Some feedback from a casual F2P player

First some background, so you can see where I'm coming from and relate that to my comments: I first played CoH in the open EU beta in the last couple of weeks before it went live. I enjoyed it at the time, though my MMO experience was limited to the CoH and another game's beta so I didn't have much to compare it to. Of the two games, I chose the other game mainly because I would be playing it with an existing online games community I'd been part of for a couple of years. Had that not been the case, I could easily have played CoH instead.

I've played WoW with that same group since release, with the occasional period of abstention (I've been unsubbed for the last four months, mainly due to no longer feeling the attraction of the game). During that six-year stretch, I've spent time in several other MMOs, ranging from a couple of weeks to the better part of a year. When CoH expanded to include CoV, I bought the game and played it for a couple of months, then occasionally popped back in for a taster.

When the game went F2P, I reactivated my account and recovered my existing toons. I've been playing a fair bit since then (my highest two toons are L28 and L15), long enough to come up with a list of things that I've decided are enough to stop me from playing much more, even as a free player. I'm going to list them here but please don't think that this is just a list of complaints: I think that most, if not all, of them are justified, rather than whinging. I mostly play CoH solo, so a lot of these comments should be read with that in mind.

Games should be fun. They can still be hard, or even frustrating sometimes while still being fun. This game has several features which I think rob me of my enjoyment while playing it:

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XP debt. It's not uncommon for me to be soloing a mission and die to a boss or a pair of mobs repeatedly. It's probably my fault for biting off more than I can chew, or not really using the right tactics. XP debt feels like a slap in the face, taking such a significant portion of my XP away from me. I've mainly been playing a mind controller who's very fragile. His only hope of beating a boss in 1-on-1 combat requires me to render the boss impotent. If I fail, the boss typically kills me in 3-4 hits while I have virtually no recourse. It may take me three or four attempts to whittle him down, all the while earning significant XP debt that may take me fifty further mobs to wipe out. That's no fun.

Miss rate: I know that this game, like most other MMOs, has a lot of RNG underpinning it, and I know that a miss is entirely governed by that RNG. I know that there are enhancements and abilities to improve my chances of hitting, but this game seems to take misses to an uncomfortable extreme. I've had many cases where I've thrown 6-8 attacks at a similar level mob and seen as few as two of them land. This is immensely frustrating and frequently results in my death. It can include attacks made against a mob that's incapacitated, too. If my toon is supposed to be trained to physical perfection, or armed with the latest fool-proof technology, and he can miss an incapcitated target with three attacks in a row at melee range, it just feels wrong, and I feel like it happens far, far too often. It feels like the RNG is weighted too much toward misses, rather than me getting a few bad rolls.

Hospital runs: they make sense within the narrative of the game. But why not have a few more hospitals? If I'm locked in a death spiral, teleported back repeatedly to the only hospital in the zone, only to have to travel a mile and a half back to the mission spot, then run all the way back through the instance to the boss, it does nothing for my good mood. Even worse is the Dam region in southern Faultline, where the hospital is effectively in a different zone to the instance, meaning I have to fly back, transition through a door, navigate needlessly twisty corridors, then transition another door, then fly back to the mission, transition another door/loading screen, then run back to the boss and die again because of misses. I'm sure you can appreciate my frustration.

The UI: within my gaming community, I'm well known for and teased about the number of UI mods I run. I love being able to tailor the UI to suit me, increasing or suppressing the information available to me, tweaking the layout or the elements visible to me or taking out the drudgery of certain operations (most hated WoW activity is probably milling herbs or prospecting ore - one click every three seconds until you run out of materials 20 minutes later. Guaranteed repetetive strain injury). CoH's UI has some glaring omissions, in my opinion, like the inability to resize the text in a name plate, or the lack of any indication whatsoever that you're out of range for your ability, other than a sound and a message on screen *after* you've tried it. Not to mention that the message text may not be anywhere near where I'm looking, so I may miss it entirely, and the notification sound may well be drowned out by the noise of battle. If we're not allowed to use third-party mods to make the UI work the way *we* want, then there should at least be a greater amount of flexibility in the stock UI than I believe CoH has.

