Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
whats the difference?
spaders
Member Posts: 7
I'm some what new to mmorpg's in general the only one I've ever played is WOW and i liked it but now I'm looking for something different. Someone please tell me the difference in COV and COH and is it p2p?
Comments
yeah if he gets the newest edition of the game whether in store or online, he'll get a few goodies too. (i think the next retail box also has a +15 days time card with it)
I bought mine online for £14.99 from the main site, for both CoH/CoV with the usual goodies associated with it.
yeah i was kinda lazy and felt like a game to play. Retail boxes are bah.. and within 2 hours i was busy creating new villians and enjoying the rogue isles.
Rockum he wasn't asking for the difference between Heroes and Villains, he was asking for the difference between this game and WoW.
Spaders, thare are a number of differences, besides the obvious one of genre, though that's kind of a biggie.
1. CoH is not nearly so loot-driven. In WoW if you find a sword you play that sword. If you find a better axe, you switch to the axe. Etc. In CoH if your hero shoots fireballs, he always shoots fireballs. The swordmaster will never drop his Katana or Broadsword and pick up something else. The hero who moves the earth to encase the enemy will always ... you get it. You get more powers as you level and there are "enhancements" you can find or buy to improve how these powers work - but basically heroes have their signature powers and that's that.
On that note, costumes are also not related to what you find (with a very very few exceptions). If you want to change your costume, you go to a tailor shop and pay a little cash for the switch, and there are thousands of choices to make. You don't need to find piece of red cloth just to wear a red shirt.
2. CoH is based off a 1 vs many formula, not a 1v1. From WoW you probably know all the situations where you have to pull or at least use some Crowd Control and you desperately hope not to get more enemies than you can handle. Even WoW teams are often trying to stick to 1 enemy at a time (though they are Elites).
In CoH it's expected that 1 hero roughly equals 3 minion-level thugs. AOEs are common and powerful, shields and life totals can handle many at once, and a full team of 8 will routinely fight spawns of 16 at varying toughness - and even at that they often pull 2 or more spawns together for a big fight.
3. CoH moves faster. In WoW you get your mount at 40, and it moves what, 80% faster? In CoH anyone can pick a "travel power" as one of their powers at 14, and it moves them up to 400% faster. Teleport powers are common (anyone can have one) and transfers between zones are instantaneous. Also with the 1 v many attitude discussed above, once you get high enough to hit your stride missions are about constantly moving from one group to the next.
4. Waypoints on the map. None of this "northeast of town" type directions - when you have a mission it is marked for you, and your teammates, right on the map.
5. 90% instances. This is a biggie. Though there is a large environment of enemies, and occaisionally a mission asks you to take out a certain number, those aren't the standard. Missions are instances inside buildings or caves, spawned specifically for your team size and difficulty setting. This means you can always expand a mission to your whole team, or pick one for the team and end up soloing. It also means you never have to wait for a boss to respawn because someone beat you to him.
6. Spawning rules. Not a big deal, but a very nice tough. With very rare exceptions that are meant to be ambushes, no enemy in the outdoors environment will ever spawn within aggro range of you - or even in line of sight. This protects you from having guys pop up right on top of you and attack, and also helps the immersion.
7. Character variety and alt-friendliness. And serious division of labor. This is like 3 points but I'll wrap them up in one.
When I played WoW, I never really felt like alternate characters were really that different. Everyone finds some armor and puts it on, gets a melee weapon, a ranged attack, a little crowd control, a focused higher-damage attack from a resource pool, something interruptible, etc. Yes there are differences there is a lot the same.
In CoH characters are very good at what they do. A good healer can get the whole team from 1 HP to full in matter of seconds - and do that over and over. (And there are many of ways to defend a team besides healing. Many!) A Tank can keep 16 or more enemies distracted at once, and take the beating pretty well (though he doesn't damage as fast as others). A Blaster has a full set of range attacks and a second set for range attacks - many can put a full non-stop chain of AOEs - but they have no defense whatsoever. And that guy I mentioned earlier who encases enemy in rock? Well that's an example of a controller and they can hold an enemy not just immobile but completely powerless, and do it indefinitely, while you're beating on him. (None of that "wake up after one hit" crap.
Because of this the game is designed expecting that many people will play different characters for different perpectives. And since even two different types of power (e.g. shooting ice from your hands vs shooging with a gun) can play differently even while being the same archetype (blaster), there are many choices. I myself have about 40 characters I run including both heroes and villains, and I rotate through them all pretty regularly.
It also means teams can really have great synergy if they play together - you get the best damagers, the best protected taunters, the best defenders, etc, each doing their thing.
Now you should know that they just don't have the depth of WoW - no one does. There's not much to do after 50 right now which is related to the Alt thing. There are a variety of missions, some including some very cool things, but on the whole they can feel repetitive since they are all taken from the same pool. The game picks a map from a list (warehouse, labratory, cave, office, villain base, etc), picks a variation on that type, selects an enemy group to fill it, picks an objective (save the hostage(s), find the stolen item, defeat the boss, protect an item from destruction, etc), and then spawns it. And a full mission takes 10 minutes to an hour, rarely longer, and involves defeating easily dozens or hundreds of enemies.So by the time you hit the mid-30s you may feel like you've seen everything. There are unique things in the game, but most are tucked away at the end of a story arc (series of missions from the same contact) or on a Taskforce (series of missions all run with the same team). They just don't have the manpower to craft that many different structures over and over for the sake of variety. But again, I don't think any game does.
So obviously I like it. Looking over that list I don't think there are a lot of games with the same type of priorities. To me it has a very fast "we're not going to waste your time" attitude that I love. I can log on, grab a mission, go exactly there quickly, fight my mission with no waiting for respawns, and call up another one. With the recent (free) expansion/issue, crafting was finally added to the game and it does bring in a new element, but the game is still very much about fighting bad guys and looking good.
(BTW CoV is very much just like the Horde is to the Alliance. The same game, but different. So although I said "heroes" here it applies to both.)
Currently playing:
DC Universe
Planetside 2
Magic Online
Simunomics, the Massive Multiplayer Economic Simulation Game. Play for free.