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It's possible that the whining had something(*1) to do with it, but I get the sense that whenever the devs think rewards are outstripping effort, they try to turn the dial back(*2)... Tankers were recognized as being slightly better farmers and it wasn't hard to see a bajillion 'in mission' level 50 Tankers, so I suspect they felt the need to smack down Tankers just because they had become the most popular farming choice. Frankly, I think the efforts in i28p2 to curb Tankers have failed to teach some important lessons to the dev team and community: Tankers got where they had been because of an excellent, but over-tuned change to their inherent. There are a bunch of other AT inherents that are terrible, and deserve to be looked at (ehem, VEATs) The dev team has been really slow to make Tanker primary T9s worthwhile across all sets. I can't imagine an AT like a Blaster skipping or under-slotting their primary T9s like Tankers do. If there is a dev vision that Tankers are supposed to have some role other than 'do damage', maybe the T9s ought to reflect that. I find it janky that the Blaster t9s removed crashes to improve performance, and yet the Tanker t9s can basically be afterthoughts in almost every build. (*1) Not exactly whining, but the Scrapper/Tanker/Brute ATO discussion always sounds a little whiny to me... Scrappers only hold their ston times because of their ATOs, yet somehow folks still think Brutes deserve better ATOs (more like Tankers' is sometimes suggested). I agree the Brute ATO look lackluster in comparison to Scrapper and Tanker, but this ignores some of the other crummy ATOs to focus on "wah Scrapper/Tanker". (*2) see also the GM changes in i28p2

MMV, but I'd dump the Speed pool before Leadership. Tactics also provides +Perception... I feel like it helps my MMs, but others may not notice. The Leadership pool has offers places to put Defense IOs.

I was always hoping that Goldside would get the equivalent of VEATs and HEATs, let's call them PEATs... that followed a similar trajectory of the VEATs... with the two initial choices leading to 'specializations' where the player could end up as a Seer or IDF (with their 'pets') or an experimental Hamidon-Hybrid fusion with its 'pets'. The fourth would probably just be something like a Carnie of Light, so the paths would be 'Resistance' -> Seer or Carnie, 'Loyalist' -> IDF or Hybrid.

As was pointed out by @ZemX : Aside from the PPM formulae mess-up, It's hard to see where Tankers were 'over-performing' except on solo x8. It's hard to imagine x8 and not think 'farming' (of one sort or another). Hey that was my joke about the animation times needing a 2% increase for 'ston-parity'! The argument about 'roles meaning less damage for some' has a fundamental flaw: 99%+ of the game's rewards are based on defeats from dealing damage... so for solo play, I like when similar ATs achieve similar completion times for similar rewards. Another drawback with 'roles'... nobody is calling for 'survival nerfs' to all non-Tankers. We have seen some of the more ridiculous stuff (Rune of Protection) get hit, but that wasn't specifically to give Tankers a more important role.

So what I'm seeing... Tanker animation times should have been increased by 2% to achieve parity with Brutes?

MMV, but I got the sense that there was some disingenuity in the (various) stated rationales for the changes targeting Tankers in i28p2. The radius fix for PPM was a no-brainer. The change to buff/debuff scales... as opposed to looking at specific powers... um okay? The "Tankers will be AoE specialists" made no sense given the initial round of changes... and it isn't as if the Tanker secondaries suddenly got new AoE attacks. I feel like most of the Tanker changes could have waited to allow the i28p2 focus to be more on Controllers and KW.

(some of) This mirrors what I am seeing: I definitely feel like this was a LOT of extra effort applied across-the-board to target one AT that simply happened to be doing what other ATs could already do (and still do). I don't typically farm(*1), but I did happen to have a Tanker just about ready to hit level 40 when i28p2 went live. Historically: by the mid 30s my characters have enough slots to handle both the offensive and defensive side of "turning up the spawn size"... and characters with armor sets (of Blasters) can usually crank that dial up more than other ATs. My soloing Tanker did have to turn spawn size back a notch after p2, I felt like I couldn't defeat (too big) spawns fast enough to stay on the green side of the grass before things would go pear-shaped. For smaller spawns (under the newly established cap) I don't notice much difference otherwise. (*1) For me: The closest regular activity is occasionally running Tip missions at x8, to most quickly get a daily Catalyst drop.

My guess is that underneath the request is the desire to do a quick logout and log back in to get rewards for something like Adamastor, which is on a daily timer and tends to get defeated quickly.

A comment from someone has done a lot of consumer usability studies: When the users can't figure out the thing that was obvious to the engineer, its not a problem with the users.

