Simple Ember Changes Suggestion(from an Ember main since 2013)

[Yamamoto-kun]

So summer is around the corner and i said ''what the hell let me give DE my 2 cents on embers state after 6 years". Now before i go over actual suggestions i will be honest: ember is trash,but she is fun. She has always been fun. Overheat giving 99% damage reduction was fun. World on fire just being an invisible aura was hilariously underwhelming,but since it lit things up it was fun. Accelerant spamming to this day is still fun. It's remarkable how enjoyable she has remained after all these years and it's proof that she doesn't need extensive changes to be ''endgame viable'' or whatever. Not to mention,she is one of the first frames a new player can get their hands on. That is why she should stay simple and deliver the basic(but oh so satisfying) fantasy of 'burning sh*t up'. So here are a few ways she could be touched upon to improve her(more detailed changes bellow):

Passive: Her current passive is beyond trash and very,very,very badly designed. It just doesn't fit not only to ember but to warframe's identity as a whole(a space glass-cannon ninja wanting to get hit by a relatively rare damage type and proc?...yeah...). There are some great ideas around the forums but i find the one thing DE should focus on is Heat procs and how Ember interacts with them. In my honest opinion Heat procs Ember causes should either be empowered(such as ignoring armor) or empower ember herself(as in if she causes a heat proc,she restores health/energy/gains power strength).

Fireball: I have nothing to say about fireball really. It's an ok ability with a bad charging mechanism. Making it interact with Heat procs could be fun though, like knocking enemies on their feet or stripping armor.

Accelerant: This is her best ability right now and the Augment is really powerful(although underrated). A stacking mechanic can be added here for the fantasy of ''light 'em up real good''.

Fire Blast: This one is weird. On one hand its a cool ability and fits her well with the fire hazard and the shooting-through-it buff,but on the other its expensive as all hell and it's yet another ''fire damage in a circle'' that i think her 4 covers. If one ability had to go,this one should be it(or even fully integrated into her 4, that would be cool).

World on Fire: So everybody loves this ability. It feels powerful,it looks and sounds cool and it sets stuff on fire. The ramping up mechanic is brutal since it cuts both efficiency and range, but i like the idea behind it. This also is a good ability for new players to play around with,its simple,fun and has a small learning curve to it,teaching new players energy management. If the increased energy drain was removed and the heat proc % was always 100% this would be ok as it is,not AMAZING OP but pretty cool.

Ok so having said all that,what would i,as a dedicated ember main, would be ok with? Well here's an example kit:

Passive: Ember's flames burn hotter than other Warframes. Heat status inflicted by Ember's weapons and abilities last 50% longer and ignore 25% armor.(bonus duration and armor ignore both increased by Power Strength)

Fireball: Same as current, but fully charged fireballs that hit burning enemies explode causing 200 Blast damage and inflicting a blast proc in a 5 meter radius(Increased by Power Strength and Range)

Accelerant: Casting Accelerant a second time doubles the bonus Heat damage multiplier on already affected enemies. Enemies affected by Accelerant and a Heat proc are slowed by 50% for the duration of the Heat proc.(slow is unaffected by Power Strength)

Fireblast: (New) Ember detonates all Heat procs in a 10 meter radius around her, causing 750 Heat damage to all enemies affected by this ability, removing the Heat status and stunning them for 1 second. The heat from these explosions burns off 25% of the affected enemy's armor.(damage and melting % both affected by Power Strength) (note:if the animation for this is Ember snapping her fingers you get bonus points DE :3)

World on Fire: Same as live, but live Fireblast is integrated in the initial cast, with the ring of fire following ember. Energy cost ramp-up is up to 50% additional energy instead of 100%.

So with the above,Ember's core design is kept intact,while adding cool and simple interactions between her abilities as well as making the Heat status a core part of her identity(as was intended,but not supported on live). Thanks for reading and stay spicy!

[BansheePrime]

Can I just say how beautiful it is to see an ember who uses or atleast acknowledges accelerant / flash accelerant? It’s pretty damn fabulous in fact.

[Arcira]

A question: How does the armor strip from her passive and Fireblast stacks with each other and corrosive projection? From the wording (ignore, burn, reduce) I´d asume they stack multiplicative?

 

For Fireblast I had a similar idea but instead of a fix damage value you´d get the damage the Ignite would have done over the duration instantly.

