CopperBezel

So funny story, this fix was not applied to the purple archon shard Equilibrium effect....

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

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If that's the intention, they gotta nerf Synth Fiber. Combat Discipline at least costs your Aura slot and can sometimes drop your health by a couple hundred when you're not paying attention. Synth Fiber costs nothing, less now. And since the Synth Fiber / Equilibrium interaction is still documented only on the wiki, not in the game, it feels like the kind of "trap for new players" mechanic that they're trying to correct with revision updates like this one. At least update the mod description.

Oh come on, it's going to be everything getting fixed but Equilibrium? 😭

Huh. That would mean it's not just the augment then, because if the bubble ends without being triggered, the bubble explodes as long as the originally targeted enemy is dead. Does the explosion work reliably if you don't have the augment on at all? If not, there might be something else breaking the effect and the augment is just inheriting that problem. If it does still work reliably without the augment, then the augment is causing problems even in places it's not involved. (And then with the augment, the disarm chance applies to all bubble explosions, and recasting on a bubble with MD always causes an explosion and disarm even without killing the enemy, so the only way not to get an explosion and disarm should be for the original enemy to survive and the bubble to end naturally.)

Okay, which part of the mod isn't working for you? It has a range buff, the manual detonation, and the disarm chance. You mentioned it still pops when you trigger it, so that part is working. Is it not disarming enemies? Or is the damage just not as expected? (The disarm definitely still works for me and I'm seeing much more than the base damage, but.)

Yeah, but then you don't have shields to take double damage on, and you still have no energy to lose, so all you get is the UI screw. "Magnetic status doesn't affect Hildryn" is a flatly wrong statement, because you have to react to it correctly, but she can easily circumvent it. One last tip in case you're not aware: the mod (not the arcane) Guardian on a robotic pet is also an instant shield restore, though it comes with a 30s cooldown. For most frames that's nothing, but Hildryn can make serious use of it. And as folks have said, the arcane Hildryn wants most of all is Aegis, if you can work toward getting that. Unlike Barrier, it can trigger on hits during her shield gate, which means you can lose your shields completely, then have it trigger before your health ever becomes vulnerable and suddenly have enough shields to cast Pillage and get back to full. Barrier doesn't do that.

Hey, fair enough, as long as we can take care to bracket what's actually in the game on the one hand, and the fanon and headcanon on the other. Thanks for taking the time to work through this stuff with me. "Maybe it works if you take X and Y and infer Z" can be a really fun conversation to have, and I've learned about big things in the lore I'd missed from this conversation myself. I just take issue with taking fanon as dogma when it's just not in the game. Even the wrong idea that I came in with, that all Primes must have been the originals and all non-Primes were modern Tenno copies, was itself some old fanon I hadn't really questioned the source of. I think this one definitely varies and is more of DE deliberately being vague. For the Inaros, the Yareli, and the Nezha that saved those villages or whatnot, I think those were probably just individual Tenno who used those frames but became known as legendary figures by the people they saved. Kullervo, by contrast, is pretty directly an individual frame who was probably the first of his line, and definitely didn't have an operator, so he's a case where the individual original transformed Dax (or other) is the guy the story is about. Then there are cases like Titania where it's less clear - there's a Titania that Silvana experiments with Transferrence on, both with the Tenno kids and by herself, and there's a Titania that appears in the end of Silvana's story to save her and who Silvana refers to as her creation. There's no mention of Silvana actually designing Titania, just "building" her, no mention of strapping Dax volunteers into dental chairs to mutate them into infested husks, which seems like it would have come up considering Silvana's empathy and distaste for bloodshed, and no mention of a Tenno operator, whose existence Silvana was intimately familiar with. At face value it seems like there's only ever one Titania frame, created and built by Silvana out of neurodes and alloy plate and tellurium for transference experiments with the Tenno, a frame that Silvana unintentionally bonds with when she tries transference herself and which later comes to save Silvana later of its own volition and then dies. Anyway, in all those cases, the lore we get always prefers to describe a single character by the name of the frame model and never distinguish individual units of a model or any Tenno operators. Umbra would be an exception to that IMO, as would Harrow, whose story is told around Rell. Those are explicitly individual frames that, whether or not they were in any sense the first of a model or whatnot, because either of them may or may not be, Umbra is a specific Excalibur and Rell's Harrow is a specific Harrow. (The fact that Umbra himself gets duplicated later by the Vitruvian Ordis Foundry notwithstanding.)

