Banshee's silence

[Shidonia]

Hi, I've been thinking what does this ability do lately a lot since surpressed weapons are now her passive and a consistent addition to banshee.

We've seen quite changes this year, some of them were like tweaks, some of them were like reworks or some of the warframes came up with their own revolutionary uniqueness.

Every warframe is in an order,  getting their polish done or being add onto the game with their own peculiarity such as Khora. She was purposefully going to offer an pre-insight and gateway to damage 3.0, but instead became a getaway for exalted weapons to get their own slots and stuff.

Hildrin Wisp Limbo Titania have their own unique idle and sprint animations and made many fashion frame ideas possible.

Garuda and Revenant on the other hand were also a great school to teach players on how overshields and health mods could be used on advantage.

 

Gara taught us that invincibility not always make you invincible but still a good thing. She got changes to her duration based unbrakable glass walls and her second ability's presence has increased on her kit. And offered mobility to her playstyle. 

These latest warframes were always unique and different. They offered fun and stuff.

But I think it's time for DE to make Silence banshee's the new unique  passive with moddable range and give her a new ability instead of her third.

 

Cause this ability offers almost nothing when enemies hear each other's guns and react to it while considering they were surrounded by your aura in the first place.

Going back and forth is hard since banshee lacks those mobility attributes of other frames, unless you have arcanes (and arcanes are kinda endgame while banshee can be accessed from any clan's tenno lab making banshee getting deleted from many tenno's arsenal after maxing).

Her first impression is cool she looks great and lovely (both her regular variant and prime) and theme is perfect.

But let's be honest her gameplay is a turn off for many starters.

To examplify, even tho her first ability is being cast with one hand she is not given an ability to reload during the animation.

She lacks mobility while being a low armored frame. And while silence is a good stun ability and as some of you say going back and forth can trigger the stun animation again it is clashing with her sonar if built for low range. If built for high range then this time silence loses it cc. And using the augment for her sonar and having a moderate range for both abilities should be a thing that needs to be addressed since we have 2 open world maps.

 

I have an idea if DE is planning to keep silence, adding multiple layers or waves that trigger and which go back and forth on it's own to her silence could be a thing. These seperate auras will break your silence into 3 zones some will to push back some will to pin and some will stun the enemies so that player will be able to take out targets and get the numbers in the zone or their closeness to you controlled and banshee will be safe. 

But I do believe that she needs something else as her 3rd ability. Something more creative just like other frames and more self defensive. Thank you for reading. 

Edited February 14, 2019 by Shidonia

[LSG501]

some paragraphs or breaking up of the wall of text would have been useful...

Banshee's silence is a form of cc, it's 'stuns' the enemies so they don't attack you.  While it could maybe have a few minor tweaks it works fairly well as is imo.

[Shidonia]

11 minutes ago, LSG501 said:

some paragraphs or breaking up of the wall of text would have been useful...

Banshee's silence is a form of cc, it's 'stuns' the enemies so they don't attack you.  While it could maybe have a few minor tweaks it works fairly well as is imo.

Thank you I re-edit the text. On the last paragraph I addressed some of the concernings with her 3rd ability range clashing with her sonar. Basically using sonar augment to make it easier to spread and having a moderate range for her should be addressed with adding more self defensive dimensions to her kit because we have open maps and I don't want her to be a hamster warframe for corridors. 

[Voltage]

Silence is extremely useful for leveling weapons with the augment (Savage Silence). Given Banshee's passive makes your weapons silent, you can solo stealth level with this ability. It is also handy for a quick stun to save yourself (same goes for Sonic Boom). I wouldn't touch Banshee at all. Her kit has niches and all abilities have a use in different scenarios.

[Birdframe_Prime]

Voltage, above, is absolutely right that the ability is useful for levelling weapons. But that's whether you have Savage Silence or not.

Thing is, my friend, that Banshee is one of the best levelling frames almost full-stop, because of how easily Silence lets her exploit the game's damage multiplier functions and the Stealth Multiplier for Affinity.

The problem people encounter is the fact that they feel encouraged to mod for Range on Banshee, for using her other abilities a little better, and that simply isn't the name of the game in this case.

