Striving for Mediocrity - Gravity/Earth - A Journal

I'm a bit behind - this post is going to be a quick catchup.

Day 26 - Super Lollie Powers - ACTIVATE!
Wednesday is our VG event night and we'd previously decided to give the Halloween event a bit of a sendoff. By the time I get there, most of the festivities are over and we're trying to spawn Jack in Irons in Sharkhead. Unfortunately on this night we just spawn Eochai over and over with no appearance by Jack.

The piccies of all the debris left by the crystal-themed Earth Assault powers a few posts back come from various encounters with Eochai. The comments were something about a demented candyman and defeating Giant Monsters with lollie attacks. (Aussies and Kiwis tend to use the term "lollie" rather than "candy").

After the team reduces to the point where GMs aren't viable I get some help to take down Calystix which is much appreciated. Even with one extra person (and I had three), Calystix is much easier to take down.

Day 27 - Maintenance
I do manage to get on for about 45 minutes before maintenance and I used it to help out some friends doing L22 cape missions. After those we make a run at Ashley McKnight's CoT mission with all the bosses and the Guardians of the Amulets but we run out of time before maintenance to finish it.

Capella Rising does hit L30 and I take Crushing Field as an experiment.

Day 28, 29 and 30 - Busy weekend
For various reasons I don't spend much more than half and hour each on Friday and Saturday that may or may not relate to a new Charles Stross book. Sunday I do get to play for an hour or so, but I mostly solo while trying to educate a mate about Brutes. Much becomes clear when he realises that Energy Melee has changed a lot from how it used to be.

Capella Rising hits 31 and I get some much needed slots into Wormhole. Looking forward to Singularity at this stage.

wow the aussies are out in force today ( btw u'll love singy)

Day 31 - Curse you Charlie!
Mr Stross is still keeping me from spending a lot of time on Capella, but I do get an hour or so in tonight. Newspapers and mayhem to unlock Hardcase and then a couple of his missions. A lot of people don't like this contact, but I've always enjoyed going up against Wailers and the "saving St Martial" thing has never really bothered me. When he sends me out of zone I take the opportunity to do the first couple of Kristof Jaeger's missions.

I now have Mynx lined up, which should be very interesting. Due to her immunity to immobs I've always found her a bit tough so she's a good measure of Dominator effectiveness.

Day 32 - Install
A late night at work means I attempt to get on about 5 minutes after the servers go down.

Day 33 - Demonic with the VG
Wednesday is VG night and this week we're doing the Demonic accolade en masse. By the time I get on there's a convenient 8th spot in a L30 team running around the Sharkhead sky raiders base beating up L31-33 Hellfrosts. I get to about 60-odd against the badge before the rest of the team has Coldhearted so we move on to the badge mission.

Most of the team logs once they get Demonic (the History and Exploration badges were gotten earlier in the evening), but a few of us stick around for some missions. Unfortunately the other guys don't want to play with a Grav Dom ( but extremely understandable, given that I've inflicted this character on them for a month now) so I switch to something slightly more competent.

Day 34 - Maintenance
I get on for about an hour before maintenance hits and use the time to finish off the Demonic badge and progress through Hard Cases' arcs. By the end of it I'm within a bubble or two of L32.

Day 35 - Demonstration of Failure
I get on a small team doing missions at +2 to me against Carnies. The mission in particular is the Merecedes Sheldon mission with the Queen of Diamonds, Spades etc. The rest of the team is a Stalker and a Night Widow. I literally cannot remember a poorer performance from a character I have run and I felt like a combination of comic relief and a leech.

A number of issues became obvious:

* I hate L31. Yellows SOs with only a smattering of IOs means levels ending in 1 and 6 hurt.

* I'm not slotted for regular outings against oranges and reds. I have one Acc SO in most powers (two in GDF and WH) and that SO is yellow at this level. One very humorous use of Wormhole against a group of 7 resulted in no hits at all and Capella checking the dirt out before the Wormhole animation had even finished.

* After years of Doms team expectations have been set: we're expected to open fights. I have two powers to do this: Wormhole and GDF. Neither last very long, even with good slotting and Power Boost, and on this team with nearly no AoE, the mobs last too long and I wind up getting way too much aggro to survive. I end up working out a compromise where I use both controls in some fights, and I go just single target in the rest.

* After years of Doms *my* expectations have been set: my playstyle is biased towards having good AoE Controls to rely on and decent AoE to work on groups. All ST grates on me horribly. It's an adaption that I need to make to have this character work, but it grates all the same.

