Panzerwaffen

How will this affect players who have total outstanding bids that exceed the current influence cap of 2 billion? To use an extreme example, what happens if a player has 8 billion influence in outstanding bids when the market merge happens? Can the system 'store' an amount that large? Will the player only be able to claim it in 2 billion increments?

I think Traps would be a great choice. You get a mixed set of buffs and debuffs, and Traps gets all its best powers early. Not all that difficult to softcap your own defense to everything either. With Hasten and some global recharge, you can double stack Acid Mortars for amazing -resistance. If you want to get really silly, combine Traps with Sonic for some really over-the-top resistance debuffs.

Same here. Doesn't matter if it's one bad guy or five of them. If it comes my way, I'm going to take care of it.

I've never understood the obsession some players have with 100% agro control. It seems that the Taunt-is-required crowd feels that if a tanker lets a single enemy slip away that the entire team is going to somehow faceplant.

Competent players are more than capable of dealing with a bit of stripped agro.

Critical

7.of decisive importance with respect to the outcome; crucial: a critical moment.
8.of essential importance; indispensable

I see where you're coming from, but I'm not sure I'd consider my use of the word inappropriate.

Circle of Thorns Guides work pretty well for this too. I've been using a lvl 54 CoT Guide for damage farming on my blaster. His one melee attack does about 1200 points of damage per hit, and I can regen that back just in time before he hits me again with one lvl 50 heal IO in Rest.

Arena heal farm still works just fine. Took me about a week to go from zero to Empath doing this. There are several threads in this section detailing exactly how to set it up. It's fairly easy, provided you have the 400 rep badge. Otherwise, you'll have to work on getting that badge as well.

If you happen to be on Protector, I'll be glad to help you out with the healing badges, and getting the PvP badge too, if you need that.

Fixed..

Personally, I'd go for 12 over 8. Also, you could consider taking Acrobatics instead of, or in addition to, -kb IO's. That's mag 9 right there. I used Acro on a DA tank, and never had any issues with knockback.

Sure they do. I'm at work (a critical factor to success in life) AND I'm posting on an internet game forum. If that's not fitting together, I don't know what is! And I'm practicing my proper usage of the Queen's English at the same time. It's like a trifecta of success!

Again, I disagree. Unless one was not familiar with the meaning of those three words to begin with, they are clearly three different terms and there is no ambiguity requiring the serial comma. This often comes down to perception issues. You apparently perceive it as ambiguous and feel the addition of an extra comma helps to clear it up, whereas I would perceive the use of an extra comma as completely extraneous and doing nothing but taking up unnecessary space.

Wikipedia does a fair job of addressing the usage of the serial comma in regards to ambiguity. Take a look at it if you haven't already read it. There is also the counter argument, that usage of the serial comma can create ambiguity where there was none to begin with.

Isn't written language wonderful?

I disagree. You should read up a bit on the Oxford Comma, or what is more commonly referred to as the serial comma. The use of the comma in that matter is debatable. It essentially comes down to stylistic differences between various institutions and cultures.

The use of the serial comma seems to be much more popular in American and Canadian English as opposed to British English.

I've never felt the need for more than 4. It protects against 95% of all kb situations you'll run into. The other 5% are the times you get hit with stacked kb powers simultaneously and the extremely rare attacks that have more than mag 4 kb to begin with.

If you're running a tanker without built-in kb protection though, such as Dark or Fire Armor, you'll probably want more than 4, simply because so many enemies will be focusing their attacks on you, so you're much more likely to run into stacked kb. In a case like that, I'd go for mag 12 protection.

If only more players were like that..

Proper vocabulary, spelling and grammar are critical factors to success in life. Learn it, love it, live it!

If you have to use PvP examples to make your case, then your argument has no merit. PvP has ZERO to do with the rest of the game.

It's easy to miss.. Trust me. (Guess how I figured out it was there.)

After reading the rest of your post, I don't think you really are OK with it. I don't mean any offense by that statement, but that's the way you come across. It seems to me that you have a serious case of envy going on here when you see those kinds of builds posted here on the forum or run across those types of players in-game.

And you can do the same exact thing here. It's not just a matter of basic SO build vs. IO'd build. There are many level of performance between the two. Don't get tunnel vision and focus solely on the extreme end of things.

The forum tends to overly emphasize the extreme edge of performance when it comes to builds. It is NOT a fair representation of what the majority of players do in-game. Don't let the forum drive your expectations.

Your statements are wild exaggeration. Have you even spent 15 minutes playing around with Mids'? It doesn't take hours to plan out a good build. It certainly doesn't require a spreadsheet. Is it possible to spend hours playing with a build in Mids'? Sure. I've done it before myself trying to tweak a ridiculously silly build to get it just where I want it, but I'm an overly obsessive min/maxer.

It also doesn't require untold hours of "working" the market to make the influence necessary to use IO's. Play the game. Sell drops. Use the merits earned from TF's intelligently. That is all a player needs to do. I completely IO'd out my first character in City of Heroes by doing nothing more than playing the game, selling drops on the market, and having fun. By the time that character hit 50, he had nearly every power slotted with some pretty good IO sets.

When I finally decided to see how much of a challenge it was playing with the market, I parked a character at WW with a 10 million influence starting fund. Spending around 5 minutes a day (a bit more at the beginning), he made a billion influence without ever leaving WW or running a mission. And this was back before AE, the change to lvl 50 earning rates, and all the influence out there that we have now. It's even easier to make that influence now, than it was before.

You have to have realistic expectations though. Your post really gives off the "I want the best shinies but don't want to spend the effort to get them that others have" vibe. If you expect to IO out every single character with 5 sets of purples, rare PvP IO's and a bunch of unique enhancements, it's your expectations that are broken, not the game.

Courtesy of the Cambridge dictionary:

opinion noun
•
[C] a thought or belief about something or someone.