UberGuy

(1) Yes. Green mitos have mag 50 mez protection. Benumb will reduce this.
(2) It shouldn't. Most mez doesn't do anything to the towers, though I believe they can be caged. They don't regenerate, move, mez or attack. They don't use endurance.
(3) There's no such thing as damage debuff resistance, per-se. Damage resistance resists damage debuffs. If the red tower is giving LR damage resistance then it would also give him additional resistance to damage debuffs.

Another problem with being SK'd up is that if nearby healers aren't SK'd up, you end up with more HP, taking more damage, and getting less proportional benefit from their heals. In fact it makes the most sense to leave low level damage dealers at their native levels and SK up any healers in the area.

Of course, with SSK, this gets complicated. Only one person can be the "level anchor" for the whole team, and high-level characters can lose a lot of benefits if they are exemplared down to a lower level character. I know I would be unlikely accept being deleveld on my 50s to try and benefit lowbies on my team. This all interacts poorly with the requirement for a team to do 10% damage to get badge credit.

All ATs are useful in the current raid strats I'm familiar with.

Brutes are useful for either Hamidon aggro or yellow mito destruction/aggro. Brutes with +HP and/or +Regen are good choices for Hamidon aggro, whereas something with at least 12 points of KB protection and the ability to fly (even just with a jetpack) are good for yellow aggro/destruction. Leaping can be used instead of flight, but it hurts your DPS, and DPS on the mitos is important.

Stalkers and DPS-oriented SoAs also work for yellow destruction, but because yellow mito attacks ignore defense, SoAs generally need active EoEs to survive. I like /WP and /Regen Stalkers if I'm meleeing mitos but not on a Brute. If you bring a Stalker, the same issues with defense apply as for SoAs and for KB protection as for Brutes.

Corruptors of nearly all varieties are helpful. Those with ranged heals are helpful for aggro Brutes as well as for the yellow teams. Pain doms can grant the aggro Brute +regen, which is a primary means for that Brute to survive. Those with mezzes are helpful for the green team, especially if they can also debuff DR on the greens or buff the green team's recharge and/or damage. Fear protection is also very useful in the green team "cloud" of players due to chain lightning, so Shadow Fall is nice to have there. Anyone with a rez is obviously potentially helpful, depending on how the raid is going. It's very common for people on the aggro and yellow teams to go down even if everything is flowing smoothly. Howling Twilight can turn around a raid going bad. Kinetics can provide key endurance boosts/recovery to people being sapped by chain lightning, and of course also increase attack rate. Rad boosts recovery, damage and attack rate, and grant some resistance to end sapping.

Doms are very important on the green team, as their mezzes are the main way to get the green mito shields to drop. Their DPS potential is also important there, as you have to beat down greens fast once their shields drop. Fortunata branch Widows also can contribute decent holds/sec on this team, and generally are exposed to less raw damage than ones on the yellow teams.

MMs usually have the most hands-off roles, as they are frequently used to stream in their pets at blue mitos as a distraction. That said, Poison MMs are usually called into healer duty for the yellow teams, especially since they can grant stackable stun protection and resistance.

It's still not exponential. Your damage admittance is proportional to (1-2*defense). The decrease in the ratio of new over old admittances does accelerate the closer you get to 45% defense (where the toHit calculation's 5% floor halts it), but that acceleration isn't exponential. Exponential implies that your admittance decreases as some constant raised to the power of your defense (or perhaps (1-DEF)), and that's definitely not the case.

According to this page he is simply on a timer.

Indeed. Walk was a "spare time" kind of thing. Taking the time to make it transition properly with all the combat modes would have probably made it a "not while the game was still operating" kind of thing, at least based on things BaB has told us about how that has to be done.

I wouldn't pursue PvP here. When I came here, I had specific goals for play that revolved around the lack of PvP the game had. This was largely because I'd spent 5 years on competitive FPS ladders, often as a ranked group member, and I wanted a break from competitive play. Nowadays, if I want PvP, I'd do it in more stateless environments. That's just my preference.*

If I didn't actively dislike this game's PvP mechanics then I wouldn't necessarily avoid it. You see, I used to avoid PvP zones out of general disinterest. Since I16 I avoid them because I actively dislike how they work.

* When I play FPS PvP games, I like being able to change roles rapidly in response to changing tactical conditions. In most games that's just a general change of your weapons and/or gear. Here, it can mean a complete change of your active character. But generally I'm playing something because I want to play the character. My resolution of that conflict is just not to worry about PvP here - if I want to PvP, I do it in other games.

Let's not forget that a lot of the examples people are giving of how ridiculous the game was pre ED had very little to do with what ED changed. Fire Tankers were strong because nothing ran out of Burn patches. They were tough enough to pull it off because it was before both ED and the GDN. Regen scrappers were tanking Hamidon because of the way old IH worked as much as because they could six slot it.

Lots of other game mechanics have changed between now and ED. It's hard to look at any one thing that was once "overpowered" and claim that ED fixed it.

ED transformed one set of standard slotting templates into another. It wasn't until we got inventions that people really truly started varying their slotting significantly, because there are so many possible overall design goals. Before, you were just slotting your individual powers for some maximal function for that power. Inventions allow you to slot with a bigger picture in mind.

In what most of us consider normal play, no.

If you start pushing your survival to the limits, particularly when barraged by a large number of attacks or conducting a very long fight (such as soloing an AV/Pylon) you might.

On average, someone with 44.5% defense is suffering about 10% more damage/time than someone with 45%. If you're suffering very average low damage/time, then that probably doesn't matter. If you're pushing it to where you're actually suffering damage that could overcome your average regen (plus whatever else you might have), then it's possible that taking roughly 91% of that damage/time might mean the difference in victory or defeat.

If you're not pushing that kind of envelope, I wouldn't worry about the difference.

With the right IOs, characters are far, far more powerful than they ever thought about being in the pre-ED world. They don't deal as much raw damage per attack, since no one in their right mind would usually six slot attacks for damage, but they have much higher sustained DPS, due to higher recharge and far higher endurance recovery (plus slotting more recharge and end reduction in the same six slots). Moreover, you can do things with IOs you could never do with slotting SOs, such as adding defense, adding knockback protection, etc.

In general, yes, IOs replaced most of what was lost. It's not a one-for-one replacement, but it's a stronger place overall.

No, it was distinctly broken when I16 came out. The attempts to characterize that brokenness are why Archie created his drop parser. (I created one too, his is just a lot nicer. )

Pohsyb told us they found an uninitialized variable bug in the code that checked if a foe was at least green-con. That bug had always existed since Inventions were added, but had apparently only recently begun to affect drop rates on a large scale, presumably working "well enough" previously due to a quirk of fate, but finally changing noticeably for the worse with I16.