travel Getting Around the Cities of Heroes and Villains

[Robotech_Master]

 

GETTING AROUND THE CITIES OF HEROES AND VILLAINS

 

or

 

YOU'RE REALLY GOING PLACES NOW!

 

City of Heroes and Villains is huge and pretty complicated, and there are lots of different zones to explore. What’s more, a lot of mission chains, Task Forces, and Strike Forces like to send you willy-nilly from one zone to another. But if you think travel is confusing now, you should have been here when the game was new.

 

In the very early days of City of Heroes, inter-zone travel took a lot longer. There were two different, unlinked transit lines, and certain zones that were intentionally not part of them. For example, to get from Atlas Park to Firebase Zulu, you would have to take the transit line to Steel Canyon or Skyway City or Independence Port, cross the zone under your own power to get to the other transit line, take that to Talos Island, cross Talos Island to take the ferry to Peregrine Island, and then cross Peregrine Island to get to the Portal Corps building to reach Firebase Zulu. (And there were Shadow Shard Task Forces that were sadistic enough to send you from the Shadow Shard to Atlas Park and back.) There were supergroup bases that could save you some time, if sufficient effort had been put into getting as many teleport beacons as possible, but even those could only go so far.

 

Now, years later, there are a wide variety of transport systems, shortcuts, long-distance teleports, and alternate routes. People who’ve played City of Heroes for a while have developed a feel for how to get from one place to another as quickly as possible, and can be off and running as soon as the next task force mission is up. However, newbies and those whose old City memories are still hazy can be left confused in the dust trying to work out how to get to from Peregrine Island to Independence Port before the rest of the team has already finished the mission there.

 

This guide will serve as a handy reference to help people find the fastest way from one zone to another, and possibly even suggest some new ways of getting from place to place you hadn't considered before. A quick tip: if you need to get from one zone to another, hit Ctrl-F and search this guide on the zone names to find where I mention them. For most transit methods, I'll list all the reachable zones. (With the exception of supergroup base teleporters, because that would be nearly all of them.) 

 

Although there are many places you can cut through that offer exits to multiple parts of Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, they aren’t used as much for getting around as they used to be. The most popular methods for getting from place to place—Ouroboros, teleporters (supergroup, Pocket D, mission), and the LFG queue—will work from practically anywhere, saving time over the need to travel to specific locations in the world to get to other ones. Combined with the transit lines and TUNNEL system, these methods mean there is no longer much need to go to a particular location just to take a shortcut to another—but I include them here for the sake of completeness.

 

THE MAP (NOT THE TERRITORY)

 

First, the basics. The City of Heroes map display has two tabs. You’re probably most familiar with the right-hand “Zone” tab showing the region you’re currently in—either the current city zone, or the instanced mission map. However, you may not have paid any attention to the second tab, “City,” to the left, which gives an overview of the city area you’re currently in and shows how all the zones connect to each other. 

 

You can use the map of the current region to see all the exits from the zone you’re currently in. Most exits will appear as either green dots for normal zones, or red dots for hazard zones (some of which will have a black and yellow striped border around them, just to emphasize their hazardous nature). However, some exits have custom icons (such as the exit to Studio 55 in Pocket D). You can mouse over each icon to get a tooltip with the exit’s destination. Clicking on an exit will put an icon on the navigation display compass to show you which direction to go to get there.

 

The overview tab can be useful in planning your trip—if you need to go to a zone for which none of the teleport or shortcut methods given below will work, you’ll need to get to the closest connecting zone and travel to the exit. It can also be helpful to know how the city is laid out in case you have business in adjoining zones. (In days of old, before Galaxy City was destroyed, people used to hold lap races from zone to zone around the inner loop of the city.)

 

If either map is too small to make out the details, even zoomed in, you can drag the corner of the map out to make it bigger, which will make everything on the map window bigger as well.

 

If you haven’t yet, I would also advise you to install the most recent Vidiotmaps add-on pack, which adds locations of badges, plaques, Shadow Shard gravity geysers, zone events, and other useful information to the map. 

 

It may be helpful to refer to these maps as you read descriptions of the transit lines and shortcuts in the remainder of this guide.

TRANSIT LINES: MONORAIL (PARAGON CITY), BLACK HELICOPTER LINE AND FERRY (ROGUE ISLES)

 

Formerly divided into Yellow and Green transit lines, the monorail has long been one of the primary means of getting around Paragon City. As noted above, it was originally two different routes where you had to physically cross some of the zones to change lines, but NCSoft eventually gave in to player complaints and unified the transit lines so you could travel to any station from any other station.

 

Black Helicopter Transport and the Rogue Isles Ferry are the Rogue Isles equivalent to the monorail, and work the same way: you can hop any black helicopter or ferry to any destination they offer. The ferry was originally divided into multiple routes, but like the monorail they were eventually combined together.

 

The monorail, helicopter, and ferry can all be used for “board transit” mission locations, where you have to use a transit line to get to the mission instance.

