City of Heroes is the World Wrestling Federation of Superhero MMOs

He got that metal 2 years before he started theatrical wrestling. He's now a stage wrestler.

-edit-
Oh neat a stage wrestler who also has failed steroid a drug screening with no active prescription.

And I guess we'll see in APril if he can get himself back up to Olympic condition...

Scrankers, blappers, scraptrollers and the rest are only underpowered because the game system is geared to discourage them. I maintain that a healthy game should encourage alternate playstyles. What you are describing is part of the disease, not a sign of health.

And you're wrong. Kora fruit were not always available. Nor were super-inspirations, Wentworth's, item email, base stockpiles, or the Paragon market. You misremember.

You're provably, factually wrong here. DFB sidekicks, allowing all levels to gain appreciable experience from level 1-6 content. The old way couldn't get you past level 8 or so.


I never did any of those. I pine for the days when teams needed to use strategy to win a mission. I miss the good old days when players actually needed skill to play high level content.

It is possible to have those old challenges without the abuses you rage against. In fact, I'm not sure how they're related. You just didn't like the old days. I agree that there were problems, but there were also game experiences that were worth preserving.

It's not fake difficulty. It's a puzzle, and we felt rewarded when we solved it.

(For those unfamiliar with Nosferatu, he has a PBAoE heal that leeches off of melee characters next to him. Blasters can solo him pretty easily. For scrappers it's harder. For a team of scrappers and tanks, which I had, it's one hell of a challenge, especially because we had never heard of him before and didn't know how his heal worked.)

There are no puzzles anymore, save in 24-man incarnate trials, where you fail if too many of the random strangers you've teamed with are idiots. It's a middle manager minigame, designed by middle managers.

I loved all of those missions, but obviously we have different expectations for gameplay. You refuse to play any ranged ATs, as far as I can tell. I think your standards are a little farther from the norm than mine.

Yeeeeaaaah, we're from different planets. I saw City of Heroes as a game where one supplemented attack powers with crowd management, team synergy, and savvy target selection, all with an interesting character design minigame. Almost all of that is superfluous, now. You've got your clickfest.

I think it was. For MMOs of its era, it was very advanced. Other MMOs had yet to standardize status effects and had clumsy aggro management. CoH also had a unique team buff role that broke away from the classic typical tanker-spiker-healer triad. The character creation and enhancement system was unusual and much more complex than the 'class and equipment' systems. Not to mention the spatial freedom this game gave the players, with the ability to fight in three dimensions and at great speed. All of those were CoH gameplay innovations. This game used to be revolutionary.

I agree that the world has passed it by. I wish the devs had tried to keep up. But they've been obsessed with making revolutions in content presentation (the AE is still revolutionary, and they're doing amazing things with storytelling in raids) at the cost of letting game play stagnate.

I pretty much disagree with everything you wrote about how the gameplay in CoH used to suck and still sucks and always will. It didn't. It doesn't have to in the future. But yes, it does right now.

if he stops getting DUIs...I might believe he could

I think they must all use those - with the fights being scripted, it wouldn't actually count as cheating, because the pre-arranged results would still happen, and it'd also help to get the required muscle-man look.

Wait, wait, what? You actually liked that mission? That is absolutely one of the worst designed missions I have ever played through! I was screaming and ******** at the computer for three ******* hours because I couldn't find the last god damn mystic!

Dear god, Sam....

soloing Hero-1 on my frankenslotted Kin/Psi Defender was a test, took a few trips to the hospital...but it was done lol

quite a few do, but it isn't necessary if you frequent the gym, you can get a body builder look w/out the help of steroids.

The system has rules, which you want to break. Simple as that. A system can't encourage EVERYTHING, lest the choice you pine for so much become meaningless. Some things need to work better than others, and you'll be unsurprised to hear that intended character builds work better than unintended ones most of the time, at least now that most of the major holes have been patched up.

What you're asking for is, essentially, why you can't fire up Doom and complete the whole game by making friends with the monsters. You picked a class deliberately designed to lack defences in return for ranged damage and found that failing to rely on ranged damage and instead relying on defence made you weaker than a character who picked a class designed to emphasise defence. I don't see that as a problem.

