HeroStats

HeroStats is a fine little CoH utility (open source and free) that sits in the background and monitors what’s going on in your CoH session. It collects statistics on what you do that you can review later, and provides some real-time monitoring that’s quite useful
The Good

1. It will monitor the buffs that have been done to you (and the ones you do on others?) with a timer, showing when they will be coming down. The utility is worth it just for this and the next feature. Very useful to give your bubbler a warning, for example, or to know when your Dull Pain is going to drop.
2. It notes recharge time on powers, and lets you know (without interpolating from the power tray) how long until each power comes back.
3. It tracks the type of damage done to you. You can see this in realtime (which may tell you about buffs/defenses you need to put up), and you can analyze it later (“I’m taking mostly X damage on the missions I run, so I should slot up …”).
4. It tracks how far you are to levelling, and, based on the XP you’re getting per minute or hour, about how long that’s going to be. Good for deciding if you want to go on one more mish before you call it a night.
5. The statistics it collects lets you see what the damage is you’re doing with each attack, and what your TH success rate is. That, in turn, may influence further powers, inspirations, enhancement slotting, etc.

The Bad

1. The system doesn’t automatically track and segregate stats by alt, so you have to do some file management, file merging, etc., yourself as you shift between toons.
2. The quantity of stats it collecs gets very big. If you have to merge in a file from a day or two of gaming, it can take a looooong time (and impact performance horribly while it does so).
3. The numbers collected for statistical purposes are not always easy to interpret — and the documentation (on the system website) is pretty sketchy.
4. Some folks find the concept of number-tracking to be offputting, or at least detrimental to gameplay. Knowing that they are 637 XP from levelling, or approximately 0:45 at the current rate, takes them out of the “magic.”
5. Hey, look — one more thing to clutter your screen!

The Ugly

1. The system works (in-game) by keeping a window up over the CoH window. this leads to a variety of problems (if you are running CoH in full-screen mode):
   • Framerate hit.
   • Can obscure other windows (especially when you manage enhancements).
   • If you go to move it or touch it in any way, it drops the mouse out of the game and brings Windows to the foreground.
2. It has some glitches to it, and doesn’t always reliably start tracking stuff. I’ve had to stop, close the ap, and restart it to get it working again.

Overall, it’s definitely worth it for the buff/recharge tracker, secondarily for the stat analysis of hits/damage and the XP/time to level. The latter would not keep me using it, but the former definitely will.