 

MONORAIL DESTINATIONS

• Atlas Park
• Kings Row
• Steel Canyon (north and south)
• Skyway City (north and south)
• Talos Island
• Independence Port (north and south)
• Croatoa
• Brickstown
• Founders’ Falls

BLACK HELICOPTER DESTINATIONS

• Mercy Island (north and south)
• Port Oakes
• Cap au Diable
• Sharkhead Isle
• Nerva Archipelago (north and south)
• St. Martial
• Grandville (north and south)

ROGUE ISLES FERRY DESTINATIONS

• Mercy Island
• Port Oakes (east and west)
• Cap au Diable (north and south)
• Sharkhead Isle
• Nerva Archipelago
• St. Martial
• Grandville

SHIPS AND SUBS

 

In addition to the transit line, there are a few ships and submarines that serve as adjuncts to the stations and take you places they don’t reach. These include the ferry that connects Talos Island and Peregrine Island, the smuggler’s ship that connects Talos Island, Striga Island, and Independence Port, and the submarine that links Peregrine Island, Kallisti Wharf, The Abyss, and Grandville. These can be located as green or red exit dots on the map display.

 

As with any exit that connects to multiple destinations, the smuggler ship and submarine can also be used for many “board transit” missions.

 

TUNNEL SYSTEM

 

In the very last update before City of Heroes shut down, NCSoft introduced the TUNNEL System, a system of dimensional portals connecting various destinations in Paragon City, the Rogue Isles, and Praetoria. Characters of Hero and Villain alignment who use the TUNNEL will not have access to the opposite alignment’s zones, but Vigilantes and Rogues will have access to both. All alignments can access the Praetoria zones.

 

Thanks to the TUNNEL, characters can now hop straight from Atlas Park to Firebase Zulu should they want to. In many places that have both TUNNEL and Monorail or Black Helicopter/Ferry links, the TUNNEL is placed conveniently to the other transit system so it’s very easy to switch back and forth. 

 

TUNNEL DESTINATIONS

• Atlas Park
• Mercy Island
• Imperial City
• Underground Imperial
• Cap au Diable
• Talos Island
• First Ward
• Night Ward
• Nerva Archipelago
• Founders Falls
• Peregrine Island
• Firebase Zulu
• Dark Astoria

SUPERGROUP BASES

 

Back on Live, a well-equipped supergroup base was pretty rare, because it required a lot of time and dedication on the part of supergroup members to grind out enough prestige to grow and power the base to become big enough to support the best amenities—including teleporters that could put you in nearly any zone accessible to your character.

 

However, in Homecoming, the whole prestige grind is one of the time sinks that SCORE got rid of. Now all base items are free, and prestige is no longer even a thing. This means that anyone who cares to put in the time and effort can build just as good a base for themselves and their own alts as they like—which includes getting all the teleporters to all the available zones. (Also, heroes and villains can share the same Supergroup, so bases can offer ports to all available destinations for both heroes and villains.)

 

Relatively few zones are unavailable as base teleports: PVP zones, the Hive, the Abyss, the Shadow Shard, Cimerora, and various other extremely distant locales. Getting to any zone on offer from a SG base is usually as simple as going into the base, finding the teleporter room, and choosing the destination from the list. A well-arranged base will make it easy to see at a glance which zones are assigned to which teleporter.

 

This is one of the absolute best ways to get to nearly any zone you need to reach. The only drawbacks are that sometimes the teleport location it lands you in is fairly remote from where you wanted to go, and some zones aren’t accessible that way at all.

 

You aren’t limited to just your own SG base, either. Many supergroups make their bases available for use by the general public as a public service. If you don’t have access to or just don’t feel like building a good SG base yourself, you could check out one of those. To get in, you just have to enter their password at the base entrance or when using the Supergroup Base Teleport prestige or Day Job power—or plug it into one of the base teleport macros below.

 

On Torchbearer, base WARPZONE-4141 is a small room with teleporters conveniently arranged by destination category. TORCHCS-5949 is a much larger base with many amenities available. If you play on a different server, check in its forum or channel on the Discord to find out about any similar bases available there. If you know of such a base, feel free to leave the passcode and server name in the comments, and I may add it to a future update.

 

BASE TELEPORTERS

 

There are a couple of different Supergroup Base teleport powers available. One of these is a Prestige power, available from the P2W store for 1 million Inf. This power can be fired off every thirty minutes. There is also a Day Job Accolade power that can be earned by spending time logged out at the base entrance when you have both the Patroller and Monitor Duty badges. Both of these powers require you to stand still for ten seconds or so as you use them, during which time the power can be interrupted by attacks or other effects.

 

However, there is actually a faster way to get to any given supergroup base, with the use of the /enter_base_from_passcode command. If you type that slash command, followed by a base password, it will teleport you to that base instantaneously, with no execution time or cooldown. (And no 1 million Inf purchase fee, either.)