No, you make stuff up as you go along. Kora Fruit was available as early as I2 and those who wanted it had it. People still traded before now, you know. And as far as "super-inspirations" go, I have never seen a single one, so they can't be THAT common. And while you could e-mail inspirations to yourself now, you're limited to a total of 20, which isn't all that much if, like many people, you wanted to use your e-mail as recipe storage, which the game still doesn't give you a facility for.

I have personally never found myself lacking inspirations. The most I've ever had to do was run back to my contact, wasting my time, but providing no extra challenge. You seem to see time sinks and proclaim them as "challenge" when all they do is tack minutes onto tasks, when a blind monkey could get to 50 - now as before - if he just kept at it. It just took time, not skill.

You are provably, factually wrong here. No, let me correct that. You have been proven wrong because the gains from the DFB do diminish greatly. You can get up to about 15-20 relatively fast, but beyond that your gains simply slow to a crawl. You could keep doing it, but you'll be wasting your time for little progress. People have made experiment on levelling up to 50 on just that, and the results are greatly discouraging. I have a feeling you don't actually know how "easy" the game has become and are going off assertions about how easy it looks like it might be.

Furthermore, yes, the sewers capped up at level 8. Beyond that, you had Perez Park. Beyond that, Boomtown and beyond that Terra Volta and Dark Astoria, and the other Hazard zones besides. Or you could do the sensible thing and run repeatable missions at max difficulty and level up that way. Why do you think people jumped on the bandwagon of grinding endless paper missions? DFB is just lots of killing stuff. This has never been at a premium in this game if that's what you actually wanted to do. Hell, if I were so inclined, I'd run the hollows and do the Frostfire and Atta missions and gain about 5 levels out of those just on my own.

As far as exemplaring for the DFB goes, this isn't a new thing. For years you've been able to exemplar down to the Positron TF and kill experience-boosted Vahzilok if that's what you wanted. Exemplaring has granted experience for a very long time now, though I guess that did happen with your dreaded "decline."

You pine for a myth, then, because it never, ever took strategy to win a mission. All it took was stats, and back then we had greater stats than we do now. You only needed strategy if your build sucked, and you can make your build suck now with little difficulty.

"Keep out of range of his heal" is on the same level of "puzzle" as "bring break frees." Nosferatu is a one trick pony, and his trick is pretty much very high stats.

Moreover, the much simpler tactic to beat Nosferatu, which I've been using since the days of old, is to buy two or four purples from your contact and then stay in melee range to your heart's content. His Dark Regeneration and Soul Drain will miss. That's pretty much the one-size-fits-all solution for how Blasters take out just about every elite boss. And when Lady Winter started debuffing my defence and resistance, I bout six and then eight purples and brute-forced her that way.

As long as we're going to measure whose "standards" are the norm - I'm still perfectly happy with the game and you don't like it. I'd say my standards fared much better than yours did.

And as far as those missions go, they're an attempt to hammer a square peg in a round hole. If you don't have the tools to beat them, you don't beat them, and if you happened to not pick an AT that even has access to those tools, then it sucks to be you. That's not difficulty or challenge, that's the game giving me the middle finger, and me giving it the finger right back by mission-dropping the offending mission.

And I couldn't be happier for it. Except, it was ALWAYS a click fest. As early as Launch, people were soloing +10 enemies (forcing the introduction of the Purple Patch) and breaking game balance over their knee. The only people who needed Tic Tacs were people who didn't know how to make a decent character, like I didn't until about 2005-2006. Because when your character sucks and you can't brute-force your way past opposition, you're forced to think of other ways to win. But while you're wasting your time pulling enemies one by one, spawn by spawn, that Burn Tanker over there is taking down five spawns at a time and levelling up at ten times the rate you are.

Every single time that you have to stop and "strategise" in this game, you are wasting time that other people are using to kill more stuff and gain more progress. This isn't new. This is how it's been since I first saw the game in 2004, back when people were spending day and night farming Hydra in Perez Park. You only "strategise" when your stats aren't enough, and at that point you've already failed.

