Ahmon

"Neutral" is a much broader category than "heroic" or "villainous," though it can take more creativity. Since you said you wanted to avoid the alien threat situation, how about a few of the following?

For low-level players, a science team goes out of contact. Villains and heroes are hired to bring an agent to their last location. As the arc develops, a small-time mastermind takes personal enmity to the task force.

For mid-level players, a religious figure calls for a meeting between two enemies for a peaceful exchange of some kind. When the meeting location is reached, however, the villain ambushes the figure and his escort. There's some very specific dialogue I could think of here, but I won't get that detailed. However, as the arc progresses the task force learns that the figure is the organizer and they take him down based on their own motivations (probably leaning towards revenge or justice).

I won't really get into high-level arcs, as there are way too many ideas. Of course, these two could be made to fit just about any range. Really, you could do just about anything. It is a simulator, after all, and what villains call villainy could be construed as research for a hero. Likewise, a villain might get a kick out of rescuing holo civvies after firebombing much of Paragon City in the "real world."

To me, the Tanker should flex from defense to offense more as a fight progresses. The easiest way to do this in the CoH system is to have an inherent aura power for tanks that increases damage done based on how few enemies are within a short range. For example, if each stack of an inherent buff added 5% damage, and use the formula:

n = 20 / e

...where n is the number of stacks and e is the number of enemies within 40 feet (if there are any in range), you would wind up with a 120% damage buff when there's just one enemy in range and a 10% damage buff when there's 10 enemies in range.

This may encourage players to try and separate mobs more, but I think that the threat vs. damage consideration would make tanking more interesting at best and more damaging against the last few opponents standing at worst. The ultimate goal, of course, is to make the tank feel more powerful as a hitter while preserving his protection/threat role. It does borrow from Fury to an extent, but I think it's sufficiently unique in that it would "reset" after every fight and keep the tank at fairly mediocre damage until the "damage dealers" knock off the minions and other distractions. It would definitely make the tank feel like a force while soloing, so that if teams aren't available, he wouldn't feel terrible about running some arcs. Just an idea, of course, dependent on the will of the developers to see it as a problem.

Since no one at all answered, I'll put in something.

Don't take Ice if it's not part of the concept. Ice isn't the ST damage you seem to want. SM, on the other hand, has damned good ST damage and still has some soft controls, too. Alternatively, take Fire. It has zero soft control to add, but the idea that Granite could use them seems dubious at best anyways. Fire has good damage and plenty of AoE for team aggro.

I know geeks get a bad rap for having poor social skills, but for ****'s sake how do you go from:

Do you happen to know the reason why this issue keeps occurring?

...to having your account suspended? The most obvious assumption one could make is that you were combative initially and pressed the GM's buttons for no reason. It's hard to assume that a GM would be the one who tried to bait you unless you were looking to take umbrage.

~6% from Weave
~2% from CJ
3.75% from Phalanx Fighting
~16% from Deflection/Battle Agility

Comes out to a little less than 28% before IO sets.

Looks pretty jaw-dropping in the damage department. To nitpick, Rain of Fire will interfere with your attack chain.

On the other hand, it looks like a pushover to kill. Would not want to play this build despite the amazing damage.

The Patron Power Pools are mostly filler, I find. Aside from Gloom, which is ridiculously powerful as a single-target attack, most patron powers are pretty limited in certain ways. As a good rule of thumb, Mu offers good fleshing of your AoE potential and Soul offers good single-target damage and a decent AoE. Personally, I pick between all four based on the character's concept. Taking none is a perfectly valid option, though the sets are very attractive now.

Working on defense is a good idea. Generally, you want to have layered defenses in this game. For example, defense backed up by a self-heal. Willpower, when it goes for defense, becomes quite scary. Defense backed up by resistances backed up by regeneration backed up by a self-heal if you take Aid Self and get a high enough defense score to use it. It's a good idea for a long-term character, and you'll want to use IO sets to work on it. If you don't really like the character, though, don't bother going through all this. It may become more powerful, but you probably won't like it much more.

Generally, you want to look first at which enhancement values the set will give and only then at which set bonuses it gives. However, you may find powers you don't particularly need to slot well so you go for set bonuses first and foremost. It's an art more than a science, and CoHPlanner.com has a semi-updated tool for you to work with. Some power values are wrong, but at least it gives the set bonuses and enhancement values pretty accurately.

Better to just make it 1 merit plus a set amount of Inf. to buy a rare. For example, if you set Pagean Soil to 500,000 and a merit at the vendor, you could either buy one at the going rate (800,000 to 1,000,000 right now) or knuckle up and run a 15-minute arc to get it for 500,000. Less salvage flipping at least, and presumably more stability between recipe and enhancement price, reducing another kind of flipping.

Obviously Hurl Boulder would be in. However, just imagine the tier 9!

Hurl Car
Lift a light truck or vehicle off the ground, then hurl it at an enemy, smashing him and all enemies around him. This attack causes extreme damage and can knock most enemies back.

Yep. As far as I know, few sources of defense won't stack.

At first the Hellions weren't too excited about the First Annual Perez Park Marathon. However, when organizer Fenrir the Bold accidentally let slip that a starter pistol would be used, they really got into the spirit of it!

I don't think it's an issue in Triage Beacon since the unenhanced cooldown is the same as the duration of the proc.

Just gotta use the search feature for now. The links are the only thing that's broken as far as I can tell. The actual guides are still there and indexed by the forum search.