The Brute - Subarchetypes
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Like its hero counterpart the Tanker, you may think that all Brutes are essentially the same. In fact, the Brute is a more generic type of melee fighter, like the Scrapper, and it's the Stalker who is the specialist. Therefore, many kinds of villain concepts can fit into the category of Brute. A Brute doesn't have to be a mindless, muscular beast, there can actually be Brutes that are cunning, quick thinking, and even stealthy. The Brute's escalating strength is explained as anger, but it could also be learning the foes' weakness, drawing energy from the enemy, or just growing desperation as the fight drags on.
Rampaging Beast: The name "Brute" most typically conjures up this kind of villain; a muscular, monstrous creature that is more animal than man. His Fury is driven by rage, and as his rage increases, so does his strength, making him an unstoppable force of destruction. While the damage of Super Strength is fairly low, its fast, quick recharging attacks are perfect for building Fury, by just charging into a group of foes and whaling on them. Claws, which is a new addition to Brutes, is similar in speed. While it does not have the massive boost of Rage, it does have Follow Up, which provides a similar, if lower, constant boost. This is different from Stalkers, who get the regular Build Up. This concept is similar to the Brick, but unlike with an Invulnerability Tanker, a Brute can't count on his defense to make him invulnerable. Instead, he uses it in the first part of the fight, to keep the damage to himself down until he can build Fury. In this, Invincibility is an excellent power, because it provides the most defense when you start, and have the most opponents. Once Fury is built up, you can toggle it off, conserving Endurance, and take on smaller groups to take them out quickly. One reason I suggest Dark Melee, although it is slower, is that it makes an excellent combination with Invulnerability due to its regenerative capabilities. Willpower also makes a good combination with this concept, as it is similar to Invulnerability in many ways. Rise to the Challenge allows the Brute to become stronger as he is surrounded by foes, as with Invincibility, and the main toggle defenses are likewise similar. Willpower also provides a good amount of Endurance recovery, which combined with his powerful healing abilities helps the Brute sustain Fury a lot longer than Invulnerability can. On the other hand, Willpower's weak taunt aura makes it difficult to tank, and the heal oriented nature of its defense means that while you can continue to fight as long as your foes don't exceed your capacity to heal, you can drop very quickly if you become overwhelmed.
Fire Demon: The Fire Demon is the Brute counterpart to the Fire Tanker. While the Fire Power Sets naturally provide more damage than the other Brute sets, however, the slow recharge and AoE nature of most Fire Melee attacks makes it difficult to build Fury. Thus, Firey Aura can actually be better with another Melee set such as Super Strength. Fury also doesn't work with the "dropped" attack in Fiery Aura, Burn, which is another point against it. Still, if the Fire Demon stays on the move, taking on smaller groups of foes as a Fire Tanker would, the extra damage can be quite helpful. Unlike the Rampaging Beast type, which relies on building up Fury to do damage, the Fire Demon can start doing damage right from the very start. This not only draws more counterfire, building up Fury, but ensures that once Fury does manage to build, the current foes are nearly dead. The Fire Demon can fire off Healing Flames and move on to a bigger group, knowing Fury will increase his damage, or try and take on smaller groups even with his HP in the yellow. (As with Invulnerability, his Resistance makes that fairly safe, as his HP loss is fairly predictable)
Dark Demon: The Dark Demon demonstrates the more generic nature of the Brute, as it originally took this set from Scrappers, not Tankers, who did not have access to it at the time. The Dark Demon has much more resiliance than the Dark Scrapper, because of its higher hit points, but takes longer to build up to that level of damage. And Dark Melee is not only fairly slow, both in activation time, especially with Shadow Maul, and in recharge time, but it is also costly in terms of Endurance, making it hard to continue once Fury has been built. Fortunately, as with the Fire Demon, it is possible to adjust your strategy to overcome these weaknesses. First of all, Brawl and the Dark Demon's starting attacks, Shadow Punch and Smite, should be used to build Fury. Second, the Dark Melee -Acc effect, which takes effect from every attack, can be used to protect the Brute and keep him in the fight longer. Enemies that miss you still cause you to build Fury, so as long as you can keep this effect going, maybe even punching multiple foes in the fight to debuff more than one of them, you can compensate for your lower recharge speed.Finally, Dark Melee and Dark Aura both are excellent regenerative powers, so as long as you can keep your Endurance going, you can heal back from damage. Slot your attacks well for Endurance, and use them wisely, conserving your Endurance as long as you can, and only using the most costly attacks once Fury is well established. Endurance is the weakness of Dark, not HP, and remember, the longer you stay in the fight, the more powerful your Brute becomes.
