srmalloy

You'd never played Hellion Golf? You took Power Push, slotted a level 50 knockback IO into it, then went to Atlas Park and tried to hit various 'targets' on the other side of the zone by using Power Push on level 1-3 Hellions; you needed to have a teammate in the target area so they could see the incoming bodies.

I was a member back in the day, although at shutdown I was playing Pakfront, the AR/EM Blaster that was the first character I'd made back in May of 2004, down in the bowl in the middle of a Rikti mothership raid, playing as if the game was going to continue forever. My character in the Legion of Catgirls was Zabastovka Molniy, an Elec/Titan Tanker.

In Twinshot's first mission, to 'meet the gang', you get a bit of unintended humor in an NPC name. When you meet Dillo, you get a call for assistance down near the entrance, and when you head back, Dillo, Flambeaux, and Twinshot all come with you (to a greater or lesser extent; this mission illustrates some of the 'quirks' in the follow code. Anyway, you get back down to the first level and find Grym and intruders in a standoff. After you defeat them, Twinshot runs up to you to chat -- but every time I've run that mission, Twinshot is already there when she runs up again. It's amusing to think that Twinshot's name might partially come from her actually being twins, not just that she uses twin pistols. The bug isn't really hurting anything; it doesn't impair the mission at all, except for having to remember to click on the Twinshot that runs up after the fight is over, not the one that was there before; that one doesn't react for the 'talk to Twinshot' final chat before exiting the mission.

To be fair, the 'just group up and go' aspect of CoH was also "After-WorldOfWarcraft"; I remember how it was in the beginning, when you had to specifically pair up characters as sidekick/mentor, and you didn't have automatic exemplar, so that if you didn't do the Positron TF when you were in the right level range, you had to find someone who was to exemplar down to, and if at any time during the TF they disco'd for more than about how long it took to relog, you reverted to your natural level and got kicked from the team because you were no longer eligible for the content, and the rest of the team had to decide whether to restart the TF or just bull on through. I remember a Posi TF where we restarted five times in the first mission because of a bad connection. But for the rest of it you're right. And once the automatic sidekick/exemplar functionality was rolled out, it became seamless. Want to run solo missions? Fine. Someone advertising to fill out a TF? As long as you met the minimum level, you're good. Have a friend log in? Team up and run missions together. This is one of the places where CoH shined; for the vast majority of the content, it didn't matter what archetype, what build, what level you were, or whether you're solo or grouped. It all worked together without your having to build a team to the tank/heal/dps/dps structure you see in so many other MMOs. Sometimes a 'broken' team was more fun -- the 'weird' ITFs that Kay would run -- an all-MM ITF (so much lag, but so much fun), or an all-Kinetics ITF (team members flitting around like angry bees with all the boosts going).

There is a little easter egg incorporated in Homecoming that harks back to the big outpouring of defiance against the shutdown announcement. If you pay attention to the character select screen, when you click on a character, if they logged out in Atlas Park, their location in the text at the bottom of the window says 'Atlas Park 33'. A very nice and subtle touch.

I've enjoyed /Dark, even though the heal forces you up closer to the action to keep your pets in the heal AoE, but I've found that Tar Patch, Darkest Night, and Howling Twilight are powerful debuffs for neutering mobs. When fully upgraded, your bots have an annoying tendency to knock mobs out of your Tar Patch, but they usually come back... if they haven't died while flying.

Moving around Sharkhead as a MM, unless you were /Dark and could move with Shadow Fall cloaking your pets, was always a rude crapshoot as to how many spawns your pets would aggro following you; it was always safer just to fight your way through one spawn at a time and accept the fact that you couldn't just use your travel power (except, perhaps, for Group Fly). Or dismiss them and resummon them at the door or just inside.

The "you are what you wear" gear system is probably one of the things I like least about other MMOs; even the games where you picked abilities from sets and they advanced differently depending on whether you used them or just knew them, your gear was always a major contributor to your combat capability, and your abilities increased in power identically to everyone else with the same abilities. CoH divorced that completely; your costume had nothing to do with your abilities, and you advanced your abilities as and in the direction you preferred -- pick any two characters with the same powersets, and they're unlikely to have them slotted the same way even if they have the same slot allocation... and their costumes will be radically different unless they deliberately made them similar or alike.

