Maelwys

This is really far less complicated than you're making things out to be: Mids has an internal database that lists Inherent Accuracy for each power. Neutrino bolt is 1.00 (correct as per CoDv2) This is used to calculate the estimated Final Hit Chance as below (same example power + acc slotting + set bonuses that you used, same total displayed e.g. 176%): Whenever the Enemy Level Slider is changed, the appropriate Purple Patch scaling is applied and you can see the estimated Final Hit Chance change accordingly: Note the 91.5% figure in bottom left. This is NOT AN ACCMODS FIGURE, IT IS THE ESTIMATED FINAL HIT CHANCE. It is also pretty much bang-on accurate to what you will see in game: Predicted Final Hit Chance in Mids vs a +4 with that slotting = 91.50% Actual Hit Chance in the Game vs a +4 with that slotting = 91.50% Caveat: This all only holds up providing that the power you're looking at has the correct mods in Mids' Database (since as I mentioned previously, this database gets wobbly in a few places - Epic Blasts especially as they're often copied/pasted from other powersets where additional inherent accuracy bonuses exist!)

They're SR... so Dodge, Agile and Lucky have a built-in mechanic where your Damage resistance increases as your HP drops. In Mids you have that slider in each of these three powers set to nearly halfway in Build #1 but set to nothing in Build #2.

Me neither, but the acceptable frequency of jousting (if any!) really depends on the OP. To be fair, using the recently introduced Powexec_Location command in conjunction with Combat Teleport is brilliant at counteracting exactly these sort of headaches and getting someone in and out of melee range without any WASD hammering or Joystick fumbling. I also have a few characters that take the Sorcery Pool and use Mystic Flight as their main travel power + who use similar "get me next to my currently targeted enemy" binds during combat with Translocation...

To caveat the above.. if /Marine Whitecap's teleporting you directly into Melee range is too much for the OP (given that no precision movement is required and you're free to immediately move or combat teleport away again afterwards) then I suspect the various Defender PBAoE nukes are also going to be too much. I like Sonic and Dark Blast on Defenders, due to the very same higher Debuffs values that @Without_Pause mentions... but unfortunately both of their Nukes (Dreadful Wail and Blackstar) are PBAoE and really need you to either stay in melee range or joust in-and-out of the very middle of a large group of enemies. Electric Blast may be an option if you feel you can skip Short Circuit... otherwise I suspect it's a choice between Ice, Water or Seismic (Ice being the favourite, obviously. Whilst Water Blast now has a passable Single Target chain due to no longer having a lockout time on instant Water Jet; Seismic is still mediocre at best - although IMO Meteor is as hilarious as it is slow) The problem is that once you start playing a Cold/Ice Defender, after a certain point you're going to wish you'd rolled it as an Ice/Cold Corruptor...

Unfortunately none of the various MM primaries provide very much in the way of support/buffs that affect other player characters... the only standouts that spring to mind would be -Regen debuffs from Robotics and -Resistance debuffs from Demons. However the Henchmen that have better behaved "prefer ranged" AI (like Bots and Mercs) tend to be much less obstructive and/or annoying to other players, especially on smaller mission maps. Your secondary will be where the bulk of any "teammate support" will come from. But it can be tricky for MMs to juggle supporting both their teammates and keeping their Henchmen alive. +Defense buffing sets have it easier than +Resistance buffing sets for this, and /FF is probably the least stressful of these because so many of its abilities are Passive. The trade-off is that FF doesn't bring much to the table aside from lots of +Defense and a smidge of -Res. If you can cope with being a bit busier, then a Bots/Cold MM will have a far higher performance ceiling than a /FF MM. Cold Domination also gets Defense Bubbles (although they are NOT affected by Power Boost etc.) as well as a truckload of useful debuffs such as -Res and -Regen. Whilst /Cold doesn't get any +Def bubbles that buff the Mastermind themselves, Bots/ does and its Henchmen are also self sufficient regarding Healing. Another very powerful option that has lots of allied buffs is /Time. However it really needs lots of Recharge as well as Power Boost and the Clarion Radial Destiny Incarnate to reach its true Defense-buffing potential. The current "Meta" pick for MMs is /Marine; but that's geared more towards capping your henchmens' HP and providing lots of damage proc opportunities than it is Healing or Buffing other players. Anything that results in "Faster Clear Speed" does tend to be highly favoured by teams though, so it may be worth considering.

