I just got done playing WoW for, like, six hours and it was bullshit. Granted I didn't get very high level (though I did PvP as a 70). IF anyone bitches to me about the lack of variety in CoX again, after I spent hours doing retarded "Kill X" quests I will stab them. Hell to make things even worse I'm suppose to be getting pelts off these cougars, they all have skin and fur, yet only 1/4 is dropping a pelt. Piss on that. At least in CoX it "Kill 20 Skulls" means kill 20 Skulls not kill 60-80 Skulls depending on random drop.
I've been told things improve greatly after lvl 10 so I'm going to try and tough it out but so far the combat is boring and the missions are equally as bad as CoH at launch. CoV's starting quests are 10x better than the shit I've done Horde side in WoW of equal level.
If Champions is equally as good as CoX is right now AND has all the added stuff they are talking but only does CoX numbers after a year I will be left an empty husk with no faith in my fellow man. /rant
Wow, you just posted how I felt about WoW. I played a couple of characters until the mid-30s and it really didn't seem to get better, in my opinion. It was a long line of go here, kill the foozles, come back with foozle bits. There were some exceptions- I really enjoyed some of the rogue quests for instance- but the vast majority was go here, kill the foozle, come back with foozle bits. Honestly the thing I enjoyed most was playing the stock market game (AH), but that got tiresome after a while as well.
WoW absolutely got PvP better than CoH, but then again if they didn't that would have been really sad. And then... then there is the player base. Create a new character in CoH. Go to one of the starting zones and broadcast that you are new and can someone help you out, show you around, etc. Now do the same in WoW. Compare the ratio of good or helpful responses to L2P, noob.
Are the Runescape numbers for subscribers, or for all players?
Subscribers.
Bruce
Thank you for the chart update, by the way. There's no other reliable source for these numbers, so being without the chart for a full year was pretty painful.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I'm sure that with the increased staff CoH is waiting for a "re-marketing" effort.
You don't hire dozens of developers unless you are planning something.
CoX is a totally different game from what it was when CoH was first released, and they just have to get that message to the peoples. I imagine they are waiting for a behemoth patch before they do that.
WoW absolutely got PvP better than CoH, but then again if they didn't that would have been really sad. And then... then there is the player base. Create a new character in CoH. Go to one of the starting zones and broadcast that you are new and can someone help you out, show you around, etc. Now do the same in WoW. Compare the ratio of good or helpful responses to L2P, noob.
I guess the crux of this is that not every game will suit every person, which is why people can say they absolutely hate WoW and it's boring and repetitive... and yet 10 million people worldwide play it, many of them (like me) obsessively.
But since this isn't a thread about WoW, I'll relate it instead to community, based on the quote above. The responses a new player would get in CoX vs WoW to a request for help would probably be far more favorable on the former game, but why? The game creates the community. WoW can be solo'd from 1-70... grouping is frosting on a very tasty cake. You can definately do it and it is rewarding, but if no one is around your level or the groups are composed of utter retards, you can go do something on your own. I think this creates something of a less helpful community, because people know they can do it on their own and expect others to be able to do the same.
In CoX, if there are no groups? You're pretty screwed. Yeah, some quests can be solo'd with some classes (scrappers are pretty good at it), but not by all classes, and even those who can solo have to turn down the difficulty, which means nerfed rewards. So being forced to group creates a bit more of a welcoming community (in general) which can be cool for noobs. For me, coming from WoW to CoX, it was terribly frustrating as I would log on during the day and sit forever just hoping to find a group for the quests I needed.
I don't want Champions Online to be another WoW clone because, as Lord of the Rings Online has proven (to me): Why should I play a WoW clone when I can just play WoW? I do, however, hope Champions steps away from the 'all instances, all groups, all the time', and compromises at least a little to those who like to be able to go at it either alone or in smaller groups. Finding groups can be a chore, and it feels less tedious when I can solo stuff while waiting for a group. Instancing, while a great idea since it lessens farming, makes the world seem like a very dead place when nothing really happens outside of them.
Hopefully, Champions Online can strike a balance. Also, hopefully my nemesis can be extremely hot and big-busted.
The CoV ATs are all a lot more solo-oriented. Partly due to, well, villains don't generally get along well together, but I think part of it is the realization that in a damage-oriented game, everyone wants to deal some damage.
And you can solo tanks/cons etc in CoH if you want to, it's just a question of expectations for speed and such. These days, to have a char who can't solo probably means you specifically designed it that way.
WoW absolutely got PvP better than CoH, but then again if they didn't that would have been really sad. And then... then there is the player base. Create a new character in CoH. Go to one of the starting zones and broadcast that you are new and can someone help you out, show you around, etc. Now do the same in WoW. Compare the ratio of good or helpful responses to L2P, noob.
I guess the crux of this is that not every game will suit every person, which is why people can say they absolutely hate WoW and it's boring and repetitive... and yet 10 million people worldwide play it, many of them (like me) obsessively.
