Okay, I haven't played CoH for awhile.. I felt the developers really screwed the pooch on character design despite having a great concept and game. Now, I'm talking about the character creation screen, that's awsome, I'm talking about the actually balance between characters and powers.
I used to post on the official boards there are Consonants. I was constantly giving info and showing exactly how ridiculous you could make certain character builds. Show how I could a level 30 solo level 50 BOSSES before the infamous "purple" patch went in. Certain things like that. The constant nerfs and badly planned out powers is what got my goat.
See, I'm usually a min/maxer and LOVE finding ways to combo up powers to make their sum more then the parts. Take power A, used with power B and have a whole lot more dead bad guys then you could normally have. I loved doing this and figuring out how massive a punishment I could dish out with any character.
After finding all this, I start posting my "uber" builds on the official forums. People at first ridiculed me, told me I was full of crap and worse. I posted screenshots and videos and people claimed me of hacking or faking them. However, a few tried my builds and reported back how disgusting effective they were. Some made "minor" tweaks and claimed them as their own builds which I laughed at. Then the nerfs followed VERY fast and furious. It was bad. The developers had no idea how to re-balance the game in light of my uber builds and they instead resorted to ham-fisted and broad sweeping changes. It took no thought and broke many of the builds I posted. Some were still good, but others went from Flavor of the Month to the trash gutter in one or two patches.
The lack of end game content, repeatative dungeon instances, limited power selection, and more is what caused me to quit. I went back when they finally put capes out to check things out and left again. It wasn't worth seeing a flowing "Cape" and being able to respec out of powers they broke into other crappy powers.
The game is alright, fun and fast at low levels. Many of their ideas had potential and still do if they ever got around to correctly implementing them.
Last time I played, the only classes to be were a blaster, scrapper, or fire tanker (with the right build). Nothing else was really needed unless you like playing a healer then you could go defender I guess. For pure fun and power right frm the get go, nothing like a blaster or scrapper. If you pick blaster though, stay away from Energy, ice, and electricity. Scrapper, just stay away from dark armor. At least that was how it used to be unless they finally balanced those power lines out to actually be good.
If you don't mind having to WAIT to be powerful, then picking a fire controller is another good move. IT takes awhile to get the pets and you rely on groups who definately will love a good controller. Once you get pets, there is almost no reason to group anymore as a fire controller. Then again, I did remember something about them maybe putting in a pet nerf. If they got nerfed too harshly then a fire controller might be the worst thing in the game to play.
