People don't seem to be putting much discussion into which group we should be joining. Lets change that.
Impact group – With Flare Blade and an upgraded Barrier Jacket, you have a better chance to survive going hand-to-hand than you did in the last Endbringer fight.
So we know fighting Ziz back in Arc 3 would have been certain death which makes given that our old Barrier Jacket crumpled against an RPG. Now however it might be worth considering. Taylor has Knight Armor which is "significantly stronger", Blitz Move for high speed dodging, and Flare Blade for both damage dealing and parrying.
One of the most important questions here is how much tougher is Taylor's Knight Armor? Well from this:
Hint: Samantha's Inherent Forcefield is already Knight Armor equivalent.
we know Sam's defenses are equivalent to Knight Armor so we can pivot this question into: "How tough is Sam?"
Well we know that dying against Behemoth was a possibility for her:
Had you sent Samantha to the fight, she would have gotten a survival roll and needed to beat Behemoth's attack roll to survive. Considering Behemoth got an 82… But! It would have given me another survival roll to work with so Danny could have gotten more than 15, his difficulty check for surviving this fight. As I've said before, a Guardian Beast is technically expendable, or at least replaceable. Your father is (was?) not.
that said the threat wasn't Behemoth so much as the psudo-Sting attack he reflected towards HQ which means it doesn't really provide a good point for comparison.
We do have another in the form of the fight against Lung:
Except Lung apparently did not know how this was supposed to go. There was a faint effect, his foe's attacks doing just a tiny bit more than they had before, and then he was growing again. Definitely more than fifteen feet in length now, and the rest of his half-formed wings ripped themselves out of his back while liquid muscle and membrane leaked out of innumerable cracks and wrapped itself around the bones. He would be flight-worthy in just a few minutes, less if he could pull off this sudden growth trick a couple more times.
A figure wearing blood-red armor and with a string of all-too-realistic skulls hanging from one shoulder teleported to them in a flash of fire and noise and slammed a stone axe into Lung's side.
The dragon screamed, his pain and rage speeding up his growth, but that did not matter. Alexandria might have backed off at the newcomer's sudden appearance, but Samantha was not going to let this opportunity go to waste. She moved faster, her shape blurring to anyone watching as she boosted her speed as far as she could go without getting lost in her own cruel fury. She danced around Lung's lunges, dodged blows that could have ripped her head off even with Inherent Forcefield, and jabbed her spear again and again against the beast's armor. Her impromptu ally took advantage of her power's effect, each blow of the enormous axe reaching flesh before the hole inevitably refilled.
Twisting around a strike at his face, Lung let the other woman's weapon dig deep into his neck before he pounced on her. A hand grabbed her mask and slammed her into the ground, and then his short snout, quadruple-jawed like no creature on Earth, opened wide. For a second Samantha thought he would bite the other cape, but instead he vomited up a torrent of flame that wrapped around them and hid his head and her entire body.
Samantha thwacked his right-hand wing joint, but then he exploded once more into flame. The fires did not discomfort her in the slightest, but the unexpected blow across her back from his wild writhing flicked her off. She hit the ground and carved a trench ten feet long before finally stopping. Laying there for a moment was nice, especially with her body aching in a crumbly way that she instinctively knew meant her Inherent Forcefield had taken too much punishment for her peace of mind. Only when a gloved hand came into view did she reach up and let Myrddin pull her to her feet.
So Lung who was over 15ft long and had just sprouted wings was powerful enough that a direct hit would have instantly killed Sam and even an
accidental hit from his wings was enough to injure Sam through her Inherent Forcefield. For comparison this is Lung at 15ft in canon:
Interlude 22 said:
He can't ignore me now, Lung thought. He was only half the height of the Endbringer, but it was enough. Fire against water, claw against claw. Leviathan hit harder, but Lung healed faster. Every second he fought without Leviathan tearing him in half was a second that was to his advantage.
Basically; Impact Group is
still a massive gamble. Probably not quite a death sentence like it would have been before but a single clean hit and we are dead.
Blaster group – You have Solar Wrath. You even have Ragnarök. Join the capes heading out to bombard Leviathan and give him a taste of nuclear fire.
This is where everyone expects Calamity Witch to go and where a lot of people are (understandably) voting for her to go. Which makes sense since the Calamity Witch Template is all about hanging back and bombarding a target.
