MMOgrinder reviews City of Heroes
By
80sBaby,
Posted on: 2011-12-29 07:19 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Sorry if you feel attacked. I think Arcana is right; the Internet is feral. People around here do sometimes flame each other, but most of it is pillow fighting rather than the kind of conflict I've seen in other games.
I do hope you stick with this game for a while. I've played some of the games you've reviewed, and while they are all different, I find most of them stick pretty heavily to the standard model of MMO. When I started playing CoH I was determined to never play another MMO again, because they all seemed the same to me. I was recruited by a friend to play for the free month and was initially unimpressed. It wasn't until about a month in that it "hit" me how different this game really is.
For one, the various power sets really are substantially different from each other, and, truthfully, in a lot of cases totally different than anything out there in the MMO market. I hope you get a chance to play around with some of this. Check out sets like Kinetics, a support set with a heal that requires you to bounce an attack roll off of an enemy. Look at Ice Control, a set that does up-close crowd control using a constantly running PBAoE.
Moreover, I think part of CoHs success is that it is both accessible and extremely deep/complicated at the same time. The powers initially seem pretty straightforward. But the more you learn about them, the more you realize you will never know everything about them. The way powers interplay, the ways you can slot them, the surprising or hidden benefits or penalties that are in there, make this game suitable for numbers-hounds to pour over and investigate for hours and hours. But the powers are still understandable enough that most new players can understand their basic functions pretty quickly...
...and players like me can play around with a tool like Mids' Hero Designer forever, whether for my own characters or for someone else, planning every small detail of a build in order to make it capable of truly amazing things. Most amazing of all? You may very well be the only person in the entire game with that build, and it is substantially different than what other people are using, beyond a few percents here or a few seconds there like I find in other games.
EDIT: One other thing I hope you stick around to experience is how responsive the developers of CoH are. I think in a lot of ways this game makes it clear that it belongs to the players. A good portion of loyalty to CoH probably has to do with the willingness of the developers to work with the community to implement features it would like to see.
Very cool of you to come here and answer people's questions about the review though, kudos.
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First of all, welcome to the game and welcome to the forums.
You'd be most welcome on Union to roleplay as well since it's the Unofficial EU roleplay server, sadly I don't think the times would match up due to the EU/US timezones.
Starting out at low level, the attacks are fairly slow, as you mentioned the lack of an auto-attack aka 'white damage' prelevant in other MMOs makes it feel slower at low level. Combat gets faster and faster as you gain more attacks until you've established your attack chain where your constantly hitting buttons, which you are in most other MMOs.
However in addition to that, CoH has something that most MMOs don't have, the ability to enhance the recharge of those powers to an almost absurd degree. Buzzsaw builds or Perma-Phantom Army require something along the lines of 160-200% recharge enhancement (though Invention sets) but a fully kitted out Buzzsaw Dark Melee brute or Scrapper is something to behold.
At lower levels, the attack chains are very sluggish, especially if you go the route most build makers suggest in skipping your tier 1 attacks (fast but light hitting, useless at low levels, not so at high levels) for the tier 2 attacks (moderate recharge with moderate damage) which are useful at high levels.
Some, of course, never get out of being sluggish, trading slow hitting for larger damage (Broadsword, Warmace, Battle axe mainly).
You are correct that there is no 'facing', if you are in range and fire off an attack, the character will automatically spin in place and aim at mob to fire off the attack.
As JB mentioned, you're using Training Enhancements, to be fair, most veteran players never even bother with slotting them, once you hit level 12 and Dual Origin Enhancements open up, then you'll see a noticable difference and at level 22 with Single Origin enhancements you'll notice a huge difference, especially if you slot your attacks with 1 accuracy and 3 damage Single Origin enhancements. That boosts the power with an additional 95% damage, almost doubling what it would do normally (obvious statement is obvious I know).
Example: Unslotted Frostbreath at level 50 is 87 damage, with three damage SOs at an even level it becomes 170 damage.
