Category: City of Heroes/Villains

I am finally getting around to running the Issue 10 story arcs. I had said before that Issue 10 did not interest me much: not much to do. Having played through everything now, I am willing to say that what is new is not a lot of fun.

Continue reading Issue 10

City of Heroes Issue 11 will include weapon customization. This includes a shovel as a weapon (War Mace, I presume). The two new power sets were mentioned in previous CoX updates. “Ouroboros” will include the long-awaited flashback system with bonus fun like detailed handicapping and difficulty control. Also, new inventions.

Did City of Heroes need “ultra-rare” loot? Were people saying that they were not spending enough time farming the same thing repeatedly? Someone looked at the current rare inventions and thought everyone had too many? Someone looked at the games where you have a 2.5% chance of getting a purple of one mob that spawns every three days and said, “Yes, that is what our players want!”?

He shovels well.

: Zubon

As a hero, you will change the world. Unfortunately, the world has been changed on you.

• Outbreak Plague Rampant for Four Years
• President Marchand Celebrates 70th Year in Office!

Welcome to a City of Heroes where no hero or villain has ever beaten the tutorial, where the villains never seized power, and where the 5th Column need not return because it never left.

Welcome to Issue 11. Coming sometime in a few months, to a server near you.

: Zubon

Update: there is an ouroboros wallpaper for it. Not terribly exciting, perhaps.

Congratulations to The Defuser, a City of Heroes player on Champion, for winning Who Wants to Be a Superhero? I will confess to never having seen the show, but hey, CoH pride. You can see the CoH boards chatter here, and probably a few more by now.

: Zubon

What is with having the Clockwork King in a level 50 task force? The Clockwork go away at level 20, when you defeat the Clockwork King at the end of Synapse’s task force. It makes perfect sense for him to come for Penny, but not as a level 50.

The Psychic Clockwork King everyone knows and loves is from another dimension where he realized his full potential. That is not our Clockwork King; he lost. I think someone missed that when writing the task force. Also, if he achieves his full potential, he conquers the world and wipes out the human race. I guess we can look forward to that.

They play with portals a lot in the task force, but that explanation does not work because this is not a trans-dimensional Clockwork King entering via portal. This is our Clockwork King, and he kicks in the door. After having leveled 30 times while no one was looking.

Maybe he paid for powerleveling.

: Zubon

My City of Heroes account expired last week. I have not renewed it yet. I seem to enjoy continuous rock ’em sock ’em action for about ten weeks before needing a break. Alas, more unsubscribed time will lie between me and my decorative pet. This, along with my badge-whoring, is why I have half as many level-capped characters as my guildmates.

Issue 10 failed to bring much new in terms of gameplay. New story arcs are interesting, but they do not play differently from the old ones. The parts that are new are annoying: more enemies with crowd control, rescue hostage pets who attack at random for little damage. The task force has some interesting new thoughts, namely mini-Hami and the Four Horsemen (new in terms of gameplay; every game has some kind of Four Horsemen). Most of the new content can be consumed quickly: do a lap of the revamped zone (where safe), check out the new art, see the new archvillains.

New things yet to do: fight the Vanguard; finish the Vanguard story arcs (or read the mission text somewhere); play more hero-villain cooperative teams; 2 badges for doing that raid 25 times.

I am rediscovering how little fun the Rikti are to fight. I mostly play squishy characters, and the Rikti have plenty of crowd control, particularly the revamped Rikti Magi. Their drones counter stealth, and they have enough psychic and toxic damage to annoy tanks. I was excited to see the game getting back to the original story, but the main benefit of fighting them is that Communications Officers summon Portals for big experience.

: Zubon

I participated in the Brutal Speed kickoff this weekend. The idea is to make one of a small set of characters that will all work well together, so that team-formation is as easy as “3-5 from pool A, 3-5 from pool B, go.” Pool A is Brutes with area effect damage. Pool B is Corruptors with Kinetics.

It works very nicely, and I took a new character to level 18. People who spent more time playing probably hit 30; I saw 28s as I logged off Sunday. We are expecting some to hit the level cap in about two weeks of hardcore play. This is just normal play, not getting powerleveled by your friends or twinking with outside resources.

One detail is that everyone must take Assault and Tactics, two buff auras from the Leadership pool. Assault increases damage, stacking to +97.5% in the standard team of five Brutes and three Corruptors. Tactics is a to-hit buff, stacking to +65% out of the box and +101.3% once fully slotted. Everyone will do double damage and never miss.

And sweet mother of pearl, it is all starting to come together. As we hit 20, the Corruptors all get Speed Boost, so everyone will be able to attack constantly with no worries about endurance. Because every team will have multiple Speed Boosters, people can skip the Fitness pool and instead take three powers that add More Smash. This could be fun.

: Zubon

City of Heroes/Villains is having a reactivation weekend, so you can come back and visit if you are interested in seeing the new stuff. Now seems like a good time to pause and reflect on Issue 9 and 10. Issue 9, “Breakthrough,” introduced inventions, the auction house, and some new end-game content. Issue 10, “Invasion,” gave us the Rikti War Zone, late- and end-game content.

This is going to be fairly long, so I am just going to insert the break now.

Continue reading Recent Issues

A Random Battle from last week fought over why MMOs use servers to keep you from playing with your friends. I have had a couple dozen friends play City of Heroes over time, but being spread across servers was always an issue that kept us from meeting up, joining together, and keeping them from quitting. There have been previous notes that chat and auction houses go across servers in City of Heroes.

When testing server transfers, Cryptic mentioned that they are looking at a potentially server-less game, in which you can team with anyone regardless of server. I imagine this could be done either as putting everyone on one big server or allowing teams to enter instanced missions from the doors on their respective servers. The follow-up clarified that this is a “maybe, someday” idea, not a “next issue, we promise!” idea. If they do it, not in 2007.

That would be really cool. It feels a little like slipping toward Guild Wars or Diablo as a model (big joint chat room leads to instances), but if you can never have an impact on the game world anyway, why not share that game world instead of making little copies of it? Of course, if you all shared one world, you could let players influence it without worrying about maintaining story and development across divergent shards…

: Zubon