vFlitz

And ever since she said that there have been countless comments saying 'yes, please do that', to no avail. It's a better solution on all accounts; you can get a better feel for range than you can for LoS checks, you can mod against range limitations and you can't against LoS, it's 100% consistent and all that range is effectively wasted with LoS in place anyway unless you go out to the open world maps. They'd have to absolutely butcher the range like they had done with Nezha initially to make people more dissatisfied than they are with LoS... which I have some slim hope they wouldn't do, given that they literally just went over it with Nezha.

On top of all that, Noctua also competes with Wordwarden for the mod config. Because Wordwarden doesn't benefit from firerate, multishot or any of the tome mods, having a proper build for Noctua means about 1/3 to 1/2 of the mods in use do nothing for Wordwarden, whereas if you choose to replace Noctua you're free to fully optimize Wordwarden.

People don't mind LoS being on Dark Verse, they only mind it on Tragedy because it's a long cast time, high cost ability that only really does proper damage against enemies that you set up for it with status. If LoS randomly fails on Dark Verse, then it carries over to Tragedy even if Tragedy's LoS catches them. If enemies move in between you casting Dark Verse and Tragedy, Tragedy can miss them. Even if they don't move, Tragedy can randomly miss them even though Dark Verse didn't. And it's all even worse if you're also moving yourself. Dante's current condition doubles down on all of LoS inconsistencies, which no other LoS ability in the game does.

I'm having a good enough time with Dante. The secret behind it is I just don't use Tragedy anymore, unless the rare golden opportunity presents itself and there's a dense group of enemies before me in an open space. Most other times the ability just feels like a waste of time to even try. So while I still think the LoS check should be removed even if it comes at a cost of range nerf, the birds and overguard are good enough reasons for me to use him.

Getting energy out of Dante's first ability is super easy. You just replace it with Nourish. Jokes aside, you can try Archon Stretch and an electric mod on Noctua, combined with Energy Nexus you should be getting more energy than you spend shooting it, bypassing the problem you have with Xata. I do think Noctua is an ability Dante 'grows out of', decent for less geared players, easy pick for replacement once you have better weapons (although it remains convenient in random loadout content like Circuit or Archimedea). But considering the rest of Dante's kit is quite strong, I don't really see DE turning it into a powerhouse without sacrificing a mod slot for an augment at the very least. Personally, I'd like to see Noctua interact with the pages that Dante has loaded in, giving more depth to his ability rotation. It could be some buffs for Noctua depending on the page combination, or something entirely groundbreaking... imagine if we had the ability to swap Noctua's mod configs in the middle of a mission via page combinations. Want to refresh your buffs? Input Light+Light to swap Noctua to a tome mod config and altfire at a group of enemies to trigger all invocations before you start casting. Want to use Wordwarden? Light+Dark swaps Noctua to another config with mods that work best with Wordwarden, and Wordwarden snapshots them when you cast it. Want to do some killing with the book? Another combination to swap it to a full offensive config. I think that'd be pretty cool.

You could still benefit from other DoTs, so long as you tag the enemies with Dark Verse at any point. The only thing that's kinda a downside is that it would incentivize casting Dark Verse quite a bit more while Wordwarden doesn't support ability attacks, only weapon ones.

This is a fictional problem pretty much as chances of it actually happening are close to 0. Unless it was a premade squad strategy, in which cases all parties are on board. In a solo/public setting there would be absolutely no reason to mod Dante for that much range, because even without LoS Tragedy can't get much done without status to detonate and Dante has no means of applying status on such a broad scale that it'd be possible to capitalize on over 200% range. Not to even mention that a player separating from the team by entire 80 meters doesn't really deserve any sympathy because they're the one being disruptive by splitting enemy spawns.

If there was any reason to use Excal in this day and age, I would definitely find turning that clunky passive off highly desirable. But taking a mod slot to do it? In this economy? The exilus slot isn't even an option because Primed Sure Footed exists and is far more crucial. Umbra comes with 3 umbra polarities that would feel like a waste to replace even if his stats don't make Umbral Fiber a particularly worthwhile choice, and he also has a non-negotiable augment. So that leaves just 4 slots that aren't accounted for, and under such circumstances 15% strength doesn't quite cut is as an incentive to fix a problem that shouldn't be the player's responsibility to fix with their build.

