Crafting in Champions Online: Guide to Low Level Items

The crafting system in Champions Online was a bit of a mystery to me. It's not at all clear from the in game descriptions what crafting you should pick if you want to boost a particular stat or set of stats. So, in a fit of anal, I made new alt and spent the entire evening talking to different crafting trainers and writing down recipes. So that future generations will not have to suffer through such tedium, I've decided to post my findings. Below you will find guides to the permanent upgrade items that you can make in tiers I and II. Some very important points:

1. Anyone can make bags and healing items, if that's all you want pick whatever appeals to you.

2. The specialization within a particular craft generally makes no difference. However I did discover one exception by accident. It stands to reason that there are a few others. I haven't checked every recipe with all three specializations of all three crafts (I'm not that anal).

3. These are only the stat boosting items. Power replacement items gimp the hell out of your stats for a chance at a proc that does massive damage. They only work on very specific abilities. For example, many work only on single handed sword attacks. I didn't consider them worth compiling stats on.

4. You may not get these stats when you actually craft something. The stats below are based on what the recipes on vendors list. I have gotten slightly lower stats when crafting items in some cases.

5. Major caveat: the stats on these recipes scale with level. Below are the stats a level 7 character will see on recipes. However a lower level character will find the stats to be lower, a higher level character will find them much improved. Take this as a guide to the stats that can be buffed by a given profession, more than the precise bonus you can get.


With all that in mind, the first two tiers of stat upgrade items are as follows:

Science

Skill	Str	Dex	Con	Int	Ego	Pre	Rec	End	Type
0	-	-	-	19	-	-	-	-	PU
10	+	+	8	4	+	8	+	+	PD
30	-	19	-	-	-	-	-	-	PO
40	+	+	+	19	+	+	+	+	PU
50**	-	-	9	4	-	5	-	-	PD
75	+	12	+	+	+	+	2	+	PO
105	-	-	-	13	-	-	-	7	PU
115	+	+	11	4	+	2	+	+	PO
125	-	13	-	-	-	-	8	-	PD
140	+	+	+	13	+	+	+	7	PU
155	-	-	12	3	-	2	-	-	PO
170	+	11	+	+	+	+	10	+	PD
185	-	-	-	15	-	-	-	5	PU

**If you choose the Invention specialization the item grants 18 Con, 4 Int, and 13 Presence

Mysticism

Skill	Str	Dex	Con	Int	Ego	Pre	Rec	End	Type
0	-	-	-	-	19	-	-	-	PU
10	+	+	+	+	4	14	+	+	PD
30	-	14	-	-	-	-	4	-	PO
40	+	+	+	+	19	+	+	+	PU
50	-	-	-	-	-	14	-	4	PD
85	14	+	+	+	+	4	+	+	PO
105	-	-	-	9	9	3	-	-	PU
115	+	+	+	+	2	14	+	1	PD
115	-	-	-	-	-	2	12	-	PO
140	+	+	+	+	7	12	1	+	PU
155	-	-	-	-	2	14	-	3	PD
175	3	9	+	+	+	1	6	+	PO
185	-	-	-	-	5	15	-	-	PU
195	+	+	+	+	9	+	+	2	SD
200	1	4	-	-	-	3	11	-	PO

Arms

Skill	Str	Dex	Con	Int	Ego	Pre	Rec	End	Type
0	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	19	PU
10	4	+	14	+	+	+	+	+	PD
30	19	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	PO
40	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	19	PU
50	4	14	-	-	-	-	-	-	PD
85	19	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	PO
105	-	-	4	-	-	-	-	14	PU
115	3	1	14	+	+	+	+	+	PD
125	14	-	4	-	-	-	-	-	PO
140	+	+	3	+	1	+	+	14	PU
155	2	1	14	-	-	-	1	-	PD
170	11	6	3	+	+	+	+	+	PO
185	-	-	3	-	-	-	-	2	SU
195	1	1	14	+	+	+	3	+	PD
200	11	10	-	-	-	-	-	-	PO

I tried my damndest to find this info somewhere else, and drew a blank. If someone else is sitting on charts like this they need to make them easier for google to find. To any random readers, feel free to repost these to your heart's content as long as you give me credit. And remember, these are the stats at level 7.

