Adeon Hawkwood

I think the reason is to frustrate you (well, not you personally but players in general). Having a time limit on spending Alignment Merits discourages players from hoarding them making it more desirable to just spend them as you get them. This, in turn, encourages players who don't need IOs to spend their alignment merits and sell the results for inf, further stimulating the economy.

Personally I'm not convinced it's needed or effective. People who are likely to hoard Alignment Merits are also likely to realize that hoarding stuff is better than hoarding inf anyway as a buttress against inflation and either hoard Alignment Merits and accept that there will be a delay in converting them or simply convert them into easily liquidate-able recipes (i.e. LotG 7.5%s) and hoard those (which does incur the potential of them decreasing in value due to changes by the devs to IOs i.e. BotZ). I started doing the latter method but recently I'd switched to the former. I don't really run tip missions (except to get alignment powers) but I convert merits to alignment merits and hoard those. Since my time is spread out across a number of characters if I need to liquidate my A-Merits I can still do quite a few conversions each day.

No, they are definitely all the same power, it might be that low level characters summon different allies. I'll try and remember to check.

Yep, there's an edit button at the top of the page. Pressing that will allow you to change the number of charges from 10 to 5.

The level shift, in particular, is going to exacerbate this. A level shifted 50 has a faster defeat rate for a given difficulty setting. Ideally people will continue to run at +0 which will increase their earning rate but won't cause additional inflation (since they maintain the same inf:stuff ratio) but the shift makes running at higher difficulties easier and higher difficulties do cause inflation (since they produce more inf relative to the amount of stuff produced).

All three recipes create the same power and you can only have one total. The reason for having three recipes is that salvage items are divided into three different tiers based on level. The recipes are similarly split along levels so enemies at a particular level can drop the salvage required for the particular recipe they can drop. If there was only one recipe then either it would only be available from a limited level range of enemies or it would drop for characters who are the wrong level to acquire the salvage.

Or Indiana Jones.

By how I meant how does it crash, BSOD, crash to desktop, infinite sound loop etc.

In any case, the last room in that mission is very graphics intensive and that sounds like a graphics card related issue. Try turning your settings down to the minimum and see if that fixes it. If it does then I'd recommend monitoring your GPU temperature while runnign with normal settings and seeing if you're running hot.

This is in many ways a matter of personal preference. I have no desire whatsoever to incarnate all of my level 50s and I only have 6 of them in the first place (hopefully 7 soon).

In fact as a lose experiment I'm "casually incarnating" one of my level 50s just to see how it goes. I'm bringing her out once a week to run the WST and that's about it. She has two notices saved up but has only just crafted her first common boost. I think I'll cheat a bit and run an ITF with her this week because I want to run her through Apex next week and since she's using SOs and doesn't have tactics a Nerve Boost will be very useful. I could deconstruct the notices into shards to get the Nerve Boost now but I can't quite bring myself to do it.

To some degree it's a matter of what you enjoy. On my AR/Dev I love running at -1 because it allows me to employ a run 'n' gun style while being virtually invincible. Charge up to a spawn, wipe the minions/Lts with a few AoEs, leave the bosses for the Scrappers to clean up and run off. Sure it's pointless but it's fun.

I do agree with you that the lack of a solid heal in Cold Domination is it's major weakness compared to other sets.

On the other hand I disagree with you about the overall versatility of Kinetics. It's a good set but I don't really consider it to be versatile. It's primary strength (IMHO) is that it makes everyone else's powers work better. It provides large amounts of recharge and damage which are always useful to have and do make teams more effective but it can only make existing powers more effective and in gneeral is slightly lacking in terms of damage mitigation. It is also lacking in -regen compared to other debuff sets (it only has -50% compared to -500% or -1000% which does make a big difference against an AV which is where -regen matters).

