macskull

lolwut? This is just completely, 100% wrong.

If you're saying MM's got the short end of the stick when it comes to secondaries, odds are you've never played anything/Dark. Whoever decided MMs should get /Dark was probably tripping on acid or something.

Castle has gone on record as saying the developers are not against farming, per se. Powerleveling, maybe... but not farming. Castle did say, however, that they're against people farming because they feel they have to to keep up with everyone else. If you're having fun farming, more power to you.

WP is probably the best Stalker secondary at the moment, in regards to PvP at least.

Right around I12 launch, someone brought up the ability to enhance the recharge of Mind Link using Membranes (or def/tohit set IOs with a recharge component). Castle said that was essentially working as intended since they couldn't "fix" that without opening up an entirely new can of worms.

EDIT: Searched Castle's post history, thread's gone.

And taking another look at your chart, we see that subs have been on a steady, gradual decline since the "nerf campaign" began. Are the two related? Maybe, maybe not, but you cannot deny that changes to the game have a meaningful impact on subscriptions. The "wild fluctuations" you see in the first half of that chart are due to the "newness" factor - people try the game out, some stay, most don't. Subs go up and then go down. Subs went back up around the time CoV launched in late 2005 and stayed high for a while.

Your chart also does not include the year 2008, during which we saw some of the lowest subscriber numbers since launch. You can take just about any data and put a marketing or PR spin on it to make it seem like there are more subs, but there just aren't as many people playing the game as there used to be. Some of that is just due to age - this game is getting old and there's competition brewing. Some's due to changes in the game or how in-game issues are handled - the I13 PvP changes drove away most of the PvP playerbase, and the I14 MA bans/deletions caused many people to simply give up, not because their characters were deleted, but because the whole thing was just a giant cluster****. I'm willing to believe that the retail prominence of CoX and the Architect Edition box set helped boost sub numbers, but what's going to happen now? Time will tell, I'm sure.

Not necessarily - contrary to what seems to be popular belief, they can break the dam/end/rech formula. It's just not likely to happen, though if it did this would be a good power for it.

Pretty much exactly this. In a direct comparison, Defenders don't have enough damage to make their stronger debuffs worthwhile. Between the higher base damage modifier, higher damage cap, Scourge, Fire Blast/Thermal Radiation, and higher base HP (Defs and Corrs have 1017 and 1070, respectively, sharing a cap at 1606), there's really no reason to choose a Defender over a Corruptor unless you really hate redside content (or really want Psi Blast or Force Fields).