PB and WS on SOs

While it's true that some ATs have a very wide variance in performance from set to set (the buff/debuff ATs, at least, do), a lot of ATs actually don't. Mainly, any AT without significant buff/debuff capacity has their performance rooted in personal offense and defense - dark melee performs differently from fire melee, and both are different from dual pistols or super strength or ice blast - but they're all fundamentally offense sets and intended to be used in the overall manner of "hit things until they fall over."

Ditto for personal defense sets. Whatever the mechanic, they achieve the same result in the end - keeping you from falling over.

That applies to PB and the forms - nova form is an offensive buff power that inflicts a defensive debuff on you (loss of access to anything but blast powers). White dwarf is a defensive buff power that inflicts an offensive debuff on you (pathetic attack chain). The problem and what causes PBs to lag in my opinion is the fact that they need to accept a 'debuff' to their defense in order to realize their best offense potential, or a debuff to their offense in order to realize their best defensive potential. It doesn't help that dwarf's defenses are subpar by modern-game standards, and it really especially doesn't help that warshades - along with most other ATs except blasters - get to have it both ways to a much higher degree than PBs do, and realize much of their best offense and much of their best defense potentials both at once.

Warshades get to do it cause of mire and eclipse, everyone else gets to do it because they don't lose access to most of their powers depending on if they're in "attack form" or "defense form"

Tanks don't need a ranged component (nor does anyone). Range is a convenience, not a defense, for any character without a means of preventing NPCs from closing on them. The enemy AI is eager to close in on you, and in fact, most melees generally -want- the enemy to close in on them for defensive purposes as well as offensive ones. Invincibility, Rise to the Challenge, Dark Regeneration, Soul Drain, Dark Consumption, Consume, Blazing Aura, Quills, and on and on represent a paradigm where melee characters are able to be safer and/or more damaging exactly because things are next to them, compared to if they kept at a distance.

Most characters do have some form of control, meanwhile. Melee sets are full of knockdown, knockup, stun, and hold as side effects of their attacks; indeed most of the control available to a PB is copied over from the melee attacks the devs ripped off to give us. And Pulsar, while a key power for the PB, is a power practically anyone else but a PB or maybe a blaster would laugh at the stats for and skip in favor of their other, better powers.

Photon seekers aren't pets anymore than rain of fire or blizzard is a pet. It's an attack that's delivered via a pseudo-pet mechanic. It shouldn't take pet sets, it should take ranged AOE damage sets, like its actual peers. It should also be rebalanced to recharge, damage, and radius numbers to match. Or else it should be made an actual pet, which would be a much superior power performance-wise for a PB, just like extracted essence is for a WS.

But yes, in your terms you do have the "flexibility" of using several methods of defense to stay alive as a PB. But every method of defense is still just defense. Whether you stay alive by using control or stay alive by using a defensive secondary, or whether you use both, all that matters is that you stay alive.

In my terms, I abstract "methods" out to their purpose - offense, defense, and downtime reduction/recovery. And downtime reduction/recovery (which is where things like resurrect powers or travel powers lie) is a much smaller category than the first two.

I'm not really just looking at 50, I am looking at 'whole journey' too. But to me 'whole journey' includes 'post-50' play as a large part of the journey. I assume characters don't level to 50 then delete or get shelved, they level to 50 then IO and (in the next issue) work on incarnate powers and continue to play.

Most of my characters are 50 for far longer than they're 1-49. I don't think I'm unique in this, and especially not in the context of forum posters who are mentioning their heavily IO'd characters like the other people in this thread.

Well, this is a point where we need to agree to disagree because now you're talking about personal preference. My personal preferences are separate from my views on performance. I would like city to be more complex and allow more variety and flexibility. I play plenty of characters who are 'substandard' performance wise and enjoy them immensely.

I don't let my wishes for the game color my perception of its reality, nor my enjoyment of those characters skew my view of their performance, though. And the way the game is, rather than how I'd like it to be, is a common experience to all players that can be checked just by logging in; the way ATs perform can be measured and compared mathematically, independent of opinion.

That's why I speak in the terms I do about those subjects, and try to leave preference out of it as much as possible, because you can't argue opinions and likes. Some people will like anything, they aren't wrong to like it.

I've tried human only form, human / dwarf, human / nova, switching between dwarf and nova and using human form for intermediary buffs, using light form as a "tank" mode (as tank read "high survivability", rather than aggro management) whilst in human form, but as flux says, if you want to defeat things at any kind of satisfactory rate (and by satisfactory, I mean "a rate comparable to other ATs"), then you have to go Nova, and risk that blaster-like "living on the edge of death" style of play.

Perhaps I just don't "get" PBs as someone else mentioned they didn't, but I'm really struggling to get the most out of mine until that magical penny drops and I do. I realise too that IO slotting is going to make a big difference like it generally does to most characters, but really until I find a build that is even slightly enjoyable to play with SO's, I don't have anything to really go on.

I think in teams it's easier to be that swiss army knife of an AT because there are a greater number of situations that call for that kind of diversity. Solo though (which I tend to play a lot more these days) I'm finding a great deal more frustrating.