But since this isn't a thread about WoW, I'll relate it instead to community, based on the quote above. The responses a new player would get in CoX vs WoW to a request for help would probably be far more favorable on the former game, but why? The game creates the community. WoW can be solo'd from 1-70... grouping is frosting on a very tasty cake. You can definately do it and it is rewarding, but if no one is around your level or the groups are composed of utter retards, you can go do something on your own. I think this creates something of a less helpful community, because people know they can do it on their own and expect others to be able to do the same.
In CoX, if there are no groups? You're pretty screwed. Yeah, some quests can be solo'd with some classes (scrappers are pretty good at it), but not by all classes, and even those who can solo have to turn down the difficulty, which means nerfed rewards. So being forced to group creates a bit more of a welcoming community (in general) which can be cool for noobs. For me, coming from WoW to CoX, it was terribly frustrating as I would log on during the day and sit forever just hoping to find a group for the quests I needed.
Hopefully, Champions Online can strike a balance. Also, hopefully my nemesis can be extremely hot and big-busted.
*nod* I certainly did not mean to give the impression that I was shitting on WoW, though reading what I wrote it certainly seems that way. WoW is a great game... It just didn't do it for ME. Granted, I apparently had a very different experience with the two games, the only toon on CoX that I couldn't solo with was a controller (until I hit 32) before they came out with the vet reward attacks and containment. Oh, and before they started scaling the AVs in the 40s. I don't think I've ever had a toon that could solo the envoy of shadows. Sure some of them take a LOT longer, but you can do it with just about any archetype if you take your time and use your head. Conversely I found myself getting a number of missions that I couldn't solo in WoW, just because there were too many mobs in too small and area.
I've always thought CoX should give an Influence boost to outdoor kills so there is an incentive for people to fight outside. Heck, now they should make it so you have a higher chance of getting Recipes/Salvage when fighting mobs outside. That way when you are more interested in getting better IOs or more money you can do that while leveling just a bit slower.
I recall the devs saying they built the over world with the idea that players would fight criminals they see on their way to missions. Well, silly devs, you should have known people would just jet to the mission as fast as possible.
Are the Runescape numbers for subscribers, or for all players?
Subscribers.
Bruce
Thank you for the chart update, by the way. There's no other reliable source for these numbers, so being without the chart for a full year was pretty painful.
Donate more money and the charts will be updated more often.
But seriously, thanks. (Although some would object to calling me a reliable source.)
Like I've said about WoW to a friend of mine: It gets better after level 10, and around level 20 you really get an idea for what your class does and what the content is going to be like as you progress. But the problem is a lot of the old world is empty now. It makes it vary boring at times to level up to 70. If I can make one suggestion that might make your WoW experience better, it would be to find a server marked as "new" where not everyone is level 70 yet.
I can totally see your points though. I think the only reason I got as far as I did was because I always had some RL friends to roll with. I didn't have to look often for other random people to fill party spots.
Are the Runescape numbers for subscribers, or for all players?
Subscribers.
Bruce
Thank you for the chart update, by the way. There's no other reliable source for these numbers, so being without the chart for a full year was pretty painful.
Donate more money and the charts will be updated more often.
But seriously, thanks. (Although some would object to calling me a reliable source.)
Bruce
If I had the spare money to donate, I would. I've followed most of the "big names" since the days of Lum's old forums where everyone would dog pile on you for whatever reasons. I blame that place for getting me into MMOs as much as I am.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
The reason I stopped playing CoH is because the combat became less dynamic and more static. When I first started you used to move around a lot, use your travel powers in combat, it was fantastic.
Now you just stand there and hit buttons over and over, not a lot of fun. Champions looks like a change in the right direction.
*nod* I certainly did not mean to give the impression that I was shitting on WoW, though reading what I wrote it certainly seems that way. WoW is a great game... It just didn't do it for ME. Granted, I apparently had a very different experience with the two games, the only toon on CoX that I couldn't solo with was a controller (until I hit 32) before they came out with the vet reward attacks and containment. Oh, and before they started scaling the AVs in the 40s. I don't think I've ever had a toon that could solo the envoy of shadows. Sure some of them take a LOT longer, but you can do it with just about any archetype if you take your time and use your head. Conversely I found myself getting a number of missions that I couldn't solo in WoW, just because there were too many mobs in too small and area.
It seems as if some stuff might change in CoX as the levels get higher... but I did play both heroes and villains, and didn't find solo'ing to be very compelling or fun with anything I tried. Yeah I could solo with some characters, but again I had to turn the difficulty down, sometimes to the point where I was beating up green or grey mobs. Maybe I just sucked at the game.
It's definately possible that the veteran reward powers make it a lot easier, but as a noob with none of that, I had to do it with the stuff the character came with. I think the easiest to solo with was probably the Mastermind, which was my highest level char (26 I think?), but even that wasn't much fun. Grouping was a blast whenever I could get one, but even that did start to get somewhat repetitive as all the environments were so same-y.
I'm not sure if you've played WoW post-2.3, but 95% of the pre-Outland quests that weren't solo-able before are now, meaning you can do pretty much on your own. The only time you need groups is for instance, and while some say they've found old-world to be dead, I still see a lot of people grouping up for the more popular instances.. including the noob ones (RFC, Wailing Caverns) because the loot has been greatly improved. Group quests do return in Outlands, but some of those are even solo-able... particularly if you're a Hunter... but the benefit is that, with the new pre-Outlands levelling, a lot more people are in Outlands so groups are far easier to come by.
