Gravity Has Issues

I created this tread to continue a discussion that Peacemoon started in another thread that seems to have died off. Not wanting to see solid constructive criticism and suggestions go to waste I'd like this topic to be brought back up again in hopes of maybe one day the developers buffing it.To start off I have played almost every controller primary with the exceptions of Mind and Gravity to 50 and I love how unique and yet still effective each set is. However Gravity lags quite a fair bit in terms of effectiveness in almost every department. In terms of experience I played a Gravity/Storm Controller up to 44 several years ago and then procceeded to delete him, the only thing that really kept him interesting was his secondary, as he was my first high level stormy. Gravity has several major issues that hold it back from being anything more then subpar at worst and a little below average at best.

Gravity's main weakness is the lack of an actual every mob control until level 26. Meaning until then Gravity's only AoE controls are an AoE immobolize and an AoE on a long timer. For a Primary for an AT all about controlling mobs, Gravity is beaten out by Dark Defenders, Storm Defenders, Cold Defenders, Dark Corruptors, some Tanks and Stalkers and many other power combinations for damage mitigation.

This lack of crowd control is caused by the placement of Wormhole at 26 and powerchoice of Dimension Shift at 12, a time when many other sets have gotten a staple control power and in its place Gravity controllers get a power mechanic that rarely has any real value.

At 26 however Gravity's problems are not aleviated with the late arrival of wormhole, as wormhole's activation and mechanics, even when used in good hands can be somewhat of nuisance, possibly a hinder to a team. This is even more obvious in late game situations in which mobs can be eradicated in just about the time it takes for wormhole to activated.
The ability to cast it out of LoS is great, yet the activation window is long enough for foes to turn the corner and hit you before it going off, plenty of other AoE controls do not require LoS and none of them have this problem but wormhole.
So what is Gravity's Strength? It' supposed to be partially like Fire in trading control for damage and yet even in this regard its plagued by a long animation on its heaviest attack. On teams your target will often be dead by the time its cast, leaving it solo only. Gravity even loses this edge when epic pools become available shrinking the gap between damage while maintaining the rift in controls and with the induction of plant as a controller set that can be argued as forerunner for AoE damage for controller while still getting its main control 18 levels before Grav. Before 26, there is no reason to take any Grav that isn't Grav/Storm, or Grav/Rad for mitigation, and after 26 there is still very little reason to as well.

To make Grav better at what it's supposed to do I'd like to see any of these things happen:
A) Make lift an AoE, Halve the damage, double the endurance and recharge
B)Move Wormhole to level 12, out of fear of Gravity being too frontloaded(Even with plant in the picture) Move to DS to level 6 and Propel to 26.
C)Cut the animation time to Wormhole (Could also change KB to KD but I'd be fine with just this as well)
D)And the least likely out of all remove DS and add a soft-control like power to help Grav
Any thoughts, or comments?

I agree that Grav needs something. I had trouble playing a Grav controller for a long time until I finally got a Grav/Storm up (currently 39, not moving because I'm working on other alts, but I like the character). I mostly solo'ed him, so I could take my time playing hide-n-seek and take my time setting up my stuff. The lack of AoE isn't nearly a problem when you mostly solo.

As it is, I skipped Lift and Dimension Shift. The only thing that makes the AoE in Grav viable is the combination of Freezing Rain and Crushing Field. Crushing Field, without -knockback, is one very unique thing about Grav, allowing for some different strategies -- but having to use two powers, including one from the secondary, makes it slow.

Here's a different thought. Illusion gets its AoE hold at 6, Fire, Grav and Plant at 18, Ice and Earth at 26. Why not move the AoE hold to 12, and then Wormhole to 18? That alone would make a big difference in the set.

I've got a Grav/Trick Arrow controller up to 28 ... and although I miss my MIND controls (confusion, mass comedy, sleeps, holds, teleki-whattheheckisthat?-nesis) from my Mind/Kin controller, it's primarily a matter of using a very different toolkit. The playstyle for Grav is radically different from Mind/Kin ... even though both primaries and secondaries are about as "clickfest" as you can get.

