Panzerwaffen

I've done every Shard TF, some multiple times, all without having fly. It's faster using the geysers than flying from point to point, as long as you know your way around the zone.

Nope. But again, that's your secondary. And healing isn't exactly the point of Storm anyway. How'd you feel about a Plant controller that couldn't really control anything because they decided to skip Seeds of Confusion and their Hold powers?

Players can build their characters however they like. They've got that choice. But choices have consequences. A player skipping set defining powers should not be surprised if some players and teams find them a less than ideal team member.

Except in the case of a controller with FF as a secondary, there are still many other valuable things you'd be bringing to the table. On top of that, you said you have the team bubbles, even if you forget to use them most of the time. I'd wager that if the team asked you to, you'd probably be a team player and try to use them.

A FF defender without the team bubbles isn't bringing much to the table at all other than some piddly weak blasts, and a bit of defense & status protection from Dispersion Bubble. And for the record, I've got a 50 FF defender; I know FF has its kb powers and cage power. Those don't even some close to making up for the lack of bubbles. FF is, and always has been, essentially a one trick pony. Defense and lots of it.

Without that defense, the bubbler is pretty much just along for the ride, and taking up a pity spot on the team.

Agreed 100%...

I disagree with the whole premise that IO's are not newbie friendly. There are a great number of players out there that have never used SO's (myself included) and went straight into using IO's. I was able to fairly easily kit out my very first character with pretty decent IO sets doing nothing more than simply playing the game. The system is pretty easy to understand, as long as a new player bothers to actually go through the in-game invention system tutorial and spend a minute or two learning how WW/BM works. It's not exactly rocket science...

This. There's at least a dozen other choices that would be lightyears ahead of any possible DP combination for farming.

What "exploiting" are you talking about? A player selling items on the market is not an exploit.

RMT activity has already been severely reduced by changes made to trial accounts and email restrictions. What makes you think your suggested changes would have any affect on RMT, other than making items easier to acquire?

Yes, you are correct, the more HP you have, the greater your regen rate will be. Although not built for regen, my AR/EM blaster is just shy of the HP cap, so if you build for it, you should be able to cap HP with accolades and sets.

There's one additional justification for sending invites to players who haven't responded to a tell: Players at level 14 or below may be on trial accounts and unable to respond to invite tells. So, now if I send a tell to one of those players, and get no response within a minute or so, I'll generally follow up with a team invite anyway.

That's what my wife keeps telling me...

Argh! I posted my reply before responding to the above..

Sure you'd be facing lower level spawns, since you wouldn't get the +1's in there, so your xp and influence per defeat would be less, but if the absence of those +1 enemies showing up at random made the missions easier for you, your overall rate of xp and influence gain might actually increase. And you'd still be getting drops from all those enemies along the way, which you've already said you happily sell on the market. You might even find that with the removal of the risk of +1 groups showing up, that you could bump your enemy count up from x3 to x4 or even x5, getting even more drops.

As I said above, I'm sure that the rewards are not your motivating factor, but they'd still be there...

That's fair Sam, and I have no doubt that you mean what you say about rewards. In retrospect, I should have worded that differently, as my intention was to point out that it would allow greater rewards with less risk in general, not that you personally were seeking those rewards out.

Not to run off on some philosophy of life tangent, but your post made me think of one of favorite quotations of all time.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. -Theodore Roosevelt

And that's what is great about this game, it caters to a multitude of playstyles.

Enemy difficulty is one factor of the game difficulty. It may even be the primary factor. But it is not the only factor.

Enemy powers and effects, spawn composition by faction type, ratio of minions to lieutenants to bosses, AT powers, etc. are all factors that affect the overall difficulty a particular player encounters in the game.

The spawn system allows for random groups that are one level above the mission level. I don't know if it has always been that way, but it has been that way since I started playing almost two years ago. It's a basic part of the game. To my knowledge, it is working as intended by the devs. Assuming that is true, the game is, to some extent, balanced around the fact that some random number of enemy groups will spawn as +1 level. This is no different from the fact that enemy groups will contain bosses when a player is not solo, even when the player has their difficulty set for no bosses. It's part of the game.

Prior to the new difficulty system, if a player was set to anything other than Heroic, they got bosses. Now, as long as they are solo, they can avoid bosses no matter what their difficulty settings are. It is pretty obvious that that change, along with the addition of the -1 setting, decreased the difficulty for players who chose to use those settings.

Changing it so that a player never encounters those +1 enemies does the same thing. It lowers the difficulty of encounters that player faces. Ergo, the game has been made easier for that player. Your whole reason for making that suggestion was because you disliked the difficulty of having to encounter higher level enemies. You, yourself, said in that thread that you found the occasional group of +1's "too hard when they spawn +1".

It's possible to debate the merits of giving players that choice, but I don't see how anyone can rationally argue that it wouldn't allow for even lower difficulty than there is now.

Whoops! Thanks for catching that. Got Dark confused with Necro.

I didn't say you asked for enemies to be made easier, I said you asked for the GAME to be made easier. There was no misquoting there, Sam. Unlike what you just did with my post.

Are you this hypersensitive in real life, Sam? If so, how do you function? Seriously, I'd like to know...

Where in blazes did I say you were stupid? Oh yeah, that's right, I didn't. Nor did I imply it. For some reason, you seem hellbent on interpreting any disagreement, debate, criticism, or heck, even discussion as some kind of personal attack on you, when it clearly is not.

Seems to be a pretty common theme with you...

I find the above especially amusing in light of your recently posted thread in Suggestions where you asked for the game to be made easier by removing the ability of +1 level enemies to spawn in missions because you found them too hard to deal with. Rather than change anything about your playstyle that might increase your performance, you'd rather ask for a longstanding game mechanic to be altered to accommodate you. That makes so much more sense than bothering to use an already existing system in the game (inventions) to increase your own performance. *facepalm*

There are no powers in /Traps that take the Recharge Intensive Pet sets.

Storm can slot them, but not Traps...

Neither are as bad as DP/Pain...

Didn't mean any offense with that.. That snippet from your post made me laugh though, so I had to comment. I might even steal it and add it to my sig.