General Discussion

As an electric/energy blaster, I remember being able to 5-slot damage with 1 accuracy and actually be able to do damage, not wait for a near-death experience to actually be able to kill something!

I'd hit Aim + Buildup and one shot an even-con Lt. with my snipe attack, then run when his buddies would come after me!  :)  I used to impress the hell out of my teammates when I could hit Aim + Buildup on my blaster and take down a whole mob of Council with one shot of Thunderous Blast!  Sure, I could only do that once every 5 minutes, but at least I got to feel really super at least once every 5 minutes.  The game doesn't give you that feeling anymore, and hasn't since fall of 2005.

Jon Wood cited the company line when he wrote:

• Blaster – Ranged damage machine
• Controller – Stun, sleep or otherwise affect enemies.
• Defender – Buffer / De-Buffer class
• Scrapper – Melee damage machine
• Tanker – Like a tank, packs a punch and takes a hit

Since all the nerfs have come about, here is how his list should read:

• Blaster a.k.a. "Pea Shooter" – Ranged "owie" generator (let me put a band-aid on that).
• Controller a.k.a. "Annoyer" – Bore them to sleep.  (Watching C-Span produces similar results).
• Defender a.k.a. "Useless" – Buffer / De-Buffer class*
• Scrapper a.k.a. "Slapper" – Sissy fighter.
• Tanker a.k.a "Wanker" – Flacid and soft.  Couldn't punch through a wet paper bag.  See also  "Sissy Fighter".

*This is perhaps the funniest and yet most tragic story of how the nerfs affected the weakest, most useless class of all.  When ED went live, Emmert and Company realized they had so royally screwed Empaths and other defenders - especially regarding debuffing powers (Radiation set, anyone? Bueller?) - that they built a percentage base to-hit debuff into the mobs so that Defenders wouldn't miss their debuffs so much.  (I'm writing this from memory, so don't hold me to the specifics.  Suffice it to say that they had to balance down the mobs to make what had been a weak set - weakened further by their nerfs - feel a little more useful in a post-ED world!  What an absolute bunch of freaking 'tards!!!)

Emmert used to decry "rinse and repeat" tactics, so his response to rinse and repeat tactics was to make his entire game a rinse and repeat grind-fest!  At least in Issue 3, you could alter your gameplay to suit your mood.  Now you have no choice but to play a certain way just about every single time you log in.  I play Rappelz just to remind me what a gawd-awful grind CoH is!

/endrant

CoH was too easy at the start.  I remember playing a fire/cold tank and I can kill any non range mob literally, tons of them at once, by throwing down a slippery ice patch around me on the floor.

Speak for yourself.  My blaster died way too often in the early game.  It wasn't until I got to level 41 on him that he really started to feel powerful.  The nerfs Cryptic instituted only made the weak weaker and did nothing to balance the metagame.  Certain builds are still overpowered compared to other builds, which none of their brutally heinous nerfs did anything to address! 

The day arenas went live was the day CoH changed irrevocably for the worse, because nerf after nerf came down the pike to balance PvP for a game that wasn't originally designed for PvP!  And what was the upshot of all those PvP balance changes??? Virtually empty arenas virtually all the time!  Want to know where the emptiest zones in CoH are now?  Just go into any arena.  They put hundreds of man-hours into shoe-horning PvP code into a game that - by now should be abundantly clear to even the slowest among the fanboys out there - nobody wanted!  And they destroyed a great PvE game in the process!

And then they had the stones - after a year of allowing travel powers to be used in combat - to nerf them with suppression, offering the lame-a$$ excuse that they "weren't working as intended!"  Not working as intended?!?!?  Wait a minute!!!  Who wrote the damn code in the first place???  Did the code for travel powers write itself and - only after a year - did Emmert and Company discover that the game didn't code itself properly and needed to be fixed?!?!?

