[Transformers Devastation] Grimlock Ch 20 No Damage SS Rank Prime

This took me five days and a great big neon yellow hammer.
I was jumping at the end because I was so excited. :)
I'm going to talk a lot now because I'm so happy. Wall of text mode engaged. You have been warned.
Fun Fact: I originally made an SS Energon Hammer, and tried basically the same thing. I managed No Damage. I got a B. It obliterated everything too fast, so no points. I had to seal its overwhelming power and make it S instead, fortunately I had one lying around.
The damage difference is ridiculous (~7500+ vs ~4900+) and over the whole stage it was ruining chances to get points. I also didn't grab much, because all the enemies you can grab were dead.
Damage isn't really important in this game, the benefit of the energon hammer is the ground slams, a humongous sphere of pain that radiates out with your character in the center. They do a basic interrupt on enemies that knocks them out of attacks, like insecticons charging lightning, and force seekers to land temporarily, or knock them out of the plane form. It will also finish off low health enemies near you that are preparing to gank ya.
Even if enemies dodge the wave instead of being hit, that's time they're spending dodging and not attacking you.
Also those aoes look and sound so damn sexy.
"KNEEL BEFORE GRIMLOCK"
WHAM
Can't believe I never tried this weapon before now. I had a big fat grin on my face when I realised what it could do and it hasn't gone away yet. Energon Hammer Prime? 8D
If you are wondering what I was thinking about when I did this, I'll tell you, because I was actually doing something kinda surprising. I realised I was mashing my controller too hard, and this entire fight I basically put a little bit of my attention on making sure I pressed the buttons and pulled the triggers and sticks etc with a lighter touch, so I could get proper control. No need to crush the controller after all, and it was actually slowing me down to grip too hard. I do that when I get overexcited and it hurts my game. (And my hands. And ruins controllers too.)
I think this caused me to stop overthinking what I was doingwhich was one of my big problems with this challenge. I kept making it too complicated and trying for special tricks and fancy moves. Trying to stick Delay Launcher tricks in there and swap targets all the time, being all try hard DMC combo styles. This distracted me from paying attention to the real threats, because the honest fact is I haven't learnt much of that kind of thing with Grimlock, I don't have enough experience with that kind of thing on this character to use it effectivelyy in a clutch situation. I end up just dropping what I'm doing, falling out of slow mo time, and get hit by something.
In fighting games they call this "choking" where pressure leads you to fuck up. I was doing that, because I was doing stuff I shouldn't have been doing. What I needed to do was get back to basics.
My Grimlock has one rule. Don't stop the smash.
Also dodge like fuck whenever you are close to a yellow guy and he's just dodged something, as well as sentinels. Those fuckers have gotten so many cheap ass hits on me, sometimes in situations impossible to react to. That's why I suddenly just started spamming, I was panicking. "I dropped my combo! Shit yellow guy shit yellow guy. ALERT ALERT DANGER" But I was dodging with a light touch! :)
Technically that is two rules.
I'm taking another break from this game.
My left hand and elbow etc is giving me trouble again. It's nothing serious, so nobody worry, I'll be right, I just need to not overuse it like a singleminded obsessive madman for a while, give it some time to rest since its an RSI problem. It's nowhere near as bad as it used to be and it takes quite a while to cause a problem. Like, eg, playing this long ass challenge in all your spare time for five days straight.
Since I am definitely a single minded obsessive madman about this game, and Grimlock in particular, this means I gotta do something else for a while.

[@KazuyaMithra]

You need to have some great reaction time to cancel enemy parries with just frame shove or spin. Anticipating it then finally pulling it off feels incredible. I try doing it as much as possible.

[@Morninglord22]

If I expect to be parried, I literally just buffer out uppercut to shove. Firstly because it auto cancels an uppercut parry, and secondly because if you just frame it, you get a unique uppercut vehicle attack.

[@robertogomez8027]

Whoa! I didn't know you can do an AIR-GRAB!

[@aaronlaluzerne6639]

So how long did it take for you to grind for all of these items?

[@Morninglord22]

I have no idea. I just kept playing and then my inventory would fill up so I would clear it out. If never deliberately ground for any items, I just went for no damage in challenges. It took a long time, and the game would save any items I picked up in failed runs, even if I quit back to ark and tried again immediately. I experimented with a bunch of stuff and then started creating the items I wanted. One thing I didn't do was up my damage much, because that's a trap. Yes you do more damage. But you don't get enough points. Makes it harder to SS.

[@georgeaustin7086]

Who said grimlock was slow

[@MariusUrucu]

0_0 Damn, I knew Grimlock was a powerhouse, but I didn't knew he was this much of a relentless powerhouse.

