For level of effort, it's just not worth it. The only useful drop to me is the crystal, which is a *chance* of dropping not even the guaranteed reward. You have the parser which is meh and then argg once you have 4 because it is WORTHLESS at that point. The a.station is meh. The planet trap is meh.

Let's take a L6 I just calibrated/calculated. 1 cube + 65 repair nanos = 30% chance of basically a terraformer (the crystal). Or I can kill npcs for a couple hours and get 2-3 terraformers and use 1/10th the repairs and get decent xp (yes also hitting bases is abysmal xp).

Are you all CRAZY ? Why fight bases at all with such pathetic rewards for the inputs ?? Silvers aren't even useful after you have all mods, sorry the clamp and nexus is meh. What I am hearing is an L7 really doesn't give much better drops either, and certainly nothing better than the crystal (which again is not 100%).

For those inputs I would want a gauranteed +3-5 AP OR a QSE. Yeah how about that make it drop something useful like a QSE 10% on L6, 30% on L7. Then I will think about it.

adumbrates are useful for cloaking planets
and i'm only using enumeration crystals after my planets hit 15x arti
(something a terraformer can't help me with, which is why the terraformers go to non-maxed planets)

abysmal rift traps... well i can live without those.. i doubt i'll even ever use my exo-rift traps...
and continuum parsers... i agree, those are worthless after the 4th....

I know what they do and I'm not saying they are useless, but that relative to the effort involved they are not that good.

when you put it like that, going over it they really aint that good, once you get the parseers they become worthless, enumeration crystals are nice but how many bases will you have to kill to get 5 of them compared to haw many npcs you can kill and farm troop carriers and the other nice planet boosting npc's

food for thought about balance i think

let's see... i think it's been about 2 or 3 weeks since my VM mission exotic hit 20x...