One of my maps includes combine balls which are non-deadly but painful. I had a trigger around the player which killed the activator and dealt some damage, and it worked perfectly when I used a point_combine_ball_launcher. But now I switched to the parentable point_energy_ball_launcher, and it doesn't work the same. The trigger is triggered, but the ball explodes when it's killed, killing the player too. How can I prevent this?

if you are making it rotate, for example, shoot a ball in 4 different directions, each time the launcher rotates, enable a new point_combine_ball_launcher and disable the previous.

Yeah, I think I'll just switch back. Combine balls have some nice features, such as dying when they get to the skybox, the only problem is that they always have infinite life.

you culd have a trigger to kill them activate along their path once the time is up.

I'm using a tank which aims at the player, but I could put a trigger in front of the barrel which kills the activator after ~10 seconds (sort of creating an event queue).