Stinkhorse

@RustonMartin Thanks for actually engaging with the concept, unlike everyone else. I'll admit, the ideas all began with having Saryn have to shoot or strike targets to activate her spore damage, so some of it might not be well thought out. I'm also not really up on the techniques that folks use to survive in the deep game outside of Duviri. Would you mind going over how the Patient Zero ability would foul up shield gating?

So, Defense. Stand in place. Mow down the dudes who are trying to get handsy with a kid in a tube. It's kinda boring? Worse still, it's kinda irritating towards the end of rounds as enemies cause the shot clock to drag on until you finish playing their game of hide and seek. Is there a way to improve this? I think there is, and the trick is to make those parts that drag the mode down into something to engage with. **The Problem - Round End** As far as I can tell, the last man standing aspect of defense, where you have to hunt down every last tube-rat and penny-pincher, is a grace period where players can go hoover up the items on the stage floor. This is bad. It slows things down for everyone else and provides no guarantee that you won't miss a particular item. Also, what you will pick up probably won't be worth that time. Why not just give players all the stuff that fell on the floor? That part isn't super important, but the point is, it fails to be compelling. **The Fix - Extraction Panic** There's twenty seconds left on the round clock. Your frame is a human blender, as in a blender you place humans into, and every corpus agent that ran out of that monster closet had as much chance as the fruit you used to make a smoothie. It's time for them to bug out, because no amount of overtime pay is going to put a head back on a pair of shoulders. Cue the Extraction Panic phase. Every enemy remaining has fear applied to them, along with a status timer that's counting down to an emergency teleport. Time to go out into the world and hunt them down. If you don't, not only will they get away, but they'll deliver intelligence to their higher-ups. Every enemy that manages to bail successfully adds a multiplier to the enemy density on the next round. This would create instant incentive to go out and hoover, while also making it a critical game play sequence that has a personality. It would also ensure that the one enemy who was smart enough to hide (and was definitely not bugged on the geometry) will be despawned on time. Going further, this concept creates an opportunity for player defined challenge scaling. Want the next round to be harder? Simply don't round anyone up and watch the enemies pour in. The Steel Path version could take it a step further and introduce enemies that specifically counter aspects of your build, but that might be harder to build dynamically than I'm expecting. I'll put a pin in that idea for a later date. **The Problem - Stationary Gameplay** If there's one thing I play Warframe for, it's the part where I stand around and don't engage with any of the movement. There have been attempts to correct for this aspect of the mission type. Mirror Defense is a solid solution for this problem. With the multiple locations to bounce between and the collection of glyphs to activate a security system, the mode has you on the move constantly. It's engaging! The downside is that it's really its own game mode and it requires maps specifically designed for it. Looking elsewhere for inspiration, the drop-everything-and-deal-with-this-particular-threat aspect of the Disruption is really good too. The Demolists are a fun mechanic that actually demands player engagement. The downside of it is that there's no other threat in the mission. The key lock pylons aren't something you really defend, so much as they're a thing you activate to summon a mini boss that you have to burn down. How do we bring some of that reactivity to Defense? **The Fix - Demo Units on the Way!** At least once a round in a defense mission, let's spawn a hard target that's capable of doing significant damage to the objective. Give me a squad of eight guys playing bodyguard for a capture target in the middle of their huddle. These enemies are all keyed to one another, so you have to eliminate those bodyguards before you can deal with the actual dude. They would have some serious durability, but if you do manage to take him out first, then the bodyguards are all promoted on the spot to Eximus level threats. Maybe actually capturing the guy after the squad is defeated reduces the round timer, similar to a necramech kill on Deimos's version of Mirror Defense? If anyone has an idea of how this could be taken further, I'd love to hear it. **Conclusion** The goal for both of these concepts isn't to make the game harder. I'm not out to punish new players or folks who have low end builds. The intention here is to make any given round of defense more engaging by providing a short shift in the mission's focus mid round. These mechanics don't have to be walking cataclysms, but they do need to be compelling enough to shift a player's attention away from mowing down generic dudes for a few seconds. Thank you for your consideration.

