A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Because you demanded answers

While your information on Stalkers is true, there are still people in the game looking for 'Healers', so... ;)

Actually Stalkers can usually do critical hits far more often than Scrappers - base crit chance for most Scrapper attacks is 10% for Lieuts and above, but 5% for Minions and below (some attacks like Eagle's Claw differ from base) - for Stalkers the base chance to crit is 10% for everything, but with a 3% bonus for each additional member on your team - so a Stalker on a full team of 8 actually has a 31% chance to crit !!! - I've experienced it on both my L50 Stalkers on SFs/Raids and it's a huge boost in damage. Stalkers can also crit "on demand" after using Placate.

Scrappers still have slightly higher base damage, higher base HP, plus with most powersets the Stalker loses an area attack from their primary (to fit in their Assassin Strike) and maybe a damage aura or other utility power from their secondary (to fit in Hide), but the classes are a lot closer in performance than a lot of people realise.

Really Stalkers have the edge against single tough targets, especially in big teams, but Scrappers have the edge against multiple weaker targets. And now the Brute's Fury has been slightly nerfed there's not the massive gulf in power between them there once was. If you want to beat stuff up in melee then all 3 archetypes are fine choices and your powerset choice may make as big a difference on your gameplay as the archetype you pick.

(For the record I've got 2 Stalkers, 1 Scrapper and.. err.. 5 Brutes at the level cap, so judge my bias accordingly - I have several lowbie Scrappers and a Stalker I'm keen to level though)

That's the irony though - Stalkers are amazing in teams (I highly recommend Electric/Ninjitsu - really good area damage for a Stalker, good survivability too), but loads of people still remember when the only archetype that was less wanted on teams than Stalkers were the poor Dominators (another archetype that has been improved and is amazing now too). But long-held perceptions are hard to change, even when they're blatantly wrong - such as all the ex-WoW/EQ people who still believe a Defender is a "healer" and that teams can't work without heals, when in truth buffs/debuffs/controls are far more important in CoH than healing.

Are Pain and Emp Doms/Defs really THAT rare?

Well Dominators don't get Pain/Emp so yeah they're pretty rare ;)

/Empathy Defenders/Controllers aren't that rare at lower levels (not on Union/Defiant anyway) but I see very few at mid/higher levels. As for /Pain, I've seen far more Masterminds with it than Corruptors at all levels (because MMs can use it to heal/buff their own pets as well as teammates, so it's useful both solo and in teams), but it is pretty rare on Corruptors on the EU servers at higher level. Not sure if that bears out on the US servers.

I suspect a lot of people start playing Emp/Pain characters because they feel comfortable with healing from other MMOs they've played, but they get to the mid levels and find they're using their buffs a lot but that there's not much need for their heals, so they reroll to an archetype/powerset with a mix of buffs/debuffs/controls and less healing, such as the ever-popular Radiation Emission (which across all my 17 L50s, it's my Fire/Rad Corruptor or Illu/Rad Controller that teams tend to want on board the most).

The fact is that if you're on a team that's running well then there's hardly any healing to do, especially if you've got several buff/debuff archetypes along and some control - and I've seen plenty of Emps/Pains at lower levels with very few attacks they rarely used because they wanted to "save endurance for healing" in case it's needed. That attitude just leads to boredom.

Lots of melee archetypes have self-heals/regen and they'll tend to take aggro so the ranged archetypes don't need much healing if they're sensible, plus you can use Inspirations to self-heal and now that you can combine 3 of those to get the Insp you want it's very easy to keep some green (heal) insps on you for emergencies. Also quite often when someone gets in over their head in CoH they'll die so fast that you'd need The Flash's reactions to heal them in time, unless you're just spamming an area heal (which usually isn't enough to save someone squishy who has just pulled aggro on an Arch-Villain).

A friend of mine levelled a /Pain Corruptor to 50 with one of my Brutes in a duo, but he kept complaining he didn't have much healing to do (I was playing a Mace/SR Brute that I softcapped at L37ish so it was very survivable), both in our duo and in teams, and by the time he hit L50 and gave team leaders the choice of which one of his corruptors he brought to Strike Forces they always wanted his /Kinetic or his /Rad, never his /Pain.

Emp or Pain would probably work best if you were playing in a regular group with Blasters or Dominators playing quite melee-heavy (blappers), because I know from experience of playing them that they tend to need more healing than most archetypes.

Oh also several of the buff/debuff sets like /Rad Emission, /Dark Miasma, /Kinetics etc. get their own area heal, which isn't as strong as some of the heals /Empathy or /Pain get, but combined with buffs/debuffs it's plenty enough healing to keep a team's HP bars topped-off.

