Some minor (but impactful !) revenant tweaks.

[JohnLemon123]

Hi there !

Revenant's been out for quite a while at this point, and as many have pointed out by now, his kit has some rather fundamental problems. Problems that, i believe, could be lessened with a couple of adjustments aiming towards his abilities having a ''common goal',' in order to create a cohesive, harmonious set of powers.

Currently, revenant's main problem is that in trying to do dip his toes into too many different concepts at once (shields, health, stuns, invincibility, mind control, leeching, you name it) he ends up not doing any of them quite as well as he should, with some aspects eclipsing others to an outrageous degree, resulting in a rather bland, one-dimensional playstyle that doesn't allow for much creativity.

So, what are his main problems ?

• enthrall is buggy, slow, and only really useful in solo, as your team will slaughter them before you can begin to use them.
• the passive feels out of place, only activates once you're already doomed, and has really poor range.
• enthrall's damage pillars cannot scale due to their damage type, resulting in an ability which's numbers will plummet really quickly.
• mesmer skin is both too weak AND too powerful. How exactly does that work ? Well...
  • because you take no up-front damage, your passive, your 3 and your ability to generate overshields are all nigh-useless.
  • However, because the protection itself prevents ALL damage, it can be melted very quickly under sustained fire.
• Reave is only useful when combined with revenant's other abilities.
• Danse macabre is too expensive for it's damage output (particularly the ''boosted'' variant)
• The ability to detonate pillars, while interesting, is very disruptive considering how often you'll cast your 4.

Well then, how do we go about remedying those problems ?

Mesmer skin : we'll start with mesmer skin, as the change made to it will be far and away the single MOST IMPORTANT one on this entire list :

• Mesmer skin only activates to prevent damage to revenant's health. shields, however, have no such protection. What this essentially means is that all of a sudden, every single part of your kit that interacted with / generated shields goes from irrelevant to vitally important. Because your charges are now gated behind your shields (which are the second highest behind hildryn, or third if you count harrow), they are no longer susceptible to instant removal due to constant gunfire. However, should a massively powerful enemy chew through your shields in half a second, the ability will still be just as powerful as it ever was, negating all damage and simply removing a charge.
• Mesmer skin's casting cost is increased to 75. To compensate for this significant increase in power, the cost of such an ability would have to be appropriately balanced, with 75 being (in my opinion) a fair trade.

Enthrall :

• Fixing the many bugs that afflict it is paramount, mainly the inconsistency in pillar ''spawning'' and the possibility of ''invincible thralls'' appearing.
• Damage type is changed from pillar and puncture to adaptive. The reason revenant's pillars are currently unable to harm anything beyond level 50 is due mainly to their damage type. Revenant, as the sentient / eidolon warframe, is the proprietor of the only instance of adaptive damage in the entire game, with it currently being only on his 4. As such, allowing his 1 to deal damage i  the same manner would not only make it scale far more effectively, but would also give it a lot more eidolon ''flair'' than it currently does.
• Only allow the revenant warframe to damage thralls. As making an enemy impervious to all friendly damage save your own would probably be quite awkward to code, restricting the ability to kill them to the warframe itself (and enemies) would still alleviate the problem without being as much of a headache. besides, as thralls are already removed from the enemy drop table upon conversion, they would be no threat even should they stick around.
• Increase the amount of overshields given by the drop to 150 (or allow it to be affected by strength). As you'll now constantly gain and lost shields from a multitude of fronts, making the ''harder to access'' sources more effective would be welcome.

Passive :

• Changed entirely; is now identical to adaptation, but caps at 60-70% instead of 90%. Because mesmer skin is now protected by shields, and because you have multiple ways to acquire them, it would only make sense for the shields themselves to be more potent, right ? on top of that, being the sentient / eidolon warframe would make revenant the ideal candidate for such a passive, as it would fit him both in gameplay AND in flavor.

Reave :

• Only the ''default'' variant : Reaving through an enemy now has a virulence-like ''energy return'' effect. Reaving through a normal enemy refunds a quarter of the casting cost, while reaving through a thrall returns half. is determined by power efficiency. This would solve the problem of reave only being useful when combined with 1 or 4, while making it's synergy with enthrall even more potent. however, due to this effect only appearing on the ''neutral'' variant, you wouldn't be able to spin around in your 4 while constantly replenishing energy
• Blinding reave : enemies blinded by the ability can be enthralled at no energy cost. This augment currently has little to no interaction with the rest of revenant's kit. Giving it this ''gambit'' effect would make you pay a greater initial amount, while giving you a greater potential payoff should you enthrall more than 2 foes.

 

Danse  Macabre :

• The ''boosted'' variant now costs 50% more than the regular version, as opposed to 100% more. let's be honest here, paying upwards of 40 energy every second to become a discount mesa is simply not going to be worth it. And while 30 would still be outrageous, it wouldn't be nearly as crippling as 40, which borders on the unusable.
• Only the ''boosted'' variant can destroy the energy pillars. As stated before, the idea of destroying your own resources, while interesting, is something that you need to be able to control and manage, and this change would do just that.
• Danse Macabre's status chance is affected by power strength. Would help the ability scale better into very high level missions, where it begins to struggle. Besides, the still massively high costs would balance out this increase in power, resulting in a stronger (but fair) ability.

Edited May 12, 2019 by JohnLemon123

[Madway7]

Yeah this is pretty much the bare minimum to make him work atm.

[Azvalk]

All of these are good ideas, except maybe for the thralls immune to allies damage..
I don't like the idea of annoying teammates with unkillable enemies in front of them, when I'm at the other side of a defense or interception map for exemple.
Maybe their immunity should depend on their distance with us.
Because I admit I want them with me to defend an objective, in mobile defense, excavation and defense, for exemple.
But in interception I scatter them, and don't care if they get killed.

