Strategy Guide for Gamora in Marvel: Avengers Alliance

The Marvel: Avengers Alliance hero Gamora is described as the ultimate assassin. And the designers at Playdom seem to have taken this to heart. Her entire design seems to be built around PvP. She has powers and abilities that absolutely devastate the most effective PvP builds in the game, yet at the same time are nearly worthless in PvE. If you are looking for a powerful PvP character on either an offensive or defensive team, Gamora is a worth purchasing, with the caveat that her abilities do not synergize particularly well. Finally, if you want a character for PvE play, she is next to useless, making even characters like Mr. Fantastic look moderately good.

Gamora is an evergreen character that you can purchase for 90 command points.

Special Ability (Deadly Presence) – While the hero is alive, you entire team gains true strike. This is an excellent ability in PvP where most teams use some form of evasion and in many Marvel: Avengers Alliance boss battles, but has little use elsewhere. A few villains like Dragoness also have powerful evasion abilities and you may want to use Gamora against such villains.

Special Ability (Master Assassin) – Master Assassin grants this character a 20% to avoid and preemptively counter melee attacks. It is a moderately handy ability that is best used in offensive PvP and almost worthless in defensive PvP. Unfortunately, it will rarely protect her from infiltrators because they have stealthy attacks.

Level 1 Power, Mortal Strike (One Enemy, Unarmed Slashing Melee, 16.6% Stamina Cost) – Mortal Strike deals high damage and applies bleeding and doom. A single stack of bleeding isn't particularly meaningful. The important status effect is doom. It essentially acts like a stun if the enemy chooses to recharge to remove it or deals massive damage otherwise and has the added benefit of punishing an enemy for using a Scroll of Angolob.

Level 2 Power, Demoralizing Shout (All Enemies, Debuff, 22.2% Stamina Cost) – Demoralizing Shout applies cower and despair to all enemies and also has a 50% chance to apply doom to each enemy. Cower is powerful, but very random and you probably don’t want to be spending your actions applying that status effect without dealing damage. Despair, on the other hand, simply destroys teams that rely on healing, like teams with Wolverine, Sabretooth, Rescue, or the Warriors Three. If you are facing a team with good healing, or just an agent with the Signpost, use this power early. Finally, while doom is a great effect in PvP, it is applied randomly with this power. The optimal strategy is to use this first and then use Mortal Strike to apply doom to any enemies you missed.

Level 6 Power, Whirlwind (All Enemies, Slashing Melee, 27.7% Stamina Cost) – Whirlwind deal rather low damage. The reason to use this attack, though, is the status effects it applies. Each enemy hit is unable to use healing or buffing abilities. Additionally, if an enemy has doom, that status effect is removed and the enemy takes massive damage. There are two good ways to use this. This power is rather flexible in effective ways to use it. If there is a blaster among the enemies, you can attack the blaster with Mortal Strike and follow up with this attack. Against enemies that buff and heal, like Rescue, Omega Sentinel, or the Warriors Three, this is a good opening move. Finally, if you use Demoralizing Shout in the first round and hit at least two enemies with doom, this is a great second round attack.

Level 9 Power, Execute (One Enemy, Slashing Melee, 33.3% Stamina Cost) – The damage on this attack is a little lower than Mortal Strike, but damage isn’t why you use this attack. You use this attack because it is stealthy and automatically defeats any enemy at 30% or less health. If you pulled off the one-two punch against a blaster, this attack will always finish off that blaster because there was no way to heal between the two rounds. Most of the time that won’t be the case, though and you will simply use this attack as a way to avoid protection or counterattacks.

Gamora will be a prime target if you put her in a defensive PvP team and, while she has some very impressive offense, she has essentially no defensive powers and only one modest defensive ability. This makes her delicate. While you will probably want to devote some ISOs to attack, you should definitely build up her health and evasion, too. Her attacks drain so much stamina that a boost there does very little, especially since you already get a massive boost if you are using her in PvP exclusively.

She may be a tactician, but she is built like an infiltrator. She is frail and has basically no support abilities of any kind. She desperately needs a healer or a protector, or possibly both. Rescue is an obvious choice, despite doubling up on tacticians, but if you do so, you will want to turn your agent into a serious powerhouse. Her offense is subtle and takes time to activate and sometimes you just need to hit the enemy hard. Another interesting choice is Valkyrie who can protect her when her health gets low and provide a healing safety net. If you use Valkyrie, equip a weapon on your agent that applies tenderized. Finally, if you have Iron Patriot, you can create an alpha strike that your opponents can’t recover from, assuming you get a little lucky on turn order.

As previously discussed, Gamora is basically nothing but a PvP character. She is weaker in defensive PvP than offensive PvP, but all characters are. If the AI is friendly to you, she is still brutal even in defensive PvP, because she disrupts the plans of the player. In offensive PvP, you can pretty much use her to create a pure offense team that tears apart an opponent in less than two rounds. It is a cheap tactic, but her entire design is cheap tactics, so if you are using her, then use her to her fullest. She is also a reasonable alternate to Horseman of Pestilence. Her ability to put Mangle or Despair on all enemies can effectively prevent enemy healing, but unlike Pestilence, your team doesn't suffer the same penalty. If you have both characters, this is only worth it if you actually include some healing on your team.

Guardian Gamora (Infiltrator / Tactician) - This alternate outfit grants an extra special ability to Gamora and all of her allies that are either wearing a Guardian uniform or the agent if equipped with the Guardian Insignia. This special ability assures that all attacks always hit. If you use this uniform exclusively, you can ignore the accuracy of Gamora. Also, it is a particularly useful ability when teamed with Groot, who has terrible accuracy. The other main use of this ability is allowing your agent to use low accuracy weapons effectively.