Profile of Blovski

The main problem about it is that it does not have any counter play. You can do it without any risks.

In vCoH, every thing you did involved risks. And everything that does not really involve risks (namingly stickies, fausts and nades) had an effective counterplay (dodging/kiting). On top of that, these abilities did not even render a vehicle (worst case a panther/tiger) useless and unable to move, but simply slowed down the unit or just did damage.

This drastically changed with Opposing Fronts, where abilities like treadbreaker, button and stuff came into play. These things do not take any skill to use, are a hard counter to things like vehicles and cannot even be counter by good micro micro (ok, you can stay out of range, but let us be honest, you cannot react to things before you actually see them, meaning that you cannot retreat your vehicle fast enough, once you see the enemy unit that can use this ability).

Now, these abilities can also be found here, again. Button, vehicle crew stun. These things don't have a counterplay, and render a vehicle useless for a period of time. On top of that they don't involve any risk using them. You click on the ability and its done. It takes away the dynamic of the game, as you just have to click buttons to win engagements. Micro? Please, you don't need micro when you have long range tanks that destroy a tank before your crew is actually able to drive its tank again.

Quinns statement that the button ability would promote combined arms is pretty much non-sense, imo. You don't promote things like combined arms by having abilities on units. You promote combined arms by giving units different strengths. Now, a units strength should not come from its abilities. A unit should be useful without their abilities. (again, look at vCoH - not a single unit there was useful for its abilities, but for its strength in fighting infantry/tanks/buildings or just being able to tank a lot of damage.

To give an example. Conscripts are like rifles - versatile and your core unit. Shocks are just a strong infantry unit that is good against infantry only. Guards are a unit that is supposed to combine decent anti infantry and decent anti tank. The thing is, this is mostly achieved by the fact that they have the button ability. Their anti tank rifles are not really the best of anti-tank weapons. Compare that to CoH1, we had rifles, rangers, which were useful against infatnry and light vehicles and airbornes, that were only useful against tanks and to some extend light vehicles. Why? Because they had different weapons that made them strong against different targets. And you know what? It worked out very well and made the game dynamic.