Category: City of Heroes/Villains

[City of Heroes] Cryptic has announced an interesting change to City of Heroes enhancements. After the second, each enhancement of the same type will give less bonus.

Some brief background for those who have not played: each power in City of Heroes gets enhancement slots. You can fill these to improve various aspects of a power, such as its accuracy, damage, endurance cost, range, etc. Damage is king, so most damage powers get fully slotted with damage, or else one accuracy and the rest in damage. If you are a defensive class, you throw most of your slots into damage resistance or defense.

The obvious effect is to reduce damage, damage resistance, and defense. It will also reduce the top speed of all travel powers, eliminate perma-Hasten (all your powers come back faster), and reduce the endurance recovery of most heroes (6-slotted Stamina is pretty standard). Oh and heals, those will be weaker, too.

Continue reading What Happens If You Nerf Everything?

[City of Heroes] You’ve probably heard by now, since word gits ‘roun’ this har intar-net pretty durned fast, but the same monthly fee will let you play City of Heroes and City of Villains. If you have bought both boxes, $15/month pays for both. You get 12 characters per server instead of 8, to be shared between heroes and villains. It’s a new game – it’s a big expansing pack! It’s a floor wax – it’s a dessert topping!

So if you were thinking of trying COH again, when the new game comes out, your free month will cover both games. Remember, you want to upgrade your existing NCSoft account, not start a new one.

: Zubon

[City of Heroes] I found an email from Cryptic/NCSoft in my spam folder. I wonder how it got there. Anyway, this weekend is free for past CoH customers.

Just log into the game between 2pm (CDT) on Thursday, September 1st and 11:59pm (CDT) on Tuesday, September 6th and you will find your account reactivated FREE of charge!* Your hero characters will be waiting just as you left them the last time you played, ready to lead the charge against evil.

But hurry…this offer is only valid for a limited time, and once 11:59pm (CDT) hits Tuesday night, September 6th, your account will again be deactivated unless you choose to resubscribe.

I’ll spend a little time playing there, no problem.

– Ethic

[City of Heroes] If ringthree gets to do it, I get to. :p Rather than posting everything, you can go check it out here. CoH has the nice aspect of including a comment on why things are getting love or nerfs.

I already told you the new and exciting things earlier: new zone, new powers, new events, some retrofitting. Also some very nice quality of life improvements, such as making the Shadow Shard and Rikti Crash Site more viable. Blasters seem to have gotten most of the love, with a higher damage cap, more hit points, damage increases as they take damage, and another Ancillary Power Pool. Scrappers got more damage.

And of course…the nerfs. I mentioned last month that the Hami-O thing was not much of a nerf. This is a nerf. Defenses and AE damage have taken a hit across the board. Maybe the magnitude is small, I don’t know yet. In order to give Controllers a more balanced experience across levels, they gain some damage capacity, lose a large amount of AE control, and got a large pet nerf; Dark Miasma Defenders were caught in the wake of this, losing some control. AE attacks now hit a limited number of targets. There are two screens full of defensive powers taking a hit. I suppose they could have just said, “All except X,” but I’m not sure what is in X yet. I don’t see Eclipse on the list, or Fire Tankers. Some classes of enemies’ accuracy was also reduced, so that might offset it.

The funny thing is, I feel somewhat struck by the defense nerf even though I play mostly squishies. Very few of my characters would see any penalty from the round of nerfs, except for the squishiness of teammates. Except for playing a */Devices Blaster, most of the nerfs in the game have missed me. Maybe it is just that the list of defense nerfs is two pages long and includes some characters I was thinking of playing.

Fire Tankers’ defenses aren’t on the list. That’s kind of funny. Because, hey, there aren’t enough of them yet. I wonder if Burn is affected by the AE damage nerf.

More as the patch develops. Or, actually, probably not much, since I avoid exploding with every change. Tip to Cryptic: make the ‘love’ section of the patch look longer than the ‘nerf’ section. For example, don’t sum up a new zone and five new power pools in half a screen at the beginning, then go on to have a few screens worth of nerfs. List out those power pools, for example. On another note, front-loading all the nerfs then scaling them back and/or adding love over time helps calm complaints, but it does train players to complain about any change with the expectation that nerfs will be scaled back based on the volume of complaints.

: Zubon

[City of Heroes] Cryptic has announced the next update to City of Heroes, Forest of Dread (in August). This brings us a new zone with four new villain groups, in which Statesman gets to show off his degrees in mythology and whatnot by showing us around the British Isles. New power sets and some other excitement I will not copy over. You can read. There seems to be interesting info about Issue 5 content gathered over here, including the now-defunct skill system. Aren’t Croatoa and Salamanca both American Indian tribe names? The latter mostly brings to mind a good book by Sharon Creech. We shall see how the background story for the zone goes.

