Heh, I never played CoH, but I used to do something similar with an enchantress in Diablo II. Lots of fun seeing a bunch of level 2s suddenly realizing they can do damage like a level 60.
I would lie if I said I wasn’t particularly pleased with myself for coming up with that one, yes 
Ah, the days before cross-the-board nerfs…
My tanker, “Crush Groove” - Hideously loud outfits, and when I had my friend playing “Kid Sidekick” - Emp defender - I would laugh maniacally watching 15 negative status tokens rack up on me, and my movement speed would diminish -slightly-.
My controller “Psi-Clone” - I love, love, LOVE playing controller roles in games. Locking down enemies is my joy. But then the wave of nerfs. Yes, yes, we can’t have controllers actually effectively controlling things… (Gads, I hated the ‘PvP must be a thing, so suck all your builds’ wave that hit when CoV came in)
But my real joy was Meggido, my dark / regen scrapper. Old days when that build made you completely unstoppable. I recall toe-to-toe-ing with the Real Nemesis and us just slugging each other for literally an hour of play time. I eventually had to call in a guild mate to push the damage dealing just a -little- further to take him down.
I also remember getting her to max level, then running with … A defender? I think? When I got to Devouring Earth mobs, and just getting slammed by them, I asked my friends, “When did they start getting status effects?” - It was explained to me that Meg had just been pretty much invulnerable to those, so I never noticed they were going on!
Man, I miss hanging out with my guild there! 
Also… I miss Ascendant. 
I had so many around the various servers that there’s no way I can remember them all. My favorite for RP was Wilf Wolfenstein, a werewolf Brute with a tendency toward Animal-speak (eg: “Wo-man! Wo-man!”) created in a laboratory accident. Like Frankenstein’s creation, he’s not really bad, just misunderstood. It wasn’t his fault that he was created in Rogue Isles so he eventually made the switch to Paragon City.
I’d love to visit my badass base on Victory again. I never had enough of a guild to build up credits on Freedom(?), but I was there when they dumped a load of gelt on guilds around year four, and build up an amazing base.
Fuggit. Let’s buy NCsoft and put CoX back on the airwaves. Who’s in for a Kickstarter?
Getting to duckwalk the asshole who canned the game out the front door would just be gravy.
My friends and I had SO MUCH fun with this game. Never came close to running out of things to do in 8 years, and the game got bigger and better all the time.
Way too much to type here, but one of the best things to do was stand in a popular spot and just watch the amazing parade of human creativity go flying, leaping, speeding, beast-running, Ninja-runing, teleporting, or sashaying past. So many crazy, funny, cool, and even tragic characters.
I once went on a Task Force with strangers that included a robotic kitchen appliance from the future and a kitten who used telekinetic powers to animate the dead little girl on whose shoulder she rode.
It was worth clicking on random PCs going by just to look at backstories. Obviously, you’d hit a lot of blanks, but a surprising number of the ones that were filled in were genuinely entertaining. Some were better than most of the backstories you find in the comics.
I loved writing the origins of my characters. It was a challenging balancing act; the tight space constraints meant I had to write very densely to get the important elements in. (This is another thing I haven’t seen another MMO do well.)
Wait, there was actually a way to put your backstory into the game, where others could read it? I thought that when people were talking about their characters’ backstories, it was just their own personal headcanon. That makes it even awesomer!
Yup.
If you clicked on an alt, you got panels of stuff. One time, near the end, I had some obnoxious broadcast-yacker call BS on my claim to be a charter player. I teleported across the zone and just stood there while he pulled up my info. The 72-month badge and the 40 or 50 with it shut him up pretty fast. One of his mates even complimented me.
Like Amateur Barbarian says, if you clicked on a character, you had the option to pull up their info. The main tab of the info had the usual basics–name, origin, archetype, and such–plus a text field for your character bio (up to 1024 characters, IIRC). Other tabs had their badges (achievements) and other stuff.
I forget–were souvenirs visible to other players?
I had a lot of fun with my character back stories. I thought of the different servers as parallel universes from each other so I would often make alternate versions of my own characters where they were good in one universe and evil in the other. There was no way anyone else would notice this but it entertained me to no end
Getting the flavor of a character into the terse text field could be challenging. I varied my approach, sometimes using straight biography, but also at times poetry, song fragments, intel dossier, or narrative of an illustrative moment in the character’s life. One villain’s bio space was (my imagined version of) the superhero Statesman’s personal field notes on my villain.
Some characters’ images and bio texts are still preserved in the fansite Titan Network’s “City Info Tracker” as if trapped in amber. Here are some of mine (I hope the link will work for people without my login password):
Airacobra – My first character, first costume (1930s throwback), first attempt at a bio…thus pretty prosaic.
Raintree (this one won a contest – I actually got a prize mailed to my house).
Zulu Time – this character was played “hardcore,” meaning any defeat ended his career (as if dead). His bio reflects that idea.
Hardcore was only a thing players agreed among themselves, it wasn’t coded. And it was crazy hard in a game where comic book characters are expected to be defeated frequently. As you can see, this guy got to level 44 (50 was max) before buying it.
American Pit Bull – the text is part of a real song by musician John Shipe.
The Last Minoan – I hope this one is funny.
Daisycutter – tragic.
The Great Goblin – villainous creature acting (at least for now) on the side of good.
The Queen of Knives – a poem. My first level 50, and an awesome mix of powersets (Ice Control/Storm Summoning). It was like being BOTH Iceman AND Storm from the X-Men.
Sister Power – blaxploitation homage.
Stratospheric – I like the action shot character portrait.
The Rainy Knight – My last 50. Too late, I discovered that Storm is even better as a Primary than a Secondary, and synergized well with Dark. Thus was born a Storm/Dark Defender, who was too much fun in action for me to write much of a bio. “Who’ll stop the rain?” indeed. Well, we found out.
There were so many more. I’ve left numerous 50s out entirely, characters I loved for years. L’Oriflamme, Djinni, Easter Island, Uluru, Ironclad, for God’s sake, how could I leave out the Man of Not Quite Steel?
I dream of the City we lost, and the City which may yet come to be, like a man in the desert dreams of water.
It works; I like the Last Minoan.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I remembered my major, long-running characters, but I’d forgotten some of the latecomers that never got a chance to grow. Gunshadow and Little Tin God never made it to level 20, but I was fond of their origins. Tin’s story is minimalist (because there’s almost nothing left of him), but I remember struggling to pare Gunshadow’s story–or rather, his guns’ story–down enough to fit.
Resurrecting this thread (couldn’t find the original , long, CoH thread and didn’t want to start a new one) to mention I just learned about a third in progress City of Heroes clone called Ship of Heroes. Web site here. Don’t know if this will be a pipe dream like the others but it’s essentially a clone of the old game. Would be interesting to see if it really happens.
“Apotheosis City”? :dubious: Srsly? :rolleyes:
City of Titans released a demo showing their character creator. Could this be the CoH game we are hoping for? Looks promising…
I’m starting to feel that old feeling…
Its fun to see everyone’s old character names…and remember.
The best name I had was Cindy Loo Tsoo - who was a controller. My husband’s best was Scraptacular. The two of us probably took half a dozen characters to the level cap together, and had dozens more. Still miss that game.
I remember Cindy Loo Tsoo. Didn’t you also have a couple named for Jane Austin characters?
Every time City of Titans releases tidbits, I get the feeling of a kid peeking into the back room where mom is wrapping the presents. Christmas can’t come soon enough.