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Ah, so the reviewer is posting on the boards? Nice.|
Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
But please. Ask me specifics and I'll gladly explain myself. |
To clarify my other post, I'm just rather ignorant of the whole MMO market of today. I stopped playing random MMOs so no idea how fast or slow paced they are.
I played several martial arts MMOs last year or so and they seemed slow compared to CoH. Combat may be 'clicky' and slower at first, but movement more than makes up for that, IMO. Lots of movement options sooner, to supplement the content...
And perhaps the vet/origin attacks have spoiled me as I always have click powers in the early levels, although my newest TW/WP scrapper didn't bother using anything but brawl and throwing dagger as extras this time around, even without momentum, I didn't feel that hampered in active speed.
Yeah, in summary: CoH doesn't feel slow to me at all...but then I don't have much frame of reference except old MMOs of the past...which weren't fast either.
One misconception worth dispelling is the one about the global cooldown in other MMOs imposing an overall "slowdown" of attack rate. This is significantly mitigated by the existance of "instant" abilities that can be fired off even while in the middle of another attack animation (the system fires it off and applies its effects immediately, even if the animations haven't "caught up" visually yet). This lends a sense of non-stop attacks in other MMOs. CoX has nothing like this, and it is the primary reason why its combat feels like slow motion compared to all the other MMOs out there.
DCU is different still in that its combat system is inherited, conceptually, from console fighting games. The left and right mouse buttons activate melee and ranged attacks, respectively, that have zero cooldown time and usually very fast animation times. This means you can attack more or less as fast as you can click your mouse buttons (or your game controller buttons). The constant barrage of attacks can be quite shocking to watch, though it should be said that those attacks are not always the most effective to use at any given moment (especially in PvP), and that's where the "power tray" attacks come in. They provide all kinds of additional side effects which are sometimes more useful than the damage they cause (like buffs).
The point is that combat definitely feels slower in CoX than in other MMOs and there are very easily identified causes for this. However, once a toon gets high enough level to be able to cut down recharge time significantly, the attacks get fired off fast and furiously (unless slowed, of course) and CoX stands behind nobody in the combat pace department.
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This sounds like two different objections. The first is rooting: being unable to move while also attacking simultaneously. And a conflation of "clicks" with "spells."|
Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
Button pushing is normal among many MMO's, but in the case of CoH, you literally have no other form of attack. To a player coming from another MMO, this is baffling, and they are used to be able to at least attack physically, either with a melee or ranged manner. Physical attacks usually don't do much damage, (depending on class, of course) but it allows both a sense of actually physically fighting your opponent. In the case of a ranged "spellcaster" this might not be much different, as you still have to stay in place for many spells. (There are a few instant cast abilities that allow movement while being cast, however.) But for a melee class, it comes across as outright baffling to just stand there and let an enemy beat on you while you are essentially waiting to decide if you want to stab them again. Melee attack skills usually don't have any sort of, as I've heard it called "root time", so you can move around at will. I have been told that there's no "facing" in this game, but being stuck in place so often will seem outright restricting to players coming from another game.
My best example for wanting to move around while attacking? In the video at one point a Hellion tosses a torch at me, causing me to have to move out of the fire. It's a common practice that standing in the fire is bad, so being essentially "stuck there" because I'm mid casting feels confining. If as a ranged caster in other games, you are mid casting, and you suddenly find yourself in a plume of fire, you just... step out of it and start the cast over again. Not to mention the damage done by spells in those games is usually much higher. I will give credit the the "superhero" aspect of the game, that even as a blaster you can hold your own against a lot of enemies, and really helps the feel of being a powerful character. Trying the same in other MMO games will get you killed outright.... unless you really know what you're doing. |
Second one first: in City of Heroes, most attacks are basically activated powers. The exception are damaging auras that you emit continuously from yourself (that basically pulse damage periodically while they are toggled on and do not require any additional action on the part of the player) and things like pets (which obviously attack on their own: in City of Heroes this includes an array of "pseudo-pets" that aren't exactly pets, but attack separate from the player: castable gun turrets, for example).
