{"id":15,"date":"2005-02-07T21:50:04","date_gmt":"2005-02-08T03:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp\/2005\/02\/city-of-heroes-my-cast\/"},"modified":"2005-02-07T21:50:04","modified_gmt":"2005-02-08T03:50:04","slug":"city-of-heroes-my-cast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2005\/02\/city-of-heroes-my-cast.html","title":{"rendered":"City of Heroes &#8211; My Cast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So what&#8217;s a game of City of Heroes if you can&#8217;t show off your characters?  I tend to rotate through these guys, which keeps me from getting any one person up to a higher level very quickly, but also keeps things more varied for me.  I&#8217;ll usually play one through a mission or up to a level before going on to the next.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nAll these folks, by and by, are on the <strong><em>Champion<\/em> <\/strong>server, if you&#8217;re looking for them.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<hr width=\"75%\" \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/velvet_jones.jpg\" class=\"right\" width=170 height=392 alt=\"Velvet Jones\" title=\"Give ya some lovin', sugah!\" \/>At the top of the list is <strong>Velvet Jones<\/strong> (science-based tanker &#8211; invulnerability, super-strength, jumping).  She&#8217;s my highest character at the moment, 10th level (huzzah), and in a lot of ways my favorite, as she can just run in there and start whomping on the baddies.  No muss, no fuss, and everyone loves a tanker (a nigh-invulnerable whomping machine) in the group.<br \/>\nShe&#8217;s originally based, game-wise, on an NPC in my original Justice Squad game (who eventually became a PC played by Tracy), a bad girl who let herself get boosted up by Dr. Dread, but later turned on him and, kinda-sorta, fights for the good guys now.  Visually, she&#8217;s inspired by one of the Steve Jackson &#8220;Cardboard Heroes: Modern&#8221; chars.<br \/>\nDoyce&#8217;s comment is that she has the advantage of being highly visible to healers during battle.<br \/>\nI have a starter-variation on her, <strong>Velvetty, <\/strong>over on Pinnacle server, just in case Champion goes down.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<hr width=\"75%\" \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/selene-circle1.jpg\" class=\"right\" width=346 height=217 title=\"Selene in some old digs\" alt=\"Selene\" \/>Next on the list is <strong>Selene<\/strong>, the white tiger woman from the novel that <s>no, I haven&#8217;t finished it yet, dammit<\/s> I&#8217;m working on.  She&#8217;s a magic-based scrapper (claws, regeneration), at 7th level.  She&#8217;s the one Lee recognized (appropriately enough), and one that Doyce had dummied up a copy of early on in a way that made me seriously jones to play CoH, and, thus, her.<br \/>\nShe&#8217;s missing her tail, annoyingly enough (it&#8217;s one of the &#8220;pants&#8221; options, and I didn&#8217;t even think of it until I&#8217;d already invested enough time in her levels to to make me unwilling to recreate her).  She&#8217;s been a problematic character, more vulnerable and less effective in combat than I think she should be &#8212; I need to do some further work on her tactics, get her in some teams, etc.<br \/>\nThose few who&#8217;ve read the story will hopefully find the screencap as eerily appropriate as I did when I ran across it.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<hr width=\"75%\" \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/snipehunter.jpg\" class=\"right\" width=187 height=274 alt=\"Snipehunter\" title=\"Takin' 'em out from afar.\" \/><strong>Snipehunter <\/strong>is up at 8th level (mutant-based blaster, energy blast, energy manipulation, flight), and another character I&#8217;m struggling a little with.  So far, Snipehunter holds my personal records for being knocked out of battle and going into debt.  Blasters are a lot of fun, zapping from afar (and now he has Sniping, which was the original idea), but they&#8217;re fragile as hell after a point unless backed up by an appropriate team.<br \/>\nI <em>have <\/em>done some team runs with him, which went fine until the team got run off to &#8220;find someone who can get us more xp&#8221; and instead got us into the hospital.  I need to do some more that are a bit more successful &#8230;<br \/>\nI like the costume (though I&#8217;d tweak a couple of the patterns a slight bit if I had the chance).  I can&#8217;t wait until he can fly at a more decent clip, since hover is a real time sink to use effectively.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<hr width=\"75%\" \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/torchielle.jpg\" class=\"right\" width=192 height=368 alt=\"Torchielle\" title=\"She's too hot, baby.\" \/><strong>Torchielle <\/strong>was the first of my next wave of characters, after I&#8217;d been playing the first three up five or six levels.<br \/>\nShe&#8217;s similar to Snipehunter (mutant-based blaster, fire blast, energy manip), but I&#8217;m having more fun with her.  