 

[Trusnam]

I like it! Nice simple and sounds like a whole lot of fun!

Also an Ember main here from way back, though my ideas are far more jumbled 😛 and I can't remember when I started playing her exactly, but it was easily near the beginning of days for Warframe.

Edited June 4, 2019 by Trusnam

[Xepthrichros]

Snap animation to detonate is a must! 

And the expanding fire wave from fire blast definitely should be kept too, and integrated to WoF. I would feel a bit cheated if those Eximus are capable of sending out a wave of fire that knocks us back, but we the Tenno with superior technology, somehow fail to do the same to them.

Edited June 4, 2019 by Xepthrichros

[selig_fay]

Ember does not need a passive ability based on ignoring armor, because you can easily fix it with your weapon, since corrosion is combined with fire. Plus, there are auras and abilities that allow to remove armor. Moreover, armor is a problem only against one of the factions, while the other two have other possibilities to ignore Ember's damage, such as ancient healers and nullifiers(You can not kill them quickly, they can kill you in one shot). 

 

[Birdframe_Prime]

Hmm...

Interesting tweaks, but with the caveat that some are under-powered while some are over-powered.

19 hours ago, Yamamoto-kun said:

Her current passive is beyond trash and very,very,very badly designed.

Indeed, but gaining Ability Strength and Energy from a passive is actually pretty good. We've seen it work on Nidus gaining strength from his stacks, and energy is energy is energy.

Why not play into those things, but give her access to them actively, rather than the tragedy of implementation that we have? Something like a stacking buff, where enemies you actively set on fire with your abilities ramp up your Strength to a cap that decays if you don't maintain it, and then enemies you set on fire while you're at the cap give you back energy.

Genuinely, though, 25% armour ignore as a passive? That's both far too on-the-nose (a total band-aid where you don't need one) and a fair bit OP.

19 hours ago, Yamamoto-kun said:

Fireball: Same as current, but

Why not encourage players to cast it for something other than just the direct attack? After all it leaves a napalm ball, why not have that last longer, have a really good status chance so that you can place them down and ignite enemies as they arrive, and use them to fuel her Passive (the one I suggested)?

Blast is good, it's a fun status and really would make the Fireball impactful when you cast it, the increased radius is great too. But give her something that really plays in to that 'everything needs to be on fire' motif with status-orbs wherever she needs them.

The passive I suggested there could literally be fed by this function, topping you up when you're low. Of course you'd have to limit this to only one or two napalm balls at once if that passive existed...

19 hours ago, Yamamoto-kun said:

Accelerant: This is her best ability right now and the Augment is really powerful(although underrated).

True and true, but you know what's 100% the most dated part of this ability? The constant, entirely necessary recasts. That's the under-powered part of this cast. It's like old Desecrate where every single enemy in range had to be cast on or you weren't doing your job right. If you want to use Accelerant at the moment you have to recast again and again to place it on enemies you encounter.

I would swap this to her 3 so that you can make it an Aura, on a Duration, that you can refresh. It stuns on refresh, which preserves the CC function, but while you have it active enemies in range all automatically have the debuff on them.

19 hours ago, Yamamoto-kun said:

Fire Blast: This one is weird.

Definitely. It needs two things; better range on the fire wave (I mean... come on... it's capped at 15m...) and better function on the Ring to encourage people to place them. Moving it to her 2 would do a lot for energy management, too.

I've been thinking a lot about how Ember could get survivability without giving her a direct damage reduction cast. Something indirect would be perfect, and why not make her placed fire objects, like the Ring, like Fireball's napalm ball, actually be 'shields' where they function a lot like Turbulence. If you're on the other side of them from enemies, or inside the ring of this one, projectiles can't hit you. Make the ability actually effective to use as a Defense object, or for when you're getting swarmed. Heck, place one in front of a choke point, in the line of fire, and not only will enemies not be able to hit you, you have the bonus damage from shooting through it.

And again, a burst to the stacking passive, where enemies can be set on fire quickly with a cast of this and the expanding wave.

What you could do with this one, as it's an AoE and now has a reason to cast more often, is have some synergy with the status that she has; hitting enemies that are already on fire could reduce armour by a percentage of maximum. Keep it low enough, like 20%, and you could then have players multi-casting to strip off armour on high level targets, while placing rings around for damage prevention, and also stacking rings for stacked damage on their weapons.

