City of Heroes is a Super Hero MMO that's technically been around longer than World of Warcraft, but has never managed to gain such a massive following.
Later this year, City of Heroes goes Free to Play, and so I'm going to tell you why I love playing it, and why I think you should give it a go.
City of Heroes (CoH) was the first MMO I played, and therefore holds a special place in my heart. Not only that, but it still manages to maintain is uniqueness. Most of the later MMOs followed Blizzards formula for a fantasy game, while CoH has managed to avoid any copycats. Even Champion Online feels more like WoW than it does CoH.
An interesting aspect of CoH/V is that most of the missions you will run are instanced. Instead of running around and competing with the other players for the same mobs, you run to a door and enter your own personal mission instance. While this has the upside of meaning no interferance from other players in your leveling, it does mean that you don't run into as many players, and some servers do feel like a ghost town at points.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given its name, you play either a super hero or super villain and run around doing heroic/villainous things! Not only are the missions you are sent on well written with some nice storylines, but while doing so you feel like a super hero. One of the things I had to get used to quickly when switching to WoW was how squishy you were, even in full plate. On CoH, I wouldn't think twice about jumping into a group of mobs 2 levels higher than me, and coming out victorious. In WoW, you will just keep dying if you try that (and I did).
One of the best bits about CoH is that lack of gear. Yep, no need to run around farming mobs to get you that piece of tanking gear you need. Instead are things called Enhancements, which can be added to your powers to make them better. The beauty of this system is that there are many options to choose from and there is not a "Right Way". Enhancements can drop from any mob, be bought or created. If you really want you can never slot an Enhancement and still be a decent tank/dps/healer, although obviously not as good as someone who does.
An important (and fun) part of CoH, that comes from having no gear to worry about, is you can concentrate on your costume. The character creator is robust, with many, many options for you to choose from. Each character can earn extra costume slots and maintain a number of choices, with transformation animations as well. Your character will always look the way you want it to!
Unlike WoW, grouping is a breeze in CoH. You can group together and run content regardless of your level, as you can either downgrade your level to match friends, or pull them up to your level. This makes for running missions much more fun as everyone is challenged, and everyone gains something useful as drops are tailored to your actual level, not the one you are running at. You are also not limited to 5 players, as the missions scale depending on the number of players and your level.
There are also the equivalent of raids throughout the level range, meaning there is always something to do, its not all about the end game. The raids also can be done at later levels, and you simply get downleveled to match the content.
In fact, I can't really speak too much about the endgame as I've never managed to get a character that far. I keep wanting to try each class and powerset, and find that I've yet to get bored of the low level content.
Not only is the official content good, but there are options to make your own content, and run other player's content.
All together, City of Heroes/Villains is a great MMO, that is going to be a bargain at Free to Play. Check it out!
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