How long does it take YOU to get to 50?

I have never understood the urge to rush to the point at which there is no longer any advancement to be done

granted, we're at a point now where hitting 50 is no longer the end of the character, but still...why get to fifty fast?

Refuge E (MA/SR Scrapper)
1 level of farming at the very end
Fall 2005 - Fall 2007
382 hours

Arctic Team Joe (Ice/Traps Corruptor)
No farming, but on an All-Traps Super Team
Feb. 2008 - April 2008
132 hours

Inciner-ific (WP/Fire Tanker)
all solo in Hazard maps
Nov. 2007 - 2009 (?)
244 hours

Tiffani St. Onge (Earth/Storm Controller)
mainly teams
Fall 2006 - Summer 2009
169 hours

Bwana Devil (Bane)
no farms
Spring 2008 - Summer 2010
129 hours

Around.... six months. Then again, I run in neutral about 95% of the time.

An open letter to NCsoft

oh, my first non-melee fifty hit a week or two ago

I have about 13 50.s so will not name them all but on average pre patrol xp took about 360 hours of game play,no farming but a lot of teaming.Ater patrol xp came in average about 260 hours,this is about 50/50 teaming and solo.

If I really get hooked on one of my characters so that I'm motivated and playing regularly, and team invites are forthcoming, I might get to 50 in a couple of months. If I don't get so absolutely hooked, it may take MUCH longer or it might not happen at all.

First 50 took somewhere in the region of 400 hours of play, I think. Currently I'm dinging 50 usually after 90-120 hours of play, could be faster, but I really can't stand the boredom of farming.

My first character, and first 50, took about 9 months. I spent a lot of time exploring the game and doing things that don't earn XP, but I also did a lot of TFs. A friend did PL me from 32-35, but that was back before XP smoothing, when that range was one of the slowest level ranges.

I have characters roughly the same age (3+ years old now) that have never hit 50. My main and namesake took about 6 months to go to 50 in his original build as a BS/WP scrapper. After shields were released, I rerolled him, and had him 50 in under a month - no PLing involved, but a LOT of TFs run.

Most of my characters take 2-3 months to get to 50 if I get hooked on them. That's really only about half that time on the specific character at most though - I alt a lot.

I did take one character 1-50, solo, in 6 hours during the monkey fiasco in AE. He's deleted now, it was mostly done just to see how bad the bug actually was.

I just like to switch characters and for a long time to me 50 was end-of-character, ergo, to be avoided as long as possible

tactics (pre XP off option) included deliberately dying

in addition, Blood Rose (my oldest character) earned every souvenir available in the original 10-40 and then 40-50 content about one or two years before Ouroboros ever came out...Ouroboros let me do the stuff I had outleveled before it ever came out

IOs gave me another way to advance her after she hit 50...and now so has the incarnate system

My first 50, a claws/regen scrapper. I had been playing for 2 1/2 years before I finally got a 50, but it didn't take me 2 1/2 years to get that claws/regen to 50, but I can't recall exactly how long it took me to get from 1 - 50 on that one.

My next 50, a katana/regen, went much faster.

I've only AE farmed 1 toon to 50 to see how fast I could do it. 10 Hours.

I've used AE farms to finish off a few levels on a few toons, but they were ones just sitting around at 44-46 and I had no intention of playing them anymore, but didnt want to delete them either. Soooo...50 and then move them

My fastest, with no farming at all, was less than 5 days time. Don't know the actual hours, and I had sleep, alting, RPing, helping others get XP with my 50 in there. That was my Dual Pistol/Mental Blaster. Dual Pistol started when released to the GR Pre-Purchasers, and that hit a few days before a double XP weekened.

My next best was in the 10 day range, and it was my Ill/Rad Troller. Once I hit level 35, it was ITF (with a few other TFs thrown in) almost exclusively. Being /RAD it really wasn't hard to get ITF team invites (ITF was new, and everyone wanted a RAD).