I take it then that your preference is for an attack system where your character just "autoattacks" on its own, and clicks are reserved for "special" attacks? I ask because that seems to be to be a less active, not more active combat system and I would normally equate that with a less fast paced, not more fast paced combat system. Its a reasonable preference, it just seems to be an odd way of describing it.
First one second: rooting is controversial in City of Heroes. Most players that have seen MMOs without movement rooting often find the rooting we have to be constraining. But there's a catch. In most MMOs the notion of significant travel and movement ability doesn't exist. In City of Heroes, we can superspeed at 70 miles an hour to a target, attack it, and then zip 70 mph in the opposite direction and hit a different target, with just a short period of travel suppression that slows you down when you attack. And that's only for actual travel powers. We can create characters that use powers that affect movement but aren't literal travel powers like sprint (which is faster than most MMOs best case ground-travel speed) and swift and be able to move very fast on the battlefield when not attacking.
Do you feel that rooting is sufficiently harsh that its too high a cost for being otherwise able to move very fast when not specifically attacking. In other words, do you feel that always moving slowly but never rooted is better than being rooted when attacking but being able to move around in and into combat very quickly? Because that's sort of the trade off City of Heroes makes: for obvious reasons we cannot have both high unsuppressed movement and no rooting: we'd be able to dance circles around the critters and kite them without them being able to catch us. I noticed in your review video there were times when you paused, then jumped quickly back into the fight. I'm guessing that was without even trying to boost your movement rate. Imagine having twice or three times that ability, in exchange for rooting. Is it in your opinion not a good trade in terms of having good combat flow?
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The rooting is something that definitely came as a shock to me, having played some other games first that didn't do anything like that -- quite the opposite, you could always move, but it would just interrupt your cast time abilities.|
Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
But for a melee class, it comes across as outright baffling to just stand there and let an enemy beat on you while you are essentially waiting to decide if you want to stab them again. Melee attack skills usually don't have any sort of, as I've heard it called "root time", so you can move around at will. I have been told that there's no "facing" in this game, but being stuck in place so often will seem outright restricting to players coming from another game.
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For the most part, it's not an issue. There are very few "move or die" scenarios in this game, and most of them are in the incarnate trials (level 50+ content). Even then you usually have enough time to move, though once you get into the habit of queuing up attacks to form a seamless chain it can get a little difficult.
Long time CoH players tend to game the system a bit. They do things like jump at an angle right before using an attack with a long animation -- the momentum carries you even while you're "rooted". I think it's fair to say that most people enjoy the game in spite of rooting rather than because of it.
The developers seem to believe that it's an important balance consideration, though, so I wouldn't expect a major change in the way that it works.
Tangent: As a few people mentioned, "Haste" works the exact opposite here than it does in games like WoW. You can never reduce the cast time of your attacks: that's fixed and tied to the animation. You can, however, reduce the recharge (or cooldown) of them, and use your big hitters much more often. By the time you're in the mid to late 20s or 30s, you should be able to use your abilities continuously with no pauses.
If you need a filler until then, you can hold control and click on Brawl to make it fire automatically, simulating an auto-attack.
Only thing that I disagreed with is the Slow Combat.
Maybe up to lvl 10 or 14...but after that, I don't see it...especially now with inherent Stamina.
I hate WoW's combat...click on a spell...watch it "activate" for 5 seconds and hope it goes off before you get hit and get "interrupted."
To me, it'd be liking using CoH's snipe powers/activation for every power....ugh 
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The question is, is that really a problem? In PvE at least?|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
But there's a catch. In most MMOs the notion of significant travel and movement ability doesn't exist. In City of Heroes, we can superspeed at 70 miles an hour to a target, attack it, and then zip 70 mph in the opposite direction and hit a different target
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Hit and run hardly seems like the most efficient way to deal damage. Even if you could play that way, would you? Yes it may be safer, but that comes at a cost of lowing your damage output. I don't necessarily see a problem there.
