Great Gamble

Great Gamble is a skill available in Dragon's Dogma.

Description

"An advanced form of Gamble Draw that exhaust the entirety of the user's Stamina to fire a stronger seeking shot that can be steered for a longer time."

An advanced version of Gamble Draw, with increased damage and 3-4 additional seconds of guided slow motion control.

Notes, Damage, and Tactics

Both skills fire a steerable arrow, that uses up all of the ranger's stamina - damage scales directly with the stamina consumed to fire the gamble arrow. Thus shooting Great Gamble with a depleted stamina pool results in reduced damage.
Ranger pawns are fearsomely accurate shooters, unless they are up against an extremely mobile enemy.

Damage

The shot shows little or no dependence on longbow power, or core strength, and so is not boosted by augments such as clout.
The arrow does entirely physical damage, and so the damage is well boosted by items such Conqueror's Periapt, but magick boosts have little or no effect.
- Elemental enchants and weakness have little or no effect on the damage from the gamble skills.
Damage seems to be nearly independent of range, until around 25m out, at which point the shot will tend to 'fluff' and will not cause a critical strike, only minor damage.
There appears to be a standard arrow component to the damage (as there is with a Blast Arrow), which scales as would a shot from the core skill Loose - if the gamble shot fails to critical this small amount of normal arrow will still be inflicted.
Hitting weakpoints multiplies damage, just as with normal bow shots. The magnifier is particulaly great for some larger creatures - so whilst hitting an Ogre in the chest may do 4,000 damage and knock it down, hitting the head does over 20,000 damage. (~2,600 stamina)
The arrow from Great Gamble is approximately half again as powerful as that from Gamble Draw, and does half as much again damage.
Stamina boosting items such as Month-Dried Harspud or Decade-Dried Harspud can be used to temporarily boost stamina, and are most effective in boosting damage.

Damage calculation is approximately related by

(Stamina consumed) * (Weakspot on hit) * (other multipliers) + standard arrow damage

"Other multipliers" include effects such as stance, curse, and so on

Stamina use

This skill will drain all of the Ranger's stamina, therefore maintaining stamina curatives such as Mushroom Potage, Large Mushrooms, Staminal Drench in the Ranger's inventory are essential for repeated rapid use of this deadly skill in battle.

When charging the shot with Liquid Vim in use, Great Gamble's damage cancels (is zero) since no stamina is used.
The Grit augment will slightly shorten the length of vulnerability from exhaustion.
Wearing stamina restoring equipment such as Trophy Bracers, Gauntlets of Shadow or Gauntlets of Oblivion (the latter two with the appropriate stamina-refreshing permanent bonus) will mitigate but not entirely eliminate the exhaustion vulnerability of Great Gamble.
By giving a Great Gamble Ranger pawn Mushroom Potages (+1550 stamina to each party member) the Ranger will refuel the entire party's stamina after a Great Gamble shot.

Against Dragons

In the hands of a high level Ranger pawn, this skill can reduce Dragonkin's health to 1 health. Keep in mind that for all dragons other than the Ur-Dragon and Cursed Dragon, the Arisen must complete the actual kill by his or her own hand.

Whenever a pawn is firing Great Gamble at a Dragon, be aware that a Dragon has four critical hit objectives the pawn will randomly target if it does not have 100% Bestiary knowledge of that enemy: destroying both Dragon Horns, disabling the wings, and shooting the heart.

Trivia

Both skills are useful for taking aerial screenshots
Though fire enchantment does not greatly increase damage, when a fire enchanted arrow is used to strike a creature that has been tarred the large damage increase will also be transferred to the gamble shot.
- It is likely that other elemental effects will also multiply damage - i.e. using a lightning enchanted bow on a drenched foe should double the damage from Great Gamble.

Gallery

Great Gamble vs Griffin (demonstration)