Birdframe_Prime
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Posts posted by Birdframe_Prime
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22 hours ago, Ohmlink said:
Only change I feel that is absolutely necessary is for dive bomb to be aimed. I think it would do wonders for the skills usability and allow Zephyr to bomb enemy formations and kill stragglers at close range if the user so feels with much greater ease and efficiency.
I can see how that would work, except you'd have to put a limit on it. Dive Bomb currently goes until it impacts, you'd either have to limit the angle that you could aim within, pointing at the ground, or cap the range to stop people 'diving' at far walls for faster-than-tailwind travel.
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Hmm, this is actually pretty solid, you're increasing the validity of the abilities themselves rather than talking trash and trying to throw them out the window, a refreshing idea, and you even included the follow-the-cursor aspect that a lot of people like for longer-duration tailwind ideas.
I really, really like your stacking ability, it's very similar to Volt's new static charge and could play very well into how she works, so the only tweak I'd add to it is that it's 'bonus travel time', meaning you have a base distance you can travel, but the stacks add to it in the same way that Volt's abilities do damage and his charge adds to them. Then you could cap it without it detracting from the overall mechanic, but you wouldn't have a case of casting it in a time of need, but only travelling a few meters.
I'd throw in something more: a wall recovery, so that if you hit a wall straight on (or at an angle that doesn't slide off, the parkour angle detection works for that) you wall latch for a short duration to allow yourself to re-orient and move on at speed, rather than just fire-working into the wall.
The damage from dive bomb already does increase with distance, but you're absolutely right about the cc and range of that cc. The 20% fixed armour debuff for duration would be nice, too, but wouldn't that just encourage spam with Heavy Impact? DB triggers the mod ability from any height, so you would either have to remove the interaction or do some serious balancing to prevent it from affecting a wide area with an instant debuff from a simple hop in the air.
Hmm... What a lot of people tend to suggest is that there's some merger of Tailwind and Dive Bomb into both being on the 1 button. I've noticed a couple of them here, so I thought I'd throw in my opinion; I'm in favour of it in order to give Zephyr a new ability on 2.
Unfortunately this would negate your suggestion of stacks on distance for Tailwind, but I would prefer an additional active ability over more mobility.
Mechanically Zephyr flies around like a lunatic already, the problem is actually getting her to stop when you're at your destination, so my suggestion is usually that you tap 1 to tailwind, and you then hold it to Dive. It halts momentum (even falling) and aims at the ground, and then dives. This allows you to target and time your drops rather than just instantly bash your head on the floor, the way you do now, and would make it feel more powerful when you did. More importantly it allows you to not cast it! Releasing the button before you drop cancels the ability and returns you to gravity's embrace, allowing you to re-cast tailwind, parkour if you have a jump, aim-glide or just land normally.
I'd like to see the mechanics and augments for Dive Bomb and Tailwind actually compliment each other, maybe the stacks could affect both? You could tailwind further, or for more damage, with more stacks, and you could use stacks on Dive Bomb to multiply your effective height. So a bomb from ten meters with 100 stacks would be the same as a bomb from fifty meters. Likewise Dive Bomb Vortex currently draws in enemies to the impact radius, so why not have it affect Tailwind, drawing in or ragdolling enemies along the line of your jet?
Moving on to some more possible improvements, though.
The new 2 is hotly debated, so I won't go into that much. Just a short one below:
SpoilerThe best suggestions I've seen are a team/personal buff dubbed 'raptor vision' which triggers an enemy radar boost, highlights enemy natural weak points (heads, limbs, natural ones, unlike Banshee's ability to create them) buffs damage on weapons or, in one iteration, makes her abilities 'mark' enemies for a small life-steal on death like Nezha's 2. The other is a cannon shot, low-damage, single target CC that does more CC the further out it goes (low range it staggers a single enemy, mid it knocks down and then staggers a small radius, long range it ragdolls the target and knocks down the radius), combine that with it dealing finisher damage and the distance-based damage ties into her mechanics for Dive Bomb too.
I really like the second, but the arguments to make her a more team-buffing frame are also very good. My preference is for target CC, since you can then lock down a high-priority target and friends but you're basically having to play whack-a-mole, not spam a whole radius as you would with a blind or chaos type ability.
Turbulence is, arguably, one of the best damage reduction abilities in the game, it suffers from only one bug, the bullet tunnels. All that needs to happen is for DE to change how the continuous fire enemies have their accuracy debuff change angle (since currently it makes them fire about a meter over Zephyr's head, which is no distance at all and we jump into it all the time), and we're free of it.
It's the AI on Tornado I'd change the most, though.
So far you've made small changes (I approve) and that's great, but Tornado is one of those abilities in game that actively annoys people and genuinely impedes progress on some mission types, like Survival. Heavy improvements below if you're interested.
SpoilerTornado needs to not do several things: It needs to not scatter loot and enemies, making finding the loot and killing the survivors a chore, it needs to not wander off and escape from the map, or sit in corners and use up all the duration trying to go through them, and it needs to not move slow enough that enemies can just walk past it to get to you if it's not quite near enough.
What it needs to do is the following: provide reliable CC, actively deny enemies from an area of the game, it needs to have an off switch to prevent annoyance of your team and to allow a re-cast if you misplaced it, and it needs to have synergy with the other abilities.