You're literally looking at what makes LoS on Tragedy particularly annoying and somehow drawing the opposite conclusion. Yes, Dark Verse has always had LoS. Yes, this means Tragedy's real damage output always has been only possible on enemies that can be directly interacted with. But that doesn't mean putting another check on Tragedy makes no difference. LoS checks aren't perfect, they miss things they shouldn't, and because there's at least a couple seconds between ability casts, the two checks may come up with different results. Dante is now in a unique situation of double dipping on this inconsistency, no other frame I can think of has to deal with that even if they do have LoS-based abilities.

That'd be fine, honestly. One of the reasons why LoS on Dante made people so bitter is that there are very strong frames who don't have it. If everyone did, then it sucks but at least it's fair... and with more people being exposed to how inconsistent LoS is maybe the criticism would get enough criticism rolling to get the point across to DE that LoS isn't the cure-all perfect solution they seem to think it is.

Yeah, it working differently for things in front of you and things behind you definitely adds to the perceived inconsistency. On top of that it gives people with ultra-wide screens an additional advantage because they can render more of their surroundings at any given moment. With how Warframe's maps are designed, LoS just doesn't make much sense for an instant large scale ability that is launched from your frame's position. All the inconsistency is easier to work around if it's something like Whipclaw that is sent out and performs a LoS check from a remote position, or Pillage that is a lingering effect that can truncate some misfires (though that is not to say they don't feel annoying at times). For Tragedy it doubly doesn't make sense because Tragedy is a combo finisher, not a standalone nuke.

Well, Wish can be healing spell if you want it to be. Wizards do have a fair number of protective spells though, and giving people Overguard is more like giving them a warding buff or temporary hit points than it is healing. (Yes, I know Dante's abilities also heal but honestly it's rather negligible with all the Overguard)

It already is. Always. You just don't have enough experience to see it. There's plenty of frames that can make it very difficult for the entire squad to die, they just do it in subtler ways than a big overguard number. A lot of frames with a decent armor value have higher EHP than the overguard granted by Dante when running Adaptation, it's just less noticeable. And even solo you can be nigh unkillable with any frame if you set your mind to it, some easier than others, but nonetheless all of them. Even if something goes wrong, Unairu's last gasp lets endgame players self-revive very easily. The kind of content that overguard is too strong for by the virtue of being a big number is content I could clear by letting my sentinel kill stuff.

Oh right, I forgot about Regulators. That knocks Noctua down to 4th place, I suppose. Noctua doesn't necessarily need to be stronger than it is, what it lacks in is unique benefits. Sure, it has the unlimited tome mods gimmick, but if you take advantage of that you diminish its value as a weapon, you diminish Wordwarden, and in a choice between +60% to strength/duration/efficiency + energy regen and Roar/Nourish, Roar/Nourish wins again. Regulators compensate for being rooted in place with extreme hitscan lethality, Baruuk's Desert Wind gives him DR and nearly puts him on par with nuke frames when it comes to killing speed, Dex Pixia is strong and also has no competition because it's the only weapon Titania can use in her Razorwing form. There's no replicating what they do with anything else. Noctua is just a somewhat multi-target hybrid gun. Aside from scanning enemies, there's many weapons that can be described this way.

The book is a red herring imo. Sure, it's serviceable if you build for it, probably the third best exalted weapon in the game, but it doesn't outperform top tier guns in any notable way. A good normal gun + a different ability is just a better value proposition, especially if the ability is something like Roar or Nourish and improves both your weapon and ability game. Plus this way you can mod Noctua with Wordwarden in mind to get full value out of that.

Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Tragedy does not and never has affected objects.

I wouldn't really call him a support either. He does things for his own benefit and they just so happen to also affect other players, you could remove all team benefits from him and he'd still play pretty much the same, the only problem is that people usually aren't thrilled with having purely selfish frames on the team.

It always had one, although it's somewhat less limiting than the usual. Generally it'll get through obstacles as long as the center of the cone isn't blocked, and some surfaces it just goes through unconditionally.

I have the opposite problem, getting an arcane instead of a tauforged from the final reward is a letdown. Unlike tauforged shards, the arcanes already have a decent drop chance on the lower tiers, and the total quantity of the arcanes that you can take advantage of is lower than the shards. It'd be nice to have at least a single guaranteed source of tauforged shards, everywhere else it's RNG unless you have such a surplus of normal ones that you can easily afford to fuse them.