Given your previous characters on live tended towards healing and bubbling rather than personal damage output, and you seem to enjoy pets... I'd suggest a Thermal Controller. Earth, Illusion and Arsenal Control all get pets that remain useful and can be relevant on many teams (for drawing aggro and tanking) but Earth's Animated Stone probably benefits the most from Thermal buffs because the bubbles allow them to become resistance capped to every type of damage. Earth Control also gets a lot of Ranged CC abilities. Arsenal Control gets more AoE damage but lesser CC Compared to live, most allied bubble powers got reworked to be AOE so there's rarely a need these days to spend time running around buffing everyone individually. Regarding a Defender... for Pure Ranged Mayhem I'd lean towards Ice Blast or Water Blast. Pairing Cold Domination with Water Blast would give a fairly survivable Ranged Bubbler. If you're set on a FF Mastermind, any Primary can work because taking Power Boost (from the Mace Patron Pool) plus Clarion Radial Destiny incarnate will drastically increase the numbers of your allied bubbles and allow you to keep everything around you softcapped even if your Henchmen lack any inherent Defenses. Mercs and Demons would get my vote, with Mercs being far better behaved.

Toggle on a Kismet or Tactics and check the figure listed. (Spoiler alert: it rises) The larger of the two accuracy figures listed against each powers in Mids is in fact the estimated Final Hit Chance, including active ToHit buffs. The smaller of the two figures is the original Base Hit Chance. Mids has been intentionally coded this way in order to simplify the planning of attack accuracy slotting. And if for some reason you don't believe me after confirming this with your own eyes then by all means double check with the Mids Devs... however it's been clarified many times before. Within the game itself Final HitChance is indeed clamped at the point of attacking. However Mids displaying an unclamped value and allowing you to work off that (rather than simply clamping the figure at 95%) is much more useful for planning out your character. BECAUSE it's the estimated Final Hit Chance, getting that larger accuracy figure in Mids to show a value of over 95% represents a "buffer" of excess ToHit chance that your character has available to them which can directly offset the effects of any Defence buff on the foes you're facing (and/or any ToHit debuffs that are active on you after they make it through your debuff resistances). Such as that blanket +30% Defense buff that gets granted to all enemies in 4Star content. Note that in older versions of Mids it was possible for you to directly hard code a default "Base Accuracy" figure within the Configuration screens. However this was removed in recent versions in favour of introducing the clickable enemy level slider. Nowadays you don't need to follow the above + look up the appropriate modifier yourself and manually hardcode them into the config screen - instead just change the enemy level slider to +4 and Mids will automatically populate the formula for you and display an appropriate estimated Final Hit Chance figure within each attack.

