Steel_Shaman

Oh I'm well aware that Blaster damage is extremely high. My fire/mental blaster is an AoE monster. But Blasters imho give up far too much survivability for that damage. I just can't get into the AT.

My masterminds are all highly amused by this statement.

I like you. Please tell me you have characters on Liberty.

That's more an issue of bad brutes in general though.
When I'm on a brute, I want my damage/taunt aura going, and I may even hit Taunt upon occassion. But I don't generally have the same mindset while Bruting as I do on my Tanker. On my Tanker I'm a walking CC, on my Brute I'm an engine of destruction.

I understand what you're saying, but your initial post made it come off like Brutes were in your opinion always required to be the tank. I disagree with that sentiment. If that's not what you meant, no problem.

As for your scenario of a Dom with multiple bosses, etc coming after him: that Dom messed up. Sounds like he opened with an AoE attack instead of an AoE control. Honestly if I were on my Dom and that happened to me, I'd shrug it off as my own fault. I would not expect the Brute to come rushing to my rescue.

Bingo. Anything short of a PToD EB or AV that gets in the face of one of my Doms will soon regret it, no tank required. It has never ceased to amaze me how many people still after all these years try to pigeonhole the redside AT's into the blueside roles. They aren't the same AT's, they don't play the same way.

I know the exact corridor you mean.
Depending on which character I'm on, I'll sometimes purposefully aggro the second group and drag them into the room with the first, just to see if I can take them all.

Quality gameplay? Here's a standard day for one of my Doms:

Dom: Gee this story arc sure is fun, I'm busting heads and making a name for myself!
PToD EB: Maniacal laugh.
Dom: Well crap. Has it been 3 days since my last auto-complete?

Granted, many EB's are soloable by a Dom if you carry the right inspirations and know what you're doing. Or have a tricked out build. Or are superbly lucky. Or all of the above. I used to regard them as a challenge. But after so long of slogging through arc after arc of them, I'm just sick of it.

Paragon City will be a nice home for my Doms I think. There are EB's there too, I know. But there are also 9 billion crazed scrappers I get to use as cannon fod-, um, I can team with and make the whole thing just so much simpler.

What's really fun is when the game engine sticks one of your glowies in that room. (I had this happen a couple of weeks ago.) I could swear I read a patch note/dev post somewhere that missions weren't supposed to do that. ie., "Jail" areas and portal rooms are supposed to be off limits in terms of objective placement. Am I misremembering that?

But to the topic at hand: yep, I have most maps' spawn locations memorized.

It seems to only be happening to my characters on the Liberty server. I just checked out one of my alts on Freedom and the game works fine for me there. So I guess a network route somewhere between me and Liberty is hosed. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Edit: Did some further testing and determined that the issue was only affecting characters on Sharkhead Isle. Any character in any other zone was fine. I was trying to get my Stalker to the ferry so I could do missions elsewhere when I got completely DC'd from the game. Upon reconnecting, the issue seems to be resolved. Very, very strange.

Yet, people still can and do fail it as has been pointed out in specific examples given in this thread.

I'd like to tell you a story that has quite a bit of bearing on this topic.
I first started playing 4 weeks before Issue 2 launched. My first character was a Mind/Empathy controller whose build I absolutely made a mess of. About the time I started realizing what my mistakes were, I heard about the Respec Trial. "Perfect!" I thought.

So around Noon one Sunday I started advertising in Broadcast to join a Respec team. I got on one pretty quickly, as the servers were all very busy back in those days compared to how they are now. It was a nightmare. Death after death after death. The team broke up before we even made it to the reactor room. Not to be discouraged, I joined another team. There were quite a few deaths, but we eventually got to the reactor. And then we failed, the reactor blew up, and that was that. No respec for us. Want to try again? Gotta start the whole thing over.

Total time from when I started to failure of the second Respec attempt: six hours. Six......HOURS. The next day I cancelled my account and bought a copy of WoW on the way home from work. I had already started feeling frustrated with CoH and this was just the last straw.

I realized later that a lot of my frustrations with CoH at the time were due to my own newbie status with the game. I just didn't know enough to build and play a toon properly. But at the time, I was a highly frustrated customer who left the game because I had the perception it was far too tedious.

So, I ask you, from the standpoint of new player retention do you REALLY want the Respec to be hard? Remember, for a new player there are all of 3 ways to respec a toon: Respec Trial, Respec Recipe, and $10 real world cash. New players likely won't have the funds for a Respec Recipe, and they may not like the idea of sinking $10 into a respec. That leaves the trial.

So now you have a player who is new, has learned just enough to know they royally screwed up their first character, and you would like their only realistic means of fixing that to be a trial challenging for vets, let alone new players? Not a good idea in my honest opinion.

Bingo. Back in the days when it was considered challenging, the respec complaint threads were about how it was far too difficult if several members of the team had gimped builds and actually, you know, NEEDED the respec. Now we have folks complaining it's so easy it's boring and to make it harder.

Honestly, I don't understand how the Dev's haven't all been committed to the nearest insane asylum by now.

You either misunderstood my point, or are choosing to ignore it.
My point is that this game in general terms is not difficult and/or challenging enough to require the extreme focus on maximized group composition that you appear to favor. Stalkers are by no means a "trap choice". They are not a bad AT at all, and I would welcome any Stalker any time to any team I am putting together. I'm just having trouble understanding why you have the view that you do.

This isn't a hardcore raid game that requires careful group composition to ensure the correct roles are present or that you have all the correct classes even. I am honestly baffled why you and some others seem to insist on treating it like it is though. This is why I don't follow that some people seem to think Stalkers are so bad they literally don't deserve a spot on a team.