CoH must have sucked

[Rathulfr]

56 minutes ago, DougGraves said:

 

I came from Asheron's Call that had none of that.  Out of the box it was solo friendly, you ran fast, there was no healers or tanks.  It was fantastic.  But as a melee I could attack or heal myself - no super powers.

 

AC was my first MMORPG, too: Thistledown, represent!  Ah, good ol' AC, where everyone was a Mage-With-A-Hurt-Stick.  There were no healers or tanks because everyone was a healer/tank.  Everyone trained at least 2 schools of magic, in addition to whatever weapon skill set they preferred.  Pity the noobs that tried to play non-magic characters: they quickly learned and rerolled accordingly.  Talk about a seriously flawed game that was incredibly fun to play.  I remember it fondly.  I even played AC2, which was completely different, before I abandoned it for CoH and WoW.

 

[DougGraves]

2 hours ago, Rathulfr said:

Pity the noobs that tried to play non-magic characters: they quickly learned and rerolled accordingly.

 

I played a pure melee dagger.   I did try a dagger with item magic after a few years but switched back to pure melee.

[MTeague]

14 hours ago, Shred Monkey said:

The big MMO of the previous years before CoH was Everquest.  At that time in EQ you would literally take an hour running across the continent to meet up with your friends.  You could wait another 30 minutes on a boat if you needed to get to the next continent over.  And you needed to meet up with your friends because, with only a few exceptions, you couldn't really solo and make progress.  The holy trinity was a real thing, and it was really a holy quartet because you needed a mana/pump class keeping the mana users full of energy.  It was also standard to need a crowd control class so your team could focus on 1 enemy at a time.  And the best tank in the game (warrior class) had the LEAST amount of agro (taunt) of any class, so everyone had to manage their own agro by joining a fight late or wiping threat, etc.

And let us not forget in EverQuest, if you died, you respawned with zero gear, completely defenseless, and had to run back to the exact spot where you died to get your gear of your corpse. 

And you lost XP each time you died. Not debt. XP was SUBTRACTED from your total upon each death.

And if you died enough, you could LOSE A LEVEL.

And you only respawned at the place you last got a bind. 

 

How many people remember XP'ing up in Kunark, only to have a group wipe, where the barbarian says... says "ah crap... I'm still bound in Halas"?  (meaning, you ain't gonna see him for at LEAST an hour)

 

Every MMO since then I've never really been able to take death that seriously.  Most of them, death is now a minor inconvenience, barely a speedbump.

[drdread]

On thing I kept having to remind myself was never to create a mutant tank. After outbreak, you would get stuck on the Vahzilok quest line and die a lot.

[roleki]

On 12/8/2019 at 4:49 PM, Sir Myshkin said:

Maybe it's just me, but I don't bother with any of the Prestige (now P2W) attacks on new characters. Given how quickly we can progress to 20 through DFB/DiB with the 2XP I just pull all my attacks as they become available. By the time I'm moving on to other content, the next few levels still go pretty fast and will have the majority of that early core >26 stuff figured out. Plus, DFB's go by so quickly (like, what, ten minutes tops per run?) I don't need to be cycling constant attacks, I'm probably wasting one here or there anyway! Use Brawl! It wont hurt!

 

I kind of find it more of a hassle to claim those extra abilities just for ten levels of over-simplification, just to never use them again.

I take the ranged P2W powers on all my characters because those come in handy during flashback missions and when you need to hunt up X more vampires/werewolves for the Atlas Medallion.  I keep them all in Tray 7, so I can just bring that up when I get flashed too low.

[Marine X]

9 hours ago, drdread said:

I kept having to remind myself was never to create a mutant tank. After outbreak, you would get stuck on the Vahzilok quest line and die a lot.

My main was and is a Mutant Tank.

 

Vahzilok Wasting Disease Auto: Self -Regeneration, -Recovery, -Hit Points, -Endurance
You have been infected with the Vahzilok Wasting Disease. This disease, introduced by the Vahzilok, is slowly wasting you away. Find a cure, quick! Your maximum hit points, endurance, regeneration, and recovery have all been reduced.

