Champions Online: just doesn't cut it.

Uh...hmm.

I guess it was a couple weeks after the news of the shutdown at CoH so early to mid-September. It's been a while. But I played through the whole thing, got to fight some dudes on a space ship and this robot guy and the tentacle thing.

I did use these, healing potions (?), I guess that kept boosting my HP and used a lot of BLOCK to keep my endo charged up. It wasn't easy and I died constant and I'm pretty sure I paid $5 in actual cash to restore my star points. But I did get through the whole thing.

But like I said, I got my blaster on that mish now and I'm very much stuck at the first rescue at the downed space ship. BUT, I got me a friend who is gonna share my misery and surely we can team defeat it. We'll see.

E.

I just soloed Whiteout yesterday, start to finish, on a Wind/Force/Electrical character that has lots of knockback. I died twice, once when my Nemesis appeared while I was already fighting an AV, and once during the final confrontation where you spend all your time getting tossed around by the villain like a Barbie getting thrown around by a little brother. Getting killed was a blessing in disguise, because once you get out of the room you can attack from the doorway at range and avoid getting knocked around as much.

So, while there might be serious bugs that cause problems, it is possible to complete Whiteout solo at this point. However, I don't recommend that characters less than level 40 try to solo Whiteout and similar arcs, especially if you're new to the game.

In my relatively short experience with CO I have found its problems with knockback to be less serious that CoH's. After playing more than 100 levels on six or seven characters, I've only been unable to attack a character in a wall once. In CoH that problem occurs constantly, at least once every mission or two, especially on cave maps. I could still attack the target in CO with an PBAoE (Hurricane), much like you can in CoH, but in CoH not every power set has access to a PBAoE. That highlights another advantage of CO: you can get any power you want with freeform characters.

In general, CO's knockback is less instrusive than CoH's. You can use Hurricane non-stop in CO without causing massive problems for melee characters, especially since CO has numerous "closing" attacks that jump your character into melee range and do damage. That essentially turns your character into one big ranged weapon and gets you into melee range almost instantaneously.

For me, closing attacks make playing melee characters much more fun than they are in CoH. Other games, such as SWTOR, also have similar attacks. CoH only has "teleport" versions of such powers (Shield Rush and Lightning Rod), which require you to target an area with the mouse. With closing attacks you can attack flying targets easily, and if you're flying already you don't have to maneuver yourself to get in range.

Go Gold. You get 8 freeform character slots at the start for only $15 a month. I'd say that's a better deal than paying $50 for one.

I've got a $5 box code waiting for my two free slots to approach 40 so I can go gold, hit 40 and get the two free slots then go back to silver after the month is up, so I'd still need to shell out for the freeform if I wanted to keep playing it.

Cryptic can thank NCSoft for my new MMO stinginess. The less invested the less to be lost.*

I had been subscribed to both WoW (since retail) and CoH (since issue 13-14ish) continuously and about the only CoH thing I didn't buy was the origins pack so it's not like I didn't spend a fair bit on MMOs. Maybe once CO proves its staying power I might sub but that'll be awhile yet.

*I always figured CoH would just go into a maintenance purgatory mode. UO (my first MMO) is still running. The EQs are still around. What's the likelihood that they'd completely shutdown CoH...

Champions actually shines in comparison. It still has a fair amount of integrity and lives up to its silver age vision. The last few years had our game get all kinds of features that had no business being in CoH. You had bind on drop, endless currency proliferation, ridiculously long fights that you'd fire up a macro and walk away from, stupidly formed raid type content that all looked like it had been lifted from Game X for no other reason than game X is doing well.

Its better option and much cheaper to go GOLD and suscribe and try out GOLD features for some time...
Then if you go SILVER again with time, you can just buy the things you tried and you know you want for sure.
Anyways is better to stick with suscription.

I forcing myself to like this game, but I think I cant anymore.
Im going to unistall it.
Im going to miss my staff fighting so much and DCUO gives me some awesome fun combat and crazy combos with my staff character.

With the dopey, tongue-in-cheek Champions universe. Yay.

I'll respectfully disagree.

Except for this one...

I can see the store-bought stuff being bind-on to prevent abuse. But the Incarnate stuff bind-on was Just Bad.

How many forms of currency does Champions have right now?

Three tiers of "currency"
Questionite
Two (IIRC) forms of merits
And now Zen

Not to mention the absolutely recockulous prices of things

Which you don't get away from in CO. Plus the boring sameness of all the instanced content. They're all, more or less the same few maps with a different skin slapped on them.

I didn't mind the raid content. It's just that they couldn't follow up with enough of it fast enough for it to stop being an utter, soul-reaving grind.