The thing about Gravity/* is that you simply have to play to its strengths (which are inobvious to a brute force player) and leverage those strengths through intelligent slotting and invention sets. Oddly enough, Trick Arrow makes for a pretty decent secondary for Gravity, since Trick Arrow makes "everything ELSE better" at what they do. It's not a power levelling build by any means (*cough* Fire/Kin *cough*), but the combination of Grav/TA does have within it some pretty powerful synergies ... if you're patient enough to look for and know how to exploit them.

Still think that Dimension Shift at 12 is pretty darn pointless. If you take this power at level 12, the amount of use(ful use) you'll get out of it is pretty darn minimal ... whereas Wormhole is one of those "where have you been all my life?!?" kinds of powers.

The simple fact is though that perhaps more than any other primary, Gravity/* needs to lean on its secondary to help fill in the gaps. A significant chunk of Gravity's damage output comes in the form of Damage over Time, which doesn't exactly help with the KILL IT! KILL IT *NAOW*! pacing that the game encourages (especially in teams). That damage is also Smashing Damage, which is the second most resisted damage type in the game (only Lethal is more consistently resisted).

So if Castle would like to drop by and get a discussion going on Gravity ... it's strengths (yes, it has some), it's weaknesses (where do I begin?) ... then that would be wonderful.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

Castle doesn't seem to want to move powers around a set too drastically, given how Electric Brutes & Stalkers didn't get Conserve Power / Energize moved to level 20, so how about changing Dimension Shift whilest sticking to the cottage rule.

Reduce the Intangibility to 8-10 seconds, make it apply a 12 second stun, after 10 seconds delay, do 0.9 BI Energy Damage after 10 seconds and do a 0.67 mag knockdown after 10 seconds.

The idea would be that snapping back out of shift should cause a system shock to those affected. The knockdown is there to convey that effect, plus it would act as a handy visual indicator that the Intangibility has worn off.

I've got a max level grav / therm-rad. I had taken gravity because on the surface it looked like a less than busy primary set. The first thing I noticed back then is that the mass-hold had a ludicrously long recharge time. Where my ice / rad controller's mass hold had a recharge time of 4mins... the mass-hold on gravity had a recharge time of... 16minutes.

Sometime later when I was respeccing, I noticed that the mass-hold had been adjusted down to be 4 minutes... something that I'm unable to find anywhere in the patch notes.

Over time I've also got pretty good at wormholing without knocking everything everywhere. My typcial pattern is mass immobilize / mass immobilize / mass hold / wormhole. Even though I can work around one annoyance... the set just never does seem to add up right. I get the point of Dimension Shift. I understand what it's supposed to do in the power set. It's a great power when playing solo... but... everything else in gravity is so weak and poorly linked together... Unless you're taking a secondary with a high damage / debuff capability (like Trick Arrow or Storm), you're probably not going to be solo-ing very often...

and in a team... well. Okay, there is Statesman's Task Force where DS'ing a critter during the Arbiter Sands fight is useful to holding off an ambush... but... come-on, that's really stretching to find a place where DS is actually useful in a team situation.

Je Saist: No AoE EVER had a recharge time of 16 minutes. EVER. I think that when you looked at the numbers (either in mids or the real numbers in-game) you were looking at the Max # of targets. MOST AoEs have a 16 target max, so, yeah.

Why is it possible to slot Singularity for Intangibility?
It's not like your Singularity can cast Dimension Shift anymore ...

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

Replying to myself... that's never a good thing...

Okay, the intangibility question. I dropped by Ghost Falcon's statue in PI and placed 3 SO intangibility enhancements in my Singularity. As expected there were no visible buff / debuff numbers in the pet's real-numbers window.

I do think I know what's going on though. Sorry, no screenshots... Cedega doesn't exactly play nice with full-screen screen-caps and Crossfire.

When-ever you spawn a pet, there's generally a couple seconds lead time while the pet animates walking in, forming up, or whatever. The summoning animation. The pet's critter target is activated as soon as the power is cast. In order to allow the animation to finish and the pet to be spawned properly, an intangibility attribute is set for the duration of the spawning animation.

*sniffsniff*

Is that dead horse wafting through the air?

Gravity has always had issues. My big things with the set are so. Lift needs to be normal 1 scale damage, not the .8 i think it is now.