[@Morninglord22]

He can actually be surprisingly technical as well.For example all his mode switches can be option selected by holding the button. So any that force you into dino, you can go nope, I want proper sized arms. And any that don't, you can go "I would like to be a trex now please". Which adds a lot of layers to your options.He can also dodge into robot from mid air to continue comboing by holding the dodge button down without pressing a direction. He can jump after the flash of his heavy rush, gain height or lateral movement, and THEN do the vehicle attack. He can also jump cancel or dodge transform cancel during any point of his heavy rush, including at the peak of his arc. So can use his instant heavy rush in combos like you can non hitting helm breakers in DMC, to get to the ground fast, and then jump to catch them from a different angle.He doesn't have a just frame shove directly out of vehicle attacks...instead doing the just frame simply allows him to do a dino heavy rush. And he can change direction to attack a different enemy with it! Many of his short ranged vehicle attacks allow for an instant dino shove cancel on hit. He can even pick dudes up, throw them, and instant light rush them before they hit the ground with the right timing.His grab can catch people on the rebound from electric walls, he can chain his light rush straight into his chomp grab, he can grab after vehicle attacks if you attack first and cancel with the grab (I messed this up on starscream and failed to do the attack before starting the grab).He can't dodge offset hammer charges like optimus can...but he can parry offset them. He's...kinda insane.

[@Morninglord22]

Shit, youtube decided no, no you don't get to have page breaks, all your sentences are going to be straight after another, also you don't get no spaces after full stops no more. Sorry man. I hate it when that happens.

[@MariusUrucu]

No problem, it happened to me too. Shit, with all that description, I really need to try out Grimlock now. I barely touched him, I mostly use Optimus, Bumblebee and Sideswipe.

[@Morninglord22]

Marius Urucu I've got pretty terrible natural reaction speed. I honestly can't see attacks over a certain speed (which is, like, 30 frames, I'm so slow) until I've trained really hard and practice seeing it and trying to react to it over and over. Eventually I can get really fast but it takes a loooong time. Anytime I'm just walking over to an enemy not doing anything, its because I've switched to "I really need to dodge these attacks now" mode, since I can't attack and dodge reliably at the same time. I'm much more effective at dodging if I'm watching without doing anything. So I was attracted to grimlock cos he can just bf+triangle in dino form and lol at all the incoming attacks. Then after it hits the ground, the flash gives me slow mo to observe whats going on, and an invincible vehicle attack that always triggers! And I can aim it in any direction, and it automatically targets planes for me, and enemies off screen. Imagine how awesome that would be for someone like me! That's why in this video, I'm barely dodging anything. Most of the time I'm premptively attacking through their shit, using aoe attacks to crowd control, and using status effects to cut off their ability to respond. It's basically the only way I can cope! Because this is the easiest way I can reliably play really hard games like this, I'm about a thousand times better at predicting attacks, and especially the timing for attacks, than I am at actively dodging them. I will know from experience that I should mash out my shove command because its likely I'll get tagged here, or I should mash the dodge button cos I'm probably vulnerable here. And then I trigger still safe and look pro but in reality I was basically panic mashing. hahahaa This also means I've had to learn to constantly stay in that slow mo period of time you get when you have a proper combo chain going, so I automatically trigger focus all the time, and all the enemies around me are slowed down so I have more time to see whats coming. It's not "focus" its vehicle attack combo slow down. Bullettime for free. Staying in it comes at the cost of flexibility. Custom combos will often drop it. If I drop out of it, I'm 80% likely to get totalled in the next five seconds unless I can get back in really quickly. I've watched some of your vids, and I honestly couldn't play like you. You are very rarely in this combo slow down time because you do moves that break it in order to do your custom combos, and yet you manage to dodge most incoming attacks. It's impressive as hell and a little bit unnerving to watch, like I'm watching someone balancing on a tightrope. If I play the other autobots like you, I get smashed. I like vehicle speed techs on the others because driving away really fast means the enemies can't keep up and I get time to watch them. :) I've learnt how to use the combo slow mo to get back into dino form to always start another instant rush so that I'm safe. One example is if your vehicle attack whiffs in open air, if you immediately aim, you get a period of slow mo. I use that to grapple someone to me, which further extends it, and I use that period to dodge transform into dino Grimlock and buffer a shove so I'm back in the vehicle chains. It's the same reason I always shove after being parried. It's completely automatic now. Parried, shove. No thinking there. It's why I'll do robot shoves in useless situations, like against blitzwing. Again, not thinking. If I'm attacking, especially command attacks, I'll often get focus to trigger, or a vehicle attack. It keeps me safe, so I just always shove. :) Also if *I* parry an enemy, it's because I was doing a shove! They just happened to hit me as I was doing the forward of the command! lol In all my videos I've deliberately parried like four attacks in total, yet my Grimlock auto parries shit all the time. Sometimes I'll unexpectedly end up with a cannon shell in his mouth and be like wtf cos I was expecting to shove. Then I usually get smacked. It just happens that Grimlock's design is based around hyper aggression rather than smooth or balanced offense/defense. Attack attack attack with grimlock in a strategic, forward thinking way, a bit like speed chess, and you live, and beat them. In fact you destroy them, and make them all look like chumps. Give me another two hundred hours playing him, I might be able to start getting really technical with him as a complement to my hyper aggressive default playstyle. Currently, when I'm pushed to the wall, technicalities go out the window, because I can't keep up and have to smash. Sometimes, I feel like Grimlock is the one playing, and I'm just desperately hanging on for the ride. I watch my own videos again for fun sometimes, just because I honestly don't notice half of what's going on around grimlock when I'm actually playing, because I'm always thinking about what to do next. That's why I didn't realise I'd done so much damage to thundercracker. I thought he'd been caught by the ultimate previously somehow and I hadn't noticed. So I just mentally shrugged and continued on. Wasn't till I did it again to starscream in the same attempt, and this time he was alone, that I thought "waaaaaiiiiit a minute..." and the penny finally dropped. So I saved it and rewatched the vid. Grimlock was built for me to play.

