Blastit

Then play at -1 difficulty with an, idk, fire/shield scrapper. You wouldn't have to spend as much on enhancements so you could achieve the power fantasy more quickly and easily. I'm not necessarily concerned with challenge, I'm concerned with the game's systems creating an environment where only damage matters. If defence and resistance buffs become less useful as the character with them progresses, then you've got multiple sets that feel worse to play as the character matures (remember how they kept tweaking blasters?). If crowd control doesn't really accomplish anything because IO sets can give even resistance sets and blasters a mere 5% probability of being hit, then you've made one of the game's more interesting systems pointless. If only the damage-focused ATs can contribute to a team the way that they are supposed to then that's a shame because the support-focused ATs are every bit as neat.

Are tankers, brutes, scrappers, stalkers and blasters mandatory?

I didn't suggest that.

Actually being unstoppable might not be a good idea, though. If you simply want to feel unstoppable you could just make a def-based character and run missions at -1x8. I feel like people are contorting themselves into looping pretzels to come up with all manners of exotic optional difficulty systems in order to accommodate an IO system that lets you build overpowered characters. Adding invisible scores to IOs so that the sets don't actually make your character too much stronger is such a silly idea. If you feel that you have to suggest that, just decrease the numerical bonuses that the sets give so that you can no longer build characters that render support and crowd control sets irrelevant.

Is it even possible for the engine to allow you to target yourself?

I think it's a bad idea to change all KB into KD because knocking stuff around is a very superhero thing.

I suppose they could replace it with Elbow Charge.

Acceptable, if picking it disables Shield Charge and One With the Shield.

Tighty whities are not strictly required. They can be any colour. Conceptually you could go for a full barbarian or elven warrior by taking archery, or you can go for all kinds of genie or elemental warrior styles, some kinda super street thug with a baseball bat and guns, space warriors with rad-blasting gloves or beam rifles. It's a way of going for weapons granting elemental powers without playing someone with survivability. You can kinda do that with the ninja sword already and iirc the martial assault set has a sword for dominators to do that too. But this set idea would lean much more heavily into that. If anyone is having a hard time linking barbarians and blasters imagine this scenario: You are really buff. Your nudity levels are at 72% and rising. You have an axe. If you rush at someone and chop them you can really fuck them up. But if someone else who is also large and nude and armed rushes at you and chops you, they can really fuck you up. This is the spirit of blasterdom.

Which power would AS replace? The immediate candidates are Tremor and Fault. In many other sets AS replaces a PBAoE attack so Tremor seems to be the default choice. Doing so would leave the set entirely without AoE attacks, though, which basically only happens for Energy Melee. Fault is an AoE control power which isn't the usual kind of thing for Stalkers. So if you want to keep AoE attacks then that's the choice. Hurl Boulder is a third option, I guess, but I don't think any set with a ranged single-target attack replaces it for AS so that doesn't seem like a priority. Hurl Boulder isn't a very good power but rather than replace it I'd like to see it be made into, well, a decent power. It's flavourful for the set. Personally I'm kind of leaning towards replacing Tremor because Fault is more important to the character of the set than Tremor is. Spines gets to keep a lot of AoE despite that not being a common thing for Stalkers, because Spines is AoE. I also think that Fault is more fun to use, it's certainly quicker and snappier to activate, and would like to see the level of extra control it gives on an AT that's frailer than Tankers and Brutes. Also, what kind of animation should the stone AS have? An uppercut or knock-out blow effect with a single stony fist would be cool.

We've got a ninja secondary and a martial artist secondary, so how about a barbarian secondary? Pilfer a bunch of attacks from war mace, battle axe and broadsword, split their damage equally between lethal/smashing and let you pick any mace, axe or sword for your weapon model. A standard 8-10 second recharge blap, a PBAoE attack, a big blap and then a fourth attack (a cone? a parry? a throwing axe?). Then the rest could be stuff like a PBAoE fear, a leap attack, some kind of single-target stun, maybe replace Build Up with a PBAoE damage buff scaling with the number of enemies around you, and of course the sustain toggle. Not sure what that should be exactly but it shouldn't be hard to come up with something appropriate. Actually you could have a PBAoE that causes fear and buffs recovery, regen and damage. Call it War Cry. A bit like the elec power, I guess. Very flavourful but possibly too many effects at once. A pretty close combat focused secondary but I think it would be cool. Maybe call it Berzerking. Roughhousing. Conanism. Fight Manipulation (is that legal?).

One big thing is the wide range of characters that can be made. The costume creator was a pretty dang big deal. Switching from an invulnerability tanker to an ice tanker is a big enough change to nearly count as a new class in other games, to say nothing of the gameplay variety you could get from switching to another AT. That's still true, at least. That teaming felt so good is another thing that I think contributed. Rewards were always individual so there was no loot drama either. Two scrappers could team up with a defender and instantly feel the difference. That buffs and debuffs were designed to be short-lasting but impactful is one of the better design decisions the developers made. Duoing with a fighter AT and a support AT is still great fun.

