Revision as of 19:24, 3 December 2016

TVTropes-ing My Characters

All pictures are of the respective agent in her base form.

Ruvelia

A self-admitted computer nerd and general nobody before the events of P-Day, Ruvelia ended up signing on with Zephyr Inc more out of a peer pressure decision than anything else. That said, she hasn't exactly regretted the decision, and has made use of their resources to take up tinkering. She became pregnant very early in her time working as a Zephyr agent, and over the course of that pregnancy managed to make great strides in personal growth, the extent of which is noted in the tropes section. Somewhat more unexpectedly, she liked the sensation, even if the nanites insisted on making her pregnancies abnormally large; if asked about it, she's still uncertain whether it's something to blame the nanites for or whether it's just a kink she never knew she had until she had the chance to try it.

• Faction: Zephyr Inc
• Mutation Type: Standard
• Role: Buffer primary, Healer distant secondary. Buffs have an emphasis on energy management, though contain a smattering of everything.
• Favorite Class Combinations: Nurturer/Strategist, Den Keeper/Strategist, more recently Pack Rat/Strategist.
• Trivia: Ruvelia has recently been showing a little too much perverse glee regarding a not-yet-made design of hers she's dubbed the Gravidy Cannon.

Tropes that apply to Ruvelia:

• Big Eater: She's been shown to be capable of eating or drinking quite a lot on multiple occasions, from having one of everything in the Zephyr coffee lounge to drinking people dry of milk on request. The fact that she's usually eating for two might help with this somewhat.
• Bunny Ears Lawyer: Eccentric tinkerer who enjoys being far more heavily pregnant than is probably healthy far more than is probably healthy. Impressively multi-talented ex-computer nerd. One of the most powerful (arguably the most powerful at the time of writing this) buffer-type agents in any of the three major factions.
• Pregnant Badass: Being a core member of the first team (a four-person team, for that matter) to ever take down a Prime from the Wax Museum: Afterlife zone (the highest level zone at the time, capping out at Lv72 when agents cap out at Lv60) while less than a day from full term and being the kind of woman whose pregnancies are far from small and dainty probably qualifies her for this.

Minions - The Ruvelian Army

Drones - Ruvelian Archer, Ruvelian Knight, Ruvelian Priest

Mutant Companion - Ruvelian Hunter (AKA Kaiya)

Personal Minion - Ruvelian Butler

Children

Drake

?????

Meredith

A stock market speculator, entrepreneur, and constant heavy drinker, it's rare to see Meredith not at least a little sloshed. It doesn't seem to get in the way of her doing what she does best, though; if anything, it might be why she's able to loosen up enough to cut deals well. A relative noncombatant, Meredith spends most of her time on civil engineering problems instead, keeping an eye on the condition of the bubble-cities and ensuring that any trouble that comes up within them is swiftly resolved. May be just a little personally greedy.

• Faction: RSX Solutions
• Mutation Type: Kemonomimi, Advanced Inoculation
• Role: In flux combat-wise. Her business skills are significantly more important than her combat skills.
• Favorite Class Combinations: Defaults to Tormentor on the rare occasions she does fight.
• Trivia: Meredith is the only one of the five that the nanites permit to be a hermaphrodite.

Shurelia

A relatively ordinary girl that got caught up in the mess that is post-P-Day life, Shurelia didn't come to terms with her first mutation very well and needed some help from the Prometheans to stop freaking out about it so much. Their help seems to have worked well enough, as she's not only no longer unnerved by such things but is actually relatively comfortable making use of the fact that she can (albeit now with much more control over when as well as with an ability to reset to human if she gets a little too weirded out) in order to help people.

As an agent, her stamina is exceptional, aided by both a fair bit of chubbiness cushioning the hits she takes from ferals and the fact that the nanites support her weight much better than she used to be able to do alone so she won't tire so easily from that either. She may be a bit self-sacrificing to some folks, but she just doesn't like seeing people get hurt for no reason, and occasionally makes a habit of feeding and providing basic medical treatment for folks... even ferals, in the hopes her Promethean comrades can do something to bring them back to sanity when they're a little less starving and bleeding.

