Well, there are (were) three serious combat threats in my 6-strong party (a Perfect Circle plus a weird Fair Folk/Solar thingy which I won't go into here).Kyeudo said:Well, I tend to play Dawns, Full Moons, and other combat-specialized characters. It is very easy to be good at combat and you know what they say - "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail". If there is any combat optimized characters in the group, they want to fight. It's what they do best. Looking for a way to not fight is like looking for a way to be bored and ineffective - it's almost counterintuitive.
The now-dead Dawn Caste was an Icewalker opposed to the Bull's plans for domination, which meant that with the exception of clear threats such as undead, demons, the Wyld Hunt, Lintha etc he generally treated most things as foreign weirdness and not worth the effort of killing. He was an absolute monster, a Grand Killstick-wielding Melee & War monstrosity that turned out capable of chopping an Earth Aspect in Elemental Armour in half in a single blow. But the player interpreted his character's methods as going wherever possible for the biggest and most visible gesture of personal potency rather than just "kill it dead", which helped hugely. He held off from getting a surprise negator for a long while simply because he felt having his character be functionally unkillable except via mote tapping would be boring. And indeed in the end a surprise attack from a massively lethal small girl he was trying to protect finished him off.
The Zenith Caste is a horrendously powerful setup, using an enhanced set of Gauntlets of Distant Touch along with Snake Style and Hungry Ghost Style tricks in vicious Combos. He punched a Slayer to death from 30 feet away. But after the character spent the first 4 or 5 sessions brutalising everything he encountered, the player settled in, and resolved the conflict between himself and the party's Compassionate medic (the Fair Folk/Solar thingy) by essentially shutting himself off from unnecessary violence and keeping back his full abilities for the moment they become necessary. The result has been a shift into a sort of zen ultraviolence, where the player responds to threats and challenges with koans and prayers before finally resorting to almost instant kills. This is the kind of character that deliberately hobbles itself in a martial arts tournament so as to better learn the value of humility. It's turned out awesome.
And finally, the Twilight Caste entered play with an Artifact 4 mega-firewand-of-death and the charms to back it up, along with Lore 5 and the Second Excellency. She deals with singular threats by handing out 30-40 damage dice of flaming death repeatedly until it stops being there. But that turned out not to be much of a problem; multiple enemies cause her severe issues and she's been forced to rely on the Twilight Anima a couple of times. The real problem is that she creates the necessary elements to get around any problem I put in front of the players by making something on the spot with a nasty Craft Combo. That's turned out to be way more of an issue than the firewand ever could have been - I can't stop her finding a way out of anything unless I actually tie her up and gag her. (I have similar problems with the Night Caste but tying and gagging doesn't work on Nights...)
I now have a Gold Faction Sid in the party with virtually every one of his starting Charms as Martial Arts. He barely uses them - he spends almost his entire time in play using Resplendent Destinies and endless Efficient Secretary Technique.
I think ultimately it's a play-style issue. One thing which helped is that with the exception of the Dawn and Twilight players, all of my party were Exalted virgins when we started well over a year ago. I suspect it's going to be more of a problem now my players are starting to reach Essence 4, but it remains to be seen.