The status effect system in City of Heroes is a complete mess, standardised or not. The Binary nature of status effects means that either your control classes have entire spawns permanently held, or they essentially lose their primary powerset. AVs got the "purple triangles of doom" expressly because Controllers were perma-holding them, reducing them into sterile punching bags. Now controllers fighting AVs are essentially gimped defenders. There's no gradual build-up of status, nor the ability to defeat an enemy through status alone.

And if you ask what game ever had that - Baldur's Gate did. If you turned an enemy to stone, he turned to stone forever, or until specifically disenchanted. If the Cowled Wizards used an imprison spell on your characters, they were GONE, and you had to remember where this took place, find a disenchantment scroll and re-enact it at the exact place. Hell, there was even a place where a Basilisk has turned a bunch of people to stone. When you save them, one of them offers to join your party.

And the status protection system is even more of a mess. It's not so much a status protection system as it's a "let's write enemy status effects out of the game." I don't get knocked back to land on my feet for a faster recovery, just off the top of my head. If I have resistance - any resistance from almost any melee defence set - status effects simply don't exist for me. Against that backdrop, the few sets with pronounced holes - like Dark Armour - come off as more annoying than "challenging." And if you DON'T have complete and utter status immunity, then you're ******, because every damn minion has a status effect of some sort in the later levels, and usually stacked knockback on top of that. So you better hope that aggro system works and you have someone else for the enemies to aggro on... Which I never had.

As for aggro, Castle and Ghost Widow (at the time) had to work their butts off to backtrack the labyrinthine logic of aggro through the source code, and it turns out the "innovation" was a x100 multiplier of threat rating that Taunt constituted. That's it. Furthermore, aggro is and has been broken, though in subtle ways, for as long as I remember. Critters will still randomly attack invisible, inactive team-members who have done nothing to reveal themselves - thus screwing over Stalkers - and randomly swap target and even ignore taunt effects for a time. Enemies will also very often decide to turn tail and run irrespective of taunt and threat ratings, causing my Bots/Traps Mastermind to become unplayable as every spawn scattered to the four winds as soon as they saw me. I'm told it's because of Poison Gas Trap, but when elite bosses do the Benny Hill run, that's not a good aggro system.

And yet for all of that, people made FOTM characters pretty much until Enhancement Diversification, when the difference between FOTM and non-FOTM wasn't that big. In fact, the original enhancements system was so ungodly broken that it actually detracted from the overall quality of the game. TO THIS DAY I have never seen anyone slot an Intangibility Duration enhancement into anything, though I'm sure there's someone and I just missed him. The original intent for enhancements WAS that they would be gear, with SOs acting like that rare gear you had grind for, with Trainings and DOs being your whites and blues.

When the developers realised we were stocking up on SOs because someone vastly underestimated our Inf-earning potential, they found that their game had been severely broken. Bosses, if you remember, were supposed to be team content. Since before I1, my completely inept Scrapper, driven by my completely inept past self, was soloing bosses left and right. The enhancement system you so praise was meaningless before I6, because slotting anything BUT 1ACC/5DAM in your attacks was provably inferior. Endurance concerns? Take Stamina. Recharge concerns? Take perma-Hasten, which lacked an endurance crash and provided 5% defence to everything. Need more accuracy? Take Focused Accuracy, which was I think a 20% to-hit buff.

Yes, I'm sure you were a creative artist who found new and exciting ways to use the enhancement system that wasn't the FOTM and yet still not suck, but my point is there was never a need to do this. Standard slotting existed then as it does now. If anything, now it's much more varied and much more creative with Inventions sets and their bonuses.

Which was and is fun to travel in, but amounted to precisely dick, to quote J from Men in Black, in the actual game. You couldn't have aerial combat because no everyone could fly, you couldn't have chases because not everyone had Super Speed, and you couldn't even have unreachable places, because people had to get there. Just look at Terra Volta and all the vitriol people have spewed out over getting to the damn reactor. I found all the ways on my own, and all the ways are a platforming nightmare. It's something I can easily do, but people have universally derided.