 

Vahzilok Wasting Disease, before they Nerfed the Story Arc, was the one thing that almost made me quit playing. You had -Everything and Yes, I died a lot. If they hadn't had to give you 2 back to back Hunt a bunch ( I think 30 ) Missions after you were infected it might not have been so bad. ( The Swarm of Flies around me was embarrassing too ). They eventually removed the hunts and you were cured in the next mission, but that was the worst experience I ever had solely because of content and story.

[Rathulfr]

14 hours ago, DougGraves said:

 

I played a pure melee dagger.   I did try a dagger with item magic after a few years but switched back to pure melee.

 

My first character was a Blademaster (which I quickly abandoned), and my second was an archer (I forget what they called those).  That was the original "Rathulfr", which became my consistent handle for all other MMORPGs after that.  I eventually ended up taking both Item and Creature Magic in order to play without pulling my hair out (precious little left back then, even less now).

 

[Rathulfr]

10 hours ago, MTeague said:

And let us not forget in EverQuest, if you died, you respawned with zero gear, completely defenseless, and had to run back to the exact spot where you died to get your gear of your corpse. 

 

AC had the same mechanic.  Some of the fondest memories I have of AC are the insanity of running around naked to recover gear from corpses. 

 

The value of gear determined what you lost with each death, so after awhile, everyone started buying and carrying expensive "death items", as insurance policies against losing equipped gear that wasn't easily replaced with just money.  It was far better to lose a useless robe that cost 5X-10X more than your helmet, hauberk, or leggings, which you spent hours getting by grinding mobs for drops.

 

Edited December 10, 2019 by Rathulfr

[drdread]

47 minutes ago, Marine X said:

My main was and is a Mutant Tank.

 

Vahzilok Wasting Disease Auto: Self -Regeneration, -Recovery, -Hit Points, -Endurance
You have been infected with the Vahzilok Wasting Disease. This disease, introduced by the Vahzilok, is slowly wasting you away. Find a cure, quick! Your maximum hit points, endurance, regeneration, and recovery have all been reduced.

 

Vahzilok Wasting Disease, before they Nerfed the Story Arc, was the one thing that almost made me quit playing. You had -Everything and Yes, I died a lot. If they hadn't had to give you 2 back to back Hunt a bunch ( I think 30 ) Missions after you were infected it might not have been so bad. ( The Swarm of Flies around me was embarrassing too ). They eventually removed the hunts and you were cured in the next mission, but that was the worst experience I ever had solely because of content and story.

 

Actually, I meant was well before you got the Vahzilok wasting disease storyline. If you chose a mutant origin, your contact for missions 1-5 gave you a Vahzilok quest line. Zombies do toxic damage, Reapers and Mortificators do negative damage. Most tanks didn't get resistance or defenses to that until about level 8.

[drdread]

I do miss Galaxy City as a starting zone though.

[Marine X]

5 minutes ago, drdread said:

Actually, I meant was well before you got the Vahzilok wasting disease storyline.

Yeah, those were where I developed my Undying Love of Vahzilok. They were the gift that just kept on giving. Had no resistance to them is an understatement, they were rough and even Inspirations didn't help. Then they started Vomiting on me, nice. Was glad to get them in the rear view mirror.

[JasperStone]

On 12/6/2019 at 7:40 PM, tafilr said:

Playing a Controller on Live solo before they had vet rewards at early levels was rough, IMO.  It's why I didn't have one that made it past level 20 until probably Issue 10 or maybe later.   Talk about a slog.

and pre-containment.

and dangerous PUGS giving you overwhelming debt lol.

 

[KC4800]

My first character was an inv/mace mutant tank. Started in Galaxy City because BABs was there. Once I got through the Vahz, without any status protection into my early 20's (didn't know I needed it) facing Tsoo. They kept sleeping me. To this day I still clobber a Yellow Ink Man first whenever and wherever I encounter them. That was an aggravating first experience to this game. 

[siolfir]

12 hours ago, MTeague said:

And let us not forget in EverQuest, if you died, you respawned with zero gear, completely defenseless, and had to run back to the exact spot where you died to get your gear of your corpse. 

And you lost XP each time you died. Not debt. XP was SUBTRACTED from your total upon each death.

