Feedback on Valkyr (Prime)

[Traumtulpe]

Some time ago I build Valkyr Prime - and while she is as one-dimensional as expected, I had a lot of fun with her. Enough fun to buy her Gersemi skin (which is awesome) and try out every build I could imagine. In light of the upcoming changes to melee (and thus presumably changes to Valkyr) I would like to offer some feedback to be considered in a potential rework.

Valkyr does two things: Being really tough and hitting enemies really hard with melee weapons. To this end she uses two skills; Warcry and Hysteria. These abilities are perfectly serviceable (though not flawless), her other two abilities however are borderline useless. Let me describe the issues and uses of all her abilities:

Ripline: Very cool and unfortunately very bad. The damage is pointless - less than an Amp at 221% ability strength. I tried to kill Kela De Thaym with it but lost patience and just oneshot each phase with a single slide attack in Hysteria. Pulling enemies is mostly pointless, pulling allies is generally unwanted and hardly moves them anyway. The only use this has is for movement - and even then only on very rare occasion as bullet jumping is faster and without cost.

It really is terrible. Should at least be faster than bullet jumping, pull farther and cause a slash proc or remove armor. The augment doesn't even deserve to be mentioned.

Warcry: Why isn't this recastable? Why does it cost so much energy? Sure, it effects allies but most allies don't use melee weapons and have little use for armor - it should do something for gun/ability users, like increased casting and reload speed. Increased casting speed and recasting would be particularly nice in combination, since it's animation is exceptionally long - it really feels bad without Natural Talent.

The slowing is nice, but you need to reduce it's duration, increase it's range, increase your casting speed, increase your efficiency and increase ability strength to make this useful. Which by the way is the only way to give Valkyr any utility at all.

The augment is good. Except when you want to buff an objective or the rare Excalibur, as you can't recast.

Paralysis: Why is this utterly unreliable? Any animation at all will block the stun - enemies can stand behind cover, slightly bend over, looking around and be immune to the stun for several seconds. This has two uses, destroying reactor cores and opening enemies to finishers - the second use doesn't work half the time on regular enemies, it has no effect at all on special enemies like the Grineer on Vodyanoi (doesn't even stagger them) despite other methods of causing finishers working just fine (Naramon dash, Stinging Thorn).

The augment is interesting but ultimately not worth using, also has no effect on Vodyanoi. You could make this comparable to the skill Larva from Nidus and it would be great.

Hysteria: Good damage, makes you immune and heals you. Very powerful, but transition in and out could be smoother (Natural Talent is very noticeable for activation), attack speed is so fast (especially with Warcry and Berserker) that you can't use combos or attack manually at maximum speed. This could really use being an "automatic" weapon. Accidentally activating combos is actually annoying as they lock Valkyrs attack direction and impair movement.

It's major weakness is the short range compared to a regular weapon you would use. The damage on deactivation has never made any difference at all for me, might as well not exist. I love the screw attack from jumping, but it would be even more awesome if it dealt damage and allowed an additional jump while in the air.

On a general note, energy drain enemies are particularly annoying for Valkyr since she is always close to them and they reduce her to slowly smash away in melee combat. They consistently drain energy faster than Rage can restore it. I would suggest changing them to periodically drain large amounts of energy to give players a chance at casting abilities in between.

Well, that became a wall of text. Thanks for reading anyway, I am looking forward to melee 3.0.

[GPrime96]

17 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

The slowing is nice, but you need to reduce it's duration, 

Reduce it's Duration? Why?

 

19 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

 I would suggest changing them to periodically drain large amounts of energy to give players a chance at casting abilities in between.

It already Drain a lot of energy if you stay in it for too Long with Negative Efficiency but the Drain is barely Noticeable if your build is Efficient and having Duration can prevent the ability from draining a lot of Duration at the Start since this ability drain Energy over time like Ember's WOF Energy Drain. So i don't see why this needs to happen.

But the rest of your Review, I can agree with.

 

[Traumtulpe]

2 minutes ago, VPrime96 said:

Reduce it's Duration? Why?

So you can cast it again on new enemies sooner.

2 minutes ago, VPrime96 said:

It already Drain a lot of energy if you stay in it for too Long

I am talking about energy draining eximus units (very typical for infested), not Hysteria's energy drain.

[GPrime96]

1 minute ago, Traumtulpe said:

So you can cast it again on new enemies sooner.

I am talking about energy draining eximus units (very typical for infested), not Hysteria's energy drain.

Now, i get what you are saying. Enemies like Parasitics is one of the reason i don’t use Hysteria a lot in Eximus Strongholds or High level infested Survival runs (Ancient Disupruptors can affect Hysteria too with his hook). Gineer barely bring Energy Leeches wierdly even when you are at lvl 200+ and lower and it’s not a eximus Stronghold while Corpus brings them more oftenly. so changing their energy drain would help.

[Femuru]

Ripline Yea pretty bad

War cry I'd prefer they not increase range and not reduce the duration as it'll reduce her kills per sec. Reducing her kills per sec also means death in her endurance runs cuz if she doesnt kill fast enough mean less energy orbs dropped. If anything i wish upon having hysteria activated it changes the armor boost for a status chance or attack range boost.

Paralysis Yea I kinda wish they work on this ability in some way and that cast time does take forever. 

Hysteria the main problem with this ability is that the stance for it is god damn horrible. She needs a new stance with a slight range or status chance boost which is why I proposed a idea on warcry. As for the charged finisher she have tbh they should of add that into the augment like ash teleport augment cuz the way her finisher is rn is kinda annoying. 

Edited October 9, 2018 by ShenRyujin

[Traumtulpe]

2 minutes ago, ShenRyujin said:

War cry I'd prefer they not increase range and not reduce the duration

What I meant was, that the player has to mod for these changes to make Warcry's slowing effect useful. Of course otherwise you would not want a reduced duration.

[Autongnosis]

I'd really want Warcry to be an aura slow instead of an on cast AoE slow, and for Ripline to work as a swing line instead of a straight pull. 

That would basically solve any qualm i have with Valkyr. 

[GPrime96]

Another thing about Paralysis is even when you use it with Hysteria, the enemy can all of a sudden survive the Finisher if a Ancient Healer appear. So that’s a annoying issue with Healers.

Edited October 9, 2018 by VPrime96