My Valkyr wishlist - balancing / roile adjustments & quality of life changes.

[Dark__Thoughts]

Dokrahm Scythes + Tempo Royale sort of renewed my love for Valkyr which is more or less my main now, which for the longest time I was kind of sick with because of some issues that are unfortunately still present to this day.

Problems (and these might be subjective and different to some of you):

- Weak passive: I think a 50% recovery time on knockdowns is really not that noticeable or useful. In lower levels a knockdown is fairly meaningless and happens rarely. In higher levels they're so frequent and severe that 50% simply don't make a difference. The hidden passive of being able to land from heights is nice, but also more of a gimmick because you can negate the effect with a slide before you impact anyway and most players will have this already in their muscle memory.

Suggestion: Keep the hidden passive as her cat like role, gimmick or not it is at least fitting. But change the regular passive to a +100% (? I'm thinking about a doubling that way because of the trade off of missing a gun and lens but that might need testing) health boost when you unequip either your primary or secondary (I'll not suggest both because you might need at least one ranged weapon in some situations and mods like amalgam serration might be interesting to you), similar to how Mesa gets a boost for not having a melee equipped.

 

- Useless 1: Of course not every skill should or can be a carrying one of your build and frame, and especially your first one might be just something that does a little bit but right now it has barely any use. I think we can live with the fact how it does little damage and crowd control on enemies but it is also a pretty bad mobility skill and gets overshadowed by a base mechanic (bullet jumping).

Suggestion: Increase the base range from 75 to 100 and increase the own body pull strength / length so it might be a somewhat situationally viable mobility skill but also make it so that using it resets your jump / double jump so you can chain use them together if the terrain allows it.

 

- Long cast times: Her cast times are pretty long for most of her skills. Casting them costs quite some time which means you will take quite a few hits before it actually activates and you're also immobile on top of that which is not very nice for a melee based frame.

Suggestion: Lower the overall cast time and add mobility to be able to cast her abilities while moving.

 

- Berserker / Eternal War issues: The Berserker augment is a nice quality of life feature to keep the buff running and fits thematically because you have to keep slaying enemies for that. However there's a pretty big issue when it comes to group play in that you cannot reliably keep the buff up for party members and an issue when you use it as a debuff on enemies in that you cannot recast it to apply the slow effect onto enemies when the buff is still active. I also noticed that some frames seem to override Berserker with their own buff but the buff timer keeps running and refreshing even though your attack speed goes down into a crawl which requires you to get rid of that first to be able to recast it.

Suggestion: First simple change would be to make the skill recastable even while it is active. This would ensure that we can use its slow debuff to be used when we need it even when berserker is still running (nice for bosses that can be actually debuffed or stronger enemies / minibosses. The second change would be more for eternal war in that it should reapply the buff to party members if I kill an enemy when they're in range. This would help keeping the buff up on them if I or them get nullified, drop out of the map or the buff runs out naturally or because they were too far away to refresh the duration (which happens a lot especially since melee frames like Valkyr move around a lot).

 

- Issues with melee changes and her 4: Ever since the nerf hammer on Hysteria it became more of a WTF / rescue skill to get your ass out of a tricky situation or to nuke a specific enemy down (like the Juggernaut). However since the first melee reworks a simply right click to for example use block combos out of muscle memory puts her guns out and takes her out of the invulnerability which is often lethal when you use it while almost dying.

Suggestion: Just give this one an exception. You should not be able to use guns, scanners or whatever while in hysteria. It's not an ability that you can keep on running nowadays anyway so there's not much of a point in having it active and then switching to something else. It breaks more than it fixes and should be reverted to how it was before the melee changes.

 

- Overall unsure role design of the frame and how her tankiness and armor works: Valkyr is a melee frame, and supposed to be tanky, but she fulfills this role only to a certain extend and this is probably also because she's quite a bit older than other frames and armor has its limits in how useful it is on a practical basis. We have some newer tank frames that simply outclass her in tankiness by quite a lot, some of which are fairly resistant to nullifying too and / or easier to keep up the tankiness while also being able to freely use ranged weapons without downsides. And speaking about melee based I think her base sprint speed of 1.1 is a bit too sluggish. 

