Punny
September 14th, 2018
Two weeks ago, I gibbered on about the various 'challenge' characters I built while playing City of Heroes. I suppose the game was easy enough that I felt a compulsion to take the most difficult power sets, or combinations therein, and work them into effective characters. The advantage of doing this was typically that they were unlikely to be 'nerfed' by the developers for being overperforming.
Characters that had any sort of mind-affecting power were usually at the forefront of such difficulty, mainly because the developers already felt the concepts were too powerful to begin with, or something. I ultimately wound up making several characters possessing such abilities, as since they weren't primarily devoted to dishing out damage, they were definitely a challenge to play solo.
The main psi-themed character of mine was the Mesmeroticist. I found the silly name amusing because it was punny. If I remember her backstory correctly, she was supposed to be introduced to a psychologist during a job fair at high school, but the facility instead booked a parapsychologist by mistake. Years later, she'd mastered the art of mind control and used it to fight crime!
Of course, with City of Heroes, you could take not one power set, but two: a primary and a secondary. The secondary could often make up for the primary's shortcomings, unless you took something wholly inoffensive. Empathy was one such set, which had nothing but 'buffs' for allies, and no 'debuffs' to make chewing up the imaginary criminals you'd be trouncing go down any easier.
So I went with the combination of mind control and empathy for the Mesmeroticist, who soloed her way through the game very, very slowly. Sure, she could have just latched onto one team after another and blazed her way to level 50, the game's maximum, but where's the challenge in that? And yes, when she did so, Mes was the ultimate team player, since that's what those powers were designed for.
But no, I fought for every single one of Mesmeroticist's experience points, and maxxing her out took forever. But you know, it made me really appreciate the character overall, so I suppose she was ultimately one of the favorites I ever played. Even if she wasn't on the 'main' server I housed most of my other folks, simply because I'd long ago filled up my 'home' server, Infinity.
Bonus nerdery: Mesmeroticist written up for the nerd game I support on my nerd site. Complete with even more screenshot imagery!
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