Champions Online: Building a Hero

Hey all,

   So the newest super hero mmo by the guys who made City of Heroes is in open beta and it is a blast.  For those who have played City of Heroes the character creation system is more open (how much more open I'll get into in a bit).  The quest system isn't as repeatative, more like WoW or WAR.  The combat system is more like Warhammer Online than it is like City of Heroes.

   Making your characters appearence should be very familiar if you have played City of Heroes (or Pirates of the Burning Seas).  The visual appearance of your character has nothing to do with its abilities.  If you want a gun toting Cat Girl, or a double sword wielding ninja, or a janitor with psychic powers the choice is up to you.  All of those options are totally there.  I've seen a picture perfect troll shaman from WoW, Alucard from Van Helsing, a bajillion hulks, ninjas, picture perfect Ironman, Batman, little grey / green aliens, etc.  I even made a skaven, and a Gordan Freeman look alike (but gave him a blue duster and a knife for style).  If you can't think of something, or just want to see what the character creator can do there is a random costum option.  If you see something you like you can lock that part of the costume and continue to randomize the remaining pieces.

   Picking your powers can be as simple or as free form as you like.  For each powerset there is a prebuilt class you can play, I wouldn't recomend these but at least you know you will not be making any horrible choices.  More fun can be had with the custom options.  Every hero needs an Energy building attack and a single target attack to start out.  So lets say you wanted to make a gadgeteer; you would get a sonic blaster attack (energy builder) and a disrupter (single target charge attack).  Unlike World of Warcraft where your character regenerates slowly in battle and quickly outside of battle, or Warhammer online where Action points regenerate quickly all the time and hitpoint only regenerate outside of battle; in Champions online your HP regenerates slowly in battle and quickly outside of battle.  Your energy doesn't regenerate in battle and will only regenerate up to about 100 on its own outside of battle.  Instead you use your energy building attack to charge up your energy for big attacks.  Your energy builder is more or less your basic attack and you tend to use it for its energy giving power rather than for damage.

   Upgrading your hero after level 1 becomes a lot more free form.  At level 5 you get your first aditional power and your first travel power.  Every three levels after that you will get an additonal power.  Level 5 will take about an hour to reach and you'll probably have it before finishing the tutorial.  At this point you can add any teir 1 power to your character from any powerset.  So lets say we wanted some more defense for our Gadgeteer.  We could review the options and decide that our Gadgeteer would probably have a device that allows him to generate a defensive forcefield.  We could then add the tier 1 force power called Personal Forcefield.  Is it really that easy?  Yes and no.  You could go ahead and add personal forcefield.  The trade off is that you will reach tier 2 powers in Gadgeteering a little later, if you mixed and matched like crazy it might take as long as level 17 to get tier 2 (the level at which all tier 2 powers at available).  Similarly it would take longer to get to tier 3.  So if you want to get to the hard hitting powers sooner, or if there is a power you think defines your character, you might want to invest in a single powerset until you get all of the powers from it that you want.

   Stats are also a consideration when selecting powers.  Certain power sets and individual powers scale based on your stats.  For instance, Force powers (force fields, etc) use Ego and Edurance when deciding how much damage they deal or how much heal they protect.  All of the stats offer benefits to your character but Ego and Edurance kind of deal double duty if you ar a force user.  So picking powers that share 'keyed' stats will naturally make your character better if you boost those stats.  So Ego has its normal effect of modifying 'intangible holds' both inflicted on others (making it harder for enemies to break out of) and inflicted on your character (making it easier to break out of).  But in the case of a force user it also directly scales their damage.  At the very least you want to maximize the stat that boosts your damage, and you also probably want to keep the stat that is linked with your choice of defensive power high as well.

   You can also upgrade the effectiveness of powers that you already have.  So lets say we have our force user and we want to upgrade force blast, it is doing the job but it would be cool if it was a little more effective.  There are a number of perks open to us, You can invest up to 5 advantage points into a skill, but the practical limit is typically 4 since most advantages cost 2 points.  We could increase the rank to 2 for two points, increase the rank to 3 for an additional 2 points, add a perk that makes it so that force blast will give us a little energy, add a perk that punishes targets with forcefields, or add a taunt effect to our force blast.  Which one you want is up to you. Increased ranks tends to change the graphic on your attack (generally makes it more impressive).  If you are spamming the attack the energy perk might be nice.  The force field punishing attack is kind of cool, might be worth looking at, it does include your 'hold' effects, so if you typically hold a target and then nuke it you get double duty.  Taunting with a ranged character is weird, but you might have reasons.  Every power including travel powers have at least 1 rank upgrade and most have at least 1 perk you can add.  There are a limited number of advantage points (but by the time you hit level 40 you'll have more than 30).  Some of the perks outright change the functionality of the power.  For instance the revive serum in gadgets brings fallen friendlies back, but if you buy the reanimator perk it will raise the enemy as zombies, and no longer work on friendlies.  Kinda neat.

   There is equipment.  You have 9 equipment slots.  3 Offensive, 3 Defensive, and 3 Utility.  You can have 1 primary type item in each slot, and 2 secondary.  The primary items tend to offer huge stat boosts and / or defenses (up to 50% damage reduction on a single type of damage for instance).  The secondaries are a lot more modest usually a minor stat buff and a moderate defense buff.  Some items by their description sound like they have non listed effects but it could just be bugged items that have cool descriptions but don't have stats.  There are also 'devices'  which are basically consumable buff items (think potions, but with a wider variety of effects).  There are also 'replacement' powers.  They change how your powers look and usually add a secondary effect (perhaps additional knockback, damage over time, etc).  For example, you can get flintlock pistols to replace your normal guns.  All of these item types can be crafted.  Equipment has no bearing on the appearance of your character (except for replacement powers, and some consumables might add auras or adjust your size).

   I don't really have a good feeling for the effect of stats on powers.  It is substaintial, but it is hard to say how much more effective a high stat makes a power, and it isn't always obvious which stat scales the damage on a particular attack.  For instance, my force user is doing excellent damage right now (compared to my gadgeteer).  However, I don't know how much of that is the result of picking the right stats or because the force powers simply deal more damage.

   So far my impressions of the game are positive.  It is still in beta and they have a ton of bugs to work out.  However, the core of the game is pretty solid.  Combat is fast pace.  Character creation is very deep and basically classless.  Downtime is minimal.  Your character feels powerful.  The missions / quests are better done than in City of Heroes, much less grind and the story lines progress in a more reasonable manner.  The core of the game seems solid and the level of customization is excellent.  You really get to build the super hero that you want and there are few bad choices (besides buying many powers with the exact same function).