Building Character: Walkers, Wasps, and Rangers

Been a while since I put up a post on character progression, so I’ll shine my light on my Champions Online characters and give them some cred.

Since the last time I’d looked, I’ve pushed no less than three characters to top level (level 40).  This isn’t as impressive as it sounds; all of them were at least level 20 at that point, and there’s been some double-xp stuff that went around, which does wonders for leveling.  And most importantly for me, very little of it was done with the Alert system, the PvE queues for CO.  I think I’ve used exactly three split up among all these characters.

Delivering beatings for justice!

The first was Shadewalker.  I might have mentioned him in a couple of previous posts.  I sort of built him around the martial arts expert concept, and grabbed the Night Avenger sort of stuff to give him that stealth/first-strike capability.  He was sort of a balanced sort of character in that he relied hard on his Dex score to give him dodge and crit capability, but used his block (Parry, technically) to help survive the nasty hits.  His passive was the Night Avenger, which gave him the ability to sneak and land a massive strike from stealth-shades of City of Heroes Stalkers!-and also gave a minor buff to one of his other powers.  Most of those powers were the standards; Thundering Kicks for bread-and-butter damage, a spin-kick sort of thing for close range area-of-effect (and it was fun to watch, although charging it for maximum effect was rare for me), and a number of other close in combat moves.  To help round him out with some distance, I grabbed a couple powers from the Gadgets framework, so he had an arc of exploding boomerangs (which did bonus damage from stealth, which REALLY helped clean out henchmen) and a set of bolas to help him with crowd control-although single target only.

The character had some rough spots, until I managed to get him an active defense power to boost his dodge for fights that got nasty fast.  He remained somewhat squishy, but he did a creditable job on getting through the content.

No, I’ve never made a character who looked like this before….

The next character had been long neglected-especially since his face is on the banner above.  I finally made the push to get my Far Ranger character-who shares that striking resemblence to all those other rangers-up to 40.  Shockingly, he was an archer character, and all of his offense came from shooting long pointed objects.  Some of them exploded, though.  The sonic arrow was my bread-and-butter for this character, even above the standard snap-shot arrows, as the stun that could come out of the sonic’s use was often far more beneficial-and was an AOE besides-than the single target snap-shots, and the exploding arrows never really did much except to mix things up.  A close runner up was the arrow storm power, which did exactly what it sounds like-rain arrows to blot out the sun.  I could usually drop all a group’s henchmen, and a fair portion of the health of stronger opposition with the storm.  However, heavy hitters (eg. master villains and better) could give this Ranger a hard time.  Active defenses and liberal use of a power to jump backward and boost dodge rating became critical-and eventually I broke down and added a chance-for-stealth advantage to that jump-back primarily to wipe threat if he wound up in a scary situation.

The Ranger was a classic blaster guy; hit hard, and get hit hard.  He was one of the characters who actually did a couple Alerts, and the opponents in those alerts knocked his health down hard; fortunately, by that time I grabbed that stealthing advantage, and I credit it with keeping the Ranger alive through those Alerts.

Those look like they’d hurt going in….

The last character was Sea Wasp, and the primary reason I’d built her was because of the Lemurian Invasion event (before it got rotated into the Alert rotations).  The lead-in to the event included an unlock for an “ancient lemurian helmet” costume part, and I’d wanted to make use of it.  And during the big fight with the Bleak Harbinger itself, I managed to get the vehicle drop for the event, so I had this Lemurian tank-thing to play with.  So I figured I wanted to make an undersea sort of character-so I made Sea Wasp.  To fit in with that name, I made her a Claws fighter, making her one of the nastier fighters in my roster.  She was even more Dex based than Shadewalker, and I went hard on the Dodge related stats.  Her passive was Lightning Reflexes, and her Block was Fluidity.  Now, there’s just a tiny problem with Dodge-based characters:  if you dodge, you take x percent less damage, based on your Avoidance score (related to Dex, but separate from it).  If you don’t dodge…well, you eat all of that yummy damage.  This is a bad thing.  Like Shadewalker, she made use of the dodge active defense, and a couple other non-claw powers, primarily the leg sweep which was her way of dealing with more than one opponent.  Claws have a number of charge-up attacks, which isn’t as fast and as fluid as one might hope.  She tended to use her combo-hit power against the henchmen and saved the charge-ups against tougher opponents.  She did suck at range, but that was intentional-besides, if she was outdoors, she had this flying tank thing….

With these three characters down, most of my first page of heroes on the select screen have hit level 40.  And by an amusing bit of coincidence, this has unlocked most of the character slots on the second page of heroes (and a few have characters waiting for my attention).  The next couple on my list are heading to the high-technology side of things.  I’ll close this post with the names of those characters-and later down the line, give peeks at just who these people are:  Overload and Mechacharge.

Next time, we’ll see how things have been going on the Trek side of the fence.