There can be only one (or two)


City of Heroes has always been the MMO in which I've let my love of alts run wild, and one year into this blog that hasn't really changed. There's a couple of other games that might see an alt sooner rather than later – Lord of the Rings Online being one, and Star Trek Online being another – but so far as CoH is concerned I've started a new character every time I've come back to the game, and that's likely to continue for a while longer.

Not indefinitely though. There is higher level content in CoH that I do want to revisit, having not ran it since the game was live, and there's content I never did at all back then, including a few zones in their entirety. Sooner or later one* of my CoH alts will become a main, for a while at least.

It's unlikely to be Mistletoe.

That's not to say I dislike this character – I don't, and the slow pace of this particular run has had little to do with the game itself. It's more to do with how dominators play, and how that differs from some of the other archetypes.

My experience with a dominator has been far less intuitive than with my brute or even my defender. This is a far more methodical archetype, and it requires an awful lot more focus on the mechanics of the game on a minute to minute basis. If I'm going up against any mob with a lot of CC resistance – i.e. every single boss mob I run into – the encounter becomes a mathematical equation. If I have Domination up I win. If I don't I need to hit them with my immoblize abilities over and over again and hope I can drop them before I run out of endurance.

What it comes down to is that any boss mob is an immediate priority target that needs to be tackled in a very specific way or I'm going to lose the fight. A lot of the time it's really that simple. It's still interesting. It's still fun. It's just more restrictive than I like, and to some extent it takes me out of the experience, as I'm less focused on the story arc I'm running or the atmosphere of the zone I'm exploring because I always have to be thinking about the rules of the game. It's not intuitive in the way that the best of CoH is.

*One or two, because blueside and redside are so distinct from one another.
 

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