Graphics: why is everything so dark? Why can't I focus on anything at long range? Why, when I have all of the settings at their highest quality, do so many objects pop into existence only when I'm almost on top of them? I appreciate that it's no trivial task to upgrade the graphics engine after the game's release, but boulders the size of the average house should not be semi-transparent when they're only a hundred yards away, and I should still be able to see skyscrapers in focus when they're a quarter of a mile off.

Running/autorunning: this may be a bug, I don't know, but when I'm running using the forward key, I often want to change to running using the two mouse buttons held down together. However, when I press the two buttons, then release the key, I stop running. This can be bad.

Being locked into an animation: I hate to think of the number of times I've died because I couldn't run away, purely because I was stuck in a long animation that I couldn't override. So I get killed, and get un-fun XP debt because the game won't let me run away just at the time I most need to.

The LFG queue: "average wait time 4 minutes". Not in my experience. It's rarely been less than ten, often more than 20. Obviously it's entirely dependent on there being enough people in the queue, and I'm guessing that it's a much better experience at the level cap than it is while levelling, but please, just put a more accurate, recalculated time on there. This issue makes my next point much harder to stomach:

Missioning while LFG: Most missions require you to go into a building/sewer/cave system. You "don't dare" enter one of these instances while waiting in a queue. I'm guessing that there's a technical reason behind this, but given how much of the content of this game is instanced in one way or another (much more so than any other MMO I've tried), this limitation is utterly infuriating. I know I'll be in the LFG queue for ten minutes (if I'm lucky), but I can't do anything more worthwhile than picking on random groups of mobs out in the open world. Not fun.

Group combat: Again, I've not reached the level cap and have no experience of groups at high level, but at low level, this is unsatisfying. Every group scenario I have been in (excepting the one last night where most of the group quit immediately, leaving us with two people to face content scaled for 6) has turned into an anarchic free-for-all where everyone just mashes buttons at the nearest mob. I've never noticed anyone tanking, rarely noticed anyone specifically healing, and frequently been unable to see a reason why either a tank or a healer would be necessary. There are no tactics, no roles, no mechanics to learn or adapt to, no repercussions when you get it wrong. It's just a zerg to the boss and a pile of XP. If the encounters for L50 players require anything more complex than a zerg, then the previous 49 levels don't seem to have prepared you for them. Group combat just feels empty.

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I could go on, but I'll leave it there. Many of my other point are merely niggles, or just things I don't like because I'm fossilised by years of doing it a different way, but the points I've raised above, particularly the last one, are really just so big that I can't see any way around them. They take away any desire I have to subscribe to this game and unlock the features I have no access to already, whether cosmetic (more costume parts), mechanic (inventions so that I have something to do with all the salvage I keep finding) or fundamental (more archetypes and power sets).

Going right back to one of my first comments: games should be fun. For me, there are too many things taking the fun out of the game for me to want to spend more time in it. Even if you could tell me that all of these issues are addressed by becoming a VIP player, the game experience so far has already been spoiled so much that I don't think I'd want to come back.

Hmm... Lemme see if i can shine some light on your concerns...

XP Debt: Let me ask: what SHOULD the penalty for dying be? You've played WoW, are you saying that having to play a little longer to get your next level is really more tedious than running back to your body to get your broken gear and having to re-craft it? Think about all the XP you miss by having to skip enemies and run away from them!

Miss Rate: You need to make sure your enhancements are the highest level you can slot (anywhere from even to +3 to your current level). This game is balanced around having enhancements, NOT the powers' default stats. As an FYI, you have a base ToHit chance of 75% (against an even-conning minion), which is multiplied by a power's Accuracy (usually 1.0, but AoEs tend to be like 0.8 or something.), so you're going to miss at least 25% of the time unless you enhance your powers. Especially once you get past level 20 and you have Single Origin enhancements, which give you much better value than "training origin" Enhancers.

