Adeon Hawkwood

I never said he did, the quote is more a general observation on why defenders need attacks.

You're mixing personal goals with team goals. Yes, the goal of any individual player is to have fun. However, the goal of the team is to complete the mission. How does the team complete the mission? Damage. Period. Anything else is just aiding int he application of damage.

All characters in the game have two powersets. I believe it is a reasonable expectation that a player will utilize both of their powersets. My view of a Defender who doesn't blast is the same as my view of a Scrapper who skips their defenses or a Corruptor who skips their buffs/debuffs. In either case you're playing half a character (Blasters are a bit of an exception, since their powersets are basically both Damage they are almost a one powerset character anyway, I still tend to feel you should select a Manipulation set that you will want to use).

Actually the Assault thing was an observation not an assumption. Most Defenders I see in game seem to take at least 1 leadership toggle and Assault seems to be the most popular. Conversely Maneuvers is the most popular Leadership toggle for melee ATs.

You are correct, there are lots of things you can do to help a team. However, at the end of the day teams need two things:
1. Damage
2. Enough protection to deal that damage before they die

The thing is number 2 has a practical limit. Once you reach a certain point adding more mitigation doesn't really accomplish much. Conversely adding damage means your team is killing stuff faster which in turn means they need less mitigation.

Yes, Tactics is useful but it's heavily subject to diminishing returns. Even against +4s you only need 2 Tactics toggles spread across the entire team (and that assumes most people have only a single accuracy SO). Against normal difficulty foes even a single tactics toggle is frequently overkill.

I'll also add it's perfectly feasible to build a Defender who has Leadership and attacks. My Traps/AR Defender runs all three leadership toggles and has seven AR attacks.

Ah, but how often ARE you busy doing that? I run a Demons/Thermal Mastermind (excuse the tangent, it is relevant). Meaning that most of my powers are focused around healing and buffing plus I have to control my pets (demons need a good chunk of micromanagement). Yet despite all of that I still find myself sitting around waiting for my attacks to recharge (I have 3 currently and plan to take a fourth in a few levels).

My opinion is no (in fact I don't even have Trip Mine in my build) but YMMV. The problem is that Trip Mine takes five seconds to cast and there's a good chance a lot of the spawn will be dead or running by then. Now, on the other hand Hail of Bullets has a longer recharge than Full Auto and Dual Pistols has lighter secondary AoEs than Assault Rifle so you might find it worth using Trip Mine on spawns where HoB is not yet recharged. I'd still lean towards the Bullet Rain + Empty Clips which has a similar cast time, larger area and isn't interruptable but the damage from Trip Mine is slightly higher.

My general strategy with my Traps/AR is as follows:
1. Unless the Tank beat me to the spawn pop seekers to draw aggro
2. Jump into spawn and drop Poison Gas Trap and/or stand at range and drop an Acid Mortar (depending on team composition and speed)
3. Jump out of Spawn and open up with Full Auto & Flamethrower

I will on occasion drop Caltrops to keep enemies at bay if the team is mostly ranged. The same basic strategy should work for you (except you don't need to jump out to use Hail of Bullets), I'd also say go for Fire Ammo (unless the enemy resists it), if a team is steamrolling they don't really need more mitigation.

Now I agree with the general sentiment, on a very fast moving team Traps does not provide a whole lot of benefit outside of FFG but the same is true for all of the debuff focused sets=, when a team is moving fast it is mostly the buffs that carry the load. This isn't really the end of the world, sure it can be a bit depressing but just remember, the AV fight is where you will shine.

Well, technically even if you start past Tier 7 you'll need to spend a point on them, it's just that it will (presumably) get spent for you.

My guess is yes you will. From what the devs have said there is no way to "skip" a reward, you have to get all rewards in one tier to open the next. To put it another way, the GR Enhancements have been added to the system to "fill in" the holes in the current rewards. Several of the current veteran rewards (45 and 69) lack any bonus beyond the regular repeating respec rewards. As such they a few new bonuses (Seismic Path and the GR Enhancements) to fill out the tree. Now supposing instead of switching to the Paragon Rewards they had kept the Veteran Rewards but added the GR Enhancements to the 69 month reward, would you expect to be able to skip that level and go straight to 72 months?

Yay!

There are two things to keep in mind, the first is that dying is not a huge deal in CoH. Debt is at most a minor inconvenience. Yes, it's better if people don't die but if it happens you shrug and move on.

The other side of it is your level. You're level 26 and are, presumably, teaming with people of similar levels. At level 26 healing is still pretty useful, people do have SOs (which help a lot) but still tend to be somewhat short on slots. As characters get into the early 30s they start getting a lot more slots which really makes a difference. Extra recharge and endurance slotting helps with endurance issues, melee characters can start really shoring up their defenses, damage goes up accross the board (mostly due to having slots for recharge) and support characters start having the slots to really maximize their powers. As you get into this range you'll find that the team needs less and less healing (assuming sensible use of Fortitude) which means you have more time to blast anyway. Yes, you will occasionally need to just sit and spam heals but those times will be the exception and not the rule.

If you enjoy Empathy then I'd say keep playing it. Unfortunately the Defenders board does have a bit of an anti-Empathy stance (largely due to poor Empaths giving Defenders as a whole a bad name) but it isn't as bad as they say. Empathy is not the best set end game but it's also not a bad set. It has what are possibly the most powerful buffs in the game and having a bit of healing along never hurts.

It gets a bit blurry in Incarnate content. On the one hand Destiny powers mean that everyone starts picking up some buffing capability and the large team sizes decrease the usefulness of single target buffs compared to AoE buffs. On the other hand, things like the Keyes Reactor Trial increase the value of healing abilities; they aren't essential, despite what some people will tell you, but having a few people with AoE heals around does make Keyes run smoother.