@Tempes Magus

Only briefly and just solo.

The lowered damage cap (down to 775% from 850% iirc) is going to bring Brutes more in line with Scrappers/Stalkers when fully buffed on teams, and that was what I referred to as the "nerf" - but in the post GR world Brutes can still be buffed to near Tanker levels of survivability (just higher HP and aggro-holding on the Tanker's side, Brutes still have Tanker's 90% resist caps - higher than 75% of Scrapper/Stalker), so I guess they needed to be brought down a little damage-wise. And lets face it, it wasn't exactly that hard to hit the damage cap, especially with a L38+ Kinetic on the team.

And remember Brutes have a lower base damage mod than even Tankers before Fury kicks in (75% melee scalar for Brutes, 80% for Tankers, 100% for Blasters/Stalkers, 112.5% for Scrappers) so you really need to get your Fury up to a decent level just to be doing equivalent damage with normal hits, not taking into account that Scrappers/Stalkers get bonus damage form crits on top of that. That's why powersets with +dmg bonuses (Dark Melee, Shield Defence, etc.) always have such a larger effect on Scrappers than Brutes.

But I guess Fury bleeding away slower is a buff - especially for soloers who like to take their time, or on teams where it used to be harder to keep Fury high than when solo unless the team as really fast/good. I used to have no problem holding Fury at 85-90% solo, though - for some reason I could only hold at 75%-ish when I tried one of my brutes the other day, though - could be my arm injury though - not as dextrous as I used to be.

Yeah Brute damage is far more predictable if you can keep Fury high - that's pretty much why I have five L50 Brutes (Fire/Fire, SS/DA, EM/Elec, BA/WP, WM/SR) and just one L50 Scrapper (Claw/WP), because I always found Brutes more effective all round - I also have more Stalkers at cap (two - EM/EA, Elec/Nin) than Scrappers because at least with a Stalker you can control your crits to some degree - and like you I don't like being at the mercy of the RNG if I can possibly help it. Though I prefer villain side to hero side, so in the past that had something to do with it as well.

Tbh, if I was to name my favourite archetypes for a melee playstyle then Brute, Stalker, Scrapper and Tanker don't even make my top 2 - Arachnos Soldier (Bane Spider build) and Arachnos Widow (Night Widow build) take those spots - admittedly mine are rather tricked out with purple IOs, but they'll be the first L50s I take through the endgame Incarnate system, and with both being softcapped they're just as survivable as all my Brutes/Scrappers/Stalkers, but are much more flexible and do more damage - and because of their defence buffs teams are much happier having them along than my Brutes/Stalkers/Scrappers.

I'm rather partial to melee Blasters (blappers) and Dominators too (post buffs they're more like a blaptroller now - i.e. a melee blaster crossed with a controller - I have high hopes for my new Ice/Earth), because they don't have passive survivability - you have to work for it - which makes them a bit more interesting to me. Sure, they're nowhere near as survivable as Brutes/Scrappers/Stalkers but they can do a heck of a lot of burst damage. Admittedly my favourite combinations for both so far are almost fully ranged (my L50 Arch/En Blaster and L50 Earth/Fire Dom), but even they still use melee attacks occasionally.

It's a fair cop, but I would argue that people still think of Stalkers as being great single-target damage with several of the Scrapper drawbacks and none of the advantages. Also, Scrappers need whatever positive image reinforcement they can get these days.

That's a fair point as well, Eliot, though Scrappers still tend to be the archetype of choice for people doing tough challenges (DM/Shield is ridiculously powerful on paper, and anecdotally on forums - Scrappers are usually top of the tables for solo pylon takedowns and highest dps scores) so while they may look a bit overlooked to some, they're still doing ok and I'm not sure they need quite as much positive image reinforcement as Defenders and perhaps Tankers ;)

@Tempes Magus - I hate to say it, but Energy Aura is one of the weakest defence sets imho. My EM/EA Stalker is my most squishy melee character by far, and it's not the fact he's a Stalker because my Elec/Nin can take hits as well as any - admittedly I didn't softcap the EM/EA as he hit 50 before inventions (and I haven't spent much on IOing him up since - just a few hundred million inf - because the Energy Melee nerf still leaves a sour taste in my mouth), so it's not the fairest of comparisons, but it's not the easiest defence set to softcap because the defence numbers start off so low and it lacks a decent self-heal.

