The random cascades don't actually kill me... then again all my characters are built to survive. I would honestly be sad if they were taken out or nerfed into whimpyness, because I enjoy the panic it induces for them to suddenly take a big chunk out of my health, and the satisfaction of surviving it.
This might be one of those things where the intent is that survival ability is more important than dps output. Like the saying "your dps is 0 when you're dead".
So my advice, bring your tougher characters, leave the squishies at home
If the random cascades have taught me anything it's "wait until she's beating someone else up before trying to self-rez". Usually when she's doing the gravity well she doesn't fling cascades around so I try to wait until then. Mertvaya Ruka, being a slightly squishy long-range gunship, doesn't do too well against Gravitar's direct damage but he's built to not stay dead. My alt Nemesis, on the other hand, has no problem getting right up in Gravitar's face and staying there no matter what gets thrown at her. Honestly I do have to say that I enjoy the challenge no matter what character I use, especially when I'm fighting alongside a good group.
I've killed Gravitar a great many times since my last post and the Yellow/blue bar theory behind yellow bubbles is 100% confirmed. Yellow bar = 80k hit and blue bar = 20k hit.
If you are tanking or in melee range you can block through the 80k hits IF you dodge with about 50%+ avoidance. If you don't have a 100% dodge chance then grab Masterful Dodge and pop it just as you see a yellow charge bar. Between a R1 block power and R1 masterful dodge you will survive an 80k hit.
Everybody else: Stay out of yellow bubbles. I don't care if you're rezing somebody and cancelling early willl put it on cooldown (no idea if this happens or not) just get out of the yellow bubble or block and pray that you dodge most of it.
No other active defense is going to save you from a yellow bubble (I checked) so any moment now somebody will be along to declare Masterful Dodge as an exploit and OP because they don't have it.
Sounds like the latest test patch is removing the smoke grenade exploit, so we'll see if folks defending this will still defend the untelegraphed cascades as adding challenge instead of fake difficulty from random death (I've gotten popped by two of them in a row before and then a third after popping a self-rezz, I was not a happy camper, the only reason it took 2 shots to kill me was I happened to have a bubble up at the time, I'm pretty sure I can with maxed Compassion bubble for more than my max HP.)
Sounds like the latest test patch is removing the smoke grenade exploit, so we'll see if folks defending this will still defend the untelegraphed cascades as adding challenge instead of fake difficulty from random death (I've gotten popped by two of them in a row before and then a third after popping a self-rezz, I was not a happy camper, the only reason it took 2 shots to kill me was I happened to have a bubble up at the time, I'm pretty sure I can with maxed Compassion bubble for more than my max HP.)
Can I clarify something? Smoke Grenade was never an exploit. An exploit is recovering, logging out and logging back in to circumvent the lockout. Smoke Grenade was doing exactly what it was designed to do and has been doing for 3 years now (aside from it's advantage changing smoke grenade has been untouched since launch).
There is a difference between using a cheesy or overpowered ability and exploiting a bug in the game. The logout trick is an exploit (which I wish people would stop using because it messes up pre-made parties after the alert) Smoke Grenade was at best over powered.
It does suck that they went with a blanket immunity for all legendaries though rather than changing the cooldown on it so it couldn't be refreshed before it wears off. It is now a 100% useless ability outside of PvP (assuming the threat wipe advantage doesn't work either if it does then at least you can use it to wipe aggro although take EM for that it's better at it).
A cooldown change on Smoke Grenade would have prevented spamming while still making it useful and if you wanted 100% uptime on the smoke mutliple people would have to coordinate their powers which promotes some teamwork.
This is just lazy.
I assume there is a nerf for Skarns Bane removing energy forms of Cosmics and Legendaries any day now and Masterful Dodge will no longer give a guaranteed dodge against attacks that do over 20k damage.
Yes I'm bitter - not because they nerfed smoke grenade just because of how they nerfed it.
Sounds like the latest test patch is removing the smoke grenade exploit, so we'll see if folks defending this will still defend the untelegraphed cascades as adding challenge instead of fake difficulty from random death (I've gotten popped by two of them in a row before and then a third after popping a self-rezz, I was not a happy camper, the only reason it took 2 shots to kill me was I happened to have a bubble up at the time, I'm pretty sure I can with maxed Compassion bubble for more than my max HP.)
Removing the smoke grenade "exploit"? Welp, there goes any sense of contribution I feel as a support character in that fight. I guess we're only supposed to bring in our heaviest-hitting tanks (with self-rez).
Ah, here's the note on Smoke Grenade in the recent patch notes: "Powers: Smoke Grenade: Smoke Grenade is now ineffective against Cosmics and Legendaries."
