Complaints about parts of hildryns kit that don't make sense

[birdobash]

Hey there! Back with another one of these, this time to rant a little about Knicks and knacks of hildryns kit that I've found from testing so far, but I also want to debunk some things before I get onto the issues with her, because there are a few things about hildryn that I'm seeing circulate around the forums, but these things aren't true, and I bet this is happening because most players don't actually have her yet and are unable to properly test her, and therefore they only have second-hand experience.

Misconception #1: shield pillage only cleanses hildryn when the duration ends or is recast

This simply isn't true, shield pillage cleanses hildryn immediately when the ability starts flowing outwards.

Misconception #2: Haven is basically useless

This is a misconception bred from the stat screen of the ability, because nowhere in the ability screen does it state that haven gives teammates her shield gating passive from shield to health, but it does.(despite this haven is still not that great though)

Misconception #3: Balefires quick shot (when you don't charge it at all) locks you into the slow walking animation

This isn't true, balefire IF clicked quickly where basically none of the charge bar goes up will NOT put you into a slowed animation, what DOES put you into the slowed animation is if you charge balefire even a tiny bit, or if you aim down sights, ADS'ing will always put you in the animation even if you're not even clicking left mouse button, this could've potentially given the impression that the quickshot locks you, when it's really just the aiming. (Also, putting on fire rate mods makes it harder to do a quick shot without getting the animation, theres some food for thought)

And with that out of the way, let's get to the issues!

Passive:

Hildryns passive gives her a shield gate with an invincibility period between her shields and her health, and a second shield gate between her overshields and shields, but this second one doesn't have any invincibility period. The biggest issue with this is rapid firing guns, which mostly originate from the grineer, although this overshield gate works great against corpus with their abundant one shot potential, it's not very balanced for grineer.

Energy orbs work differently with hildryn where they will restore shields instead of energy and will remove the cooldown of passive shield recharge, my question is, how come the ratio is 1:1??? 25 shields per orb is literally nothing, and although the cooldown removal is pretty decent, it doesn't work when hildryn uses any of her abilities, firing the balefire, having haven on, having aegis storm on, or casting shield pillage all stop and prevent shield regeneration, which seems like a huge limitation considering being damaged by even 1 point also stops it as well.

Balefire:

There is no incentive to charge up the shots, because even though they increase the range and double the damage per shot, it costs around 3-5x more shields to fire a charged shot than a quickshot, and spamming quickshots actually has more DPS than charged ones.

Balefire locks hildryn into a really clunky walk animation which although looks cool, doesn't feel good to play, it prevents jumping or any parkour, and after firing off a shot it for some reason has about a full half second afterwards where you are still in the animation and cannot jump.

The weapon itself doesn't have good supporting stats like crit or status, only raw damage, even with the immense amount of raw damage it has (I can get over 40,000 damage easily on it with corrosive and heat) raw damage can only carry itself so far, against armor it will start to fail beyond level 60-70 against heavier units, and just doesn't have the killtime for enemies with armor above level 90, with unarmored enemies like corpus and infested it doesn't fall off as fast but still falls off much quicker than normal weapons. 

Shield pillage:

The most dangerous status effects to hildryn (toxin and slash) are status effects that are non-existent with corpus, but prominent in grineer and infested, the problem being that they're so common and certain units are able to reapply them instantly and constantly such as with rapid firing weapons or toxic auras, cleansing these effects won't do much if they immediately come back.

Theres also the problem that at higher levels you won't have time to cleanse the effect because they get strong enough to one shot you before you have time to cleanse, this is mostly a problem with toxin more so than slash.

Shield pillage does literally nothing to health based enemies, and barely gets any shields from armored enemies until they scale up really high or already possess high armor (heavy units), while being only really effective vs shielded enemies. This is basically the only ability that gets worse the lower the levels go (in respect to armor), the closest other ability being saryns spores that would kill too quickly at lower levels to spread.

Haven:

The main effects of haven are not very useful, giving teammates more max shields while increasing shield regen, mostly because the way the game has built up to now has made building for shields inferior to building for health and armor with exception to a few specific builds.

The effect it has on enemies is near useless, it does radiation damage but does not proc radiation status, the only useful thing it does to enemies is it periodically staggers enemies that are not considered heavy units (things like common butchers, Lancers, crewmans etc)

The cost per enemy unit is way too high, especially for how not useful the ability is when linked to enemies.

Aegis storm:

Aegis storm generates energy orbs, but only if the enemies are alive, if playing in a team environment this is not easy to do as teammates most likely will kill enemies suspended very easily.

Again, energy orbs while useful for teammates are not useful for hildryn herself, especially when aegis storm ITSELF stops shield regeneration.

