CoH must have sucked

[Lines]

There's a lot of goodness to unpack in this topic. It's not just rose tinted nostalgia nor resentment for hostile game design, but space for an honest look of why we've played over the years and how that has changed. What can we learn from the launch years and what are we happy to be rid of?

[roleki]

5 hours ago, Haijinx said:

wait you want people to use travel powers in missions not just to get up on a ledge or balcony?

There are tons of arc and TF missions that would be stupid to attempt without travel powers.

[roleki]

10 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

Hurdle with three SOs is nearly the same speed as the Fly cap.  Hurdle with two level 50 IOs and few very inexpensive and easily obtainable +Jump Speed/Movement bonuses is faster.

And single-slotted fly with capped 7.5 bonuses is faster than that.  And you're not wasting slots on fucking hurdle.

[Luminara]

2 hours ago, roleki said:

And single-slotted fly with capped 7.5 bonuses is faster than that.  And you're not wasting slots on fucking hurdle.

Fly with every bonus and max slots is still subject to the speed cap of 58.6 mph.  Hurdle can exceed that with the addition of one slot and comparable bonuses.

 

The only way to fly faster is to spend two more power selections in Flight, to unlock and acquire Afterburner.

 

One slot, or three powers.  As with everything else in this game, it's your choice, but being an opinionated, prejudicial ass to those who don't make the same choice isn't appropriate.  Even less so when you're ignorant or misinformed.

[Haijinx]

5 hours ago, roleki said:

There are tons of arc and TF missions that would be stupid to attempt without travel powers.

Jetpacks

[srmalloy]

9 hours ago, roleki said:

There are tons of arc and TF missions that would be stupid to attempt without travel powers.

And even with the rework, Faultline is still not particularly Super Speed friendly.

[Apparition]

4 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

And even with the rework, Faultline is still not particularly Super Speed friendly.

 

Probably why it's my favorite blue side zone...

[roleki]

7 hours ago, Luminara said:

Fly with every bonus and max slots is still subject to the speed cap of 58.6 mph.  Hurdle can exceed that with the addition of one slot and comparable bonuses.

 

The only way to fly faster is to spend two more power selections in Flight, to unlock and acquire Afterburner.

 

One slot, or three powers.  As with everything else in this game, it's your choice, but being an opinionated, prejudicial ass to those who don't make the same choice isn't appropriate.  Even less so when you're ignorant or misinformed.

Merry Christmas, person.  I hope to see you bounding like a jag between doors somewhere.

[Sovera]

7 hours ago, Luminara said:

Fly with every bonus and max slots is still subject to the speed cap of 58.6 mph.  Hurdle can exceed that with the addition of one slot and comparable bonuses.

 

The only way to fly faster is to spend two more power selections in Flight, to unlock and acquire Afterburner.

 

One slot, or three powers.  As with everything else in this game, it's your choice, but being an opinionated, prejudicial ass to those who don't make the same choice isn't appropriate.  Even less so when you're ignorant or misinformed.

There are definite perks in taking all three in Flight though. Hover is extremely good maneuverability in combat and turns wide arc attacks like Crowd Control or Shockwave into PbAoEs if floating on top of enemies. It also takes a LotG 7.5%.  Flight is the most iconic of travel powers and super handy with the tridimensional aspect of it. Afterburner of course turns Flight into a decent travel power (sad that we need a second power to turn Flight decent, and that it's not an auto. I don't care about the extra defense since it adds nothing to me, but I care about the speed). It also takes yet another LotG 7.5.

 

For most powersets who don't have easy access to defense powers where they can stick LotGs this makes Flight useful for all the reasons mentioned where Hurdle.. what? Makes us bounce a bit more?

 

I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I just rarely am out of power picks that I feel I need to ditch something. What I usually am is out of slots which sometimes has me picking useless stuff (on top of the three power picks in Flight) like Super-speed for the stealth effect (and then rarely bother using it).

[Pixie_Knight]

On 12/6/2019 at 6:06 PM, DougGraves said:

I have been soloing a bit lately and noticed how I use my bonus powers like black wand into my 20's.  I cannot remember what it was like playing with just brawl and your powerset attacks but it must have been painfully slow.

 

I am generally opposed to making things easier, but I would not go back to playing without those extra attacks at lower levels.