Going for neutral or even slightly negative range gives a Banshee player a very, very simple method of killing enemies. You run up to them and hit them with your stick.

I'm kind of joking, but I'm also really, really not... Run into range, cause the stagger, it places any enemy into the state where the bonus damage for Unaware enemies is in place. Any melee hit will deal up to 8x bonus damage, and any primary or secondary will get multiplied damage as well. As you're killing enemies within your own range, while they're stunned, the only way that the alert can be raised is if you're running directly at an enemy's face.

It's now all about placement, making sure you enter rooms where you can be sure to either kill everything in short succession, during each enemy's stun section, or that you can escape notice before the end of that stun period and double back to inflict it again before they notice any body-parts on the floor.

An important note is not to leave a mess where the enemy can see it, that will alert them just as fast.

Basically, because you're not making sound, enemies are entirely reliant on line-of-sight to notice you. Anything from being down a short lip so you're not on eye-level, to being slightly above them in the air, and if you're far enough around that you can't see their eyes? They can't see you.

So make sure you use the high mobility that all Warframes have and just exploit the hell out of them not noticing you until they're clutching at their heads from Silence's radius and you're spin-attacking a sword through their lower intestines.

Could Silence be given a new mechanic that helped her out? Sure. But I'd rather they reworked Soundquake so that it wasn't counter-logical to the rest of her play style, or allowed Sonar to be cast while running, or Sonic Boom becoming a one-handed cast (or all three), because a lot of players already know how to use Silence to literally break speed records on Forma runs or Focus gain.

[TurningDrop]

It would be nice if they made it so that the stun that enemies get when they enter the radius would scale with duration. The stun from it is what keeps banshee alive.

[Tiltskillet]

8 hours ago, TurningDrop said:

It would be nice if they made it so that the stun that enemies get when they enter the radius would scale with duration. The stun from it is what keeps banshee alive.

This is one of the things I think whenever I play her.  The base duration is so short I doubt it would need much rebalancing, but the extra leeway would be huge for me.

(I'm not very good at Banshee-ing though.)

Edit: the alternative thing I always think about is a debuff that would linger on Silenced targets.  There's a bunch that seem vaguely appropriate, but a Slow effect is a  simple one  that would really make her ability set hum.

(In my humble bad-at-Banshee opinion.)

Edited February 15, 2019 by Tiltskillet

[ShortCat]

20 hours ago, Shidonia said:

But let's be honest her gameplay is a turn off for many starters.

Banshee is easy to acquire, but she is not a newb friendly Frame.
The way I play run&gun Banshee is with Stretch and utilizy Silence's boundry as my engagement line at ~30m. Enemies come to a halt and I can easely destroy them with damage boost and map markers from Sonar. Depending on your aim, map awareness and with huge damage boost, enemies usually die before they can recover from stun. Enemies should not get close, and if they do, push them away with Sonic Boom.
With 1.1 runspeed, Banshee is above avarage and frankly I do not know what mobility you are talking about, as bullet jumps devalue most mobility skills.

You are right about her effectiveness on open maps, this issue is not exclusive to Banshee though. In general, Frames without active DR skill suffer, as enemies engage from greater distances and all directions.

I enjoy Banshee, because her toolkit does not provide an immortality button, AI shutdown button or delate all enemies button. However, she could use some tweeks: 1handed action for her #1 would be nice. Silence could actually silence enemies, not deafen them. She would welcome a new #4.

[Shidonia]

10 hours ago, ShortCat said:

Banshee is easy to acquire, but she is not a newb friendly Frame.
The way I play run&gun Banshee is with Stretch and utilizy Silence's boundry as my engagement line at ~30m. Enemies come to a halt and I can easely destroy them with damage boost and map markers from Sonar. Depending on your aim, map awareness and with huge damage boost, enemies usually die before they can recover from stun. Enemies should not get close, and if they do, push them away with Sonic Boom.
With 1.1 runspeed, Banshee is above avarage and frankly I do not know what mobility you are talking about, as bullet jumps devalue most mobility skills.

You are right about her effectiveness on open maps, this issue is not exclusive to Banshee though. In general, Frames without active DR skill suffer, as enemies engage from greater distances and all directions.

