[quote=@Liaison]
[@MelonHead]

Spawning fire on even some of my most basic characters wouldn’t be that much of a threat and it’s not because of strength. Some are better at combating it than others. Like some people say guns are overpowered but an easy counter to them is an advanced view of perception. If you have outterworldy eye sight you can judge the trajectory of any bullet before the shot is even fired out the nozzle.  

Personally, I think using what you identified as “Non interactive” attacks are broken rather they just take skillful and considerate roleplayers to execute properly. When it's done right threads are really fun to read as they tend not to become a dodge-fest where no one gets hit or hurt. 

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I don't think you fully appreciate what being in a fire does to the majority of characters, then, to be honest. If someone can cause fire to ignite the air around you, your lungs will incinerate from the inside, your eyeballs will melt, your skin will melt, your clothes will ignite and you will asphyxiate and you will die painfully and in some cases immediately. Perhaps your basic characters aren't in anyway linked to real life physics, or perhaps you underestimate how bad it is to be directly inside a fire. 

I've already said that fire alone isn't necessarily going to be super effective if used at the higher tiers, but the ability to generate it directly on a person is still broken in Arena combat in the majority of circumstances. Not every higher tier character is going to be inherently immune to burning to death, and as that's the only reasonable way to survive if you're suddenly and inexplicably engulfed in fire, it becomes non-interactive.

As for your gun example, people believe guns are overpowered because they share a wide range of similarities with non-interactive powers at the majority of power levels. It's only as you move out of the medium power level into the higher power levels that you have characters that can reliably dodge bullets, so you're left with pre-empting the pull of a trigger. The problem with this is that the speed at which people can aim and fire reliably increases with the speed at which characters can dodge and perceive actions. At the level your character is capable of avoiding a firearm, your opponent is going to have similar supernatural advantages, unless you agree that a firearm is unbalanced and that only an ordinary human should be allowed to use them at that power level. In reality, it takes no effort to simply point a gun in someone's direction, and with that you have cut off their ability to move in a wide range of fashions. Using guns is easy in arena combat, because no one ever misses their target. Also, when you actually translate what a firearm can do to cold-hard statistics, you would be highly dubious of a magical power capable of the same feat. 

I think that personally if you need to rely on an attack your opponent couldn't conceivably avoid in any fashion, they just have to take it, then you're probably not a very good fighter to begin with. The entire point of the Arena is to manoeuvre your opponent into a situation where you can land the hits, disable their characters over time, back them into a corner and then finish them off. I don't really see any merit in 'My character incinerates the air around your own, this will result in your immediate death.'

Then again, I may be biased because I think the higher tiers are pretty worthless as Arena fights, they only really serve as fun mess around battles. There's no real skill involved at those levels, other than in writing interesting scenes of combat. You can only really have skill in a fight that is still at least partially grounded in real world logic. This is just been my experience over the years, but as the largest arena tournament currently being run has been and is run at the lower power levels, I think that pretty much speaks for itself. 

I suppose what I'm saying is I completely disagree with everything you said, but you're entitled to your opinion.