Champions Online: The Thread

[Bounty]

[Thread necro]

Champions Online has gone free-to-play, at least for the main content. Is anyone still playing this? Or interested in making a team?

[Chardok]

Mmmm.......well.....I'll say tl;dr for the thread so make this sweet for me:

#1 - Is it "better" than CoX?

#2 - will I take 5 hours to make a character. (Yes = good)

#3 - Do I get travel powers out of the gate?

[Bounty]

1 - dunno
2 - shitload of customization
3 - first thing after the tutorial

[Mr Bean]

Mmmm.......well.....I'll say tl;dr for the thread so make this sweet for me:

#1 - Is it "better" than CoX?

Better as in combat is better? Meh, content wise CoX is still King
I called Champions the best month of your life because it had exactly one month of content at launch which was over a year ago so now who knows

#2 - will I take 5 hours to make a character. (Yes = good)

Yes, the one thing Champions beats CoX is in ever more customization down to customizing the color of every power. However there are still no Masterminds.

#3 - Do I get travel powers out of the gate?

Within twenty minutes, once your out of the tutorial.

[Chardok]

Sounds cool. But.....no masterminds? Fuck off.

[Mr Bean]

Sounds cool. But.....no masterminds? Fuck off.

I know right! Even mentioning Masterminds makes me want to bust out my old City of Heroes account and play my mastermind again. I had such utter fun with a large scale pet class in CoX but the best you can do in Champions is pick up three or four different pet powers and summon them all at once, hoping for the best. But most enemies have AoE knockback attacks meaning even running one pet power means treating them like disposable fodder.

Now I'm really tempted to throw down for a month of CoX and take play it for nostalgia alone.

*Edit, fuck it I did it, time to throw back into CoX for a month, ironically because Champions went F2p

[Chardok]

I do miss playing Not 47 (My Hitman clone with dual silverbal...errr high-caliber semi automatic firearms.)

[Bounty]

Is CoH that much better? D/L'ing the trial now.

[Chardok]

Is CoH that much better? D/L'ing the trial now.

CoH is good. I quit playing because it was so damned Samey. same missions over and over and over and over again and just got bored. I understand that now with user-generated stuff there has been/was some revitalization. It's for sure worth a go in free trial mode. My problem is that when I left, if you weren't specc'd Juuuuust so - you were considered effectively useless in a group situation. Like if you were a healer and you didn't have power X at level Y, NO ONE would take you one. and as a healer - you HAVE to have a group. Radiation as an offensive power is usssssssssselesss. so if you want to be a healer - do NOT go RAD/EMP

[Mr Bean]

And Empathic anything is a group monkey in CoX. You can't do anything except make OTHER people awesome. Which is great because a standard team who gets a Empathic healer becomes a Super team crashing through multiple enemies with ease and taking on twenty bosses at once. I had a Dark/Empathy back in the day and I had issues fighting one Lieutenant at a time. My scrapper could fight six at once plus a boss which would insta wipe my Empath.

Play Empaths only if you have a good SG, otherwise your pretty much done

[Ritterin Sophia]

Another change I know they've made is Athletics is now entirely inherent, since everyone took it to get Stamina anyhow.

[Joviwan]

They've made a lot of huge QoL improvements to the game (merging ferries with all other ferries/trains with all other trains, inherent Fitness so everyone has the power that everyone was taking anyway, a bunch of other stuff), and the new level-cap content has been proving to be very interesting.

There's actually a *lot* of mission content to the game. A lot of it is really samey (go into this warehouse, beat up 90 clown whores, click a box), but they're working on making things more varied and interesting because they've been expanding their dev team. They're expanding on power customization (adding alternate animations to some power sets, changing colors on shit), expanding on power sets, and there's a whole new "side" that offers a vastly different flavor of experience from the 1-20 level range with things like moral choices in missions and things.

At any rate, this 6 or 7 year old MMO is vastly superior to Champions in nearly every way, except customization. Even then, most of champions stuff looks like complete crap, so at best you can get slightly less crappy looking crap.

