Customer Reviews

City of Heroes (Prima's Official Strategy Guide)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Prima's relationship with game companies often allows them great access to the innards of game development during alpha and beta testing, which usually leads to some useful insights in their guides. Unfortunately, that's not the case here. While the combat section of this guide is fairly well detailed, the meat of the game is in character development where this book fails with poor research and outright errors.

The good news is that there's good use to this book if you're wandering around Paragon City, the City of Heroes base. Creature factions are very well described, with useful tidbits on how to fight them. For instance, two melee fighters shouldn't simultaneously attack a Circle of Thorn (COT) mage as the mage will self destruct, likely killing both fighters. It's hard to tell this simply by playing the game. Geography and combat tricks are also well described.

Unfortunately, the character development section has some problems. First, its readily apparent that many of Prima's testers gave only a cursory look at several skill sets. As an example, in only a couple hours of gameplay its readily apparently that the most powerful illusion controller attack is Deceive, which takes over the target for 30 seconds. In the guide, its mentioned only in passing. Second and more disturbingly, there are a number of errors in the skill guides. For instance, Siphon Speed under the Defender/Controller Kinetics power set claims to give you the ability to fly. It doesn't, and if you waste how many days to get to level 10 for it you will be very disappointed. Given that this skill never even had that during beta testing it's clear there was very poor editing involved. Finally, some of the technical details are also just outright wrong. Most notably, NCSoft has outright repudiated Prima's claim that you're limited to a certain number of enhance buffs per skill.

Games change from alpha to beta to gold, and clearly there have been some changes in City of Heroes that are hard to capture in a published guide. Nevertheless, Prima didn't do its job on this one. Some of the blatant errors in here along with signs of very little play testing of other skills take two stars off of this. Still, for a beginner's background to combat this has a decent amount of value. Check the bulletin boards for character development issues though!

It's always hard for a publisher to create a guide for an ever-developing MMO like City of Heroes. However once again Prima has decided to make a quick buck by releasing a guide that was outdated a day after the game's launch.

The majority of the information is from the beta days of CoH, and there are plenty of typos and misinformation strewn throughout. For newbies, the Zone maps are fine, as are the character generation guides.

However none of the information is very "deep". It provide basic stats for an enemy, which is usually incorrect in some fashion or another. The guide lists arch villians but doesn't give you any idea where or how to find them. It tells you how to start Task Forces or certain Quests but gives you no help on solving them.

Most of the text for the mobs and areas is lifted straight from the game itself, with little commentary from the editors. There are no handy cross referenced charts for mobs. There isn't even an index.

Character generation strategies are strictly for newbies. According to this guide, pretty much every character ability is fantastic and works great with every character. For those who play healer or ranged archetypes, it's obviously a poor idea to dump slots and skills into close combat abilities - yet this guide makes it sound like a good idea.

There's some interesting information on how the Trial Zones work (which haven't even gone live yet and will most likely be changed from what's written here when they do go live). No mention is made of the Tailor stores or anything that happened in the game after the Beta. Fortunately the game world hasn't changed much 2 months after the guide's release.

Overall this is yet another 2 star Prima Guide. Poorly edited, inaccurate, and outdated even at the time of the game's release. It's good for newbies, and the zone maps and most mob stats are accurate, but all the information contained can be easily found online, updated and for free.

Poorly constructed guide. On the one hand, it has all the basics you might expect; character development details, zone details, and enemy details. They also include some useful tips and a whole chapter on why copying trademark characters is bad taste (hey its they're book, there allowed the occasional tangent).

However it was way too obvious that each power, as well as some of the enemies, was researched by different authors. You may be reading about one power for an archetype that is described well, turn the page to the next power and find it poorly described. In addition they have obvious errors in the book. For example they mention a supergroup vault, which COH designers have told me directly doesn't exist.

All in all, this is book was obviously slapped together much like a frat kids research paper. Shameful for a proffesional game guide company.

This book is not entirely unhelpful, but I would not recommend buying it without looking at it first.

There is some good information here, such as:
- Guides (though incomplete) to the city's various zones
- Expanded information about powers, archetypes, and origins
- Some scant but helpful information on tactics and gameplay

The problem I have is that there was so much more that could have been included. For example:
- Location of the various "stores"
- More advice on character creation and power choice
- Information about the villiains that would be, I dunno, maybe helpful? (tactics rather than tables of stats and origin info)

I also believe that the readers would have been better served by delaying the guide a month or two so that the many modifications to the game after launch could have been included. Instead, the guide was rushed out and still includes some erroneous information about gameplay and even some incorrect terminology (many aspects of gameplay and the names of some powers changed at launch due to suggestions by beta players).

In short, you might get some good information here, but you should try to get a look at the book to make sure it will be useful to you before you shell out the money. Here's hoping that Prima will put out a second edition of this guide.

This was a good reference back when it was published but I doubt much of it applies to today's version of the game. I am still playing it after 5 years and it has really changed since the beginning.

After owning the paper-back original version of this guide for COH, I bought the ring-bound version. The ring-bound version is up-to-date through Issue #6 and it is in a totally different printed format than the paperback version. It is also designed differently and probably has much better information in it since it was created well after the game had been out for a long while. Go for the ring-bound version if you want more current information. The paper-back version is good for starting, and most of its basic strategies and concepts will help you design a good character with good powers.

Sadly, this book was outdated and inapplicable the day it hit the stands. Repeated changes to the City of Heroes interface, infrastructure and gameplay have moved the game so far away from this book it often seems to be discussing an entirely different game. In many ways, it is.

If you're looking for a quick start guide, strategy guide, or even just a collection of helpful hints, this is NOT the book you want.

The strategy guide is outdated, and should be revised for the current issue of city of heroes, the book still refers to the villains "council" as Fifth Column, and there are other things that are clearly outdated, it would be nice if Prima would take the time to give us a quality product, all in all, I would say, if there is a marketplace seller with a cheap price on this, go for it, it's been useful, but don't pay full price for an outdated strategy guide.

Product has been very helpfull and contains many good tip to assist player. It was shipped from amazon in a very timely manner and arrived in superb condition.

Guide is ok in dealing with chara building and development, but quite a few errors. The maps were great as were the few tips they gave for tactics.Little disappointed no badge listing or how to get them. Only buy guide if you want a little more info on game.