Picking an Archetype in City of Heroes is one of the most important choices you’ll make in character creation and like everything else in the game there are tons of options. Even with all the options on offer, we all have our favorites. What are your top five Archetypes? These are my picks.
#5 – Corruptor
I love the idea of the Blaster, but I just never use the secondary powersets. Typically, if I’m picking a ranged blast set, I don’t really want to be in melee at all and most of the other Manipulation powers aren’t super interesting to me. The Corruptor lets me deal similar levels of damage while also supporting my team or debuffing the enemy to amplify my damage even further or mitigate my own damage taken as a squishy ranged caster. Also, Scourge is awesome.
#4 – Mastermind
The Mastermind is the best pet class in MMO history. Period. It’s a unique Archetype with multiple tiers of pets and pet upgrades with plenty of different options to fit whatever character theme you have in mind. I like to think of the Mastermind as more of a solo Archetype, especially since I bring my own team. The AI is a bit wonky, though.
#3 – Dominator
The Dominator is an excellent mix of a lot of the fun possibilities City of Heroes offers. It brings a massive amount of crowd control to the table while also being able to dish out tons of damage through a mix of both melee and ranged attacks. The only downside is that other players tend to have such efficient and powerful builds in the endgame that crowd control in general can fall to the wayside since everything tends to die so quickly.
#2 – Brute
There’s no wonder why Brutes are one of the most popular Archetypes in the game. The Brute is a rage-fueled melee smashing machine that can tear through anything in the game and laugh in the face of incoming damage. If you can keep your Fury high enough, you’ll outdamage a Scrapper and you’re capable of being just about as tanky as an actual Tanker.
#1 – Warshade
Warshades are one of City of Heroes’ unique Epic Archetypes where you get to play as a shapeshifting alien who’s formed a symbiotic bond with its human host. If that doesn’t sound cool enough for you, your abilities are also unique in that many of them require defeated enemies to function. You can pull off corpse explosions, create pets and sustain yourself using the life force of your enemies and more.
The ability to shapeshift brings a number of different ways to build out your character, focusing on one or more forms, or on all three together if you like. City of Heroes is a game about almost endless possibilities and the Warshade (and to a lesser extent, the Peacebringer) truly embody this goal better than any AT in the game.
