SpittingTrashcan

Those powers are good reasons, and Tankers don't need to sleep bosses because they can take hits.

No, they were having trouble doing damage.

Let's step back a bit. You seem to be coming at this from the position that specialized ATs should only have powers that cater to their specialty. I'm coming at this from the position that even specialized ATs should have a little of everything, because they aren't always in a position where they can focus on their specialty to the exclusion of other concerns. Tankers needed damage in Frozen Aura because, even though a Tanker's "job" is to hold and survive aggro, in practice people don't always play Tankers with a team that includes damage specialists, or even with any team at all, and need to actually deal damage so that they can defeat enemies. Blasters can use a zero-damage stackable sleep because, even though a Blaster's "job" is to deal damage, in practice people don't always play Blasters with a team that includes survivability support, or even with any team at all, and need to actually do something about enemies that they can't kill immediately so that they don't die.

Could Frozen Aura be improved? Sure, but I'd bump the sleep to mag 3, to make it more useful without needing to combine it with Siren's Song or Sleep Grenade, rather than adding damage for the sake of damage and thereby eliminating one of the few multi-target boss-level mez options available to Blasters.

Rather, since Blasters are guaranteed plenty of damaging attacks, and Tankers are not, so they suffer quite badly when saddled with pure utility powers in their secondary. See also: Clobber.

In fact, name even one Blaster combo that would benefit as much from Frozen Aura doing damage as /Ice Tankers benefited from Frozen Aura doing damage. In return, I'll name you two reasons why Blaster Frozen Aura is better without damage: Siren's Song, Sleep Grenade.

This is a true fact. I will still say that Blaster Frozen Aura is not as bad a power as Tanker Frozen Aura was, due to their respective contexts.

Many /Ice tankers agreed with your assessment. They agreed so long and so hard that the devs finally noticed and gave Frozen Aura the same damage as Foot Stomp.

Greater Ice Sword is still crap, though.

Well... yes, obviously. The devs release "edicts" in the form of the game, and the game is presumably intended to be an implementation of some driving vision of how the game should work. Which is not to say that the game as we play it is not also the result of a number of happy accidents, or that the vision has not evolved over time. But to take a wild guess, I would assume that part of the developer vision is that for any AT and sets you might choose, there's some reasonable performance-based (as opposed to aesthetic) argument to making that choice over any other choice you might make. If Pistols is so benighted as to not have any such argument, then it's probably not working as intended. I don't think it's quite reached that point.

Specialization does get a lot of traction in game discussions, yet the nonspecialized ATs of redside tend to be just as popular and effective as the trinity ATs blueside. Conversely, however, Khelds have a reputation for being a jack of all trades, but in a modal fashion, so that you can only be almost as good as a specialist at one thing at a time*. It remains to be seen whether Pistols are the villains of blast sets, or the Khelds.

* Before I am shouted down by Kheld players, I'm aware this is not an entirely accurate representation. But it is a common complaint, and it does take some insight and a fair amount of skill and effort to not play a Kheld this way, and that does limit the popularity of the AT.

That depends on your definition of "ridiculous". There's no absolute standard to measure performance on, beyond the minimal standard that the devs design to: able to solo at +0/x1 without IOs. Pretty much all considerations of performance are relative. It's fine if one choice of AT/sets has greater potential in one aspect of performance than others, but if you're not happy unless you're playing something that clearly outshines every other possible choice by a wide margin, then you're not happy unless you're playing a badly designed game.

On the larger topic of Dual Pistols: It seems like a set designed for corruptors and defenders. The selection of secondary effects seems much more handy when you have a significant secondary effect multiplier in the AT, and the fluid attacks seem well-tailored for a character that doesn't mix up the pistol blasts with attacks from their secondary. Also, Dual Pistols is the only blast set I can think of with a direct synergy with Sonic Resonance: +resist and -damage combine quite nicely.

I meant more in the sense of "at least it doesn't do much damage if someone has it and uses it every chance they get." Contrast: Dimension Shift, Black Hole, Gale...

Right about now. *wave!*

Of course, I freely admit I'm doing it for concept and set bonuses. It's not very good. On the bright side, at least it isn't actively harmful.