 

If you want to add this command to one of your trays in the form of a macro, just type something like 

 

/macro WARP enter_base_from_passcode WARPZONE-4141

 

If you’d like to create a nicer-looking macro using a power icon image, you could use this instead:

 

/macroimage DayJob_Teleport Superbase_Teleport enter_base_from_passcode WARPZONE-4141

 

Substitute the passcode for your own base, if you prefer. Your SG leader should be able to tell you what it is. If you’re the leader, you can simply set it for yourself with the command /sgpasscode [word] where [word] is the word you want to use. (The game adds the 4-digit number itself.) If you don’t know the passcode to your own base, you can at least use someone else’s base for convenient teleporter access while using the P2W store power to get to your own.

 

(SCORE lead developer Leandro has said this command was never actually intended for player use, and will eventually be removed. So, enjoy it while you can; I'll remove it from the guide when it no longer works.)

OUROBOROS

 

Ouroboros is the “flashback” system that lets characters play through content they’ve outleveled. It’s located in a zone outside the normal timestream, and characters gain a teleport power allowing them to access that zone upon doing a mission arc or gaining a badge associated with time travel. (This includes the exploration badge within that zone itself, which is why people often ask for someone to summon an Ouroboros portal for them to let them go there and get it for themselves.) Characters must be at least level 14 before they can use the Ouroboros Teleporter to reach Ouroboros.

 

The main exit from Ouroboros leads back to a number of zones in Paragon City and the Rogue Islands, and will also work for most “board transit” missions, meaning that players often find it most efficient to throw down an Ouro portal to avoid having to travel cross-zone to a tram station. (There are some “board transit” missions, such as the one in the Market Crash trial, that it won’t work for, but for those you can exit to Talos Island and come out very near the tram station there.) Heroes and Villains won’t be able to exit to each others’ zones, but Vigilantes and Rogues can exit to any.

 

In a portal at the back of Ouroboros is another exit to the five Echoes of old zones that Ouroboros hosts: Atlas Park, Galaxy City, Faultline, Dark Astoria, and the Rikti Crash Site. These Echoes depict the original versions of zones that were removed or considerably changed with new Issues that came out, including containing the original badges and plaques from those zones (and replacing them with new ones in the new versions of the zones). The newest Vidiotmaps contains updated badge and plaque locations for all of those zones. 

 

The Echoes of Galaxy City and Dark Astoria can also be reached from supergroup teleporters—and characters below level 14 can teleport in from the base and use the exit in that zone to reach Ouroboros and get the badge and teleporter power that way (though they still can’t pass through that teleporter themselves until they hit level 14).

 

Because Ouroboros makes it so easy to get from distant zones back to more central areas, the Ouroboros teleport power is often employed as a shortcut to get home from places like the Hive or Cimerora back to those zones in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles. It’s worth noting, however, that there is a way to use Ouroboros to get to zones that are not listed on Ouroboros’s exit. 

 

All you have to do is flash back to a mission arc belonging to such a contact, use the crystal to teleport to that contact, then quit the Ouroboros task force. Of course, there are enough other methods of speedy travel that it would probably be far simpler to use one of those than to go through the effort of clicking through an Ouroboros arc. Nonetheless, it’s good to know the option exists.

 

OUROBOROS EXIT DESTINATIONS

• Atlas Park
• Cap Au Diable
• Talos Island
• Sharkhead Isle
• Independence Port
• Nerva Archipelago
• St. Martial
• Founders’ Falls
• Grandville
• Peregrine Island

OUROBOROS ECHOES

• Echo: Atlas Park
• Echo: Galaxy City
• Echo: Faultline
• Echo: Dark Astoria
• Echo: Rikti Crash Site

VANGUARD BASE (RIKTI WAR ZONE)

 

Another co-op zone with multiple exits is the Vanguard Base in the Rikti War Zone. Heroes and villains have the option of three exits each (not counting the Crey's Folly zone exit a few hundred yards away) and Vigilantes and Rogues can take all six.

 

This base has a lot of amenities, including a hospital, merit vendor, trainer, Enhancement store, supergroup base entrance, and even crafting tables, making it a great place to hang out—especially since it's in the zone where Rikti Mothership Raids are formed up.

 

VANGUARD BASE EXITS

• Atlas Park
• Founders Falls
• Peregrine Island
• Cap au Diable
• St. Martial
• Grandville

There is also a map exit to Crey’s Folly in the southeast part of the Rikti War Zone.

 

THE MIDNIGHTER CLUB

 

Best known as the place you can get to Cimerora from, this base offers three zone exits to Paragon City and one to the Rogue Isles that characters can use as their alignments permit. To have access, you either need to do the Midnighter story arc, launched from a contact inside the Steel Canyon or Cap Au Diable University, or go to Night Ward and enter the front door of the big spooky mansion to get the House Hunter badge.

