Crush Has Two Big Problems (Mag, No Stun)

[Rydian]

Mag's ultimate ability, Crush, has two major flaws that inhibit the effectiveness of it in combat.
 

• It does Magnetic damage.  This may seem like a minor note given that all Warframe abilities do specific damage types, but Magnetic damage is often considered the most useless type in the game.  This is because the only strength it has is versus shields which can be bypassed entirely with toxin (making Toxin much better at the job).  In addition, it's only strong versus proto/shields, it has no other positive modifiers.
  
  The main weakness is that it's weak against Alloy Armor, which is notable because the Grineer extensively use this.  It's not just their heavy units, once you get past the midrange difficulty they begin to replace Lancers with Elite Lancers and such, meaning most Grineer you fight will have this type of body structure and thus give a huge penalty to the effectiveness of Crush.  Even with Intensify, a level 32 Elite Lancer will take less than 250 damage from a maxed Crush, which would have a base 1,300 attack with that mod on.
  
  For this issue, I suggest changing Crush's damage type to Impact.  Impact has less harsh negatives while still being effective against shielded enemies.
  
   
• It has no stun time.  This is an issue that plagued Excalibur's Radial Javelin previously, and it's still highly-visible with Mag.  After attacking an enemy with Crush, they are free to retaliate before you can respond.  They are literally freed from the attack before you are.
  
  
  
  inb4 "Use Natural Talent you scrub!"
  
  
  
  Max Natural Talent, they're still freed before you're done.
  
  For this issue, obviously I suggest the addition of stun to enemies that survive the attack, like Radial Javelin had added to it.

 

[size=2]Typo fixed.[/size]

Edited December 9, 2014 by Rydian

[DarkLordX2]

I Agree.

 

I don't play Mag, but i have played as her, her main problem is the lack of CC from her Ultimate.

 

About the change from Magnetic damage to Impact...nah. She is called Mag for a reason.

[Thyriell]

Agreed completely

[The_Sharp_Demonologist]

Mag magnetices and crush every single bone on their body, skill ends and they are back on their feet before Mag is even done with the Animation.

 

Space magic you have beaten me once again...

 

But seriously add some kind of stun or a crpippling effect on the survivors.

[GinKenshin]

I agree on the 2nd thing (I just noticed it myself XD), but the first "issue" should stay exactly the same, so what if magnetic dmg is "supposedly" weak? mag should be used VS corpus anyway, she's just like ember or saryn, ember is very effective vs infested, and saryn is vs grineer and corrupted, since their ults dmg type is very effective against these factions, magnetic is also useful vs bosses, since it takes away their ability to cast their powers, so it isn't the "worst" dmg type....and if I may add, there no "bad" damage type, every damage is effective against certain enemies and factions   

[CY13ERPUNK]

+1 OP

 

enemies recover from EVERYTHING way faster than we do, it's bonkers

[LordMelvin]

I think a knockdown affect similar to Oberon's Retribution would fix the CC part nicely. If slamming someone into the ground can knock them off their feet, crushing them into a tiny ball with massive magnetic fields should do the same. And considering that Crush still has a ludicrously long cast time I think it deserves a bit of love.

 

Frost has a similar issue with Avalanche in that enemies are free to attack immediately after damage is applied. 

[esapto]

magnetic damage for crushing bones doesnt make any sense, damage from bones getting chrushed > damage from magnetic force.

 

Personally I'd like to see its damage type changed to finisher and a 5 sec or more recovery time which may or may not be affected by power duration.

[Azawarau]

To be fair

 

It is really powerful when used on corpus

 

It needs a buff though

[-FV-Wsocks]

I've never once played mag but I've played with many and I have to say that I agree. Crush could definitely do with either a brief stun much like the one given to Radial Javelin or simply a knockdown. 

 

+1

[PsycloneM]

In other Crush threads I've argued how the ability does not offer anything new to Mag's skill set (considering Crush's current state).

 

You can argue that Crush is radial CC; however for less energy, one can use Pull in different directions to control enemies over a greater range, shorter cast animation, and longer stun duration at the cost of hitting more keys and dealing less damage. Not to mention that taking advantage of Crush's ~3 second stun is impossible since Mag is locked in the animation and recovers after her enemies do.

 

You can argue that Crush deals high magnetic damage to shielded enemies; so does Shield Polarize, and its damage scales with enemy level, it costs less energy, and it restores ally shields. Shield Polarize's weakness in comparison is that it requires the presence of shielded enemies to be used offensively, and its damage drops off with distance.

 

 

Crush's damage type is fitting considering Mag's theme, and damage resistances are to be expected, so I don't particularly agree with that being a central issue. Regarding issue #2: I strongly agree that enemies should be knocked down and forced to recover as they did before Damage 2.0. However with just a knockdown, Crush would function similarly to Oberon's previous iteration of Reckoning, which of course gained a significant boost in utility in response to player feedback. In my opinion, Crush would still be lacking in the utility department, and would remain a formulaic radial nuke with minimal synergy with Mag's other powers.

