Do you ever miss the challenge?

Personally I'm a huge fan of making content challenging rather than trying to steamroll everything, though it seems that's becoming increasingly hard to do these days.

I seem to recall a time (I'm thinking around i7-i8, along those lines) many AVs were a challenge. Doing Maria's arc was a challenge. Doing even something like a Crimson arc could be tough with the wrong team - the regular mobs on it, that is.
If it wasn't already you could often make it that with your rep setting. As such I ended up running everything on Invincible I think it was called at the time, and its blue side counterpart.

Now if I set my difficulty to +4x8, which already equates to a lot more than Invincible was back then, the average PUG still seems to have enough alphas, level shifts and hundreds of set bonusses to steamroll it with one hand tapping the controls and the other graciously tilting the beer bottle.

Note: This is all generally speaking.
Ofcourse there were simple things back then too and ofcourse there's the occasion challenge now. Yet somewhere underneath it all I can't help getting caught by the impression that somewhere the upping the content difficulty and adapting the available difficulty settings to rebalance this took a wrong turn.

This leads me to the big question: Is it all just my imagination?
Or is anyone else getting plagued by that dominant feeling of relative lack of challenge as well?

Some of us have found it again.

I find myself increasingly uninterested in most high level task forces because, as you stated, it's just a roll-over with a swarm of +1 defense-capped alphas just making it a snooze. That's not a criticism of the players but just the fact that the mudflation of other games has caught up with CoH. I suppose our focus is supposed to be on the new trials now and the old TFs are something to do before getting your incarnate stuff.

That's why I PvP. A thinking, (usually) intelligent opponent can provide more challenge than a whole map full of NPCs. The only PvE I do these days is TFs for shards.

Doing things solo tends to keep the challenge alive I've found.

For example last night I ran the Incarnate arc on my Plant/Emp at 0x3 and that was a fun challenge, I managed to do it without dying too (with quite a bit of running away from Honoree and the good Captain which separated them and meant I could take them down individually).

Then afterwards I joined an 8 man PuG running +3 radio missions and it was horrific (for them) and a breeze for us.

So if you're really pining for that challenge try soloing something out of your comfort zone.

The other problem is...'challenging for who?'

Team of 8 fire/Rads or the notorious Repeat Offenders team can usually crush absolutely anything in the game in short order.

Heck even in the new trials, stack enough of the big hitters and you'd still probably be able to walk them because in the end it all comes down to killing something big, very quickly.

Even the hardest stage, the escaped prisoner stage, requires you kill a lot of things quickly and once people have pegged down the entrance routes of the prisoners, you'll find the difficulty drops immeasurably.

Now secondary to this and mentioned in the above paragraph is 'Challenging for how long?'

Take Augustus at the end of the ITF, when first released to live servers he was quite a bit of a challenge but fairly sharpish, people worked out basic strategies for him to the point where everyone knows how to deal with that scenario now and he nolonger presents a challenge.

World of Warcraft for example, there are very few raid bosses that are constantly challenging, especially in vanilla, most of it is basically learning to do the right 'dance'. Do this now, now do this when the boss does X, move out of the fire. Once you both know and outgear the encounter it nolonger becomes challenging.

Yup MoG never got changed for the Paragon Protectors

Heck go and beat up one now, it STILL fires off the 'full heal followed by crash to low HP but with stupidly high resistances and defense' old school MoG which makes them a real pain in the backside for anyone non-psi to deal with or trivially easy for people with Psi to deal with (as was the way with old MoG).

As mentioned Behemoths still have old school Invincibility and Nemesis Lts still have ye olde Vengeance (you could only fire it off when YOU died, not when someone else did).

My 2 cents here...suppose you like steamrolling AND a challenge? Some nights,I like to grab one of my 50s and lay waste to everything in my path or everything that might be in my path or.....well you get the idea.
Some nights I like to do Apex or Tin Mage,which at the moment are the hard TFs. They are challenging for me and I enjoy it.
To me,it doesn't have to be a either/or situation. It just has to fit what I feeling like doing.