You might be thinking of streaming and making videos, especially when posted on monetised channels. Screenshots posted on the HC forums aren't a problem. Even if they were to become a problem the most likely outcome would be for the screenshots to be removed.

You could certainly still have PvP zones like Warburg or ones where you decide to join one out of three zone-exclusive factions even without an explicit blueside/redside split. I'd be all for a system that doesn't divide you into hero and villain but is instead composed of a whole bunch of "contact factions" that you align with depending on your character's past workings. Like city hall can be one group, various big-name heroes can be others, corporations and criminal groups can be some. You don't join them necessarily but you work with or for them. Obviously getting contacts in the hospital workers' union would push you towards certain styles of mission while getting contacts in a shipping company and doing some acquisitions from Crey for them would push you towards other styles of mission. A more substantial combination of the current contact, alignment and tip systems. So if your character does a lot of missions where someone explicitly pays you to work for them, then you'd get more of that sort of job. If your character instead does a lot of rescue missions then you build a reputation of being a good rescue worker and people in that sphere would want to talk to you more.

Of course he isn't, he's on the clock. It isn't break time yet. Paragon City is precisely the kind of place that would find itself, one day, haunted by mysterious toddlers that are gone as suddenly as they appeared. It's a comic-book world that spans as wide a range of tones as the entire Marvel and DC publishing histories. Weird shit happens.

Bring your child to work day is pretty funny because of the awful baby. Look at it. It sucks so much.

By "other play" I do of course refer to fighting enemies and completing missions, not logging in and typing the /ah command. Rewards objectively are much higher. Reducing how much XP you get from AE missions was done so that levelling in other ways isn't enormously discouraged by the game systems. They even added a custom double XP buff! There are entire zones outside of fire farms and balancing rewards so that there's at least a sane range of disparity between them if not equilibrium is one of the bare minimum things you can do to foster a healthy game environment. Increasing everything else to the level of AE farms would result in blasting through everything unless you manually shut off XP. At that point you might as well have live XP levels but introduce the beta cheat menu to the regular servers. It'd be more practical.

Incarnate bits and IO sets of even the deepest, richest purple are vastly easier to get than they ever were during the live period. Reductions in the efficiency of farming are to move it closer to ten times better than other play rather than closer to a thousand times better. You're hyperfocusing and losing perspective on how good farming still is.

I think the shadow shard should be huge, spacious and weird to navigate in the service of style.

Because the game's systems encourage use and exploration of them by virtue of existing. The point of the IO system is for it to be used. Most people are going to use it. The community has this expectation. Damn near every single build being posted on these forums aiming towards maximising defence and recharge tells you that people do in fact adhere to the system as it exists. The people who use IOs aren't even doing anything wrong. They didn't design it, they're just doing what the game expects them to do. So demanding that individual players voluntarily police this is not a great solution. I mean, what do you think the success rate of asking a PUG to make and use a non-IO build is going to be? Gimmick SGs and meet-ups happen fairly often but each of them don't happen nearly as often as just regular play. Should we kick people from the team for having a character that makes too good a use of the game's systems of progress? "Sorry, Power-Brute, you did much too well on the last mission and have got to go" Characters being so strong that they don't need to team is why we got enhancement diversification and aggro caps in the first place. That would've been a hell of a response to the craze of Burn Tankers. "Just don't play one, or team with one". They still existed and set the expectations. That's why extremely powerful outliers are brought down, they set the expectations and turns everything that can't keep up into a de facto failure.

This is the real concern with power level. If the only thing that matters in a team is how much damage you do, then the ATs that focus on crowd control, buffs, debuffs and aggro are going to be worse than the ones that just fight stuff. A good Controller is then one that can put out a lot of damage instead of one that can put out crowd control. That would be a real shame because the support ATs are fairly unique and do stuff that is rare to find in other games to say the least.

It isn't a bug, it's a spider.

A controller with storm summoning should be pretty safe. Of course it depends on what context you play in but if enemies are locked down, debuffed and/or scattered to the winds then not a lot of attacks are coming your way. Force fields give more direct defence while also having a lot of knockback so that's also an option.

When I say that it isn't a good premise to start from, I mean that I don't think it's a good idea to just accept the level of power already provided by sets and incarnates. "Our characters can already easily be built to be so strong that the difficulty level doesn't matter so you should just let us have even more efficient builds" is an argument that doesn't do anything for me except reveal a huge problem.

Maybe it isn't more gamebreaking than IO sets and incarnate powers already are but I don't think that's a good premise to start from. You can already create characters that can solo things that were meant to challenge entire teams.