Here, we got a transmission from Fire Angel Bunny:

What the Flip, Skip?  You’re seem to be a knowledgable, handsome, well-weathered hero who’s knows his way around making a good hero.  Could you please explain characteristics to me?  I just don’t get it.  I have a fire character (obviously), and I don’t know which characteristic adds to my fire damage or what upgrades and talents I should be picking.  Help!  Save this poor bunny!

Hello, Bunny.  Your assessment of my prowess and good looks, I modestly admit, are all true.  How very kind of you to say, given that I am obviously not paying you in order to generate new site content.

Characteristics are something that confuses a lot of newcomers to the Champions Online universe.  You’ll be happy to know that they aren’t really all that complicated, but playing other games causes us to make assumptions of the system that just don’t apply.  The short answer to your question is “you’re probably doing it right without knowing it”.  Let’s start from the basics.

The Characteristics

There are eight characteristics in Champions Online.  That’s a lot compared to some games, but they all do something useful.  This’ll be review for most, but let’s cover that.  If you get it just fine, please skip to the boosch.

  • Strength – Strength does a lot of things.  It determines how well you resist being knocked down and around.  It decides how well you knock other people down and around.  It decides how well you break out of things holding you.  It decides how much damage you do with melee attacks like swords and fists.  That last bit is a little confusing, because no other ability adds damage to anything.  That’s right, before we get too far, your fire damage comes from no-where.  Well, that’s not exactly true, but we’ll get there later.
  • Dexterity - Dexterity decides your chance of an attack being a critical hit.  Critical hits do more damage.  Damage is how we take down scummy pigs who rob banks and insult the color pink.  How much more damage does it do?  I’m getting there!  You’re impatient, Bunny.
  • Constitution – Constitution does one thing and one thing well.  Every point gives you more hit points, making you harder to take down.  How much?  Eh, looks like about +10 HP per point, though I haven’t really tested to see if that goes up or down at different levels.  When you start walking around with several thousand HP, +10 may not seem like much, but it all adds up.
  • Intelligence – If you thought Strength had its hands in a lot of cookie jars while honorably stealing many cookies, then Intelligence too is a tentacle monster raiding the honorable cookie factory.  Of its many things, though, the one worth mentioning is that it makes all of your powers cost less to activate.  To a much smaller degree, it makes your powers recharge faster.  The increase is so tiny, I hesitated to even mention it.  But hesitation gets you killed, so out it came!  Lastly, Intelligence aids you in seeing hidden enemies.  Lacking that, being ambushed also helps you find hidden enemies.
  • Ego – I’m back, critical hits!  Did you miss me?  That was a rhetorical question, because I know you did.  Ego decides your critical severity.  That is to say the higher your Ego is the more damage you do when you score a critical hit.  Dexterity and Ego go very well together, for this reason.  If ever you’re putting a good amount of points into either, it’s always a good idea to put a few in the other.  Prior to the early October patch of 2009, Dexterity and Ego were inseparably married, and if you didn’t pile on the points in both, the other was largely wasted.  These days, they’re just good friends and talk on a regular basis, but you can neglect one slightly and still benefit.  Ego also helps break out of certain holds.  Kind of like Strength, but for the more ethereal, non-physical types.
  • Presence – The main role of Presence, though not what it is most used for, is threat management.  Say what?  Threat?  Yup yup!  The more presence you have, the more likely an enemy will attack one of your party members instead of you.  If you change your role in the build options to Protector, it’ll make you more likely to be attacked instead.  As you can guess, it’s not especially impressive to most people.  Luckily, a lot of abilities designed to buff, heal and support your friends gain benefits from Presence.  It’s definitely a group thing.
  • Recovery – Recovery is purely for energy management.  The higher your Recovery, the more your blue endurance bar fills up when you use abilities that do so.  It also sets those little triangle looking dealies on it, which is called Equilibrium.  The higher your Recovery, the more endurance you start a fight with, because whenever you aren’t fighting, it will fill back up to that point.  Recovery is great for starting out fights with powerful attacks before your enemy can fight back.
  • Endurance – Endurance is a companion to Recovery (and their often ignored brother, Intelligence) in the energy management game.  Endurance is different in that it simply gives you more maximum endurance in your blue endurance bar.  The great thing is that this doesn’t make it take longer to fill up, like you might think.  In fact, I should probably break energy management down a little better.

BOOSCH!

Energy Mangement – Intelligence/Recovery/Endurance

  • Intelligence – Lowers the cost of your powers.  It doesn’t actually give you more energy the way the others do.  Instead, it makes the energy you gain and have worth more by needing less of it.
  • Recovery – Raises how much energy you get when you get it and how much you start with before that.  Recovery ensures that you spend as little time gathering energy by making it take less time to fill your bar up.  That’s time you get to spend blastin’ heads.
  • Endurance – Raises how much energy you can have.  Since energy builder attacks don’t give a flat amount of energy, but instead a percentage of your bar (a percentage that can be increased with Recovery), then it also means you get more energy per attack with your energy builder.  Huh?  Yup.  Say you have a bar capable of 100 energy and your energy builder refills 10% of it per attack.  Say it, come on.  Good.    It would take 10 attacks to fill it from empty to full, and you’d get 10 energy each attack.  Now assume we took lots of endurance and now we have a bar of 200.  Your energy builder still fills up 10% per attack, but now that gives you 20 energy per attack.  Happiness is.