Hosp runs: I can appreciate your frustration, though I assure you your experience is subjective. You sound like you're just playing at too high a difficulty. Go to a HeroCorps representative (the dudes in blue, they're on your map) and set yourself to -1 with No bosses until you get the hang of your powers =) Also, there are ways to resurrect yourself from within the mission, such as Inspirations and temp powers (though you'll wanna be more than 60 feet away from any enemies before you try using one of those).

UI: I agree with ya here, actually. The UI looks nice, but it's cluttered. Chat window, team window, pets window, target window, nav window,and a power tray taking up a huge portion of the screen... it's all scalable but then you can't see a darn thing! The ability to make custom windows would also be nice.

Graphics: Check your gamma settings; game is nice and bright for me. Then again, right now the Halloween event is live, and it's 2+ weeks of full night, NO day cycle, which may explain that.

Autorun: Autorun by default is tapping the R key. I'd never heard of holding down two mouse buttons o_O

Animation lock: Nothing can be done about this, sorry =/ I feel ya though, there are times I'll be doing something, and something unexpected happens but I'm stuck. Just gonna have to develop better situational awareness.

LFG: yeah, the system could be worked better. The problem is that most people form their teams OUTSIDE the queue, which doesn't allow people to join in, which was the entire reason the LFG tool was formed. It's more of a player attitude problem than anything. You may want to try a more populated server like Freedom or Virtue, or Union if you prefer a European server.

Group Combat: That's actually the GOOD thing about this game: You don't NEED Tanks or Healers. Some dedicated group content like Task Forces encourage you to have tanks or buffs, but they're still not required. Your grouping experience where 6 people quit is far from the ordinary. Give it another try.

I'm sorry to hear your experience has been frustrating so far. If you have chat channel access, try forming a team of like 4 or 5 people and run Positron's task force (which has been changed recently if you'd done it before), both parts. It's a nice romp that's perfect for a small team.

Posting options: there are definitely many forums I can't post in, yes. They won't even open the edit window, while this one did. The Development forum seemed to be the only one that would be suitable for the feedback I wanted to give, and I didn't see any thread explicitly for feedback. Given that this sub-forum is the "Gameplay/Technical issues and bugs", and most of what I wanted to post was about gameplay, it seemed appropriate.

Difficulty: I've mainly set it at +1 level, 2 heroes equivalent, no elite bosses, no arch villains. Any lower on the level and it just doesn't have any challenge. Any lower on the heroes equivalent and it just seems empty. Elite bosses, no hope. As it stands, I typically Confuse about half of a group, then use an AoE sleep/disorient on them before laying into them one at a time, accepting that I'll lose XP due to mobs doing half of my damage. Any that wake up get Confused or slept again. This tactic seems to work with groups of up to 6-8 minions at +1 level, including the occasional lieutenant.

On bosses I've tended to take the safest option, given that they won't fight back against a mind controlled mob. I confuse as many mobs as I can keep under until they've killed each other and brought the boss down a significant chunk. If I try any other method, my first attack gets me aggro from every mob, including the boss, and the boss wanders over and murders me in short order whether or not I've put the rest of the mobs to sleep. My only chance of survival at that point seems to require me to put the boss to sleep, and that's reliant on my sleep or confuse attack actually landing on a red-conning mob.

Serious question: I know I've chosen a support class, but does the design of this game mean that he's never supposed to be able to solo an instanced mission unless I reduce the difficulty to trivial levels? I didn't research my build, I just chose whatever looked useful, so I guess it's possible that I've lucked into a combination that's generally considered to be unable to solo stuff.


XP debt, hospitals, corpse running: when WoW launched, a lot of zones had too few graveyards, and I think at least one had no Alliance yard in it. Blizzard realised that this meant a lot of time running a long way to resurrect, and added more so that players could get back into the fun part of the game more quickly. Yes, it's appropriate to have penalties for dying, and given that you don't have gear to break in CoH, I guess that XP debt is probably the only way to do it. Paying a nominal fee to repair your broken gear feels a lot friendlier to me than a penalty that hinders your levelling for however long. Now that you mention it, I do remember debt being worse in the beta - I think I had several cases where a bad string of deaths put me in hock for more than a full level. It may be better now, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still feel like a slap in the face. Perhaps you could opt to pay it off at the hospital with influence? That's not a huge leap in a game where it can cost you 6.80 GBP just to respec, and it's more in keeping with the game universe.


