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Most of my Controllers still need to lean into a single-target START attack, for pretty much all levels, just to be able to finish off minions.

Widows *are* slightly hard to play at low levels, especially without slotting. I recall soloing the Hollows arcs and they were pretty gruesome. Redside Widows were similar, but I guess I didn't notice as much drag, but I was enjoying Lore and arcs more there so I didn't feel as held back. Perhaps the enemy damage resistance was more favorable to my damage typing at those levels. A couple of simple notes: The toggles aren't providing much benefit at low levels, but they still cost Endurance (as does Sprint). My recollection is that low-level Widows take several attacks to be able to clear even a typical x1 spawn. Eventually the scales of enhancements begin to help, and with respectable slotting in attacks this becomes less noticeable.

I agree with Senator @macskull ... there are no problem with %damage procs. If %procs are seen as a problem it would actually be that it is possible to achieve absurd levels of Global Recharge (which is just fine by me BTW). %damage is a pleasing option for some builds to leverage to make it so that they don't have to wheez through content when they lack damage powers. If someone makes the choice to use %procs, via franken-slotting, they are sacrificing set bonuses.

From another era...

Even simpler: a data point is a discrete bit of knowledge; information is the relationship between multiple data points.

IIRC, the "+" signals the rest of the macro/bind to start on press, complete on release. I'm glad it worked for you.

The game is set up with a reward structure, and the reward structure *is* part of the game. I don't have to imagine that. I can relate to people wanting insta-50s and full-kit builds... and while that is possible, it is not how the game was initally built... even if it is practically achievable, but a player has to engage with the game (not MIDS) some way besides just typing "I want". I don't care if it is via farming, constant raids, play-through-to-50, or marketeering. Each of those is actually engaging with the game. The lack of imagination being demonstrated IMO that hypothetical players are so superior to the game we actually have that the game has to make it easier for them to get what they want. People who want builds & characters without engaging have Brainstorm. Nothing is holding anybody back except stubbornness about not wanting to engage in the game that everyone else is playing. What is it @battlewraith actually wants from the game?

@Maelwys I love ya pal, but you have got to let this one go: It is simply too easy to reduce your argument to "Nerf those other Melee ATOs" or "Gotta give Brutes something to hang with Scrappers/Stalkers in terms of DPS." A wall of text with a bajillion points of nuance doesn't change the overlapping Venn diagrams for the above simplifications and your argument. Furthermore, when you start arguing about IOs (specifically procs), it isn't as if you are offering a comprehensive review of all procs and what powers they can be slotted in, let alone all other ATOs.... things that not every player uses, so this argument you want to make can't apply across the game or player base. You are pointing to a tree, when what the rest of us are wondering why you can't see the forest.

The suggestion to use Brainstorm was for people that don't want to play very much but want only level 50+ characters with whatever they want for zero effort or cost.... especially for case when the imagination is providing an unending roster of level 50+ builds, all of which must be insta-50s with full-kits. AFAIK, Brainstorm hasn't had a wipe in quite some time. I have difficulty imagining wanting to invest significant play time in a character and also seeing the game as a 'grind' to the point of actually being unwilling to level up. I must be an inferior player because I use the leveling experience to test out powers and slots, get costumes right, work on macros.

Who wants to play with such people?

Asking for a friend: Is this "hundreds of hours" played on a character all at 50+, or is it leveling up a character from level 1? I've been suggesting the Beta server to the players that only want to play at level 50, immediately slotted with a full-kit that they don't want to pay for, and who have more-or-less said that a hundred hours is something they wouldn't accumulate for a long time, certainly not on only a single character.

I will skip 2XP, and I will often turn off XP altogether, just so that I can do more arcs. I find it practically impossible to do all of the Hollows with XP turned on, Faultline is a balancing act. Red side.... fuggedaboutit with XP turned on. The game doesn't start at level 50! (*1) Even without turning off XP. I rarely get a character to 50 without it having something on the order of 600 merits, and then playing it at 50 is when the drops really start to accumulate. I am unaware of any player being kicked from a team, or being looked down upon because of the way they've built their character, except in the self-confessed cases of the fragile team leaders who kick because they are mentally offended by Kheldians, MMs, knockback, whatever. I've been doing low level content where level 50s have apologized because they haven't got their characters "slotted" yet, and our teams have had to apply some assurance to those players to believe... (*1) it is of course possible to spend bank on characters below level 50 (ATO, Winters, PVP are all decent sets that can be slotted quite early in a career)... but without the slots, and things like Beginner's Luck and all the personal buffs available, there is less immediate need (in my experience) to slot anything until about level 15. With a SG base, I find it trivially to store pieces (like attuned PVP sets) for reuse, as those recipes drop across pretty much the entire content spectrum of the game.

I'm never in a rush to 50... but around level 12 I'll start slotting. My older characters have usually made some ATO and sub-20 pieces. As I've written elsewhere, it is pretty easy to have a previous level 50 get a new character set up with some gear. I am remind that on Live, the one thing that made the biggest impact for me was the prestige (subscriber) powers. They really smoothed out the play experience for a lot of my characters.

*shrug* I don't really have Endurance problems... the henchmen don't run out with my slotting of them, the MM don't use Hasten, and I don't proc out my MM attacks (instead they are slotted with sets with Endurance Reduction pieces and also provide bonuses). The sets I use in my MMs tend to offer +MaxEnd and/or Recovery and/or Global Endurance discounts. Plus accolades, natch. The only times I come close to running down my blue bar (that aren't related to something doing Endurance Drain) is in drawn out fights (5+ minutes) when I've done something like taken the 90 minute attack speed boost and I'm running an additional toggle... my main MM has a bunch of defense/resist toggles that I typically don't even bother turning on, although with the increased ToHit given to Giant Monsters, I will occasionally do so now. The 90 minute recovery boost from the SG base covers me here. So in other words... not getting tuckered.

