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Ventura_Highway

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  1. I did actually think about it being cool to have a tome attack that throws out an Orowyrm and lets them start screaming at enemies sometime earlier. Making an Incarnon Tome wouldn't be on my agenda though personally. Figure it'd be smarter to try and make one solid tome first then try to go for the bells and whistles. The other thing that kind of concerns me is that the Grimoire seems to be very easy to work with, by design I think, to let the brain cells that would have been preoccupied trying to go for headshots for Incarnon charge focus more on being a cool wizard instead. I do think the Grimoire is too easy to use but I think keeping the Tomes (less) easy to shoot is a good precedent.
  2. Spitballing what I think a cool Tome would be like: Name: Clown School Textbook Primary Fire: Tap to shoot. Holding enters a lockon mode like the Tenet Diplo/Sepulcrum, release to fire a homing barrage. Mediocre damage but decent status and can make Energy orbs if you hit enough times in a barrage. Honk noises Secondary Fire: Longer recharge than Grimoire; doesn't benefit from primary shots but recharges faster when abilities are used. Unleashes a barrage of flying clown cars that fly at, distract and explode on enemies.
  3. Trying to keep this short. I've played around with the Grimoire for a bit and I like the idea of a caster/support weapon type but the Grimoire fails to hit the high notes. This isn't a surprise to me, I mean no one here is complaining that the Kuva Scepter, another quest weapon, isn't top dog in Steel Path right? But still, if a Prime/Kuva/Tenet (Tome) had that meaty level of grind, and this level of performance I wouldn't look twice at it. What I expected was a unique weapon that complimented players trying to focus on teamplay and/or ability-heavy playstyles. What I got was, yeah something decently interesting but with benefits that were pretty milquetoast and not really worth the tradeoff of just bringing any recent decent gun. The Canticles don't really warrant the trouble of killing enemies with the Grimoire, or even tagging a bunch of enemies with the Grimoire then killing with abilities. The Invocations are pretty worthwhile, not hard to keep up if you're spamming the Grimoire's shots but I can really feel that mod slot they're taking up. Some things I think would be good in future tomes would be: 1) Including some inherent utility on the Alt-Fire. Obvious choice is a mob gather, but that's not very creative is it? 2) More interplay with Warframe abilities. 3) Better/Easier to activate Canticles. Would suggest making making kill-assists on tagged targets provide diminished/lower-duration benefits, as well as something to make tagging targets faster, not necessarily a larger AOE but that's the simple albeit inelegant solution. 4) The Grimoire feels very boring to shoot. You guys keep making interesting guns, even if this is a spellcaster's weapon it needs to be more interesting to shoot. Spamming shots with the Grimoire is just boneless. EDIT: Replaced instances of "Tome" with "Grimoire" where appropriate. One is a weapon, the other is a weapon type.