I would put a range on it, a zone where Tornado spawns, similar to Tentacle Swarm. This would allow all the other changes to be made. Making it a range-based cast would then allow players to change how far they want their funnels to roam, whether they want the four funnels to patrol a wider area actively, or deny a single doorway, passage, interception point etc from the enemy. The speed of each funnel could then be increased to be able to seek enemies actively, as long as they're within the zone, following the nav-mesh in the level, preventing the funnels from ending up in corners forever. The suction of enemies and mods could result in throwing them straight up from the funnel, a release mechanic that prevents them from staying pressed against the ceiling in low rooms, dropping them and the loot back in the zone area for easy collection or for getting sucked up by another funnel.
An active dispell would be handy too, making sure that you could turn it off to release trapped enemies and loot when you have a long-duration build on, or allow you to re-cast it on a point to change up where your denial is based.
Then! With a zone, you have an area where you can stand to synergise with her other abilities! Inside the zone, you could provide a boost to, say, Turbulence, giving it a more physical shield nature by staggering enemies that come inside a short range, think Warding Halo, but only a stagger and only while you're in the limits of Tornado, allow yourself to take a break from those pesky chargers and machete wielding grineer. A buff to your new 2, meaning it does the full rag-doll at closer range, allowing you to pick targets and actively CC them even at closer range.
Even better, an interaction with Dive Bomb, hitting from heigh enough (or height modified by stacks) bursts the entire ability, ragdolling everything in a 50m radius for huge temporary area cc.
Annnd there you go, an AI re-work by putting a limit on how far the funnels can roam allows it to be a stronger and more reliable CC ability, while the increase in power is then balanced by limiting that range too. Active dispell allows you to re-cast for the duration, and the synergy with other abilities makes it the same kind of power boosting ability as Saryn's Miasma when it gets damage buffs from Molt and Spore.
I'd really like to see Zephyr as a highly mobile CC frame, area denial with Tornado, single target knock-downs, ragdolls and an encouragement to use her height and control in the air to gain additional mobility and damage.
Again, really like your stacks, bonus for more air-time is a great mechanic for Zephyr.
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13 minutes ago, D20 said:
The best exemple I could pull out is Saryn's rework, that massively changed how she works. Prior to her rework, most of people would build Saryn with a duration as low as possible due to Miasma actually getting a big benefit with very low duration builds. But those builds pretty much also made every other abilities almost useless. The rework gave to Saryn a lot of synergies on all of her skills, encouraging skill combos, and making all abilities useful in their own way while making players work a bit more to earn their kills.
Exactly.
Saryn used to be a nuke frame, you could pull a solid 10k damage from a Miasma every time, and the max efficiency, max strength, min duration build worked perfectly with just that one ability. It completely ruined the other three, but with Saryn's unlikely amount of armour and an easy press-4-to-nuke ability, that was all you needed to destroy most game modes on the star chart.
On the other hand, I just forma'd up enough of a build on Saryn that is... kind of obscene. I forget efficiency, put it all into strength and duration, while keeping as much range as I can. This nets me a spore build that you hit once, cast Toxic Lash, gain all your energy back in a few swings, and repeat until you have everything in the room (and the next ones) at half health, suffering from toxic procs in the high hundreds to thousands range, and then blitz everything in range with Miasma for 15k damage each. You can get higher than the old Saryn, you just have to play her differently. It's all about the Spore farming, with Molt for survivability (if you're solo I'd swap out a bit of power strength for Regenerative Molt), and making sure that nothing and nobody you're against is healthy and fully functional.
I've seen Toxic procs on some enemies in the 10k range just from the Spores alone, forget Miasma... It's such a good ability. And all because they took away the negative duration part of her that she had before.
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8 hours ago, BigBlackCook said:
the shards from polarize does not make a huge or dramatic difference in damage.
Yeah, that is definitely something I've noticed. Not that they don't add dramatically to the damage, but the fact that the effect is applied really erratically.
I can cast Magnetise while the ground is littered with shards and only one or two at most are every actually picked up. It's easier to ignore the shards that are there, magnetise, and cast Polarise on the trapped enemies to force it to apply them to the damage bubble.
Even then, whether it actually applies them is often hit-or-miss.
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Any resource you can label Alertium is, to me, a bad plan.
I'll list a very good reason; Not everyone can play all the time, nor can they play at different times of the day.
Nitain alerts are supposed to be balanced so there are four per twenty-four hour period and last for an hour each, meaning that for four hours each day there's Nitain available. In maths, this means that just signing in every day for a month means you should, statistically, see twelve to twenty chances to get Nitain for only ten to fifteen minutes of game play time.
In practice, the probability of seeing a Nitain alert if you sign in four times a week or less, for a maximum of two hours or so, exclusively in the evening after 8pm GMT... you'll see virtually none.
I say this very specific method because that's the maximum I can play Warframe in a week. That's my total. I can't sign in every day, I can't play for more than two hours since I have actual responsibilities to attend to, like cooking, cleaning, caring for family, a job and other hobbies besides gaming. I can't do the minumum required to see twelve to twenty Nitain every month.
And over an eight week period after Vauban Prime was released I only was able to collect a grand total of five (5) Nitain from alerts. Just over one every two weeks. Due to being unable to play as much as I wished to.
At this rate it will take me another four to six months to even be able to craft Vauban. There will be new Primes in that time, new warframes, maybe they'll need Nitain too, there are weapons and warframes currently (luckily ones I managed to farm and get before Vauban's release) that take Nitain, but there could be more, every two weeks there could be something new that costs one or two Nitain to create. Vauban will get further and further away, and I might be better off just paying for Prime Access now.
Alert based resources are okay, like Mutalist Alad V coordinates for Invasions, because the thing you're building only needs three of that alert resource. Mission based random resources, like the four Beacons, are okay because while you need several of each (I can't remember the exact amount, but it's about twenty overall) the missions are available all the time and you can run them as many times as you're willing to put up with.
