Of the Criminal Sort
September 28st, 2018
My favorite archetype while fighting and/or committing crime in the City was the mastermind. Sure, I enjoyed my sword-slinging stabber for justice, my fire-blasting burninator for freedom, and my plethora of psionic types, but nothing managed sheer mayhem like the mastermind. I could closely emulate that with the Jerk (what with all his spider-bots), but doing so took a lot of work.
Masterminds were basically a 'pet' class, a relatively soft character who surrounded themselves with minions they could summon pretty much at will. The weaker three were good for cannon fodder, the medium two were often possessed of numerous useful abilities, and the big one was a good match for your own ability. Or, if you had the Thugs set, you could occasionally summon a horde.
I had one of those, Mister Really Long Name, as well as Hate Ball, who utilized Mercenaries. But I think my favorite overall was Three Dollar Bill. This madman had Robots. These things were relatively tough, made with the pew pew pew, and could easily run rampant over everything. I never quite managed to get Three Dollar Bill to level 50, but he was fun every time I broke him out.
Already somehwat sturdy, robots could make force fields around themselves, which you could readily augment by having the force fields power set as a secondary ability. One that I am already quite familiar with, if you've been following my weekly, nerdy posts about my various avatars in the City. This made them nigh-invulnerable, especially when grouping with even more masterminds.
And that's really when the City of Villains went off the chain. A bunch of players summoning their gaggle of goons all at once could pretty much steamroll over most everything. Sure, you'd have to keep summoning them back up as the individual robots or thugs or soldiers or demons or zombies or ninjas or pirates or whatever were defeated, but these legions made it impossible for enemies to focus on you.
And since the mastermind is constantly buffing his allies, his minions, and his allies' minions, these waves of criminals quickly made a circus out of things. Not that this was a bad thing, of course. Abject bedlam was a great way to blow off steam, which I needed to do a lot when I was working at ADT, back in the day, before those scumbags laid me off. But I digress.
Note to self: fix that link to the ADT post sometime!
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