magitek

I'm not asking for a list of specific things not to do, because I agree that that's cumbersome for all the reasons you listed. Jack had, at one point, put forth his "one hero equals three minions" dreck, with the idea being that powers would be balanced around that. While I think that particular number was moronic, it's basically the same type of thing I'd like to hear from the developers.

If they say 1-50 should take 20 hours and will make changes to any/all game systems to achieve that, that's great. I may not agree with the idea of 20 hours, but I would be fully aware that anything which gets me to 50 under that time is in danger of being nerfed. If I abused something which got me to 50 faster than that, I'd have no basis for complaint when it got fixed.

This is kind of the point. The rules are not defined. By nerfing things without explanation, they're effectively creating a law that's all spirit and no letter. If Posi were to come out and say "going from 1-50 in anything less than 20 hours of constant gameplay is out-of-bounds and will get something nerfed", then far fewer people would have a problem with these changes. Plenty of people might disagree with the numbers (as with MARTy), but there'd be no grounds for any exploit/not-exploit argument.

Permissible is not the same as officially condoned. We've got an entire topic about farming here; if it was considered an actual exploit then we wouldn't be having this conversation here.

Now, if you're saying that they're just enforcing their "vision", maybe you're on to something. Then again, using the developer's vision as an argument here does not work when you are simultaneously arguing against their vision in other things, like the iTrials reward fiasco. The player base has already had its share of divine vision interfering with people's preferred styles of play, and I had hoped that that had left along with Jack. Maybe when the vision suddenly changes to "maximize revenue in the F2P model," player preferences fall by the wayside.

This whole thing would not even be an issue if the developers would just come out and tell us whatever the metric is that we're supposed to be conforming to, but perhaps "we want it to take two months to hit 50 so you'll buy XP boosters" and "we want it to take forever to fully-slot your Incarnate powers so you'll keep your sub up" are not palatable statements to NCSoft's marketing gods.

So... MMs are top-tier just as long as all the other ATs fight at a huge disadvantage?

I'm a big fan of MMs, but any semblance of uberness (when compared to other ATs) went out the window with the Invention system. Masterminds just don't get as much benefit from IO sets as others do. They're still fun to play, they can still solo most things in the game, but they're not going to be winning many min/max contests.

To answer the OP, Mercs are perfectly playable, but they're not ideal. You can solo most of the game's content with them, though you'd probably have little choice in secondaries if you wanted to do stuff like soloing AVs.

Ah, that makes sense.

I'm not very experienced at farming stuff, so forgive me if I'm asking the obvious, but why stop at 33? You can always exemp down for 33-ish TFs, and the ticket vendor has a level slider for buying enhancements/doing recipe rolls.