So why aren't Doms locked?

Errr you stopped in 2008 I guess. Almost nobody uses fire/kins for farming anymore. MMS were never popular farmers. If there is ANY At that I see people use besides Brutes, it's fire/psi doms, which were the premium villainside farmers for a long time, now not so much after the psi assault changes.

And if you wanna talk about regular mission game breaking teams, look no further than 8-defender teams, they can debuff everything to oblivion and turn avs into kittens.

My guess is that since they wanted to avoid locking two redside ats, they decided to lock trollers because they have two very intensive powersets - a control set and a buff/debuff one, and the buff/debuff sets certainly are more resource intensive than a blast (defender)/assault (domi) secondary - after all you can change 'statuses' of all your teammates and fill the whole screen with long duration buffs and debuffs like fearsome stare, tar patch, rad toggles, time's flashy patches, auras, heals and buffs that affect a whole team - couple that with a control+pet primary and you have the busiest blueside AT - that's why everyone says Controllers play so differently depending on the prim/sec and most of them are better suited for players who don't mind multitasking a lot.

Well, we know the dev reasoning specifically was because of how server resource intensive Masterminds were.

... except they gave all non epic ATs to both sides at the same time.

Which is why that doesn't really follow, for me, as an excuse.

I am inclined to think Kioshi's at least close, though. I don't know how "server intensive" buff/debuff sets are.

That's not how people think though.

It doesn't matter that they're all available on both sides NOW. Masterminds will always be a Villain Archetype, and Controllers will always be a Hero Archetype as the established player base at large sees it.

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

Indeed. So much so that, until you said that I didn't know what Stormbird was talking about regarding giving us all the non-Epic ATs at the same time.

It's not how the free players who the restriction applies to will see it, though! I mean.. They just got here.

The most difficult toon to solo with (and even use on a team) for new players is a blaster. Blasters are also one of the most favored new player toons because many of the really cool comic book characters are blasters so lots of new folks start with them not realizing the learning curve that exists. Wonder why they aren't locked.

sometimes I wonder how I managed soloing most of the way to 32 using Ring of Fire and Char...

I did say "established player base" right?

New players aren't really going to care why something is locked, just that it is locked. They're not the ones constantly asking "why are trollers locked and doms not?"

Locking an uneven number of Red/Blue archetypes doesn't really matter to new/free players, but it would set off those veteran players with the constant "Devs hate....." BS.

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

I don't think so, exactly. Early on they are in fact very easy to solo. Target and blast away at everything. It's only later when the enemies get tougher and have more tricks that blasters start having problems. Kind of the opposite of controllers that way.

Mid-2010, I still saw GR not-so-closed beta. Anyway, I usually saw quite a fair share of obviously farming firekins back then... Why are they no longer used as much?

This may be true, but for all the new free to play players, inventions are locked. On SOs only, fire/kin is one of the top farmers out there. No perma dom required, no defense softcap required, just flashfire, cage, fulcrum, kill. Siphon speed and hasten can keep flashfire up for every mob, and transfusion/transference keep you going like the energizer bunny.

This was my theory as well. Currently the best option for an SO only farmer on a "free" account is probably to spend 5 dollars on a free account (so it can go into AE), and roll a claws/fire brute, who can do ambushes farms pretty well (he wont get XP, but if the person you are leveling is VIP they will still get XP).

Depending on how the ambush farm change works out, the new best option might be to spend the 10-15 (can't remeber atm) on a free account to unlock trollers, as they work on plenty of "normal" content farms

You won't. Or, at least, you're not supposed to - although I've heard some players say they still had access to their HEATs and VEATs after they downgraded.

If you end up without access, it's still available in the Paragon Market. But there's no Tier reward to unlock epics like there is for trollers and MMs.

Are you sure? I let me account lapse for a bit just to see what happened. I still had VEAT/Epic access. I assumed they just unlocked at the same time controllers/mms did on the tier reward scale.

I had also unlocked up to the point where I got the invention system as well, so maybe they unlocked higher.

You definitely do get access to them though.

Sadly this is true (i like doms more than both but thats me) i actually got CoV mostly BECAUSE of MMs.

