Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes - SWGOH Update : General Grievous

General Grievous was added to the shard shop today!

Going to post a video with my thoughts and initial impressions – I’m sure he will be out there in PVP for those hoarding shards to date. In the meantime, here’s a peek at his abilities via write up:

General Grievous

Dark Side, Droid, Attacker

Furious Assault

Deal physical damage to target enemy. This attack can't be Evaded or Countered.

Furious Assault (Basic)

Grievous Wounds

Deal physical damage to all enemies with a 35% chance to inflict Healing Immunity for 1 turn.

Grievous Wounds (Special)

Sinister Laugh

Inflict Health Down on all enemies for 2 turns, with a 25% chance to remove 20% Turn Meter. This chance is doubled against Jedi enemies.

Sinister Laugh (Special)

Daunting Presence

All enemies have -10% Critical Chance.

Daunting Presence (Leader)

Tactical Retreat

Grievous has +5% Max Health for each living Droid ally. In addition, whenever Grievous falls below 50% Health, he will force a random ally to Taunt for 1 turn if no ally is currently Taunting for him. If he does, that ally also gains 100% Turn Meter.

Tactical Retreat (Unique)

Brutal Attacker that cuts down defensive enemies while protecting himself with forced ally taunts; although he hates being called a droid, he counts as one in combat.

“I’ve been trained in your Jedi Arts By Count…DOOOOKKUUUUUUUUUUUUUU”

I’m thinking he is legit. Why? First of all, the fact that he has 2 specials, a Leader AND a Unique skill is the first clue. Let’s look at what they do individually:

Furious Assault

Deal physical damage to target enemy. This attack can't be Evaded or Countered.

Okay. Can’t be evaded or countered. Well. There isn’t much to say about that, except … awesome. How many times have you wanted to finish off that sliver of health, only to get dodged by Lumi, and then have her bust our her MASSIVE heal? Yeah, me too. Grievous is here to put an end to those shenanigans. What a strong BASIC attack.

Grievous Wounds

Deal physical damage to all enemies with a 35% chance to inflict Healing Immunity for 1 turn.

HA! Area of Effect Healing Immunity! This one had me on my ass. Let’s see, besides the obvious droid teams that will now be led by Grievous, we have a chance to really invalidate healing characters in the meta. I see a triumvirate of doom in my future containing Kylo Ren, Sidious, and Grievous. Throw in some speed debuffs, and go to town. Opponents will be unable to heal characters back up from busrt damage to stabilize a turn meter debuff! The only workaround to this could be Bariss.

Sinister Laugh

Inflict Health Down on all enemies for 2 turns, with a 25% chance to remove 20% Turn Meter. This chance is doubled against Jedi enemies.

Ok this is getting not so funny anymore – can’t dodge his attack, can’t heal against him, and now an area of effect reduction on health?

Daunting Presence

All enemies have -10% Critical Chance.

All that utlity mentioned above…and the passive ability to almost single-handedly cancel out Sidious and Leia’s crit buff! You kidding me with this? I know they wanted to put incentives for people to farm in the game in 2016, but Grievous at first glance seems to be quite powerful.

“And this time, you won’t escape!”

Tactical Retreat

Well, Obi may have been wrong a time or two in his career, particularly when it came to Grievous. And this unique ability has the potential for some serious synergy theorycrafting. Redirecting to Kylo Ren, who just used Lash Out to gain Retribution for a turn? Meaning every attack that turn is going to get counter attacked, with the potential for Kylo to stick a healing debuff? Plus, Kylo has a quite beefy health pool to tank it out. I see a lot of dirty combos with Grievous’ unique, but if you think about it, it could backfire as well if you’re mainboarding someone with a lower health pool and no evasion to back it up (Rey).

Full disclosure – I’ve started redirecting extra shards to Grievous. He’s going to be good. His damage output is the only question mark that remains. But with all that utility – if he has output comparable to Poe and Phasma, with a tad more utility, he is going to be a beast.

Just don’t expect him not to run…