So let's see... against Cosmics and Legendaries, we're just not supposed to use crowd control. Go big damage, or go home.
Removing the smoke grenade "exploit"? Welp, there goes any sense of contribution I feel as a support character in that fight. I guess we're only supposed to bring in our heaviest-hitting tanks (with self-rez).
Ah, here's the note on Smoke Grenade in the recent patch notes: "Powers: Smoke Grenade: Smoke Grenade is now ineffective against Cosmics and Legendaries."
So let's see... against Cosmics and Legendaries, we're just not supposed to use crowd control. Go big damage, or go home.
It does look more and more like the Devs have abandoned the idea of Crowd Control in this game entirely (I'm probably summoning Jaybezz to this thread now) but Smoke Grenade was one of the last useful control powers and now it's gone. Everything is being balanced around DPS and Mitigation and that's it. That's really boring.
I remember my Gravity control toon in City of Heroes being able to incapacitate half a room full of enemies with one AoE power and feeling useful and also nesecerry to the success of the group because even the best tanks with the best healers couldn't survive pulling the whole room at once and you needed crowd control.
I miss the days of door missions where every time you turned a corner you were faced with 40 or so bad guys to smack. Now we just have boss fights over and over. Shame my NCSoft account got banned for not being used in too long.
EDIT: I am no longer bitter. I am laughing. Quite hard.
Not Jaybezz but me... Are you disappointed?
Anyhow I have yet to be killed by a bubble and I get killed quite a bit tbh.
If squishy block up and move out.
If solid block and hope then heal and block a bit more.
I get killed by stuff I don't see coming. Yep those seemingly random cascades!
If I pay very close attention to Gravitar will I see her targetting me before I get cascaded?
Not Jaybezz but me... Are you disappointed?
Anyhow I have yet to be killed by a bubble and I get killed quite a bit tbh.
If squishy block up and move out.
If solid block and hope then heal and block a bit more.
I get killed by stuff I don't see coming. Yep those seemingly random cascades!
If I pay very close attention to Gravitar will I see her targetting me before I get cascaded?
Nope unless that's what they changed in the patch. Nearly everything else they claim to have changed about Gravitar in the patch didn't actually work. The only thing they did fix was the logout exploit. Everything else (including multiple rewards) is still there.
Something interesting you may want to add for tanks is a way to use the black hole as an extra healing break. Basically, the protector spec has a specialization that heals you a percentage of your HP over time every time you are knocked or held. Yes, the continuous swirly-whirly of the black hole does in fact keep triggering this. I usually get back a significant amount of HP just from her using this power.
Now the Alert battle locks out the players even before they spawn in the area making the already not 10 hero battle even lesser than before, great bug fix.
I don't know what it is but the most recent change has caused my durable tanks to feel squishy too. A force geyser that connects and then spammed force cascade and I'm down. 300 Con with Invul, a stack of Defiant, Eye of the Storm fully maintained, Unbreakable and she uses a force geyser and spams her force cascade twice and I'm down and out. The difficult challenge has turned into PvP with nothing but auto knock up spam, but like from a player who hits ten times harder and never runs out of energy and takes 10 minutes to whittle down.
The constant bubble spam followed up by that damn spam makes reviving impossible to do. Pulling agro doesn't allow you to lure her away from defeated team mates.
I'm usually for fair trial and justice even for villains, but in this case the officer that cuffs her should do us all a favor and slit her throat.
I don't know what it is but the most recent change has caused my durable tanks to feel squishy too. A force geyser that connects and then spammed force cascade and I'm down. 300 Con with Invul, a stack of Defiant, Eye of the Storm fully maintained, Unbreakable and she uses a force geyser and spams her force cascade twice and I'm down and out. The difficult challenge has turned into PvP with nothing but auto knock up spam, but like from a player who hits ten times harder and never runs out of energy and takes 10 minutes to whittle down.
The constant bubble spam followed up by that damn spam makes reviving impossible to do. Pulling agro doesn't allow you to lure her away from defeated team mates.
I'm usually for fair trial and justice even for villains, but in this case the officer that cuffs her should do us all a favor and slit her throat.
LOL. Loving your last comment But you are correct my Behemoth(Black Diamond) has 13.5k hp and high enough strength to me a force to be reckoned with and still Gravitar fires at me with a couple of cascades and I am diamond dust.:mad:
I had the same feeling. Gravy does seem to do more damage now with her non-bubble attacks.
I especially noticed her Force blast. I think it's FB. The one where she sticks both arms out in front of her, and charges up. Before I could just shrug it off, and keep attacking to hold aggro, maybe hit BCR, but now it's taking 1/3 my health(this is with 200% resistance, and over 12k hp), and she does it like 3, or 4 times in a row.