Aegis storms range is based off of how high off the ground below you is, this normally would seem reasonable, except there are many maps where the ground is not always the same level, and the CC hitbox of the ability seems a little awkward at times. For example, I was doing todays sortie Lua defense, and enemies on an elevated platform who were supposedly in range of aegis storm according to the wave, were NOT being cced at all, that is until I floated away from them a bit and ended up on a similar height platform farther away, where they for some reason were then lifted into the air, not when I was closer to them.

Balefire is the only weapon you are able to use in aegis storm, not only is this very power hungry, but from my point above, balefire isn't the greatest weapon in terms of anything above mid level content.

During aegis storm hildryn pulls out TWO balefires, but for some reason this is purely cosmetic, cmon man, if you're gonna force us to use the mediocre weapon that's super power hungry, at least buff it in some way.

Shield pillage cannot be used in aegis storm, this is proven to not be an oversight due to the new "tips" tab in the ability overview screen that straight up says in one of the last tips something along the lines of, "deactivate aegis storm to cast shield pillage when your shields get low". From a gameplay perspective this is quite clunky, and doesn't help the power hunger issue of using balefire and aegis storm together.

 

And now it's done, since hildryn is so new there are things that are bound to change, and just from the little amount of testing and gameplay I've been able to amalgamate these are what I've been able to pick out so far, meaning there could be much more hidden things in her kit that we don't know about yet, or hidden synergies as well. I expect this list to quickly get outdated within the next month (at least I hope it does), comment if you find something interesting about hildryn that I hadn't found or pointed out, or anything I'm wrong about.

[vid23]

for the passive, you missed one and a pretty big point, overshield blocks damage from affecting your health, which means you absolutely cant be killed with overshield, since no slash or toxin proc will hurt you (i think you cant even get them with overshield, but not sure about it, or atleast i never noticed it) and i think energy orbs should give 250 shield atleast

balefire, i think it should get a bit of increase in the status, right now with my build i can get 50%, which is nice but the gun fire too slow for it to be noticeable, also, just spamm your second ability before you shoot, it removes armor an shield, which makes it really easy to get kills with Balefire, it definitely need a slight buff, but i think its a really powerful first ability, and relatively cheap to use compared to the amount of damage you can dish out with it

Shield pillage, is useful, scales well, also see the passive i wrote down now, its quite useful against toxin an slash for example, completelly useless vs infested, and dont forget that, if your teammate has 3 CP, you wont be doing anything vs grineer, the same could go for the shield aura mod but, honestly, nobody ever use that, so its not that big of the problem i think, the shield restore element also should scale from health itself, so it would be useful against infested or low level enemies, or grineer with literally no armor because your team is actually competent enough to bring CP to a high level grineer mission

Haven, you pretty much said it all, its pretty great at clearing low level content though, in my opinion, it should have a radius, instead if a line of sight based thing, in a public match its not useful, but it is useful when your team builds their frame around it (using adaptation for example, i think it works way better if you got shield since you can regenerate it) also i dont know this, but, i can imagine 4 hildryn in a team can greatly benefit from this ability, if it stacks

Aegis storm is really weird as you described, i think, if you had double firerate with balefire, or only shoot charged shots, it would make this ability way better than it is right now

i really hope they will adjust her, she is really fun to play as, i think, in the past 2 year she is the very first frame i really like to play an see more than just a mastery fodder

[DissentWomble]

If her 4 is on, her 1 shouldn't eat any shield for ammo since its her only attack available to her.

Her 4 should have a proper aoe like equinox's maim kinda deal so you can use her 4 to crowed control. Can add for eg a limit to the number of enemies she can hold at one time for balance. 

Havens great but a slightly higher figures would be great so the effects are more noticeable. It can be locked when she has her 4 up or Instead of taking more shields when more team mates are buffed it should be based on how much damage they are absorbing in case if its too OP.  

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

In addition to everything you said, I have another big issue with Hildryn (though this one isn't really her fault): there are no good auras for her (outside of the universally good ones). All of the auras in the game that actually do anything for her are the ones that are good anyway, like the weapon damage auras or enemy/loot radar or sprint speed. We don't have a +shields aura, and all of the auras pertaining to shields either do nothing for her (Brief Respite) or actively hinder her (Shield Disruption, etc.).

I would like to see a +90% base shields aura, a +30% max overshields aura, and maybe even a +10% shield resistance aura (flat DR for shields, multiplicative with all other DR, additive with other copies in the squad). These would obviously primarily benefit Hildryn (and maybe Harrow), but I think they could be useful for other frames as well.

Also, Capacitance, Crush, Polarize, Blessing, and Mend can all restore Hildryn's shields, but Vampire Leech cannot. I hope DE changes this.

[Atsia]

28 minutes ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

Also, Capacitance, Crush, Polarize, Blessing, and Mend can all restore Hildryn's shields, but Vampire Leech cannot. I hope DE changes this.

I mean, this is in-line with how she interacts with things that directly effect energy, like Flow.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

1 minute ago, Atsia said:

I mean, this is in-line with how she interacts with things that directly effect energy, like Flow.

