Champions Online: The Thread

[Rahvin]

One good trick for when you do need to grind (and you will at some point, until they fix the fucked-in-the-ear exp curve) is to instance-hop open missions. Finish one, and then rather than wait out the ten-minute (or however long) reset timer, hop to another instance of the zone and get in a shorter leftover time.

There are a bunch of repeatable quests, too. On my lunch break, I did "Scared Straight" (kill like 18 lvl 22-ish Hunter-Patriots in Canada) three times, and farmed them for items and XP for a while as well just for kicks. The mission seems to have a timer on teh reset, but it's obviously not long, and gives about 2500 XP. Not a lot...but considering I can take out a group of 5 with a single shot and they respawn quickly, it's a pretty good rate of return (Gigabolt with Death Arc; line up with the 4 henchmen, 1-shot them, and the Death Arcs all kill the Villain - ezmoad).

Repeatable quests, open missions, and instances should be able to clear up the gap pretty easily. It might even be how the XP rate slipped past QC on Cryptic's end; that, or the XP changes at the tail end of Beta threw everything a bit off.

[Mr Bean]

The biggest thing that messed up level with those dang ranged was the fact that due to scaling bug, post 20 enemes ten levels below you still gave 75% of their equal level XP so you had the odd view of 30's running through Canada spamming AOE attacks and one-shotting everything in view in order to grind that much faster. Thing was the risk/reward was of course borked since the level 22 Hunters could not even dent the level 30's while they were getting decent XP out of it. I still think their XP reward caculations are off because thanks to the head start we had 40's on the day of launch.

Current calculation says it takes 37 hours total to get to 40 and not abusing the above.

[Oskuro]

Sounds like the endgame will get crowded pretty quickly. And with 8 character slots in the whole game (no alternate servers to choose from) the whole "make an alt and replay the game" philosophy that kind of worked for CoX will quickly run out of steam. Troubling.

[Mr Bean]

Sounds like the endgame will get crowded pretty quickly. And with 8 character slots in the whole game (no alternate servers to choose from) the whole "make an alt and replay the game" philosophy that kind of worked for CoX will quickly run out of steam. Troubling.

40 is the current level cap. Unlike CoX I don't think the system paints them into a corner since they can easily expand levels to 50 or 60 or 70 with new zones (Ala WoW) with the new levels bringing upgraded abilities or maybe access to "ultra" super powers or some such. After all at level 20 I can already throw trucks at people(Only empty ones mind you, Hero'ing and all that) at level 30 I can throw train cars. At level 40 I can only hope I can throw train engines or prehaps small buildings. It's something to see a 747 get chucked your way in PVP let me tell you.

[GuppyShark]

I was surprised by how story driven the game was, I was expecting CoX style "Here's a zone full of bad guys, hit them to level".

What are you talking about? City of Heroes is very story driven. The problem is you can't tell the story missions appart from mindless grinding.

My point exactly, thankyou.

[Mr Bean]

I was surprised by how story driven the game was, I was expecting CoX style "Here's a zone full of bad guys, hit them to level".

What are you talking about? City of Heroes is very story driven. The problem is you can't tell the story missions appart from mindless grinding.

My point exactly, thankyou.

Let me also add I notice this, many of the quests harken back to old ones. You contacts have lots of extra lines they add in if you've done certain missions or gotten certain perks. I've noticed for example the General in charge of Project Greenskin mentioned the fact I had done certain missions or referenced a mission in regards to a new one. On one character I had done a medic question where I ran around helping hurt soldiers and escorting them to safety and when later the General gave me a mission to escort some scientists on the one character which I had never done the quest he simply asked and said they had no one else to spare at the moment. On the other character which I had done that medic quest he told thank me for doing so much for the Project and asked for one more favor.

I don't think their was a difference in reward but the unexpected carry-over surprised me. I've also notice a perk affecting a mission only changed one line of text where on one character the contact asked me to deal with some Purple Gang members at a construction site and told me a little about the group. But on the other character it was changed to be much shorter and a simple request, hey we got some trouble here, do you mind dealing with them?

And that's never-mind the big things like the Qulaar and the Radiation shield/arctic storm which also get referenced.

[Rahvin]

Nice changes in todays patch. The insanity that was Pyre has been brought back in line with other AoEs - in other words, they nerfed the damage. Apparently it (and a Telekinesis power) was using the wrong coefficient to determine damage, and so was vastly overpowered.

Many knockback effects (shotgun, the advantage on pyre, many more) now also apply knockback resistance. The pyre advantage also now can only occur once every 5 seconds, and requires at minimum 1 second of charging. That should cut out some of the chain-knockback craziness.

Condemn has been nerfed, but not into the ground. Previously, the Hold it applied would be 100% strength 100% of the time, and the duration depended on the amount you charged the ability. Now, there is a chance to apply a 100% Hold that increases as you charge the ability, but never to 100%. No more chain AoE Holds with excellent damage. Now, just excellent AoE damage with a chance to Hold, which is more appropriate compared to other abilities.

Regeneration's scaling with Recovery has increased, which is cool for me.

And the biggest news: free FULL respec for every character made prior to a specified date that I can't seem to recall at the moment. It's a bit bugged (you have to use a command while the respec window is open at the trainer), but it erases all of your power/enhancement/talent/superstats choices completely and lets you start from scratch.

I'm still testing in the Powerhouse, but basically I dumped Chain lightning (which I never use anyway) and picked up Force Shield instead, with Force Sheath (gives you energy when hit while the shield is up and makes the shield last for a few seconds after you stop blocking). I also swapped around a few of my other advantages and talent choices in favor of reducing aggro and maximizing damage. I still have a few advantage points remaining.

