A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Starting fresh and clearing conceptions
So last week I had announced that I'd be going through some Mission Architect content for this week's column. There were two things that derailed that event, however. The first was dealing with the aftermath of a Thanksgiving holiday and an immense patch for another game which I cover, which meant that my playtime wasn't sufficient to give the submitted arcs the full attention each deserved. But the other one was a bit more interesting from a City of Heroes point of view, coming from a friend who decided to take advantage of the pricing on Monday and purchase the heck out of the game.
On the one hand, it's great that buying the game and getting into it are now so cheap that it can really be bought on a whim -- players can look forward to a pretty steady influx of new blood as a result. But City of Heroes, for all its casual-friendly nature, is a six-year-old game with all the complexity those years would imply. It's very easy for a new player to start in without the slightest idea of how the different archetypes play, or with ideas about the game that are built by other games. And life as a superhero is a pretty different experience than leveling yet another character in your fantasy game of choice.
Today, in reaching out to new players, we will be covering the simple fact that what you may have grown to expect from other MMOs is not quite what you find in CoH. Oh, yes, you can port over a lot of your experience, but not all of it. And the sooner you wrap your head around these axioms, the faster the game will become straightforward and understandable.
"Healers" do not exist
There are four archetypes in the game outside of epics that can serve in a healer-esque role in the game: Defenders, Corruptors, Controllers, and Masterminds. Each of these archetypes has one powerset that seems tailor-made for healing and several other powersets that have little in the way of heal effects. This is not unusual, nor are you expected to take Empathy just to make your Defender work. If anything, people are expecting Kinetics these days. If you watch the livestream event, I even went so far as to mention that you can either spec for healing or spec for awesome.
Simply put, active healing isn't as big a deal in CoH as it is in other games. The battle is far more frequently controlled via buffs and debuffs, with the goal being to reduce the damage output of your targets and improve the defenses of your allies. Virtually no one in a given group is going to be a glass cannon, able to stand only two hits before crumpling to the floor.
If you want to make a traditional healer, it's certainly possible, but you don't have to feel constrained to just the healtacular sets in order to be useful. Even if you have a somewhat bizarre-seeming combination of sets that would leave your defender hard-pressed to really heal much of anyone, you'll be welcome in groups more often than not, which ties directly into the next point.
Parties are more ad-hoc than anything
Generally speaking, for task forces, people will want a tank, healer, controller, etc. For a random mission party, people will want as many live bodies as they can fit into the party list without much regard for what each person can actually do. All that matters in the long run is that the party is full, and little care is taken for such trivialities as making sure you have a healer or that everyone in the group can speak the same language.
The reason for this is simple. While CoH isn't a game that requires you to group up in order to level, you can rip through missions far more quickly in a group. As a result, what matters far more than group composition is the number of participants. Every class has reasonable damage-dealing capabilities, and as long as the difficulty isn't turned up to ridiculous levels, you can manage just fine with normal defensive powers and reasonably focused fire.
Even in groups designed for more intensive fights such as task forces, aggro control is not usually as tight as in other games, and that means that defensive powers are still useful for most playstyles. Dodging attacks is still useful and relevant with a designated tank, especially with many flavors of damage coming in the area variety and the odds being against powerful area heals.
You do not often need to optimize
This is one of the hardest lessons for players accustomed to other games to learn, because it runs counter to almost everything MMOs teach us. In most games, you have to optimize your character build; that's just what you do. The whole of the game is based around making your character as powerful as possible. Granted, it's not possible for players in City of Heroes to wind up with all of the awesome equipment that other games have, but it's not the gear or lack thereof that determines whether you still have a series of right and wrong choices to make.
Certainly a Lightning/Shield Scrapper is going to be more useful to a farming party than a Dark Melee/Regeneration Scrapper. But unlike many games, CoH makes sure you aren't going to lose a whole lot by choosing the latter over the former. You can choose powers and builds that you know aren't going to top the charts in damage or farming capability, and you aren't going to suffer endlessly as a result.
Obviously, you can't just pick and slot powers with no regard for the consequences -- but I don't think anyone expects that. People do expect, based on years of experience, that if you don't have the "right" build, you aren't going to be able to accomplish anything. While builds optimized for solo play aren't going to perform quite as well in a group, they're not useless in a group, and virtually no one will ostracize you as a result -- even the people who have optimized a build and kitted every power out with the best possible invention sets.
I wouldn't say the game is easy. But it's not structured in such a way that challenges have to come from the overall strength of your build. Hard fights are equally hard no matter what, whether you're perfectly assembled or haphazardly thrown together. You can build your character however you want and assume that while you might need to file off some of the rough edges, you won't be useless.
Next week, we really are doing Mission Architect, so if you missed your chance before, guess what? You have one last shot to get arcs in. Until then, let me know what you think in the comments field or send a letter along to eliot@massively.com. The latter is a slightly better way to reach me at the moment, due to some minor idiosyncracies in receiving comment notifications since the version update.
By day a mild-mannered reporter, Eliot Lefebvre unveils his secret identity in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles every Wednesday. Filled with all the news that's fit to analyze and all the muck that's fit to rake, this look at City of Heroes analyzes everything from the game's connection to its four-color roots to the latest changes in the game's mechanics.
