Zen and the art of Knockback
or
40 levels of gravity and force fields
[resposted here from the controller forums, since CuppaJo sez this is a better place... Also fixed a few typos.]
Ok, so I finally hit the big 40 last week. And since it looks like it will be a while before Im actually 50, and because Im impatient, Im going to write this now, instead of waiting for 10 more levels. What is this? Im glad you asked. Its my guide to the effective use of gravity and force fields, as a controller, of course!
But first lets start with what this is NOT:
This is not another heres what I think of power x list for the set. AtomicKitty already has an excellent one for gravity that I agree with for the most part, so I feel no need to duplicate her efforts. There is also at least one decent force field guide floating around on the defender forums somewhere.
This is not me trying to tell anyone how to build their character.
This is not even me trying to tell anyone how to PLAY their character.
What this IS is a list of why I think gravity and force fields go well together, what powers work well together, the tips and tricks Ive picked up, how I see my role in a group, and my general philosophy when playing as a grav/ff controller.
If you find this helpful, then great! If you dont, then oh well. If you disagree with me, feel free to point out all the places where you feel Im being horribly, horribly wrong. And if you have your own nifty tricks, insights, or just general commentary on gravity or force fields, feel free to chime in. I don't pretend to be an "expert" on gravity or force fields, just some poor sod thathappens to have slogged through 40 levels of them.
Sorry that the whole thing is a bit long winded. Lets get started:
General thoughts on Gravity as a set, and my role as a gravity controller:
Gravity is weird. It is pretty much the most single-target-oriented controller set in existence. It has one of the best singe-target damage abilities (in terms of pure numbers) in any controller set, with Propel. AND it has Lift, another excellent single target power that can be slotted for damage. Together, these make early level soloing a lot easier, especially in the teens.
To pay for these, however, Gravity has very little area control. Aside from the amazing Gravity Distortion Field, (which is arguably the best area hold in the game, except for EMP) the only other area crowd control gravity gets are its area root and the much maligned Dimension Shift, an area intangible. Contrast this to Earth, which gets no less than 6 area crowd control abilities. (Salt Crystals [sleep], Volcanic Gasses [Hold-zone], Earthquake [knockback-zone], Stalagmites [disorient], Quicksand [snare-zone], and Stone Cages [root].)
On the surface, it looks like gravity kind of got the short end of the stick. However, if you look closely at some of gravitys single target abilities (Wormhole, Lift, and Propel), you start to notice that they all have something kind of interesting in common: They all have 100% knockdown on them, and ignore magnitude. This gives gravity several fairly decent powers to cycle to keep individual enemies out of the fight. Even bosses, and other high-threat targets! While other controllers are struggling to maintain magnitude, gravity can just juggle the tank smasher around until the group is ready to deal with it, or until they land two consecutive holds.
And this single-target mastery only gets better once the gravity controller hits 32 and gets his or her pet: Suddenly, you have one or more mini-controllers floating around, and applying the same holds as you are, and helping you achieve and keep magnitude. NO other controller can keep bosses locked down with such ease. Any single target that is not an archvillain or monster class, (and is within a reasonable level range) a gravity controller can solo in near complete safety. It may not be especially fast, but if done properly, there is virtually NO chance that it will ever break free.
No other control set is as good at single-target control as gravity. We do kind of fall flat when battling monsters and archvillains however, which is kind of unfortunate. Hopefully the new redlight-greenlight system theyre implementing will make us more useful there.
Gravity controllers are a lot like ice blasters, then: For those unfamiliar with the powerset, ice blasters get very few AoE damage abilities, but get a lot of tools to pile on the damage to a single target. If you want to take down a field of minions, then fire or assault rifle is your blaster set, but if you want to tear down a single target with lots of HP, its hard to do much better than ice. The parallel should be obvious; this is gravity all over: Very few AoE abilities, but single targets? Man we have those covered.
As a gravity controller, here is how I see my role in a group:
I float over the group during battles, and watch the battle unfold. I usually toss out my area hold at the start of the fight, because its basically free. But other than that, I feel that my job is NOT to keep every enemy in the battle locked down forever. In most cases, it just isnt needed.
Groups have ways of dealing with things like minions. Ways like blasters and scrappers. My job is not to make sure that no one on my team ever gets hit. Thats why we brought one or more healers. [hopefully!] My job is just to make sure that if someone DOES start getting hit, particularly someone who shouldnt be (like a blaster or healer, for example) that I make them not be getting hit. Knock away whatever was hitting them. Hold it. Wormhole it into the stratosphere. Whatever. As controllers, we dont need to be spamming our area lockdowns as fast as we can, willy-nilly, since the simple fact is, most group members can deal with the attentions of a minion or two just fine. Lieutenants and bosses can be a different story. (or large groups of minions for that matter.) Those are where I direct most of my attention. Keeping them off their feet, and away from our more fragile group members. Keeping them busy until a damage dealer can put them down for the count.