The reason I like WoW is that it's fast-paced and, no matter what character you play, you have a lot of options on how you want to develop. I like the diversity and the character of it, not to mention the high-production values and combat that moves at a brisk pace. If Cryptic can capture some of this and put their own flavor on it (not to mention make it super-heroic) then I might be a switcher.
I've only ever had one character who couldn't take on greens, and that was a Dark/Psi back in like fall 04 (which I rerolled as a Warshade). I think it was cause Psi sucked back then, I have a Sonic/Psi now who handles a whole world better. As far as difficulty goes, I don't touch it til about 22-27 (which gives whites/yellows, anything old that turns into greys/greens I drop). After I get SOs in a character I run anywhere from 3rd to 5th...if I go lower, it's not because they can't do it, it's just that I want to go faster. Soloing a con or a tank is actually boring not just because it's slow, but because after mid level you can handle well more than 3 guys at a time and you're never really in much risk. My Willpower tank was taking on about 7 trolls at level 15ish, and her hp just wasn't dropping even while I as just standing there.
It can be harder if you go against something not suited for you - ie, Banished Pantheon when you deal negative damage, robots when you're psi, but I think in general cox tends to be pretty easy.
Man, I don't know if the classes I picked were horrendously overpowered or something, but when CoH first came out I made an AR/Dev blaster that could mass AOE groups of purples with LTs and bosses in them without being hit. Acc debuff, def buff, acc buff (so all slots were dps enh), and huge AOE dmg was just ridiculous at the time.
Then in CoV, I made a thug/poison mastermind the first time I played and could solo some AV's/heroes and later made an SS/invuln brute that along with my buddy's stalker could duo any hero/av until the mid-30s when we stopped. We just started up again and put it on the hardest difficulty from level 2, and our accuracy is miserable and it's challenging, but quite doable. All in all, I was hoping Champions actually added some difficulty over CoH that wasn't of the "You miss 80% of the time!" nature.
I can't really imagine ever having to turn the difficulty down but I might be getting lucky with powersets. I found grouping much more necessary in WoW, though I know they have changed a ton of elite quests to nonelite recently.
Man maybe I suck at this game. Aside from my bots/dark, who rolls through max-diff missions without much trouble, I hardly even turn the difficulty up very far. My dominators work pretty hard to solo even-level missions, except the one I have in the high 30s, and my blasters and controllers on the hero side are too fragile, I find.
How do you guys solo as controllers, anyway? I can do it, but until you get pets it's so slow and you're so fragile that it's awful. More than once in the teens and 20s I've been fucked hard by a +1 lieutenant. Do you slot your controls for damage, and if so, does this hurt your group viability?
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Man, I don't know if the classes I picked were horrendously overpowered or something, but when CoH first came out I made an AR/Dev blaster that could mass AOE groups of purples with LTs and bosses in them without being hit. Acc debuff, def buff, acc buff (so all slots were dps enh), and huge AOE dmg was just ridiculous at the time.
Then in CoV, I made a thug/poison mastermind the first time I played and could solo some AV's/heroes and later made an SS/invuln brute that along with my buddy's stalker could duo any hero/av until the mid-30s when we stopped. We just started up again and put it on the hardest difficulty from level 2, and our accuracy is miserable and it's challenging, but quite doable. All in all, I was hoping Champions actually added some difficulty over CoH that wasn't of the "You miss 80% of the time!" nature.
I can't really imagine ever having to turn the difficulty down but I might be getting lucky with powersets. I found grouping much more necessary in WoW, though I know they have changed a ton of elite quests to nonelite recently.
At CoH Launch, many enemies did not have ranged attacks, and two Devices powers, Smoke Grenade, and Caltrops, were bugged and were exponentially more powerful than they should have been. They literally misplaced a decimal point with Smoke Grenade, and it became a "you can't hit me, ever" button. Also, at launch, they had not yet implemented "the purple patch" that makes your powers less effective againt higher level foes.
For CoV, Masterminds in general are just freaking powerful, Thugs especially.
Also, Cryptic was never owned by NCSoft, they co-owned the CoH IP, split 50/50. Budget and time restrictions, technical limations, all those things are just as likely to be problematic now as they were years ago. Yes, Cryptic no longer has to run things through NCSoft, but they also no longer have any incoming revenue from subscriptions. They've got the cushion of whatever they sold the CoH IP for, minus whatever they spent to acquire the Champions IP. Money may or may not end up being an issue for them. Its possible NCSoft paid them enough that they can do whatever they want, but I don't think the payment details have come out on that.
You know, I didn't think of that, and I listened to the darn NCSoft conference call. They didn't say how much they paid.
I did some digging through the financial documents and there's no line item for it. However, comparing Q4 to Q3, there was a *large* jump in the "Other Intangible Assets" line from about 1.3 billion Won to 12.5 billion Won. That increase corresponds to $11.8 million US.