• Faction: Prometheans
• Mutation Type: Advanced Inoculation
• Role: Tanking, with some mild area damage for solo purposes.
• Favorite Class Combinations: Point Man when tanking, Berserker when solo.
• Trivia: Shurelia's feral-feeding may be slightly self-serving, since spending so long living the Cow Girl life makes for milky breasts even when she's never been pregnant, and there's not always a convenient milker at hand.

Nyssa

Another pic of her.

A girl born relatively recently to feral parents, Nyssa might have been just another feral if not for the Prometheans catching her relatively early in her life and slowly converting her back toward a more civilized mindset. Walking that thin line between the feral mindset and a still-sane one gives her some insight into the way they think, but at the same time she's not exactly a paragon of Promethean discipline, indulging herself in normally feral pleasures a bit much (though not before smacking the victim-to-be around more than a little in many cases). She may be self-loathing and taking that anger out on ferals, or she may be trying to get them to kneel by force, or maybe she's even just coming to terms with what her early life actually was like and is attempting to punish the instigators for it. Either way, she has an unusually strong appetite, both for food and... more perverse things.

Lately she's started work on the Glenstock restoration project. She's supposed to be a mentor to help teach the children there the construction skills they need to know, but she has admitted that while she knows some about computers, she only really got sent out there because of the 'big three' caring more about sending someone with some knowledge than committing an expert to another city. Still, she feels somewhat at home, given certain locals...

• Faction: Prometheans
• Mutation Type: Kemonomimi
• Role: Area damage through large single attacks.
• Favorite Class Combinations: Monstrosity.
• Trivia: Nyssa has been attempting to channel her urges into more constructive uses, and has lately taken up massage in the city of Eureka.

Tropes that apply to Nyssa:

• Anything That Moves: Having been skirting the edge of a feral mindset for the majority of her (admittedly short so far) life has kinda done this to her.
• Deep South: Seems to have this sort of accent to her speech. Most likely due to her parents or the Promethean who took her in having it.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Despite standing at a mere 4'6" in her base form, the shortest of the five by a significant margin, her class of choice is Monstrosity.

Raika

Sometimes keeping her supplier happy can go to some weird places. Third time around, she's attempting to develop her combat skills nekomata-style.

A girl born relatively recently to a couple of RSX agents, Raika was born with what might be considered a disability in this world of nanites and crazy mutant powers. Unable to harness the latter in the slightest, she instead took to training and designing so as not to be a disappointment to her parents. She's received a couple gifts of equipment from a mysterious benefactor, and while they're quite useful, she does occasionally get exasperated when said benefactor sends her something that, while useful, is a little more perverse than might be necessary.

Over time, she's grown stronger and stronger and is a force to be reckoned with, only particularly fearing the Devils of the Wax Museum, but as her gear largely comes from this mysterious benefactor of hers, their demands on her have grown as well... and not always in the way she's happy doing. She still complies begrudgingly, though, even if it's embarrassing sometimes.

• Faction: RSX Solutions
• Mutation Type: Human (shifted to Kemonomimi after her second remort), Advanced Inoculation
• Role: Eventually, adaptability. Presently, several flavors of harsh damage output paired with a surprising amount of durability. Also has an improvised healer-tank plus boss-hunter support fire setup.
• Favorite Class Combinations: Has gear setups for single-target DPS of all three types (as well as AOE Repeats DPS), along with a few scattered pieces for an AOE Healer and an improvised Healer-Tank. Tested Sniper/Strategist for remorts 0 and 1, Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist for remort 2, Monster Monarch/Strategist for remort 3, Brawler/Blood Warrior along with a shift to repeats gear for remort 4, Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior for remort 5, Plague Doctor/Strategist as the shift to DoT gear for remort 6, Den Keeper/Strategist for remort 7, shifted to AOE with Determinator/Blood Warrior for remorts 8-23, and currently trying that same AOE gear set with Blood Warrior/Strategist for remorts 24-43.
• Trivia: Raika keeps being subjected to embarrassing situations. A bra that pumps a faux-Lactaid effect through her whenever she gets hurt, a serum that overwhelms her body with so much energy that her body takes on a pregnant-looking appearance just to have a chance at venting at least some of the energy safely, and getting stuck in various kitty-related forms... she never takes them very well, but she's improving.

