Morning Folks! I am technically in holiday mode this morning and as a result, getting up and around far later than normal. However, I decided to go ahead and make a post given that I had something I wanted to talk about. Over the weekend we recorded our podcast as normal, and one of the subjects we discussed was the recent news about the City of Heroes Homecoming server officially getting a license from NC Soft… and thereby gaining the legitimacy that no emulator server project has gained to date. This made me and several other members of the podcast nostalgic about this game, and as a result Sunday morning I got everything up and running and took my first steps into Paragon City since 2020. We are rolling on the Everlasting server and I believe my handle is @Belghast so if you find your way over there say hello.
One of the most interesting things about being back in City of Heroes, is this game is a snapshot of what the evolution of an MMORPG looked like before the world changed. This was the game that me and my circle of friends were playing when we all started getting into the World of Warcraft beta process. This was the last game we played before that title stole our attention for the next several years. After the launch of World of Warcraft, the formula for what an MMORPG was changed forever to shift to adapt to what that game was doing. However, in City of Heroes you can see the slow steady progress of what came before culminating in this exceptionally polished product. This was the best the genre had to offer and had so many ideas that were well ahead of their time like Mentoring and Bolstering to raise or lower the character level to make sure that you could always group with your friends. It also had these amazing open area “raid” zones that were way too tough to tackle alone, but if you gathered up a group of friends you could run around and fight baddies for hours.
The mission structure was also revolutionary for the time. Instead of a single quest… you had chains of quests that were related and felt like you were investigating a case. You might start with tracking down clues by killing baddies in the open world, which would then lead you to a hideout… and eventually maybe even to take you to the lair of a boss for that faction before eventually wrapping up that chain and leading you to a new contact. It isn’t that quests did not exist before, or even quest chains… but the entire experience had more narrative cohesion. You were a hero and you were fighting back against the evils that sought to decimate this fair city. On top of that these instanced areas required strategy to get through them… you might have to learn how to work your way through a “pulling puzzle” and figure out which enemies you could single pull to ultimately lower the amount of damage you were going to take when you eventually had to charge forth out of the shadows.
Another aspect of the game that was somewhat revolutionary is that it had some proper build craft. Every level you either got to choose a new ability or add sockets to your existing abilities… this allowed the player to pick and choose how to evolve their character over time. For example I am playing a version of what I played at launch… the Katana/Regeneration Scrapper each of those aspects dictating what type of build I can craft with it. You chose a primary power pool, a secondary power pool, and a base class that dictated what your ultimate role in combat would be. I remember this being an extremely solo-friendly character back in the day, and I managed to dig up a build that I am loosely following from the now long-defunct official forums.
I am not sure if I am just drifting by on a wave of nostalgia, or if this game is far better than I remember it being. So many aspects of combat from the superb sound design to the gravity of your attacks… make combat feel more “meaty” for lack of a better term as opposed to a lot of other hotbar combat games. World of Warcraft really gets a lot of credit for making combat feel immediate and visceral… but City of Heroes was doing this as well. The class design also stems from an era before the holy trinity of DPS, Healer, and Tank… and includes a lot of crowd control and pulling mechanics to add more strategy to approaching every combat puzzle. I remember I used to have an ability called “Teleport Other” I believe, that would allow me to yoink a single mob out of a pack and silently pull them over to me. That way I could whittle down the strongest member of a pack making it a bit easier for when I pulled everything else.
I only made it to level eleven yesterday, but I had way more fun than I was expecting to. Legitimately City of Heroes is a better game than even my rose colored vision seemed to remember. There have been a number of times on the podcast where we have wondered what MMORPGs would look like if World of Warcraft had not been the runaway generational success that it was. I think playing City of Heroes gives you a pretty decent idea of what a best-in-breed game looked like from that time. I remember at the time it legitimately was one of the best-selling games and was breaking records… that only got eclipsed in scale by the launch of World of Warcraft. Somewhere around here I still have the comic books that we used to get in the mail from our paid subscription.
If this post made the nostalgia well up inside of you like the podcast did for me this weekend, I am thankful to say that the process of getting everything up and running is straightforward. As someone who has jumped through some nonsense hoops before to play on emulated servers… this is as simple as setting up an account on the Homecoming forums, setting an in-game password, and then downloading the installer. Because this is an older game, the total footprint is about 5 gb which should not be an awful download from a modern internet connection. That is smaller that a lot of mobile games these days, to be honest. There are even folks who have been successfully playing it on the Steam Deck which is pretty sweet.
If you make your way over to the Everlasting server feel free to say hello. I’ve set up a private area on the Super Dungeon Friends discord for City of Heroes. At some point, I need to rework the auto-role menu, but for the short term ping me if you want access to it.
The post The Path Abandoned appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Hopefully, everyone is staying warm this week with the big cold snap hitting the center of the country and more specifically impacting Bel and Thalen. This week we start off talking about the Rogue Trader CRPG and how it is doing a pretty solid job of moving the bar forward. From there we talk a bit about the upcoming Granblue Fantasy Action RPG and how we have been waiting for it since 2017. In shocking news, we talk about the City of Heroes Homecoming server and how it is officially licensed and we believe it is the first fan-run emulator server project to achieve that status.
Last Epoch is nearing its official 1.0 launch and with it, a bunch more information about the Trade system came out this week so we dive into it for a bit and contrast it with our experiences from Path of Exile. Peglin has released a bunch of updates and we talk a bit more about that phenomenal puzzle combat game. Thalen shares some information about how Dungeons and Dragons Online is apparently just giving away a ton of content and selling a bunch of mission packs for cheap on top of it. Tam finishes out the show talking about how it has taken him the better part of a year but he finally understands Star Trek Online.
