New player, overwhelmed by character creation!

Hey everyone. I'm new to the game and so far I'm enjoying it. However, I'm little overwhelmed and underwhelmed with the game's powers.

I'm overwhelmed by how many types of powers there are. There are ten classes, and then each class has like 16 primary and secondary powers. It's staggering.

I decided to try a few different characters out, but this is where I'm underwhelmed - for the first three or four hours of gameplay, I only have maybe three powers to play with alongside 'brawl'. It feels kind of sparse. A lot of my time is spent waiting for my powers to recharge. It also means I can't really get a quick feel for a power set without spending more time than I'm comfortable with.

It feels like there's too many power sets, which makes it hard to test them all, and powers are unlocked too slowly, which makes it even harder to test them.

Welcome to CoX!!!

It can be overwhelming at first with all the powers and such, I think in my first week I made about 6 characters but wound up sticking with just 2 because running the same starting missions over and over got boring.

As far as the limited amount of moves goes, best advice I can give you is to team as much as possible. You'll have more time to recharge when your team is taking the target's attention away from you, and you'll fly up in levels easily. Bigger teams get an XP bonus, food for thought anyway.

Also, if you don't like waiting for your own moves to recharge, you could always use a mastermind, they summon things that do the moves for them.

Oi, tell me about it... been here for 75-ish months, and I haven't tried them all. As for powers unlocking - after you get some experience under your belt and have a better idea of what you're doing, the first 15-20 levels wiz by on further new characters.

Welcome to the City!

Just like everyone else said the choices can be a bit heavy but that also part of the fun. Each Type and each Powerset has a different feel. (Not much but it is there)

So playing over and over creating new characters is half the fun. I been playing 4 years now and still haven't done EVERY mission.

If you find that you need help in the game or have questions, then visit the Mentor Project.

Let me echo the welcome to the game; I think you'll enjoy yourself here. Many of us have been playing for 5 or more years already so the game must have something going for it to keep us here. There's not a few players who are still here from the launch

If you're getting bored with waiting for attacks to recharge might I suggest rolling a Scrapper? Something like a Claws/Regen will have a full attack chain pretty early and the Regen set is clicky with it's heal (Reconstruction) and Dull Pain (Heal & HP boost). As you get up a bit in levels, by level 12 anyway, you should have only minimal waiting for attacks to charge, and with Regen having Quick Recovery available at level 4 endurance shouldn't be a problem for you.

A Blaster can also be very busy with attacks but they don't have the survivability that a Scrapper does so they're less forgiving of beginner mistakes. Once you get your feet wet and learn the basic mechanics you'll find that level 1-10 only takes you 2-3 hours or so, and 1-20 goes by in just a couple of nights.

Hey there! Welcome!

Okay, as you've noticed, there's not a humongous difference in the classes at extremely low levels.

The low levels are basically to get you used to playing in your AT and learning basic tactics and skills for overcoming obstacles in the game.

Once you hit your teens, your powers will mature a bit. You'll have more slots to play with and can start diversifying your abilities a bit. Just before you hit your teens, you graduate from Training Origin enhancements to Dual Origin enhancements (1 DO grants the same boost as 2 TOs).

Once into the 20's, your core powers (and some important ancillary powers) start to arrive. Early on, you also gain access to Single Origin Enhancers (1 SO = 2 TOs) and your performance really starts to take off.

Up into your 30's you secondary powers start filling in the gaps and you begin playing a lot more like you should for the rest of the game. Slots become quite plentiful and you've got the ability to start slotting higher level IOs that, even with the multi-aspect versions, provide greater return than just single aspect Single Origin enhancers.

Once into your 40's, you start rounding out your powers and filling in little gaps here and there. Early on you gain access to your Patron Pool/Epic Pool and you get to play around with some powers that are normally outside the purview of your traditional AT roles or are extremely useful additives to it.

Just be patient. Take your time. And DON'T rush yourself to 50. You'll thank yourself later, and be a much better player because of it.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

You might want to take the power pool power super speed Hasten.

