Reptlbrain

[ QUOTE ]
Met a controller, not even out of his teens, wanted to know if the team wanted him to HERD)

Conversely, if you're talking to someone who knows what they're doing; by all means, consider an invite.

[/ QUOTE ]

Some controllers do have the ability to herd in their teens: /Rads (with Radiation Infection) and /Storms (with Snowstorm), if you don't mind the herd moving s l o w l y. (/Storms get much better at it at 20, when they get Hurricane.) Since mobs don't mez so much in those levels, and hp disparity versus melee'ers isn't as great, it is possible, though a defender of the same sort (or a Dark/) would be better-suited to the task.

Why not invite him and see? When someone suggests a tactic that seems unusual, you should see if it works, though also prepared to RUN! if things go awry.

I was actually planning to make the reply that Jeff_Alexander and Raxer already beat me to about adding defenders, but I'll elaborate a little.

The reason I think you make the mistake about not hiring defenders for offense is because 2/3 (or more) of defenders are empaths (and some 1/2 of those "pure"), and two of their three offensive buffs are single target (RA excepted), so the whole team, unless small doesn't benefit. Throw in Rads/, Storms/, and Darks/, and each has a power that, if played thoughtfully, can increase every team member's damage by 30%, while simultaneously slowing incoming damage (thru redux, knockdown, or slow). Kins/ can add even more at high levels, as you know. More defenders than other classes also take Leadership powers as well, buffing your offensive output even further. And defenders & controllers make it much safer for blasters to go wild with their AoEs, killing mobs faster.

I suspect your "linebacker" team had a tank for the other member (a lineman?), and the bulk of the defenders were empaths without much in the way of blasts.

Yeah, somehow the Khmer Rouge never acquired the bizarre evil-cool that is the Nazis. And that's good.

[ QUOTE ]
Many other 'Historical' regimes don't have quite the fantastic horror-story air that Hitler or the rest of the Axis leaders did. They're either still too recent or too obscure.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're right about obscurity keeping most historical villains from fame. I blame the Hitler Cha--I mean, History Channel for showing WWII stuff ad nauseum. But there are hundreds of (interesting) villains that just don't get the infamy. You could pretty much take any empire from the past and find horrible acts they've perpetrated on their subjects and even citizens.

In Southern Africa: Cecil Rhodes (representing the British Empire, which probably invented concentration camps in Africa) or the Voortrekkers (the ancestors of Apartheid), or on the African side, Mzilikazi of the Ndebele, or Tshaka (or the less famous leaders Cetshwayo or Dingane) of the Zulu, all renowned violent empire builders.

Across Africa there were witches (*/poison?), witch-fighters, and rain-makers (Storm, anyone?).

In Central-East Africa: Mirambo or Tippu Tip both built trading and raiding empires that sold slaves, massacred elephants, and ran plantations to feed their armies. Henry Stanley, their contemporary who is so famous for the mild (and amusing) quip, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," was a brutally cruel man who regarded shooting Africans as sport, and participated also in the slaving and raiding as he "explored" the center of the continent. The Belgian King Leopold, who set up the Congo Free State in part on the information from Stanley, put in place a regime that chopped the hands and heads off of the Congolese who refused or resisted enslavement in rubber harvesting or copper mines. Plenty of fantastic horror all round, there.

And I ain't even gone into the slightly more famous great Eurasian empires of the more distant past, Ghengis Khan, Tamurlane, the 'Abbasids, the Vikings, the Huns, the Romans, or the Persians, all of whom were quite villainous to some of their conquered. Or more recent villainous organizations, the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad, the PLO. All fertile ground for murderous sumb!tches.

*Runs to store to plunk down 50$ for CoV*

The effort!

Many good and useful things pointed out--particularly the phrase "Fascism was the [censored] child of Aristocracy and Capitalism"--but as a historian I have a few quibbles:

[ QUOTE ]
The whole of Europe had recently watched two extremely bloody Socialist revolutions over a relatively short period. First, the peasants of France rose up and slaughtered the Nobility and the Rich in that country in massive numbers.

[/ QUOTE ]

I doubt the French Revolution (~1790s) weighed heavily on the minds of the elites of interwar Europe, because the elite (at least in the western half of Europe) at that point were the middle classes who that revolution had brought into power. The French event was also less of a peasant revolution than that of urban commoners (both middle and lower classes) who presided over the execution of the nobility. (That said, peasants participated in some cases in the massacres of priests, the other pre-revolutionary upper class.)


[ QUOTE ]
This terrified people. The poor commoners could revolt, steal everything you owned, and then kill you and your family.

[/ QUOTE ]

Only if "people" and "you" belonged to a very small elite class.

[ QUOTE ]
Like the lower-class Italians, the lower-class Germans swallowed Fascism hook, line, and sinker, even though they were really those Fascism targeted as its enemies.

[/ QUOTE ]

"Hook, line, and sinker" overstates the gullibility of the lower classes (I'm assuming you mean peasants and working classes). The Nazis drew their semi-popularity from all classes, from old Prussian aristocracrats to middle class factory owners to those destituted by the depression. Probably the most vigorous resistance to the Nazis came from organized workers (lower class people), since, as you pointed out, they understood that the National Socialists were utterly opposed to socialism.

[ QUOTE ]

Eventually, in order to keep the government from dissolving altogether, the Parliament voted to appoint Adolph Hitler, as leader of the Nazi Party, to be leader of the government. He was sworn in as Chancellor in 1933.

[/ QUOTE ]

The elected president at the time appointed Hitler to the chancellorship, and he used constitutionally legal "emergency" powers available to that position to disband (and re-elect) the elected parliament, and then to further restrict democratic institutions.

I'd also argue that you underestimate the centrality of racism to the Nazi ethos, that it was crucial to convincing the populace to much of what the government did.

Looking forward to your next historical villain post.