The reason I consider Cold Domination to be the most versatile buff/debuff set is that I think it provides an excellent mix of buffs and debuffs in a way that plays to the strengths of both buffs and debuffs. The defensive abilities are primarily buffs (which are superior to debuffs for dealing with alpha strikes) while the offensive powers are more focused on debuffs (which tend to be more powerful). Against normal groups of enemies it combines defense buffs to mitigate alpha strikes with -recharge to handle sustained damage and an AoE resistance debuff. Against single tough targets it has -regen, -resistance, +defense, and an endurance management power to help keep allies in endurance during a long duration fight (something which can be an issue for certain builds). It also has a stealth power int he set making it easier to get stealth TP capability without sacrificing something else.

The main weaknesses of Cold Domination are:
1. No real healing ability
2. Needs more recharge than other buff/debuff sets (including Traps)
3. It doesn't have a panic button power

Compared to Radiation Emission I think Rad does have the edge on AVs due to better recharge on Lingering Radiation and the fact that Enervating Field is a toggle but against groups of enemies I think Sleet wins out due to having defensive buffs (as compared to devuffs) and having it's offensive powers as AoE clicks instead of toggles. As the amount of recharge a character has increases the utility of Cold Domination goes up faster than Rad which is why I tend to give it the edge.

There's a player on Virtue who did this for at least a few characters. He would level a character to the upper end of each range (i.e. 4, 9, 14, etc.) and then turn off XP until his contacts completely ran out of missions to give him.

I teamed with him a few times, not really my thing but he was a great source of teams in the mid-levels .

A general piece of economic advice, the inf/a-merit ratio on purple recipes is horrible. If you desire purples you will find it a lot faster to use your alignment merits to purchase high end rare recipes, sell them and use the inf to buy purples on the market.

A level 25 LotG 7.5%s cost 2 alignment merits each and if you craft it you can generally sell for 200 million. Even the most expensive purple recipes are less than 600 million each so selling 3 LotG 7.5%s will give you enough inf to buy a purple recipe and only costs 6 alignment merits instead of 20.

This isn't entirely true. Debuffs are very useful (or more accurately, certain types of debuffs are very useful) but a successful high end team can manage without them even for stuff like STF.

In particular the Repeat Offenders have demonstrated the usefulness of the "All Empathy" team. As Hyperstrike said it's not about the heals, it's about stacking buffs. A team of 8 Empaths means that each person has Adrenalin Boost on them permanently (or close enough) along with triple stacked Fortitude and permanent Auras. At that point they essentially combine the survivability of tanks (or pretty close to it) with the damage of blasters. Due to the multiplicative effect of mixing buffs and debuffs they could be more powerful by switching some of the Empaths for debuffers but they do manage just fine on their own.

Nope. I have a few lowbies that I intend to run through Sister Psyche and I intend to join the fastest teams possible. If I want to fight enemies for XP Sister Psyche is not going to be my preferred method of doing it, it is nothing but an endless and rather boring parade of Freakshow. I will be doing it because in addition to the normal TF rewards the WST give me a very large chunk of bonus XP and a total of 100 merits. Since I get both of those for TF completion I will happily look for the fastest way to get there.

The Freedom Phalanx TFs are, for the most part, complete snooze-fests. They consist of an endless stream of missions with a single enemy type (except Positron). For the most part I do them once on each character for TF commander and then call it a day. I occasionally run Manticore on characters that have it since it isn't as long as the others and it's high enough level that things are interesting.

People seem to be predicting doom and conflict between people leveling characters and Incarnates in this WST and I really do not see it. In both cases the devs are bribing me to do a TF that I don't really enjoy, so I'll do it the same way in both cases.

I agree with this, I've got two Stormies (DP/Storm an Earth/Storm) and I find that I vastly prefer Storm paired with a Control set than with a Blast set.

What is comes down to is that if the power is tagged to not benefit from external buffs then PB will not work. If a power takes resistance enhancements it is always tagged to not benefit from external buffs but if it has non-enhanceable resistance values it generally is not (there are exceptions such as Scorpion Shield). This is why FF's bubble benefit from Power Boost but Cold Domination's do not.