  4. The rule I generally use for defining whether or not a Warframe's kit is fine is if you can use the Warframe in a Steel Path Incursion and four things apply: 1) You can use up to 1 augment and have all four buttons be "worth pressing." If you have to fix the Warframe by replacing an ability, maybe look at the ability that gets removed most often. Lavos's kit is pretty solid in this regard. Excal's Slash Dash and Radial Javelin really don't work up here as far as I'm aware, nor does Sound Quake or Sonic Boom. You could argue that Sonic Boom is good for pushing enemies back but that's not something most Warframe players would find useful. 2) Your Warframe's health/shields/main not-die resource doesn't disappear in ~3-2 seconds without the ability to cheaply and quickly regain it. If you have to use more than 1 Arcane and ~(3-4) mods to keep the Warframe alive, or have to use Decaying Dragon + Shield gating to survive at that level, something is wrong with the frame's defensive capabilities. I think Protea's defensive game is pretty fine despite her shields going away pretty quickly because it's not hard to reapply Shield Satellites, Nidus/Revenant have Parasitic Link/Mesmer Skin respectively, and Lavos' health pool does work with three or two mods + Arcane Blessing. Personally, I think it's really dumb that I get on a Volt and I'm just resorting to Discharge + Capacitance to keep the Shields topped. It's like "Oh man a Heavy Gunner looked at me again, let me just DISCHAAARGE." Really ruins the flow for me. Banshee is playable, I mean practically any Warframe is playable in Steel Path Incursion, but you've got to do a bit too much for my liking to not constantly worry about dying. There's an argument that this is fine and that this is what a starter Warframe should strive for and there's an argument that this and other 1-buttons with poor scaling are byproducts of older Warframes not being updated. If you think this is okay, I respect that but choose to think it'd be more fun if all abilities were worth pressing all the time. As far as I'm aware, at Steel Path Incursion levels Protea's kit works and if a trash mob steps on one it's probably going to die, and an enemy group getting hit by Discharge will greatly thin them out. I'm just saying, your Disruption video's Volt player doesn't even bother using Electric Shield to mitigate damage, and that it's a perfectly good damage amplifier but it's ideally supposed to be alright at blocking things. See above about disagreeing/agreeing about what a starter Warframe should be capable of. I'd argue that Mag's Pull at least has utility for displacing enemies, but yes I think Excalibur's Slash Dash is pretty bad too. I really, really do not see a point in arguing around level 9999 enemies, which is why I use Steel Path Incursions as a baseline. Those show up in the alerts. The devs don't really give you a reason to go up there, and if this is Warframe's endgame, it's a really spammy one that I'm not interested in because it lacks a sense of diversity in its tactics. But you really, really seem invested in this senseless oneupsmanship so I'm going to go do something more interesting. Consider this my final reply.
  5. I dunno. I always thought one of the coolest things about Shakespeare was how he made up words in his plays that eventually became part of the English language. I'm not so prideful as to put myself on his level, but languages are living things that constantly evolve and change. Take a look when you've got time. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/linguists-have-identified-a-new-english-dialect-thats-emerging-in-south-florida/ EDIT: Oh, yeah you might want an explanation on both things. You actually changed what I meant by going from handsful to handful. There's like, eight? something Warframes they had on release iirc. It's a bit more than would fit in one hand I figured. You'll often find that two-word terms that get used a lot in a language start to get run together. It's my understanding German and Japanese are pretty notorious about this. https://blogs.transparent.com/german/german-kofferworter-portmanteau-words/ This is kind of annoying and the last thing I'm going to say on this matter but I generally argue that languages are supposed to be efficient while not compromising clarity excessively, and that anything that doesn't unduly compromise either aspect really doesn't matter.
  6. Well, taken another way, you wouldn't want to be given/farm for/unlock something that's pretty useless in a game, right? When someone gets Volt, they get three good abilities and a garbage one, and when Shock levels, it chains to 4 more enemies, but 4 times a zeptogram of utility is still very small. Basically agree with everything here, and yeah, if I had to get rough, one of the first tweaks any sane Volt player would do is kick off Shock for Pillage/Tharros Strike/practically anything you could subsume. Volt is also, I think I've said this, holding up surprisingly well despite how old is design is. But as for the "but Volt is a good Warframe who is incredibly far from the one most in need of improvement," consider this dosage of cynical wisdom: "Is it possible to fix Hydroid? At all??" Consider not only how warranted it is to fix a Warframe, but how feasible it is. Hydroid's kit is an utter mess. They made four abilities with no Steel Path damage potential and gave them some of the worst damage types. Frankly, I'm not sure anything besides basically deleting Hydroid's kit and making everything from the ground up would suffice. For Volt, it's easy for me to point out that there's two problem points on his kit and two problems he's inherited regarding Shields and Electrical damage.
