firespray

And yet, somehow, they feel like the longest, slowest grind that exists in this game.

I didn't think about this. I suppose tweaked out high-end builds can surpass what people could do in the days before ED and GDN. However, someone who still plays with SOs or uses frankenslotting, or uses a mix of SOs and IOs, or even people who just use cheap set IOs for the enhancement values and not the set bonuses is significantly less powerful.

That's not exactly power creep. It's just widening the gap between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'.

Do you really think characters are more powerful now than they were in the days before ED and the GDN? Back when you could make hasten permanent on SOs? And health and stamina provided 1.5 times the bonus they do now? And there was no cap on aggro or AoE abilities? I don't think we've even reached those levels yet, let alone surpassed them.

I cannot state strongly enough how unhappy I would be if they chose to do this.

No. No no no. Not what I want at all. I absolutely positively 100% do not want anything that adds more redraw to this game.

It's not being removed from the game. Characters who currently have it will still have it until they respec. However, barring bugs/exploits, it will not be possible to have both inherent stamina and the fitness pool stamina. New characters who start after issue 19 will not have the option to choose fitness as a power pool.

Controllers are the best team support AT. Their support powers are only marginally less effective than those of a defender, and the ability to lock down spawns is more useful for protecting your team than a defender's anemic blasts.

Depending on what you mean by being a 'heal b**ch', you could be either very useful to the team or the opposite. Empathy is a great set if played well. However, though healing is a part of what empathy does (and a dead useful one, despite what some people will tell you), there's a lot more to it than that. If you want to play an empath, go for it, but learn how to play one well. Don't be one of those morons that just runs around with their AoE heal on auto and does nothing else. If you aren't dead-set on being a healer (i.e. an empathy), there are some other great choices of support sets. Cold domination, kinetics, radiation emission, and thermal radiation are also superb choices. Force field and sonic resonance are one-trick-ponies for the most part. Force field is more so, but also better at what it does than sonic. Storm summoning is a good set, but probably the most difficult to play well, and is kind of a half support half control set. Trick arrow is inferior to the other sets and should be avoided.

For a primary, I'd suggest plant or earth. Earth has, bar none, the best hard controls in the game, and hefty defense debuffs make for a useful secondary effect. It's low damage though. Plant doesn't have as much hard control, but seeds of confusion is arguably the single best control power in the game and it comes early. It also does quite a bit more damage than earth control does.