So there's a lot of kvetching about Dante. Why should he be nerfed when Saryn isn't? That's a great point. Let's nerf Saryn! I'm kidding, I kid. We all had a laugh, and now let's talk about the actual reason for this post. Warframe has changed a lot since Saryn was released, and I think they've put her at odds with what the game is becoming. With only a couple tweaks she could keep her core theme, and even several for her existing mechanics, while altering her scope so she actually plays the game. Currently she can annihilate enemies across a map which denies engagement to other players and allows the player themselves to be largely hands off in terms of their own engagement. This sucks. The game should be played actively. That said my goal here is to keep the base concept of a walking plague. Her ability to spread spores to enemies, and other players helping to further that spread, would still be foundational. **Passive - Enhanced Status Duration** This is pretty core to the frame's identity and doesn't need real fixing. I might suggest turning it into an aura that also enhances the duration of other players as well though, just to encourage staying in affinity range. **Ability 1 - Spores** The big change would be turning her Spores into a means of potential damage based on Saryn's proximity. They don't do anything lethal on their own. Instead it would generate a growing damage number just like it does now. The speed of that growth would be determined by the number of enemies with an active infection stack. In order to cash in on that, Saryn is actually going to have to get her hands dirty. If the enemies are dry kindling, then the Spores are accelerant and Saryn the match. Attacks at range do half of the accumulated potential damage to a target, and would spread it to other enemies within X number of meters. Melee fully activates the potential damage and applies it outward in a diminishing wave to all nearby enemies that have been infected, but does not spread the infection directly. Spore's potential damage growth would scale logarithmically so there's an initial spike that tapers off, but that can be reapplied to jumpstart it again. If spores are left in an enemy long enough without any further action, the effect will wear off like any other status aliment, but this number would of course be affected by Saryn's passive. As a secondary effect, enemies affected by spores will come down with coughing fits, doing a mild DOT, and throwing off their aim. The greater the build up, the weaker their accuracy becomes. This secondary effect would be tempered by enemy level, so you won't be able to throw a parade down Grineer Street and never catch a bullet. **Ability 2 - Patient Zero** Molt becomes Patient Zero. It remains a panic button, but now applies the molt effect to an enemy within a cone of proximity to the player's crosshair. Saryn flushes all status effects before teleporting to that enemy. They're rooted in place where they erupt into a DOT Spore cloud. Any enemies caught in the cloud either get a stack of Spores, or have their existing stack reactivated. The rooted patient zero becomes targetable by other enemies, who will kill them to remove the spore cloud effect. As an added bonus the cloud prevents line of sight, giving players a smoke screen they can use to control sections of the battlefield. Finally any Patient Zero affected enemies that are still standing at the end of a round are automatic killed to prevent delays. **Ability 3 - Toxic Lash** This ability mostly remains the same. It causes both ranged and melee attacks to deal toxin damage, while also to reactivating the Spore scaling effect on any enemy hit. The only notable change is that other players can be targeted with ranged weapons, and hits will to grant their own weapons the effect of Toxic Lash for a limited amount of time. **Ability 4 - Pandemic** A high cost crowd clear, Pandemic would cause an AOE to activate any spore stacks, converting them to viral, and applying them at full damage. At the very edge of the AOE, the effect would jump to the nearest enemy with a Spore stack on them, apply damage, and then jump again. This will chain as long as there's an enemy in range, but with diminishing returns on damage past twenty meters. **Conclusion** With these adjusted abilities, Saryn would still have her functional identity as the premiere disease frame. They would remain a powerhouse, capable of dealing ridiculous amounts of damage and nuking crowd of fodder, the only catch would be actually having to look at an enemy to do it. It would also localize those giant detonations so that the players around her wouldn't have to watch a map of engaging mechanics go up in smoke without a chance to take part. Thank you for your consideration.