Vermain

No, since the test was solely about sustained DPS, rather than burst. Night Widows do much better burst than Fortunatas, but Fortunatas, thanks to Aim + Follow Up (and, to a lesser extent, Dominate) have better sustained DPS.

Actually, Fortunatas can take both Aim and Follow Up. Someone did the math over in the Scrapper forums and it lets Fortunatas barely beat out Night Widows under optimal circumstances for DPS.

Not really. "Tankmage" implies being able to do obscene damage on top of being hard as hell to kill. Crabs are sturdy, but their damage (aside from Omega Maneuver) isn't anything to write home about - ithey're good for AoEing, but it's nothing you can't really get elsewhere. Banes have good damage but no DDR and poor resists. The devs did a reasonably good job balancing them out, although Banes could use a small buff, honestly.

It's not a huge increase, although there's a certain amount of finesse required to know when it's best to sit in human/Nova form and blast stuff, and when it's best to turn into a Dwarf and grab dudes.

I'd say it's, more than anything, the fact that it forms the core of gameplay in the CoH experience that makes AoEs negatively impact the game. There's always been bomb groups in MMOs that gather up huge groups and AoE them down, but they tended to be limited in scope. DAoC's bomb groups were mainly in one particular spot in Albion and on that island in Midgard where Spiritmasters would powerlevel people, and WoW's AoE groups are restricted to heroic dungeons (a combination of people severely outgearing them and Blizzard's more timid design in regards to requiring crowd-control after Burning Crusade's heroic dungeons, where crowd-control was required for the majority of players).

Meanwhile, excluding the lowest levels in CoH, AoEing huge groups is the strategy, with little deviation ever taken from it. I tend to have more fun in the disorganized groups I occasionally land myself in where there isn't solid AOE or control and we have to scramble to try and stay alive. That is fun. Hitting the Spin key every so often isn't.

Not really. It just means that AoEs become situationally useful, rather than being top tier in nearly every situation (barring Cims or Nemesis). The fastest and safest way to take down a spawn in CoH currently is to cornerpull them and throw everything you have on them. Single-target damage lags behind in this regard, which is why Stalkers, even post-buff, tend to be black sheep in parties, since they miss out on the crazy AoE ball everyone else gets.

I'd say Going Rogue would be a perfect platform to institute AI changes (at least to the new higher-level mobs) with the easily backed-up excuse of providing more challenge.

Simple language: Buffing rather than nerfing becomes unsustainable because buffing up one particular aspect of the game requires compensating for this sudden increase in strength by buffing other aspects to match the new strength of this aspect. Suppose that, instead of nerfing Shield Charge, all of the other AoEs in the game were brought up to its baseline. Now, the devs have to buff up the mobs to compensate for this new gameplay dynamic (because they were originally balanced around the current AoE numbers), and... we're back to square one again.

It's impossible to ever fully and completely balance a game unless you turn it into the video game equivalent of chess. The best that you can do is try to bring everything to a relatively even plateau, which Shield Charge clearly isn't at. Nerfing Shield Charge consumes a significantly less amount of effort than trying to bring up every other AoE in the game (and subsequently buffing up everything else) to compensate.

It's mostly just the double-stacking debuff resist that it can get that's the problem. Take that away and it's about as soft as Energy Aura (though, admittedly, much easier to soft-cap) with crazy damage instead of crazy endurance recovery.

Welp,

I was actually mildly nervous about that, so I've only been sending relatively inexpensive ones into the Email Zone. Glad to see my paranoia's paying off.