The City of Heroes Thread

[malonkey1]

I have played the original Superhero MMO, City of Heroes (http://www.cityofheroes.com), and wondered who here at GitP played it, and what their opinions of it are. If you like, feel free to share your global name.

[Calemyr]

I have played the original Superhero MMO, City of Heroes (http://www.cityofheroes.com), and wondered who here at GitP played it, and what their opinions of it are. If you like, feel free to share your global name.

I play occasionally. The game feels better than other MMOs gameplay-wise, but I've got so many games to play that I only play it casually - and MMOs are just not suited for casual play.

[The_Jackal]

Well, it's got strengths and weaknesses. Strength wise, I feel it delivers the superhero genre more convincingly than its later immitators, with tons of flexibility in terms of look and playstyle, lots of powersets and cool synergies. It's also the game that does the best job of marginalizing the 'healer' trope. There are still tanks and healers, but for many healer types, their heals are cooldown limited, and offers instead more proactive methods of reducing enemy damage. They also have a venue for player generated content, and a mechanism for rewarding content creators when its played, probably the single cleverest maneuver I've seen in the MMO genre to date.

Where the game falls down is in content, however. There's nothing like the depth of fight mechanics seen in WoW, so most fights just wind up being an exercise in pinata busting. The character's mechanics also don't have anything to mix up the rotation, so many of the more straightforward builds can get very monotonous. The Blaster and Scrapper primaries here are a good example, where you get 9 powers that all have more or less the same effect: Hit enemy for damage. Later powersets/archetypes did somewhat reverse this trend, my favorite straight up combat class was the Arachnos Bane Spider, a stealthy melee trooper with some slick control and debuff abilities.

What I enjoyed most when playing CoH/V was the controller types, both on red-side and blue-side. They were more powerful than you typically see in traditional MMOs, able to stun enemies for long periods of time, while still doing respectable damage, via personal damage or pets. Other classes did more damage, but once you'd locked a spawn down, that was more an exercise in cleanup.

[malonkey1]

I see what you're saying, Jackal, and I agree that a lot of the basic DPS builds end up being pretty dull after a while, but the great thing about CoH, in regards to building characters, is that it is incredibly flexible, especially when adding in IO sets. You have a glass cannon Blaster, and wanna tank with him? Take Fighting, Leadership, and maybe Stealth, and slot in some Defense IOs. Petless Mastermind? It'll be hard, but you can do it! Wanna be a control-oriented Scrapper? I'd go with Dark/Dark. Nearly any archetype can, with some canny building, be reworked into nearly any role passably well. Beyond the actual player choices, content is pretty good. The Praetorian Arcs get special mention in my book for offering such a rich world to play in.

[Ashen Lilies]

I'll echo the sentiment that combat can get pretty repetitive for certain Archetypes. My main character is a 20-something (I don't play all that much) SS/Willpower Tanker, which was a... poor choice for someone who ends up soloing as much as I do.
Running missions with him invariably ends up an exercise in boredom as he sits in the middle of a bunch of attacking mobs with all his toggles up and sloooooowly pokes them to death with his feeble attack damage. Playing my dominator (only level 11, I think - I kept vacillating on whether to roll Plant/Thorns or Plant/Psi... and I'm still not decided. :/) has definitely been a lot more rewarding so far.

[Pronounceable]

I've been dabbling in this for a while now. The actual game part is bad. Bad as in completely generic snoozefest.

At least I've discovered jousting is sort of possible with melee but that multiplies the time to kill enemies unnecessarily. Unless it's a melee elite boss that's still alive when your massed gob of inspirations run out, in which case you'll get trampled swiftly without jousting (a ranged elite boss will pwn your face regardless).

Which also brings to mind the inspiration bombing: the consumables in this game might be limited by carrying capacity, but there's no limit to use. Therefore 4 purples and a whole bunch of oranges makes you almost untouchable for a minute. Or if you think defense is for sissies you're allowed to dish out stupid amounts of hurt by using an entire trayful of reds. Once your inspiration tray has 12 slots you can destroy everything except archvillains for a ridiculously tiny amount of money, a fraction of the money an enemy that needs so much insp to defeat will drop. Also I randomly saw someone mention mailing insp to yourself (you can get your mail anywhere). While I'm a froob who can't send mail, if that sort of unbridled insp bombing is possible they might as well put in a godmode and be done with it.

Also I haven't seen any enemy do something remotely interesting so far. Tutorial boss taught me to not stand on red glowing ground (which is yet to be utilized by anything else) and an archvillain I met did some red glowing a few times while FLASHING HUGE RED LETTERS appeared on the screen telling me to run away. I also joined a sewer sweeping team a couple times and the whole screen was filled with glowing crap from all other players and enemies during battle and I'm told particles of other people can't be turned off.

I am unpleased with this. Everything may be changing at 50 but I doubt that. You know there's something wrong when playing with its dolls is immensely more entertaining than playing the game itself. I'd buy the fully unlocked character screen seperated from game in a heartbeat, but I'm not gonna pay regularly for a game like this.

However everything else is AWESOME. Atmosphere, heroes, villains, powersets, story arcs, world, style... It's got everything else right. I'd totally go fanboy for a CoH2 made with better gameplay.

[malonkey1]

Well, you can go to video options and turn down the max particle count...that should help some with the blinding ball of VFX. It's also much less pronounced out inthe open, as opposed to in small, enclosed spaces.