Diellan_

Yes.

For melee ATs, I mostly play Brutes, though I've had all of them at one point in time (and am currently playing an ELA/Titan Weapon Tank). And the thing is, my Brute doesn't need any babysitting... In fact, he runs through +4x8 at a brisk pace, able to take on anything short of Vanguard or sometimes Arachnos (due to autohit -defense buffs), and was doing that even before he got the Incarnate slots. His damage is excellent and his survivability is sufficient to take things that are meant for teams to handle...

Including this. My softcapped perma-Hasten Dark/SD/Soul Brute (no purples, because there aren't any worthwhile defense bonuses there) has tanked all 8 heroes on a pug LRSF where the team (except me) had wiped. Sure, it required me to be smart with pills and accolades, but the simple fact that I could reach the 90% resist cap was enough for me to be able to take a ridiculous amount of punishment. I can't perform at that level all of the time, but the fact that I can when I need it (as opposed to the other 99.9% of the game, where it's superfluous), and maintain a Brute's level of damage, is the reason why Tankers are rightfully annoyed.

This is why I talked about the fact that Defense is so easy to get via IOs being part of the serious problem here, whereas +Damage is really, really hard to get (and for many Tankers, pointless, due to the low damage cap). The Invention metagame is such right now that there are really only two things worth building for, defense and recharge (or some combination thereof, with other things being a nice perk), and those just don't help Tankers where they need it most.

Stalkers are getting buffed, and Blasters have been in a sore spot for a long time...

Also, only sets with scaling auras can easily handle larger and larger groups (like Willpower with Rise to the Challenge), while Fiery Aura and even Stone Armor's Granite are only increasing their incoming damage.

Not to mention that the issue of having to control more than 17 targets isn't exactly a super common situation. There are lots of places in this game where Tankers get dissed in favor of Brutes (and, to a lesser extent, Scrappers), and "facing more than 17 enemies" is a rather small subset here.

+Defense is problematic in that it's far more useful to, say, Invuln, than it is to Electric Armor. You'd need to be granting both +Defense and +Resistance if you want it to be useful across the board. Conversely, if somebody is already softcapped, then this buff to survivability would mean very little at all (say, an SR tank, for whom 10% more defense means little and 20% regen is a pitiful token compared to what they need to survive). The different powersets all have different issues, so it's very hard to come up with a single buff that's equally beneficial across the board, and won't just be "yes, Shields is even better now, sorry Electric". Even if you stick to enhancement bonuses, that won't help SR much since his only enhanceable trait is Defense, and it has enough of that by endgame. Electric would certainly love a nice +50% Enhancement(Resistance), on the other hand (which might be problematic for the Devs to do since Resistance powers are flagged to avoid external buffs, so they'd have to use the work around they did for Alpha slots).

17th century.

Even worse, these outfits aren't even the kind that a Saloon Girl of the period would wear. It's what a Saloon Girl from a Hollywood movie might wear... Or maybe a burlesque actress pretending to be a Saloon Girl.

There are plans, yes. After I finally implement PVP DR, the next thing on my list is a proper entity browser.

Already fixed internally.

I've been refactoring the Mids' code a lot over the past year, and doing a bit of optimization along the way. Theoretically, it should be faster, not slower - it's certainly smaller (the installer executable is smaller now than it has been since at least I18, even with the addition of all the Incarnate data).

I like the slots in the prestige sprints.