Hopeling

Sounds plausible, but it's still a totally new mechanic that would need to be added to existing attacks, so SCR definitely applies.

Yep. I wasn't saying that OUR tanks don't represent something from comics, just that what THEY mean when they say tank is apparently something different. I just thought it was a funny example, not to particularly prove any point.
If we're upgrading AI for verisimilitude, they should be ignoring all the melee and shooting Controllers first. If we're upgrading AI because screw those other melee types, they have nice things that I wish I had...?

Unfortunately, from what I recall of previous discussions of positional resistance, the Standard Code Rant applies here. Positional defense works because attacks have more than one tag, but damage doesn't have multiple types. Fire Sword does fire damage and lethal damage, resisted separately, not a hybrid fire/lethal type that checks against the highest applicable resist. Also, how do existing, non-positional res buffs (Tough, for example) stack with this set's positional res?
Why not? The devs don't appear intent on making EVERY set have a psi hole, considering the existence of Dark Armor, Electric Armor, and Willpower. When they really want an attack that players can't resist, they just make it unresistable.

A little while back, when the Justice League comic was starting up again (this was before the New 52 reboot), there was a scene with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman going through the list of people they could invite to join the new League. They got to Hawkman's picture, and one of them said something like "yeah, we could use a tank". Probably not the exact phrasing, and I don't have it on hand right now to look up, but they definitely referred to him as a tank, and saw that as something which the team needed. Even though they already had Superman, right there in the same room. So apparently comics do have something called tanks, and Hawkman is one, but Superman isn't.
The comment was never explained or expanded upon that I know of, so I couldn't tell you just what they think a tank actually is.

I know this is digging back a couple pages into the thread, but I just remembered it and thought it was funny.

Do you frequently find yourself with more than 17 enemies in range of your taunt aura? Which, by the way, target caps at 10 anyway? In the situations where I would be able to use a larger aggro cap, many of the enemies are spread out.

Alone on a farm, sure. Without a higher aggro cap, those enemies would just be picking their noses. But given your stated opinion on farming (with which I rather agree), I don't think this is your actual concern.

On a team, those enemies are going to be shooting at someone, though. Might as well be the guy who's already far tougher than necessary for normal situations. So on a team, you're reduced from "unkillable" to "still unkillable", while making your team safer and doing something a Brute can't. And if you're fighting enemies where you don't want three spawns of aggro, well, nothing forces you to tab around the whole room as you throw your attacks and taunts.

Yes, this is true. When you're actively trying to finish a build, it's annoying to roll and a bunch of worthless stuff, so I sometimes go for the guaranteed but lesser return. Currently I'm in save-up-until-I-start-a-new-project mode, so I have no immediate pressing need for inf and don't mind the highs and lows.

Yep, that's actually pretty much the position I've held for most of this thread. But making Tankers even more like Brutes doesn't give them an identity. If anything, it eats into both their identity and the Brute identity. I'd much rather see them given something that makes them actually stand out, like stronger secondary effects, or the ability to absorb damage from teammates.

I'd say I'd be willing to drop my damage scale from 1.125 to .8, and lose crits completely, when I want to play a character that has Tanker-level survivability.

Edit: Or on a brute, I'd be willing to give up Fury altogether.

The real question is, if someone doesn't agree that those trades are worthwhile, why ARE they playing a tank?

I can only assume you're talking about SS with double Rage as if it were the only possible build, since no other set can even come close to permanently damage capped. But let's pretend every set does, for a moment. So you get your Musculature, and you're capped. You then proceed to Judgement: adds a new attack, damage cap not an issue. Interface: adds a DoT, damage cap not an issue. Lore: Summons pets, damage cap not an issue. Destiny: Has few offensive options at all, but if you're really pushing for that, you can get Ageless to boost recharge, and so... the damage cap isn't an issue.
Hypothetically, future slots might include damage buffs. So those would potentially run into the damage cap. In that case, you can adjust your build to not double up on Rage, in which case you get fewer crashes, which means you do more damage overall.
So really, you aren't up against the wall for damage at all. You're much less against the wall than, say, a Kinetics Defender, who doesn't even need incarnate powers or IOs to run into the damage cap.
By the way, if you're running stacked Rage, with Musculature, and skipped the Fighting pool, you've got a slightly funny definition of not building specifically for damage.

Also worth pointing out that, if we're discussing SS with double Rage as if it's the only set that matters, Brutes do NOT do more damage 100% of the time, something you've stated several times in this thread. In fact, they do more damage only about 83% of the time, because Tanks will do more damage during Rage crashes.

You're not limited to 5 of a set type, you can put all 6 Doctored Wounds in the same power if you wanted that psi/toxic resist for some reason. The rule of 5 is just that you can only benefit from up to 5 identical set bonuses. So if you had 5 sets giving 10% regen bonuses, equipping a 6th set with a 10% regen bonus would not improve your regen, but a set with a 12% regen bonus would work fine.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Rule_of_5#The_Law_of_Fives

Here's a general overview:
Personally, my thoughts on Alpha run thusly:
-If you have endurance problems, get Cardiac.
-If you don't have endurance problems and want a better attack chain or some other reason for more recharge, grab Spiritual.
-If you don't have endurance problems and you don't have a great use for higher recharge, go Musculature for the damage bonus, the immob and def debuffs are largely irrelevant.
I'm not quite decided on the new alphas yet. Vigor could be a good replacement for Cardiac for some builds. The rest seem lackluster for scrappers.

