How many Characters does it take to use all the Powersets?

[legendaryjman]

This is the thought experiment that we all have fallen into at one point in time. I know someone out there has done the math of how many different powerset combinations there are. Some people probably made all the characters, some other might even have leveled them all. Me, I just got bit by the bug and decided to figure out how many characters would it take to make one character of each powerset, with as minimal overlapping as possible.

 

Short answer: 69.

 

To start lets go to the Melee ATs: Tanker, Scrapper, Brute, and Stalker.

There are 14 different armor sets and 23 different melee sets. One thing I found interesting is that all of the ATs share the armors except for Ninjitsu, that is only on Scrappers and Stalkers. They almost share all of the melee sets except for Super Strength, that is only on Tankers and Brutes. Stalkers are the only ones that get Ninja Blade, but the trade off is that they are missing 5 different melee sets.

 

Lets get the easy sets out of the way, the elemental pairings. All 4 ATs get access to these.

Dark Melee/Dark Armor, Electrical Melee/Electric Armor, Energy Melee/Energy Aura, Fiery Melee/Fiery Aura, Ice Melee/Ice Aura, Psionic Melee/Psionic Armor, Radiation Melee/Radiation Armor, Stone Melee, Stone Armor.

 

That leaves us with the 7 “natural” armors and a lot of weapon/martial arts sets.

 

First we have 3 one handed weapons that pair perfectly with Shield Defense: Battle Axe, Broad Sword and War Mace. Tankers, Scrappers and Brutes get access to all three.

 

The obvious answer for Regeneration is Claws, Katana can go with Ninjitsu, Super Strength and Invulnerability is the classic combo, Martial Arts gets Super Reflexes, which leaves us just Bio Armor and Willpower and 8 melee sets. This is where overlapping has to happen. You can mix anything with anything but this is what I am going with:

Dual Blades/Super Reflexes, Kinetic Melee/Willpower, Savage Melee/Regeneration, Staff Fighting/Super Reflexes, Street Justice/Willpower, Titan Weapons/Invulnerability.

 

Which leaves us with Bio Armor. There is no symbiotic melee, or even elasticity melee. The only “weird” powerset left is Spines, which I guess can fit ... maybe? Also we have Sonic Melee being worked on. There is no Sonic Armor (yet). At this time the only thing that seems to fit is Psionic Armor (you can't spell Psionic without Sonic, amirite?).

 

This is how I would break down what you would make for minimal overlapping:

 

Tanker: Dark/Dark, Elec/Elec, NRG/NRG, Ice/Ice, Psi/Psi, Rad/Rad, Stone/Stone, Inv/SS, Shield/Mace, Will/Street

Scrapper: Sword/Shield, MA/SR, Spines/Bio, Claws/Regen, Katana/Nin, Titan/Inv

Brute: Fire/Fire, Kinetic/Will, Savage/Regen, Axe/Shield, Blades/SR, Sonic/Psi

Stalker: Ninja/Ninja, Staff/SR

 

That is a total of 24 different characters but covers every powerset at least once, and you don't do the same powerset on an AT twice. Obviously you can make the elementals on any AT but I like Tankers.

 

Now we have to get into the rest of the mess. It was fun to try and spread out the support powersets because those can go into Defender, Controller, Corrupter or Mastermind. Another interesting thing is that all of the ranged damage powersets are shared with all of the ranged damage ATs: Blaster, Defender, Corrupter and Sentinel. The real problem that kinda brought my whole thought experiment to a halt was Blasters and Dominators. Their secondaries are not shared with any other AT. They both have 15 secondary powersets, which means one has to make 15 Blasters and 15 Dominators. There are 15 ranged damage sets, sure, but only 12 control sets.

 

The easy stuff for Blasters:

Radiation Blast/Atomic Manipulation, Dark Blast/Darkness Manipulation, Seismic Blast/Earth Manipulation, Electrical Blast/Electricity Manipulation, Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation, Fire Blast/Fire Manipulation, Ice Blast/Ice Manipulation, Psychic Blast/Mental Manipulation, Sonic Attack/Sonic Manipulation, Archery/Tactical Arrow.

 

This leaves one with 5 damage sets: Assault Rife, Beam Rifle, Dual Pistols, Storm Blast, Water Blast and 5 secondaries: Devices, Martial Combat, Ninja Training, Plant Manipulation, Temporal Manipulation.

 

We can do the natural stuff with the natural stuff: Beam Rifle/Devices, Dual Pistols/Martial Combat. But what do we do with Assault Rifle, Storm Blast, Water Blast, Plant Manipulation, Temporal Manipulation and Ninja Training? None of those go together. Still, we gotta make it work so Water Blast/Plant Manipulation, Storm Blast/Temporal Manipulation, and finally Assault Rifle/Ninja Training. It doesn't feel good, but we did it.

 

Dominators are just as bad.

