More MMOs need to have a combat system like this game.

I liked this system overall. There were obvious things that showed age though.

Pro's-
1.Fight more then two enemies at once!! ZOMG this is so beyond most games it is crazy.
2.Lots of effects, dmg types, secondary effects, etc. Some were more important then others, but thats ok anyway. In the end, IMO, the devs for the most part had figured out how to make powers with potent secondary effects balanced with those without. For the most part.
3. Escape! Holy crap, most MMO's, you cant run away. At least, your odds are really bad that you will survive a retreat. I have never understood this, especially when leaving foes usually resets their health. In CoH, you could flip on a travel power, or even TP right out of the hot zone if you needed to, and most of the time had a good chance to survive and recoup.
4. masterminds. havent really come across anything quite like them elsewhere.
5. Force multipliers. Sure, there are buffers/healzorz in other games, but I havent come across any other game where you had the freedom to totally neuter your foes and make your team into gods at the same time like in CoH. Inother games, it is too unpredictable, meses with the formulas too much, might make pvp issues, whatever. CoH? Who cares, it's fun, let's do it.
6. Difficulty system. Evenas somewhat limited as it is here, I havent found anything like it elsewhere. probably closely tied to that "you can only fight one ravenous racoon at a time" rule.
7. and finally, the enemies here. I like fighting thugs, mutants etc. I dont like fighting for my life, in a 2 minute epic battle against a ravenous racoon. I mean c'mon. IRL I am 6 foot 260 lbs, and i could kill a racoon with a stick. Why my Conan sized warrior almost dies in a drawn out epic fight when he has a razor edged sword and armor on I will never understand.

The cons:
1. mez is binary. I think this was an engine/system limitation. I think a newer game with better system code could have made mez effective and totally not binary.
2. rooting. again, likely could be removed with an updated code.
3. binary accuracy. They masked this well, or as well as could be done I suppose. Really though there should have been a middle ground, where blows could be partially deflected and whatnot. Damage would have varied, which would have totally eliminated the 1-2-3-1-4-1-etc attack chain monotony. the system they had wasnt really awful though.
4.endo bar. dont think there was a way to really improve it within the current system. but newer games did it better in some ways. IMO, I think this might be the one thing CO did better at, at least in the after battle recovery style- there is a lot less downtime in that game.


The only other thing I thought CoH ever lacked were enemies that used buff/debuff sets effectively. It would be really tricky to stick them in at this point, but if there were tsoo sorcerers of a type more often in fights, it would have really mixed things up more. Again, not really a con.


Overall, I dont think a pure port over of this system would be the right way to go for any game. BUT, man, there is a lot other games could learn from CoH. I sure will miss this game.

The problems with CO are not the game mechanics. The game mechanics are fine, if a little uninspired.

The problem with CO is the attitude. The graphics, all the mission content, and it seems the entire world exists to parody the superhero genre. Almost every mission contains a winking joke about how lame everything is. "Ha, hah, isn't this lame? Everything you accomplish, it's so lame. Isn't it hilarious how lame you are?" It's like playing a pen-and-paper game with an annoying sarcastic hipster as your Game Master. The makers of CO are jaded and resentful of the superhero genre, and it shows.

An occasional joke at the genre's expense is okay. But CO is just overladen with them. If you're not going to take your genre seriously, pick a different one. (Maybe they did, with Star Trek Online. I don't know, I haven't tried it yet. Did they take space opera seriously?)

I have no idea how they thought that attitude was a good idea. It certainly doesn't encourage players. The players that kind of vicious sarcasm *does* attract...well, that's another problem.

I very much enjoyed CoH's combat system. There were a few things that did it for me:

1) Positioning engages an appropriate amount of twitch skills. You must align yourself for optimal use of cones, to force AI patterns of behavior and to limit the damage types you are exposed to or keep enemies in aura radius. This is made more interesting by the wide variety of positioning tools available; I find knockback in this game incredibly fun.

2) It let you be extremely overpowered. My force field defender has 90% damage mitigation in the vast majority of circumstances, with 97.5% against the game's most common damage type. He can give 90% mitigation to the whole team. Controllers can permanently lock down entire groups. Masterminds can summon an endless stream of minions who are individually reasonably strong. Blasters can nuke entire spawns to death in a single shot. In SWTOR, the calculated damage mitigation for a tank with the best end-game gear is something like 70%-ish vs. common damage types.

3) It has a difficulty slider. This is very important because of point 2, but is good in general. People have wildly varying skills, and being able to adjust the game so that it remains challenging to you is extremely important. Lacking this feature has killed my interest in many other games, including SWTOR. They fail to provide an appropriate challenge because while they have much better balancing than CoH, if your skill level is above or below average, you're stuck; you can't adjust the difficulty to make the game more fun.

Seriously! CO is Freedom Force with a budget.