Soooo....
what primary sets can you take with Polearm Defense, or are you just limited to Polearm Offense? And if you are a Martial Arts / Polearm Defense character, why are you completely unable to hit people with your six foot long stick with a honking big knife at the end of it?
This is the reason why there is no Shield Melee set. It makes no sense to be holding an object in your hands and be totally unable to use said object for its primary purpose. The primary purpose of a shield is to hide behind it. The Primary purpose of a polearm is to stick it in things and make them bleed or whack things over the head with it and make them fall over drooling.
The closest thing I could think of to showcase a staff's ability to keep people at bay is if they included a toggle in the set that gave a minor to modest defense buff (or, failing that, it could always take a lesson from the Parry power that Katana and Broadsword have).
In order to have a true parrying dynamic in this game, it would need to become more "twitch" and less tactical. There are literally hundreds of fighting games that do this already. When I want "realistic" weapon or martial combat, I use those. When I want a superhero MMO, I come here. Sometimes I want a little fast paced martial arts fighting in my MMO time, but it doesn't sound like any game has been able to mix the two yet. 9 Dragons had promise, but every review I read found it lacking. Maybe I'll see if ther is a trial.
In order to implement twitch melee into City of Heroes, it would require a rewrite of the combat engine.
New story arcs coming soon (ARC IDs will be aded when I finish the arc):
So, you want to join the Hellions? (level 1-14 Villainous arc)
Sparks & Steel (level 5-20 Heroic arc)
and
So you want to join the Skulls? (level 1-14 Villainous arc)
I believe a new and fun concept would be dual powerset classification, where as you take one power and it is both your primary set and secondary set. Polearms would be a good choice for this.
Polearms in reality are good at attack and defense, and the costume characterization would be amazing!
what does everybody else think?