At what point were characters the most powerful?

[Supermax]

When in the game's lifespan do you think that characters in CoH/CoV were at their peak power? When the game was still fairly new, we didn't have a lot of the nerfs that came later, like ED, the target cap, etc. At the same time, at the end of the game we had Incarnates.

The target cap was a huge blow to the overall power. Before, you could have a single tanker herd an entire map and then a single blaster could one shot the entire map. But defense didn't work too well. The 45% softcap didn't exist, and neither did IO or set enhancements. So offensively I think that was the peak, but defensively, things got a lot better later on. After defense was changed and IO's appeared, you could have a blaster that would essentially have the same level of defense as an SR scrapper, leading to unprecedented survivability. Layering resistance/defense/healing/regen was the best way to survive, after all.

At the end, Incarnates added a whole new level of power and pretty much completely changed the game.

Overall, I would say that a fully-Incarnated, fully-IO'd character at the end of the game was overall probably more powerful than anything we had prior to that. Sure, he couldn't one shot an entire map and couldn't have perma-hasten, but in normal circumstances he would likely outperform the same build from earlier in the game. The one exception I can think of is Regen scrappers from early on, because perma Instant Healing before the IH nerf basically meant that you couldn't die, no matter what.

What do you think?

[Ironwolf]

Inventions could literally turn a blaster into a tankmage.

I would say Issue 23 and even Issue 24 if we ever see it would make us the most powerful we had ever been.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Inventions could literally turn a blaster into a tankmage.

I would say Issue 23 and even Issue 24 if we ever see it would make us the most powerful we had ever been.

Pretty much this. The vast majority of ATs and powerset combinations at shutdown had the potential to be more powerful than the vast majority of ATs and powerset combinations in CoH prior to the addition of the invention system. There may be some edge cases of specific builds played against specific enemy types being more powerful before IOs, but i would have to consult someone like Arcana to confirm that. The invention system also allowed for all sorts of new and interesting capabilities to be added to existing characters that were not possible prior to it as well.

[silvers1]

Depends on the archtype.  My tanker was most powerful at issue 4, before the double whammy of ED and GDN.
Even with full IO sets, he never recovered all of his tankiness.

As for the rest, probably I23, since the iTrial rewards pushed everyone to new heights.

[HEATSTROKE]

 Easily at the close of the game toons had the potential to be far more powerful than the early game.  With the combination of IO sets and Incarnates you could do more with almost any AT..

 

[Supermax]

Looks like we all agree!

Interesting how the game ended up, considering their huge efforts to make characters less powerful for many of the issues.

[MaidMercury]

My character was an Empath and I designed her to have maximum healing and lowest offensive damage possible.
.....Just a silly Bow & arrow.

When CoH introduced Incarnate Powers, my char had gained Damage ability(you had to choose something)
I chose Ice spray (forgot the proper name). Also I could conjure up a body guard BCU (warworks-like robot).

...so I guess in my case Incarnate.

[Canine]

Overall, I would say that a fully-Incarnated, fully-IO'd character at the end of the game was overall probably more powerful than anything we had prior to that. Sure, he couldn't one shot an entire map and couldn't have perma-hasten, but in normal circumstances he would likely outperform the same build from earlier in the game. The one exception I can think of is Regen scrappers from early on, because perma Instant Healing before the IH nerf basically meant that you couldn't die, no matter what.

Objection, Yeronner!

It was pretty easy to die as a pre-ED perma-IH Regen Scrapper.  I managed it a lot.

It was due to the one major weakness of Issue 4 Scrappers.  The player.

Overconfidence and scrapperlock were a regularly painful combination.  Especially when usually playing on a team with lunatics who liked old fashioned Invincible settings....

[Harlequin565]

Overconfidence and scrapperlock were a regularly painful combination.  Especially when usually playing on a team with lunatics who liked old fashioned Invincible settings....

Fun times...

Lots of loons about in CoX all through the Issues, but those tells that I said yes to even though I knew it would be a debt fest...

{Tell} Fancy joining a 20 team in the hollows?
{Me} What are you doing?
{Them} Atta on Invincible
{Me} OK. I'm in

Somehow I always thought I could make a difference. 

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Objection, Yeronner!

It was pretty easy to die as a pre-ED perma-IH Regen Scrapper.  I managed it a lot.

It was due to the one major weakness of Issue 4 Scrappers.  The player.

Overconfidence and scrapperlock were a regularly painful combination.  Especially when usually playing on a team with lunatics who liked old fashioned Invincible settings....