The game did change over the years. But the core of it remained (mostly) untouched. Some changes were much needed, although certain sections of the community railed against them. These include capping aggro to 16 enemies (as opposed to everything on the map, at once) and the Global Defense Nerf. GDN got everyone up in arms, me included. My main (and at the time only character) was a Claws/Super Reflexes scrapper, and I was positive that GDN was going to utterly destroy my character's viability. Amusingly, before GDN hit I was slotting my defenses with 3 Defense SO for the passives and 3 Defense/1 End Redux for the toggles. I was aware that if I six slotted them for defense I'd be virtually untouchable. But I'd felt my defenses were good enough as it was. If I needed more defense, I could pop a Luck or two to bolster my Defense. Then GDN hit, and I panicked. Using my free respec, I changed my build to having TWO attacks and every single pool power that granted defense and could be ran at the same time. So Combat Jumping, Maneuvers, and even Stealth. And everything that gave +Defense got six slotted for defense.

 

And you know what? That was a huge mistake. Right up until level 30 I had only Strike and Swipe for attacks. Oh, and Brawl. But I felt like it was needed. When Enhancement Diversification came along. And I panicked again. I was among the many who were raging on the forums over ED and how it would ruin our characters. I came very close to quitting over it before the patch even went live. Only, when I used my free respec to redo my build (getting more attacks in the process) I found my defenses were not as paper thin as I feared. In fact, they were still on par with what I'd originally considered "good enough" back in issue 4.

 

When the Vet attacks were added (nem staff, sands of mu, and so forth) they were an instant game changer... for some AT. For a low level controller it allowed you to actually kill things quickly enough while street sweeping that people would jump in and one shot the mobs you JUST started fighting to help you out. For a low level Dark Melee it meant you had a full attack chain faster. For Dark Blast users it meant that you might be able to defeat Banished Pantheon easier (since they heavily resist Dark Energy). But they come at a cost. They can't be enhanced so they have baseline accuracy, and they all have a rather large endurance cost. So using too many of them can cause your blue bar to bottom out fast. The origin specific inherent attacks (throwing knives and the like) are also a huge help at low levels since they help flesh out your attack chain until you get 2 or 3 attacks. But they were never actually needed. And in all honesty, most powersets don't need the extra help at low levels. The one or two attacks you'll have from your powerset (so far) are more then enough to last you till you can get more.

 

On 12/7/2019 at 1:56 PM, Rathulfr said:

The original Positron TF was a real challenge back in the day, before inherent Fitness.  It was a long, hard, slog.  And auto-exemplar/sidekick wasn't a thing, so you had to be careful about team composition, or else folks would out-level the TF and get kicked from it if they DC'ed (which happened a lot more back then on dial-up).

 

Oh yeah, that and the Synapse TF could be brutal. Better make sure you went to the bathroom, have something to drink, and maybe some snacks on hand. Cause they were long. But I had some very cool moments during them. Such as one group I was in, we ended up running town the streets of Paragon City during a Posi TF in a flying V formation. And stayed in that formation even when taking turns. We didn't plan it out or anything. Things just worked out that way.

[Mr. Wallet]

It's funny, I really liked most of the changes you mentioned. For example, the only things ED really threatened was direct effects like resist, defense, and damage, (almost no one was actually doing interesting things like 6-slotting -acc to shut enemies down, althought it did exist) and I had been thinking for a while that there really was a rich system of buffs and debuffs that was being completely thrown in the garbage by min/maxers who were slotting pure damage on their fire blasters and deleting everything, to the point that I often considered not even inviting blasters into my team. Cheat codes to instantly kill everything and never die are fun diversions, but they're not what most people actually play games for, which is why most games don't act that way by default. Telling players, "OK, damage, but if you HAD to pick ONE OTHER THING ALSO on that power, what would it be?" greatly increased the diversity of the blasters and scrappers I played with, and made them interesting to play with.

OK, continuing that train of thought into a more piecewise era-by-era perspective on how much the game sucked, my personal experience follows:

 

The launch of the game did have its problems, and each Issue went a long way to make the game better. Issue 6 was the City of Villains release issue, which included Enhancement Diversification, and then 3/4 of the staff got laid off. However the remaining staff did manage to coast on momentum for a while, and the game got clearly better all the way through 8.

 

Issue 9 added inventions, and this to me was the first big change that merits some ambivalence. It's interesting, but it introduces salvage as a form of loot, and if City of Heroes had just one unique gameplay feature, it wasn't the super-hero theme, it was the near-nonexistence of loot, and the determination to design a satisfying MMO experience under those constraints. It was refreshing to play an MMO where you were leveling up but also not looking for that one drop that was going to give you a proc or boost your Wisdom or whatever. Before inventions, literally any gear you wanted before level 50 could be bought from a vendor if you weren't lucky enough to find it in combat - but the expiring nature of the enhancements meant that you couldn't afford to keep yourself decked-out constantly and still cared about finding enhancements off enemies. If anyone newer to the game has ever wondered why the inventory system for salvage and recipes is so inexcusably awkward, it's because the game at its core was simply never designed for them.

