Here's why Titania is still bad

[malekas]

With the recent "rework" and subsequent tweaks, the general feeling towards Titania is that she's still bad. I won't be posting any proposed fixes, but just what the problems with her abilities are. These are the problems that need to be addressed. Trying to tack on extra effects doesn't fix any issues.

 

Spellbind:

 

The casting time is a bit long for what it does. And the ability actually makes it harder to kill enemies. The way they float around makes them hard to hit, and headshots are pretty much impossible.

 

Tribute:

 

Most of the buffs are still awful.

Entangle: A 25% slow, even with the new range, is barely noticeable when active.

Thorns: Damage reflection in Warframe sucks, the game simply isn't balanced for it. Damage reflection on a squishy frame that specializes in "evasion" is just laughable

Full Moon: Companions disappear when entering Razorwing, 90% of players go straight into Razorwing at the start of a mission. And Razorflys are too squishy to expect anything out of, except a minor distraction.

 

Lantern:

 

The fact that the target still moves. A slow acting tether doesn't stop the target from being blasted out into space and rendering the ability a waste of energy.

 

Razorwing:

Healing Razorflys on kill sounds good, but the Razorflys are just too squishy. I just tested against a group of lvl 50 Lancers, and all of my Razorflys were gone in about 20 seconds.

 

[sappinmahsentry]

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The fact that the target still moves. A slow acting tether doesn't stop the target from being blasted out into space and rendering the ability a waste of energy.

Since the update, this has literally never happened to me. I don't get why other people have this problem.

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Spellbind:

 

The casting time is a bit long for what it does. And the ability actually makes it harder to kill enemies. The way they float around makes them hard to hit, and headshots are pretty much impossible.

Additionally: Why even use this over Lantern?

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Most of the buffs are still awful.

Entangle: A 25% slow, even with the new range, is barely noticeable when active.

Thorns: Damage reflection in Warframe sucks, the game simply isn't balanced for it. Damage reflection on a squishy frame that specializes in "evasion" is just laughable

Full Moon: Companions disappear when entering Razorwing, 90% of players go straight into Razorwing at the start of a mission. And Razorflys are too squishy to expect anything out of, except a minor distraction.

I agree with the other buffs that aren't dust being awful, but didn't they say they're gonna change them later? Good feedback though.

 

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Razorwing:

Healing Razorflys on kill sounds good, but the Razorflys are just too squishy. I just tested against a group of lvl 50 Lancers, and all of my Razorflys were gone in about 20 seconds.

I agree, how are you gonna heal something that dies?

I don't think Titania is bad, but there are definitely some weird things about her abilities that still need to be fixed. Good post.

[Andele3025]

Spellbind is still merely CC and with Razorwing damage output enemies flying away REALLY shouldnt be a issue.

Triubute and Lantern being entirely worthless is a issue however (tribute, for top levels of cosmic irony, even has partial self countering effect in that the insanely bad damage reflect is weaker due to the punch itself reducing the enemy damage output by 25% just for keks ignoring that all of the buffs barely come to the edge of her kill field/she survives best sticking to at least the 30m if not full on 40m away from enemies; lantern on the other hand giving immunity/immortality to a enemy and now being a meh/worse DG & Spectro that it finally works more reliably is still never worth the energy), so is lack of ways to recover razorflies (despite Lantern saying it summons razorflies to do the job in its flavor text) without dropping razorwing/losing augment stacks thus energy.

[WhisperBiscuit]

I feel like Titania has the same design philosophy as Baruuk, but by a different means. Baruuk has 3 abilities which provide CC or damage reduction in some form, to give him survivability. Then he has an exalted weapon that does good damage, when armor is not present. Titania is about achieving her survivability through evasion and CC, then a big single target damage exalted weapon for when it's time to kill. 

Titania's kit falls apart however in the sense that evasion makes her survival an rng mechanic, if she gets hit, she dies, even with low chances of getting hit. Couple that with 2 good CC abilities and she can be very hard to kill. She doesn't have 2 good CC abilities.

Spellbind takes too long to cast, is a two handed animation, and the range is small. But, it works in a pinch if you need status immunity and are in razorwing with tribute buffs. 