Suggestion: Remove her shields entirely and buff her base health up to something closer to Nidus. This would give us a bit more of a better health buffer in synergy with our higher armor values to better react to high damage situations (especially in arbitrations I noticed that the base health + vitality mods often doesn't suffice to give you time to react - especially in comparison to other tankable frames or proper tank frames), but it would also improve her energy management in lower level content. The latter is somewhat of an issue because her usually useless shields are still pretty useful in lower levels, except that most people will rely on Hunter Adrenalin or Rage to get enough energy to be able to recast her abilities if necessary (lack of enemies, falling out of the map, nullifiers etc.). This results in a weird situation where lower level content becomes "harder" than higher level ones because you cannot keep your berserker up as well as in higher level content where enemies will chew your shields instantly anyway. This would also make her actually usable in hijack missions, or change those to draw from health on any frame when the shields are gone (seriously, try doing hijack missions solo with just 150 shield capacity). Her sprint speed should maybe go up to 1.2, we should just not have to rely on specific weapons with specific stances with specific combos to reach enemies quickly, cats and melee based frames should provide some mobility or compensate through other means.

 

- Nice curves but edgy: Her model is one of the older ones, this is not just apparent on the terrible design of the prime skin but also on her base model. Valkyr got nice curves but her behind is so low poly that you look like you're made out of cardboard boxes. Her default skins color channels do not allow the coloring of her machine bits and I personally also wish I could just use the prime thingies on her arms without the rest of the prime skin which looks just terrible. 

Suggestion: Well... I think redoing base and prime frame would ask for too much, although I'd love some polycount increase. But maybe we can take those issues into consideration if we maybe do go through with Umbral variations of more frames (which I would assume we'd do chronologically too).

 

I'm not really sure what to do with her 3 though, the skill as it stands is pretty useless in almost every situation. I was thinking about some form of buff that provides health leech on melee (critical?) hits for Valkyr which would fit her active and raging playstyle while also helping out her tank and melee role or just her general reliability but haven't found a good design here yet because I think a change like that would require some careful testing since this could be breaking balance quite quickly. But it would be a cool and fitting alternative to something like Nidus health regen or Inaros finisher heal.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

While some of these suggestions are nice overall I don't really feel like any of them really drastically change/push her kit in a different direction.  She was basically the melee counter part to Excalibur when she was dropped and even when he got exalted blade this remained more or less true.  But with the continual additions to melee weapons and their updates her being a melee frame has meant less and less.  Zaw's pretty much invalidate any melee weapon unless you're going for a specific trait unique to that weapon.  This is more or less forgivable with are makable guns.  Since guns have always been and will continue to be stat sticks.  But it's not fine for melee since melee has more substance to it.

The other main reason to run her was her invincibility.  It made her effectively the best tank for awhile.  But with the nerf to the drain on her 4 (which I agree was needed) and general survivability going up for frames as a whole it's not really a driving factor to pick anymore.  Which sort of leaves Valkyr as a servicable but highly dated frame.  Many people akin her gameplay to being some what like what an MMO would call a berzerker class.  And while i'd much rather DE make a new frame concept based around that I wouldn't mind if they leaned into that a bit more with Valkyr.  So long as there was a distinct unique aspect to Valkyr that would not make a Berzerker style frame redundant.

Personally as a long time Valkyr main i'd love to see her "focus" to be around finishers.  Her 1, 3, and 4 all give her opportunities to do finishers.  But the appeal of doing them isn't really there outside some niche cases.  Due to it being a single target and due to the animations being kind of slow barring modding.  None the less I think if we gave a strong benefit/effect for her doing finishers in general and for doing specific ability finishers it would be more enticing to do.  I'd also like to see her 4 get heavy attention in the combo department.  As there really isn't much point to do anything that's not her slide attack.  It would be great if we got new comboes entirely that enhanced her movement and each combo had a reason to be used (similar to what Baruuk was going for with his desert wind) in place of what we currently have.

