I'm taking a break from the game until the next content patch goes live; advancement got to be too slow for my taste, especially after the most recent rebalancing, and they need to hammer out some small balancing issues before I return. (But mostly it's just that World of Warcraft is soooooooooooooooooo good, and why pay for CoH when my MMO time is going to be spent elsewhere?)
In any case, the good things about City of Heroes are:
- Incredible customization of the appearance of your character, as I'm sure you've seen. It's really fun and cool to make a hero JUST the way you want. The possible power sets and combinations are also fun.
- It's REALLY easy to find people to group with - you can usually be in a team, killing things and having fun, within five minutes of getting online. Compare to the one or two hours spent scrabbling a team together in FFXI.
- Even more importantly, almost any group can fight together effectively. This is a HUGE change from most MMOs, where you NEED an exact group of four or five specific classes, all within three levels of each other, to have any chance in hell of accomplishing anything. The sidekick system (instantly pump someone up to your-level-minus-one) also helps with this.
- Fighting is just really, really fun. You are a superhero, and you start out with cool powers, move up to awesome ones, and end up with frickin' rad abilities. It's in real time, and each skill you use has an associated Endurance cost (MP) and recharge time. So a power blast might be cheap and reusable within 4 seconds, while an Area-of-Effect damage spell is expensive and take 45 seconds to recharge. Since you'll probably be using five or six different skills in battle, it can be really fun to switch between them, running around waiting for the one you need to come back, and switching up the ones you use according to both necessity and charge time. There's no "attack, attack, attack, attack." Instead, it's "strong ice blast, ice freeze, weak ice blast, ice storm, punch, weak ice blast, ice breath, ice breeze, strong ice blast, weak ice blast." You also tend to fight enemies in groups of 3-6, a welcome change from the "solo or die" difficulty of most MMOs.
- Streamlined gameplay. There isn't any armor or weapons - you are your powers. There's no "trade skills" or "crafting" - you fight. You can put "enhancements" into your powers to make them faster, more powerful, etc. You can also carry "inspirations," which are items that instantly restore some HP/MP, increase damage/accuracy. etc.
The negatives, imo, are that it takes a long while to level up past level 10 or so, and the mission objectives can get really repetitive, really quickly. Like PSO, there's not much to the game beyond fighting; also like PSO, the fighting is fun and varied enough to keep you having fun. Still, I put about 35 hrs into the game and loved, if not every minute of it, at least 90% of them. Personally, though, I'd recommend playing WoW or just holding off for another month or two ... the new content patch and rebalancing sound like they'll hopefully address most of my concerns.
City of Heroes is by far the best MMO out of the gate I've seen, and I look forward to returning to it in a few months once it's even better.
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