As far as giving it control, the perfect power for it would be what i call "gravity well" though i think there might be a power using that name in the warshades power list. But basically it works like a reverse bonfire, where it sucks enemies into the center and knocks them down. Same recharge and duration as ice slick and earthquake.

Instead of dimension shift, in place rather, call it Dimensional Vortex. A power like that at level 12, would help the set out a lot. As mentioned by the OP, wormhole due to the way it works is still not the end all control the set needs by far, the set needs a power like i just suggested.

If it is unlikely for Wormhole to be moved to level 12, I think the simplest changes that would vastly improve Gravity's performance would be to increase Wormhole's radius of effect and decrease its animation time.

Increasing the damage of Lift so it is on par with Levitate would make a lot of sense too.

I refer you to these two threads, in which I attempt to explore how Dimension Shift is broken: Linky 1 and Linky 2.

The portion of the power that immobilizes the enemy and removes the detection box appears to work on level scaling. The portion that removes the enemy's ability to affect others or be affected by others, however, works on any mob that is struck by Dimension Shift regardless of level or rank. As a result you get mobs that have no visual effect applied to them, but cannot be affected. Basically, it's working in cases when it doesn't appear to be working. I've pm'ed Castle about the inconsistency but have not had a reply.

I had really hoped that by showing how broken and confusing this power was that it might sway the devs into at least considering how it could be re-worked into something useful.

[QUOTE=Redlynne;2298324]

The simple fact is though that perhaps more than any other primary, Gravity/* needs to lean on its secondary to help fill in the gaps. QUOTE]

This is my point. For Gravity to be Passable in terms of control and mitigation you need to be one of 3 Secondaries, TA, Rad or Storm. Combinations like Ill/Rad, Fire/Rad, Earth/Storm, Ice/Storm, Plant/TA, Earth/TA all considered amazing combos and yet Gravity needs them to be only decent?

What about the other secondaries? Some may not synergize well like Illusion/Forcefield yet they're still effective because your taking two independendtly good sets and playing them together to protect a team and yet by taking anything like Sonic, FF, Empathy, and so on you're hit again with that lack of controls leaving you to be a slighly gimped defender. One of many examples would be Levels 1-25 Gravity/Forcefield loses out to an FF/Ice Defender in terms of crowd control.

In terms of your comment about needing to use IO's to be effective, Powersets in this game were designed around the original enhancements, IOs were meant to make a character even greater not good to start with making gravity even more in need in my eyes.

And Finally the only ones worse off then Gravity Controllers are Gravity Dominators who cannot fill their control gap with more controls, instead get sub-par damage from their primary and more damage from their secondary. :P

Gravity has been the way it has been for five years and I dont think they will be changing it at all. It has been suggested for years, however I havent seen one Dev comment on Gravity needing a change.

First off, an anti repel gravity wellish pseudopet would be awesome, unique, sought after, and conceptually perfect... especially since well, what does dimension shift have to do with gravity?

Also, the lift AoE would match well... but I can't think of a comparable Controller power (that being, an AoE damage power) unless damage is reduced to make it more like a one time ice slick, or blaster sized ice slick + a little damage.

Now, to things that might be changed, I'd be happy if they just sped up some of the powers. Lift has a long delay before damage hits the enemy, propel takes so long to animate that it seems like I never hit anything living on teams (though I do love propel visually).

Wormhole would be great if it didn't
-Almost always split up mobs by missing (raise inherant accuracy)
-Have crazy unpredictable knockback at the other side (hilarious to me, I can't think of a good way to change this conceptually either)
-Take forever and a seventh to animate (this is also due partially to positioning time, to control knockback it usually takes a moments placement... often they've usually already undergone some sort of crowd control that you're about to destroy by that time+animation time)

My suggestion for Wormhole's Split-Spawn problem:

-Raise the radius to 25 feet (which it really should be anyway).
-Make it auto-hit, but force the Stun to hit at -25%.

Voila. It doesn't split spawns, it isn't overpowered, and it doesn't use any new technology.

The stun and the teleportation need not go to together. Why not make the teleportation autohit, and the stun not autohit?

I can't really imagine a regular AOE control power on so many mobs that is autohit mezzing... (telekinesis has a huge endurance cost and can only fit so many)