The CO Community & You

Okay. but, just one question:
Why? because this seems like the exact same concept.
This is just not true at all. You are only limited by your own creativity and the tools at your disposal.
Define "make sense visually" because for me that means "things that occur on screen appear to be interacting in an observable manner."
I don't really see what the "origin" discussion has to do with this.

This is the entirety of the point. Not having elemental powers as melee powers is the exact same thing as not having earth control powers.

Fine then, come up with new animations for each one.Excluding of course the energy builders, since all ranged ones look exactly the same as well. This isn't 100% necessary, really, but it would certainly be more fun for my tastes.

I don't know why you insist that everything has to look exactly the same. While also, contradictorily suggesting that actually making everything look and also function the same is somehow a solution to the problem of everything looking and functioning the same.
Think of it as doing any other kind of melee attack that would be stylistically appropriate to the concept of the "element" in question.(Also, defining what "darkness" is and does kind of matters here, because if you get punched, with say, a life-draining fist, that pretty much is cut and dry)

okay, first, you really need to deepen your reference pool.
Second, There where examples of "energy blasts" being used differently in Dragon Ball/DBZ
Kienzan/Destructo Disc
Tri beam
Kamehamea Wave
these became less relevant as the characters using them became less relevant themselves and quality waned in filler-filled(derp) fight scenes, but that's not in inherent flaw of the concepts, that's just bad writing.

Third, this is where function factors in. The Kienzan had to be held up, swayed, and then swung, flying in an arc. Wherein it would cut the target. This is different from the Masenko-ha which was an exploding ball. Despite both needing to be charged over-head, and then fired in an arc, they behaved differently.

A Martial Arts(power set) punch with a dark aura is different even From the exact same punch animation that causes fear, life drain, -tohit, e.t.c.
They behave differently in order to better represent different concepts.
By the same token, the "Martial arts+cosmetic effects+some dark ranged blast powers" doesn't work because of the disconnect between The effects the dark blast powers have and the effects the martial arts powers have. What I'm doing at range isn't the same thing as what I'm doing in melee. The difference in such things would be clear as day. Instead of using the same element in melee and at range. You're using glowing martial arts in melee, and shooting an element at range. The only thread of connection is the visual. It's Bessie the Unicorn all over again.
You did not just lie on yourself like that, Sam. Bad Sam. very, very bad. Go to your room.

Please actually do that, then.
Non-punching. Ranged attacks. Unless you're about to argue that using ranged attacks in melee means you have melee attacks(in which case why have melee at all?)

People want Elemental Melee, the concept, not Energy Melee, the Paragon Studios, City of Heroes Melee Archetype powerset. Hopefully other people put their own spin on the idea, otherwise why do it at all?

City of Heroes has clearly trained you in only viewing "X-thing" melee a certain way, maybe because it is the first place you have ever seen it, but most people have seen it elsewhere and are so used to the idea that they can imagine it multiple ways.It's not even interesting anymore. It's pretty much just a basic concept for me(the reason it not being in Champs is such an annoyance, it's like not having fire powers at all.) I don't need Elemental Melee explained. I see a dude with a flaming hand, I know fire melee of some type is about to go down.

I only stand up and take notice when a work takes the time to explore the unique potential in the idea. Similar to the "Scythes" discussion we had before. Seeing somebody use a scythe doesn't really budge me unless they use the unique properties of the weapon to craft interesting action sequences.

Punching is just visual and verbal shorthand being used because it's the most obvious way to visually describe melee combat. This is most likely why it was used for Elec/Dark/Energy melees in this game. It's the most readily understood expression of hand-to hand combat. Further, it's the only real tool both of these games have to represent it, punching, kicking, slapping, chopping, maybe, but more intricate melee combat concepts are not available within either engines(so far as I know, Champions let's you grab and throw objects, but not people) exploring new options would give Champs and edge, not having even basic punching puts it behind.

