Will there be a gap in my arsenal?

[Stormed1]

Brunswick also has the Karma urethane. Roto Grip has 2 new releases that are below the Rising Star, The scream and Shout

[dgz924s]

You could alter the finish on the ball. My Vivid had way too many teeth so I polished it and helped considerably. If polish does not get the desired result you can go up to a 4000 grit surface. Moral here is you can alter a ball surface to obtain a desired reaction and far less expensive than buy a ball made specifically for a lane condition. Even the lane specific ball may not produce the reaction desired.

I too have a rather slow speed and roll straight up lane from the 10 board out, usually target the 7 board.

[Ball99999]

I might wait on drilling the Vivid until I can nail down a really good form.
Assuming I didn't have a Vivid, on a freshly laid THS, what would be a good Storm ball for 4-5 games with other people?

[billf]

Storm Natural Pearl is a great urethane ball. I use mine a lot. There are a lot of balls by Storm that fit between the Vivid and the Misfit. Look on bowlingball.com and use their perfect scale to select one that seems to call your name.
*The Misfit is a medium-light oil ball.

[Ball99999]

What confuses me is that they'll have balls in the medium-heavy category that are still 220 in the perfect scale. I wonder if that means they'd still be too strong for me?

What's the difference between natural and natural pearl?

[billf]

The Natural is able to handle a tad bit more oil. It has a straight up urethane cover stock while the Pearl has a pearlized urethane cover stock. The pearl additive takes a bit more bite out of the hook potential hence the lower scale rating more than makes up for it with how it drives through the pins. I get more dead wood flying out onto the lane with this ball than any of my others but some of that is due to the pins tendency to fly up rather than staying low.

[Ball99999]

My end of day thoughts right now are to eventually have something like:

High end heavy oil ball for competition/fresh sports patterns - Vivid
High end medium-to-heavy ball for something I can use for most games - ?????
A ball for medium-to-dry lanes for maybe for lanes that have lots of games on them - Crossroad
A ball for really dry - Natural
plastic - Tzone

I don't want to waste money with too much overlap/redundancy though.

[billf]

???? get the Hy-Road or Fire Road.