I would even be fine with letting go of invincibility on her 4.  So long as she got high flat damage reduction in it's stead.  And tack on a bonus effect for receiving damage.  Maybe something like increased movement speed and farther reaching claw attacks.

[Dark__Thoughts]

I purposely did not want to push it too far from her current kit, I wanted to instead go for more of a polish of what is good about her current one which would be easier for DE to work with compared to some bigger reworking. I think half her kit is actually pretty decent, I'm not directly opposed to armor tanking but it needs some adjustments to work out better, I'm not much against her 1, her 2 is great but suffers some QoL changes and polish. What's really bad about her kit is her 3 and 4 but I also did not want to push too much change to her 4 because of how much it still holds the identity of her frame and I personally don't have a good solution at hand to fix it. Especially because I actually don't like exalted weapons like these too much, I think they take away from the already often nonexitant flexibility and synergy of the frames. Berserker is so great because it works with pretty much all melee weapons, I'm not forced to use her exalted weapons or a very specific set of weapons or even a very specific weapon. I have a synergy between a frame ability and weapons, many frames don't actually have that - you use either an ability build or you use weapons but not so much a synergetic usage between the two.

I honestly don't like the idea about finishers. Warframe is a game that is much more focused on masses of enemies, or really strong single units but those are usually not finishable. If your kit is build around finishers you're build around high single target damage and end up being one of the most useless and unflexible frames in the entire game. As it stands there are enough builds for finishers, any frame that can stun, sleep or stealth in combination with Covert Lethality can fulfill this role already and it already has not much use in Warframe because it isn't really the type of gameplay it makes use of.

The topic of slide attacks is something that should get resolved in the coming melee overhaul phases and isn't really an issue specific to Valkyr - she just makes any sort of melee build better (with few exceptions), which includes spin to win builds.

[(PSN)jamdjedi]

I would like her #3 and #4 to be faster, at the very least her #4 should be instant. Having to use a mod to increase cast speed on is a bandaid, I dont know how many times I've died in mid animation because of the cast time. We should be able to keep Warcry up and recast as long as we have the energy to do so. 
a base increase to innate run speed since she needs to get in close to do her job

also why is her #3 bad does it not work as intended? Granted I'm new to her but I try to keep it up at all times on the group I'm in

Edit- #3 is her stun that I never use I confused it with Warcry

Edited April 10, 2019 by (PS4)jamdjedi
Im a fool

[peterc3]

On 2019-04-04 at 12:06 PM, Dark__Thoughts said:

similar to how Mesa gets a boost for not having a melee equipped.

50 HP compared to what you suggest, a 100%+ boost to Health. Why does Valkyr need that?

On 2019-04-04 at 12:06 PM, Dark__Thoughts said:

I'm not really sure what to do with her 3 though, the skill as it stands is pretty useless in almost every situation. I was thinking about some form of buff that provides health leech on melee (critical?) hits for Valkyr which would fit her active and raging playstyle while also helping out her tank and melee role or just her general reliability but haven't found a good design here yet because I think a change like that would require some careful testing since this could be breaking balance quite quickly. But it would be a cool and fitting alternative to something like Nidus health regen or Inaros finisher heal.

She already has a life leech ability. Why more?

[NotDaijoubu]

I'll have to disagree about changing her passive. For me the 50% faster recovery is quite beneficial and fits her tank and spank style. It's not exactly a strong passive, but it's far from being the worst as well. I don't have issues with Warcray and Hysteria either, mainly because I run eternal war and just use it as a self/team buff rather than a debuff. Hysteria is still powerful, and although its harder to stay in it forever, thats a good thing because it makes Valkyr more than just "press 4 to win".

Her weakest tool definitely is her 3 and I'm just as lost as to how it should be changed. For ripline, I think range is fine even with a max narrow minded. My suggestion is to make it a better CC in that it can pull multiple enemies in your line of sight. Would definitely make it a more useful ability since this game is about group clearing.