LFG: I hadn't actually realise that I was so limited as a premium player instead of a VIP, but still: I have never seen an average wait time for either the sewers or the haunted house of anything other than 4 minutes when I first open the tool, regardless of whether it was peak time or not. I don't watch the thing the whole time it's open, but if it's not showing a representative number when I first open it, I don't think it's worth showing it at all.

As for the missions I may or may not be able to complete while waiting: I don't tend to fill my log with them, I usually just work on one at a time. It's not always obvious that they're going to send me into an instanced area (or maybe I've not read them fully...) so, again, it's frustrating to find that I can't get in. Yes, I could go search for a mission that doesn't lead to an instance, but as a newer player I have no idea where best to pick these up. I'd just be randomly hitting up contacts in the hope that I'm at just the right place in the chain.


Graphics: could be partly down to brightness/contrast/gamma settings. There was one instance I've done recently that was set underground: visibility was down to about 20 yards, until I turned a corner and was able to see about 60 yards. For about a second before the black fog came down again... Not really fog, though, as I could see the green fire from the Circle of Thorns mobs' flaming torches, though. That seems like a design decision. Same with the distance view being out of focus. My card's a Geforce 560Ti, BTW, about 4 months old and with up-to-date WHQL reference drivers, so I'm pretty sure it should be capable of anything this game can throw at it.


Locked animations: I don't know about anyone else, but if I was incanting some long spell and realised mid-way through that a piano was about to fall on my head, I'd shut up and run away. And given that a missed spell triggers the cooldown for that ability, and that there's probably a global cooldown preventing me from firing another ability immediately, then where's the harm in being able to move immediately? Which breaks the fourth wall first: not being able to stop doing something and running away, or running away after you've triggered an event that will come to the same conclusion regardless of where you're standing?

Something that makes it more frustrating for me is when you've queued up your next attack and even though you're trying to run away at the conclusion of the last one, the fact that you're still in range of the target means that the second attack will fire off regardless, locking you in place for even longer.


Group combat: yes, it is a preference on my part. When I solo the bosses I'm capable of killing (bosses scaled more for solo players, based on the difficulty set when I enter the instance alone), I accept that I need to use tactics rather than button mashing. When I enter an instance with 7 other players, I'd rather see something that requires a little more coordination than what I've seen.

Mechanics: given the two group fights I seem to have access to (sewers and halloween), I've seen a pair of mechanics in action. In the sewers, you run away from the bubbles (assuming you're not stuck in an animation before they burst and do you a load of damage. I know how not to stand in a fire. Last time I did this fight I died twice, partly due to my own stupidity and partly cos I couldn't move, mid animation. The other fight was at the end of the halloween event. The boss does a couple of emotes, one about his hands and one about his feet. I can't pretend that I was paying full attention, but I guess I should have run away from at least one of those (I was hovering about 30 feet up, so I thought I'd be immune to the stomping foot). Even though I didn't run, and most of the time I don't think anyone else did either), there were no real consequences. I did it wrong and didn't die, or come particularly close to dying, and we killed the mob anyway.

If there isn't something interesting or challenging about an encounter, and you can get away with just spamming stuff at the target, then it's just a loot pinata: hit mob, pick up shinies, leave. I don't find that fun, do you?

Someone please tell me: at level 50, are the fights still like this? Does it still not matter if you don't have a tank or healer? My controller's alt spec is more healy right now, but it sounds like it's irrelevant.

.... casual player....

... CASUAL player...

Do these two words even go together?

OP must have meant to say Causal Player... yeah... that must be it...

