Samuel_Tow

This would make the power many times better. As of right now, the best way to use Dimension Shift more than once per hour is to aim such that you MISS part of a spawn, which is... Really counter-intuitive to how AoEs work. But giving, say, Lift the ability to just... Well, lift an enemy out of Dimension Shift actually allows you to pull enemies out and beat them up one by one.

I love it!

I must have glossed over your point, but I see what you mean. This... I can't say I'm too happy with this. On paper, that's have a lot of options to its name, but... None of them reliable. I have a power that stuns from time to time, but I can't count on that because it happens rarely. I have a power that debuffs, but how often will that happen? Basically, at least in terms of perception, such a setup would simply lead to questions as to whether the effects are working at all. Energy Melee's chance stuns work because, while you have a low chance of seeing any specific one of them over a power's cycle, your chance of seeing "just a stun" as a general thing is fairly high. I'm not guaranteed that Energy Punch will stun on its next few applications, but I have a good chance that SOMETHING will, and that gives me the impression that it's working. Thunder Kick's stun... Practically, I could swear it doesn't have on.

Now, I guess you could say that just because the set has so many differing secondary effects, something will always be triggering, if they're just a hand basket of different effects, I'm not sure it'd matter too much. Energy Melee's stun I can rely on, because I know that every power I have works towards that. Broadsword's defence debuff I know I can count on, because I know any swing I get through (well, almost) will debuff, so if I miss on one, I just swing again. Power effects that are all over the place, though... Those become completely unpredictable and unreliable, and I have a hard time imagining that such a system would FEEL good, even if it actually works numerically.

Honestly speaking, I'd like to have as much of a characters' performance as possible in the hands of the actual player and as little as possible in the hands of the RNG.

It's not impossible to satisfy, it's just impossible to satisfy for all people on the team at the same time. I'm an emotional hypocrite, and I've built my life around stinging events such that things turn out to satisfy my view of how things should happen. When I team, therefore, I usually team with lower-level players on a lower difficulty. Bringing in a lowibie (or two or three) 20 levels below you gives you a team which very much needs me, because lowbies just aren't mechanically capable of handling high-level content without a lot of hassle and trudge. I, on the other hand, am playing on a difficulty that's fairly easy for me, personally, and I'm usually capable of handling two, three people's worth of enemies with at least some degree of comfort, so I technically don't NEED them.

But that's hypocrisy in action, as well as engineered circumstances, and it's not actually fair to my team-mates. To get "my fix," I end up putting other people in a position that I wouldn't feel was ideal for myself to be in. There is no way that I can think of for all of us to feel needed on the team, yet at the same time not feel like we need the team. When everyone is strong enough to not need a team, then people teaming together are much stronger than they need to be, and usually half the people can fall asleep without much of anyone noticing. Think about a team of eight Masterminds, for instance. One Mastermind can drop off the face of the Earth, and not only will the team not suffer in the slightest, but NO-ONE WILL NOTICE.

Now, there's something to be said about difficulty scaling. Scaling your difficulty down when you are solo so that you don't feel you need a team, while upping it while you team so you feel the team needs you, is a possible strategy towards achieving that. However, and this is the crucial point, oftentimes lowering your difficulty to "very easy" feels like a cop out, like a severe loss of rewards (and it usually is), and like you're not actually playing the game, but rather just skipping over it. In this aspect, it can feel like, yes, you can kill stuff, but you still need a team to REALLY play, because the REAL difficulties are too difficult.

As the saying goes, you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. It's possible to get that feeling for one, maybe a few people on a team, but it's always at the expense of other people on the team, so it's literally impossible to get EVERYONE on the team to feel like this. Someone has to need a team for someone else to be needed on the team.

The pointed toe and the giant round kneecap are exactly what makes the boots so cool. We don't have any other boots that have this shape, and they're very much half the reason I bought the pack, that and the shoulders. The rest of the pack I haven't actually used much, I don't think.

I've not done a lot of precision testing on Martial Arts, and every time I run any numbers, they look kind of OK. But empirical evidence seems to suggest, at least to me, that "something is off," so to speak. I like to think I have a fairly good sense of how fast things go down, and I do know that every time I got back to Martial Arts, nothing ever goes down as fast as it feels it should. I don't have any attacks I know I can rely on and I know that, whatever I do, I'm in for a LOT of kicking.