Unless you think every MA scrapper has absolutely no ability to grapple, despite being talented enough at hand-to-hand combat(which includes grappling) that they use it to fight crime, You have to recognize where design limitations come into play in how powers are made, and how that relates to the actual broader ideas behind the powers.
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Please join us in the discussion we're actually having. You're turning this into a discussion of:
1:"It sucks I can't make an energy melee character"
2"well just put an energy visual on regular punches and maybe have an energy blast power"
1"That's really not the same thing"
2"BUT IT'S PUNCHES"
1"Still not the same thing"
2"Well, Energy Punches are stupid anyway"

Yeah, control is just flat-out weaker in CO than it is in CoH. Ditto buff/debuff (last I checked, anyway). For that reason alone, I think the diversity of playstyle choices in CO will always seem a little pale in the comparison.

Then again, CO isn't exactly unusual in that respect. And to be fair, there are a host of good design reasons to moderate the power of control and buff/debuff effects.

FWIW, I'm enjoying the heck out of my return to CO these last couple of weeks. It'll never replace CoH, but I think it's capable of replacing a part of what drew me to CoH (character customization, build tweaking).

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I think its more precise to say that control and debuff are almost ludicrously powerful in City of Heroes, and virtually nowhere else.

I can't address what "makes sense" to any particular person, but its worth noting that the original conceptual metaphor for City of Heroes' "powersets" was that the set name was the actual power, and the powers were "skills" - ways to use that power. So the power is "Energy Manipulation" and within the game universe players with that power can train themselves to focus that power into a melee strike that knocks targets away, into a punch that has a chance to stun the target, to empower themselves to use less energy when using their power, etc. The fact that Dark Melee wielders can learn to use that ability in conjunction with a punch and Energy Manipulators can learn to use that ability in conjunction with a punch is conceptually coincidental. We have two different sets because Dark Melee cannot learn to extend its range and Energy Manipulation cannot learn to focus energy to terrorize a foe.

Shadow Punch is not "punching with darkness" in the weird conceptual sense of taking darkness, forming it into a punch, and then shooting it out of an arm-shaped cannon. Its me, the Darkness wielder, throwing a punch that projects my darkness wielding ability into the target. I am a focal point for dark energy, but to affect targets with it requires skill. The first skill I learn is to punch someone in the face while yelling "spoon!" and that darkness affects the target. At level 83, I could probably just sit on the sidewalk and go "suck it!" and point with my index finger and the target would just drop dead. But at level 1, I have to punch the target to make it happen. That's not a limitation of darkness, its a limitation of me.

Alas, this seems to be the case for most MMORPGs I've sampled. I liked how COH had multiple ways of protecting a team, not just "healing". I even liked that the community, in general, corrected other players for calling the defenders "healers." I hated having to explain to ignorant team mates that I, as a sonic defender, provide you damage resists, and that damage you don't take is like healing. I get a "pfft whatever" for my troubles.

However, CO might be a little better than most, but I can't say with much authority. My anecdotal experience was that I ran an Alert that had a bubbler, but not a "healer", and we did just fine. Outside of COH I've never seen that.

EDIT: I know you didn't address buffs explicitly, but I think you could argue that COH buffs are in the same category as its controls and debuffs. A notable exception to all of this might be the original Guild Wars.

Yeah, I don't mind these effects being weaker, and I appreciate they haven't built entire powersets around buffing, debuffing, or control. Most powersets have some element of these things, however. And few powersets are designed strictly for one role and no other. Some are extremely versatile. You can design a power armor character for dps, for tanking, as a hybrid of both, as ranged, as melee, or as a hybrid of both without ever picking a power outside the set. However, that versatility was the outcome of post-release expansion. I just hope they continue expanding existing powersets like this.

Well played.

I think that's fair to say, but also that the armors are ludicrously armoring, the melee powers and blasts are ludicrously damaging, and the heals are ludicrously heal-y. And somehow all of this works without everyone just building a DPS cannon.

