BellaStrega

This is explained easily enough:

Avatar Roku dies. Aang's born as the next Avatar. 12 years after Roku's death, and some time after Aang ran away and was frozen, Sozin takes out the Airbenders in order to kill the Avatar. He died 20 years afterward. He was not on his deathbed in A:tLA, so there is no plot hole here. I believe the physically oldest character in the series is King Bumi of Omashu, being as he was one of Aang's friends during his own childhood.

Fire Lord Azulon died at 95 years, and had two sons: Ozai and Iroh.

I meant the role that blasters were designed for in teams. I didn't mean high-end IO builds. I shouldn't have had to specify that I meant "blasters without defense" or anything else, because "glass cannon" is a design goal for the entire AT, and such was the context of the discussion in which I posted that. I am not able to predict how egregiously other people are going to misinterpret my words, so I am not going to try to preemptively correct them.

Further, I am curious how you could manage LGTF, especially the AV and EB fights, without dying once, without any defenses, and without any mez protection.

I said it's not a viable role, and I do not believe it is. It's the only role designed/intended to require support in CoH currently. This doesn't mean it's impossible to play a blaster solo or on teams and make any progress, but it does mean that blasters are dealing with imposed limitations that no other AT has to be designed around. There's a reason said AT was found to be the lowest performing across all aspects of the game when the devs decided to upgrade defiance.

But you are ignoring a major part of the game, when you say blasters have no problems because you can spend billions of influence to produce a functional character. This is like arguing that blasters are fine with mezzing because you can take Clarion at 50.

It depends on the teams. But blasters require the support on teams that other ATs do not, and that support is not always guaranteed, and less support can (and in reality, does) mean a dramatic drop in performance.

And blasters do much worse solo than other ATs.

I believe this is called a false dilemma. The difficulty options range from -1 to +4, from 1 to 8 players, whether you face bosses solo and whether you face AVs solo. The question isn't whether blasters can solo on 1 and have troubles on 8, but whether blasters can make use of those options to a degree similar to other ATs, or if they're restricted due to certain difficulties other ATs can typically handle and blasters cannot.

This is called "la belle indifference."

Minor correction: Sleep puts the character out until said character takes damage or is healed. It's one of the easiest status effects to respond to, since you don't need a status protection-type buff to remove it, just a heal.

This is the same mistake so many people seem to make. A lot of this discussion is centered around how blasters are less viable than other ATs while leveling up. Expensive IO builds and anecdotes about personal exceptions don't counter that, especially when other ATs can achieve similar goals with less effort and cost.

I don't think it's true at all, not in a general, objective sense. I learned a lot about learning to deal with mezzing with my first character, due to the way Dark Armor's toggles worked (that is, you had to choose a shield to resist damage or a shield to protect you from hard mezzes), and I spent most of my time with Dark Embrace up.

I mean, my D3 rarely gets mezzed at all. I don't need to carry many break frees with her because Most mobs can't even hit her. My Fire/Kin controller is similar, but for different reasons and has click mez protection (not Clarion) when I need it. My Ill/Rad is again similar, but yet again for somewhat different reasons. She practically never gets mezzed, and when she it only lasts for a short period of time. My Bots/Storm MM rarely gets mezzed because hardly anything actually shoots at her, and she has so many tools to handle mobs that even when they do they have relatively little success.

The other day my D3 actually got hit with sleep, and then I had to wait much of the full duration because the mob that did it was still debuffed too much to actually hit me.

I'm trying to understand how "hardly ever getting mezzed and having options even when mezzed" is worse off than "getting mezzed but being able to use your three weakest attacks." How does that correlate with "The worst performing AT across the board?" I mean, I could take on a full Malta spawn with my DM/DA scrapper pre-stacking armor, pre-endurance resistance, in the days when Malta sappers would often spawn in pairs. I've survived while all of my teammates got drained of end, detoggled, mezzed, and defeated, and then finished off the spawn. But this doesn't mean I had less trouble with end drains or mezzing than other scrappers, it just meant I had developed a playstyle around that weakness that compensated for a lot of the set's shortcomings. I have no illusions that /DA was equal to any other scrapper set at the time (Invulnerability, Regeneration, Super Reflexes).

I suggest reading everything Prometheus has to say on the subject of the Well and Emperor Cole. It's clear there's only one (human) Well and the point of the Praetorian trials is to attract the Well's attention and prove your worthiness as the Well's champion(s) over Tyrant.

The argument is that "glass cannon" isn't a viable role.

I am curious as to your impression that blasters worry less about mez than other non-melee ATs, because that is most emphatically not my experience. I play just about everything but Dominators and Stalkers and what I see is that most ATs have some way to deal with mez either proactively by mezzing and defeating the problem mobs or through some forms of self-applicable status protection, or both.

But...But...Kheldians? Shapeshifting is basically stances, and more extreme stances than the suggested at that. Maybe I'm warped because I was playing a druid in Some Other Game and a Kheldian in CoH at the same time.

Not going to lie, that pissed me off. ED didn't piss me off, and I found (as I suspected at the time) that ED didn't severely nerf most characters or most powers (it did impact some rather disproportionately, such as nukes and snipes, plus the way it impacted defenses). But the sense of being misled like that was one of the reasons my interest in the game tapered off before issue 7. If he hadn't said that, or if he'd at least been honest about further changes possibly in the pipeline, I would not have been fussed.

This actually contributed to my last break from the game. I was working on a kinetic melee/willpower scrapper in Praetoria (and I think KM was my first mistake). I felt like I was taking forever to whittle mobs down while they were beating the heck out of me every single fight. As I was really looking forward to the new 1-20 stuff I just sort of stopped - all I did was Hamidon and Mothership raids for a month or two after that, and then left CoH alone.

I like having new enemies to fight but this was like the original (test server version) of Outcasts and Trolls in the Hollows, but with less control and more debuffs.

Now that I've come back I started new characters that seem to handle Praetoria a lot better.

Well played.

I find that reading Arcana's posts makes much more sense if I don't look for implications or try to infer things she didn't explicitly say.

This is perhaps noticeable to me because I find that many of my misunderstandings come from similar problems (people look for implications and try to infer things that I never intended).

It depends on what those wishes are. If it is, as some posters have done, to complain about how female characters are getting cool, badass costume options and that the number of pieces available to male/huge and females are not precisely numerically equal, I really can't respect that because it is a huge missing the point.

If it's a matter of wanting options that seem arbitrarily limited to one or two character models (setting aside gender at the moment, as I understand huge models don't have access to options that male, female, or both have access to as well) then I can understand that. I mean, I can sympathize with the sash thing because I've wanted a real sash since I purchased the game in mid-May 2004, and I've tried very options that very inadequately simulate it. I am so glad to have one (and it's on three characters now), but there's no reason it should be female only. I understand that the reason it currently is would be logistics.