Even so I believe it is possible to softcap /EA for Smash/Lethal and probably Energy typed defence too (pretty sure I've seen softcapped builds on the forums - maybe search for "softcap energy aura") - sadly it's much easier to softcap positional defence sets (like SR, Ninjitsu and Shield) in my experience than it is to softcap typed defence sets like Energy Aura, Stone Armor, Ice Armor and Invulnerability (though the latter are quite easy to softcap on a Tanker as they get higher defence numbers on their def sets).

To softcap Energy Aura to S/L def you'd be looking for IO sets like Kinetic Combat for your melee attacks, Reactive Armor in your energy resist powers, etc. - I know there are several more sets with Smash/Lethal def but those are the only ones I can recall off the top of my head - basically slot any set that gives Smash/Lethal and maybe Energy/Neg defence, using however many IOs from that set it takes to get the bonus - you can do that up to 5 times with the same magnitude of the same set bonus (so you could have the 3.75% S/L def set bonus up to 5 times, whether it came from Kinetic Combat and/or other sets - 5 of those gets you 18.75% S/L def).

You can also slot the 3% defence unique IO from Steadfast Protection set into a resist power (it adds 3% def to all types/positions) - that's well worth having - and taking a power like Combat Jumping will add a couple of % of defence as well (to all types/positions) so that really helps. A character builder like Mids' Planner from Titan Network is invaluable for planning a softcapped build and seeing what IO set bonuses are available.

The goal is to have 45% defence to whatever position (melee/area/ranged) or type (smash/lethal/energy/neg/fire/cold/psi) of defence you're trying to softcap while you're in combat (this last point is important because the defence on Stalker's Hide and EA's stealth power for Brutes will partially suppress when they become visible)

Smash/Lethal are the most common damage types in the game so getting softcapped to those will protect you from most enemies. Energy is the next most common damage type so that will be desirable to softcap too if you can (some sets have both S/L and E/N def, like Reactive Armor does, which helps).

45% defence to a type/position means that most attacks of that damage type (or of that positional type) will only have a 5% chance to hit you, unless the enemy is getting bonus +ToHit from a buff/power/effect - and that goes for every enemy up to +5 levels above you (i.e. until they're purple), except for Archvillains and GMs which will usually have 7.5% chance to hit you because they have a higher base ToHit than everything else. Any mobs with +ToHit buffs/bonuses will be able to hit you more easily too - which is why defensive-based characters hate fighting stuff like Nemesis, as dead Nem lieuts give the Vengeance buff to every living Nem around them, which adds a lot of +ToHit.

The last 5% def adds a lot - someone with 40% def to an attack will get hit twice as much as someone with 45% def to the same attack. It's the difference between 1 in 20 attacks hitting you or 2 in 20, which with Stalker HP makes a big diff (especially as you're not playing a powerset with a good self-heal).

It's not going to be easy to softcap /EA though and you'll probably need to make some sacrifices - maybe take powers you weren't going to, maybe have a little less endurance/recharge reduction in attacks than you'd like, etc. But I think you'd be shocked how much of a difference it makes - for many characters it's the difference between being able to solo archvillains or not - or being able to jump into Task Force size spawns first and survive the alpha compared to just dying really fast.

Night Widows are pretty much the easiest thing in the game to softcap (at least until they give Super Reflexes to Tankers :p ) - you start with very high defence just from your powers, once they're properly slotted, and Mind Link makes it very easy to softcap from there with just a few set bonuses - though to get Mind Link perma might cost you a bit in IOs with recharge bonuses. I've managed to softcap all my VEATs except my Crab (who has resists and a good heal to make up for it) while also getting around 170-200% global recharge on them (including perma-hasten admittedly) so they can't be that hard to softcap because you don't have to devote your whole build to defence set bonuses.

As for farming, I've never done much of it - I made all my inf on the market, patiently bidding for recipes, making them up, and listing them at prices impatient people pay when there's a shortage on the market - I used to make 2 billion every 3 weeks from starting with 100million seed money, spending maybe 15-20mins a night making up IOs and listing my bids and sales - easy money - I have no idea if it's still possible in the combined market though - prices have come down an awful lot. But when you're bidding for IOs just remember that patience will save you a lot of inf - the people who feel they have to buy what they want right now are the ones paying 2-4 times what the item is worth and making people like me rich.