Double-Inf for no XP was turned off because Farming with (lvl 49 IIRC) sitters was yielding 2x Inf rewards.... so adding almost as much Inf as 2 level 50 sitters, but not as many drops.

With default toggles (and auto-click) running, my Rad/Dark Tanker was the only one of my characters that couldn't be eaten by Blarf! (I haven't tried all of them, just that this one stood out) Blarf is a very convenient way (at higher levels) to get the debt badges for the red side accolade. I find the little glob to be so much more convenient than trying to get things in Dark Astoria or GMs in Hazard Zones to repeatedly kill me.

That isn't a bad suggestion, but you'll have to pry the Musculature damage boost from my claws!

Posi 1 is so short, and one of the missions is all Clockwork (so KB is pretty much always affecting them, despite KD) I wouldn't sweat it. I love Energy/Martial Blasters, and I'm getting ready to build another one! Besides... it is probably the case that more advanced players will be using Plasmatic Tasers and/or Hand Grenades to get through those early TFs anyway. Specifically for low-level content, when players don't have many slots and likely don't have anything like a full suit of powers, there is no room for drama about what another player is choosing to play.

Circling way back.... I do encourage Kheldians to solo the Kheldian-specific arcs, you get quite a bit of Lore that is otherwise invisible in the game. Without Shadow Cysts, the content isn't nearly as hard, although a few arcs will have a boss/elite boss that might self-rez into an even tougher form which can bring an old-school-struggle feel to a small number of missions.

The level shifts can be really problematic if you don't plan for it. As @Maelwys notes, Tactics is pretty important once you have all three tiers of henchmen, as it's a toggle and it can also be used as a good indicator how close the henchmen are to you (alongside Maneuvers). There are only limited cases where I'd consider NOT taking the Leadership pool on a MM, part of such a case might be... ...If you only planned to use ONLY the T3 henchman, you can be slightly more frivolous with how you leverage the slotting of the T1 and T2 powers (to hold global pieces)... you take those powers as mules, you simply never cast them. Using only a T3 isn't a great performing strategy but it can be fun for role-play and it might be all you want if you take a MM to some trials.

In terms of types of powers, it is perfectly fine. It is possible to build up a decent attack chain with it, and Mass Levitate is fun! For me, it falls into a category with some other sets (like Dual Blades) when against some enemies it begins to feel like I'm taking forever to defeat them, because of damage (and resistance) typing. An obvious fix for this drawback is to try to leverage Epic attacks, but for me I don't like to pick up attacks that late in a build and will usually only do so if it fits the character concept.

As noted, I have more testing to do... but if a power has multiple controls types, for me that usually makes it a good candidate for (Control) ATOs and/or Hami-Os, since the 'control' boosts in those enhancement sets boost each type of control. I don't have strong opinions about AoE holds because the Live devs beat them out of me.

My initial testing with Brilliant Barrage left me unimpressed with it as a source of %proc damage. My initial thinking is that the poor performance was somewhat related to the reasons you don't get %proc damage in a power like Seeker Drones... that delayed effects and the lack of a pseudopet 'body' left behind work against "on cast' %damage (like you can reliably get in the cast of something like Caltrops, whereas teh 'tick' chances aren't good at all) I'm still leveling up my Pyro Controller, and I'm soon to have some extra slots again to try testing Brilliant Barrage with %damage... but for now it is looking like I will lean into it to hold a control set (probably stun, possibly ATO) rather than trying to leverage it as a source of damage.

The economy is both quite stable and somewhat deflationary, so I don't understand what the advantage of raising prices (by whatever currency: Inf, Merits, Aethers) would provide. The only real gaps I see in the market are the non-fungible items (some recipes, some non-set enhancements). Let's not ignore that the market (and merit vendors) is pretty much the means by which we can have a diverse set of fun builds... and not just for +4x8 players. I don't think Winter Packs are a good case study for a few reasons: It was a seasonal sale for items (the packs themselves) that have an otherwise fixed price the rest of the year... so players could undersell the store and make a profit. The contents of the Winter Packs were extra-profitable, because of the sale price. If I turn this around and try to think of where it might even make sense to raise prices... I think we'd be playing a different game. For example, if we had to pay Inf to level up, folks with bank wouldn't care... but new players would be scrounging for Inf after something like a DFB with 2XP. That doesn't seem cool.

I certainly hope I am not misrepresenting anything like 'programming skills' on my part... it's probably been a decade since I had to install anything like a development environment for anything more complicated that quickly navigating a code base and assisting with instrumenting code for low-level testing. For about two decades my own programming has been pretty limited to scripted/configured development, or visual programming systems and their like. I can tinker of course, and trying to get VBA from old office applications to work on LibreOffice, or Android, or whatever is its own form of hell for a tinkerer. I do have the proverbial 10K hours (several times over) logged in everything else relevant for software development, from requirements and architecture through all levels of testing, plus lots of project management. I'm impressed we got the Homecoming code working so well, and my truth is that I'm ok with the pace of releases, and that 'bugs' are typically pretty minor... except of course for some things that work as-intended, but maybe didn't have the best considered intentions.