New build looks like this:


Cathode: Level 25 Champion

Superstats:
Level 5: Super Endurance
Level 13:Super Recovery

Powers:
Level 1:Electric Bolt
Level 1:Sparkstorm -- Accelerated Metabolism, Electric Personality
Level 5:Lightning Arc -- Never Strikes Twice?
Level 5:Teleport
Level 8:Electric Form
Level 11:Ionic Reverberation
Level 14:Electrocute -- Superconductor
Level 17:Gigabolt -- Rank 2, Accelerated Metabolism, Death Arc
Level 20:Regeneration
Level 23:Force Shield -- Force Sheath


Talents:
Level 1:Electric Potential
Level 6:Energetic
Level 9:Tireless
Level 12:Intimidating
Level 15:Amazing Stamina
Level 18:Prodigy
Level 21:Lasting Impression

Still having loads of fun.

[Oskuro]

Turns out that the profile I made in hopes of getting into the Beta was still around, so it's @Oskuro for me.

Now I need to go pay Cryptic a visit and calmly explain how irritating it is that the keybinds reset upon instance change. And then set them on fire.

[Oskuro]

And after much mucking about, a concept I came up with as a joke has kind of grown into an interesting character. What was originally meant to be the alpha-male of lawyers, is now a secret agent who had a misshap with a container of mutagenic fluid and a pool of sharks, resulting in the always perplexing Agent Sharkhead!



So far he is a mix of munitions (only pistol powers) and supernatural (for the bite power and some regeneration). Maybe I'll drop a couple gadgeteering powers into the mix. Oh, and he is a burrower. Pity I can't make the shark fin poke out while he's underground.

[GuppyShark]

Oh look the server is down again.

I'm really glad I paid all that money for a game that is not available during my peak gaming hours every day of the week.

[White Haven]

Someone's got tunnel memory... That happens to every MMO early on, WoW was ridiculous in the early-to-mid days.

Also: 40, bitches.

[OmegaChief]

Yay for White Haven

Perhaps you can tell those of us who never managed to get to 40 what the game is like at that level, and specificaly what there is to do?

[Mr Bean]

Bah sitting at 28 almost 29 now, yay for alt-aholics. Think I'll make my nemesis today

[White Haven]

Hell if I know, I hit 40 at Stupid o'Clock this morning and then crashed shortly after. All I know so far is that you get to join UNITY, which opens up some quests of some type and a bunch of potential rewards. From what I hear, the tuning needs work on them, but I haven't seen enough yet to say.

[GuppyShark]

Someone's got tunnel memory... That happens to every MMO early on, WoW was ridiculous in the early-to-mid days.

Also: 40, bitches.

Blizzard gave us extra gametime to compensate us. Cryptic have not.

[Rahvin]

Someone's got tunnel memory... That happens to every MMO early on, WoW was ridiculous in the early-to-mid days.

Also: 40, bitches.

Blizzard gave us extra gametime to compensate us. Cryptic have not.

I never got extra gametime to compensate for all of the time I spent waiting in queues because Blizzard allowed their population to exceed the capacity of their hardware...

[GuppyShark]

Yeah I'll just move to a different server. Oh wait.

[Stark]

Wait did someone just ding 40 and get a congratulatory response on SDN?

Oh wait, GNC. lol!

What's the patch situation? It's early days, but if there are serious issues I'm curious how long you're looking for fixes.

[GuppyShark]

Daily patches, server goes down at 6PM Australia time every day.

[Mr Bean]

Daily patches, server goes down at 6PM Australia time every day.

We here in America still hate your entire country and it's timezone sooo much. It's 1AM to 3 AM PST or a handy 4AM-6AM EST. Even Euro side it's just before noon when you should be asleep anyway.

[GuppyShark]

Connecting to the login server








Fuck, this stopped being funny two days ago.

[Oskuro]

Yay! Not even a month old games who were obviously rushed out have problems to iron out! Who knew?

Nevermind this is more of an IT problem bound to happen to any online bussiness who just opened the floodgates to internet traffic. But hey, what makes MMOs different is the amount of short-sighted whiners playing them.

And this isn't about you, GuppyShark, it's about the semi-constant flamewars ingame when someone decides that WoW is so perfect CO should be ashamed of even trying.


Now, on the other hand, Grond spawned on top of me last night, and some time later a nuke went off nearby while I was talking to a NPC. And it was awesome!

[SylasGaunt]

Out of curiosity what sets that nuke off? I had it go off on me once. While it was awesome to see it up close and go flying (and even survive it) it also plunked me into a group of about 6 enemies with only a quarter of my health left.

[GuppyShark]

Yeah the last time I was allowed to play I got to punch COWBOY ROBOTS. That was pretty awesome.

It's a generic WoW clone but the content is novel enough it should be at least worth a playthrough. Though at this rate I won't even hit 20 by the time my initial month is over.

[Oskuro]

It's a generic WoW clone

By this rationale, WoW is a generic EverQuest clone, and EverQuest is a generic Ultima Online clone, and then we dive into the world of M.U.D.s

If there is something I like about this game is how different it is to WoW (for an MMO), with its action-ish gameplay, the class-less system, and the simplistic and straightforward inventory and crafting system. Not to mention how nice the maps look, even if they are not a seamless world.

I must say the PvP is a nightmare, though. It boggles the mind that a supposedly high damage build (might) can't scratch a caster that is blocking while her health regenerates, and then is perma-held into oblivion. But when not facing über-builds, it is fun.

Today I flew over the ROBOT COWBOYS and couldn't believe my eyes. Awesome! And Grond bouncing about is great too. Also, Millenium City is nice to fly around, unlike the bland and boring Paragon (or the depressingly gray Rogue Isles).