Altitis Question: Under-used Toons

[Scarlet Shocker]

I have a LOT of toons. Not thousands, but the reality is I think of concepts and create the toon and maybe do a bit with them but they can get shelved not because they are wank (they won't last that long if they are) but because the next shiny/concept/interesting idea comes to mind.

 

So I have many many concepts. I have relatively few 50s - and of those 50s I play few infrequently. I'm growing the next one or doing something else.

 

And yet some I have a deep love for them even if they don't get played too often. They are fantastic, work very very well and do what I require of them but they still only come out on high days and holidays.

 

Sometimes events get bring them out. The Valentines event saw me work on many alts in rotation to win the Cupiditous lovlinesses and my base is well stocked with a few sets. I found myself teaming with a good friend and we'd rotate for a couple of hours a night straight. But other than that they often rarely see the light of day.

 

A strength, and weakness, of this game is that we can play so many toons but we neglect good ones in favour of the next project.

 

Who would you play more of? Or am I unique in this?

[UltraAlt]

18 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

Who would you play more of? Or am I unique in this?

 

I'm not 100% sure what you are looking for on this.

 

Often when I game on the static group that I game with a couple of nights a week, I get stuck playing the same character for months.

Lately, that group has been working on level 50 content, and, though I do have a couple of 50's (I think 3 or 4), I have stopped leveling to 50 and xp lock my characters at 49. That means that I could run around with them with the character I was leveling up with them, or I could alt out. I've been alting out and bringing in a different character every play session while they run end-game content. Sometimes I feel that I have to cover a niche for the team (and pick a character based on that) or sometimes I just pick who I want to play.

 

Otherwise, I basically have three tactics for character selection.

1) Log characters to market. And watch the LFG while doing so. (I try to make sure all my characters are logged in at least every 50 days)

2) Watch the LFG. See a group I would like to join, and switch up to a character that seems to fit the theme of the recruiter.

3) Check to see what level range in online that has a good number of players that would possibly join a task force or trail. Switch to a character in that level range and start recruiting.

4) Pick a character that I haven't played for a while and solo until I see something come up in LFG ... and, if I don't feel like I'm too high level for it, I'll leave the mission I'm in (probably level-lock so I don't outlevel the current content) and send a tell to see if there is still room to join.

 

[Scarlet Shocker]

31 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

 

I'm not 100% sure what you are looking for on this.

 

 

I genuinely have no preconception (that I'm aware of 😎 )

 

It's a very open question and there is no bad answer, I'm simply curious and your response was very interesting to me so I thank you for it!

[baster]

I don't yet have a 50 as I only get to play 6 days per month. However I noticed so far with the few mid to high 30s that I do have I tend to gravitate to playing the ones with the most manageable endurance, smoother rotations and appealing combat animations.

 

One other criteria that can't seem to get away from is they must be tough and able to absorb punishment which is why I have more brutes on the go that any other archetype, and by a larg margin. For every 10 ATs created 8 are brutes. 

[skoryy]

I have 13 (14?) 50s, and 4 more projects that I know are on their way there someday. Of my 50s, I usually go with whoever I'm hyperfixating on now. Though, I have to admit most of my melee time now is on my newest tank, but again hyperfixation go whee.

[Clave Dark 5]

More 50s than not, but they usually do get shelved around then for "the next cool idea", sop many of them don't have much Incarnate powers, certainly not say tier 4 - which is just fine, by 50 you have too many powers anyway, seems like.  My problem these days is I seem to lose interest before they even get to 50, although I can tell you that's with the game and community, not the toon concept.  I've probably just played enough for now, or too much.

[baster]

6 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

More 50s than not, but they usually do get shelved around then for "the next cool idea", sop many of them don't have much Incarnate powers, certainly not say tier 4 - which is just fine, by 50 you have too many powers anyway, seems like.  My problem these days is I seem to lose interest before they even get to 50, although I can tell you that's with the game and community, not the toon concept.  I've probably just played enough for now, or too much.