Well, pre-ED my DM/Regen Scrapper by level 40 was effectively unkillable unless enemies could pile enough damage into a roughly 1-2 second window, mostly unlucky two-shots from AVs and GMs. Or Sappers, a Sapper in the group was nasty if i didn't take it down fast.
Original Regen Scrappers tended to give Empaths fits since your health would yo-yo so rapidly in combat and anything that could kill you would probably do it before they could react. Part of the nerf calls early on were because most other players would only notice that by the time a fight was nearly over the Regen Scrapper would usually be at full health and endurance and ready for the next spawn; they didn't have as much time to notice all the times in the middle of the fight where the Scrapper's health bar was blinking red. A popular saying was, "Playing a Regen Scrapper is a lot like snowboarding: you either look awesome or you're dead."

[cohRock]

Looks like we all agree!

Interesting how the game ended up, considering their huge efforts to make characters less powerful for many of the issues.

Agreed.  I will say, though, that the nerfs ended up giving room for power growth into the endgame (post-50).  This helped achieve a more linear advancement, at least for those players who understood and could make use of the intricacies of inventions and incarnate stuff.  (That said, it never feels good to be nerfed, even if in the long run it might make things better.)

[Canine]

Original Regen Scrappers tended to give Empaths fits since your health would yo-yo so rapidly in combat and anything that could kill you would probably do it before they could react. Part of the nerf calls early on were because most other players would only notice that by the time a fight was nearly over the Regen Scrapper would usually be at full health and endurance and ready for the next spawn; they didn't have as much time to notice all the times in the middle of the fight where the Scrapper's health bar was blinking red. A popular saying was, "Playing a Regen Scrapper is a lot like snowboarding: you either look awesome or you're dead."

Don't forget the ability to give your teams empath kittens by popping old fashioned MoG.  "Shit! his health's redlined!  SHIT! I can't heal him!"

My regular teammate empaths just gave up paying any attention to my health.

Also, having your first character being a /regen scrapper, and having a playstyle of 'I will play this one character to 50 and not run any alts until I get done with this one' meant that I had absolutely no clue at all of the level of hazard I was just casually wading through...

[Groundbreaker]

Don't forget the ability to give your teams empath kittens by popping old fashioned MoG.  "pancake! his health's redlined!  pancake! I can't heal him!"

My regular teammate empaths just gave up paying any attention to my health.

Also, having your first character being a /regen scrapper, and having a playstyle of 'I will play this one character to 50 and not run any alts until I get done with this one' meant that I had absolutely no clue at all of the level of hazard I was just casually wading through...

QFT

My first 50 was claws/regen it was so hard to play anything else after. And OMG I miss old MOG. Being able to heal in MOG always felt like cheating, also you didn't look half as awesome than when you were killing tons of goons on red health

[Ironwolf]

Fun times...

Lots of loons about in CoX all through the Issues, but those tells that I said yes to even though I knew it would be a debt fest...

{Tell} Fancy joining a 20 team in the hollows?
{Me} What are you doing?
{Them} Atta on Invincible
{Me} OK. I'm in

Somehow I always thought I could make a difference. 

I used to greet new members with:
Hi welcome to the team - we are working on the debt badges? Are you in?

Then after the stunned silence we would all laugh and say actually we are steam rolling everything.

[Ankhammon]

Don't forget the ability to give your teams empath kittens by popping old fashioned MoG.  "pancake! his health's redlined!  pancake! I can't heal him!"

My regular teammate empaths just gave up paying any attention to my health.

Also, having your first character being a /regen scrapper, and having a playstyle of 'I will play this one character to 50 and not run any alts until I get done with this one' meant that I had absolutely no clue at all of the level of hazard I was just casually wading through...

I remember getting caught that way with my dark/. Running in frantically hitting my heal (and every other button I had) while chatting "Why won't you French toasting heal?" I think I was like level 10ish and on one of my first sidekicked group street sweep massive map wide tank taunting demolish the world excursions.
The heal was my only job!

[Waffles]

The Alpha enchancement single handedly made IO builds that were heavily flawed, mostly due to endurance consumption (Claws/Dark, Night Widow, Illusion/radiation, Crab spider.)

or endurance was fine, defenses were fine, but lacked recharge/healing as a set-back to make the heavy defenses, which is where the recharge alpha shined (Elec armor, Warshades, /regen, Katana/will, any given mastermind.

Damage and accuracy alphas were kinda 'meh' in my experience, with one exception being the Damage radial Alpha on my Plant/fire permadom, as I was making a ton of power, and endurance modification sacrifices to get high defenses and high recharge for the build, which the alpha effectively neutralized the drawback of.

With this in mind, i'd say that the Alpha enhancement was what started to create some really, really crazy builds.

