Kelenar

On the upside, Energy Drain provides enough endurance to run forever and ever in most situations when you have Stamina and some decent endredux slotting, and it's pretty simple to get through the T9 crash by popping a blue and a few defensive inspirations, Energy Drain'ing a mob, and plowing right on. The set isn't unplayably bad, especially if you take Aid Self.

I'd be hard-pressed to not call it the weakest option available to Brutes, though. I still managed to get mine to 50. Having a high-mitigation primary like Stone/ really helps, and EA fortunately provides the endurance bonuses to deal with Stone/ and some Fighting toggles. Ironically, I think the set would do a lot better heroside, where you don't have to deal with the psi/toxic horde that is Arachnos every other mission.

Well, Hide gets you pretty much to the softcap against AoE when you're hidden, anyway. But for things like Placate->AS mid-battle, yeah, defense definitely helps. Between having no defense and the DoTs from my primary, I use Placate very rarely on my Spines/Regen as opposed to my Ninja/Ninja stalker.

And even better, Rikti Drones are vulnerable to AoE, so if you have Irradiate...

Only if, every time a villain walks in, the clerk at the register sighs and exclaims, "I'm not even supposed to be here today!"

Most of the other powers also have longer durations on their defense debuffs, too. It's not the most amazing secondary effect for blasts to have, but having some -def on a team is usually good to make the team more reliable.

Forgot about the dang purple patch in the numbers I gave. Allow me to rejigger.
Edit: Rejiggering complete!

Your final to-hit chances against 0% defense enemies based on level (which is probably a lot more common):

Until they remove/raise the aggro cap or allow even higher level settings, this will always be possible. See Silverado's post above.

So they do have non-standard HP caps? And if so, does anybody know how to calculate them? I was dealing with this very issue the other day, since the HP cap formula given on ParagonWiki was giving me drastically different numbers than what I was seeing on my Stalker when my combat attributes screen said I was maxed.

Um, wish granted! Poof, Integration is a toggle!

∫(2^Defender + VEAT³ + Controller + 0.75(Tank^Taunt))/(96% * FotM + 0.5Blaster)dSurvivability = X

The Defender accelerates at 0.2 m/s/s through a magnetic field perpendicular to the Y axis. Solve for X, integrating over the area of a torus, assuming it's Thursday and all rats are mammals therefore all mammals are rats. Show your work.

This expresses why I do it. The RP tag isn't there so you know I RP when I'm RPing. It's there so if I'm fighting stuff on the street and somebody walks past, they might join in IC'ly. Or if I join a PUG with another RPer, they can see it and might jump IC, just maybe. It only happens once in a blue moon, but I've had some fun times with random people I met because one of us had our character tagged for RP.

As for seriousness level, eh. I have characters whose backstories range from 'She was a goddess, but then she decided to be an evil robot instead because that's cooler,' to completely serious, world domination types, complete with manifestos about social revolution. I know characters covering an even wider area of the spectrum, too. They're all out there in the zillions. If you play a super-goofy character with a bunch of people brooding into their whiskey, they might shut you out, but the same goes for talking about how Vahzilok killed your wife on a team full of joke characters.

Barring AoEs would make it less problematic, yeah. It'd still probably make a Dominate-powered ST hold kill bosses in one hit, but depending on how long the timer is (I agree with LISAR that the time should probably scale by rank, if not necessarily her numbers) that may not be game-breaking.

Yes.

Well, unless you're Spines/, in which case you're not so much a single target specialist as you are a perambulatory explosion.

As somebody mentioned, I think it has to do with them having all their ranged attacks recharging, so you might not be seeing it at higher levels. I can confirm that it happens at a wide range of settings lower. My low-level bots keep charging over Caltrops patches to punch enemies (after an attack or two, so I know they're in range) when they're set to Defensive/Stay or Defensive/Follow, and if they're set to Passive/Stay and I give them an attack order, they'll charge into melee after the first attack or two. Even with far away, immobile targets like items in mayhem missions.

Yeah. There are very few 'pure' EBs (that is, EBs who aren't scaled-down AVs) heroside, but there's a generous helping of them villainside. Against these, I can confirm that knockdown/back works well in most cases. It's about the only way my Stone/EA brute managed to get through some of those fights.

In situations like this, yeah, I fully support people breaking off on their own. It is so boring to play any sort of damage/mezz/debuff character on a team where spawns melt in three seconds. There are very few cases where I don't think teams should try splitting into two, since any random grab-bag of people you happen to get will probably have at least two characters capable of taking alphas and keeping the spawns under control. Basically, if the team can handle it, go for it.

But that's "if the team can handle it." Not if you, personally, can handle one spawn but the rest of the team combined struggles with them. Or, what I've seen more commonly, a few people on the team can single-handedly take the spawns, and everybody else just gets to struggle to keep up. I play lots of Defenders. They traditionally don't take getting shot at well, especially when the team's scattered over half a map so I'm basically flying solo as far as support. If there are ambushes, or there's a patrol, or just if a handful of enemies take their attention off whoever I'm following to attack me, there's a good chance I'll spend half of the mission doing two things: sucking and dying. And that's no fun either. I like self-sufficient characters. I have a lot of them, myself. But keep in mind that not everybody can shrug off a x8 ambush solo, and those people have as much of a right to enjoy the game as you do.

Yeah, my Dominator frolicked merrily as she set them all on fire without taking a scratch. My Brute sort of ran head-first into a horrible wall of death that made stacking purple insps almost a requirement. Which was a nice change from melee characters soloing everything effortlessly and my Dom running into mez-resistant Arachnos every ten minutes.

You know, I don't think I was there for that one, but I do remember a similar incident. Which just got better when somebody said, "You know you guys are currently using a game client that probably took millions of dollars to develop as a glorified chat engine, right?"

I personally take the damage auras at low levels if I'm going to be soloing, especially on AoE-light sets like Dark/. Having some AoE really helps speed things up, especially if you do something like fight -1/x8 newspaper missions. Pack 10 targets into one and it's doing pretty darn good DPE compared to a low-level attack chain.