This is going to sound weird but I wish they would change as little as possible. Maybe upgrade the graphics for 2.0. However the devs of CoH have said before they don't even know what they did to make the game so special. Every change made to the game risks compromising that.
Making player based changes to the game we love could be a very slippery slope.
I think the reason many of the CoH devs didn't know what they did to make the game so special is because they've not really seen super teams in action, but maybe also forgot the kind of depth the game had. It's easy to lose touch, and heck i'd expect some people to lose touch, with why the non-trinity kind of play city of heroes inadvertedly had was a good thing. It's even easier to misunderstand city of heroes when every single other mmorpg does things in the draconic ways they do. These days the devs are working on existing titles that more than likely are comprised entirely of holy trinity clones.
It's probably easy to forget why an all corruptor or all defender team was so powerful, or why people had success with scrappers or why so much altitus was prevalent in city of heroes. Truth is it's because the game had far better balance than other mmorpgs because it didn't conform to the same imbalance-prone rules that other mmorpgs follow; if anyone is winning without using the holy trinity tactic they see the game as imbalanced. In reality though, balance is both subjective as some people had said but also comes in multiple forms.
I often saw city of heroes classes as either "Muscle" or "multiplier" types. A muscle character had a ton of power built in, but couldn't increase the power of anyone in the team effectively. A multiplier character boosted the effectiveness of teammates, sometimes they benefited from their own buffs/debuffs, others didn't but could buff others even further in some way.
At same time I saw that every powerset had some kind of strategy to it. And the fact that you couldn't just randomly pick/choose from other sets you didn't take meant that balance was far more important.
In many ways city of heroes was almost more of an mmorpg/rts than it was a streight mmorpg. And it was also because it didn't really seem to forget what the "rpg" meant at the end of mmorpg. In that, it was about solving problems, not "your defined role in a team". The whole "defined role in a team" mentality is to me a terrible way to think what "role playing game" stands for, because it's like your thinking as if people are just cogs in a machine rather than individuals in a team. Other mmorpgs teams were not individuals teaming and working together, but just cogs in a machine. Even the player behavior in them being rude to anyone making any perceived mistakes reflects that mindset. Your either a healer, tank, or damage dealer, not whatever your name is, and if your not putting out the right numbers you deservery every form of mistreatment to some players.
Edit: Heck, I even had a case where my team couldn't kick a jerk because he was playing the most vital "minionmancer" role, which was our only means to do damage and he revealed himself as a jerk halfway through the content we played. Because if the "cog" he was, was removed we'd all have been destroyed. All because to many mmorpg players, your not a human being but a cog in the machine. Not to mention our only incentive to play was the reward, not the fun.
Which to me is another problem, mmorpgs try to keep people playing by not being fun but simply by playing addictive mind-tricks. Your rewarded items for success even if your bored of the game, you end up keep playing for the loot even if your very unhappy playing it. Course many players fail to realize it, but they are addicted even though they have no fun playing, they only play for the reward. And when they get it, they consider the game "beat" and move on.
While in city of heroes you were you. You were a human being and you weren't just another healer/tank/damage dealer. You weren't a cog in the machine. You were you, and your skills were yours to contribute to the effort. There is a huge difference between a team of robots and a team of human beings, know? Thats also something that, due to the sheer variety of viable strategies city of heroes had, helped it significantly.
And the game didn't try to keep you playing by being addictive, but more by balancing the whole "instant gratification" vs "fake fun through rewards". You still had to level up a new character to see what kind a combination of powersets would do. But it also made it fun to see how the character develops. Character development was a stronger point of city of heroes. A reason I wouldn't want AE to be usable for power leveling, since you miss the whole point of character development. Heck city of heroes was a role players game, not a munchkins game. And I think that, also made a huge difference compared to other mmorpgs.