As for why you can't focus on things at long range. Turn off Depth of Field in your graphics settings. It's supposed to simulate the way that when you are focusing your vision on something close things in the distance are blurred. Instead all it simulates is having a blurry screen.

Also in game you can set your draw distance to maximum by typing "/visscale 4" without the quotes. It won't stick between sessions but you can easily bind it to a key and use it each time you log in.

Finally try running CoHHelper and posting the results here. It will show us what your hardware is and what your in game settings are. That will help us to suggest changes that may improve your visual quality.

Why in the world are you soloing a mind controller? Controllers work best for team play. Why not roll up a brute or dominator or corrupter for solo play? Especially at low levels (things change at higher levels) soloing controllers WOULD be frustrating. A mind dominator will give you all the fun of mind control with a much less frustrating experience solo.

Others may well have covered all this, but I'm too lazy to read their posts just now

So, my thoughts on your criticisms:

XP debt: Oddly enough, most of us consider the XP debt to be such a light penalty that it's barely even noticeable. Especially when combined with patrol xp. Now if you went back to the game's release, the debt was pretty noticeable and could put a real damper on solo efforts (or bad team efforts), but these days it's trivial. I'm not sure what to say other than that really, just seems we have very different perceptions of it.

Although if you're having trouble with bosses I just wanted to check: are you making use of inspirations to fight them? Especially purples (+def) and reds (+damage). Pop 3-4 purples and you should be fairly safe, easily long enough to stack up your mezzes on them. Use up/delete/combine less useful ones during the easier fights to ensure that you have a few purples and reds by the time you hit the boss (may want a few greens/blues in there too if the fight is likely to take a while, though I appreciate the inspiration tray isn't that big at low levels).


Miss rate: well, we all have times (especially at low unenhanced levels) when the miss rate seems excessive and it seems the rng is out to get us. And that missing can be hard to adjust to if you're used to MMOs where everything is auto-hit. The only real suggestion I have here is ensure you have at least 30% (ideally a bit more) accuracy slotted in each power as soon as that's plausible. At low level that'd be 2 Dual Origin enhancements. Later on one Single Origin enhancement would probably do you for even level content, but many would opt for two to make sure they're still hitting against higher level enemies.

Hospital runs: Eh, with travel powers I don't find these half as annoying as the ghost runs most fantasy MMOs I've played subject me to. There's also awaken inspirations if you can do a bit of last minute manoeuvring to land your death somewhere it'll be safe to recover. But if you make use of inspirations and don't have the difficulty settings cranked up too high, this shouldn't be a particularly common occurrence - a Mind Controller should have no issues with normal even level spawned-for-one-person spawns, and as I say, Inspirations take care of boss fights most of the time.

UI: Won't argue too much here, though I suspect revamping the UI to the levels of customisation some MMOs offer may be an issue on such an old game.

Graphics: Haven't really noticed any of those issues. Well, except maybe the darkness - that's because the Halloween event is currently running, so it's permanent nighttime just now. Or if you're running villains, the dingy gloomy scenery there is a common complaint. But inside missions etc, never had any real brightness problems. For the other issues, possibly there may be a change of settings that would help with some of that, but it may just be differing tolerances for a dated graphics engine.

LFG: Both are issues that I think most (bar the more, ah, enthusiastic fans) will agree with you on. The estimated time includes the time it takes pre-formed groups that enter the queue - because their group is already at the maximum size when they queue they get into the instance immediately with close to zero wait time, and that throws off the average (especially since most people are preforming groups rather than just queuing and waiting). And many people have complained about being unable to run missions etc while queued - it's one reason people are pre-forming their groups instead of using the queue

Group Combat: Well, first of all this game does usually have a less rigid group mechanic than most MMOs. There are tanks and others designed to manage aggro etc, but it's not quite as vital that they hold on to every target's attention. Similarly there's plenty of healing powers, but they're just one small part of the mitigation - buffs and debuffs (and mez) are at least as important and many would argue even more so (to the point you don't necessarily need any "healers" to do well) - they have *way* more impact than in most MMOs. There's *far* less emphasis on the holy trinity, and when played well pretty much any combination of characters can do well (though from a minmax standpoint, some will still do better than others). Essentially, every role can help, but none are outright required.

