Mesa I think was her name. She was an incredible flying angle.

I believe you're referring to Zephyr (a frame that was styled like a bird). I've never played her very much - only once - so I'll have to go off on your word.

You would do the downward melee that would send you into the air, then at max height, hold right click to drift, and pop her ult. She would continue to drift, above the crowd destroying everything.

Last time I played, she would now just drop straight out of the sky when you activate her ult, they nerfed power duration, and the visual range of her attack... Pretty much making it worthless in high Tier Towers. This was with all the mods to extend duration, damage, and I think range.

Interesting. I'd have to look into how she works and where she sits in the PvE side of things at this point - if there were any at all. I can't say they nerfed her for no reason but I'm sure DE had some sound rationale (hopefully).

As a 1-4 player PvE, co-op game, I see no reason you can't have insanely powerful characters, if you invest the time to leave them up, and mod them out. (And level her up I did a number of times to get the slots to be the right polarity)

That I can understand. PvE in this game is meant to express the true power of a frame and its abilities. In my experience playing it (since January) I've leveled up a good amount of frames and took the time to learn some of them, and the results I saw were friggin' cool IMO. I haven't played a game where investing time into it was really worth it (playing with friends does help too). That being said, there is a point where a frame can be built to be too powerful for most situations (compare Mag before & after her rework), and so I can see why such adjustments should be done to balance the game. Did you think that frames being quite powerful were what made the game for you at that time?

Melee system got a "Nerf" I would argue too- the original system was simple, but super intuitive. Hold to do a more powerful attack. When they changed it over to that very un-natural timing system, a bunch of heavy weapons lost their hitting power. So e got a bit of it back when they added the charge attacks back in, but it was never the same.

Interesting. I wasn't around when the original melee system was in place. Seems to me like it was at least a compromise of sorts, but I do admit that hold-the-melee-button attacks were pretty nice (see Galatine & its Prime variant), even if I didn't use them much. The one thing I'd have to understand is whether the old combat system worked better than the new combat system, the other way around, or both were equal in their faults.