48% is the Base Hit Chance of this power against the enemy level you've selected at the top. It includes each Power's inherent "Accuracy" (which is 1.00 in the case of Fire Sword) Versus an even-level foe, the Base Hit Chance of a power with regular 1.00 Accuracy is 75%. Versus +3s the Purple Patch will reduce this to 0.65*0.75=0.4875; which is where that 48% figure is coming from after things are rounded/truncated. 101.5% is the Current Hit Chance of the power; after it's been adjusted for any Accuracy Slotting and Set Bonuses and ToHit Buffs that Mids knows about and that are currently flagged as activated. Whenever this figure reaches 95% you should have a Capped Hit Chance against enemies of the selected level (providing that Mids accuracy values for the power in question are correct; and that the enemy's defence is not being buffed nor your ToHit chance debuffed!). Whilst you won't need to plug anything into a hit chance formula manually... be aware that Mids' totals are often a few tenths of a percent off what things are actually like in-game; and many of the power accuracy scalars are incorrect in Mids (particularly Epic Pool Powers like Dominate and Char). There's also a longstanding issue with Rain Powers being thought of as 2.00 accuracy rather than 1.00. So it's often worth confirming the ACTUAL accuracy scalar of each power via CoDv2 and the in-game Detailed numbers display; or just assume that everything is 1.00 Accuracy until you prove otherwise. You can enable viewing Mid's internal Power Database by pressing the Key Combination Ctrl-Alt-Shift-A And here's an example of an incorrect accuracy scalar in Mids: Sentinel Psionic Mastery Epic Pool's Dominate actually has an accuracy modifier of 1.00, not 1.2 as claimed here. Also note that since the Alpha Incarnate Slot provides a +1 level buff to the player; +3 enemies are the usual maximum you'll encounter at endgame outside of any content with special level shift mechanics like the Labyrinth and so having 95%+ Hit chance against them without any "Build Up" type powers/procs active is a good performance yardstick. However when planning for "Advanced Difficulty" content you'll need to factor in the additional defence buffs in play - foes in 4 Star content get an extra flat +30% Def buff which means you'll need to aim for 125% in Mids rather than 95%. [EDIT: In reality the target 'Accuracy' value within Mids for 4 Star content would typically be considerably higher than 125%; because enemy Defence gets subtracted from your Chance to Hit before your Accuracy Slotting gets applied. This means that the actual excess 'Mids Accuracy' required over 95% would be (AccMods x 30) where 'AccMods' includes the attack's own inherent accuracy modifier, slotted accuracy enhancement % and any global accuracy set bonuses. Which is definitely possible to work out, but trickier to quickly eyeball whenever you're just glancing at the final Accuracy value in Mids. Mids used to let you manually specify a custom 'Base ToHit' value within the regular Configuration Screen, but in Mids Reborn this has been moved to the Advanced Database Menu (under Server Data Editor --> Base Values) and currently it is not functioning properly. I've logged a bug report with the MR devs; but in the meantime the easiest thing to do here is probably going to be to change the enemy level to +6 (as that sets your Base Tohit to 20%, and you really want it to be 18%) and then overshoot a smidge...]

At endgame I suspect that a Debuffing-centric toon and a Buffing-Centric toon would be the way to go; because Incarnate abilities are so damn powerful you rarely need a melee AT to "tank". And if we're talking pure duo performance ceiling... I may lean towards a /Marine MM plus either a /Dark or /Cold Corruptor. However the journey from Lv1-Lv50 is probably going to be "Any Brute plus a debuff-heavy support AT". Somewhere in the middle would be a Tanker (likely Bio/ or Rad/) and a Corruptor (/Kin /Time /Marine /Cold etc).

This one? Aside from the Mids builds themselves; all I can currently see there is a few Pylon times and a youtube video of a runthrough of Amra's AE Clearspeed benchmark mission (which makes sense, since it's within Amra's ePeen measuring Benchmarking Leaderboard thread). Granted , that mission is technically a +4x8 mission, but isn't regular PVE content and to be honest the post reads as more "look how fast the build can clear things" than "this is how super sturdy it is". And whilst yes - some may claim that Offense is the best Defense; more than a few /Regen Scrappers over the years might beg to differ. I'm sleep deprived and loaded with antivirals so it's possible I'm being a tad more thickheaded and prickly than usual here - so I just want to make it perfectly clear that I do recognise that the builds that you linked here are GOOD and that the points being made about optimization for specific types of endgame content are USEFUL... however I'm just not sure that they quite match what the OP is looking for here (although the OP appears to have not responded now for over a week... so that may be a moot point!)

