ClawsandEffect

I just came back a couple months ago, but I already have a pretty beastly Street Justice/Bio Scrapper. The classic RWZ Challenge was a cake walk. I duoed a Lady Grey with my wife's brute. Neither of us had any holds so we had to brute force our way past the mitos in the Hami fight. I have a planned build for Claws and Effect 1.0 (claws/regen) that hits 47% S/L defense and permahasten with Tier 4 Spiritual and has 724% passive Regen. I expect him to do great things.

I put it in my Street Justice/Bio's damage aura. It procs pretty regularly when I am stuck in with a bunch of enemies.

No, I understand just fine. You want the game to be more challenging so you can run it with any random group of people and have it the way you want it. I gave you a solution. Form a group of people who DON'T USE THAT STUFF. EVER. Play with those people and those people alone. It's not hard to find like-minded people to do just about anything in the game. There are some people who play what they call "hardcore", in which if your character is ever defeated you have to delete it. If you just flat out make the game harder it isn't fair to people who don't build min/maxed characters. They join a random team and find they can't do anything because the team leader didn't inform them that they need a min/maxed character to play with them. I'll let you in on a little secret (that isn't much of a secret): I played on live from 2005 to 2012. The game has NEVER been very difficult. The thing that has been explained to you that YOU don't seem to want to understand is that adding higher difficulty settings is a problem to do with the game's coding. Anything higher than +5 will start getting nearly impossible to hit because your base chance to hit goes down the higher above you in level they are. And last I checked anything above level 54 just doesn't exist.

Then don't use them if you want the game to be more challenging. The game is perfectly playable without them, and was in fact designed to be played without them. IOs will never be removed from the game, so there's no help there. And adding more difficulty levels is problematic for other reasons already covered above. You want the game to be more challenging? Get a group of people together who will run characters with no IOs used. We have a thousand character slots, pretty sure one can be spared for a non-IOed character.

And here's your problem right here. If the game is too easy, stop using Incarnate powers in content that was never designed with them in mind. You may not realize this, but Incarnate powers were intended to be used in content that we never got to see because the game was shut down before Paragon Studios had a chance to actually design any of it. Using Incarnates in regular game content is like taking a Top Fuel drag car to a friendly street racing event and complaining that no one can beat you.

Wasn't Savage Melee originally developed in response to players asking for a way to NOT have claws as attached weapons and use natural claws instead?

Personally, I think where this whole thing gets out of hand is approaching the game with the idea that a power that doesn't deal enough damage to add to an attack chain is "useless". Taking Screech as my example here. I used to play a Sonic/Devices blaster on live and got a TON of use out of Screech when I soloed. I'd stealth up and put a group to sleep with Siren's Song. Then I'd wake up a LT with Screech...who was now stunned and unable to attack me. And wash rinse repeat of the whole cycle. I would frequently go entire missions without even being attacked, let alone damaged. Point being, there is a place in the game for low damage mez powers in offense sets. Most of those sets deal plenty of damage and aren't really being hurt by having 1 power in them that doesn't do much, but does do something else. If I recall correctly, the original intent of the low damage mez powers was to give blasters a means to deal with enemies who mez by mezzing them first.