Grav/earth

has anyone tried this build? Any suggestions?

I have a love/hate relationship with Gravity. You have to get to a pretty high level to start getting reliable area control that still lets you damage the foes. Still, I love the set once I get to the 35-40 range. Of course, some of the soft control in /Earth Assault may help a bit with the wait.

As for combining Gravity and Earth, be mindful that a lot of your Earth Attacks are melee range, more so than pretty much any other assault set. However, some of your Gravity powers can knock guys away from you (Propel, Wormhole, Singularity), though you can manage it with care. So, it could be a bit awkward.

I think it would be a challenging but interesting combo, and the knockback / knockdown from both sets could be as amusing as it is challenging. Throw in Water Spout for giggles.

Lewis

/quickie level 50 build:

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I have a Grav / Earth. Extremely Fun. Lift And Stonespears is great early level entertainment

I've not paired the two but something I think about playing my earth/earth is do I use my AOE immobilize or not. If I use stone cages I grant everyone I hit KB/KD resistance which means I just cancelled out the mitigation that earth assualt has. Grav's AOE immobilize doesn't have any KB/KD protection so you wouldn't have to worry about losing a whole secondaries worth of mitigation at once.

Warden,

Yeah I meant to state that specifically, but that was part of what I meant by Grav and Earth's knock-up, knock-down, knock-back and other powers playing very well with one another. I failed to specify in my post. Ah well.

I think the combo would be pretty fun. Grav / Earth / Water (Mako) would be a cool "Nature" variant.

Lewis

It is a fun combo, I have one at 39 at the moment. It is a rare combo but in my opinion you need to be a veteran player to get the most out of it. It's best attacks are all melee and Gravity is light on aoe control till late game so knowing when its time to get in there and melee and when to stay at range are critical.

The best thing is the incredible animations, propel, stone spears, hurl boulder in particular stand out (I highly recommend the lava animations for /earth assualt with a light/dark color complimentary color scheme). Some good synergy is the immobilizes in gravity still allows the knockdown/knockup that /earth assualt provides for additional control. With a decent ranged attack chain early, great melee and your controls it solo's fairly easily.


Now for the bad things, poor aoe control until wormhole shows up. You have to spam your single target hold and levitate/stone spear combo for control (it gets tiring but is effective). Once you get wormhole it is fun but fickle control. Being able to stun/teleport a group is a lot more fun that it sounds and if you practice you can stick them in corners or walls to negate the knockback. Sounds perfect right? For some reason you end up eating an alpha strike from the mobs if they have LOS to you, you can wormhole from around corners but it has short range so its not always possible. The other big problem is that all your damage is smashing which is highly resisted from 35 on, so your damage goes in the tank. Still good to great single target melee damage but your ranged attack chain and aoe damage just fell off a cliff (it is fairly dramatic change in damage and cannot be emphasized enough). Your ranged attack chain is good but it has long animations in hurl boulder/propel so you probably should pick just one (I couldn't I love both animations too much) and you will still end up dying more than a few times because of the long animations. So if you have any min/maxer tendencies this probably isnt the toon for you.

The only problem with /earth assualt is it has poor ranged damage so it pairs best with a primary with a ranged attack damage in it (Gravity/Mind/Immobilize proced up). I think ice/earth assault might show the best synergy. All in all it is a fun change of pace toon with some incredible animations.

[EDIT]
You know what forget all the negatives I just mentioned, I just logged in to this toon after playing alts for two weeks. And he is just too much fun, epic animations. Seriously go make one now it is worth it. No, I can wait. Are you still reading this???? Make one now, you wont regret it.

I'd suggest reading Mins thread that was linked to earlier, theres some good advice there. I leveled one of these to about 39. I had a good time along the way. The essence of Grav/Earth is solid single target control. You'll be able to stack ST holds (with singy and seismic smash) faster than almost any dominator out there. However, Grav/Earth does not excel at AoE damage and in many ways that's its Achilles heel. Large mobs will be hard for you to control. While Wormhole helps I've found most PuG teams won't have the patience needed for WH to work effectively. On big teams you're better off taking out the most worrisome NPC you can spot. Solo, the games your oyster...wormhole and smash to your hearts content.

It's a pretty fun combo and I'm satisfied with the overall damage output. Mine is used in a semi static team so I've got breathing room to mess around with some things like Dimension Shift.