I suspected that this content was what you were referring to. However @Auroxis already brought up hardmode 4* content in post #6: "Just keep in mind that even on 4-star content people don't lean into building towards def/res caps because of Barrier." And my answer now is the same as then: "let the 2nd build handle the 4-star stuff..." Building for minimal clear times on 4-Star content (with constant buff saturation via competent teammates and T3/4 Destiny Incarnate rotation) is completely different from building for "super sturdiness" on regular PVE content when you mostly solo or PUG. There is no point having one single build to cover both scenarios. If there is no need to build for other types of mitigation then by all means chase Maximum HP and as much Global Recharge as you can shake your Razer Tartarus at. However in this particular thread (as I'm surprised I *still* need to point out) the OP is specifically requesting builds for "super sturdy, Offensive mode bio tanks"... which I very much doubt includes builds that are designed with the expectation of gaining the majority of their "super sturdiness" from external teammate buffs. Regardless of whether or not they always run with a competent premade and have someone verbally precalling the activation of those buffs every 30 seconds on Discord.

True. Not quite True. Pure B*llocks. Even if we ignore the fact that the minimum defense limit is not 0% but -100% (and so any Defense above -45% will directly contribute to your survivability) ... how many of this game's enemy groups inflict noteworthy Defense Debuffage outside of Lethal typed damage which a Bio Tanker can just ignore anyway (due to hardcapped S/L Damage Resistance plus all it's Absorb/Regeneration Clickies)...? Prioritising attaining an extra layer of useful damage mitigation which applies in the vast majority of PVE content is a perfectly valid way to build. That said, I definitely agree that if softcapped defense is your ONLY layer of damage mitigation then you can occasionally encounter "kryptonite scenarios". In my posts further up this thread I linked a few discussions that break down my own "sturdy-ish" Bio Tanker's build. And they specifically call out Bio's lack of DDR and note that one very effective counter to this is to be able to "turtle up" and stack multiple copies of Parry/Guarded Spin/etc at will. Because even at the aggro limit and without noteworthy DDR, it's extremely unlikely that there will ever be a sufficiently high number of incoming -Def effects to cause Cascading Defense Failure if you can maintain a constant buffer of 20-30% Defense over and above the Softcap. (Also FWIW the post you're quoting was actually using the word "Defense" as an alliterative synonym for "Mitigation"- as in DEFENSE VS OFFENSE - rather than using it to refer to the specific in game character property that lends itself to Typed or Positional softcapping...) 😉

It's 2.5 PPM, not a flat 20% chance. (Unfortunately that particular bit of forum disinformation just refuses to die!) FWIW I find it useful to Frankenslot that Proc into the Assault Bot, but it pulls double duty there for KB>KD conversion. The only pets that I've ever bothered slotting it into for mitigation purposes are my Crabbermind's spiderlings.

The best milage for damage procs can often be had in summons (do those count as "attacks"?) providing you do your homework and work out how many of each pet's abilities will give each Proc an opportunity to trigger. Regarding other powers, sure it's a balancing act. But one that often still heavily favours using procs in long recharge powers that have low inherent damage but multiple enhanceable aspects. Whitecap in particular is incredibly receptive to procs, including a -res one. There's certainly an argument to be made that the MM themselves ought to not attack much beyond inflicting debuffs (like applying -Regen from the Bot/ rifle blasts) because of a low damage scalar and high endurance cost. However if they're already sufficiently powerful and would otherwise be sitting around twiddling their thumbs then where's the harm? Even long before shutdown my Bot/Traps was running around actively blasting things and toebombing with Trip Mine.

That issue is pretty easy to work around by tweaking your binds to detoggle any active forms prior to activating powers. If you use static binds like the below then appending a command or two to the end of one or more of your movement keys that detoggles both Dwarf and Nova form can help. /bind 1 "+$$powexec_toggleoff Bright Nova$$powexec_toggleon Bright Nova$$powexec_name Bright Nova Bolt" If instead you use rotating keybind file loads (in order to trigger completely different command strings on keypress and keyrelease) then you'll always be calling the detoggle in the right place + so this should never be an issue in the first place (assuming that the actual loading of the bind files itself doesn't get out of sync... which it never should since you can always just include a few calls within the files for bind#1 to silently reset bind#2 back to its defaults and vice versa!)

