself alive so that one can continue to benefit the team. I don't think that support sets should be turned into the superior solo players, but I do think that they should be able to gain some of the benefits that can offer. Rudra talking about false equivalencies while making blatantly incorrect statements with regard to game mechanics. If you have the equivalent of a sucking chest wound in this game and you are a defender/corruptor, you absolutely can treat your own wound as long as you haven't died and you have a group heal power. If you have Empathy or Rad.Emission, you can group heal and treat your own injuries, but if you Poison or Storm Summoning, you can only heal one target that isn't yourself... for some reason you can't fill your own lungs with healing air or benefit from the healing Alkaloid that you can lob at others. If you're Force Field, you can put up protective bubbles on allies which they can attack through, but you can only put a bubble on yourself that stops you from attacking. I get having support powers, but I'm questioning the validity of the ones that specifically cannot target the user. "Game balance" as an explanation sounds as about as reasonable as having soldiers in the army who only carry ammo for other soldiers and aren't allowed to use it themselves.

Support powers are meant to support others not the user, and letting the user benefit would be unbalancing Except debuffs grant their benefits to the user and others by affecting opponents. You can gain the benefits of opponents reduced dmg resistance and the benefit of being harder to hit by reducing their ToHit, but you can't enhance your own defense or damage bonus--you can only affect your allies like that. That seems unbalanced.

My first foray into generating an image of my main instead of modifying an existing one

Maybe in addition to costume files and emotes, give the NPC a dropdown menu of tasks (trainer, inspiration vendor, street talkers, etc) so that we can not only customize what they look like but give the custom NPCs purpose.

Exactly

Just you watch, there will be new ways created to scrape devised to get around the safeguards. It'll be a constant back and forth battle.

There are AI tools specifically devoted to removing watermarks.

I've always felt that the easy to fool people are being fooled by stuff that they want to believe.