The Blaster AT didn't quite pan out until then end, but overall the game pulled off some things most MMOs never will. For me, CoH hit the perfect balance between freedom of choice and interesting limitations.

FWIW I think part of the secret of CoX is that MMOs should be building most encounters so that defeating an individual enemy is easy. If the player can beat 3 or 4 enemies at once but not 8 or 10, it's not the most awful thing in the world. In other MMOs you have lots of characters who struggle with one monster which is just such a turn off to me after experiencing this game.

If we all knew what we had early enough, the correct thing to do in my opinion was to adopt something close to STO's reward model** of backloading most of the rewards for mission or task completion, and far less for killing things. That way, killing is only a means to an end, not the end itself. The guy that sneaks to the end of the mission and kills eight things could level just as fast as the guy that herds the map and wipes everything out with a nuke - maybe faster. Doing that would reduce the impact of "unbalanced" powers, and free the devs to restrict only the most abusive effect, not the broad middle ground of just stupidly powerful effects.

The difference between running solo and running in teams would be more interesting opponents, in an analogous way that zone events scale up the spawns when there is a higher density of players. You can obliterate your way through a mission map solo, but you might never see the Big Baddies that can spawn when you run it with eight. But you could still genocide your way through scores of foes if you wanted to, because that wouldn't skew the reward curve very much if at all.


** Disclaimer: I haven't logged into STO since about six months after launch: I have no idea what its reward systems look like today

I wouldn't say the armors are ludicrously armored at all. It's been my experience that tanker sets achieve (sometimes barely) acceptable armor-ness once pushed into the SO levels with enough slots to go around. And the rest of them are rather fragile.

In ChO it was far worse at launch, but after playing for quite awhile recently I have to say that I find the defensive abilities to be better over there now. Lightning Reflexes still seems to be the weakest to me, but it provides a far more noticeable boost in survivability than it used to and it looks to me like it can directly benefit a great deal from specializations and gear. I just wish there were more defensive passives.

This is what DDO does. More to the point, most enemies within the instances do NOT provide XP at all. Instead, if you kill most/all of them, you get an XP bonus at quest completion.

(you also can get an XP bonus for killing /none/ of the enemies. There's lots of little things like that.)

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

For all the little things I didn't like about DDO, their individual quest design was downright brilliant.

In my version of it, the Coming Storm beat us... And we beat it. Mutual Destruction for the sake of the countless other dimensions that wouldn't have had a chance to stand up to it. An astronomical number of lives will go on, blessedly unaware that one single City of Heroes and a collection of Rogue Isles silently, and anonymously, paid the ultimate price for their future.

Because I concede that elemental weapons being left off is a problem. Hence, my argument does not extend to them.

Neither do I. What are you talking about?

This is the entirety of the point. Not having elemental powers as melee powers is the exact same thing as not having earth control powers.

Because I'm not? In City of Heroes, all of the elemental sets look the same because they share the same very small pool of fairly simplistic animations. They don't HAVE to look the same, they DO look the same. That's the whole point.

And really, how do you set them apart but with visual effects? How is punching with fire any different from punching with darkness or punching with electricity? Are we going into Avatar: The Last Airbender territory where every element bending is designed after a different general martial arts style? Yes, Water Bending is mostly Tai Chi, Firebending is mostly Kykoshinkai Karate and Earthbending is mostly Kung Fu, except for Toph who has her unique style. And this works for a cartoon where the fighting styles are picked to reflect the characteristics of the people who use them. But as with Toph, that doesn't always work.

What I'm suggesting is that there's no logical link between, say, "punch" and "fire" that defines the final product as a singular entity. You can take any "fire punch," swap out the visual effects for, say, electricity and end up with an "electric punch." There's nothing inherent in HOW you punch that's unique to fire or electricity, because those are not mechanical forces which define the nature of a mechanical force attack.

You're right to bring up concepts like fire breathing, fire swords, Combustion and so forth. These ARE fire-specific attacks visually and conceptually that just don't work as well for other elements. Sure, you could have a "breath" attack for ice and toxic, but you can't really have that for electricity or energy. And I do agree with you on that point - Champions does lack elemental weapons.