[@MariusUrucu]

Morninglord22 I literally read all of this while eating a pack of peanuts until it was empty. :)) What can I say, I love Transformers Devastation, simply because it's not only easy to get into, but also insanely customizable, depending of what type of playstyle you like. You can be more aggressive or more defensive, you can play at a distance or be an in-fighter, you can be more practical and do more minimalistic combos or you can be more fancy, or, in your case, smash the fuck out of everything stupid enough to stand in Grimlock's way. It saddens me that this gem of a game is so criminally overlooked, just because it doesn't have "enough content" or the campaign doesn't last 10+ hours.

[@Galvatraum79]

Wow!!! Christ, that is some fantastic playing! I usually play as Prime, but I just started messing with Grimlock. There is definitely a learning curve there! Sad to hear you're taking a hiatus from TD, but thanks for all the previous videos you've posted, they've been an enormous help! Peace!

[@noble7jamie]

Jeez, that was awesome. In the clip, you dominated like a relentless dinosaur who seemed absolutely in control, which your description describes of, and even enlightened me on a similar flaw in my own playstyle, that attempting DMC style combos and complicated tricks actually hinder a hyper aggressive playstyle. I say that extreme ferocity can match creative skill in Hack n' Slashes, but you can't "stop the smash", and Transformers: Devastation allows such ferocity to be unleashed in full force. You deserve your break, pronto.

[@Morninglord22]

That's it exactly. "Grimlock beat you up" *complicated bullshit from starscream* "Grimlock still beating you up" Grimlock is relentless and implacable. That's why he was given instant rushes. My problem was that I wasn't actually being aggressive like I have in every other challenge. For some reason, because it was long, I thought I needed to change things. I played around with various techs and builds, all useless. He's only got two tech slots. He can't do anything technical or fancy with that. More focus is pointless when he doesn't even need to do fancy combos, and often doesn't even need to use his equipped melee weapon. I got attached to the delay launcher, cos its really cool, but because I was new with it, I couldn't both figure out how to use it properly and I just kept tripping over my own feet. I was using grimlocks gloves when I only really know how to use the hammer. So I went back to the old standby. Hammer, grapple, crowd control launcher that lets me combo, and freeze launcher that works on everyone and everything. The only stuff I fiddled with was improving that setup in different ways, like trying out different hammer types and stumbling on the energon shockwave. And replacing confuse with hyperburn, which doesn't let the enemy attack at all, but wont work on menasor or enemies in vehicle form, unlike freeze.

[@aidenpearce8384]

noble7jamie راءع.جدن.٩٩٩٩

[@themanaiacalgamer8451]

It took me TEN days (not five) to get an SS on this without using help items. I wouldn't be able to do a "no damage" run not even in a 1000 years...

[@Morninglord22]

I did no damage on all the others that led up to this though. I was using skills I learnt through taking poundings in all those fights, many of which took me several days/even a week and a bit in a couple of cases. I've got several hundred hours in this game mostly in challenge mode, 99% with grimlock. I am, perhaps, a wee bit crazy. But I've also played it for a really long time....

[@themanaiacalgamer8451]

I am training my Bumblebee for no damage on story mode (seems the only way to get SS on there)

[@acetraker1988]

In a game of rock paper scisor. Dinos > Planes.