My current project is taking me awhile though. But, then I'm also level pacted with someone who isn't playing theirs (I knew they wouldnt). Penance for that 10 hour 50? Naaa. I just wanted to do it.

It took seven months to get my first character to 50. On my last one I did it in two months of focused play oh and it was solo.

Hooray for the granular mission slider! Plus it was my first Praetorian 50 so I was racing incarnate content at the time, but also purposfully taking him through the story arcs that I wanted to be part of his history on Primal Earth.

He doesn't have a good opinion after that whole Revenant Hero Project thing and Crimson kind of frightens him, but Malta is worse. However the water on Primal Earth doesn't taste funny.

Couldn't really tell you time-wise. But that's because I have a fair amount of alts.

Hours wise, first 50 was around 500 hours, taking about four months (IIRC.) And given this was I3/I4, that was fighting double debt, no reduction, and a nasty 37/38-40 content gap.

These days? 100-150 hours.

See my Guides and Tutorials

First one, around 400 hours over 6 months.

Fastest one 40 hours over a double XP weekend (and this was not PLd, team of 8 of us went 1-50 basically on TFs).

Slowest 5 years, a toon I basically left on a server I started on before I realised my friends played elsewhere, and disliked until it got to level 47, I now enjoy taking it for a spin occasionally.

Average now, maybe 200 hours depending on how much it keeps my attention, I tend to stall in the late 30s.

First 50 was my Mind/energy Dom. She took me about 800 hours.

Most recent was my first viable hero [Archery/cold Blaster], who had been stuck in neutral for a while as I leveled other folks up. Just the other day she hit 50 with about 105 hours of gameplay. She deserved to get to 50 and I decided to make it happen.

On a new toon that I am spending a lot of time with, I can level to 50 in about 3 months. The aforementioned Dom took me a year to level, but a great deal of that was solo gameplay.

Depending on how much I enjoy playing a character, hitting 50 for me is usually less than a month or 2-3 weeks. (not counting my first couple of 50s!).

Currently, I seem to hit 50 way faster than I -want- to.

I enter Praetoria, and within the first day, I'm around level 15.

The second day, I'm around level 24.

The third, around level 29.

Fourth, around level 32.

Fifth, around level 35.

After level 35, I simply join lots of ITFs and begin truly grinding with Tips and papers. It gets better with TFs once I hit 45, and then it's a small gap to fill to 50.

What's interesting to me is try not to farm at all. I like to do Story Arcs or TFs so that I can get the bonus XP from arcs (giant chunks of free XP!) and have a huge collection of merits by the time I hit 50. What's more interesting is that I don't like to team up unless it's for TFs and the such! I enjoy solo'ing more! It also seems faster to me.

Been here since day one. Have about 60 alts. No 50's yet. Do I win?

My first 50 was Hyperstrike. Took just under 3 months (not solid, 3 months of real world time, less in-game) to get to 50. Mostly because I played him constantly. He probably would have done better had a gotten a better handle on the content earlier. Most of his time was NOT spent in missions, but out street-sweeping.

Never...
Ever...
Again...

Now, back when epics unlocked at 50, there was SOMETHING of a reason to race for 50. That and I wanted to have an alt that could participate in the high level stuff.

As such, Hyper paid a price. He bypassed a LOT of contacts. As such, there are zones he just does NOT have store contacts, etc in. And I missed out on a lot of chances to pound face in some seriously cool missions.


My stalker took longer. Partially because sometimes it was just too damn EASY to stealth missions. However, I had a lot more fun with her.

Right after that, I made a determined push to get my first villain, my corruptor, Domina up to 50.

My controller took about 8 months. Mostly because I put him down for a while post-40.

My warshade, Inion, from conception in August/November of 2008, just hit 50 after i19 hit. So about 2 years.

My Stone/Fire tank took about 8 months. Altitis.

My bubble defender took about a year and a half.

Hoping my SS/Inv brute The Man From BEATDOWN makes 50 sometime next month.

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

Took 9 months for my namesake, but I had no idea about slotting or anything.

