Originally posted by Serling

Everything about the game since just before Issue 4 came out (I'm talking nerfs here) was designed to ramp up risk and screw reward, as though to punish players for leveling too fast or having too much fun.  In issues 1-3, players could have as much fun grouping to street sweep or power level each other as they could doing missions or task forces, if they so chose.  Now the game is nothing more than run to a contact (or call them if you've done enough of their missions), run to instance, do mission, collect reward: it's the ultimate "rinse and repeat" grind-fest, offering little or nothing in the way of a "sand-box" style of play.

I originally joined CoH on January 21, 2005, during the hay-day of Issue 3 and right at the height of the Winter Lord event.  Everything - and I mean everything - Emmert and Company did to the game after Winter Lord did nothing more than punish the players for having a blast.  The only reason Cryptic didn't get more bad press for all the nerfs to CoH was because SoE was busy screwing its customers worse.  And SoE had way more customers to screw.

Fourteen days isn't enough time to get heinously bored over this catastrophically nerfed and boring P.O.S.  But after a month, you'll wish someone would put your eyes out and dip your fingers in sulfuric acid.

YMMV.

Originally posted by finnmacool1

CoH was a game i really wanted to like but couldnt. Aside from a varied costume design the game offers nothing close to what i would call fun.

As others have pointed out the game takes repetitive grinding to new levels. My "favorite" thing about the game was getting missions that required me to pass through areas where the mobs were so much higher level they could kill me as i tried to run by. What fun.

CoH was new to me when it goes commercial, I was not in the beta.  The customisation, the travelling modes (flying was fun for a while till I got shot down in bricktown, and even that was fun), the combinations of skills ... are fun to me.  What I like most is the fact that your lvl 1 skill is as good when you are lvl 50.  Properly slotted, a skill never grows old.  Unlike the other games where you get single heal class 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, .... in CoH you get single heal and then you can slot it and augment it as you like as you level up.  The power of the heal scales with your level.  Come to think of it, that makes sense on its own.

Its gets old fast, I agree, the newspaper missions from CoV adds a dice of fun but not enuf for a long haul.  There is little end content, I already stated that indirectly, I do not want to put my words with force, b/c everyone deserve a chance to make his own judgment.

All this does not negate the suggestion that, for a 14day free trial its worth a shot.  Whether you feel bored a month down the road or 2, it does not deny the fact that it entertains the newcomer for a while.  And when that duration ends, subscriptions will be cancelled, but the player might have a good memory of something that does make him/her smile for a month or few.

There are betas and free games that you will feel sorry for wasting the time downloading the client and patching.  I for one do not think CoX falls into this category.

Originally posted by Serling

Everything about the game since just before Issue 4 came out (I'm talking nerfs here) was designed to ramp up risk and screw reward, as though to punish players for leveling too fast or having too much fun.  In issues 1-3, players could have as much fun grouping to street sweep or power level each other as they could doing missions or task forces, if they so chose.  Now the game is nothing more than run to a contact (or call them if you've done enough of their missions), run to instance, do mission, collect reward: it's the ultimate "rinse and repeat" grind-fest, offering little or nothing in the way of a "sand-box" style of play.

I originally joined CoH on January 21, 2005, during the hay-day of Issue 3 and right at the height of the Winter Lord event.  Everything - and I mean everything - Emmert and Company did to the game after Winter Lord did nothing more than punish the players for having a blast.  The only reason Cryptic didn't get more bad press for all the nerfs to CoH was because SoE was busy screwing its customers worse.  And SoE had way more customers to screw.

Fourteen days isn't enough time to get heinously bored over this catastrophically nerfed and boring P.O.S.  But after a month, you'll wish someone would put your eyes out and dip your fingers in sulfuric acid.

YMMV.

But it sure was fun perma holding huge groups of bad guys while my imps tore them apart. But then holds got nerfed. Cryptic decided it was to much to let controllers "control" so they cut way back on hold duration to the point of making many holds totally worthless. 

Another fun thing was watching my Fulcrum Shift power line up about 50 debuff icons across the screen and watch the pack of crazed imps tear everything apart with the huge damage buff from Fulcrum's Shift. But it was too much apparently because Fulcrum's Shift was nerfed and had caps on the amount of mobs it could affect. To much damage for one character to wield apparently.

Thats ok because my saving grace was being able to 6 slot the imps for damage...think again. No more six slotting anything in the game. That too was nerfed. You could have 3 slots with maximum effect then severe diminishing returns kicked in. No more perma hasten meant your powers refreshed much more slowly thus making you less effective.

What made all these nerfs even worse was that as a controller for the first 32 levels of my existance I could not solo a grey con mob. I was completely and totally group dependent and ran PUG after PUG to climb my way to 32. Once I'm there and really getting into it the nerfs start raining down. They "fixed" this hard path to 32 for controllers. They allowed controllers to do double "containment" damage when a mob was held. This makes the first levels easier to get through for new controllers. The damage from containtment was about 1/10 of what I did before the parade of nerfs.

These changes were SUPPOSED to make the game more challenging thus more fun. It just made me feel like a super wimp. I ending up cancelling. I realize your game experience may change while playing any online game but that doesn't mean I have to stick around and like it.

