Interesting to hear how everyone's groups are.

Hood is a lonely expert. His group has one martial, one sorcerer priest, and the rest are psions.

Here's how I view Arcanis character design in a nutshell; you can either pick one area to focus on and be extremely good in just that one area, or pick two areas of focus as still be pretty good, or at most, three areas, and you will probably be at least competent. If you try to do any more than that, you just won't be able to consolidate enough skill ranks and complementary talents to have a major impact on gameplay.

So if you do the melee/ranged combo, that's pretty much going to be the main definition of your character. If that's that character you want to play then that's cool. Personally, this doesn't really appeal to me, because that character will be pretty pigeon-holed as a combat specialist, and I like characters that can contribute to investigation/research/conversations/etc and other "soft" skills.

For example, Hood's primary contribution to combat is high base damage and murderous precision. But his soft skills include larceny, streetwise, stealth, etc. So I pretty much run the information gathering aspects of the modules for my table, and that gives me a lot of opportunity to roleplay.

Ss'kethis isn't much good in a city. He has no social or city-oriented skills but I knew that limitation when I created him. He's good at buffing (mostly self) and can heal in a pinch but is mostly melee (the idea for him started when I ran across the Huge talent in CoH and grew from there).

G'hyu'thyh is much more refined. He doesn't hit as hard but has more knowledge and social skills. He can be his own worst enemy though (he has very fixed ideas about honor and nobility).

Ironically, Ss'kethis is my Expert and G'hyu'thyh is my Martial...

The local group I run has 1 Ssressen Expert (probably should be Martial but she really wanted Quick), 1 Elorii Elder caster, 1 Gnome (templar? divine caster at any rate) of Cadic, 1 Val'Emman (can't remember if he's Expert or Martial but does have some psionics), and 1 Val (Abebbi I think - the face of the group with less combat skills and no psionics (yet anyway)).