Monday, September 3, 2012
Characters, Part 3: The Buffbot Girls
Ever since the Architect Entertainment system was put into City of Heroes, players have used it to try and get the most experience in the shortest amount of time. There were boss farms (only bosses -- they gave a lot of experience), "meow" farms (rikti communication officers, also a lot of experience), "bubble" farms (hami healing mitos, lots of experience and they don't fight back), farms with nothing but little spiderlings (easy to kill, lots of xp) or mastermind minions (also lots of xp). I remember one farm I was on where every enemy group had a captive Lord Recluse, who was, of course, worth a lot of experience. And there were the CEBR farms, where you made a claw/electric brute with a damage aura and damage aoe (spin) at very low level, and you loaded up on inspirations before diving in and went to town.
And right up until the end there were fire farms and smashing/lethal farms designed to cater to a player's strengths. Those were probably deemed less of an exploit per se, though they were certainly leveraging the game as much as you could in your favor.
In many of these early farms you had captive defenders or corruptors who would follow you and buff you after being rescued, so that you would eventually have an army of buffers following you around, making it that much easier to kill stuff. Often they were scantily-clad beautiful women. I ran one particular farm of this sort quite a bit and it entered into my head to try and create a character who looked like one of these buffbot girls -- maybe one who had somehow escaped from AE.
And so, Sonic Girl Seven was born. I played her for a couple of weeks and designed several costumes for her, and I absolutely fell in love with the whole concept -- so much so that I had to create one of each possible buffbot girl. Their names were Rad Girl One, Kin Girl Two, Fire Girl Three, Dark Girl Four, Empathy Girl Five, Bubble Girl Six, Sonic Girl Seven, Ice Girl Eight, and Pain Girl Nine. For a while there was a Mastermind named Poison Girl Ten, but I eventually deleted her. Most of these characters I PL'd to about level 20 or 22 before I started playing them. Empathy Girl Five was just my old empath from Pinnacle, Jalia Genie, with a new name and look. The majority of these characters I never actually played (I created ten of them in one go -- how could I play them all?) but three of them wound up at 50 and the original Sonic Girl made it to 45. Much later, still in love with the look and costume of the various buffbot girls, I created an ex-buffbot girl named Scrapper Girl One, who had traded in buffs for melee.
There was never a Time Girl Eleven or a Nature Girl Twelve, although possibly there should have been. ^_^ I never did a Storm Girl either.
Each girl had the same first four costumes. When they got a fifth costume at level 40 they got to do something unique for themselves. For the most part, I had trouble coming up with a fifth costume that I liked, although the one I made for Bubble Girl I liked quite a bit. Each of them had essentially the same back story, but I rewrote it each time so that each one was unique to that character.
If I remember correctly, at the time I created all of these characters I did not yet have a level 50 defender. But eventually I not only had three level 50 buffbot girl fenders, but several other level 50 fenders as well. I'm glad I did this project, I learned a lot about what all the different defender sets could do.
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