Blastit

Savage Melee's biggest problem is probably that Brutes already have the fury mechanic so you can't just port a lesser version of it to every melee AT.

Never underestimate the value of "good enough". If your character is 70-80% to reaching its full potential without you needing to prep a lot then that sounds like a better use of your game time than meticulously planning a build. Then you can practice planning builds when the inspiration genuinely strikes you. If you decide that, yes, you really would like to take that Stalker to the next level then you'll be working at it from a place of passion instead of a vague sense of obligation.

Going whole hog on optimising a character isn't really worth it if you don't play that character a lot. I bet a lot of people go for the easy IOs like the global recharge ones and various recovery options as a first step. Having a farming character greatly affects how you approach building a character, too.

That would probably be more effort than is worth it, and would be confusing for players to deal with.

Making tankers more competent compared to brutes isn't exactly a fleeting whim, though.

I'm amazed that Hasten has been kept in the game, considering it's such a strong and ubiqutous pool power.

I think that Rage would be more interesting not as the vital cornerstone of the set, without which it's terrible, but as a situational power or one that required more consideration for when and how to use it. A toggle that improves damage but decreases def and res would be more interesting to me.

Yes, it's a legal matter. So it's a practical concern for the HC team, not a moral one.

"Illegal" and "wrong" aren't the same thing, though. There are plenty of immoral laws currently existing, and the attempt by multibilion corporations to claim legal ownership of culture is certainly among them. So I declare myself a moral leader here and now! And I say this: that there's nothing wrong with playing this game. The people who made it are no longer involved and were paid for their work at the time. No one loses out on something they've earned.

Obviously you skip the tomato.

Ah, I hadn't seen that. Quite unfortunate. Controllers, corruptors and defenders would certainly appreciate some more flexibility.

How sensible would it be to open up the two first secondary powers for everyone? It feels more elegant than swapping the order of powers around for tankers. Is it doable? Personally I'm happy for anything that make tankers feel nicer to play. I like the suggestion of giving tankers better scaling for support abilities. Have brutes deal more damage overall but tankers have bigger AoEs and better support. Brutes have a big advantage in having one of the best defined playstyles of all the ATs. You've got mechanical and emotional incentives to keep pressing ahead so that your sweet fury bar doesn't decay which is something the state of tankers can't take away. Better support can open up for adding some buffs and debuffs into epic pools, because tankers epic pools are pretty boring honestly. I'd rather have idk Ice Shield than Chillblain. That'd just be neat. Imagine putting Warmth in Pyre Mastery.

Pineapple is fine, but it's gotta be fresh and you can't just pair it with everything. Smokey meat and a touch of chili is quite acceptable.

I'd like to see more ancillary pools, so that there is one thematic match for at least every primary that an AT can access. Fully implementing the planned origin power pools. I'd also like the iffy and/or outdated power sets to receive some thoughtful attention to make them play better. Stone Armour could do with a real niche, for example. Then of course I'd like more costume pieces, auras and so on.

The drop rate of each type of inspiration remains the same. It's just that instead of the blocked type you get nothing. If you block everything except purples, you don't get more purple inspirations in any given time span. You just don't have to bother with deleting the rest.

Is it even illegal to log into the game like we do? I mean, how are we legally distinct from someone who never uninstalled CoH or who used their old discs?

Arguably it is more heroic to not be bound by the letter of the law and to apply every faculty of moral reasoning we have. A hero who knows that something is right or wrong stands their ground regardless of what the rest of society says. Copyright specifically is a framework of law that is not as black and white as you portray it because we're dealing fundamentally with human culture. Copyright law can be used to allow mere individuals some measure of control of the new ideas and art that they work on so that their immediate livelihood isn't taken by someone with superior capacity to reproduce a piece of work but copyright law can also be used to give megabillionaire legal entities the right to control how people engage in art.

Energy Manipulation should be a decent choice for AR. It's got strong single-target attacks and I guess you could do something with Beanbag, Stun and Power Boost if you want to. Energize seems hilarious. Obviously it's a must-have and when you get a little over 100% recharge in it you can enjoy a permanent 80% end cost reduction. It's a bit of a hassle if you like Hasten, I guess, since it's a click power. Devices is thematic but it lacks Build Up, which means that an AR/Devices Blaster is completely without major attack buffs. A primary with so many AoE attacks does particularly well with Build Up and it would help with the drawback of putting knockback reducers into them.

How many powers are entirely without sets?