Stone Brute: The Stone Brute is the closest a Brute can come to the hero side concept of the Tanker. While he cannot "tank" as well as a true Tanker, he can come awfully close. With more hit points than a Scrapper, and the massive protection of Stone, he can protect a villain team as well as a Tanker can protect his team, since villain Archetypes tend to be more resiliant anyway. So those players who enjoy the role of the "meatshield" in City of Heroes will probably want to play the Stone Brute in City of Villains. Unfortunately, while the slow, ponderous pace of Stone Armor is fine for a Tanker, which is typically slow anyway, it is disasterous to a Brute's Fury. Thus, the Stone Brute is really only suited for teams, where other teammates can do the majority of the damage. Even if the Stone Brute avoids Granite Armor while solo, so his attacks will not be slowed down, using Rooted to prevent status effects means it will be difficult to move from group to group quickly. Thus, the Stone Brute works best with Melee attacks that are slow and powerful, doing massive damage right off the bat, without the need to build Fury. Once the fight gets going, the Fury which is built up just by those attacks should be enough to match the damage of a Tanker, but the Stone Brute will never match the constant damage of a Scrapper. It is better to rely on high burst damage, doing massive damage in single strikes to take out foes as quickly as possible. Interestingly enough, this type of strategy can work well in PvP, too, since it is difficult to build Fury in PvP.
Power Brute: The exact opposite of the Stone Brute, the Power Brute is fast, powerful, and usually, extremely intelligent. He may draw his powers from a suit of high tech armor, or he may have the power to generate energy with his body. Or, he could even be a skilled martial artist, who channels his "chi" into energy attacks. He could even be a sort of Agile Totem Animal, combining claws with a great deal of speed and agility, while still retaining his Brutish strength. In any case, this concept is similar enough to the Tanker Powerhouse that I chose a name to suggest that connection. Energy Aura is unique in that it is one of the only two defense Sets (the other being Dark Armor) that has stealth. It may seem bizarre for a Brute to be stealthy, but in fact this can be a very useful power to a Brute. By keeping down the number of foes that attack him, yet leaving more nearby that can be attacked quickly once Fury is built up, the Brute can gain a real advantage over just charging in and taking them all on. While the Stalker is the specialist in stealth, a Brute can be smart and sneaky, too, and this concept is a perfect example of that. Energy Aura is not very well recieved by many Brute players, though, perhaps because its stealth and reliance more on End recovery than healing seems contrary to the Brute concept. An alternative to Energy Aura is Super Reflexes, which will provide the Brute with even better Defense. The stealth is not available, but Super Reflexes does have Quickness, (see Electric Armor below) and Practiced Brawler, which is a very good status protection power once it is slotted with recharge. Super Reflexes tends to be somewhat stronger overall than Energy Aura, although it lacks any form of Endurance recovery or healing, and can be a little Endurance intensive. See the Stalker Agile Totem Animal for some of the other commentary on Super Reflexes.
Electric Brute: The Electric Brute bears a lot of similarity to the Power Brute, since it shares many of Energy Aura's Endurance recovery powers. In fact, Electric Melee is more Endurance efficient than ANY other Brute Melee set, since its ability to transfer some of the Endurance drained from foes is inherent to the set. This means that while the Electric Brute may not do a lot of damage, it does build Fury well, and it can keep going at full Fury far longer than any other Brute. Electric Melee's final attack is also very unique, and fits well with Teleporting as a concept. In addition, the speed boost of Lighting Speed makes the Electric Brute so fast many players don't even choose another movement power. Lightning Speed, like Quickness from the Super Reflexes set, increases both movement and attack speed, so again, it is very useful for building Fury, and in allowing the Brute to use that Fury by moving quickly from group to group. As with the Power Brute, the Electric Brute is VERY fast, almost a Speedster, and not at all like the slow, ponderous, hulking monsters you would expect a Brute to be. An Electric Brute might not even be muscular at all, he (or she) could be small and skinny. (And so could a Power Brute, actually) Electric Armor is not very well regarded, however, primarily because of its lack of a powerful heal, similar to Energy Aura. Some healing was added to the new power Energize, but the amount of healing is still fairly low. It primarily is an Endurance conserving power, much like Electric Armor and Melee in general, and a boost to regeneration.