[Dark__Thoughts]

2 hours ago, peterc3 said:

50 HP compared to what you suggest, a 100%+ boost to Health. Why does Valkyr need that?

Mesa has other bonuses, either way this wasn't to compare it to Mesa but to draw inspiration from a mechanic of another frame. Valkyr and Mesa are generally not comparable because they have two completely different concepts. And why I think she needs a HP boost is something I've explained already. 

2 hours ago, peterc3 said:

She already has a life leech ability. Why more?

I was spitballing for some bigger reworking, her 4 is already in a bad place so I'd rework it together with her 3. I just wanted to throw in some conceptual ideas on what we could do.

55 minutes ago, NotDaijoubu said:

mainly because I run eternal war and just use it as a self/team buff rather than a debuff.

It doesn't work as a team buff, and Eternal War is exactly the reason for that which I also explained.

 

 

I honestly don't get people who generally just try to counter argue against suggestions towards the devs, especially when you can't bring anything on the table yourself.

[peterc3]

5 minutes ago, Dark__Thoughts said:

I honestly don't get people who generally just try to counter argue against suggestions towards the devs, especially when you can't bring anything on the table yourself.

I want your idea to be better because it affects a frame I like. For the most part, these are changes I find questionable. Unless I've missed something, they are all outright buffs to a frame that really doesn't need buffs.

The thing about drawing inspiration is you should also pay attention to the context. 50 HP for not having a melee weapon on Mesa is really just a thematic thing. In gameplay, that 50 HP is meaningless. Valkyr having a health multiplier for not using guns is wildly out of line, especially with the presence of another part of the passive, the soft landings.

Now, if you were to then theme out the rest of her kit with things that would deplete that health boost, then sure, you've got something going. A boost like that with no downsides? Why should the idea be entertained, let alone seriously considered?

[Dark__Thoughts]

34 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

I want your idea to be better because it affects a frame I like.

No it does not. It doesn't affect anything in the game because it is merely a suggestion by a user inside of a forum.

35 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

The thing about drawing inspiration is you should also pay attention to the context. 50 HP for not having a melee weapon on Mesa is really just a thematic thing. In gameplay, that 50 HP is meaningless.

I see you still ignore my point.

35 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

especially with the presence of another part of the passive, the soft landings.

Which is 100% useless. Absolutely no one needs this.

36 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

A boost like that with no downsides?

Being almost 90% melee only is already a downside, especially when armor tanking is such a big hurdle. Other frames can achieve 90% or more damage reduction way easier, faster, and are not bound to melee only to keep it up.

37 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

Why should the idea be entertained, let alone seriously considered?

Well, how about you just #*!% off with that elitism, especially after still not being able to bring anything to the table yourself. If your only job here is to post thousands of off putting comments towards other users then I'm seriously questioning why you're even here. Make your own damn thread with your own "better" suggestions if you have them or shut it if you think she's fine.

[(PSN)jamdjedi]

I agree with most of your suggestions; while solo MOT isn't a barometer of anything I was able to do 40 mins relatively easy(outside of the damn animation getting me killed that is so annoying) last night and I see no reason 1 hour is not a possibility. Is it as easy as Nidus? nope but two different play styles. I actually prefer Valkyr's playstyle TBH 

 

What I'd like to see:

- a BIT more HP

- Make 2/4 instant -or at least 4 instant

- allow 2 to be casted anytime and not tied to a timer

- 25% base speed increase 

- 100% knock down resistance 

 

 

Having come from Nidus he can do everything she does and better, shoot Umbra can probably do it as well.  I'm still plugging along and playing with different mod setups. I never got to play Valkyr when her 4 was God Mode-QQ- but I still think she is viable. It seems that Warframe is making all these new frames, new Primes and forgetting about their older ones which is fine-new shiny stuff=more $$ so from a business standpoint I understand this. She is already severely bugged with not being able to use her weapon after using her abilities. DE are pretty good at a addressing bugs, perhaps they will revisit her when addressing said bug.