But twenty. Twenty Nitain for building a warframe. Something that people already have to farm for and have RNG dictate whether they get it in the first place. Further put out of their hands by RNG dictating whether they even see the resource at all? That's just bad design.
I literally haven't even bothered trying to farm Vauban in the void since the moment I realised how much time it will take to build him once I've actually got him. I'll wait until I have 18 or 19 Nitain and then start again. I'll still have the last parts I need before I see that last Nitain.
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I'll sum it up in a simple statement: DE Don't support 'infinite' anything. Be that infinite range, infinite scaling, infinite stun locks, infinite spam... it's not good game design.
Mag had an infinitely scaling damage ability, they took that. Trinity had an infinite range heal, they took that. Valkyr had infinite invulnerability, they can't take the basic mechanics of the ability, so they changed the drain so it's way more difficult for it to be infinite. Saryn had near infinite spam on an ability that could be modded to deal 10k damage instantly, with no fall off or cool-down for 25 energy, they took that (well, they took it and re-worked it so that the combo between it, molt and spores could actually deal 15k damage if you mod correctly and combo correctly, but only 4-5k if you use it alone).
If everything is based on fixed numbers, with percentage buffs and de-buffs as game mechanics, then it can be balanced as the game goes on.
Like Excalibur, his Exalted Blade became quite powerful and easy to maintain at that power, many people could actually stay in EB for an entire mission and hit everything for consistently high damage at any range, or there were those creating Exalted Turret with him, Mirage and Equinox buffing his damage, hiding in a corner and nuking t4 survival missions with ease... So what did they do? They adjusted the numbers so his damage had range fall-off. Instant re-balance.
The same can be done for Saryn, or Mag, or Volt now, already has been with Volt increasing his shields from 4 at a time to 6.
Balance the frames through capped abilities, no infinites, reduced spam, and then address the imbalance in the enemies once that's finished.
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Your entire argument seems to hinge on the idea that making us overpowered isn't a bad thing.
Except this is a loot-based game where long run survivals, defenses and interceptions can net you valuable and trade worthy loot, even if you're the guy being taken there as a new player who needs a few keys, levels or prime parts. And the high-level content, like Sorties, that you currently have to either grab a team for and/or cheese with exploitable frames, which can net you even rarer rewards like 50 fusion cores, a legendary core and trade-able blueprints, will become easy and with new ones able to be run the instant you've finished the first.
You'll flood the game with all the parts and mods that people desperately want, trivialise the costs for trading them and take away the one thing that DE wants most of all from these: Your incentive to purchase Platinum for things that you're unwilling or unable to farm yourself, which is how DE currently supports all the work they're doing on Warframe.
But that's just a reason not to make the frames over-powered for any period of time. The real reason is because they're fixing more than just the frame's balance.
Frames first means DE can address many of the things that they don't want in the game regardless of the balance (like infinite range, infinite spam and infinitely scaling damage), and once the core mechanics are fixed on the frames, any changes they make in the future is then reliant on just the numbers to balance it.
Look at Excalibur; they changed up his core mechanics so that he works entirely differently after Parkour 2.0. People found that his 4 was actually too powerful if combo'd with other frames and he could turn into Exalted Turret and hit for massive consistent, continuous damage. So DE simply adjusted his numbers, and presto, damage fall-off at range, he's no longer capable of that strat. No mechanical work, just numbers.
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53 minutes ago, RealPandemonium said:
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Look, you've successfully managed to derail this conversation so it's about Loki's viability in game and whether he's under-powered or over-powered. Congratulations, you've missed the point.
Still a good design. Still better designed than half the frames in the game.
A high power in game does not equal bad design if you're supposed to, and are encouraged and able to, use all of his abilities effectively and consistently to produce the result intended for the frame and for the gameplay. Loki was intended as an enemy debuffer and stealth frame, he does it well, and helps out teams by doing so and can go solo by actively using all his abilities in concert. These abilities are powerful, but they do not actively blitz wave after wave of enemy, it debuffs them so that your team and your weapons can. It is team oriented and survivable, and I admit it's powerful.
That is not a bad design, that is a good design allowed to become over powered.
On the other hand, a badly designed frame is used for a single gimmick (at best), is only useful for that one gimmick and people are, by the way the game currently functions, encouraged to only use that gimmick in order to profit.
Mag's Polarise, scaling damage that could nuke enemies at any level, Trinity's infinite range and 99.9% damage reduction to all allies, Valkyr's infinite invincibility at incredibly cheap energy cost, Ash's Bladestorm hitting up to 18 enemies with 20k damage that ignores armour over five seconds and Saryn's Miasma hitting for 10k in an instant both with a single press. These are/were not functioning as intended with the game, they are/were gimmicks that are exploitable and need/ed to be addressed. That is bad design, because the abilities don't just out-class other tactics in the game, they outclass the other abilities on the frame, they become the meta, they become the sole reason to use that frame.
Other badly designed frames are ones that do not do anything they were intended to do at the level they should do, either mechanically or in functionality. Oberon is supposed to have a healing/damage balance, except his damage is weak, his buff/anti-debuff encourages people not to use their mobility and to cluster up (counter to game logic that says they're free-roaming up to 50m if you want Affinity), his heal is only effective if you somehow psychically predict when your team-mate is going to get hit for massive damage and cast in time for your heal to reach him, and then drains you for as long as it's active or until they hit max health, and his 4 is supposed to balance healing with damage by dropping health orbs on killed enemies, but caps out in damage so it can almost never kill them, it works best as a temporary CC at higher levels, much like his 1. Limbo is supposed to be a master of the Rift plane, but his abilities are limited to 'go there and come back' 'make one other thing go there or come back' 'gain damage while there' and 'send a whole area there', it works on paper, but not in practice, and using Cataclysm defensively is usually useless since most enemies have to enter into it to be killed, but can in turn kill you, compared to Frost's bubble which you and allies can shoot out of.