But here's the thing - I'd rather have elemental weapons for Single Blade, Dual Blades, Heavy Weapon and so forth. My one most prominent fire user in City of Heroes is Stardiver, and she doesn't have Fiery Melee to begin with. She's using Titan Weapons with the Fire and Ice sword. What I'm talking about is already true in City of Heroes - you don't need a set that says "something" melee in order to get both melee and that same thing. I have a wide range of super strong characters, but not all of them use Super Strength itself. One uses Titan Weapons, one Axe and Shield, one Mace.

What I'm saying is you don't need a set that's CALLED what you want if you can find a set that does what you want and can be customized to resemble the theme that you want. That was one of the biggest drives behind our continual requests for "power emanation points" in this game. If you could customize, say, Assault Rifle attacks to come out of wrist-mounted guns/shoulder cannons or Archery to come out of a crossbow, you wouldn't need a special sets called this, you could customize the existing sets to do what you want.

I would always rather have fewer powers with broader customization available for them than many redundant powers made in large numbers just to give them different appearances or secondary effects. As far as I'm concerned, Bone Smasher, Cremate and Haymaker are the same attack (they even have the same cost, damage, recharge and animation speed) with different visual effects and damage type. City of Heroes is a FIERCELY unstructured game and that's what we're used to, but if I had my way, I'd structure attacks into much more strict frameworks and just share them among sets. It makes for much greater customizability.

Such as? Serious question here. Aside from breath powers (which aren't melee) and elemental weapons (which I already admitted was a good point), can you explain to me what a melee attack could only ever make sense to be done with fire but not with ice or electricity or darkness? That's the core of my problem - I can't think of any single type of non-weapon melee attack that is unique to one element but not another. You can SAY they're different, you can give them different numbers, but if I'm on the outside looking in, it would still look like the same attack with a different glow around the arms or legs.

And I fully agree with you on the nature of ranged attacks, as well. As far as I'm concerned, the animation for non-weapon ranged blasts is IRRELEVANT. Pick any blast power from any set, then swap its animation for any other power from any other blast set and the result will still work. Hell, for the most part, you don't even need to touch up visual effects. Ever since the one and only time we got a new batch of alternate Blast animations, I've been a strong proponent for simply letting every power have every animation and letting the player pick. Want every attack in your set to fire using the two-fist-thrust of Power Burst? Sure, why not? Want every power to fire from your eyes using the X-Ray Beam animation? Again, why the hell not?

Oh, sure, technical limitations of animation speed apply, I agree, but those are technical limitations, not conceptual limitations.

"Different" is not the same as "not appropriate." Hence why I'm suggesting that being able to pick animations and effects separately is far more customizable than having effects baked into animations, even for a much smaller pool of both effects and animations. Now, granted, Champions can't do that, and to me that's one of its biggest failings. With as simplistic as their animations are, I could see them just adding basic effects as options for their melee attacks - they already lack the "drop-down" that other powers have in customization.

I can tell you for a fact that if I can make a martial artist or a might user and then put glowing energy auras on his hands when he punches, I will take this over a specific "energy melee" set any day. No, Champions doesn't do let you do that, and it could. That's down to the developers to answer for that omission.

And yet that's the entirety of how Avatar: The Last Airbender's fighters fight. Firebenders have a whole repertoire of fireballs and flame waves, yet they shoot those out from their fists and feet via martial arts moves, rather than pointing. That's actually the genius behind the whole show - making ostensibly "magic" appear as a believable extension of martial arts. But strip the movements of their magic and they're still martial arts first, "elemental blasts" second.

In fact, check out one of the final fights. I don't think things are as set in stone as you present them as, or at the very least I can't see them that way. The way you describe it, there should be only one way for a melee fire-user to fight and a melee electricity-user should fight completely differently, as though there's something "fire-specific" about the way one punches and kicks, and I just don't see that.

