aethereal

There are defense set bonuses of 5% to one of three positionals or two of six typed. There's no set bonus that's +5% defense all. To soft-cap all defenses purely with set bonuses, you'd have to get 9 +5% bonuses to each of the positionals, or a total of 27 set bonuses (obviously the rule of 5 makes this impossible). The top damage bonus is 3% I believe? 27 of those (again, the rule of 5 makes this impossible) translates to +81% damage, not a big difference from the 95% that you're considering as "soft cap." This isn't to say that damage isn't a weaker set bonus than defense, but I don't think you're successfully making the argument for why it's a weaker set bonus than defense. I think the actual reason is that defense (and resistance) have vastly increasing returns as you approach their caps, while damage bonuses have decreasing returns the more you pile on.

Does the inherent malus to self-damage-bonus mean that a Tank under these rules would get less out of +damage set bonuses?

If you a tank can keep blasters safe, a single blaster really, really, really ought to be able to kill an AV, unless there's some uniquely bad matchup (AV with good fire resistance against a fire blaster or something like that) or the blaster has end problems. Sustaining >100dps while not being attacked should not be a problem for a blaster.

Super Jump is a rare case of a "second best at everything" winning out over all the first-bests. It's not as fast as Superspeed or Teleport, but it's pretty fast. It doesn't have the vertical of Fly or Teleport, but it's got enough vertical. It's not as totally-in-control as Fly, but you don't have to babysit it like Teleport. Which sucks, because honestly it's really hard to recommend any of the other travel powers over SJ. I think Fly should get a hefty speed increase, SS should get a little bit of jump (since it's presumably de facto impossible to allow running up walls), and god I don't even know what we could do with teleport. Wrap in long-distance-teleport to the basic power, maybe? But that still won't be useful until/unless they take away enterbasefrompasscode.

Defenders, controllers, corruptors, and masterminds should not be as durable as armored classes. I don't know what's complicated about this.

But now SS tanks don't need to have Jab in their attack rotation, since it no longer provides bruising, and Jab is terrible, right? Surely that more-than-covers an extremely minor decrease in overall damage, when you look at sustained damage for an attack rotation.

I thought even-level minions had a 5% chance to hit you at softcap, not 10%.

Also, come on, balance changes aren't QOL.

Or play a sentinel!

The contacts who show up in the "Find Contact" interface are a small subset of all the contacts available to your level range.

Gygax, not Gigax. Also, I don't think that old-school D&D actually is significantly the origin of holy-trinity team roles. Fighters in D&D were damage dealers, not just tanks, and in fact had relatively few tanking tools. Thieves weren't really DPS: yes they had backstab, but it was difficult to use in combat. Holy Trinity (tank/dps/heal) was created more by video games who had to find more of a combat role for D&D classes, than by D&D per se (which significantly balanced the classes through non-combat roles: thieves kinda sucked in combat but had a whole bunch of stuff only they could do). Mez protection is a creaky mechanic in CoH, no doubt. It kinda sucks that it's such a, to borrow an actual D&D term, save-or-die effect. Most characters either have essentially total immunity to mezzes in PVE, or else get really screwed over by them. It would be nice if there were some half-measures, if for example you could get partially affected by a hold which gave you a slow or a modest damage debuff, if a partial knockback caused you to have a very short stumble animation, etc. Honestly, probably the best balance for mez protection we have in the game are the (somewhat reviled) clicky mez prot powers that don't just let you set up a toggle that you completely forget about afterward and which gives you nearly 100% ability to ignores mezzes. But we shouldn't give blasters 100% mez immunity to everything forever the end. If you like to play Sentinels (and I do!), play Sents. Giving blasters some level of mez mitigation is find (note that there are anti-mez powers in at least a few blaster secondaries). Defenders would be ridiculously, grotesquely overpowered if they could put their armors on themselves. I don't enjoy playing buff sets, but hey, there are debuff Defenders. And holy shit, the last thing that CoH needs is to make Defenders tougher than scrappers.

Sure. I'm not saying they're overpowered. I thought you didn't know what dragonhawk was referring to, not that you understood what he was referring to but disagreed whether it constituted overpowered. Obviously, the sniper change constitutes a buff for characters who have snipes available.

Snipes are now fast in combat (that is, they do not have the wind up/interrupt time before doing their animation and damage, if you have attacked or been attacked in the last 8 seconds). They do good damage while fast, and more damage if you have +to-hit. They do even more damage when they are slow (ie, when you are out of combat).

There are apparently dominators with access to power build up that can Pierce purple triangle Mez protection.

That sounds like a bunch of basically good ideas that comes together into an incredibly complex package. If people don't understand the sentinel inherent now, how would they figure out all those different, largely invisible, abilities?