For one thing, I like fire blast better than energy blast (just for the effects, if nothing else).  Second, I <em>really <\/em>like her visual appearance &#8212; the leather gloves and boots, the suede-like tunic and tucked pants.  And the red hair, of course.  She <em>looks <\/em>like someone who works around fire.  I think my initial visual inspiration was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comicbookresources.com\/news\/preview.php?image=\/solicits\/dc052003\/big\/PowerpuffGirlsCVR38.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Tess Turbine<\/a>, a visiting character in a Powerpuff Girls comic I read to Kitten that evening, but the powers and colors are fairly different.  At any rate, she&#8217;s one of the least garish characters you&#8217;ll see running around Paragon City (some of whose denizens make Velvet look dull and muted).<br \/>\nBackstory (for what it&#8217;s worth) has her the child of two of the previous generation of supers, their &#8220;logos&#8221; incorporated into her own.<br \/>\nShe&#8217;s up to 5th level now, and I&#8217;m looking forward to playing with her more.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<hr width=\"75%\" \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/theblueshield.jpg\" class=\"right\" width=242 height=285 alt=\"Blue.Shield\" title=\"To protect and carve.\" \/><strong>Blue.Shield<\/strong> was an interesting experiment.  You can create male characters, female characters, or &#8220;huge&#8221; characters (who, lacking breasts, are basically male).  Selene should have been (as I envision her) a huge character, not as svelte as she is, but that wasn&#8217;t an option.  Blue.Shield, a crippled cop in a cybersuit, is my one huge whomper.  I was going to do a scrapper, but ended up with a tanker (because having someone that big and armored who can&#8217;t take punishment just doesn&#8217;t make sense), so he&#8217;s a tech-based tanker (invulnerability, battle axe), 5th level.<br \/>\nBasically, he goes around and hits stuff.  Hard.  I think he&#8217;s visually really, really fun.  The only thing that doesn&#8217;t quite work is the axe, which I picked up based on a guide recommendation for something that did faboo damage; someone like him should have a club or just hit with his fists.  Ah, well.<br \/>\nBiggest problem I have with him, though, is his <em>size.  <\/em>It&#8217;s hard to see past him to the villains &#8212; especially when they&#8217;re tiny folk like the Clockworks.  I keep having to adjust the camera angle up and down over him.  For all that, he&#8217;s pretty darned impressive, and fun.  Seeing him pound his way through the streets or jumping off bridges should give him some sort of &#8220;aw, crap!&#8221; advantage over the bad guys.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<hr width=\"75%\" \/>\nFor some reason, I don&#8217;t have a screen shot of <strong>Ground-Pounder<\/strong>.  He&#8217;s a magic-based scrapper of some sort, simple green t-shirt and jeans.  He&#8217;s Marine who got a blessing from his Irish grandma before going off to WWII, leaving him a hella bruiser and much longer-lived that he ought to be.<br \/>\nHe&#8217;s turned out, though, to be a lot less differentiated from the others than he ought to be, a lot less interesting to play, and at the top of the list of characters I&#8217;m likely to drop (reflected in his only being 3rd level).<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<hr width=\"75%\" \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/psi-clone.jpg\" class=\"right\" width=186 height=336 alt=\"Psi-clone\" title=\"Who *is* this guy?\" \/>Last on the list is <strong>Psi-clone<\/strong>, who&#8217;s my first mentalist-type of character (mutation-based controller, illusions\/empathy).  He&#8217;s up around 4th level now, and a lot of fun, since he basically tricks the villains (so far) into fighting each other, or else standing still while he sics damage-causing illusions on them.  It&#8217;s slow, but it&#8217;s effective, and oh-so-fiendish.  Eventually, with his healing powers and the like, he should be good for some team-ups.<br \/>\nI don&#8217;t know what inspired me visually here.  Kinda goofy-looking, if you ask me.  Though he does blend in with a crowd on the streets of Paragon City (which, I think, sometimes leads other heroes to poach on my targets).  He&#8217;s not my favorite character so far, but I have a warm spot for him nonetheless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So what&#8217;s a game of City of Heroes if you can&#8217;t show off your characters? I tend to rotate through these guys, which keeps me from getting any one person up to a higher level very quickly, but also keeps things more varied for me. I&#8217;ll usually play one through a mission or up to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2005\/02\/city-of-heroes-my-cast.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;City of Heroes &#8211; My Cast&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}