1741

Heh. Electricity is still a bit overpowered. If it wasn’t I might already have quit :) Sometimes I accidentally single-shot-kill-steal entire groups of enemies, when an arc goes around a corner or something like that. Some villain groups seem especially vulnerable to electricity, too, so when I’m fighting them, I can take on multiple groups of villains at the same time. I recently dispatched 3 villains, a master villain, and some unknown number of henchmen in about 20 seconds or so. So many particles and flares shooting around that I had to pretty much just tab and shoot, hoping I hadn’t targeted something far away…

Of course there are times when I get pwned for not having any good defense against physical, magical, or psionic attacks, but I’d rather have the game go by fast and die a lot than slowly tank through all the content. And anyhow, now that I tacked on the smoke bomb power, if I actually remember to use it I can survive a lot of the time anyway.

1742

Are there any, uh, not gatling gun looking guns? I dont want a big ass gatling.

1743

There are. I’ve got my gatling gun changed to a browning .50 cal, which looks fantastic. I’d have to login to tell you which one that is, though. There’s also a qularr gatling gun power replacer, but I’ve only ever seen one for sale, so it’s clearly a rare drop.

1744

You can use the flame thrower replacement power (no costume unlock sadly), but then it was pretty lackluster from my limited testing.

1745

There’s a FLAME THROWER? Must try.

1746

I retconned my dual blades guy to a single blade/munitions build and even though he’s just level 9, he seems like a lot of fun. I’m pretty sure both sets live off of close to the same stats.

1747

Ok cool enough then. I don’t fully ‘get’ the whole power replacement thing or how that works. I did find a qualaar or whatever pistol once that said something about costume pieces, but you can’t see weapons in the tailor, so it’d eat my limited funds (accidental retcon ate my money)

1748

I didn’t test it a ton, but on the dummies it seemed REALLY bad. it supposedly has a clinging fire debuff, but either it has no debuff icon (likely since a lot of things don’t have icons sadly) or it procs extremely rarely, because i never saw the dummies getting an icon or visibly burning.

Also, again, for some reason it has no costume unlock. I guess it makes sense though as turning your minigun in to a flamethrower and then using it as a minigun for 100 yards would be kind of funny looking.

1749

This is a 58 page thread but I’ve seen very little about the game itself. What do you actually do once you’ve made your super hero? Is there an engaging plot, PvP action, something like the quest progression standard in MMOGs? Is it solo friendly?

1750

=> No engaging plot as is standard with mmorpgs. the story elements (quests, instances and pretty much anything pointing to an overall story in the world) are significantly worse than wow (probably the best in that area of mmorpgs i’ve played). My highest hero is 21 though. I basically felt like i was wandering around doing random quests the entire time. This may change when you get a nemesis at 25, but i doubt it will change much.

=> Pvp sounds like wow in that if you don’t pick one of the fotm pvp focused builds, you will be free points to the other side, but i haven’t tried it personally. There are if i remember right 5 pvp arenas where you can fight other players to win points in order to buy items with. Similar to wow arenas kind of.

=> Quest progression is noticeably worse than other mmorpgs. Getting to 21, there was BARELY enough content to get there. You will have to do every quest in the game to level basically and often times you will be doing noticeably higher level quests because there is nothing near your level. This is an obvious and significant problem caused by lowering the exp rate but not increasing the content shortly before launch. This is one of the few problems developers admit is their fault (as opposed to saying it is a bug or blaming the players for exploiting) and say they’re fixing though. This also significantly lowers replay value as every time you level a character you’re playing the exact same quests each time.

=> Yes it is solo friendly. If you have picked one of the underpowered skills or not getting a powerful passive, you will likely die a lot though. If you played wow, imagine doing +2-5 quests constantly. Some classes with good builds can likely do it without much trouble, but if you’re playing a class on the weaker end of spectrum, you will die a bit. My 21 was played almost totally solo.

1751

It’s pretty standard MMO fare. The tutorial scenario is an alien invasion of Millenium City, where it guides you up to level 5 or 6. Most quests are “kill x” or “obtain x”, and there’s one public quest in the tutorial.

After the tutorial you can choose to go to either the US southwest desert zone or the Canadian snow forest zone for essentially tutorial part 2. This adds in crafting quests (picking a crafting discipline and focus, harvesting materials, etc.) as well as group-recommended bosses.

Basic gameplay is the same as CoX or any other MMO. Fight bad guys. Get stuff. Level up. Gain powers. Craft/obtain equipment. Repeat.

The character creator is really the best feature of CO, as it’s very detailed and very flexible, with sliders and options and sub-options and sub-sub-options for just about everything, with the inexplicable limitations on modifying non-human faces (beast, alien, insect heads, etc).

There are also no real “character classes”, as defined by most other MMOs. Instead, you either pick pre-set power sets (fire, ice, magic, martial arts, might, etc.) or build a custom set. Characters are thus defined by their stat focuses, their powers, and how they are modified. For example, two people can both have fire powers, but they can pick different types of fire powers, and they can also both modify those powers differently. One character might focus on single-target ranged attacks with their primary attack increased in level/damage; the other character might focus on close-range area attacks with damage-over-time effects added (ie clinging flames/burning).

Oh, and one aspect I think that’s handled very well is the way they give you a travel power very early (right after the first tutorial level), and that there’s no mana/endurance limit imposed by travelling. If you get flight, you can fly forever without getting tired; if you pick teleport, you’re limited to 5-second teleport bursts, but you can keep teleporting forever as long as you re-trigger the power every 5-seconds. The only penalty to travel powers is a percentage increase to the endurance costs of your other powers (typically +10% cost to other power usage).

