Adeon Hawkwood

I don't think it's practical to make these work the way you want them to, specifically I think making the extra buff per teammate apply to all teammates is going to cause problems. The only way I can see to do it is for the power to give you an aura that buffs all teammates with the base amount and then grants them a short duration temporary power that provides further buffing based on how many teammates are near them. This could cause all sorts of problems and would require a lot of server power to update meaning it's probably not something the devs would go for.

Win!

Base to hit chance for (most) NPCs is 50% so even against an AV only 75% of attacks will hit, this also completely ignores the fact that you do get a little bit of defense in Cloak of Darkness and can easily stack a bit more with power pools (Combat Jumping in particular gives a little more defense and costs almost nothing to run), additionally Cloak of Fear has a to hit debuff which effectively adds more defense. Dark Armor is about layered defenses, true you can't (easily) match the passive defenses of other sets but you get decent passive defenses combined with a lot more active defense than most sets.

So take Taunt, move around or find a Controller to team with. There are plenty of options for either holding aggro on enemies who aren't in melee range or keeping mezzed enemies in melee range.

So what? You mez the minions which lowers the incoming damage you face and means that your lower base resistance/defense compared to other sets isn't as big a deal.

One of the best Tankers I've ever met was Dark Armor.

That's a fair point.

Even with a DM user who spams HT is lags behind the other two simply because it has the worst duration/recharge ratio and is impossible to make permanent. Of the four sets with high -regen the ratios are:

Traps: 40d/90r
Radiation: 30d/90r
Cold: 30d/120r
Dark: 30d/180r

Traps is the best on paper since it's very easy to make permanent and it provides twice the debuff of the others. In practice it has some issues, primarily you need to move into melee range to drop the trap and you need to keep the AV reasonably stationary to get the full duration (the actual debuff lasts 10 seconds so you need to keep the AV in the cloud to reapply it).

Don't get me wrong, I think Rad is a very good set, I'm always happy to see one on my team however my experience is that I see Rad being elevated above both Dark and Cold in player estimation. Overall I think all three sets are pretty equal in power (with Dark lagging a bit behind the other two in AV fights).

Rad is more toggle based while the other two have patches. There are pros and cons to both approaches although personally I prefer patches.

My understanding (based on the contacts dialogue, I'll admit I haven't tested it) is that all members must have unlocked the alpha slot to start the TF.

I would say that Stalkers are actually better off relative to Scrappers than they are in normal content. The main issue people have with Stalkers always seems to be the lack of AoE damage and these TFs are much more ST focused than older content (i.e. lots of tough single enemies) so that disadvantage isn't as important. Additionally fighting +4s means you're less likely to have an enemy die before AS finises animating.

It's not really a matter of being impatient needs to be punished, in fact several of the regulars here (myself included) cheerfully pay "BUY IT NAO" prices when we're shopping for one of our characters. It's only used as a pejorative in reference to people who pay "BUY IT NAO" prices and then complain that prices are to high.

There is a cost to being impatient, if a person is unwilling to be patient they don't really have a right to complain about the cost.

In general the most popular support sets are the ones that combine good team support with good solo abilities which mostly means rad, dark and kinetics. Traps is also on this list but due to the fact that it's only recently become available on blue side and that red side has always had a lower population it lacks the raw quantity of the other three. Empathy also tends to make it into the high end of popularity due to people who enjoy reactive support (i.e. healing) as opposed to pro-active support.

There are several very good sets (Cold and Sonic in particular) which provide very good support but lack the strong soloing tools of other sets which makes them less popular overall.

The problem here is that the gravity geysers are part of the appeal of the zone. In addition to being fun to use they also allow for movement around the zone to be a LOT faster than would otherwise be possible which in turn means that the larger zones are actually faster to travel accross than, say, Independence Port. Rather than trying to devise a work around my suggestion would be to make the geysers easier to use. I have a few suggestions on that line:

1. Make the map use the city zone style fog of war so someone new to the zone can see where landmasses and areas are.
2. Make the geysers more visible on the map. The are technically shown but are rather hard to see. Do something like the Vidiot Maps overlay and have the routes marked in thick, easily visible lines with the geyser itself as a large dot.
3. Fill in the geyser network, some routes are rather tricky to do with the geysers and while I enjoy that I can see it annoying other people so add more connecting routes. FBZ and The Storm Palace are fine as is but The Chantry and The Cascades both have areas that are very tricky to navigate unless you have Super Jump and/or know the tricks.
4. Where possible add a little more flexibility to the jumps to make the learning curve easier. In particular for jumps where you have to hit a little island make the island larger and add a little extra height to the jump to give a larger margin of error.
5. Make vertical geysers more obvious (different color smoke maybe?).

I think rather than trying to devise a work around the devs should encourage people to use the zones the way they were designed.

^This. I've started running a few tip misisons on my newer toons to get these cheaply. Adding one or both to Health solves endurance problems on all but the heaviest users.

Very much this. Sometimes you have to play worse because the people you're teaming with can't adapt to you playing well. Yeah, it sucks but think of it as a challenge and it becomes more enjoyable .

I think the rational was to give it some weakness so as not to compete with sets that provide more comprehensive mez protection but require individual buffing. Personally though I think FF should get sleep protection so as to give it a boost over Traps.