I mentioned the other day exactly how much effort I have been putting into my characters at the top end of City of Heroes lately and how I’m pleased that even after the changes to how I play MMORPGs over the past several years, my enjoyment of CoH has not changed. However, one of the things that does go hand-in-hand with that is understanding that there’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes with character building than I had previously internalized – and what better way to account for something I barely understand than by writing a whole column I think is the definitive word on the subject?
I kid, of course; this is not the definitive guide to building your character, nor does the title claim it is. It is a place to start understanding what you should be doing beyond just downloading Mids (and you should download Mids) and hoping for the best. So let’s go over a few things that are worth understanding, discuss some beginner tips for figuring out what to slot and where, and generally de-mystify an aspect of the game’s mechanics that can be pretty mystifying.
Let’s start with the very, very basics. You are going to have nine powers in your primary set and nine in your secondary unless you pick one of the epic archetypes. And you probably don’t want all of them. The majority, sure, but not all of them. In fact, with the exception of a couple power sets, several of them are just dead weight.
Some sets, like Dual Blades, are explicitly built as combo sets wherein everything ties into everything else. There, yeah, you want all of the powers. But many other sets, like Fire Blast, are not built that way. The reality is that with a reasonably developed build, odds are near-total that you will not actually have time to cycle through more than three attacks for a given scenario. If you’re using AoE on a crowd, you will probably hit your third attack and then the first one will be recharged and ready to go again by that point.
Equally important, a lot of the game’s mechanics revolve around chances to do something. Slower, later attacks just have fewer chances to proc than faster, earlier powers. As a rule of thumb, you probably want to have somewhere between six to eight of the powers from your primary and secondary set respectively, depending on how combo-reliant the set is and what you hope to accomplish with it.
“But which powers should I pick?” That depends on your character, guy; I’m can’t tell you that. If you want an Ice/Ice Blaster, this is not the guide to tell you if that’s good or bad; it’s to help you make it as good as it can be no matter what it is.
Now, even a cursory bit of math will tell you that you have 24 power slots, and that means you’d have several extras even if you picked up all of your primary/secondary powers as well as a travel power. But here’s where it’s time to get a little bit more controversial and say that a lot of those power picks are a little less open than you might think. For most archetypes, you’re going to be picking up some combination of the following: Maneuvers, Tough, Weave, Combat Jumping or Hover, and Stealth. Why is that? Because of how the game works.
If you’re diving into the game’s mechanics, you’ll learn two things. The first is that every archetype has a Resistance Cap, a point where you literally cannot increase your Resistance any further. Tanky archetypes have a higher cap, obviously. There’s also a Defense “soft cap” without an actual cap; essentially, no amount of Defense can ever reduce a to-hit chance below 5%, which makes 45% the soft cap for on-level enemies and 95% the functional cap barring hit boosts and the like.
To solo stuff at +4/x8, you are going to want to be brushing up against these caps. Now, with many builds, you are not actually going to be hitting these caps or even necessarily getting close to them. A Brute is going to have a much easier time hitting these than a Controller (of course, the Brute is also going to be unable to lock things down like a Controller and thus will need those higher caps). But you want to still aim for those caps because no matter how good your control powers are, things will still sneak through. Threat control is not absolute. There is AoE damage. Every 1% closer to the defense cap is 1% less chance that this group of two dozen enemies will actually land a single hit on you.
Here’s where Enhancements, naturally, come into play. For starters, no matter your power set, you will have two Archetype Sets that you can slot; often you’ll also have a couple Event Archetypes like Avalanche or Biting Cold that you can fill in. That’ll help boost your recovery, defenses, and resistances. From there, you’re going to want to look for specific powers that help in that field, set bonuses, and specific enhancements.
Wait, specific enhancements? Yes. Many sets have one or two parts that just provide great benefits all around, and you should be aware of them even if you aren’t slotting the rest of the set.
Preventive Medicine: Chance for Absorb can slot into any healing power and gives a chance for an absorb shield to pop up. It can also be slotted in your Health power, so you constantly have a shot at a shield. Similarly, Power Transfer: Chance to Heal Self and Performance Shifter: Chance for +End can slot into Stamina with a similar effect. (I recommend including those with an actual modification power to boost your passive Recovery as well, though.) Got a healing power? Numina’s Convalescence: +Regeneration/+Recovery will help you get some extra passive benefit from it.
Any Defense-boosting power can take Shield Wall: +Res (Teleport) / +5% Res (All) for a resistance boost, and conversely a Resistance power gets Gladiator’s Armor: TP Protection /+3% Def (All). Defense also sports the Reactive Defenses: Scaling Resist Damage, another good pick if you have a couple places to slot that (and you probably do). Oh, and you can grab the ever-fun Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Global Recharge Speed which… you know, does what it says on the tin. Best of all, unlike the other options in this paragraph, this is not unique and you can equip it more than once on different powers!
And a lot of various sets have a last piece that has a chance of doing a type of damage which gets back into that proc fun, so look out for that as well. If you don’t want the sixth piece of a set, consider checking what else you can put in there.
None of this will make you a master of building out your character tomorrow, of course. I’m not a master. I’m slightly better than an amateur. The nature of the game means that if you are not disposed to soloing +4/x8, you will not be required to do so, and you can get on teams and still do fine and have fun. Rather, the point is that you do not actually have to pick.
You can be a primarily RP sort of player who chooses your character’s powersets around what makes sense for them and absolutely tear things up in endgame content while watching dozens of enemies die at your feet like a buzzsaw. And hopefully you have a bit more idea of how to make that happen now.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti covering superhero MMORPGs, past, present, and future! Come along on patrol as Into the Super-verse avenges the night and saves the world… one column at a time.
