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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Fair enough. I have two.
First, as I mentioned above, I think CoH's combat system was something the original team sort of stumbled into, and it shows insofar as its almost unique: only Champions Online is similar for obvious reasons. But my question is: you mention that on the one hand City of Heroes makes you push a lot of buttons constantly to fire attacks, and on the other hand combat in other MMOs seems to you to be more "fast paced." To most City of Heroes players, that probably sounds like a contradiction: because CoH doesn't have global cooldowns you can fire attacks pretty much constantly provided you have enough of them and they recharge fast enough. In the early levels you can have only few attacks recharging slowly, but for damage dealers that usually resolves itself once you're around level 20 or so, if not earlier.
Have you seen combat at those higher levels, and if so how would you compare its "pace" to other MMOs with global cooldowns where there is enforced waiting after action?
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Button pushing is normal among many MMO's, but in the case of CoH, you literally have no other form of attack. To a player coming from another MMO, this is baffling, and they are used to be able to at least attack physically, either with a melee or ranged manner. Physical attacks usually don't do much damage, (depending on class, of course) but it allows both a sense of actually physically fighting your opponent. In the case of a ranged "spellcaster" this might not be much different, as you still have to stay in place for many spells. (There are a few instant cast abilities that allow movement while being cast, however.) But for a melee class, it comes across as outright baffling to just stand there and let an enemy beat on you while you are essentially waiting to decide if you want to stab them again. Melee attack skills usually don't have any sort of, as I've heard it called "root time", so you can move around at will. I have been told that there's no "facing" in this game, but being stuck in place so often will seem outright restricting to players coming from another game.
My best example for wanting to move around while attacking? In the video at one point a Hellion tosses a torch at me, causing me to have to move out of the fire. It's a common practice that standing in the fire is bad, so being essentially "stuck there" because I'm mid casting feels confining. If as a ranged caster in other games, you are mid casting, and you suddenly find yourself in a plume of fire, you just... step out of it and start the cast over again. Not to mention the damage done by spells in those games is usually much higher.
I will give credit the the "superhero" aspect of the game, that even as a blaster you can hold your own against a lot of enemies, and really helps the feel of being a powerful character. Trying the same in other MMO games will get you killed outright.... unless you really know what you're doing.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Second: what do you think of our powers system in general. In general, in most MMOs where powers are balanced with very tight limits (which is not the same thing as balancing "correctly") generally the only thing that dramatically changes your ability is the acquisition of a specific power or ability. That one ability can dramatically change what you can do as a character. But enhancing that ability, or using skills to improve that ability, is usually highly restrained. You're often fighting for a percent here and a percent there. Here, when we enhance an attack for damage its *normal* to increase that damage by 100%, doubling its damage on the target. Its not abnormal to also improve the recharge of that power by 33% or more, allowing us to use it 33% more often. Invention builds that allow all powers to be used *twice* as often, sometimes even *three times* as often, are not entirely rare.
I think most City of Heroes players, if they thought about it, would agree that this wild and admittedly crazy power system works well for the superhero genre, where vast levels of power are the perceived norm. Separate from your experience with the character customizer where you can customize your appearance, what is your personal take on the nature of customizing your performance? Do you notice it at all, and if so what is your opinion on how effective or not effective it is in creating a more "powerful" feel to the combat in the game?
Consider this: if you want to solo something in this game that is not directly intended to be soloed, its often the case that a tray full of inspirations - which are specifically intended by the game to be chomped like chicklets as you get them to keep giving you bursts of superpower - will allow almost anyone to defeat almost anything short of Monster-class critters (like the Jello mountain, Karem Rularuu-Jabar, and the rest of your poster). And we tend to like it that way. But it does have detractors. What's your take?
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Enhancing super powers rather than relying on gear and talent trees to do the job for you is ingenious. Yes, at an early standpoint it's a negligible amount, especially for free-players to really notice a difference. I augmented Frost Breath (my Blaster's most high damage attack) with a ton of power enhancements, and I barely felt it made a difference. It's still a really good idea, as I can't count to number of Spells I had in WoW that I didn't even want to upgrade, or being forced to wear very specific pieces of gear in order to function properly in several situations, making my character a carbon copy of every other character like them. It's only gotten worse. CoH lets you be YOU.... or superhero you, at least.
As I said at the end of the last reply, it's a superhero game, It'd be weird not to be able to take out a ton of characters at once. But I can see from a gameplay standpoint why people wouldn't like it, but then again, if people don't like, they can just not play it. Why wouldn't you want your superhero to BE a superhero?
