Balanced

Personally, I refuse to use any of the ugly workarounds for character names--no x[Name]x, no extraneous punctuation, no all-caps or spacing games (unless they're appropriate to the character for other reasons). You can still come up with decent names, you just have to approach it from a different angle sometimes.

For example, I have a blind character, too--my TA/A defender. I named him "Bluff", as in "Blind Man's Bluff", and tied it into his backstory. The name is connected with his defining characteristic without being a synonym for it, and it's a decent name that was available on Virtue.

I also recently started a Magic Origin rad defender on Freedom. I was quite surprised that the name "Hex Ray" wasn't taken, and it's a perfectly punny name for the character.

I get frustrated with naming sometimes, too--times when my first choice or two are taken--but I've never resorted to a thesaurus to name a character. French, German, and Latin dictionaries, maybe, but never a thesaurus.

Most of my characters on any given server would know each other to some extent, mostly because they're all in the same SG. There are a few cases that have connections beyond that, though:

Blightfall, a knight from Brittanic Earth, is that world's version of Redemption Jack, a reformed villain from Earth Prime. Both of them find this disturbing, for different reasons, and the more things they find they have in common, the more creeped-out they get.

All of my characters on Victory--in fact, the whole SG there--are crew and/or passengers from the same marooned, time-traveling airship, so they have an established web of relationships with each other.

*applauds*
Well done, and quickly, too! Did you enjoy playing tourist?

There's actually a way to get to the Death St...er, Storm Palace without flying, but it's substantially slower and more difficult, even at high levels--the gravity geysers make a trail around the long arc of islands that will get you there, as long as you don't misstep or get eaten by some of the most annoying mobs in the game. Flying is quicker, though.

The Storm Palace is where my empath used to go to hunt. He held the top of the Nemesis boards for storm elementals for months.

Classifying your character by theme and trying to stay within that theme is fine, and has the potential to be a lot of fun. I wouldn't want the theme to become a straightjacket, however; comics are full of heroes taking on threats that are outside their weight-class, and villains with goals too grandiose for their actual powers--that's part of the fun. To borrow an argument from Batman, "Those monsters you don't fight? They tend to step on little guys." In the end, though, it's up to the individual player--if you don't want your character getting dragged into something bigger, that's your choice.

I rather like the idea of categorizing AE arcs this way, since you can actually follow the theme all the way through a character's career that way--if you avoid all the really earth-shaking stuff in the main high-level content, you're going to end up short on stuff to do, and if you're looking for cosmic threats at low levels, you're going to come up empty. I'm not sure how you'd handle the categorization of that much stuff, though. The easiest way would be to have a set of threads in the Player Guides section, one for each category, and ask people to post arc ID and title of AE arcs that fit the category. Then you'd periodically update the OP with a list of the arcs by level. It would likely be very messy, though.

For the dev-created arcs, on the other hand, it could be as simple as updating the wiki entry for each arc to include a list of categories the arc fits. Still time-consuming, but not the bottomless pit that an AE classification project would be.

While the idea as presented is arguably better than what we've got--as, indeed, most ideas would be--I can't say that I'm thrilled with it. As others have pointed out, the sheer variety of primaries makes it very uneven. It leaves Rad out in the cold, for example. Dark wouldn't get much joy out of it, either. Force Fields would end up uselessly renewing bubbles before their duration ends to keep the buff. The idea of making the single-target powers function (and function differently) without a target is probably impossible, and certainly inelegant.

As is my usual practice in these threads, I am instead going to toss a random idea into the pot just to watch it bubble:

The new Vigilance has a bar similar to Fury or Domination; it builds up whenever the defender activates any single-target power (primary, secondary, or pool). The represents the defender vigilantly watching friend and foe alike, and determining the best response on the fly. The defender radiates an aura similar to Supremacy or a Leadership aura, which provides an assortment of buffs to the defender and all allies--thematically appropriate buffs for it would be ToHit, Defense, and Perception. The magnitude of the buffs would be based on the state of the Vigilance bar.