She also seems to be even more random in where she targets her bubble attacks. Before it would seem she kept it more to around melee range of her, but now she seems to shoot them out all over the place, even when I have aggro the whole time.
That said, she's still beatable, even though I lost to her for the first time last night with my MA/LR dodge tank, America the Beautiful, who's every bit as tough as my Might Defiant Tank.
I had the same feeling. Gravy does seem to do more damage now with her non-bubble attacks.
I especially noticed her Force blast. I think it's FB. The one where she sticks both arms out in front of her, and charges up. Before I could just shrug it off, and keep attacking to hold aggro, maybe hit BCR, but now it's taking 1/3 my health(this is with 200% resistance, and over 12k hp), and she does it like 3, or 4 times in a row.
She also seems to be even more random in where she targets her bubble attacks. Before it would seem she kept it more to around melee range of her, but now she seems to shoot them out all over the place, even when I have aggro the whole time.
That said, she's still beatable, even though I lost to her for the first time last night with my MA/LR dodge tank, America the Beautiful, who's every bit as tough as my Might Defiant Tank.
The bubbles will seem more random now because less people are using Smoke Grenade on her. Smoke Grenade meant she would limit her attacks to people in melee as those were all she could see. Now people think Smoke no longer affects her (it does) they aren't using it as much so she's behaving "normally"
She is also doing the same amount of damage she's always done with her Gravity Cascades. In fact the only thing that changed about the fight was the bug that meant when she was in her last 1/3 of health her normal 20k Force Detonations were getting a yellow bubble instead of a blue one.
Most likely what is causing you to take more damage is that the lockout works now meaning that as the fight drags on there are less targets available for her and you are taking more Gravity Cascades in a row than before.
I am impressed by super-specialized tanks that can solo Gravitar (when everyone else dies and there's still half her life left). I've only been with one so far. It was amazing. Only her super-bubble could bring his life bar down a significant way, and he'd recover his health almost instantly.
But I really wish they would remove some element of Gravitar's randomness with her super force cascades/geyser. I wish you could at least see her *targeting you* so you can block, or save your dodge for when a string is coming in. Or maybe you can get a different colored glow that indicates you're going to get hit. Something to help with the roulette-wheel element.
As a ranged dps, I don't even bother saving bcr or masterful dodge or my electric sheath with ME advantage--I just use them and nanobot swarm when they're up and hope that one is up when I start getting hit. Blocking only helps some of the time because I can get knocked right out of my block and get hit with a follow-up string immediately after, before I can resume blocking.
Blocking is even worse if you're a power armor dps--there's a bit of delay before block cuts through the attack toggles.
As it is, I'm already tough for a dps, I have 60% dodge and avoidance from gear and quarry, and have pretty good defense when locus is up, which is a lot of the time.
I mean, I don't want to have that anti-knock circle just for Gravitar (nor should Gravitar's doability depend on people having smoke grenade).
Comments
This might be one of those things where the intent is that survival ability is more important than dps output. Like the saying "your dps is 0 when you're dead".
So my advice, bring your tougher characters, leave the squishies at home
If you are tanking or in melee range you can block through the 80k hits IF you dodge with about 50%+ avoidance. If you don't have a 100% dodge chance then grab Masterful Dodge and pop it just as you see a yellow charge bar. Between a R1 block power and R1 masterful dodge you will survive an 80k hit.
Everybody else: Stay out of yellow bubbles. I don't care if you're rezing somebody and cancelling early willl put it on cooldown (no idea if this happens or not) just get out of the yellow bubble or block and pray that you dodge most of it.
No other active defense is going to save you from a yellow bubble (I checked) so any moment now somebody will be along to declare Masterful Dodge as an exploit and OP because they don't have it.
Can I clarify something? Smoke Grenade was never an exploit. An exploit is recovering, logging out and logging back in to circumvent the lockout. Smoke Grenade was doing exactly what it was designed to do and has been doing for 3 years now (aside from it's advantage changing smoke grenade has been untouched since launch).
There is a difference between using a cheesy or overpowered ability and exploiting a bug in the game. The logout trick is an exploit (which I wish people would stop using because it messes up pre-made parties after the alert) Smoke Grenade was at best over powered.
It does suck that they went with a blanket immunity for all legendaries though rather than changing the cooldown on it so it couldn't be refreshed before it wears off. It is now a 100% useless ability outside of PvP (assuming the threat wipe advantage doesn't work either if it does then at least you can use it to wipe aggro although take EM for that it's better at it).