Lantern is a 75 energy cost ability. The CC is reliant on a mobile unit that requires LOS for the CC to work. It is situational at best. Because any damage or aoe to the lantern sends it flying, probably breaking the CC. Secondly, it has a damage component (the reason for it's extra energy cost) that is ineffective. The DOT has low damage and the range is extremely low, so, if it is not cast at the center of a group, enemies usually don't get within range. And the explosion radius is ok, but low non-scaling damage. That, in effect, turns lantern into a worse Lull, for more cost. I do not understand the fascination with the slow walk to the lantern. It makes the ability work against itself and nullifies it's own damage potential. It would be more efficient to use Spellbind three times and create the same (reduce potential sources of income is damage through CC) effect while setting up status immunity. I'll never stop saying that lantern would actually achieve it's full effect if enemies ran to it at full speed. Grouped up enemies are easier to kill and grouped up enemies that are standing still even easier. Even with lantern's low damage it would, at least, do some damage that it doesn't currently do. 

[WhimsicalPacifist]

My current thoughts about Titania:

1. Tribute still is a waste of energy for 3/4 of the buffs.  Thorns sounds even nicer with 30m range, but damage reflect is the worst noobtrap in the game.  Punchthrough would be nice.  Mods scaling with Tribute would actually be nice as well if the buffs were actually meaningful.
2. Lack of Operator mode.  Right now I don't care about any of my operator skills or arcanes because for them to actually affect me, I have to jump out of Razorwing, onto foot, operator and then I can access the operator arcanes/Void Mode/operator skills.  No really, this is getting increasingly annoying when you introduce more homing missiles/AoE's on grunts and more homing attacks during boss fights that Void Mode are supposed to counter.
3. An increasing perception that Razorwing is allocating too much Design Space when it comes to attempting to balance Titania (and designing mechanics that hit her in the 'nads).  Ok, it can avoid melee and makes jump puzzles easy. Totally endgame content.  Is there a build that can make use of Tribute's slow, reflect or pet damage in an intriguing and statistically significant way for greater than lvl 30 content?  Why is Diwata at a state of melee weapons pre-Acolyte?  Why use her for Dex Pixia at all when there's far more easy options (and potentially superior DPS options) in Chroma or Rhino for the only times that the Pixia would shine?

[Xzorn]

9 hours ago, sappinmahsentry said:

Additionally: Why even use this over Lantern?

 

Group Status immunity.

It's also a cheap way to keep Dex Pixia ramped up with her Razorwing augment.

[birdobash]

With regards to her new tweak with her being able to heal razorflies with damage, they should've just made it so razorflies are GENERATED through damage not healed. If you lose all razorflies because they got 1 shot, they aren't going to be healed at all because they're dead, on the other hand if they were generated through damage even if they were to all die you could create new ones WITHOUT exiting and re-entering razorwing. (Plus I kind of feel like titania should be able to shît out butterflies)

Also buff the razorflies, because they only do significant enemy damage up to around 20-35 on a build with 286% strength, past that they tickle the enemies because of non scaling damage. Give them something useful that prevents the minuscule chance an enemy can hit you and therefore 1 shot you RNG-like, therefore making it so if an enemy is within razorfly range they cannot harm you because of X reason. This could either be straight up perma-stun when a razorfly is attacking an enemy or something else entirely.

Edited January 16, 2019 by birdobash

[ScytodiDaedalus]

Issues with Titania haven't changed and naturally haven't been adressed in the slightest bit, sure she got buffs so Tribute isn't a energy drain farm for the buffs and debuffs. Arguably I believe Thorns and Full Moon can be useful since they auras, they are meant to also affect teammates around you.
Casting speeds need to be altered and Spellbind needs to apply it's effect to targets that were in the area upon hitting the button and ending the animation, that way you can actually wash off status effects off yourself and allies when bullet jumping.

Now this is an opinion that's been on me for a while now but I feel Razorwing as an ability is too crowded with mechanics, Exalted Dual Pistols, Melee, razorflies and the movement and evasion and so, what I see redundant here are the Razorflies since they require recasting the Razorwing and the new tweak that allows you to HEAL low hp razorflies seems like a really strong of excuse of a buff.

I suggest strongly moving the Razorflies onto Lantern, since now you can have up to 3 lanterns(although it still would be great if you didn't need any enemy for this), either in their current state of summon X flies per lantern or make them swirl around the lantern and deal dmg in a radius around them when passing through enemies, thus buffing the AoE DMG of lantern since it's completely negligible. It would be great to have this since another really nice interaction between Razorflies and Lantern is having the flies target IMMUNE Lantern targets and sticking onto them forever.

[WhimsicalPacifist]

7 hours ago, ScytodiDaedalus said:

Issues with Titania haven't changed and naturally haven't been adressed in the slightest bit, sure she got buffs so Tribute isn't a energy drain farm for the buffs and debuffs. Arguably I believe Thorns and Full Moon can be useful since they auras, they are meant to also affect teammates around you.
Casting speeds need to be altered and Spellbind needs to apply it's effect to targets that were in the area upon hitting the button and ending the animation, that way you can actually wash off status effects off yourself and allies when bullet jumping.

