So is COH finally dead?

[JanessaVR]

I liked the normal IO set bonuses too much too replace them with purples.

???  So, for example, a 6.25% bonus to Recharge and a 9% bonus to Accuracy (Positron's Blast) was better than a 10% bonus to Recharge and a 15% bonus to Accuracy (Ragnarok)?

I lived and breathed Mids when CoH was running - I didn't even consider creating a character until I'd spent probably about 2 weeks (on and off) working out a build and examining the powers/enhancements.  If, at Level 50, you were just using basic IOs and I was using a full 5x purple sets (along with the best other IOs available), then there is no way your #'s were going to equal mine.

[JKPhage]

And to bring the conversation about IO's full-circle, let's not forget the introduction of Attuned IO's. Those you could ONLY obtain through the store, and they scaled with levels. If you purchased a purple IO it functioned the same way as in-game ones, always on, no matter what level you were operating at, but even more-so were the attuned non-purps. Those adjusted to whatever level was needed for you to use them. If we're talking a set that was available as a 30-50 range then you normally had a choice in the market scene. You could buy those at the lowest possible level so that you'd keep their benefit when exemping, or buy them at the highest possible level to get the best bonus, but only when not exemping below 47. Plug in an attuned IO, and you could exemp all the way down to 27 and keep properly scaled bonuses from that IO, and when you jumped back to 50, you'd reap the full benefit of that IO at it's max level.

If you want to look at it from that point, then purchasing market IO's with real money was actually even more of a benefit. SO's compared to generic IO's were not a HUGE difference, a change of a percentage point or two, but SO's compared to even orange, and especially purple, IO sets WERE a vast improvement, the difference between nearly one-shotting a boss with a snipe/assassin strike and merely taking off a sizeable chunk of their health, not to mention the myriad other benefits like global recharge bonuses, stealth, movement speed, etc. etc. Add to that the scaling of Attuned IO's and there really is a compelling argument for "pay to win", though I don't think any of us who actually played the game would buy into it (no pun intended), just pointing out that even as fair as most of the market was, if someone really wanted to nit-pick there are certain things that really don't sound good on paper.

[r00tb0ySlim]

My pvp stalker bled purple 8) I was lucky enough to finish his build with them and Hami's.  The prices of some purp recipes and many PvP sets came down during the last year, but rare salvage prices went up and they were scarce in the BM/WW's.  Experimenting with enhancements options was just another fun part of CoH.

[thunderforce]

Add to that the scaling of Attuned IO's and there really is a compelling argument for "pay to win", though I don't think any of us who actually played the game would buy into it (no pun intended),

Well, I think the question is not "was it pay to win", but "might a new F2P player reasonably feel that it was pay to win", and I think the answer to that is yes.

But... I did actually play the game, and I sort of buy into it. I was Frankenslotting attacks with "2 of one, 3 of the other" (I'd stick everything in at level 33 once the character could slot them, letting me examplar down a fair way) which got more accuracy/damage/endurance/recharge than 6 slots of SOs (later with spare slots I'd do 5 of Crushing Impact plus the damage proc from Mako's Bite) and two minor set bonuses, defences with four mixing Def/End and Def from different sets (doesn't save slots, but saves blue over 3xDef 1xEnd SO, and you get a minor set bonus, etc.

This stuff is cheap; I never in my life played with market speculation (although I did run a private SG base as shared salvage storage, so didn't pay over the odds for salvage), just putting drops up for a reasonable price if they seemed valuable, and could sugar daddy every other toon I wanted to play out of Thunderforce's loot once she reached 50. But... I reckon cumulatively such slotting gave a factor of 2 in effectiveness over SOs - attacks are better by a fraction, defenses better by a fraction, spare slots to go to powers that wouldn't have them, it all adds up.

And... that's a great deal less effective, from what you're telling me, than an Attuned IO build, which you really can just slap down the cash and pay for.

[HEATSTROKE]

 Ive never understood the Pay to Win issue.. I mean exactly what was I supposed to win ? Amd if I paid money I supported the game.. so whats the issue ?

