I thought i'd make this post as to encourage some thoughts on one of the things often over-looked in CoH: How the secondary effects of blast and melee sets fundamentally changed how you played. A few notes:

This challenge is more, powersets of the original CoH and the archtypes that had them. Not powers and whatnot in valiance online.

This post is more about discussing how much secondary effects of many powersets in CoH mattered and how they changed how you played. It's designed to encourage people to think about these things in other discussions about powersets in valiance, including sets designed primarily for damage.

The rules: One powerset cannot be changed.

You can change the archtype to choose a different type of powerset, but you have to try and keep realistic. A buff set for example isn't on any melee archtypes, or a defense(as in things like electrical armor or lightning reflexes) set wouldn't be on ranged or crowd control wouldn't have been on a melee toon in city of heroes. It was something we didn't see in that game.

I'd encourage picking a different set then what someone else may have picked.

Ancillaries/incarnate powers aren't included (for now, for simplicity sake).

Enhancements(and IO's if you know em well) can be used to determine how you'd be playing.

You may post two different sets, but they must be of significantly differing effects(for example, no fire blast + archery or fire blast and then assault rifle, the three sets are purely damage with no significant secondary effects to separate one another other than different power cooldowns/cones ect. This is about things like cc effects, debuff effects ect.) If you do, you must also include the advantages of picking one set over the other.

Edit: Another rule; no picking a secondary with intent of not having taken anything from it. No "Attackless empath" builds, that basically wouldn't change things any as having no powers from an attack set or another meant there was no difference between them, not to mention incapacity to solo in that game.

Lets start off:

You have to pick time manipulation(controllers/corruptors/defenders/masterminds). Thats a set required for the challenge for now. I'll go over it's characteristics:

Average AoE heal w/ minor CC resistance(not protection)(small heal amount up front and tiny amounts after over time).
Single-target buff "Temporal selection" which boosted damage and effects of other buffs(except farsight), cannot be maintained on more then 2-3 people.
Time crawl: Single-target debuff, modest cooldown(cannot apply more then on a few badguys), increased debuff potency slightly for other debuffs.
Farsight: AoE +defense(strong, 9-15%(or 18-30 damage mitigation) and +tohit. Enahnces up to 14.4-24% defense.
Time's Juncture: Medium range PBAoE toggled maintain damage(20-30%) and tohit debuff(9-15%). To-hit debuff enhances up to 14.4-24%. Effects increased with Time Slow. High Endurance cost to maintain(and generally something you wanted on a lot!)
Temporal Distortion field: AoE slow/recharge debuff with periodic hold effects, increased for targets afflicted by Time slow.
Time Stop: Single target hold(modest duration of I think 10-15 second base enhancable up to 20-30 seconds). Increased potency against those already time crawled.
Slowed REsponse: AoE Resistance and defense debuff; enemies take more damage while under it's effects and cannot evade hits, especially from those boosted by farsight.
Chrono Boost: Massive AoE recharge buff and burst heal on long cooldown time. Also recharges endurance. Slightly more potent for those buffed with temporal selection.

So to start off, I'll pick an easy one: Dark blast. How would this effect my strategy? It'd be safe with time manipulation; debuffing enemy to-hit even further would prevent damage outright, I could possibly even skip Temporal mending due to such sheer amounts of to-hit debuffs. I wouldn't want to skip farsight, as it's to-hit buff would also help me debuff enemy mob to-hit. As for archtype I'd pick corruptor over defender, specifically for superior damage since I already got massive defensive advantages from having both dark blast and time manipulation. I'd favor pulling mobs around corners, but I'd prefer to group them some by teaming up with a tanker/brute so I can remain both close and hit them with AoE cones.

For another set, since I'm not sure if someone would pick this: Energy blast. Yes, the knockback set. How would this change how I use time manipulation? For starters, I'd favor luring enemies into tighter rooms to keep them in range of time's juncture while i'm knocking them about like rag dolls. I wouldn't necessarily want a tanker or brute moving enemies for me, because I have to be forcing them to move all the time anyways. I could use flight/hover above however that could take endurance down rapidly since I'm already using time's juncture, so it's limited.

Dark blasts advantage would be ease of use: It's the lightweight of the racing game, so to speak. Streight forward cone effects, enemies don't tend to be knocked often or randomly. It's easy to line enemies up in cones with experience, and the massive to-hit would even prevent defense debuffing attacks from being as prone to "defense cascading"(flooring player defense after 1-2 hits). Teams would see damage being taken so rarely that you may not even need to heal anyone. But dark blast has one of the lowest DPS in the game, and is very burst-less, as it's AoE's are entirely DoT. You'd be relying entirely on defense and to-hit debuffs to prevent alpha strikes to anyone, rather then putting them down quickly. Dark blast also has poor single-target damage, with only 2 attacks worthy of true single-target damage.

At the same time.....the saying goes: "More layered defense tactics are much more resilient", and energy blast would excel at that with it's crowd control. Enemies being knocked around are not retaliating. But it'd be much harder to use due to it's knockback possibly counter-acting against times juncture, forcing me to draw enemies into corners or engaging them next to walls, or using flight/hover to position directly above to keep them within times juncture. Enemies missing attacks and getting far, far less attacks off may just push energy blast ahead defensively, and energy blast has far better single-target damage, actually being specifically designed for single-target and inflicts very high damage in that category. But Energy blast takes far, far more skill to use, and bad players with it often struggled to find teams willing to put up with them, even with such a powerful set as time manipulation to pair with it.

I think it's a little early to be trying challenges like this before we even know the powersets and mechanics isn't it?

and excuse me? how does it not make sense for ranged to have defense? explain?

It's more about power sets in city of heroes that existed then in a sense. The sets in CoH likewise, you couldn't pick a "Defense" set with ranged as those sets were specific to melee in that game, hence why I mention the rule. I'll clarify that more in the original post. The idea is to discuss how a set changed how you played when paired with another set. Such as how dark blast would change how a person played with a buff/debuff set, or how say energy melee would pair with electrical armor and then change electrical melee out for say street brawler ect.

Again the idea of the post is more to spur creative thinking than anything else. Thats also why I put a limit on one set not being changable and also in the rules discouraging people from picking a set which as already talked of, or at least comparing it to another set and how that changed the game for the player.