Also if your group experience is mostly based on the Death from Below trial (via LFG) then yeah, you'll find people tend to be a bit more care free and chaotic in their approach - it's a pretty easy trial, based around low level content (despite being able to run it at any level), and most characters won't have many of their tools available yet (so e.g. a Tank isn't really that much more survivable than anyone else, and may well not have taken their aggro mangement powers yet in favour of powers that'll help them solo).

There tends to be a bit more in the way of group roles later on as enemies get tougher and everyone starts filling out their builds, but realise it doesn't really ever get to the levels of coordination and narrow roles that other MMOs require. Enemies will start to get some nasty abilities, but there's not many in the way of scripted fights where you learn it like a platform game boss and such, it remains a straight hack'n'slash for 95% of the game. The only real exception is the Incarnate content at endgame, though I'm not sure how it compares with other MMOs. Generally though, CoH's a fairly straightforward game when it comes to the actual gameplay (the complexity is more in the build options and synergies) and allows for a more freeform approach to group roles - and really, most of us prefer it that way (for me the grouping here is one of the big reasons I play this instead of any of the competition).

Any points I didn't address is because I felt they were more pet peeves, and ones I've never had any issue with personally, so I don't have any real input to offer.


Anyway, I hope you find some or all of these issues ease as you play and learn the game, and that you come to enjoy it as much as most of us. That said, just as WoW doesn't appeal in the slightest to many CoH players, it may well be that this game just isn't for you - that's ok if so.

Reading your points, it seems like you're expecting this game to be a lot more like WoW, in a way that many people here dislike.

On the bright side: devs seem to hear you lately, with the introduction of holy trinity-based trials where people are mere units instead of superheroes. In certain encounters, whereas healing used to be part of the efficient mitigation, it's starting to be the sole useful thing, and whereas tankers and brutes used to be competent damage dealers as well as aggro holders, they're starting to be bags of HP spamming taunt.

On the other hand, the rest of the game still offers something widely different than that - which, you can tell by my wording, I much prefer. So, if you dislike that, you're going to repeat the same sort of content a lot.

Even disregarding personal taste, CoH simply wasn't built like that and I think it would result in an inferior game in all aspects if it tried to emulate the way WoW plays, as the gameplay would end up being a pale shadow of something done better elsewhere.

I see so many people with a really cluttered screen. I couldn't stand that. I only have info that I want to know. (I don't want to be told I healed someone, I know that...and not interested in hit points, etc.) I like knowing what my rewards, xp, inf and prestige are. I made my windows transparent so I could see more of the screen.. I use binds and macros so usually only need one power tray showing. Here is what my screen ingame looks like. For me, less is more LOL.

Something I'm not sure anyone else has mentioned - the complaint of not being able to dodge things like the bubbles in the sewer trial because you were stuck in a long animation. Almost all the enemies with such abilities give you at least five seconds to notice and move. To my knowledge there exist precisely four powers in the game with animations longer than five seconds - the sniper powers scrappers and stalkers get in their patron pools. Even regular snipes and Assassin Strikes, which would be the next longest, are half a second or so short I think. And all of those are in fact interruptable.

So ignoring those, since there's no valid complaint there as they're all just as interruptable as you'd like them to be, let's consider something like Total Focus, a power known for its ungodly long animation. Total Focus animates in 3.3 seconds, leaving you 1.7 seconds to move. Is this somehow not enough? Are you lagging that badly, that you press the button and it takes almost two seconds for your character to respond? Are you paying that little attention that you manage to miss the giant red text warnings that tend to pop up if you're anywhere even remotely close to being in range of such abilities? (Sewer trial exempt there cause it has no such warnings and really should if you ask me.)

I dunno about you, but I'm not really seeing a problem here.

Hmm several points.