  7. Well, it's still different. Actually, if your definition of "needs to be different" means we need to remove anything that has approximately the same role/effect, well Good God, look at all these Warframes with access to a team damage buff. This cannot stand! let's get rid of all but one of them. I'm joking. That wouldn't make sense because each Warframe buffs team damage in a different way and with a different end-result. They're variations on the same idea, capisce? It kind of happens when you've got 200+ abilities across 50+Warframes. In the same vane of this newfangled "variation" concept, Garuda's Dread is an oval as opposed to Volt's held Electric Shield being more of a rounded square. The shape matters when you're trying to block with it, actually. She rips it out of an enemy as opposed to generating it, it's 25 energy instead of 50, and it feeds the meatball on top damage instead of buffing gunfire. It's still different, unless you want to fairly apply your definition of different so that there's only 1 heal button, 1 teleport, 1 damage buff, 1 aoe CC, and so on, in the game. Tenno, like, I've been on the receiving end of some lunatic's 250 power strength Speed buff. It's annoying bumping into walls because you can't sprint for .5 seconds without slamming into one, and it's even more annoying that they kept pressing Speed over and over backflip after backflip. It wasn't helpful and it wasn't a buff. If you want to find space on a Dualshock Controller though for something as trivial as a "cancel annoying buffs" button, go ahead. There's 22 Warframes out of the 51 or so in the game (apparently there's more than that? 220?) with the ability to achieve ~75-90% Damage reduction, stay invisible, have some kind of ability that nullifies damage/death or prevents bullets from hitting, or can just make shields out the wazoo without an augment. I'm being generous and not counting the Warframes with high armor. Okay, for one, all you really "need" to play the game on Steel Path is Zenurik, a well-modded and somewhat meta set of weapons and eight mods with some thought put into them on a Warframe of your choice that's not on the very bottom of the Overframe tier list. The rest is unnecessary. And again with this myopic "It's the same" business. Let's break this down. Wrathful Advance has Kullervo teleport and Heavy Attack with his melee weapon. This costs 25 energy and 25% of his combo counter, and it buffs his critical chance for 10 seconds afterwards, duration scaling. The proposed Volt ability's melee half (It does something completely different with a ranged weapon) moves him into the air, then teleports, then shock-stuns nearby enemies while giving Volt a fixed four seconds of increased melee damage. Under your logic, Kullervo's ability should have never existed because Nezha's Chakram is a teleport that makes him do more damage. The teleport is also strong melee attack on an enemy like Ash's Teleport, but really, new things or even just the thought of them make you uncomfortable. The defined phenomenon I am trying to work around is being able to constantly generate full shields with a Decaying Dragon key and an Augur set. By avoiding changing Volt's base shields, at all, we avoid messing with people that want to do that. By changing the Shield's ability to resist damage, and retaining a regeneration delay that is more sane than four seconds, the shield actually has a chance of passively regenerating on its own while still asking people to not get hit or killed by a dot for ~1.2 seconds. Please elaborate. The drawback of Volt's dual steroids of Electric Shield and Speed is that Electric Shield basically only increases the damage of guns, and the latter primarily helps swing your melee faster because Melee Speed is a lot more noticeable than Reload Speed, usually. There's edge cases for both, where a gunblade gets damage from E. Shield and Single-Shot or low-mag weapons benefit a lot from Speed. (I suppose the Incarnon transformation counts here but I'm sure DE will powercreep those in due time too.) But nothing about playing on a Steel Path Incursion actually warrants paying close attention to a build or resorting to something like a clapspam Gauss. Warframe is not a game that actually pushes people to the edge, and this "difficulty" you're trying to preserve is hilariously minimal. Of the other shooters I've played I'd peg endgame Warframe as being as difficult as the middle difficulty of Deep Rock Galactic or the second lowest difficulty of Division 2. Warframe is interesting, but the idea of it being actually difficult to a player with normal endgame gear is amusing.
