Actually doom, is not far from the truth.
I do believe this is poorly thought out, and although I can feel the flames of posts from the fan club who would praise a power that would let one polish a turd as long as its a new power, I think people really need to sit down and think about this.
Taking blasters as a first example being that I have a level 50 one, giving a blaster force bubbles is a rediculous imbalance of power. As it has already been stated, giving sets that offset the major weaknesses of the classes pretty much destroys the point of having archetypes at all. A better idea would have been giving additional powers that accessorize the archetype without taking away drastically from its weaknesses. For example a blaster would have been much better off with regen as a pool which would help out with their stamina and health issues especially tied in with fitness but still allows for them to take great amounts of damage and have to use their heads to keep from getting killed outright.
Now take controllers. Giving them damage output in the level 41+ range is like throwing gas on a fire. When they needed it was back at their earlier levels when they couldn't solo a mission no matter what they tried even though just about every other arch out there could.
Oh and then theres the scrappers, if there was any question about their ability in pvp before...which I definately think that they are far too overconfident considering the strengths of other archetypes over their weaknesses...i.e. such as melee vs. ranged...now all bets are off. With a hold ability, a ranged ability (powerful at that...remember the shurikens thrown by ninjas in some of the AV missions? Holy crap..ouch!), and their natural ability to do massive damage (and don't forget crits) in melee...its not hard to guess who is going to dominate. I can hear the nerf screams already.
So whats the answer? The answer is to do a hard look at whats currently out there and what real problems each of the archetypes has today. If you want to bandaid something, don't let it be a weakness that was purposely built into an archetype that made it different from another, bandaid the other problems that changes has caused such as the increased difficulty of lower level mobs that have now sidelined the controller, look at what could be done to support characters to make them more attractive in a group environment rather than what your about to do which is make them less needed...hell basically with the new thought process everyone should be able to solo everything..who needs groups?, look at accentuating existing strengths or slightly improving upon weaknesses without taking it away entirely. One of the major things that makes Superman boring is that he has one stupid weakness, where characters like the x-men have to depend upon one another for their strengths when going against the really tough opponents which makes them more attractive to readers.
Now I'm not suggesting that people should have to group all the time by any means, but I'm also not suggesting that we should all be a bunch of solo vigilantes either. Theres a happy medium to be found if you just get creative...and that goes double when thinking about new epic powers.
Other issues to consider is that if a level 50 character respeced and made any mistakes or chose their travel power last for whatever reason, etc and they are only able to change those last 4 powers as of 41+ then its not really an option for them as their choice is either to give up their travel or give up their epic powers. So another full respec is a must for them...in fact, taking away an entire pool power from a character is definately going to have an impact, then again perhaps it will make for some interesting choices amongs the archs...who knows.
But again...please don't just throw something out there...think about it first, thats all I'm asking.
-Scion
