Anyone still playing CoH / CoV ?

[edkompik]

I'm trying to find a new MMO that my wife might like since she's gotten sick of the repetative gear-grinding of the WoW endgame. The first thought that came to mind was the first MMO I ever tried: City of Heroes.

The only thing is, I haven't played CoH since it's early days; certainly way before City of Villains was released. There are things I really liked about the game, and I'd like to check with the current players to see if any of these things changed since I left.

1. You complete a mission and *everyone* in the party gets a reward at the end. {Spending 5 hours in Molten Core and walking out with nothing tangible to show for it but a big repair bill gets old after a while.}

2. Once you sucessfully complete a mission/instance there's no particular reason why you would want or need to do it over again. I.e. You beat the Clockwork King once, then move on with your life. You don't kill him over and over again wait for your turn to win his loot or hoping he'll drop some particular rare item you want.

3. Instanced missions scale according to your party size. {Having to wait an hour because only 16 memebers of your guild show up on time for a 20-man instance really makes you wonder why you even bother.}

I must admit I never made it past level 35 when I was playing (level cap was 40 at the time...no idea what it would be now), so I wasn't doing any CoH endgame; so any comments about that would be welcome too.

[Gumblackwood]

Yes, there's still a nice community in CoH and CoV.

1. No change there, everyone will get enhancements/inspirations etc. for beating a big baddie, and randomly for any other. You earn an enhancement of your choice at the end of long, multiple mission tasks. There's some additional rewards as well now. People can earn badges (basically character titles) for beating certain missions or achieving certain goals, like damage taken. There's also salvage, which drops mostly while in supergroup mode; these are items that contribute to stuff in your supergroup's base.

2. No change there. They've even added an option that if you have the same mission as someone else in the group and complete their one, then you can complete your one, and earn the experience and rewards.

3. Same, and it's been refined. There are now contacts scattered around that can scale the difficulty of missions for a small fee as well. These are more sweeping changes than the changes made by the number in your group, and the highest difficulties should only be taken on by well-tuned groups.

As for other changes, there are a lot since it looks like you've been gone since some of the early issues. The level cap is 50 now, for both heroes and villains. Enhancements have been changed so they are less effective if you're putting in too many of one type (there are very few powers that can be made permanent like they used to with hasten and enhancements). There's been changes in defense and a lot of balancing and a lot of new content. I'm sure I'm missing more, but there really is a lot of new stuff, especially for someone gone as long as you seem to have been.

[Zapp Branigan]

It should be noted that you only get the option to complete your same mission in CoV, in CoH you will still have to do it twice.

[garac]

One hopes that they might bring that wonderful feature over to city of heroes at some point

[Raxtull]

They really do need to revamp CoH to be more in-line with CoV.

This comic (http://www.deviantart.com/view/34894975) sums it up pretty nicely.

[junior]

CoV now has MAYHEM MISSIONS!

You'll sometimes get a mission to go into one of the sections of Paragon City for the ostensible purpose of robbing a bank. But it's really an excuse to go in and blow lots of stuff up. You'll be placed in one of the Paragon City districts, but with a forcefield in place that keeps you from wandering too far away. You have 15 minutes to rob a bank and make your escape. But there are a ton of destroyable objects scattered around, and if you destroy enough of a given object (number is based on how many people are in your group), then you'll get a bonus to your time. Also, cops are all over the place and beating groups of them will give you time bonuses. So will the Longbow agents who sometimes spawn. And there are also some random side missions you can engage in. Killing the bad guys that show up in the zone (for instance, you might encounter a clockwork prince and his retinue) will give you a key that will provide access to the side mission area where you have to do things like rescue a captured NPC villain (who will then accompany you), rob a store (and avoid the security cameras or alarms will sound and you'll get an armed response), or similar nefarious deeds.

But the best part of these missions is simply the opportunity to run around blowing up cars, trucks, bus stops, parking meters, newspaper stands, mailboxes, etc...

[One-Winged Angel]

Double XP weekend: Friday, July 21st, 9 am PST - Sunday, July 23rd, 9 pm PST :D