[Segev]

Ive never understood the Pay to Win issue.. I mean exactly what was I supposed to win ? Amd if I paid money I supported the game.. so whats the issue ?

Not disagreeing with your attitude, here, but seeking to explain why people get upset with "pay 2 win."

"Pay 2 win," in its truest form, replaces any other form of investment in the game (time, energy, effort, playing, socializing, etc.) with money. Real money. P2W games come in two main varieties: PvE and PvP. PvP P2W is the easiest to see the problem: buying the items that make you "win" means that you practically can't lose against those who didn't spend as much money as you did. Sure, there's some modicum of skill, tactics, and strategy involved, but it easily gets to the point that "knowing enough not to stand around picking your nose" is sufficient to beat the most skilled tactician in the game, if you have spent enough money on enough "perks" and he hasn't.

This is an "ante game" because it basically asks, "who is willing to spend the most?" The "winner" is the guy who did. He just wins all the PvP fights.

PvE P2W is no more subtle, in truth: things start off as something your skills allow you to achieve. Challenges get harder, but what you earn in-game and what you learn in terms of tactics and skills let you keep up, and feel accomplished. When you get "stuck," there's always the option to buy something from the store that will help. From the beginning, if you're willing to spend money, the game is easier and you win faster.

The insidious part of PvE P2W is that the difficulty ramping up eventually exceeds what you can do without a little purchased help by design. And, once they get you to spend some money, it becomes harder to tell if it's just that you're "not quite good enough," so you are buying help that "better players" don't need, or if the game's really impossible without spending money.

In either event, spending more money lets you get farther, faster, and thus, it's pay 2 win.


And, because it's basically removing anything except money as a measure of how hard you're winning, it eventually exhausts people.

[damienray]

I remember a guy with this battlecry on Champion! Made me laugh every time!

I had a plant/water name "GetOffMyLawn". Old man, with the derby, wife-beater, gardening gloves... would spray water on the bad guys and yell at them ... good times !!

[P51mus]

???  So, for example, a 6.25% bonus to Recharge and a 9% bonus to Accuracy (Positron's Blast) was better than a 10% bonus to Recharge and a 15% bonus to Accuracy (Ragnarok)?

I lived and breathed Mids when CoH was running - I didn't even consider creating a character until I'd spent probably about 2 weeks (on and off) working out a build and examining the powers/enhancements.  If, at Level 50, you were just using basic IOs and I was using a full 5x purple sets (along with the best other IOs available), then there is no way your #'s were going to equal mine.

Purple sets were good for recharge, but if I remember right, there were very few defensive bonuses in purple sets.  So if you wanted to get a large amount of defense, or defense cap a character, you needed non purple IO sets.

Also, I think that as far as team content goes, the way CoH handled buffs made it not really need IOs.  IOs could make you need less buffs to become super awesome, but a team with enough buffs/debuffs/controls gained so much from them that the IOs might not mean that much anymore.  Mostly they were good for solo/small team power.  And even then you could play through normal content fine without them.

[JanessaVR]

Purple sets were good for recharge, but if I remember right, there were very few defensive bonuses in purple sets.  So if you wanted to get a large amount of defense, or defense cap a character, you needed non purple IO sets.

Also, I think that as far as team content goes, the way CoH handled buffs made it not really need IOs.  IOs could make you need less buffs to become super awesome, but a team with enough buffs/debuffs/controls gained so much from them that the IOs might not mean that much anymore.  Mostly they were good for solo/small team power.  And even then you could play through normal content fine without them.

Recharge was always the #1 stat I was pushing on any character - achieving Perma-Hasten was always stat design goal #1; I just hated the constant Hasten glow for most characters and we almost got that taken care of!  Argh...