Analysis:

Arms is a very good generic crafting profession. Pretty much anyone can use constitution and endurance, and strength is good for any character that melees a lot. For crit builds (i.e., dexterity and ego) mysticism is reasonably solid. For a lot of builds, you are simply out of luck. For example, if you want to boost endurance and recovery (common for ranged DPS), nothing really works all that well at low levels (though science may work depending on how it scales).

Hope this will be of some help to readers. Happy adventuring :)

Back in Champions Online

Finally fired up my Champions Online account. I'm two days into my free 30 days, and enjoying it quite a bit. A few thoughts.

The character generation system doesn't seem as arcane as it did to me before. Part of it is likely that I understand the system better now. Part of it is also likely that I've been playing a lot of DDO lately, and that game has a well and truly arcane character development system. However, I suspect that some of the tooltips and descriptions have been cleaned up a bit. Certainly choosing primary stats is much less confusing than I remember.

At least at the low levels I'm playing, rumors of apocalyptic nerfs seem exaggerated. I decided to roll up a new dude (actually, remake Electric Dude) and see how the post nerf 1-10 game plays. It did seem a bit slower than I recalled at first. However by level 7 or so everything was right as rain.

I sucked before, I really really sucked. I'm sure I still suck, just (hopefully) not as tragically. I finally figured out that the main attack in the electric power set arcs between multiple foes if you let it charge all the way up. That makes a huge difference when you are pulling groups of mobs. Now I can get them more than half dead before they reach me and then spam them all down with electric shield, taking nary a bit of damage from minions. How the hell I got a nearly identical guy to level ten in the OB without noticing that eludes me.

I also finally figured out what the is going on with the various energy sheath powers. Hint: grab the one that goes in your passive slot first, it will be on damn near all the time. The one you trigger may be a slightly better buff, but you won't be able to use it more than one fight out of three in a dense area.

Evidence of my previous suckitude can be found elsewhere. I switched over to my old main from the headstart weekend. He was parked right outside an instance entrance. I was level 11, they were level 13 and packed tight as sardines. I got my ass handed to me on my first pull. Respawned, watched the patrol patterns, this time cleared my way to the boss (a Master Villian). She proceeded to rip me a new bunghole several times in a row.

Once I got down to three stars decided to check over my build. Discovered that it bit badly. The two stats I was most heavily invested in were presence and recovery. Recovery isn't too bad, it means I regen power very quickly. Presence, on the other hand, is full of suck for a solo character. It reduces threat (useless solo), and buffs my non-existent pets and heals. I can see why I decided to boost it. The in game description of the stat is vague as hell, and it's one of the two powers given a big bonus when you choose the fire power set. That does sort of imply it's something you'll want. However, at low levels it's an extremely poor investment for a fire character. Even at high levels I'd argue that more hitpoints (con) or more power (end) are both likely to be more useful than a buff to the one pet the set eventually gets.

In any case, that was not the worse of my suckage. Oh no, not by a long shot. I had items sitting in my bag that I hadn't even bothered to slot. One item summons a ghostly hound for two minutes. Hmmm, that might be handy in a tough boss fight. Worse than that, I had a small stack of healing items that were also unslotted. Put both of those on my hotbar, spent a little money on a retcon, and went in an slaughtered the boss with ease (as well as the Super Villian and two minions that spawned behind me as soon as she dropped).

All in all having a lot of fun with the game. Look forward to seeing some of the higher level zones.

Update

My PC is indeed still under warranty. One way or another I'll be back on with a decent rig by the end of the month. Missing most of the CO early start was a bummer. I was playing two slight updates of my open beta characters and enjoying the hell out of them before my PC croaked. Of course given the nerf cannon that was recently applied to the game, it seems as if I would have been in for some anguish regardless.

One quote that really bugs me in that producer letter is "A good number of players were complaining that the game wasn't challenging enough." I find this hard to believe, given that players almost never complain when they are overpowered. It has been remarked by folks more knowledgeable than I that the surest sign that a class is overpowered is that no-one that plays the class is complaining about it on message boards. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I also find it hard to believe that many players were complaining about the easy of combat in CO because it's a Superhero MMO, you should feel overpowered. Finally, the current most popular MMO on the market, WoW, is if anything easier than CO was during the open beta and early start. I know this because I switched back and forth between them in the same weekend (below).

