State of the frame

[LizSeven]

Alright I may be beating a dead horse here. I'm still new to the game only 60 something days but I've noticed in not the only person that see's this as a problem.... DE, what is with the terrible rng passive abilities? For specific examples. Gara, Frost, Ember, Hydroid, Nyx. 

Gara is rng based and situational if it's night her passive means nothing it's a raft in the sea its list you aren't gonna find it. 

Frost why? It's not like frost has a huge reason to even leave his bubble as it stands getting a frost out of his bubble is like trying to make friends with a honey badger.

Ember on paper good idea put into practice is potato water, why must enemies be the ones to set you on fire why can she not use her own flames???

Hydroid I still believe was a bet that whoever won could pick the passive and nobody was allowed to voice their opinion about it. Why does he have a "chance" I can make him summon them with his 4 and not only not have to ground slam but I get more for my buck?¿?

And finally Nyx I love nyx but her passive makes things worse a specific example used my 4 on some corpus they begin fighting I see a nullifier bubble and you know what else I see 3 idiots baton in hand rushing the nullifier why because instead of keeping their guns and shooting at it the passive activated and they decided to have a slug fest that the nullifier's bubble completely messed up. 

[Birdframe_Prime]

Okay LifeOfRio we know it's you...

That said, though, fair points in raising them. Buuuuut, aside from the caveats on the passives making them less useful in the first place (how situationally useful they are), what's so wrong about them being RNG based?

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

Gara's passive, while RNG based, is tremendously useful. It has a 12m range, 10 second stun duration and opens enemies to Finishers. I love it. 

[GrayArchon]

The passive ability is not supposed to be clearing rooms. It generally has a small, mostly-unnoticeable effect. Some passives are actually bad, like Ember's (IMO), but Gara's and Hydroid's are just small little things that happen sometimes and benefit you. Your first ability should be more useful than your passive (although this varies across all the available frames).

[felixsylvaris]

Ember is not exacly RNG. If you can find a nice tileset with napalm paches you can set yourself  on fire quite often. However even then fire status last around 4 sec, so that is 40 energy back per patch.

There is a proud tradicion of bad passives, like Rhino is not really important one, but Rhino in general is a good frame. With Ember it hurts more since a lot of things in Ember could be done hot, but she ends as avarage flame with no good reason to play it.

With Gara you may make a point that if it happens it is good. With Frost the chance is low, and the requirments very specific, so the chance could be higher.

Edited September 18, 2018 by felixsylvaris

[(PSN)CoolD2108]

vor 5 Stunden schrieb (PS4)LoisGordils:

Gara's passive, while RNG based, is tremendously useful. It has a 12m range, 10 second stun duration and opens enemies to Finishers. I love it. 

Pair that with her 90% damage reduction and the fact that it effectively reduces enemy fire and she's literally immortal.

That thing is the link that makes her the one most tanky frame in the game.

[Obe-Ron-Kenobi]

You forgot the worst of all: Chroma. Literally a non-passive. 

I mentioned changing it to a third jump with an aim-glide boost in my recent rework post, but currently anything is better than what it currently is.

[GrimAtrament]

  At lest they have a passive ;_;

[GPrime96]

4 hours ago, hazerddex said:

  At lest they have a passive ;_;

His Passive is by far the worse.

[EinheriarJudith]

17 minutes ago, VPrime96 said:

His Passive is by far the worse.

ember's passive can only be activated if there is a napalm or scorcher or hyekka master on the map or fire trap. atleast chroma passive is working.

[EinheriarJudith]

the problem i see is people are expecting passives to boost frames to an unbelievable point like nidus and inaros who both can cheat death. DE should never have introduced passives to this game.

Edited September 19, 2018 by EinheriarJudith

[GPrime96]

Just now, EinheriarJudith said:

ember's passive can only be activated if there is a napalm or scorcher or hyekka master on the map or fire trap. atleast chroma passive is working.

Ember’s Passive can work in a Invasion because there would be patches where you can take fire damage so you don’t have to take enemy fire to the face with her. Chroma’s passive only works with the Energy Color so when you find a build you are fine with, good luck trying to make Chroma look amazing while you are using only one Energy Color.

[EinheriarJudith]

3 minutes ago, VPrime96 said:

Ember’s Passive can work in a Invasion because there would be patches where you can take fire damage so you don’t have to take enemy fire to the face with her. Chroma’s passive only works with the Energy Color so when you find a build you are fine with, good luck trying to make Chroma look amazing while you are using only one Energy Color.

his passive is always on and influences his whole kit. embers is extremely situational and off unless those conditions are met.

Edited September 19, 2018 by EinheriarJudith

[(PSN)CoolD2108]

vor 7 Minuten schrieb EinheriarJudith:

his passive is always on and influences his whole kit. 

What's not essencially a bad thing. For something to let you choose the damage type is a great passive only rivaled by auguments.

It's just that his kit sucks.

That he can't really do much with it makes it a failure and that's not exclusively the passives fault. It's something that could be fixed by eather changing the passive OR by reworking him.

