Adeon Hawkwood

50ft range is standard for all Blaster single target immobilizes despite that fact that the controller equivilents have 80ft range. Personally I think it's fine. I wouldn't object to 80ft range for all of them mind you but I think the shorter range is useful for balance. The shorter range encourages blasters to use them as immobilizes rather than attacks (obviously this is aimed at the ones from other sets).

No argument from me regarding slow IO sets.

Quoting myself due to ego and laziness:

My suggestion is to turn it into a simple target AoE. Call it Satchel Charge, it's a location targeted AoE with a short range (say 25ft) where you throw a satchel charge that explodes with a short (about 2second) delay. Make the casting time 3-4second uninterruptable (in line with the various nuke powers) balance damage and recharge accordingly.

Actually because I have a twisted sense of humor what I'd really like is to call it Petard, give it the same effects as above except that when it explodes you get a moderate magnitude, unresistable, knockback applied to you. Unfortunately I can't see that going over well with to many people (plus I'm not sure if it's even possible with the powers system).

Here's my quick opinion on each power:

Web Grenade: A change on the normal Blaster secondary T1 it trades damage for a hefty recharge debuff. IMHO this is annoying in the early game where the extra damage would be nice but useful in the late game where the damage from the T1 immobilize is meh and an extra debuff is handy.

Caltrops: An excellent area denial power and a cornerstone of the set. Can be used as a damage power (by slotting it with lots of procs) but personally I prefer to slot it for slow and save some slots. It doesn't need a huge amount of slotting but it's worth putting a single slow enhancement in it to increase the effectiveness against +1s (add more if you like fighting higher cons).

Taser: The utility of this depends a lot on your primary and play style. It's pretty much identical to the single target stun in several sets, just with a shorter range. It's most useful if you have a stun in your primary and want to easily stack it on bosses or mez two LTs at once. Primaries with a Hold instead (Ice, Electric and sort Dual Pistols) just get the ability to mez two LTs instead which is handy but not as useful (Ice Manip is probably more useful for them since it has a Hold).

Targeting Drone: What used to be the main reason to take the set, this power has fallen on hard times. It's well worth taking but a poor trade off for Build Up when you consider that a Blaster with a different secondary could take Tactics to get ~50% To Hit bonus as providing a To Hit buff for the team (especially annoying since I19 makes taking leadership a lot more appealing for a Blaster anyway). The fact that high end IO builds tend to have a lot of global accuracy and a Kismet To Hit IO anyway further decreases the value of what should be the set's defining power.

Smoke Grenade: A moderate to hit debuff (not great, but not bad for a Blaster) and a underrated perception debuff (awesome for grabbing guarded glowies). One thing to remember when slotting is that the perception debuff is auto-hit but the to hit debuff is not.

Cloaking Device: A glorified pool power, worth taking if you've got the space but only marginally better than Stealth.

Trip Mine: A decent damage power for the patient (especially if you've got a primary on the low end of the AoE damage scale). While it is possible to run into a pack and place a mine effectively acting as a Blapper it's not really playing to the strength of the rest of the set (although I know some people like doing it). Personally my preferred use is to drop one at my feet before engaging. This serves two purposes, first it provides a 26.4% defiance damage bonus and secondly the mine serves as a deterrent to melee oriented enemies. Interesting factoid, Trip Mine, Time Bomb and Gun Drone have a longer effective Defiance duration than they should. Defiance bonus is supposed to be 7.5s + Cast Time for regular powers and 7.5s + Cast Time - Interrupt Time for interruptable powers the intent being that the buff persists for 7.5s after you finish casting the power. However the interruptable Devices powers have defiance durations equal to 7.5s + Interrupt Time which means they last for 7.5s + 2 * Interrupt Time - Casting Time after you finish casting the power.

Time Bomb: Theoretically a good power, it deals almost as much damage as the crashing nukes (except for Inferno). The problem (in my opinion) is that it is horribly boring to use. It takes 9 seconds to setup and then another 15 seconds before it goes off. I'm just not that interested in it to wait that long.

Gun Drone: A reasonably decent pet and a nice distraction, can be out permanently with little effort. The only real downside is that you have to re-summon it every 90seconds and it has that awful 7second interruptable casting time. Still the defiance boost is nice.

According to the fluff Bane Spiders do indeed have a combination mind control/hive mind thing going on. However, there are a number of Banes who have broken free of that conditioning. In the case of player controlled Bane Spiders I figure it's up to the player to decide whether his Bane is part of the collective or not and if he isn't whether or not he is still loyal to Arachnos.

If you did the new arcs you are probably missing Siege (who for some reason no longer appears in Maria's arc). If you run random missions from Maria you should get him eventually or alternatively run her old arc in Ouroborus, he shows up in the third mission.

I see plenty of AR/Dev and DP/Dev with both tech and natural origins. I think (as Jophiel said) it really comes down to a skill versus gear question. Any Gun/Dev character is technically using both so it's a question of which is more important.

My AR/Dev is Technology since in his case the most important piece of equipment is his power armor.

For primary I'd say Earth Control. It's got a very nice selection of hard and soft controls plus the defense debuffs it tosses out (especially in Quicksand) helps the rest of the team if they are having accuracy problems.

Secondary is a little trickier since it depends heavily on what the rest of the team has. Cold Domination is a nioce alrounder since it has defense buffs, resistance debuffs and -regen for those pesky AVs. Sonic is another nice choice, it provides resistance buffs which are more useful than defense buffs to some characters (primarily heavily IO'd ones) and in gneeral people with resistacne buffs (i.e. sonic and thermal) are rarer than those with defense buffs.