If you want to farm then you need something that can kill lots of enemies very quickly while solo, so you want area damage and survivability (whether that comes from an armour set or controls that can be used every 20-30secs so you can use them every spawn). Then you set your missions for 8 players, enemies at -1 level and no bosses, and pick missions against an enemy faction that either dies fast to your attacks or can't hurt you much - then you kill as many as you can as fast as you can - any level 47+ enemy can drop a purple IO and that's what you want dropping, because they're the IOs you can sell for lots of inf. Fire/Kin Controllers, SS/Fire or SS/Shield Brutes, Elec/Shield Scrappers - these are the kind of builds that are popular for farming - built for lots of global recharge reduction they can put out lots of area damage quickly in almost complete safety.

For soloing Mastermind, Brute, Stalker and Scrapper are definitely top of the tree of all the normal archetypes - all fairly newbie friendly too (though I prefer playing my MM with custom keybinds, which probably isn't so newb-friendly).

I only have one L50 MM though (Bot/Dark) and deleted my lowbie MMs when he hit the cap - I just got a bit bored solo with everything being so easy and the pets doing most of the work and as someone else said MMs aren't exactly desired on teams cos the pets can cause lag and get in the way. Plus I've never been a big fan of pet classes and prefer direct combat to indirect (i.e. I prefer my character doing damage, not his pets). In what is already an easy game to play, MMs just make it far too easy for me.

Stalkers are well worth playing, though, Tempes Magus - especially if you team a lot and can get the full crit bonus (31% on an 8-person team as you get +3% per teammate) - I highly recommend Electric/Ninjitsu if you want to do good area damage (Lightning Rod doesn't break hide, so you can follow it with Thunderstrike for some nice area-critting - assassinate spawns, not individuals, hehe), or DarkMelee/Ninjitsu if you want amazing single target damage.

Though Dominators are my current favourite archetype from the non-epic ones (both Arachnos ATs and Warshades are my 3 fave ATs in the game, tbh) - they take a fair bit of attention and planning to play well, but that's what I like - your success or failure is truly in your own hands - and after their buffs last year they're now quite close to Blasters in damage over time (if not burst damage - Blasters using BU+Aim then attacks still makes them the burst damage king, even over Stalkers), but still have all the controlling ability of a Controller. I highly recommend Earth/Fire for some amazing area control combined with huge gobs of fiery damage.

@Tempes Magus

I'm probably the worst person to give advice on Bot/FF as I quit mine in beta cos I just found re-buffing the pets so dull, hehe - that's why I went with /Dark when CoV launched (and got it to L40 before I7 and L50 not long after) as it is a more active secondary. My MM is IO'd up now though and I do use him occasionally, and most of my mates have played the other MM sets, so I know you've got the best primary for area damage of all MMs, but your secondary won't really help with killing speed like /Dark does, so you won't be farming quickly.

MM's kill at a fair rate, but I'd probably pick something else for farming, honestly - but with your poor net connection maybe MMs do just suit your purposes better.

Ideally you'll want to farm something weak to energy and/or fire damage, as that is what the bots do - Banished Pantheon would be ideal, but there aren't many missions with those at high level.

Probably best if you just farm whatever faction you find easiest to kill, and like I said in an earlier comment set the mission for 8 players with enemies at -1 level with no bosses (though you'll still get some bosses from the 8 player setting) and just chew through them as fast as possible. You want to kill anything L47+ to be eligible to get purple IO recipe drops, as selling those will be your biggest inf gains. It's not really worth farming at lower levels - inf comes fastest nearer L50.

If you find a mission you're particularly good at clearing quickly then don't complete it and just exit and reset it to do it again (and again and again) and keep it for your farming needs. Familiarity with the map and spawns can also increase your farming speed.

Farming can get a bit boring though, unless you keep racing yourself to get faster and faster - that's why I prefer to make my inf on the market, then most of my playing time is spent actually doing fun things. Some people find effortlessly churning through enemies in the same farm fun though - perhaps even therapeutic - I'm not one of them though - I like hunting down challenges or new experiences (even if it's just playing a new character through the same old content).

The game is definitely worth trying! The gameplay is far deeper and more like a traditional MMO than Champions, the system requirements are lower, and IMHO the art direction is far superior to Champions (I consider CO to be interesting-but-ugly).

Grab a free trial and try it out, you've got nothing to lose.

City of Heroes is *definitely* worth trying ... IF (and only if!):

1) You do not arrive expecting it to play anything like Everquest or WoW. From character creation to character roles on teams to equipment and loot, none of it works the way you expect it to. If you're not going to spend the whole trial complaining that this isn't just like your favorite MMO, skip it; if you're not willing to read all the in-game tutorials and ask questions, skip it. This is especially true if you play any of the villain archetypes (brutes, corruptors, dominators, masterminds, stalkers) because they are nothing like your standard MMO character classes, they're all multi-role, with a learning curve to match.