Again, Over/Under Powered does not equal Bad Design. Gimmicks that encourage ignoring the frame's other abilities and functionality/mechanic issues that prevent you using the frame as intended are bad design. Also, this is supposed to include Visual design and Conceptual design, which a lot of people have been missing.
Please argue the point, not what you think it might be.
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1 hour ago, ShardsSuperior said:
First of all, at least three-quarters of the frames have abilities that trivialize melee enemies. Without swarm-based auras like the infested have, I'm not sure how any melee enemy can kill a competent player who can just Bullet jump away and knock down everything in his wake.
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First of all, zero-offense frames do not exist when most of your damage comes from weapons.
First first of all: Loki doesn't. That was a thing I was trying to say. Then there's the fact that it's not just frames, it's defense VIP's, pods, consoles and so on, that a bum-rush of enemies all swinging melee because they can't shoot, does happen and can get through. Bullet jumping is a thing, yes, well done, doesn't stop a badly timed evasion or a heavy unit's knockdown smash when you're trying to kill something else. It does happen. It's happened often enough when I've been playing Loki in a team and I've been the one having to go pick them all up again (thank RNG'sus for Vazarin during the more recent times).
You can jump right into a nullifier bubble, wonderful, you're now visible until you kill him and re-cast. I pointed out that you need weapons as a factor limiting his abilities and balancing out his skill set. He has to rely on them, he can't do everything, for everyone, all the time. Just because he's good at what he does, doesn't make him badly designed overall, I argue that it makes him better designed since his skills are all en-mode and need to be used correctly for best effect.
Second first of all: Yes, weapon damage can be good. But we're talking about a game where a frame like Nova can use that gun to instead churn out 400k damage every 3-4 seconds. That's something no weapon can do. Absorb, if charged by a team, can hit 300k easily.
Loki is one of the few frames that has absolutely no ability to directly affect enemies offensively. He can defensively remove their guns and defensively soft cc those same units there-after, he can divert aggro to a Decoy, he can switch teleport. Even Zephyr has Dive Bomb and Tornado, even if those are comparatively very bad abilities. Trinity can, with a long duration build, lock down CC a target for a given amount of time, and I would argue that Zenurik trivialises energy while EV is at least a little balanced, since with EV you actively have to seek a target and ensure your allies are within range.
I still don't see how anything you, or the guy before, makes him badly designed. Powerful, yes, maybe too powerful and in need of a nerf, but not badly designed, especially when that design was created when the game was created, and is somehow still useful after three years of game dev and changes that have managed to marginalise dozens of other frames created since. They buffed his energy efficiency and his range at some point in the past, but that's about it. If he was badly designed, he would have flat out been forgotten and been on the list of re-work frames by now.
A powerful frame does not mean a badly designed one, powerful ones can be nerfed, badly designed frames have to be re-worked.
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15 hours ago, RealPandemonium said:
Loki wins at the arsenal screen. There's nothing to pressing 2 every 15 seconds and pressing 4 to make all enemies in a 50m radius effectively useless forever.
That's bull and you know it, at the point where the difficulty has ramped up enough that guns on enemies are a genuine threat to your team's survival in a mission, the melee is then almost as dangerous and if you're not running a 4x Corrosive Projection, the armour is enough to let them get close and use it. If you can't kill those enemies before they hit a target, they'll still kill any defense/rescue NPC or pod or console in seconds, and any non-tank frame in one or two hits. Testing shows that the Lvl 1. base damage is only 60, but doubles to 120 if they use the jab ability, and ramps up per level until it can do over 900 by the time you hit actual high levels, enough to kill quite a lot of frames in, as I said, one or two hits.
Yes Loki is invisible, but if he's spending all his time picking people up because they aren't surviving waves of tanky melee enemies, he's not actually making the game easier, just delaying the inevitable.
And how about Nullifiers and Nul Combas, you can't disarm them, you can't Invis near them, you're back to weapon damage only, meanwhile your team is getting sniped by everything under the Nullifier bubble, or chased down by a deranged hover-skater.
I'm not saying that this powerful ability of his won't get some re-balancing, nor am I convinced he doesn't deserve it, I'm arguing that he's not a badly designed frame just because of what he's capable of.
Just because a good player can use him to make the game easier, doesn't change how well his abilities fit together, how much awareness of the game is needed to play him at high level or how much a bad player can drag down a team. There are dozens of times when players can, do, and should take other frames and other frames are actually more applicable to the mission to play as.
Especially when other combinations of warframes can do that just a well. A CC Frost, a Pacify Equinox, a Creeping Terrify Nekros and a Slow Nova on their own or as a combo can make missions like VIP Defense, Mobile Defense, Excavation and Interception the most easy missions in the game, because their slow abilities affect every enemy regardless of level, and if you combo them they can stack with each other.
I would personally pick up Saryn, work up the combos on her for tens of thousands of damage, or I'd take Banshee for her damage buffing and use her to level weapons, I'd take Zephyr and enjoy my near immunity to ranged attacks, for fun I'll pick up Atlas and spend a mission punching things in the face.
Warframes are fun to play with for variety, but because of how different each one is and the different roles each one plays, there will always, always be one or two that people consider essential for high level play.
I wouldn't leave for a long-run void or OD Defense without my AMD Nova build for smashing down the crowds, while others wouldn't go to a Defense without their Frost.
