Hopeling

I was in a run with a Defender who got the drop, so no, you don't have to be TW to get the recipe.

No, I believe you are entirely correct:
I'm saying that the person who concludes they are missing out on something, wants to know what that something is, and makes no effort to find out is their own obstacle. The game or the market isn't holding them back.

...and yeah, actually, if Bill Gates had become a billionaire by wandering around on his days off, doing whatever struck his fancy until it became boring without regard for the money he'd earn doing it, and also being incredibly irresponsible with the money he did earn, and without encountering any particular lucky breaks, he'd have pretty good justification for calling the rest of us lazy and incompetent for our financial troubles.

And you're wrong about that, which was my point. The epic RotP is different than the Fiery Armor RotP in only one way, which is the delay on the Untouchable effect. Since epic pool powers are as a rule inferior to primary/secondary versions of the same power, this seems intended.

Like I said, if you want to make a suggestion that it should work differently, you have my support.

I'm not sure why you've asserted this twice now without even checking. RotP provides 50% health and 50 end, and deals 333.7 damage with a 14.9 second stun on Blasters, Brutes, Scrappers, Tankers, Dominators, and Controllers. I'm not sure how much damage/stun the Mastermind version deals, Mids doesn't list it for some reason, but it seems like a safe bet that it matches the others.

From direct experience, the .25 seconds of vulnerability does not totally cripple the power. Not every death is followed by a large spawn of angry enemies camping your corpse. I would personally rather it gave less health or did less damage or had a longer recharge or whatever than that it had the delay, sure, true. Make a suggestion that effect, and I'd agree.

But your anecdotal evidence was totally a valid generalization?

You don't need to understand the whole market. You don't need to know everything that can be bought with every kind of currency. You don't need billions to make a solid build. It takes one good market niche, one question in /help, one quick tip from another player, to learn how to earn enough for almost anything you could want. Keeping your SOs up to date so they didn't turn red was harder. I'm not saying everyone knows the methods instinctively, I'm saying that the methods are right out in the open for anyone who attempts to look.

Someone who totally doesn't understand how other players can have so much inf, wants to have that much inf, and does not bother to ask or look for info is the kind of person I'm saying is their own obstacle.

I have spent roughly zero hours in the last year focused on earning influence. The only inf I've earned from the market has been from selling items I obtained as drops or via merits I got from stuff I wanted to do anyway. The only farming I've done has been, hm... I haven't actually done any. I don't have a character that could farm competently if I even wanted to.

Currently, starting from approximately broke a year ago, I have every 50 I care about (about ten at the moment) equipped with the best build I want, plus a few billion liquid.

Yes, inf does grow on trees. Knowledge is definitely a part of it, but you don't have to be a market expert or an awesome farmer to make hundreds of millions. I'm certainly not in either category. I agree with Nethergoat: anyone who has IO access, knows what an IO build is, wants an IO build, and tries to obtain an IO build, will be able to do so, fairly easily.

Influence, yes, pretty much. RL money, still no, but it's no more necessary for IOs than it's ever been.

You don't need to be a market guru to run tip missions and cash in the merits, or most of the 417 other ways to quickly and easily obtain very valuable items.

The fact that people could/would do this is WHY the end-cost-no-cooldown approach was scrapped. Tweaking a build and running the toggle full-time was specifically how they wanted Hybrid to not work.

The target cap depends on the power; the t1 caps at 4, but by t4 they cap at 10.

But yes, the buff scales with nearby enemies, like Invincibility/Rise to the Challenge/Against All Odds/etc. So you're looking at something like 300% regen, 20% resist or 10% def, and mez protection at t4, which is reasonably competitive with Assault's +75% damage at t4. The Radial path provides a buff only per enemy; Core provides some of its buff up front even with no enemies in range.