Let's look at our inherent!

Well actually, if the pb has some teammates that can boost its resistances to 85%, then it should be more survivable than the warshade because of those extra heals. Its not at all impossible that Irresponsible has had these experiences on such teams.

Actually, it's not at all impossible for the gameplay reality to not be measuring up to the theoretical numbers, for one reason or another. In fact it would probably be more noteworthy (and suspicious, IMO) if the numbers did match correctly all the time, because the theoretical numbers generally don't account for player tactics or player mistakes.

Warshades are fairly complex characters. They have better numbers, but they're relatively high-execution - they have more opportunities to make mistakes and those mistakes are going to hurt their performance more. Things like 'missed eclipses' or 'non full eclipses' are going to drag them down, and those kinds of things do happen in gameplay: say, you go in for an eclipse and someone else KB's the spawn away from you. How often does that sort of thing happen? I don't know, and can't think at the moment of a good way of estimating it either (where 'good' is defined as 'doesn't require datamining, is understandable by normal people, and isn't just pulled out of the posterior').

But I do know anecdotally that I see warshades dying plenty ingame, certainly more than their numbers would suggest (though I also see a lot of PBs dying more than I think they ought to, too). I generally am not observing them so I don't know why, and generally they are PUG members so I don't know their builds or players and can't speak to the strength (or weakness) of their skill or build. Maybe the game has simply become that lethal for characters who aren't at the defense softcap.

Well 'gathering observations' is called 'gathering data' and is a key part of the scientific method

But most of the time I'm not experimenting strictly with the game, I'm just playing it. And I admit my perception of how often people should die is skewed by my personal standards: I run some very capable and survivable characters. Mostly what I'm trying to say, though, is that I totally see where the other poster is coming from, I generally expect theoretical numbers to exceed what happens ingame even in 'average' or 'conservative' cases, and can think of a few reasonable explanations - including the already mentioned player skill based ones - for why it'd look that way.

Those things would be what I would experiment with and gather data on if I were interested enough to, which I'm not. But if someone is: in addition to trying to figure out how often average (not super-duper-quality) warshade players get partial eclipses, I've seen a few warshade players fairly consistently getting killed while trying to get an eclipse off to start with, in an NPC alpha strike. Figuring out how often that happens is probably not a waste of time. And finally, warshades and PBs don't have debuff protection or debuff avoidance from defense, and even if you've got good resistances and healing, those debuffs piling up can still drag you down pretty quickly - cascading defense failure applies to non-defense-based characters too. Getting the effects of debuffing nailed down might be enlightening in a lot of ways; personally I think NPC debuffs, in the volume they come at you in during 8 person content, are more dangerous than damage to the characters who should even be on that difficulty at all.

On a final note... I think on SO'd builds, NPC knockback is also a very serious and very underrated issue. You can Breakfree or dwarf out of other control. But if you're being KB'd you can't do anything until the animation finishes, BFs don't protect against it, and you can be 'juggled' - quite easily so, in fact, since many npcs get knockback attacks.

Looking at the inherent and the buffs it allows, I'm unsure if the inherent is the entire problem or not a problem at all. Pushing aside the issues of mez resistance and wonky power designs for the moment, it could be that a Kheldian's "out of the box" performance relying on teams is more of a good thing.

To extrapolate, the two biggest problems I see in relation to Kheldians are "Soloability" and "High end contribution." While the former speaks for itself, the latter is something to expand upon. As is shown by the DPS with a "kitted out" Kheldian, Khelds don't really improve worth a hill of beans, nor do they bring anything major to the table assuming a fully stacked or even slightly balanced group. Assuming this as an optimal situation, it's kinda hard to put a Kheldian side by side with, say, a high end scrapper and not immediately feel that the scrapper is better in every way. I feel that nerfing the inherent or baking it into the power won't do anything here but solve the first problem without bothering to address the second. After all, dominators still use domination to augment their controlling and vigilance still helps the defenders end usage to allow each to have a given role.

If I may say so, after looking at these numbers I'd be willing to say that Khelds' inherent really brings uniqueness to the class much like Fury does to a brute. Because of this, I think that changing the inherent to retain uniqueness while attempting to maintain the same numbers is the smartest move, in my mind. Likewise, I think that using the inherent as a base rewards Kheldians for taking both "paths" in IOs (recharge or softcap) and should be retained as best as possible.

In light of that, I like the earlier mentioned idea to half the cosmic balance buff, bake it into the Kheld's powers, then make Cosmic Balance return to the team. This gives Khelds a semi unique role (jacks with support) and makes a good starting point to allow further analysis into the power. For example, PB forms could grant a certain buff to the team and the PB (Nova for damage, human for mez protect, lobster for resist) which stacks with Cosmic Balance. Warshades could be given a Gauntlet ability where attacks in a certain form likewise grant debuffs (Nova -res, Human -rech, Lobsters -damage). These are obviously starting points, but as I mentioned earlier, it's best to identify what Kheldians are right now and what they should be, then work design changes to reach that paradigm and remove the glass ceiling they have now.