Adeon Hawkwood

The Rikti War Zone can be entered through the Vanguard Base in Atlas Park, Founder's Falls, Peregrine Island, Cap au Diable, Grandville or St. Martial .

Cimerora is entered through the Midnighter Club which can be accessed from Steel Canyon, Founder's Falls, Croatoa or Cap au Diable. In order to access the Midnighter Club you have to first become a member by doing a story arc from either Montague Castanella (blueside) or Ashley McKnight (redside). Alternatively you can get the "House Hunter" Exploration Badge in Night Ward.

Which would imply a prejudice against those players .

I disagree. I took Radial Rebirth on my blaster and haven't looked back (I do have Clarion as well but I only really use it on the Underground trial). Given the choice between managing my mez protection with inspirations and managing my health with inspirations I find it much easier to use break frees and emerges. The Regeneration tail on Radial Rebirth really makes a huge difference.

Are you kidding? It would be a balance nightmare. Deflection Shield and Insulation Shield are league-wide buffs on a really short recharge timer, have about half the end cost of an AoE heal and have a larger radius.

Given sufficient endurance management a FFer could basically alternate the two powers indefinitely with no break. Compare that to standard AoE heals like Healing Aura which have an 8 second recharge and only one per set.

This would mean that the entire league has a constantly refreshing Absorb Shield which would be a lot more powerful than an Empath or such trying to use their AoE heal. If the devs really wanted to add a league-wide Absorb to FF Dispersion Bubble would be the place to put it since at least then they can better control it's strength and pulse rate.

It depends on the AT. For Blasters Hoarfrost takes them almost to the HP Cap unslotted. For them changing would allow them to be at the HP cap and have a nice bit of absorb (the downside is it might be a bit to good when paired with Ice Manipulation due to how Absorb powers stack).

You joke but when the iTrials first came out the LFG system was so buggy that this did happen with entire leagues getting ported into random missions instead of the Trial they were trying to run. I don't think I heard of anyone being able to PvP this way but I did hear a few stories (complete with screenshots) where a giant league ended up running amok in someone's PvE mission.

You've got the right general idea but you're confusing "unresistable" and "not affected by external buffs".

The game cannot distinguish between resistance buffs and damage buffs so any powers that have an enhanceable resistance component (and a few that have an unenhanceable resistance component) are flagged as "Not Affected by External Buffs". This tag affects all aspects of the power, not just the resistance. This doesn't actually matter for Incandescence since it decreases healing resistance but it doesn't matter for powers like the upcoming Field Medic and Power Boost which buff healing strength.

Now all Resistance Buffs and all Self Heals in Armor Sets are tagged as "Unresistable" but for different reasons. In the case of Resistance Buffs if they weren't tagged as "Unresistable" then your current Resistance would resist the new buffs which would decrease their effectiveness.

However for self heals the reasons is more complicated. Healing Resistance exists in the game as both a means of increasing your healing (i.e. Incandescence) and a means of decreasing it (i.e. Hamidon's attacks). The "Unresistable" tag was added to most self heals in Armor sets but not heals in other sets in order to make it easier for melee characters who rely on self heals to stay alive in situations where they had a high healing resistance applied to them. The fact that most of these powers also have a resistance component means that they also have the "Not Affected by External Buffs" tag but this does not specifically require that the healing portion of the power be tagged as "Unresistable". For example take a look at the power Alkaloid. This power has a Resistance buff but since it's an ally heal as opposed to an Armor set self heal the healing portion of it is resistible (the resistance buff however IS resistible for the reasons discussed above.

Core Melee is not a bad option for squishy characters. You get a large chunk of the buff even if you aren't in range of any enemies so its basically a moderate regen/resist/mez protection buff even outside melee range.

The downside is that you really need Tier 4 for it, the Tier 3 version has a much smaller buff unless you are in melee range.

For Interface another thing to consider that I'm not sure anyone mentioned is that if you get Reactive or Preemptive you can use them to light your Oil Slick.

There are two that were leaked. However the only source of info on one of them is the Wikia version of the CoH Wiki so search at your own risk (and preferably with good spyware/virus protection).

Here's the thing. Due to how regeneration works a 20% regeneration bonus increases your effective HP/Sec by 20% of the base level.

When you compare the math required to know how a 5% Accuracy or 5% Defense buff is actually going to affect your character Regeneration is pretty damn simple.

I think part of it is also due to changes in the content players are running. Speed LGTFs used to be very popular which meant that Rikti Invasions were quite common (especially on popular servers like Virtue). However with the shift to incarnate content people don't run LGTF as much which makes Rikti invasions a lot less common. This in turn means that people probably have quite a few characters who don't have Watchman and are therefore more likely to participate in Rikti Invasions.

Empirically I've noticed a lot more participation in invasions even in zones that rarely have much population.

I think that Kinetics would be a bit weak on MMs right up until you got Fulcrum Shift at which point it would be to good. A group of Fulcrum Shifted henchmen is just plain nasty.

It's easy for some MMs to solo AVs/GMs. I don't think that anyone is going to argue in favor of a buff to the top-tier MM sets (Bots, Thugs and Demons) they are fine as is. What people would like to see is the lower tier sets (Mercs and Ninjas in particular) bought up to par.

