A charged champion

When Champions Online released I was all over it and I loved the game – despite some flaws I found the combat quite fun and a mix of great and so-and-so missions. After about 4 months the activity dropped significantly and suring the first half of the year it did not get much play time. I had maybe 14-15 alts and the lack of variation in the mission options did take its toll.

Recently I have begun to reacquaint myself with the game again – this time pretty much only playing one character. I still do not think I can stomach too much altitis in the game at the moment.

Since I have been playing an electricity stalker in City of Heroes/Villains I thought why not try electricity this time in Champions also? It was a powerset I had not really tried much before in the game.

Dr Charge getting ready to electrocu...save the world!

Said and done, I created a Dr Charge. I skipped tutorial and headed into the Canadian crisis zone. From there I continued to Canada and the Southwest Desert for the initial 15 levels. When I first started playing Champions most of the characters received some kind of defensive passive skill – regen was common, but also others were used. This time I decided to go all out offensive though and see how that worked out.

I started out with the two initial powers you get when you select Electricity at character creation –  Electric Bolt (energy builder) and Chain Lightning. This was working so-and-so. I added more passive powers later – Ionic Reverberation and Electric Form. At some point here I realised that charging Chain Lightning to full did not do so much more damage on a single enemy, but it was more likely to jump to other enemies also. However, in a number of cases it was better/quicker for me to just shoot short bursts on a single target. Using this as a variation it started to play out much nicer. I also switched from Guardian role to Avenger role, boosting damage. Supposedly a bit more of a glass cannon than Guardian since defensive powers would be less effective. But since I do not have much of defensive powers anyway it did not matter much in that regard. I pretty much use Avenger all the time now.

Later I picked up Thunderstrike, which was quite nice as an initial attack. It would pretty much one-shot minions and drop the health of a villain to half, so it was a good start for a fight. It has a long recharge time though, so not something that would be spammed.  Next one that I picked up was Sparkstorm – a really fun power! It is a maintained power which essentially electrocutes enemies around, causing them to shake, drop health and possibly get knocked back.  At this point the character has really started to shine, it is pretty fun and the powers can be quite devastating. The latest power I have picked up now is Gigabolt – quite powerful, will see how I end up using that one.

Electrocuting the minions of Mr Zombie

Most of the missions are the same as I remembered them up to and including teen levels. There was a new instanced mission in Canada though which I had not encountered before (saving some hikers in a cave) and they had changed the mission Dead Alive. This included defeating a Mr Zombie. Originally he was placed out in the open and thus pretty much camped by a lot of people – in particular during a period of time when he dropped a rare item. At that time he was constantly camped by level 40s who had nothing better to do than to try to get this drop.

To my surprise (a pleasant one), Mr Zombie has now moved away – he now has his own instanced dungeon where one has to fight through hordes of low level zombies before picking a fight with him. I think this was an improvement for this mission.

Right now Dr Charge has reached level 18 and is roaming around in Millenium City. Most of the missions there are the same, as far as I can tell. I do not try to do all missions though and avoid the ones I definitely think is boring. I still do missions which have lower level than me at this point, so it works out fairly well so far.

While part of the experience right now is going in old tracks, I must say that I quite enjoy it. The new content like Serpent Lantern is probably something I am going to tackle once I get to some of the more rough spots. I am in no rush, so perhaps there they release more new content also before I hit some of those.

Unfortunately it seems that my Super Group is not that active, so there was not really anyone from there to team up with. Will have to see how that part works out.