City of Heroes has been the patron saint of Superhero sim fans for the last seven years, providing them a safe haven to create new heroes or villains , develop elaborate backstories and experience the life of a masked crusader (for good or evil) in a mature environment since 2004. Cryptic (the original developers) and Paragon (currently in charge) have injected a lot of content into the game in the past seven years, but one thing that neither developer added to the game, before today, was raids. With today's big expansion, Issue 20, Paragon introduces the endgame staple of MMORPGs to CoH, with a few unique twists to make their own stand out.
The most surprising element of the new raids, labeled Incarnate Trials, is their ability to scale to the number of players you bring in the raid. Grab anywhere between 7 and 23 fellow players and the encounters will scale their difficulty (not just hit points, but the number of adds that spawn and other boss mechanics) to match the size of your group. Even better, the new League system is a nostalgic tip of the hat to old-school raiding, allowing you to form groups of up to 48 players to tackle content together. Content scaling is very difficult to balance, but if done right, I believe it provides the best compromise for players: no matter what size raid you prefer, you can play it. I'm looking forward to hearing from City of Heroes' newly-elected raid leaders about how well the difficulty-scaling works.
The system launches with two Incarnate Trials, both revolving around taking down the corrupt dictator of Praetoria, Emperor Cole. You can ransack his secure prison the "Behavioral Adjustment Facility," where you have to stop the prisoners from escaping while taking down the massive guards, or blast your way onto a military base in the Lambda Sector to battle Cole's genetically-engineered super soldiers. Either way, it ain't gonna be easy.
Luckily, you're getting some added power to help tackle 'em. The Issue also adds new tiers of Incarnate Powers: endgame-only ability slots that add extra oomph to existing powers or open up new options altogether. For those not quite ready for the endgame, the Issue also adds 2 lower-level Task Forces to tackle as a group. The official launch trailer is posted below. Be sure to let us know what you think of the new raid content in the comments below, or email us !