I almost feel like it's one of those holdovers that don't make as much sense today as they once did.
To me, it really runs counter to what they've been trying to do in trials; getting people to do more than stand there and cycle attack chains until all the enemies are dead.
They want people moving, they want things to be more dynamic, but the old mechanics and limitations beat that out of players.
I honestly don't see any unconquerable problems if they did let players move around more freely, and I think it a little hypocritical to punish players in trials for doing what the game levels 1-50 has spent the last eight years reinforcing. If it was my call, it'd ditch rooting and suppression.
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Based on his replies in this thread, I'd say this ended up as a win for COH. In clarifying parts of his review, he's said he enjoyed the game, and doesn't usually go on to play the games he reviews. But, apparently based solely on in-game experiences had during the making of his review, he's decided to continue playing COH as time allows. He's also seen what we have to offer as far as community goes, both on the forums and in-game, both good and bad, and still wants to continue playing. He even went as far as giving out his global to us all here.
... I don't really know what my point is here, just that it kinda gives me warm fuzzies inside to know we (used in general here cuz I didn't do crap) hooked another one in.
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would just like to point out that you've carried yourself much better than the previous "reviewer" that came to the boards around a year ago.
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Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
But please. Ask me specifics and I'll gladly explain myself.
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The fact that melee toons can't pick up objects and turn them into improvisational ranged attacks almost guarantees that they will forever fight up close and personal 99.9% of the time (the only time my brute ever needs to move during combat is if my target runs, staggers, or gets knocked away). Everyone else stays a good, safe distance from most mobs, and moving around a lot is rarely necessary when getting most enemies within effective attack range is so trivial.
Moving during combat, even if you remove rooting and suppression, rarely helps tactically anyway since the moment you see an attack coming it is too late to do anything about it; the game engine has already computed the to-hit mechanics and applied the damage, and you get hit and damaged no matter what you do movement-wise (e.g., every time I fly out of the SSA #1 CoT caves to leave, a good five or six uneventful seconds go by while the game engine figures out how/when to show the Igneous rock hitting animation that was computed back when I was in the corridor with them--I know better than to think that flying by them and having nothing happen for that long means I managed to evade them).
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Obviously not given the unsupressed movement of Speed Boosts and such.
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Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
The question is, is that really a problem? In PvE at least?
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WoW is pretty toxic. Not really the game itself, but the community. So many people have had such bad experiences there that there's a lot of knee-jerk hatred toward the game.
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Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
Don't know why the mere mention of WoW causes such rage.... still.
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I feel starting combat is slow even with 3 veteran powers - 2 wands and sands of mu. I don't want to imagine what it would be like with only brawl, the origin power, and one wimpy attack.
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Originally Posted by Tyger42
WoW is pretty toxic. Not really the game itself, but the community. So many people have had such bad experiences there that there's a lot of knee-jerk hatred toward the game.
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I think part of the reason is also that the games don't really compare. They both have levels. They are both RPGs. Your powers are mostly based on stats/enhancements and not physical skill. But beyond not much really matches. So, I think there may be some suspicion when the games are compared that the reviewer didn't really understand CoH, similar to when anyone in CoH uses the word "healer" or demands a tank. I don't know whether that's justified in this case, since I think this review was fair. But I do think being a good at CoH requires you to un-learn many of the lessons picked up in other games. In some ways its almost easier to train a totally new player than an experienced MMO-er, who arrives with his or her own assumptions. I know there was plenty I personally had to forget in order to make the adjustment.
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I seem to recall that one of the reasons for suppression in pve was due to people queueing attacks and straffing, and with enough recharge, were defeating encounters with a high degree of minium risk. |
Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
The question is, is that really a problem? In PvE at least?
Hit and run hardly seems like the most efficient way to deal damage. Even if you could play that way, would you? Yes it may be safer, but that comes at a cost of lowing your damage output. I don't necessarily see a problem there. I almost feel like it's one of those holdovers that don't make as much sense today as they once did. . |
Many players tried to reason that there were quite a few AT powerset combos that let them defeat difficult encounters with minumum risk, but were put down stating that players that stayed in melee were still at more risk, or at least engaging in the contect the way it was intended.