Demons/Dark works well. The small AoE of your heal will have you playing up more closely behind your pets than some of the other secondaries, but you can get some fun synergies.

One of the little things about teaming in CoH that wasn't mentioned is that when your team completed a mission, and you had that exact mission, too, you got a pop up telling you of this and asking if you wanted to have that mission completion count as completing yours, too (with a setting to do this automatically). So you had the choice of running it once and everyone with the mission gets completion, or hang onto it and run it later. Other MMOs, like SWTOR, make you run the mission separately for each character in the team who has it.

Boost Range really makes the Assault Rifle primary sing. With Pakfront, the AR/EM Blaster that was the first character I created back in May of 2004, she could hit targets out past 270 meters with Snipe and LRM -- one of the things I'd do to amuse myself waiting an ITF to start was to stand up near Imperious, pop Boost Range, Aim, and Build Up, then one-shot white minions halfway across the zone. I discovered that if you're far enough away, and one-shot your target, the rest of the spawn won't aggro, because they can't spot you. The next one you shoot will aggro them, though, but with BR up you can drop two or three minions before they get into range to attack back.

One of the things that always bothered me about AE was why you got influence doing the AE missions. Inf is -- at least, how it's rationalized -- as your public reputation for your actions, either positively (blueside) or negatively (redside) that made people willing to support you, either out of gratitude or fear. But I fail to see how crawling up your electronic navel in AE missions does anything for the public perception of you -- the missions are fully immersive, so getting XP is appropriate, and the ticket system is a reward for participating in the AE missions, but that's it. And since you're already buying rewards with the tickets you get, getting influence on top of that feels like getting double rewards. Now, with the AE mission XP cut in half, that should cut inf rewards as well, which addresses the issue to some extent, but you're still getting reputation as a hero/villain for what is essentially playing video games, not being a hero/villain.

Regen, if you were willing to slot it right to allow you to run Instant Healing continuously, was a good secondary. Unfortunately, after a badly screwed up evaluation on their internal server, where they were able to have a Claws/Regen Scrapper take on solo spawns at +4 levels sized for an eight-player team (and over the vociferous denials from the players that this was possible), Regen was reworked into a click-based set making many of the powers situational. It was only after this was done that the devs discovered -- or had to admit -- that their internal server had a bug that did not reduce to-hit and damage against higher-level opponents, and their test Scrapper was hitting about six times as often doing five times the damage it should have, and their evaluation of Regen was worthless... but the changes to Regen were kept. When Willpower was released, it became the fire-and-forget secondary that Regen had been, making it a solid choice for people who didn't want to micromanage their defenses.

One big downside with Rain of Arrows is that it is a DoT and has an activation time like a snipe, and once you start, the location of the AoE is fixed -- if whoever is holding aggro on the mobs drags them around, or some fool Blaster pulls aggro of them and they run over to him, you can be left watching your arrows rain down on open ground, unhindered by the presence of any mobs to absorb the arrows. It can be incredibly situational if the rest of your team is more mobile.

Don't want to deal with the knockback? And miss out on the utter silliness of Hellion Golf? Take a level 50, put a Knockback SO in Power Push, then go to Atlas Park and use it on a Hellion... and try to keep them in view;they disappear so quickly as they take off flying across the zone.

There was collision, but the collision box was only for same-level movement -- I'm sure you've run into NPCs. But from above, there is no collision box, so if you can get a mob to jump over an obstacle, or down off a balcony or ledge, it can land completely overlapping a mob that was already there. That's why you could fit an entire map of mobs into a dumpster. The other wolf farm, on the instanced outdoor 'forest' map, had the tanker collecting the wolves up against a notch in a big boulder. That wasn't as efficient, because the wolves would be running up to the tanker, and collide, but their pathing logic would make them try jumping over the obstacle (the wolf in front of it), resulting in a similar but less dense packing; when the trip mines went off you'd see dead wolves flying everywhere.

