Tenzhi

I have to wonder how much experience some people from this game have with MMOGs in general. In the majority of them that I've played all you get to select is gender, *maybe* race, and then choose from a small handful of heads and/or hairstyles. Your clothes are whatever equipment you find. Games that move beyond that have been the exception, and it just so happens that CoH is very exceptional in that regard.

When I try this game I won't be expecting a great deal of customisation. Its draw, for me, is largely the story and setting with a small amount of curiosity towards the gameplay. It's not a surrogate CoH, but it looks like an interesting diversion.

Yeah, I like some of the things they did over in DCUO, but over there my characters felt even less powerful than they did here with no options in their limited selection that felt sufficiently "tanky".

I was simply pointing out that blocking can actually *be* an attack.

Which opponent? In instances and with many of the non-instance groups one gets sent after I find one generally only needs to face a couple of enemies at a time (similar to CoH, actually).

When I'm playing a squishy character (read: one without a slotted defensive passive) I've found it can be a close call with some of the "Lieutenant" or "Boss" type enemies (I forget the Champions designations - Villain and Master Villain, perhaps?) particularly if I miss blocking one of their big attacks (signified by one of the big icons above their head). If I miss blocking a couple of big attacks it might get really close. Super Villains might prove to be an obstacle for my squishy characters unless they have the Night Warrior slotted offensive passive, as it gives them the equivalent of Assassin Strike which so far has one-shotted every Super Villain I've faced up to level 20 (I would not be surprised to see it get nerfed, but I enjoy it as-is).

For those characters which have a slotted defensive passive, I can pretty fearlessly march through missions. And have found Super Villains to be a bit tough occasionally, but doable.

And I'm the guy who finds *this* game difficult enough that most of my characters play at -1 Level difficulty (incidentally, there's a difficulty option in Champions, but it only goes down to "normal" and I'm not sure what all it affects). Perhaps the problem is that you have been trained via downtime in this game to not want to take any damage, but in Champions even if you lose nearly all of your health and squeak through combat by the skin of your teeth you'll be back to full a couple of moments after combat ends.

I don't think they are *significantly* better than each other.

If I were shopping for cars, I probably would've known about the other car already and probably passed it over for other reasons. The fact that cars with different stats exist certainly wouldn't leave me confused in any case, and given the way the world works I wouldn't even be shocked if a car with better pragmatic stats was cheaper than the one I wanted which had fins and suicide doors.

Some of the numbers are... odd. At least to me. Damage Resistance seems to operate by a strange scale wherein 50% is actually 33%, 100% is actually 50%, and 200% is actually 66%. And then there's the flat damage reduction numbers in Invulnerability and Inertial Dampening Field (.22 and .11 respectively is what it was giving me with the last character I checked).

Personal Force Field is extremely useful for survivability, at the very least. And it has a knockup power that's pretty useful.

That darned Canada clone problem has been happening off and on since around launch.

And there was an underwater event mission thing, centered around the wreck of a giant submarine IIRC, that often bugged out and couldn't be completed.

Mind you, I've never played an MMO that wasn't plagued with some manner of bugs, but when they happen in ChO they *do* seem to be rather glaring.

It's ultimately *one* of the reasons I got frustrated with TERA and cancelled my sub. Surely, though, it's not nearly so bad in *this* game.

I recently defeated a whole room of enemies by blocking.

And while blocking can be essential, it's generally an intermittent thing rather than a constant thing.

Luckily, you don't have to go through the tutorial repeatedly. That fight didn't used to be so rough, but since they took equipment out of the tutorial that fight just got downright mean. "Skip Tutorial" became my new best friend.

Reminds me of when I wandered into the pit of the Hollows and suddenly got dogpiled by animated bits of rock and lava.

It does a lot less when you don't have a Block power. And some of those do more than others.

Incidentally, while in the Powerhouse did you complete the mission (by choosing a primary Super Stat) with the Head Trainer and get (and equip) your starting gear? I didn't get it when I went through the Tutorial again for the first time and I've found it makes a big difference. Unfortunately, the mission seems more obvious when you skip the tutorial and get immediately placed in the Powerhouse with that mission already accepted.