True, but Vampire Leech's wording is 'excess energy'. Since Hildryn's energy pool is 0, shouldn't all energy be excess?

Same as in most other games, where if you can get something to 0, all 'when x is full/maxed' effects are permanently active.

[EinheriarJudith]

2 hours ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

In addition to everything you said, I have another big issue with Hildryn (though this one isn't really her fault): there are no good auras for her (outside of the universally good ones). All of the auras in the game that actually do anything for her are the ones that are good anyway, like the weapon damage auras or enemy/loot radar or sprint speed. We don't have a +shields aura, and all of the auras pertaining to shields either do nothing for her (Brief Respite) or actively hinder her (Shield Disruption, etc.).

I would like to see a +90% base shields aura, a +30% max overshields aura, and maybe even a +10% shield resistance aura (flat DR for shields, multiplicative with all other DR, additive with other copies in the squad). These would obviously primarily benefit Hildryn (and maybe Harrow), but I think they could be useful for other frames as well.

Also, Capacitance, Crush, Polarize, Blessing, and Mend can all restore Hildryn's shields, but Vampire Leech cannot. I hope DE changes this.

they would benefit hildryn, harrow, mag, volt, zephyr, pretty much every shield based frame. im actually tired of the meta corrosive projection. I said it a few times. aura mods need an overhaul. they should be team/personal buffs only not enemy debuffs.

[Mudfam]

18 minutes ago, EinheriarJudith said:

they would benefit hildryn, harrow, mag, volt, zephyr, pretty much every shield based frame. im actually tired of the meta corrosive projection. I said it a few times. aura mods need an overhaul. they should be team/personal buffs only not enemy debuffs.

The bigger problem is how broken armour scaling is. CP is simply required to make anything but weapons with high proc rates of corrosive or slash function at all. This includes all weapons, warframe abilities, companions, operators...

Until DE fixes armour scaling and remove this requirement for CP to make the game simply functional, it's pointless looking at what other auras might do. Nothing else can ever compare to all damage sources being 3000% more effective (literally). It's infinitely more mandatory than mods like Serration.

I don't know if DE can handle such a dramatic shift in the meta and game balance (or lack of) this late though. Feels a bit like crying over spilled milk. I think we have to accept the mere handful of viable strategies / builds or using the Corrosive Projection Slot for what it is.

 

Well said @birdobash, this matches my own feedback almost exactly. Unfortunately posts like this tend to just get buried and forgotten. I tried to raise awareness of these issue by also talking about them in a certain youtuber's discord, but was met with a lot defensive denial (though not from the youtuber).

It probably doesn't help that Hildryn excels at fighting corpus in open spaces, which is the context most people have played her in so far. Her abilities are worthless in other contexts and her shields mean nothing, with random toxin oneshots being ultimately inevitable.

[EinheriarJudith]

10 minutes ago, Mudfam said:

The bigger problem is how broken armour scaling is. CP is simply required to make anything but weapons with high proc rates of corrosive or slash function at all. This includes all weapons, warframe abilities, companions, operators...

Until DE fixes armour scaling and remove this requirement for CP to make the game simply functional, it's pointless looking at what other auras might do. Nothing else can ever compare to all damage sources being 3000% more effective (literally). It's infinitely more mandatory than mods like Serration.

I don't know if DE can handle such a dramatic shift in the meta and game balance (or lack of) this late though. Feels a bit like crying over spilled milk. I think we have to accept the mere handful of viable strategies / builds or using the Corrosive Projection Slot for what it is.

 

Well said @birdobash, this matches my own feedback almost exactly. Unfortunately posts like this tend to just get buried and forgotten. I tried to raise awareness of these issue by also talking about them in a certain youtuber's discord, but was met with a lot defensive denial (though not from the youtuber).

It probably doesn't help that Hildryn excels at fighting corpus in open spaces, which is the context most people have played her in so far. Her abilities are worthless in other contexts and her shields mean nothing, with random toxin oneshots being ultimately inevitable.

i agree with most of what you said. i tend to use the meta auras as little as possible around anything below 100. its just sad to see almost no aura for shields. while they keep adding auras for enemy debuffs which they wouldn't have to do if they balance the factions properly. 

they over buffed corpus and now we have a third frame that exceeds at killing them while the other 2 are more balanced between the 4 factions. 

Edited March 12, 2019 by EinheriarJudith

[Franticlly_Skeptic]

One of my biggest issues is the LOS requirement to Haven. if someone is within range, and on the other side of a pillar they are out of luck. It ruins the whole support part of the support frame. I am talking mainly about what it does for other players. I can understand how it should have LOS for mobs.

 

Edited March 12, 2019 by Franticlly_Skeptic

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

Wasn’t Haven supposed to be an armor/shield stripper originally? Wonder why they changed it to damage.