I should have been doing more productive things last night, but I ended up spending the vast majority of my time playing City of Heroes Homecoming. I’ve had all of this nostalgia creep up on me and attack. I guess in some small way I didn’t realize quite how much I had missed having a Super Hero genre MMO. Champions Online was a massive disappointment and while CoH is not exactly a “modern” MMO, the core functionality is still extremely enjoyable. While I have heckled some of the projects trying to recreate this game in the past, I guess having experienced it once more that I absolutely understand where they are coming from. For me City of Heroes was a weird footnote between playing Horizons and getting into the World of Warcraft Beta. Once I moved on to Azeroth I really didn’t spend any time looking back at this game, but I have a feeling that it was to my own detriment.
While I dabbled a little bit with the City of Villains beta, I never actually played that game when it was live. Additionally I have never played any of the more faction based content that came into the game with Going Rogue. The tweaks that have been made are noticeable and interesting, and even in Atlas Park the “newbie” zone I am seeing the beginnings of a larger story arc against the Arachnos that serve as the larger factional villains of the game. The more time spent in the game the more I am remembering about the finer points of questing and how to build a character. I should be playing other things but for whatever reason this is just deeply compelling to me at the moment.
I ultimately went speed for my travel power tree, but I am wondering if I am going to regret this. Teleport Other was one of my favorite abilities where I could “yoink” a single target out of the pack and use it to both pull and give me a head start on burning that target down. Hasten from the speed tree however is the “correct” choice to make for any sort of a melee character, and I ultimately went down the path of the min-maxer instead of following my heart. I managed to get to seven last night before wandering off and picking back up on the FFXIV Main Story Quest. Tonight I am likely going to be spending my time trying to catch up in Wolcen as the rest of my crew has not been nearly as distracted this week as I have and as a result is probably way ahead of me in the leveling.