As mentioned before, it's vital that you choose wisely here, because it's costly to change your mind later. The combat system in Champions isn't what I'd call straight-forward. Characters use energy for all skills except your energy builder, and the amount of energy you start off with depends on your stats. This means that you'll be using your energy builder in most fights for at least a few seconds before being able to use your more powerful skills. When choosing new skills, try to make sure you have a close combat attack, a ranged attack and some sort of self-buff that either protects you or gives you back health over time because, as I soon discovered, without these you don't last long against a group of mobs.

My first character was a dual blade fighter. I favour melee over casters in most games and I was keen to charge into battle and wreak havok on the bad guys. It didn't work out so well. Due to my choice of stats and skills, where I focussed more on improving my existing skills or chose too many of one kind, I found I was dying very quickly against enemies. Also, most mobs in Champions have some sort of ranged power, either magical abilities or guns, and I noticed that while I was pounding away at one or two enemies, others would be damaging me from a distance. I bitterly watched as archers or munitions characters swooped in and took out a group from a safe distance and it wasn't long before I re-rolled.

I got on much better with my new Sorcery character, but I realised some time later that, despite the powerset you choose at the start, as your level grows you can pick more skills from other powersets. A Might character can also hurl balls of fire or shoot lasers from his eyes. Of course, without the correct stats, some abilities won't be very strong, which is why I feel it's very easy to get into a mess with Champions. All the information to help you is there, but unless you read the pages of info the NPCs have to offer, you're probably going to be a little confused over certain things. For instance, on top of all your abilities, you have character builds and roles.

There are four roles, Guardian, Avenger, Protector and Sentinal - read balanced, offensive, defensive and support. The effects on characters based on their chosen role are quite prominent, to the point where it's considerably harder to tackle solo content. I arrogantly opted for the offensive role while questing alone, only to find myself repeatedly overcome if I took on more than a couple of enemies. I'd recommend sticking to the balanced role and save the others for the rare occasion in the early levels that you're in a team.

With builds, you can switch to different powers, roles and upgrades at the click of a button, you can associate a different costume to each build too. This will probably be more useful in the later game when grouping up with others is hopefully more common. But, again, early on in the game, all this choice can be a little overwhelming.

At level five, you get to pick your first Travel power. There is a wide selection, but on closer inspection many are quite similar. Some are just plain bizarre such as Acrobatics and Superspeed, and I can't see why anyone would pick them over, say, flight.

The profession system in Champions is, while trying to be different than other games, awkward. You can choose from three different schools; Arms, Mysticism and Science. Each of these schools has three specialisations, and each produce their own upgrades, devices and consumables, specialising in certain stats. The only way to find out in-game which is best for you is to look through the lengthy list of blueprints available. To progress in your chosen profession, you must collect materials which can be found scattered around the world. You can also break apart items you find that are from your school into materials. This is a quick way to level as well as get plenty of materials, but I still found levelling my profession a struggle, and before I knew it, the materials I found lying about in the world were too high for me to be able to gather.

It wouldn't be too bad if you could sell the things you craft in the Auction House, but that's another area that needs some attention. Search results only return the first 100 items found, and they appear to be listed in the order of age. Also, when looking for upgrades, you can't search for items that only have certain stats. Therefore, this means mousing over dozens of mostly useless items until you find one that might be good for you, but then it's likely to be highly over-priced, as many people avoid using the system completely and the process of undercutting is difficult due to the fact that only the oldest 100 items are shown.

During the 30 something hours I've put into Champions Online so far, I've gone through several emotions. The first part of the game, namely the character creation and tutorial, are lots of fun, and I enjoyed the first few quests in the follow-on zones. However, faced with a multitude of stat options, power advantages and so on, it's easy to make a bad choice and live to regret it once you are given some harder tasks. The powers don't seem to be balanced just yet either; some powersets are emerging as the dominant choices whereas others, melee in my opinion, need some help, at least early on.

One thing I will say is that I've yet to be bored in Champions Online. There's no 'grind' factor, the quests can be completed quickly and there is a nice variety to them. Some take place in instances, others are public quests, but most are easily soloable. There hasn't been much call for grouping up with others yet, but I assume that comes later, putting the build and role options to some use. There are still some issues that Cryptic needs to address, but the regular, sometimes daily, patches applied to the game show that the company at least listens to its players. The popular new Celestial powerset is a direct result of player feedback, proving to me that Champions is still growing and improving, and plenty more change is on the way.

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