CometCometh

I am. I have hit 16 already in a few hours. Took me a bit to relearn stuff though. Still feel like I am relearning. All these new quests lines and cut scenes are NOT from when I last played. They are quite enjoyable. The fact I have like 6 "attacks" to rotate through with the prestige stuff is game changing in the early levels right now. Because early levels back in the day sucked for everyone. Most builds couldn't get their "build" going until they reached between level 18 through 24 depending on the build. I don't mind grinding. I actually had a blast clearing whole hazard zones with different builds before all the nerfs. I also had a lot of fun after the initial nerfs because I expected them. I had no problem for the first year+ of the game. When they brought out PVP I literally was number 1 and dominated all the matches back then. Why? Prescence was so OP in pvp for tankers back then. Literally NO ONE ELSE TOOK IT, but I did. Why? Fear in PVE sucks for tankers. Fear back then in PVP literally allowed me to kill everyone by myself in an arena when combined with provoke and the damage output of burn. It was dumb. I know why they nerfed it. The original nerfs though gutted the abilities completely though so they couldn't actually be used in PVP when people were complaining about me in the forums. I had huge ass threads literally complaining about me and my build specifically in PVP when it came out. As @Crysis mentioned, while I had fun, when the build got completely gutted along with other builds I had going on just about as strong then I stopped having fun. I am fine with BALANCE. I am not fine with knee jerk nerfs that gimp builds and play styles. That did happen. I know most of the players in this thread can't believe what I am talking about, but I doubt most of them had over a dozen level 40-50 characters in the first year like I did. I left from boredom, other games out there, and the over nerfs to several specific builds I had back then. I think I know where the disconnect with my post and other posters is happening here. I know the exact state of the game when I left it. Why? It was my last memory of the game. Other posters here either didn't play during the time I played or they played the game for longer. Think of it like that. I bet everyone here can remember their high school graduation day and ceremony right? Can you remember every day or even a specific date fully 100% from a random day in highschool from 20 years ago? If for some reason high school wasn't over 20 years ago, then use middle school, or elementary school as a substitute. Point being, you will remember the last memory of a given thing far longer than something accumulated at random in the middle. I know the nerfed/gimped state several of my characters and builds were last left in. I remember the reason for leaving was for mostly the heavy handed nerfs. Also, I hated playing MMOs that basically only cater to group play and screw over solo play. That was the reason I originally fell in LOVE with City of Heroes. I could make a build that could solo 99% of the content and be heroic feeling in doing so. Games like WoW, Neverquest, Neverquest2, and a crap ton of other games basically stopped people from soloing fairly early on in the level progression. Take Neverquest for example. I hated the fact that you literally started a character at level 1 running around a forest solo killing rats, bats, and goblins. You reach max level and the high end dungeons are full of rats, bats, and goblins that will wipe you out solo and even whole parties sometimes. Lots of games were the reverse power fantasy. The higher level you get the actual worse any given character's power is in relation to what they fight. Its a dumb concept. City of Heroes didn't have that. I mean I still love group content and the idea of raids, big boss battles, and epic siege style combat. That is fun too. I was pointing out that at one point the devs of the game of City of Heroes had decided to try undo what made them stand apart from the competition and nerf the power fantasy. They literally stated in the forums what I said earlier about trying to balance all builds and power sets around being able to only solo 3 regular equal level mobs. I am glad that design philosophy eventually changed after I left. It was a dumb philosophy they had for awhile. Right now I am having a blast with my newly minted Fire/Ice tanker. Liking all the content I never experienced before. I don't feel under powered or over powered. I hope that continues through the progression of the character up to max level.

Because I enjoyed the game when it wasn't over nerfed? I don't want to waste energy and time on a game I do not enjoy. I specifically left back then for a reason. Several patches had crushed several builds in particular. I was asking if the game was still in that state or something more playable and thus enjoyable. It is a fair and relevant question. Why even make this snarky and elitist comment in the first place if you have nothing valid to input?

