Hopeling

There's a hole in the force field facing the floating landmass, which you can fly through, or which the nearby gravity geysers should launch you through.

He's in the groove of the Chantry. There should be a waypoint on the map, although it isn't automatically selected upon entering, IIRC.

Believe me, I do not like the kind of grind you're talking about. I've left more than one game I otherwise liked because of it. I'm playing this game specifically because it ISN'T anywhere near that level of grind. If it does become that, my patience won't last long.

I don't even disagree that what you're talking about is a problem when it exists, but it is a problem that we don't have.

AoE buffs have a target cap that is intentionally too high to be reached in the majority of realistic situations. Farsight is not alone in having this extremely high target cap while only affecting teammates. I guess the devs wanted to not make team buffs three times more awesome on leagues than they already are, which seems pretty reasonable, actually.

So... wait, do most players want to play for fun and not care as much about numbers, or do we want to max out our numbers ASAP and not care as much about fun? You seem to be contradicting yourself on this.

IMX, the things don't actually interfere with each other to nearly the degree you're talking about. Occasionally, I sit through something I don't enjoy because I want the rewards. (Synapse TF, I'm looking at you. Rasafrasa...) Occasionally, I do things that give little or no meaningful reward, just for fun. (My main is slowly clearing out his active contact tab, on x8, for gits and shiggles, even though I don't need the shards anymore, and the drops/merits would be far outclassed by many other possible activities.) Usually, I do things that are fun AND give meaningful rewards (basically everything else). I have multiple characters that are more than capable of pulling their weight on any Incarnate trial, on the day it's released if I choose, and if I don't like that trial I don't repeat it.

I'm not even sure if you're railing against the game's structure, or your perception of player preferences. You're barely making sense.

If we're just playing for fun, why do we care about how fast the rewards are?

And if we're just playing for fun, why can we only do each thing once? I like the Lambda and Keyes trials, so I do them more often. I find BAF terribly boring, so I rarely if ever run it anymore, maybe once on a new 50 hoping for the bonus uncommons from badges. This doesn't seem to have prevented me from obtaining full Incarnate power on several characters.

Basically, the Scrapper resist cap means you get less benefit from /Elec's very high energy resistance, and from Power Surge. Also, the scrapper version of the damage aura does not have a taunt component, so enemies are more likely to run from it. These definitely do not cripple the set, but scrapper vs brute is mostly a toss-up anyway, so /Elec having a few points in the brute's favor tends to tip the decision.

Edit: On the plus side, scrappers get Energize eight levels sooner.

The first arc, which gives you the badge and access to the patron pools, is 5 door missions and 2 talks, according to paragonwiki. http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Scirocco

It doesn't take very long; exact time will vary wildly by character, difficulty setting, etc, but you could probably do it in well under an hour if you wanted.

If you were logging in, I guess you didn't get to see the big red text warnings, but yeah, this is standard maintenance time, and they issued 30, 10, and 5 minute warnings in-game as usual.

I personally don't usually rush to t4 on Alpha. A t3 is of course high priority, for the level shift, but after taht I just eventually work my way to t4, with Notices from the WST and whatever shards I earn from normal content.

Usually, I get Destiny to t4 first. Generally, this gives the longest duration, without sacrificing the Wide area.

I would not be at all surprised if Cimerorans are still on top, but the variance between the various pets is probably much narrower than it was, is what I meant. I don't think you're wrong about Cims, but it was worth mentioning for this discussion that the frequently cited numbers are no longer valid.

The numbers we have actually do lie, if you're referring to the pylon tests somebody did a while ago, since Arbiter Hawk mentioned recently that a bunch of pets have been changed since then. I don't think anyone has gathered new numbers yet.

Cimerorans are cool, because they're basically scrappers too, making you into a sort of scrapper nesting doll. Oh, and they're absurdly strong.

Generally, I think the damage lore pets are far better than the support pets, although admittedly most (?) solo scrappers cannot keep the pets alive very well against large groups of strong enemies.

Basically the same, yes. Some dialogue is different, mostly.

It was directed at post #40, but I chose not to quote it, because I feel silly when I quote the post directly above, but then I wrote slowly and got distracted by something else and you scooped me

Is Time with Power Boost overperforming? Not really, so far as I can tell. Is Time without Power Boost underperforming? Not really, so far as I can tell. Sure, I could be wrong and it could get nerfed at some point, but that's true of anything in the whole game. Best not even log in if the possibility is totally unacceptable. I was responding to the assertion that it will "obviously" be changed, because Power Boost is better than no Power Boost, so one or the other must be over- or underpowered.

Do points count as a reward?

Personally, I don't think having a bunch of different rewards is a problem, at least not any more than having a bunch of different invention salvage is a problem. Less than that, in fact, since the various rewards generally stand on their own, unlike salvage where you need specific unguessable combinations for each recipe, and inventory space for most currencies is not an issue.

Still, some people apparently do dislike it, which is a decent reason to be wary of adding new currencies unnecessarily.

The entire alignment system and the SSA reward tables happened so long after Cryptic gave up the reins that I have a hard time believing Cryptic had any part in it. Not to mention that the relevant limitations here were not present originally, they were added to the SSAs later, I guess to limit people rolling alts to level 10, getting 2 hero merits, repeat ad nauseum.

It is, unfortunately, not an intuitive system, and not at all clearly explained in-game, but I don't think we can lay the blame on long-standing issues in the engine, here.

Game balance is not a single point, it's an interval. A whole range of things can be balanced, even if they are not all exactly equal. Farsight without Power Boost is still a really good power; Farsight with Power Boost is an even better power, but considering how extensively the combo was discussed in the Time feedback thread during beta, I find it hard to imagine it's more powerful than it was intended to be. It would have been trivial to make Farsight into a toggle, or give it a minor resistance buff, or otherwise prevent it from turning 15 seconds of Power Boost into 120 seconds.
One could also say they already nerfed PB+Farsight, now that HOs can't make Power Boost boost more.

I mean hey, if you want to take a different epic pool, that's fine, but lose the self-righteousness about it.

No, TPN has an improved chance of R/VR, not guaranteed, exactly as Draeth said.

I thought it was very interesting that Michael's reactions were mentioned in Prometheus' dialog. I had figured he and Christy were throwaway NPCs, like every other merit vendor. It seems to be hinting at something more - I'd guess they're members of Prometheus' organization, whatever that is, and members important enough that their reactions to Prometheus' words are worth mentioning.

It's also worth noting that you have a second option at the end, instead of "Why do I get the feeling that time will never be right with you?":

You can convert reward to alignment merits without confirming, last time I tried, so having them doesn't necessarily mean being eligible to receive them from SSAs.