Damage/Range HO's in melee attacks

Just noticed that in Mid's Hero Designer I can put a Damage/Range Hami-o into melee cone attacks that do not normally take range enhancements and the range number goes up. Is this a mistake, or can you make melee attacks hit larger areas with these? o.O

In most cases, that's a Mids' error. All melee attacks are flagged to ignore range boosts. However, all melee attacks have a range of 7'. If the power has a longer range (KO Blow, for example), it used to benefit from the Dam/Range HOs. I haven't tried this since before the Hami-O adjustment though, so it may not work at all any more.

Crowd Control and Shatter both show a range of 8 for scrappers. o.o

I don't have a WM/X scrapper yet (that's what I was thinking about rolling for the 10th time and still haven't...) But I have a bane. Mids says the bane version of Crowd Control is only 7, but their Shatter is 10. I will try to get a Dmg/Range HO and throw it in there to see what happens.

last I knew adding range to a melee attack -will- increase it's melee range.

For a generic example, I know a dmg/range in brawl will increase brawl's range by about 1 ft. It reads that it does in fact apply to it (shows ingame that it's range is increased) so with that said -

I wouldn't doubt that it does.

They have since fixed HO's so they do not enhance powers that do not take said enhancement (Melee doesn't take Range enhancements, so Dam/Range HO doesn't enhance its range anymore)

IIRC, back when Castle upped "melee" attacks range from 5ft to 7ft, he also made them all ignore range modification... that, or it was when he added the -range portion to taunt.

He did this because it was actually possible to make melee powers completely broken if you slapped enough -range on a target (i.e. hurricanes). It shouldn't buff the range of any melee attacks. I'm not sure about the non-standard ranged attacks like KOBlow, or the "melee" cones like Shadow Maul &co, but I don't believe it should.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Yeah, that wasn't supposed to work in game any longer. It won't work now with almost 100% certainty, because HOs have been changed to provide only enhancement of the sorts accepted by the power in which they are slotted. Since most melee powers don't accept range enhancements, HOs won't apply any range enhancement, even if the power was accidentally left able to benefit from it.