Adeon Hawkwood

Because that solves the opposite problem. The issue isn't people without the current slots running the new trials it's people using the OLD trials to fill the new slots. When the trials were first released they were somewhat tricky however now we've got them on farm mode. If the new-slot trials give the same rewards as Lambda/BAF/Keyes but are designed to only be doable by people with the current crop of slots then they will likely end up ignored in favor of farming BAF/Lambda/Keyes to open up all abilities. A new currency avoids that by limiting how far you can progress through particular content types. So currently you can progress up to Alpha slot by doing TFs and up to Destiny/Lore by doing the current crop of trials. Progression up to Omega will presumably be via a new tier of content rather than through repeating current content.

as a side note I would actually quite like it if the devs figured out a way to do a "gear reset" so that the "up to Omega" set of trials provide a similar level of challenge both to people with all of the current slots and people with no Incarnate slots at all allowing people who haven't done the current trials to run the "up to Omega" ones on almost equal footing with people who have all T4s (for example they could have those trials disable your alpha level shift and incarnate shifts so everyone is facing +4s again).

Well Fiery Assault is the best Ranged secondary. It's got three ranged blasts with better than average damage plus a heavy cone. While it has melee range powers none of them are hugely critical.

Now if you won't play Fire it's hard to say. Thorns is probably your next best bet. You aren't exactly playing to it's strengths at range but it does at least have three ranged blasts and a reasonably heavy ranged cone. It's also got some extra control to help you stay at range.

Well lets see.

Endurance/Range is a solid choice for any Blaster with cones who also wants to run a number of toggles (i.e. Leadership, Fighting, Epic Shield etc.). Blaster toggles mostly come from power pools and have a correspondingly high end cost.

Recharge/Stun or Recharge/Stun/Slow allows a lot of Blaster combos to get higher recharge while maximizing the potential of some of their secondary abilities (which they often lack the slots for). Most Blasters have access to a stun of some type and slows are present in several sets.

Damage/Immobilize allows a Blaster to make better use of the immobilize from their secondary and also helps if they opt to pick up an AoE immobilize from their Epic Pool.

Oh I've got that as well, and the miracle unique, and a bunch of recovery set bonuses. My Blaster still runs hot enough to need Cardiac. Now if Cardiac didn't exist I'd shift things around and add more end reduction (or drop some toggles) so he could run without it but that would come at the cost of damage and/or defense.

The Alpha slot is useful to Blasters because by building around it they can get more of other things they want. If you look at the Alpha slot in isolation then it doesn't do a whole lot for Blasters, it's when you start figuring how you can optimize your build around it that you start seeing opportunities.

A T4 Alpha provides 15% ED-affected enhancement and 30% ED-free enhancement. It's important to consider both aspects when designing a build. I have several characters who use the Musculature Alpha boost. With them I always look for powers where I can usefully drop their damage enhancement to 85%-90%, when you factor in the Alpha Boost those powers have pretty much the same enhancement as if I'd gone for 100% enhancement and the half a slot savings allows me to enhance other aspects of my build.

See, people assume that was the intent of the currency switch but I do not buy it. If that was their goal then the devs screwed up by not putting a timer on the trial rewards. Now since the TF components all had a reward timer I really doubt they just happened to forget to put the trial ones on a timer.

Instead I'm pretty sure the purpose of the currency shift was to control what content could be used to progress through the new slots. The idea with the incarnate system is that you need to do Incarnate trials to progress, the Alpha slot serves as a bridge linking the old content to the new. In some ways I think introducing Incarnate Shards at all was a mistake. The purpose was to help ease people into the system by allowing them to start it through familiar content but it ended up giving people a false idea as to how the system would work.

But yes, I'm am sure the next round of slots will have a new currency. Not because the devs are trying to limit the speed we get it at but because they will want to stop us from progressing through the next slots by repeatedly running BAF/Lambda/Keyes (which I think we can run in our sleep by now). Instead the next slots will presumably feature a new round of trials which assume you already have your J/L/I/D abilities.

It would be nice (as Shubbie suggested) if when they implemented this change they depreciated either Threads or Shards so that there is only one currency needed to
'gear up" for the higher trials but I'm not going to hold my breath for that.

I'd disagree. Cardiac Alpha allows my AR/Dev to run all 7 toggles at once with no end issues and the +range makes my cones a lot better.

I'm not sure. Personally I think Demons/Sonic and Demons/Thermal are going to be noticeably different creatures. With Demons/Thermal the MM himself is VERY squishy, I have to use my pets to take aggro because if I get any significant aggro (such as from an ambush) bodyguard mode causes my pet's health to drop at an alarming rate (often faster than I can kill them). Additionally having no defense means that I'm extremely vulnerable to mezzes. Switching to Sonic Resonance adds a decent chunk of resistance and mez protection to the MM making Tankerminding a lot more practical.

Additionally Sonic has more reliable -resistances than Thermal which should mean more damage. I don't think Demons/Sonic is going to approach the OP-ness of Bots/Traps but I think it does offer some potential opportunities that Demons/Thermal does not.

It's the general problem with the "pure healer" type build. There aren't enough useful non-combat power pool powers to fill a build so sooner or later you have to take something useless to fill the build.