The nugget being that he agreed I was gimped. I didn't say I couldn't "handle" lower level mobs either. I said it took minutes at a time trying. Meaning I could "handle" them, it was just a waste of time. I think you and others have completely misread what I wrote and came to your conclusions. The character could still function, it was just GIMPED as Fonebot even agreed and a few others stated there was a period where the nerfs to my character would have made it under performing. That is you and others screwing up and making strawmen. There was more to it then the simple answer of "slot accuracy" even back then. I'll point to the one period of time where ice patch had a single check for slipping per mob ever. That made ice patch basically worthless as a power at one point. You couldn't slot anything in to fix it. I specifically remember it. It was also I think later fixed back up to a more reasonable check for slipping in between its original super slippage checking of 4 per tick versus one check ever.

Really? I'll just leave this nugget. The fact that burn had been given a tohit check and i didn't slot accuracy probably would lend credence a bit to my claim there. Also the balance claims I were making for from the first year or two of the game. I don't have the years of changes done to the game afterward. I remember the super overtuned intro days of the game for some power sets. I remember fondly when there was initial balance changes like the purple patch and a few others which were nerfs, but I thought they were inline. I also remember I think it was ED and a few other nerfs along with some targeted nerfs to specific powers that still happened after CoV release. I had a Dark/Dark scrapper for along time that kicked some serious butt. However, even a bunch of what he did got nerfed to no longer feel heroic anymore. It was around that time the devs explained their balance goal with that fighting of 3 regular equal level mobs being the "solo" content they were trying for. They over nerfed more than a few things. If you didn't happen to be playing then, or those builds then you would have probably never been bothered by it. I gave an example of when I was fighting mobs about 20 levels above me, pre purple patch, with my build no problem. I also gave an example of when I came back for about a week and was seriously screwed over so bad I took forever killing enemies many levels below me. I didn't say ever character I had was that nerfed when I came back. I specifically gave an example of my fire/ice tanker WHICH WAS that bad. It isn't hyperbole. It was a factual experience that happened to me. A prime example would be also ice patch. At one point in a patch notes when they did the first set of nerfs to it I specifically remember the claim that it was being fixed because it was "bugged" in that it did 4 checks per tick instead of 1 which they originally thought it was suppose to be. Then they nerfed that further several times at one point. You going to call that hyperbole too?

You are the one going to the extremes with hyperbole here. There were certainly times the player base dipped due to major nerf patches. I never claimed everyone left except 3 remaining players or some such crud you just asserted. I said that at one point in time with the game that it felt very "bad" to play the game with just about any character. It is a fact players leave games like this when major nerfs happen. This goes for every game. I happen to also play a lot of Path of Exile and if you track their steam charts for player base for leagues, the major "nerf" leagues tend to have huge drops in player retention versus leagues that tend to empower the players. Even in this thread others have also remembered EXACTLY what I was talking about and agreed with me. You are the odd one out here. There was also a big exodus of players at one point when Champions Online came out. I distinctly remember that too. Due to the nature of these games, many players tend to leave and come back as well. Just like how I am interested in coming back too. Sorry you seem to think that CoH never had some bad patches that made a lot of players upset and think it was the greatest thing ever created. See I can do hyperbole too!

That is the info I was wanting. Not all the snarky remarks. Too many here didn't understand I was laying out a timeline, events, and statements of why certain nerfs happened. The big thing was at one point in time the devs explicitly stated they wanted to balance everyone around making "every" fight you come across as "epic" which they said should take time. They were explicitly trying to shoehorn every build in the game into being only able to solo 1-3 regular same level mobs of equal level. Anything more they wanted people to group for. In higher level zones finding a group that small or that "weak" was practically impossible as well. I remember the purple patch now being added, as someone mentioned previously. For reference I played in beta, when it came out for about a year. Then quit for a small time before CoV came our shortly after quitting. I played for about 6 months after CoV came out. Then tried to come back a few years later. During the active play time, despite several nerfs, the fire/ice tanker in my example when through significant changes. When I said I was using Burn/Ice fists for awhile as my only attacks that was true for a small period of time for that character. The character changed during the patches to keep it "viable" as I kept playing although the mounting nerfs made it significantly weaker and weaker as time progressed back then. When I had come back that one last time and found my character in a really bad gimped place I tried looking up how to fix it. The consensus was to scrap the character because at the time it was not salvageable. It looks like things changed again after that point in time, but in that specific point in time there was no redeeming the character to make it playable. That was a very disheartening thing to find out and basically made me leave shortly after trying to come back. I do not know if inventions or other things like that were out when I came back that time. I suspect they weren't based on the replies to this thread. I am not looking to make a character that can do what the OP builds of the first days of the game allowed. While it would be nice to get a character as strong as possible, with what you said being able to do +4/8x type missions. I don't even remember having that difficulty setting being able to be selected before. I just was making sure the game wasn't at the point where most builds at higher levels couldn't handle basic mobs of equal level without taking forever or risk of being defeated. Because at one point in the time frame of the live game that was exactly the case for most builds. That created a mass exodus of the player base at one point in time.