I could see this if you were making an argument for weapons. A sword can slash and stab. A spear can only stab. A axe can only slash. Just as a rough example. How you animate using the weapon depends on what the weapon is, because we have real-life examples of how those weapons are used, and even if we didn't, their size, weight, shape and "killing end" configuration depicts how we use them. But "fire" has no such inherent logic behind how it's used, because from the moment we start talking about "punching with fire," we're already disregarding the realism of how fire is used. Once we've started disregarding realism, then I see no more need to limit ourselves. Why NOT have kicks that throw fireballs? Why not backhand chops that shoot electricity?

My argument isn't that "elemental melee" is a dumb idea, so much as that it's not a "groundable" idea. I looks like whatever you fancy it looking, thus to me it makes no sense to claim that you can only punch with fire one way but only punch with ice another. My problem isn't that you can't do what you're claiming, but rather that you can't do a whole bunch of other stuff besides.

So your concept is very specific to a darkness-using martial artist. Fine - pick the melee martial arts attacks, give them a "dark" effect and ignore the ranged ones. It's what I did. But you wanting to make a dark martial artist shouldn't preclude me from making a dark brawler or a dark rifleman. And that, actually, is the biggest drawback to Dark Melee in City of Heroes for me - I frikkin' HATE the animations. All of them. Too much punching, too stiff, too awkward. If I could replace them with Martial Arts with the same visual effects, I would.

Now, if your complaint is that Champions doesn't do a good enough job of making your punches LOOK like they're attacking with darkness, then I'm right there with you. Power customization isn't as good there as it was here. Effects are VERY basic and colour selection is severely limited. No white, no black, mostly generic glows. I agree with you that that's a problem, but the solution isn't to add "fiery melee," it's to let me turn the regular melee sets into fiery melee. As of right now, the game has two unarmed melee sets and three weapon-based ones. If I could pick fire weapons for the weapon ones and fiery hand effects for the melee ones, that's a HELL of a lot more customizability than having just one fire melee set, especially when that will likely consist of a small handful of attacks stuck in-between the cracks into "fire."

Ever since BABs left, City of Heroes has been getting an increasing number of non-physical weapons. Right now, if I want to play a fire user, I can pick nearly any of the weapon-based sets and use the Fire Sword and/or Fire Shield for them. I can make a ton of very different fire users, all by using sets OTHER than the ones that have "fire" in their names. Out of the many ones I have, I think only one here is Fire/Fire.

Such as? Again, genuine question. You keep telling me THAT using fire in melee is somehow different from using ice or electricity in melee, but I still don't get a good sense of HOW you see it as being different. And I don't just mean how it COULD be different. You can have ten different ways to shoot a gun, but that's not the point. How are those different in such a way that they can NEVER be the same? How are they so different that they can't be played by the same animation if the player happened to have similar concepts for how his fire, ice, lighting and energy users fought?

Please, explain this to me.

That's not what I'm arguing. Not even close. I'm asking HOW it's not the same thing, and you keep tripping over yourself to assume me that, no, really, it's not the same thing. Do you honestly expect me to throw my hands in the air and go "Welp, you said it enough times, I concede!" It's not a discussion if you just restate your position, it's "IS NOT! IS TOO!"

Let me simplify the question: If you could take any melee attack and attach any visual effect to it, how is that different from having an elemental attack that has one animation and one element hard-coded into it? Let me pose another: In what is meleeing with fire unique different visually from meleeing with ice, that cannot be accomplished by swapping visual effects around? That's all I'm asking, and if you can stop trying to prove me wrong for a minute and actually elaborate and explain, we could probably move on.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Fair enough, but isn't that sort of the job of the player to explain for themselves? Suppose you're a game designer and I'm a player... Wait, where are you going? Get back here!