[Nugz]

IO's and purple sets changed everything. My Ill/Rad controller was a beast after purple sets. Enough recharge for perma hasten and  phantom army. Less then a second downtime on phantom army and hasten. His name was Debuff on Liberty server then moved to Freedom. I solo'd every single giant monster hero side with him and have pleanty of witnesses. Adamastor, Kraken, Babbage, Eochai, Jack in Irons, Jurassik, Kronos, and even Lusca. Granted some of them took over an hour and a half to take down mostly Lusca but it was done. With enough recharge i would just spam hasten, phantom army, blind, flash, spectral wounds, and all the radiation debuffs. His build was as much recharge as i could fit in without loosing important stats. Could solo a good amount of the AV's too. Was great at keeping Lord Recluse busy while the rest of the team got busy. Man i miss that game!!!!!

[blacksly]

Issue 23 (and as planned 24) overall, but there were certain powersets and broken powers in the early issues (Issue 1 Smoke Grenade, heh, early issues Regen Scrappers, a few others) that made those characters probably better than anything available at I23. But certainly as an overall average over all builds, the character strengths dropped with ED and the GDNs, and then has slowly but steadily improved every issue until it's surpassed the early-issue averages. Also, in those early issues, there were some powersets that are strong now, that were really weak at the time (Dark Miasma, Super Reflexes, Ice Armor, etc).

[Chance Jackson]

Pre-ED, Pre GDN, Pre HO nerf, Pre Pet Recharge Nerf
Back in those days dual aspect HOs enhanced each aspect by 50% and triple aspect HOs enhanced aspect by 33%
That was probably the best era for Scrappers, Tanks and probably offensive Controllers too

[Dollhouse]

No argument that i23/24 Incarnated characters were the most powerful. I had a ridiculous fully Incarnated, "sea of purple" enhanced Elec/Nin Stalker that could solo quite a few AVs (no Shivans/nukes, either).  That character could dive into those level 54 spawns in Moth Cemetery and just trash them. The Incarnate stuff altered the game fundamentally (and trivialized the majority of content for Incarnated endgame characters, but that's another story).

But there were some exceptions. Pre-i5 D3s (Dark/Dark Defenders) could also solo many AVs. It took a while, but the outcome was never really in doubt unless the player spazzed out. Completely game-changing characters when on a team, too (D3s were that for the whole run of the game, really...).

Pre-nerf Firetanks were pretty out of hand, too...

[mezzosoprano]

When in the game's lifespan do you think that characters in CoH/CoV were at their peak power?

For my Plant/Storm Controller (one of my favorite characters), the peak was the period where the Reactive Proc could proc from pets and DoTs, stacking a near-infinite number of times.  I could run ambush-mechanic-abusing AE arcs and decimate a ridiculous number of enemies as Freezing Rain, Roots, Carrion Creepers, Lightning Storm, Ice Storm, and Tornado all wreaked havoc.  With the T4 variant, I was earning nearly 3M inf/minute on my controller, with the Reactive Proc generating nearly 70% of my total damage.

I had a great time confusing people looking for tank-led PL teams -- "Aren't you going to wait for the tank?"  "What tank?"   

[Advanced]

My Stone/SS tank had some problems after ED, it was not the same. However; with a little bit of math I was able to fix his problems. Invuls got hit hard unfortunately (glad I never had one). My Rad/Elec defender got better after ED, he was finally able to dual Dark/... Defenders in the area. ED I think diversified the game more, and made people have to actually think about how they wanted to slot their characters. Was I stronger pre-ED? No doubt (Remember Regens tanking Hami solo like?), but did I become a better player after ED? Hell ya, how else would I survive the devastation. At times, the game got a bit scarier after ED. Hahaha!

[MWRuger]

I think a more useful question might be when were they more fun to play?

Of course everyone has his/her own view, but was a there a level range were the challenges were well balanced versus capability and you had enough powers to have varied strategies for dealing with those challenges?

For me, I loved it at just about every stage, but if I'm honest it always really gelled for me in the 30's.

[Canine]

For me, I loved it at just about every stage, but if I'm honest it always really gelled for me in the 30's.

22 was when characters started to become more fun to play for the vast majority of my time in the game.

Stamina, 3 slotted with +3 SO's.

It became less about dementedly managing the blue bar to being able to concentrate more on the other things going on.

[Ankhammon]

22 was when characters started to become more fun to play for the vast majority of my time in the game.

Stamina, 3 slotted with +3 SO's.

It became less about dementedly managing the blue bar to being able to concentrate more on the other things going on.

Well, if we're talking about level your personal chars got better it has to be level 12. DOs weren't anything to write home about but level 11 was the worst. No n00b buffs and just some nasty level 10++ TOs (usually all acc at that level) to try to make it through just when you started to take on something that could hit back a little.
To make things worse, if you had a team going they usually broke up right about that level. 

It always felt like xmas when I dinged level 12 and could go shopping for an end redux to add to your acc's in your attacks.

[Waffles]

Let's not forget that glorious....GLORIOUS knockback > Knockdown enhancement.