I'm rather certain that both the initial completely broken implementation and the current one with Dante's model blocking his own LoS would be mocked quite viciously. It's because he'd still be a new frame that most people wanted to try out unlike, for instance, Khora's situation. When she got nerfed with LoS (and it was horribly broken LoS as well) she's been out for a while so only people who played her actually cared, and on top of that DE's managed to turn the rest of the community against them by dismissing them all as salty afk farmers.

Thanks! I originally wanted to write my thoughts on the rest of his abilities as well, but I figured it would make the entire thing too long and they're not really too pertinent to the nerf discourse. Yes, it's certainly puzzling, especially since it applies not only to Dante but even more so to Nezha's augment. It got revealed what, a month ago? And any player with some game knowledge could immediately tell that it's overpowered, many have indeed pointed it out, including some content creators. Yet it released with no changes, gave players a taste of the ridiculous power, before getting hit what might have been the harshest nerf in augment history. It's really difficult to fathom what the devs were thinking. I can't really agree with that, other than Triumph being a juiced up Light Verse. Dark Verse and Tragedy serve different purposes, and what I'd expect from a caster is the ability to solve all his problems exclusively or almost exclusively through casting. Aside from the fact that Tragedy is now unreliable and falls behind weapons on many tilesets, Dante can easily do that. He fits the bill thematically as well - his looks, animal familiars, making yourself untouchable with buffs before you decimate your opponents, it's all very reminiscent of a D&D wizard and I'm all for it. Turning a book into a gun is the only part that doesn't quite fit, but it is about what I'd expect from Warframe's spin on the idea. Naturally, Dark Verse can't keep up forever and at some point supplementary use of weapons becomes necessary, but that's a good thing. It'd have to be staggeringly powerful to handle special enemy units at extremely high levels. And even then, Wordwarden is supporting your weapon use to make it a bit less mundane. That you don't find it enjoyable isn't necessarily a failure of the design, it's simply impossible for any given thing to please everyone. For instance, people generally like and praise Gauss' design, but I personally can't stand having to act like a caffeinated squirrel to keep the battery overcharged and the refractory period between Redline expiring and getting the battery to an overcharged state again.

Writing this because there are misconceptions about him being constantly thrown around. The Overguard: There are two components to this - the regen, and the amount granted on cast. For the starchart, either one is enough to make him and his team immortal. Even if Overguard was capped at something like 1000, it would have been enough, enemies are just that weak on low levels. For long endless mission runs, only the regen truly matters. It makes no difference if it's 5 or 300 per second, which is way the buff to it had little to no value, the only part that matters is that it refreshes the Overguard gate. This lets Dante ignore all damage so long as he's killing enemies, which is enough to make it substantially less broken than Revenant. Fail to keep the kills flowing and the only way you can protect yourself is spamming Light Verse while you retreat or resort to external tools like Rolling Guard or the Operator, until you find an opportunity to go back on the offensive. So where does the Overguard on cast matters? Only the midrange, roughly 150-400 level range. It's a purely ease of use thing, a safety buffer that cushions you from living on the edge and relying solely on refreshing the gate. Even though the regen is godmode, it's also something few players would want to bother with on an everyday basis. So after the Overguard nerf, even though Dante still had the same cap and still had access to regen, his QoL went down substantially as players were forced to either rely on regen at all times or cast an egregious amount of abilities to have a buffer, and neither of the options are convenient. Dante was mostly said to be less powerful than the already established meta picks, but feeling good to play. This nerf was aimed exclusively at how Dante feels in content that's most relevant to the average late game player. Admittedly, convenience can often prove more popular than sheer power potential, and combining a fair amount of both is enough to outclass many frames... The initial nerf was certainly excessive, the current state I'd say feels manageable, at least on a high strength build and there's not much else to build Dante for. The Nuke: Once again, two components - the direct damage and the ability to detonate and multiply status damage. A lot of people seem to somehow believe that Dante could deal millions of damage to everything within an 80m radius and that's simply false. It's countered by armor, especially since it's typed as Slash so it has a -50% penalty against Alloy and -15% against Ferrite. Without any status to detonate, it can't kill a level 30 corrupted heavy gunner even at 300% strength. A build going for range would have less strength at that, so Tragedy's no setup lethality was strictly limited to enemies that are very low level and/or squishy fodder units. In any meaningful content building for high range would have meant giving up a lot for the single benefit of clearing fodder, which is hardly worthwhile, and the fodder that got cleared coincidentally on a typical build was, once again, convenience. Nobody likes making their way under a staircase because some Crewman got stuck there. As for the very low level enemies, well.. you may disagree but IMO unless you're a very new player they can never provide engagement worthy of being called gameplay. They're mere time wasters, standing between you and an alert reward, a ranked up piece of gear, an annoying rotation C reward. Anyone who kills them quickly is doing you a favor. It's also something that can be so easily eliminated by simply lowering Tragedy's direct damage. And at higher levels? Tragedy isn't so much of a nuke as it's a combo finisher. It has no value of its own and can only enhance what you put into it. The bare minimum option is Dark Verse since you have to cast it anyway, and that already came with its own LoS check that's generous, but still obviously inconsistent if you've used it for a while. Mixing in weapon procs also requires direct interaction with enemies and further extends the process. Slapping another check on Tragedy doubles down on a point of failure that's impossible to predict and risks wasting energy and a lengthy cast process. LoS checks would have to be nothing short of immaculate to prevent this from feeling bad, and even if the devs could pull it off, the more thorough the check the higher the performance cost it comes with. And to what end? What is there to gain from giving Tragedy a LoS requirement that can't be achieved by much simpler methods? Especially when it was no special case, many abilities have no LoS just fine. And if DE wants to change that, they should first take the time to develop a quality solution and then make changes across the board, not single out one frame with a rushed and botched job. A huge chunk of Warframe's maps simply wasn't build with the idea of LoS checks originating from player's position in mind, it's much more restrictive than sending out something explosive and making the check from its destination. Even the more open tilesets often feature multiple elevations and various decorative clutter. Tragedy's effective area gets limited so much in tighter areas that it effectively gets reduced to being a single-target tool with maybe some collateral if you're lucky. Even though you need two casts of Dark Verse to trigger Tragedy, the second one often ends up lacking purpose because if you try to send it some other way than the first, Tragedy will end up missing one of the two anyway. Weapons are much more reliable and generally faster in such environment, and if the preferred solution for a caster archetype is weapons.. then he fails at being a caster, doesn't he?

