Hopeling

Off the top of my head, Council Marksmen and Rikti Drones are perfectly happy shooting you from across the room, and do not prefer to be in melee range like the rest of their buddies do. There are lots of others, but those are the first that come to mind. I think Rularuu Wisps actually run away if you get in melee range, but I haven't fought them much in a long time, so I might be misremembering that.

Well, actually...

...oh, I should know by now not to defend an MMO on another MMO's forums. Suffice it to say that, although their freeform building has its problems, One Build to Rule Them All isn't really among them.

If /SR has to use a specific Destiny and epic pool (and give up some degree of offense/utility to do so) to make up for what /EA does out of the box, I don't feel it's /EA that's jumping through hoops to play effectively.
I agree, it isn't absolutely the best secondary. IMX, I just do not at all agree that /SR directly outperforms it, at any level of play, except in certain edge cases. Of course, depending on playstyle and what you like to do in the game, what I call an "edge case" might be what you call "the game", so YMMV.

Not on a single character, no.

You only get so many power choices and slots, and only 4 pools and 1 epic pool, so you just plain can't take every power, nor 6-slot all the ones you do take. That's not to say every build will have gaping holes in performance - many builds, across many ATs, have a wide enough array of strengths that they rarely if ever really notice a weakness. Bots/Traps for MMs is one, as Dechs is saying. After all, you don't necessarily need everything maxed out, you only need to be better than what the game will throw at you.

Yes, that's been pretty much my position here, so we might be talking past each other a bit. You can have a secret identity - most of the population won't know who you are. Some people will be able to figure it out, if you ever give them sufficient reason to try (such as, say, by getting in the way of their nefarious goals?)

I find it unlikely that the FBSA would make something standard issue which specifically prevents them from doing their own job. And even if you managed to invent a perfect godmode macguffin that protects from every method of super-inquiry, and even prevents anyone from remembering your real name, a villain can still follow the hero home, write down their street address, and sell it to Malta.
I... don't see how that counters what he said about the real world being short on crystal balls, for one thing. Moreover, I don't personally know their names, no, but I'm quite sure some people do, and if I were a nefarious supervillain bent on their destruction, I could probably find out.

Well, you could have that. If you really want to say that your character's secret identity really is a perfect secret, nobody can stop you, after all, much like we can't stop you from saying you're Ms Liberty's secret love-child with Lord Nemesis. But it wouldn't make much sense in the setting. Even handwaving away your secret identity as magically secret doesn't necessarily preclude someone else discovering it by using better magic, or cleverly finding a way around whatever protection you use.
So this would give you better protection than mere secrecy, but still not perfect protection, thus IMO it falls into the same category as the examples I already gave.
Yes, that's a good comparison, actually. Your identity here on the forums is protected - none of us know who you are. Still, even with modern computer security protecting you, your identity might plausibly be discovered by a sufficiently dedicated and resourceful hacker, for example (and such things really do happen). This would only get much, much worse if hackers had literally superhuman or magical powers, especially in such a wide variety of ways as we have here in the Cityverse.

This is pretty much my feeling on how it "should" be, too. You can have a secret identity by not telling anybody, but basic secrecy can be plausibly broken even by mundane means. Some characters will have more exotic identities and/or methods of protecting them - time travelers who never give their real name nor era of origin are mostly safe from other time travelers killing them in their cribs, learning an alien visitor's real (alien) name isn't very useful, and a great mage might give out his name left and right, safe in the knowledge that his "true name" is well-guarded by both secrecy and spell. But even things like this don't give total protection: a psychic could read the time traveler's mind, an alien name could be useful to another alien, or a clever thief might sneak into the mage's sanctum and peek in his spellbook.

In any case, you can still have a secret identity - street thugs and the civilians you save don't know who you are. It takes someone sufficiently determined, and with access to sufficient resources, to find out. Even the FBSA might not have every super on file, especially at the rate they crop up, but if you do something they need to investigate, they'll figure out a way to find you.

IMX, the "major holes" that you "cannot cover" are complete non-issues on any character, including ones with even bigger "vulnerabilities" to them than /EA has. They are ALREADY covered. I also find that a hole you really can't cover with inf and insps, namely massive tohit buffs, are worse for /SR than any other secondary. /SR does have advantages; if you like them, great, but they are not objectively better than /EA's advantages. The fact that we've reached 3 pages going back and forth about this pretty clearly says it's a YMMV issue.

Stealth, a heal, massive endurance management, consistent resists, a taunt aura?

I mean, we can go back and forth all day on which set's advantages are better, but to pretend that /EA's dont exist is a bit silly.

Ah - when you said "passive regen" I thought you meant "regeneration without actively doing something to heal", not "regeneration without toggles", since very nearly 100% of combat time is spent with toggles on, although not necessarily in melee range of something, which was why we weren't counting RttC.

OK, but if you're assuming Conserve Power for the /SR, you have to consider that the /EA can have Hibernate/Fireball/Shadow Meld instead. Rebirth + Energize will help more against a DE Quartz or Veng-stacked Nemesis than the SR using just Rebirth. I find psi in Lambda or toxic in UG to be a complete non-issue on almost any character, especially since we're counting Destiny, which means you're at least +2 and probably +3.
For the DDR problem, there's always Ageless.
/SR does do better in some edge cases, but IMX they are indeed edge cases, while /EA's advantages come into play much more often.

I'm not yet sure how new EA compares to /WP and /Shield, but I'd rate it above /SR for most purposes. It has resists that work all the time, a very good heal, and incredible endurance management, yet still isn't very difficult to softcap.

Fast Healing + Integration is more hp/s than Fast Healing + High Pain Tolerance.

And of course, once you add IOs into the picture, Regen can get perma-DP and then it's WAY ahead.

I don't recall seeing that post when it was new, so I don't know if it was accurate at the time and changed since then, or if he was just mistaken/unaware (like I said, I'm not even sure if it's intended behavior). It's definitely been around for quite some time, though, I'm pretty sure as long as Destiny has been out, because I remember early discussions of whether it was unfair for Judgement to be affected by Musculature but not Spiritual, and some suggested that Spiritual boosting Rebirth made up for it.

Spiritual boosting Rebirth isn't a Mids error, and has been around since Destiny's introduction. I don't know if it's intended, but Spiritual (and now Vigor) has always boosted Rebirth (and still does right now when I checked on beta). It's the only Destiny that is affected by Alpha enhancement, AFAIK.

However, it IS a Mids error if it's showing Spiritual giving you an additional +700 hp. Spiritual's +33% should add ~120 maxhp to Rebirth Core, not 700.