I strongly suspect that what really happened is that Cryptic got terrified of how quickly players were leveling during the early start weekend, and decided that they needed to put on the brakes a bit. They tried nerfing XP gains in the last days of beta, and players whined up a storm. So instead, they buffed minion damage and nerfed defense across the board to slow down the pace of combat. Both inelegant solutions that won't have much impact on the core problem they are trying to deal with: superhardcore players will likely gun through the game and leave in droves withing the next few weeks.

I personally don't see that as such a bad thing, though the bean counters at Cryptic surely will feel differently. To me the strengths of CO are in catering to casual players and alt whores. It just not the style of game that hardcore players are going to dig long term, regardless of how long it takes to level. Hopefully things will have settled into some sort of sane medium by the time I get back to the game.

For the time being, desperate for something my backup PC can play at decent framerates and still run i-tunes in the background, I have fired up my old WoW account again. I had fun running around and buying everyone mounts and epic mounts. I also liquidated a level 62 character (my second highest) because his finances were in such terrible shape.

One thing that is really striking to me when I play WoW now is that the combat difficulty tends to be binary. Either encounters are so easy that you wouldn't have a chance of dying were you drunk and half asleep during combat (this has been tested!), or they are impossible at your level. There is nothing like the happy medium that you can find in most MMOs. For example, in Champions Online (at least over the weekend and in open beta) any time you are in a fight that includes a villain or master villain the game hits a "challenging but not frustrating" medium really well. Combat in general in LoTRO is also a good example of that in my mind.

WoW simply offers no real challenge for a solo player these days, at least not by the mid to high levels where most of my toons are sitting. Good for new MMO players I imagine, but to my tastes it becomes stale and repetitive quickly. I'm hoping that restarting one of my mains as a level one character of a super squishy class (Mage) will provide some entertainment.

Champions Online: Photos from my vacation in open beta

Thought I'd post a few of the screen shots I took, as well as point out some of the specific features that caught my eye.

This is the first guy I rolled up, Electric Dude.


He is as close as I could come to a remake of one of my City of Heroes characters, an Electric/ Electric Blaster of the same name. In terms of appearance he's identical. He also ended up with the same travel power (teleport), and a lot of similar combat abilities. My CoH character has a lot more powers than this guy did even when I took him up to 40 for the closed beta event. However in terms of how the characters play, it's not contest...this guy is a lot more fun. His controls are more fluid, and somehow he just "feels" more like a superhero.

The mundane appearance of this character helps me stand out a bit in a game where most players are running around as super hero clones, S&M call girls, cyborgs, space demons, werewolves, and anything else you can imagine. I also feel like it contrasts well with his fairly flashy powers:

One of the things I really like is that as you level up abilities they become more impressive. Level 1 electric blast is above, level 2 is below:


I didn't take any screen shots, but level 3 is a real whopper. I also love how teleport works. When you teleport you wink out of existence and become a little glowing ball of light that can fly really really fast:


From the standpoint of another player, you disappear and reappear in a different spot. In addition, while you are flying around as a little ghost ball you are invulnerable to attack (at least as far s I can tell), making it a great escape power. It's saved my ass quite a bit during the end of beta event.

Next I wanted to see what a melee class plays like so I rolled up this chick:



As has already been pointed out by others the melee animations in this game are great. She also gave me an opportunity to try out the travel power acrobatics. It's sort of a compromise between super jumping and super speed, neither as high as former or as fast as the latter. But you still run hella fast and jump hella high, I really liked it. Plus when you back up you do flips!



Finally, I decided to get a little more creative with the character editor. I started with the idea of a fire imp, but ended up with something a little different . . .

This was also the first character where I messed around with the ability to change the color of your powers. I turned most of his fire abilities from fire orange to light blue to make it look a little more like "eldrich energy." Below is what fire flight looks like:



He looks super cool when he is in full flight, however I needed a third hand to hit the print key while I held the camera in place for a good pose. It occurs to me now I could have mashed it with my nose...maybe next time.