Edited September 19, 2018 by (PS4)CoolD2108

[EinheriarJudith]

nyx's passive actually works against her kit.

[Birdframe_Prime]

So what I'm getting from this whole thread is that the passives, most of which were created during update 18.13 in 2016, aren't good. And we knew that already because, as DE said when they created them, they were just 'flavour' for the frames in question.

I mean, who honestly thinks that Loki was created with 'infinite wall latch' in mind?

The majority of the 'good' passives are for frames that were created with those passives in mind, the original being Zephyr (which people still debate on whether they like the passive or not, but nobody can deny it's a unique theme and does make the frame 'different' from the others), and every frame since being created with one in mind. The most powerful passives are the ones that break DE's original intent of a passive just being flavour and get into the realm of full powers in themselves, with Nidus' Stacks/Undying/Self Heal and Octavia's Energy Regen.

The passives that we're talking about, the RNG ones listed, are almost all described as 'not good conditions'. The fact that they're RNG, and the effect they have, doesn't actually come into it.

Gara is the best off, with an effect that blinds enemies, who wouldn't want that? A free, short-range Radial Blind is a good effect. It's the conditions placed on it; only available in the light. Warframe uses Volumetric lighting, and so defining 'light' and 'shadow' has always been a difficult thing. Mirage gets around it by having her Eclipse actually physically change her appearance when you're in light and shadow, so you can actually see which effect she's having. But Gara does not, and there are places in the game, particularly earth, but also a lot of the tiles on asteroids, ships, the Derelict and so on, where there's a vast imbalance of light-to-shadow.

That condition is what makes it not a good passive.

Hydroid, with his tentacle? There's actually a pretty fun play-style with him where you use his Undertow to pull in enemies and group them up in a slow version of Nidus, then double-jump out of the ability to ground slam all of the enemies you've gathered with a usually slow weapon, like a hammer and you potentially Tentacle all of those enemies for more damage while you go. But, as we know, the condition of doing a ground slam to get it? That's pretty terrible. Having the ability to bring up a mini-version of his 4 without energy cost is not a bad passive, but the activation of it is slow, cumbersome and people just... don't use it.

Wait for the Ground Slam change in Melee 3.0, I bet you it'll be a good passive then ^^

Frost and Ember are, by far, the worst off. They are the only ones who have to play counter to their own preferred play style to get the effects. Frost is not supposed to get into melee range, that's why he has Globe, Ice Wave, Freeze and Avalanche; to stop enemies from hitting him in the first place. If Frost is getting to use his passive, you're not using his abilities in a way that prevents that, and you're likely letting enemies do something else too, like hitting your allies, or a defense objective.

Frost's could be good if it affected enemies in just a basic radius, meaning that if they got too close to Frost, even if they aren't melee enemies, they could be frozen, as long as they're targeting him and the 50/50 chance kicks in. The possibility of running through a mission and an enemy you didn't notice targets you as you round a corner, only to get frozen because they're within a few meters of you and were unlucky with their defense roll? That could be actually fun.

Meanwhile Ember is in an even worse state, she can't even activate her passive unless there are specific enemies, or a specific Hazard, on the map. And even when she does, those enemies quickly scale to the point where taking an instance of damage from them to activate the passive will usually kill you with the Burn, even if not the actual damage. Ember does not want to take damage, least of all from Scorches, Napalms or Hyekka Masters... that's crazy talk once you get to the kind of level where Particle Damage is lethal in under three seconds. I have gone for two to three hour runs (in a team) with Ember, and not been able to activate her passive even once past the one hour mark without actually dying to it. Even going into Vazarin Operator mode and dashing through to heal back up and provide Damage Immunity doesn't help, because while you're not in Ember, she isn't regenerating Energy or casting her powers, just surviving the proc and damage. Worse, her own ability, World on Fire, blocks the energy regen, and you need to de-cast and re-cast in order to benefit from the power strength.

The passive would be awesome if you could activate it with an ability combo. Maybe casting 1 at your feet when you're inside your 3? Meaning you'd have cast two abilities, but you'd get 60 Energy back over a 6 second fire proc, putting her on par with Octavia for energy sustain (as long as she's not in World on Fire).

And then Nyx has a unique problem; the effects of her passive are useful and scale well, as we've seen with Loki time and again. But the condition 'enemies effected by her powers' is so poorly executed. With Mind Control, at least, they specify that they 'relinquish' at the end of the ability, but everything else is at the instant it happens. Meaning that if you cast Chaos over a wide area, roughly half the enemies are disarmed and go charging about in melee mode, doing nothing to each other or, worse, charging at a Nullifier, running into the bubble and cancelling the effect, then coming right back at you. The conditions are just... not thought through.

Simply putting the condition to 'enemies have a chance to be disarmed at the end of her ability effects' would change that up, making the ability clear that for every cast you do, only once the cast ends is there chance of a specific effect.

tl;dr

The RNG nature of the passives isn't the problem, it's the bad choices of limitations on them, the bad conditions around how they do what they do, not what they do specifically. 

Edited September 19, 2018 by Thaylien