So I'm reading the newest generic PAC, and I notice something I'd never really noticed before: Energy Explosion and Pulse Wave are activated by Ranged Combat Actions.

As the descriptions say neither "may" nor "can," am I correct in assuming that, if your character has either power on their dial and you make a ranged combat attack, you HAVE to use these powers? Or do you have the option to either make a normal ranged attack OR an EE/Pulse Wave attack?

Thanks!

When you assign an action, you can choose to activate a certain effect. You don't have to activate a certain effect if you don't want to when using effects that require actions to activate.

Activating a power is with an action is always optional because you give the character the action to do a specific thing. You give them a ranged combat action and can activate pulse wave, or you can give them a ranged combat to activate EE, or you could just give a ranged combat action to do a vanilla attack. The only things which are not optional are passives which use the words "can use" rather than "may use".

Thanks guys, I originally thought this, but then read it and totally second-guessed myself. Thanks again!