My ability to get groups in CoX depended on that costume creator. If you can't do good/evil in style, then you clearly can't play the game.

At least that's what I took from it.

I admit to being annoyed by poorly-designed/ripoff/retina-searing costumes, but I've never refused to team with somebody because of it.

Nine out of every ten groupings I was in started with "damn nice costume, wanna group for missions?"

You obviously haven't been to many bars. "Damn, nice clothes. Want to grab a beer with me?"

Very astute.

Why pay $20 for four shots of Sailor Jerry when I can buy a handle for that?

I think I've got a Korean stand-alone version of the CoX costume builder. All the tabs are in (Korean, I think, maybe chinese) but once you get past them you basically have the costume designer.

Ah Champions, I kinda wish I went lifer with it like I did Star Trek online, just cause i could pop in an out at will sorta like I do with STO, play for a couple months now, take a month off, etc. Heh, I do recall how awesome mini-mines were before they got nerfed. I solo'd that mecha-dinosaur by hovering above it, out of range of its big attacks, soaking its lesser ones and just dropping loads of mines. It was almost like pre-nerfed Burn from CoH, my stone/fire tank would pull a taunt, draw a whole cluster and drop a burn patch, rinse and repeat. Later they nerfed it by adding a fear factor to Burn, so mobs run away, even if taunted.

The lifetime membership is available again for Champions.

Mreh. Any game I would pay a lifer for doesn't offer it, and those that do I don't really feel the need to.

Yeah, what with it becoming free to play in a month and a half (give or take) it doesn't really seem all that worth it.

Champions is going free to play? Maybe I'll take another look at it but I wasn't massively impressed first time around.

Yeah, sometime early next year it is supposed to go free to play. You can play through the tutorial with a trial if you want. It doesn't give a great view of the powers and such, but gives a good idea of gameplay and such.

I've done that. From what I got to see it didn't hold to CoH or at least how I remember CoH.

I actually trialled Star Wars Galaxy at the around the same time and found that more enjoyable than CO.

I've enjoyed it more than CoH myself so far.

I wanted to like CO; I really did, but all my characters except one were completely unplayable. The one that was playable still wasn't that great, and she wasn't much more than a big sack of hitpoints and life drain.

It's not a bad game, but I'm happy with CoH/V for now.

Define "unplayable."

I don't know how you managed to stumble on so many 'unplayable' archetypes. I ran through about half the options and all of them seemed to work reasonably well. I admit I enjoyed some more than others...

The only thing I can think of is that he went with custom frameworks for every character and somehow managed to pick powers and characteristics that just don't work well together.

That's about it, yeah.

Also, I was playing at the time when Lightning Reflexes was really awful. That, I didn't find out for a while. My good character had Regen.



Couldn't soak or avoid damage well at all and couldn't deal enough to make up for it. The worst of my characters, I think, couldn't get past the desert crisis exit mission.

Well, I hate to say it but that's kind of more your fault than the game's. Powers within a given framework are designed to work together and cover the bases; yeah, you can find synergies between frameworks, but if you don't know what you're doing it's also pretty easy to gimp your character into uselessness, as you discovered the hard way.

Lightning Reflexes, ICYI, is very nice now. My archer has Lightning Reflexes, Form of the Unfettered Master with the Storm's Eye Prana advantage, Bountiful Chi Resurgence with the Resurgent Reiki advantage, and Evasive Maneuvers (a dodge chance buff). What this means is that every time she dodges an attack, she gets extra ticks of healing from BCR and reduces the cooldown of BCR... and she dodges a lot of attacks.

I remember dueling someone with that combo (Or I think it was that combo, they dodged everything and healed like crazy).

Edit: We drew. I think we fought for like 20 minutes and we just couldn't kill each other.

Nah, it is. I do sort of wish I'd known it earlier.

Glad to know they fixed LR, too.

The funny part is, back when Cryptic was developing CoH, they scrapped their early "anyone can take any power" model they'd started with, for this exact reason. It was way too easy to gimp yourself with a bad build. So they spent two more years, and rebuilt their system in CoH with set classes so every class theoretically has a balanced mix of abilities.



-k