Hasten speeds up the recharge time for your powers. Also look for Recharge enhancements. This would speed up the wait time to use powers. Note would also speed up how fast you run out of endurance!

Someday I'll put together the Big List Of Cheap Shots available in the game.

For now, I'll restrict myself to figure 1: The Bat.

Basically this is a temporary power, an invention, and an extra attack.

Extra attack: Self-explanatory. You pull out a baseball bat and whack people in the torso with it.

Temporary power, pretty self explanatory, you use it 30 times and then it's gone. Hopefully by that point you either have more attacks or don't mind making another one.

Invention is the complicated part. To make an invention, you need a recipe, some salvage, enough money, and a crafting table. The first three come from Wentworth's.

MONEY: Embarassingly easy to get, especially in quantities under 100,000 inf. That's a rounding error to a lot of people. Look for level 50 recipes with a lot for sale and zero bids. Put in bids for 100 or 500, whatever you can afford. Buy some of those, run to a regular store, sell them for 5000 or 10000 each. This is stupid and tedious but you will get your money NOW. Do this until you have, like, 50 thousand inf. Which is more than you need for this purpose but may come in handy later in life.

RECIPE: Back to Wentworth's, look for recipes, then Other, then all the way down to temporary recipes, then click on St. Louis Slammer. You will, confusingly, see three seemingly identical recipes on the right hand side. If you hover over them, you'll see that they have different salvage requirements. The bottom one should list "Fortune" and "Kinetic Weapon". Put in a bid- should be available for less than 500 inf, but I wouldn't worry about paying as much as 5000 for it. You should have plenty of money and you can make more surprisingly fast.

SALVAGE: You can type in "Fortune" and "Kinetic Weapon" at the top and see them. Right now they're selling for under 100 each, but I would have no problem going up to a couple thousand for each. Like I said, money's ridiculously easy to get. Buy one of each. You should now have in your inventory a recipe and two pieces of salvage.

CRAFTING: This is the hard part. You have to go to Steel Canyon for this. Either you can run, nimbly avoiding the guys 10 levels above you, or you can pay a lot of money to cheat. They have things which say "Fixed price" and one is a Wentworth's Teleporter. It costs 10,000 inf [you did get the 50K I asked, right?] and it is one-shot. It will take you to any Wentworth's. There happens to be one in Steel CAnyon right where you need to go.

Buy it, put it in your task bar [click on "Powers" and you should see it], use it, buy another one immediately so you can get back to safety. There's a half hour cooldown so you can't go back immediately. So it goes.

Then, when you're in Steel, look on the map and to your East you should see a university.

In this university, to either side of the staircase, you'll see desks with glowing blue things on them. These are crafting tables. Click on one and it will list a lot of things. Scroll down to "invention" and open it up. Your St. Louis Slammer should be in there, lit up, with a "Create" button in the lower left corner. If you hit "Create" it will charge you 500 inf and give you a new temp power, just like the Consignment House transporter. You can put that in your tray, and voila! a new way to run around and hit people!

>>Powers not recharging fast enough

1. Claws
2. Archery
3. Dual Blades
4. Recharge Enhancers.
5. Level 6. Hasten.

Seriously, when I first started some time back, it seemed like nothing recharged quickly enough... but at the time I was thinking the game played like one of the slower MMOs and that you had to rest after every encounter. It was the Rest power I was waiting for to recharge.

Get four attacks or so of all but the absolute SLOWEST powersets under your belt and get a few enhancers in 'em and your only downtime will be looking for groups.

Once you get over twenty or so, you'll start wanting to prioritize your powers. You simply won't be able to use them all rapidly enough on every encounter.

Along the way, you'll seriously want to consider playing with the difficulty options to give you more enemies per encounter.

I'll echo the teaming suggestion, but not so much because it gets you leveling faster, but instead so you can see a lot of other sets quickly as your teammates use their powers. If you see something you like, ask them about it. You might decide their AT and power sets are more to your taste.