[Madway7]

On 2019-05-12 at 2:31 PM, JohnLemon123 said:

 

• Damage type is changed from pillar and puncture to adaptive. The reason revenant's pillars are currently unable to harm anything beyond level 50 is due mainly to their damage type. Revenant, as the sentient / eidolon warframe, is the proprietor of the only instance of adaptive damage in the entire game, with it currently being only on his 4. As such, allowing his 1 to deal damage i  the same manner would not only make it scale far more effectively, but would also give it a lot more eidolon ''flair'' than it currently does.

The main issue with this suggestion is that adaptive damage is really just adaptive status, his 4 changes damage types in order to proc status and when these status procs are no longer needed (ie no shields/armor on a non infested enemy) it switches to an undefined neutral damage type which does the listed modded dmg amount regardless of health type.

His pillars have 2 issues, one being that the pillars are stationary and unless you make a lot of them at a choke point enemies are not likely to walk across them. For a "high damage" concept these work in theory (just DE didn't give them much dmg), but for status I don't think these can work at all unless they either pull enemies into them or deal a lot of status procs per second.

The second part being the projectiles that currently do impact, issue with converting them to adaptive damage would be that they are very slow, it takes a few seconds before they start going out and even when they do they don't hit that many enemies. (this might be different if the Enthrall spread worked tho, but atm that is impossible to test)

 

Forgot to add this to me previous reply, since edits don't give a notification I am posting this in hopes of getting a small discussion going.

[JohnLemon123]

3 hours ago, Azvalk said:

All of these are good ideas, except maybe for the thralls immune to allies damage..
I don't like the idea of annoying teammates with unkillable enemies in front of them, when I'm at the other side of a defense or interception map for exemple.
Maybe their immunity should depend on their distance with us.
Because I admit I want them with me to defend an objective, in mobile defense, excavation and defense, for exemple.
But in interception I scatter them, and don't care if they get killed.

I could see them being long-lasting ally-immune targets as a problem, if only as an annoyance. Thing is, considering how much of your kit relies on them, and how variable the results can be, you'd really need to come up with a powerful upside to make up for said variability, should they be susceptible to all damage, right ?

Well... DE had already thought about it, some 11 months ago !

I encourage you to look up devstream 112 on youtube, and to go to the 42:53 minute mark, at which you can see (at the bottom right of the screen) revenant get back approximately 12 energy upon killing a thrall. which approximately translates to getting back half of a cast's worth of energy back whenever a thrall dies.

There you have it ! An elegant, simple, manipulable way to make casting enthrall worthwhile regardless of how much it snowballs ! and considering how expensive his 4 is, it'd make sense for the rest of his abilities to fuel it as efficiently as possible :

• Getting energy back from thralls upon death would be a really cool way to make spreading their affliction useful, to the point where you may even want to go out of your way to kill them yourself ! And besides, the ability would still be nowhere near op, as you can only have upwards of 7 thralls at any time, as casting your 4 prevents you from proactively making more !
• Mesmer skin's free cast of 1 would, thanks to the new shield mechanic, be harder to access, making it's snowballing potential less dangerous, yet still interesting. but again, as previously mentioned, the ability already balances out by limiting you to only seven thralls !
• Reaving through thralls would become a way to not only gain access to a niche one-shot combo, but would also allow you to get back even more energy, which itself balances out due to revenant not having many uses for energy besides getting rid of most of it by casting his 4.
• It would also allow for a more defined playstyle consisting of a thrall -> reave -> pillar loop, that'd allow for a consistent, fair and clear goal (mixing CC and damage) while passively recharging your tanking power (via mesmer skin charge return) and giving you the energy necessary to power your big, explosive finish should you need to quickly nuke something !

Edited May 14, 2019 by JohnLemon123

[JohnLemon123]

1 hour ago, Madway7 said:

The main issue with this suggestion is that adaptive damage is really just adaptive status, his 4 changes damage types in order to proc status and when these status procs are no longer needed (ie no shields/armor on a non infested enemy) it switches to an undefined neutral damage type which does the listed modded dmg amount regardless of health type.

His pillars have 2 issues, one being that the pillars are stationary and unless you make a lot of them at a choke point enemies are not likely to walk across them. For a "high damage" concept these work in theory (just DE didn't give them much dmg), but for status I don't think these can work at all unless they either pull enemies into them or deal a lot of status procs per second.

The second part being the projectiles that currently do impact, issue with converting them to adaptive damage would be that they are very slow, it takes a few seconds before they start going out and even when they do they don't hit that many enemies. (this might be different if the Enthrall spread worked tho, but atm that is impossible to test)

 

Forgot to add this to me previous reply, since edits don't give a notification I am posting this in hopes of getting a small discussion going.

yeah, i guess the pillars themselves would still need a bit more help, though i do still think that making them have this ''adaptive'' property is important (if only for flair).

As for the other problems, i think they'd be easily fixed by giving the pillars (not the projectiles) a given amount of status per second affected by strength, which would probably start at 40%, requiring the player to invest about 250% power for maximum status, putting it in line with reave and the boosted dance macabre.

The projectiles themselves would probably need a significant increase in damage (not sure to what extent) alongside a high status chance to compensate for their speed, resulting in a mechanic that makes the pillars destroy enemy defenses before the projectiles take care of their health.

that's only theoretical however, but (as mentioned in my previous post) the ability would already have enough sustainability and utility to warrant SOME form of unreliability, itself offset by it's potential payoffs in snowballing, energy returns and damage.