2) You avoid roughly 75% of the hero level 2-19 content as if it were a leper with halitosis on fire. No, really. The hero-side game, level 2-19 with the exception of The Hollows zone and the Faultline zone, are all six years old *and it shows.* They date back to a time when "wander around for days killing everything for no good reason" was considered "content" and "kill 10 rats and come back to me before you kill another 10 rats" was considered "cutting edge content." Either roll a villain, or a Praetorian, or else go directly from Atlas Park to The Hollows, do missions there until you're level 15, go directly from there to Faultline.

3) You don't mind heavily instanced content. Almost all content scales seamlessly to the level of the team leader and the size of the team. But the way it does that is that there is nobody around but you, and your team if you have one, during most of the missions.

If that all sounds okay with you, absolutely pick up a discounted copy of City of Heroes: Architect Edition or a slightly more expensive copy of City of Heroes: Going Rogue and give it a month to make up your mind.

InfamousBrad's points are all very well made and I agree 100% with them.

Honestly if anyone reading this has ever had even the slightest desire to play CoH then now is absolutely the perfect time to try it - you can get the whole game with Going Rogue and there's a brand new newbie zone that shows off all the newest tech in the game that the Devs have developed.

More importantly, in 5 years I haven't seen CoH as busy as it has been this last couple of weeks - the servers are absolutely packed with new players and returning veterans, and all the existing subscribers are desperate to retain as many new people as possible so you'll get lots of advice and help if you ask for it. CoH's community isn't like WoW or other MMOs - you won't get mocked for asking for help - in fact you'll probably have several veterans fighting over which one of them gets to help you :)

It's also a very casual MMO that you can play however you want - solo or teamed, for 3-4 hour sessions or just in 15-30min bursts - it's up to you. Challenges are there if you go looking for them, or you can breeze through the game at your own speed.

CoH has tons of depth to it as well - you'll not have been able to customise your character as much in other MMOs as you can in WoW (I even include Champions Online in that) - you can pick your costume/appearance, the colour and sometimes even the animations or weapons for your powers, you can pick what powersets you use and what powers you take and when, and you can pick how those powers work by slotting them with a huge range of enhancements - for example 2 of my characters have the same attack (Total Focus) - one has it slotted for long duration stuns, another for massive damage - or you can slot it for a little of both. How your character progresses is entirely up to you.

It's a casual MMO that can be as deep as you want it to be. That's why I've been playing it for 5 years and none of the newer MMOs have dragged me away for long.

"CoH has tons of depth to it as well - you'll not have been able to customise your character as much in other MMOs as you can in WoW"

Doh I meant "as you can in CoH" of course - that evil WoW and it's brain-rotting ways, hehe. WoW has less customisation than non-MMOs like Borderlands :p

Btw my comments about how busy the servers are is relating to the EU servers - but seeing how empty they were becoming, and how busy they are now, I bet the US servers are even busier!

The game might be getting a bit longer in the tooth, but it's still a sterling example of how to make a good MMO.

Hey, that could be a good column. Hmm.

"Anyway, my question for next month: Why does CoH have to repeat so much of the content? We have such huge gaps between issues, you would think they could add at least one map per issue?!"

Good questions, to be sure, but then other MMOs repeat content too - WoW can be pretty bad for re-using textures, art and mobs in new expansions. I just think it's a bit more obvious in CoH because of the heavy instancing so you're going to see the same offices a lot because almost every quest is set in an instance and there's only about a dozen different tilesets (office, lab, cave, arachnos lab, arachnoid cave, etc.).

The huge gaps between issues bug me as well - we used to get content more often. What I can't understand is how the issue content seemed to be higher quality, higher in quantity and arrive more often back when they only had 15 devs on the team (back when Cryptic transferred loads of Devs to Marvel MMO, before it was cancelled and they sold CoH to NCSoft so they could afford to make Champions Online). Now they have 60+ Devs on the team I'm hoping we get issues more often, as this last year the work on Going Rogue has obviously affected things (hence why issues like I15 were so underwhelming).

If issues are still smaller and slower to arrive from now on the only excuse I would accept is that most of Paragon Studios was working on CoH2 :p

Admittedly it's a six year old game and we should probably be grateful we get free content at all - there's plenty of old MMOs that are basically in maintenance mode and not seeing many updates at all. CoH seems to have a much brighter future than most MMOs of its age because the devs are always pushing the boundaries of what the game engine and other systems can do.