Tropes that apply to Raika:

• Animal Motifs: As of her twenty-fourth remort, Raika seems to be taking on a cat motif. Given the form she ended up getting stuck in, "cute and cuddly, but also a predator" describes her fairly well. She managed to get unstuck a dozen remorts later, but the motif still fits.
• Balloon Belly: During her fifteenth remort, courtesy of the Supermom Serum. Any feral that mistakes it for one of their ilk having gotten the best of her is in for a nasty surprise. Revisited at the tail end of her thirty-third with a gear refinement that substitutes her Padded Armor for the Perfected Supermom Serum, which has a much lower but safer energy output and reinforces her belly to the point that it may as well be considered an armored location... and later refined once more at the tail end of her forty-second remort to the point that standing behind her is a fairly safe place to be in the wake of most wide-area attacks (as of the shift in how Height and Mass impact health was changed to be entirely dependent on Height, the old Weight Gaining modifier she used to have on the Perfected Supermom Serum was tagged out for Blocking).
• Blade On A Stick: Her strongest weapon and the one she's usually seen carrying is a halberd she refers to as Brachion. It's exactly as effective as halberds have been shown to be historically. The much more defensively oriented Resurgam, a monk's spade, also qualifies as this.
• Blood Knight: One possible interpretation of her workaholic tendencies when her work involves copious amounts of combat. Assuming the cred energy meters represent a work quota that agents are expected to fill, after which anything else is overtime that pays progressively less as a 'you can stop now' sort of thing, she keeps on going anyway, well beyond any point of reasonable returns for work still being acquired. From roughly her fortieth remort onward, she's been using these habits more as a way to hone her skills than with the intent of being paid, especially as cred energy has been decaying as of late.
• Competitive Balance: More marked for the archetypes since she's been so many before and because Flexible Survival is not PvP-balanced anyway.
  • Close Range Combatant: From an RP perspective, her typical combat loadout while in the process of remorting counts as this. Packing light on weaponry, with little more than a halberd and a pair of injector dart pistols offensively, she doesn't carry any big guns that would afford her a longer range. She's used them in the past, but they've slowly been falling out of use in her arsenal in favor of defensive and augmentative equipment. Up close, however, she's an absolute monster, possessing incredible combat instincts, a powerful and versatile melee weapon in her halberd, the ability to ruin enemy movements and strategic reasoning with her injector dart pistols, physical abilities far above the human average thanks to various augmentative equipment, a hideously powerful barrier field in the Juggernaut Harness, and two layers of regeneration -- one working to heal her body whenever it gets damaged, one tearing nanites off her opponents to heal her injuries -- to quickly mend any injuries she does suffer without ever having to stop and apply first aid manually.
  • Glass Cannon: For her initial leveling path and first remort as a Sniper/Strategist. Could put out impressive amounts of damage in a short span of time, but couldn't survive well enough even with regeneration to make an effective soloist. Revisited this for her twenty-fourth remort with the incredibly risky Blood Warrior/Strategist just to see if she could handle it, but given all the survivability improvements she's made over all those remorts...
  • Stone Wall: Her second remort as a Two-Tailed Wizard/Strategist drastically improved her survivability but also slowed down her damage output significantly. Her fifth remort as a Regen Scrapper/Blood Warrior also qualifies, as it had massive amounts of survivability but its lack of Overkill or general damage skills limited its clear speed. Revisited this at the tail end of her thirty-second remort with Wasteland Paladin/Point Man, though as a test rather than actually trying it for a remort, with an improvised tanking setup that could withstand hideous amounts of punishment even without a proper healing AI and would likely be damn near totally invulnerable with one.
  • Mighty Glacier: Her third remort as a Monster Monarch/Strategist brought back a fair bit of her damage output as well as offering more survivability, but slowed down her actual clear speed until later in the level path when an effectively 90%+ Overkill rate turned fights into one giant health bar instead of a bunch of little ones.
  • Magically Inept Fighter: Has always been this if one counts mutant powers as magic for this purpose.
  • Gradual Grinder: Her sixth remort as a Plague Doctor/Strategist counts as this due to the nature of damage-over-time effects and the immense Vampiric healing they generate.
  • Puppet Fighter: Her seventh remort as a Den Keeper/Strategist counts as this on account of packing relatively little herself aside from a couple buffs, a couple heals, and her Tranquilizer pistol from her time as a Plague Doctor.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Her fourth and to a much greater extent eighth through twenty-third remorts as a Brawler/Blood Warrior and Determinator/Blood Warrior respectively have been this. Her damage output in either case is enormous, both pack some regeneration to help them stay alive, and the Determinator in particular has Durability and Vampiric to increase its sustain further. Determinator has a balancing factor in its energy inefficiency, which she is compensating by way of using relatively few attacks in her rotation, which leaves plenty of open space for energy recovery. This downtime weakness is then compensated with plenty of Recharge as well as making use of Blood Warrior as a secondary to provide InstantCooldown every five turns as well as when a new fight starts to get her stronger weapons available again faster.