Now, Cryptic had about 135K subscribers last quarter. If you assume each subscriber pays the full $14.99 per month, minus 2.5% for credit card trasnaction, you get a gross revenue of $23.7 million US per year. If NCSoft had a 50/50 split with Cryptic on that, then Cryptic was getting ... surprise, $11.8 million US per year.
So did NCSoft simply buy out CoX for one year's revenues? The numbers are eerily similar, but $12 million seems a bit cheap. But a Price/Sales Ratio of 1.0 is not unusual.
Bruce
Hmm, very interesting. Thanks for the update Bruce. Your site was missed. That other one that started up never seemed to work right for me.
Also, Cryptic was never owned by NCSoft, they co-owned the CoH IP, split 50/50. Budget and time restrictions, technical limations, all those things are just as likely to be problematic now as they were years ago. Yes, Cryptic no longer has to run things through NCSoft, but they also no longer have any incoming revenue from subscriptions. They've got the cushion of whatever they sold the CoH IP for, minus whatever they spent to acquire the Champions IP. Money may or may not end up being an issue for them. Its possible NCSoft paid them enough that they can do whatever they want, but I don't think the payment details have come out on that.
You know, I didn't think of that, and I listened to the darn NCSoft conference call. They didn't say how much they paid.
I did some digging through the financial documents and there's no line item for it. However, comparing Q4 to Q3, there was a *large* jump in the "Other Intangible Assets" line from about 1.3 billion Won to 12.5 billion Won. That increase corresponds to $11.8 million US.
Now, Cryptic had about 135K subscribers last quarter. If you assume each subscriber pays the full $14.99 per month, minus 2.5% for credit card trasnaction, you get a gross revenue of $23.7 million US per year. If NCSoft had a 50/50 split with Cryptic on that, then Cryptic was getting ... surprise, $11.8 million US per year.
So did NCSoft simply buy out CoX for one year's revenues? The numbers are eerily similar, but $12 million seems a bit cheap. But a Price/Sales Ratio of 1.0 is not unusual.
Bruce
Seems like NCSoft thinks there's only a year or two worth of real fianncial production left in the game (especially with Champions being announced.)
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Man maybe I suck at this game. Aside from my bots/dark, who rolls through max-diff missions without much trouble, I hardly even turn the difficulty up very far. My dominators work pretty hard to solo even-level missions, except the one I have in the high 30s, and my blasters and controllers on the hero side are too fragile, I find.
How do you guys solo as controllers, anyway? I can do it, but until you get pets it's so slow and you're so fragile that it's awful. More than once in the teens and 20s I've been fucked hard by a +1 lieutenant. Do you slot your controls for damage, and if so, does this hurt your group viability?
The one controller that I've liked well enough to continue playing him is Fire/Storm, your ymmv. With char alone (properly slotted) you should be able to reliably keep 2 mobs held, unreliably keep 3 held. This is a standard spawn in a heroic single player mission. Hold them, nudge them together with hurricane, then drop hurricane, hit them with firecages, then stand next to them with hot feet turned on. Reapply char as soon as it comes up. Every other spawn you can hit with freezing rain to make it go quicker. Hotfeet is an attack, slot it as such.
For those occasional larger groups, then come up to the group and smoke them. Firecages then flash fire, freezing rain on the group. Char on whoever you missed (and you will always miss one) then stand in the middle of the group with hot feet. Hit firecages when it comes up again. If things go bad start herdicaning and pin them in a corner (if possible). You can get this running by 12 or 14, but it will be more difficult until 22 and SOs come into the picture.
Use your inspirations, they drop frequently and they do you no good sitting in your tray.
And most importantly, if you do not START the fight, then run the hell away. If you miss two chars in a row... be prepared to run the hell away.
If you want to make a solo machine, play a BS/Regen scrapper. Easily the most solo-capable toon I've made. The only time I die on him is when I get scrapper lock and start thinking that I can take those 3 purple bosses. Or that group of 15 minions (protip: you can't take those 3 purple bosses or those 15 minions most of the time.)
Seems like NCSoft thinks there's only a year or two worth of real fianncial production left in the game (especially with Champions being announced.)
I wouldn't go that far. Valuing a company... or in this case, half of a company's revenue-generating assets.. can be done many ways. Price/earnings is one, but difficult to estimate going forward considering that NCSoft would be taking on only some of the staff and opening a new studio to accomodate them and so on. So the costs are somewhat unknown. Price/sales is not an unusual basis, and in those cases a ratio of 1.0 is considered normal, though many companies are valued higher than that.
When companies are valued at high P/S or very high P/E ratios, it's usually because it's assumed that they will be growing in the future. I think NCSoft is correctly assuming that CoX won't be growing much in the future. That doesn't mean to say they think it will die after a year, but just that it will have less subscribers next year. How much less, though, is another unknown.
Do I think Cryptic could have gotten more maybe? Perhaps, and for all we know they did; my numbers could be wrong, or it could be part of a structured payout over time, etc.
And for the record, I'm a soloer and I played an invulnerability scrapper in CoH. Fun stuff for about six months, made a few alts, then got tired of the repetitive instances and lack of new content. But I love Cryptic. (Hire me!)
