Monday, March 16, 2009

My first CoX PvP experience

I've being playing City of Heroes/Villains for a little under a month now and have been loving every minute of it. I'm a huge PvP fan (no secrets there), and so I was eager to get to the PvP areas of the game. You cannot truly judge a game, until you've experienced it's PvP content in full ;)

Last night I discovered Bloody Bay, which is apparently the lowest level PvP zone in the game. Everyone who enters the area is scaled up/down to level 25, which keeps the battles fair. For those who haven't played CoX before, the PvP zone maps are huge. I'm talking 5+ minutes of in game travel to get from one side of the map to the other. It's not like your standard arena battles either. It can take considerable time to find an opponent and they usually travel in pacts, which makes it difficult to have a good old 1v1. Also the map is full of NPCs, that will attack you if aggro'd. This makes choosing your battle ground crucial.

I have many alts in CoX, but my highest is a level 25 Villain Brute with Fire/Fire (melee tank/dps class). I'd decked the char out with a bunch of level 25 single origin enhancements, which are supposedly the best cost to benift choice, and so I was pretty confident that my first PvP encounter would go smoothly...

Man was I wrong...

To put it bluntly I had my ass handed to me on a plate with a side order of chips and salad. No joke, the guy came out of no where and owned me in four seconds flat. After re-spawning, I brushed off the noob embarrassment and headed back into the battle zone. After about fifteen minutes of flying around I finally found someone else to fight. He/she was fighting some NPCs, and so I thought I'd take advantage of the situation and execute a perfect gank. I know that ganking is frowned upon in all MMOs, but sometimes you need to get a little dirty in order to extinguish the noob flames... :P

I jumped in and successively unleashed four of my most powerful attacks on the poor unsuspecting player. Their health dropped by about 10 percent. The player continued to finish off the NPCs and then turned and killed me in five or six moves. WTF?? At this point I realized that I must seriously be missing something. Is there like some aura of leetness that I was supposed to buy before going into the PvP zone?

Attempt number three: I decided to play it smart this time and wait for another villain to spawn and then follow them and let them choose the battle. The villain went about 30 seconds away from the base and landed on a rooftop full of heroes and villains. Ahhhh... I'd finally found the place where the battles were taking place... or were they? For some reason everyone was standing around watching two guys duke it out in the center. I figured it was some kind of organized battle, so I just stood back and tried not to look like a noob. I watched the extremely boring battle for about 4 minutes with still no victor and so decided to mix things up a bit. I jumped in and started attacking the hero as well. Holy crap, that definitely livened up the party. Another hero jumped on me, and then another villain jumped on him. The next thing both sides were in a full scale battle. As it should be... Unfortunately I was killed about eight seconds into it, which I think is my highest survival record to date. After I re-spawned, I decided not to go back into the fray. I was a little tired I getting slaughtered, so I logged off.

I think the next time I do some CoX PvP, I might take someone with me who knows what they are doing. The PvP zones are extremely noob unfriendly. I'm also going to have to hit the forums and find out what the hell I was missing to prevent insta-death.

All in all I was a little disappointed by my first CoX PvP experience, but it hasn't completely deterred me. I'll be giving it another shot, once I figure out the recipe for leetness ;)

9 comments:

Chappo said...

l2pvp n00b :D
CoX PvP sounds brutal...does it play any major part in the game?

Crimson Starfire said...

Not really. There are a few badges (achievements) that you get from PvP and some temporary powers, but that's about it.

It's probably not as bad as it sounds, I'm just new to the game and thus a little lost as to what I should be doing. Plus I haven't worked out any leet PvP builds yet, which puts me at a huge disadvantage.

CoX PvP is not like other MMOs.

Anonymous said...

So... you started a riot.

Well done! :)

Crimson Starfire said...

Well someone had to get the ball rolling ;P

Anonymous said...

I've been to Bloody Bay a couple of times for missions, but never have found any PvP. I guarantee I'd be toast.

Anonymous said...

Note that just regular singlar origin enhancements is far from the optimal you can have. I would imagine that the PvPers are decked out with some pretty good combinations of IO sets which can get some good boosts.

Crimson Starfire said...

@Tipa
Last night I accepted a mission in Bloody Bay to fly around and collect meteorite samples. I completed it without too much hassle and received a temporary power to summon some Simians (or something). I still don't have any idea how the PvP is meant to work in Bloody Bay, so I think I might leave it for now and maybe come back to it later. I've heard there are other PvP areas that are better, so I'll check them out as soon as my level permits. I get the feeling though that CoX was not really designed for PvP :(

@Sente
Yeah I'm still working out what all the different enhancements do and what combinations to use etc. I've pretty much only slotted damage and recharge reduction enhancements so far, but I'm guessing accuracy and endurance reduction are important as well. I read a forum post yesterday saying that IOs are better because they never expire and you can get a higher overall gain from them. I'll keep researching, but I guess it's just one of those things you pick up from experience.

Anonymous said...

It depends on the archetype and powersets, but in most cases you will have a number of powers you will want to slot in accuracy in.

The base to hit rate is 75% (0.75), which can be modified by accuracy multiplier. To-hit will also be affected by defense, various buffs and debuffs etc. But ignoring those parts, each of you power that has an accuracy check will have a base multiplier. This one will be 1.00, 1.05, 0.80, 1.20 or something similar, depending on power and archetype. This multiplier can be modified by the accuracy enhancements.

IO enhancements always have the same improvement factor and does not change as you level. But IOs also come in different flavours.

One is the IO enhancements that pretty much works the same as the regular enhancements, the other is the IO sets.

The IO set enhancements have families of enhancements that share a common name. The enhancements in a set typically modify multiple attributes at once, e.g. they can improve accuray, damage and perhaps range in one single enhancement (but with lower values for each attribute).
On top of that they can give additional bonuses if you use multiple enhancements of the same set in the same power.

One such combination could be that if you have 4 enhancements of the same set in a power, then your accuracy is increased by 7% for _all_ powers. These bonuses stack and stack on top of what the bonuses given from single enhancements.

The challenge level for regular PvE content is scaled so that it is suitable for just using regular enhancements. Getting the best options for IO sets has mainly value in PvP I would say, plus perhaps some of the more challenging PvE content.

Anonymous said...

lol! that was hilarious. XD
I remember my first days as a PvPer...

It's all about inventions these days (and fire melee is a bad pvp choice) :P

hit me up if you're on freedom @5atan