Eh, you can assume that Umbra was created before Excalibur Prime, or you can assume the reverse. It's not evidence for one idea or the other if it's completely consistent with both. That's the case for 99% of this stuff. The other 1% is that almost all of the lore in the game is told around frames that are not said to be the Prime version, are shown not to be when they're shown at all, and are also treated as individuals with names and not as particular instances of a product line by that name, and I don't understand the value of latching onto the handful of times where that's more explicit than usual and pretending we can uncover an elaborate hidden reason for it. We also know that every frame will eventually have a Prime version with the same abilities, and that would still be the case even if DE decided to introduce a frame that was explicitly created as an original model long after the Orokin era. These are just unshaking limitations of the formula. We probably should assume that the profile video isn't a very good guide to canon, but the last line, "Valkyr was crafted from torment, Tenno. Take control of her rage," is still in her lore snippet in-game. Her whole theme all along was meant to be that the frame we know now was a result of the experimentation inflicted on her. She has the remains of restraints bolted to her arms and uses them in combat along with her claws. I'm not really concerned with whether the Geresmi skin, which doesn't have those restraints, has been retconned out of existence by Valkyr Prime. It's a Deluxe skin, it doesn't have to fit. Atlas Karst is a rock. What Valkyr Prime does importantly retcon is to say there was a whole Valkyr line that always had the same abilities (so that "rage" had nothing to do with being experimented on) and the same blocks bolted to her arms before they were restraints. So like, Alad V just picked a frame that was already bondage and torture themed, and subsequently bound and tortured her. I think it's probably better to just let both ideas (original Valkyrs created by Alad V and Ballas) live in their own spaces and not assume there's one "real" history there that we have to make up based on the bits we have. "But the canon!" - forget it, DE didn't care and neither should you. (I think they do care now, and avoid creating frames with lore that will be complicated by having Primes later. More's the pity, honestly, I'd rather they didn't have the limitations. Sevagoth was a ghost themed frame even before he became a ghost ship captain, why.) And it could easily reflect how those frames are seen now, as opposed to how they were used then, kind of impossible to say which. It's just the closest she comes to actually giving us a category. All we know is that there Primes, there were frames that weren't Primes, some of those frames "earned" being Prime (which could mean individual frames being turned into Primes or non-Prime models having Prime models created based on them), and we also have frames now that also aren't Primes either. I think the more important retcon is that the word "Prime" seems to come from this "Prime Vanguard" we've never heard of elsewhere and doesn't mean they're the originals of anything per se. Maybe non-Primes aren't all the same, maybe that's just a gameplay and progression design thing, and non-Prime frames have existed for different reasons at different times. Maybe the Prime Vanguard is what Ballas is pitching frames to (that "For your consideration" in the Vauban Prime trailer) and even his own designs weren't "Primes from the start". (Though in that case, what would be?) Maybe Ivara was created by Archimedean Stacie long before the fall, and then Ballas tested one with his Myrmidon trap and decided he liked Ivara's kit, so he created his own Ivara to pitch for the Prime Vanguard and took the credit, and finally, much later Tenno tried to recreate Ivara Prime and failed and created non-Prime Ivara instead, who somehow happens to exactly resemble Stacie's original design before Ballas's changes. (No less tortured than Valkyr's apparent story.) I think the best thing to insist is absolutely for definitely certain canon is nothing at all. I want to be really clear before responding to this: I'm not denying that Varzia's snippets introduce a bunch of non-Prime frames into the Orokin era, because they 100% do. I also just really need to point out that this is not one of those lines. I mean, that is the reverse engineering theory, that Tenno have been trying to make their own copy frames, with imperfect results, in the time since the Orokin era. If Varzia was summing up what we thought before she showed up, that's what she'd say. (She's not though. I want to be very explicit here to avoid waking the strawmen: There absolutely were non-Prime frames around in the Orokin era and they were the majority. This line in particular is just not how we know that.) It actually doesn't. The Kullervo lore just refers to the same uncontrollable monster frames that Ballas told us about in the Sacrifice, the ones that were in the process of being destroyed when it was discovered that the Tenno could control them, as also seen in the Rhino Prime codex entry. It's not necessarily a bad guess that the the prototype skins refer to the prototype frames in lore, but they're not explicitly called that, and nothing in the Kullervo lore makes a stronger connection between those skins and those frames than what we already got from Ballas in The Sacrifice. (The new lore does of course put lie to the idea that those frames were, in fact, uncontrollable monsters, and it's very consistent with what we know of Ballas for him to see monsters in anything he can't personally control.) I did find one place those original frames before the Tenno are referred to as proto-warframes, but it was just a paraphrase of the Kullervo lore text on the Warframe wiki. Given the skins are Dark Sector themed, I'd personally put my chips on Volt Proto showing up as a costume in 1999 instead. Yep. Every one as good as any other. Better to stick to what's actually known.