1752

Be sure to use block to full effect and pick up a passive defense and that should help your surviveability. I’m not sure what the best passives are, but look at which passive defenses scale with your super characteristics.

1753

I think Lightning Reflexes should be decent with munitions, as they both rely on a good Dex.

1754

Some of the quests are pretty super hero-ish, it’s just the game goes with a different dynamic than CoX. Think of yourself as a one person Fantastic Four rather than Daredevil or Spiderman. That said the writing isn’t particularly strong or funny, but that’s true of most MMOs.

=> Quest progression is noticeably worse than other mmorpgs. Getting to 21, there was BARELY enough content to get there. You will have to do every quest in the game to level basically and often times you will be doing noticeably higher level quests because there is nothing near your level. This is an obvious and significant problem caused by lowering the exp rate but not increasing the content shortly before launch. This is one of the few problems developers admit is their fault (as opposed to saying it is a bug or blaming the players for exploiting) and say they’re fixing though. This also significantly lowers replay value as every time you level a character you’re playing the exact same quests each time.

I was a little hard on content gaps but WoW is pretty much the only MMO that launched with enough content and even then there was a short gap in the early 40s alliance side (again at launch).

=> Yes it is solo friendly. If you have picked one of the underpowered skills or not getting a powerful passive, you will likely die a lot though. If you played wow, imagine doing +2-5 quests constantly. Some classes with good builds can likely do it without much trouble, but if you’re playing a class on the weaker end of spectrum, you will die a bit. My 21 was played almost totally solo.

Yeah, the game is built a lot like a single player game as far as the mechanics are concerned, but with an MMO quest design. I’ve been grouping a bit lately and while not necessary at this point, I consider it fun. Really, I’ve grown to really like the combat and even like some of the animations (even though they may lack any personality sometimes… so far I’ve seen nothing as cool as the Mastermind’s summoning animations from CoX). I think it’s quite an achievement that they’ve created as flexible and still functional skill based system. That certainly goes against the grain of modern MMOs.

I do wish more of the pets seemed worthwhile. The summoning circles are way too expensive. It seems like the zombies are the only worthwhile summons and I wanted to save them for later. They kind of fit Shadowfire, but kind of not too.

1755

I’m the opposite, I do just about everything to not die, even if it’s blocking and slowly using bountiful chi to live or with Shadowfire blocking, regen, and quick life drains. Just a quirk of mine I guess.

1756

Yeah I cant quite figure out what passive works for him (or my elec guy)

1757

If this was FF XI I’d be with you completely, but this game practically allows you to zerg the content, with only the loss of a few percentile points of star-buff level per death, and you can earn those back very quickly. I tried some melee and defense-based alts, and while they are effective, they are so much slower to kill routine enemy groups than my pure offense ranged-aoe character that they bored me.

But I do use my defensive arcane circle thing for bosses. As long as they don’t knock me out of the circle, its combo of defense and regen is pretty hot stuff.

1758

You’re not using electrical form with the electrical guy?

1759

Mordrak: i only really grouped for a decent amount of time once and it was pretty fun. I escorting an escort npc and this hilarious character with a name something like “Landshark” (yes, he looked like a shark man) invited me to a group to see if he could get credit for it too (sadly he didn’t because i was half way done by then). After that we did one of those random citizen missions together while waiting for the npc to respawn and it was pretty fun. It would be nice if there was group credit for those and they scaled, but if there was some group instances later on in the same vein of wow it could be interesting.

I guess to me when i see engaging plot i mean something that goes beyond single quests or quest chains. Wow has a ton of things like that and i remember the various plot points leading up to fighting nefarion for example. It is a nice feeling that everything generally feels connected and i think CO misses that, leading to everything feeling like a different minigame in a way (well, disconnected).

The content gap was created specifically because they nerfed the exp rate. Ok so they wanted leveling to be (much) slower, i can understand that, but they should have planned for this more than waiting until the last day of beta and saying “oh shit, leveling is way too fast!” It also annoys me beyond belief what the leveling rate nerf combined with the lack of content (ie you do the same quests every time) has done to making alts. Maybe i just don’t have the stomach for mmorpgs anymore or i don’t play enough/right, but making alts for me in CO has been hard. Well, making them has been easy as i love the character creator and planning my character’s skills, but once i hit the mid teens the leveling pace starts to get to me and i falter. They should have kept the leveling rate exactly what it was until 25 (when you get a nemesis, which seems like a marketing point in CO) and then slowed it down so you got some abilities quickly.

Also, while sorcery in general might stink, the angel hero i saw summoning other angels with sorcery was so well done that i will no doubt have to make one “in the near future.”

Pet peeve: While doing some research on my next fire hero (something that is sadly required in CO unlike nearly any other mmorpg due to lack of viable respeccing), i noticed a disturbing trend… (nearly) everyone says ice form is better than fire form for fire! This is apparently due to them both scaling damage the same way, BUT ice form scaling with END, which is better than presence. I decided i wanted to go with fire form anyway for the looks and will be picking up some heals to go with that presence. Hopefully my character will look nice on fire, although his costume would probably be best suited to might. It is the demon in case anyone remembers, i’ll probably post pictures later.

1760

Is it passive? I hate dealing with buffs toggles.