Part 34: Tip Missions - Fearless_Decoy
Oh hello. I'm Joe. Joe from Accounting. Not exactly the most feared profession, I grant you, but I provide vital skills and support to keep Arachnos running smoothly and help Lord Recluse to reach his goals of a better future for all. I am a CMA, CIA, CFE, and Hunstman class Soldier of Arachnos.
You're probably wondering why I chose to stay as a Huntsman rather than specialize like the majority of Soldiers with my level of experience. For me, it's a matter of style and comfort. Bane Spiders (on left) are the hidden steel fist of Arachnos, able to infiltrate and destroy individual victims with brutal finesse, but for my line of work I require a broader brush to paint with. Crab Spiders, on the other hand, are anything but subtle. Their armor packs allow them to plow their way through large swaths of unfortunate opposition, sure, but for me the suit is too bulky and cumbersome for most of my work. Having 60 pounds of metal and extra blasting arms does not help when you have to sort through files and field reports.Plus anyone can look badass wearing those things. To do it in a dress shirt and tie takes much more work.
Ok, my official auditing equipment helps, I'll grant you that. My custom firearm is able to fire semi-automatic burts, lob a wide array of useful grenades, and of course make people shut up and respect my authority.
If I could get a clean screen shot of Pummel it'd be here. Pummel is a very quick smack upside the head with the butt of the rifle that does decent damage and can stun.
Being a loyal Arachnos accountant means the majority of my time is spent behind the front lines, ensuring that the troops get paid, the equipment is 
Have I mentioned how much I hate my superior officer? A bug with Soldiers and the Tailor screen I've come across is that if you've got an outfit in the Arachnos slot that doesn't have a helmet, it screws things up and resets things to default but keeps the coloring. No cape, no rifle.
Technically I report to Lord Recluse himself since I am not part of any of the four factions, but in reality I'm buried under a half dozen layers of Arbiter bureaucracy. To be honest, that suits me just fine because as long as I keep the Arbiters happy I have quite a bit of leeway with my free time. Working these cess pit sweeps lets me keep tabs on events that may be beneath Arachnos's notice, but for a highly skilled man with a bit of spare time like me they can bring in some nice pocket change.
Tips were added in the Going Rogue expansion, and are the way characters can start changing their alignment. Tips can drop from pretty much anything you kill once you hit level 20, you don't even need to kill things in your level range.
Oh, don't act so surprised to hear I'm in this for the money. I'm not some insane psychopath who only lives to burn and destroy, and I certainly don't want to be bothered with ruling the world and worrying about keeping power. I plan on building myself a nice nest egg, find myself a nice tropical resort away from super powered morons, and faking my death to get off the radar. Trust me, it's far better than the usual Arachnos retirement plans, which usually involve prison sentances, maulings from scientific monstrosities, or having your brain wired up to one of those Tarantula bodies.
Anyway, let me tell you about one of my little side adventures, when I wasn't wading in toxic sewage or writing up reports. 
Graverobbing may sound negative, but I prefer to think of it as collecting Arachnos Estate Taxes.
For a dumping site there's a fair bit of security running around. Either they've been doing a good job of collecting bodies or this is a trap. Since this is Nemesis we're talking about here, it's the latter. Thankfully, I got back-up.
Meet my good buddies Standards and Practices. They're Arachnobot Disruptors, nasty lightning throwing machines that are fairly durable and surprisingly agile. Between them, my grenades, and the Arachnos Leadership training I've recieved I can handle these Nemesis squadrons. With them out of the way, I can get to some proper scavenging.
My Huntsman build piles on team buffs and big AoE attacks, making me a low-effort Mastermind in effect. Sure, Crab Spiders may have more pets, but I just can't used to the backpacks or the longer animations.
After I checked the body bag I heard a voice down the hallway that sort of sounded like Miss Thistle, a semi-dangerous brute of a villain. But once I saw her and her 'back-up' gang it was obvious that Nemesis had made one of his automaton clones. The boys and I had no problem taking her down.
Clearing out the rest of the warehouse wasn't much of a challenge, but I have to admit that I wasn't being quite honest when I said I skipped specializing. I shoeed up to the first day of Bane Training just to pick up the armor improvements and this little beauty, the Surveilance device.
Surveilance is a very nice single target defense and resistance debuff that will not generate aggro, a stalker's dream opener. A neat side bonus is that it lets you see the target's Combat Attributes, which is the complete list of statistics that players can see of their own characters.
Why can I never read anything in peace?
Apparently Nemesis had made a copy of me and gave it a Bane Spider mace to come after me. Sadly for the thing it didn't know how to use it or any other of the Arachnos tech I've got. No Cloaking Field, no Surveilance, no Arachnobot back-up, it just charged right at the guy with the rifle. No points if you guessed how it turned out.
Well, that didn't quite pan out for me personally, but foiling a trap that Nemesis invested a fair amount of resources into made it worthwhile. They can't all be winners. There's always going to be more chances to suppliment my paycheck, so I'll keep looking out for tips.
After completing a tip mission of any kind you get 1 point added to the proper morality meter. Here I've done one villain tip in the past and this one rogue tip, so I would need 9 more of either before I could get a Morality Mission. The Morality Mission is the big 'are you sure you want to do this' event where you can officially change from Villain to Rogue, Hero to Vigilante, etc.
The main benefit for accepting one of the 'midpoint' alignments is that you can travel to both hero and villain zones and do all the content that brings, including running task forces and working with contacts. Any of the co-op zones will let you exit to either side, and there's a smuggler that directly connects a hero and villain zone. To offset this, those who stay pure good or evil can earn Alignment Merits through Morality missions, very valuble tokens that can be spent on very rare recipes. I'd show off a Morality Mission but the game has a hard cap of 5 tip mission reward points per day, and I don't have any characters close to one. Sorry.