City of Heroes/Villains Glossary

Some helpful concepts to know for when I blather about CoX. Or you can pick it up as you go along, I guess, but this is so you don't have to. Warning: quite long. I tried to arrange it so the most common terms were earliest, though. See also: MMO generay glossary.

Last updated: 10 Feb 2010.

CoX: City of Heroes (CoH) plus City of Villains (CoV). These days they're the same game anyhow; you get access to both sides with one purchase. Either way, refers to both sides of the game as a whole.

Zone: A distinct area in CoX, most often a neighborhood. Each Zone has its own feel to it, different levels of enemies, and different types of enemies. A Hazard Zone is a zone with an unusual level of challenge in the form of larger or denser groups of enemies, often a ruined area of some sort.

Prestige, Infamy, Influence, Merits: The various currencies of the game. Infamy and Influence, both shortened to Inf, are the basic type, used to purchase costume changes and enhancements (see below). Prestige is what you earn for your supergroup (see below). Merits are specialized rewards earned by certain tasks that can be used for various things.

SuperGroup (SG): Like a clan or a guild, a group for people to join. Except you can make one-person SGs, or, in our case, two-person ones. If you have a supergroup, you can build a Base. Bases can be used for a number of things, but the most common things are to store certain types of items and have certain items to aid gameplay. Purchasing these requires prestige, which you can only earn in SG Mode. At higher levels, if you're in SG Mode, you earn less Inf, but you can also earn very large amounts of Prestige.

Costumes and Costume Slots: You start with one costume, but when you get to be higher level, you can get additional ones, allowing you to have multiple looks available without always editing your costume (though you can do that at any time for a fee). When you are in SG mode, any costume can optionally (and partly or fully) display the colours and icon of the Supergroup instead of the original colours you chose, which also gives you more looks.

Archetype (AT): Character class, the basic type of character you are:

AT Type Summary

Heroes

• Blaster: Primaries are mostly ranged attacks, sometimes with debuff or status effects. Secondaries are mostly a mix of range and melee and debuffs or statuses. Blasters do more damage by firing off a lot of attacks in a row.
• Controller: Primaries usually are status effects and debuffs; secondaries are mostly the same choices as Defender primary. Controllers do more damage to held, immobilized, disoriented, and sleeping foes.
• Defender: Primaries include buffs, debuffs, and occasional status effects; secondaries are mostly the same choices as Blaster primary. Defenders use less endurance when their teammates are hurt.
• Scrapper: Primaries are melee attacks, sometimes with debuff or status effects. Secondaries are mostly the same as Tanker primary. Scrappers have a high chance to get a double-damage, critical hit.
• Tanker: Primaries are defensive/resistance abilities. Secondaries are mostly the same as Scrapper primary, but there are some additional sets only available to Tankers. Tankers taunt simply by hitting things.

Villains

• Brutes basically have the same powers as Tankers but in reverse, making them a bit more like a Scrapper in some ways with a bit different powersets. Brutes do extra damage by damaging enemies and taking damage.
• Corrupters basically have the same powers as Defenders in reverse, making them a bit more like a Blaster in some ways. They can do extra damage to foes whose health is getting low.
• Dominators have most of the same primaries as Controllers, and most of the same secondaries as Blasters, making them a status-oriented damage dealer. After a certain amount of attacks made, they have a special power that buffs them in several ways, including doing longer-lasting control and more damage.
• Masterminds have a primary involving summoning minions (with various powers of their own) and strengthening them, with a few ranged attacks. Their secondaries are roughly the same as Corrupter/Defender secondaries. When they are close to their minions, those minions hit more often and do more damage, and may reduce the damage the mastermind takes.
• Stalkers have primaries and secondaries similar to Scrappers with minor changes. One of those changes is the ability to be stealthy and strike from stealth, doing a extra damage to foes. As well, if they use their assassin strike power, they can fear or debuff the to hit chance of all enemies near their target. They also have a chance to critical hit foes when not stealthy; the chance increases with more teammate nearby.