This would benefit defenders on or off teams, be readily usable regardless of primary, and encourage defenders to take highly active roles on teams (whether actively buffing teammates or attacking enemies).

No, the FFG doesn't inherit the buff. Even if it did, it would only last the duration of PBU (12.5s), which wouldn't be very useful.

I find Absorb Pain completely dispensable. I've never needed it while supporting a tank against Recluse in the STF--or for anything else, really. In my experience, it's very rare to have someone die on me as a result of just not having enough healing; they die because they've wandered off, because I've been mezzed and am out of Break Frees (rare--I'm obsessive about keeping them in stock), because they've split up and two or more teammates need heals simultaneously, or because they took enough simultaneous hits to kill them before I could fire any power.

None of those scenarios can be fixed with Absorb Pain. They can, however, be ameliorated by sensible use of buffs, inspirations, aggro management, and team coordination. That's not to say AP is useless; if you have a power slot free, and nothing else you really want to put in it, go for it. You might even occasionally save someone with it. (Of course, you might also occasionally manage to kill yourself with it.) On the whole, though, I'd rather fill that slot with something a little more proactive (like a mez or--heaven forfend--a blast) and rely on Heal Other for my ranged healing.

I would guess that Praetoria's critical failure rate with native supers--90% of them disappear "overseas"--must be leaving them short on meta-power. If so, it's not wonder the DE have been able to run amok, and there's no telling what kind of imbalance that's introducing between them and the other nations on Praet-Earth. Since Tyrant has reason to know of the huge number of supers zipping around Paragon, he may have some notion of trying to "recruit" some of them. He may also have some "Justice Lords"-esque notion of conquering Prime for its own good, since we haven't managed to crush our villains for ourselves.

Regardless of his reasons, his current approach isn't working. Prime and Praetoria have been raiding back and forth for years now, but both sides have been concentrating heavily on the upper-echelon supers. As a result, neither side has been able to hold onto captives--they've been too powerful/clever/plot-armored to keep contained. He's going to expand his Prime operations by having Loyalists infiltrating or invading Prime; that's why they leave Praetoria for either Paragon City or the Rogue Isles at 20. The Resistance, of course, would want to send agents and advisors through to counter the Loyalists.

Empathy has sort of an odd learning curve, I think. It's not like Storm, which has a learning curve of "ThisSucksThisSucksThisSucksThisSucks...THIS ROCKS!" It's more like a series of plateaus, with a steep slope looming over them.

Basic healing is easy, and Empaths get praised for it early on, which I think leads far too many players to stop there, on the Aura Rocker plateau. On the edges of the plateau, you'll find a few more adventurous types playing Whack-A-Mole with health bars. The problem is, that sucks, and the suckage increases with level. They usually don't notice.

Aura buffs are also pretty easy to use, and they form the next plateau. This is where the Gatherers live. You can hear them calling out to their teams whenever the RAs recharge. This, of course, interrupts whatever the teams are doing, but at least they get some really nice buffs out of it.

Single-target buffs require a lot more work than auras. You have to pick targets, and renew the buffs often. It involves a lot more clicking, which distracts one from the game of Health-Bar Whack-A-Mole. This leads to the plateau where the Tank Polishers live. The Polishers choose a Tank and attach themselves, remora-like. This allows them to simplify their single-target buffing by only buffing the Tank (whether the Tank needs that buff or not), and they get to feed on the bits of xp the Tank drops (Tanks are messy eaters).

On the slopes above all the plateaus, you find the real Empaths. These defenders use their powers dynamically, firing auras on the fly when the natural flow of combat clumps the team for them, covering as many of the team as possible with single-target buffs based on an every-shifting set of efficiency and safety critera, spot-healing when bad luck or mistakes open holes in the team's defenses, and contributing with damage and control. Not all of them are equally skilled in these endeavors, but they have all abandoned the easy life on the plateaus for the sake of their teammates. They do not ask for praise for their "healz", nor do they demand special treatment. To make such a sacrifice, they might say, is simply the way of the Defender. Treat them with the respect due a fellow hero, and maybe they'll make you a god for a little while.