Striving for Mediocrity - Gravity/Earth - A Journal

Day 1 - The Dreaded Dominator
The wife and kids want to watch some awful television show so I have some time to play relatively early (about 8pm). However, it's the last day of Friday maintenance (yay!) and the servers are going to go down in just under an hour. After a brief think about what I want to do for that hour I decide that it's finally time to bite the bullet. It's time to start something I've been dreading: my Gravity Control/Earth Assault Dominator. An hour will give me a hard deadline so that I don't get lost in costume creator hell.

** Aside: There's an interesting book called The Paradox of Choice by a psychologist named Barry Schwartz. He explores the theory that "infinite" choice can bring genuine suffering, particularly to certain personality types. My reaction to spending time with the costume creator tells me I'm most likely one of those people he's talking about. There's a part of me that just sits behind the rest of me screaming "JUST CHOOSE SOMETHING! ANYTHING!" When that gets loud enough I tend to have a new character. And I tend to be visiting the Tailor for tweaks sometime before L10.

So, "dreading", huh? That probably deserves an explanation.

I've been a critic of Gravity Control for a very long time, but other than some early abortive attempts, most of my criticism comes from on-paper comparison with the other sets. I feel that to own my opinion of the set it's probably worthwhile to actually take it to a decent level. Similarly, on paper Earth Assault doesn't look great either. Tremor is painfully slow and does awful damage besides, the ranged attacks are slow and Mud Pots and Fissure have reduced their radii so far as to make them questionable. About they only good thing I can see is that the melee powers look to be terrific. So I have an opinion to form here as well.

I end up with a female magic-origin character with a primarily blue costume with reddish-pink features (what the hell was I thinking?!) and using basically the same colours but flipped for the powers with the crystal theme for Earth Assault. Following on a recent theme on character naming I name her Capella Rising. One of my VG mates is on in the last few minutes before maintenance so I get him to invite the character.

Day 2 - Early Levels
After a very busy day involving work in the morning and then driving all over the city to get kids to various band performances (including an evening one with both my elder daughters here. Yes, I am a proud parent ), I eventually have everyone in bed and I get a chance to unwind. Time to put Capella through her paces.

By the time I get on it's quite late at about 10:30. That's actually about 11:30 for most of the rest of the Australian population, so I'm unsurprised to find things quiet. That's ok, I usually solo the first few levels anyway.

I start in the tutorial and spend a few minutes setting up the UI as I prefer it with all the powers in their right places and global channels on the right tabs. I'm about half way through the tutorial when I realise just how cool the Stone Spears animation is. This is a good sign because I'm easily amused by costumes and powers that I like. I'm not particularly imaginative or easily bored (still playing after 5 years!), so that's a good thing. I've gone with Lift and Stone Spears to start with, and I quickly pick up Gravity Distortion after I leave the tutorial. Some quick Kalinda missions (including the mandatory-drop Eliminate the Infected) and I'm level 5 and off to Port Oakes for my jet pack.

At this point I've selected Stone Mallet for my Level 4 power. Hate the look, love the power. Pretty much the reverse of Stone Spears really. At this point the performance of the character is ok, but I do kind of feel more like a Gravity/Vet Power Dom than any particular reliance on my secondary. I'm dropping in the odd Earth Assault power to look pretty while the vet powers are doing all the work. That's kind of frustrating, but it's a common feeling for low level Doms, so I'm not rushing to judgement here.

I get to Port Oakes and I go see Drea the Hook (boo!) to get my newspaper. After getting it and grabbing a mission I get a tell from a cheery fellow looking to start a team and promising "super fun times". It's after 11pm and I've had a busy day, but how do you say no to that? He's a level or so ahead of me, but that's ok as he's looking to do the paper/mayhem grind as well. I get into the mission and he's dressed up in cool blue and white pirate gear and he's a Ninja Mastermind. Pirate ninjas? Gotta love it when someone runs with a cliche and really makes it their own. I did make the suggestion that he pick up the mekman non-combat pet and go for the robot ninja pirate trifecta.

As promised the duo with this guy is indeed "super fun times" and we get through a few missions, levels and a mayhem before I have to plead exhaustion. Fun evening, a couple of levels and a new global friend (who I'll probably not see much due to near-complete inversion of our timezones). At this point I'm L7 and I've picked up Hurdle for my L6 power. I'm still vacillating as to whether this guy is going to be a speeder or not, so I wasn't sure about Hasten at L6.


Day 3 - ZZZzzzz
A relatively lazy Sunday with a few errands to run. I get on a few times during the day, but never for long. A couple of extra missions and I've soloed Capella Rising to L8 and here I bit the bullet and pick up Hasten. A very small amount of soloing follows in the evening, but I'm tired and I head to bed quite early.