 

 

Along with the forced knockdown, Crush could use an additional mechanic:

 

For example, Crush could debilitate enemies by reducing their knockdown recovery speed by a fixed percentage while having a small probability of crippling enemies, leaving them in a bleedout state (attacking while lying on their backs). A slower recovery speed means enemies would be put out of action by Pull and Crush for a longer period of time while the crippling effect would have a small chance of disabling an enemy's movement entirely.

 

I would like to see the forced knockdown make a return, along with some additional mechanic that's original, adds utility, fits Crush's theme, and gives the ability a dose of individuality.

 

 

I should stress that I'm not suggesting ideas for augment mods. I completely disagree with augments acting as solutions to underwhelming abilities—Crush included. The base ability needs to be addressed first.

Edited December 10, 2014 by PsycloneM

[Hypernaut1]

Crush needs to make enemies collapse on floor. i dont understand why it doesnt do this.

[HAYABU5A]

+1

100% agree, long overdue 

[Centias]

Way before Vauban was ever introduced, I thought it would be great to change Crush to a ranged AOE that pulls enemies into the center, similar to Vortex, except that it starts quite large and shrinks over a few seconds (4-6), pulling in new enemies that pass through it while it lasts, doing large damage when it shrinks to its minimum size, and throwing surviving enemies a short distance from the center and/or dropping them out stunned on the floor. It never seemed right to me from day 1 (literally, my first frame was Mag) that her 4th ability had to be used by standing right in the middle of the crowd and left a relatively fragile frame far too vulnerable.

[Rydian]

Since DE's been doing little tweaks and buffs to various frames lately, hopefully they see this and at least fix the stun issue.

[(PSN)Chino_Feo_1337]

My (radical) solution: Change damage type to finisher and give it a knockdown. inb4 you say "mag op endgame!!1", 2k damage isn't going to kill a level 120 gunner very fast... also, polarize can do over a billion damage 

 

I made a topic regarding crush and an augment for it, if you're interested: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/389348-buff-for-mags-crush/

Edited January 30, 2015 by (PS4)Chino_Feo_1337

[ThePresident777]

+1'd  The enemy are more Space Ninja than Mag.  Since the enemy are magnetized by crush, they should all slam into the nearest metal object, or each other even, and take considerable time getting up.

[Paradoxbomb]

I can go either way with the damage type, but Crush definitely needs some sort of stun at the end, at least reuse the blast damage knockdown or something.

Edited January 30, 2015 by Paradoxbomb

[tpollett]

Here's an idea about how to incapacitate enemies hit by crush while also giving it late game scaling: apply a personalized bullet attractor to the enemy hit by crush. Have it be localized to just the enemy hit; so after they get crushed if they try to shoot they hit themselves. Any enemy not hit by the ability is free to attack as normal and won't have their attacks attracted to the enemies which were hit by crush. This would protect mag from enemies which were hit by crush without affecting enemies who weren't hit, it would be entirely in line with mag's skill set and would provide some measure of scaling as enemies would hit themselves for a few seconds after getting crushed. I would say 3-5 seconds not modified by power duration mods is enough to provide protection without being overpowered. It also wouldn't stop melee enemies or stop enemies from running out of range or into cover.

[Archwizard]

The main issue here would be solved by having Crush ragdoll targets affected by it, as they were before Damage 2.0. (Perhaps a reversion of Pull to go with it, to pull enemies to the caster's feet rather than fling them from one side of the room to the other.)

 

As for the rest of it, I think Mag requires just a few more touches...

 

- Make Magnetic damage slightly more potent against Ferrite Armor. If compensation is needed, reduce its effectiveness against an Infested armor type. Presently it's only useful against Shields (which is part of the reason Proto Shields are so frustratingly indistinguishable from regular Shields, as they're affected exactly the same way).

- Make Crush pull affected enemies into "clusters", dealing more damage in each cluster based on the number of occupants.

- Give Crush an augment that throws the clusters in the direction she's aiming, affected by Bullet Attractor, dealing additional damage at the impact location to all involved.

Edited January 30, 2015 by Archwizard

[[DE]Rebecca]

Dev is taking a look at this and experimenting with some changes to address many of the issues listed (particularly point 2 from OP)!

[Ralsk]

Dev is taking a look at this and experimenting with some changes to address many of the issues listed (particularly point 2 from OP)!

Great to hear.  Thanks for the response on this issue.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Ralsk

[-SLX-J3tAc3]

Need to add on to this:

Frost Prime has no stun time on his number 4 as well - no continual freeze or stun after his attack ends. He'll be attacked as soon as he's done, even a little before he's done attacking.

Edited February 19, 2015 by -SLX-J3tAc3

[[DE]Rebecca]

Need to add on to this:

Frost Prime has no stun time on his number 4 as well - no continual freeze or stun after his attack ends. He'll be attacked as soon as he's done, even a little before he's done attacking.

Is the 'Prime' detail implying this is exclusive to him or does his Vanilla counterpart suffer this also (I assume yes)?

[Fraystar]

Is the 'Prime' detail implying this is exclusive to him or does his Vanilla counterpart suffer this also (I assume yes)?

I can confirm it on prime and vanilla. They just magically thaw out and retaliate