By comparison, if I pick up Broadsword, I know that I can chain things up in different ways and see almost instant carnage, either in single-target or in AoE. That makes sense, since that's pretty much what the set is good at. But the flip side of the coin - Claws - feels as strong, but in a different way. With it, I can't really kill anything in an attack or two, but with repeated slashes, I can actually shred things in no time flat just the same. Dual Blades is probably the only other set I can honestly say feels a little on the low side, but Dual Blades has a way to blow my socks off if I abuse the combos and pick a decent crowd.

But Martial Arts just feels... Off. Like there's something missing. The offence doesn't leave me feeling confident in my abilities, and the utility of the set plain isn't there. Again, I have no evidence to back this up, but based purely on feel, experience and judgement, that's how I feel.

I have no problem with Martial Arts being utility-centric, but if we're going to put that utility on a chance to occur, it better be GOOD. Good enough to justify it not being reliable. Frankly, I find a 10% chance for a short-duration mag 2 stun to be INSULTING. It's too short, it's not strong enough and it very rarely even triggers. Why even have garbage like that in the power at all? It is completely useless.

Chance stuns aren't actually a bad thing in themselves. But BY themselves, they have little use. Energy Melee does well, largely because so many powers have a chance to stun, which means your chance stuns have many more opportunities to trigger. If Barrage doesn't slap one, Energy Punch might. And if that doesn't, then Total Focus probably will. When each attack carries a chance to stun, that stun matters. But a one-off effect? That's so unreliable it may as well not even be there.

This is a major problem I have with MMOs in general, what I like to call the "everquest effect." Not necessarily unique to the game EverQuest, this is the mentality that an MMO should never "end" and that it must therefore take you FOREVER AND A HALF to get anywhere decent. Frankly, I enjoy City of Heroes exactly because the game takes the opposite approach. It can let you get to the "end" fairly quickly, but because you can only see so little of the content on the way up AND because it wasn't a horrible grind getting there, then feeling inclined to do it all again is that much easier. MMO development can never keep up with the rate of content consumption, so it makes sense to get people to play them over and over again, rather than trying to develop faster than they play.

This is the other big thing, and something I've been getting at this entire time. "A good game" is something actually very few MMOs can be described as. All too often, they're giant time sinks and addictive grinds, with the actual gameplay being something players are taught to AVOID. Sometimes it feels like they designed the MMO aspects first, then someone slapped his forehead and said "Doh! We need a GAME to put this auction house and that loot and that crafting in! That completely slipped my mind!" And I'd really like to play a game, first and foremost. If the game isn't fun, all the trinkets in the world won't make it worth the money.

Put it this way - an MMO game without loot is still better than loot without a game attached to it.

Rather, Blizzard make the highest-quality games, so beating them to their market share requires more than just quality. Since you can't beat them on sheer quality alone (or budget size, for that matter), you need to come up with something they don't have. Sheer quality pretty much always goes to them, but there are plenty of creative ways to make up the difference.

It IS depressing, and pretty much the cornerstone of everything I dislike about MMOs. So much money and development time goes into giving the MMO all the stock features, and yet no-one ever seems to stop and think how much FUN the damn thing actually is to play. The quality of the MMO is in the numbers game, but the ACTUAL game falls sadly short.

Something like Lineage II is a good example - a system of grinds more complicated, involved and demanding than life itself, and the graphics look amazing in still shots, but... The actual gameplay is utter crap. Animations are stilted, combat is monotonous and boring and even the big battles aren't actually all that impressive.

Very few MMOs are actually quality products in the slightest, and that's not even counting how many are rushed out the door unfinished. MMOs just don't even shoot for quality, because that's not what they sell on. I actually feel City of Heroes has more quality than most, at least most until fairly recently. The game actually looked good for its time and manages to look good now, combat is interesting, animations are, for the most part, pretty impressive and someone actually spared a thought for the story, giving us a storyline that's more than a vague excuse to go hunt 10 frogs. Certainly it's not ideal, but given most of its competition at the time, and especially given Castle and BABs' constant vigilance and high quality standard, it IS a pretty good contender.

If you are suggesting I hit something with Cobra Strike, then wait until that stun expires and hit it with Eagle's Claw... That's not really a realistic look at how the game plays out. Eagle's Claw is an attack, and as such its purpose is to kill things. A Scrapper tends to make things dead in a few attacks, so hitting something with Cobra Strike and then attacking it is a waste. And if you hit something with Eagle's Claw, chances are it's going down. But on the off chance it DOESN'T go down, the four second stun is rarely sufficient.

