Category: City of Heroes/Villains

The leader of my first City of Heroes supergroup wanted to try something different, a poor man’s version of what would come to be known as a superteam. “We should all make the same character, with the same look, and they can be like a Borg collective!” Hence the name and the green cyborg look. I was the only person around that night, so we and his wife gave it a shot. Not bad, not great at low levels. Then he swerved to a new theme and quit within a month.

Despite an inauspicious opening, I liked the character. Kinetics is not stellar at the lowest levels, and I forget how I muddled through them, but it soon picks up some rather nice buffs. Once I had Speed Boost, I was off and running. I spent most of the late game with my buddy Tank Unit (also since moved along, to Auto Assault, bless his soul), hitting Fulcrum Shift around his insane masses of Freakshow. Big buffs, big booms.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 3: Assimilation (Kinetics/Psychic Blast Defender)

I’m kind of tired right now, so I will link you to someone else’s City of Villains story. Van Hemlock ran the first villain strike force, and he has a detailed write-up of their villainy in two parts. Check it out. Spoilers abound.

: Zubon

Positron announced that the 42 month Veteran Reward would be Recall Team, the group summon power you get from the Steel Canyon Safeguard/Mayhem Mission. For those not in CoX, this teleports everyone in your group in the zone to your location. Very useful, even 1/30 minutes.

Given my breaks from the game every few months, I will be getting this in … maybe 2009? Crap.

: Zubon

In every game, I have a healer named Zubon. Empathy is the classic healing set in City of Heroes, so Zubon is an empath. I went with electricity because it comes with endurance drain: an enemy who cannot activate his attacks cannot hurt anyone.

The life of a Defender is interesting. As with most healers, everyone wants to have them on the team, but no one wants to be them. As an actual healer, an empath is in great demand amongst people trained on other MMOs. Solo ability is low, but he brings a lot to a team.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 2: Zubon (Empathy/Electricity Blast Defender)

Since we like holiday events, I thought I would mention that City of Heroes/Villains starts its third Halloween event today. In addition to last year‘s features, you can also get temporary powers that make you look like any of 33 enemies (well worn territory in other games, I know). Event info here.

I like that City of Heroes has cumulative holiday events. If you missed last year’s, they recycle that code in addition to adding this year’s. And I stand by last year’s statement that trick-or-treat is the Platonic ideal of the grind. 1/minute: click, monsters appear, crush; repeat, badge.

: Zubon

Tobold has been thinking about how game design affects guild life. Foton already explained this one pretty well with respect to how WoW raiding has killed guilds.

In the Cities, we have supergroups (guilds) with 75 member caps. Do y’all have caps in other games? ATitD required you to pony up more bricks and boards to increase the guild cap, but I cannot recall caps in other games. I cannot imagine that in WoW, with 40-man raids and a 75-man cap. The 75 cap might have related to something at some point. I recall the claim that it was needed for supergroup PvP raid balance, or to prevent massive lag in said raids, but since said raids are two years late with no plans to implement them, it is just annoying to have alt supergroups into which to shuttle characters.

Am I mis-recalling the normal estimate that 1/5 of your subscribers are online during peak hours? That would mean a full CoX supergroup, with no alts, would average 15 members online. This is about two full groups, which is quite enough for a game that only recently added its second raid — there is not much to do with large groups. In our glory days, I recall our Teamspeak setting up rooms because we were running two full groups at once. We never went past that, despite a massive flurry of activity.

This seems like a combination of guild and game design. Your guild caps at 75, so your active guild playerbase caps around two full groups; letting alts in caps you around one full group. Since the full group is the standard unit for task forces and high-end play, that all falls together.

It all falls apart when people leave. You have an alt SG for alts, an elite SG for folks’ level-capped characters (now alts), and the main SG. Conveniently, you can communicate in a coalition channel or a global channel across the lot of them. When people leave, though, you are already that fragmented. You may only have a dozen members in these SGs, so any loses can kill the whole thing. Now the surviving members are spread across three guilds, each of which is a collection of alts and ghosts. I know one SG that made a half-dozen alt SGs for the various hero classes, then ended up with only a few active characters in each after the next wave of MMOs came out. Do you abandon the old base and everything that went into it? There are a lot of orphan supergroups out there, inhabited by long-dormant alts.

: Zubon

The part of Issue 11 that I am most looking forward to is going back to old badge missions and story arcs. Not because I want to re-do content, but because I need not worry about missing content as I level. If I do not need to worry about out-leveling missions I want to run, then I can team with my friends freely and do whatever I feel like that night, without loss. That is remarkably freeing. They just need to expand that to Mayhem and Safeguard missions, and I will be set.

: Zubon

I have announced my annoyance with the Rikti and Issue 10 for bring us more. What is good about having Rikti in the game?

First, they are the backstory. Before we turned to immortal spider-kings, nazis cum other fascists, and interdimensional duplicates, the original interdimensional attackers were the Rikti. The whole story behind the City is that the Rikti attacked. I like getting back to that story.

Second, there are some good Rikti stories. The Dark Watcher story arc (“The Horror of War”) is excellent, one of the best in the game. “Division: Line” and “The Organ Grinders” are fundamental arcs in getting the CoH backstory. Lady Grey’s Task Force does not have a great story, but it has interesting ideas and a great twist at the end.

Third, in terms of gameplay, they bring a lot to the table. There is something there for everyone, which is to say that there is something hard there for everyone. Their drones see through stealth. They have every type of crowd control, which is rough on squishies. They have lots of psychic damage, which is hard on most non-squishies. They have hordes of little monkeys to fight. They summon portals that are worth ridiculous amounts of experience. They have Guardians, who will give you nice buffs if you land a confusion power. The ideal anti-Rikti PC is probably a Spines/Dark Armor Scrapper: status protection, psychic resistance, PBAE damage toggle for the monkeys, and a single-target ranged attack to aggro without disrupting the portal summoning. That could explain part of why it is the flavor of the month.

: Zubon

My first level-capped hero was Frosta. It is the same character I made in beta, when my wife said I should name her after a She-Ra character. (I am far enough away from the namesake to be safe.) After playing a War Mace Tanker for a while, it was nice to have some real damage. At the time, I was in a supergroup with an Earth Controller named Heaven’s Hold, and I usually had someone keeping the enemies pacified. That makes it much easier to freeze the Hellions.

I played carefully to see as much content as possible. Whenever possible, Frosta completed every story arc available. I was quite bitter about the arcs that were bugged, but Issue 11’s Ouroboros will let me get back to them. This meant a fair amount of time soloing, which let me get through all the arcs without out-leveling them running others’ missions in teams. Conveniently, almost everyone from that original supergroup quit a couple of months in, leaving me lots of solo time.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 1: Frosta (Ice Blast/Devices Blaster)