 

MIDNIGHTER CLUB EXITS

• Steel Canyon
• Croatoa
• Founders Falls
• Cap au Diable

And, of course, there’s the exit to Cimerora through the crystal at the center.

 

POCKET D

 

Pocket D is probably the best-known co-op zone. It has all the amenities except crafting tables, plus a P2W Store and access to Null the Gull to change alignments or disable unwanted buff effects. There's even an Architect Entertainment annex built right in. You can get here from the entrances in any of the zones listed below (just look for the green dot on your map), or you can buy a Pocket D teleport power with a 30-minute cooldown from the P2W store (or get it free for hanging out in Pocket D for a couple of hours).

 

Since the LFG teleport system can launch trials from anywhere (see below), this makes Pocket D a great place to form up any trial, Task Force, or Strike Force. Participants can make sure they're the right alignment, have the double-XP buff filled up, or even disable the Speed Buff run-speed effect if there's a Kinetic on the team and the trial involves lots of caves or catwalks. Then, when they're ready, the leader queues them up and they teleport to the contact or directly into the trial. (Pocket D is also one of the main places Incarnate Trials form up.)

 

Plus, there are the eight exits available: four to Paragon City, three to the Rogue Isles, and one to Praetoria. Characters may take any exit their alignment permits—and can change their alignment at Null the Gull if they need to.

 

POCKET D EXITS

• King’s Row
• Faultline
• Talos Island
• Founders’ Falls
• Port Oakes
• Sharkhead Isle
• St. Martial
• Studio 55 (Imperial City, Praetoria)

PARAGON DANCE PARTY

 

Back in the early days of the game, some of the Cryptic devs thought they’d do something nice for the roleplaying community, so on their own time and without official sanction they coded up a little dance club and tucked it in. It wasn’t anything fancy—just a reskin over a room from the warehouse tileset—but it proved so popular that it wasn’t too much longer before Pocket D was commissioned as an official, sanctioned dance club.

 

PDP wasn’t popular with only the RPers, though. At the time, the transit lines were still split, so you had to travel the length of Steel, Skyway, or Independence Port to get from one line to the other. Since PDP had exits to Talos Island and Independence Port, and its Steel Canyon entrance was a lot closer to the south transit line than the other line all the way across the zone, the traffic between exits by shortcut-takers soon dwarfed the traffic on the dance floors. There was no zone map and the exits weren’t marked, but it wasn’t hard to memorize which one was which.

 

When Pocket D was added, NCSoft removed the old Paragon Dance Party—but during the six-year interim when the game was being developed in secret by fans, the nostalgics in SCORE added it back in. So, you can still visit it, or use it as a shortcut if you like, even now. Of course, now that the transit lines are merged, there isn’t much call for taking that kind of shortcut anymore. And since Pocket D has a lot more amenities than this little dark empty warehouse, you don’t find too many people stopping here anymore. But it’s still a nice quiet spot to hang out, craft, and, yes, roleplay.

 

PARAGON DANCE PARTY EXITS

• West: Independence Port
• North: Steel Canyon
• East: Talos Island

GETTING AROUND THE SHADOW SHARD

 

The Shadow Shard was Cryptic’s first attempt at creating real endgame content for City of Heroes, and the huge zones full of floating islands and gravity geysers present a number of travel questions all their own. 

 

The Shadow Shard is made up of four huge zones connected serially, with an exit in the east end of each zone leading to an entrance in the west end of the next: Firebase Zulu links to the Cascade Archipelago, which links to the Chantry, which links to the Storm Palace. These connections are in the form of green “vines” with swirly portals in the end. 

 

The military base at the west end of the Firebase Zulu zone also has exits that lead directly to the west end of each of the other three zones. These are circular clickable portals at the point of exit from the base, each labeled with the name of its zone. Those portals come out in little glowy balls near the swirly-vine entrance to the previous zone. (And there’s also a third exit to from Zulu to the Cascade Archipelago, from a cave in the Firebase Zulu military base that leads to a secret base, “Mole Point Charlie,” in the very middle.)

 

There’s no “ground” in the Shadow Shard; if you fall off an island and can’t catch yourself with flight or teleport powers, you’ll be teleported back to the west end of the zone you’re in, near the swirly vine and glowy ball exits back to the previous zone and to Firebase Zulu. If you want to get to the east end of the zone you’re in, all you need to do, then, is drop into space and land at the west end, take the glowy ball portal back to Firebase Zulu, and then take the Firebase Zulu zone portal to whichever zone is east of your current zone. Then go back through the swirly vine, and that will take you to the east end of the previous zone. 

 

This can be particularly useful on Justin Augustine’s Task Force, which sometimes sends you to destinations on the east end of the Chantry. To get there, all you need to do is take the portal to Firebase Zulu, take the portal to the Storm Palace, and then take the vine back to the Chantry.

 

Travel from place to place within the Shadow Shard zones themselves is accomplished by means of the “gravity geysers,” blue glowy fountains of mist that will fling you across great distances. (It is permissible to shout “Wheeeeeee!!!” at the top of your lungs as you hurtle through the air.) Vidiotmaps marks the location and direction of all geysers, which can be extremely useful when using them for travel.

