Six characters in and I still haven't exhausted the possibilities of the early game.
City of Heroes has a justified reputation for being alt-friendly far beyond most other MMOs. The number of possible combinations of archetype, primary and secondary powersets are essentially limitless, and even within the same archetype the experience can be very different depending on the combination selected.
What you do with those characters can be just as varied. There's no main story as such to follow in CoH, and it's perfectly possible for two characters to go through the same zone and have entirely different experiences depending on which story arcs they pick up along the way. The zones that were added or revamped later in the game's development do usually have a series of connected arcs that form a single story, but even so you'll never see all of them during a normal levelling run.
I've taken full advantage of this, and so far each of my Heroes has taken a different route through the early game. Time Raider did the Issue 0 experience, running only missions that were in the game at launch; Ms. Midnight has been running the Warshade arc – which intersects with the Issue 0 missions ocassionally, but not significantly – and filling in the gaps with radio missions; and now Tempter has run the Hollows, which neither of the other two even set foot in. I already have the revamped Atlas Park and revamped Kings Row pencilled in for two future heroes, and one of them will likely also do the Shining Stars arc, which is the blueside equivalent to Hearts of Darkness, which I ran on American Nightmare.
My original plan for Tempter was to finish the Hollows and then move on to Faultline, another former hazard zone that was similarly revamped. However, Faultline starts at level 15 and by the time I finished the last story arc in the Hollows I was close to level 17, so I decided to save Faultline for a future character and head to Skyway City. There I've ran a few radios, stopped a bank robbery (rather more successfully than Ms. Midnight) and joined a team for the Positron Task Force.
(A team comprised of a dominator, a blaster, two brutes and me, a scrapper – not a healer in sight...)
This, and a Midnighter's story arc, took me to level 20, and since I'd already unlocked a contact there, I went to Talos Island. Talos is a 20-27 zone, but I could have also went to Independence Port, which covers the same level range.
Possibly I should have gone to IP. I'd been doing well against the Lost and the Circle of Thorns – albeit with the endurance issues that always come up around now – but in Talos I've had some rough encounters with the Tsoo (expected), the Warriors (surprising) and the Banished Pantheon.
Who?
The Pantheon are an enemy group I've hardly ever fought – maybe a couple of times on Live in the old Dark Astoria – and rather like the Igneous in the Hollows my lack of familiarity with them has been initially painful. TIL: Take down the shamans first, always. They're like if the devs said, “So can we make these guys like Tsoo Sorcerors, only even more annoying?”
The placement of the hospital in Talos Island also leaves something to be desired, since a freshly defeated level 20 will step outside and find higher level enemies as far as the eye can see. I've had quite a few opportunities to see this for myself since I arrived in this zone.
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