aethereal

I mean, sure. But it's still using two powers at times when they sync up when there's a lot else going on. Clicky mez protection is easily made perma, is just one power, can be done auto, and the consequences of having a gap in your mez protection are usually much less than the consequences of suddenly losing essentially all your defense. But people are still constantly complaining about clicky mez protection.

Farsight is a great, set-defining power, certainly, but I think the OP also undersells some of its downsides. Yes, it's easily made perma, but that's easier than making Power Boost perma available in time for the recharge of Farsight, and then you have to not click Farsight when it becomes available, because it will precede Power Boost. So no auto-powers. You need to manually manage it, and if you take your eye off the ball, well, your defense just crashed son. I'm not saying that because it's two powers that require a specific epic set choice and a fairly large amount of manual protection that Farsight doesn't deserve a nerf or an unenhanceable portion or whatever, I'm pretty agnostic, but saying that two Defender powers outperform three Tanker toggles certainly undersells the ease of use of those toggles.

This also has the potential to be a newbie trap. The T1 attacks in most sets are not good. Even if they were zero endurance, they're not good. Encouraging players to heavily use them and slot them just creates another point where you're rewarding play that leads to problems later in the game.

Sonic blast is really low-damage for a blaster, and is a really good blast set for a defender (where the res debuff is much higher than it is for the blaster version). It is of course possible to imagine a melee set with -resistance that wasn't overpowered -- the resistance debuff can be arbitrarily small and short-duration, and/or the damage of the set can be reduced -- but I doubt that that's what you have in mind. For whatever it's worth, I don't think it's particularly in-theme for MA to do -resistance, either. Theme is often a bit arbitrary in CoH, but we don't usually see relatively straightforward unexotic "I hit you" sets getting weird debuffs across the set.

Because -resist is better than -def. Most people most of the time hit most enemies 90%-95% of the time. -def has either no or little effect on your ability to kill most enemies. -resist gives an effective damage buff, to your entire team, in the vast majority of all situations.

-Resist seems a lot better than -Defense.

I don't know how many brutes have bothered to cap resists against more than s/l, but it's potentially removing 2.5% set bonuses to several different damage types that may have driven mule powers and slotting decisions. I think it is a big change, especially considering the sheer number of brutes out there. It's the most-played AT, right? You should also consider that your proposed change now provides a certain amount of breathing room in previously tight builds, that could cause resist-oriented brutes to get more defense or regen or recharge and thus have some larger echoing ramifications through the meta. It just feels like we're stuck with 90% resist caps for brutes at this point.

Giving Brutes 90% resist caps must not've seemed like a big deal when they created the class, as almost all armor sets would at most be able to approach that cap to 1-2 damage types. I forget if IOs came before or after Brutes, but IOs as they were when I played didn't really change the equation much, because at the time resist set bonuses were pathetic. Then they increased resist set bonuses to parity with defense set bonuses and all of a sudden Brutes' resist caps were a very big deal. They probably should've dropped their resist caps at that point down to 85% or something, but by now I think the moment has passed. You'd be asking a LOT of people to change their builds a LOT to accommodate a change that is by design not supposed to be a big difference in play.

Yes, streakbreaker is not the cause for softcapped or near-softcapped characters getting hit. It is vanishingly unlikely that streakbreaker will ever kick in in such cases. Streakbreaker may more realistically cause an auto-hit for characters no, small, or medium levels of defense. And remember, it's not 1 attack in 100, it's the 101st attack after 100 consecutive misses from the same attacker. The odds of a character with 95% chance to miss missing 100 times in a row are just about 0.5%. So the expectation is that if you had 200 even-level minions continuously attacking you for 100 attacks each, we would expect streakbreaker to force one hit against you. Meanwhile, we'd expect basic probability to cause 1,000 hits against you.

Also streak breaker does not realistically mean that a high defense character gets hit. The floor hit chance (5% for an even-level minion, and higher from there) certainly means that you will see significant numbers of hits to soft-capped characters, but streak breaker only cuts in after 100 consecutive misses from the same NPC.

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?