*nod* Yeah, I play usually once a week with my fam. When new content comes out I'll log in to check it out... but it is definitely a re hash of the same type of missions in the same half a dozen tiles. That is something that I would wish for ChampO. If they can figure out some way of NOT having the same type of mission over and over again I'd be thrilled, but I don't see how they could do so.
Man maybe I suck at this game. Aside from my bots/dark, who rolls through max-diff missions without much trouble, I hardly even turn the difficulty up very far. My dominators work pretty hard to solo even-level missions, except the one I have in the high 30s, and my blasters and controllers on the hero side are too fragile, I find.
How do you guys solo as controllers, anyway? I can do it, but until you get pets it's so slow and you're so fragile that it's awful. More than once in the teens and 20s I've been fucked hard by a +1 lieutenant. Do you slot your controls for damage, and if so, does this hurt your group viability?
I've got two cons, a 50 Ill/FF Phantom and a 38 Grav/Storm. To be honest I don't even really consider the teens, if I'm actually playing a character and it's not languishing in alt limbo I tend to hit the 20s pretty fast. Especially since I'm often sidekicked up for these levels. By the mid 20s you should have multiple mass effect powers to shut a spawn down and let you pick them off at leisure with your one or two containment-boosted attacks.
With Phantoms you get Decoys at 18, and Terror and Flash somewhere around the teens and 20s. With recharge you should have at least one up for each spawn, then you single-hold and containment them one at a time. With Gravity, you've only got the AoE hold and Wormhole for effective aoe (wormhole is great solo or when used smartly in teams), but you've got 2 direct attacks so your single-hold can be spread around a bit more. Your secondary like Dispersion Field or Hurricane, etc, will help to mitgate whatever manages to keep shooting at you. If you're up against a tough lt or boss, your absolute priority is to double stack your hold on him as fast as possible and to keep it on.
Now, it is slow, but it's generally pretty safe. Slotting a control for damage isn't worth much, better to have recharge.
The single target immobs like Ring of Fire are decent damage if you slot them up. Every control set has something you can use as an attack in it, like Lift, or Levitate, or the immobs or spectral wounds. Just make sure to leverage containment, use lots of inspirations, and use any temp powers you can get. I won't lie, the veteran powers like Sands of Mu and Blackwand were really nice for my low level controllers.
The mid teens in general were apparantly one of the bad areas, so level 15 is apparantly the level that had the largest adjustment in the recent XP curve changes. Solong a low level controller is generally going to be be pretty tedious in many cases though, and thats sort of by design. They're supposed to be slow and safe.
I did play a BS/Regen scrapper, and he was fun for awhile. I made him because I heard that this was a strong combination of powers for solo'ing and indeed, he was decent. But again... booring.
Reading about how various controllers and such can solo through missions, I can definately see where you're coming from and I don't doubt that I could have done this. But again, it sounds extremely tedious. It might be the same way some people find levelling in WoW to be tedious, I dunno... the way we're wired or some such. But as Bruce mentioned above, I just found the mission environments to be so repetitive, and them being instanced really just made it worse for me I think.
I really hope Champions has less instancing than CoX.
Solong a low level controller is generally going to be be pretty tedious in many cases though, and thats sort of by design. They're supposed to be slow and safe.
I guess it differs between builds, but my Gravity/Rad controller felt anything but safe in the teens. Even with DOs slotted his accuracy and recharge were too low, and endurance consumption too high to really make him viable for anything except the off-healer in groups. It wasn't until the mid twenties that he could actually do more than hold a single mob and toss shit at it.
I did play a BS/Regen scrapper, and he was fun for awhile. I made him because I heard that this was a strong combination of powers for solo'ing and indeed, he was decent. But again... booring.
Reading about how various controllers and such can solo through missions, I can definately see where you're coming from and I don't doubt that I could have done this. But again, it sounds extremely tedious. It might be the same way some people find levelling in WoW to be tedious, I dunno... the way we're wired or some such. But as Bruce mentioned above, I just found the mission environments to be so repetitive, and them being instanced really just made it worse for me I think.
I really hope Champions has less instancing than CoX.
Tedious? Oh hell yeah it was tedious. I hated playing him solo. My point was that it is realistically possible, it just takes a while.
Solong a low level controller is generally going to be be pretty tedious in many cases though, and thats sort of by design. They're supposed to be slow and safe.
I guess it differs between builds, but my Gravity/Rad controller felt anything but safe in the teens. Even with DOs slotted his accuracy and recharge were too low, and endurance consumption too high to really make him viable for anything except the off-healer in groups. It wasn't until the mid twenties that he could actually do more than hold a single mob and toss shit at it.
If you where having trouble with accuracy on a controller with /rad you where doing something very very wrong.
Anyway.
My Fire/Rad Controller was soloing full minion spawns in Perez Park from level 8ish on. Even spawns with lieutenants. At level 18 I think I can take double boss spawns with little trouble. I like playing my Mind/Psy Dom more tho.
Before Stamina there's no way in hell I could afford to both run the toggles and actually have an attack/hold chain going. At least, not for terribly long.
Plus, /rad's toggles turned out to be rather annoying to play in groups. The need to apply multiple debuffs with long animations plus the (what feels like a) 5 seconds warm-up before the debuff actually becomes visible enough to other players meant the toggle tended to be dead by the time I was done. Give me /dark's single uberdebuff any time of day.
