While some specific power sets are difficult to solo with, every AT can solo. An empathy based character would have a hard time but a Radiation/Radiation Defender, for example or a Fire/whatever Controller can solo pretty easily.
I didn’t play CO (I didn’t have a PC that met the specs until recently) but from what I have heard, having open ended power picks is a balancing nightmare so everyone just ends up picking what works best. Is that a mistaken impression?
From what I understand, you’re simply gimping yourself if you create anything other than a ranged fighter with defenses, a ‘tankmage’ in MMO parlance. There’s no advantage to melee attacks over ranged, and I suppose the lack of need for groups means team support is less useful than personal defense.
The new Going Rogue expansion for City of Heroes almost seems to encourage soloing. The new low-level missions appear to be specifically tailored to a single meta (rather than hero or villain), and at certain points you embark on morality missions that must be handled solo. The writing is really very good, though; I’ve played MMOs that tried to make you care about morality choices, but either they stunk at making lasting consequences for your actions or they stunk at lending the choice emotional weight so that you cared about which choice you made. The GR expansion has (relatively) compelling story with recognizable and likeable characters. They do a much better job in GR of making your meta feel like a badass even in the early levels, rather than in CoH or CoV where they send you off to go kill a den of boring thugs.
I have played both CO and CoX, although I haven’t played CO in a while so they may have fixed a lot of the issues I had with it. IMHO CO is better if you want mindless smashing and fun action-filled combat and don’t intend to stay with the game long, while CoX is better if you prefer strategy and want more depth and a world you can play in for years without seeing everything.
CO, from what I saw, had massive problems with balance. The classless system they had in theory allowed you to combine whatever powers you wanted to build your character. The main problem with this was that the powers were simply not at all balanced, and in practice only certain combinations of powers were actually useful. The game also only lends itself to a certain kind of gameplay, basically just personal energy-building, attacks and buffs, which is great for soloing, but lacks the team dynamic and strategies you see in CoX.
The CoX class-based system does limit the flexibility of your build, in that you have to pick a role for your character from the start, but the actual powers you choose as you advance do make a huge difference in how your character works. Some power sets are not good for soloing. Some are - my fire/devices blaster can solo most of the content in the game if I’m careful with my strategy.
The biggest difference is that CO just doesn’t have much content - you’ll see everything pretty quickly, and as the developers already seem to have abandoned the game in favor of their other projects I wouldn’t expect to see much more added. CoX has been adding new content regularly for many years, so a new player has a lot to explore and see.
The flexibility in character design in CO is great, though as stated already, the balance is atrocious. My teleporting dual-pistols munitions specialist was powerful and flashy, and I had a lot of fun mowing things down solo on my way to max level (this was before they nerfed the minefield, heh). I could take on most group content by myself and absolutely dominated in the PvP minigames.
Then I rolled a couple alts to try out different power sets. This is where the game falls apart. In order to reach max level, you really experience ALL the content in the game. My alts were going through the same crap again, with no hope of any alternatives. I had made a healer to be group-friendly – sorry, nobody wants to group. Soloing was an incredibly slow grind. Though I did make quite a difference in the PvP minigames healing my teammates, but that was about the extent of it. Then I rolled a martial artist. HAHAHA. Useless for soloing, group content, and PvP. I shelved him for a bit hoping that melee abilities would get some love from the devs, but I got bored with the repetitive content and cancelled before that happened (if it did at all – sounds like it didn’t).
Never played CoX though.
ETA: CO is great fun if your character design happens to coincide with the optimal combination of abilities. Even then, it’ll only be fun until you exhaust the content (~a month or so).
Actually, melee in Champions Online has gotten some love. A *lot *of love, in fact. There are some who say that melee has become more powerful than ranged (which is as it should be, if you ask me).
Of my many, many alts, my Infernal Supernatural guy (ranged), Nuke, is my most powerful. Right behind him, though, is my pure melee Might character- Super Happy Fun Ball. He’s pretty unstoppable (and insanely fun).
An Empath doesn’t solo as fast as a Rad, generally, but I’ve had no trouble soloing with mine–I’ve played him mostly solo since launch, including through periods when the game was much, much harder than it is now.
The new Praetorian content that come with Going Rogue seem to be more challenging than the 1-20 game for heroes and villains (in addition to being very shiny and outstandingly well-written). I might start an Emp to run through it as well, but I don’t anticipate any serious difficulty.
This is relevant:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=5015
SHamus Young did a Let’s PLay of CoH. Aside from being a fantastic read, it’s also somewhat painful to see his intital love, and how it slowly got worn down by bad design, minimal content, insultingly stupid quest design*, and bad balance.