Im not saying that throwing area effects around willy-nilly is necessarily BAD, but it is somewhat inefficient and needlessly hard on the endurance bar. And particularly for gravity controllers, who dont HAVE lots of area lockdowns to throw around, we tend to gravitate [hah! I made a funny!] towards more precise methods. And again, we ARE uniquely situated among all of the controller sets to deal with bosses. So it makes sense for us to focus there.
Moving right along...
Force fields:
I really like force fields as a secondary. It has a lot of interesting things as a set. For one thing, it is the only controller secondary that has ZERO healing ability. It makes up for this, in general, with its amazing defense buffs. You may have trouble getting groups earlier on, (whut kind of controller ARE you that cant heal?!?) but after they start noticing that theyre not getting hit much, people usually figure it out. In particular, you really come into your own at level 20, when you can take Dispersion Bubble, and offer your entire team a nice defense bonus, AND high resistance to all crowd control effects except sleep. This is also a wonderful power because it is the only real force field power that defends YOU, the caster. (except for the incredible Personal Force Field, but you cant attack out of that one.)
Fun fact: The single target force fields provide a base 16% defense increase to their target, and the dispersion bubble is a base 10% defense boost. Fully slotted with defense enhancements (which give only +20%, instead of the usual +33%, sadness) you can get the defense up as high as:
(10% + 16%) * (0.2*6)
(26%) * 2.2
~57%
A blanket 57% defense increase to everything except psionics is pretty impressive, when you think about it. Especially since that all comes from one character, and stacks with whatever other defense abilities they might have. For reference, even-con minions have only a 50% chance to hit you in the first place. This drops even-con minions down to the minimum 5% chance to hit, as well as taking a huge chunk out higher-level foes chances of landing a blow.
Funner fact: If you were a defender instead of a controller, your force fields would be 25% better, so the base bonuses would be 12.5% and 20%, and the max you could protect your team would be ~68% or so. So they still defend better than we do.
As a force field controller, (or bubbler, in street-talk) you have several advantages over your less defensive counterparts. For one thing, you are far sturdier than they are. Early on, you can hide inside of your personal force field, and do the boombox emote while the group wipes around you after a bad pull. (Im all for staying around and helping as long as it looks like we can win, but once 75% of the group is dead, its time to hide in my hamsterball, as far as Im concerned.)
Personal force field is really an amazing power. Aside from phase out, it is the single best dont kill me! move in the entire game. It gives absurd defense bonuses, as well as blanket 50% damage resistance. Ive taunted Malta mechs 10 levels above me, and they didnt hit me once, while I sat around and admired their cool looking missiles. It has the downside that you cant affect anyone outside of it, however, that doesnt stop them from affecting you. The neat thing is that this includes teammates as well as enemies. If you get low on life you can just put up your bubble and wait for the team healer to toss a heal your way. While your bubble will stop the nazi bullets from shredding your hide, the sweet, green glow of Heal Other will go right on through, smooth as you please. (The power pool ability aid self is kind of nice here as well, for patching yourself up from within the safety of your invincible hamsterball.)
I STRONGLY recommend binding personal force field to something easy to reach, and activating it any time youre below 40% life or so. Your xp bar will thank you for it. The only caveat is that it does not protect you from status effects, so if you want to be REALLY safe, put up dispersion bubble as well.
Once you get dispersion bubble, 6-slotting it as fast as possible. Dont just put defense in it however. Slot enough endurance in it so that you can leave it on at ALL TIMES, and still have enough endurance to function comfortably. This amount will vary from player to player. 3 endurance-reducing SOs were enough to let me function pretty well pre-stamina. After stamina, it takes a lot less, but how much less is up to you, and a matter of personal preference. However the point is
leave it up any time you are in a place where there MIGHT be danger. It will really, truly save your life. Youll have a base 10%-22% defense boost on at all times, depending on your slotting. At the upper end, thats like having a def. Inspiration on permanently. Also, youll have a lot of resistance to status effects, so you wont worry as much about being stunned while flying, and landing in the middle of a bunch of people with sharp weapons and nasty grins. This single power will make you far more likely to survive than almost any other available to any controller, anywhere. And your team will like the defense and status effect resistance as well. I really cannot say enough good things about it.
