I was just curious to get everyone else’s opinions on Mister Fixer. Having played several games with Rook City components now, I’ve found Expatriette to be pretty straight forward and useful. Tactical Shotgun is awesome; Assault Rifle is awesome, and she’s even got utility with RPG Launcher. However, I just haven’t really found a place for Mister Fixer. His base damage is pretty negligible, and while he can search for his stances, he relies on luck of the draw for the right tool (possibly luck enhanced by Toolbox if he draws that). Many of his tools have excellent utility (Jack Handle, Hoist Chain, Tire Iron) and the other are a solid damage increase (Pipe Wrench, Dual Crowbars), but I rarely seem to have the right tool for the job. I think Riveting Crane is probably one of the coolest ideas in the game, but quite commonly, I end up in this situation:
Some critters are on the table, and some effect is reducing all damage by 1. “Awesome, I’ll use Riveting Crane and make my group love me! Oh, wait. My base damage is only 1. My damage will be reduced by 1, to 0, meaning I didn’t deal any damage, and Riveting Crane doesn’t work…Hmm, I can use Meditation to search for Grease Monkey Fist, to make my damage 2, but I can’t have that and Riveting Crane out at the same time. Well fooey.” Every time this happens (and it happens to me a LOT), I ponder that if Strike did 2 damage as its base, this would work out.
Now, I do understand that under perfect conditions, You could have out Grease Monkey Fist, Harmony, and Dual Crowbars, and be doing 4 damage to 2 targets, and that’s awesome, I’ll admit. Even using Jack Handle to deal 3 damage to all targets is pretty slick. However, it just seems like that situation never happens.
What bothers me the most is that I LOVE Mister Fixer thematically. I love how his tools work, and while I wish stances worked the same way (bouncing to hand instead of discarding), I think their effects are awesome. Salvage Yard and Grease Gun are neat. I do wish their was some way to play Bloody Knuckles along side Charge or Overdrive, but whatever, you can’t have everything you want.
To be clear, I’m not trying to start a flame war, nor am I criticizing >G for making a weak character. What I’m actually hoping for is for a bunch of people to point out combos or clarify something I’m missing. I fully admit, I was one of those people that didn’t really “get” Absolute Zero at first, it took me time, and a few posts by others on how awesome he could be. I’ve played Mister Fixer several times, and I love him thematically, but I hate playing games where he never seems to come together, and I feel like I’m letting down my team when it happens.
So, what I’m looking for is overall opinions about Mister Fixer and whether you’ve found him to be weak/strong/extremely situational/general purpose, etc. If you think he’s strong, please tell me what you do with him that makes him so, and if you think he’s weak, what do you think might make him better? As a stated above, I think Strike doing 2 damage would help a lot. I understand that >G does tons of playtesting, so I assume there is a really good reason that it only does 1, but I just haven’t seen it in practice.