Some of the talk in game at the time and note this is probably rumor, it basically came down to people saying that there was a way to do things that allowed people to gain xp at an extraordinary rate (this was pre AE, snowbeast babies, etc...days) so take that as you will.
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Sorry. Didn't intend that in a "OMG! N000000B!" way. I was responding to someone saying "There should be a "tell" for that" with "There is". Like I've said, even I was kinda stumped the first time I ran through it.|
Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
That was my second time in Manticore's Mansion where they do include the arrow since I'd already been through the door once. I didn't record it on my first run through.
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| Also hello, everyone. Feel free to ask me anything about about why I said what I said. You seem way more civil than the Facebook page has been. |
Honestly, I think the review was fairly kind to the CoH, considering you haven't spent an appreciable portion of your life memorizing the ParagonWiki and have limited exposure to the game.
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Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
Don't know why the mere mention of WoW causes such rage.... still.
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| If people feel I shorted this game... I probably did. This review took place during Christmas, and I was almost late with it. I literally finished it two days ago, having gotten sick during the holidays, when I didn't have somewhere to be. |
*Hides original build with 6-slotted Brawl in the Locker of Shame*
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| If you think I sound unenthusiastic... that's how I talk. It takes a while for people to get used to it. I know. Watch some of my other videos if you haven't. Eden Eternal was another overwhelmingly positive review I did, so if you think I was sounding distant and harsh... well there ya go. |
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Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
Button pushing is normal among many MMO's, but in the case of CoH, you literally have no other form of attack. To a player coming from another MMO, this is baffling, and they are used to be able to at least attack physically, either with a melee or ranged manner. Physical attacks usually don't do much damage, (depending on class, of course) but it allows both a sense of actually physically fighting your opponent. In the case of a ranged "spellcaster" this might not be much different, as you still have to stay in place for many spells. (There are a few instant cast abilities that allow movement while being cast, however.) But for a melee class, it comes across as outright baffling to just stand there and let an enemy beat on you while you are essentially waiting to decide if you want to stab them again. Melee attack skills usually don't have any sort of, as I've heard it called "root time", so you can move around at will. I have been told that there's no "facing" in this game, but being stuck in place so often will seem outright restricting to players coming from another game.
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The difference in this game is that baseline, characters ARE tougher than they are in other MMOs. So running into a group and shaking hands with their face is an eminently do-able proposition here, even with "squishies", where in other games people start mentioning a guy by the name of Jenkins...
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| My best example for wanting to move around while attacking? In the video at one point a Hellion tosses a torch at me, causing me to have to move out of the fire. It's a common practice that standing in the fire is bad, so being essentially "stuck there" because I'm mid casting feels confining. If as a ranged caster in other games, you are mid casting, and you suddenly find yourself in a plume of fire, you just... step out of it and start the cast over again. Not to mention the damage done by spells in those games is usually much higher. |
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| Enhancing super powers rather than relying on gear and talent trees to do the job for you is ingenious. Yes, at an early standpoint it's a negligible amount, especially for free-players to really notice a difference. I augmented Frost Breath (my Blaster's most high damage attack) with a ton of power enhancements, and I barely felt it made a difference. It's still a really good idea, as I can't count to number of Spells I had in WoW that I didn't even want to upgrade, or being forced to wear very specific pieces of gear in order to function properly in several situations, making my character a carbon copy of every other character like them. It's only gotten worse. CoH lets you be YOU.... or superhero you, at least. |
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| As I said at the end of the last reply, it's a superhero game, It'd be weird not to be able to take out a ton of characters at once. But I can see from a gameplay standpoint why people wouldn't like it, but then again, if people don't like, they can just not play it. Why wouldn't you want your superhero to BE a superhero? |
And we get into the alignment system...
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Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
That's a question I get most often when I do MMO Grinder. (Well, not specifically leveling to 50, but you know what I mean.)
