Hopeling

In principle, yeah. But that doesn't mean every build will end up with one; in fact, as far as I've seen, a very large fraction do not. Doms/Trollers on the other hand have them in most of their primaries, and usually do take them.

I don't think forcing you to fight full AVs for the solo path is a good idea, because while soloing AVs is hard, it's hard in different ways than most of the game. Since this would be for actual rewards and not just bragging rights, it would be fine to use inspirations, which partially mitigates the issue, but still, there are lots and lots of good builds that would have an unreasonably hard time soloing an AV. You don't just need to survive their damage and out-DPS their regen, you need to be able to do so for quite a while, which also means you need long-term sustainable endurance and etc etc. Also, some AVs are just much much harder than others, and which ones are hard varies wildly by character type and build.

Sure, almost anyone can do it with a Shivan, but if you need one of the strongest temp powers in the game to solo content that is explicitly designed to be soloed, I'd call that a design failure.

I'd much rather see things be difficult in a more 'normal' way, like groups of difficult enemies of normal ranks (possibly with level shifts EDIT: or simply level 54 like Tin Mage/Apex), or multiple EB fights in quick succession, than a simple "you must be this tall to ride" DPS test against the AV's regen.

Not according to the detailed power descriptions, they can't. Call Reinforcements also doesn't take def debuff sets to allow the Achilles proc, just plain def debuff enhancements.

I had never before noticed they even could be slotted for it... but now that I see it, I'm pretty baffled.

Anyway, even if they have good -def in their attacks somehow, it wouldn't be worth slotting for over damage.

Damage debuffs are not affected by AV debuff resistance, but they ARE affected by normal damage resistance. So if you hit a target with -50% damage, they'll do half damage if they have no damage resistance. If they have 20% lethal resist, they'll resist 20% of the debuff to their lethal damage, but take the full penalty to the damage types they don't resist. Since NPCs tend to have good resistance to the same damage type as their attacks, damage debuffs in practice are less effective than the raw numbers might lead you to believe. They're still useful, just not as powerful as they might appear.

Like almost everything, the magnitude of a damage debuff is also affected normally by the purple patch.

Once you figure out how much of the debuff is actually being applied through resistance and level differences, it should provide the same mitigation as an equal amount of damage resistance to yourself, if you have no resistance to begin with, and the target has no damage buffs.

Edit: And I have no idea if they debuff special damage.

I'm currently leveling a WM/SD scrapper, and you're totally right about its power (although what's this about -res in Shatter?), but we're 'missing' that combo in this discussion because this is a thread in the brute forums asking about a brute, and the OP specifically rules out War Mace in his first post.

I don't have experience with Axe, but I have used Broadsword a lot. If you plan to make use of Parry, go with Broadsword, because Parry is great at what it does. Even at 50, Parry can still be useful these days since 45% isn't softcapped in trials. If you don't need/want parry, you'd probably be happier with Axe.

If you need Rares or Very Rares and don't get them as drops, it's more efficient to make them with Empyreans than try to construct them from threads. A rare takes 8 emp merits (160 threads if you broke them down), or 340 threads + 25m inf (4 uncommons at 60 threads each, plus 100 more and the inf for the upgrade recipe).

180 merits is a lot, but not an incredible amount; most of the good recipes cost more than that. Over the long term you'd have to average only 6 merits a day if you wanted to use these things forever; just running the WST once every week could cover that. But it probably feels like a huge amount when you're saving up to buy the first one ASAP, rather than a replacement 29 days down the line.

Unfortunately, you need 8 tokens to earn reward merits at all, so this doesn't do anything for the f2p crowd I suspect it's aimed at, unless they're also changing that requirement.

Indeed, but that's true of any resistance debuff. What is the nerf you speak of? I'm not aware of any nerf to Reactive at any point in time.

A passive 5% defense bonus to everything, costing zero power choices and zero slots, is a HUGE buff, FAR stronger than +5% hp, because of the above-linear returns on defense. Remember, people spend billions of influence for 3% more defense from the Gladiator's Armor unique, and that takes a slot.

No, actually, as has been pointed out multiple times in this thread, +heal set bonuses do NOT boost health. +heal set bonuses only work on healing powers, as in, the kind that make green numbers appear over someone's head. They do absolutely nothing for regeneration powers like Health.

Since the defense hardcap is both incredibly difficult to reach AND irrelevant in most situations, 'defense capped' almost always refers to the softcap. Your objection is as silly as it would be for me to rebuke you for talking about "defence" when the in-game stat is clearly labeled as "defense": you aren't even incorrect unless I deliberately misinterpret you (in this case, as a typo rather than a regional difference).

Now, if you had just objected to the actual content of the statement, because a great many characters are NOT softcapped...

Edit: Personally I look forward to the new IO sets, because I really missed the frequent misunderstandings over how PPM (Proc Per Minute) mechanics work from other MMOs.

You mean like this?
http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/n...et_-_11811.php

As Agent White says, the clues you find in that mission, explicitly for the reason of learning more so you can answer the questions, give the answers to those questions. Edit: And not that I've checked for these specific clues, but since it's a TF, shouldn't the clues show up for everyone on the team?

Fortunately, there's already a feature on the beta to address the problem in the OP: the SSAs are grouped together as 'Signature Contacts' or something in the contact window. Would've been nice to have it all along, but at least they're correcting it.