I don't know whether I should post this here as it's spoiler'ish yet amusing.. or in the bug/issues forum, because it's not exactly right. LOL


I just beat the game aligned with the NCR.

SO! As I come to fight Legate Lanius at the very end, I'm scrambling for ammo and eating all the food in my inventory to heal myself (I decided to go finish the game while totally unprepared with 2 stimpacks, 0 doctor's bags, and only a couple guns I was carrying I actually had ammo for) along the way to Legate's Camp. Well, lucky for me the last NCR Veteran Ranger who died at the Camp with me had a Brush Gun and 20-30 bullets for it - more than enough ammo for me to finish the game apparently.

After I speak to Lanius and end up having to fight him as I don't have a Speech/Barter of 100.. I start backing up trying to recover from my crippled torso and head causing my vision to blur. I take a couple shots at Lanius through VATS and what do you [censored] know. Miss Fortune (who's super buggy for me ANYTIME she shows up - causing me to be stuck in VATS while being attacked or just not even shooting opponents, etc.) shows up to shoot him down.. but instead.. he flies into the air and for some reason explodes into a ball of fire. Legate Lanius is a [censored] phoenix.

However, he didn't die immediately it seems. He never came down to the ground as far as I could tell and the quest didn't update to tell me I had defeated him until I finished killing his 2 body guards plus whatever other Legion douchers were attacking my drugged up, dog steak eating, crippled head self.

Moral of the story.. Legate Lanius is a [censored] phoenix... or is it that the Miss Fortune perk blows and is super buggy? You decide.

toodles

Miss Fortune is not a good perk from what i can tell. I used it on my first run, and all she did was fire 5-6 shells that sent my enemy flying. Leaving me to chace after the guy.

A few time inside buildings it would come in handy as it does knock enemies down, and I can blow away into the back of there head, but heck the other guy just outright kills people for me.

The other guy is much, much better...

Ive personally never chosen that perk, it just seems a bit redundant to me. But as far as I can tell, ( by the description of it ), its not supposed to be like the Mysterious Strange who come and dominate things for you, Miss Fortunate is supposed to make it seem like the current enemy that your targeting in V.A.T.S have like -36 luck. So Id imagine the whole " enemy flying around and spontaneously combusting " thing was done like that on purpose. Though I could be WAY OFF.

Miss Fortune is supposed to be the Mysterious Stranger for pacifist characters I think. But sometimes she kills people instead of knocking them over.

And I've seen Lanius' phoenix form once. He came down and died from the impact though.

My endgame was last night and he wasn't a Phoenix. We went in with sniper backup and there was never a conversation with the Legate. You know Boone. He doesn't stop for talk when the Legion's around. The Legate went down like any other Legionairy and didn't rise up again. He had 5 of us shooting at him (Cannibal Johnson's a beast on that Gatling Laser), so I'm sure he took a huge number of shots from all of us but Veronica finished him off with Pushy. Bam. It was over. That was some weapon the Legate had.

Note:
You don't require Speech of 100 to 'talk sense' into Legate Lanius.
A Speech of only 90 is required.
I didn't even need my precious Meeting People magazine for that, since my Speech + heavy Charisma buffs barely reached me up to 90.
Therefore I could save my magazine for NCR General. When you play YesMan you do in fact require Speech 100 when dealing non-violently with General Moore.
Or to have him tossed into the dam from the sniper tower, heheh... whatever seems best to you.
I was determined to take over Vegas and not kill Legion or NCR - and I did it!
Now I run Vegas, but I have joined the NCR using Giskard's play-after-game mods (which are pretty kewl...)
Regards

Pre-nerf Lanius goes down with two .308 JSPs to the head from a sniper rifle....don't know what it takes now.

I only used one of the perks like that in Fallout 3 the "Mysterious Stranger" Helped me a lot but I don't really need it anymore.
So I can't really comment on it.