You like CoH you will most likely like Ultima Online Outlands, hard-core pvp  open world, sandbox  you not pigeon holed in to say template, you can create any abomination you like. Ofcourse sone are more viable that others.

[Lazarillo]

I have a fair number of characters I don't play as much because they're more team-oriented, and when I jump into the game to just play a 50, I rarely have a plan, and, relatedly, don't have much interest in starting and/or finding a team.  But even once I'm on and I see something forming, it's "too late" and I'm already playing whatever else was more solo friendly, even if/when I end up joining what I see.  Mostly these are (non-Mastermind) support ATs and other squishies.  Most notably, I have an Ice/Martial Dominator who I made as sort of P&P game tribute to CoH during the dark years, and was one of the first characters I made in the game when it went public again.  But Dominators can feel like such a slog to play outside of specific setups that she never gets the attention I'd like to give her.

[Clave Dark 5]

1 hour ago, baster said:

You like CoH you will most likely like Ultima Online Outlands, hard-core pvp  open world, sandbox  you not pigeon holed in to say template, you can create any abomination you like. Ofcourse sone are more viable that others.

Nah, I'm not a gamer, if I quit CoH, I'm done.  Again.  I also despise PvP 😄

[Seed22]

When CoH came back and for a few years after, I was in a craze and made 50 after 50, especially after discovering via a forums post, a cheap farming build that I used till recently(still use the build but havent PL'ed any new 50s as of late). 

 

I have 103 50s. I only play roughly 3-5 sporadically whenever I log in. Combination of nerfs, and just being too lazy to update and minmax old builds and being burnt out on content leads to me just abandoning a large majority of my 50s, though I still love to sometimes log in and read their bios from time to time.

 

My last ever 50 will be a Sav/Elec/Mu brute probably before the end of this year sometime. Maybe. Depends on when P3 is set to come out. 

 

I plan to go all out on this 50, empty my coffers, do the accolade gauntlet to get them HM 4 ready, and to tank all the HMs in order(tanked 4 star ITF on my rad/dark and had a lotta fun) on it. 

 

Then I'll enter full retirement and focus on other ventures/games like I did when CoH was shutdown, only periodically logging in to work on AE pilots again if the mood strikes me.

[MonteCarla]

I try to have 3 levelling characters and maybe one Incarnate on the go at a time.

Recently I'm up to 7 levellers, one of whom I haven't played for at least two weeks.

Two are re-rolls of existing characters with tweaked power sets, just because I enjoyed being those characters.

One's at 47, waiting for the right Task Force to come along and finish off at 50. 

 

Sometimes a character gets dropped on the way to 50 due to being squeezed out by others I'm more into.

Sometimes I pick them up again, even a year later and get them to 50.

 

eg Mary Alpha, MA/Dark brute, a parallel earth clockwork character, was abandoned at 39 for nearly a year. A thread in the tanker forum about Dark Armor made me pick her up again, and I had fun. And I've now got her to 50 and made two "sister dolls" of hers as new characters, and stuck them all in a SG together.

 

I can think of two others in the high 30's/low 40s I might revive, maybe once I've cleared some of these levellers out.

 

 

[lemming]

A year or so ago I trimmed back from around 250 characters to below 100.   Now whenever I make a new alt, I retire one I'm just not playing much.

With around 90 chars, I tend to have enough in each niche scattered across servers.

[baster]

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Nah, I'm not a gamer, if I quit CoH, I'm done.  Again.  I also despise PvP 😄

If pvp isn't you thing then you can just level up a trade skill and be a guild dedicated blacksmith , carpenter, tailor etc.. and sell excess items via your owne vendor you have set up at a house you owne in UOO.

And if UOO isn't your thing then WoW might be a good choice, as you can just dedicate yourself to pve and never have to engage in any pvp.

[MTeague]

I have a grand total of thirty two characters right now.  I may create more.  But I deliberately level them slowly, and I tend to create a 1,000 character backstory for each one, and mentally  lump them into hypothetical buckets in the event of a Final Cataclysmic Showdown between my Heroes and my Villains (even figureing out which ones my goldsiders will eventually go with).  I over-the-top OCD them, trying to keep an equal number of origins, equal number of archtypes, in each bucket, and for the first 31, without any duplication of powersets at all.  

