City of Heroes / Villains Issue 13 and Issue 14: Multi Builds and Bases

The hub for City of Heroes articles is now located here:

http://www.brighthub.com/video-games/mmo/topics/cohcov.aspx

Once again, Positron provides the basic details:

Another innovation to City of Heroes, we are delivering the ability to have two different build-outs of each character, including which powers are selected and which Enhancements are slotted. This will now be possible for characters who want to take advantage of it. By visiting any Trainer you can switch the entire build of your character to an alternate one. You can use this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE. It’s up to you.

Calling this an innovation is pushing it, since countless games have had such features before. For example, EverQuest 2 has a crafted mirror object that allows people to create multiple Achievement Ability builds. It is, however, a very interesting and potentially good idea. It would let people create PvE/PvP builds, solo/group builds, or concept/utility builds. The devil is in the details, as always. Will the multi builds be able to share enhancements (especially IOs), or will players need to buy or craft twice as many enhancements? The effect on the economy could be pretty extreme if people need twice as many enhancements to benefit from this feature. On the villain side it could be positively disastrous since the economy there is already in shambles.

The base details are pretty minor so far. One hopes there will be more information available soon. According to Positron:

One of the first things coming for base changes is going to be in Issue 13, and that is a repricing for a lot of things that supergroups can purchase for their bases.

This is nice, but it was needed years ago. Very few players participate in anything base related any longer - especially base raids. But this bit of information was far more interesting:

And in addition, one of the things we're doing is we're getting rid of the Base Salvage out of the game, because a lot of the players were getting confused with the Invention Salvage, since they both get the same kind of message. Players get excited when they get Invention Salvage, and then they get disappointed when they find out it was only Base Salvage.

It is about time they did this. The piles and piles of base salvage really clogged up inventory management. Now if they could take the next logical step and let people carry and store more invention salvage, they'd be onto something. And by more, I mean 10-100 times more. One of the main reasons people can so effectively game the salvage markets is the fact that it is such a hassle to put very much on the market. Carried, Stored, and For Sale inventory space is extremely limited. As a result, people end up vendoring the overwhelming majority of their salvage instead of bothering with the market.