Origin of the Character - City of Heroes

In 2004, a friend of a friend introduced me to this great new game: an MMORPG called "City of Heroes".

Now, I'd been burned by my previous MMORPG experience, so I was leery. See, I'm a huge fan of the "Ultima" series. I've played every game, know the story of the world in and out, and it's a universe I love. Ultima Online destroyed that. I came to the game wanting to immerse myself in that world. In the six months I played it, I met exactly one person who'd heard of Ultima before UO and had exactly one RP experience. The rest of the game was fleeing in terror from city to city to avoid the "Player Killers", cutting trees for firewood, earning a few gold for a nice suit of armor and a sword to go avenge myself... and getting killed and having to start over. I hated MMOs.

But here was this shiny new interface... superheroes fighting crime... super-powers from day one... no crafting... no PvP... it was... *sniffle* beautiful...

It wasn't long after the game came out that I started playing. And of course, my first thoughts were of my DC Heroes game. We could all get together, re-create our heroes, and go play together! It'd be great! Just one tiny little hitch: all the heroes I got to play were canon DC comics characters. I didn't want to steal a character from one of my players, and I couldn't break copyright, so that left... the villains.

Okay. I had two friends playing the game: one on Pinnacle, the other on Virtue. I'd take my two least "evil" villains and fire them up. Torak, the enslaved warrior bodyguard of one of my mystical villains is still languishing on Pinnacle. SL8 Broadsword/Invulnerability Scrapper. EVAC was my other obvious choice.

Let me explain just a bit here: my first RPG was Dungeons & Dragons. My first and longest love has been playing clerics, special emphasis on their ability to heal and fight. I figured E was a lock 'cause after playing all those clerics, it'd be a natural for me. Everyone appreciates a healer, right? Right?

Yeah, I'll give you a minute to stop laughing.

Okay, so Damage Transference became Empathy, Projectile Weapons became Psionic Blast, and Warp became Teleportation. Why Psi? They get their snipe the earliest, and the other blast sets just didn't work for my mental image of E. So, minor re-write of the powers, slight tweak to the history, and I was ready to rock. Her costume got some adjustments for aesthetics. I let her hair out and uncovered her mouth. I had a blast with her for quite a while. She was fun on teams, she got flirted with (never seriously), and even was given gifts by those she helped and "admirers".

And then I entered the high 20s in level.

It seems that after a certain point, people either start to realize they don't need a healer, or they learn to compensate for not having one all the time, or they give up on the characters that "need" a healer around. That point (and trust me on this one) is in the upper 20s. The first CoH E hit a wall at 28. I couldn't get teams for her, and she couldn't solo for squat since she only had two attacks and I'd focused on her healing/teaming powers. She stayed at level 28 for over a year. I'd re-visit her by taking her to the Hollows and doing the TP/rez/heal thing for the newbies, but that only amuses for so long. I brought her into the Dauntless Reverie as a member of the Dauntless Consortium (associated non-magical heroes), but had a hard time role-playing a female character with people.

So she sat on Virtue while I played my main (The Vagabond Mage) all the way up to 50 and indulged in altitis. I enjoyed the game, and never really had the heart to delete the first character I made on Virtue.

Until someone lit a Fyre.