I had so much fun running around as a Fire/Energy blaster, AoEing the shit out of everything and kicking people off of buildings. Knockback is the greatest thing ever.
The fun parts were when me and my duo buddy aggroed way too many mobs, I'd be furiously trying to murder as many as possible. And then he slowly hovered away, out of reach.
Before Stamina there's no way in hell I could afford to both run the toggles and actually have an attack/hold chain going. At least, not for terribly long.
Plus, /rad's toggles turned out to be rather annoying to play in groups. The need to apply multiple debuffs with long animations plus the (what feels like a) 5 seconds warm-up before the debuff actually becomes visible enough to other players meant the toggle tended to be dead by the time I was done. Give me /dark's single uberdebuff any time of day.
I generally don't use anchors at all on anything less than a really tough boss.
Before Stamina there's no way in hell I could afford to both run the toggles and actually have an attack/hold chain going. At least, not for terribly long.
Plus, /rad's toggles turned out to be rather annoying to play in groups. The need to apply multiple debuffs with long animations plus the (what feels like a) 5 seconds warm-up before the debuff actually becomes visible enough to other players meant the toggle tended to be dead by the time I was done. Give me /dark's single uberdebuff any time of day.
I generally don't use anchors at all on anything less than a really tough boss.
Same here. And then you have the whole issue with the AI being a bunch of total fucking pansies that tend to run away from everything nowadays, and an anchor debuff on a boss who's running away while still at 90% health is a recipe for disaster. Especially single toggle debuffs are meant to be "fire and forget" things.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I dropped my Controller because he just felt completely ineffectual at high 20s... I'm a Controller. I do shit-all for damage even with containment (and Gravity is supposed to be the damage set, Fire aside), and yet most of my powers are either single-target holds (which are only moderately useful in a game where you fight +dozen mobs at a time) or AoE holds with monster recharge times and ridiculous default accuracy. Feeling both squishy, low damage AND only really useful for crowd control every couple minutes just wasn't terribly fun, no matter how cool Propel looks.
From what I've read of dev posts, it doesn't sound terribly different. Pretty sure it uses the same TAB style combat as the rest of the MMORPGs, just faster.
Posts
Wow, you just posted how I felt about WoW. I played a couple of characters until the mid-30s and it really didn't seem to get better, in my opinion. It was a long line of go here, kill the foozles, come back with foozle bits. There were some exceptions- I really enjoyed some of the rogue quests for instance- but the vast majority was go here, kill the foozle, come back with foozle bits. Honestly the thing I enjoyed most was playing the stock market game (AH), but that got tiresome after a while as well.
WoW absolutely got PvP better than CoH, but then again if they didn't that would have been really sad. And then... then there is the player base. Create a new character in CoH. Go to one of the starting zones and broadcast that you are new and can someone help you out, show you around, etc. Now do the same in WoW. Compare the ratio of good or helpful responses to L2P, noob.
Thank you for the chart update, by the way. There's no other reliable source for these numbers, so being without the chart for a full year was pretty painful.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
If they make a villains expansion, the proper name would be either CKC -- Conquerors, Killers, & Crooks -- or Villainy Unbound for us old-schoolers.
RE: Secret Id's. I personally have to wonder if this disadvantage's "other half", the Public Identity, will be reflected too.
You don't hire dozens of developers unless you are planning something.
CoX is a totally different game from what it was when CoH was first released, and they just have to get that message to the peoples. I imagine they are waiting for a behemoth patch before they do that.
I guess the crux of this is that not every game will suit every person, which is why people can say they absolutely hate WoW and it's boring and repetitive... and yet 10 million people worldwide play it, many of them (like me) obsessively.
But since this isn't a thread about WoW, I'll relate it instead to community, based on the quote above. The responses a new player would get in CoX vs WoW to a request for help would probably be far more favorable on the former game, but why? The game creates the community. WoW can be solo'd from 1-70... grouping is frosting on a very tasty cake. You can definately do it and it is rewarding, but if no one is around your level or the groups are composed of utter retards, you can go do something on your own. I think this creates something of a less helpful community, because people know they can do it on their own and expect others to be able to do the same.
In CoX, if there are no groups? You're pretty screwed. Yeah, some quests can be solo'd with some classes (scrappers are pretty good at it), but not by all classes, and even those who can solo have to turn down the difficulty, which means nerfed rewards. So being forced to group creates a bit more of a welcoming community (in general) which can be cool for noobs. For me, coming from WoW to CoX, it was terribly frustrating as I would log on during the day and sit forever just hoping to find a group for the quests I needed.
I don't want Champions Online to be another WoW clone because, as Lord of the Rings Online has proven (to me): Why should I play a WoW clone when I can just play WoW? I do, however, hope Champions steps away from the 'all instances, all groups, all the time', and compromises at least a little to those who like to be able to go at it either alone or in smaller groups. Finding groups can be a chore, and it feels less tedious when I can solo stuff while waiting for a group. Instancing, while a great idea since it lessens farming, makes the world seem like a very dead place when nothing really happens outside of them.
