My Scrapper is level 12 right now, and already it seems that I've been doing it wrong >.o
I have three attacks (Umm... The first and second one whose names I forget, and Siphon Life, yay selfheal) and three defensive skills (Battle Agility, the other one, and True Grit) and hover for a little resistance.
For all that the rules we've thrown at you, you don't really "go wrong" that heavily in the game. The early part of it is easy enough that suboptimal power choices only make levelling slightly slower, and by the time things start getting really difficult you've got enough power choices to make up for it.
I should note that most of my optimal-build stuff is because after getting to level cap seven times, hell yes I want to go through the low levels as quickly as possible just so I can get Stamina.
Don't worry about suboptimal builds on your first character. The only real danger zone is sometime after level 30, because of the levelling slowdown. If you're patient enough to play for three whole levels in order to "fix" a build mistake (by taking the power you "needed" and slotting it if necessary), then there's no Doing It Wrong.
If it helps, apart from my tendency to kind of construct my early character builds around Getting To Stamina, your power picks are the ones I'd take as well. Since this is not actually possible, I'd be leaving Battle Agility (the Ranged and Area of Effect Defense) to later, but I would be doing so with great reluctance.
If you really want build advice: stay away from Confront. It offers little to you. You're a Scrapper: if you want aggro, punch someone in the face.
Yay for face-punching!
Oh and there's gotta be some kinda Xanatos Gambit going on with how they make you agree to the EULA every time you start the game.
Few people actually read the EULA.
I know this because I'm one of those who reads it (for lack of anything better to do), even though I might not actually care about what it implies for my actual ownership of the game or my characters. It's amazing how many long-time players don't know what it says.
I lack the attention span to read through them aside from some skimming. The only EULA I've ever read through is the one for Aviary, and that's because it actually has a summary in non-legalese to make things easier.
It's pretty boilerplate stuff.
The main thing which people get very interested in is that anything you create in-game is property of NC (the publishers). This includes characters, bios, whatever. In practice, this is to allow NC to use footage of your characters for promo materials without asking for your permission. However, it's still a good idea to keep any character concepts you plan on selling in any form out of the game.
NC is not responsible financially and legally for any hardware failures, downtime, whatever. As mentioned, standard stuff.
Really, I know exactly where you're coming from - I'm hesitant about seriously starting a new archetype out of fear I'll totally gimp it, when I know enough from playing the game to know better, and that even if the only penalty for death is slower levelling... hence giving you time to think about what you're doing wrong. Especially when I've got something like five veteran freespecs on each character, so I can totally change them easily anyway.
Or alternatively... the EULA is all a Nemesis Plot.
And Nemesis is a government plot!
Hmm, maybe I should delete my Blaster and Mastermind, then? They have names of characters from Maikros...
Alright, I'm gonna delete them. By the way, how can I change my Global handle? Sarah Meteora was my first character and is said handle. Or will it change on its own?
Okay, they told me how to do it in the Guardian chat channel.
My new Global handle is @Matrix The Kitty
Something that I forgot to mention way back in the beginning:
Players are not allowed to create characters that may infringe on copyrights of others.
This is pretty controversial. The original reasoning was that NC got sued by Marvel because the character creator allegedly allowed players to make copies of Thor or Spider-man or Wolverine or whatever, thus infringing on Marvel's copyrights of those characters. (There's a whole huge tangent on the concept of copyright, and how it relates to trademarks, and so on.) The case was settled out of court, but now NC is paranoid about getting sued again. Apart from being policed by the game moderators, they've also requested that players report any infringing creations they see.
The rule of thumb is: if it's recognizable in any way as referring to an existing character in a copyrighted work, it's no-go.
Why is it controversial? Apart from the standard flamebait arguments (of poor logic, and thus unworthy of taking up any more of our time), the developers (formerly Cryptic, then NC in-house, then Paragon Studios; same people, different organizational names) have inserted lots of sly references to popular culture in the game. They're very obviously the COH-verse analogue to Robocop or Due South or Mystery Science Theatre 3000 or whatever, so the question is: why can they do it, and not us?
The stock answer is that their lawyers okayed it, but their lawyers obviously cannot okay all the players' attempts, so they're playing it safe.
This is, as usual, Internet Backdraft on the forums.
Planescape Hijack
Oh my, I never had any idea how many tropers played this game. Maybe I should get back into it, it was always fifty times more fun to play with friends. I think the best was the time I won a contest one of them was running and got a million inf, thus setting me for life.
This was the only MMO I could ever really get into. I wanted to love FFXI so, so much. But it was just so boring ><
I only ever really played scrappers. A katana/invulnerability one on Virtue, a Dark Melee/Willpower one on some other server (for the two months or so when I played last year), and my first major character: the Kindly Horror, a Spines/Dark Armor, which used to be terribly inefficient endurance-wise but was actually pretty good when I tried to get back into Co H last year.
edited 21st Jun '09 3:00:38 AM by Haven
Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku
I see several regular names in the page history for the City Of Heroes page who haven't turned up in this thread yet, so there are more player tropers around.