Welcome to the club.

Paragon Wiki is your friend.

You level fairly quickly at low level with a new power selection every even level, two enhancement slots every odd. Find a trainer to level up to pick additional powers and assign enhancement slots.

You can always tweak your costume later at a tailor and later on you can get additional costume slots.

Certain archetypes (classes in other games) lend more to preferred play styles. Scrappers, Tankers and Brutes are the melee classes, Blasters and Corruptors are more range/AoE. Stalkers are melee-ish, more hit fast, run away until hidden again. Masterminds send in their lackeys to dole out and take punishment while supporting them from the rear. Dominators, Defenders and Controllers tend to be more team support.

However, and I need to make these points, all of them are soloable and none are required for a team. It's just that some can mow down critters faster than others (thus leveling quicker) or require you to control them more than mashing the various attack powers.

Also the goal isn't getting to the level cap quickly. There really isn't anything special content at 50 waiting for you, yet, and plenty of content at all levels.

As for the powers they will come with time, it is how they keep you hooked to the game, I have been playing for a long while now, about 6 months after the game came out, I still haven't experienced everything.

A great way to see powers without actually having them is by teaming, when you team with other people you get to see a plethora of powers and their uses, and it will kinda give you an idea of what your next creation will want to be.

Other than that, just have fun and enjoy the game, welcome to the City

Thank you all for your advice! I'm playing a Mastermind and the first few levels were really boring, but now that I have three assault rifle attacks and two henchmen, things are picking up.

I was wondering if any of you wanted to refer-a-friend me? I'm planning on playing on Virtue, but I don't personally know anyone who plays CoH, so I figured maybe someone who helped me in this thread wanted a free month? :]

I don't know if it's prudent to post my email here in this thread but if you want to refer me, throw me a PM!

You're running red-side right now (City of Villains), but if you switch over to blue-side (City of Heroes) at some point, you'll be able to start new characters with a "Sewer Team" or Sewer Run starting in Atlas Park.

This is what many Vet players do to avoid the tedium of the low-level arcs (by tedium I'm mostly referring to the slow, pre-Travel Power travel between contacts & missions) and power their heroes quickly through the lower levels.

It's not unusual to go from level 2 to level 7, 8, 9 or even 10 in maybe 30-45 minutes, while tearing through the Sewers on a rockin' fun team (most Sewer teams have a carefree, happy-go-lucky feel, because there's no debt at that level, so nothing to lose).

When you decide you've had enough, you suicide in a mob, hit Hospital for the express train back to the surface, and Sprint to Ms. Liberty to grab 3 or 4 new powers and a handful of Enhancement slots.

One could theoretically level 3 or 4 heroes to level 10 in one evening's play (without "power leveling").

So if you're all about "trying out" all the ATs and powersets, I suggest flipping to blue-side for a while, get what you need in terms of info and experience, then go back to red-side when you've settled on a favorite AT or power set.

Of course - all this becomes moot now that GoRo is here - I *suppose* Vills can now start out with a Sewer run as well...

Welcome to the best game AND best forum around. Can't add much to what everyone else has said other than to stress that with experience will come better strategies for leveling faster and utilizing your powers more efficiently.

Also, use the paragonwiki site and do not be afraid to ask questions. I have yet to get a rude response to a sincere question concerning gameplay. Normally folks will fall all overthemselves to help you out. Certainly there are jerks in the pile (human nature being what it is) but the ratio to helpful friendly folks is exceedingly small.

Lastly, remember that you are playing a game and you are only here for fun. If you feel like a certain archtype or powerset just isn't working, junk it! There's lots to choose from; I haven't come close to building 'em all or even trying 'em. Later on you'll probably dust off that brute or controller or whatev and find that you've learned enough to make em fun to play.

Except warshades. They're just terrible.


Have fun and welcome again!

Depending on the character, you might do almost as well soloing as on a sewer team. Running to the mission? Someone offending your personal space? Whack 'em! Running back from mission? See a good target? Whack 'em!