My Grav/Arsenal Dom has each of those powers: Crushing Field was taken at level 8 slotted w/ 6x Ascendancy of the Dominator Wall of Force was taken at level 14 slotted w/ Acc/Range and procs (including %+Recharge) Gravitational Distortion Field was taken at level 18 slotted with 5x Gladiator's Net EDIT: As for heals: I took Unleash Potential at 20, franken-slotted with 3xShield Wall, a LotG +Global Recharge and a Heal/Recharge... the extra defense was more important than the healing for me.

Apropos of (almost) nothing: I find that IOs (*1) help (me) more with Offense than Resistance/Defense. There are a some reasons why *I* feel this way. Global Recharge and Global Accuracy (and +ToHit) are much more noticeable than anything else during typical play I play enough characters with terrible Resistance that it gets hard (but not impossible) for me to tell the difference between 70% Resistances and 90%+ Resistances Defenses are easier to notice solo, but once teamed I can usually see by a quick glance to my combat attributes window that someone is buffing them. (*1) The "help" is the difference between me liking an offense set (with high Global Recharge) and not liking a set.... but on the defense side I simply get better feels, not radically different ones. MMV.

I like the upgrade to the Giant Monster base ToHit, I think this was a long over-due improvement to the difficulty of them. I've long observed that being able to stand "toe-to-toe" with them was the #1 reason why they were generally not-so-tough. nuEochai's Pumpkin Patch made this much more difficult, which is why I think of all the GMs this one is often ignored. As a practical matter, I've noticed this most evidently with Lusca, where it is impossible to fight only one (Tentacle and Lusca), and when tackling more than one tentacle at a time (plus Lusca) the fight is a proper PITA for a solo player. The only other one I've noticed being slightly more of a PITA is Jack-in-Irons, only because of his somewhat rapid-firing AoEs and controls. Other GMs are taking a little bit more time for me, but I haven't quite pinned down why this would be. Also: Thanks for giving Raving trolls the ability to leap not-so-tall walls!

I haven't tested in on Tankers, but my expectations match what @PeregrineFalcon describes, based on the way it played for me on a Scrapper. I loved it on a Sentinel FWIW. If I was to try in on a Tanker, I'd absolutely try to maximize HP, and I would use the Force of Will pool to have Unleash Potential available as often as possible. I'd probably franken-slot it with Defense and Heal (and getting whichever Defense globals that don't fit elsewhere in it) but this choice isn't one I can guarantee because of playstyle. For the Scrapper, I found I needed both Defense and Healing way more often than I would have preferred. The extra HP of Tankers should make a big difference (for the way I played and built the Scrapper) Overload (for Tankers) is harder to predict (for me). It probably would get added as an easy IO mule.

I've taken it: as noted it is a good 1-slot-wonder, and with enough recharge in a build it can be available to grief critters. IIRC it can get in the way of the interruptable summons enemies. I've skipped it: Since it is a level 6 power, it "gets in the way" of me when I am planning to get a level 14 (or 20) power pool power ASAP... level 6 happens to be a convenient time to pick a first or second pool power.

To further fuel the anti-Google sentiment: It appears (to me) that whatever they did in March includes a new variant of digital finger-printing that will force certain users, under certain conditions, to solve captchas to use the default Google search. For example, I don't have to solve the captchas on one machine (of several) unless that one machine is using a browser in incognito mode. I had another machine start down this path when it was on another network, but it seems like (for the time being) I changed networks/cleared caches/etc. enough to get it off that "list". Ultimately I simply rely on other search engines. I don't have extraordinary measures in play: I use Firefox "strict" policy (except for one service that the mode otherwise breaks), and a handful of common blockers. The only thing I can think of that mimics 'bot behavior' on my end is possibly quickly flipping through sites and leveraging an external text file of bookmarks (as opposed to having them in a browser).

I will probably opt for a Regen Tank of some sort depending on what sort of concept I can come up with. I'd say the same for Psi Armor... I may reroll a stalled concept character using it. Energy Aura is quite low on my list: The current HC version (pre-beta) is something I like on my Sentinel but I don't like the way it make me play my Scrapper. A Tanker with more HP might handle it better, but I am in no rush to find out.