 

When using the gravity geysers for travel, you need to disable any powers that affect your movement rate, such as Super Speed, Super Jump, or Combat Jumping. Even then, sometimes the geysers can miss their target, so be ready to click on a flight power or temp power if you need to catch yourself before you fall out of the map.

 

You can, of course, simply use flight or teleport powers to avoid geyser travel altogether—the Rocket Board and other non-combat flight powers are especially useful in this regard—but the geysers actually can get you across the zones fairly quickly if you’re any good at using them. I used to race against characters who habitually used the geysers, and they often beat my speed flying in a straight line. 

 

If you’re doing Shard missions or Task Forces on a full team, making sure that every team member has Team Transport can be a great way to avoid the question of geysers altogether—the half-hour cooldown for the first member’s TT power should be over by the time everyone else has had their turn. Mission Transporter plus Assemble the Team or Incandescence Destiny can also be useful, for missions in the same zone.

 

The Rocket Board, Team Transport, and other useful prestige/temp powers can be purchased from the P2W store (of which there is one in Firebase Zulu, another one in Mole Point Charlie, and a third one next to the Enhancement vendor near Justin Augustine).

 

THE LFG QUEUE TELEPORTER

 

One of the most unexpectedly useful newer additions to City of Heroes is the LFG Queue. This is the panel you use in queueing up for Death From Below, Summer Blockbuster, and all the Incarnate Trials, among others. It lists all such Trials and Task/Strike Forces available to you based on your current level and alignment, so that you can choose the one you want to join and queue yourself or your team up for it. But it can also be spectacularly useful in helping you get around.

 

Before the LFQ Queue, any Task Force, Strike Force, or Trial could only be started by visiting a specific contact to ask them for the mission. Some of these contacts are quite remote, and sometimes getting everybody there would be its own “trial”. 

 

But now, in addition to letting you queue directly into trials that don’t start from contacts, the LFG teleporter can send you and your entire team to the location of Task/Strike Force or Trial contacts. Or, if you’re soloing, it can send just you.

 

The LFG Queue is supposed to work by you indicating you want to take part in a trial and waiting, and then whenever enough people are interested the trial starts. In practice, almost nobody actually uses it that way (perhaps because when you’re queued for a trial that might never happen, you can’t join any other teams or do much of anything else). So people form full trial teams and then queue them up so that they all hop into the trial right away.

 

If you decide you want to start with a team smaller than the Task Force or Trial's maximum, and don’t want to wait for anyone else to decide to join you, you select the radio button at the lower right, to lock the trial for your group and begin with just the team members you have—and that’s also the key for using the LFG Queue to get from place to place.

 

All you need to do is select a Task Force, Strike Force, or Trial that starts at a contact, lock the trial for your group, and queue up. The teleporter will then send you to that contact—but you’re not under any obligation to do their Task Force when you get there unless you want to talk to them and select the first mission. Once you arrive at the contact, you can go wherever you want from there. Of course, you do have to know where the Task Force contact actually is to know where porting to them will take you, but that’s the kind of thing you pick up with experience.

 

Note that this will not work if you’re on a Task Force or Ouroboros mission already. Or, rather, it will work, but it will also remove you from that Task Force, so it kind of defeats the purpose of using it for that.

 

This power will work best when used solo, because you only have to queue for yourself. If you’re on a team, all members of it have to be in the same zone, and they need to know what you’re doing so they don’t get confused and turn down the invitation to queue. But if you explain ahead of time, and everyone’s in the same place, it’s a great way to get your whole team from one place to another—for example, if you decide to form up your Task Force or Trial team in Pocket D, as I suggested in that section above. (Though sometimes when you travel this way, the game may give the team leadership star to some other team member when you arrive, and you’ll have to ask for it back.) 

 

There is no cooldown on this power; you can use it as often as you need to. It can even work to get you out of places where other teleport methods are disabled, such as PVP zones.

 

I like to use LFG teleport when I hear of a Task Force forming that I’d like to be on—particularly when that’s Imperious’s Task Force, because of how annoying it is to travel to Cimerora the “normal” way, but it’s also nice for TF contacts who are some distance away from the nearest transit, like Moonfire or Hess. I’ll ask if there’s an opening, then ask them to wait thirty seconds before inviting me while I use the LFG Queue to teleport to the contact. That way I’m there immediately; I don’t have to mess around with traveling to the right zone and then making my way to the contact in the usual way. 

 

While not meant to be an exhaustive list, here are a few of the more useful Task Force contacts for LFG teleportation. Note that these will only be available to you if your character meets the level and alignment requirements to participate in the TF in question.