New players could try looking. That's what I do when I'm new to a game - explore the options. When I get to select a power for the first time past character creation I notice there are tabs on the top of the power selection window with various icons, and clicking them opens up a string of other icons. I see there is a "Filter" option for the powers and that I can have it show me "unavailable" powers. I notice that clicking on a power gives me a description of what it does (with an option to open an advanced description) and when I click on a greyed out power it tells me what I need to have before I can select it.

During character creation one can open up a complete list of powers for each of the Archetypes, too. I think each of the powers listed has a brief tooltip description of what it does, but I don't exactly recall.

It's really bad in TERA. Over there they have huge enemies that can potentially take 45 minutes to an hour to kill. These enemies often have dashing and jumping maneuvers. Imagine spending 30 minutes whittling down a HP bar to almost nothing, only to have the enemy jump or dash out of its own designated aggro area and reset its HP to full.

I certainly agree that it's a BS game mechanic.

Huh. And here I was just telling a friend of mine about the new streamlined tutorial and how the cat-carrier mission didn't seem to exist any more (not to mention the Foxbat mission, and the mission where you save the hero from the cage). And also how the boss fight near the end is far more painful, presumably due to no longer getting equipment in the tutorial.

As for your bar not charging up all the way - have you not noticed the mark denoting where the bar will charge to on its own? Did you not use the very first attack power in your bar throughout the entire tutorial and thus not see the blue numbers popping up by your character and the blue bar going up? I think the tooltip for that power may mention it is an Energy Builder. Any place you can view the advanced description for it should also show how much blue it gives you per attack.

Many of the power sets also have an "Energy Unlock" type of power, which builds energy for various actions that usually revolve around the mechanics of that particular set.

Any of the places where the game tells you what the various stats do will mention that Recovery sets your Equilibrium - which is the little mark that denotes where your blue bar will charge to.

The quest tracker and minimap tend to give all sorts of direction, pointing out where just about any current quest objective is located, as well as where to turn in quests that are complete, and even marking many nearby quest-givers that you haven't discovered yet. But then, I could never understand how people in *this* game could have all the info the UI gives and still be asking basic things like where the mission is. Do people just get tunnel vision on their character's shiny butt as the UI slowly morphs into unreadable hieroglyphs on the periphery of their screen?

I don't see this one in the Wikipedia entry. It only lists four animated series ranging from 13 to 26 episodes long. Out of the ones I've seen, the sort of recent one by that French animation studio was the most watchable.

Every fight against an AV in CoH made my characters feel small and weak, whereas the opposite has been true for the most part in ChO without even getting into the mission packs or what-have-you.

I find the specializations and such in ChO easier to deal with than IOs and set bonuses - both because I don't have to buy equipment to implement them and because as a tabletop RPG player they seem more natural to me.

I could see Morgan Freeman as a Gene-Wilder-esque Wonka...

I enjoyed them all to varying degrees, as well as the Samurai Warriors series, and Warriors Orochi series. I even played Dynasty Warriors Gundam 1 and 3, enjoyed the Fist of the North Star game and am looking forward to its sequel (assuming it gets a US release on the 360), and was disappointed that the 360 version of Legends of Troy was cancelled for the US for no apparent reason.

Out of the entire series, I'd have to say Warriors Orochi 3 is my favourite - but I have a catastrophic attraction to crossovers.

Awhile ago, actually. I'm not even certain it's still running. I tried it because I'm a fan of the series, but I didn't care for the system it was using - as I recall, you had to level up your weapon skill anew every time you played a stage.

Well, it's been awhile since I played it, but I think Dynasty Warriors Online has similar temporary buffs to the non MMO games in its series - which would be akin to damage and damage resistance buffs (Accuracy and Defense don't really have an analogue there, I think).

In my day, the only filters we needed to ignore someone were inside our own heads.