And if you died enough, you could LOSE A LEVEL.

And you only respawned at the place you last got a bind. 

All of which were staples of MUDs, which were the text-based precursor to MMOs.

[TNT]

I think I started Issue 6.

 

Maybe my memory is faulty but I remember slow jogging back to Hollows missions all the way from Atlas Park due to no hospital in the zone. Then needing to sneak my way to the mission entrance all the way across the zone.  Ugh.  

 

Of course I was so new to the game that as a blaster I took the confront power so that I could pull just one at a time.  Power  descriptions can be pretty vague. That experiment turned out to be a massive learning experience.   I had to hold onto that power a long time before I had earned a respec and changed powers.  He became my main, an elec/elec endurance sapping blapper.

 

I can't bring myself to rebuilding him here, despite all of the love I feel for that toon.  I guess you never forget your first. :D

[Coyote]

13 hours ago, MTeague said:

Every MMO since then I've never really been able to take death that seriously.  Most of them, death is now a minor inconvenience, barely a speedbump.

 

Heh, nothing had as harsh a death penalty as UO. I mean, dying to mobs was annoying enough, but dying to PKs... heh.

[Coyote]

3 hours ago, Marine X said:

Yeah, those were where I developed my Undying Love of Vahzilok. They were the gift that just kept on giving. Had no resistance to them is an understatement, they were rough and even Inspirations didn't help. Then they started Vomiting on me, nice. Was glad to get them in the rear view mirror.

 

Vahz are limited in range ,but they do so much damage that when I hit a spawn with Seeds of Confusion, if I don't hurry up and hit them with a damage power, they kill half the spawn in like 3 seconds.

[Frunobulax]

I'm not sure how to explain this, in the decades of my playing video games Pre SOE (NGE, the bungling of eq2, the sabotage/neglect of vanguard SOH) the idea of a game not being made properly or having lackluster elements never even occurred to me at all. Before that, I just took things for what they were and if a game didn't directly support modding I never really even considered what could be done differently or improved.

 

It's just the way the game was, I had no perception of it being slow or any expectations for how the game should progress.

 

Also it was basically a super fast quasi-action game compared to some other games like everquest, it could have been far slower and I would not have balked at it at the time.

 

I actually quit this in its first year because I was big into raiding so I went back to a game where we'd spend huge amounts of time dying/ressing/rebuffing to crack new content and it was sooooo much slower then COH even at release. My tolerance was way higher for that kind of thing, and the mmo market was still sparse.

 

[Troo]

3 hours ago, Coyote said:

 

Heh, nothing had as harsh a death penalty as UO. I mean, dying to mobs was annoying enough, but dying to PKs... heh.

PKs that would proceed to loot your corpse for that awesome gear.

 

Some of those game mechanics would... Imagine that most prized purple or pvp enhancement breaking and disappearing as an expected part of the game. Or death = losing one random enhancement.

[srmalloy]

11 hours ago, drdread said:

 

Actually, I meant was well before you got the Vahzilok wasting disease storyline. If you chose a mutant origin, your contact for missions 1-5 gave you a Vahzilok quest line. Zombies do toxic damage, Reapers and Mortificators do negative damage. Most tanks didn't get resistance or defenses to that until about level 8.

It was a Science origin that got you sent out after Vahzilok -- Jonathan St. John Smythe in the S.E.R.A.P.H. office in City Hall, your first mission being 'Talk to Iris Parker about the zombie attacks', and he would forward you to Henry Peter Wong. The Mutation contact would send you up against Council/5th Column. I gave up playing Science origin characters after getting bitten by that a couple times.

[Mr. Wallet]

I played from launch and I cancelled my subscription and stopped playing around issue 20. The only reason was because they kept spoon-feeding an easier and easier game and it was getting harder and harder to really appreciate the content.

 

Endurance reduction TOs go completely out the window if you get Stamina at level 2. I took Fitness on maybe 20% of my characters before level 30 because I either used my attacks judiciously or I actually slotted endurance reduction where I needed it. I felt smart when I could have more tools (powers) at my disposal and use them well, rather than just take Hasten to spam things and then complain that Fitness was "required" because of the problem that Hasten created.