 

But if i have one skill in life, just one.... it's overthinking things. 😆

[Clave Dark 5]

1 hour ago, baster said:

If pvp isn't you thing then you can just level up a trade skill and be a guild dedicated blacksmith , carpenter, tailor etc.. and sell excess items via your owne vendor you have set up at a house you owne in UOO.

And if UOO isn't your thing then WoW might be a good choice, as you can just dedicate yourself to pve and never have to engage in any pvp.

Nope, nope nope ha ha 

 

As stated, I'm not a gamer, I gave up on playing video games while the Atari 2600 was still a thing.  CoH is a one-off for me, and will be the only one-off.

[UltraAlt]

10 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

I have a LOT of toons. Not thousands, but ...

 

I guess I forgot to address this part.

 

I have a spreadsheet, but I haven't updated it in several months and have definitely made more characters since then.

 

Server	Alts	total levels	avg level
Torchbearer	90	1951	21.68
Excelsior	22	661	30.05
Everlasting	63	1538	24.41
Indomitable	3	66	22.00
Reunion	19	452	23.79
Victory	3	30	10.00
Total	200	4698	23.49

 

 

Archetype
Blaster	23
Brute	7
Controller	22
Corruptor	16
Defender	17
Dominator	18
Mastermind	28
Scrapper	23
Sentinel	15
Stalker	10
Tank	17
Peacebringer	3
Warshade	1
Total	200

 

 

 

[White Cobra]

I am definitely suffering from out of control altitis that leads to a lot of internal “mental conflict” between playing beloved old characters and creating/playing new ones.

The most recent page launch and the new powersets took me above the 1000 50’s mark and I still keep getting flooded with ideas for new characters. In addition to that I struggle with some - borderline or actually - obsessive compulsive concepts, like having at least 2 50’s of every powerset for every AT, and a 50 “everything” for WP, MA, STJ. Before the latest proliferation I had that for Energy Aura too, so now I have a lot of new EnA tankers to play to catch up on that front!

So for me there is certainly a lot of this “neglected beloved characters” going on, and an almost daily inner struggle as to whether to replay some old characters for a few missions or continue leveling the current new ones.

[Uun]

I currently have 42 characters, all but 1 of them lvl 50. I know they can be moved, but at the moment 27 are on Excelsior and 15 are on Torchbearer. I typically create 4-5 new characters a year, but I don't level more than 1 or 2 at a time. Unless I need something specific or am in the middle of a story arc, I try to grab whoever has been idle the longest. I manage to rotate through the roster every month or two this way.

[gameboy1234]

I have a fair number of alts, well over 100.  About 80 to 100 of which I "play."

 

My main sticking point seems to be IOs.  Once I'm basically required to get out Mids and start figuring out what I want to do, the time required skyrockets and I tend to get stuck.  Usually happens in the late 30's to 40's.

 

There's another sticking point for me: running mission arcs.  Some (a lot) characters have a "story" that I'm running them through, and they'll sit on certain contacts or mission arcs since I want to have a group to go through with.  But that takes more time and effort than just pugging, so I go play the pug toons instead.

 

I'm not sure at all what could be done about this, it just seems to be the way I play.

 

BTW, my latest alt: Astro-Man.  I found this public domain hero who had been created just to have a superhero in the public domain, so now he hangs out in Pocket D chatting people up.

[JKCarrier]

I tend to play one toon exclusively from 1 to 50, then retire them and start a new one. They never get played after that. I should probably respec, sell their IOs, and delete them. But I'm nowhere near out of character slots yet, and who knows, maybe someday there will be post-50 content that makes me want to pull them back out.

The one exception is my designated Badge toon, Mekanikron. I'm not obsessive about it, I know there's certain badges I'm never going to get (PVP, blech. Task Forces, double blech). But every once in a while I pull Mek out and knock out a few more defeats or whatever, just to see how many I can get.