Overall I would say that even in end game content Empathy is a solid middle-of-the-pack support set.

Because farming up 30 Alignment Merits or 60 Empyrean Merits is (for me at least) a lot more effort than making 2.5 billion through the market.

Given that character slots are not listed in the comparison I suspect they are indeed not a part of the Paragon Rewards Program.

That means the real question is is this something worth quitting over? I'm inclined to say no. True, we are no longer getting free character slots through veteran rewards however are are getting a monthly stipend to spend in the store. Effectively the free slots have been shifted from the rewards system to the stipend. Is that better or worse? Well, it depends how you look at it.

According to Zombie Man's price guide 5 character slots will be 1600 points under the new system. Presumably smaller quantities will follow a similar pricing scheme to the current one giving 480/800/1600 for 1/2/5. So what that means is that a person who really wants new slots can acquire 2 every 2 months (or 5 every 4) without spending a dime, in practical terms acquiring slots faster than under the current veteran rewards program and without spending any money.

The essence of Freedom is choice and the monthly stipend is a large part of that. It allows you to customize what you get for your subscription dollars by purchasing upgrades that are important to you and ignoring whatever you don't want.

Pre-selected would imply that it does indeed use our PRTs.

I disagree, the quote I like (from another similar thread on the topis) is:
"If you can't take out a couple of minions without help you aren't a support character, you're a character that needs support"

At the end of the day what really matters is damage, everything else is just making that damage slightly better. Consider it this way, a Defender deals half the damage of a Blaster. A good Defender can use their support powers and attack. That means if you aren't attacking you should be increasing the team's damage output by half a Blaster's damage more than the attacking and buffing Defender. Pool powers just do not do that. The only pool power that provides a damage boost is Assault and most Defenders take that anyway.

If you don't blast you are short-changing your team and making them work harder to compensate for you. That's my definition of a gimped character. I don't care which Blast set you choose (I am personally partial to Assault Rifle) but whichever you pick, please USE it.

I disagree with both of these. Badges aren't critical but they do give some useful information (for example I look for the 42 month vet badge to see if they have ATT). Similarly checking a character's powers is useful partly to find out what powersets a character has and other things like what utility powers they have. For example, in the case of Radiation Emission it's a generally valid assumption that they will have Lingering Radiation (assuming they are high enough level) but they may or may not have Mutation, that sort of information is nice to know so when I faceplant I know if they are going to rez me or not.

Your choice of secondary is not critical, some are better than others but the only one I'd really advise against on an Empath is Dual Pistols (Empaths tend to spend a lot of time alternating between attacking and Empathy and DP has a very long redraw time).

As others have noted Ice Blast is generally rated as one of the top Blast sets for Defenders in part because Ice Storm is a pseudo-pet that was never re-scaled for Defenders so it does Blaster level damage. Additionally Ice Blast provides good control (two holds and several AoE slows) and has a nuke that, as with Ice Storm, deals Blaster level damage.

So no, you aren't gimping yourself with Ice unless you don't take the attacks.

Well you only should be going that route if you specifically want an AE team. If you're happy doing non-AE content then it's easy enough to form a team for that instead.

Yes, all subscribers will have access ot it. If they are planning to get free accounts then they will still need to buy it.

As je_saist said the best option is to make all of the character either Rogues (if they want to be villains) or vigilantes (if they want to be heroes). That way they can all come to the same zone and do missions together. There are two problems with that, however. First SGs are side specific so while a villain can be a member of a hero SG (by joining as a hero and then switching sides) they don't get any of the benefits of belonging to the SG (no base access, can't enter supergroup mode) which kinda limits the point.

The other downside is that they cannot switch to Rogue/Vigilante alignments until they reach level 20. My recommendation there would be to have them all start in Pretoria, that way they can play whatever At they want and all play together until level 20. At that point they will need to select an alignment (hero or villain) which will split them up for a minimum of two days until they run the tip missions to change to Rogue/Vigilante.

No I'm not. There is a huge difference between powers that are only available to a specific AT (and one that has fixed powersets as well) and permanently grant extra powers and a power that would, by nature, be a temporary power.

Take a look at the Kheld powers in RedTomax, notice how they all have extra tags in the "Modes Disallowed" portion of the power box? In order to use a similar system for a temp powers the devs would need to add an extra tag to EVERY SINGLE POWER available to players to disallow it in "super mecha mode". That's a significant amount of effort (not to mention any coding needed to support it) just for a single mission.

Next, think about how the power would actually work in game. When you enter the mission you get granted a temporary auto-power "Super Mega Mech". You now look like a mech and all of your powers are greyed out. You also get a bunch of other temporary powers "Mech Attack 1", "Mech Attack 2" etc. But they aren't on your trays. You've got to dig through your temporary powers list and find them. Then when the mission is over you need to reset your trays. Consider how much trouble people had with the temp powers in Lambda when it was new, does this really sound like a good idea?

See, this is where the Standard Code Rant applies. Most of this stuff can be done in game, it is possible to replace the character with an NPC model (Stone Armor and Halloween costumes), non-targetable but attackable objects are theoretically possible (PBAoEs affect untargetable enemies so a combination of a PBAoE aura and placate effects could probably simulate it).

The BIG, major, humungous, issue is how to give you access to the vehicle's attacks. The above examples of costume changes all either require custom animations or turn off all powers. So to make a vehicle work it would need to turn off all existing powers (to avoid animation issues) and then, somehow, give you access to a new set of powers. Anyway you look at it that's a significant change from anything that has come before which almost certainly means a large amount of coding. Add in the animation and art work needed to make it look good and it's almost certainly a huge amount of work for minimal benefit.