macskull

This would be the case in a vacuum, but in an actual gameplay scenario both Scrappers are going to be actively trying to defeat the enemies they're surrounded by and they only need to live long enough to stop the incoming damage. In other words, the Scrapper's primary powerset is going to be contributing to their survivability. To borrow the skydiving analogy: the resistance-based Scrapper's going to deploy the parachute immediately after jumping and fall at a relatively predictable rate. The defense-based Scrapper does the same, except the parachute might not deploy right away and even if it does there's the possibility it fails after an indeterminate amount of time.

Been saying for a long time now: the right answer here is to offer optional higher-difficulty content (and rewards commensurate with the degree of difficulty). The ASF difficulty levels are a huge step in the right direction. The baseline game being pretty damn easy is one of its main selling points, IMO.

Your defense overhaul was a bad idea when you first suggested it, and it's a bad idea now. It's also worth pointing out any character at its defense cap with no resistance has the potential to get insta-deleted by a few lucky hits, which will never happen to a character at its resistance cap.

I think your best bet is to use software like Karabiner to remap the key to a standard key at an OS level.

I'm not really sure why they were ever removed. Some tiers of the Cardiac and Resilient alphas used to boost intangibility duration but it looks like those have been replaced with absorb instead.

Apparently the reward merit system is some form of charity, at least that's how I'm understanding it.

The system you are describing in your post already exists - for the most part just playing the game will get you enough inf to kit your character out with SOs or generic IOs. Both of those are perfectly adequate for, in your own words, "capable of dealing with even-level enemies." The game's balanced around generic enhancements and the IO system is entirely optional.

Hyperbole much? The game's combat is not balanced around the existence of IOs. This was reiterated multiple times back on live and the current devs have stated the same on several occasions. I'm curious what price point you think that needs to be, considering a character needs exactly zero IOs for the game to function as intended. The most difficult thing about the new Crey is remembering they've changed so you aren't surprised by some of the new powers. I haven't found them to be any more difficult than they were before but I'm also not trying to solo them on +4x8 or something.

Same here, but I know not everyone thinks that way or they'd just be speedrunning every TF. The wealth of +4x8 TF runs I see in LFG tells me plenty of people are doing them for XP and drops.

Anecdotal here as well but none of the speedrunners I know will touch the shard TFs unless they're the WST and sometimes even that isn't worth it if you're looking at it from a reward merit standpoint. The speedrunners definitely aren't running it when it's not the WST and on the weeks when it is they're still going to be far outnumbered by the rest of the teams running it.

No, but that's also why median time is used instead of mean/average time. I suppose it all depends on the time range they're using to determine what the median time is though. Apex and Tin Mage are both worth 40 merits which would imply a median completion time of around two hours each and you know as well as I do that isn't even close to how long those actually take. I'd bet all my inf those two TFs will see their rewards dramatically lowered and would be pretty surprised if the adjusted value is anything over 20.

I mean, regardless of what level you're at you're going to get more non-merit rewards during the run if you're fighting through each map than you would if you're stealthing to the objective on every mission.

Only cases I can think of of the "gotta go fast" crowd cratering rewards for content is KHTF and Eden (KHTF gave 7 merits when I13 launched and Eden gave only two) but those numbers were adjusted back upward around I14. There was one Kheldian-specific arc that got its merit rewards cut a bunch in the first merit rebalancing but that was more due to lack of data for assigning the initial value. Either way, the players who aren't doing "speedy anything" are ending up with more xp, inf, and drops for their time so... shrug. Just a matter of whether you want to prioritize merits over everything else.

I'm not going to respond to the rest of the post because I'm getting some pretty strong "I don't know what I'm talking about" vibes but... To your first point: the resources for even a brand new player to be rolling in inf are easily accessible to anyone who is curious. Are they going to be able to quickly afford a top-of-the-line build? No, but they have the tools to get there in a reasonable amount of time. If your response to this is "but you have to use the market to do that," see this post from Faultline. I'd argue it's even easier for a new player to get to that point than it would have been for the veteran players to do it 12 or 14 years ago. The game's already plenty playable and fair from the very beginning. To your second point: that's not how that works at all. There are two pretty distinct groups I see running task forces - the first just wants the merits and any xp/inf/drops are just a nice bonus, and the second wants the xp/inf/drops and the merits are just a nice bonus. Considering the popularity of things like +4x8 steamroll task forces I'm pretty sure we're not running the risk of alienating people if merit rewards drop a bit.