 

Then came issue 11 which added Ouroboros and to me that was the first thing that added to the complication and weirdness that is now endemic to the game, the complication and weirdness that makes it kind of awkward and unplayable without band-aids like portals that take you anywhere and level 4 travel powers. 2 years after most of the company got laid off, they just kind of ran out of steam. 2 months after issue 11 released, they announced that NCSoft bought the remainder of Cryptic Studios, renaming it to Paragon Studios. From here the game went consistently downhill for me, with issue 14 being the worst, introducing Architect Entertainment and relegating most of the game to either waiting 5 times as long to find a team or giving up and instantly joining one of the multitude teams grinding AE XP farms all day every day. Speaking even as someone who absolutely adores both creating and consuming user-generated content, that was a total abdication of game design on Paragon's part, and the single best feature of Homecoming is probably that they put some reasonable limitations into it that should really have been there to begin with.

 

I quit around issue 16, and looking back it was probably mostly over the fact that there just weren't enough people playing non-architect-farm content below level 50 and it was too hard to fill a group.

 

So, did it suck? Well I would never say it sucked, but if you played in issues 6 through 10, it was absolutely great. Pre-6 there were a number of stumbling blocks that even nostalgia can't totally erase, and I think a lot of people, myself included, just bore with those problems on the sheer high of having a genuinely fresh gaming experience the likes of which few companies have ever risked dumping so much investment into before it was proven. Nowadays that kind of experimentation on a well-funded project is far less rare because platforms like Steam Early Access and Kickstarter allow end-users to bear more of the financial risk that would normally be on the publishers, but in the mid-2000s those things simply weren't around. You will tolerate a lot if you want something badly enough and only one company is doing it. But Issue 8, for example, definitely did not suck.

[Dafydd Hywel]

It did not suck...it challenged.

You LEARNED how to play your alt to it's strengths not just rely on fancy freebies to do it.

Was it slow?

Yes it was.

Was it tough?

Yes it was.

Was it worth it?

HELL YEAH.  There were some seriously talented players back then.

[MunkiLord]

23 minutes ago, Dafydd Hywel said:

You LEARNED how to play your alt to it's strengths not just rely on fancy freebies to do it.

You say that, but I played my issue 2 Rad/Rad Defender like he was softcapped(definitely wasn't) and I stayed in perma debt from 30 to about 43/44. Now some will say I didn't learn, I like to think that I was just ahead of my time and prepping myself for IOs.

[Dafydd Hywel]

Fair play to MunkiLord for a top response there.

 

I confess for all my "learn to play" I repeatedly flunked" Rad😁

[Xanatos]

6 ACC/DAM Hami O's in every attack prior to ED.

 

Twas a glorious time.

[cranebump]

On 12/17/2019 at 10:02 AM, jubakumbi said:

This is an awesome description.

To some people, it's about numbers, not the experience itself, which I also find a little sad.

This is true, and has been so, in my experience, for every game I’ve played since the first min-maxers showed up at my tables to play DND. “Optimizers” (power gamers, munchkins, etc) aren’t going anywhere. Neither are crusty old grognards. But, as long as we’re not all accusing each other of “badwrongfun” it’s all good. This is just a silly computer game, after all. It shouldn’t be the hat hook for anyone’s ego cap. Life is short. Have fun, whatever way you do it.

[Myrmidon]

The game before all of the add-ons did not in any way suck. It was the first Superhero MMO ( the only thing that could bring me into those at the time) and we all LOVED it. Still do.😁

[Myrmidon]

On 12/7/2019 at 1:39 PM, Call Me Awesome said:

It was a different game in the beginning and progression was considerably slower.  My first 50 took around 250 hours of playtime and was a bit faster than average for the time.

 

Tanks had no aggro cap and generally MUCH higher defenses and damage than today so they were able to herd up hundreds of enemies into a nice tight bunch and survive doing it... then kill them all quickly.  Blasters had no target cap and were able to eradicate that herd of hundreds of mobs with one Nuke.  Controllers were able to permanently lock down that entire herd so they were harmless while the rest of the team killed them.  Defenders buffs and debuffs were much stronger then as well.  Scrappers were basically the wild animals they are today with better defenses and better damage.  None of the other AT's existed yet... although Keldians were starting to appear with issue 3 (and you had to have a level 50 character to unlock the AT).

