Is the CoH Game Actually Good?

Thanks for making me laugh. You reminded me of a particular thread made by someone complaining how CoH was too expensive for him because he was on disability and had to live on $900 per month. Then in the same post he listed his "monthly" expenses.

CoH $14.99
another online game $9.99
X-Box $50.
PSU $9.99
another online game $14.99
Groceries/alcohol/restaurants $300.
rent $279.
maid service $40.
porn $20.
car insurance $50.
renters insurance $25.
life insurance $10.
Gas $30.
credit reports $25.

Now this right here put his monthly expenses at $878.96 but that wasn't enough, he had to go even further and say he also had other monthly expenses where he didn't list how much they cost

dental insurance
new furniture and electronics (he never explained how this was a monthly expense)
6 more games he named and admitted to buying/subscribing to more
gambling
movie theatres
video rentals
postage stamps
medical bills for surgery

$1200. for a new computer

and he was considering buying a lifetime subscription to another super hero MMO. (which ran about $200-$300)

And he got mad at everyone that pointed out that if what he said was true he was spending more money than he was earning from disability and the price of CoH was the least of his worries.

Some are expensive. Some are cheap. Some are significantly cheaper, even when factoring crafting costs, than SOs relative to the buffs they provide (for example, if you're slotting a sniper attacks you can probably buy the recipes and salvage for many of those essentially for nothing: the only thing you have to pay is the actual crafting cost to create them).

A large subset of inventions are only somewhat more expensive than SOs relative to their strength, and still provide significantly better performance than just SOs. So there are options for every budget, from SOs, to the very cheap set IOs and common IOs, to the mid-range IOs, to the ultra-expensive inventions.

Some of the bargain basement and budget tricks are things like slotting two cheap Accuracy/Damage combination IOs instead of one damage SO and one accuracy SO. Those can often be reasonably inexpensive and provide a substantial benefit over slotting pure SOs (at high enough level). Expanding that trick, higher levels one damage IO and two damage/end IOs get very close to the benefit of three damage SOs but significantly reduce the endurance costs of using that attack.

Its called "frankenslotting" and its something some players do to squeeze a lot of benefit out of the invention system without spending a lot of money. You get something that is better than standard SO slotting, not as good as the best optimized builds, but pretty cheap to make.

One more thing about inventions and standard enhancements. All enhancements have an intrinsic level. You must be no lower than three levels lower than the intrinsic level of the enhancement to use it: if you are too low you won't be able to use it. Conversely, standard enhancements degrade as you level: when you get more than three levels higher than the enhancement, it shuts off. However, inventions do not do that. Once you slot an invention, it retains its strength indefinitely as you level up, which means you do not ever need to replace it (unless you want to trade it for something more power). So sometimes some players will slot cheap ones as they are leveling up just because it means they don't have to worry about replacing them every three to five levels.