Hey Folks! I am getting around to writing my “morning” post in the afternoon… or at least it will be after noon by the time I finally publish this thing. Yesterday was the official end of our private league that lovingly became known as “Bel League”. I think this was a very interesting experiment and I think that for the most part, it was a success. I created three highly viable characters during the league and one failed character. I made my way through all of the maps save for one that never would drop… the Unique Twilight Temple map, but I still consider that a win in spirit. In the experience ladder my characters sit for perpetuity at First, Third, and Fifth place which seems like a solid performance. The character that did not work was my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking build, but I pivoted that character into what has become one of the more enjoyable Righteous Fire characters I’ve created. Now that I am over in Trade League, my characters are showing up on POE.Ninja so for anyone at home you can check out the state in which I managed to get them all.
As soon as I got access to the trade economy… I of course started fiddling with my characters. The problem with reaching a point of stability with a character is that it is almost like trying to renovate a house of cards. As you swap a piece of gear for something else… you create a deficit that you then have to patch elsewhere. In all of my time in the private league, I never found a single viable Elder influenced helm and since we are playing in a hyperinflation league… I did not want to pay 20-30 Divines for a pseudo-six-link helm to put Righteous Fire in. My first purchase was spending 5 Chaos on a level 85 base Pig-Faced Bascinet that I then proceeded to pour a bunch of fossils into before making do with Level 20 Burning Damage and Level 18 Concentrated Effect. This however meant that I would be losing my +1 to Maximum Fire resistance on my influenced helm. So I got around that by picking up a Rise of the Phoenix with +2 level of Socketed Aura Gems… which bumped my 21/20% Purity of Fire to the next breakpoint and made up that missing Maximum Fire Resistance allowing me to stay at 90% to all elements.
If I was moving Righteous Fire to my helmet, that meant that I needed to either recolor my existing Lightning Coil or purchase a new one. Having access to trade meant that I could find a better-rolled one that was also corrupted and had the +2 to Level of Socketed AOE Gems on it… meaning that my 21/20% Fire Trap gains +2 from the chest, +1 from a leveling Empower, and +1 from my Sceptre for a grand total of Level 25 and soon to be 26 once I gain another level on that Empower gem. Since I am converting 50% of my physical damage taken to Lightning Damage, I thought while I was at it I would pick up a reasonably rolled Taste of Hate to add 15% of physical taken as Cold. I thought these flasks would be much more expensive but I picked it up for 10 Chaos. I am guessing all of the magic find is producing more than the market can absorb.
This left me with one last problem to try and fix. I’ve always had negative chaos resistance on this character since the swap over to Righteous Fire and I really wanted to at least attempt to resolve that problem. Given the high number of uniques that I am using, that left me with three slots that I could swap out pretty easily to try and at least make a dent in this problem. So after some fiddling around I found a new pair of boots, gloves, and an amethyst ring that combined take me close to the cap in spite of not quite hitting it. I’m at least up to a positive 67% which is far better than I was before starting this process. I could in theory swap my necklace out… but given how much I am relying on it to make up attributes I would still want +1 to all fire skills… I figured that would be a more tricky replacement. I would love to be able to run Defiance of Destiny that I lucked into yesterday… but I would need to probably swap over to a full cluster jewel setup in order to make that happen. I’ve rapidly run into a Ship of Theseus problem… where I am not quite certain how much of my build remains the same.
The last thing that I swapped out was my two Ursine charms for slightly better-rolled ones to increase my regen and strength… that will give me some additional health. In the end… I’m about the same armor-wise… down about 200 life, and 200 life regen… but am converting 15% more damage to elemental and have enough chaos resistance to not be completely trashed by any modifiers that deal chaos damage. I also picked up a bit more damage from the swap of Righteous Fire and Fire Trap so am killing things faster…. which ends up making the build feel better as a result. All told… it was a good series of moves that cost me around 5 Divines in total. If I decide to push this build any further… it will involve almost entirely respeccing the character and stacking on a bunch of cluster jewels. For now, however… I am going to let things alone for a bit and just play the damned game.
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Last night I decided to play some City of Heroes, in part because Thalen created a SuperGroup yesterday and I was hoping to potentially get an invite. That did not happen, but what did… is I experienced something that I am guessing I had pushed out of my memory. I was hanging out in the highest level end of King’s Row because it was much easier to solo than Steel Canyon. I had just rounded a corner when I noticed that a bunch of bombs had spawned with what looked like countdown timers. A few minutes later… there was a massive wave of players rushing towards me and before I knew it I had been invited into a raid group for whatever nonsense this held. I had completely forgotten that City of Heroes had zone-wide events.
What proceeded was about thirty minutes of nonsense where I targetted whatever I could get my hands on… and made my way through waves of mobs that were way too high level for me. The splash healing of my party though kept me alive and well throughout the entire event. Per the patch notes on the Homecoming forum, apparently, the Rikti Invasions will keep going through January 23rd when the next maintenance happens. I guess maybe I need to actually start reading chat, because I have been playing this game with the entire chat window minimized and slowly working my way through quests and doing some random combat. Last night though was a heck of a lot of fun and I would happily join in this nonsense again in the near future.
I realize I am playing on Everlasting the Roleplaying server, but I was pleasantly surprised by just how chill everyone seemed to be and how much actual roleplay was happening. Granted I myself am not a huge roleplayer but I always try and respond in kind. I tend to roll on Roleplay servers when possible because the players end up feeling like they are much more community-minded, and last night absolutely made me feel like Everlasting was the correct choice for me. You have to figure that the folks playing Homecoming are folks who missed the special magic that City of Heroes had over other MMORPGs so just from that alone they are probably going to be on their best behavior. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much fun I am having and how close to my memories of the game the actual experience ends up being.
At this point I am level 16 nearing level 17 and am hanging out in Steel Canyon. I’ve continued to follow this build guide that I found linked via the wayback machine to the old forums. It isn’t exactly the Katana/Regen scrapper that I played at release but it also isn’t super far off. One of the things that I want to do for my own benefit is to start collecting City of Heroes resources that still exist around the web and create a tools page as I have for other games. At a minimum I want to create a copy of that wayback machine page so that if I lose it, it will still exist in some form on my infrastructure. There are so many resources that I remember having… that just do not exist anymore. For example, I remember zone level guide maps that showed which factions and what level ranges were in each area. I would love to have those back so I am going to do some digging to attempt to unearth some of these things.
One of the things that I dig about this server is that pretty much everything that cost money at one point is free. You can move your characters freely between servers and it seems like you can also respec your character as often as you like. On the character select screen it shows that we have access to 1000 character slots which also seems similarly silly. I need to dig up what sort of support infrastructure this game has because I would not mind chipping some money towards the product. I feel like I am getting more than enough enjoyment out of it that I should at least make a one-time donation if not a reoccurring one. This is not how I expected to be spending January… but I am having a blast all the same.
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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.
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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.Â
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.