Day 4 - The Day Off
A pupil-free day for the kids, plus catching up after working the previous two Saturdays, forces me to take the day off work. After getting the kids up and fed they want to have a quiet day. Suits me, the elder two have homework, and I have a Dominator project I want to have some fun with ...

So early on I do a little bit more soloing of Port Oakes missions (Angelo Vendetti's Vampyre arc to be specific) and after about 20 or 30 minutes of this I get snapped up by a small team (a couple of MMs, a corruptor and me). That suits me well as I want to guage the performance of the character in a team situation. In short, it worked reasonably well. The heavy buff on the team allows me to cut loose with the full target-switching aggro-magnet fun that is an early Dom's stock in trade.

This pushes me through to about L11. I pick up Hurl Boulder at L10, and this is another power which I love the look of. As promised earlier, I had to spend some time with the Tailor to fix up my costume and powers. I've got rid of the reddish-pink and gone with a three-toned approach. Base colour is a royal blue as before with bare shoulders and royal blue tights below with the "Lock" pattern in a sky blue. I rounded it out with thigh highs in royal blue and black using the "Vandal" pattern and matching it on the gloves. I modified the mask to the same royal blue as well. With the powers, I eliminated blue and went with the reddish-pink with a light purple backing for both powersets. Hurl Boulder looks brilliant with the Hasten glow around the fists as the boulder gets raised in the air. Ultimately, I'm hoping that looking cool will keep me playing this character well into the time where I expect it will become painful.

I was on about 5pm when I get a tell from my mate the pirate ninja looking for a team again. I say sure, but I have to go soon and make dinner but I have some time, so we form up again. By this stage I've actually got a level or two on him instead of the other way around. We get to chatting while working our way through the missions and I express my opinion at one point on this Dominator so far. "Racing to the bottom" was the phrase I used and he was quite surprised, as he'd already decided to roll an Earth Assault Dom based on the performance of our duo a couple of days ago. I laughed and pointed out to him how much damage was coming from Earth Assault and how much damage was coming from the Blackwand, Nemesis Staff and Sands of Mu. We both thought the Earth ranged powers look cool though, so that's something ...

Day 5 - Halloween is Nigh!!
For various unusual reasons, I get to play a bit during the afternoon and I end up on really early (7:30pm), which a hard deadline of 9pm as the servers go down for the Halloween publish.

The late afternoon play gets me to L12 where I pick up Propel. Yeah, yeah, Doms don't need Propel. However, I'm going to need something besides Stone Spears and Hurl Boulder to ooh and ah at, so Propel is it.It does slightly more damage than Hurl Boulder and together with the vet powers I have a nice (if excruciatingly slow) ranged attack chain. I find that I can hold one target, lift another and then annoy the hell out of a couple more with ranged knockback/down. On a small team, that behaviour could make up for not having actual AoE control of any sort, so I'm feeling a bit better about the prospects of this character. Stone Spears is already on the scrapheap with only occasional use to knock off slivers of health from mobs. (It's not even great for that. I suspect by L20 if you can see a sliver, Stone Spears won't be enough to remove it). With L12 I've also picked up DOs.

The good news is that's early enough in the evening to catch a couple of my VG mates playing their new Widows. They're at Level 4 so with the shiny new SSK feature I nip over to Mercy and help out with the early SoA missions and then do Kalinda's arc again. Capella works really well with the two Widows in exactly the mode I described above. By maintenance time we'd finished a fair few of the early missions and I was well into L13.

After thinking about it a bit while I'm watching an excellent documentary (the Stephen Fry/Mark Cawardine Last Chance to See following up from the Douglas Adams book), I log on again after maintanence. I'm wondering if I've been fair with Tremor, because I'm thinking a major lack of this build is AoE of any sort (damage or control). So to test this hypothesis I switch to my secondary build and this time I include Tremor. Capella Rising was lucky to survive the experience of a couple of missions with this power in the mix. I nearly deleted her outright. How on earth is a three and a half second PBAoE power that does the same damage as the already discarded Stone Spears seem even half way reasonable?! Even if it was being sold as a PBAoE knockdown power, by the time you've finished activating it, whatever you were trying to knockdown is playing catch with your kidneys!

Gogogo!

I recommend the Grav/Earth, though judging from this topic so far I guess I'm not actually too close to you in playing style. I suppose as soon as you got AoE Control (especially Wormhole, if you're mobleader) you're gonna want any AoE damage you can get, at least I did, but then again I didn't ever find Tremor THAT bad. You might argue that I die a lot though

Anyway, good luck furtheron.
Won't wish you fun, since grav/earth has a pretty good built-in fun factor if you play to it.

