expected average time to defeat per enemy, what do the devs expect?

Well....

1) Sometimes it is more fun to have a less active set. Active sets can be really painful to use(for the hands and fingers as well as the eyes and mind managing it) sometimes.
I know I have been put off by active sets like that. I don't like Dual Blades for this reason. The most active set I actually like is Time Manipulation, but I even find that very trying at times such as on a mastermind.

2) Sometimes I just want a change from the usual "walk up and spam attacks" with either passive defenses or defenses you need to spam. It would be nice to have the option to make offense the mostly passive thing while defense is active or still passive.
It's like a robots/force field mastermind at lower difficulties. The pets require less management then so you can just buff them every few minutes and just manage your positioning so they stay in the big Dispersion Bubble as much as possible.

3) If people didn't like being passive at least in some situations then tanks and healers wouldn't exist. Just see what a Hamidon raid tanker does sometime, or their empaths. All melee characters get this way though; they call it "scrapper-lock" or something else where they just, apparently "mindlessly", run in and spam attacks until everything is down and they move on to the next.

4) There would be new strategy for fighting against such a passive set. It could make staying in melee range a bad idea, forcing melee characters to adapt(in pvp or if used by pve NPCs), or it could make some other strategy interesting.
That is not even counting the amount of strategy the powers could take to use for you as well.

5) Being such a "powerful entity that your very presence can affect the world around you" is a VERY cool character concept.
Just look at Mot from the Dark Astoria incarnate content for an example of it taken to the extreme. Mot does not even move or fight himself(from what I gather on the wiki) yet he is able to absorb and destroy people/heroes/villains supposedly around the world.

There are so many concepts open to it as well, most of them having to do with some unseen mental control(through some method like technology or a mutation or natural willpower...etc) affecting the world.

Hell, there are examples of it in our powers already with all the toggles that affect more than just our character without requiring us to hold down a button forever or be stuck in an animation like some "ritual that demands absolute concentration and would be broken by combat".



I would find it very fun(especially considering situations where lag makes getting clicks out quickly difficult) to be a sort of "focal point of power" and watch enemies be "defeated by my mighty presence".



It also would not be completely passive, I imagine:

1) I would include at least one single target attack, probably ranged, to give people something to do(other than other things I'll get to in point 2) and make performance definitely more varied than "constant identical DPS in every fight".

2) I have the idea that such a set could emphasize positioning in battle. Instead of the usual "melee characters run into melee and just spam attacks while enemies come to them", it could encourage/require melee characters to position themselves to do optimal damage or to specific tougher targets rather than just the closest melee targets.

3) Such a set could be emphasizing setup before a fight as well, instead of just running in and spamming then. Like masterminds, it could be more about preparation before a fight or strategy/tactics rather than "SMASH!" running into combat without thinking beyond "me smash biggest/littlest bad guy(s) first".


I have plenty of ideas for it, but it is also fairly difficult to turn them into a working set idea, especially figuring out a theme for it(or multiple themes for many similar sets if I can).

I think it would be awesome and fun, especially with an awesome concept.





Edit:
I don't want to see the set become an endurance management set though. It isn't fun to have to "stop doing anything" while you wait for endurance to recover or Rest to recharge because you used it the last fight and are out of endurance.
There are already too many combinations that are heavy on endurance and suffer for it.

Endurance management is rarely fun and most often a curse.

Also, such a set needs to be active in some way, and the best way to do that is not to slow it down.
The best way to make it active is to encourage constant fighting and managing the position of the character and the enemies in combat or some other way besides a binary resource system that either has "enough endurance" or "not enough".

*shrug* different people like different things.

I'm right there with you though, it sounds like a very limited concept and probably not very viable in this type of game setting. And for me somewhat boring rather than fun, no matter how it is spun.

But, concepts like this can lead to interesting places and all ideas find their place in the big picture.

I understand that.
You probably don't like /Force Field masterminds, but I quite enjoy them. I like letting the pets do the work as I don't do much or have room in my build and time for pool powers.

That is why I came up with this idea. I'm more interested in easier to manage power sets and archetypes(hence my favoritism for brutes and masterminds and the Fortunata side of widows).


Though, this idea would work best in exactly this type of game. It would be very hard or impossible to make it work in an FPS game, for example.

I'm still working on this idea, but I think it can be both mostly passive and still interesting and active enough. Also, it is more about the illusion of passivity, such as Gravity Control powers don't have projectiles so that it looks like your will alone just locks a target down.

I like attacks that are not physical, ones that just effect a target(Gravity Distortion/Lift/etc) or instantly hit(X-ray Beam/Laser Beam Eyes/etc).
Sadly, no melee power sets have that at all. They're all about physically punching and kicking and only quick because the target is so close.

I am unaware of any such specific rule, except to say that of course the average such defeat times of all existing sets for a particular archetype is logically going to be near the devs' intended target, and some of the game's bedrock damage and health tables are designed around the assumption that when slotted with SOs it takes three to four attacks to defeat an even con minion for an archetype with base damage (i.e. damage modifier = 1.0).