Nihilii

Both. Also Mesmerize, both confuses and the AE version of these powers. Also Terrify. God, I hate Terrify on SR. Those lvl 30 Tsoos in St Martial use it, and then they can't hit you for the 20 seconds or so it lasts so you're stuck right there doing nothing.

You mostly posted in the AT and powers forums, though. Devs and mods don't tread in these places.

Standards may differ, but... Generally speaking, anything a purple or PVP IO set can do can be replicated at a lower scale with a normal set.

Some PVP sets are arguably worse than some normal sets, even. You mention Gladiator's Strike, for example, and the bonuses in that particular set aren't very interesting, in my opinion. I'd much rather slot either Crushing Impact or Mako, and I haven't ever used Gladiator's Strike in a build.

True. I'm so addicted to inspirations I intuitively had the "pop pills to manage PA/decoys mishaps" mindset even though I was trying to talk about non-inspiration play, heh.

As for meleers - yeah, you're likely right as well. New stalkers can put out such impressive DPS numbers a spiderlings + DM + defense powerset build might get somewhere. I could see a granite brute getting good results against most AVs, too; or a TW/resistance set combining Defensive Sweep with resistances. It's tricky finding the balance between decent survivability, sustainability and damage on SOs/common IOs. Against a theoretical AV lacking resistances or any special power it looks about alright, but even dealing with something as little as 20% res can make a fight impossible, and there's so many AVs out there with some resistance to S/L - which takes a significant amount of powersets out of play.

Try to take on AVs on any character with that setup (I'm assuming you meant "no insps" as you mention stocking up on inspirations later) and the list comes up painfully short, though.

You've got Illusion controllers... You've got some masterminds... You've got perhaps a handful more of debuffers and controllers if they do things like spamming immobilizes from out of LoS (but I honestly doubt anyone uses this as a main and sustainable AV soloing tactic, it's just so long and can go wrong so easily, without any mitigation).

All of these characters defeat AVs through bending the usual rules rather than sheer power applicable to normal game situations. Where are those masterminds when speeding TFs? Yeah, yeah, this being the forums I'm sure we'll see ten people popping up to tell me their MM is all that and a bag of chips even in these situations, but let's face it, the more dynamic the fight the less attractive they become. It's not surprising the devs eventually had to give special treatment to MM pets during itrials, and despite that there are people out there who still feel MMs are underpowered there.

I mean, coming back to other characters, RI and DN, to pick two powers often mentioned for their impressive mitigation, give you a fat load of nothing against AVs, as they are heavily resisted (~85% by level 50). A 30% tohit debuff is nice, a 4% tohit debuff is... less impressive. Unless you've got 41% defense perhaps, but no Radiation or Dark defender is going to have that much defense from common IOs.

Kin actually often ends up with more mitigation than Radiation against AVs, as damage debuffing isn't resisted (unless the particular AV you're fighting has resistance), and your heal is stronger as well as having an actual offensive use, making using it less of a DPS loss.

By itself it won't do much, but when you stock up on inspirations... That is, spend ten seconds to buy 20 small lucks to your contact before heading into a mission with an AV, and consume 3 or 4 at a time... This significant healing + damage debuff starts to stack pretty well.

I mean, I could go on and on on that topic but likely I'm the only one entertained. In the end I think it's telling we can even debate the ability to solo the strongest stuff on a powerset that is able by itself to give unsuppressed movement, +50% recharge buff and double recovery for an entire league, as well as a significant amount of damage buffing (although I agree with those disputing the claim it's trivial to consistently keep a team at the damage cap).

I'm actually hard pressed to find an example of a kin build that *couldn't* solo AVs and TFs, in today's game.

I thought maybe a kin/elec or kin/DP defender... But nope, not anymore, at level 50 your Lore pets annihilate everything, and below that, AV HP scaling is lenient enough you can get by.

I mean, you could cherrypick specific tasks that might pose trouble to a kin and not to specific other strong soloing builds; i.e. a mind dom can get through the LRSF with sleeps and/or confuses whereas any non-illusion kin would likely be out of luck in the finale. For soloing the vast majority of available TFs and AVs though, I'd pick a kin before I'd pick most melee builds, or a TA, sonic, FF, emp, storm, pain, or a blaster, or a non-mind, non-earth dom, or a non-bots, non-thugs MM, or a PB, or a WS... And when you tally it up, kin really ends up being a better pick than most builds.

So true, and loving the way you put it.

There's nothing stopping anyone who wants to talk about middle of the road sets in performance discussions to do so, but to suggest everyone else should do the same is silly. From a strictly performance oriented point of view, the average *is* skewed towards the best, as why even consider playing anything else in this hypothetical scenario? The only thing that is relevant is to determine what is the best.

Even applied to the game where performance is never the only concern, it still tends to lean this way; i.e. you don't see a bazillion Battle Axe/Shield brutes farming, but you do see endless hordes of SS/Fire brutes farming, and while your BA/SD might be average doing a set-to-set comparison, it's likely going to be subpar for the task at hand compared to the average ingame performance, due to players playing, say, ten SS/FA for every BA/SD.