You could MOVE in three dimensions at great speed. We still ended up fighting in the flat and in the open. Remember the old narrow blue cave maps? Yeah, that and Ornabega are universally reviled throughout the game. I like them, and I've done what I can to defend them, but the people have spoken, and now most new maps are much more open and with a very high ceiling.

What you call stagnation, I call perfection. City of Heroes in 2004 is the City of Heroes I liked - that is, get into a mission, flip out and kill stuff. Difficulty, challenge and even gameplay doesn't enter into it. The simpler and more straightforward the game is, the better. I'm glad complicated builds are no longer a necessity. I'm glad pulling isn't needed. I'm glad sets like Devices were recognised as the mistake they are. The less time I have to spend standing still and looking at my enemies, the better the game is for it. If I wanted to slow down, I can do this on my own initiative. I don't need the game killing me five times to remind me.

The gameplay doesn't "suck," it's just the same now as it always was. This is a click-n-kill action RPG. That's all it ever was. Remember all those cries of "CoH has no depth?" This isn't the right game to look for depth in. It never had it. You could pretend it had depth and hamstring yourself into doing things the hard way, but that doesn't make the game deeper. It just means you're good at making your own fun. But the game itself was always about "push button, receive bacon." And that's all it ever needed to be. With literally hundreds of over-complex, boring MMOs out there, the last thing I need is for the one single user-friendly one to be made harder, slower and less entertaining.

And, yeah, that's all the game ever was - an effects soup button masher. Think back to Romulus Augustulus. You could, if you were so inclined, try to pull him away from his Healing Nictus, try to scatter them, not summon henchmen and do all the other overcomplex tactics people came up with to defeat him. Or you could bring enough debuffs and damage and brute-force your way past him. I've seen it done via brute force almost every time I run it.

With the exception of Incarnate Trials, there isn't a single part of this game that couldn't be brute-forced by a half-way decent build and a half-way decent team. That's how it's always been. You can bring up all the Tic Tacs in the world, plan, plot, postulate, number-crunch and so forth, but at the end of the day, that's what you do when you can't brute-force your way past content, and I've yet to find content I can attempt on my own that isn't susceptible to this. And this isn't a new thing. It's always been like this. In fact, when the original difficulty "slider" came up, the first thing I did was up the difficulty of my namesake Scrapper because the game up to that point had been too easy and I wanted to fight more enemies at a time.

You're talking about difficulty and innovation which you faced, but all of that stuff is still there. You're merely better at the game now, and you refuse to go back to the old ways to find the same old challenges. The fact of the matter is, however, that City of Heroes has ALWAYS been easy. Geko vastly underestimated what players would do to gain power, so we started out the game overpowered to ridiculous degrees. We have, ironically enough, only gotten weaker over time, because player characters have never been stronger than they were back in the Hamidon farming craze. Characters have never powerlevelled faster than they did with Winter Lords, where a 5-munute fight could grant you 15 levels all at once. And people have not complained that City of Heroes lacks depth more than before I9 and Inventions.

The simple fact is the game you remember never existed. You made your own experience like it was, and you're fully capable of doing it now, but for your refusal to do so.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You didn't see her Cage Match against the Undertaker? [insert quip about R.E.S.P.E.C.T. here]

While I cannot deny that the devs have made leveling easier and faster over time, I disagree that it was significantly harder. It only seemed harder because we didn't know what to expect.

That's precisely the same reason why a large number of people initially thought that the RSF, STF, ITF, LGTF, Khan, Apex, Tin Mage and all the new trials were too hard. And now all but the two most recent trials are successfully run by just about everyone in under an hour, frequently under 30 minutes by some. Given a few more weeks I expect that Keyes and Underground will be done just as quickly and people will then complain about the new trials.

As to Sam, I can only say that he has almost polar opposite wants in the game than I do. He likes a Ron Popiel set-it-and-forget-it solo playstyle throughout the whole game so long as his character looks cool and the story makes sense. While I don't mind the occasional mindless button mash to escape my troubles of the day, I prefer a pedal-to-the-metal speed run against 8 AVs that requires a lot of team coordination and skill. While I don't hit random when creating my character, I usually don't type anything in the biography section and only use alternate costumes on three of my many characters . . . and those are some of my oldest three.