Now, granted, hitting a boss with Cobra Strike FIRST and THEN striking with Eagle's Claw will give you four seconds' worth of stun. Which accomplishes exactly nothing. It's not long enough to let you switch targets OR mitigate much damage.

Basically, the stun on Eagle's Claw does almost nothing. It's too short to make much of a difference, especially on the recharge that Eagle's Claw is at, so its contribution is negligible, but for delaying a boss a couple of seconds (with the flip landing eating up part of the stun). Its being guaranteed doesn't really help, because from my experience, enemies stay stunned about long enough to take a step, then turn around and keep attacking. And unlike a pure stun attack, slotting the power for a lot of stun is tricky.

As a matter of fact, a four-second stun is actually WORSE than knockdown, in that things are stunned just long enough to step out of melee range, yet not long enough to actually make a difference.

Looking at the numbers, I realise why people say Cobra Strike stacks with Thunder Kick or Eagle's Claw. I thought these powers just had a higher chance to stun, but they are the ONLY OTHER powers that stun. And Thunder Kick has a stun mag of 2. Great. At this point, I have to agree that the secondary effects of the set are a mess, because they're just all over the place.

Thunder Kick has NOTHINHG, Storm Kick has an insulting stun (10% chance for diddly sqat manitude 2 stun for seven seconds), Crane Kick has a 60% chance for knockback, Crippling Axe Kick has a low-mag immobilize with a 50% CHANCE of a higher-mag immobilize and a bunch of not very useful slows Dragon's Tail has chance for knockdown... Eagle's Claw and Cobra Strike are practically the only powers which actually have a guaranteed side effect, and the 4 second stun on Eagle's Claw is insulting.

If starting from scratch is not an option, then we can at least significantly up the power of the secondary effects. Give Thunder kick a mag 3 stun, and give it a better chance, something like at least 30%. Give Crippling Axe Kick a mag 3 guaranteed immobilize, give Crane Kick or Dragon's Tail a guaranteed knock effect, and I'd say up the stun on Eagle's Claw. I mean, the secondary effects are all over the place and FAR weaker than I thought they were.

Looks good, actually. You're going to have to do something BIG with Eagle's Claw, though, as with its current scale damage, it won't even show up on the radar. Total Focus is scale damage 3.56, more than anything else a Blaster has access to short of a nuke. Eagle's Claw is around 2.5 or so. I'd probably include one more debuff attack focused almost entirely on debuffing and less damage. It's sort of inline with both the martial arts theme and with the pattern of Manipulation secondaries.

Pity that doesn't actually work as advertised. You can't put everything down before you're exposed to risk, so you need powers to help with mitigation. Self buffs, enemy debuffs, controls and even utility can go a long way towards that. A lot longer than more personal attacks, which is ultimately redundant on a Blaster who has no business engaging in stand-and-fight tactics. For the most part, Blaster melee attacks aren't designed to go out and punch things with, they're designed to punch things that come to you. Willingly exposing yourself to melee is a HUGE gamble for a Blaster, which is why Manipulation sets don't focus on melee combat.

My answer is nothing of the sort. I don't believe for a second that what Blizzard have done is easy or trivial, or even that it prays on fools. On the contrary, what they do is ingenious. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Blizzard pick the MOST average, most cliché, most basic game type in a given genre, and they just make flawless, smooth, clean and engaging game out of it. Rather than overcomplicated, ambitious ides, they take simple, basic ideas and polish them to perfection.

Blizzard have invented almost nothing of their own. Their games are hideously derivative of other games that came before. What Blizzard are experts at, however, is picking a genre, getting their foot in the door and creating very much the best game in the genre. In so doing, they sweep up all the fans of the genre in their game, score big and move on to the next genre. That's why they generally have only one game per genre - Diablo for the dungeon crawler, WarCraft and StarCraft alternately for the RTS genre and World of Warcraft for the MMO genre. That's all they need - one game to serve as the best.

The original WarCraft was nothing even remotely original. It was a Fantasy C&C knockoff, which itself was the successor of Dune: Battle for Arakis. Warcraft 2 shared a lot of similarities with its contemporary counterparts, like Dark Reign, KKND and the other low-key strategy games. From then on, they've essentially been remaking WarCraft 2 over and over again. StarCraft was WarCraft in space, WarCraft 3 was a lot of the same, and now StarCraft 2 looks like StarCraft in 3D. Just as an example.