  8. Oh good, finally. I wouldn't call Volt a caster, or at least exclusively one. 2 out of his 4 abilities straight out of the box are weapon steroids, at least in part, and the first ability can be modified to improve weapon damage. He is a highly versatile Warframe, but just like you can make Rhino a support instead of a tank, there's more than one way to play this particular Warframe, and I fail to see how the potential for high ability damage rules out access to sane amounts of damage reduction. Further, there is, a Warframe that more strongly fits the caster identity with multiple direct-damage powers in her kit, that happens to do electrical damage exclusively: Gyre. I have to wonder what level range you're talking about when you mention millions of Overguard, because it takes enemies being way over level 200 in order for them to start doing four digit damage. You basically have to go looking for that kind of enemy in an Endurance Survival, or you have to be in the Steel Path Circuit, and those simply cannot be accounted for, and they are not situations the average player will encounter on a regular basis. I completely fail to see how adjusting the cost and duration of Speed to require less refreshing on the buff is overpowered, unless there's some weird argument about high APM gameplay in here. There could be something said about the status resistance portion here, but there's no argument here besides calling it stupid and I've self-scrutinized it to the best of my ability. If you want to expound on that go ahead. Unique =/= Good with regards to Electric Shield. Not to be rude, but you described using Archon Stretch and Capacitance to survive damage in your first post, neglecting to mention blocking with Electric Shield, and only described its capacity as a weapon steroid in the second one. This really leads me to think that well, you don't manage to block too much with it either. Many Warframes do in fact have passives that take but an entire sentence to describe, but there are in fact other Warframes such as Wukong, Nidus, Khora, Gauss, and Sevagoth that have considerably lengthy descriptions on their passives, nor does this passive have anything to do at all with Shield Gating besides trying to avoid affecting the mechanic at all. I also have to mention Kullervo hardly has the monopoly on Teleports. They show up in the kits of Ash, Wisp, Loki and Nezha as well; some of those frames are from the very start of the game. Unfortunately, Warframes by default are pretty frickin' fast, so in order for a movement ability to be worth pressing for the movement, you have to make it move much faster than even that. That's why this is a teleport. The slow/Vortex is there to help differentiate it from other Damage Vulnerability abilities like Blazing Chakram while complimenting Electric Shield's Critical hit component. Yes, Capacitance is a thing, but I call it a defense deficiency if a Warframe has to constantly press its ult to survive gunfire comes their way. That's not normal at all.
  9. It would be good to see some Warframe usage statistics at Tennocon, but I've seen some Yarelis around and would consider her a pretty solid pick for Steel Path Circuit provided you've got a decent Secondary lying around. In contrast to the open arenas of the Undercroft, if you're running around doing relics or other star chart things, it's really noticeable that those areas simply weren't designed with K-Drive movement in mind. Bumping, falling off the map, losing the precise movement of a Warframe on foot, these things happen. Tragic, but might explain why you don't see her as much there. EDIT: Would like to say, Incarnons got some good ammo economy. That's something Yareli likes. Those Dual Toxocysts seem made for her.
  10. What's really miserable is explaining to someone that when you lose all the shields on a Warframe, unabated, the health goes next and then you have to be revived.
  11. I'm getting the impression someone didn't read the entire original post so I'm going to ignore this.
  12. That analogy isn't an argument. Is Volt of some archetype that trades durability for raw power? That's quite obvious with some Warframes like Mirage and Kullervo, not here. Does having Shield-based defenses immediately mean you should expect to lose all of it quickly? Someone should tell Gauss that, or Yareli, or Hildryn, or Mesa. EDIT: By the way, that second "glass cannon" has an Overguard, this blocks Statuses too, mind, that is cheaper to put up and has more bulk on it than a Volt with Capacitance up.
  13. Anyone with less than 52 intelligence has the ability to select another Glintstone sorcery to use that comes with its own advantages and tradeoffs compared to Comet Azur, and even the lowly Glintstone Pebble retains more value in Elden Ring than Shock does in Warframe. There is simply no reason to want the base version of Shock in Warframe.
