I think a nice addition to the XML games would be to add "mental health" bar for (heh...). The HP bar would account for "everything else" - "physical" damage, giving us 2 ways to eliminate an enemy.
Telepathic powers are pretty popular with mutants, and they should be able to take down a normal person almost instantly by messing with their minds. normal soldiers should have lower mental health bars than trained telepaths. Telepaths using telekinetic moves still affect enemies physical bars, and/or moves can be made to do lower damage to one life bar but affect both physical and mental at the same time (like when you apply mental powers to melee).
For the playable characters, mental health should be harder to recover from - you won't be able to just pop some potion like you do to treat HP... maybe it just recovers slowly over time, and some telepaths will have boosts to heal mental damage.
This can add some other features
-Enemies or allies like Juggernaut and Magneto get immunity or high resistance from telepathic attacks-- until someone rips off their helmet.
-Wolverine can go feral/berserk and harm both enemies and allies once his mental health is low enough... he'd be uncontrollable for a while but very powerful.
yeah......
Isn't this like impossible to do? Well, I don't know...
i'm not asking for someone to mod it, i was just thinking of what they can do for future games if they ever go back to doing XML.
They should just stick with damage resistances. It's a lot simpler that way.