Blastit

Dark Melee coupled with the defensive set of your choice does a lot of work. Willpower, Invulnerability, Super Reflexes, even Ice Armor all work for your undead types. Fire sets recoloured a ghostly green/blue can work too. Then you've got Mind Control, Dark Miasma, Necromancy and so on. Hell, something with Super Strength and Super Reflexes plus a nicely chosen costume would be perfectly suitable.

Travel path auras would indeed be sweet.

You get to flop people around a bunch so you get a lot of breathing room for healing. I've only minor experience of it on an invuln/stone tanker, though, nothing high-end with sets and such.

There's the same issue with masks. They're a little translucent for whatever reason. I'd love to have proper opaque options so I fully support this.

Metal armour would be nice. You can pull from all sorts of metals for it. Lead, quicksilver, whatever strikes your fancy.

It's a mystical thematic thing. It isn't meant to make physical sense. You're missing the forest for the trees.

I think part of the idea behind the hero and villain powers being much better is to compensate for rogues and vigilantes getting access to both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. They're not meant to be weighed against each other in a vaccuum. There was a bit more population and more appeal to being able to cross over to do whatever back then so maybe something else can work now.

idk, I think that if you just practice a little you will find that MPCDAPO rolls right off the tongue. Along with all your saliva and maybe a tooth, but still.

I mean, the theme is pretty clear: a peculiar weather phenomenon swaps the typical weather of Pragon City and the Rogue Isles. Therefore alignments, which are linked to these locations, metaphorically shift too. He also did say that the coralax "venture" inland, meaning they go somewhere they usually aren't found. This continues the theme of things getting swapped around. Boundaries are pushed. It happens around the equinox because that's the point where light and dark hang in the balance and then swap. I'm not sure about the details suggested here but the fundamental idea of an event where things swap is perfectly acceptably mystical and is less tied to a specific culture than something like the Valentine stuff, Halloween or that one with the 'orrible year-baby.

Bonus points if they spill over into City of Villains and you can team up with the fire-based Hellions to fight them

Let's introduce a rival faction within the Hellions that makes their pacts with the denizens of the fields of ice instead of the lakes of fire. They all have attacks that apply -recharge and -movement speed. Let's have them at around levels 4-8 or so.

Depends on the quantity of work that buffing other things would make for, don't it? It does feel bad for your character to get weaker but there are definitely players who are deeply silly about it and have an irrational fear of [ominous booming] The Nerf [echo]. If one powerset or class or whatever is a lot stronger than other things then it makes sense to bump them down a little. It's just less work. You also have to ask yourself why the things you're buffing are weaker and if you can actually improve them in a way that is relevant for the play environment they're weak in. If, say, incarnate powers and IO set bonuses can be pushed to the point that they devalue the buff support sets then there's maybe not much you can do there. If, say, a particular set just has too much stamina cost or too long animation times to feel good to play then there's probably some easy work to be done there. Ultimately a developer should just use the tools that are necessary to reach the intended goal. What those tools are will depend hugely on what the intended goal is! Homecoming, for example, doesn't have quite the same goals as a commercial MMO has. I don't personally care if this means increasing or decreasing the power of things as long as the play environment is fun and lets all AT playstyles perform nicely in at least most stuff.

I'd see what could be done with a melee/support or melee/pets AT. Figuring out a clever inherent power is probably key. These would mainly be for concept and playstyle. Maybe an AT with assault for their primary and a secondary that is a defensive version of the assault sets, with a combination of armours, control and support. Call it the Elementalist or something. If you want to make it an epic AT it could have four mini-pools of melee, ranged, defence and support (with control elements thrown in here and there as appropriate) and you'd have to pick an element for each.

Defenders with Empathy have like three powers from their primary that at all work on them specifically, so that's probably the default hardmode for soloing without getting into additional rules and restrictions.

Melee sets? Pretty neat. You get to have a sword. I do wish that there were more styles of axe to pick from, especially some more generic ones. Many of the axes just feel too specific in style. I would like to see melee sets paired with something that isn't an armour set, perhaps support or minions, but that's a somewhat different topic. My favourites are Earth with its big chunky fun, Spines with its quirky ranged and AoE specialisation and Broad Sword for just the simplicity of it adding an iconic costume piece (and Parry is fun, gotta have wrists of steel to swing some of the sword models around like that!).