Saturday, March 17, 2007

I'm the Multiple Man! .....ok, not really.

It occurred to me last night that I could make a passable "multiple man" character if I used Phantom Army and made a few concessions.

The Cool Factors:
1: Multiple man/duplication powers would be fairly unique in CoH. (And you know how much I like "unique.")
2: ....uh, that's about it. It's a big one though.

The Concessions:
1: The only way to mimic this power is to use Phantom Army. Among other things, this locks me into playing a Controller.
2: The nature of Phantom Army means that all phantoms (ie, my "duplicates") look the same. This means that my costume has to resemble the phantoms' costumes as closely as possible... which is incredibly boring.
3: Similarly, to fully simulate the multiple man effect as much as possible, my name is chosen for me: "Decoy." Not surprisingly, "Decoy" is taken ...as is "Decoy.". I choose "Decoy ." (Decoy-SPACE-PERIOD).
4: Finally, and most annoyingly, until I can get to level 18, I'm just a dopey mook with a stupid name. (Phantom Army isn't available til 18.) And we know how long it takes me to level a character. (This is similar to trying to create a speedster, only worse.)

Upon hatching this ill-conceived scheme, I did manage to leap into a sewer team for a couple hours, getting me to level 7. But at that point, progress came to a grinding halt. To make matters worse, I mated the mandatory Illusion Control power set with Storm Summoning, which stinks on toast. Watch in horror as the dopey mook with the stupid name goes toe to toe with a minion of equal level and nearly exhausts his Endurance defeating him. Oh, the shame.

I'll probably shred the first draft and take another shot at this, but I think I'm going to have to put my artistic pride aside and crock the powers to make him as effective and team-attractive as possible.