Day 6 - Trick or Treat or Powerlevel?
It's the VG event night, but due to timezone issues I'm normally late for these and tonight is no exception. The group finishes the scheduled SF and are looking for some Halloween action. Thinking that I'd best jump on with my badger for this I grab my L50 Plant/Ice Dom and while we're waiting for the big event the group does a zombie invasion. It's been ages since I played my Plant/Ice and I'd forgotten just how much fun this character is. Anyway, with no supernatural incursion happening we switch to Trick or Treat so I switch to Capella.

ToTing in Grandville with the team is fun, but some of the guys have their difficulty way up, so what comes out of the trick doors is purple as often as not. As much as I like to complain about this character, I defy any character in the low teens and only outfitted with DOs to handle groups of purples well. I was of some use to hold and pick off stragglers, but I did get to visit the hospital several times. I was also of considerable use as comedy relief. With Liliaceae on the team, and him knowing full well how I feel about Gravity, there was much mirth pretty much every time I threw out Propel or Hurl Boulder. In fairness, my Hurl Boulder is bright pink, so much of the comedy was justified.

As always when many of the enemies are purples there was a whole lot of xp gained in a very short period of time and the ToTing saw me from L13 through to L18 in under an hour. I canned it there because (a) I was tired and (b) I hadn't done the L15-19 mayhem and I wanted to see what the character's solo performance was like in the upper teens.

With powers, I picked up SuperSpeed at 14, Health at 16 and Gravity Distortion Field at 18. It was either that or Power Boost, and I really don't have much Power to Boost just yet.

Day 7 - No Server, No Dom
Thursdays are now maintenance day, so tonight's a bust. I get on for about 20 minutes to outfit Capella with L20 DOs and do the Bloody Bay Arachos Liason/Seer Marino runaround.

Day 8 - Striking Out
Tonight I intend to solo. Time to get a feel for Capella as the damage scaling and accuracy bonuses are coming off, and see if this character is going to be in anyway viable. The period from L18-19 is typically where a Dom is weakest for these reasons, and if you can make a go of it here, you can make a go of it anywhere in the game.

So, firstly I do a newspaper and a mayhem to get the badge and the temp power. Then I decide to do the Ashley McKnight Origin of Power missions and the Seer Marino arc which I've always found to be fun. By the end of the evening Capella Rising is not far from L20 and I've pretty much got a better feel for the character.

Here's my thoughts:

Pro: I've never had a Dom better on endurance. I'm not really keeping more than one blue, and outside of Mu in numbers I'm not really ever running out of endurance.

Pro: I've shuffled around my attack chain. Stone Mallet and Stone Spears (yes, I've changed my mind about this) are now the core of the attack chain. The vet powers are now too inaccurate to rely on. Hurl Boulder and Propel are good for picking off runners, but essentially, Stone Mallet is the source of most of my damage. I'd pretty much kill for the equivalent of Ice Sword Circle or Psy Scream at this point, but the frustration is still not enough to revisit Tremor.

Con: My build is poor. In my haste to check out all these wonderful attacks, I now have far too many attacks. More than I can fit into an attack chain even. I'm seriously considering another look at the immobs. They're not much, but an unused attack is a wasted power and I know that I can make the immobs work for me situationally at least.

Pro/Con: Lift is wonderful for the early mez resistant mobs, but I'm actively having to remember which ones I shouldn't use Grav Distortion on because of this. I'm getting used to it.

Con: CoT Spectrals deliver a timely reminder that all my damage is Smashing. In fact, a group of three yellow spectrals calls for a bowel-clench at this point in this Dom's career.

Overall I'm still enjoying the character. The inbuilt challenge factor is fun ("I know it's awful, but I can still do it!") and the animations are seriously cool. I will admit to firing off Hurl Boulder far more than I strictly need too simply because of the grin I get when I do it. I'm even getting used to Stone Mallet and I'm trying to think of a better customisation option to make it look less lame.

Here's Capella Rising with Hurl Boulder in action.

i see you on my global and on the forums a lot and yet i never say hi!!!....anyway hi!!!(goodluck on your toon btw)

Thanks for writing this up. It's an interesting read. My go at /Earth was deleted at level 9, so you've managed to get a lot further than I.

I hope you keep the updates coming as you move along and get more familiar with the set.

Day 9 - Level 20 and Stamina
Or not. I'll discuss below.