They might say its because of server load, and that is at least partly true i would expect. But lets face it, people are more likely to pay money for these ATs.

Perhaps it is just this cold I am getting over, but arn't I saying the same thing Koshi is?

Locking the Mastermind set was a good idea because of the resources they took up. That was a given.

Controllers were just the next most resource heavy on the Hero side.

SS/Fire brutes are extremely fast, especially on ambush farms. Basically on an ambush farm (which are being nerfed) you'll go to a fire-dealing mission since you have 90% fire resistance, use insps to cap defenses and stand still using Footstomp, Burn and other Aoes (usually Elec Fences and Ball Lightning, Fireball works too), and the ambushes are so big that you're always at the aggro cap, half of them aren't even attacking you.

This video shows how an ambush farm is (you can skip to 4:40 to see) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ziR1Y9-rM (since it's on the signature of the person who made it, I assume he won't care I post it here)

Now, since ambush farms are being nerfed (the subsequent ambushes will give less xp progressively) it may affect self-pling a brute (which is what the video is about). But a 50 SS/Fire or Claws/Fire can easily farm 54 mobs, and your insp tray is huge at this level so you'll always be at the def softcap and you can use a macro to convert everything else to reds like I do. So while it may affect powerleveling, I don't think my brute will 'feel' it because when you fight 54s you cap AE tickets after about the middle of the second ambush, so you exit and restart in like 2 minutes or less (even in the video the lowbie brute completes the farm in 3 minutes, but on the lowbie ones you have to kill more ambushes to cap tickets so it will be felt more).

Also, imo (I have a tricked out fire/kin I actually leveled the hard way, IOed him and in the end I did more TFs with him than anything else) I find it much more relaxing to farm with a brute, I got bored quickly with the f/k's use of siphon speed, Fulcrum, transference, etc. I'm lazy so I'm a bit sad the ambush farms will be nerfed because I actually prefer to farm with my level locked 33 claws/fire on a level 3 AE farm - eat 4 purples, click hasten before entering, leave Spin on Auto, I just have to click on insps and follow up (which is why I chose a level 3 farm, I get to keep powers till level 8, and I click Hasten before entering because it's not available for me after I enter, the 50 claws/elecs who do that click Power Surge and energize so they'll have +recovery and crazy resists while inside, diminishing the need to worry about insps). But I do just like the guy in the video shows, I mash f1-f5 not worrying about which insps will drop and I'm always good to go. Aside from some procs I put in the dmg aura and Spin, she has no slotting at all since it doesn't matter on a lowbie map (check the CEBR topic on the Brute forums).

But see, my ss/fire was self-pled in one of those lowbie farms, it was far from optimal until 33 because I had no AoE besides the damage aura and sands of mu. After I hit 33 (Burn+FS+slotting) I went to the normal farms and went very fast to 50 using SOs and insps. I wasn't fighting +4s like now but it was good enough, I also only moved from the lowbie farms after FS because on the lowbie ones mobs are so weak you can farm with a fury boosted damage aura.

Plus, brutes are free for f2p players, controllers are not. No need to softcap defenses or good end management because insps will rain anyway, my brute has 25%ish fire def in his farming build just because I want to softcap with 2 purple insps instead of 4 (Actually since the 54 bosses drop a lot of big insps I usually need only one purp and can convert the rest to reds), it's not like I needed it. No need to be an ambush farm either since they'll be nerfed, it will just be slower in the normal ones because you have to move. Maybe on SOs a claws/fire will be faster than SS/fire since Spin is godly on Brutes.

But I agree that, regardless if they're faster or not on SOs (I never farmed with my fire/kin while on SOs and farmed very little after due to getting bored and friends calling for TFs), fire/kins are good farmers with little investment, while all the other farming toons I can think of except brutes require heavy IO builds to be effective (Elec/SD scrappers rely on the long recharging telenukes, Arch/MM blasters rely on the nuke, drain psyche and PSW, Warshades need perma eclipse which can get expensive). I've seen Fire/Fire tankers farm, a lot actually, and I think they can do it on SOs too, but I always found them quite slow, even IOed out ones.