Well if I were setting priorities for Paragon Studios I think that MMs would be third in the list. Specifically my list would be:
1. Balance Pass on Buff/Debuff sets to take a look at the under-performers (mostly TA, FF and Sonic)
2. Tankers (at least assuming anyone other than J_B thinks they need it, I don't play them myself)
3. Mastermind Primaries

Not at all. I think it's entirely possible to better balance the MM sets without worrying about the cottage rule at all. For one thing the cottage rule only applies indirectly to pets so as long as the pet retains it's same basic purpose and doesn't lose any slotting options the devs can change it's powers almost at will without violating the cottage rule.

I'll also add as a side note that I'm not sure I agree with your comparisons of which primaries are good and which are bad. Robots and Thugs (two of the oldest sets) are still considered the top performers while Beast Mastery is considered a bit "meh".

A Mastermind is primarily a damage dealer. I expect him to be spending a good bit of his time making sure that his pets are dealing damage in a sensible manner. I get a bit annoyed when I see an MM who just hangs back with his pets on follow/defensive and hopes that they attack, if your pets are on follow/defensive then you need to be taking damage otherwise give them a target.

His second role is the general role of protecting the team. How he does this can vary a lot from MM to MM, some can buff and heal teammates, others focus on debuffing foes. Some will aim to draw aggro onto either them-self or their pets thereby stopping it going onto the rest of the team.

An MM's role can change with content. They are the AT that has the least flexibility for handling content. They are fine in a stand-up fight but unlike other ATs they lack the ability to quickly move firepower around (some MMs are better at this than others but none of them will match the speed of a normal AT for quick repositioning). They also have issues with situations that require either tight control of AoEs (since for most MMs the only way to avoid AoEs is to not upgrade pets) or situations that require significant vertical movement (Group Flight is an option but it requires a significant build sacrifice that not all MMs want to make). While this is not an optimal position for MM's to be in I do consider it a fair trade for the fact that most MMs are very powerful in normal content.

No. Some MMs can Tank but not all are built for it and even the ones who are can't really do it like a true Tanker (for one thing they have less Taunting).

I'm going to address these in reverse order. First do I like the Aura IOs? Yes I do. I think that they are a relatively elegant solution for addressing the fact that MMs get less benefit from IOs in general than other ATs. However I will add that I think we're reaching a point where the devs should be VERY cautious in adding more of them since the current crop is providing almost as much support to the pets as severla of the MM secondaries.

I do agree that it's unfair that some MM primaries can secondaries can get more benefit from these IOs that others. I also dislike the fact that MM's have such limited options for slotting their ATEs than other ATs. To that end I posted a suggestion for fixing both of these about a week ago:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=293689

The problem that I have with that comparison is that not all Hybrids are the same. In the case of both Judgement and Lore all powers serve essentially the same purpose, they increase your damage. There is some difference in application but the basic principle is the same.

With Hybrid that isn't the case each tree does something completely different for the character so a cry of "everyone activate Hybrid" doesn't make much sense unless everyone has pretty much the same Hybrid.

Now if this were The MMO That Shall Not Be Named where the need to min-max exists to a higher degree we might see a situation like that. 10 people would have Support Hybrids and would alternate them. The Tankers would have Melee Hybrids and everyone else would have Assault but things don't work like that here.

Yes Hybrid is very powerful but it's not really syncronizable in the way that Judgement, Destiny and Lore are without a lot of pre-trial planning and organization that we just don't need. Maybe we will eventually see a situation where iTrials are calling for people with specific Hybrids but I really, really hope it doesn't come to that. We will not however see iTrials making a general call for people with any T4 Hybrid.

In any case the complaint most reasonable people have about Hybrid isn't that it's weak but that it's not particularly fun. While there are some people who are unrealistically hoping to get the original version of Hybrid back I think most reasonable people realize that that isn't going to happen but that doesn't mean we couldn't get something mroe interesting than the current one.

Agreed. Almost all of my characters have at least two Leadership toggles (the only exception I can recall at the moment is my Crab Spider who just has one from the pool plus his built in leadership abilities). It's a nice way to provide a bit of extra oomph for the team and a low-cost use of a power choice (plus Maneuvers and Vengeance can each take a LotG).

That being said, I do tend to select the toggles based on what ones benefit me so (for example) my AR/Dev Blaster doesn't have Tactics since Targeting Drone covers that for him but he does have Assault and Maneuvers.

On the subject of Vengeance, I find that it's pretty useful on Incarnate trials, especially since you can target any league-member (although only your team gets the buff).

I think the idea of an incarnate ability that allows you to make tradable crafted items would have a lot of problems. The big one being if you're going to go to the trouble of making a new set of IOs, why lock it behind Incarnate Content? Plus it has the problem of one-and-done, you do the slot on one character who then crafts stuff for your other characters.

That being said, an interesting variant on it would be an Incarnate slot that either allows you to slot special IOs or (less problematically) modifies special IOs but that has it's own set of issues related to the way enhancements work as gear in CoH compared to gear in other MMOs. Also the question becomes why tie it into a slot at all? Releasing Incarnate-Origin Enhancements would be a pretty neat feature without tying it to one of the Incarnate Slots.