What's so great about City of Heroes?

Of the MMOs I've tried or otherwise know something about, City of Heroes (/Villains) is the most atypical, and I think that's the major reason I like it so much.

Leaving aside the setting and theme for a moment, one thing that makes it really work for me is the fact that it is not balanced around what have become the typical character roles.

In traditional MMOs, there are generally three vital roles needed in a party. The first is a tank, a character whose main purpose is to attract the aggression of the enemies and take the majority of the damage. Their skills usually are geared towards these tasks and secondarily towards dealing moderate damage. The second is the healer, whose job is first and foremost to keep the tank alive, secondarily to keep the rest of the party alive. Aside from direct healing, their skills usually involve making the party stronger or the enemy weaker. Lastly you have the damage-dealer, or "DPS" (damage per second). This is any character type whose primary purpose is to create large amounts of damage, though they may have subsidiary skills.

It is possible to play MMOs like this without all three roles, or with character types that can do multiple roles, but it's generally somewhat harder, both in terms of the developer-created content and the mindset of players. The encounters are usually balanced with an assumption that you'll have all three roles, a maximum-sized party (generally anywhere from 4 to 8 players, depending on the game), and any subsidiary roles are also equally represented across the party. And most players expect that's how you will play, and that even if you have a character type that can do more than one type of thing, you'll do only one type of thing at a time.

I find that very limiting.

City of Heroes has 5 classes and therefore 5 basic roles (and its companion/flipside, City of Villains, also does, though they're slightly different roles)... Every class has both a primary set of powers and a secondary set of powers. Every character, regardless of class, also has access to additional powers, some of which have to do with travel (e.g., flying), some of which help you or your party with fighting, and a few other things. And at the highest levels, there are some special additional skills which vary by class but usually add some powers from a different role (armor for non-armored classes; ranged attacks for melee; DPS for support characters). It is possible for two people to both choose the same class and wind up with two extremely different characters, too, because when you start, you not only pick a class/role, but also a specific subset of powers (e.g., fire or ice or electric or illusion), and as you gain levels, you pick which exact powers you want (with certain powers not available until higher levels) in what order.

The hero side's five roles can be put into the traditional roles... sort of. But there are definitely differences.

There is a tank. It's even called a Tanker. Primary skills involve self-protection, but there are some skills meant to get and keep aggression, weaken (debuff) the enemies, or even strengthen (buff) party members. Secondary skills involve dealing damage at a fairly reasonable level, primarily with melee combat.

There are two primarily-DPS types. The first is a Scrapper. Scrappers and Tanks actually get many of the same power sets, but in reverse. Scrappers' primary is melee damage, and secondary is the self-protection sets. Blasters are mostly-ranged DPS. Their primary is nearly entirely ranged, but their secondary can have melee attacks, and both sets may have debuffs or what's known as "soft control" (stunning, for instance) as well.

And then there are the two... not-really-healer classes. Defenders primaries often have a heal of some sort, but not always, and they're actually primarily a buffing or debuffing class. Their secondary powersets overlap with Blaster's primaries and do ranged DPS. That makes them a buff/debuff and DPS hybrid, not a "healer". And Controllers, well, their primaries are about both "soft" and "hard" control -- immobilizing enemies, or preventing them from acting, and other similar things. Their secondaries overlap with Defender primaries, meaning they buff and debuff and occasionally heal.

(Villains have somewhat different classes. There are two that have similar powersets to Scrappers, but play rather differently, the first being a sort of reverse Tank which can tank but which is better at nonstop damage, the second being a hit-and-run assassin type. There's a class that combines the controls of Controllers with the secondary ranged/melee mix of Blasters. There's a sort of reverse Defender, with Blaster ranged damage as their primary and Defender buff/debuff powers secondarily. And there's a Mastermind, which has a mix of minion-summoning and blasting, and buff/debuff secondaries.)

And it is possible to play nearly all of the game with any character class, alone, without a group. There are two reasons. Firstly, except for outdoor encounters, the game changes the number of enemies you run into based on your group size. There isn't a problem where you go to a mission and find the enemy groups are large enough to challenge a full team (8 characters in this game). Secondly, although the support characters do a lot less damage than the DPS (or Tank) classes, they both do appreciable damage and have multiple ways to mitigate damage, often by making it so the enemies can't hit them in the first place.

Also, player mindset is mostly different. Transplants from other games sometimes don't or won't change how they approach the game, but people who primarily play CoH or have played a while know that, for instance, a team of 4 people who are all the same class is not only viable but may well be pretty efficient. There are still a lot of people who prefer full teams with a varied makeup, and for people to concentrate on their primary roles... but concentrate on is not the same as 'only do'. It may seem like a subtle difference, but trust me that it is not.

And a team of two, like I tend to play in, can get through content at a reasonable pace with reasonable safety, which is terrific, as the primary reason my fiancé and I play MMOs is to play together. Granted we also did it in "traditional" MMOs, but in CoH it's actually easy. There is only one set of content mostly closed off to us, a series of challenge missions that have minimum group sizes, and even those in theory can be done by one or two people if you can find a few players to start with who then leave the team. And a handful of things that are unwise to do in small groups, but usually possible... and one mission in the entire game that needs a full group of 8.

There's some other things I really like. The stories are good. The game is about the journey to the top level, rather than getting to the top level and then suddenly having bunches of content open up. There's PvP, but it's more an add-on than one of the main focuses of the game, which since I rarely PvP is a plus to me. The setting is modern and you play superheroes and supervillains. I like fantasy games, too, but it's nice to have something different. There's enough content that until recently it was almost impossible to do it all with one character... now there's a few ways to go back and see old content, but that's optional. And even if you do the same content again, with different characters it feels different. Doing the same mission with a duo that's a Controller and a Defender feels different than a duo that's a Blaster and a Scrapper, say. Plus if you take different paths through the game, even when you get back to the same stories, they're fun again... kinda like re-reading a good book, y'know?

Also, City of Heroes/Villains has, bar none, the absolute best character customization in any existing MMO. (There's an upcoming MMO, not surprisingly under the same distributor, which will rival it... but that's not out yet.) They have an awesome costume creator, and your costume is not in any way tied to your character class. If you want to make a support character that's actually a giant, armored robot? You can. If you want a melee-based DPS character who is 4'5 and wears a dress? Yup, you can. Traditional super-hero tights-and-mask? Obviously tons of options there, with varying patterns available. Zombie pirate with leaves growing out of your arms and a giant exposed brain? If you really want to, you can do that, too.

I've stopped playing the game twice. The first time was after the friend who introduced me to the game died. The second time was when we were having issues with the game because of their at-the-time piss-poor support of ATI cards and chose to leave for a while... but they're getting better, and in fact now have an ATI logo and someone from ATI working with them. But I went back both times, because... it's really a good game with exactly the types of things I like, and very little I do not.

And because I love knocking enemies off buildings and watching them plummet to their doom.