Suppose you're a developer and I'm a player. You provide me with a "shadow punch" that looks like a punch but has a shadowy effect, and it's left to my imagination to explain quite what that means. But suppose I said... Well, my character wouldn't punch like that. The punch you gave me is awkward, unwieldy and like something a gorilla would throw. My character is a skilful, athletic fighter who also happens to wield darkness. Please, Mr. Developer, could you give me a punch that looks more like I'm using martial arts, but with a darkness effect? Suppose for a moment that your artist is made of magic pixie dust and he can just make that on the fly.

Has anything been lost? Has the theme of "darkness" been compromised somehow? Am I now doing something that's inconsistent with darkness by punching in a different way? Honest question here.

OK, me being myself, I say "Well, that was nice, but I was thinking... Can that punch actually be a kick?" Well, your artist has run out of magic pixie dust and says no. Because, let's face it, I'm being unreasonably demanding. But your artist wants to please everyone, so in his spare time, he rips the effects of all melee attacks, throws all the animations in a giant pool and lets the player pick an animation first and then an effect and say "this is what I want to use." So now I'm using the crane kick while my leg is bathed in darkness.

Has anything been lost? Has the theme of "darkness" been compromised somehow now that I can pick animations the set didn't originally come with? Again, honest question here.

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What I'm saying isn't that "elemental melee powers don't make sense" so much as "melee powers don't make sense to be only ONE type of thing." To me, it makes more sense to make modular attacks that you can attach effects to, rather than bake effects into attacks, because that leads to unnecessary redundancy. Champions FAILS at doing this, because it fails at allowing us to customize our effects, but it still comes close in terms of basic idea, does it not?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Y'know, I keep seeing this around more and more lately, so I decided to start writing my wishful thinking on what could happen - and while I'm still uncertain about quite a few things, I do know one for sure: there's not going to be anything 'anonymous' about it, heh. Wherever, whenever the characters I've come to love in CoH appear again, it will be known exactly where they came from.

Okay, how it's not the same thing is here:

The difference between an Electric Melee attack and a Martial Arts attack that has an electric graphic overlay on it is damage types. An actual Electric Melee attack does Energy Damage in addition to (or, depending on the power, instead of) Smashing, a Martial Arts attack does only Smashing, regardless of how many Electric auras I throw on the character's arms and/or legs.

In other words, when I say I want Electric Melee, I mean I want to actually do electric-type damage (whatever the game considers that to be - Energy in CoH, Electric in CO) with my melee attacks, not just have an electric-looking visual on a physical-type (Smashing in CoH, Crushing in CO) attack.

If there was a way to change damage type along with the visual effect, sure, that'd be the same thing. But you can't. Just the visual. And I don't want just the visual.

Conceptually no, but in City of Heroes that is a dangerous path to take - completely decoupling effects from powers - because in the general case it can cause balance issues. And it would be very difficult to manage this sort of gameplay option when you have to constantly explain exceptions to players, who will in the general case never accept your explanations for exceptions.

CO isn't offensively balanced in quite the same way, and is less vulnerable to this type of problem. Even so, there are still strong limits on how much of this sort of thing you're allowed to do. The intrinsic core behavior of the dev-designed attacks tends to remain the primary behavior, and the modifiers tend to be just that, modifiers, at least to the extent I've seen. But you stick Fire's DoT on Claws, or Sonic's res debuff on a fast set like Psychic Blast, and you've created fundamentally different offensive sets in City of Heroes.

Have you tried the different block powers? Each "set" has its own.

Power Armor gets a hard light Beehive Barrier

Earth gets an stone shield (that, when ranked up grants stone skin, and then stone armor along with the shield)

"Force" gets a cool "both arms outstretched in-front of you projecting an "invisible woman" force field."

Wind shares the Force pose (both arms outstretched) but projecting a short tornado in front of you

Telekinetics get a shield similar to CoH's energy shield.


Electric and Fire get shields that I haven't seen yet. etc etc


The best part is outside of Power Armor's shields, all shields are the same so you can pick whatever you want.