[mistagoat]

I adore the leveling process and progression in this game, that's what I derive the most enjoyment from these days. I always start with a mids build then make a toon and run it up (no PLing) to 50 giving it IO sets as it gains slots/powers and going after accolaids. I'll always unlock Incarnates via the Oro arc once they hit 50 but it's a toss up if I keep playing them to put anything in those incarnate slots. I have a few fully t4'd toons but most are somewhere between none and fully t3'd. Most of the time I'm eager to try the next combination of powers.

 

Once a toon hits 50, it doesn't get a lot of playtime. I ran through every single 50 I had during the Valentines event multiple times and I love an "all anything" TF so I'll bust out an old toon to play one of those or maybe I'll grab my toughest tank to try a goofy self-imposed challenge but aside from a small group of favorites they mostly collect dust 😞. I'm at 117 set out 50s and I add another one every couple weeks.  It's an expensive way to play but all the tools exist to support my lavish and inefficient in-game lifestyle so why not??

 

It would probably be wise of me to strip older toons to use for newer toons but even if I don't play them often I like knowing that I could knock the dust off any one at any time and have an effective toon.

 

I'm not really a concept guy, I like a good name and I want to experience tons of powerset combinations and see how they play through the whole leveling process so this is how I go about achieving that.

[Go0gleplex]

Been back for a couple years now and I've still not gotten any of my toons to 50 due to squirrel syndrome (altitis). Kinda loose interest in the toon once the grind seriously starts and start playing the grind less frequently than I do the lower level alts I make. Some of those I end up deleting as I find that I'm just not having much fun with them and move on to the next experiment freeing up names cleanly rather than just having them in a 'stock' list.  So can't really say that the OP is alone... 😉

 

[Ukase]

On 7/12/2025 at 3:01 PM, Scarlet Shocker said:

Who would you play more of? Or am I unique in this?

You are not unique in this. 

I have 4 accounts. The primary account @ukase had almost 300 characters, which I've whittled down to a mere 137. Of the 137, only 4 are not level 50. Now, on my other 3 accounts, I have one character at level 10 sitting next to the candy keeper to get the Winter recipes at level 10. 

I've got a fire/regen sentinel that's just ...well, it's not fun. So, it sits there until I decide to somehow make it fun, or delete it. I've got at least a dozen, maybe 2 dozen characters that are like that. 

From time to time, I'll have a character with the Unlucky artifact mission and just keep them in stasis for the next account to get it before level 30. 

I've got a scrapper with the Sister Solaris finale specifically for the minos and cyclops, as an example of why some characters don't really do much but log in, invite an alt, and log out. I've got probably a dozen characters across each account that have the mayhems, safeguards, AM, Siege, Multidimensional, Shrouded so characters can get accoladed more quickly. 

I certainly have no intentions of ever playing any of them through content again - they've got their purpose. One such character that holds AM/Siege has no enhancements. And literally auto-completed over a series of a few months. I don't think that character has ever fought anything, lol. but it serves a purpose.  

 
 

[TacoPete73]

I seem to be very much like yourself. I get an idea for a character and make it. Play it for a bit and then some new idea will come along.

 

I have about 50 characters currently on the go and 9 that are retired. All of my characters retire at level 50 with the exception of my 1 badge collecting character.

 

The characters that I do end up playing the most and longest tend to be ones that develop a story and progression through the game. I tend to go with themes;

My WW2 hero and his constant war against the Council and 5th Column for example.

My occult character will do battle with the evil forces of magic but ignore Skyraiders for example. He will team for certain TFs but not all (Katie Hannon but not Manticore).

A cosmic hero who fights shivans, rikti and explores the shard (mothership raids & shard TFs for team ups).

 

Sometimes a character will get hung up at a level where there doesn't appear to be a path for them to explore. That's when they might sit on the shelf for awhile as well.

 

I don't do inventions or incarnate stuff except for my badge character as I don't find those aspects of the game fun. I also tend to ignore the Praetorian stuff as I could never get into it.

 

[BZRKR]

If I build and slot a character, and then notice that I am not playing it much I either send it to another shard (especially Reunion which is in a physically different place) or strip it for parts.