Vanden

I'm quite certain Apex and Tin Mage have intentionally inflated merit rewards, since they're pseudo-incarnate content.

I can't say one way or the other. In order for a speedrun-esque time to become the median completion time for a piece of content, speedruns literally need to be more than half of all completions of that content. Anecdotally, I don't believe that to be the case for the majority of content. It's only content that is particularly onerous, like the Quaterfield TF or the Cavern of Transcendence trial, where players essentially refuse to run it without the speedrun strategies, where that's likely to happen.

Players who can't afford IOs are a shrinking minority. Homecoming has made the barrier to entry to the IO system lower than it ever was before shutdown. Median completion times are going to reflect that. The useful thing about median is that it's less susceptible to outliers than mean is, and that goes for both top-end and bottom-end outliers. If speeding content happens enough to merit lowering rewards, but the devs choose to ignore that data, it only encourages more speeding of the content.

Incarnates aren’t available in sub-45 content, but they aren’t the reason that that content is being completed faster. The wide proliferation of IOs on Homecoming are responsible for that. Content is being completed faster than ever, with or without Incarnates.

It's median (i.e. average, more or less) completion time. In the Cavern of Transcendence example, stealth or speed runs far outnumbered "normal" runs, helped by the fact that attempting to run the trial the "intended" way was virtually guaranteed to fail.

The whole basis of your suggestion is that the difference between how Placate and Hide put you in Hidden are somehow the cause of Assassin's Strike doing the wrong version of the attack, but the only salient difference between the powers in this context is that Placate gives slightly less Stealth Radius in PvP. Since Stealth Radius isn't what Assassin's Strike checks when deciding between the fast or slow version, the suggestion wouldn't accomplish anything. It's entirely founded on a faulty premise.

Stealth Radius is not an essential component of the Hidden status. It’s governed by the Meter attribute; when a Stalker’s Meter is at 100%, it becomes Hidden. Placate and unsuppressed Hide both set the Meter to 100%. The reason you can still see a Stalker in PvP after it Placates you, but not when it's in unsuppressed Hide, is because Placate gives less Stealth Radius in PvP than Hide.

According to City of Data, Placate and Hide already do the same thing to achieve Hidden status. There's no such thing as "pseudo" Hide.

You're allowed to post recorded videos to YouTube, however all links to YouTube from the forums are banned, with the exception of Rickrolls

Half spider... Half Cop... All Atter!

You want to plug Invul’s psi hole, you slot for 100% slow resistance so you can just kill the psi enemies faster and Dull Pain comes up quicker.

If you assume Activation Time is 0, it should be extremely simple. Just divide the damage scale of every attack by its recharge time and sum that figure up with every attack in the set. The only tricky part would be figuring out how to factor AoE size into that. If nothing else it would give us a figure to shoot for in a revamp.

What if we played Devil's Advocate for a bit, and judged it on the merits that sets were balanced around when it was created? I.E., if we pretend there's no procs and ignore activation time, does it at least come out on top that way?

Of course it’s about procs, OP even said as much. It’s always about the damn procs. I really hate how high-level performance has become centralized around procs. What powers actually do has taken a backseat to how many procs they can slot. They’re long overdue for a balance pass.

Ah yes, let's take the silliness of a level 1 Arachnos Soldier who took Pummel instead of Single Shot, and make it last all 50 levels.

What does this mean You're making my head spin

I would say the ease of reaching the defense soft cap is absolutely broken, but the playerbase would never allow it to be fixed. Not when they can just switch to another server.

There used to be channels in the official Discord server where a bot would post the chat that went out on LFG, General, etc. I know this isn’t exactly what OP is asking for, but perhaps a webpage you could load up to look at recent chat if you’re interested is a better implementation than one that’ll increase the server load from every player regardless of whether they use the feature or not.

No.

Miss Liberty can’t do it, but the Cosmetic Surgeons in every Icon and Facemaker already have this ability.

Sometimes when I’m playing the game, and the varmints manage to hoodwink me yet again, just typing, “Tarnation!” into the chat box isn’t enough to express my frustration. For those occasions, I’d like an emote where I throw my hat on the ground and jump up and down on top of it. Obviously it should only be possible to do this emote if you have some kind of hat on, and after using it you’d have to go to Icon and get a new one.

A lot of us are familiar with the final fight in the Magisterium trial; use the temp powers on the lights, scatter when the Air Crackles and focus on Tyrant. There's more going on than that, though. There's some Olympian Guards running around, which I think is tied to the reveal that Tyrant has Recluse's powers in addition to Statesman's, and which doesn't otherwise amount to anything besides explaining why Tyrant has Energy Smash instead of Knockout Blow. Tyrant's eye beam attack is also deemed worthy of a big text popup like Lightning Flow, despite seeming like a completely unremarkable attack. So my question (mainly for devs like @Faultline or @Piecemeal who can look at the actual encounter design in the files, but really anyone who might know) is what's the story with these elements? Are players actually expected to do something about this seemingly mundane attack that gets a big scary warning, or the elite boss mobs that I've never seen anyone pay any attention to at all?

needs to be fixed*

My friend has no idea what you're talking about