Brute Speedster: The Speedster is sort of a subarchetype unto itself, an Archetype based on concentrating on Super Speed from the Power Pool. On the hero side, the Scrapper represents the generic melee hero, so the Speedster, with no ranged attacks, fits that Archetype, but on the villain side, it is not so simple. Either a Brute or a Stalker could fit the Speedster concept, depending on how "stealthy" you wanted the Speedster to be. The biggest issue is making the punches in Super Strength look less super powered and more like speedy blows, but with Power Customization there are a few options that are less, well, brutish. The Brute Speedster handles those Super Speed concepts that are not stealthy. The idea of Fury doesn't exactly fit a Speedster, the Speedster doesn't want to stay in combat with his foes long enough to build up Fury, he wants to zip in and take them out, then zip away. Then again, once Fury has been built up, the ability to zip from one group of foes to the next helps keep that Fury up. You could represent Fury as the Speedster "getting up to speed", once he reaches full Fury he is moving so fast he can take down his foes in a single blow. The best choice for a "pure" Speedster is Super Reflexes, due to Quickness, but as mentioned above, Electric Armor can increase movement speed as well, with Lightning Speed. Thus, the concept of the Electric Brute is already somewhat close to that of the Speedster. It would only take a little "push", taking all the powers from Super Speed, as well as Fitness for Stamina, to make him an Electric Speedster. (Actually, a Brute should not take Flurry, as the long animation time will cause him to lose Fury)
Flier: As with the Scrapper version, the Flier is not as much a choice of Power Sets, as the choice to specialize with a Power Pool. The "pure" Flier, using nothing but the Flying pool and no other "super" powers, would be more of a Brute and not a Stalker, unlike with Super Speed. (It would be hard to miss an assassin diving on you out of the sky) The interpretation of Fury could be that as the Flier engages in battle, he becomes more and more dangerous as he tires out and outmanuevers his foe. Super Reflexes is probably the better fit to the concept, as it is Defense-based and more about dodging, although as with heroes many Fliers are extremely resiliant.
Black Knight: Now that Battle Axe and War Mace have been added to the Brute Melee choices, many weapons are available for use by a hand to hand warrior concept. This warrior concept could be a medieval knight, a barbarian, or a technological fighter from the future. This subarchetype covers those concepts that are high class and "noble", a villanous knight that has chosen the path of evil. Battle Axe is somewhat slower than Dual Blades, which can make it more difficult to build Fury. However, Battle Axe also does more damage, and its attacks can be alternated with Brawl to increase its attack rate. There was some talk that testing of the weapon sets showed they did not build Fury well, but this might have been solved when the redraw times of all weapons were reduced, to help them do more damage. Dual Blades, of course, was designed from the start to eliminate redraw, where possible, and so it is much faster. It is not quite as fast as some other sets, as many of the moves are multiple slashed, but still only count as one attack. Still, it is probably easier to build Fury with Dual Blades than with Axe and Mace, if only slightly. Invulnerability would be a good Secondary for an armored knight, but Shield Defense is probably the more traditional image of the medieval knight. Shield Defense is a fairly strong set, and is unique in its utility in teams. The Shield Brute actually gets more defense from allies standing next to him, the opposite of sets like Invulnerabily which scales their defense to the number of foes. And Shield can be used to protect allies, and buff their Defense, in an almost Defender-like manner. Finally, there is the Shield Charge, which does massive damage, and fits perfectly with the Brute concept, making a good alpha strike before the Brute begins to build up Fury in earnest. And it is even MORE devistating with Fury behind it.
Bloodthirsty Barbarian: In power choices this subarchetype is almost identical to the Black Knight, but it is its exact opposite in terms of social standing. While the Black Knight is a noble warrior, this concept is a mindless beast of a man, a barbaric fighter from a chaotic age, a savage caveman from before the dawn of time... or a sadistic and brutal serial killer who beats his innocent victims with whatever weapon he can find. The main difference between this subarchetype and the last would be the choice of costume, and the weapon. There are a number of "Brutish" weapons available, from a lead pipe to a pipe wrench to a shovel. A manhole cover can even be selected for use as an improvised Shield, and there are also some Tribal style shields which could be usable with a barbarian concept. Willpower would be a good choice for this concept, as well, to represent the mindless killer's stubborn or even magical ability to survive all attacks and refuse to die.
Mystic Villain: As with the Mystic Warrior concept from the Tanker, this concept is built around using a Fire Sword or Stone Hammer to represent some sort of mystic weapon. Ice Melee and its sword is unfortunately not available, but perhaps a similar set will be designed in the future. Outside of the non-weapon, elemental powers, this concept would be similar to the Black Knight. One interesting possiblity that the introduction of Shields brings to the game, however, is that the shield is the elemental "weapon". A Fire or Stone Shield could be chosen to match the sword, or a shield of another elemental type could be chosen to mesh with Electrical, Dark, or even Energy Melee. The Dark Shield and Dark Melee in particular would make a good "Demonic" type mystical character.
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