Captain Fabulous

I think you underestimate the amount of time, effort, and skill that goes into making new content and systems. Even back on live content updates were few and far between, and Cryptic/Paragon had a staff of full-time workers. Not to mention the fragility of the code base and how trying to add a new system could very well break other things in unexpected ways. And while the idea of a Nemesis system was pretty cool, the CO implementation was kinda meh. A lot of potential that was never reached. There are some good things in CO, IMO it's an enjoyable game to play casually as there's some nice content and mechanics there (along with some really nice costume pieces and character builds you simply can't do here), but CoH is overall a far better game. I think we would all love to see massive updates, but honestly I'm just thankful to be able to play again and am grateful for all the hard work the HC team does to give us new stuff and QoL additions whenever and wherever possible.

Pretty sure it's always been like that, along with the Phantasms.

Psi/Psi Blaster and Mind/Psi Dominator are both good choices.

EA is the best of the 3 IMO. It has 2 click abilities, but Energize you can put on auto and forget about it leaving Energy Drain as your only active defensive click ability. SR would be my second choice; WP the third. I've never understood all the love WP gets. I've always thought it was kinda meh.

I think CO has a far more enjoyable solo experience than CoH to be honest. Unless you're really well-built, soloing in CoH is a slog IMO. The only time in CO you have to team is for hard group content or alerts. In fact it's almost impossible to find a team to do anything else. It's just not worth the aggravation, as most characters are completely self-sustaining and the need for support characters is little to none. CO has been in maintenance mode for over a decade. The only people playing are the die hards and/or whales. I used to play occasionally, usually during events, cause I have some nice characters that are genuinely enjoyable to play (and I have a lifetime). But after they decided to delete unused event credits at the end of every year that was it for me.

Nah

https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe

I'm pretty sure you'll need emulation software like Parallels. PC games won't run natively on M2 chips.

"Yo mommas wear combat boots!"

Ah, sorry, hadn't had my coffee yet lol

As @sbloyd said, a full respec on a fully IOd character is a massive PITA (Mids and the test server makes it easier, but it's still a PITA regardless). For me personally I will only respec if I feel it's absolutely necessary.

Try tinting everything black/black (or darkest grey if black isn't available). It's the best way I know to minimize power VFX when there is no option to turn them off. Unfortunately there are many melee sets that you can't tint at all, off the top of my head I don't know if SS is one of them.

There's a Cupid's Bow badge?

Homages are ok. Just don't get too close to the original in either name or look.

Yeah, the issue is that you're on a 32-bit version of Windows, which limits how much RAM the game can use.

The wiki lists 6 temp powers?

It's more likely they're running a 32-bit OS like Windows 7.

I wish I could say the same, I have a list of ~25 character names I wasn't able to get within the first week of launch, and I'm almost guaranteed now to not get what I want on the first try unless it's something very unique or tongue-in-cheek, which is fine for the occasional offbeat character but not for general use. I used to play with a buddy who also never had trouble with names, but he used things like B. Phase, Trollya, Fanish, Healing Cowgurl, etc., not something most people would consider desirable. There are a few characters I've gone thru over a dozen names with a thesaurus and still couldn't find one available, got fed up and wound up going in a completely different direction. Another required HOURS of research in classical mythology to find a name of an Egyptian Goddess who could control the weather. Tried at least 20 different names, all taken, I wound up having to use a little-known alternate spelling, and I'm surely the only person who is going to know who that goddess is, which absolutely defeats the point. So yeah, be thankful you've never had to deal with this kind of bullshit. And it is pure bullshit,

Why would you want to punish yourself like this?

Not being a dev nor a mod I don't have hard data I can give you. Maybe @GM Crumpet can? I know we've been told since live that's it's always been an issue, one that's been magnified here due to the near limitless numbers of characters one can freely create. There are a number of threads here that discuss it. Since it's not a violation of the TOS I'm not sure what reporting them would do. I guess the person I referenced could be lying, but it's easy enough to use /getglobalname to see who owns a particular character name, and he's come up a number of times when I've checked to see who has a name I tried to use.

The other nice thing about Ninja Run that the other Prestige runs don't have is the way you hold weapons.

Bro, dunno what you're smoking, but SS Hurl is damned good. 80' range, 2.5 sec cast (used to be higher on live), 8 sec recharge, 9.36 end, and has a melee damage modifier instead of ranged so it does the same base damage as Haymaker. Random items on Propel works because you're creating a wormhole, but that makes no sense if you're pulling up the ground beneath your feet.

I'm not a sociologist so I can't explain the pathology behind it, but there are people in this game that have made hundreds, if not thousands of characters for no other purpose than to lock up popular names, simply because they can. They derive some sort of perverse pleasure from knowing they have something other people want that no one else can have. There is one here in the forums who openly boasts about not only doing this, but also powerleveling them all to 50 so they are immune to the name release policy, should it ever be implemented. I wish I was making this up, and that people like this didn't exist, but here we are.

Man, don't go giving away my secret identity like that! Not cool, bro!!!

We've been begging for a solution since 2004. Unlikely anything meaningful is going to be done about it.