Around hour 23 of this run I finally stepped through the inter-dimensional portal in Underground Neutropolis and made my escape to the Rogue Isles. This is the first time I've ever been glad to see Sharkhead Island.
It's taken me over two months to drag myself through this 24 hours of City of Heroes, and much like the last time one of these runs stretched out interminably it's worth asking why.
I wasn't in much of a mood for gaming for fairly long stretches of those two months, but there's more to it than that. In the past I've been able to rely on CoH to snap me out of that as often as not, so why didn't it do so this time?
My chosen archetype was a factor. This isn't the first time I've played a dominator, but it is the first time I've taken one this far, and specifically taken one through the 15-20 level range, which is at best purgatory for any CoH character, and hell for many. Whatever weak points an archetype and powerset combination has, this is where it will be highlighted.
Mistletoe checked the usual boxes – diminishing accuracy and vanishing endurance – but more significantly I don't recall the last time my damage output fell so far behind the curve. The binary nature of dominator gameplay – an enemy is either held or not, immobilized or not, and 'not' means unharmed and unhindered because I don't have any debuff worth a damn – means I needed to be able to burn down active enemies fast, and I never felt I had that damage.
Would this be true of all dominators? Quite probably not, as different powersets can make a big difference in how an archetype plays. It is, though, true of Plant Control/Thorny Assault – it's an aggressive combo, and I never had the damage numbers to back it up. Everything, quite simply, took too long to die.
That I was running what's probably the hardest content in this level range didn't help. I like a challenge, but there does come a point where it stops being a challenge and starts being a slog.
A repetitive slog, through repetitive locations. I wrote some time ago that if Going Rogue is the worst possible introduction to City of Heroes then the resistance crusader storyline is the worst possible introduction to Going Rogue. At the time I was thinking mostly about the difficulty of the enemy groups and the tone of the story arcs, respectively, and I stand by that, but I'll now add that the crusader story makes incredibly little use of two out of three of the new zones of GR. In both Imperial City and Neutropolis almost the entire story takes place in the Underground, and while I like the idea of the Underground it only really works as a contrast to what's above. Spend a lot of time in it, as I did, and it's just not very interesting.
The crusader storyline doesn't entirely work. It gets off to a strong start in Nova Praetoria, through a combination of funny, interesting, well written characters and a casual indifference to human life that's played for shock value, drama and laughs. That mostly keeps going into Imperial City, so it's not until Neutropolis that it runs out of steam, with Calvin Scott, the leader of the resistance himself, being a surprisingly uninteresting character with a selection of missions that are mostly either below his pay grade or completely out of nowhere random – specifically the last one, which has no build up and so is almost entirely lacking any context.
It also doesn't help that several missions in Neutropolis (or rather under it) rely on scripted sequences that don't always quite work as well as they should, and it really doesn't help that pretty much every mission takes place in either a laboratory or a section of the Underground.
So much then for City of Heroes: Going Rogue, at least for now. There's another three arcs to explore (and technically four if I go back at some point and see what I missed in Imperial City) but not any time soon. Next up I'll be trying to get back onto my schedule, and doing so with an MMO that I'm not sure I actually like that much... so that can't possibly go wrong, right?
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