    • Blood Warrior/Strategist from her twenty-fourth remort onwards has ended up being this due to her arsenal containing significantly more armor, deflection aids, barrier projection, and regeneration than actual weapons. Combine the Blood Warrior's raw damage output with her having as much health as most tanks, and that's what she's become.
• Cursed With Awesome: Somewhat debatable on whether it's technically a curse as nobody's actually sure of its source, but Raika's unnamed disability could qualify as this. Her inability to use mutant powers due to her personal nanite field being locked to its basic body maintenance functions means that if the field gets stronger or denser for whatever reason -- a possible explanation for remorts, perhaps -- all that extra power is going right back into basic body augmentation, meaning that she doesn't need any fancy mutant powers when she can just outclass most foes by way of raw martial skill and physical capabilities. The fact that her gear is both exceptionally well modified and works with this augmentation by packing its own nanite fields rather than working against it by drawing against her personal pool only reinforces how useful this 'disability' can be with the right adjustments.
• Cute Bruiser: Look at her. Then look at her fighting style, and the sheer amount of damage and survivability she packs.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Successfully hunted multiple Primes solo at the tail end of her eleventh remort, and has continued to do so at the tail end of most of the remorts that followed. So far the list includes Termite Drone, Termite Warrior, Nanite Sorceress, Nanite Wizard, Perfect Soldier...
• Disability Superpower: Raika's presently nameless disability (the RP explanation for her All Natural status, among other things) means that she's unable to manifest mutant powers, perhaps in part due to a naturally weak constitution that means her personal nanites are almost all concentrating on their basic body maintenance functions rather than trying to divert any to power manifestation. Gear uses its own reserve of nanites if any at all, though, rather than drawing from her personal pool, and on account of her disability, she trains incredibly hard to overcome her own weakness. In spite of this disability, she is arguably the single most powerful PC agent in any of the three factions.
  • Alternatively, it could be that her constitution is fine, but something about her (likely something related to being a child of RSX operatives) causes nanites to have a rather hard time gripping her system, and as such her personal nanite field is smaller or thinner than most. This still produces the same end result of having all her personal nanites devoted to basic body maintenance functions with none to spare for power manifestation.
• The Juggernaut: As a Wasteland Paladin/Point Man. While her damage output wasn't great, nothing short of some of the most powerful Boss-ranked mob types in the game including at least one each of the Shock Trooper, Bloodletter, and Diseased templates on absolute maximum difficulty and pheromones ratings could bring her down, and that was with a faulty to nonfunctional healing AI.
• New Game Plus: Currently has done the most of these out of anyone by a long shot. Never stop learning!
• No Social Skills: A perpetual weak spot of hers. For all her competence in other areas, she has nothing in any of what could be considered the social proficiencies, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. This makes it a bit awkward for her to be a squad leader, because while she understands it on a technical level, it's something she still has to get used to on an emotional level. Given how she's been fighting ferals for most of the time she's been alive, this makes sense.
• Temporary Bulk Change: Got stuck in the kemonomimi form of Plump Tigress shortly before beginning her twenty-fourth remort, and stayed stuck until her thirty-sixth. While she's as embarrassed about it as she was the Nekomata remort (#3) and the Supermom Serum remort (#15), she's taken it as a sign to try something new rather than fall into the general complacent routine she's been doing for the last sixteen remorts, and is taking it remarkably in stride in spite of her embarrassment, especially with the Perfected Supermom Serum becoming a core part of her arsenal as of her thirty-third remort.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: Given that her parents are RSX agents -- heroic and insanely powerful ones -- Raika has a rather warped sense of reasonable expectations for herself. She's not actually sure what they think of her, since she spends way too much time on the job and not seeing much of her parents, but there's a strange dichotomy between what most may see as the ludicrously powerful Prime-slayer and most likely single most powerful PC agent in Flexible Survival... and her own perception of herself, as a child with a disability she has to compensate for and that she's just barely an eighth of the way to reaching her parents' levels of competence. The fact that she's well aware of the less-than-pleasant designs of some of her weapons doesn't help her in feeling like she's anywhere near living up to her parents' standards.
• Workaholic: Others call her overzealous. She calls them lazy. It's very rare for her to be doing much other than clearing out ferals and other manners of beasts to keep the streets safe, and she tends to get grumpy when people waste her time while she's working, which ties into her general lack of social skills and care for social niceties.
• Younger Than They Look: Standard for children these days due to the nanites. Looks to be an adult or at least in her late teens, was born in early 2016.