The classic was the Portal Corp mission 'wolf farm' on the instance map that was the NE corner of Bricktown; the mission goal was to close the eight dimensional portals, but you ignored them. You needed a tanker (Inv worked best) and a /Dev blaster. The blaster flew to an open-top dumpster to the north on the east side and started putting down Trip Mines continuously while the tanker ran around aggroing the map (the trip mines would age out and vanish, so the blaster had to keep putting new ones downl. When the tanker had grabbed the map, they would call 'inbound', and the blaster flew up toward the height limit. The tanker would jump into the dumpster, and the wolves would jump in after them. Because mobs didn't have a vertical collision box, mobs could jump down onto each other and overlap, and you'd get about 90% of the map in the dumpster. Because of a quirk with Trip Mine, if the blaster that put it down was too far away, the mine wouldn't go off, so the 12—15 trip mines in the dumpster would just sit there. Once the tanker was sure they'd gotten all they could into the dumpster, they'd call 'in', and the blaster would dive down; when they got in range, all the mines would go off. All the wolves in the dumpster would go down, your Inspiration and Enhancement trays would instantly fill up, and you'd get around 600,000 to 800,000 XP. Exit, reset the mission, and repeat. One of the funny things that would happen, if you were too close to the dumpster when the mines went off, is that you would get a pop up window from the game engine that said "Too many effects to render." Unfortunately, the change to the aggro limit made it impossible to get the entire map at once, so the classic wolf farm fell to the game updates. Prior to that, though, putting limits on how many times you could reset a mission, and making that mission timed, restricted how much you could exploit it for XP and drops, but didn't stop it. A lower- level open-zone version of this, with somewhat different tactics, came from before the changes to Burn that ended the Burn Tanker as the brain-dead leveling build, epitomized by the Burn Tanker -- and I'm sure someone still has screenshots of this -- running through Perez Park aggroing all the Skulls and Hellions on the streets and dragging them to the dumpster in the southeast corner of the zone, jumping in, and burning down all the mobs that followed them in.

And the people out farming Madness Mages for the Luck Charms they dropped; those were always the limiter on making the first-tier Accuracy IOs. I would slot out in 15 IOs at 12, then try to hang on to replace everything with 30s at level 27, because 30s were better than even-level SOs, so from there to 50 your IO slotting just got better.

Unfortunately, no. If you read deeper in the story:

One of my characters from before the shutdown, Yaderniy Ogon, used the chitin set colored to look like chitin plates and exposed muscle. When I found that CoH accepted Unicode, I made her a chat bind that said, in Russian, "This isn't a costume; this is my body. A 'gift' of 'glorious Soviet technology'." She had some issues.

I can't tell you offhand what pieces I used (from screenshots of all my characters before the shutdown), but there are insectoid costume parts in the creator:

Given that PvP wasn't part of CoH until issue 4, and was then restricted to the Arenas, and that the devs entered into an ongoing process of reworking the way powers worked (with the claim that "we won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons", which soon became "we'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons" and then disappeared completely as more and more changes were made to PvE abilities to fix balance issues in PvP -- remember movement suppression?), I think it's pretty clear that CoH was designed from the ground up as a PvE game -- and, in fact, one of the things that attracted me to it in the first place was that it didn't have PvP -- that had PvP plastered to the side as an afterthought.

The thing that epitomizes City of Heroes for me above everything else comes from an ITF where a mother and her five-year-old son were on our team, with the kid carrying his weight in the fights, and the mom said that CoH was the only online game that she had no qualms about letting her son play unsupervised, because of what the playerbase was like. And in every other MMO I've played, there is a visible level of vitriol in the chat channels, the official forums, the reddits, and where open-world PvP is enabled, a population of yahoos whose sole metric for how skilled they are as a player is how fast their level-capped character in best-in-slot gear can gank characters fresh out of the tutorial area. It's a sad reflection on other MMOs.

There is only one thing that would make this more magical than it has been for me being able to recover something I feared lost forever -- When the game shut down, I was playing the first character I'd created, four days after launch, in the bottom of the bowl in the middle of a Rikti Mothership raid,playing as if it was just another night and the game wasn't going to be shut down; if I'd been able to come back to the bowl, it would have been the perfect resurrection of the game. But the work that has been done to bring it back at all is more than I thought I would see. Thank you.

I suspect that it's an issue with the host that is managing the server access -- so many people going through it that it's not getting connections back from the individual servers quick enough, and they're timing out, so they're showing as down.