Bots are the most survivable primary powerset and are very good at AoE damage, but poor at ST damage. However Mercs deal top tier ST and AoE Damage and the pets can sit at the damage resistance cap with sufficient investment (see: Serum). Demons have a slightly higher potential damage ceiling but are much more unruly than Mercs. Either way, I'd very much recommend combining them with /Marine. I posted example Mercs/Marine and Demons/Marine builds earlier today (currently just one thread down in this very subforum) Whilst I do enjoy my Bots/Kin it is very much an acquired taste and requires a lot of active juggling of incarnate abilities to survive solo farming on +4x8.

You're right it's not, that thread intentionally skirts around the whole "Infinity Changeling" thing (which is a stupid name that keeps making me imagine stuffing Garth Logan into a Von Neumann woodchipper) other than listing a few binds. In short, swapping Kheldian forms essentially nullifies the remaining time of any currently active attack animations. So the effective animation time of each attack becomes a few tenths of a second (best case = two Arcanatime ticks IIRC) whilst still dealing full damage. Endurance consumption obviously skyrockets alongside damage output; but that can be mostly worked around via slotting +End procs in the form toggle powers. The real headaches are that (i) it's a known bug, albeit one that the Devs have effectively said they're not going to discipline anyone for taking advantage of because Kheldians as a whole need a major rework and it's easier for them to just leave this bug in place for now (ii) the resulting graphical vomit from repeatedly form shifting several times every second looks utterly ridiculous and cannot be overridden with Prismatic costumes etc.

The two most important things will be Softcapping the Henchmen; and Procbombing Whitecap. Also put the Gaussian Proc into Shifting Tides if you intend for the Master to be dealing much "raw" damage themselves (meh) 18.06% (Protector Bot Bubbles with 1x Attuned LoTG 7.5% Rech and 1x Lv53 Def/End HO) 3.65% (Maneuvers with 1x Attuned LoTG 7.5% Rech and 1x Lv53 Def/End HO) 8.69% (Barrier Reef with 1x Attuned LoTG 7.5% Rech and 2x Lv53 Def/Rech HOs) 10.00% (2x Pet Set +Def Aura IOs) --------- =40.40% Barrier Cycles add another 5% minimum to get you to softcap. Support Core Hybrid can also boost that by another 12% on demand to counter def debuffs if you're not using Assault Radial. You won't need the Command of the Mastermind Aura +AoE Def Aura IO; and you can swap those HOs for regular set IOs if inf is an issue...

That list could do with a shuffle IMO. Marine is quite simply miles ahead of the rest at the moment regardless of your primary powerset. Bots/Marine can run with its henchmen at the Def Softcap and MaxHP Hardcap with respectable resistance levels and still achieve ridiculously short Pylon times. It won't quite output raw single target damage as quickly as a Mercs or Demons, but the tradeoff is better AoE damage plus >21% Def to all from the Protector Bot Bubbles and additional -Regen. Regarding the other secondaries mentioned there for Bots/: IMO Time is the one with the next highest performance ceiling after Marine. Time's one weakness is low -Regen and Bots provides that in spades. Traps specialises in halting AV Regeneration but it is glacially slow moving and still can't solo a level 54 AV as fast as a Marine. Dark is a very good secondary (stackable Tar Patch carries a lot of weight by itself) but it has a higher performance ceiling on other primaries as Bots simply do not require all that -ToHit and Healing. Elec Affinity is slower to move and set up than most of the other secondaries with similar or lesser buff/debuff values even under optimal conditions. Kin and Cold whilst not listed both also have their inherent disadvantages largely offset by Bots/ toolkit and are surprisingly decent.