A cooldown change on Smoke Grenade would have prevented spamming while still making it useful and if you wanted 100% uptime on the smoke mutliple people would have to coordinate their powers which promotes some teamwork.
This is just lazy.
I assume there is a nerf for Skarns Bane removing energy forms of Cosmics and Legendaries any day now and Masterful Dodge will no longer give a guaranteed dodge against attacks that do over 20k damage.
Yes I'm bitter - not because they nerfed smoke grenade just because of how they nerfed it.
Removing the smoke grenade "exploit"? Welp, there goes any sense of contribution I feel as a support character in that fight. I guess we're only supposed to bring in our heaviest-hitting tanks (with self-rez).
Ah, here's the note on Smoke Grenade in the recent patch notes: "Powers: Smoke Grenade: Smoke Grenade is now ineffective against Cosmics and Legendaries."
So let's see... against Cosmics and Legendaries, we're just not supposed to use crowd control. Go big damage, or go home.
It does look more and more like the Devs have abandoned the idea of Crowd Control in this game entirely (I'm probably summoning Jaybezz to this thread now) but Smoke Grenade was one of the last useful control powers and now it's gone. Everything is being balanced around DPS and Mitigation and that's it. That's really boring.
I remember my Gravity control toon in City of Heroes being able to incapacitate half a room full of enemies with one AoE power and feeling useful and also nesecerry to the success of the group because even the best tanks with the best healers couldn't survive pulling the whole room at once and you needed crowd control.
I miss the days of door missions where every time you turned a corner you were faced with 40 or so bad guys to smack. Now we just have boss fights over and over. Shame my NCSoft account got banned for not being used in too long.
EDIT: I am no longer bitter. I am laughing. Quite hard.
Anyhow I have yet to be killed by a bubble and I get killed quite a bit tbh.
If squishy block up and move out.
If solid block and hope then heal and block a bit more.
I get killed by stuff I don't see coming. Yep those seemingly random cascades!
If I pay very close attention to Gravitar will I see her targetting me before I get cascaded?
Nope unless that's what they changed in the patch. Nearly everything else they claim to have changed about Gravitar in the patch didn't actually work. The only thing they did fix was the logout exploit. Everything else (including multiple rewards) is still there.
The constant bubble spam followed up by that damn spam makes reviving impossible to do. Pulling agro doesn't allow you to lure her away from defeated team mates.
I'm usually for fair trial and justice even for villains, but in this case the officer that cuffs her should do us all a favor and slit her throat.
LOL. Loving your last comment
I especially noticed her Force blast. I think it's FB. The one where she sticks both arms out in front of her, and charges up. Before I could just shrug it off, and keep attacking to hold aggro, maybe hit BCR, but now it's taking 1/3 my health(this is with 200% resistance, and over 12k hp), and she does it like 3, or 4 times in a row.
She also seems to be even more random in where she targets her bubble attacks. Before it would seem she kept it more to around melee range of her, but now she seems to shoot them out all over the place, even when I have aggro the whole time.
That said, she's still beatable, even though I lost to her for the first time last night with my MA/LR dodge tank, America the Beautiful, who's every bit as tough as my Might Defiant Tank.
The bubbles will seem more random now because less people are using Smoke Grenade on her. Smoke Grenade meant she would limit her attacks to people in melee as those were all she could see. Now people think Smoke no longer affects her (it does) they aren't using it as much so she's behaving "normally"
She is also doing the same amount of damage she's always done with her Gravity Cascades. In fact the only thing that changed about the fight was the bug that meant when she was in her last 1/3 of health her normal 20k Force Detonations were getting a yellow bubble instead of a blue one.
Most likely what is causing you to take more damage is that the lockout works now meaning that as the fight drags on there are less targets available for her and you are taking more Gravity Cascades in a row than before.
But I really wish they would remove some element of Gravitar's randomness with her super force cascades/geyser. I wish you could at least see her *targeting you* so you can block, or save your dodge for when a string is coming in. Or maybe you can get a different colored glow that indicates you're going to get hit. Something to help with the roulette-wheel element.
As a ranged dps, I don't even bother saving bcr or masterful dodge or my electric sheath with ME advantage--I just use them and nanobot swarm when they're up and hope that one is up when I start getting hit. Blocking only helps some of the time because I can get knocked right out of my block and get hit with a follow-up string immediately after, before I can resume blocking.
Blocking is even worse if you're a power armor dps--there's a bit of delay before block cuts through the attack toggles.
As it is, I'm already tough for a dps, I have 60% dodge and avoidance from gear and quarry, and have pretty good defense when locus is up, which is a lot of the time.
I mean, I don't want to have that anti-knock circle just for Gravitar (nor should Gravitar's doability depend on people having smoke grenade).