Ah, that wouldn't help much either because the motes would just reapply it right after. They do it every 3 seconds I believe.

Nah, he only detonates slash, heat and toxin. Even if he could detonate electric, Wisp Shock Motes deal 10 damage, so even with Tragedy's multiplier it's still much less than Tragedy's default damage

They all scale with mods, so that's no argument. And they're not actually that far apart in terms of damage considering unlike Tragedy the others are DoTs. Discharge's pulses last 4s so that's already 4600 that also scales with density. Miasma immediately applies viral so it doubles its own damage and gets another 400% multiplier from spores which any Saryn will be spreading regardless, giving a total of 7200 at base duration. This is no argument. So? Aside from killing low lever or unarmored fodder enemies, Dante would have no reason whatsoever to individually mod for such high range. It would have to be a build that's made specifically for team synergy, and if we start getting into what's possible in a coordinated team setting then there's no end to absolutely broken combinations. And one could still argue this is healthier than other nukes because it requires everyone to participate. And at high levels the others would also need to use some pretty strong heat procs or bring armor strip because Tragedy only goes through armor with detonated slash procs. No, they wouldn't be making it feel worse than LoS. LoS already indirectly nerfs Tragedy's base range and direct damage by removing the value they can provide. It's not as if most of the game's tilesets are wide open rooms with no clutter, likely over half of them aren't, and there's no reason to cast Tragedy without a worthwhile group of primed enemies in sight because it can't clear out any stragglers now. It'd only be a waste of energy, so the part of damage that doesn't come from status detonation has no purpose anymore. If Dante nuking level 10 enemies is really such a problem, even though there's a multitude of other ways to do so, then reducing range to 20-25m or lowering the direct damage would have been reasonable solutions. FYI, the direct damage already can't even kill a lvl 30 corrupted gunner, and that's on a 300% strength build, not one that focuses on range. His 'nuking' already was hard countered by armor at anything higher than baby levels. I'm not saying he's trash. I'm well aware he's nearly immortal in a way that's reasonably less broken than Revenant because he needs to either keep killing to proc regen or cast repeatedly to protect himself against enemies that are strong enough to delete Overguard instantly, while Wordwarden and Pageflight give him solid utility. But I'm also aware that Tragedy feels bad to use now. Half of the game there's no point in using it because your weapons have similar effective coverage and are quicker, the other half it fares better but there's still inconsistency, random misfires and a guessing game of what is and what isn't within the LoS check. And for an ability with a lengthy cast time and 100 base energy cost, that's just unacceptable.