A character has 24 power choices:
9 Empathy
4 Leadership
Hasten
Recall Friend
Travel Power (needs to be SS or Teleport due to power pool limits)
Stealth and Grant Invisibility (stretching the definition of useful there)
Tier 1 Blast

Works out to 19 powers meaning you still need to spend 5 more. I guess you could take PBU, Temp Invulnerability and Force of Nature but that is REALLY stretching the definition of useful (PBU isn't that useful for an Empath since Fort has a longish recharge and you don't need resistance if you aren't taking damage)

Except F2P accounts can buy points themselves anyway. If one person own two accounts they can presumably use their credit card to buy points for either account. I figure it's a given that a decent portion of people will probably have a second account for power leveling but it's probably not the end of the world if they do. After all there are plenty of ways to power level now, a second account just simplifies it.

Ok, I found the old thread on the subject:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=248962

Someone in the thread did some testing and found that for human henchmen Detonator did the same amount of damage regardless of the pet used (although he tested against a very low level minions so it could have been lost in the noise). Conversely my testing using Robots showed that for them at least Detonator damage dropped a LOT when used on low tier pets since they apparently got lower base damage (after accounting for the effects of the purple patch and enhancements). the human henchmen also seemed to get a higher base damage than non-human (but again see my concern regarding the method used to test human henchmen).

Yeah, but the same is true of ANY support power set. You can't fully replace the -resistance and -regen from Rad, the -slow and knockback of Storm, the -to hit and control of Dark or the resistances of Sonic to name a few. I would say that Forcefield is the only set that is truly marginalized by IOs and Incarnate Powers (it isn't useless by any means but it is the set that has the least to offer a team composed of high-end IO/Incarnate characters)

Yes, Empathy has nice buffs that aren't completely replaced by anything else but the same is true of every support power set, Empathy isn't anything special. It's also worth considering the value of the things it does offer compared to other powersets. You mention Regen and Recovery but how useful are those really? At high levels most people build their characters to be self-sufficient in terms of Endurance management and as such in the few situations where they need extra help (due to enemy debuffs) a lesser recovery power (such as from Kinetics or Radiation) is often sufficient, it's rare for a high level character to truly need the level of recovery provided by Empathy. The extra regeneration is more generically useful but even there outside of a Hamidon Raid it is simply one method amongst many of keeping green bars topped up. The benefits Empathy provides, while nice, are not irreplaceable.

Don't get me wrong, I like Empathy, I think it's a solid support set, I just get annoyed by people who try to elevate it on a pedestal above other support sets (I also dislike the opposite, people who dismiss it as useless).

Actually, I'm betting it's a mix. Allowing subscribers to buy their way up the tree is another method of encouraging them to spend money beyond the basic $15/month subscription. Someone could easily start out buying a few thousand points for the extra PRTs but that then serves as a gateway drug encouraging to spend even more in the store.

Additionally, according to Zwillinger PRTs are awarded up front for subscription time so I bet a few people will switch to yearly subs in order to get a lot of PRTs early which again is a large benefit to Paragon Studios.

I agree with this. Most problems caused by gender are because people on both sides of the problem choose to make an issue out of gender. Some people in this game are males, some are females which one a person is only matters if you allow it to matter.

If someone is harassing you about anything the correct response is to petition them and then put them on ignore doing anything else will either muddy the waters when the GM reviews the petition or, worse, encourage further harassment.

I'm afraid I don't remember. If you do some searches int he MM forum you might be able to find the older threads on the topic.

That matches my (admittedly somewhat shaky) memory of physics. Assuming a perfect restraint and no friction the Y component of the force would be canceled by an opposing force meaning that the net force on the object would be the X-component of the applied force.

It's useful, but I still think it's less useful than other sets.

I disagree. The problem is that the one place where green numbers are really needed is Keyes and the nature of the trial invalidates a lot of Empathy's advantages over other sets. Since the Empath himself is constantly taking damage it's had to safely use Absorb Pain. This means you fall back on HA and HO which are good, but not significantly better than other sets. Thermal has direct clones of them, Kin and Dark lack a single target heal but have a stronger AoE heals which are actually more useful on large teams.

The place Empathy shines over other sets is when only a single character is taking damage, a situation which rarely occurs on the trials.

I don't disagree with this, in fact I think Regen Aura is the primary power of a high level Empath.

Yes, they are wonderful boosts. However, on a large team the ability to make one member a killing machine is a lot less useful than giving smaller boosts to lots of members. A Force Field or Cold Domination character can provide a similar defense boost to 23 people. Similarly Radiation Emission can buff the damage of all 24 league members (to a smaller degree, but a much larger boost overall). Most leagues tend to have a couple of people with Tactics with alleviates the need for the to hit buff.

That isn't specific to Empathy though. Most Defender's I've met have at least a few Leadership buffs (and with Inherent Stamina a lot of other ATs are taking them as well). Empathy doesn't really offer any advantages over other sets and in some ways is worse since it has a larger number of critical powers and high endurance usage.

I agree with this. As I said before, it's a solid middle of the road set, it isn't the strongest set around but it also doesn't have any major weaknesses and it works about the same in all situations (the closest it has to a weakness is widespread AoE damage but it can handle that reasonably well). I'd never turn one away but then I never turn away ANY support character. I love them all.

Ah, but what about the people in the middle? I like to look at other player's power selections simply so I know what powers are floating around on the team.

I would actually rate Assault Rifle ahead of DP in terms of a good AoE combo with Traps. Yes, it lacks obvious synergy but it makes up for it in other ways.

The primary advantage of DP over AR is the PGT + HoB combo which I will admit is more convenient than the PGT + FA combo but FA has half the recharge which I find largely makes up for it.. M30 Grenade and Buckshot work the same as Bullet Rain and Empty Clips but have much faster cast times. Flamethrower is a cone, but it's got a wider arc than a lot of Blast set cones which makes is surprisingly easy to use up close.

Additionally Ignite works well with Traps since Web Grenade provides an easy immobilize.