[Chardok]

most of champions stuff looks like complete crap, so at best you can get slightly less crappy looking crap.

May I sig?

[Joviwan]

Of course you can.

[OmegaChief]

Yes, the one thing Champions beats CoX is in ever more customization down to customizing the color of every power.

This is not entirly accurate anymore, as a great deal of the CoX (I'd say all but I can't remember off the top of my head if it is all) can now be colour and animation customised too, so I wouldn't really say Champs has it beat there.

[Mr Bean]

Yes, the one thing Champions beats CoX is in ever more customization down to customizing the color of every power.

This is not entirly accurate anymore, as a great deal of the CoX (I'd say all but I can't remember off the top of my head if it is all) can now be colour and animation customised too, so I wouldn't really say Champs has it beat there.

If you've played CoX and played Champions you know that Champions has it beat. I can for example shoot lets say a fireball
In CoX I have my pick of several colors maybe
In Champions I have my pick of all colors AND the animation of how to shoot it, if I want to shoot fireballs from MY MIND that can be customized or shoot them from my fists, or chest and so on.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I play Champs off and on. Still lovin' it.

I was a little irked looking at the F2P matrix, though. All the stuff about Champs that's worth playing is locked out of F2P. Only subscribers can actually mix and match custom powers, which is half the damn game for me. F2P is restricted to pre-defined archetypes, though apparently you can still customize their look pretty much however you want.

[PREDATOR490]

Played it before it went F2P last year... blitzed the content within a month then got bored at endgame.

This game suffers from the same thing STO does with endgame being extremely weak. The customisation is nice but once you get passed this feature onto say... playing... it becomes a typical MMO with some issues.

There are simply some aspects of Champions that are inherrantly tedious - T3 Travel Powers
There are some aspects that seem to be inherrantly broken / worthless - Crafting

The one aspect I did find extremely nice was the Nemesis concept but once you play that out it just repeats itself. The population felt rather weak when I played it. Maybe F2P will change that but I spent a large amount of time on my own. Folks I started with quickly got bored and bugged out before I finally did so in frustration .

[HMS Sophia]

I'm downloading the F2P version now. I'm a bit worried about the limited archetypes, but whatever, I only have one question:
Can you create an Iron man/Warmachine style hero, with an armoured suit?

[Bounty]

I'm downloading the F2P version now. I'm a bit worried about the limited archetypes, but whatever, I only have one question:
Can you create an Iron man/Warmachine style hero, with an armoured suit?

Yes. Pick the inferno type and go for the cyborg head/armour plate customizations.

[Vanas]

You certainly can in the custom frameworks, there's an entire Power Armour tree that I'm quite enjoying. off the top of my head, there's not a PA archetype yet, though they've said they'll be adding more as time goes on.

Here's one I made earlier
And in action. Electric Form, Healbots, HAND BEAMS and a minigun


I'm in CO mostly because I found a awesome guildy thing way back in CB and have been there since. That and it's a nice game just to mess around in. Lots of alts, lots of powers and bizzare combinations. For example, Fire/Ice/Infernal is suprisingly lethal.

Is endgame bad? I don't know in all this time I've only got one char to 40 'cause I keep getting distracted.

[SirNitram]

Sounds cool. But.....no masterminds? Fuck off.

A few powersets have controllable pets. My freeform has a pair of Munitions bots(Gunner/missile spam, can turn into stationary gatling guns), and a pair of drones(HEaling beams, blast energy and knockback in their altmod), and these aren't even all the tech-based ones.

[Mr Bean]

To be exact there are

Heal bots, Muntion bots, Zombies, Wolves, plus the circle pets Angels/Demons/Elemental's but those require you to be near stationary to be used.

[Vanas]

There's also now the Darkness shadow summonable pets as well. IIRC, zombie equivalents and a tank equivalent.

The Ritual pets from sorcery can be taken out of the circles if you get an andvantage for it; I know people who go around with all three at once, just for the hell of it.

[RogueIce]

Alright, so I'm F2P and according to some stuff I found, I should have Advantage Points at Level 7. But I'm Level 8 and no Points? WTF? Is that something only for Gold members?