Now this is an opinion that's been on me for a while now but I feel Razorwing as an ability is too crowded with mechanics, Exalted Dual Pistols, Melee, razorflies and the movement and evasion and so, what I see redundant here are the Razorflies since they require recasting the Razorwing and the new tweak that allows you to HEAL low hp razorflies seems like a really strong of excuse of a buff.

I suggest strongly moving the Razorflies onto Lantern, since now you can have up to 3 lanterns(although it still would be great if you didn't need any enemy for this), either in their current state of summon X flies per lantern or make them swirl around the lantern and deal dmg in a radius around them when passing through enemies, thus buffing the AoE DMG of lantern since it's completely negligible. It would be great to have this since another really nice interaction between Razorflies and Lantern is having the flies target IMMUNE Lantern targets and sticking onto them forever.

Want crowded design?  Octavia.  So many buffs that actually affect your team in massive game changing ways.  I'd rather that a team mate not try to build around Thorns.  They have to build to take damage, and that means no adaptation, minimal armor.  After they take damage they then reflect it back but the problem is that Warframe HP limits reflect to insanely small amounts compared to enemy health.  In a Sortie 2 or 3 you wouldn't even add a percent of damage to the score.

As for pet damage, pets get stuck on Hydron geometry and are not reliable.  Most people still use sentinels but if they do use a pet it's primarily a Kavat for utility.  As for actual usefulness, I'm assuming it stacks additively with Pet Damage mods just like most other buffs add with their mods.  So in the end you're not buffing that one Kavat in the squad by 75% damage, you're buffing it by 80 base damage * (Maul% + 75%).  So 324 total damage instead of 264.  Yaay.  Balloons fall from ceiling and it maybe kills 4 grunts instead of just 2.  Insert video of highest damage companions below.

 

[ScytodiDaedalus]

1 hour ago, WhimsicalPacifist said:

Want crowded design?  Octavia.  So many buffs that actually affect your team in massive game changing ways.

Okay now, Titania is meant to also have 4 buffs but now I see how useless Full Moon can be thanks to additive damage and the companion AI, this is another problem altogether really, but the damage buff is very small, negligible. As of Thorns now, considering it is damage after calculations on armor... yeah pretty useless, even more so for Titania. It would a bit different if it gave atleast 25% DReduction for allies and if the Dmg reflection even wants to be kept, needs to be above 50% reflected before damage calculations against allies.

For some reason I feel Thorns was somehow an ability designed to work only with Inaros on squad now...

[Fallen_Echo]

A simple fix for all the problems:

Spellbind now gets hard cc instead of flying away, enemies gets frozen in the air 0.5 seconds after flying.

Tribute entangle gets 25% accuracy loss, thorns is now true deflection so if you get hit by 100 damage you take 75 points damage and 25 gets reflected at the enemy, full moon affects razotflies and lantern razorflies.

Lantern gets hard tethered, so it cant move away more than 2 meters from its cast point.

You can now spawn 1 additional razorfly on kill and the less you have the more damage they deal.

[Elementalos]

On 2019-01-15 at 3:10 PM, WhisperBiscuit said:

Titania's kit falls apart however in the sense that evasion makes her survival an rng mechanic, if she gets hit, she dies, even with low chances of getting hit. Couple that with 2 good CC abilities and she can be very hard to kill. She doesn't have 2 good CC abilities.

I don't think the problem with Titania is anything systemic. It's just frankly, that her abilities aren't very good as is. Spellbind is too slow, Thorns is too weak, Razorflies die too quickly, Lantern has all sorts of weirdness to it, Diwata just isn't very strong. 

Her fundamental gameplay loop is solid, she's just held back by the way those skills interact right now.

[Teridax68]

5 hours ago, Elementalos said:

I don't think the problem with Titania is anything systemic. It's just frankly, that her abilities aren't very good as is. Spellbind is too slow, Thorns is too weak, Razorflies die too quickly, Lantern has all sorts of weirdness to it, Diwata just isn't very strong. 

Her fundamental gameplay loop is solid, she's just held back by the way those skills interact right now.

I personally feel it's both: even if Titania's kit were perfectly fine by itself, her reliance on evasion to survive means that, in high levels in the current state of the game, she constantly operates under a random chance of getting one-shot. That's not good gameplay, and while part of that simply has to do with the nature of RNG evasion, part of it is a systemic problem tied to enemies scaling to excessive amounts of damage against the players. It's the reason why squishy frames in general struggle in the current meta, which makes it a problem that affects many more frames besides Titania.