All The Guides/Maps/Etc. You Could Shake a Stick At

[Arathrael]

I mentioned this in the review thread, but it'd be handy to have it in its own I reckon.

On the US CoH forums, there's an index of guides. Vast quantities of information there.

Lot also posted this link to a site with some good maps.

Any others?

[Lot]

Character Planners

While I was playing CoH on the U.S servers, I used a program called Hero Planner to design my characters. It was written by a player named Lil Pips and it was the original and best planner; but sadly the developers of this program have long since quit CoH. It might still be fine to use, if all you want to do is plan powers and enhancements up to lvl 41. However, the power descriptions are most likely very out of date.

There are now three pretenders to the throne, I've had a look at all three and the one that is closest to the original is CoH Hero Builder by Sherk Silver. It requires M$ NET Framework 1.1.

The feature that I liked the most about the original Hero Planner was that you could set any power choice directly at any level. For example, you could fill in Stamina at lvl 20 without filling in all the lower level powers. This is very useful for setting key powers before choosing and filling in other powers. CoH Hero Builder seemed to be the only planner that supported this feature, although I may be wrong.

These are the other two planners available at the moment:

Designer Hero by Cyberware, Inc (it's freeware). I liked the layout of this program, however it quickly became apparent this was a badly written Visual Basic program. It was slow and didn't redraw when exposed.

CoH Planner by Joe Chott. I very much liked this program. If it had that ability to directly set powers instead of being restricted to the power-up sequence, I'd choose it.

I reserve the right to change my mind about these programs and my order of preference. Although IMHO none of the current crop are as good as the original by Lil Pips, CoH Hero Builder seems to be the best. All three have various features that may be useful, so why not install all 3?

[Lot]

Mission / Storyline / Badge Guides

City of Heroes Online Much of the work here was originally by Artphobia and this site took over the collection when Artphobia quit playing CoH. It's the best collection of information about story arc missions, badges and accolades.

No Future This is another good site by Red Tomax. I used to play in the same supergroup as Red Tomax and I was in a few of those missions when Red was making notes.