Mr_Slovakia

I dusted this off over the last week (played it for one whole night when it launched). General thoughts:

1. It's not CoH. That doesn't make it unbearable. Given the choice I'd play CoH, but come December 1 that's probably not going to be possible, so I'm trying to judge this one on its own merits rather than comparing it to CoH. It can't live up to that just because we all have too much history invested.

2. Graphics are an eyesore on the defaults, but the two biggest things that can help are turning off the godawful outlining (which improves performance to boot), and spending time with the sliders in the character creator. Shorten up those Gumby arms, shrink the basketball head and the pie plate hands. Lengthening the legs a tick also gets closer to the CoH proportions we're used to. Remember to check out the face sliders and squint the eyes unless you're an anime fan.

3. Once you get used to the graphics, the fact that it's five years newer than the original CoH zones becomes apparent. The city architecture for instance - it FEELS like a city, or at least a comic book version of one. It feels much closer to Nova Praetoria than Steel Canyon.

4. The tutorial is longer than the "new" CoH one but there's a lot of the same feel - that you're being led around by the nose. Once you clear that and train up it's starting to feel more like the sandbox we're used to, though there does seem to be a shortage of contacts compared to the KR-Steel-Sky range. Again, a Praetoria feel.

5. The character creator is a bit counter-intuitive but there's some good stuff there. For some reason they retain the ancient CoH model (when did it go away - issue 3 maybe?) of having to scroll through an ENTIRE list with a mouse instead of giving us clickable arrows. And if you choose something, it resets to the top of the list which is annoying if you're fiddling around. The free to play costumes are a bit limited on the armors and wacky stuff, but there's a good selection if you're into spandex and capes. And considering where we're coming from...

6. The big one: The free to play archetypes are really, REALLY limited. If you want to play a scrapper you'd better like swords, for instance. The freeform ATs, and most of the flavor on the basic ones, are all behind the paywall.

Like I said, if City stays, I'm staying here. But at least at the low levels, it's not bad. A few of us tried running the first post-tutorial missions as a team the other night. It went surprisingly well in the sense that it passes the test of being decent interactive social media; giving your fingers and eyes something to do while you're chatting with friends. And personally I've always been more into the social aspects of gaming than min-maxing anyway. I'm not saying it's great. But I'm hoping it will be "good enough."

I worked a Dark/Dark to 50, back in the I2-I3 days when they were damned rare - rare here defined as "almost nobody knows what this toon does" vs. the current "almost nobody plays this set." Particularly when coupled with Dark secondary, I find Dark a wonderful grab bag of debuff, great heal, great rez that doubles as an AOE disorient, and some good crowd control thrown into the mix. I thought of it as the CoH equivalent of a multi-class AD&D character - capable of virtually anything, master of very little. But on a team, that lends a lot of flexibility to deal with virtually any situation. (And there are worse pets than ol' Fluffy, silly though he may be.) Dark/Dark was the first (and to date only) combo for which I rolled a second toon, just because the first was so much fun getting to 50.

Stormies are a mixed bag. Our SG still tends to herd, and an unskilled Stormie can lead to much screaming and/or hilarity. Played well it brings a lot of control and damage mitigation. Played badly - and this seems to be most of the time, as it's a hard set to master that requires team cooperation - it can be a knockback-happy nightmare. I have teamed with MA scrappers with Dragon's Tail slotted for knockback; I have teamed with Energy blasters that Nova at the start of a fight, bring every mob down to 2 pixels of health, and stand back to watch the rest of the team clean up the mess. A Stormie who isn't on the ball can be worse than either.

Problem was there this morning; logged back in this afternoon, and netgraph is green. Let's see if it lasts...

Server - Triumph
Provider - Comcast
Location - Nashville, TN

Server - Triumph
Provider - Comcast
Location - Nashville, TN

This has been extremely annoying for the last several weeks, but peaked this evening. Several of us went past lag, rubber-banding, delayed power activation and inaccurate states on power icons, and entered the new and exciting territory of "City of Heroes has encountered a problem and has to close." Started with a team of 8 on an IE mission; after four separate dumps by the majority of the team most of us called it a night. I have been paying for this game every month for five years and have just about had it over this issue.

With several people in the SG having characters in the mid-20s, we've been tending to run some bigger teams. Meaning, bigger groups of mobs. Meaning, very very big Fury bars.

My brute (DM/Fire) and a pal's (EM/Dark) generally stand back-to-back, beating the snot out of our respective sides of the pile, with the dual damage auras broiling anything in range. Our regular Corruptor teammate swears a lot on Ventrilo - he feels like a Kinetics-bot because the mobs go down so fast he has problems targeting them for blasts. Between the flying fists, ragdoll physics and swarm of damage numbers, I feel like I'm standing in a lawnmower.

Good times.

SMASH!