Garent

I think you definitely want to switch to electric. Traps sometimes has a serious issue with causing enemies to run away, and if you want to mess up GMs you'll need to keep it in place. Just take shout's slotting and put it into electric fence. Shriek-scream-shriek-fence is only slightly less damage than using shout, so don't be afraid to use it as an attack.

Corruptor damage is only slightly higher (about 15%) than a defender's. They have scourge, but whether or not that helps them much depends on their specific set. Fire and ice get a huge boost from it, but sets that rely on DoT like dark blast get very little difference. Meanwhile, defenders have a 25-33% advantage in buff/debuffs over corruptors, depending on the specific type of buff/debuff.

It's something that's very open to interpretation. I've heard plenty of people on both sides saying that one is clearly superior than the other. What it boils down to is that corruptors have superior caps to their abilities, while defenders reach those caps more easily.

As for dark miasma, it's widely considered to be the best buff/debuff set in the game overall, so don't feel sorry for it.

Healing aura should never be put on auto. It has a specific radius, and if you want to heal people with it you need to be in range of them at the time of casting. Its animation time can also get in the way of you attempting to heal people with heal other.

It's dumb to call someone a loser over something like this, because your worth as a person doesn't hinge on your ability to play this game, but I can tell from your post that you have a problem with juggling all your powers. You shouldn't be using clear mind on every person on the team, and you definitely shouldn't make it a goal to have it doubled up on everyone. A single application of clear mind is enough to make someone impossible to mez in most situations, and melee archetypes have their own status protection and don't need it from you. As for fortitude, you shouldn't just automatically put it on scrappers. If it's well slotted, you can have it on three people at all times. Blasters probably benefit from fortitude the most, but pay attention to who on your team is taking the most damage and give it to them. Strategic fortitude use will make your team take a lot less damage.

Right. I just wrote accuracy without thinking.

Get rid of the quartzes as soon as possible. DE are a really bad matchup for defenders and controllers because they throw out mezzes and you need quick damage to take down the buffing objects they summon. If you're not sure what one does, the right click info will tell you.

I'll try to make a list from memory.
cairns- buffs resistance
quartz- buffs accuracy
tree- buffs regeneration
mushrooms- buffs status resistance

I used to use the healing proc in mass hypnosis, and it can go off multiple times with a single casting. It didn't make any difference for me though, so I ended up dropping it.

Empathy/ice should work well. All of the powers in both are potentially useful, but some are definitely more desirable than others.

You asked about pros and cons of the sets. Empathy is a really useful set in a lot of situations, but if you're on a team that doesn't need much healing, your only contribution might be fortitude and adrenaline boost. However, ice blast can make up for this because it's one of the more damaging blast sets. Even if you're in a situation where your team's health bars aren't budging, you'll still be able to contribute a lot through buffing and blasting.

The power which you absolutely must get is fortitude, and the power that you most likely want to skip is blizzard. Everything else will depend a lot on who you ask. In my opinion, absorb pain should be skipped since if anything isn't healed to a satisfactory amount by heal other, you can just put another one on them with very little delay. Bitter freeze ray can be pretty safely skipped, though it's not useless. Freeze ray is pretty good for shutting down troublesome non-bosses, but it's not required.

You do want to be grabbing all three single target blasts as well as both frost breath and ice storm (unless you're really bad at using cone powers, in which case frost breath won't help you).

I don't think it's a fair assumption to say that since there was proliferation in issues 12 and 16 that there is going to be more in 20. Two pieces of data is not enough to make a pattern. Issue 12 came out in May 2008 and issue 16 came out in September of 2009. I could use this to say that the next round of proliferation is in January 2011 and it would be just as arbitrary and inaccurate as saying that issue 20 will likely contain proliferation just because 12 and 16 did.

And I'd like to issue a formal apology to Hawkeyed for forcing him to wear that outfit.

Ice armor alone wasn't the reason. It was Ice armor along with ice melee.

The recent fury changes mean that this isn't really a big deal though. Even my stone melee brute with his area knockdown and stun spamming can build fury now.

How would you like hawkeyed costume suggestions to be submitted? Costume files in e-mail? Screenshots in the thread or through PM?

The way to tell if a damage buff will affect a pseudopet is what the duration of the buff is. Pseudopets don't simply copy over your damage modifier. They copy over all the buffs you have -including- their duration. Let's say you use aim and fulcrum shift then put down blizzard, and to keep it simple let's assume they all go off at the same time

Aim lasts 10 seconds, blizzard lasts for 15, and fulcrum shift lasts 45.

When blizzard gets summoned, it'll inherit aim and fulcrum shift. For the first ten seconds, it'll be getting the damage bonus from both aim and fulcrum shift. After that, aim will wear off and blizzard will only have the damage bonus from fulcrum shift.

Vigilance doesn't have a notable duration. It's constantly rechecking how many people are on your team and replacing its values. I don't know exactly how long its duration is, but I'm willing to bet that vigilance will have no effect on pseudopet powers.

It's probably next on the list of things defenders are going to get proliferated. There hasn't been any word about when the next set of proliferation is going to be though.

Ouch. That's a tough time for me, but I'll try my best to be there.