I don't begrudge him his playstyle. There are plenty of missions for him to run exactly as he likes. I only get upset when he insists that the stuff that I like gets the Ronco treatment.

Regarding the "gimmickiness" of the game recently: I've enjoyed it all except for Keyes. I think that Keyes really exemplifies what Commander is talking about -- coming up with a list of gimmicks and then shoe-horning them all together around a Preatorian story. It doesn't really reward teamwork. Four skilled players can complete the mission while everyone else runs around and dies. And the final encounter is the only place in the game that I can think of that has an unavoidable, unresistable, map-wide effect -- Freezing time. Oh no, wait. There's also the unavoidable, unresistable, map-wide effect of the damage pulse just before that.

And yet some games allow this. Fallout, which is not so very far from Doom, allows you to skip a lot of combats with high charisma and smart dialogue choices. In some RPGs you can design a character to be a complete pacifist, and finish the game with non-combat interactions.

We don't need anything that extreme in CoH. But some kind of gameplay other than button-mashing would be nice.

I said level 20 in 4 hours. I know it doesn't scale much beyond that. The DFB is officially sanctioned powerleveling past the early levels.

I think this is the basic difference between you and I, Samuel, and it illustrates how this game has changed. It used to be that you *could* win a mission with strategy. Brute force worked, but there were alternate ways to win. I preferred to find the alternate paths.

But the missions no longer reward alternate strategies. Even the old missions are no longer challenging enough to bother figuring out strategies for, because stamina-inherent veteran-power equipped characters are overpowered compared to the old content.

The game used to support both of our playstyles -- my thinking, and your button-mashing. It no longer supports mine. That's the root of the problem.

I think it's a very interesting fact that the person who is very happy with the game is the one raving about how simple and brainless it is.

We were talking about MMOs. Many of the innovations CoH brought to the MMO world were lifted from single-player RPGs. They were still revolutionary for MMO games.

But there was the ability. Giving players the ability to escape the FOTM rut allowed both you and I to be happy. The devs have now driven the game toward the rut, hoping to bring in twitch-happy hordes of new players, but they're losing their thoughtful iconoclastic explorers.

I'm trying to figure out how you can support that statement. I've had tons of aerial combat, with sky raiders in IP and goldbrickers in Cap, not to mention the dogfights I've had with Circle ghosts in Oro missions. Superspeed is less useful with suppression but the good old punch-by still works as a pulling tool. I have several characters designed to fight only while Hovering, and at least one with enough endrdx slotted in Superspeed that I leave it on during combat.

Some MMOs don't even give characters the ability to jump. CoH pioneered high-mobility combat in MMOs.

Well, you got the game you wanted. In the process, they took the game I liked away.

To get back to the original point of this thread, some players are looking for more substance than button-mashing. They will not be distracted for long by gimmick gifts like new costumes.

That's a perfect example. I liked the pull-apart strategy, and I always tried to convince my teams to do it. These days nobody bothers -- most characters in the ITF are incarnates and they're so powerful that there's no need for subtlety in that fight anymore.

I'll give you another example. The first Signature mission arc, where you save Synapse? The entire arc -- all three (?) missions -- can be solved by hovering over the lava. You never have to fight at all, just throw an attack as a taunt and start floating. That's an alternate strategy for the new content. But it's cheap, it's exploiting the bad AI, and it is probably not a tactic that the devs put in intentionally. It's an accident. I want well-crafted content that requires strategy to solve.

It's not the same. My new characters have inherent stamina and are forced to take every power in their ATs; they're not unique or innovative, and they're significantly more powerful than my old characters were at the same level.

Besides, I've played all that old stuff. I'm not going to keep playing the same content over and over, even if the character options remain as open-ended as they used to be. All the new content is for people like you, the button-mashers. Or the middle-managers. There isn't any new content for me.

That's the problem. You may not agree with me, but if you have any empathy at all then surely you can see the problem.

Not that it really matters. Paragon studios is gambling that the loss of players like me will be balanced out by an influx of players like you. For their sake I hope they're right.

