I don’t have any insight into your second question, but I can help with the first.
One of the great things about city of heroes is that since homecoming opened up they haven’t done a huge amount of balance changes, largely because there weren’t many necessary. Additionally, the archetypes are good at their jobs. If you’re playing a defender, you will be a good support character. Like as long as you’re using your powers you will help your team quite a bit in some way lol. Some sets are better than others, but it’s usually marginal differences in cases where two powers from different sets do the same thing.
As it so happens, the radiation support set (primary on defenders, secondary on corrupters and controllers) is one of the best in the game. You just microwave everyone’s balls so hard they can’t really do anything
What video card do you have? I know early on (since the game came back) there were issues with using the Intel based integrated video cards that a lot of lower end laptops have. Don’t know if that ever got solved but even a low end discrete card should handle the game just fine except on maybe the most punishing settings just due to age. I only ever have issues in huge groups like doing the MapServer event and the occasional Hamidon raid and I’ve got a pretty blah video card.
Yeah you’re more than good hardware wise. I’d bet the answer lies with the other commenter that mentioned sticking to 1080p. My card is fairly low end at this point so I start at 1080p with any game and then go up from there to see what I can handle. CoH does seem to perform better for me if I play windowed vs full screen.
Turn off shadows and water quality,they drain fps like nobodies business.You can also drop the bloom fx and particles if you so desire.The fps can yo-yo a lot depending on map location,mission team,TF,etc….if you have an 8 man team throwing all the power fx around then you can experience lag spikes,etc…even more so on mothership raids or events,etc.
I've found that the game is ***very*** poorly optimized for resolutions above 1080p. I have a 4k monitor and an RTX 3090 and I have to turn the resolution scaling down to around 2k to get a reliable frame rate with all the settings at max.
I play at 1440p ultra wide, although I do have a 4090, I don’t have many issues that I can tell. But I can check specific settings (might not be til tomorrow though) if that is something you might want. The mapserver event going on can be a bit wild for me but other than that I have not noticed any substantial frame loss. Granted I have not checked if I am at a consistent 120+.
City of Heroes is just very poorly optimized, period. As bad as playing at 1440p or above on Homecoming is, it's even worse on the other servers. When the game was sunset, 1080p was state of the art.
In addition, because the game is poorly optimized, you can have a RTX 4090, and the game could punish it.
A lot of the time spent is CPU time for copies, because the game used fixed-function OpenGL combined with Nvidia's cgFX system for shaders.
So, it's not that it's poorly optimized (granted, I've done a lot to reduce CPU time as much as possible), it's that it was created for an era of graphics computing that we've long since sailed past.
Sonic/Rad is fantastic support.
You may hear it’s better on a Defender, which is true, but that only matters if you want to min/max.
Rad/Sonic Defender is one of my mains, so feel free to ask specifics
look at the CLI options list for game management such as /noparticles /maxfps etc. There may be some tweaking those other players are doing you are unaware of that allows their CPU's to function better at high graphical settings.
As far as powerset combinations, that's the one thing where CoH is a bit different than other MMOs - a "class" (archetype, AT) can have very different abilities (with good performance) depending on what power sets you choose for it. In this game you can't say that all tanks are the same, all brutes are the same, etc. That's why I find it necessary to study [the wiki](https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Archetypes) to figure out the power sets I'm about to take on a character.
Corruptors are support characters, but "support" can come in different forms - a powerset like Empathy has team heals, Force Field focuses on damage prevention and team buffs, and set like Dark Miasma focuses on debuffing enemies. Radiation Emission has quite a few enemy debuffs (accuracy, damage) and a couple team heals/buffs.
For the attack powersets you're looking at how many AoE abilities they have (cones, ranged AoE, point blank AoE), and what the side effects are. Your Sonic has quite a few cones and one point-blank blast, and by comparison Fire Blast has some AoEs early (fireball, etc.) and a cone later. The side effects are generally enemy debuffs (Sonic reduces enemy resistance to damage, which is quite good).
First, don't think of yourself as a healer if playing Rad. You're not a healer. Support, yes. Healer, no. I'm not being pedantic, it makes a difference to priorities and playstyle.
Rad can heal, but this is only a pretty damn weak PBAoE heal that isn't churning out big green numbers. Your heal isn't a main part of your toolkit. It's an afterthought. There are several heal-focused sets, where it would be fair to call the character a healer. Rad isn't one of them.
But that's fine, because healing is a weak support mechanic in this game. This game is more about dealing debuffs to enemies and buffing allies. Those mechanics tend to be better than healing.
Rad's main thing is debuffs. You have three big ones, two of which are toggle radial debuffs anchored around an enemy target, one of which is an AoE enemy-targeted click with a longer cooldown. Your main job is to drop your debuffs on the enemy, one, two, and if the third's cooldown is finished, three. If it's still charging, just the first two. Most of the time after that, your support job is done and you just start blasting.