All in all, I am very much looking forward to playing this "for reals" when the game goes live for pre-orders.

Champions Online: open beta impression

I absolutely had a blast in the open beta. The combat system is fast paced, fluid, and a lot of fun. The character customization, both in terms of what your character looks like as well as what they can actually do, is exceptional. The graphics are also lovely, at least if you turn off the thick black outlines in the graphics options.

My only real gripe is repetition in the starting area. Classes start out with two basic attacks that function nearly identically regardless of what class you pick, and you will be playing though the same tutorial with every new alt. But really in the grand scheme of things that's a pretty minor quibble. It takes maybe 15 minutes to gun through the tutorial area, and after that you get to pic from one of two main starter areas (one is a desert Hulk inspired area, another is a Canadian wilderness Alpha Flight inspired area). As soon as you get there you pick your first additional power and your first travel power (from many options), both of which potentially make a big difference in how your character plays. And from there on out is all gravy.

I'll definitely be pre-ordering this one, though I'll admit I'm a bit ticked that I missed the six month option. I also suspect that the naysayers that had their undergarments atwist right after the NDA went down either played early builds that weren't as polished as the current one, or simply aren't part of the potential audience for a game like this.

Things looking up for Champions Online, and other quick news hits

Among the bloggers that I follow, there were two in particular I was waiting on to give their impressions of Champions Online. Anjin, of Bullet Points, is a fan of comic books as well as MMOs. Sente, of A Ding World, is the most hardcore City of Heroes fan I follow. Both Sente and Anjin have posted their initial impression of the open beta, and are pretty positive. In fact, the the buzz on the net has completely turned around for this game. In addition, the open beta is truly open now (at least until Fileplanet runs out of beta keys). To me that signals confidence in the product on the part of Cryptic, and I think it's a great move. Hopefully, I'll be able to get one of the keys before Fileplanet runs out so I can stick my head in and form my own opinions.

In other news, to the surprise of few save Tobold, the leaked WoW expansion rumors turned out to be true. The expansion will certainly get me back to try things out, but my urge to play the current game has pretty much vanished. Obviously a goblin mage will will be the best character type to play (particularly if they have a flying carpet and a swami hat!)...why even bother leveling any of my existing toons?

Finally, City of Heroes is getting Issue 16 about the same time that CO launches. The main theme of the patch is that heroes will be able to customize the color of their powers. For example, if you are a blaster type that shoots lightning, you can make it any color you like. Unfortunately, CO offers this option right out of the box..which sort of steals their thunder in my mind.

Things aren't looking too good for Champions Online

The NDA went down on Champions Online, and so far the early reports from the MMO blogosphere are pretty universally negative. The sole semi-dissenter I've come across is a post by Beu over at Spouse Aggro, who points out that the game is still in beta. The problem with this counter argument, if indeed it is meant as a counter argument, is that I have never really seen a game make a major turn around during open beta. What you see is pretty close to what you will get at launch, at least for the content that they give you access to. Improvements tend to be in the area of client performance, if anywhere.

Even before this round of early reports, I found it odd that they hired Bill Roper to helm the launch of CO. Hellgate was a pretty amazing tragedy in my mind. There were a lot of great features in HL, but it got the legs kicked out from under it by a few unfathomably poor management and design decisions (but that's another post). Hiring the guy that steered that ship straight into a reef seemed (at best) a puzzling decision to me. A few months after he was hired, CO announced that you could buy a lifetime sub for $200...but only before the game launches (!?!). At that point alarm bells started going off in my head. Now that reports from the beta are coming in, color me officially skeptical.

All that said, this is a game that I've been following for more than a year. Whenever I get an opportunity to try it for free, I certainly will (I haven't yet looked into the conditions for getting into the open beta). I try never to form a firm opinion of something until I've experienced it myself. That tends to get me in to trouble a lot when I'm dining out. "Well, that's an odd sounding dish. Doesn't seem as if it would taste very good, but I'll never know if I don't try it..."

In any case, expect some impressions on CO here at some point. I sincerely hope that my skepticism is unwarranted.