"Recommend" is a strong word. My Bots/Kin is powerful, certainly. It can comfortably farm and solo AVs (including the Crimson Prototype from Market Crash which annoys several of my Melee ATs) but it's also VERY busy and takes a lot of work to micromanage properly. And endgame teams tend to prefer anything other than a MM unless they're very casual and not running any door missions; because the T1 and T2 henchmen are lower level (and so suffer a lot from purple patch on non-incarnate content) and pets in general still partially block corridors and clutter up line of sight. That said; even *WITHOUT* pets a Bot/Kin is pretty valuable due to Kinetics buffs and lots of -Regen from the rifle attacks... If I was to pick a MM to recommend these days, it'd be a /Marine. And likely Mercs (much easier to play) or Demons (a smidge better damage; but akin to herding kittens). Something like one of these: zMastermind - Mercs - Marine.mbd zMastermind - Demons - Marine.mbd

Whenever I farm on that MM (and I still do occasionally despite the Bonfire nerf) it tends to be on one of the Asteroid Maps; with a custom enemy group that deals primarily either Ice or Psychic damage. Both Ice Melee and Psychic Melee have Smashing and Lethal mixed in; but Psychic Melee has less (really just TK Blow and Psi Blade) so it's a smidge easier for the Bots to deal with; and neither has particularly worrisome mez effects. EDIT: also, FWIW I've tweaked the build since then and now run with these: Mastermind - Robotics - Kinetics (Bonfire).mbd (regular gameplay and farming. Uses Talons Radial Lore, Barrier Destiny + Support Hybrid) Mastermind - Robotics - Kinetics (-Regen).mbd (for soloing particularly nasty Lv54 AVs. Uses Longbow Radial Lore, Barrier Destiny + Support Hybrid)

Min/maxing is certainly one way to go about ensuring a level of consistency across multiple characters. But you'd need to establish a very clear set of build goals and priorities. Attaining a reasonable level of damage output without negatively impacting on Buff/Debuff enhancement slotting is doable; but after a certain point chasing additional damage needs to be weighed up against other beneficial things; such as +Defense/Resistance/MaxHP to ensure personal survivability. And I doubt that any builder worth their salt has never found themselves in the position where they had to choose between additional proc damage and additional global recharge; especially when an important buff is a few seconds short of perma! Another way of going about it may be intentionally limiting yourself to only utilising specific enhancement types (e.g. no Incarnate Clickies, no HOs/Purples, or even "SOs only"). Although that'd be less valuable at showing "real world performance"... 😖

I'm going to highlight something in particular here. This is the build for "Ampere Avenger"; your Elec/Elec Defender: Defenders have a low damage scalar and their Blast sets have minimal CC. The best way to get milage out of their Offensive powersets is to Procbomb them. By not aiming for maximum damage output from your Defenders' blasts, you're unfairly favouring the Plant/Elec Controller even before the Top-Tier performance of Plant is considered; because Controller CC effects do not rely on specific slotting and neither does their additional damage from Containment (whilst your Controller's Carrion Creepers and Fly Trap would both really benefit from being Procced out - neither will *drastically* affect their Survivability or Clear Times unless they're soloing). Your Elec Blast Defender's attacks are currently dealing damage like this (Assault + Interface active, but no Vigilance or Hybrid): Charged Bolts: 84.79 Lightning Bolt: 132.7 Zapp (Quick): 185.2 Tesla Cage: 47.86 Ball Lightning: 84.71 Short Circuit: 75.14 Thunderous Blast: 316.3 Compare that to another Elec Blast Defender build like this one Defender - Sonic_Elec (Energize+TCage).mbd (again, Assault + Interface active, but no Vigilance or Hybrid and ignoring the effects of the Primary) Charged Bolts: 99.76 Lightning Bolt: 239.4 Zapp (Quick): 304 Tesla Cage: 316.9 (more than 6 times higher!!) Ball Lightning: 178.5 (more than 2 times higher and applies a -res proc) Short Circuit: 134.5 (also applies a -res proc) Thunderous Blast: 496.9 (They also have sufficient recharge levels that their single target attack chain is seamless, and the Nuke is up every ~51s rather than every ~116s) That second toon's Elec Blast attacks can also drain the endurance of whole mobs in a few seconds and keep them at zero indefinitely if needed, but they will be contributing far more damage than the first toon as well as applying a rather decent chunk of -res. Even Tesla Cage (a power which is traditionally viewed as skippable for many top-tier Elec Blast builds!) will be doing far more for the team as long as you can keep your 'Static' stacks up. I'm not trying to say that all the builds in your testing ought to be min-maxed and purpled out. But I wanted to highlight that the performance of the same Defender Blast set can very WILDLY whenever the character is built by two different people with two different goals; even if you completely discount any differences from things like Secondary and Pool Powers and Team composition etc. So at best you're going to be observing what the performance of one particular predefined character is, not what a powerset - let along a combination of powersets - on each AT is actually capable of.