As for teaming, I teamed about half the time and solo-ed half the time, so I always tried to engineer builds that struck a balance between the two without me having to actually maintain 2 builds per character.  And when I was solo-ing, I certainly did notice the difference between a fully-purpled-out character and one without them.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Recharge was always the #1 stat I was pushing on any character - achieving Perma-Hasten was always stat design goal #1; I just hated the constant Hasten glow for most characters and we almost got that taken care of!  Argh...

Recharge was one thing i rarely pursued very heavily since it still came with a lot of set bonuses i wanted anyway. i tended to focus more on defense bonuses and +max end/+rec bonuses. By the time a character was a high enough level to start slotting sets i had more than enough powers to have something useful available at all times. My Dark/Sonic Def was late thirties at shutdown and never lacked a ready AoE mitigation tool or effective attack with no purples bonuses at all. Between high defenses, debuffs, and a solid selection of attacks soloing was almost stupidly easy. Still, i can see how a heavily purpled build that can spam high recharge powers rapidly would be more efficient, but i liked cycling through a varied selection of powers.

As for teaming, I teamed about half the time and solo-ed half the time, so I always tried to engineer builds that struck a balance between the two without me having to actually maintain 2 builds per character.  And when I was solo-ing, I certainly did notice the difference between a fully-purpled-out character and one without them.

i never had different team and solo builds either, it was easy enough to design a build that functioned well both ways. Other than adding sets as i leveled up i also never had a leveling build and a 50 build. i always took whatever powers i wanted most as early as possible so the character generally functioned well at any level.

[Osborn]

The sort of argument against claiming CoX was a pay to win game, was the fact that I'd never had a single character slotted in nothing but SO's, as long as my slotting in SOs was even slightly intelligent and took ED into account, and didn't 'waste' slots on stuff like sprint or fly, fail at the game, aside from one Mercenaries/Dark Miasma mastermind which basically begged for IOs.

I'd never run into the level of 'equipment elitism' that I did in every other MMO I'd ever played. I'd never been kicked from a team for failing to have the 'proper raid gear'.

Even playing things like Archery/Empathy defender was fine, even though healing was universally panned in the game, because as long as people stayed on their feet and full bellies of endurance and fortitude everybody the team would stay happy and effective.

I never ran into teams where pretty much anybody using anything was welcome as long as characters took and trusted in their powers (that is, scrappers purely without toggles or some other extremely rare weirdness).

[Ironwolf]

I never slotted any IO's except drops until level 40.

I had great fun for many years with nought but SO

[LaughingAlex]

For me, it really depended on the character.  The last toons I made in City of heroes all used time manipulation, and because it could achieve extremely good defense against everything with just power build up, IO's were not actually that high on the priority untill pretty late.  After hitting fifty on those characters however I'd focus very aggressively on recharge, as combining time manipulation with incarnate powers really combined to devastating effect.

[JanessaVR]

For me, it really depended on the character.  The last toons I made in City of heroes all used time manipulation, and because it could achieve extremely good defense against everything with just power build up, IO's were not actually that high on the priority untill pretty late.  After hitting fifty on those characters however I'd focus very aggressively on recharge, as combining time manipulation with incarnate powers really combined to devastating effect.

Indeed, my last character was an Illusion/Time Controller (her motto: "Time is an Illusion."  :) ), and she certainly could use all the recharge she could get - being able to achieve Perma-Phantom Army and then able to spam Illusion and Time lockdowns, she was awesome.   :)

[thunderforce]

Even playing things like Archery/Empathy defender was fine, even though healing was universally panned in the game, because as long as people stayed on their feet and full bellies of endurance and fortitude everybody the team would stay happy and effective.

Well, you say that about healing, but the only times I ever had a team effectively refuse me was on my bubbler. "No, we need a healer". Sure, they were wrong, but it happened.

I never ran into teams where pretty much anybody using anything was welcome as long as characters took and trusted in their powers (that is, scrappers purely without toggles or some other extremely rare weirdness).

I took quite a dim view of aggro-less tankers (I'm carefully not saying "Taunt-less" to avoid eliciting the reply from someone who didn't take Taunt and is totally convinced they were effective, and doubtless some of them were); I wouldn't kick one, but such a toon is a bit of a leech; safer than a scrapper (less risk), does less work (attacks are a bit tickle-to-death), gets the same rewards. Shoulda played a scrapper.

