My friends and I ran our first playtest of the combat system in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition. It was a productive test, and we learned a lot about the game's mechanics ... and how to design a more effective heroes. Here's what we learned in the first go round, featuring four battle-suited, Power Level 10 combatants:

1) The rules are as cool as they seem, and once you get the base mechanic down. We had a little confusion understanding how the Protection (Invulnerability) power worked, but eventually figured out it was soaking a certain amount of the damage bonus each round, and how to defeat (or at least, weaken) characters with such powers by making power attacks (which increase the damage bonus by sacrificing the attack bonus).

2) We learned that having four characters with varying degrees of Protection (Invulnerability) makes for a very long combat, because while it's easy to hit someone, actually hurting them is considerably harder with that Protection power.