Hopefully, Champions Online can strike a balance. Also, hopefully my nemesis can be extremely hot and big-busted.
And you can solo tanks/cons etc in CoH if you want to, it's just a question of expectations for speed and such. These days, to have a char who can't solo probably means you specifically designed it that way.
*nod* I certainly did not mean to give the impression that I was shitting on WoW, though reading what I wrote it certainly seems that way. WoW is a great game... It just didn't do it for ME. Granted, I apparently had a very different experience with the two games, the only toon on CoX that I couldn't solo with was a controller (until I hit 32) before they came out with the vet reward attacks and containment. Oh, and before they started scaling the AVs in the 40s. I don't think I've ever had a toon that could solo the envoy of shadows. Sure some of them take a LOT longer, but you can do it with just about any archetype if you take your time and use your head. Conversely I found myself getting a number of missions that I couldn't solo in WoW, just because there were too many mobs in too small and area.
I recall the devs saying they built the over world with the idea that players would fight criminals they see on their way to missions. Well, silly devs, you should have known people would just jet to the mission as fast as possible.
Donate more money and the charts will be updated more often.
But seriously, thanks. (Although some would object to calling me a reliable source.)
Bruce
I can totally see your points though. I think the only reason I got as far as I did was because I always had some RL friends to roll with. I didn't have to look often for other random people to fill party spots.
If I had the spare money to donate, I would. I've followed most of the "big names" since the days of Lum's old forums where everyone would dog pile on you for whatever reasons. I blame that place for getting me into MMOs as much as I am.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Now you just stand there and hit buttons over and over, not a lot of fun. Champions looks like a change in the right direction.
It seems as if some stuff might change in CoX as the levels get higher... but I did play both heroes and villains, and didn't find solo'ing to be very compelling or fun with anything I tried. Yeah I could solo with some characters, but again I had to turn the difficulty down, sometimes to the point where I was beating up green or grey mobs. Maybe I just sucked at the game.
It's definately possible that the veteran reward powers make it a lot easier, but as a noob with none of that, I had to do it with the stuff the character came with. I think the easiest to solo with was probably the Mastermind, which was my highest level char (26 I think?), but even that wasn't much fun. Grouping was a blast whenever I could get one, but even that did start to get somewhat repetitive as all the environments were so same-y.
I'm not sure if you've played WoW post-2.3, but 95% of the pre-Outland quests that weren't solo-able before are now, meaning you can do pretty much on your own. The only time you need groups is for instance, and while some say they've found old-world to be dead, I still see a lot of people grouping up for the more popular instances.. including the noob ones (RFC, Wailing Caverns) because the loot has been greatly improved. Group quests do return in Outlands, but some of those are even solo-able... particularly if you're a Hunter... but the benefit is that, with the new pre-Outlands levelling, a lot more people are in Outlands so groups are far easier to come by.
The reason I like WoW is that it's fast-paced and, no matter what character you play, you have a lot of options on how you want to develop. I like the diversity and the character of it, not to mention the high-production values and combat that moves at a brisk pace. If Cryptic can capture some of this and put their own flavor on it (not to mention make it super-heroic) then I might be a switcher.
It can be harder if you go against something not suited for you - ie, Banished Pantheon when you deal negative damage, robots when you're psi, but I think in general cox tends to be pretty easy.
Then in CoV, I made a thug/poison mastermind the first time I played and could solo some AV's/heroes and later made an SS/invuln brute that along with my buddy's stalker could duo any hero/av until the mid-30s when we stopped. We just started up again and put it on the hardest difficulty from level 2, and our accuracy is miserable and it's challenging, but quite doable. All in all, I was hoping Champions actually added some difficulty over CoH that wasn't of the "You miss 80% of the time!" nature.
I can't really imagine ever having to turn the difficulty down but I might be getting lucky with powersets. I found grouping much more necessary in WoW, though I know they have changed a ton of elite quests to nonelite recently.
How do you guys solo as controllers, anyway? I can do it, but until you get pets it's so slow and you're so fragile that it's awful. More than once in the teens and 20s I've been fucked hard by a +1 lieutenant. Do you slot your controls for damage, and if so, does this hurt your group viability?
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
At CoH Launch, many enemies did not have ranged attacks, and two Devices powers, Smoke Grenade, and Caltrops, were bugged and were exponentially more powerful than they should have been. They literally misplaced a decimal point with Smoke Grenade, and it became a "you can't hit me, ever" button. Also, at launch, they had not yet implemented "the purple patch" that makes your powers less effective againt higher level foes.
For CoV, Masterminds in general are just freaking powerful, Thugs especially.
Hmm, very interesting. Thanks for the update Bruce. Your site was missed. That other one that started up never seemed to work right for me.
Seems like NCSoft thinks there's only a year or two worth of real fianncial production left in the game (especially with Champions being announced.)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The one controller that I've liked well enough to continue playing him is Fire/Storm, your ymmv. With char alone (properly slotted) you should be able to reliably keep 2 mobs held, unreliably keep 3 held. This is a standard spawn in a heroic single player mission. Hold them, nudge them together with hurricane, then drop hurricane, hit them with firecages, then stand next to them with hot feet turned on. Reapply char as soon as it comes up. Every other spawn you can hit with freezing rain to make it go quicker. Hotfeet is an attack, slot it as such.