Making money off execution over idea is what Blizzard do best, and they've made tons of cash off that. What they do is ingenious, but they are essentially the only company in the history of gaming that has been able to do that to such extreme success. So I make a pass for Blizzard. When I say you can't re-release the same game over and over again and expect to stay on top, this counts for everyone BUT Blizzard. This is what they do, this is what they're good at, and so they don't count. But anyone who is NOT Blizzard attempting to do what they do WILL FAIL.

See, here's the thing - Blizzard games sell on pure quality above and beyond everything else. There's nothing innovative in them, or anything all that spectacular to catch your eye if you're not already a fan. All they have is quality of manufacture. They're big, they're expansive, they're well-balanced, they have good graphics, voice overs, cinematics and so on and so forth. This is their thing, and as long as they make games, they're going to hold that position. Other developers who are not Blizzard yet try to make it big on their model will fail.

Blizzard's games will always have one extra level of polish and shine, and so they'll always hold the top spots. Other developers will have to think of something to offer that Blizzard's games do not already. As the old saying goes - you can't beat WoW by giving players the same things WoW gives them. They can just play WoW to get that. You can only beat WoW by giving players something WoW DOESN'T. Hence the cornerstone of my argument - WoW holds the high ground and can afford to set the mould. Everybody ELSE has to improvise, or they WILL fail.

There are a couple of problems with that. First of all, the old stop gap ensuring that if enemies spawned +1 to the mission, they did so in smaller spawns... That's gone. Right now, you can get the biggest spawn your difficulty is capable of generating, and have that at +1. This causes erratic jumps in difficulty, where you'll fight a few smaller mission level spawns, then suddenly run into a huge +1 spawn. For lack of this stop gap, bosses can, and often DO, spawn +1 to the mission, sometimes in pairs at +1.

The other problem is that I don't WANT bosses every other spawn. Bosses are cool and all, but they're boss fights, and I'd rather only have one or two per mission, especially in the upper levels where boss difficulty increases sharply. I do NOT want a Gunslinger boss or a Master Illusionist every other spawn, which is what I was seeing, and what I still see occasionally. If I had to choose between meaningful boss fights at the end of a mission but trudge and turmoil until then, and easy fights at the end but less annoying missions, I choose the latter.

Frankly, if I could degrade everything BUT named, mission-specific bosses, I'd do that without a second thought.

Ah, THAT change. Yes, now that you mention it, I do remember. However, the change I remember wasn't to animation times, but rather to damage. Prior to it, Crippling Axe Kick was a very low-damage attack, useful only for its immobilization (hence "crippling") and not at all for its damage. It was boosted to be almost at the same level as Crane Kick, which caused people to complain that "Well, yeah, but it's still too slow! No amount of damage will make up for that!" Understandably, those calls were ignored and Crippling Axe Kick was left with a decent damage component and its current animation. In fact, I'm not sure it changed during the I2 Martial Arts changes at all, which is what makes it slow by current standards.

By far Archary's biggest advantage is its unreasonable accuracy. With an archer, I know that I can reliably hit:
*Enemies +a LOT when the situation calls for it
*Enemies with absurd defence powers, like Drones and Earth Casters
*While suffering from severe to-hit debuffs, such as those applied by Spectral Demons and Hurricane users.
This is the single greatest aspect of the set - it simply almost never misses against anything. I don't know why that is, but I do know that this is one thing I can rely on.

Also, Archery does not have a "beastly" AoE potential so much as it has a mini-nuke. Outside of that, Archery's AoE is sub par to average. And even with that, it still lags behind something like Fire Blast and DEFINITELY behind Assault Rifle in terms of AoE. In fact, the set is almost completely standard, with three stepped single-target attacks, a cone, an AoE, Aim, a snipe, a utility power and a nuke, only it differs in that it has a mini-nuke. Whether those are better than full-fledged nukes or not is subject to debate.

Martial Arts has improved accuracy. Not as much as Archery, but it does. It doesn't have as much AoE as Archery, mainly because Archery has Blaster are covarage, while Martial Arts is a Scrapper set, but unlike Archery, it also has a ANOTHER secondary effect on every power. Granted, the stuns are so minuscule they don't actually amount to much, but at least technically, it has them.

Where Martial Arts suffers is in that it's a very low-damage set, apparently built to be quick but weak, only it isn't actually quick. It's not slow by any means, but for the damage it does, it's nowhere near quick enough. Put it this way - Martial Arts has damage on its attacks comparable to Katana. Only Katana is faster (yes, it is) AND has a lot more AoE AND a secondary effect that actually stacks nicely AND which also helps protect the user.