I enjoy Banshee, because her toolkit does not provide an immortality button, AI shutdown button or delate all enemies button. However, she could use some tweeks: 1handed action for her #1 would be nice. Silence could actually silence enemies, not deafen them. She would welcome a new #4.

I love her playstyle as well and I love the fact that she requires a little bit of pre-testing forehand playing with her to define a comforting range for your sonar & silence. But a moderate build for banshee to increase her survivability is always around 30ish in game meters which isn't that cool because it doesn't offer uniqueness or more possibilities to further enhance her kit or benefits you can get from it.

She has the very greatest augments basically banshee is fun especially the fact that she doesn't have delete all enemies in the room button. She offers a fun way to do all of that work manually to you with sonar and her abilities but her defensive capabilities are really low she is pretty hit and run but lacks mobility and by sprint speed being 1.1 I'm talking about the way other frames are designed. Other low armored frames always feel much more faster than banshee and feel less sloppy you always have to stop to cast an ability maybe small quality of life changes could shut my mouth on her you know. I believe that she has to be more agile and a quick killer and some synergies could be added cuz disregarding the time you have to become a banshee pro, she makes any team endgame. But not widely used even tho she is easily acquirable.

I wanted to see some changes with banshee cuz i love her design and my ideas could be stupid but I want to see her get an oberon treatment or saryn like one. And Silence ability seems like a really good candidate to fill it with other possibilities since they emptied it a bit by moving surpressed weapons buff to her passive. It was a cool change but either DE was lazy with it and gave an unrequested passive to her and emptied silence ability for me. Or she needs silence to be taken down, one way or another for me cuz feels a bit empty

 

Edited February 15, 2019 by Shidonia

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, Shidonia said:

I wanted to see some changes with banshee cuz i love her design and my ideas could be stupid

Heh, not as stupid as mine... or a lot of other people's.

Thing is, though, Banshee has 1 Utility cast, 1 really strong buff cast (really, really strong...), 1 pseudo-Survivability cast and 1 radial Damage cast.

Combined with her passive she has the ability to be incredibly stealth-oriented, rivalling Loki for run-and-gun or Exterminate style missions. What she lacks, though, is the sustain necessary for anything else.

DE hoped to give her that function for other mission types with her 4, but they kind of made that... un-fun. It's counter to Mobility, it doesn't affect all enemies equally (damage will always vary from enemy to enemy, but when you apply a 4th ability you should at least be able to use it against every enemy type and not have some units simply avoid it), and it also doesn't play into her kit of using Sound as both Offense and Defense except in the most basic of definitions; it does damage and stops enemies from walking towards you.

Basically, while DE has succeeded in creating a strong frame, it's a frame with many, many drawbacks and caveats to the use. Want to Soundquake? Make sure there's no hovering enemies, no launching enemies, no Leech/Disruptor eximus units (because they make your ability drain faster) and no snipers with a direct line of sight. Want to use Sonic Boom, make sure you're not in need of a reload and you're not going to be in range of anything from behind you. Want to use Sonar? Stand still a bit while everything is still free to attack you, best do it when you're not being targeted at all. Want to use Silence? Well, part of it is now her passive, and part of it is a conditional function that is tricky to use correctly and relies on your Time To Kill being under 3 seconds per enemy from the exact moment you apply the effects of Silence to them.

Eesh... drawbacks, right?

But how have DE handled reworks recently? The good ones? They've taken a frame's less used abilities, the ones that don't really connect properly, and make them the most important part of the kit with new functions.

Take Nezha as an example, where before his Chakram used to be incredibly niche, it was a straight damage ability and marked enemies for a good, but incredibly low-range healing burst on death. Now? It's a damage multiplier (always, always a good thing), a guaranteed Health drop (which with his 90% DR is easily capable of healing him up), a 30% Energy drop (which is also always a good thing, it's never not), and on top of that it's a stun CC, guaranteed Status Proc and has a fully-functional interaction with his 4 that multiplies his Chakrams out to other enemies in different directions. Now that's just a great cast ^^

Yes they devalued his knock-off Iron Skin into a Damage Reduction with invincibility frames at either end and CC immunity. Yes they kind of ruined Pyroclastic Flow for the people that enjoyed it, because it now casts every time you either run out of Duration, or when you re-cast, meaning that it can never gain more than a certain level of damage. But the frame plays so much better now that it doesn't have any Drain function, can fuel itself on health and energy almost without fail, and has a great CC that doesn't have any de-cast animation to slow you down.