Judgement is almost completely up to personal taste/concept. They all do the same base damage, so it's just a question of damage type and what kind of aoe you like best (pbaoe, chain, cone, wider cone, ranged aoe), or possibly secondary effect.

For Interface, get one of the DoT powers. Reactive, Preemptive, and Spectral do the most damage; Degenerative and Cognitive DoTs are weaker (in addition to being more commonly resisted damage types, go figure). Reactive is slightly better overall if you get to t4, because its other effect is -res, which is generally more useful than a chance at immob or end drain.

Lore pets range from "powerful" to "monstrously powerful". The Core path is generally better than Radial, because the boss pets in Core are wrecking machines, while the support pets in Radial are just mildly helpful. Cimerorans and Warworks are particularly noted for their single target DPS, and Longbow has strong -regen. I've read that Storm Elementals have the best aoe, but haven't tried them personally.

Destiny is a team buff, but most people seem to use it as a personal buff that might happen to help nearby teammates. Rebirth (Radial path) or Barrier are amazing for surviving things that should by all rights kill you. Ageless is nice for end, recharge, and debuff resistance. Clarion is generally not necessary for melee, but you might want to build one eventually for Underground (the last boss does a mag 20 confuse that really messes leagues up). Incandescence is sort of an oddball, and I haven't quite figured out yet if it's amazing but underused, or just mildly useful on occasion.

I've never played spines/ or /fire, and IO builds are a huge topic all by themselves, so I'll leave that to someone else to discuss before this post gets unreasonably long.

You mean... the Marshal that we beat up, in that very same SSA, despite him having a literal invulnerability field and a flying gunship? As Mr_Morbid points out, that's not Brass, anyway.

Honestly, unless you specifically pick sets that are very similar in every way (Broadsword and Katana being the clearest example), it's hard to find two sets that ARE very close in damage output. On one end of the spectrum you have stuff like Spines built for heavy AoE, and on the other end you have Martial Arts built almost exclusively for single target (and in the case of stalkers, you remove the "almost"). One the one hand you have Energy Melee that's mediocre to terrible at everything, and on the other hand you have Titan Weapons where the primary downside is that it does SO much damage to SO many targets SO quickly that it's difficult to sustain the endurance cost. There's no pattern at all to what constitutes "acceptable" AoE damage, or burst damage, or DPS, or DPE, or control, or any meaningful metric at all really to what makes a set balanced. They're qualitatively balanced against each other: if you compare two sets, you'll generally find each has some points in their favor and you can't make a clear decision that one is "better". But there is no mathematical formula to decide that X powerset is stronger than Y powerset by Z amount. You'd have to somehow invent one to implement the system you're suggesting, and then extrapolate it to include a couple orders of magnitude more combinations than current power sets allow. If you have the genius to do that, or know someone who does, get off these boards instead and go build a fusion reactor, then use your fortune to hire a crack team of designers from your favorite games and build a new game from the ground up with your system in mind.

My post focused mostly on melee sets because I know the most about them, as I usually play melee. Note that balancing the blast and support sets would be AT LEAST as difficult.

Excellent! Just in time for him to resurrect himself in April as a messianic figure, and claim his rightful (???) place as the TRUE champion of the Well.

Most sets (there are exceptions) are pretty well-balanced overall, in that they have pros and cons compared to other sets. But they are certainly not all close to each other in damage output.

I suspect "value" in the line you quoted is used in the qualitative sense, not that there's an actual spreadsheet somewhere on a dev's hard drive with a numerical Value score for every attack. In fact, based on the very line you quoted, such a spreadsheet would be impossible, because you can't judge a power's worth (and thus assign it a Value) in a vacuum, you have to also consider the powers it is combined with.

It's basically correct; DPA is the important thing to look at for attack chains. There are then basically two ways to build attack chains: "what chain can I run with this amount of recharge", or "how much recharge do I need to run this chain". The actual chain may or may not be somewhat more complex than "always use the best DPAn attack that's up". Sometimes you'll use a power with lower DPA first, to prevent gaps in the chain. For example, one common Fire Melee chain (for scrappers anyway, I don't have a FM tank, not sure if they're different) is Incinerate-Scorch-Cremate-Scorch, which uses Scorch after Incin, even though Cremate has higher DPA, because Incinerate-Cremate-Scorch would leave a gap in your chain unless you have a huge amount of recharge (and if you have that much recharge, you can run one of the better chains anyway). In any case, the idea of a rigid attack chain breaks down pretty quickly when you start to account for the constraints of actual play, like maintaining the Bruising debuff, taunting, using click defenses, moving around, etc. So although not quite technically right, your statement didn't seem worth derailing the conversation to correct.

Just from curiosity, is there a particular reason for the periods several lines down at the end of your posts?

Vet attacks are not affected at all by damage buffs or debuffs (which is why we use them during Rage crashes; if they were, they'd be hit by the -9990% damage from the Rage crash like other attacks). The +tohit still works, though.