The fact that Loki, a zero-offense, low-defense, stealth and support-cc frame, can be used to make a team go further and better, does not negate that his presentation, how his abilities work together, his role in a team and his ability to solo on stealth missions are all because he is a well designed frame. Definitely better designed than the dozen or so that populate the ranks of 'badly designed' frames in the game people are arguing about in this thread already.
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1 hour ago, MacabreHaze said:
The healing ability might be a little better if you could like, perhaps see the HP of other frames.
PSA, there is a function in game for this, has been for a couple of years now, where a press of a key will show your allies status on your HUD right under your own and your kubrow/sentinel's status. You can have it on by default if you set it up in the options, rather than turning it on manually.
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20 hours ago, Enno69 said:
You say " if that frame can be used so well as to trivialise much of the game content for other players, then he's very well designed indeed." and use it as reason to praise Loki, then uses the exact same argument to downvote Ash (" easily trivialising much of the game's content for anyone else (there's a reason they call it an Ash-hole build") ... Something's wrong here.
You missed my point; I specifically said 'If a frame with no damage, no kill ability at all, a frame that is all about evasion, hiding, and debuffing the enemy to help his team' is able to trivialise game content, vs Ash who is currently the last of the Press 4 To Win crowd. I also mis-phrased my wording on Ash; he doesn't trivialise, he makes it boring, uninteractive, and uninteresting.
The point is you do have to play Loki half decently and even then you're not even scratching the surface. Loki can, and does, make game play easier. That doesn't make him a bad frame. Loki does not kill everything in the room, in fact his abilities can't kill anything unless you drop them off a cliff with Switch Teleport, his specialty is CC and radial Debuff. Should that be quite as strong? I'm not sure if the line-of-sight rule may come into play here, but unlike other single-cast radial abilities it only debuffs enemies, it does soft CC those enemies if re-cast, but it's better to drop a Decoy and hope it draws more aggro than your team, or the pod. Meanwhile recasting Invisibility every time it drops, constantly aware of where you are, where your team is, what the mission status is...
It takes a modicum of skill to play Loki effectively. It takes a great deal more, plus situational awareness and team awareness, to play him excellently.
Meanwhile any guy with a trip to youtube can build Ash for Bladestorm and use him to wipe out rooms of enemies with one button, denying his team the kills and affinity while providing little to no actual support for his team and basically making the game uninteractive for any of them.
This latter is the mentality that DE wants to remove, not the former. The former may need to be better balanced (line of sight, maybe), but the design is already far better, and has been since inception, than many other frames, which is why Loki has remained practically unchanged since... well, ever.
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2 hours ago, yles9056 said:
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Exactly, there are a ton of re-work threads, but all the most likely ones I've seen to actually get implemented actually have really simple fixes.
SpoilerLike the AI on Tornado being re-worked so it doesn't wander off, doesn't scatter loot and enemies, has more of a zone-denial kind of aspect to it and that standing in the area of it then interacts with her other abilities.
Dive Bomb, as another example, people always want to combine it with Tailwind; Tailwind itself would be fixed in one way, by giving a very gentle 'follow the cursor' aspect so you can go through doors, not into the wall, and a wall-recovery on hard angle impacts instead of fire-working into the wall until done, while Dive Bomb would be how you cancel your movement mid-air, a half second charge time would cancel out your movement and then dive, or just release to drop, parkour, re-tailwind, anything.
Turbulence has always been about RNG, they've balanced that, but need to fix the bullet tunnel bug so that going straight up doesn't get us hit regardless. Although the synergy with Tornado would be nice, maybe if you're in the range of the Tornado casting zone it knocks down enemies that come within a 1.5m of you for melee finishers.
And a new 2 would be needed after this. There are two that I've seen that work; a CC-based ranged attack that gets stronger as it goes, so at short range it staggers, at longer range it knocks down a single target and staggers those in range, and at longest range it ragdolls the target and knocks down the rest in range. In addition the damage, while small compared to other abilities, would be finisher damage, since 'air' can find and cut into all the weak points in armour. The second is quite good, a team buff that gives everyone 'raptor vision', giving everyone enemy radar and highlighting the crit points (the regular crit points, like heads) of enemies, and then granting buffs to the things Zephyr needs, like increased damage and range when in the air, or (my favourite) encouraging use of other abilities by 'marking' any enemies hit by Zephyr's abilities the same way Nezha's 2 does, so she can dive on a group of enemies, and all of them are then marked for a small bit of life steal, a fixed digit so it's not too overpowered. (Also, putting that delay on Dive Bomb would help to balance this, meaning you couldn't just spam it over and over with Heavy Impact, you would have to get height, charge it and release it every time to get the most out of it.)
So Zephyr either becomes a CC frame, with damage reduction, mobility, range and area denial, or an active ability caster and team buffer, where using her abilities more offensively allows her to survive more with that life gain. In either case, we could see her sacrificing a little of her really high shield and health for a little more base energy to move towards casting her abilities more.
But there's definitely a lot more frames than her that need the work sooner.
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This is one of the things I'm actually half-way on board with.
I've been running Zenurik for a very short time, casually levelling it up specifically for Energy Overflow, nothing else. I just wanted to see what it was like with 4.8 energy per second ticking up and how much it would affect my negative efficiency builds, like my Saryn.
I can't help but think that... a constant supply is too much. I'm only at getting 2 energy per second so far, plus the Energy Siphon, and I can already quite easily compensate for a Spores build that has negative efficiency of up to -40%
But! I can't think of a genuine way to nerf it without taking away all the fun of having it. Less energy might be a way, but... again, some builds are specifically suited for having it, especially for late-game.