(For the curious, as far as I can tell, the status effect resistance works by simply giving everyone in the area a magnitude boost. So they CAN still disorient/hold/root you, they just have to hit you two or three times in a row with it. A feat made somewhat more difficult by the aforementioned +10%-22% defense bonus on the bubble
)
Gravity and force fields, together at last and kicking butt:
General themes:
Knockdown: Magnitudeless crowd control
Energy blasters have known it for a long time. Knockback is a beautiful thing. It ignores magnitude and when people are knocked down and getting up, theyre not attacking you or your friends. You even have a melee-friendly knockdown, in lift: They go straight UP, and so they land in the same place, and your friend Fred the Scrapper doesnt have to run across the room to keep fighting them. (Note that knocking down heavy enemies is still pretty melee friendly, since they tend to just fall down, and not go anywhere. Heavy enemies include things like clockwork princes, wolfpack robots, and freak tanks.)
Propel is also useful as a knockdown power, although its long casting time makes it somewhat less useful this way. Its less melee-friendly than lift, but it has the benefit of doing the most damage of any controller power that I know of. (Spectral wounds seems to be about on a par with it, but it has the whole healing back part, so its total damage is not quite as high.) Sadly, propel deals crushing damage, the most resisted damage type in the game. But even so, slotted out with 1 accuracy and 5 damage SOs, it still does around 25% of a white minions HP. Not blaster-level by any means, but still enough to pick off the odd enemy that my singularities havent killed yet.
Force bolt is also an excellent choice for knockdown. It has further fling than propel, an extremely fast casting time, minimal endurance cost, great recycle time, and a good base accuracy bonus. The only down side is that it does less damage than brawl, so dont count on killing anyone with it. It is an all around good utility power.
And of course singularities are the ultimate knockdown bomb. You can only place them once in a while, but when you do, why not place them on top of an enemy? They automatically fling anyone near them, so use them as a knockdown if you can find an enemy that no one is fighting that needs to be knocked down.
Knockdown is really a wonderful tool, and with gravity and forcefields, you have a ton of ways to do it. (I didnt even touch on repulsion field or repulsion bomb, since Ive had very little experience with either one.) The only thing to keep in mind is, for a scrapper, knocking down an enemy that they are fighting with anything other than lift is going to make them run after it, and possibly feel annoyed at you. You have the potential to spare your teammates from a lot of attacks with knockdowns, but you also have the potential to be really annoying to them as well. So make sure to use your powers for good and not evil.
Distance: A gravity controllers subtlest weapon
As a gravity and force field controller, you have one other really excellent tool at your disposal: Distance. Another simple idea that is often overlooked, if you can keep an enemy out of their attack range, then they cant hurt you or your friends. And with good roots and good knockbacks, you have just this capability. Toss a root on almost anything, and then force bolt it. Off it goes, most likely out of its attack range, and your hair. If that isnt far enough, then force bolt them again. (It recycles fast enough.) Or if one is handy, knock them off a ledge. Either way, it puts them out of attack range for a bit, and keeps them there. For no particular reason, I like to call this a ghetto hold.
This works especially well with enemies that have few or no ranged attacks, such as Freakshow tanks and Fifth Column warwolves.
This tactic gets even more potent once you get wormhole. Toss a root on something. Wormhole it out somewhere over the horizon. It will come back eventually, but you have still effectively taken it out of the fight for quite a while. Heck, you dont even have to use a root if you dont want to; wormhole has such a huge range that just the time it takes them to recover from the disorient and make their way back is often as much as you need.
Knockback resistance: A double edged sword
One of the many ways in which gravity is somewhat unique is that the knockback resistance on its root and hold is reversed from most other sets. See, most other sets have a root that prevents knockdown, but a hold that does not. Gravitys root does NOT prevent knockback, but its hold DOES. While this can be annoying in some cases, (you cant knock down a boss while you are trying to get hold magnitude on him, for example) it also has some great uses. For example, if you use your area hold, then blasters can blast to their hearts content, and not knock enemies out of their tight formation. Your blaster friends with trip mines or energy torrents and nova will love you for this.
(Funny fact: You can increase the hold duration with enhancements, but the knockback resistance duration will be unaffected. What this means in game terms is that if you increase the hold duration, then they will spend the first part of their time held and immune to knockback. But then, sometime later, the knockback resistance will vanish, and they can be flung around, even though they are still held. This can be a useful way to tell if a hold is running out; just toss a force bolt at them, and if they go flying, its time to start thinking about reapplying it
)
Gravity/Forcefield ultimate technique! Battlefield control!
I feel that this is sort of the highest manifestation of the gravity/force field controllers art: Incredible control over the placement of everything on the battlefield. You have all the tools you need in these two sets. Quick, fast knockback with force bolt. Precision teleporting with wormhole. Mass enemy herding with repulsion field and force bubble. Area roots with HUGE areas, to make sure everyone stays where they are put.