I wonder how many people hold on because of the promise of new and shiny things to come. Most games release with something less than full content; City of Heroes’ major contribution to this trend was adding levels 41-50 in the first patch, which is probably a lesser sin than many games. Some games have gone more than a year without implementing everything listed on the box, even by generous interpretations.

I know that I will be around City of Heroes to see Issue 5 because I am on the three-month subscription plan. Were it not for that, I wonder if I would stay until August. For me, there is a six-month gap with no significant content additions. I am not really interested in PvP, so Issue 4 was mostly wasted on me. It brought new story arcs for Kheldians, and those have been good story arcs as far as I have seen, but that’s it besides Defender love and Scrapper nerfs. I took a few months off the game early on, since I had lost interest in the low 30s, but I have taken three characters to 50 since then. There is not much more content for me to see, and it is only so interesting seeing it from a different angle. I must make sure to have a level 25 character or two when the time comes.

: Zubon

[City of Heroes] Remind me, do players complain at great length about every nerf?

City of Heroes has almost no end-game content. You can go through the late-40s content, especially the harder stuff now that experience debt does not matter, but the only Big Thing at the end is the Hamidon. The Hamidon is City of Heroes’ one and only raid encounter, and by now players have it figured out (even after a few changes to it). The zone only instances if there are 200 people in it, so anyone level 45+ with a decent computer can go. When Hamidon drops, everyone involved gets rewarded. The reward is a Hami-O.

For those not part of City of Heroes, you do not get equipment as such. Instead, you get slots in your powers into which you can put enhancements, and each enhancement increases it along some axis (damage, range, accuracy, endurance cost, etc.). Aside from Hami-Os and trial rewards, the best of these are single-origin enhancement (SOs), which boost a power by 33% or 20% in one way. Hami-Os instead boost two or three parts by 50% or 30%. Effectively, this lets you eighteen-slot a power, when the limit is six enhancement slots. Characters with many Hami-Os are rather effective. For example, my Blaster’s Trip Mine has six Damage/Accuracy Hami-Os, and it one-shots groups of level+2 minions.

Since there is no other end-game content, people have been raiding Hamidon more or less constantly. Some characters have a Hami-O in every power that can use one. This makes the design of new end-game content difficult: how do you make an encounter good for a new level 50 that is not trivial for someone with 30 Hami-Os? You do not want to make Hamidon raids a required ‘entry fee’ for the rest of the end-game. Also, it has interesting effects on PvP when one character is that much more effective.

The current solution on the test server: a Hami-O will be worth two SOs, instead of 2*1.5. It will boost two aspects by 33% or 20%. Thus, you can still 12-slot a power, but there is no way to cap damage purely off enhancements. If you were using a Hami-O for just one aspect (say, 50% end reduction in Phase Shift), it is no longer useful for that purpose (and an SO will be more effective in that slot, since you can push a SO to level+3, which the CoH players understand and I will not bother to explain for the rest). Free respecs will be given.

To me, this is a sane and mild nerf. Yes, it sucks 1/3 of the effectiveness of something away, which is a large change, put they are still about twice as good as anything out there. I will miss having damage-capped powers, especially since I have several that cannot be buffed by anything other than enhancements, but I will adapt more-or-less instantly. Respec, pull out the ones that are no longer really useful, trade them off to alts who can use them, and we win. I will have some spares kicking around that are completely useless to me, but maybe a future character will need debuffs or maybe I can trade them.

Wow, that is a lot of context for a small observation. As I write this, the official message board thread on the topic has 2,109 replies. We have the usual shouts of doom, whining, whining about whining, mocking of complaints, threats to cancel, etc. Randomly jumping to page 83 of the thread, I see lots of comments about PvP, a parody song, some off-topic banter amongst regulars, some discussion of how this makes characters/the game ‘unplayable,’ and arguments about whether the devs are really great or really suck. The “I’m quitting!” post on that page is not as amusing as some, but it is the first post from someone who registered two days before. We also have two posts on different, milder ways to nerf the powers.

First, as the post title implies, I do not consider it that significant. My level-capped characters have a limit on how obscenely powerful they can be. Wah. It would be nice if this was accompanied by letting us pick which two SOs each Hami-O was equivalent to, instead of random from a specific subset, but I will deal. Actually, for most of my purposes, one nerfed but custom-made Hami-O would be at least as useful as a pre-nerf Hami-O, especially since I have a character who has virtually no use for them.