Whilst I agree that the influence of Random Team Composition and Mission Variability could in theory be drastically reduced to the point of negligiblility by running a sufficiently high number of trials... I think that you're missing a major issue here with Slotting and Powerset Variability. You seem to be intentionally matching Support Powersets between the Defender and Controller ATs. Aside from a few outliers such as Dark Miasma and Dark Affinity, this is an achievable goal. However if you're also trying to factor in the effects of the Offensive powersets and Pool powers then in order to make it a fair test you would have to consider the effects of ALL POSSIBLE offensive Powersets - and ideally in combination with each Support set. Otherwise you can and will end up in a scenario where the Offensive Powerset that you arbitrarily pick for one AT will drastically outperform the Offensive Powerset that you arbitrarily pick for the other AT. And to a lesser extent the same is going to be true for pool powers. As an example: Plant Control and Arsenal Control are both consistently top of the charts for Controllers. They have highly Procable AOE attacks, Short-Recharge AOE Confuses, a variety of CC and useful pets. Plant can even function as a Ghetto Healer with a Panacea Proc in Spirit Tree (and Arsenal's pet gets hardcapped resistances and Taunt). The performance ceiling of those sets is drastically higher than the likes of Ice or Symphony Control. However most Controller Primaries (with the notable exception of Illusion before Perma Phantom Army) can lockdown at least two full enemy spawn groups indefinitely. Conversely, Dark Blast is about the only Defender set that can drastically improve team survivability, and when procced up it can also deal reasonable levels of Single Target damage (whilst Elec Blast can theoretically floor mob Endurance and Recovery, unfortunately only the toughest of targets will have their Blue Bars bottom out before their Red Bars eg. EBs and AVs - and these days those foes can still attack with zero endurance anyway!). All of the other Defender sets have at best a few middling low-Mag ST CC abilities, but bring wildly different levels of additional damage to the table (Ice Blast is good due to probability, Beam Rifle and Dual Pistols and Sonic Blast are good due to -res stacking, etc). Likewise, Defenders getting higher base scalars for debuffs/buffs means taking specific pool powers such as Weaken Resolve and Spirit Ward grants more benefit to them. Aside from different raw base scalar numbers on pool powers; there is going to be a big difference in how specific pool powers mesh with different powersets. A Kinetics that can Combat Teleport into melee range for a split second to drop Fulcrum Shift and then immediately reappear at safe distance is going to be bags more survivable than one that relies on Sprint and Combat Jumping. And the same goes for any Defender with a PBAoE attack, especially a Nuke. In short, unfortunately I really think there are too many variables here for you to "average out" unless you run an unfeasibly large number of tests (e.g. MANY THOUSANDS)... so as things stand I very much suspect that the only way you're going to be able to draw any useful unbiased conclusions here is if the variables are drastically reduced by standardising as much of the build (and the missions and level range and team composition) as possible. However I appreciate doing that would not make for as much fun when playing your way through all these toons, and I'm sure the eventual writeup will at least be entertaining even if it won't be possible to draw many unbiased conclusions from the data set. So by all means continue to have at it.