Minions - The Lightning Crusher Squadron

Remort 7 brings recognition of Raika's dedication to suppressing the feral menace, and as such, she's been assigned a handful of lesser operatives in the hopes that she can make something of them. (Due to their stackableness, normal Mechanical Drones might be 'generic' RSX Troopers.)

Monica

A laid-back, somewhat lazy agent that nonetheless has been something of a cool big sister to the much younger Raika, Monica's usually been responsible for Raika's medical treatment on those occasions where Raika gets the crap beaten out of her while out feral-hunting. She was assigned to Raika's new squadron in the hopes that she'd actually go out and do some work. She still isn't much for actually fighting, but as the only one of the girls to be something other than fully human, she's not afraid to make use of that distinction to serve as the group's medic.

Her 'modification' (Wild, Potent, Overcharged, Overwhelming, Ruggedized) comes in the form of running afoul of Raika's own mysterious benefactor and scoring some effective albeit slightly perverse equipment. Unlike Raika, however, she's much more okay with the strangeness of the gear.

Celica

The most serious of the squad members, Celica lost an arm during a Feral attack some time ago, which has thankfully been replaced with a size-shifting (or possibly just multi-layered and removable) prosthetic since then. She serves as the group's tank, making use of the most oversized and shield-like of the sizes/layers both to stand out for attention-drawing purposes and to block the resulting fire as it comes in.

Her 'modification' (Improved, Overcharged, Attention Grabbing, Sticky, Ruggedized) largely consists of a couple tweaks to the largest form of her prosthetic arm, purging unnecessary components and re-balancing its weight so as to be less unwieldy than it appears while still packing a fairly nasty punch. The portions of the 'modification' that this alteration does not encompass come as social lessons from Clardona on how to make her a bit less of a stoic wallflower and as some lessons on medical treatment from both Clardona and Monica.

Clardona

A relatively inexperienced but nonetheless eager agent, Clardona was assigned to Raika's squadron mostly just so she has a mentor figure to learn from. She packs a fairly basic new-agent loadout, something which causes her to be a bit envious of her squad leader's heavily modded gear, but she nonetheless has the combat instincts and fervor to do well at her job.

As Clardona's mentor figure, Raika has been watching how she fights, and noting that Clardona tends to go a little too all-out, tiring herself quickly. As such, she's training the girl in pacing herself a bit better, as well as general combat arts and an improved gear requisition. This is the manifestation of her 'modification' (Optimized, Overcharged, Stabilizing, Extra Lethal, Ruggedized).

Rosetta

A short young woman that joined up later, Rosetta is a bit on the cute-but-clumsy side. Luckily, she hasn't actually hurt any of her squadmates through her clumsiness. Like all members of the squad, she knows at least a little healing, though she (not entirely by choice) tends to follow Monica's way of doing it through milk heals due to the nanites having blessed (or cursed, depending on one's point of view) her with quite the ample bosom, especially given her otherwise small size. The 'not entirely by choice' bit may have something to do with Monica's influence and Clardona's general envious tendencies.

