Stranger’s force fields were much appreciated, back in the day.
I remember that I once went to one of the PVP zones, and put on Dispersion Bubble, Personal Force Field, and a couple of other defensive powers from tertiaries/rewards and just /emoted reading the newspaper … took a long damn time for someone to kill me!
Griefer!
Postscript: apparently NCSoft is bringing aspects of CoX back in their upcoming MOBA game.
Hate NCSoft. Hate MOBAs. Oh, well.
(Watches video.) FUCK you, NCSoft. Fuck ya dead and buried.
I was The Rose’s Thorn, a Spines/Regen scrapper made on day 1, before anybody knew each half of that combo was overpowered and the combo was cheese supreme. Aaaah, good times. Of course, they nerfed her down later. Still, while it lasted, she could solo SO MUCH ridiculous stuff ! The spine toss alone could bring mid-bosses to a sliver of health.
I was also ThermoCop, a fire/gadget blaster. For when RoboCop was not enough “oomph”, yanno ? And Czernobug, a bug-eyed, antenna’ed, fluo green-skinned Radiation/Radiation Defender who was a magical spirit born of urban superstitions about the Chernobyl meltdown, and who spoke in an ultra-cliché Russian accent. Is easy to do, you omit articles and roll Rrs, da ? 
I came back to the game years later and rolled a robot mastermind and a katana/regen stalker roughly templated on Deadpool (before he became mainstream, /fedora) ; but I forget what their names were.
Preach it, brother !
AFAIK archetypal powers were in from day 1. They were :
Tanker : AoE attacks taunt their targets on top of their regular effects (ie force enemies to target the Tanker)
Blaster : the fewer HP you have left, the more damage your attacks do. Dance on that red line !
Scrapper : every attack has a chance to crit for double damage. Stay in for one more shot at it, he’s almost dead. Just one more !
Defender : the more people in your group lose health, the faster your powers recharge. Sucks to solo, huh ?
Controller : your offensive powers do more damage on controlled enemies (i.e. held, mezz’d, rooted, sleeping etc…). Even then your offensive powers do jack shit, because 200% of zero is still zero. Sorry.
Brute : the longer combat lasts, the more damage you do
Stalker : automatically inflict crits when you attack from stealth. Since stalkers also all had at least one “high damage, long recharge” power, this made for a *mean *alpha strike.
Dominator : each time you inflict a status effect, your Domination bar fills up. Once it’s full, you could activate Domination mode which boosted your damage by a lot for a short while. But there were ways to be perma-dom’d at high level and with enough gear.
Corruptor : do more damage the fewer HP the target has left. A fun reversal on the alpha strike : you kept the good shit for last. Many an enemy died of sudden, terminal “Bwuh ?!”.
Mastermind : boost pet damage when you’re close to them. You were always close to your pets, and were the only pet class, so this was the most passive least noticeable one.
Here are a few of mine:
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Arrow Lord…he was my main. Bowman
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Powerblitz…Electro Tank
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Mississippi Lumbago…Dark blaster. Named under the influence of extra strength NyQuil.
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Slugbug…strength Tank
A few others that didn’t make the Facebook page: Knightdragon…superstrength evil Tank, Stonethrow, Brute-sized Tank who was covered in lava.
These weren’t present until the addition of City of Villains. Definitely not day 1.
What the Barbarian said. NCSoft can rot. They have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with an investment of my time or my money.
I think scrappers had their critical hits from launch, and tanks had some sort of aggro booster, but it wasn’t exactly Gauntlet. Blasters didn’t get Defiance until Issue 5. Defenders’ Vigilance was added several months after that, in September 2005, just before the CoV launch. I believe the others were added and/or formalized around then to make them match up with the new villain archetypes, which all had inherents.
Some were, most were not. Tankers didn’t get an inherent AoE Taunt until I3, for example.
I had many alts, but my most famous toon was Angus McKenzie (SS/INV Tanker). I even won some kind of “best thread” award on their forums for an “Ask the Noob” thing I did over there years ago
I made a western themed blaster named “Jonah Wales” who sometimes cracked wise about great-great Grandpa Josey…
Well, yes, obviously, since those classes were added in CoV
I count at least three different levels that name works on, all of which fit with the origin story. Well done, my man.
Me, too. When I first started playing MMOs, the first two that I went with were the Saga of Ryzom and CoH. I miss them both.
My wife and I played together, and our favorite characters were Ping and Pong, twin Energy/Kinetics villains (backstory was that they were child-prodigy Chinese Olympic table tennis players, kicked out because it was discovered they were mutants). We designed them to synergize with each other- since in CoX, buffs only affected your teammates and not yourself, they would cast buffs on each other. Their movement power was teleport, and one of our favorite tricks to do was to use Teleport Friend on each other, which resulted in us immediately swapping places.
Since everyone in our group got our team-wide buffs twice, we were very popular. Once we had a party wipe- we were the only ones left standing, and finished the fight zipping around like hummingbirds.
I really enjoyed CoX, but I tended to lose interest at the higher levels- because every power stacked more and more particle effects on your character, I started to get eyestrain.
They did add a toggle or slider to limit that, at some point.
As much as I loved my tanks and scrappers, my Emp buffer with a fully customized macro keyboard setup was a beloved asset of many teams. If I was bored, I’d run around the middle-low zones (15 or so) dispensing buffs and heals.
I’d fly around the Hollows dispensing heals & rezzes. Not so much of the latter after the place got the aid station.
My Western blaster was Liberty Valence. He was an undead Liberty Valance, reanimated by a bolt of lightning and reformed by his time in Hell. He was Pistols/Electric, of course.
Yep. I liked to take my Emp main to the lowbie zones and buff people to a high shine. Fortitude, Clear Mind, Adrenalin Boost, and a tell, “Hi, welcome to God mode. Go to town.” 