The fact is, the league management tools, while meaning well, completely ignored how most people ACTUALLY form raids in this game, which is a leftover from the pre-league teaming paradigm.

Had some of these league management tools been made available MUCH earlier (as in several years ago), it probably would have been tweaked and become a much more integral part of large-scale raiding.

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

Yeah, there are many currencies it seem in CO. But stuff seems a lot more reasonable priced on the in game market than COX, and havent really paid attention to the paragon market prices to the compare of price of stuff on the market where the zen had to be used (Paragon market equivalent) but so far, I havent found anything expensive there and all relatively cheap.

But COX didnt exactly have large variety of maps either, especially when it was three-four years old. We have caves, office, sewers. Then they added futuristic office/lab, which kind of looked like a reskined office map just white, and more reskinned office and cave maps.

CO has office, warehouse, sewers, muesum/bank, cave, lab and probably a few more that I'm forgetting on each side.

About the same amount overall I think. Neither one is a paradigim of map variety. Although I think CO have more interesting looking maps and less maps that are large just to be large as if the only purpose was some dev showing off their map making skills (many CoT mission maps).

But the raid stuff made the game less casua and more and more like a grind fest on top of the crazy price of stuff on the black market and Wentworth.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

You miss the point. It's one thing to bolt on add hoc bits and pieces it's another to have them designed in. The trials from CoP on were all force fits. Endless incarnate currencies were all annoyingly obvious in their design to make you grind god forbid anyone got clever. Even merits were broken on arrival, without being able to roll the level you wanted. Bolting a jet engine onto an el camino doesn't make it an f15.


Really post I12 it was the devs saying make them grind and players saying F.T.N. Even the things that were great ideas never got perfected. AE ? Great idea release it broken let it wreak destruction then keep breaking it more. Incarnates ? Why not find all the really bad features of other games, players having to do gear checks, encourage ridiculously elitism, ultra uber bosses that take you out with a glance and bring them here.

People complained, they were dismissed usually derisively and then just left.

Strangely enough the closure brings with it an enormous upside. The wife isn't attached to the games we are playing now, when their devs have their heads rectally inserted we just switch to something new instead of trying to make it work, or arguing for fixes.

Wha?

Resources, Questionite, Drifter Salvage, Snakebucks, Nemesis Tokens, and four different levels of 'recognition'. And those are just the ones I know of.

Instead of Lead Tempest / Hurricane / Epidemic your way to victory?

Alerts vs DFB/DIB. Discuss.

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

Their chat and forums seem to be full of whinging about lowbies in alerts where that's not a problem with DfB.

I just got someone up to the apparent alert socially acceptable minimum level of 18 and I'm still not sure I want to try them since a> not 40 b> not purpled c> never done them before which, at least to initial appearance, makes their use as an alternate leveling path questionable.

With DfB the worst that could happen was a badge run gets screwed up on the first badge and since you exemplar to level 2 - 6(?) no one cares what your natural level is.

Most people over 20 are fine for Smash alerts. The problem is the difficulty varies *wildly* to the point on nonsense; on some, I could bring in a level 15 character with a decent build and tank it and we could probably finish with no character being much above level 20. Others will find most people below level 30 being more of a liability than anything else. However, both of these give the same rewards and they change randomly through the day; while someone who is new to the game or relatively inexperienced might be fine doing one Smash alert, suddenly it changes and they're now dying repeatedly and doing virtually no damage. You have to know the powers of the various bosses as well as how much difficulty the scenario itself adds, which is silly to ask of people who may not have even seen some of the rarer bosses. In addition, there is very little incentive for level 40s to even be running those alerts; the bosses have a tiny chance to drop costume items, but that's about it.

Then there are the Nemesis alerts, which suffer from blatantly poor planning; scaling up a Nemesis sometimes results in an easy target and other times results in something nearly unkillable for a lot of people. Of course, then there's the other issue where, if there's anyone in the group who doesn't have a Nemesis it will still sometimes choose them and create a generic (and fairly irritating) Nemesis instead of using the Nemesis of one of the four other people who should have one. On the upside, at least those *do* attract 40s properly, but even that's not enough sometimes if the boss has a health drain or the like. I ended up changing my tank's Nemesis because it was almost silly how few groups could beat it even if it couldn't even dent my health bar.

Finally, this assumes the Alert team up tool doesn't only give you four people due to either crashes or other bugs. Also, it's possible to make one of the smashes-- Trainstopping-- impossible to complete. Basically, I'd take DFB/DiB any day of the week over the Alerts. It honestly looks like they released a proof of concept build as the final version given the lack of balance and thought put into it.