TV Tropes itself is getting a bit of a backlash on the City Of Heroes forums, ever since the Mission Architect came out. To be precise, ever since reviews of missions made through the Architect became common. The backlash comes threefold:
- Overuse of unintuitive trope names, leading to "what in blazes are you talking about?" and the reply "go look it up, I'm not doing your work for you", then a flamewar about not caring enough to look it up and whether or not one should.
- Attempts to reduce everything to tropes, resulting in overexposure of this wiki. Hype Backlash, of a sort.
- Frequent use of the more negative trope articles, to complain about some aspect of the Architect missions or something. Players then associate any mention of TV Tropes with the subjectively negative tropes. A sub-flamewar may rise with the whole Tropes Are Not Good and Tropes Are Not Bad thing, despite both leading to Tropes Are Tools; this is seldom noted by either side.
Planescape Hijack
Attempts to reduce everything to tropes, resulting in overexposure of this wiki. Hype Backlash, of a sort. This is happening all over the internet. If I hadn't been hanging out here before I started seeing this place pop up on the Order Of The Stick forums, I would probably be TV Tropes' mortal enemy due to this.
Anyway, the solution to this is that we need to build a death star.
That said: is there a TV Tropes Supergroup? It could be called Trope-Tan's Honor Guard or something. Actually, what servers are everyone on? My main was on Guardian.
edited 21st Jun '09 3:31:56 AM by Haven
Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku
No TV Tropes supergroup that I know of.
As for characters... off the top of my head:
- 14 on Virtue (including 4 level 50)
- 7 on Infinity (including 2 level 50)
- 5 in Pinnacle
- 4 on Guardian
- 3 on Justice (including 1 level 50)
- 3 on Victory
- 2 on Triumph
- 2 on Champion
- 1 on Protector
Most of these are one-shot characters I don't play anymore. For characters I'm actually working on, two are on Virtue, one is on Infinity, and one is on Pinnacle.
I'm always willing to create a new character on another server. However, I solo almost exclusively, so my contribution to any group will likely be limited to grinding Prestige and taking advantage of storage bins.
edited 21st Jun '09 3:41:56 AM by dkellis
Irritable Reptilian
I'm on Guardian, and I managed to sucker persuade Matrix into joining me there. It's a good server (my global is @Wall of Knight there, if anyone cares). My playtimes are a bit erratic, though, due to graveyard shift work.
ARTIFACTING!
I had about a dozen different characters on Virtue, but nowhere else.
Not that that's particularly relevant anymore.
Your common sense doesn't work on me!
My view is that endurance is like dakka: no such thing as Too Much.
I prefer City Of Heroes to Villains because I generally prefer happier surroundings. I love playing Masterminds, but the red/black/red/black/grey surroundings are a little depressing.
Yes, I know, Going Rogue and side-switching. And Issue 16's probable power customization.
I forgot about Regeneration, yes. (My first character ever was a Katana/Regeneration Scrapper, started in Issue 2, when Regeneration was almost unkillable. I didn't know that, I just picked it based on the super-quick healing characters from Ken Akamatsu's manga.) Even now, with some support (say, the Defense or Tohit Debuff from Broadsword/Katana/Dark Melee), Regeneration can be impressive.
Willpower is very powerful because it has some Defense and a pinch of Resistance and quite a lot of Regeneration, making it Regen With Support. I have a Broadsword/Willpower Scrapper at... 45 or something, I think. Haven't checked in a while; I've mostly been trying to figure out how to play Blasters (solo).
Last I checked, the rule of thumb for relative value of mitigation types is that one point of Defense = two points of Resistance = ten points of Regeneration.
Regeneration (the powerset) currently actually lives and dies based on its recharge, since its primary mitigation tools are now click-power active healing than passive health regen. Willpower, by contrast has... I think two click powers: a rez and the godmode. Meaning that Willpower has less stuff to worry about when things are fine, but can't react as well to emergencies. This means that the favoured activities of minmaxers (ie going after team content solo) are ill-suited for Willpower, what with Archvillain-soloing pretty much being a constant emergency for half an hour at a time.
It can do some impressive things, it just doesn't do it as easily as, say, Super Reflexes.
I stopped playing Kheldians with my Peacebringer at... 37, I believe. (Warshade at 13.) This was back in Issue 7 or 8, when I got tired of faceplanting after every single spawn containing a Void Seeker. (Yes, I know they changed Nictus damage.) I much prefer soloing, and Kheldians are not a good solo archetype. (Entirely and deliberately because of the Voids and Quantums.)
edited 20th Jun '09 12:14:41 PM by dkellis