I'm also an ex-WoW player, and have been playing CoV (no Heroes for me thanks) for a couple of months now. My highest character is a level 30 Mastermind, with a handful of other chars in the teens.
I'm really torn about this game. First, the bad...
The lack of polish in almost every regard compared to WoW is surprising considering the age of CoX. Quests send you all over the place - you spend a lot of time traveling in this game, as opposed to WoW's "quest hubs". The quests themselves are fairly light in story line and involve plowing through randomly generated mazes (while neat in theory, they end up being simple and dull) and defeating some slightly tougher mob or clicking a glowing crate. I have done about 3 questlines ("arcs") that've had any good story at all, the rest have either been randomly generated or were just blah. Maybe I missed some good ones so far, but then again I often find myself with nothing to do a lot. Perhaps I am spoiled by WoW, which shovels quests and achievements at you. And certainly WoW has it's share of clunker quests but the story lines are far superior.
I find soloing is tedious - either the mobs are too easy, or if you choose to up the difficulty, you'll be making a lot of trips to the hospital. I haven't found a middle ground there.
The impressive gameworld is 99% irrelevant as soon as you can fly (level 14), as missions put a destination marker on your map to travel to - just ignore everything and fly straight there. Hop into the bland, randomly-generated maze portal and wack the bad guy. Done. Fly back to your contact and do it again. Move on to next zone...
The recently added the Mission Architect is a potentially revolutionary development, letting players generate their own content in a MMO. Unfortunately so far it's mostly used to build "farm" missions, packed with high-level mobs to kill en masse. It does level you fast; I've joined a few times just to get over some leveling humps. But if the game were better laid out I wouldn't need to do that - I should be able to find enough to do at lower levels to not need to farm my way up.
So why play CoX at all? Well for all the irritations the game just has *something*. As little content as there is (I don't consider randomly-generated whack-a-mole missions content, sorry), it prompts you to use your imagination. Of course the superhero theme helps with this. From the creation of your character to what you do out in the world, it really is up to you. The classes are nicely done (villains at least, heroes look dull), and the wide variety of power choices let you choose a style or role you want to play. Of course you can min/max things if you want to but CoX doesn't seem to punish you too much if you don't (nor reward you too much if you do). Anything's viable. And after the almost compulsive min/max world of WoW, that's a relief.
Arguably the best thing about CoX is the players themselves. One caveat - come to the Virtue server. I have found the players plentiful (pretty easy to get a team) and very friendly. Seriously I have not met a single @$$hat there yet. I'm usually the n00b in any group I'm in, but people are (generally
) forgiving and helpful. And as dull as soloing is to me, groups are a blast. You'll level faster too. And then if you want to, role-playing has a much stronger basis in CoX. Even if you're a n00b at it like me, it can make things *much* more entertaining.
CoX is extremely supportive of playing with friends via the Exemplar/Lackey system, which as far as I know is unique in MMOs. You're not punished for having a level difference in your group - it actually makes playing with friends regardless of level more attractive.
You'll make up your own mind, of course, but as long as you're having fun play on!