I’ve talked about my Righteous Fire Chieftain for a few days now and the more I play it… the more I think I maybe even like this build better than the Pre-Nerf Juggernaut that I have played for several leagues before. One of the things I dig the most about this build is how easy it is to get off the ground, and how easy it is to gear. Most of the items that I am wearing are effective trash drops, and there is SO MUCH room for improvement. My sceptre I threw a few essences at it until I got something halfway decent, my helm, boots, and gloves were things I legitimately picked up off the ground and just started using. The only piece that I feel is somewhat critical is the Lighting Coil, but I ran without that for a very long time and primarily it simply adds some survival layers bringing it a bit closer to the tankiness of the Juggernaut. Most builds I am seeing tend to favor the Cloak of Flames… but I wanted some more armor and have also seen four Lighting Coils drop this league making that choice a no-brainer.
The main reason why I am talking about it today, is that I thought I would record some of my dumb little videos showing off gameplay. In this, I am running a non-juiced T16, but the build can handle juicing via the forest… it just significantly slows things down a bit. Right now my happy spot is to run t11/t12 maps with as much juice as I can get. Despite not putting any investment into the run and doing stream of consciousness… I still get a wild map explosion during this video. The play style is just so comfortable and I’ve noticed some weird things about Ignite Proliferation and Hinekora’s Fury down in Delve… that it seems like it can hit things and kill things that are in the Darkness and would otherwise be invulnerable. I need to play around a bit more with this to make sure what I think I am seeing is actually happening but so far this is one hell of a delver and mapper but probably a pretty poor bosser… though to be truthful I have yet to run any bosses or guardians on it.
I am so far from an expert at Path of Building… and in fact all I really know how to do is import my build from the GGG servers and then set some of the correct checkboxes. However, if you want to see the current state of my build:
I have no clue how valid the damage numbers are… because it does not feel “ZDPS” but also can’t oneshot tanky things without a Hinekora’s proc. Bossing on this would be a challenge because not getting the Hinekora’s proc means you are left just grinding it down with Righteous Fire and Fire Traps. I’ve not really talked about what I am running for Primalist charms but the above image is a cut-and-paste job showing everything I am running for both Ascendancies. I would probably swap these out for explosive charms, but I have yet to see any. In a perfect world, I would love to find some with maybe Life Regen and Explosion. I’ve still yet to find the final big boss version of the King in the Mists so I am lacking one entire charm.
All in all, I kinda love this build. Pending nothing significantly changes between now and 3.24 I can see league starting it. I feel bad because I essentially have two other characters… Lightning Arrow Champion and Boneshatter Juggernaut that I built out completely but have also just been sitting there and rotting because I am enjoying the RF Chieftain so much. The only thing odd that you will see in my POB is Corrupting Cry. I just threw that gem in there because I had the spare slot and it converted my Infernal Cry to cost life instead of mana. I am doing nothing with it past that and legitimately just started using it last night given that my Stone Golem could no longer stay alive long enough to be useful. Normally speaking in past leagues this would have been the time when I put a Portal gem in there, but since I have not seen one drop… I can’t do that. If I can find a Vaal Breach I would probably socket that in because it would give me a way to summon a bunch of small adds… and therefore proc Hinekora Explosions on bosses.
Anyways I will probably stop talking about Righteous Fire Chieftain for awhile. I love it, but I don’t want to just pound the build into the ground on the blog now that I have finally recorded a gameplay video.
The post 3.23 SSF Righteous Fire Chieftain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Shocking to no one… I’ve found myself back maining a Righteous Fire character. This time, I converted my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain over to Righteous Fire, and in the grand scheme of things, it is going pretty well. I do not feel anywhere near as strong as my Juggernaut did, but for playing a very tanky Righteous Fire character, this might be a viable alternative to Inquisitor. I am hoping that maybe we will get a new alternate quality gem that restores RF to its former glory, but if not… I think I can be happy enough with Chieftain going forward. My comfy space seems to be alternating between T11 Cemetary and T12 Tropical Island and then trying to stack on as much juice as I can get from the mists.
My focus over the last week or so had been trying to get levels so that I could add a Medium Cluster Jewel with Fan the Flames. This essentially gives you Elemental Proliferation at the cost of SEVERAL passive points. I accomplished this at 95, but I have to be honest… it wasn’t really that big of a bonus. I am already running Berek’s Respite which gives me something akin to Elemental Proliferation any time I kill something that has been ignited. Since Ignites can’t stack… it essentially just didn’t add any significant bonus to the build. I’ve since specced out of this medium cluster and distributed the points around the board into more life which in turn should translate to both more survival and more damage for Righteous Fire.
We’ve also decided to let our Private League lapse into Trade League. There are essentially 8 days left in the league and at that point all of our characters will transition over into Affliction Trade. This is going to open so many doors for making minor tweaks to my characters, the one I am looking forward to the most is Boneshatter. I still feel like I have not given Boneshatter a proper shake, so when the private league collapses I think my first goal will be getting that character some better gear. I would really like to reach 100% spell suppression and have a MUCH higher damage Two-Handed Axe. It will be a challenge dropping into the league so late and being so relatively “poor” as compared to where I usually am at this point in a league. I have enough of a stash of Divines though that I should be able to make some movement on my characters.
Lastly this morning I recorded another one of my dumb videos, this time attempting to explain what I have been talking about regarding the SkyScale versus World of Warcraft Dragon Riding. Mostly after being used to instant mounts having to wait three seconds feels like an eternity. I show off some gameplay of GW2 specifically flying around on the SkyScale and then show some Dragon Riding and talk about its positives and differences. Maybe with some footage, it might finally start to make a bit of sense.
The post Flames Didn’t Need Fanning appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