I don't get a lot of time to play today as my weekends tend to be busy. It's that time of the year, and many of my weekends are spent travelling to various music performances around the greater Brisbane area (and we're not talking about a small place here - this is an area on par with Los Angeles in physical area). My kids play a variety of instruments and each play in a couple of bands (and sometimes fill in for others), and this time of the year is when most of the music competitions and school performances are held.

Anyway, I jump on late and play for about an hour before bed. This is enough to push Capella through to L20 and ... not Stamina. I pick up Heavy Mallet instead. What?! Another attack?! Don't I already have too many!? Well, yes, but I really don't have very many good ones and my Seer Marino arc has basically set my plan for how this character is going to play in the future. Additionally, I'm just not having issues with endurance. It's quite bizarre. I will still pick up Stamina at 22, but right now, a smooth damaging attack chain is more important.

Day 10 - Smash!
I only just dinged L20 last night so I never got an opportunity to try out Heavy Mallet. I'll just explain how that goes ...

Gravity Distortion on target one, Lift on target two, close on target three and HAMMER SMASH then HAMMER SMASH again and then SMASH the ground, laugh maniacally and target three isn't there any more.

You may thing that step four in the attack process is optional, but it's not. It's so not. I'm finally really enjoying Earth Assault and I can't wait for Seismic Smash in a few more levels. Earth Assault is indeed full of SMASH. IMO it really carves out a niche as a melee-heavy mid-maturing single target set with Power Boost. At some point I need to do some number crunching on Earth Assault vs Energy Assault, because I think they're playing in the same kiddie pool with Earth Assault specialising in areas where Energy Assault seems to be stubbornly generalist.

Also, I find that I really only need one damaging ranged attack beyond Stone Spears (and I'm not even totally sure about that; if Hurl Boulder had a less entertaining animation I'd consider dumping it more strongly). Propel is still in the tray, but I never use it. It will be gone in favour of either Crush or Crushing Field at my first respec.

Game-wise I continue soloing and I get through the costume slot and cape missions and then move on to newspaper missions and the Steel Canyon mayhem. All of that has me dinging L21 just before the mayhem. I'm now beginning to have endurance issues, but due to my yellowing DO enhancments, that's entirely to be expected. L22, Stamina and SOs loom close so I'm unconcerned.

I'm glad to see that you're having fun - you've got the same reaction I do to the stone melee attacks, it's just so much *fun* to SMASH the heck out of everything.

The /earth dom I plan to make eventually will also be a grav/, so I'm finding your reports quite interesting. In most cases, I would usually suggest taking the ST immob for use on EBs and skipping the AoE version, but with the extreme melee focus of /earth and possibly wanting to prevent scatter from WH, I'm not as sure. If you have room, I might actually suggest taking both (you ought to have room, if you're skipping propel, dimension shift, and mud pots), though you obviously don't need both immediately.

I haven't forgotten the Journal.

My VG is trying out a hero night, so that consumed Monday. Family commitments precluded Tuesday, and the last two nights have been wiped out by maintenance and an install. The Wednesday patch has the Oceanic community in something of a tiz given that there was a commitment made only a couple of weeks ago that patches would be on Tuesday with maintenance on a Thursday. Makes it hard to plan anything regularly ...

Anyway, Capella will Rise again!

Well, capella rises every night - at least from this latitude. (although somtimes it *is* during the day...) The only question is: will you be at the helm or not?

Day 14 - Late Night
Third day of downtime in a row is a lot frustrating, but because it's Friday I don't mind playing a bit late. So I get on at about 11pm and after a few missions (Captain Petrovich's Iron Widow arc to be specific) I hit L22, Stamina and SOs. I'm thinking this is going to be a profound difference, and it doesn't take long to realise that it is.

After about half an hour of soloing I get picked up by a L23 MM and we do a few newspaper missions. He's Necro/FF, probably the first of those that I've seen and seems to be quite effective, if a little lacking in punch. For the last mission of the night he suggests a mayhem. Sounds like fun, so I foolishly agree.

Aside: I quite enjoy mayhems. The low level ones are reasonably challenging and the upper level ones are a source of much mirth as you ambush the ambushers. What I'm going to talk to at this point is the low level type (or it's equivalent: too gimpy low 20s characters). In my experience there are three ways to do a mayhem mission at low levels:

1. The Right Way - Move steadily to the bank, destroying objects for time and dealing with ambushes as they come.

2. The Wrong Way - Run straight for the bank and wait in the foyer to deal with the ambushers. This actually becomes the right way with good teams or higher levels, but at low levels Longbow are too tough in comparison to you and you can get swamped.