No. Never made that inference of wanting to herd whole hazard zones still. Rest of everyone else here being very snarky and elitist is saying I am wanting that. I was giving background to my previous play experience. Yes there was a point in the game where some builds were so OP it was stupid. Never claimed I wanted that play style. I said in response back in the day the devs over nerfed a ton of builds because some were that strong. At one point claiming they wanted it balanced around having 1-3 regulars or 1 regular and 1 Lt mob being the "normal" soloable content of same level mobs for all builds. That was an express stated design at one point in the game history and there were a ton of nerfs because of that. It made a lot of people quit the game including myself because we felt that the nerfs then were too heavy handed. My reference was that at some point later I tried to log into my level 50 character to see if the game was still in a bad state and my character was literally gimped. Couldn't do anything. Other posters in here remember that too. The whole point to my question wasn't whether the game was back in the original OP days. I was asking if it was in a more balanced state that from when I last quit it. People are claiming it is and that is great. The crazy people are thinking I am asking for something different. I am not asking to be invincible. I do want to feel heroic. I should be able to run up to a group of mobs in a zone appropriate to my character level and wipe them out without breaking a sweat at higher levels. I don't want every group of mobs I run into to be a slug fest that takes forever. That is where the game was before. People in this thread have said it no longer the slug fest sort of game, and that is good enough for me.

I just decided to dive back in. OMG the text is so small on my 4K monitor though. Need to figure that out. Also, I couldn't figure out how to logout. I remembered there were slash commands and /quit got me out. Went looking around and noticed someone use the MENU word on the upper right part of the screen. Again this is tiny for me at the moment and there is way to log out that way through the UI. I forgot how un-intuitive the UI is compared to what I've been used to. Oh well. Getting used to it again. If you dive back in I am sure it will come back with play time.

Yep. That's what I am doing. I didn't play when inventions were out. As I said, I just remember my character at one point in time being gimped when I left the game. Another poster also pointed out that there were changes. I don't know what they are and that was why I was asking. I assume since people are still enjoying the homecoming version that the balance was brought back to a more acceptable level. That was all I was hoping for. Playing a hero that can't be heroic doesn't feel very good. I was in my 20's when this game came out and now I am in my 40s. I just don't have the time to invest in a game that I still won't find as fun or satisfying. I do remember the good times of the game, but don't want to be blinded by nostalgia and rose-colored glasses. Especially since I have less free time that I did when I was in my early 20s. I will say man some of the comments to this thread make me shake my head at some of the posters. I'll just leave it at that. Your post though and a few others like it were the answers I was looking for.

Yep, burn and frozen fists. Everything else was defense. I came back and could kill nothing. Didn't want to respec either. I was like this is horrible. It went from god mode to beggar mode. I don't know all of what was nerfed back then. I just know it was horrible. Several of my characters were in that state. Literally they were at one point gods able to destroy anything with a single attack or two. When I came back they couldn't kill anything and usually died to almost anything. It was more than a little disheartening. I left for good at that point. The first time I left it was already disappointing with the massive nerfs. I seriously remember how they were trying to balance around PVP. Looks like they made abilities run different finally for pvp than pve. Because originally those nerfs were crushing builds. Finally someone else remembers the game like I do.

