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  • A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Why there are no more Epic Archetypes in City of Heroes

    by 
    Eliot Lefebvre
    Eliot Lefebvre
    05.16.2012

    My weekend plans went cross-eyed, as they often do, but as a result I found myself looking through some old notes for future columns on City of Heroes. There were a lot of notes I took early on when I was first writing columns, some of which I wound up using and some of which wound up being discarded, but one particular idea jumped out at me: a column about potential future Epic Archetypes. Specifically, I was looking back over and noting how a lot of the archetypes I listed wouldn't actually work at all. I've gone on record as having been a big fan of EATs right from the beginning, as they're meant to be classes that break up the regular structure of the game's classes. That strikes me as laudable. But even disregarding the technical aspects of the epics that makes them more complex to develop and balance, I think there are some noteworthy basic problems with them on a conceptual level. We may very well never get another one just because the game has been structured to make them almost a design mistake that's never been corrected.