The rampage everyone either loves, or hates. The rampage people who love fire and ice hate, but also the rampage people who hate fire and ice love. Gravitar is a no-bars no-bullcrap rampage. It rewards the skilled, and punishes those who rely on others to do everything for them.
The gameplay in gravitar is in many ways, as unforgiving as fire and ice, but for different reasons. Agro means very little in this alert, meaning the holy trinity will not work in this. You WILL get hit by a random force cascade, and thats the main worry of the alert in some cases. It's best to think of this as a very random fight with little predictability.
Frequently, gravitar will launch spheres in the area. While it seems unpredictable with the force cascades, shes got a pattern to her sphere attacks. The smaller spheres appear in point blank range, and do a modest amount of damage. Larger spheres spawn on top of players but do not follow them explode for a heavy amount of damage, but are survivable with a block. Another similar sphere attack spawns on a random person, but this time follows the person. On detonation, it holds everyone within.
At two thirds health, gravitar will start to pull everyone into melee range of herself. Often, this follows one of the above attacks, or a chain of cascades. This means the players must be ready to activate an active defense and be ready to heal themselves and others. She usually announces the attack, so it's easy to account for it.
The last attack does not trigger untill she is down to 1/3rd health, and is the most lethal attack. The gold spheres spawn randomly after her holding spheres, and can inflict up to about 30-60k damage. This attack is instantly lethal if you do not have a means of either escaping it quickly(by blocking the hold sphere, you can move), or by blocking and dodging it. It can be survived if you are closer to it's edge and actively have a lot of defenses up, but you have to actively deal with it.
Gravitars attacks are balanced around hitting teammates more randomly, as a means of ensuring they have to defend themselves. If you die, it's more then likely your fault, not someone elses on the team, and this actually makes the alert very fun to play. Teamwork does have it's merits, as you do not want to get teammates held by a sphere, you don't want to leave teammates who mess up dead or anything. HEaling others is useful, but a dedicated healer or tank isn't really required for this one(unlike fire and ice).
I give the alert a B in grade. While the Cascades and the spheres are random in targetting, this is an alert thats very doable and it's not really hard for any wrong reason. Gravitars random cascades hit hard, but no where near the "one shot kill" that kenina and frosticus put out unless your using invuln/defiance. The fact is, you can react to a problem in this one, while if you get hit by kenina and frosticus randomly, you don't get any time to react, you just die unless you have a very specific type of character.
If this rampage exposes any problems of champions online, it in reality exposes the weakness and the overall problems of the archetypes, as they depend entirely on others doing something for them and are still very limited.
Juuuuust so you know what it took me a whole year to figure out...
Of the maybe 12 ppl that visit here, probably me and you like Rampages.
Just to put things into perspective.
Gravi is my favorite Rampage, I think. Fire and Ice is a close second. Gravi wins, probably, because she has attitude, dresses stylishly, and can solo 10 players still after all this time. It's a fun fight, to me. Another thing in Gravi's favor for the #1 spot over F&I is that she can be pugged, and pugs can be just as fun as any other teams. Unless there's no healer. Then I load my healer. Prob solved.
She's bad! She's a bad gurl. And she's gooood at it.
Go Gravi!
Now if she could only find someone who is her type.. So many rejections.. "YOU, are NOT my TYPE!" Ok, ok, good luck on j0r search, eh?
Since the revamp her fights have been wayyyy "cleaner". YellowDoomDome behaves way better overall and the lag in general seems to be cleaned up a lot.
Now if they can just make it so that all 10 people's hp bars can be seen, I mean, what. All this fancy new queue business and a Rampage revamp in general and we're like two separate teams once the event starts.
The getting dumped at our spawn points afterwards, unteamed, is kinda lame too. Sure, you can set up a meeting point but.. why bother. This just seems unfinished.
Otherwise, go Rampage Revamp. It gave us the Rampagers channel and < 2 minute queues. Sometimes, < 2 ms queues.
I've got 6 +/- of the components but no Drifter salvage, yet.
You don't really need a healer though as long as it's all freeforms. Thats more a CO failing then anything though, as the damage gravitar puts out is still damage that can be defended against by people who have skill. Thats what I mean by the trinity not being a flat out requirement for gravitar, unlike fire and ice where it 100% is with ZERO alternative due to the sheer damage overpowering what you can heal as a hybrid or tank with such an extremely limited supply of debuffs and no buffs that help mitigate damage outside of aura of radiant protection.
Quote from: LaughingAlex on April 03, 2014, 10:12:53 PM
You don't really need a healer though as long as it's all freeforms.
You don't really need a healer as long as at least one of the FF's is uber. I can tank Frosti so I'm doing ok enough but I can't tank Gravi without help the last time I checked. I've heard enough stories of people soloing her (they didn't really need a healer) but that would not be me at this point.
At one point I bet that Gravi was considered undoable without a healer, too. Now it's just *usually* undoable/painful without one and when none are on I load mine up.
I already did a F & I in a PUG that I have no idea how we won it. I was on heals and rarely healed the 'tank' (was he even a tank...?) that was in Frosti's target and I was watching Frosti's target the whole time. I was so shocked I didn't even know what to do with myself for a minute - ha! I literally had nothing to do except whip my puny dps out on cages and throw heals the tank's/everyone else's way occasionally to help keep him topped off... just in case. We won fast, too. Maybe the tank's heals were coming from someone else but their HP bar sure didn't look like it was getting healspammed.
It would suck with no dps in a(ny) team, too. Try doing an FM with no dps.
Sometimes your the star, sometimes not. Everyone contributes tho. Sometimes more than others. And most people play more than 1 toon.
It all evens out. The girl that was the star healer in F & I will likely not even be wanted in other events. Like FM for example. No one really seems to care if I have my healer in LI, either. They want vehicles. Even vehicles get to be the star sometimes.