TwoHeadedBoy

That's what happens when you do really crappy on trials, your only choices are threads or super inspirations. That's why it's funny.

Drain Psyche provides more recovery than you'll generally need with no additional end mod slotting. I 6 slot it with Panacea and an Acc/Recharge IO on my Archery/Mental and am very close to the regen hardcap. It makes a noticeable difference, but will not do much good against lots of burst damage. I don't need Aid Self, but my Drain Psyche is also permanent, and is layered with softcapped s/l defense and good s/l/e resistance in order to help me get the full benefit of the power.
Keep it in Blaze. You'll get better results from it in a ST attack.
The -regen from Drain Psyche is really all the debuff you need. Going with Mu Mastery is what I'd recommend for the resistance to the three most common damage types plus a tAOE immobilize, which is very useful with a primary like Fire Blast- You don't have a taunt aura, you do lots of AOE, and things are prone to run away from you, thus reducing your AOE ability. If you can lock everything in one place (and not even have to worry about lining up a cone like some other immobs) it goes a long way to help alleviate that issue.

Edit: Also it's worth mentioning that Afterburner from the flight pool takes a LOTG which is where I get my fifth from. Fly can be one slotted with a KB IO and obviously Hover rules for the defense and the LOTG.

They have a counter to Stygian Circle... Reform Essence and Essence Boost. Warshades still have marginally higher potential for survivability than Peacebringers do, so this is not a justification for any damage discrepancies between the two. The tradeoff is that where Warshade's survivability can be marginally better than PB's, the latter is more consistent. This is where the Shade's stuns come into play, which has the benefit of also adding team utility. You can't take the more consistent but generally comparable and very often lower survivability of Peacebringers and use it as a justification for less damage potential, because it just plain doesn't make sense.

That damage disparity will still be there if the revamped version still has the scatter. It doesn't do any damage at all if I don't take it.
Why would you like the scatter? With the exception of closed spaces, it will inevitably grief all of your other AOE attacks. If the initial 'BOOM!' was like Repulsion Bomb, you would have targeted AOE Knockdown with a chance for stun component, followed by your 'summon Polar Lights' idea.

Yes... Playing...

Making them envious would involve letting in the dogooders in the first place. Do I have a traitor amongst me?

The thing is that right now the characters are both struggling (mainly with endurance) and I want to get something slotted in them ASAP. I'll consider upgrading from level 20's to 25's when I hit 22 also though.

But it says "easiest" in the subject line, hah. I think the most important thing to consider when you're talking about getting a new player into the game is how much fun they'll have. If they're immediately presented with hurdles and difficulties, especially like the OP mentioned they have no previous MMO experience, I would say a more challenging AT/combination would be likely to leave a bad taste in their mouth and stop playing the game more than anything else. It really would probably be best to start off in easy mode, get to learn how the basic stuff works in relative ease, like the UI, where stuff is, how the map works, where to find contacts and just basic playing through the content.

tl;dr I used ninja run and shadow maul so this is now completely pointless and nothing interesting or potentially useful can be had from this thread for anyone. Got it. Move along.

This isn't meant as a "be all, end all" sort of thing, or anything even remotely close to it. Those veteran powers will be useful up to like, level 20 max. I've hardly used them at all since level 10, and with travel powers available early now I don't see NR being a huge issue either. I'm not expecting to provide flawless results meant to simulate the experience of every single potential Blaster player vs. Melee player, that would probably take me like two years and by the time I finished the game will have changed so much (more than likely) that everything I found out would be irrelevant anyways.

Now here's a question for you: What if the initial "BOOM!" KB of Seekers was replaced with an AOE stun, followed by your adaptation of Polar Lights working how you've laid out? This would serve the multipurpose of retaining utility in seekers, adding an AOE stun making Pulsar a more viable power (a means of layering mez) and it would remove the unpredictable location AOE Knockback that myself and many others find annoying.

Hey, I've never said I have a problem with deliberate and controllable KB like Emanation- You get to pick where you throw stuff. The only KB that I have an issue with is the random scatter that can't be used deliberately, like Seekers and Solar Flare.
They'll be aware when their soul is following me around, shooting negative energy at their pals.

Yeah, for Malta I just use Clarion and a target sapper macro. If I can Gravity Well the Sapper and I have status protection, I'm generally golden... Arachnos on the other hand pretty much throws everything at you from every direction.

Arachnos are insanely hard unless you're playing a melee set with protection to the frankly cheap and overwhelming debuffs they dish out. They do -recharge, -tohit, -end, -def, and they have a crapload of mez on top of it. Even with Destiny there's really no way to protect yourself from all of these things. The best I was able to do on 54x8 without eating a crapload of inspirations was take out 4 groups. Once I had more than one group aggroed at once (kinda hard to avoid on that first map) I was done, they were stacking their crap on me before I could even think about mezzing all of them. Maybe I should've used Megalomaniac, but oh well. These guys are one of the few things in the game that just make me want to pull my hair out.

Dark has an AOE stun and some tohit debuffs. Drain Psyche on its own isn't going to keep you alive, good as it might be. If you get hit with enough burst damage (no defense) and you're feeling the full impact of it (no resistance) you're not going to have a chance to regenerate the damage taken. You can also go /Force Mastery for Repulsion Bomb (an AOE stun to stack with /Dark's) that also does KD for mitigation and a Soul Drain>Inferno setup, but then you'd miss out on ROTP.