[84773-RY]

When I first started playing Valkyr was my main, a position lost only when Khora came along. I still enjoy playing her, and love melee focused slaughters she lends herself towards. Her passives of no hard landings and faster recovery I often find myself missing with other frames, and the mobility granted by her 1 mean I always use her for Maroo's hunts. 

That being said I never use her 3, unless I accidentally hit the button.

 

Only changes I can think of are as follows:

1) Might be fun to improve the enemy-targeting side. Maybe allow you to cast and hold to drag an enemy all the way to you for an automatic heavy melee hit? Might be cool if the line remains until released for terrain navigation too, to let you swing yourself.

2) Think this is fine currently. Maybe a slight tweak to eternal war that if you hit an enemy with melee but someone else gets the kill, it still counts. 

3) Could replace with something else also fitting. Maybe hitting 3 could launch you into the targeted enemy to literally tear them apart similar to her 4th's finishers. And gain health or an armor buff in the process. 

4) I love this ability but admit I mostly break it out in emergencies, or to heal if running low on health. Maybe a mod could be added to automatically drop you into this ability when you hit 0hp, as a last ditch rage, at double energy cost per tick. 

[xDangerCatx]

Valk is definitely one of the forgotten frames.  They nerfed her four and then forgot all about her.  (Didn't even remember her tail for her prime version... still annoyed with that...)

You make some good suggestions, OP and they would go towards making her feel better if DE doesn't want to do a radical rework of her for a few years.  Her passive is just okay? Knockdown recovery is good and useful in some situations and the no stagger animation when she drops far enough is thematically cool, but as you mentioned most players know to slide or aim glide before they land.  Heck, I sometimes find myself doing that when I play Valk and I don't need to.  I would suggest switching her knockdown reduction to a form of Quick Thinking and call it 9 lives, buuut that would probably be OP.  I guess it's fine as it is, if a little underwhelming.  Now, on to talking about her powers.

Her one can very annoying at times to use.  Sure, it's a bit faster than bullet jumping, but not by much.  Sometimes I'll aim for a spot and accidentally target an enemy, yanking him away when I meant to pull myself over there.  Other times the game doesn't register things as "grabable" and I have to run and bullet jump along like a chump.  (The downhill final stretch of a certain outdoor corpus base is notorious for this.  You know the one.  You bust through that grate and mash 1, hoping you could grab on to one of those walls JUST this once, but nope)  Also, can we talk about how using her one on enemies is awful? The enemies go FLYING.  Either the skill should zipline you directly to the enemy, or pull the enemy to you.  Maybe a new augment to switch between the two modes? Either way, it should stun the enemy you use it on for a few seconds.

Warcry is great, it's her bread and butter skill... which is kind of sad when you think about it.  It really should be buffed to increase allies armors based on Valk's armor, their melee kills should extend eternal war's buff. (Maybe not to the same extent, but it's annoying to try to keep up enough killing when you have allies "stealing your kills".  It's supposed to be a team game, but Valk has to act selfishly to keep her one good skill up)   Honestly, I would fold Eternal War into the base skill and put the "Allies melee kills increase the time" on the augment.  And while the slow is nice, you only get to use it once.  Being able to recast it while it's active would be good and would make a non eternal war based build pretty usable if you didn't want to fold that augment into the main skill.

