I had an on-again, off-again relationship with Huntress Midnight. I originally had a "buzzsaw" build on her, meaning a lot of very quick low-damage attacks that were loaded with procs. The idea was that slower attacks weren't as good in the DPS department and that fast quick attacks built fury, and dark melee was a very good set to accomplish such a build with.
Later on this general build strategy was debunked, I think. Shadow Maul was actually a really good DPS attack, despite the length of animation. In time I tried to rebuild Huntress Midnight for defense, but I still didn't know how to do that properly so I eventually gave up and went for a massive recharge build with lots of purple IOs. But she was still very squishy, so I left her alone for years. She was one of those characters that I planned to fix up someday.
Well, that day came this last spring. I rebuilt Huntress with a much better build that focused on softcapping smashing/lethal defense. I moved her from villainside to heroside, and I started playing her more, even on a few itrials.
Long before I'd reached that point, however, I'd come to the conclusion that having 10+ level 50 scrappers and only 1 level 50 brute was an imbalance that I needed to rectify. This started with Shinobu Eden, a super strength/invulnerable brute who was essentially a brute clone of my invul/energy melee tanker Sailor Shinobu. She was built to fulfill the role of Eden Trial runner, and was level locked at 41 because for years you could only start this trial if you were 39-41. By the time I decided I needed more level 50 brutes, the trial had been fixed, and so Shinobu Eden shot up to 50. She was my first and only level 50 super strength character and was a lot of fun to play. She became one of my favorite toons, and the nominal head of Hero Force in the last two years of the game.
I was hardly done there, however. Next up was War Maid, a claws/WP brute that I quickly got to 50 and IO'd out. Another favorite of mine, she was placed in charge of one of my private SG divisions.
Mina Evangeline got to 50 not too long after that. She was something of a tribute character, based partly on Evangeline A.K. McDowell, the child vampire from Negima, and partly on Mina Tepes, the child vampire queen from Dance in the Vampire Bund. She was dark/dark, my only level 50 dark armor character, but ultimately I didn't like playing her as much, in part because any armor that obscures the character's looks annoys me.
Those were my original "big four" brutes. But I didn't stop there.
Shinobu Hime was created on one of my extra accounts -- one of only 2 50's that weren't on my main two accounts. She was a "CEBR" brute, or in this case a "CFBR" because she was claws/fire rather than claws/electric. CEBER was a TopDoc thing which meant "Claws Electric Brutes Rule", and was built around the idea that, you gained experience fastest at the very lowest levels, and a claws/electric or claws/fire brute had a great AoE attack in spin, a great AoE damage aura, and could leverage their damage output via fury. CEBER brutes would load up on insorations at the AE building, then run in to a CEBR-style AE mission which placed you at level 1 and spawned enemies in huge numbers. If you chewed inspirations as fast as they dropped, you could self-PL at amazing speeds.
I got Shinobu Hime to 50 this way, just to see what it was like. I never did much with the character after IOing her out though.
When Street Justice came out, I built a street justice/shield brute named Megamisama (goddess in Japanese). This was my third level 50 shield toon, after Sparks Fly and my fire/shield scrapper Trinkets. I built all three very similarly, and they were all amazingly powerful. Megamisama became another of my favorite toons.
Megami Hime was my Titan Weapons brute. I even got the Excaliber sword for her, for which I paid a lot of money. She was a lot of fun too. She was Megamisama's sister. I had plans to make a third sister who used staff melee, but that character never really got off the ground.
Those were my seven level 50 brutes -- in the end, while I didn't craft a stable of 10+ brutes like I had for my scrappers, I was able to increase my collection of level 50 brutes by quite a bit, and in so doing created some of my all-time favorite CoH characters.
I did have a few other brutes who were working their way up to 50 eventually:
a trained monkey's primary function was to make NPCs say amusing things. :D
"Did you hear that the Council were defeated by a trained monkey?"
Princess Shinobu was my main character on one of my many extra accounts. I had hoped to eventually have a level 50 on each of those accounts.
In my quest to play every melee set to 50, I was working on Vashti Ahandra (dual blades) and Candy Smash (stone melee) among others.
Shinobu Thirty was level locked at 30. Her only reason for existence was to earn hero merits and then random roll level 30 recipes. But she was my highest level Kinetic Melee character.
Known as Rocker Girl on Virtue, I transferred her to Exalted where she became simply "Rocker". Only a month or two later, I teamed with a different Rocker Girl on Virtue, so the name didn't remain unclaimed for long. ^_^
Princess Ozma, of course, is the toon I'm currently working on and plan to get to 50. She may not be my last 50 brute, however, because I also have....
Cupcake Overdrive, who I started on Double Experience Weekend in August, just a couple of weeks before the closing of the game was announced. I'd like to get her to 50 as well.
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