• Citadel (Citadel’s Children). All the Task Force Commander contacts are located across from a trainer and near a supergroup base exit, but Citadel is unique in that he is also positioned right next to the tram and TUNNEL. If you want to catch the tram or TUNNEL, Citadel’s your best bet.
• Katie Hannon (A Tangled Plot). If you want to get to a giant monster war in the north end of Croatoa, or see if Sally is available to be bopped on the nose, LFGporting to Katie will put you convenient to both of them. Note that you do have to have done the last Croatoa story arc to have unlocked her to be able to port to her.
• Maj. Richard Flagg (Terror Volta (3)). Maj. Flagg is located right by the middle Portal Corps building, so if you have business there, or need to be on the northeast end of Peregrine Island for other reasons (doing the Maria Jenkins arc, talking to Detective Selnum, starting the Dark Astoria content, heading north to hunt Rikti monkeys, etc.), this is the fastest way to get there.
• Imperious (Time’s Arrow). If you’re sick and tired of having to find a university and then change zones three more times to get to Cimerora, LFG queueing will seem like a gift from the (Roman) gods. There is no supergroup base teleport beacon for Cimerora, so this is just about the only fast way to get there. (You do have to have Cimerora unlocked for this Task Force to be available to select, of course.)
• Lady Grey (The Lady Grey Task Force). This is your instant port to the Vanguard base, where you can make use of all the amenities I described in the earlier section. (This is particularly useful given that the supergroup base teleport beacon to RWZ puts you way out in the middle of nowhere.) It’s also a speedy way to get there when you hear of a Mothership Raid forming up…except that the port may put you in the wrong instance of the RWZ for the raid, so be sure and check the /search window to see if you’re in the same instance where all the other people are, and if not, head to your alignment’s exit and quickly zone out and back into the right one.
• Mairenn MacGregor (Descent to the Hydra). This contact is located right next to the Atlas Park sewer entrance. If you want to go where all the people forming up DFBs hang out, or otherwise have a reason to want to get to the Sewer or Abandoned Sewer right away, this is who you’d pick.
• The Woodsman (Prisoners of Eden). If you’re wanting to get to a Hamidon Raid, this is the closest teleport destination to the Hive. (The supergroup base Eden teleporter will put you here, too, but using the LFG port means one fewer zone transition.) 
• Ada Wellington (Market Crash). This puts you a lot closer to the university than the Kallisti Wharf supergroup base teleporter. With the single exception of using a Wentworth's teleporter to get to Steel Canyon (see below), this is the closest teleport destination to any university, if you’re looking to use the crafting tables or park for a Day Job. (This university doesn't have a Midnighter Club entrance, though.) And it’s a co-op zone, so is available to all alignments.
• Sara Moore (The Legend of Ruladak). Of all the Shadow Shard Task Force contacts, Sara Moore is especially worth mentioning for being located within Mole Point Charlie, the secret military base in the heart of the Cascade Archipelago. If you’re doing the Shadow Shard story arcs, you’ll be required to travel here several times—to visit the mole point, to carry fedexes to the contacts, and to return to the contacts once or twice after you run their earliest missions. And the first time, you’re expected to travel the long way, rather than using the secret portal in Firebase Zulu. But don’t mess with the gravity geysers, and don’t spend long minutes flying or teleporting across the zone. Just choose Sara Moore from the LFG list, queue, and there you are. (Also, you’ll be sent on a fedex to Justin Augustine, another Shard TF contact. Just use LFG to get to him, too, and save yourself yet more travel time.)

(Props to Hedgefund, whose own LFG teleporter travel guide turned me on to this technique.)

 

FIND A CONTACT TELEPORTER

Your contacts list has a similar teleporter to the LFG Queue built into it, though this one isn’t quite as useful. If you open the contacts list, at the top you’ll see a blue button marked “Find Contact.” If you choose this, you can flip through all the remaining contacts available to you at your level. If you haven’t spoken to them yet, the window will say that you don’t know the contact, and will offer to teleport you to them. This makes it easy for you to find new content that you haven’t done yet if all your other contacts don’t have anything interesting to offer you.

 

However, the teleporter will only work once per unknown contact. If you’ve used it already, the system considers you to know the contact now, and only allows you to select them from this point forward. Hence, it’s not exactly the most useful thing in terms of getting to the same place more than once.

 

That being said, it can be useful in particular circumstances, if you should have the need to teleport to a given contact once. For example, if you need to unlock Cimerora in a hurry, you don’t have to take the time to find the nearest TUNNEL and take it to Night Ward, then find the mansion. Instead, simply teleport to Fireball or Trilogy from the “Find Contact” function. That will put you in the catacombs underneath the mansion in Night Ward. Go through the set of double doors with the Midnighter Medic standing next to them, then go out the front door, and you’ll have the House Hunter and Midnighter badges and be good to go.

 

MISSION TELEPORTER and TEAM TRANSPORT

 

I’ve already mentioned a couple of the teleport powers available from P2W—the Supergroup Base teleporter and the Pocket D teleporter. But there are a couple of other P2W store powers that can be particularly useful in getting from place to place as well. 