 

Endurance was generally more of an issue than it is today, builds were tighter because everyone needed the trinity of Hurdle/Health/Stamina by level 20.  The XP gain required from the mid 30's to 45 or so tended to bog down and it wasn't uncommon to run out of missions and have to rely on running teammate's arcs to gain XP... or simply power leveling.  Task forces did not exemplar players so you needed to be in the level range of a TF to run it... or be exempted by one of your lower level teammates and if they or you DC'd then you were kicked from the TF.

 

All that aside, this was a unique game environment with a great player base; and that player base was more than anything responsible for the game's success.  There were relatively few young players; most were in the 25-60 age range and most were friendly and fun to be with.  Yes, you had the occasional idiot as always but they were more noticed since they were so rare.  Inexperience was very common and lots of players made lots of mistakes but few were trying to cause problems.  Also there were very few elitist players and as long as your build choices didn't negatively impact the team nobody really cared.  Sure, we'd give advice if you asked but we didn't generally volunteer it unless it was a major issue like a level 40 who was always out of end and hadn't taken the Fitness pool.  If you pulled a bonehead and caused problems we'd ask you not to do it again and tell you why it was a bonehead and caused problems without carrying on about it.  If it was a continuing issue then we might have to reluctantly resort to /kick, but that was rare.  The one that really stands out to me was once we had a SG team with one PuG player who was an idiot, constantly pulling aggro and endangering the rest of us.  Then he starts hollering that we had to invite his buddy and since the team was full we'd have to kick someone to make room.  So we did, just as he yells "Not Me!"  We joked about that for years, and the team lead made himself an Axe tanker named Hatchet Man in honor of the occasion.

This reminds me of the time that I joined the Watchguard (a prominent SG on Champion) as the Tanker for my very first Eden Trial. I herded the entire Crystal Titan map (minus the Titan, of course) into a crater, the Kin hit Fulcrum Shift and two teammates’ computers crashed.😂

[golstat2003]

I'm just glad the game is back. Hell I would have take issue 23 of the game is that's what we could have gotten. 🙂

[laudwic]

On 12/7/2019 at 7:46 AM, Jthowell1 said:

This! God I hated running through with lower level characters in a maze of trees hoping I wouldn’t run into a big mob, lol.

Or worse, someone's ambush that they didn't clean up.

[marcussmythe]

On 12/23/2019 at 5:41 AM, Pixie_Knight said:

TI was positive that GDN was going to utterly destroy my character's viability.

Amusingly, the only place I've really felt GDN badly was on Invuln.  It went from having a Psionic Damage hole to having a 'all damage not smash/lethal' hole.  Nowadays you can patch that up pretty decently if you IO for it and Incarnate for it and and and and and... 

 

Oddly, my DEF characters didnt notice much, probably because DEF is so powerful.

[Bonkleberry]

Yay for necro threads!

 

But yeah, the game was not challanging at all back then or boring. Sure, compared to the games we have now, it seems like it would have been a pain, but the only MMO competitors back then were like WoW, Lineage, and Everquest--Guildwars came a bit later. Those games sucked at early levels as well. I mean, in Lineage you had to rest after every battle and WoW mounts were impossible to buy until max level without a friend's help, so running everywhere was half the game.

 

All of the games sucked together, though, so the slog seemed normal. It was just a matter of fact for MMOs back then that characters at low levels were AWFUL until you reached a certain turning point were they became bearable. If you stuck with a character that long, that was a sign you enjoyed playing it enough that maybe you should take it to max level. There was also no option to just go play another game, because the other games were the same.

[srmalloy]

On 7/13/2020 at 7:04 PM, Myrmidon said:

This reminds me of the time that I joined the Watchguard (a prominent SG on Champion) as the Tanker for my very first Eden Trial. I herded the entire Crystal Titan map (minus the Titan, of course) into a crater, the Kin hit Fulcrum Shift and two teammates’ computers crashed.

The wolf farm that was one of Unai Kemen's "close the dimensional breaches" arc, taking place in what can be mapped to the NE corner of Boomtown, using the /Dev Blaster 'spammed trip mines' tactic would, if you were too close to the dumpster when the mines went off, throw up a game-engine error window saying "Too many effects to render".

[Shred Monkey]

Didn't read through 8 pages to see this if this was mentioned already... But I'll tell you something that really did suck back in the day.   When this game was released there was no way to CHANGE YOUR COSTUME!   That's right... want to fix something?  You have to re-roll.   Now THAT really did suck.

 

Although, keep in mind, expectations weren't like today.  CoH was the only game out there where there was anything to customize besides your hair style and color ...which was typically covered by a helmet anyway.

 

 

 

[Greycat]

... appropos of nothing... I seem to recall either late in the game's life or maybe one of the AMAs, one of the devs mentioned we never did do Hami the way they intended.

 

Did they ever say just how they intended for it to go?