So why not look at Banshee the same way too? Take the focus from her least connected ability, make it almost new with new functions and every reason in the world to cast it, and then tweak the rest of her kit to fit in with it.

How about... this:

Spoiler

Passive: Suppressor. Banshee draws less attention from enemies than other Warframes and all of her weapons fire silently, including weapons equipped on Sentinels.

1. Sonic Boom. Create a sonic shock-wave with a wide cone of effect that ragdolls enemies and deals minimal damage. If an enemy is marked with a Sonar weak point, enemies affected by Sonic Boom will have a 50/50 chance to drop an Energy Orb or Health Orb on death.

Buff over existing ability: One handed cast to not interrupt reload or movement, also additional reason to cast the ability even without the Augment.

2. Sonar. Create a field of echo-location that pinpoints enemies and exposes weak points to everyone in your squad.

Buff over existing ability: Two handed cast, will interrupt actions and reloads, but not movement. Otherwise this ability is damn near perfect.

3. Silence. Creating a vacuum of noise, Banshee extends the effects of her Suppressor passive to all allies in range, and enemies that come into range are staggered for a minimum of 3 seconds, affected by Duration. Stunned enemies are affected by Stealth Damage Multipliers, but enemies that are Alert will remain Alert even if stunned. Killing an enemy affected by Sonar while within range of Silence will extend the Duration of the ability by 2 seconds per kill.

Buff over existing ability: Two handed cast, and that stun Duration extender, but the key is, again, interaction with that Sonar cast to make the ability last.

4. Sound Quake. Drop to the ground for up to 15 seconds (un-affected by mods) to imbue a charge of sonic disruption into the surrounding area, pulsing sound waves out in all directions at even intervals through the air and ground. Enemies are pushed back a short distance by each wave, the distance getting shorter the further away from the centre they are, and suffer medium amounts of damage per wave. Sound Waves deal damage to any Sonar Weak points. Based on the amount of time spent charging the ability, a Quake Zone of equal duration (affected by mods) is then created over the area affected by the cast. Within this area for that duration enemies suffer a 50% Accuracy debuff and a 30% Slow (affected by mods, both debuffs are capped, 75% Accuracy debuff and 60% Slow) due to the unstable ground. Only one Quake Zone can be active at a time.

Complete change from original ability. Capable of dealing out fair base damage, for a short time, but then creates an exploitable area of debuff for an equivalent or longer time. If you mod for 200% Duration, for example, the base cast will still only last for 15 seconds, but the duration of the debuff zone will be 30 seconds.

The damage can be upped by combining it with Sonar, and the part where you drop to the ground is then a risk/reward tactic to use with a bit less actual risk. Since all melee enemies and all flying enemies will be pushed back, and since the push-back is accompanied by a stagger CC to deal with enemies that could be shooting at you. As for the actual 'waves', take a look at the Banshee Prime Trailer, so rather than a rapid-fire, multiple instances of small damage type of cast, it becomes a true wub-wub where the same damage is dished out in less frequent intervals.

Cast Sonar, cast Sound Quake for 5 seconds, cast Silence to apply the stagger animation on the Slowed enemies in range, go to town on enemies for the next 10 seconds of the Quake Zone. If you're low on energy or health, try Sonic Boom a couple of times on the slowed, stunned enemies to apply slow-mo ragdoll to them and mark them for the Orb drops.

This whole idea is to make Sound Quake into the biggest work-horse of her kit next to Sonar. Sonar is, and always will be, an amazing and essential part of her kit, and Silence is just plain great anyway. Throw in some interaction with Sonic Boom to mark enemies, and you're doing well, but Sound Quake... You can use it for defense style missions to push back charger enemies, and then make sure they can't come back as fast, charging up to nearly 40 seconds (I think, at max Duration from modding these days) of heavy enemy slow and enemy debuff. You can use it for run-and-gun missions, hitting a short pulse and ending it early just to affect a single group of enemies long enough that the Silence CC is super effective and ensuring that you have your Time To Kill no matter how high you're going in level. You can use it on lower level as a short-term nuke, but you can't use it all the time, and you really want to use it for the debuff zone which will make everything easier no matter where you are. You can use it anywhere and it works ^^

What do you think about those?