 

These two powers are effectively the same thing; they both have a 30-minute cooldown and will both teleport you to the currently selected door mission. It’s just that the Mission Teleporter only works on you and costs 1 million Inf, but the Team Transporter transports any team member in range and costs 10 millon Inf. (You can also use the Team Transporter solo.) Note that Team Transporter fires off in pulses; if you miss the first transport window, wait ten seconds or so and you’ll get another.

 

Their use for getting to missions in distant zones (and in the Shadow Shard, as mentioned above) is obvious, but you can also use them as methods of zone transportation if you can call a contact giving missions where you want to go. Just get a mission there and use the teleporter. You can then call the contact back and drop the mission, if you don’t feel like doing it.

 

Honorable mention goes to Assemble the Team and the Incarnate Incandescence Destiny power, for making it possible for you to port the rest of the team to the mission if they're in the same zone when you get to the door.

 

At 10 million Inf, the Team Transporter is one of the most expensive powers available from P2W, but the first time a Shadow Shard Task Force sends you to Paragon City, then sends you back to the Shadow Shard again, you'll agree it's worth every penny. (All the more so because those Task Forces usually repeat this particular trick multiple times. That's part of why the Dr. Quaterfield TF used to take over eight hours to complete, but can now be done in about three.) If you have trouble affording that amount, this other guide I wrote could help with that.

 

AUCTIONHOUSE TELEPORTERS

 

In the I25+ version of City of Heroes, you can now access the auctionhouse anywhere you are (outside of a mission or supergroup base) thanks to the /AH command. But in the old "Live" version of the game, this command was a tier 8 Veteran Reward. If you couldn't use it yet, you had to travel to where one of the auctionhouses was physically located to be able to place and check bids. To make this easier, there were various teleport powers you could obtain that would take you to an auctionhouse when you fired them off. These powers are still in the game—and while they may no longer be necessary in order to trade, they can still be very useful in getting around. 

 

There are two different varieties of these powers you can obtain. Under the "Fixed Price" category, the auctionhouse sells teleporters that will take you to each different variety of auctionhouse in the game—the Consignment House, the Black Market, the Trading House, or the Underground Trader. They cost 10,000 Inf each. Due to a bug the way the game stands right now, you can buy more t han one charge—but you might as well not, because the power itself will be deleted when you use it no matter how many charges you have on it.  Still, 10,000 Inf  is practically a pittance, so you might as well grab one.

 

(The Auctionhouse lists teleporter Inspirations, too, but these apparently no longer exist in the game. The only one you can actually buy is the round power icon.)

 

The other variety comes from the Day Trader Day Job, which you obtain by logging your character out at an auctionhouse location. While you're logged out, you'll slowly earn uses of an Auctionhouse teleporter power (which you can have multiple charges on). Once you earn the Day Trader badge for having spent 100 hours logged out there, you'll earn those uses faster. This is one of the only Day Job powers you can earn without needing an Accolade, and if you'd like to have an extra way to get around the city that you can use even when LFG is unavailable to you, you might as well get in the habit of logging out at an auctionhouse.

 

Using any auctionhouse teleport power means you cannot use any other such power for 30 minutes.

 

LONG RANGE TELEPORT

 

I’ve not had any experience with this, the final power from the Teleportation pool, as I’ve never been moved to take it on any characters, but as I understand it, it works more or less like the transit system—firing it off gives you a list of zones you can teleport to, depending on your alignment and where you currently are. I imagine it could be convenient to have, and maybe thematically relevant to a character for RP purposes—but look at what you’ve just read in this guide. There are already so many ways to get somewhere else quickly for free, why would you spend one of your precious 24 power slots on something like that?

 

YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

 

So, with all these teleport powers at hand, where can’t you easily get from somewhere else? Not so many places. Really, there are only a handful of zones that can only be reached by going through a door from another zone. There are the Sewer and Abandoned Sewer, and the network of troll tunnels under the Hollows where the Cavern of Transcendence is. There are the PVP zones, and extreme hazard zones like the Hive and the Abyss. For those, you need to know what they’re connected to and where to go to get there. And you’ll learn those things the longer you adventure in the game.

 

But for the rest, getting to any particular zone should simply be a matter of choosing whichever method is most easily available to you and using it. Hopefully, this guide gave you some good ideas of where to start.

 

TRAVEL PLANNING

 

It's beyond the scope of this guide to go into too much detail on where within a zone any given travel method will put you, but as you spend time traveling around, you'll start to learn these things for yourself from experience. And when you do, you'll find you can start making decisions of which method to used based on where it puts you. For example, if you ask a Task Force teammate who's gone on ahead what part of Steel Canyon a mission is in and they say "in the southwest, near the Perez Park entrance," you'll know that the closest exit to that part of the zone would be to take a Consignment House Teleporter to Wentworth's—you'd have to cross the whole width of the zone if you took the south tram line, and the supergroup base teleporter puts you all the way across the zone in the northeast. (And the LFG porter would kick you off the TF, so that's not even an option.) In big zones like Independence Port, this sort of planning can make a considerable difference. 

