#CoH – Blog of Heroes

Returning to “City of Heroes”

Because I am a bad blogger, I’ve not been doing anything with my gaming blog (this) forever and a day.

Which means I didn’t include here the biggest gaming news (for me) in years:

Returning to the City of Heroes

So go ahead and read. I’ll do some sort of update (on this blog) Real Soon Now, updating where things are.

(Long story short: Loving it. Again. Still.)

City of Rogues – bits and bobs (Part 3)

Well, we basically took up our Labor Day weekend playing CoX — which was some pretty fun together-time for me and Margie. One last round of random comments on the Going Rogue supplement:

Our first duo, Golden Judgment and Velorio, hit Level 20 and departed for Paragon City. We decided at that point to shift over to another duo we’d gotten up to 5, Margie’s Positive Force (Kin/Elec Brute) and my Ms. Crackle (Elec/Storm Controller). We ended up this evening at 18, well into various story lines in Neutropolis, and quite happy with how the duo plays.
Timed missions are interesting in GR. Unlike “Do X. You have 45 minutes.” types of missions, instead you get “Do X. Additional security will arrive in 5 minutes.” Sometimes that must means running at full tilt in the mission map to X, then finding your way back out. Other times it means just living with the wave attacks of bad guys that happen with the timer goes off. The nice thing is that you don’t Fail the mission by losing the timer; instead, it just becomes more difficult. (I think in some cases, that’s more to add tension to the situation; some of those missions simply cannot be done in the time alloted, unless you have a stealth power.)
Every first mission from a contact you have to return to that contact (with some very rare psychic exceptions). After that, you get the person’s cell phone for the next mission in the arc. When I think back to early days in CoH when you never got to call the mission contact, but always had to trot back across the zone (or two or three) to report in … yeesh.
Everything in GR is an arc. Kudos to the CoX team for not throwing a bunch of random one- or two-offs as starting content. Level progression is steady, and story interest is high. Randomized missions, a la Newspaper/Police Band stuff, can be added in later supplements.
GR buildings have names. Time to go visit Mr. Yin? You can find him at the Yin Technologies building, not some random structure in the city.
GR has a large number of cut scenes. Particularly nice, your character shows up in several of them.
I still resist the idea that it’s all about a binary choice of SIDES. There are enough moral gray areas in some of the decisions to be made that stepping over the line here or there shouldn’t brand you as an automatic hero to your new side, or an automatic enemy to the other.
That said, it’s odd that the consequences of being known as Resistance (i.e., you no longer have the combo to the Loyalist Underground area, nor do you get Loyalist missions) doesn’t mean that you get auto-attacked by PPD (nor vice-versa for being known as a Loyalist). That might have to change if they expand the level cap in GR beyond 20, since that’s sort of the Big Final Decision Point.
There are no Zone Alerts in Praetoria. Zone camping areas seem to be smaller in number, too. On the other hand, it’s very cool that it’s all a huge 3-zone city, and that you can actually either take the train or fly from one end to the other. No war walls or island barriers. Really, it’s not a significant difference technically, but it has a different feel. You can see Cole’s tower in Nova Praetoria, all the way across in Neutropia.
Missions are nicely clustered in your neighborhood. No need to go flying to hell and gone for a given mission (unless you need to go back and sell, or visit the one auction point and invention building in Praetoria).
Along those lines, the Resistance has a way better access to commerce. Their Underground lair in Imperial City has an auction point and a vendor in spitting distance from each other, and the exit point is just down the street from the invention site. Loyalists have to fly back and forth across People’s Park to do the triangle trade of Auction / Vendor / Invention.

Good stuff. As much as I want to see new content, I really hope they retrofit some of the GR mechanisms back into the old CoH stuff.

CoX: Dual Pistols in review

Golden Judgment and Velorio — Golden Judgment (the Tank) and Velorio (the Dual Pistols Blaster)

This isn’t going to be any detailed guide to the Dual Pistols power — more scribbling down my own notes for next time with Dual Pistols. I ran Velorio through Going Rogue up to 20 with the set.

As a set, DP is lovely. The animations (some of which vary from use to use of a given power) are lovely. Sometimes a bit much (throwing around ammo in all directions seems wasteful, vs. a flame blaster’s AoE attack), but overall quite nice, from the fancy-twirling Dual Wield, to the deliberately lethal Executioner’s Shot.

The biggest nuance with the power set is Swap Ammo. You can, in theory (and, perhaps, for RP) go without the power. Velorio didn’t, which meant I had to decide in any given combat (or even during it, since it’s a quick swap) between:

Basic bullets: baseline Lethal damage, chance of knockback/down. The knockback chance made it less attractive to me, duoing with a Tank. For a soloist — or someone who wants basic bullets for their own character’s artistic integrity — it’s fine.
Cryo bullets: partial Cold damage, +slow. I believe the damage is a little less than basic bullets. I tended to use these when we were being mobbed by more powerful opponents — slowing their attacks relative to us was a force multiplier.
Incendiary bullets: partial Fire damage, DoT. Net-net, a higher damage set, albeit with DoT. I tended to use this when we were plowing through lower-level types.
Chemical bullets: partial Toxic damage, damage debuff. I tended to use these when going up against a boss — anything to lessen the damage the Tank was having to stand up to would keep my delicate little Blaster in better health.

There’s a lot I haven’t played with in the set — I skipped the first quickie power, as well as Suppressive Fire, and, at level 20, hadn’t hit my snipe yet, etc. But it’s nicely done. I enjoyed it.

City of Rogues – bits and bobs (Part 2)

Played Going Rogue most of the day yesterday. We got our first duo through the Level 20 Content — Margie’s Golden Judgement (Elec/Shield Tank) and my Velorio (Dual Pistols/Mental Blaster), running as Wardens (“good” Resistance).

I have to say the justification for the transition from Praetoria to “Primal Earth” was a bit silly (“We’re going to insert you into Earth society to demonstrate that not all Praetorians are bad guys out to conquer the world, so that the folks there will help us against Emperor Cole”), but the actual execution of it was nice, including the choice of going to Paragon City or the Rogue Isles. (I would have liked to have been a “hero” in RI, but that’s not an option provided.)

It will be interesting to see what bits of the Praetorian storyline carry over into Paragon; there’s at least one contact provided that sounds like it’s involved in that.

Anyway the execution was nice, even sentimental. I look forward to seeing how it’s framed for Loyalists when we get there with our next pair. I also look forward to returning to Praetoria for future stories.

A few other items:

It took me a while to get the hang of multiple ammos with Dual Pistols. I have a post coming on that.
Going Rogue is very, very arc-driven (and meta-arc driven). It’s a much tighter story than CoV, let alone CoH. It’s the right direction for them to be going. Question is, can they retrofit some of that into the existing game content?
Had a few problems on some missions with only the person who’s mish it was getting the exposition dump (or dramatic farewell) at the end from the last person you talk to. Which was okay, since Margie and I play in the same room, but would have been a bit more problematic otherwise.
The final mission we were on was focused on Enriche, the rather creepy, probably mind-controlling soft drink / fortified water that everyone in Praetoria drinks. Which was fine, except we hadn’t really done any stories related to Enriche. Not sure if we missed something, or if that’s in other Loyalist/Resistance arcs, but it sort of came out of nowhere.

Going Rogue has clearly perked up my attention in City of Heroes. How long that will last, going through the different types of characters possible, remains to be seen, but it’s been quite enjoyable so far.

Now to go through the semi-wrenching transition from tank/blaster to scrapper/controller …