Paralysis? Worthless.  A stun based on her shields when she shouldn't have any shields.  (I'll get to that later)  The stun lasts so briefly, even if you hit a group of enemies by the time the finisher animation finishes on the first enemies, the rest are probably up and attacking you again.  I suppose you could use it as a brief respite? Maybe you're in such bad trouble, you cast it and hope the animation for her four finishes playing by the time the enemies come around AND you don't have spoiler mode to use.  Really, it's such a useless skill.  If I have a challenge to kill enemies with finishers, it's the only time I'll use it.  I say you change it into a different type of CC.  When you cast it, you taunt any enemy nearby to swarm you.  This would help to keep enemies off defense targets, to stop hacking interception towers and would make it easier to group more enemies on you to kill quicker.  I suggest calling it "Faster pussycat! Kill kill!", but DE could probably come up with something more lore appropriate 😛

Now we come to Hysteria.  Oh hysteria, how pitiful you have become.  Any seasoned valk player that still plays her only uses it to heal and tank through certain situations.  As has been said, the casting time is way too long to be an "Oh S#&$!" button.  You pop into Hysteria before you're in trouble, hit an enemy or two to get your health back and pop back out before you took any damage to cause the circle to ramp up enough punishment to kill you.  Using Hysteria as we used to use it is just a terrible idea in this day and age.  Thankfully nullifiers aren't as big of a problem as they were in the old days, when they would spawn in on the other side of a wall with a full bubble over you and instantly nuke you due to damage, but prolonged hysteria use is a bad idea.  Yes, I still use it to tank through "bosses".  Sortie level juggernaut can one shot some frames with his attacks, so it's nice to switch over to that and slide attack through him.  Kela's bombard phase makes Valk a decent choice on her boss fight, too.  But most of the time enemies can't be hit by melee, so I need to use my guns, or if I can use melee, my actual weapons are far better.  And unless you give us exalted weapon Rivens, it's always gonna be that way 😛

Continuing on with what's wrong with Hysteria, as the OP mentioned, the melee not 3.0 rework makes it feel awful to use hysteria.  Accidentally switching to your gun during hysteria is often instant death.  I was in a Kela sortie mission and one of my teammates went down while I was in Hysteria.  "No problem, I'll just jump over and glide to a pin point landing on top of them and revive them!" I thought, but completely forgot about melee 2.999whatever.  The instant I aim glided, like I was used to and had been using for years to extend her jumps and to land perfectly where I wanted to, Valk whipped out her gun and was nuked.  Not sure if it was to one of the bombardments, or because one of the roller orbs was around, but I still ended up on the ground because DE thought it was a good idea to make it super easy to accidentally drop out of hysteria in a second AND still have the ramping energy drain continue, but eliminate her invincibility.

I don't expect DE to let us stay invincible while shooting, but I expect them to completely lock us into melee while in hysteria.  Let us aim glide like we used to.  A peacock's gotta fly!

Granted, that's just a band aide on her hysteria.  A more radical rework would take time, one which she desperately needs.  It's frustrating to see Saryn get multiple changes and even Vauban is getting a complete rework before Valk.  (Although I can't complain too much, that poor boy needs it.  Can you imagine being a CC frame at this stage of the game? That's almost as bad as being a melee only frame with no CC and an ultimate that's only used to heal 😛 )

Valk should lose her shields and gain an increase to her health.  Maybe she doesn't need as much meat as Inaros and Nidus, but armor doesn't work as well as it should after a certain point and that extra buffer would be nice.  Thematically, she's always going to be a melee only frame, but if the kitten is going to use her claws they need to be better than other melee weapons in most cases.  Why use the claws when my zaw has far better range? Why use the claws when I have a whip with maiming strike? Etc, etc.  If she loses her invulnerability, minus a few seconds at the start of hysteria, that's fine.  Just give her a big damage reduction buff and life steal.  Honestly, it's pretty frustrating to see the state Valk is in these days because DE never seems to recognize her problems.  I still consider her my main and I like to use her when I'm just goofing around and not doing anything serious that requires a specific role, but her loss of usefulness should really be looked at by DE and hopefully fixed. 

In closing, thanks for reading this message and maybe a certain community coordinator who voiced our girl could pass on our cries for fixes, hint hint 😉 @[DE]Megan

Edited April 11, 2019 by xDangerCatx
saw a typo!

[(PSN)Ragology]

On 2019-04-10 at 2:28 PM, (PS4)jamdjedi said:

What I'd like to see:

- 100% knock down resistance 

*cries in Atlas*