How about it not being a constant supply? So the effect lasts for a minute or so after casting the ability, encouraging timing your casts for maximum effect... maybe. Or having some form of way to earn that energy back, the same way Naramon needs Crit damage to keep up Shadow Step, you could then trigger energy gain for doing something in game. Ten seconds of Energy Overflow for every set number of enemies killed, or... you know, something.
A constant supply of that much energy is very, very much like setting the game to easy mode. Having to trigger it by doing something, effectively earning that return, would make a lot more sense.
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4 hours ago, yles9056 said:
For me, it's Zephyr. She is disappointing. We expect Zephyr to be a true flying frame or at least a frame with good maneuverability in air, but she is not.
I don't like the design of Tailwind. It does not make Zephyr fly. It only turns her into a bullet. The vertical jump causes you to either bump into the ceiling or fly outside the height limit.
And having Dive Bomb as one separate ability is unnecessary. It's also hard to hit enemy unless you keep spamming it on the ground which makes the whole "dive bomb" concept pointless.
Zephyr was never meant to be a flying frame (in fact no frame is meant to be a flying frame, even the upcoming Titania uses an ability to become a micro-archwing instead of flying). The more people stop trying to make her a flying frame, the quicker DE will get to a proper re-work. Rant below.
SpoilerShe's an aerial frame, yes, reduced gravity, control over air, but just because she looks like she has a beak doesn't make her a bird. Certainly not a hummingbird that can hover in mid-air.
There are dozens of re-work threads on her, my own included, because she definitely needs a re-work.
But. She's designed well visually, she's themed well as an air caster (because Tailwind, Turbulence and Tornado are Air manipulation), her Tailwind is an additional mobility skill in a world where you have only bullet jump and a double jump on everything else (no matter where you're going, a Zephyr can get you there nearly as fast, if not faster, than a Volt can), and her Turbulence is one of the best damage reduction abilities in the game. Myself and many of my acquaintances on Warframe can, and will, take her to hour long runs in Void survival, and enjoy playing as her in any mode where the enemies have guns. Zephyr is a well designed frame that was, unfortunately, limited by the programming technology of the time and so isn't as useful in the game anymore. A new 2 ability and an update to how her Tornado works is all she really needs to be brought up to date.
The one thing I will always point out about Zephyr, though, is that flying won't make her better. I can do anything a flying Zephyr could do without actually flying, and you'd be wasting an ability to do that. It's way more sensible to give her an actual ability (by combining Tailwind and Dive Bomb into her 1st), like a wind-based CC or a team buff ability, as her 2, instead of wasting huge amounts of time and effort to make her fly.
In short, Zephyr is better designed than Limbo, since Limbo was designed with a specific set of abilities in mind, the Rift, that he then uses poorly.
Zephyr falls into the same category as Banshee, a well designed frame that people don't actually need, but occasionally still want.
In a similar fashion to Limbo, Oberon was designed to be a combination of offense and healing, a sort of druid or paladin style of character with an offensive base for his 1 and 4, but a way to heal and remove debuffs from team-mates with his 2 and 3. He does these things poorly. That makes Oberon a badly designed frame, although because his abilities actually do what they're intended to do (if not as well as many other frames), he's not as bad as Limbo.
Hydroid was designed to control Water and be a CC frame, his 1 is actually pretty random for a direct damage ability, while his 2 and 4 are pretty decent, but then... he turns into a puddle. A puddle of water. That enemies fall into. I... I don't even know what to say about that.
As for Nekros... as designed originally, he was perfect. The game has left him behind, though, and it's only now that his augments have made things a little more interesting, that he's back to being a solo-capable frame that's actually fun to play as. I wouldn't put him on this list as others have.
Back to Loki...
12 hours ago, bubbabenali said:Oh, how wrong you are, good sir.
He turns enemy AI nearly off at up to 50m range and can be out of sight of any enemy forever, also he has extreme mobility.
Doing any type of mission alongside a Loki (in the hands of a merely capable player) makes the run at least 50% easier, if not trivial.
You seem to forget that this topic is about 'badly designed frames'. All you're coming up with are reasons why he's actually well designed. If a frame with no damage, no kill ability at all, a frame that is all about evasion, hiding, and debuffing the enemy to help his team... if that frame can be used so well as to trivialise much of the game content for other players, then he's very well designed indeed.
Better than Ash, where people spam his 4 to deal around 20k damage to 18 enemies at a time, killing quite a lot of them up to very high level, and building up a melee combo counter at the same time to keep a crit-build weapon going, easily trivialising much of the game's content for anyone else (there's a reason they call it an Ash-hole build)...
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14 minutes ago, ShardsSuperior said:
Loki.
He was fine before Corrupted mods, but now, he's the literal embodiment of cheese. You can Invis walk throughout an entire mission without touching a single enemy. You can reduce every single enemy in the game to the same state - melee units with varying amounts of HP.
With the current look against player cheese, I don't understand why Loki hasn't been under fire.
I'll tell you why-for, my good man, it's because while you can cheese many mission types with him, you can't do two things that are considered complete cheese: room wipe or have an infinite of anything.
He's balanced by not having any kill abilities, by having no scaling abilities, his CC is minimal and his damage reduction is reduced to 'run and hide' or 'take their guns away'. In essence, Loki is purely a utility frame, and, because of that, his utility will never be lessened.
The frames that are there for fun, they'll be dealt with in turn, but Loki does what Loki does, he's in a box.
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The biggest point about these re-works that became clear to me is this:
DE Does not like infinite scaling, infinite range, or infinite anything. They definitely don't like room-nukes like the old Miasma or the old Radial Javelin. They want all of these abilities to be both damage capped and, where their range can reach 50m, line of sight based. Why?