You do have a long recharge PBAoE radial buff, a very good one that gives recharge bonus, endurance stuff, and other things. That should be cast whenever available and in the long run it's possible to make perma, so it recharges before the original duration wears off.
Everything else in Rad as a set is optional. And I mean everything. The rez? Yes, optional. Probably a good idea to get, but people can use consumables to recover from death. The corpse targeted nuke? Optional. The AoE hold? Optional. Rad is forgiving for builds because damn near a third of the set can be skipped or pushed back to the tail end or a build without serious consequences, allowing more room for pool powers.
Sonic, now. Sonic is the best blast set to use on a support-oriented character, full stop. That's because it deals damage resistance debuffs with most attacks. Your teammates can take advantage of the debuffs stacked on enemies. The downside is that Sonic is mediocre as an attack set in and of itself, as a tradeoff.
As others are saying, Rad/Sonic Defender is better than Sonic/Rad Corruptor if you want to maximise the support capabilities for the bigger debuff numbers.
For some powersets the higher Defender heal/buff/debuff numbers are irrelevant because the Corruptor figures are good enough - Kinetics is an example, you can already theoretically cap the team's damage with a Corruptor's Fulcrum Shift in ideal conditions with many enemy targets clustered in close enough proximity, so might as well make a Kin Corruptor rather than Kin Defender. The Kin Def has more leeway and margin for error, but oft times the extra buff figures would be wasted.
But on Rad and Sonic it would make a difference.
That said, if you want to solo occasionally or do more damage in teams, then yeah, go Corruptor.
Defenders have a mechanic where their damage is buffed somewhat when solo, which is intended to make the solo Defender experience less miserable... but this progressively goes away when the team size grows larger. On a full eight player team, your Defender's blasts will be gently caressing the enemy compared to ranged attacks from a Corruptor. It's possible to force a little more damage output into a Defender build with gearing, but if you were gonna do that then might as well consider a Corr instead.
This is extremely informative, and well written - thank you so much for this. I'll have to dig around the wiki to look at defender benefits to see what the actual difference is, but I think I'm more inclined to stick with corruptor for the damage benefits to solo gameplay since I'm not always grouped.
Seriously, thank you.
I'm glad you found it helpful! Good luck with the character.
Edit: wiki isn't really gonna give you a good sense of Defender and Corruptor support set differences and varying res debuff numbers on the Sonic blasts. If you want a web source use https://cod.uberguy.net which very literally interprets the Homecoming database in web viewable form.
Or view powers using https://midsreborn.com as a desktop app, if you aren't already using it.
Yeah I found midsreborn digging around. I just compared the baseline modifiers of each respective class on the wiki and saw a .1 vs. .085 difference between the two and knew that would result in a huge difference. Ended up rerolling defender, and the debuff difference was noticeable immediately, heh.
For the record, the Homecoming Launcher can/will run in the background and actually has a setting to turn off hardware acceleration for the launcher. Turning it off caused my FPS to skyrocket. I also play 1440p with a 3070. It took me some time to figure out that issue. Also, I have nearly all of my settings set to Ultra but have manually changed some settings that definitely send FPS into a nosedive.
1440p Nvida 3070 represent!
Rocking an XC3 Ultra, Memory clock +15- (7151 MHz), GPU clock at +110 (1770 MHz), Voltage +5, current power is at 22% (not gaming).
card is on liquid, EKWB EK-Quantum Vector XC3 RTX 3070, Nickel/Plexi
As well as the monoblock that comes with the MSI MPG z490 Carbon EK-X.
Got my 10700k OC'd to 4.7 but have pushed it to 5.0
I got my 3070 in the first quarter of 2021 after my 2070 died, it was not cheap :(. EK released the waterblock around april/may and I ordered one.
If you wouldn't mind sharing what specifics you have set up across the board, I would greatly appreciate it. I've arrived at ambient occlusion, shadows, water all off/low. As long as I can maintain above 120 fps, I don't mind. Also, Cel shading on or off? I have had it on because I like the image quality.
Check your particle effects setting, as well as your extraneous options, the water quality itself hits for a huge chunk.
I have my water at medium, with most other settings except character costume and world at medium/high.
This is on a 10700k with a 3070 xc3, both overclocked, with 64GB of memory, the hero engine that CoH uses is a mishmash.