I don't care about herding entire zones. I remember the agro cap patch long ago. I was literally at one point unable to kill anything without taking a long time to do so. I just was wondering if the game was in that horrible state or not. Literally lots of people left the game because they nerfed everything into the ground at one point. Can't remember which patch it was. Again, this was years ago. Made another Fire/Ice tanker like my original main. I think it was 18 to get burn and 24 for ice patch? When I get to 18 I'll be able to tell then I guess.

It was awhile ago, and yah, I power leveled by fire/ice tanker level 30+ killing level 50+ enemies at a time. Whole zones. Literally I remember going around a max level hazard zone at 30ish, running through the map hitting provoke on every stupid group I saw and generating a massive train of enemies until I basically had the whole zone. Jump in a dumpster, watch everything jump in after me stacking in the same spot, and then die to burn and ice patch. It was quite silly OP even back then. They nerfed it down through the years and many patches. At one point mega nerfed it to the point that when I logged on later at level 50, I couldn't kill lower level 40 regular mobs with the character.

There were BiS enhancements for certain builds and archetypes.

Yah, originally Fire for tanks and Ice was pretty OP. Then again, that was the case for a lot of power sets for all the archetypes. Actually my first character was an Earth/Earth Tanker in beta until I saw a fire tanker lower level than me smash a bigger group of mobs in seconds compared to what took me a couple minutes to do. Then I saw a blast fly by and do the same. And other champs. I was like, this Earth/Earth tanker sucks. And truth be told they did in beta and the early portion of the game. They were one of the massive under performers. For the first couple of years most patches were nerfs and not buffs. Cryptic/NCSoft were on a mission to make everything as bad as the Earth/Earth tanker in terms of performance instead of bringing up the performance of the crap power sets. I am not saying I want the crazy days of my fire/ice tanker being able to kill off an entire hazard zone at once, even if it took about 30 minutes running around using provoke to gather them all up, of enemies many levels above. I don't want it to be at the point though where the character couldn't kill anything even at max level with hammadon enhancements and BiS stuff at the time. The character was literally unplayable unable to beat up anything. Hence why I was asking if the mega nerfs were there or not. I wasn't asking for the crazy OP numbers to be back. Just not the crazy buttcrack numbers.

Nope. I can give a list of the remembered nerfs specifically for my fire/ice tanker. I had dozens of characters, but don't remember all the nerfs and what I was capable of before. So previously upon release of the game the Fire branch for Tanker had Burn which would make a patch of fire on the ground and do massive dot damage. It was literally the first nerfed introduced to the game. They reduced the damage a tiny bit and added a fear effect to the enemies hit by burn so they would try to get out. To use burn after than you had to get provoke to counter the fear effect. Until the nerfed provoke to not override fear effects. I was also using Ice so I could drop an ice patch first to make enemies slip and then drop burn. So they couldn't get away with the fear because they were slipping. Then they nerfed the ice patch so that the slip effect check was less frequent. At one point the slip check only ever happened once per enemy. So they could slip once ever and never again. I think they reverted that a tad later because the power was basically unusable at that point. Then the damage from Burn continued to be nerf over and over and over. It started doing tickle damage at one point. Let me put it this way, before all the major nerfs to Burn and Ice patch, I could literally pull an entire hazard zone 20+ levels above my character, jump into a dumpster to get the enemies to stack inside each other as they followed me in while jumping, and they would immediately start slipping and burning until death. Only the toughest bosses had a chance to escape or would take a long time to kill. Those weren't worth killing so I would move on to grabbing all the respawns instead. Again, that was probably too strong, but literally being able to take out hundreds of mobs in a few seconds was fun. My blasters couldn't do that, but they zoomed from group to group and literally 1 shot a group many levels above it as well. Basically many of the power sets, not all, had a massive AoE damage ability that could be used to 1 shot enemies 10+ levels above your current level. That was all nerfed into the ground at one point. I know some nerfs were lightened back up, and then some re-nerfed at some point. I know this because I came back one shortly before the game was closing. Got on my max level fire/ice tanker and tried to kill some mobs. Even a group that was 20 levels lower than me without bosses I couldn't kill with probably wasting a huge amount of time trying. I was wondering if the game was still in that state or not.