I understand that, but if you'll forgive me shifting mythologies west a bit, that's what the non-Prime warframes represented when they were iron-age imitations of golden-age heroes. Now it turns out even they were around during the golden age too. From a purely technological standpoint, that does make for a bigger fall, but it sidelines the visual metaphor going from gilded porcelain to steel and twisted flesh. I also think they could have easily gone the other way with it and had new models of frames created by the Tenno post-Orokin, and given them something other than Prime counterparts as the equivalent later in-game upgrade, Nova and Revenant and Valkyr Tekelu or something. But hindsight is 20/20 and all that. And the imagery is more important than the technological reality IMO. The Tenno already possess void magics that the Orokin never fully understood and couldn't replicate themselves, the Zariman and Deimos still have people around from the Orokin age, Ballas survived until recently and had figured out his own very costly means of getting to Tau. We have access to the very last of Albrecht Entrati's old junk to rifle through, and he's the original Prometheus for the Orokin themselves. So it doesn't throw a wrench in the works if Archimedean Yonta can complete some equation by Albrecht or something and finish the Zariman's jump IMO. Yeah, you can imagine that if I don't trust the Levarian to be perfectly literal in all it presents, I'm not super keen on basing lore assumptions on load-screen tips.

Yeah, not much to argue out from there really. I think the Ivara thing hangs on a lot of assumptions that all happen to fall right where the limits of the formulae do. You're right that the Varzia stuff is pretty unambiguous, so there's a substantial change or reveal to lore there, but the role it introduces for for non-Prime frames doesn't really leave a lot of space for frames that only exist as non-Primes. And then we'd still have the question of who was designing these other non-Prime frames not based on the Prime designs (different Orokin, the Tenno themselves?) and for what reason. And yeah, I don't love the change, I think it's a little limiting. Like it's already bad enough that every model of warframe that exists already existed, and in its best form, during the Orokin era, makes things feel more static than they need to. If the copies we thought were reverse engineered Tenno work were actually around all along as budget models, that's just even less change over the interim.

Right, I mean, I'm entirely certain you're wrong too, that's what I said. But I hadn't heard those dialogue bits from Varzia, specifically that some frames "earned" being Prime contra Ballas, and also that "Primes were reserved for the Prime Vanguard". She also refers to frames that aren't Primes as "training" frames. This is obviously inconsistent with other lore, but by mentioning that Ballas "never told the whole truth", she does seem to account for that. The idea of "training frames" might entirely supersede the idea of reverse-engineered Tenno handiwork, though, which is itself more implied than stated. If that's the case, all the frames that exist now would have existed then in the same flavors. There is still the meaning of the word "Prime" to get around, but if non-Prime frames are training frames, that's an easy answer; Ballas designed the original, Prime design of each model, and non-Primes are cheap alternatives based on those models to allow Tenno to learn how to use the real thing. There would still need to be a Prime original for everything though. This is what you're inferring, but it'd would have been more useful to have linked to your reasons for thinking so. The story of the Myrmidon comes from the Levarian, and none of that is in it. Ballas tells Ivara she has earned the right to be remembered. That's why the other two frames in the story, which didn't "earn" it, are left nameless. By all appearances, it's just a story about the original Ivara Prime that happens to be presented by the Levarian, which uses non-Prime equipment, no hidden extra meaning to be found. You can make it something else if you read really hard into the single word "earned", but I don't think that's an intended easter egg. Revenant Prime has a trailer, in which Ballas, in sequence, calls Revenant fatherless, says Revenant "mock[s] me and causality alike", and asks who gave him the name Revenant. It's a deliberate and explicit explanation that yes, all the Revenants we have in the present, Primes included, were copied from the Warden after he got Eidolonized, not from Ballas's original design.