Powerset: A sub-type of character class, denoting your specific power types, e.g., Fire Control. A Primary is your main skill set with powers that are the essence of the AT; a Secondary is your other skill set, with additional powers of a different sort. Powersets plus AT are how people refer to their characters, e.g., an Illusion/Storm Controller: A Controller AT with Illusion primary and Storm secondary. One can also choose from Pool Powers (universally available to all ATs), and at higher levels, heroes get Ancilliary Powers and villains get Patron Powers, special powersets one can only choose one of.

Powers are, of course, the individual powers within a powerset. When you level up, you usually have several choices of powers. What order you take them in (and which ones) is up to you. There are also Temporary Powers, which either are awarded for (or during) certain missions or can be created; they usually have a limited number of uses or expire after a certain amount of time. A few temporary powers have versions given permanently to characters as Veteran Rewards, extras given to people who have been subscribed for a certain length of time.

Enhancement: An item you can buy or create that improves a power you've taken. When you reach certain levels, you can add two (or later three) Enhancement Slots to your choice of powers so you can put these items to use (each power also comes with one slot). Improvements include extra damage, extra accuracy, less downtime between uses, and so forth. They come in a lot of different sorts and I won't go into all that here, but I might occasionally mention getting a particular good one or making a lot of Inf from selling one or something.

Ding!: The sound of leveling. Actually it's a more complex sound than that, but reproducing it in text accurately would be hard. Anyhow, some people say "I dinged 30 during this mission". The appropriate response to a ding is "Gratz".

Mission: Like a quest, more or less. A specific objective. Missions are sometimes stand-alone, and sometimes part of story arcs. There are also Newspaper Missions and Radio Missions, which are random, one-time missions. Doing a number of these will allow you to run a Safeguard or Mayhem mission. Safeguards are hero missions that have you keep a bank from being robbed, city objects from being destroyed, etc. Mayhems are the villain side version, where you're the one robbing the bank or destroying things, and are a lot more fun.

Rikti; The Rikti War; Rikti Invasions: A major part of the backstory of the game involves some aliens or dimension travelers called Rikti. In the backstory, there had been a short but devastating war with the Rikti, and there were still some on our planet/in our dimension, many of which were in hazard zones. The Rikti War used to refer to this. However, a couple years ago, the Rikti invaded again, and since then there's been an ongoing series of zone-wide invasion events. So people now sometimes say "the first Rikti war" to mean the original, considering the current situation to be the new Rikti war. Rikti invasions are awesomely mind-blowing (and lag-inducing, sadly) events that dozens of heroes or villains will group up to tackle.

Zombie Invasion: A recent Halloween-based event that has lingering effects. Like a Rikti Invasion only with zombies, it's a zone-wide event and everyone gathers to destroy them. Both Invasion types can be triggered by certain player actions.

Giant Monster: Particularly tough enemies that require a very large group to destroy. Each is associated with a particular zone. Anyone can contribute to an attempt to take down a monster, because they did some very tricksy and cool coding to make it so your level doesn't matter (a version of this also happens during the Invasion events, but it's a bit different).

Con; Con Colour: Based on a level difference between you and an enemy, and whether or not the enemy is a harder type. "White" means the enemy is more or less the same power as you; most characters can face a group of 3 Whites without a problem. "Yellow" is slightly harder; Orange is harder still; Reds are the hardest you should normally tackle; Purples are all things high enough level that you should generally (but not always) avoid them. On the flip side, Blues are slightly weaker; Greens weaker still; Greys are very weak, and most of them don't give rewards of any sort. Giant Monsters always con Purple but they're a special case.

Buff, Debuff: Buffs strengthen. Debuffs weaken. Both can affect how quickly you regain endurance (you need endurance to do things), how quickly you regain health, your ability to hit and to damage, your ability to avoid attacks (defense), how much damage you take from attacks (resistance), and how quickly your powers recharge.

Status, Status Effect: Non-damage results of attacks. A hold makes you completely unable to act. A sleep makes you unable to act but can be broken by you taking damage or being healed. A stun makes you unable to act temporarily and makes you walk around crazily for a bit. An immobilize keeps you from moving but lets you act normally. Slows slow your movement (and a lot of powers that slow also debuff recharge). Knockbacks, well, knock you around, down, or up in the air, and for a few moments afterwards you can't do anything. Confusion makes you think your allies are your enemies and vice versa. And a taunt will make a target focus on the taunter for a time. Some attacks do only the status effect; some do it in addition to damage.