Now I've noticed you've taken Mind/Empathy which really isn't the best pairing to do anything solo, infact Controllers full stop aren't that great solo up until the late 30's (where some like Fire control/Kinetics and Illusion/Radiation Emission turn into group killing and single target killing beasts respectively). They're a team focused AT back when the game still cared too much about the Holy Trinity but never really bothered to enforce it.

If you like holding mobs and playing solo, I'd recommend a Dominator over a Controller. The City of Villains Archetypes were designed around having more soloability and damage than their heroic counterparts (apart from Stalkers/Scrappers, Scrappers are better solo).

Remember you have more than just healing in Empathy, I've seen quite a few new Empaths take purely the healing powers because they think, like other MMOs, that healing is the best thing in the game. While it is very helpful at lower levels (pre 30) it becomes less and less useful up until level cap and only becomes useful again in Keyes Incarnate trial.

Buffs and Debuffs reign supreme in CoH with healing being a nice side benefit which makes it different from a lot of other MMOs who ARE focused on healing with buffs and debuffs being fairly minor additions.

This means that there is no 'holy trinity' for 95% of the content, especially at higher levels when Scrappers can fill the role of 'Alpha Strike absorbtion' just as well Tanks. The only time a Tank is prefered (but not strictly needed if there's enough buffs or debuffs on the team) is when fighting Archvillains or for the new Incarnate Trials (where they are needed admittedly).

I think it should be noted that XP debt doesn't actually take anything away from you. It just slows your rate of improvement until you pay the debt off (this saps 50% of XP income). It's more of a slap on the wrists than a slap in the face and it really only becomes problematic if you die excessively and repeatedly at higher levels. Also the most debt you can acquire is half the amount it takes to level so the amount you're slowed by is capped and it would actually take some seriously learning FAIL to get to the point of having to pay off half an entire level's worth of XP before your XP rate returns to normal.

Furthermore, in a lot of scenarios you don't seem to take on any debt whatsoever. It seems like the more random and unexpected the death the less likely it is I acquire anything serious (e.g. turning a corner and walking right into a mob of purple enemies)

I'm not sure how much it takes away from the game to have zero consequences for death but I can't help but feel like there shouldn't be something. Without consequences you lose that "Oh crap!" factor when your health bar dips into that bottom third.

This seems like a pretty good compromise. You're not really punished severely for making mistakes early on but at really high levels where advancement slows to a crawl the stakes get higher, which is as it should be IMO.

Just popping in to post two little factoids I haven't yet seen anyone mention in this thread.

To-Hit: While the baseline to-hit value versus an even-conning enemy is 75%, level 1 characters are affected by what's known as Beginner's Luck. This manifests as a 15% bonus to to-hit, thereby giving a level 1 character a 90% chance to hit an even-con enemy. This bonus gradually decreases as a character levels, ending at level 20 with the character having the aforementioned 75% baseline to-hit.

XP debt: XP debt does not begin to accrue until a character is level 10. Also, the amount of XP debt you earn while on an instanced mission is half that of XP debt earned while street-sweeping.

Controllers become powerful usually quite late in the game 32+ normally. A Mind/Emp is without doubt one of the better team support toons but one of the least solo friendly ones.

I usually run at -1 x 8 up until 22 so it is a challenge due to sheer numbers but less incoming damage. It also is much easier TO HIT with a lower foe less defense!

Debt is nothing and less than nothing - if you log off overnight a full bar of debt will be nearly worked off. Also running at -1x8 it will clear a completely full bar in one mission or about that. It is the mindset of it - debt means you need a bit more time to learn your limitations.

Graphics - turn off bloom and depth of field. I hate these two settings and they just add fuzziness.

Other than that start with what I call the "fun" characters. They are easy to level. tough as nails and basically just fun to play.

Fun (to me) characters include:

Fire/Fire blaster
Claws/Electric or Claws/WP brute
Fire/Time controller
Willpower/Stone tank
Fire/Dark corruptor

These are the ones I will make if I join a new server as they level like crazy and can generate lots of influence and are FUN solo and in teams.