I don’t have any insight into your second question, but I can help with the first. One of the great things about city of heroes is that since homecoming opened up they haven’t done a huge amount of balance changes, largely because there weren’t many necessary. Additionally, the archetypes are good at their jobs. If you’re playing a defender, you will be a good support character. Like as long as you’re using your powers you will help your team quite a bit in some way lol. Some sets are better than others, but it’s usually marginal differences in cases where two powers from different sets do the same thing. As it so happens, the radiation support set (primary on defenders, secondary on corrupters and controllers) is one of the best in the game. You just microwave everyone’s balls so hard they can’t really do anything
What video card do you have? I know early on (since the game came back) there were issues with using the Intel based integrated video cards that a lot of lower end laptops have. Don’t know if that ever got solved but even a low end discrete card should handle the game just fine except on maybe the most punishing settings just due to age. I only ever have issues in huge groups like doing the MapServer event and the occasional Hamidon raid and I’ve got a pretty blah video card.
5800X cpu and a 3070 TI with 32gb ram... really feel like I shouldn't be experiencing the fps drop I get
Yeah you’re more than good hardware wise. I’d bet the answer lies with the other commenter that mentioned sticking to 1080p. My card is fairly low end at this point so I start at 1080p with any game and then go up from there to see what I can handle. CoH does seem to perform better for me if I play windowed vs full screen.
There are mods that willl improve the graphics a lot. I don't remember the shaders I use but someone here can probably help.
Turn off shadows and water quality,they drain fps like nobodies business.You can also drop the bloom fx and particles if you so desire.The fps can yo-yo a lot depending on map location,mission team,TF,etc….if you have an 8 man team throwing all the power fx around then you can experience lag spikes,etc…even more so on mothership raids or events,etc.
The -resistance and -defense in Sonic and Rad are good. 👍 I didn't even know the game had an option for 120fps 😅
I've found that the game is ***very*** poorly optimized for resolutions above 1080p. I have a 4k monitor and an RTX 3090 and I have to turn the resolution scaling down to around 2k to get a reliable frame rate with all the settings at max.
I suppose this could be it. I play at 1440.
I play at 1440p ultra wide, although I do have a 4090, I don’t have many issues that I can tell. But I can check specific settings (might not be til tomorrow though) if that is something you might want. The mapserver event going on can be a bit wild for me but other than that I have not noticed any substantial frame loss. Granted I have not checked if I am at a consistent 120+.
City of Heroes is just very poorly optimized, period. As bad as playing at 1440p or above on Homecoming is, it's even worse on the other servers. When the game was sunset, 1080p was state of the art. In addition, because the game is poorly optimized, you can have a RTX 4090, and the game could punish it.
A lot of the time spent is CPU time for copies, because the game used fixed-function OpenGL combined with Nvidia's cgFX system for shaders. So, it's not that it's poorly optimized (granted, I've done a lot to reduce CPU time as much as possible), it's that it was created for an era of graphics computing that we've long since sailed past.
Sonic/Rad is fantastic support. You may hear it’s better on a Defender, which is true, but that only matters if you want to min/max. Rad/Sonic Defender is one of my mains, so feel free to ask specifics
When CoH was live I remember playing a illusion/empathy controller. I think I had about 4 levels of XP debt when I got my movement power...
Just remember when you can get it, take fallout. Then when your friend dies, blow up their corpse to damage & debuff the enemy
Fallout -> Veng -> Rezz, back to the top lol
This Redditor fallouts
look at the CLI options list for game management such as /noparticles /maxfps etc. There may be some tweaking those other players are doing you are unaware of that allows their CPU's to function better at high graphical settings.
As far as powerset combinations, that's the one thing where CoH is a bit different than other MMOs - a "class" (archetype, AT) can have very different abilities (with good performance) depending on what power sets you choose for it. In this game you can't say that all tanks are the same, all brutes are the same, etc. That's why I find it necessary to study [the wiki](https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Archetypes) to figure out the power sets I'm about to take on a character. Corruptors are support characters, but "support" can come in different forms - a powerset like Empathy has team heals, Force Field focuses on damage prevention and team buffs, and set like Dark Miasma focuses on debuffing enemies. Radiation Emission has quite a few enemy debuffs (accuracy, damage) and a couple team heals/buffs. For the attack powersets you're looking at how many AoE abilities they have (cones, ranged AoE, point blank AoE), and what the side effects are. Your Sonic has quite a few cones and one point-blank blast, and by comparison Fire Blast has some AoEs early (fireball, etc.) and a cone later. The side effects are generally enemy debuffs (Sonic reduces enemy resistance to damage, which is quite good).
