Lunar Ronin

Theoretically, Tankers do more AoE damage while Brutes do more single target damage. Also, Tankers' threat is a little higher than the Brutes' threat.

The severe lack of a red side population on Homecoming compared to live is down to two things: The ability to create red side AT characters blue side Null the Gull Before, if you wanted to play a Brute, Corruptor, Dominator, Mastermind, or Stalker, you had to play red side. There was no choice. Now there is. With Null the Gull, people can take ten minute trips red side instead of spending a minimum of a week red side. The combination of the two has effectively gutted red side, at least in comparison to live.

You could launch an instanced Rikti mothership raid by yourself and go to town on all of the level 54 mobs outside of the mothership.

Yes, and no. A lot of the Issue 0 contacts are duplicates, and the majority of Issue 0 and Issue 1 content is terrible. The writing in City of Heroes didn't start getting good until Issue 2 with the Hollows, then had a marked improvement with Issue 6 and City of Villains, and then a marked improvement again with Issue 18 and Going Rogue. Everything from Issues 0 and 1 are mostly forgettable "Go to Perez Park and defeat ten Hellions, and then go to Boomtown and defeat ten Trolls," or "Beat Fifth Column The Council in this office building." Once you remove Issues 0 and 1 content, City of Villains has a similar amount.

Dark Blast wants to be at range, while Sonic Manipulation wants to be in melee. They clash with each other and don't mesh well at all. That said, this is City of Heroes. If they fit your character concept, go for it.

Just the Precinct 5 tutorial.

Because Excelsior has been overpopulated and experiencing database issues for the past two years. The Homecoming team has done a great job of trying to mitigate the problem (by moving some of the database directly to the server's RAM for example), but haven't solved it. See the shard's occasional database lockups causing queues during peak activity times like Rikti mothership and Hamidon raids even if the shard has under 1,000 players on, and regular server lag. That became greatly exasperated over the past couple of days. For the good of both Excelsior and Homecoming as a whole, some players need to move off from Excelsior to other shards. Better to offer a carrot of double XP and Rikti invasions than a stick.