YMMV / Champions Online

• Alt-itis: A common complaint at the start of the game was that Cryptic hadn't set up the option to buy more character slots yet — accounts were limited to 8 or 16 slots, depending on subscription. This has since been dealt with; even free-to-play players (who start with 2 slots) can get more character slots.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Warlord Zarn. Most named villains in CO that are the targets of missions are usually a master villain (three health bars) at the very least. Warlord Zarn is a mere villain type mob (two bars) in a high-level instance. It doesn't help that he isn't that much different from other Lemurian villain mooks.
• Better Off Sold: Drop rates for the least-useful equipment were significantly increased as a solution to complaints about the expensive respec system.
• Demonic Spiders: Demonlings, Inchoates, Fleshrippers; all have tiny postures, the tendency to spawn in droves, and disproportionately high damage output.
• Difficulty Spike: When soloing, it's not uncommon to mop the floor with minions (such that you'll begin to wonder if you've found some sort of exploit) only to have the final boss ignore your most powerful attacks like they were made of butterflies and smiles and proceed to one-shot you at will. Sometimes, the spike will be delayed until roughly halfway through the fight with the aforementioned boss, at which point, they will declare I Am Not Left-Handed or go One-Winged Angel and proceed to hand you your rear.
• Fandom Rivalry: with City of Heroes; not only is Champions Online a newer and shinier Superhero MMORPG, it was created by the company that originally developed CoX. The "rivalry" has more or less ended, with Champions players welcoming ex-CoX players almost like refugees in the wake of the announced closing down of the latter's servers.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • VIPER Infiltrators love using smoke grenades on you, which prevents you from targeting them, and always spawn at least one more Infiltrator.
  • Rats in Monster Island never come alone, and always spawn two more Rats if you do not kill them fast enough.
• Good Bad Bugs: One forum member found a way to call NPC contacts remotely.
• Memetic Badass: Grond Smash Puny Internet Meme!
• Memetic Mutation: "We have to shut down ALL of those Beacons! They're driving the Qualaar CRAZY!"
• Player Punch: The deaths of all the Champions in Vibora Bay Apocalypse. In addition, the possibility to fail the mission and thus doom the two people you rescue from their nightmares with no retries in Aftershock.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Poor Power Armor has to suffer three of these. First of, there's the lockout system that imposes a cooldown on all but some Power Armor powers (including non-damaging powers, so no healing until you stop attacking and wait for a second before you can heal). Second, the same lockout system makes it irritatingly difficult to make a Power Armor build with powers from any other powersets. Finally, the powers eat up so much energy that you are practically forced to make Intelligence one of your superstats to be able to hold three PA powers up for longer than even three seconds, and even then you might have to heavily invest in energy stats. These combined makes Power Armor a very unpopular powerset in the community. Needless to say, players have been begging for the devs to fix these problems for the next Power Armor review.
• That One Boss: The finale of the Lemuria Crisis. For some builds, it's an easy boss in an environment that actually favours you. For others, it's impossible without help.
  • To be exact: The remaining 99% of the game follows a simple goal — replenish Mana as fast as possible, and convert it to damage as efficiently as possible. But in this 1%, the damage you take scales rapidly with the amount of Mana you have stored, and the arena will quickly recharge it. If you don't have an attack that burns energy quickly enough, you will take horrendous damage.
  • Draconis in Serpent Lantern with his knocks, and Jack Fool with his one-shot-kills and Left Hand for being a Lightning Bruiser, in Demonflame. Most average players can solo most of the Adventure Packs on normal without trying too hard...but not them!
    • There's also Freon and Spirit Serpent, from the new Serpent's Lantern update. Freon has an AoE hold power as well as a stealth power. The Hold occurs if you get enough stacks of a debuff he has that is constantly ticking. The only way to remove it is to get too close to a set of generators on either side, damaging you but removing the debuff. Spirit Serpent, meanwhile, is stationary with a damaging fire around his base, and a MASSIVE damaging breath attack, and two Master Villains to help him out that also do quite a bit of damage. Oh, and the alcoves in his room do massive damage if you go too far inside them. Good luck!
    • Freon was patched to acceptable levels. However, the Spirit Serpent himself can now be a very big problem, especially on large teams.
    • This seems to be dependent on difficulty level. On normal difficulty, at least, solo runs—even using archetypes—can bring down the Spirit Serpent without a scratch if they have a 120 ft-range attack (such as Sniper Rifle), as the serpent is stationary and does not have an attack that goes to that range.
  • Now that he got darkness powers, Kevin Poe can be this to newbies thanks to Life Drain. The NPC version of Life Drain is infamous in the community for not only inflicting heavy damage on players, but also for healing the user up fast. Veterans doesn't have much trouble with it as they can tell when to block it. Newbies, however, doesn't necessarily know the tricks to fighting a Darkness villain beforehand. It doesn't help that Kevin Poe also got a hold power that makes the target vulnerable to Life Drain.
    • For that matter, old force-based Kevin Poe used to be murder on newbies as well since his huge AOE knockback didn't have a tell beyond the fraction of a second it took him to wind up.
  • Gravitar, the first Rampage Alert supervillain. Powerful enough normally to one-shot non-tanks and wipe a full ten-hero team in seconds if they're not careful, when you get her down to one-third health she starts to try. Occasionally gaps in her AI have been found (for example, Smoke Grenade). The developers, seemingly with glee, have patched them.
• That One Level: Lemuria. Perpetual lag, with unbalanced powerful mooks, mission objectives that are impossible to find, instance entrances that are even harder to find, terrible quests, perpetually broken open events and the rubberbanding from hell, there is very little to like about this Zone. Oh, and it wasn't beta tested.
  • Largely averted with Lemuria at present (2010) after it suffered a particularly horrific bout of lag and had some real attention poured on it. It's still got a poor reputation though.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Naturally, one of the reactions to the change to the crafting system with the On Alert update, which functionally switched out a WoW-style system (with the added ability to break down equipment into components) for a Diablo II style system with fewer maximum sockets and no runewords.