Focusing on two of these will result in a noticable increase in the amount of energy you can toss about all willey nilley.  But how does one focus?  With…

Characteristic Focuses… or, um, Foci

When you first get out of planet tutorial and into your first real adventure, you’ll be about level 5ish, and ready to pick your first Character Focus.  You get another at level 13 before you go on to Millenium City as well.  What are these?  Really really big bonuses, that’s what they are.  At first, you’ll get about a +12 or +13 to your chosen characteristic.  This number will quickly go up to +20 and beyond as you gain levels.  This is the thing(s) your character improves upon as levels go by without you even needing to equip a single upgrade.  They are what make you SUPER!  And that is not all, oh no madam.  Going back to the earlier question.  What was it?

… I don’t know which characteristic adds to my fire damage …

This!  The answer is “whatever you pick”.  Yes, Strength adds to melee damage, but that’s just a happy bonus for dealing with chasing down your victims and beating them with a personal touch.  But if that same hulking brute chose Presence as his Characteristic Focus, then he would gain bonus damage to all of his attacks just because he’s so personable, and then also get a Strength bonus just to melee.  If he took Strength as his focus, he would gain a bonus for being really strong to all of his powers, then another strength-based bonus to his melee.  Double Trouble!  If you hover over your characteristic in your character’s status screen, you’ll see a bonus that says something to the effect of “+XX% all damage strength”.  If that number is 30% or more, you’ve got a good amount of whatever your focus is.  Past 30% takes a lot of points to see a benefit, and you could be spending those points on more of whatever else you’re not doing.  It’s called a “soft cap” because it’s essentially the limit, but you can go past it if you really try.  It’s chill like that.  It’s also the source of much CO forum rage.  Forum goers are not so chill.  Also, note that what it takes to reach said soft cap goes up every level.  So my damage goes down when I level up?  No, the extra damage you get just for being higher level counters the fact that your bonus is going down.  You’ll still want to head back towards that 30% when it’s convenient, though.

What was that about a Strength melee bonus?

If you have a high Strength, you can get up to 20% more damage on to your melee damage.  How much does that take?  There’s math and formulas and such, and that’s always changing, so I don’t recommend caring.  Right now, if you dedicated yourself to getting Strength as much as possible in your equippable upgrades, you’ll have roughly enough to hit 20% without getting your bonuses from anywhere else.  If you chose Strength as your Character Focus, you’ll be hard pressed not to get the full bonus.

Innate Talents Are Not A Focus

When you first make your hero, you pick what the game calls an “Innate Talent”.  If you pick a preset framework, it is chosen for you.  If you picked the fire preset, you got the Incandescent talent, which gave you +12 to Presence and Recovery and +5 to everything else.  This doesn’t mean you have to pick these as your focus choices.  It’s nice when your Innate and Focus match, but where as your Characteristic Focus improves over time, your Innate Talent will always just be that bonus that got you started.  There are also combinations you may want to try that aren’t available as Innate Talents, and you shouldn’t totally ignore those ideas just because you can’t get +12 in both.  Just as an example, focusing in Constitution and Presence makes for a durable support character that can both heal and survive extreme punishment.

So, if fire scales with whatever focus you choose, why does the framework suggest Presence and Recovery?  That would be…

Scaling Powers

In your fire powerset, you have a power called Fiery Form.  It is your slotted ability, and it’s great.  You catch on fire and do tons of damage and hurt anyone who goes near you and it is honorable and awesome.  It is also a scaling power.  The higher your Presence, the more bonus damage you get in Fiery Form.  The higher your Recovery, the better the elemental resistance bonus it gives you.  Is there anything else amidst the fire powers that cares?  Nope.  Just Fiery Form.  But, Fiery Form is a good power to have if you’re fire-based, and if you want to improve it, you focus in those two.  In fact, in most sets, the recommended characteristics are only linked to their one slotted power.  That’s the case with Electric, Fire, Ice, Force, Shadow, Supernatural, and many others.  Just one power that benefits.

Support-oriented sets are more dependant, and that’s on Presence.  That is probably because Presence is otherwise pretty lame.  All of Sorcery’s auras, many of their circles, and their healing all seem to benefit from it.  Telepathy, with its many heals, falls in the same category.  In the case of these, the scaling is really noticable.  Presence really adds a lot to healing and buffs.  It’s hard to ignore.  They’re also the abilities that often forget to tell you in their description to stock up on the Presence.  That’s why I’m telling you now.  Educate.

Equiping Upgrades

Wew, this is going long, but I’m almost there!  The tutorial is in the home stretch.  I want to point out something about the upgrades you equip that is worth considering when you’re planning your hero.  Your upgrades are separated into three groups: Offensive, Defensive, and Utility.  In each group, you can equip two secondary upgrades and one primary upgrade.  Secondary upgrades have smaller bonuses, but you can get a wide variety of  them.  Primary upgrades give fairly large bonuses or special powers and attacks that can be activated by pressing their associated button (default: 8, 9 and 0).  The large bonuses provided by the primary upgrades can be a great way to raise your focus, or to augment your ability with complimentary characteristics.  Example: You’ve focused in Endurance and Ego as one very sexy Force based blogger.  Because Ego adds to the damage of your critical hits, equipping a Primary Offense with a large bonus to Dexterity can greatly improve your critical hit chance, making you all the sexier.

Knowing where these large bonuses come from can be really helpful in planning, so here goes:

  • Primary Offensive – Strength, Dexterity, Recovery
  • Primary Defensive - Constitution, Presence
  • Primary Utility – Intelligence, Ego, Endurance

You can get items with more than one bonus, though they won’t be as high.  Example Again: Our Constitution and Presence character idea will probably go for Primary Defensives with both characteristics, where as most characters will want the high-HP offering of a Primary Defensive with only Constitution.  Con/Pre Man will have to make up the difference with secondary upgrades.

Oh My GROND, that took way too long.  Hopefully, Bunny, you now know everything you ever needed to know about your hero’s characteristics.  And I mean everything.  Now go forth and fight for honor and awesome!