I played a villian and I only bought the CoH edition, back at release. I have purchased absolutely nothing else besides 1 game card. Was this how it was and now changed? I know looking at their confusing site last night, I did see, repeatedly, that it said buying one entitles you to both.

There’s three kinds of respecs: Earned from the respec trials (Max of 3), Veteran Rewards (I think 36 month players can get 4) and Freespecs given out, typically for Christmas and the game’s anniversary (you can only have one of these at any given time).

The hero respec trial isn’t particularly difficult, unless you have a particularly bad team. The villainside trial can be very hard if your team is too large or poorly composed. I’ve found it impossible with group of 8 friends due to poor builds and a bad mix of ATs, and fairly easy with a group of 4 as well.

As far as builds, try Hero builder. It’s not perfect, since it doesn’t have IOs included yet, but it’s a good tool for seeign how your powers will come in and be slotted. http://sherksilver.coldfront.net/index.php

There’s the good vs Evil edition, no longer Walmart-only, that has both COH and COV included, plus some rather pointless fluff. Jumppack, which is a decent emergency vertical travel power, the Pocket D Teleporter, usable once every half hour, and some special costume pieces.

PVP is a bit of a pain in COH. Ostensibly it’s been balanced around team vs team, but few people fight that way. Balance is already out the window, for example there’s an epic power tanker and scrapper heroes can get that can cut through defense-based powers (i.e., dodging attacks). Villainside, Stalkers should be able to kill nearly anything in a big alpha strike. That said, my squishy corruptor has never been killed instantly - fights in the 40’s typically take a minute or two of bouncing, jousting passes.

And, the final point about PVP is that most peopel go there to get a bonus power for PVE. Wether it’s to pick up a Shivan to help against Archvillains, or to grab a heavy and maul big packs of Longbow or Arachnos, many peopel in PVP zones are avoiding fighting.

For first, COH players don’t get COV for free. Which probably was ok some time ago, but at this time, for what I understand, this only increases the unbalance between heroes and villain presence on each server.
For what I was told this unbalance, together with lack of PvP rewards, kills PvP.

Another thing is about respecs. For what I understood getting a respec is not easy. The last time I reactivated the account for 1 month I did know I wanted to use my free respec (I wanted to take out the hover power and get something more useful, since my toon relies on superjump for traveling), but I didn’t wanted to use it until I had a clear idea of my template at level 50 (which I will never have since I never hit level 30).

I know, it sounds paranoid, but I just don’t want to waste something that is so rare, difficult to get, and most importantly limited. I mean, once you respec 6 times you can’t respec anymore, doesn’t matter how much you might want to pay for another one. Why is that?

She’s almost 10 - once she hits, I’ll start up a guild. In the meantime, you can contact me at global chat handle GB.

I figure another 40 minutes and we’ll be ready to roll.