Martial Arts does have its own secondary effects, but it just doesn't have enough damage to truly shine. I don't believe the answer is to give more damage to Cobra Strike, though.

Right, right. Never having had a console, I keep forgetting about all the Japanese games that were never launched for the PC and I never saw. Personally, I prefer fixed-stat items and fixed item progression simply because I like to feel I'm in control of my own fate. Raids, counter-intuitively, are a step closer to that than just random drops, because you know what you're getting out of a raid.

That's one side of the coin. The other side is completeness of sets. One of my BIGGEST problems with items in general is that they come with a bazillion stats, and if I decide to upgrade weapons, I have to take another weapon, warts and all. I had it up to HERE with that in Torchlight, most recently. OK, this new gun is twice as strong, but it gives me less dexterity and doesn't have health steal or armour degradation and... Well, I guess I might as well. See, there's never a clear upgrade into a BETTER item. In a sense, there's very little upwards progression, only what feels like sideways progression and spinning my wheels. In City of Heroes, it'd be like juggling slotting. Instead of one accuracy, three damage, I could go with two accuracy, two damage and I might have better DPS against +3 and above enemies. But that's not progression. Progression would be another slot.

But that's all generally sideways of the topic.

It very much is a game problem, indeed. That's why I was behind Jack and his team back in the day when they pushed for balance (I still have other reasons to rag on him) and why I'm behind Matt and his team every step of the way today, when they push for more balance. Whenever someone claims an entire set was held together by one overpowered power, I know something was wrong even before the changes. If the game gives one vastly superior way to do things, people will spam just that.

But then on the other hand, it's a bit of a player problem, as well. I don't know where this comes from, maybe from the old days of arcades and limited lives, where your only outstanding goal was to get to the end no matter the cost. But in today's games, and especially in MMOs, I feel that's not the biggest thing to do. I mean, yeah, you get to the end, and then... What, exactly? You could start over, but if it wasn't cool enough the first time around, why bother going at it again. My point is that it's at least a little bit of the player's responsibility to look after his own fun and not delve into mindless exploitation, because there IS no pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow.

I started with this, because I see this as the major problem holding cool back, this notion of putting marketing before the cool factor. You already criticised me for ragging on designers, but in this day and age, it feels like it's not designers designing these games, but rather marketing people doing the designing and then handing it out to graphic artists and programmers. It's a bit like Linkara's rag on editorially driven comic books, in that the product's direction and execution ends up being dictated not by the people whose job and vocation it is to make engaging, appealing and above all COOL products, and instead usurped by bean counters who make products based solely on what sells how well to what audience, and then just stuff something into that mould. Kind of like the FBI from Die Hard following their ultimate terrorist handbook, as Paul put it.

Basically, yes, it is ultimately coolness that I miss in recent games, because none seem to have been made with that in mind. But I see the root cause of the problem of missing coolness as being deeper than just the execution stage. When your design stage calls for an MMO that's the virtual equivalent of a tourist trap, you can bust your *** and you still won't end up with anything more than a mediocre game. And unless you're Blizzard, the champion of making mediocre games sell for millions, you're not going to do well. Not outside of Korea, anyway. As long as MMOs are designed as MMO first, we'll think about what to put in the MMO framework afterwards, that's how it's going to go.

And that's actually why I don't think this is going to last. We're already seeing a serious decline in MMO quality and a declining interest in new titles offering the same old same old. If anything, Jack and Cryptic had a good initial idea of making an MMO that was different and would give people something they couldn't have in Age of EqCraft II. Their execution is... Suspect, but the idea is actually exactly what I had in mind. Do something new and different, something I can look at and think "Wow, I haven't seen that before. Could be interesting." rather than something I look at and think "Oh, another paint-by-numbers MMO. Thanks, but no thanks."

That right there wins an Internet

That's a pretty cool idea. It may be cheating a little bit, but I'd go with this as a single word and end up with Pressuregauge (or PressureGague if you like) which is not a word, but has the kind of sound I'd like for such a hero if I were making one. I already have Bodyshop done in much the same way.

As far as I'm aware, you're not supposed to be able to, and if you can, it's a bug. BABs has been really cautious about letting emotes interrupt combat animations in the past, so I doubt that sort of thing would be encouraged and intended behaviour.

I was under the impression that we were talking "at all." You mentioned changes to Martial Arts animation times, and as far as I can remember, the only time that happened was the rework with I2. That still puts it behind Katana, though, which essentially got a full set's worth of new animations. Even its own Taunt. But aside from that, yes, Martial Arts was changed significantly.

