Making something overpowered and unbalanced WILL break game balance eventually.

Making it 'really hard to do' or 'unknown' doesn't restore that balance. I understand the whole role play/fantasy aspect of.. say being Sparhawk and being the ONLLLLLLY person in Thera with Bhelliom. It works wonders in books, not in games.

A great example of this is Roll-canceling in CVS2 (In short, a way of hitting two buttons between 1/60th to 3/60th of a second before finishing a move, to make you invincible during it.) Hard to do, and even harder to do consistently, but after a few people found out, some crazy people (like myself) practiced the hell out of it got very efficient at it. What happened? Being able to Roll-cancel became damn near mandatory to be competitive at the game and completely ripped apart the balance.

CF, unlike CVS2, can change these problems when they get exploited... but changing how roll-canceling is done does not fix the problem. Someone will find it again, figure how to do it again, and exploit it again. As long as you keep roll-canceling (or whatever else you want to call it) in CF, the problem will never go away; only repeat.

In another analogy to CVS2 roll-canceling....

So now in CF you've got some awesome preps out there, that are "sooooooo easy to get" and "soooooo easy to figure out". Soooooo easy that anyone can find them right? Similar to roll-canceling, someone figured it out, WHY NOT YOU??? Roll-canceling is not to hard to pick up if SOMEONE SHOWS you howto do it. Therein lies the problem; someone SHOWING you howto do it. Not many people can/will figure it out themselves and soon knowing how to do it becomes very critical to staying competitive. Is it absolutely essential? No, but not having/not doing it gives you a huge disadvantage. So the information leaks out, or people genuinely figure it out due to necessity of having/wanting to stay competitive. Being the only person playing CVS2 without roll-cancels in a room of players that roll-cancel sucks. And when you ask someone "Hey, what is that? What does it do? Where do you get it?" and they don't answer your question...

You don't say "Oh gee! What a good roleplayer! It is my duty as a Roleplayer to go on some holy quest to figure out what it is he has! Whooo Hooo!"

You say "Jesus, what a (whatever your favorite curse is)."


Either way the next problem arises...
Is roll-canceling legit? Is it a cheat? Is it some sort of hack that should be banned from the game? The people who can do it say "It's easy! Just practice! Just figure it out! Everyone can do it!" The people who can't figure it out/can't do it say "No! It's a cheat/bug/hack/lame thing that's ruined the balance!"

Then the Immortals have to do something, and the only guarantee they have is that whatever they do, will never make everyone happy.