Because Scaling 2.0 (or Damage 3.0) is in the works. They want to be able to make this game playable based on the skill and practice you put in and in finding a team you can play with and talk with to get the best results, not based on finding an exploitable combo and hitting the same two or three buttons over and over again.
There will, supposedly according to their comments, be no need for scaling abilities, because of the return to skill and teamwork and the rework to how damage is applied both by us and by enemies to us.
Mag's infinite scaling damage with the old Polarise was only situational, but in that situation was godlike, it allowed a four man team to progress through to several hours into void survivals by effectively camping in a room with good flow, no interaction, just throwing down a low-range bastille, peppering the ground with Torid spores to take care of the melee, and popping corpus shields whenever there was a large enough group. Desecrate, have Loki pick everything up (or worse, greedy pull before it benefited Mag-only), profit.
And let's not even get started on how Saryn's old min-duration Miasma build could stomp any alert, any star-chart mission, any challenge... Remember when the Manics were first introduced? There was a Treasure Ship mission for Darvo and you had to fight... dozens of them solo, and more if you were in a team? All we did was put my Saryn in a Frost bubble in the middle of the room, hide everyone else up in the corners, molt to draw aggro, and hit miasma every time one appeared. I don't think anyone even lost their shields, let alone took major damage, for the entire mission. The energy reduction to 50 wasn't even an issue since a max efficiency build is needed to get the minimum duration... So damn easy.
It's not possible now, and for that I'm actually thankful. It was so boring playing that way, so boring just hitting combos that you could actually macro, leave running and go get a cup of tea before you needed to check back in.
All in all, the reworks are something I'm actually happy with. I think DE is too, and should be.
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Gotta say I'm going with Limbo here, Ember was designed as one of the original 8 frames. At the time, and for quite a while after, she was considered one of the best damage frames in the game, and the go-to choice for Infested missions.
It's only since Damage 2.0, the introduction of several better frames for her speciality mission types, and a general move (not something DE intended) towards noticing just how much CC and scaling abilities worked better than fixed-damage types, that Ember became as bad as she was. With a couple of buffs, and some mechanical introductions like CC on her 2, that she became more a mid-tier frame than before. Ember was not badly designed, the game has moved on to leave her behind. Much the same as Zephyr, who was the first warframe introduced with a passive, the mobility frame in an era where coptering was the most mobile thing you could do, and had damage reduction (near immunity) and a roving CC ability as her 4th, which worked better back then because enemy AI was a lot more artificial than intelligent. Same thing, though, the game left her behind.
Limbo is supposed to be a frame that uses the Rift to mitigate damage, bring in friends to rescue them, bring in enemies to assassinate them, and then his ult was to be a great shift to take an area through to the Rift to stop enemies from attacking it. He was supposed to be the alternative to Frost for Defense, the alternative to Loki for captures and sabotages... but he's definitely not.
Hence why he's up next to get a re-work ^^
As far looks go, however... the only frames that I think have anything genuinely badly designed about them are Banshee's shoes and the default Mag Prime helmet... maybe a few of the alt helmets for Mirage and Mesa. Everyone else, as default looks go, is pretty XD
Thing is that the game has changed so much. Bad frames that we have now literally weren't bad frames when they were released. Under-powered, maybe, like Hydroid, but thematically and over time, the game has changed leaving some of those weaker frames as bad frames, and some of those better frames as unused due to people preferring other play styles (Banshee... such a good frame, but left so very much alone because she's not... what people expected when they play her).
As it stands, only Limbo is not performing as designed, and that's why he gets my vote.
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You do raise some good points, but I have some counter ones. Because changes are being made to the game; the Devs have already considered these points, and there are also some game design elements that explain, even if you're not keen on them, many of the others.
For an example, did you notice something from one of the prior devstreams?
They're adjusting the way the game works to make more mods worth something. Why would you ever take Warm Coat / Fire Repellant? Because, as we've seen a little of in the new corpus Sabotage missions, elemental hazards are going to be re-introduced with some legitimate level of threat and not just randomly the way they have been, each mission will now state whether it has a hazard before you start so that modding for it is now possible.
The mods themselves, and the weapons themselves, may not be equal, but the game is being adjusted as we go to make them legitimately viable choices.
Other mods you've raised quite legitimate points for, like the channeling on Reflex Guard. This one is what I like to call a Legacy; reflex guard is an old mod that's not currently a priority to fix, it was introduced because blocking used to work off a different system, the now-defunct Stamina. Seeing as Parkour 2.0 removed Stamina, and doing so meant that blocking had to become an Innate mechanic of the weapons, it had to be adjusted a little, but it then got shelved since more important content was taking precedence. It will be addressed, but it's about 999th place on the list of things to do.
I'd also like to point out that your views on weapons, while not exactly wrong, aren't exactly right either.
This is an RPG, it's about the stats. Not all weapons are created equal because there has to be gear that out-damages other gear. You have to want to farm up to get the best weapons, they have to be worth the time it took to get them. So rather than pull the same thing that every other RPG does and have one of each type of weapon that's re-skinned for better stats (with a slight name change, like Mk2), they design a new, unique looking weapon and balance its stats against its weapon type. Sure, there are a few re-skins for better stats, but that's on quite a lot of weapons that people would normally get to early, would work, but not be spectacular, and then move on. (I mean, really, Twin Gremlins Wraith?)
Therefore it becomes a matter of using what you feel is best for the mission. A high rate of fire, low damage, high crit chance weapon like the Soma Prime sounds good, especially since it's primarily Slash damage and you're going to run Void with a team equipped with Corrosive Projection. While a Panthera doesn't for that... but then again what if you're not going there? What if there's an alert for something and you just want to have some fun?