Remove some of the drawbacks of casting her 1, 2 and 3, give her a way to sustain her 3 in a natural fashion, give her actual interactions between her kit that will help her self-sustain despite her low health, and give her that massive area debuff that will scale wonderfully through all the levels and everyone will find useful, even the damage will scale because you can cast multiple Sonars just like now, meaning you can stack damage zones (if you use even a Neutral Strength Banshee, that's 5x damage that then stacks another 5x damage on top for 25x damage, so a 200% Strength Banshee creates a 10x multiplier stacked with a 10x multiplier for 100x damage... I'm not even joking there, so if the new Sound Quake dealt 250 damage per wave, you could cast Sonar twice and reasonably expect some enemies to take 250,000 damage, while the rest would be taking at least 2500) and that is just freaking cool.

I think that our little Banshee, who is niche, but good now... would become a monster.

[ScytodiDaedalus]

6 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

What do you think about those?

The Sound Quack changes sound(heh) like the best thing that could ever happen to Banshee.
Silence changes for sustainability would be great, so duration isn't extremely mandatory for her
Sonar casting changes are good, does the enemy pinpoint mean see them through walls or see a marker through walls just like Zenith?

My real concern with the listed changes is Sonic Boom allowing her to get some energy revenue out of it, I feel like it might be too much considering Silence essentially becomes an infinite duration ability. Sound Quack finally becomes an ability that isn't just there to drain your energy away just because you feel like so or you have Resonating Quack, it's just great.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

Banshee is near perfect as is.  The only blemish being her sound quake.  Sure her 1 could be a 1 handed cast.  Sure the stun on her silence could be a little longer.  But neither are needed. 

[kgabor]

With a proper cc in form of a longer stun, Banshee could trivialize any content without effort pushing the frame to the broken category.

Currently with the duration being minimal it's just short enough to leave the ability skill oriented yet useful when used right either with a melee or ranged weapon. (though more tricky to make it somewhat viable with a ranged weapon, it also extends Banshee's passive into a team wide buff, so noobs around Banshee can't mess up Rescue and Spy missions as easily as without)

I would only like Sound Quake to be changed for an exalted sniper and Sonic Boom made an one handed cast, my Banshee does great with around 175-145% range (depending on build)and augments as is.

Knowing DE tho, i rather wouldn't want them to touch Banshee at all or we might end up with another useless frame for years.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

6 minutes ago, kgabor said:

With a proper cc in form of a longer stun, Banshee could trivialize any content without effort pushing the frame to the broken category.

Currently with the duration being minimal it's just short enough to leave the ability skill oriented yet useful when used right either with a melee or ranged weapon. (though more tricky to make it somewhat viable with a ranged weapon, it also extends Banshee's passive into a team wide buff, so noobs around Banshee can't mess up Rescue and Spy missions as easily as without)

I would only like Sound Quake to be changed for an exalted sniper and Sonic Boom made an one handed cast, my Banshee does great with around 175-145% range (depending on build)and augments as is.

Knowing DE tho, i rather wouldn't want them to touch Banshee at all or we might end up with another useless frame for years.

Eh.  I don't think we have any useless frames.  We just have some poorly designed frames.  It's rather hard for DE to screw up a frame without the frame itself being bad design to begin with.  ex titania.

[Birdframe_Prime]

14 hours ago, ScytodiDaedalus said:

My real concern with the listed changes is Sonic Boom allowing her to get some energy revenue out of it

Fair point... with how flimsy Banshee is, I could easily suggest changing that to pure Health Orb drops instead. Literally the combo would be Sonar, Sonic Boom, kill = Health Orb. Given how not-very-powerful that combo is overall, needing multiple steps including two casts plus damage, I don't see an issue with making the drop guaranteed, much like interactions in other frames, such as Oberon's.

Would make running with Arcane Pulse or Health Conversion a better option for her, especially in a team.