 

In any case, once you've been able to put some time into learning these ways to get around, before too long you'll find that you're now one of those people with the expertise to leave their less-savvy teammates in the dust. If and when that happens, be sure to message those teammates the link to this guide!

 

As always, if I made any mistakes, left anything out, or you have other useful advice to add, please hit that reply button and let me know! I will update the guide as necessary.

 

Thanks for reading my guide, and thanks for any feedback you have to offer.

Edited January 21, 2020 by Robotech_Master

[justicebeliever]

This was fantastic, you've tied together all the tips and tricks i’ve used i to this.  Great work as always!

[SlimPickens]

[Mr. Vee]

Great guide - there's also the Wentworth's and Black Market teleporter charges that you get for logging out in those dayjob locations. Quite handy on TFs or Flashbacks when you can't use LFG, for Kings Row and Port Oakes especially. 

[Robotech_Master]

52 minutes ago, Veelectric Boogaloo said:

Great guide - there's also the Wentworth's and Black Market teleporter charges that you get for logging out in those dayjob locations. Quite handy on TFs or Flashbacks when you can't use LFG, for Kings Row and Port Oakes especially. 

Oooh, good catch! I'll definitely add something about those next time I update the guide.

[Heraclea]

More about  Cimerora - home of the Imperious Task Force.  You need a Midnighter Club member ship to get there, because the entrance is through the Midnighter Club.  Blueside, you get there through the building on the right hand side of the universities (facing the main building) with a moon and crossed swords logo above the door.  Redside I think there is one entrance from Cap au Diable but don't quote me on that. 

 

There are two ways to gain access to Midnighter Club and thence to Cimerora.  The hard way for heroes is to run Montague Castanella's story arc (Steel Canyon - heroes) or Ashley McKnight's (villains).  Montague's arc is rather fun - you get to craft a Lost Cure that turns them into citizens who immediately get attacked by their former colleagues, and it gives the Lost Savior badge.  Heroes can do this at level 10; villains must wait until 30. 

 

The easy way for either is to enter Night Ward via the TUNNEL swirly; I know there's one for Heroes in Atlas and Talos, for villains in Mercy and Cap; there are likely others, and it is available to Praetorians also.  Once in Night Ward, you will see a large haunted house on a hill.  Go inside.  You will be immediately awarded the House Hunter badge, which in turn gives you Midnighter Club access as well.  With that, you can get to Cimerora once you hit 35. 

 

There is AFAIK no other way to get to Cimerora. 

[molten_dragon]

One small correction, the slash command to set your base password is /sg_passcode [word], not /sg_password [word]

[Robotech_Master]

Oops! I'll fix that.

[AboveTheChemist]

Outstanding guide! For anyone on Everlasting, I created a utilitarian, no-frills teleport base accessible using the code ELTP-7670. It has a trainer, normal and inspiration vendors, Ouroboros crystal, and teleports for every available beacon, all clearly marked and visible from the port-in location. Feel free to use it if you wish, and please let me know if you have suggestions for improvement.

[Hedgefund]

16 hours ago, Robotech_Master said:

LONG RANGE TELEPORT

 

I’ve not had any experience with this, the final power from the Teleportation pool, as I’ve never been moved to take it on any characters, but as I understand it, it works more or less like the transit system—firing it off gives you a list of zones you can teleport to, depending on your alignment and where you currently are. I imagine it could be convenient to have, and maybe thematically relevant to a character for RP purposes—but look at what you’ve just read in this guide. There are already so many ways to get somewhere else quickly for free, why would you spend one of your precious 24 power slots on something like that?

 

Once while I toyed with a (failed) experiment to create a 2nd build for travel, I took Long Range Teleport.  

 

Your understanding is correct. I do want to dig in a little deeper to your "depending on your alignment and where you currently are" line.  Just so folks get the practical consequences of this, if you're in a hero zone, this will only teleport you to train stations (in hero zones, natch).  If you're in the Rogue Isles, it will only take you to another ferry.  So you can't use it to go into the other faction zones like you can with oro, base teleporters, or lfg.

 

In the current world, this may be the worst power choice available.

[DoctorDitko]

Brilliant guide!

Just a small note, if you've forgotten your base passcode (or aren't sure which one is for THIS server), if you nonetheless remember the WORD part, you can type:

 

/sgpasscode word

 

and the game will return your current passcode.

Thanks for all the great guides!

[thunderforce]

Is it worth mentioning the PDP has two entrances in Steel (the old and new ones from live), but the exit always dumps you out the new one behind Icon?

[Troo]

Anyone up for refreshing RM's excellent guide to reflect the recent changes?

 

@Jimmy could someone update it and still have @Robotech_Master as the author?

 

Edited November 25, 2020 by Troo