Eh. On the one hand you have individual contradictory implications in details of deep lore, and on the other you have the surface reading of literally everything else ever said, which wins? No frame was a "Prime" during the Orokin era, the Tenno just call them that retrospectively to refer to the original models. That's been the whole idea all along, the reason they're called "Prime", which is very much a real word in a common usage that just means the first or original in this context, like T' in an equation means the initial time. Ivara and Titania are only unique in that we're told about the singular original frame of that model while also being shown the non-Prime one. But like ... we know the reasons the Titania quest and Ivara Levarian respectively can't show us the Prime versions, c'mon. There wouldn't have been any reverse-engineered Tenno designed frames at the time either of those stories happened, because the Orokin were explicitly still making warframes, so if there were already Primes and by extension non-Primes at the time, what would the non-Primes even be, and why would they resemble the later Tenno designs? Making the lore work while taking every snippet at exact literal face value is fun and all, but we gotta be real here about the story that's actually being told. And equally honest about why it inevitably contradicts itself, like it will again when they release Kullervo Prime in a few years, and he doesn't look like the singular actual original Kullervo who is still alive in the Duviri mind prison and older than the Tenno. I suppose avid lorehounds can say at that point that Ballas later made a production run of a new model Kullervo out of spite, while the original was mutated by Duviri magics to look like DT's Dax. (I also look forward to Xaku Prime, though DE figured out the problem in the years between Valkyr Prime and Revenant Prime and just told us that the origin story we were told about Revenant actually happened to the Prime original before the Tenno copied it, easy, so they'll probably pull the same trick with Xaku as well.) Edit: On the main topic, Excalibur Umbra is just like us, he's got cosmetic slots. They're just different ones than we get. He was turned into an Excalibur Prime and then got a scarf and an armor set, but the attachments worked differently X centuries ago so they're not compatible with our slots.

Okay, belated reply unrelated to the thread topic that's not even strictly about Yareli. DR from Adaptation and the armor from Arcane Guardian have a multiplicative effect on one another, and while one is cumulative over a period and the other is an all or nothing chance, they both have to be triggered by damage. So both, yes, all the time, they both always work better at protecting health in the presence of the other. I don't think of Molt Reconstruct as something to use instead of Guardian so much as, if this frame's main defense is health and I don't have any healing abilities to draw on, I'm going to have to use both and don't get to use one of the fun arcanes instead. But that's after I'm already definitely using Adaptation, Guardian, and Vitality, pretty much in that order. (Quick Thinking should be the mathematically right choice on a lot of frames but never seems to live up to it in practice.) For Yareli specifically, and me specifically, I did put two blue archon shards on her for some initial armor, as 300 armor is still 50% reduction on the first hit before anything else kicks in, even if that becomes irrelevant once Guardian triggers. She squish after all. Yarleli is a CC frame, which does reduce the amount of fire coming her way, and the helminth's options for tanking abilities are extremely limited. And if you don't mind being on Merulina all the time, score, no need to solve a problem you don't have (although you'd definitely be seeing an effect from Adaptation there.) But yeah, squishy casters in general tend to benefit from Adaptation and Arcane Guardian together. (Unless you're talking lower enemy level missions, but then Adaptation on any frame is plenty.)