Second, is it always this bad? I have avoided threads about the latest nerf, but (checking again) 2,115 posts on the thread, and that’s just the official forums. Is there anything new to add to the discussion? Is this just because it is the only change in the pipeline, so the only nerf up for discussion? When the round of Scrapper nerfs went through, there was a lot of discussion, but some of it was actually productive. It involved testing and comparisons and finding what was wrong with the testing environment. There is not so much to discuss here: one category of enhancement is losing some strength. Fin.

Also, anyone care to count whether we have more complaints or mockery of complaints out there? I think complaints used to win, but we get to the point where people complain about people complaining about people mocking those who complain… Wait, no, we passed that point a while back, so now we complain about whining about…

: Zubon

[City of Heroes] To my mind, the reason to play City of Heroes right now is to play through the 20s. Issue 3 brought some of the best content in the game, and you should go play it right now. Not everyone likes it, but Striga Isle has higher design standards then pretty much any zone in the game. Statesman, our fearless leader in CoH, has said that Striga is the design standard for other zones. This makes me hopeful for a new place expected in Issue 5, as well as potential retrofitting of zones to be more user-friendly. Care for a brief guided tour?

Your first contact in the 20s will send you to Striga to meet the first contact there. You can ignore her, or you can follow the line of four contacts in Striga. These combine to 25-or-so missions of various types. You have the standard “Arrest all villains in base,” “Defeat 15 Council in The Bog,” “Defeat base commander and his men”; the most innovative involves attacking a Council vampyre creation plant, in which you must fight vampyres as they come out of the transformation capsules. Striga introduces a new tile set, the boat, and has a few vertical shafts in missions (think Castlevania, the original, when you drop down that long shaft into the underworld). One mission uses two different tile sets, which I have not seen anywhere else.

There are four different temporary powers, all useful. One gives resistance to all (including psionic, and it is a toggle), another lets you summon a Council War Wolf boss as a pet (5 charges, they do *nice* damage to Archvillains). You also get your zombie-hunting shotgun, so you can pretend to be Ash. “Defender with boomstick? Check.”

Striga includes two task forces. One gets you most of the way through your Silver Bullet and Slayer badges, so you can get the Atlas Medallion accolade (passive +5 endurance). The other is the best task force in the game, and you need to go do it right now. The 26-30 TF has several unique maps, including the spectacular last mission. You get previews of this last one in the missions leading up to it, which have windows facing into the last chamber. Yeah, you see that thing? That’s the final showdown. :)

All that, three exploration badges and one history, plus a trainer in-zone. So what about the zone itself? Striga is designed rather nicely, with a main island and several smaller ones around it. The contacts lead you logically from the docks, through the defenses and the monster-infested jungle, and into the Council’s secret volcano lair. Zombies, werewolves, and vampyres abound in the jungle and graveyard. There are zombies hiding beneath the waters, ready to swarm up around you. There are fights between the various factions who want control of the island. There are dogfights between Sky Raider Sky Skiffs and Council Hoverbots. There are robots on patrol. There is a new enemy group in the form of missile turrets.

I am probably leaving out some things, which is for the best. I have already outlined most of the sights to see, so come see the rest. Stand on top of a volcano that stretches from the ground almost to the flight ceiling. Check out the sprawling Council compound and watch them fight off invaders. Join the attack and protect Paragon City from the Council’s new schemes. Find your favorite little touches in an excellent use of space.

One hint: the road runs straight through, from the entrance to the Council base. If you cannot find the Wolf’s Throat, just follow the road into the tunnel. The tunnel is the Throat.

: Zubon

[City of Heroes] Life must be odd in Paragon City, you know? Superheroes everywhere, and a lot of them are pretty freaky. I mean, to say nothing of the guys walking around on fire or covered in floating skulls, you have half-transparent floating squid creatures that can turn into some tank-like crustacean. Over here, the author wonders, “Just stop and think for a moment about how odd it would be if the world’s most powerful superbeing just stopped into a malt shop in full costume to share a milkshake with a girl.”

When you get on the monorail, you need to ask the guy next to you to please stop dripping his alien ichor on your groceries. “Pardon, my wife is expecting, could you not use your cloud of choking nuclear radiation just here?” Oh, and the equivalent of GNC, Image Inc., also has a big display case of firearms and special ammunition to go with your high-fiber cereals.

Despite all of this, after rescuing someone, s/he will frequently tell you, “I’ve never met a hero before!”

Zubon