On the good side one of the team members has a high level Grav Controller and he gives me some useful tips on managing the Knockback from Wormhole, and he obviously understands the power so he's looking for the output spot.

I log off just short of 32 and I log back on later that evening and hit 32 and push a fair bit further into that level. Singularity is the first Gravity power that hasn't disappointed me (more on this in a later post). Singularity has me victorious against Mynx in short order and I'm already noticing a better solo playstyle with it around.

I wish I could say the same about Back Alley Brawler though, but I suspect he has a high Smashing resistance so I think I'll need a team for him.

Yes, I'm fairly sure I had Mynx perma-held through the second half of the fight pretty much overpowering the PToD. That's very nice.

To make this a real AV killer though I'll need more slots so that I can bring in some endurance reduction.

WH is horrible on outdoor maps. Not much to bounce mobs off of. Indoors, especially tight maps like warehouses and offices, you can place mobs in corners all day long. One fun thing you can do outside is sky shot targets. Adds a bunch of time to your control as you launch mobs on a ballistic arc. It'll scatter them for sure, but if you're desperate, it's the right play.

I'd advise against it.

Sometimes they get stuck, sometimes they bounce off and sometimes (rarely) they go through the War Wall. Which is a real shame if you need to defeat the whole group to meet a mission objective (like the Carnie one I was doing).

But then again, I've seen that with knockback in the Troll cave missions too. It's not a fault with Wormhole per se.

Day 36 - A Better Team Experience
I get a team going late with a Stalker and a low level MM from my VG. Much, much better than the previous days effort and we have a lot of fun going through some paper missions, one of Hardcase's ones and a Mayhem. The team was not familiar with Wormhole, and there was a whole lot of fun to be had while educating them. wormhole whack-a-mole may have been mentioned.

The wheels fell off a bit during the Mayhem though as it was down to the Stalker and Capella and we got hit by too many PPD Hardsuits and Equalizers at one point.

I'm beginning to see something of a theme with where Capella falls down. I've very much taken for granted that the places that Doms are really, really good on teams is managing encounters with mobs, both by starting fights and by dealing with ambushes. This is a role I find very comfortable filling, but the tools are simply not there with this one. Reminds me greatly of a high-level Blaster.

Anyway, the poor performance with ambush control has me contemplating Dimension Shift. I feel I need a small green alien telling me to avoid the dark side ...

Day 37 - Something Different
I am heartily sick of the CoV L30-40 content. Unlike the low levels where each character can alternate contacts, by the time you get to these levels you don't get to skip much so it's stuff I do over and over again. The cure of course is the Mission Architect so I head over.

For this evening's exercise I spend some time with the Scott Kurtz LOLBAT! arc which was quite brilliant. The LOLBAT's dialogue was brilliant as was the Culinary Institue of Evil. It's a shame it's so hero-biased, but you can't have everything.

The second arc I tried was the next one of the guest arcs which deals with a magic student trying to become a superhero and having you run around looking for magic items for her to do it. Obvious foreshadowing is obvious. This one is even more obvious than the obvious foreshadowing in Kelly Uqua's arc IMO, the only way that this story arc would work is as a villain arc, where your character is playing along just to have an opportunity to prove to the contact that no matter how powerful she can get, you'll still win.

I get a start on the Rooster Teeth arcs, but the warning about Exteme Elite Bosses seems ominous.

Does Dimension Shift allow you to target and attack those mobs that are affected?
Like on Bank Mishs you can attack the civilians, wasting attacks and being a royal pain in the “select next enemy” finger.

I always thought DS would be excellent for Mitigation or for helping with too many mobs (someone AoE around a corner and grabs a 2nd mob, you DS them and they go away until the first mob is dead.) Alternatively only slot minor Acc and hit a normal mob and those not affected you can wipe out (hurts AoE centric toons though).

Better! It's likely to be Mud Pots.

Day 38 - Late Night Cameo
I don't get to play much tonight; it's a bit of a theme for Monday nights which will hopefully change soon. When I did get on I worked my way through a few more MA arcs and hit L33. That means 3 slots in Singularity and some IOs become available.

I've been sitting on various IO bids aiming around 34-36 for some relatively cheap IO sets with good recharge bonuses. That's Stupefy and Expedient Reinforcements and together I've slotted enough for +12.5% recharge. I'm sitting on about 175 reward merits so I'm closing on a LotG +recharge as well; I guess it's time to do real arcs again. I'll be putting in quite a few bids for Crushing Impact sets in the 35-40 range as well and that should help with my endurance woes as well as smoothing play somewhat. I need to look into the availibility of Kinetic Crash too, as I wouldn't have to put many more slots into Lift to pick up a set there as well.

