Ethan158

Also experience this on my Ash with Rakta syandana!

New invis changes are good but the semi cloak doesn't work with my syandana. It doesn't break the game or anything but it looks weird. Weirdly all my other Syandanas work with the cloak except Rakta.

Can you elaborate on such problems? I am genuinely curious as my change is more aimed at QoL for the current blade-storm which they seem keen on keeping to ensure its "interactiveness". The targeting system itself, in my opinion, isn't the main problem. I feel as if when they first introduced the targeting system it was pretty bad. You had to put all 3 marks individually and the cursor selection isn't as generous as it is now. This was all fixed as now it's an instant 3 marks and although undocumented it has felt more generous to mark enemies around your cursor. But now I feel it feels so clunky in the first place because after you make your selection you have this in-between time where you can't make additional marks and you have to wait for the current marked enemies to die to do so. Ash has always felt like he was oriented at a solo playstyle, it would be nice if they could make him more viable in lobbies but it's not something I expect. This is because Bladestorm itself is kind of slow but fast enough to remain viable but doesn't knock its competition out of the same ballpark. Old Bladestorm's design was trashed because players would spam it which I imagine your change would incentivize this sentiment. The idea of making it a channeled ability is yeah you have to mark enemies but the clones would go out and do their job and while they do you have the ability to "continue the storm" by marking more enemies rather than just simply pressing a 100 energy button and everything gets re-marked/attacked or with the current blade-storm of having to wait for them to finish and going through the whole recasting loop. Your ideas aren't bad but I can never imagine DE just implementing another one-button instant room nuke for Ash again without severe mitigations that aren't worth paying when I think the current system is fine just needs different interaction changes with the player in regards to casting.

Hello everyone, my primary discussion topic for this post is Ash's ultimate ability: blade-storm. Now I want to preface that I know Ashe is in no way a "bad" Warframe and other Warframes such as Inaros and Yareli need much more attention by the dev team but this is simply a tweak rather than an overhaul. Ash was reworked already about 7 years ago introducing his "marking" mechanic and then further tweaked so that he wouldn't have to go into the blade-storm"cutscene" unless he casts teleport to join. The current problem with blade-storm is that it completely disrupts the flow of combat in the game. Even on release, it was pointed out that an already relatively slow acting ability was nerfed in an aspect that made it even slower. This is because the marking ability requires you to: A: Activate the ability putting you into a "marking" phase. B: Hover your cursor around the enemies you wish to attack. C: Recast the ability to commence the blade-storm. Compared to the old blade-storm where it was instantaneous in the marking (and the commencement of the ability) of enemies around you, the new Blade Storm is just incredibly slow. You couldn't re-mark enemies during its duration and often players found it more efficient (whether they wanted it or not) to kill the unmarked and even marked enemies rather than go through the hassle of setting up Bladestorm and waiting for its animation time. The storm often ended before it started. To paint the picture even further, I ran a Steel Path Survival in the Kuva Fortress with a Savage Silence (200% power strength) Ash setup with an Epitaph and Melee Crescendo. This way I got to focus purely on priming enemies and not having to worry about the combo counter so that I can effectively one-shot all enemies marked in a pretty condensed map. Around the 35-minute mark, I was around ~1450 kills which averages 42 kills per minute (rounding up). This is slow. During the survival, I found myself often in need of activating the life support and using my melee to supply more kills for modules as blade-storm could not keep up. In similar cases, most melee focus Warframes such as Khora/Baruuk far surpass the Ash's kills per minute with their abilities alone. Kullervo makes this even more apparent with his instantly acting gameplay loop being more fluid and quick than the ninja frames himself. I imagine they tried to make it so that blade-storm bolstered the players' combat loop by having clones attack one group of enemies while the player can focus on another group rather than make it an ability of focus where it is your sole tool of killing. In my opinion, this fails its mission as it interrupts the game by requiring the player's active attention to casting the ability, cursor marking, and recasting which takes up too much time disincentivizing the use of the ability. This in fact can be seen as players often Helminth his ultimate ability for a damage-boosting ability such as Xata's whisper or roar and using the shurikan augment, effectively making Ash an armor-stripping weapon platform. What I propose is simply making the ability a channeled ability and upon activation puts the players in the marking phase we have right now but doesn't require the players to reactivate but simply drains energy like normal for every enemy marked and the clones actively seek out those marked refuding the energy if killed. Cutting out the re-activation aspect makes it so the time in between marking them and killing the actual enemy is greatly shortened. That time crunch would be enough to improve the flow of combat as you get to kill enemies with your weapons and blade-storm simultaneously without having to worry about any reactivating and as a bonus would utilize that cool smoky effect as its uptime would be more constant. This change doesn't require damage tweaks, energy value changes, or augment revisits. The only thing I'd imagine would need changing is the teleport interaction where the player can join the clones. It would have to be made so that Ash can't mark any more enemies while in the cutscene to prevent an infinite cutscene which would be reminiscent of old Ash. I'd like to know your opinions on the change and discuss variations or changes to it.