What is Designer Hero?

[RonHiler]

Designer Hero would only be useful to you if you play City of Heroes, a MMORPG by Cryptic Studios (released by NCSoft). In a nutshell, it is a Hero planner that allows you to plan your hero from start (level 1) to finish (level 50).

Essentially, at each level, it will ask to to select either a new power or new enhancement slots (as appropriate). All hero archtypes are supported, including the new Kheldian Warshades and Peacebringers. Full descriptions of all powers are supplied so you can make intellegent decisions with regard to your slotting.

You begin by inputting your character name, your archtype, origin, primary power set, and secondary power set. When you have decided on these, you select your first power. The program will then automatically give you the appropriate inherent powers for your archtype and level (and for level 1, will also automatically give you your first secondary power (although in-game, you actually get to select your first secondary power, you only have one choice, so Designer Hero will just do this for you)).

Similarly to how you select your primary and secondary power sets (which you must select prior to taking your first power), you can select your four power pool sets and ancillery set at any time (from level 1 to 50). Once you select a power from one of these sets, the power "locks" so you cannot unselect it (it will unlock if you "undo" to a point where no powers are selected from that set).

Powers from the list of primary, secondary, power pool, and ancillery power lists become available exactly as they do in game. At level 1, only the first two powers of the primary power set are available, at level 6, the first two powers from all the power pools become available, and so on.

You continue to select, placing powers in your slots (from your primary, secondary, power pools, or ancillery power lists) and enhancement slots until you reach level 50. Ehancement slots may be assigned to any power, including inherent, prestige, and dependent powers as well as all the regular powers (there are two powers in the game, both associated with the Kheldians, that do not allow enhancement slots, and this is reflected in DH).

Enhancement slots can be filled with enhancements at any time by simply dragging a legal enhancement into a slot (or alternately, right click on a slot to bring up a mini window which will show you all legal enhancments for that slot).

At any point (from 1 to 50) you may save your plan. The save file is in human readable format and is broken down into two parts. The first part is the hero profile, and shows powers, enhancement slots, and assigned enhancements. The second part is the hero history, and gives a detailed breakdown of selected powers and enhancement slots at each level (so that in game, when you train or respec, you know exactly what you meant to do at that level). The text in the save file is easily readable and can be copied to forums for peer analysis and critique. In addition, a print function is available that provides the same data in a hard copy format (useful to have in front of you when training and respecing, as well as for making notes).

As an additional function to help with the assignment of enhancments, there is a built in enhancement calculator. Simply shift-click on any power on the screen (it doesn't even need to be one of your selected powers) to pull the power into the calculator. From there, you can assign enhancements exaclty as if you were assigning to one of your selected powers. For each of the six enhancement slots, you can select not only the kind of enhancement (Damage, Range, etc.) but also it's flavor (training, duel origin, single origin) and it's relative level (from -3 to +3). From this data, the program will show you up to six statistics (depending on the power): Accuracy Modification, Endurance Cost, Activation Time, Recharge Time, Range, and Power Duration. Nothing you do in the enhancement calculator has any effect on your plan, it is simply a tool to help you intellegently assign enhancements to enhancement slots.

At the time of this writing, I consider DH complete (I've released version 1.3), although I will continue to release bug fixes and updates. The datafile for DH is a text file that contains all the powers and data that run the program, and is occassionally updated independently of the executable. The current release of both the complete program and the datafile is always shown on the download page. You can always compare this against the versions you are running (shown in the title bar when running the program) and update if needed.

I intend, in the future, to make two major changes to the program. The first involves including an "expert" mode, where you can assign powers and enhancment slots without regard to the current level you are at. The second is the inclusion of a "Hero Planner" import, where save files from the old Lil' Pips Hero Planner can be loaded by DH (this is in addition to loading it's own save files, which it can already do), since I know many people used the (now obsolete) program and have a lot of character plans saved in that format that they don't want to lose.

Ron

[sreeja]

I am new here.Thank you for the information about designer hero.