So why slot for recharge? Am I going for perma?

I'm slotting for recharge for two reasons. Firstly, I want every spawn access to my AoE controls which I don't quite have for Wormhole yet and I want better access to GDF. Because Wormhole is so bad (it's good for Gravity, but it's bad compared to other Dom staples), I rely on GDF far more often than I would like. Secondly, if this character is ever going to be good at anything, it will be EB and AV killing. To do that I need Seismic Smash up way more than it is now and to be able to stack GD very, very quickly. An attack chain of GD, SS, hammer, GD, hammer, GD, SS, etc. is the goal.

So, am I going for perma? I doubt it. I'm not sure how far I'm even going to take this character: I figure once I have slotted my L38 power I've had the experience of the powersets I was looking for. There might be the bragging rights of a "I've got a L50 Grav Dom, next stop: petless MM" t-shirt, but I'm not convinced I want to do the slog and inflict such an underperforming character on the teams I'd be with. We'll see; it might be worthwhile doing to pass the time until GR.

This has been a very enjoyable read, thank you for this and I look forward to seeing how far you take it.

Are you playing the alpha dog with this character? Because you should be. With proper slotting there's no reason you shouldn't be able to walk up to a spawn and either WH it into a neat corner pile or string them up like puppets with GDF every time.

And what about your placement? Do you have range in WH? Are you breaking LOS when you use it? Are you using Singy as a door blocker?

Grav is all about taking the lead ("dropping mobs in corner, go get 'em", "herding 2nd mob onto this one", etc.) and proper placement (WH, Singy and your own body). It sounds like that's not your style, so I'm not surprised you're having trouble.

I'm not saying it's the best set out there or anything (Dim Shift blows, and WH should definitely come earlier), but by your 30s you shouldn't be having as much trouble as you're saying regardless of what other doms you've played. That line you used about 'traditional role' really struck me because it sounds like you're trying to get grav to fit some preconceived notion of what a dominator should do. And I'm guessing you're wanting to run up to a spawn, hit an AoE control, then charge in and unload AoE attacks. That's not grav's strength. It's the total opposite. It's the stealth set of controls. You hide around corners, duck behind crates, stand under stairs, pop up over railings, and use singy as your muscle.

I'll address the "traditional role" comments. I'll also point out that I'm addressing a team role. Solo, I have few issues with this Dom.

IMO, the traditional role of a Dominator is to:

#1 Start the fight and eliminate the alpha strike

#2 Disable key dangerous targets

#3 Apply situational awareness: reapply control where necessary and take the initial brunt of ambushes

#4 All while doing a fair share of the team's damage

This Dominator is doing an excellent job at #2, a good job of #4 and a mediocre job at #1 and #3.

The first problem with #1 is that Wormhole is good, but it has a few issues. For me the largest issue is the radius of the effect. A substantial number of groups are not all going to be hit by it, even before the to-hit roll. Secondly, it's fiddly. Targets that you miss are free to attack you at the start of the horribly long animation so you really need to be careful about LOS. It's also got a fairly poor range. So you have to worry about the size of the AoE, you have to announce where you're placing the output, you have to be careful about LOS and range. Oh, and the knockback at the output point. All for an effect that's far better done with Flashfire and Stalagmites.

What exacerbates the issue here is that this particular Dom has almost no AoE damage (yet), and ST attacks take a while to deal with a group even when they are very good. Wormhole's duration, even with Power Boost, is not normally enough to last more than half the fight, so I'm often needing to use GDF far before I want to. Which means I have to wait a while before I start the next fight. See point #1. A Dominator that can't start the fight isn't much of a Dom.

As for #3, this is also made worse by #1. I've either used GDF or WH to start the fight and it's highly likely I'll need to use both. So what's left for ambushes? This is where other Doms use their lesser AoEs. Mind throws a Sleep, Plant and Ice probably already have their key powers recharged, Earth uses whichever of the big three it hasn't used yet or simply throws a QS patch in the ambushes way. Even Fire, which is largely in the same boat as Gravity with only having two real AoE controls has the option of using Bonfire.

DC, the things you're describing about how to get the best out of your Grav Dom? I'm doing nearly all of them (no range slotting in WH yet). But they infuriate me, because they aren't strategies - they're coping mechanisms. As in something most other Doms just don't have to do, because they simply don't need to.