The issue is with me, I don't really play the MMO I review after I've finished it, but this game got not only myself, but quite a few of my friends interested in it. The guy in the green suit with the lightning powers I was playing alongside was a friend of mine who absolutely ADORES this game, and it pulled him out of the rut he was having with CoH. I also really want an MMO that I can actively roleplay in, and this game was just that. Meeting "The Dawn Patrol" was fascinating, and seeing characters like "Iron Goliath" transform from a young woman into her giant mech suit was just awesome to me. WoW's roleplay is dead, as Blizzard's enforcement of the RP policies amounts to "Cool story, bro." So I definitely want to get my character transferred onto Virtue and keep working on her (especially since my villain Violetshade rarely talks.) Of course I have MAGfest next week. All in due time. I'm fully willing to stick with the game and keep going until I reach max level, but I won't have all that much time to devote to it with the show and all. Global BTW, is @Ciann_Magnol (does that have an underscore or not. Either way, it's the same name as my main Ciann Magnol) |
Also, if you decide you want to test out what the sub-side looks like, I suggest you check out this guide. Like Amazon, if you gotta pay for something, nobody said you had to pay list price.
Also, a few links for you to make life easier (if you haven't got them already).
http://paragonwiki.com
ParagonWiki is essentially THE go-to place for all your CoH info needs. Warning! PW is RIDICULOUSLY comprehensive! This can spoil things if you compulsively use wikis like a user-productivity virus. Pretty much every user-available command, option, contact, task force, etc, etc, et-freakin-cetera is in here. If you wanna know, this is the first place to go. If it ain't there, you either mis-typed, misunderstood what you were searching for, or it's some piece of BRAND FRICKING NEW esoterica that just hasn't made it in (YET!)
http://www.cohplanner.com/
This is where you can get Mids' Hero Designer.
It's a build planner so you can work out, in advance, power choices, slotting, and even specific enhancements. All without wasting a single precious Inf on gear in the game.
You have a metric butt-ton (as opposed to those wimpy imperial butt-tons) of options here. Including import and export functions so you can share builds on various forums.
http://cit.cohtitan.com/sentinel/
Titan Sentinel is a tool for pulling your current build directly out of the game so you can import it into Mids'.
http://www.cohtitan.com/
CoHTitan is the Titan network. It's the host for Mids', the ParagonWiki, and several other HIGHLY useful sites for CoH. They're good guys who bust their donkeys delivering to the community.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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Heh, I think I may have been one of the first people to suggest you review City of Heroes, back before it was on your list when you first made the site |
Originally Posted by MMO_Grinder
My best example for wanting to move around while attacking? In the video at one point a Hellion tosses a torch at me, causing me to have to move out of the fire. It's a common practice that standing in the fire is bad, so being essentially "stuck there" because I'm mid casting feels confining. If as a ranged caster in other games, you are mid casting, and you suddenly find yourself in a plume of fire, you just... step out of it and start the cast over again. Not to mention the damage done by spells in those games is usually much higher.
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That said, I think you've run into something of an unfortunate problem with City of Heroes - the original game was designed with zero regard for animation times, so some powers were made blindingly fast while others terribly slow, and it's not always the one you'd think would be fast or slow that actually are. The original balance only took into consideration recharge and damage (for attacks, at least) and balanced around that, as if expecting that you will always be bound by recharge. The thing, though - and you can't really tell this until you hit level 26 or 32 - is that when you get enough attacks, something magical happens. You suddenly have enough attacks to just cycle them endlessly without ever having to stop. Especially on your Blaster, you'll end up having upwards of 10 attacks, which is so many you will literally not have time in the day to use them all, with most standing around unused, waiting for the appropriate situation.
