Gell's Gravitas

[mopl]

I sometimes try and play some backgrounds as intended, which means I learn spells of the starting book and develop accordingly.

Just started an AM and want to use Gell's Gravitas.

How does it work ? Is it useful ? Any tips ?

[rchandra]

All I can say is I look forward to your finding a use. I've learned it a few times on characters using Hexes and not figured out when it was useful.

[PerverseSuffering]

It's supposed to drag all monsters towards the affected one, right? Sounds like an escape plan. Drag monsters closer to you to those farther from you and run/shoot at them? I dunno, I never used it myself, but it sounds like that kinda spell.

[le_nerd]

Except it still is resistable by MR, and if you have to punch trough MR you can either enslave the monster (old versions) or tukima/confuse etc it. So far the lack of answers seems to indicate that no-one has any use for Gells Gravitas.

[PerverseSuffering]

Tukima/confuse still won't affect an entire crowd, right? Clumping an angry mob following you together still sounds viable to me, I'll check it out as soon as I can.

Badwiki says: "Gell's Gravitas may not do very much damage on its own, but its ability to clump multiple enemies into one location makes it a perfect setup for other attack options. Area-of-effect spells such as Fireball, Inner Flame, and Freezing Cloud are effective follow-ups". Thoughts?

[mopl]

  Code:

Corona, Slow, Inner Flame, Cause Fear, Leda's Liquefaction, Gell’s Gravitas

That's the book of debilitation, so Inner Flame can be an idea...

[duvessa]

Here is a list of situations where Gell's Gravitas is a useful spell:

[Magipi]

Whoever was the dev who designed and implemented the spell, he must have had some uses in mind, no?

[wizzzargh]

I thought an implied combo would be to Inner Flame something, then blow it up by squashing it under a pile of monsters who would then themselves be destroyed in the fiery explosion, but between targeting, spell failure, limited MP pool early on, and damage so low that I'm pretty sure it is inferior to throwing stones, I've never pulled it off

[raikaria]

It's mostly for combos. The biggest one I can see is using it before an Upheaval as a Stormbringer worshipper; especially since the noise you generate by worshipping Qazlal will summon every enemy nearby anyway.

But for that matter Translocations are generally pretty good for Qazlal worshippers; since it lets you reposition away from hordes while letting your clouds thin melee ranks. Bonus points if you use ranged combat [Bows/XBows/Slings/Throwing] since you simultaneously get to reposition using Translocations and cripple things with hexes to play keepaway; while also having Qzalal thin numbers and give you perma Repel Missiles to help out against ranged retaliation.

[rchandra]

It's mostly for combos. The biggest one I can see is using it before an Upheaval as a Stormbringer worshipper; especially since the noise you generate by worshipping Qazlal will summon every enemy nearby anyway.

I suspect that this isn't worth the turns/xp but it sounds cool: it might let you save piety by using gells+upheaval instead of 2x upheaval, and I'm often low on qaz piety. If you get this to work well let us know.

[shrinkshooter]

Badwiki says: "Gell's Gravitas may not do very much damage on its own, but its ability to clump multiple enemies into one location makes it a perfect setup for other attack options. Area-of-effect spells such as Fireball, Inner Flame, and Freezing Cloud are effective follow-ups". Thoughts?

If it actually did something to that effect, then it might be useful. What it actually does is take anything in a 3x3 square around your target and cause collision damage to it based on whatever things are in those squares next to it. This is stupid and useless for three reasons:

1) it can be resisted by MR. as it's been said, if you're going to take the risk of having a spell resisted, there are much better spells to use.
2) the damage it does is a joke. for the mana cost and resist chance, you'd be better off doing something else like, say, Mephitic cloud.
3) the only time the damage *isn't* a laughable miniscule amount is when the target is entirely surrounded. that's not going to happen very often, and it means you'd need multiple castings of this spell in order to set that up, and that's even assuming the enemies don't move, screwing up your preparation.
4) it's only a 3x3 square. That's almost doing nothing. You can't "pull" anything together because the 3x3 grid size means they're already together. If they expanded the square or changed the shape, like, say, a 5x5 diamond or something, it might have its uses. As it is, if you're casting a "pulling" spell at something and its sphere of influence is only immediately surrounding your target, it's not pulling anything at all, it's just doing small amounts of collision damage to everything in the square with a bit more done to the middle target.

So no. Granted I haven't used this is a wide variety of situations, but I suspect whoever invented this spell idea and coded it in never really tried to use it or tested it in different situations. MAYBE you can use it to pull something into deep water or lava, but again, situational and not entirely useful.

[The Ferret]

It might be better implemented as Singularity without the damage.

[Siegurt]

It might be better implemented.

Ftfy.

[byrel]

Between Gell's and Leda's, I'm inherently skeptical of alliterated spells...

[Pollen_Golem]

We need a rename to strengthen byrel's supposition: Alistair's Alcoholism

[jason0320]

Just bring back Singularity, or make Gell's Gravitas' area grows with Spell Power.

[partial]

GG is a crap version of Singularity (which I always thought was a v cool spell and should still be in the game)

[PerverseSuffering]

Gell does have a use: teaching new Crawl players that the game has a lot of redundant stuff in it that sounds cool, but isn't!!

[BugHunter]

I don't know if people have noticed that there were several modifications to Gell's Gravitas in trunk about a week ago.

* Remember the centre of Gravitas when its target dies.
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/e ... 5712f12eba

* Flatten Gell's power curve.
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/f ... 239125285d

* Some Gell's code cleanup.
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/7 ... e7c6411ea0

* Let Gell's target empty space.
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/5 ... 3229f62171

* Tweak Gell's Gravitas's description
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/6 ... bddb1e858e

The "Flatten Gell's power curve" change seems like the most significant:

It was originally designed to be cast with a higher initial spellpower;
as such it was needlessly weak when it first came online at its new
spell level.

This recalibrates power 0 Gell's to be equivalent to old power 100
Gell's, getting strong half as fast until spellpower 200 matches with
old 200 spellpower. This should mean that its effect is a heck of a lot
more significant early on.

This also stops monsters at the target square if the monster previously
occupying it dies.

So maybe it's not as crappy now. I haven't tried it, so I can't really say. I just wanted to make sure people were aware that it had been tweaked.