Choose My Adventure: Breaking through the obstacles of Going Rogue in City of Heroes

“Traveling the realms is no task for the meek. The underprepared. The easily overwhelmed. The challenges you face and the hardships you have to fight against are beyond the most advanced understanding of the word ‘daunting.’ Doing this will kill you. Full stop. Lucky for me, I’ve done this long enough and gotten near enough to that brink where it’s a lot like walking down the street… albeit an extremely weird street.

My name was Allison Raynor, and a long time ago, I was a boxer in training until fate saw fit to grant me a new ring to fight in: the cosmic struggle of opposing forces to maintain the multiversal balance. I link mystic power with melee skill because this job need dirty knuckles and broken noses. I am a sorcerous angel. A temporal samurai. The Magician Magnificent. I am Witchfist.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the advice of most of the City of Heroes-playing public given to me last week when I struggled with my Mastermind was “fix the problem with alts.” It’s a tried and true solution to a great many things in this game, so I was both unsurprised and relieved when the votes rolled in to drop the Mastermind and roll up something different. And different she is; Witchfist is a Street Justice/Dark Brute that came together over the course of character creation when I sought to both mitigate the difficulties of Going Rogue and make an interesting-to-play character. The powerset combination was chosen in large part thanks to you fine commenters who provided some excellent insight and thought on what to do to prepare myself. The fact that she’s a character in her own right is a sort of happy accident.

The differences between this Brute and the old Mastermind were night and day. Not only was I arriving to Praetoria with more forward knowledge of what to expect, but I feel like I’ve built a character that can better stand up to the rigors of the nonsense Going Rogue likes to throw at you from the jump. She seems to mitigate the damage enemies dish out better, she has a whole lot more damage output than those idiotic robots do at the same level, and I’m not falling nearly asleep playing as her since I have to be active.

Also, did I mention she takes things out nice and fast? Boy is it different.

I had almost forgotten how much fun Brutes are in this game. It’s like someone decided to make the Tanker archetype actually fun again, and the brutality of the Street Justice moves is pretty satisfying. On top of that, there’s a chance that my strikes will either make my foes dizzy or send them flying nonsensically up in the air, meaning I can pile on the pressure. The rotation seems easy enough, with the prime crux of the powerset revolving around building up Combo Points to unleash a boosted finishing maneuver, and mercifully, the impact of the finishing maneuver I have now is satisfying from both a visual and gameplay standpoint. Seriously, MMO devs, one-shotting an enemy now and again feels good. Let us have that more often, please.

Of course, meting out punishment is nothing if I can’t take the same, and the Dark secondary appears to have most of the bigger bases covered in Going Rogue, at least in the interim. One of the comments mentioned that psiconic damage was a pretty prevalent thing in the game, and so I sought to focus on halting those effects as much as possible, along with the usual energy and physical damage mitigation, and while I worry about the lack of defense against knockback effects, I figure being able to smash and punch foes in swift order is enough of a bulwark against that die.

The Brute playstyle and powerset I’ve put together appears to have infected me a bit too deeply, if I’m honest. I recall one of the comments previously mentioning that the storylines in Going Rogue were some of the better ones in the whole of City of Heroes, but I was just so enamored with being a character that could cut through things again, I was blitzing past paragraphs of quest text without even thinking about it.

Going to my next contact, I think I have the general gist of where things are narratively speaking — it’s not like City of Heroes has astonishingly deep lore, at least in what’s immediately visible to newbies — but at the same time I’m open to some suggestions on how to press on with our City of Heroes adventure. And so that leads us right to today’s polls.

This is a simple one, but it’s an important one to ask, especially in deference to the old veterans of the game. As I mentioned before, my five-odd years of playing City of Heroes revolved around almost exclusively playing the red side or blue side, using the features of Going Rogue as a means to blip between zones without issue or to play with (and summarily be disappointed by) the Dual Pistols powerset. So with that in mind, I’m curious to know what you think is the best course of action for taking in this expansion’s content: Should I smash through as fast as possible until I’m back in Paragon again, or do I take my time and nibble on those succulent story leaves?

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Second is the question of playing with other people. I think I’ve played solo long enough, and so I’d like to try to get some team action in where and how I can. The question, of course, is whether or not being in Praetoria — a part of the game that seems to be generally avoided by a lot of groups and power-players — is worth the effort of trying to find other people to be with. I’ve seen one or two folks milling about the city, sure, but it is alarmingly barren compared to the lowbie zones of Paragon City itself.

So, how should I go about finding group stuff to do, if I do so at all?

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As per usual, polling will wrap up at 1:00 p.m. EDT this Friday, July 26th. And if you happen to be among those voting to find a party outside of the game, feel free to look my character up in the Everlasting server of Homecoming. Until there, I’ve looking forward to mystically whaling away on enemies very soon.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.