Ah, I understand now. Basically, you need 2 emitters. The first is the energy ball (or burst, or laser, or whatever) that moves from the thrower to the target. Then you need a 2nd emitter that does the "burst".
Don't try to do it with a single emitter.
I took an existing emitter (turbulent plasma) and made it into a enery ball. Then I moved it, and duplicated it. Then modified the duplicate emitter to make it "explode". This took a little work, and you need some understanding of how these emitters work, but it mainly involved increasing the velocity for the particles (and a few other tweaks).
http://www.wondertouch.com/downloads/temp/cow/energy_burst_example.zip
This example was made in SE for Windows. There might be a problem with opening it on the Mac version -- I can't remember.
Alan.
wondertouch