I have to say, I'm with Sam here. I've been playing CoH since pre-release, and I don't remember missions taking strategy, ever. The hardest mission I can think of back in the day was the "rescue friendly Oranbegans" map full of Malta, and that was only hard when you took a large team in. The only "strategy" we ever used on that was to try and not aggro multiple groups, the risk of which was the thing that made it hard to start with.

I always remember laughing at the time limits we were givin on missions. They were beyond generous for even my most limited soloers. And I have been in the habit of clearing maps, even when I don't have to, since before ED. (Then again, I didn't try to run missions solo with anything that wasn't picked because I knew its AT or powerset choices allowed it to solo with some facility. Dark Miasma and Rad Emission Defenders soloed more easily than Empaths, for example.)

Er... again, as someone who's been here since day negative three, I don't know what you're talking about. There have are only ever been two ways to complete door missions in CoH that I can think of: click on something or defeat/destroy something. Your choices in achieving those goals are: fight to the objective, and then do the needful, or stealth/leeroy past foes to the objective and do the needful.

If you have examples of alternatives to those "strategies" I'd like to hear them.

I soloed the whole arc with IO'd characters, but my support ATs soloed it at +2/x6, and the only inspirations I used were BF-types in the Hero-1 mission. (There are lots of mezzes with all the Rikti, plus The Honoree having stuns in his ranged attacks.)

I even posted a YouTube video of my Dark/Dark corruptor's fight with Trapdoor.

Agreed.

Alrighty Remus, put your money where your mouth is and tell us what these 'strategies' were. Infact any of them for ATs where 'hit or shoot stuff' is the MO their play style. Building a character is not a Strategy, it's a logistical thing and as I pointed out earlier could be entirely invalidated by looking up a build/build guide on the forums.

You make it seem as if there was some kind of grand strategy to a game which has never been beyond 'hit stuff to do stuff'.

Perhaps you mean the things people learn really quickly, like kill Sappers first and Nemesis Lts last, if so...that STILL applies today.

lol even GG is speechless. The world will end soon for sure...

I'm with both you and Sam. I've played this game since May 2004 and I don't recall it ever having anything all that challenging in terms of trying to puzzle out what to do. It's always been about being super. It's always been about flipping out, yelling "Hulk SMASH!!!", diving in and killing... er, arresting stuff!

I've done the pulling tactic on my weaker characters. It's not as satisfying as barreling through and taking them all at once. So I'm not satisfied with those characters until I've gotten their builds right and IO'd them out.

I think the only times I ever had problems with timed missions were when they were a surprise (and I had to log out to go to work or something), or else when there was a single minion hidden behind a wall (in one of those cave maps, argh!) and I had already wasted my time going through the entire map multiple times trying to find him.

It was just a passing problem - I'm totally ok again now

It can't be those - they're just gimmicks.

This is the City of Gimmicks.

But then, OP is asking for an "Attitude Era" for CoX, But the Attitude era was the biggest gimmick yet for then WWF. Former Blonde Bombshell Steve Austin running round beating up the boss and his family, the birth of DX, Undertaker goes biker so he doesn't have to use his old signature move for a while after shattering both knee caps performing it, The Rock, The return of Mick Folly, and Mick Folly and Mick Folly, and getting drawn 3 times in the same royal rumble, as different characters.....

Was all just 1 big gimmick "getting rid of the old gimmicks".

And I still never took it seriously, was just good for a laugh, sometimes.

Originally Posted by Forbin_Project Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.

I know a lot of pro wrestlers.

It's really funny to be one of those lucky people who gets to hang out after the show and get to see the 'Evil Big Bad Dude" (ie, heels) selling Girl Scout Cookies for his little girl. And the face characters buying them.

http://nwaanarchy.net/ films just down the street from where I work, and they come in to my restaurant after every show.

knowing them personally is completely different then being a fan of wrasslin'

as a matter of fact, an old old wrestler named Junk Yard Dog was a friend of a family member of mine. Met him twice, nicest damned guy you ever wanted to meet, but that still wasn't even close to enough to make me watch wrestling.