 

Giving everyone Fitness broke a few things, mostly by not making Rest a penalty for playing badly but also by eliminating some of the early-game jump height puzzles that made you want to work for that travel power. Stamina made -recovery attacks and debuffs stop working as effectively as they're supposed to; they should have reduced endurance costs and buffs across the board instead (even save players 2 extra enhancement slots), but I guess that would have been too much work.

 

A similar "it wasn't designed that way" applies to content levels 4-14. People can explode through it with a travel power, not least of which because they can trivially tag along with any high-level group that will take them. The non-stop double XP doesn't help - that's basically a "skip the early game" button, and if you're not building a capable soloer then the "you don't have to use it if you don't like it" argument doesn't work, because you're not getting a lot of pickup teams so it's going to be even more of a slog than when you actually played that way, even with your veteran powers, if you had them. When only a few people had those powers, you could actually find those people who didn't and team with them, if you wanted.

 

City of Heroes was absolutely freaking great, and if I were a super-villain my first dastardly plan would be to force my minority opinion on everyone else by rolling Homecoming back on all that crap that funneled you to the endgame at the expense of the experience getting there. I barely played WoW but I've heard the same complaints from people who were hyped about WoW classic, things like actually working to get your mount so the world feels bigger. Most people play Minecraft in survival, not creative. People like to struggle against things, to push back and overcome. The right amount and type of challenge is different for each person, but for me things went south vaguely around Going Rogue, 10 months before I quit and about 2 years before the game shut down, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I think they started chucking darts at the wall to see what might improve the game's numbers and keep NCSoft from pulling the plug. They pivoted away from principled game design, and toward handing the players absolutely everything they wanted even if it turned the game into a bland mess. The problem with this strategy is that dedicated game players are barely better at game design than the general population. If you're a doctor, the patient is only good at knowing what their symptoms are, you do not let them tell you what is wrong and how to fix it.

 

The most disappointing part about Homecoming specifically is that I don't get to grind prestige. I liked the feeling that I was sacrificing personal gain for the sake of the supergroup. I liked going from one dinky little room to two dinky little rooms and us being like, "We did that. We earned that." Now we don't get to earn anything. Minecraft creative mode.

 

(Edit: upkeep was kind of stupid though. Just add 6 or 12 times the upkeep cost to the original price of things and let us keep whatever we bought without that punishing drag that only lets big, active supergroups ever ever get anything of note.)

 

Don't get me wrong, I am deeply, deeply overjoyed that I get to play this game again. But it took stepping away from it for 4 years or so before I started to miss it badly enough that I wished I could go back, even if it was this new, less challenging experience.

Edited December 12, 2019 by Mr. Wallet

[THEDarkTyger]

On 12/6/2019 at 6:11 PM, biostem said:

Can you give us an idea of your AT and powersets/power picks, because this isn't my recollection at all?  Especially for blasters or other ATs that have more "active" secondaries, there is always some power ready to use...

The, at least for the first 10 levels or so, you're remembering wrong.

[THEDarkTyger]

9 hours ago, Coyote said:

 

Heh, nothing had as harsh a death penalty as UO. I mean, dying to mobs was annoying enough, but dying to PKs... heh.

XP loss. De-leveling. On PvP servers, your corpse could be looted. Corpse runs naked through high level areas. Everquest was pretty damn harsh, too.

[biostem]

16 minutes ago, THEDarkTyger said:

The, at least for the first 10 levels or so, you're remembering wrong.

As a blaster, for instance, you'll have at least 3 "active" powers to use by level 2.  Now, if you spam something like your immob over and over, you'll quickly run out of end and you'll be sucking wind for  awhile.  If you pace yourself, and make sure to detoggle powers like sprint, you'd fair much better, even that early on...

[drdread]

2 hours ago, srmalloy said:

It was a Science origin that got you sent out after Vahzilok -- Jonathan St. John Smythe in the S.E.R.A.P.H. office in City Hall, your first mission being 'Talk to Iris Parker about the zombie attacks', and he would forward you to Henry Peter Wong. The Mutation contact would send you up against Council/5th Column. I gave up playing Science origin characters after getting bitten by that a couple times.

Could be. It's been so long since that time, i may have misrembered.