[Thunder Glove]

Weird.  I loved getting Aggro with my Tanks (and my Brutes, for that matter, who were usually built pretty defensively as well), and almost always took Taunt.  For my main Stone/Stone Tanker I even turned it into a (very unreliable) ranged attack by putting a damage proc in it.

As for "healers", it was actually very nice to have an Empath or Pain Domination (or even Thermal or Nature) Defender/Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind around for Incarnate trials, when it seemed all the enemies (even minions) could tear through buffs and ignored debuffs.  Generally, though, I preferred playing debuffers rather than buffers or healers (with Storm Summoning, Traps, and Dark Miasma being my favorite Support sets).

I did make a Necromancy/Pain Domination Mastermind as sort of a "rebellion" against all the people advertising themselves as "healers" and nothing else ("Hey, I'm a healer, too!  Look at these fellows right here!  Don't they look healthy?" "BRAAAINS" "Atta boy!"), but I never really played her.  (I created her on August 31, 2012, and then I was distracted by a far bigger concern)

[thunderforce]

I did make a Necromancy/Pain Domination Mastermind as sort of a "rebellion" against all the people advertising themselves as "healers" and nothing else

Conversely, for many years on Pressure, my LFT text was "I'm an empath, but I'll still leave if you ask "r u a healer?"".

[blacksly]

???  So, for example, a 6.25% bonus to Recharge and a 9% bonus to Accuracy (Positron's Blast) was better than a 10% bonus to Recharge and a 15% bonus to Accuracy (Ragnarok)?

I lived and breathed Mids when CoH was running - I didn't even consider creating a character until I'd spent probably about 2 weeks (on and off) working out a build and examining the powers/enhancements.  If, at Level 50, you were just using basic IOs and I was using a full 5x purple sets (along with the best other IOs available), then there is no way your #'s were going to equal mine.

One thing about slotting for Defense bonus versus slotting for Recharge: Recharge bonuses are less effective as you get more of them, and Defense bonuses are MORE effective as you get more of them. Getting +10% Recharge when you have NO +Recharge increased your powers-per-minute by more than adding +10% to a build that already has +50%. Conversely, +2% Defense to a build with 40% Defense is a huge boost, while +2% to a build with 0% Defense is a minor build

In the end, the effects of +Recharge are, not exactly self-limiting, but at least self-weakening. As you have more powers recharge faster, your animation-time limitations hamper you more, and you get less effect from each +Recharge point. The builds with purples generally have enough attacks available that +Recharge helps, but not as much as +Defense.

Builds that depend upon major long-recharge powers (Illusion Control, Storm Summoning, etc) have more use for the +Recharge powers, but most builds that rely on attack chains don't need a max-Recharge build to do very well, and often do better with a +Defense/+Endurance build.

[Heroette]

All of a sudden, I am really missing my Ice/Dark Melee tanker.  She was awesome (as long as it wasn't against fire).  But she was so tough, I could take on so many, and not even worry about my health.  I didn't build her build myself.  I was never very good with the numbers thing.  Bada Booom was kind enough to send me the build.  And by learning how she was set up, I was able to make other tankers almost as tough.  I really want to play now. :-[

[CheerGunbunny]

I never number-crunched. Ever.  Every characters powerset choices were determined by their concept.  I did have a few IO Sets on my main villain...but only has those for the last year and a half of the game.  My main hero?  AR/Dev blaster i started in 2004.....hit 50 pre-ED, so I had too many hami-o enhances to want to respec to "recover" from that.  Nobody else had any IOs.  ton of alts, but did have 5 @ 50+3.  only the Brute messed with IOs.  I faffed with that for like 2 weeks, and said "too much grinding/market stuff"

I always felt that IO sets were for the serious PVPer, where everyone was looking for the "perfect" build, where every last percentage point mattered.