Notorious

When I was playing World of Warcraft I spent a lot of time writing about the lack of challenge in the quests, and how that was exacerbated by level scaling. I touched on the same subject when I played Lord of the Rings Online.

I will never write that about City of Heroes.

Most of the missions in CoH are instanced, and the game gives you incredible depth of control over just how hard those instanced missions are through the Notoriety system. This enables you to decide your own difficulty level, by setting the average level of enemies, and the number you encounter, as well as whether or not you'll face Boss level mobs.

This is utterly invaluable. Any archetype – and most powerset combinations – can solo effectively, but not all builds will do so equally, and with Notoriety I can dial up the difficulty if I'm on a soloing powerhouse, or dial it back if I'm not. I'll never find myself sleepwalking through missions because there's no challenge involved, but I'll never find myself running up against an unbeatable enemy either.

I have a few self imposed rules for Notoriety. I always enable bosses by level 5, and never turn them off again. I don't set mob level below +0, and I prefer to increase the spawn size rather than the mob level, even on characters that are mostly single target oriented. That's very much a personal preference.

At level 16 I've been running +0/x2 for a couple of levels – all that time spent in Perez Park left me feeling fairly confident that I could handle larger groups. Maybe too confident, as I've found I could handle Skulls fairly well, but the Vahzilok were lethal enough that I'll be dropping back to +0/x1 for a while.

It's an interesting extra layer to the levelling experience – seeing just how far I can push a character, and how long I can maintain it.