I think you are correct. IOs, and IMO the lowering of levels at which powers can be chosen, further reduce how much certain ATs are 'valued' for even more content than just 45+ when incarnate powers come into play. It was always true that exemplaring down (with slots and more inspirations) was good... now exemplared characters have access to T9s for even lower level content. BTW: I think the lowering of the power choice levels was a good thing, some of my ATs used to really flounder for some lower level content when exemplared... I point this out because it was a dev choice that directly reduced the disparity (for much more content) between ATs like Tankers/Brutes who have flip-flopped primaries and secondaries. Writing for myself: %proc damage gets some amount of hate, but I find the PPM %damage to be one of the few ways the lower-performing (DPS-wise) ATs can stand a chance to finish most content within an order of magnitude of other ATs... and I'm NOT thinking about +4x8 content when I write this! At the 'finish content uber-fast' end of the spectrum, I simply don't care if a bunch of fully-tricked out solo-ists all finish some content within a minute of each other. The ATs that can already do excellent amount of damage don't need to rely on %damage, and through build choices can concentrate on something else.

I am simultaneously surprised and not surprised that certain things that brush up against the idea of 'farming for rewards disproportionate with effort/time' haven't been touched. Hami raids are at least somewhat social. The social aspect(*1) is IMO the only reason why SNS is still accepted, otherwise the idea of flooding a zone with players and GMs was something that used to result in caps on the number of players in a zone. (*1) unfortunately, SNS has long been showing signs of 'this is something we're owed, so conform'. I think it was a cool proof-of-concept idea, but it generates some amount of groupthink that isn't always pleasant.

(+) The AH offers me something to do with my 'loot' drops, (-) which would go unwanted if everything was 'free' I like the progression upwards... even if I can get stuff for one character by having another 'pay' for it, it still feels like I'm engaging with the world of the game. The biggest 'plus' for me would be we could eliminate all forms of storage (AH, Vault, SG base) to simplify the database. I suppose we'd have to keep personal enhancement storage.

I always run to the end of that mission and defeat my way back towards her. It doesn't make her any less chatty, but it reduces my stress levels.

I've bolded the part that I think is fundamental... Tankers (and Brutes) are both pretty close to the "Imma always gonna live" limit for 99%+ of the games contents, no matter the Primary/Secondary choice. Scrappers and Stalkers (and VEATs!) are also pretty close. When we factor in Defenses only... the field has more room for variability, but in comparison Tankers and Brutes have essentially run out of headroom. From my PoV the differences between Brutes and Tankers mostly comes down to the level at which certain powers can be chosen, and the slightly different base scales. I'm not at all bothered by the possibility of nearly identical performance (survive/defeat) at level 50 and beyond... especially if the final equivalence comes only from specific slotting choices. The rumblings about the motivations for the deep pull-backs on Tanker damage don't strike me as entirely well-considered... because (1) Tankers don't really get more AoE 'out-of-the-box' than other ATs and (2) I can't imagine scaling back OTHER ATs to make those easier to be hit (or given fewer HP, or made easier to get mezzed, or whatever) because 'Surviving is the role for Tankers and Brutes'; there would be a riot.

Personally, I'd rate the %Orb/%Font procs at the bottom, and the "%minor PBAoE" ones fighting for last place. MMV. "always on" ones are usually the best IMO, and the Tanker ones are good... but they aren't exactly needed for most Tankers, such that they are practically passive. More often than not: aside from the Stalker and Scrapper ATO %procs, for me the choice to include those sets in a final build (I'll always use them while leveling, because level 10) almost always comes down the set bonuses over trying to make the most of the specific ATO %proc. My choice to (not) leverage ATOs is HIGHLY complicated by the powers available that can hold the ATO sets. Blasters are golden (since primaries and secondaries are full of powers that can hold them), other ATs often have far fewer places to slot such sets. I used to be bothered that Tankers (and Brutes) didn't have one (of the two) ATOs be slot-able in a the Primary (Secondary for Brutes) until I realized that most Armor sets would probably end up being way past the ED limits after 3 or 4 pieces... and for some powers in some sets the sorts of things that would be in combination (Endurance, Recharge) wouldn't matter. Of course there ARE some armor powers that could stand to also take Accuracy, but its kind of uneven across sets.

I'm unconvinced that Brutes have the worst ATOs. Certainly they aren't as good as Scrappers' or Stalkers' ATO (procs), and the Tanker ATO (procs) that lean into more survivability will make Brutes jealous.

I usually have 60 minutes before work, sometimes I can stretch that to 90 minutes. After work, it depends on my household chores and evening activities. I can usually sneak in about 2 more hours before daily exhaustion sets in. This makes it hard to coordinate with on-line pals. On weekends, I usually try to stretch the morning session further, and then come back for some more time if I've done what I RL wanted to do for the day.