No changes to Martial Arts animations have happened to the best of my knowledge. I could have missed something, but I highly doubt it. Either that, or the change was so minor I could literally not notice it, because the set played for me exactly as it always has as far back as I can remember it.

That said, I do very much agree that something could be done about Spines. It has the "Barrage" problem of Barb Swipe (was it?) using that slow and fat Barrage animation, yet being the set's weakest attack, among other things. And I was surprised to see Claws' Focus as a fast attack, while Lunge (was it?) still uses the very slow baseball pitch. I tend to enjoy longer animations in general, but I prefer them when animation length reflects power, so small attacks are quick, big attacks are slow.

"Good enough" is subjective, in that Martial Arts not being good enough is subject to debate. Trying to bean-count the number of stuns and their mags (both of which are mag 3, by the way - mag 2 only stuns minions) or per-power effects isn't really fair to the set. Claws has a secondary effect on only a handful of powers, War Mace has very low-mag stuns on everything, Axe has unreliable knockdown, Dual Blades has nothing but combos which don't contribute nearly as much as people claim, and Fire has pretty much nothing but some added damage, and even then only on a handful of powers.

Martial Arts is a lot like Archery in this respect. Archery attacks have no secondary effects. At all. Damage attacks do damage, Stunning Shot stuns. What Archery does well is accuracy and range - insane innate accuracy, serious range on their heavy-hitter (80 feet vs. 40 feet for everybody else). Martial Arts has added accuracy (just not as much) some stuns (two guaranteed, which is more than most other Scrapper sets) and generally quick attacks (something not true for Archery past Snap Shot and Aimed Shot). Whether that's enough... I don't know. Like I said, it's debatable. I do know that the set's damage leaves something to be desired, especially compared to something like Broadsword (itself lacking a truly meaningful secondary effect, but whatever) or even Katana, not to mention the DPS that Claws bring to the table. I guess the problem could be AoE damage, but frankly, with the set lacking any actual real heavy hitters, I think that's the biggest reason I have that feeling. All Martial Arts attacks are... Kind of underwhelming. And damage in Cobra Strike won't help with that. Not unless we make it a heavy hitter, and I don't expect to see a second Clobber.

The Shuriken is actually two powers, and if you want any attacks out of the set, that's what it has. Shurken and Exploding Shuriken. And while that and Web Grenade (which still looks like a military issue grenade, mind you) and Caltrops do fit the ninja theme, Targeting Drone does not.

But beyond that, this point centres around the belief that dual pistols, in and of themselves, are a concept-restricting idea. I'm not going to argue with you whether or not they are. Developer action clearly demonstrates their belief on the matter - Dual Pistols are diverse enough to constitute a full, complete set just by themselves. And that's something I CANNOT say about Weapons Mastery. Making a full set out of the thing would end up as "Ninja," specifically because at least two of your attacks would be shuriken. And "ninja" is more specific than "pistol."

But even precedent and concept expansion aside, it's just not reasonable to claim Dual Pistols are concept-restrictive, yet ignore the GLARING restrictions something like Dark Mastery poses. It's darkness, explained via the Netherworld and replete with demonic tentacles, hellish squeals and grinning skulls. If THAT'S not concept-restrictive, then I see no reason why we can't give a free pass on Dual Handguns.

Frankly, seeing what I do from Gunslingers in the game, I see no reason why we can't have the set go with a single-shot attack, a cone attack, a freezing bullet, a sleep bullet and some kind of targeting mechanicsm, like... Targeting Drone! Or, if you don't like copying powers (despite Weapons/Targeting Drone being identical to Body/Focused Accuracy in actual function), then let's go with UI Goggles that activate sort of the the IR Goggles and then fade away.

I see no reason to NOT give all ATs access to a few weapons they don't have access to in their primaries, if for no reason other than because mixing weapons is cool. This doesn't stop at giving, say, bows to Scrappers. I'd say give Blasters a sword or a mace to swing around as an anchillary. Give Masterminds a hard-hitting melee weapon. I don't really know how their Epics are structured, but I just see weapon mixing as nothing but a good thing. It's about as close as we're going to get to a free-form build system, at least in terms of thematics.

"Are you stupid? Are you retarded or something? What are you going to try next? The Godamn Batman?"

Something along those lines?

As someone who's lived with a cat for years, I can assure you, cats have no problem clawing concrete, stone, brick and even mortar