My Panthera build won't ever equal a Tonkor's damage, but I feel so much better about running normal star-map missions with it and feeling like I'm not wasting my tense of thousands of damage on level 30 enemies. It's *boring* to play with the best weapons all the time, that's why you have these more interesting, but less damaging, weapons so you can mod them to be good (if not actually great) and viably use them in many different game modes that aren't end-game or endless ones.
In terms of game design, not everything being equal is actually the way to go. It makes players keep looking for things, keep grinding for that better weapon, that different warframe and so on.
As I say, you're not exactly wrong, but I just can't say you're right either.
From a certain point of view, yes this game is all about the grind, it's about shooting things for more things, lather-rinse-repeat. But I have yet to find a warframe and weapon combo that doesn't have potential, that I can't have fun with.
Before Parkour 2.0 I picked my weapons for their Coptering speed, because movement mattered more in most situations. Now I can take whatever I want, when I want, a Fraggor is a legitimate choice against a Tipedo again.
Before Damage 2.0 a weapon like the Akjagara would have been laughable, now with a few Forma it competes well enough that I can use them just because I like the looks and I don't even mind that it's not as fast as taking a Brakk or Atomos.
The game is changing around us, there will forever be a cycle of weapons and mods that aren't useful at the moment, of abilities that don't do well vs others.
I just think you need to have a little more faith that DE already knows this and is already planning new things to take advantage of those weaker options.
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Many thanks OP.
Now excuse me while I go shake my head at yet another guy that wants to make Zephyr have a hover/flight ability... honestly, it just doesn't work.
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3 hours ago, Aquasurge said:
just curious, just how big was the clan?
We had 24 members including the test guy, at the time.
Then we went on to make an Alliance with the original high ranking members each heading up a clan of their own, so we're now... about a 150 I guess, we hit nearly double that during the Second Dream, but recruiting has been slower since then.
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2 hours ago, BeardyKyle said:
Yeah, I saw the devstream where Steve mentions it. I laugh because that was awhile ago and it seems DE is always pushing new content and adding small fixes instead of handling this issue.
Of course you're right, especially with U19 fully announced and listed off over in the Dev Workshop, but he also said he's been trying to find fixes for it ever since Damage 2.0, so... can we hear the official 'Soon'? XD
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54 minutes ago, -GDN-Blazkvitz said:
Another whining one. What is wrong with these players?
Bursas are hard? Really? Actually, do you know where to shoot?
Also, don't wanna play it? Just stop then.
Really, another one who doesn't bother to read the thread, then condescends and contributes nothing while others actually try to help out?
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9 minutes ago, BeardyKyle said:
Lol.
This is completely right. However the same doesn't apply to weapons, they should definitely scale damage with level and free up those slots for more customization. The only reason I can think for DE leaving them in is to occupy players who have to level, forma, catalyst etc to get a build with Max damage and space for other mods.
You may laugh, but Steve (in particular) is trying to do just exactly that. Rebalance enemy scaling to the point where enemies at level 30 are considered as dangerous as a rank 30 Warframe, and rank 100 are supposedly more powerful than a squad of four. Where the actual damage you can do doesn't mean as much as the tactical balance between weapons, abilities and combos, the cooperation between players and the game awareness you get from consistent practice.
DE do not like scaling enemies into the hundreds, they don't like that people can cheese sorties (or that cheesing them is the most viable way to get your loot), they like encouraging variety, team play and using all four warframe abilities together to do the most damage or control the most area of the map.
Most importantly they don't like 'essential' mods. Ones you are required to level up and use on every single build you have in the game; Serration, Point Blank, Hornet Strike, Pressure Point. There are pros and cons to every other mod in the game (except maybe Split Chamber and Hell's Chamber), but these four are considered 'essential'.
This is where they're beginning with weapons. By incorporating the base damage scaling into the weapon itself, you remove the four essential mods, ones that have no purpose in game other than to force players to fuse mods until they have one of each at max rank to even progress further in the game.
Zephyr's passive tweaks.
in Warframes
Posted
Eh-heh, you'd be surprised actually; I've been to dozens of re-work threads and not one person wants to change her passive, instead they want to buff it so it applies to the parkour system too.
Zephyr's passive makes her one of the most mobile frames in the game, yes it's annoying if you hit the top of the door instead of go through it, but that doesn't change the fact that for any regular run she can pretty much keep up with a speeding Volt due to her not touching the ground as much, and being able to steer in the air to get past obstacles that other frames have to parkour around.
Low gravity is considered a nightmare mode status for other frames because they lack Zephyr's steering ability in the air, they literally can't move left and right, or back, during low grav, only slide, aim glide or use the double/bullet jump. Parkour 2.0 is fairly recent, Zephyr isn't, her passive made her the perfect speed run frame, especially in nightmare modes where her Turbulence compensated for the lack of shields. Even with parkour, if you've used your second air jump (bullet or otherwise) already, that's it, you're stuck moving in the same direction until you land, and if you're heading over a pit good luck, have fun.
Now I've already said, and I won't deny, that when you're too high off the ground and want to be on terra firma again, low grav is pretty annoying. But compare that to Atlas' passive, where he can't be knocked down if he's standing on the ground, a powerful bonus, right? Except that if he wants to parkour in a mission his ability is null and void. Similar trade. You get control in the air but can't land early.
The only change that anyone I've ever seen mention about Zephyr's passive is that maybe, maybe, crouching with no momentum should make you drop faster instead of slide. That's about it.