Adeon Hawkwood

Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.

Well yes, that is the point. It would increase the value of the vendor trash recipes without really increasing the supply of non-vendor trash recipes to much.

No one at Cryptic decided anything regarding CoH. They sold it to NCSoft some time ago and Paragon Studios are the developers now. In answer to your question Back Alley Brawler was the dev responsible for Walk.

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth. No truth-handler, you. Bah! I deride your truth-handling abilities.

Dr. Aeon claims to be a man of science but look at what he promises, glitz and glamor with no substance. Television has no such pretension, his promises may not be glamorous but they are real, they have substance, they have meaning. And in the end, isn't that what man truly desires?

You really are flipping from one extreme to the other here aren't you?

Personally I would say that a Empathy excels in three places:
1. At lower levels (up to the low to mid twenties)
2. On smaller teams (5 players max)
3. During Hamidon raids.

Outside those places it's still a very nice set but other sets do tend to outshine it although Empathy is still good, especially if you have two on the same team.

EDIT: Ok, I did the math and all I can say is WOW! Assume we have two Defender Empaths who have Fortitude, the Auras, Adrenalin Boost and Hasten all ED capped for Recharge (and Defense for Fortitude). If they cast Adrenalin Boost on each other then they get almost perma-hasten and can permanently AB each other. This allows them to keep at least one set of auras up constantly and they can each keep 7 instances of fortitude going (i.e. they each get ti one and their teammates get two). This means that everyone else on the team has soft-capped defenses, a 61.5% damage boost, a 37.5% To hit boost and a huge regen/recovery boost. The Empaths themselves don't have as much damage and defense but they have even more regen/recovery and enough recharge to keep the blasts flying.

Although if you're on a trial you can't use broadcast and send tells. You're best bet is to set your flag and for your comment say something like "Trial Account, cannot respond to tells"

Indeed, Empathy isn't the best buff set out there, but it is far from useless. It just has a poor rep due to people who play it poorly.

While this is kinda true (especially in games like WoW where there are gold sinks that offer things players actually want), the primary purpose of any currency sink is to remove currency from the economy and therefore maintain it's value. In CoH Inf has no inherent value, you can use it to buy SOs and it's needed for crafting IOs but those represent a very small portion of the things people want to buy. If you want to acquire set IOs or HOs the only way you can exchange Inf for them is to buy them from another player. Now consider that other player, what does he need the Inf for? Sure, he might use some of it to buy SOs or common IOs but the chances are that he is going to turn around and use it to buy a Set IO or an HO from a third player. Essentially Inf is only exchangeable for set IOs and HOs because the majority of the player base has decided that it is so meaning that players feel confident that if they sell something for Inf they can use that Inf to buy a different item that is of greater value to them.

Now what would happen if there were no Inf sinks in the game (in particular the transaction fee for the auction house since that is the primary one)? People would keep killing NPCs and so Inf would keep entering the economy. BUT very little Inf would leave circulation, obviously some would due to the remaining sinks or players quitting but in general it would keep on piling up. however, the rate at which players were generating usful items (set IOs and HOs) would remain the same. This would cause inflationary pressure since there is more Inf available and the same number of items to purchase with it. Eventually Inf would become useless as a medium of exchange between players simply because there was so much of it available that trying to use it to trade is pointless.

Yuo might want to consider the vidiotmaps map pack. It marks all of the paths in perez on your in game map.
http://www.vidiotmaps.com/downloads.php

I find a single Accuracy enhancement is sufficient for most of the pwoers. Full Auto can probably get away with none although I recommend at least one since missing with it sucks.

The thing is, Flash Arrow is a pretty weak debuff for a Defender since they have a lot fo good debuffs. Conversely for a Blaster it's quite a nice debuffs since Blasters aren't exactly overflowing with AoE debuffs .

Yeah, that's pretty much it for ignite. You can scare melee guys or web someone and use it on them. That's why people seem to either love it or hate it.

Fair enough. It does look very cool, I'll grant you that.

Well, one thing to remember is that the timer stops when you log off, so if you'd logged off the timer would've remained at the same time until you next logged on.

Intellectually I know that it's pointless, emotionally I just have a hard time seeing ignorance without trying to educate it.

To follow up on this there is also a global channel (called CoX) if you want to hang out with people who play CoH without joining Paragon Fleet.

On a team you are correct, it's a not particuarly better or worse than any other controller. Solo however it is a poor combination, Other Primary/Empathy will get more use out of Empathy's single target Buffs since they can use them on their pets while in general Mind Control/Other Secondary will get more secondary powers that are useful to the soloing Mind Controller.

My mistake, IOs are resold at the crafting (i.e. vendor) price I assumed HOs were the same. In any case the point still stands. Reselling them at the actual market rpice would be worse for the economy than allowing the player to keep every enhancement. Keeping all enhancements is a deflationary pressure that makes low value IOs vendor trash and selling them at market price is horribly inflationary.

The devs have specifically linked Dual pistols and Demon Summoning with Going Rogue so I will be VERY surprised if they bundle them in with I17.

No, it redeemed them at VENDOR value which is also what IOs and HOs are redeemed at. Obviously for IOs and HOS vendor value is significantly lower than market value but personally I think that's a good thing. Allowing them to be sold at the current market value would add an additional inflationary pressure to inf and it already seems to be rather inflationary.

I think it comes down to player perceptions. The majority of controllers can solo reasonably well, their damage isn't as high as a blaster or scrapper but they make up for it with controls. So if you say I want a controller with powerset X, which other set should I use with it? People will tend to look at it from a solo viewpoint first and a group viewpoint second. In a group Mind/empathy is a fine combination but it's a poor solo'er and people tend to judge controllers that way. Additionally people tend to give the Controller's secondary almost as much weight as it's primary when considering the character, this is because all of the secondaries work differently.

Conversely for Defenders soloing ability is defined a lot more by the Primary than the Secondary. Additionally when judging Defenders people tend to gloss over the exact secondary being used, this is justified since even though all of the sets are different they all focus on damage, the only difference is exactly how much damage they do and whether their secondary effects boost damage or survivability. Because of this if someone says that they are making an Empathy Defender there is a built in assumption that they already know the Defender will be at best a mediocre soloer. If they wanted a Defender who solo'd well they'd pick a different primary.

There is another possible solution which is to make very hard content designed for teams. IOs have a much lower impact on teams since you have teammates shoring up your weaknesses. For example it doesn't matter how much defense my Blaster has is there's a FF defender giving everyone 45%. Obviously a team of well IO'd characters is better than an SO'd team, but the difference is significantly smaller than between soloing characters. And of course multi-team content blows this even further away, Hamidon Raids are a good example of that.

Not a lot, the bonuses they give are very small and jump speed matters a lot more than run speed. As I said above, I've entered geysers with Super Jump and Super Speed turned on with no problems.