Draeth Darkstar

Rule of 5 is just for set bonuses and things that function like set bonuses (for example, the LotG 7.5% +Recharge IO).

That said, Achilles Heel does not stack with itself (from any caster) so too many of them in a build tends to be a waste.

IIRC, Tornado and Water Spout are both auto hit, so accuracy doesn't do anything for you, and mez enhancers are just going to make things run from it longer, which you really don't want.

The optimal slotting is damage, recharge, and procs.

...what?

I think you need to elaborate before anyone is going to be able to help you. Bots/Traps is one of the most versatile builds in the game.

I doubt most people are thinking about DPS when they're talking about not liking to play knockback heavy sets. I, personally, am thinking about how annoying it is to chase every single enemy I have to fight down, in a different direction, when playing a Peacebringer.

Being frustrated by a game is not a good thing.

Considering that you need to stand in melee range to benefit from about half your powers as a Kinetics user, Repel is one of the worst offenders in the game of powers that hurt you much more than they help you.

I meant that the mechanics of Katana don't particularly favor either archetype, which is not true for every set.

If all you care about is single target DPS, a scrapper is going to be better in basically every case, but if so I would recommend against ELA in favor of something that suits a Scrapper a bit better.

I could not even begin to list the number of people I have personally been harassed by for this very subject, let alone the number of people I have seen harass others over it. Also, this is, once again, an unnecessarily disingenuous response.

The only situation where it can actually be used to deal damage is against an AV or GM if you don't have a reliable way to prevent it from immediately launching your target(s) to the four winds (pardon the pun) on contact.

No, I require my power combinations to work together, not against each other. For a Blaster, that means I need my attacks to not prevent me from using each other effectively, since, you know, the entire purpose of being a Blaster is... to have access to potent attacks.

Once again, your attitude is excruciatingly tiring. That aside, in the realm of the hundreds of thousands of players who play this game, there are inevitably going to be people who enjoy every possible combination of powers. There are people who love Knockback. I never even began to claim that there weren't. The fact that there are is inherently obvious to this conversation or we wouldn't be having it.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there are also many people who absolutely loathe knockback in all its forms and would never touch a set with heavy knockback presence even if paid. There many more players, like myself, who think knockback has a tendency to become more of a liability than a useful tool with a great enough frequency that it isn't worth the frustration it causes when that happens.

In what way would it hurt you for the game to allow an optional removal of knockback?

P.S. Kindly do me the favor of responding to me with the respect I have shown you if you bother to do so at all, again. I do not appreciate being talked down to and I have been nothing but polite to you and everyone else in this conversation. Additionally, I can only assume you're intentionally misinterpreting what I have posted to respond to it in turn as you did in the last section of your post. All you are doing by employing a tactic like that is discrediting your own argument.

Without question, this.

My Bots/Force Mastermind has 5 Primary and 5 Secondary powers in his current build. That is about as primary/secondary light as you'll find (and not suck).

Despite how absolutely, atrociously rude and condescending your post is (careful when you call other people conceited in a wall of text like that, by the way, it awfully much resembles a certain pot and kettle we've all heard of), I'm going to answer your stated question.

The reason that I care about having options to remove Knockback effects from powers is because I find them frequently to be frustrating to deal with in action.
I gave up on my original main, an En/En Blaster, because the pervasive knockbacks were so counterproductive for actually killing anything and because I enjoy teaming, where it doesn't matter how careful you are, you will still mess up someone's plans and they will attack you for it.
I gave up on my Peacebringer because it was, surprise, even worse than an Energy Blaster for knocking things around, because unlike the Blaster, a PB needs to be in melee to use all of their heavy hitters... and their PBAOE also has a huge knockback on it.
I hate playing Storm Summoning on anything that isn't a Fire/ Earth/ or Ice/ Controller because there is no practical way to make Tornado useful on anything save AV/GM class enemies without those -KB immobilizes, and Hurricane can be heinously annoying without one.
I gave up on my Dark/Mental Blaster after waiting years for Dark/ to come out, because unlike the classic Dark Blast, I can't just skip Torrent and be happy with my other two AoEs, because they merged two of them together, so now I either have to mess up my targeting for Tentacles and Psychic Scream or skip most of the area damage potential the set has to offer.

I really should not look at a power set and think, "Yeah, that'd be cool, but I'd just get tired of chasing things around or herding all the time to be effective." Many players feel this way. That is a flawed design, and if you can't see that, there is no point in continuing this discussion, because your bias is beyond reason.

Speaking of which, will there ever be another edition of your Guide to Defense (or any of the others)? Your guides are so well written, they are a pleasure to read.

About as odd as the game not working like it's supposed to. Glad to hear your play experience has been forever unmarred by emergent behavior, but it happens.

Hoverblasting as a Peacebringer in human form isn't going to be exceedingly effective as most of their decent human form powers are melee, but to answer your question, most of their attacks do have a chance to knockback. Their two human form AoEs are 50% and 80%, the single targets are a bit lower IIRC.

The nova form powers all have high chance to knock back.

Yes, that is an accurate description of how targeted AoE knockback works in theory, but no, in practice, that does not always happen. Latency, moving targets, ragdoll, and presumably other factors that I can't even guess at, for all the years I have played this game, caused some goofy things to happen, not infrequently, when using a targeted AoE knockback power, such as mobs shooting upwards/downwards/sideways/forwards instead of away from me.
I played an E/E/F Blaster as a main from "issue 0" until issue 9 and never did notice a pattern to the nature of that particular phenomenon, but it happens often enough that it made me finally give up on the character I got so frustrated with dealing with it all the time.

This is not always true in practice.

It's also "radial" if you fire a targetted AoE at a group and hit anywhere other than the most exterior row, which can be exceedingly difficult to do if the mobs are moving. I have seen people misuse Solar Flare, for example, much less frequently than the Nova Form blasts, which can easily scatter a group six ways from Sunday in a matter of seconds.

Maneuvers is a larger Defense bonus on every Archetype except for Tankers, and aside that, benefits your team regardless of whether you've got other +team defense or not. It also stacks with Combat Jumping, and is the largest pool +defense option available except for Weave, which requires two other power picks to get to.

In most situations where you're going to be trying to stack defense from sources other than your primary/secondary, you're going to need more than one pool power to reach the soft cap anyway. Maneuvers is one of the last ones that it makes logical sense to skip for mechanical reasons.

Really?

Have you ever played or teamed with a Peacebringer?