The issue isn't that a melee AT with a solid range debuff would be bad, even if the AT itself isn't tough enough to easily be an aggro magnet. That sounds like a fine power to have and one that any melee or AoE character would appreciate having on the team even if it just adds convenience. It's more the degree of survivability you'd need to manage using a taunting power. If it was just a range debuff that caused no more aggro than inherent to a range debuff then I don't think anybody would have a problem with that. I made that suggestion because mez toggles already exist and can simply be copied (except for fire, iirc), and because the inherent is just one power. I saw it as less work than coming up with new, different powers for every set. I'm certainly not opposed to doing it the other way around. I'm not sure how to feel about mex protection that is just always on for an AT and costs no endurance. How good should that be allowed to be? I was approaching this primarily from a thematic point of view, which is why I mentioned the paladin. It's usually a melee dude with some spells to heal and buff with. A very common thing for people to visualise when a melee and support character is mentioned, and why I would prefer an AT that could have Empathy or Thermal. But eh, if certain kinds of sets are what work best then that's pretty much that. Mechanically, I guess I'd aim for basically a Corruptor who trades damage for mez protection and a bit extra survivability against incidental AoE damage. You don't hit as hard but you're also not as vulnerable to stray crowd control. Plus you get a new perspective due to using different attack sets. A melee primary and support/defence hybrid secondary AT is pretty cool and would be a much individually thougher individual tho it'd lose out on support stuff. I'd be fine with that archetype, too. It'd be closer still to Night Widows which is something I rather like playing, so that's not a problem. I was just thinking about something that's tougher than a Defender but not tougher than a Scrapper because... well, it's just where I started.

I was thinking that the main problem with being a melee AT is taking incidental damage and crowd control from AoE that targets the tank/main aggro magnet or simply originates from whatever you're fighting. That's why self-buff and debuff sets would be optimal and why I suggested both that the primary gets a mez prot toggle (replacing taunt because I see it as by far the most replacable power for such an AT) and that the inherent is some kind of def/res boost for each teammate you have. I don't know exactly how much, I'd want it to be a relevant amount but nothing approaching a proper defensive secondary. 5-10% def and 10-20% res on a full team? The bonus wouldn't have to scale linearly, you could get the biggest chunk for the first two and then less for each extra member after that. That way you don't feel punished for ending up with a smaller team. I'm suggesting both def and res so that it synergises with whatever APP shield you pick. The fundamental purpose of the AT would mostly be to fulfill the dark and detestable desires of anyone who wants to play a paladin. Or a Tsoo ink man. I don't see it as a true support tank because it'd be very weak to AVs since they resist debuffs so much, and that role might be better suited to something that can have support/armour hybrid sets. I'd like to find a fundamental design that'd allow for Empathy because of being the support set most closely matching an MMO cleric. Dark Miasma and Radiation Emission are already some of the strongest support sets so I don't want to design an entire AT around them. If the design overall favours them, yeah, ok, that's already the case with every support-capable AT but I'd be happy with something that just means Cold Domination etc aren't simply bad choices.

Obviously it depends on the power sets that the AT is designed around. I'm pretty sure that an /Empath wouldn't have much reason to appreciate a taunt effect while someone with /Radiation Emission could make do. Depends on what the inherent power is, too. I'm assuming that, since the other ATs got plenty of sets proliferated, this AT would have most any melee and support set available to them. So giving all their primaries a power that likely only works for some of the secondaries doesn't seem like a worthwhile design goal to me. I'm also assuming that secondaries go unchanged and that primaries don't see more changes than having the taunt power swapped out for something. Going all out like for Sentinels is of course a possibility but I'm not sure that's needed to create a fun and satisfying AT that fills untapped stylistic space.

For the same reason Stalkers don't get Taunt. It just doesn't do what the AT wants to do. A melee/support AT isn't about drawing aggro and surviving it through personal defences so a power that has as its only purpose to draw aggro and gather enemies around you in melee range would be iffy. Now, maybe someone with /Kinetics could find some utility in that... and maybe it'd be cool with an AT that's a kind of support tank... but that feels like a subtly different AT and perhaps something better left for a new EAT than a regular AT. Maybe an EAT with a melee primary and two modified secondaries? Anyway. For a melee/support AT I would toy with replacing the Taunt slot with a mez protection toggle (taken from an appropriate set to match the melee theme in question, modified as necessary) and making the inherent give a small bonus to defence and resistance per team member. An AT that is a little bit Peacebringer, a little bit the Blapper version of a Defender. Compared to Defenders they'd have worse buffs but better survivability, compared to Corruptors they'd have worse damage but better survivability. I'd also try to come up with a neutral name for it. Defiler or Paladin or w/e are a bit too heavy towards either end. I don't know what, though. Skirmisher? Valiant would be a nice AT name but it's very heroic. Maybe somethign that evokes a mystic or a monk without being tied to a specific origin?

People who use IO sets and Incarnate powers aren't "defiling the game", they're playing the game as it exists and as the developers intended. Those two systems are both explicitly meant to surpass previous limitations in capability. The AE system only lost rewards because it was so good for farming that its sheer resource use overloaded the servers. If you want to role play as you run interesting story arcs then nothing has changed.

Get some Reward Merits, spend them on Enhancement Converters and sell those on the AH. Then use your money to buy level 25 IOs from the AH. You'll be set until 50 and/or until you decide to start working on sets.