You say PoTAYto, I say PoTAWto...

...you say Zapp, I say Proton Volley.

One of the most frustrating and disinteresting aspects of CoH for me is the similarity, sometimes extreme similarity, between powers and even power sets. Often it seems a blaster is a blaster is a blaster.... It's mainly a matter of what color flies out of his hands. I realize that this is a way to establish game balance. (And let's face it... This was about establishing game balance during the initial design proccess, not about maintaining game balance. There's a distinct difference.) I'm sure there were a billion things that needed to be done while bringing CoH to the public, but this is one shortcut they took that I believe really cost them seriously, in a very real financial sense, in the long run. It causes loss of interest which in turn causes subscriber drop off.

Powers and power sets can be different from each other and still have game balance. Sure, it requires a lot of testing (which I think they have enough people to help with now) and a broad understanding of the game environment as a whole (ie, not missing the forest for the trees). Illusion controllers should be very different in some ways than fire controllers.... Fire blasters from ice blasters... Stone tankers from invulnerability tankers. Yes, each archetype should still serve its assigned "roll" in the game (much as I'd love for that to not be the case), but each power set should have it's own advantages and disadvantages. This is done a little in CoH, but it's not stressed or accomodated to any degree. Electricity manipulators should be balls-nasty against robots, but should take it in the ass from ice (or water? ...where's my water??) attacks. Fire users should get heavily smacked up by ice users, as ice users should by them in turn. Common sense adjustments like that could add a lot to the feel of a game.