Last time I wrote about Champions Online, I had just started a new character. Well, I haven’t gone back to Heron Blademaster yet, and I’ve gone through two more characters.
Michael was intended to be a half-man-half-machine sort of dude, with the power armor power set. I didn’t really like it, though, so I didn’t play past level 8 or 9.
Silhouette uses the Darkness power set, which is fairly overpowered compared to some of the others. It’s a set of ranged attacks (which are, without exception, superior to melee power sets in every way) that include a life-sucking ability. Life-sucking is cheap and unfair, and it means I got a lot further with Silhouette than I’ve been with anyone else.
I stopped playing as Silhouette because when you hit level 28, you run into a few quests that you cannot beat unless you go in with four or five heroes. Two- or three-man quests I can stomach – it’s fairly easy to ad-hoc a team that size with whoever happens to respond to your shouts – but five-man teams are difficult to ad-hoc. You have to plan that sort of thing ahead of time. Remember, I stopped playing Lord of the Rings: Online because I hit the you-have-to-plan-a-group-ahead-of-time-to-keep-playing point at level 13.
So, I started over again with Cold Shoulder. He’s a guy who uses the Ice power set. However, when I got to level 20 yesterday, I found that it’s much harder to beat quests than it was with Silhouette at the same level – because he can’t leech life off of his enemies like Silhouette can. It means Cold Shoulder has to carry around large stashes of healing and protective items just to survive; Silhouette could get away with much less.
What I’m getting at is that the power set in Champions Online is wildly unbalanced. I don’t like Player vs Player because of that. (I tried PvP with Heron Blademaster, but melee-only heroes are worthless there, because ranged/flying heroes can just go in circles around you shooting until you fall over.)
I’m not sure what they could do to fix it. Superheroes in general are unbalanced and overpowered – I think that’s the point. Spiderman can do just about anything, as long as he has tall buildings to swing around on. Superman is, well, Superman; he has probably had every power in the book at one point or another. Batman has enough money that he can make gadgets for just about any situation, meaning he’s always prepared and his set of “powers” is limitless.
Those kinds of things make for entertaining comic books, but my conclusion (after playing Champions Online) is that they don’t translate to video games very well.