*Hint: Just because some people sprint past the quest and storyline explanation does not mean you, as a designer, get to mock everyone and ignore cool stuff for dumbassery.
You mean CO, not CoH, for people who don’t click the link.
That’s Champions, not City of…
And “It was fun at first, but then…” is the reaction I hear from a lot of people who’ve tried CO.
:smack:
I do recommend clicking the link, though. I don’t always agree with Shamus, but I love his writing. I’ve heard a lot of generalities about CO, but this is the first write-up I’ve seen that’s gone into such detail, and it’s entertaining as hell.
They both get boring faster than WoW IMO… CO’s lack of balance, lack of use for teams, and lack of content. CoX lacks flair and more flexibility in power options. Maybe DCU will find away to put it all together and fill in what’s missing. But i suppose either one (more so CoX) will retain far more value with friends which I never had on these. Soo… Group and be social for > experience I guess
Are you serious? You’re actually comparing power options in City to those in WoW?
Take Defenders. We’ll call them an analog to WoW’s priests. (They’re not, really, but we can use it for the sake of discussion, since both have a damage mitigation bent as well as damage options.)
Defenders have access to 10 different primary powersets (mostly damage mitigation and buffs) and 10 different secondary powersets (attacks). That’s 100 different possible specs, without even considering the power pools.
Even if you discount the secondary sets because of their similarity (aside from, you know, damage type, speed, controls, secondary effects, and various other stuff), you have 10 wildly different primaries, in each of which you can pick up to 9 distinct powers (which can be further customized in both effect and appearance). You can straight up heal and buff yourself and allies, use shadows to conceal people and keep them from getting hit, make enemies sick, put up two different types of force fields, set traps, call down storms to batter foes, sap their energy, freeze them in their tracks, or just shoot them in the face with a boxing glove arrow (well, a stun arrow, anyway.) Those are just your damage mitigation options.
Priests…well, you can go with a Discipline spec for healing and some mitigation, or a Holy spec for lots of healing, or Shadow for damage and some buffs. Or you can waffle around with some sort of hybrid thereof. Every priest picks from the same set of powers, though, so far as I know.
Counting all the abilities available to priests, I come up with 75 (including all the racial abilities). Defenders have access to 180, not counting power pools. If you look at a specific Defender powerset combo, they get access to 18 Defender powers, plus their choice from 10 power pools with 4 powers each and (at high levels) from 8 ancillary/patron pools of 5 powers each. So even if you pick a single combo–like say, and Empathy/Dark Blast Defender, you get to pick from 98 powers.
That’s just one AT/Class comparison. IIRC, WoW has 9 base classes and 1 hero class; City has 10 base ATs and 2 epic ATs.
Care to elaborate on how CoX has less flexibility in power options?
Or how it “lacks flair”; it’s a superhero game, it has flair dripping out of its metaphorical ears.
That Let’s Play is a great read; thanks for the link.
I have not played CO, but I have played CoH and WoW. I’ve gotten bored with WoW twice; CoH has yet to bore me. Part of that is because it’s simpler; lacking the gathering/crafting depth of WoW means that it isn’t a second job, it’s a game. You can skip the crafting in CoH and it doesn’t particularly affect your gameplay - you’ll be a bit less powerful than you could be, but unless you are going in for PvP, that’s not really a factor.
The depth of content available in CoH is remarkable - even without the user-created Architect missions, you have custom early mission series for each of the five origin types, as well as for the Epic archetypes, and enough mission content that you will hit max level before experiencing more than half of the content, even if you avoid Radio missions and street-sweeping for xp.
For me, the beauty of CoH is that I can play for 30 minutes and actually get something done. I can log in, check the Radio (or the Paper if I’m on a villain) and see that the P.L.O.T. Device has been stolen, fly to the mission location in less than two minutes even in the biggest zone, and put a beat-down on some bad guys.
Defender can’t use swords. What if I want to wield an axe and shoot lightening bolts and have frost armor? The CoX I remember this couldn’t be done.
By flair I mean the graphics and combat are <less than CO… I can rarely get through a 3min YouTube clip of CoX “action” without getting a little bored and turned off. Yet more often than not CO clips are quite inspiring.
And by comparing them to WoW I’m Mearly saying that personally more interesting after a few months. Not that they have any smilaries.
Not making violent claims just personal opinion lol.
Customizing effect and appearance of powers tho is kinda cool. That’s new… Kinda wanna rejoin the game just for that feature lol
Then don’t play a Defender, play a Tanker. Absolutely none of what you said here is what a Defender does, but Tankers have all of it.
Oo.o tanker can utilize 2 elements plus weapon now?