Fair point, and that's something I can work with. Please, just work with me here and let me ask you a few leading questions:

Let's say for the sake of argument that I agree with you that damage type is what defines an attack. How do you know what type of damage you're doing? It may seem like a dumb question, but take a moment to answer it.

The way I see it, there are two ways to know what type of damage you're doing. One is, obviously, to look at your power stats or your combat spam. Granted, that's always a source of information, but it's not a concept-specific source of information. Someone above mentioned how martial artsts can't grapple due to limitations of the game's combat system, and I agree with that complaint wholeheartedly. The truth of the matter is that we can't take the game's numbers and mechanics as direct character traits, in the sense that if you wanted to write a slash fic about the Statesman and Miss Liberty, you wouldn't focus on how much accuracy he had in two-decimal percentage and how many hit points her Dull Pain returned. That's meta-game stuff.

The only other way I can think of to tell what type of damage you're doing - and this one IS concept-specific - is to watch how easy which enemies are to take down. For instance, robots are armoured, thus billets deal less damage to them. If I'm pretending that my gun shoots energy pellets of dimensional force which would normally punch through armour, then having a hard time killing robots but an easy time killing plants ruins my immersion. It simply shows me that my damage is "lethal," because I know what the enemies are resistant to.

But the thing is... Champions enemies are almost never resistant to anything to any degree. They have hit points, some more than others, and when they have damage resistance, it's usually to everything. So what that means is you really can't tell what damage you're doing by sheer experience, at least for the most part.

Obviously, that's not a "solution." If you simply must have electric damage, then I concede that you need a special set of electric attacks or a system that's more versatile than I'm aware exists at the moment. Not MUCH more, but more. That's a problem I can respect and acknowledge.

All I'm saying is that, for those inclined to "make it work," there's at least enough ground for plausible deniability. I tend to care greatly for what my characters do and how they do it, yet still I gave into the temptation to have energy blasts AND melee attacks AND survivability on the same character. It's neither as pretty nor as comfortable in City of Heroes, but at least it exists, which is better than I can get from the gaming world when this game shuts down.

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Just for the record - I'm not dising anyone's characters. I'm just trying to look for ways to make powers work that don't look like they should.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Wow, it's like Sam started an argument and then with this post, entered a completely different argument that no one was having. Bravo.

Last I checked, people were complaining not about animations lacking fire effects, but the lack of melee powers that did fire damage. Good attempt, though, at trying to confuse the issue.

Nifty! I'm only level 16 atm so that'll be something I pick up at some point. Right now, survivability hasn't really been an issue mowing everything down with gatling gun. Maybe you could tell me, what is the best "Tech" self heal? The one I have now locks me out of most of my powers for up to 8 seconds. I'm currently going for a durable ranged damage type character.

I'm the same way. I went gold on CO because the timecards are so cheap on Amazon.

CO runs great for me on a Radeon 6850, which is pretty close to the same spec as your card. This may be a driver-related issue. I've read that sometimes older drivers may work better with the game. So, if updating drivers doesn't help, rolling back to an older driver might.

I'll add to this Combo powers. You get one power, but you get a series of animations that change as you repeatedly attack with it. I don't know if Power Armor has any of these, but some of the other sets do.

I think you can buy a full respec token in the cash shop, but you don't have to. You can go to the Power House and remove powers in the reverse order that you bought them in. Each one costs in game currency, so if you want to swap out a power you picked up at level 4, it's going to cost you more than swapping out a power you picked up at level 14. (Note, I don't know if you actually get powers at those levels, the numbers were just picked out of the air for the example.)

One exception is the magic block. (Eldritch Shield) You hold both hands in front of you and a cool-looking magic shield pops up. A lot of the arcane and other magic powers have pretty cool effects.

Try Bionic Shielding.

ETA: Also, Support Drones, if you don't mind a couple of drones following you around. They constantly emit healing beams that hit you and your party. If you don't need their heals, you can flip them to DPS mode and they turn into flying beam weapons. Or you can turn one to damage and one to heal mode.