For those occasional larger groups, then come up to the group and smoke them. Firecages then flash fire, freezing rain on the group. Char on whoever you missed (and you will always miss one) then stand in the middle of the group with hot feet. Hit firecages when it comes up again. If things go bad start herdicaning and pin them in a corner (if possible). You can get this running by 12 or 14, but it will be more difficult until 22 and SOs come into the picture.
Use your inspirations, they drop frequently and they do you no good sitting in your tray.
And most importantly, if you do not START the fight, then run the hell away. If you miss two chars in a row... be prepared to run the hell away.
If you want to make a solo machine, play a BS/Regen scrapper. Easily the most solo-capable toon I've made. The only time I die on him is when I get scrapper lock and start thinking that I can take those 3 purple bosses. Or that group of 15 minions (protip: you can't take those 3 purple bosses or those 15 minions most of the time.)
I wouldn't go that far. Valuing a company... or in this case, half of a company's revenue-generating assets.. can be done many ways. Price/earnings is one, but difficult to estimate going forward considering that NCSoft would be taking on only some of the staff and opening a new studio to accomodate them and so on. So the costs are somewhat unknown. Price/sales is not an unusual basis, and in those cases a ratio of 1.0 is considered normal, though many companies are valued higher than that.
When companies are valued at high P/S or very high P/E ratios, it's usually because it's assumed that they will be growing in the future. I think NCSoft is correctly assuming that CoX won't be growing much in the future. That doesn't mean to say they think it will die after a year, but just that it will have less subscribers next year. How much less, though, is another unknown.
Do I think Cryptic could have gotten more maybe? Perhaps, and for all we know they did; my numbers could be wrong, or it could be part of a structured payout over time, etc.
Bruce
Bruce
I've got two cons, a 50 Ill/FF Phantom and a 38 Grav/Storm. To be honest I don't even really consider the teens, if I'm actually playing a character and it's not languishing in alt limbo I tend to hit the 20s pretty fast. Especially since I'm often sidekicked up for these levels. By the mid 20s you should have multiple mass effect powers to shut a spawn down and let you pick them off at leisure with your one or two containment-boosted attacks.
With Phantoms you get Decoys at 18, and Terror and Flash somewhere around the teens and 20s. With recharge you should have at least one up for each spawn, then you single-hold and containment them one at a time. With Gravity, you've only got the AoE hold and Wormhole for effective aoe (wormhole is great solo or when used smartly in teams), but you've got 2 direct attacks so your single-hold can be spread around a bit more. Your secondary like Dispersion Field or Hurricane, etc, will help to mitgate whatever manages to keep shooting at you. If you're up against a tough lt or boss, your absolute priority is to double stack your hold on him as fast as possible and to keep it on.
Now, it is slow, but it's generally pretty safe. Slotting a control for damage isn't worth much, better to have recharge.
The mid teens in general were apparantly one of the bad areas, so level 15 is apparantly the level that had the largest adjustment in the recent XP curve changes. Solong a low level controller is generally going to be be pretty tedious in many cases though, and thats sort of by design. They're supposed to be slow and safe.
Reading about how various controllers and such can solo through missions, I can definately see where you're coming from and I don't doubt that I could have done this. But again, it sounds extremely tedious. It might be the same way some people find levelling in WoW to be tedious, I dunno... the way we're wired or some such. But as Bruce mentioned above, I just found the mission environments to be so repetitive, and them being instanced really just made it worse for me I think.
I really hope Champions has less instancing than CoX.
Tedious? Oh hell yeah it was tedious. I hated playing him solo. My point was that it is realistically possible, it just takes a while.
Bruce
If you where having trouble with accuracy on a controller with /rad you where doing something very very wrong.
Anyway.
My Fire/Rad Controller was soloing full minion spawns in Perez Park from level 8ish on. Even spawns with lieutenants. At level 18 I think I can take double boss spawns with little trouble. I like playing my Mind/Psy Dom more tho.
Plus, /rad's toggles turned out to be rather annoying to play in groups. The need to apply multiple debuffs with long animations plus the (what feels like a) 5 seconds warm-up before the debuff actually becomes visible enough to other players meant the toggle tended to be dead by the time I was done. Give me /dark's single uberdebuff any time of day.
The fun parts were when me and my duo buddy aggroed way too many mobs, I'd be furiously trying to murder as many as possible. And then he slowly hovered away, out of reach.
I generally don't use anchors at all on anything less than a really tough boss.
Same here. And then you have the whole issue with the AI being a bunch of total fucking pansies that tend to run away from everything nowadays, and an anchor debuff on a boss who's running away while still at 90% health is a recipe for disaster. Especially single toggle debuffs are meant to be "fire and forget" things.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
http://www.champions-online.com/trailer
Tiny little clips of combat. Looks very... familiar.
The combat may look familiar but its not the same at all from what they say.
Its like saying Two Humans combat looks like a Devil May Cry ripoff, but really, it doesn't play like that at all.