3. The Really Wrong Way - Same as the Wrong Way except that you use Fly or Super Jump and it's a map with the Longbow Eagle Assassination Squad.

About 15 seconds into the mission I realise "we" have chosen option 2. Except that I'm wrong, "we" have actually chosen option 3. (Only, I'm still wrong). So we're in the bank foyer when the Longbow arrive. Unfortunately they continue to arrive for some time and in numbers that seem inordinate for the threat that they are facing. The good news is that the bubbles, enhanced with some handy Luck inspirations, are keeping me alive to deal with a good half of them. The bad news is that the MM goes down and goes straight to the PPD jail.

In favour of Capella Rising, rapid target switching and knockdown in nearly every attack as well as her entire inspiration tray keep her alive long enough for the MM to come back to the lobby where I learn that option 3 is no longer on the cards. This genius of an MM has invented a whole new option.

4. The Really, Really Wrong Way - Same as the Really Wrong Way, except that you repeatedly go to the PPD Jail and return to the bank via a different route while flying or super jumping every time. Thus bringing a whole new set of Longbow to the already active pile-on in the bank foyer.

Eventually, I run out of insps and I join the MM in jail, but we return to finish off the Longbow and complete the mayhem. It's fortunate at this point that I'm going to bed, but I do ask about how much experience this guy has with mayhems ...

I don't know why you have such a problem with Stone Spears the damage is exactly the same all most of the other tier 1 ranged attacks from the other sets. It actually does more damage than flares or psi dart. It's a pretty good attack.

Tremor is a mixed bag. the damage is right for the recharge/end cost and it has better mitigation than say Whirling hands, but the animation does make it less desirable.

I have to say, THANKYOU FOR THIS, you have given me a real chuckle with this write up, i really wiah I could be bothered to do this type of thing with one of my alts when I start them.

Keep it up

Day 15 - Difficulty
One of the nicer things about where I live is that I'm only an hour away from this place and we're coming into summer. After a lovely day at the beach boogie boarding and rockpooling with the kids I finally get on quite late.

The very first thing I do is get Capella Rising to a Fortunata. With SOs the default difficulty level is embarassingly easy. Tentatively I raise the setting to Bosses, +1 level. Without any AoE I'm reluctant to raise the equivalancy settings. Turns out that I'm being quite conservative as yellow minions prove to be two-hammer laydowns and orange minions not much worse. I'm really loving these mallets.

I was just on the way back to the Fortunata to try out +2 level when I get an invite to a ToT team in the RWZ. I'm not particularly enamoured of the low 20s missions and I did the one I wanted to do (the Lt Chalmers Ballista-1 mission) so I head over there and spend the next 45 minutes doing ToT. Much better experience than last time and I really feel I'm contributing this time around. It also takes me from L23 to just into L25 before I say my goodbyes and head to bed.

L24 was Power Boost in anticipation of Wormhole at 26.

Day 16 - New Band
With L25 a new band (L25-29) is nigh and I need to do some cleanup on open L20-24 contacts. I spend the first 45 minutes online doing just that; finishing an old Darrin Wade mission and then nearly finishing his early arcs as well as finally clearing up the Cap au Diable invention tutorial. Then I get tempted by an ITF which I haven't done for a while so I flip to my 50 Crab to have some fun with that.

After 40 minutes I'm back and I head towards unlocking the 25-29 contacts in Nerva. I'm extremely surprised to note that Doc Buzzsaw is now in my active contacts. I normally don't unlock her until L29 or so. Her missions are always fun, so I'll probably knock those off in the 25-29 period.

I'm about half way through L25 and looking forward to Wormhole.

Very nice journal, gotta say it's kept me entertained for a couple of days. Having played a Gravity/Forcefield Controller to 35, and now a Fire/Earth Domi to 9 (Thanks to you ) I can admire your tenacity to stick through with the combo.

After reading through up to day 10 (all that was updated at that point) I decided to go check out Stone Spears' animation, which was alot easier now due to the great and wonderful power customisation. I had a Dominator planned, originally for Fire/Elec, but after seeing Stone Spears in action it was a difficult choice, eventually boiling down to which looked cooler; Spears or Static Discharge.. Spears won due to it being at level 1, rather than 35. Very much enjoying it so far despite the attack chain being Char - Spears - repeat with the occasional Tremor (which I find useful, despite the nay sayers) and Nemesis Staff thrown in for flavour.

So far, not planning to get the hammers (concept, roleplaying be a harsh mistress) and will focus more on control and ranged supremacy, with a little SMASH thrown in for good measure. I look forward to seeing how your combo goes, especially once you have Wormhole which is oh so much fun.