This was the modus operandi of these bozos: let their perceived "problems" fester for a year or more, then insult the intelligence of the customers by saying the game "wasn't working as intended" as though every bit of code they wrote was a game-breaking mistake they let slide!  Does this sound like the kind of development team that had any clue about what they were doing?

I've written it before and I'll write it again and again until someone "gets" it: If you're going to charge a monthly sub for your game, you damn well better have all the big balance changes made BEFORE YOU START CHARGING PEOPLE TO PLAY IT!  Otherwise you simply invite the kind of heat (deservedly so) that companies like Cryptic and SoE get for their half-witted changes!

If - after letting a game mechanic go for a year - you can't think of anything better to do than punish the players for using a game mechanic YOU created in the first place, you don't deserve my respect or money.  That's how I feel about these clowns.

As always, YMMV.

P.S. If you let something go for a year then "fix" it, offering the excuse it was never "working as intended", I can only conclude you're either incompetent or a liar or both.  If it was never "working as intended", why wait a year to "fix" it?  And if it was originally working as intended but they simply wanted to change it, why not be honest about it?  Why lie to your paying customers and treat them like idiots because you're afraid of the heat you might take?

These are the same morons who tried to cover up ED's impending release when some CoV beta testers broke their NDAs to let people know how badly ED was going to screw their builds.  Emmert and Company deserve every bit of contempt they get because that's EXACTLY how they treated their customers!

I'd like to ask the people who suffered from the nerfs what MMO they're playing now. Because from my experience even after the nerfs other MMO's still have much more dangerous combat in general, where you can battle with a beetle for a minute and actually fear for your life.

I was going to try it then...

NOTE: This trial is only valid in North America.

These 5 classes are only in city of heroes, not to mention the 2 secret ones u get after reaching lvl 50

there are another 5 in city of villains, they may be working on the new archtype.

u get both games for the price of one,

wow eat ur heart out cause u can never compare to coh/cov

there are usually no gold sites or bots that i have seen in my  years of playing unlike wow

and last but not least! no one needs to pay 10k in real money for a costume

not to mention veternwards

as for the gathering missions - wouldn't that be a "defeat 10 <some baddie>" or a patrol mish?

Thanks for the very good review. We, too, have been trying out the 14-day free CoH trial, and the review reflected well our own favorable impressions of the game.

Thus far, my kids really like CoH/CoV. (It didn't appeal to me much and was in no way going to lure me away from Eye of the North.)

My chief complaint with CoH is that it didn't seem worth (to me) the price of the subscription. It seemed like the kind of game that you'd want to play for a while, then stop for a while, and then pick up again and play some more. Well, on a subscription basis, that just doesn't make economic sense and would be too much of a hassle.

If the initial admission price (game cost) was higher -- but the game was "free to play" thereafter -- we'd probably get a copy. As it is, our 14-day trial has expired and we are back to playing Guild Wars.

The irony is that I *would* willingly pay for a monthly subscription to Guild Wars IF they were continually adding new content, as they do in CoH.

I just started playing this myself with the free trial and I am loving the game! Good write up!

Originally posted by tmr819

"Thanks for the very good review. We, too, have been trying out the 14-day free CoH trial, and the review reflected well our own favorable impressions of the game.

Thus far, my kids really like CoH/CoV. (It didn't appeal to me much and was in no way going to lure me away from Eye of the North.)

My chief complaint with CoH is that it didn't seem worth (to me) the price of the subscription. It seemed like the kind of game that you'd want to play for a while, then stop for a while, and then pick up again and play some more. Well, on a subscription basis, that just doesn't make economic sense and would be too much of a hassle.

If the initial admission price (game cost) was higher -- but the game was "free to play" thereafter -- we'd probably get a copy. As it is, our 14-day trial has expired and we are back to playing Guild Wars.

The irony is that I *would* willingly pay for a monthly subscription to Guild Wars IF they were continually adding new content, as they do in CoH."

I find Guildwars to be absolutely boring. atfirst i thought it was good or great but after playing i found it to be like wow or wow like it i should say. too many skills for your skill bar/s