Arsenal Control/Arsenal Assault, Darkness Control/Darkness Assault, Earth Control/Earth Assault, Electric Control/Electricity Assault, Fire Control/Fiery Assault, Ice Control/Icy Assault, Mind Control/Psionic Assault, Plant Control/Savage Assault, Symphony Control/Sonic Assault.

 

This leaves us with 3 control powersets: Gravity, Illusions, and Pyrotechnic, which would be fine because we still gotta make some controllers, but we also got 4 secondaries: Energy Assault, Martial Assault, Radioactive Assault, and Thorny Assault. None of this stuff fits nicely so we, once again, gotta hand wave away some characters: Gravity Control/Energy Assault, Arsenal Control/Martial Assault, Pyrotechnic Control/Radioactive Assault, Plant Control/Thorny Assault. ew.

 

With that out of the way we can go back to the fun part where we gotta spread out the support sets. We got 18 sets to spread out over 4 ATs.

Cold Domination/Icy Blast, Electrical Affinity/Electric Blast, Marine Affinity/Water Blast, Radiation Emission/Radiation Blast, Sonic Resonance/Sonic Attack, Storm Summoning/Storm Blast. Those can be Defenders or Corrupters.

 

Lets throw in some Masterminds:

Beast Mastery/Nature Affinity, Ninjas/Trick Arrow, Necromancy/Dark Miasma, Demonic Summoning/Thermal Radiation, and Mercenaries/Traps. Those are the easy ones. The two hard ones are Robotics and Thugs. We could go Robotics/Traps as well, but then what would we do with Mercenaries? Instead we are going to go Robotics/Force Field. For Thugs I thought about Poison to represent what they are selling, but I decided to go with more enforced loyalty with Thugs/Pain Domination.

 

Controllers have one specific support set in Darkness Affinity so we can easily pair that with Darkness Control/Darkness Affinity.

 

This leaves us with 4 support sets: Empathy, Kinetics, Poison, and Time Manipulation. We also have one control set left to use in Illusions. Sadly Illusions does not really pair with anything. I would want some kind of Psychic Affinity. Instead we are going to go Illusions/Time Manipulation to stick with the mental aspect.

 

Empathy, Kinetics, and Poison. Why is there no Empathy Blast?

Poison/Radiation Blast, Empathy/Psychic Blast, and finally we end on Kinetics. Kinetics, the powerset that pairs with everything, and nothing at the same time. I had no idea what to do with kinetics so I just went with something to finish this thought experiment and free myself from having to agonize over spreadsheets and go with Kinetics/Electric Blast. With that, it was finished. Here is how I would spread them out:

 

Blaster: Rad/Atom, Dark/Dark, Earth/Earth, Elec/Elec, NRG/NRG, Fire/Fire, Ice/Ice, Psy/Psy, Sonic/Sonic, Archery/Arrow, Beam Rifle/Devices, Dual Pistol/Martial, AR/Nin, Storm/Time, Water/Plant

Defender: Emp/Psy, Poison/Rad, Kin/Elec

Controller: Dark/Dark, Ill/Time

Corrupter: Ice/Cold, Elec/Elec, Water/Marine, Rad/Rad, Sonic/Sonic, Storm/Storm

Mastermind: Beast/Nature, Demon/Therm, Ninja/TA, Robot/FF, Merc/Traps, Thugs/Pain

Dominator: Arsenal/Arsenal, Dark/Dark, Earth/Earth, Elec/Elec, Fire/Fire, Ice/Ice, Symphony/Sonic, Plant/Savage, Mind/Psy, Grav/NRG, Mind/Martial, Pyro/Rad, Plant/Thorn

 

That is 45 characters, with not one Sentinel in sight.

 

Now I leave it up to the streets. How would you do it?

[lemming]

Well, by my calculations, you've got 2648 different combinations of primary and secondary powers and 201 different choices.

That's with using exclusions such as Stone & Claws (only Tankers and Brutes have that excluded, Scrappers & Stalkers can Stone Claw)

Shield locks out Claws, Dual Blades, Katana, Spines, Staff Fighting, and Titan Weapons

 

Blaster -> 225 - 15
Brute -> 315 - 23
Controller -> 204 - 17
Corruptor -> 255 - 17
Defender -> 255 - 17
Dominator -> 156 - 13
Mastermind -> 119 - 17
Scrapper -> 324 - 22
Sentinal -> 210 - 15
Stalker -> 280 - 19
Tanker -> 301 - 22
HEAT & VEAT -> 4 - 4

Combo: 2648 - 201

 

addendum: This is with Sonic Melee

Edited Monday at 04:43 AM by lemming
couple other off numbers

[Clave Dark 5]

9 hours ago, legendaryjman said:

Short answer: 69.

 

Short reply: Nice.

 

(hey, someone hadda do it)

[Glacier Peak]

[Skyhawke]

From what I've heard, 3. 

 

 

[lemming]

3 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

Worse, it was programming.

[madicen]