I came back for CoV and got a taste of the completely watered down, so unfun to play, villain archetypes that Emmert and Co. came up with. Obviously, these mangled versions of the hero archetypes was Cryptics attempt to "get it right". All of the CoV archetypes suck. They are all shadows of the hero side even after all the class "adjustments".

Dominators = gimped controller combined with a gimped blaster. You are only really effective when the dominator bar fills up. So, this leaves your character feeling helpless when the dominator bar is not full. This is a horrid mechanic. Even if you gave dominators perma domination they would still merely be ok.

Brute = can't tank and has to build rage to do 1/2 the damage of a scrapper out of the box. Rage goes away fast and takes a long time to build. I remember one of the devs (maybe even Emmert) talking a few years ago on the tanker forum about ways to help improve the tanker. One idea was to make the tanker more effective as the fight progressed. I'm convinced this is where the brute was born. They can't take nearly as much damage as a tanker and again you have to stare at a rage bar and wait for it to fill totally in order to feel like your character is playing at maximum effectiveness. Think of a class with the defense of a scrapper but only does scrapper damage every once in a while. Why would you even bother with this class? Just go build a scrapper. They are better all the way around.

Mastermind = pet class that can't debuff or hold like a controller could back in the day. Somewhat fun but once you've tasted what a real controller could do when this game was in its prime it just feels watered down.

Corrupter = gimped blaster damage with second rate defender abilites. You do double damage when the mob is practically dead otherwise your damage is on par with a defender but you don't have nearly the power to debuff as a defender. Admittedly there are a couple of strong lines in this class but overall it feels watered down as do all the CoV archetypes.

Stalker = stealther character that make blaster look like tanks. I personally hate stealth characters in all MMO's so I never even bothered with this class.

I know this won't stop many of you from having fun. And some people managed to play through the nerfs and still enjoy the game. I, however, was not one of them.

I sound like a paid ad, but no I am not paid to say this.

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.  Every melee mob will run to me and keep falling down unable to land a blow on me.  All I need is to maintain a firewall around me and my XP rocks.

Same for all those classes that can use smoke, say rifle blaster with smoke grenades.  Most mobs are blinded that will almost always miss you, while you can shoot at them point blank or do whatever you want.  Pick the right enemy and just roll over them.

Then come the series of nerfing patches along with enhancement.  Put it this way, everyone has his views on what is good and what is bad.  I for one am not too hostile to most of the changes.  The Fire/Cold tank just trivialised the game, so is the submachine gun blaster, and the fire controller you mentioned.  What is the point of playing a game, in which you summon 12 imps let them loose and go afk.

They do not always nerf, they did improve the playability of some skill sets such as the energy melee set.  Mildly improving it, but that shows the developers were trying to finetune, and not just across the board bashing.

If CoX added DAoC or even WoW style instanced battlegrounds, with various PvP rewards, I'd never leave it.  The (incredibly fun) PvE really needed a PvP counter.  The way the PvP is instituted now just isn't fun.

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

Originally posted by Tier

yeah coh/v gets boring after a while but thats near level 40 or so..there remains allot to do.

Yeah, I stopped playing for a while at level 39, because I ran out of missions. However, issue 10 should alleviate that, with the new level 35 rikti content. Once I got the 40, things got interesting again.

I played CoX for about a year. The game, while having a great community and plently of customization options for how your character looks, is very, very, linear. Your basically stuck with the handful of powersets that aren't nerfed, which you'll have to combine and modify in the same ways as everyone else in order to expedite the incredible amount of grind within the game. 

CoX would be a great game if the devs put the same amount of customization within the powersets as they do with the costumes, but currently, players are still stuck with the same box in a new wrapper everytime they want to make a new toon.

Played for nearly a year and agree with the comments that it gets very, very repetitive and dull.

A nasty XP curve (compared to modern MMORPGs) combimed with XP debt does not make leveling friendly for casuals.

Horrible mission maps.  Nothing says 'Superpowered' like seeing your character struggling to move between sewer pipes or getting stuck in grating. 

Annoying timesinks.   Zones designed so they are tedious to traverse and this is WITH superpowered travel abilities! 

CoX deserves its place in MMORPG history for the innovative character generation and trying something different.  But at this point, this game is only that, history. 

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.

Irrelevant.  How many of these other MMOs offered the promise and potential of playing a virtual superhero.  And if you feel less super now than you did before the nerfs, then that promise and potential have been taken away from you.

It's like buying a Porsche only to have the dealer come along a few months later and replace it with a Yugo in the middle of the night.  Anyone in their right mind would be pissed about that, not shrug it off and say "Cars change. The dealer was only doing what he thought was in the best interest of the Porsche."

People need to stop letting companies like Cryptic push them around and cause them to settle for a second-rate product, because while you may view it only as a game, the people at Cryptic see it as serious business.  Only when they start feeling the pinch in their bottom line will they learn to stop screwing with their customers.

Stop being sheep and start being shepherds.

Annoying timesinks.   Zones designed so they are tedious to traverse and this is WITH superpowered travel abilities!

Nothing says "We need to keep subs up" like having a contact in one zone and a mission two zones and 5 real-time minutes away.

I am a 30 month vetran of the game which just goes to show how much i like the game.

Once you get into the game you really don't care about the repetivness or going into the same maps.

There are lots of superb graphics through out the game and i erge people to try it, it's one of the most underrated games about.

Please try it out, become a Superhero.