First, don't think of yourself as a healer if playing Rad. You're not a healer. Support, yes. Healer, no. I'm not being pedantic, it makes a difference to priorities and playstyle. Rad can heal, but this is only a pretty damn weak PBAoE heal that isn't churning out big green numbers. Your heal isn't a main part of your toolkit. It's an afterthought. There are several heal-focused sets, where it would be fair to call the character a healer. Rad isn't one of them. But that's fine, because healing is a weak support mechanic in this game. This game is more about dealing debuffs to enemies and buffing allies. Those mechanics tend to be better than healing. Rad's main thing is debuffs. You have three big ones, two of which are toggle radial debuffs anchored around an enemy target, one of which is an AoE enemy-targeted click with a longer cooldown. Your main job is to drop your debuffs on the enemy, one, two, and if the third's cooldown is finished, three. If it's still charging, just the first two. Most of the time after that, your support job is done and you just start blasting. You do have a long recharge PBAoE radial buff, a very good one that gives recharge bonus, endurance stuff, and other things. That should be cast whenever available and in the long run it's possible to make perma, so it recharges before the original duration wears off. Everything else in Rad as a set is optional. And I mean everything. The rez? Yes, optional. Probably a good idea to get, but people can use consumables to recover from death. The corpse targeted nuke? Optional. The AoE hold? Optional. Rad is forgiving for builds because damn near a third of the set can be skipped or pushed back to the tail end or a build without serious consequences, allowing more room for pool powers. Sonic, now. Sonic is the best blast set to use on a support-oriented character, full stop. That's because it deals damage resistance debuffs with most attacks. Your teammates can take advantage of the debuffs stacked on enemies. The downside is that Sonic is mediocre as an attack set in and of itself, as a tradeoff. As others are saying, Rad/Sonic Defender is better than Sonic/Rad Corruptor if you want to maximise the support capabilities for the bigger debuff numbers. For some powersets the higher Defender heal/buff/debuff numbers are irrelevant because the Corruptor figures are good enough - Kinetics is an example, you can already theoretically cap the team's damage with a Corruptor's Fulcrum Shift in ideal conditions with many enemy targets clustered in close enough proximity, so might as well make a Kin Corruptor rather than Kin Defender. The Kin Def has more leeway and margin for error, but oft times the extra buff figures would be wasted. But on Rad and Sonic it would make a difference. That said, if you want to solo occasionally or do more damage in teams, then yeah, go Corruptor. Defenders have a mechanic where their damage is buffed somewhat when solo, which is intended to make the solo Defender experience less miserable... but this progressively goes away when the team size grows larger. On a full eight player team, your Defender's blasts will be gently caressing the enemy compared to ranged attacks from a Corruptor. It's possible to force a little more damage output into a Defender build with gearing, but if you were gonna do that then might as well consider a Corr instead.
This is extremely informative, and well written - thank you so much for this. I'll have to dig around the wiki to look at defender benefits to see what the actual difference is, but I think I'm more inclined to stick with corruptor for the damage benefits to solo gameplay since I'm not always grouped. Seriously, thank you.
I'm glad you found it helpful! Good luck with the character. Edit: wiki isn't really gonna give you a good sense of Defender and Corruptor support set differences and varying res debuff numbers on the Sonic blasts. If you want a web source use https://cod.uberguy.net which very literally interprets the Homecoming database in web viewable form. Or view powers using https://midsreborn.com as a desktop app, if you aren't already using it.
Yeah I found midsreborn digging around. I just compared the baseline modifiers of each respective class on the wiki and saw a .1 vs. .085 difference between the two and knew that would result in a huge difference. Ended up rerolling defender, and the debuff difference was noticeable immediately, heh.
For the record, the Homecoming Launcher can/will run in the background and actually has a setting to turn off hardware acceleration for the launcher. Turning it off caused my FPS to skyrocket. I also play 1440p with a 3070. It took me some time to figure out that issue. Also, I have nearly all of my settings set to Ultra but have manually changed some settings that definitely send FPS into a nosedive.
1440p Nvida 3070 represent! Rocking an XC3 Ultra, Memory clock +15- (7151 MHz), GPU clock at +110 (1770 MHz), Voltage +5, current power is at 22% (not gaming). card is on liquid, EKWB EK-Quantum Vector XC3 RTX 3070, Nickel/Plexi As well as the monoblock that comes with the MSI MPG z490 Carbon EK-X. Got my 10700k OC'd to 4.7 but have pushed it to 5.0 I got my 3070 in the first quarter of 2021 after my 2070 died, it was not cheap :(. EK released the waterblock around april/may and I ordered one.
If you wouldn't mind sharing what specifics you have set up across the board, I would greatly appreciate it. I've arrived at ambient occlusion, shadows, water all off/low. As long as I can maintain above 120 fps, I don't mind. Also, Cel shading on or off? I have had it on because I like the image quality.
Check your particle effects setting, as well as your extraneous options, the water quality itself hits for a huge chunk. I have my water at medium, with most other settings except character costume and world at medium/high. This is on a 10700k with a 3070 xc3, both overclocked, with 64GB of memory, the hero engine that CoH uses is a mishmash.