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Why City of Heroes is Better than World of Warcraft

Many of you may know that Going Rogue; the latest expansion for City of Heroes was recently released. I was at my computer, minding my own business and looking for a spot to upgrade my account, when out of nowhere this advertisement hit me, proclaiming the glorious deeds able to be done in World of Warcraft and their generous ten day trial. I was torn! Do I stick with my original MMORPG love, or do I drift over to the dark side of gaming where countless hours and relationships have been lost into the ethers of Orc vs Human combat?

Truth be told, it was an easy choice. Let's look at the traits. Step one is always character creation. World of Warcraft lets you choose from a handful of base races, which each race presenting a number of classes to pick from. From there you basically spend your entire WoW career trying to copy players of a higher level by going to instance after instance to acquire the same gear.

In City of Heroes you get to completely customize your character not just by choosing your origin and class type, but you get to customize your hero from a long list of superpowers! Then you get to customize your complete character appearance with one of the most complex avatar appearance systems in any MMORPG. In CoH you can claim to be from any race you want, as long as you can mix and match the character creation preferences to get a believable appearance.

World of Warcraft started its life as a game that pitted Alliance against Horde Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes have to team up against Undead, Orcs, Trolls, and Tauren. This results in the entire game literally being a massive war between the races. City of Heroes didn't release an expansion called City of Villains until much later that allowed for the playing of the classic arch-nemesis of super heroes. City of Heroes instead has always supported team play and is largely a PvE environment instead of PvP. If you're looking to grind your way up and do battle with other human controlled avatars, World of Warcraft has the advantage. But City of Heroes makes up for it in a more important way.

Their focus on group play has led City of Heroes to form the best teaming system in any MMORPG. You can literally click on a search tab and find every player within your level range who has chosen to mark themselves as "LFG" or Looking for Group. Up to eight people can form a single team. What's even more impressive is that through the use of the Sidekick feature, a player who is much lower level can pair up with a more experienced hero to increase his own temporary level. This allows friends of different levels to team up at any time without fear of taking an experience penalty. This game took it even further when they implemented a Shared Experience feature, which allows two characters to choose each other at character creation. From then on, anytime one of the characters gains experience, his partner will as well. This allows for friends to guarantee they remain on an even playing field from character birth to retirement.

What really sells it for me however, is the style of combat. In World of Warcraft, with the exception of large raid parties, and exceptionally skilled groups, I found that combat is rather dull. Monsters of equal level to your character are built to be roughly of equal power. That means the entire combat system is based off a series of one on one duels, where if you want any chance to survive, your best bet is to lure one enemy away from the rest and strike! Should more than one enemy be attracted at a time, your best bet is to run away.

City of Heroes on the other hand, gives you the joy of being a true superhero. Every fight is designed as a massive brawl, with multiple enemies piling on all at once. But your character is designed with superhuman endurance to take every hit, enough speed to dodge bullets, or extraordinary abilities to launch elemental blasts or waves of telekinetic energy to take down swarms of opponents all at once.

Comparing City of Heroes to World of Warcraft is really a matter of game complexity. City of Heroes has no items or job skills to worry about. Whereas in World of Warcraft you spend the majority of your time grinding up by repeating the same job task, or killing the same monsters over and over to get the reward you want. What it means is that World of Warcraft is designed for a serious, even obsessed player. Whereas City of Heroes is designed for a casual gamer who just wants to cut down swarms of alien monsters with laser vision and move on with their day. That's what makes City of Heroes the game for me.