And on the notion of rooting, I actually consider this a good thing, and for a couple of reasons. For one, rooting allows attacks to be long without having to be ugly. I've seen games that allow you to move and attack at the same time, and to avoid bringing up other MMOs, I'll bring up the 2000 game Rune. In there, your torso and your legs are separate, allowing your lower body to run irrespective of the way your upper body swings. What this results in is both a very ugly combat system and a very dumb combat system. A lot of the time, you have to sort of time your attacks so that you're moving towards your enemy only as your attack is in mid swing and you're running back the rest of the time, producing this sort of "juggling" combat.
Worse still, having your body parts move independently of each other just looks BAAAD. I know other MMOs have done it, and I've hated it there, too. Especially with melee attacks, a lot of the apparent power comes not just from flailing your arms, but also from your lower back and your legs and your overall stance. My usual example here is: Try to imagine that you had to run backwards at speed and swing at a person in front of you, himself running towards you. Try and imagine how goofy that would look. That's how these types of combat systems actually look. When you disconnect torso from legs and turn your waist into nothing more than a transition zone, you lose the beauty and fluidity inherent in the motions of the human body. What you end up with is, in essence, a shooter that you're trying to melee in, and that very rarely looks good from a third person perspective.
Now, I get that you dislike being stuck in fire or being unable to catch a fleeing enemy or being sapped to death by Protean's Power Syphon because Total Focus takes three and a half years to connect. I've been there, too. But as you say, City of Heroes is actually pretty lenient about this. The need for precise timing combined with precise positioning isn't great, and where it shows up, you're usually given ample time to react. The irrationally popular Death From Below Trial (level one to level, what? 10? 20?) has this right at the end, where the two Hydra Heads summon either a vortex or a bubble under you, and you have to move away before it triggers and either hurts or debuffs you. The thing is, this gives you something on the neighbourhood of 5-10 seconds to react, and that's enough to cover pretty much any animation you can't interrupt.
Speaking of which, being able to cancel your own animation with movement might sound like a benefit, but it is a curse. I don't know what your ping time is, but mine's around 300, which means that I have to stand perfectly still for something like half a second before I try to use interruptible powers, and then I have to wait an extra half second to ensure I don't move too early. Being able to interrupt your powers would make the game system far more demanding on a player controls level, because right now, you can be sloppy and it'll still work. Queue up an attack, run past your enemy and it WILL trigger at some point. Because you can't interrupt it, you don't have to worry about interrupting it.
That's how I see it, anyway.
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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.
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Without rooting there's no penalty to moving at all: in the days before suppression even rooting wasn't a big penalty.|
Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
The question is, is that really a problem? In PvE at least?
Hit and run hardly seems like the most efficient way to deal damage. |
And critter AI used to cause an even bigger problem than that: until not that long ago, running around in circles around a spawn reduced their damage output by over 50%. That's been mitigated, but I don't know if its been solved. This was so dramatic that I didn't really discuss it much on the open forums because it was bordering on an exploit, but I know I'm not the only person to have noticed this oddity.
What we have now allows for hit and run, but without rooting you can have hit while running, and that's potentially bad. Separate from on-paper AoE calculations that only matter to 0.1% of the players, it allows for a lot of tactical options that aren't or at least weren't intended.
Replacing rooting with suppression would solve some of those problems, but there's another catch: in this game we have very powerful and long-duration movement affecting powers, like slows or speed buffs. Our buff/debuff system can interact unexpectedly with changes like this: its pulling one thread that then starts unravelling others.
Keep in mind I'm all in favor of rootless combat that's balanced in theory: that's just going to be very tricky and time consuming in City of Heroes because its not just about eliminating the root.
This past weekend I was lightsabering my way through an unnamed MMO when I realized something I didn't fully appreciate until just then. Among the many, many good thing this game does in terms of promoting casual teaming, one of the least appreciated of them is travel powers.
It sounds almost too stupid to say out loud, but you can't team with people if you can't get to where they are. If you're a level 20 and you want to team with your level 40 buddies, supersidekicking enables you to do so without having to suffer a huge combat penalty, but the only way that's going to happen at all is if you can get to where they are when they invite you. And I do not have to imagine what it is like when you are in an MMO where when you invite someone for team content that requires additional team members, you may have to wait as much as five or ten *minutes* for them to reach your spot. *Per person*.