Guides

Build Advice

No matter what role you want your character to play in combat, there are three things that every role needs to take into account to some extent if they intend to pursue optimization. Some builds care a little less about certain tenets of the three than others, but that said, all builds should at least consider them. In no particular order...

• Uptime. Ideally, you want any statuses you throw out to be able to stay up constantly by way of reapplication by the time the original duration elapses. Not following this means that there's likely to be odd spots in your combat rhythm where you're missing some statuses and thus are inconsistently at your full power, which can in some cases create vulnerable spots in your rhythm where you can be KO'd where you wouldn't be otherwise. Most relevant on buffing and debuffing builds, but still applicable for any build that runs either of those effects in smaller quantities (self-buffing counts too), runs cover and/or taunts in order to be a tank, or runs a Repeats or Damage Over Time damage-dealer setup (though the damage-dealers care in a different manner). Big Hits damage dealers care the least about this, though they still need to be mindful of the uptime of their passive effects to some extent.
  • Repeats and Damage Over Time differ in their caring in that it's a waste of damage to reapply the same attack to targets still suffering from it (with the potential exception of reapplying a Damage Over Time effect on an enemy that got a high deflection percent on the same one earlier in the hopes of getting less of a deflection percent this time), so ideally these two want to apply their damage to targets not currently suffering from the attack in question if they have one that becomes available for use again before its first use expires. Failing that, power is more important than duration with these two when it comes to clearing most fights quickly. It doesn't particularly matter if a Repeats or Damage Over Time effect has an enormous amount of damage over its full duration if you're fighting enemies that won't survive the full duration (unless you have Overkill, but that's another story and even then it's somewhat limited, more on that elsewhere), and even if the damage per use is enormous, a low-power, long-duration attack of these types won't contribute much to the damage per round, which is generally more important than the damage per use when it comes to clearing fights quickly. As a result, both of these do quite nicely with low uptime but high intensity attacks, but do be mindful of how their damage per round matches up with their cooldown, because that's still relevant in terms of efficiency (especially when trying to gather EXP by doing lots of fights in rapid succession) even if the matter of overlapping or having downtime on the damage ticks is less of a concern.
• Energy management. If you have no EN left, you can't do anything meaningful until you recover some. It's no good having all your statuses up and plenty of options to use if you don't have the EN to use them. It's also worth noting that ENBreak and ENMod synergize with one another and the former makes the latter worth more than it appears. Debuffers and Big Hits damage dealers care the most about this, the former because many powerful debuffs are hideously expensive and the latter because as the only build type with one-and-done effects rather than lasting ones, it has nothing to offer if it stops being able to throw out new attacks. Other builds care to some extent for the general reason that they can't do anything meaningful if they run out of EN, though the lingering nature of Repeats and Damage Over Time attacks as well as buffs generally sticking better than debuffs (since you can trust your allies to be around longer than any particular enemy group will) means they can afford a little more downtime for energy recovery purposes without suffering too much in their main role. Tanks tend to vary somewhat in how much they care about this, with Cover tanks probably caring less than Aggro or Taunt tanks, though all three tend to have some energy problems, usually by way of running a ton of passives and toggles to boost their durability which leaves them a little short in terms of maximum EN, which also restricts their natural EN recovery rate somewhat.
• Rotation blank spots and/or overcrowding. Strike is ideally a last resort move that exists to fill any instances in which you have nothing better to use (or perhaps functioning as a minor energy restorative at the same time if upgraded as such). If you're using Strike more often than you need it as an energy management tool (if upgraded as such), you either need more active options to use, or to pack more Recharge so the active options you already have are available more often. At the same time, some builds, notably Big Hits damage dealing, suffer if you have too many options competing for the same usage turns, especially if some of those are outside the damage-dealing role itself, so be mindful that running too many active (and non-instant) buffs or debuffs on a Big Hits damage dealer competes with their damaging attacks and eats into their overall damage output.