Problem is Leviathan is fast and sneaky.
If the Enforcers have some top tier support mages on binding duty then yeah we can probably hit him with a Solar Wrath or two. Or if Alexandria pins him down somehow. But other then that we ain't going to be unleashing any of our major spells.
Despite that we are still fairly well suited to Blaster duty. Wide Area Search to keep a constant track on Leviathan. Flight to sit mostly out of reach of the battle. Multishot + Homing Bullet to make it rain fire without causing mass collateral damage.
Definitely a good example to remind people just why Calamity Witch really deserves that Blaster 9 (or higher) that the PRT have been holding out on giving her.
Wave group – Leviathan's main strategy involves sending wave after wave at his target. There is always a need for barrier capes to keep them away from the city.
There are a lot of people voting for this but I'm not sure I entirely understand
why. We are
Calamity Witch not
Infinite Enhancement the only Barrier spells we have are Round Shield and Shell Barrier which are both intended for
personal defense not
city defense. The largest example I can think of for a casting of Round Shield was about 3x Fate's height in the 1st Movie which puts it at ~13ft in diameter. Even if we say 3x Taylor's height that is only ~17ft in diameter. For comparison:
Interlude 8 (Bonus) said:
"Wave!" someone screamed.
Forcefields went up, and being as high as they were, they were out of reach of the worst of it. She could see it, a tide of water several stories high. The impact was reduced to a manageable level only by the shattered Boardwalk and fallen buildings at the end of the road, the uphill slope.
A story is generally accepted to be around 10ft so with the wave being
several stories (IE: definitely more then 2) water will spill over/under any shield Taylor throws out.
On top of that consider just how damn
big a coastline is. Even being
ultra conservative here and saying we need to shield the mouth of Sydney Harbor, for example, that is still 1.57km (5,000+ feet). We're far better off leaving this to people who are
actually capable of shielding large areas.
Search and rescue – You played this role once before, when fighting the Simurgh. You shouldn't need to rescue capes this time, just help get civilians to safety.
Kinda pointless to be honest. Even with thirty minutes notice there is just no chance of even a significant portion of people in any of the big cities making it to a shelter or safety. Especially not at sunset which on the 26th of July 2011 happened at 17:17 in Canberra. Most people would be just knocking off work and the roads in full gridlock. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people, probably over a million in Sydney, on the road right now. More now that the Endbringer sirens would be blaring.
We can certainly help but it is going to be a drop in the bucket.
Transport group – Some capes, Tinkers especially, are using the extra time to finish preparations for the big fight. Head out to pick them up just before Leviathan shows.
As one of the few capes capable of international teleportation we'd actually be pretty damn useful here. Plus it is short enough to free us up to join one of the other groups afterwards. Something we need to bare in mind is that psudeo-Sting railgun from the Behemoth fight still has more ammo:
The Gauntlet's Tinkers were working with a number of scientists at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology to create an anti-Endbringer weapon. What they came up with was a railgun-cannon that fired dimensional-shifted tank shells, the plan being to use dimensional shenanigans to get the shells past an Endbringer's outer layers and into what they assumed would be softer and squishier innards.
If you look back at those rolls, you'll notice there was an "Oh Shit" roll. That was to determine if there was a
second payload the cannon could fire. Since that roll passed, I'll just keep the idea in the back of my head for maybe the next Endbringer fight.
It's… certainly a "desperate measures" strategy for dealing with them.
so we may be bringing that in or other heavy support.
Gofer – Dragon should have Tim and the healers well in hand, but there is always the possibility she will need a mobile pair of hands. Mobility you can do.
Honestly this is a waste of our capabilities. It is
probably the safest of all the options since it keeps Calamity Witch outside of the fight (more or less) but we'd be far more useful in other areas. It would also make her look like a coward since we already skipped out on the Behemoth fight. That at least could be justified by saying "fire blaster + dynakinetic == bad". This time; not so much.
TL : DR -
- Impact Group: Dancing with Death (OHKO)
- Blaster Group: Think thousands of Homing Flare Bullets not Solar Warth or Ragnarok
- Wave Group: Completely pointless (small shields)
- Search and Rescue: Drop in the bucket.
- Transport Group: One of only a handful capable and still leaves us free for other work.
- Gofer: Safe but a waste of our abilities.