Super speed, super jump, recall friend - we literally take distance almost completely for granted in this game. We complain when the vault is not in the same building as the market. If it takes more than one minute for a team mate to arrive we wonder if they've been disconnected.
The way in which each game's features - and even its design flaws - interact can be very tangled and far-reaching.
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Hear, hear. After spending time on a planet of conflict where a flight from the north of a continent to the south of the same continent could easily take over 10 minutes of AFK-worthy time, I've come to appreciate, and indeed become completely spoiled by, the speed of travel in this game.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Super speed, super jump, recall friend - we literally take distance almost completely for granted in this game. We complain when the vault is not in the same building as the market. If it takes more than one minute for a team mate to arrive we wonder if they've been disconnected.
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Seriously, I saw a video from a competing heroic product showing off their version of "Super Speed". My first thoughts occurred simultaneously: "Pretty effects," and "Oh, that looks slow."
In the age of mission teleporters and Ouroboros Portals at level 14, we waste next to no time getting where we want to be. And yet I still find myself sighing when I get a hunt mission in Boomtown and have to zone twice to get there. Oh, the humanity!
The interesting thing about City of Heroes is that this is a game where distance really doesn't matter. Between the tools that players have from their own powers, the way the game's transportation works and all the many esoteric transportation methods on top of that, there really is no place in the game that you can't get to within about a minute, if your rig loads zones reasonably fast. Yes, that's including the Shadow Shard, if we presume players will use the cop-out teleporters and the cheap jet packs, or just know how to use the geysers.
I remember a friend of mine playing Lineage II and fighting in some cave somewhere. I believe he mentioned needing to return to the nearest town for something, but being unable to. I asked him why he didn't just use the Scroll of Recall that I know he had (which would return him to the last town he's visited nearly instantly) and he replied something to the effect of "Yeah, but do you have any idea how long it would take me to get back here?" I don't recall the eyeball estimate he gave me, but I recall guessing at 15 minutes and him scoffing and shaking his head.
If there's one praise that I can easily and unquestionably give to City of Heroes, it's that this is by FAR the most convenient game I have ever played. Worlds and worlds apart from even its nearest competitors. Yes, part of it is that I'm just so used to this game, but it's still the one game that pisses me off the LEAST
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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.
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Very fair review overall. One question I have is how much did you get to explore City of Villains/the Rogue Islands?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
This past weekend I was lightsabering my way through an unnamed MMO when I realized something I didn't fully appreciate until just then. Among the many, many good thing this game does in terms of promoting casual teaming, one of the least appreciated of them is travel powers.
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This is something I agree that other MMOs should learn fom City of Heroes. Not the travel powers specifically, but that ease of gathering affects willingness to do it.
Another big one in my mind that's often overlooked is the drop system. In City of Heroes, when loot drops, its yours; you got it. Other games go the "realistic" route of having the drop be a physical object that all team members have to decide ownership of, whether by rolling for it or just fighting over it. Can you imagine how different teaming would be if we all had to fight each other over who got the Very Rare drop in a trial, or who got to keep the purple Armageddon or Ragnarok drop? It's interesting that such subtle design differences have such a large impact on player experience and the desirability of teams.
The fact that we can bring 8 players instead of 4 or 5 to a mission also IMO is a huge part of what allows the game to be so casual friendly. You rarely need a "perfect" person to fill any role because chances are any combo of 8 will seal most major issues. I find in CoH it takes less time to gather 8 players than most MMOs to gather 4, because everyone is so specialized and you can't burn a team slot on someone who isn't "ideal."
Both of those are things that a lot of players hate, but have grown to put up with and aren't expected to ever change.
Some people want to be challenged by a bunch of thugs with knives and pistols. Some people want to punch out 50' tall robots and toss cars around. The game doesn't always serve both as well is it could, and IMO, tends to favor the first group and neglect the second.
Your mileage may vary.
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