  14. Sister thread: As stated above, while Volt as a Warframe has held up pretty well for how old his design is, he could use a couple adjustments to shore up weaknesses in his vanilla kit to have more of a place in endgame content and be a generally more well-rounded Warframe to start a journey across the Solar Rails with. Provided within is a list of suggested changes by me to remedy these issues while trying to, as much as possible, not make the frame overpowered or compromise existing functions. Major design concerns: Minor design concerns: Things to avoid in design: Changes in aggregate: Stats: Shield Resistance increased Recharge Delay from full loss decreased Overshield cap adjusted downwards to compensate for Shield Resistance increase. EHP remains mathematically same. Passive: Removed and replaced with Energy-Shield Converters: Volt gets some Shields when he picks up an Energy Orb, and a stack of his passive that increases his Shield's performance. Every certain number of kills, Volt is guaranteed to spawn an Energy Orb. Shock: Removed and replaced with Bolt: Volt creates a bolt of lightning and either: a) Throws, then teleports to it while a Melee weapon is equipped. Post-teleport, (Volt's Melee damage is increased for a couple seconds.) or (Nearby enemies take more damage) b) Launches it at an enemy to increase that enemy's damage taken while creating a slowing Lightning Vortex around the impact point while he has a Primary, Secondary or Archgun out. The damage vulnerability debuff works through Overguard. Speed: Cost and duration doubled. Only affects Volt when tapped; can be held to affect party. Electric Shield: Held version larger. Can now hold ability button to create Electric Shield on Volt instead of needing to pick it up. Shield no longer dropped on pressing Transferrence. Augments/Synergies: Shock Trooper: Now a Bolt augment Transistor Shield: Damage collected from Electric Shield now feeds its own buff instead of the removed Volt passive. Shock + Electric Shield & Shock + Discharge: Removed Anything unlisted is simply not changed. Numbers, Details and Design notes Stat Adjustments New Passive - Energy-Shield Converters New First Ability - Bolt Speed Adjustments Electric Shield Adjustments There's not much to explain about Augments, nor the removed Shock synergies. Shock Trooper works like before, hold 1 for buffsies, and no one used the Shock synergies. Final notes and future plans: First off, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I'll be adjusting values as needs be, but I can't and won't factor for endurance run balancing, and working around Shields remains pretty complicated. In the future I'd like to explore alternative First abilities in case we discover Bolt doesn't seem as good in hindsight or really have a purpose, and to see if Electric Shield can be fitted with an active component to make his kit more animated. Changes: Removed "Speed makes negative Status Effects shorter." This was originally suggested to make Heat/Tesla Coil ticks less lethal under the presumption their damage stopped Shields from regenerating, but this is not the case and this adjustment is unnecessary. Offered alternative end-effect to Shock replacement. Either way, it's intended to make killing a single/very small group of target(s) easy,
  15. Wouldn't say very good, personally. The frame's lack of sustain can get onerous on Steel Path when enemies packs start being dense enough that you can't just mangle all of them at once and they start being able to have some time to shoot back. While Capacitance does help with restoring Shields, I've found that it being 100 cost means even Zenurik can only do so much. Yes we can fix that with Arcane Energize, but for every Arcane Energize and Arcane Aegis we've put on Volt to make him not die horribly, I've put Molt Augment or Efficiency on Protea to make her kick harder. Despite the lack of tweaking compared to say, Ember or Saryn, he's held up decently... certainly better than Ash, Excal, Banshee, Frost or Nyx I would argue, and that's an achievement but I still feel like some adjustments would be warranted. And a fear-based mindset where we always pay attention to what could go wrong ends up ignoring the possibility that things could be better. The first is quite possible, and has happened, and we can always go back and take a look at what the move does and should do if it ends up being too much. As for the second, if the frame's design does now have to take mind that new players are potentially going to be exposed to Volt first that's undesirable, definitely, but ultimately a matter of opting not to incorporate that in the design of the ability. That's not to say there are quite elegant inherent synergies in certain Warframe kits, like Nidus' Larva and Virulence.
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