I dont think any other combination of sets has as many ways of making sure enemies go (and stay!) where you want them. And that, my friends, is real control.
Ok, enough general theory. On to practice:
General tips, tricks, and combos with gravity and force fields:
Lift + Force bolt:
This basically gives you a long-distance fling, if timed right. Since they start the forward momentum from somewhere up in the air, instead of on the ground, they tend to fly a bit further. This does not work as well as it used to before they adjusted knockback, but it still works well enough to get that extra bit of fling.
Crush + force bolt (on fliers)
This one is kind of obvious, but included for completeness:
Knockback does not work on fliers. They just do a little flip, and dont really lose any time. Annoying? Yup. But wait, what was that secondary effect on our root? The one that everyone laughed at in controller school because it was useless? -fly? Hmm. Guess it does have a use after all. Since, you know, you cant keep them off their feet until you make sure theyre on them. Not wonderful, but there are some fairly annoying flying enemies that have made me glad of my roots secondary effect. (Tsoo ancestor spirits, for example.)
Gravity Distortion + Wormhole
The common complaint with wormhole is that it is hard to use for fine placement, since it has that absurd knockback when they come out of it. Most gravity controllers have already figured this out, but for those that have not yet made the connection: Knockback is the problem. Gravitys holds prevent knockback. If you hold them before you wormhole them, they will go right where you want them to, and stay there.
Wormhole + Singularities:
Singularities have the attention span of 2-year-olds on caffeine. They switch targets as fast as they can find them. However, when focused on a single target, they can usually make pretty short work of them. But how do you make sure that the singularities stay focused? By making sure that only one enemy is within their attack range at a time. How do you do that? See battlefield control, above. Wormhole works REALLY well for this, Ive found. Summon up a few singularities. Throw an area hold on a group of enemies. Wormhole them over to your singularities one by one, and watch them get munched. (This is more of a useful tactic when soloing, since otherwise fights dont last long enough for this to be a help. In groups its only nice for letting your singularities keep a boss out of everyones hair, like a Crey Paragon Protector that you dont have time to babysit.)
Singularities + choke points:
Singularities are kind of neat, in a lot of ways. They have a fairly simple AI pattern: Is there an enemy within range? If so, stop moving and throw some gravity at it. Otherwise, follow the controller. The interesting part about this is that, as long as there is at least one enemy within range, the singularity will usually stay stationary as it cycles through its gravity powers on everything it can see. So if you put it in a choke point that you dont want anything to get past like a door or ramp, then the singularity will usually stay there for as long as there are enemies to block. This is a great tactic since players can run through singularities without any problem, but enemies get flung back and cant get through.
Force bubble + corners:
This one is sort of obvious, but it is still pretty handy. It takes some time to get good at, however. Force bubble is a gigantic repel-field that shoves everything in it away from you. (But does not knock it down.) If there is a corner handy, you can use this to herd a bunch of enemies into it, and then they cannot escape. This is basically blaster heaven. Blasters can even use knockback attacks, and the enemy will still be pressed into the corner. Woo!
Force bubble + Dimension shift:
Dimension shift is a great situational panic button, but it has the problem that the phased enemies run up and mingle with the unphased enemies, and it becomes impossible to target one or the other. (This will get a bit better once issue #2 goes live, and Dimension Shift has a root component, in addition to phasing) So how do you filter out the ones you can affect from the ones you cannot? Force bubble! All the ones that are in phase will be flung out of your bubble, but the ones that are affected (and that you can ignore) will be able to stay inside your bubble. So as long as your team knows what you are doing, you can use this as a giant sieve to separate the phased enemies from the normal ones.
Final thoughts:
Gravity and Force Field are some really neat power sets. Part of the reason I think they are so neat, is because they have some great effects that just are not FOUND in very many other places. Effects that interact with the game in ways that go beyond just throwing blanket status effects on an area, or making numbers appear over enemies heads. Knockback by itself is a tremendously fun aspect of the game, with a lot of room for creative use. Throw in things like wormhole and force bubble, and you have the potential to solve a lot of your crowd control problems in some fairly unique ways.
Gravity does not feel like a gimped power line to me. It just feels like one that requires slightly different tactics in order to reach its full potential. Am I saying that its perfect? No, like any power set, it has some powers that could use some love. (Dimension shift really needs some sweet Dev lovn, propel and lift could stand to do more damage, and propel and wormhole could stand to have their animation times drastically reduced.) But all in all, I think its a pretty solid set, once you get used to its quirks. And if nothing else, it has been a FUN set, that has kept me entertained for 40 levels, and will probably keep me entertained for at least another 10.
Happy controlling.
-Doctor Gravity
40 Gravity/Forcefield Controller,
Justice