Most others took a month or two, sometimes much faster if I needed something in a hurry.

I have 2 fifties, one on each side. The first one came in about 6 months after I started playing, the other was easily a year after that. No idea how many hours each took.

I have bad altitis and about 25% of my toons get up into the 40s before I got distracted with a new one. I have toons all over the spectrum of levels out there and I want to play every one of them.

RIGHT NOW. AT ONCE.

So I have no idea when I'll reach 50 again, but off the top of my head I'd say it will be my 42 Bots/Dark MM; then again, my 34 Ill/Rad troller is turning out to be great fun.

1st 50 was my fire tank in dec 26th 2004....I believe I was 50 by feb 2005.

Farming back then was wolf farms and the asn and kraken farming.not to mention it was around the same time the first wnterlord event happened...and we all know what happened then

So if your toon was made then we all farmed from lvl35 to 50

So, if I'm reading right, most posters in this thread take longer to get to 50 due to altitis.

My main character was created April 14, 2006, and hit 50 July 3, 2006. I PvPed a lot when I hit 30, so I took longer than I should have.

Every other character I created after that took about a month each, mainly because of my gameplay style and me being hard to bore.

Plus, back then I was single and got long stretches of days off when I was in the military, so I had the time to play for ungodly hours.

I would create a character and refuse to do anything else until that character hit 50. 2 characters hit 50 due to Double Xp weekends faster than the other 6, but I averaged about a month a character, and that was before the increase of levelling speed and patrol xp.

I've been here for five years and have racked up nine 50s (with no recourse to farming and/or PLing). So ... at least a few months.

It all depends. I spent a good six months or more when I first joined CoH just making tons of alts and feeling out the powersets. Lots of alts in their teens and a few aborted attempts at level 35+. Also feeling out the servers: started on Justice, went on to Freedom, experimented with Guardian and Pinnacle and finally settled on Virtue.

The first character I really 'clicked' with was the invul/fire tank on Freedom a little before the issue where invul got nerfed. Spent maybe a couple happy weeks of teaming and got to about 35ish before the hammer came down on invul. Dangit. Was still in love with it all the same, so I kept working on it, soloing and teaming up to 50. Think it was about 280+ hours.

More alting. More not hitting 50 on anything. City of Villains came by, decided to get a level 50 villain to match the level 50 hero. Teaming and soloing the ice/energy dom, took about 180 hours to get him to 50.

About this time, there was a big dom debate furor on whether they were OP, alright or gimp. Hold Them Touch Them was made on the Pinnacle server by DarkCurrent and ShrikeX (iirc). I tried a grav/, ugh, even slower than ice. Decided to go hog wild and try the powerset more likely to be considered OP. BJ, fire/fire dom was born... Playing him, I realized I really was a closet pyromaniac and REALLY LIKED BURNING things with FLAME.

My timezone was off from the others, it was quite hard teaming up regularly, and they were racing through the levels. The PvP zones were the new thing at the time, and it hit me to do a self-imposed solo 'plevel' challenge and race the HTTT teamers up to level 50. It took maybe 4 days to a week of 6-8 hours a day doing nothing but PvP zone missions over and over since level 25ish - setting things on fire never got old though - and BJ hit 50 practically before anyone else, except ShrikeX's dom, if I recall correctly, who had been started first before the others, and he spent a lot of time joining 8-people teams. BJ was very young when he hit 50, about 100 hours plus minus 2, I think.

The dark def on the other hand has taken literally 3-4 years. Made when I first started the game (she's got like the first anniversary badge) and abandoned for other characters for a very long time. Took the incoming spate of lots of TFs with lots of AVs for me to decide that one of the more reliable characters to have in my stable to take on TF teams would be a -regenner debuffer with control and other support options. Started seriously working on her when the Katie TFs were the popular thing and got her to 50 then.

Between soloing and teaming, I would say most of my chars all average 150-180ish hours now to hit 50, but how spread out those hours are is something else entirely.