I can't speak to story arcs because those are less-commonly run, but I fully expect task force/trial rewards to go down almost across the board even for pre-level 50 stuff. Everything's easier to get on Homecoming so the average player is running around with a better build than back in the live days (incarnate powers notwithstanding, this just adds another layer of it at level 50). I can't think of any content that's so terrible it causes players to stop playing for months, but if task force A is only run 10% as often as task force B despite offering identical rewards for the time spent that tells me there's something going on with task force A, not with the reward system as a whole. The weekly strike target system does a good job of incentivizing players to "spread out" content even more than they already do by offering bonus rewards. But you do have somewhat of a point - Dr. Q might be worth 244 merits when it's the WST but even at a relatively fast run of 90 minutes it's a drag. I don't really buy the "one correct thing" argument these days. There might be a handful of task forces which are run more often than the others but it's not like LFG is full of "speed katie lfm" or "speed eden lfm" like you would've seen pre-I13. I haven't run the Barracuda SF since probably 2010 but I'd imagine one of the biggest issues was how it practically required certain ATs to complete and you wouldn't know 100% whether you were screwed or not until the final boss fight. That's not something that can be solved by increased merit payout. If there's one thing I've noticed with any consistency since Homecoming showed up nearly three years ago, it's that the powers that be put a lot of stock in design formulas and how things "should work" which tells me issues like this are more likely to be fixed by adjusting the content rather than the rewards for the content. Other examples of this include the I27P3 changes to the CoT and Eden trials and the RSF. In the case of the latter two you could teleport past/through certain objectives to complete the content much more quickly than was intended so rather than adjust merit rewards downward the ability to bypass those objectives was removed. That being said, the devs have explicitly said merit rewards are going to be looked at at some point in the near future, and I'd expect with three years of Homecoming-specific data to look at it would mean an overall reduction in rewards.

Incarnates only matter in the sense of comparing median completion times of level 50 content before incarnate powers existed to the same content after the introduction of incarnate powers. Merit reward payouts were rebalanced several times during the four years between I13 and the game's shutdown. Incarnates are a non-factor in pre-level 50 content because, well... they don't exist. You don't magically get reduced rewards when you unlock incarnate powers - you're simply more powerful and as such will probably move through a given piece of content faster, which results in a smaller payout because you're spending less time on that content. If you're arguing "not having incarnate powers as a level 50 nerfs my rewards because other level 50s with them finish content faster" then... well, that sucks for you, but it is incredibly easy to unlock and slot all six incarnate abilities, and odds are pretty good any team you're on is going to have players with incarnates to help out anyways. What is "good content?" What is "annoying content?" While there may be some general agreement among the playerbase about which task forces suck to run, the entire goal of the reward merit system was to provide roughly equal reward for any content regardless of length. Those of us who played before Issue 13 remember running speed KHTF trains nonstop because a task force gave you one random recipe roll no matter how long it took so there was little to no incentive to run longer content. Why would I spend 3 hours on a Dr. Q only to end up with a Trap of the Hunter proc when I could run almost 20 KHTFs (and therefore get 20 recipe rolls) in the same amount of time? The actual determination for how many merits a given piece of content earns follows the formula: (MedianTime / MPM) * TaskModifier * TimesRunModifier * TimeModifier + ArtificialModifiers TimeModifier and ArtificialModifiers are important because TimeModifier essentially acts as a bonus which goes up as the length of content increases as an extra incentive, and ArtificialModifiers can be used to manually change reward amounts, usually to do things like make a TF which would otherwise only award 18 merits award 20 (enough for a recipe at a merit vendor). There's no need to use ArtificialModifiers to account for "difficulty" of the content because harder content will take longer to complete and will therefore be reflected in a higher MedianTime. TL;DR: If the new enemies present that much of a greater challenge, completion times for the arcs featuring them will go up, which will cause the rewards to go up.

The single biggest factor to merit rewards is median completion time, so as more people use powers like TT to complete content faster, the median time - and therefore the merit payout - goes down. As for why the thread has gone off on the incarnate discussion, that's pretty simple too. Your argument is "the enemies are now more difficult so the merit payout should be harder" but the merit payout is based on completion time so until there's evidence of the buffed enemies causing completion times to go up merit rewards won't go up.

Oh, when I'm playing with friends I absolutely drop junk enhancements and recipes onto them. I don't do it to randoms though. I also tend to do my crafting/marketing in the quieter universities, like Croatoa.

Thunderous Blast is kinda niche for this in that it'll work once and then you're stuck waiting on the power to recharge for a minute or so, and any opponent carrying inspirations or that's got end drain resist will just shrug it off.

Usually not, unless you have room for an extra power pick somewhere. Damage bonuses in this game are sort of misleading because a, say, 10% bonus isn't actually 10% - damage bonuses only affect base damage and also do not affect damage from procs.

There are quite a few powers which don't show hit rolls unless they miss. Definitely not working as intended.

I don't think Sentinels will get Seismic Blast and Stone Armor until after the AT gets a rework.

I feel like most of the responses in here missed the "I want to be able to solo AVs and 4x8 content" part of OP's post. Tossing in another vote for the good ol' Blaster.

Uhh, these things were nerfed because the risk to reward ratios were so skewed players gravitated toward them at the expense of other content, therefore making it harder to do anything except those things, so by definition they were nerfed because they harmed other players. You could argue their existence harmed the game as a whole rather than other players specifically, but at the end of the day that's the same thing. Claiming email attachments in combat doesn't really meet any of those metrics.