19 hours ago, Yamamoto-kun said:

World on Fire: Same as live

And if you don't want to change World on Fire from current, then sure. If you think it's good enough, then that's a fair take.

I, however, think that the method that DE used to nerf her 'anti-fun' strategy of turning the ability on and forgetting it as long as you had energy was the exact wrong way to deal with the situation.

It shouldn't have been to make the range a problem (completely invalidating players' Fire Quake build) and increase that energy drain, it should have been to make the ability impossible to use constantly and encourage players to actively time their usage.

Take a leaf from a mechanic we know works; Harrow's 4, where we have a dedicated charge up period with a buff to your team, but then release that charge into a damage function.

So imagine something like this; for an arbitrary ten seconds, all Heat damage, including existing procs, weapons and her other abilities, charges up a damage multiplier. When the time is up, a radial damage aura is released. Not old World on Fire, but more akin to her old Overheat. Just multiplied damage over time to all enemies in line of sight (with the same mechanics as Radial Blind, so that enemies diving for cover are still affected) in a very large range, with the multiplied damage from the charge and then the bonus from Accelerant being an Aura that applies to everything in that range.

The bonus to allies for the charge period is casting speed, fire rate, reload and melee speed, in order to deal out more Heat damage. Everyone goes mad for ten seconds, then the world goes boom. World on Fire.

This one could bring back the CC of Fire Quake, which would then additionally knock down all enemies that ignite or have their status refreshed by World on Fire.

What's to stop that being spammed? Make the duration of the damage portion only about 12 seconds at base, means that you can mod for around 30 seconds without too much issue, but you still have to stop and do the charge portion for 10 seconds before you start again. You can't AFK it, you get minimum damage if you don't charge it, it's line-of-sight so you can't kill through walls like you used to... it's a better version of what we had, and think of what it would do to enemies with armour stripped by quick casts of Fire Blast, or a Survival full of Infested ^^

So you get your minimal changes to her 1, 2 and 3 that would improve things, and you get one truly reworked ability to make her that damage frame that people really want to see out of the Fire Frame. You also remove the Drain abilities from her, keep the active casting of her Accelerant and Fire Blast, have a specific reason to place your Fireball strategically... it all works together.

[Yamamoto-kun]

First off, I'm really happy to see fellow spicy people gave my little idea some love. ^^

Second, as i said in the main post there are other more in depth ideas around the forums but i wanted to focus on simplicity, new player friendliness and the damage/heat frame role DE wants for our little KFC.Also, the passive and the other abilities were made with Heat status(not damage type) in mind,with her passive turning it into pseudo bleed and her abilities using it as a base to operate.

@BansheePrime it's really #*!%ing good but nobody ever notices :S

@Arcira I'm guessing in a way that benefits ember and is not a headache to code 😛

@Xepthrichros with a snap of her fingers she could make half of the defence wave disappear 

@zhellon yeah but those screw everybody over anyways

Edited June 4, 2019 by Yamamoto-kun

[(PSN)MyUnhealthyHobby]

On 2019-06-04 at 4:03 PM, Yamamoto-kun said:

First off, I'm really happy to see fellow spicy people gave my little idea some love. ^^

Second, as i said in the main post there are other more in depth ideas around the forums but i wanted to focus on simplicity, new player friendliness and the damage/heat frame role DE wants for our little KFC.Also, the passive and the other abilities were made with Heat status(not damage type) in mind,with her passive turning it into pseudo bleed and her abilities using it as a base to operate.

@BansheePrime it's really #*!%ing good but nobody ever notices :S

@Arcira I'm guessing in a way that benefits ember and is not a headache to code 😛

@Xepthrichros with a snap of her fingers she could make half of the defence wave disappear 

@zhellon yeah but those screw everybody over anyways

That snapping fingers looks quite familiar 🤔

[(PSN)MyUnhealthyHobby]

On 2019-06-04 at 4:03 PM, Yamamoto-kun said:

First off, I'm really happy to see fellow spicy people gave my little idea some love. ^^

Second, as i said in the main post there are other more in depth ideas around the forums but i wanted to focus on simplicity, new player friendliness and the damage/heat frame role DE wants for our little KFC.Also, the passive and the other abilities were made with Heat status(not damage type) in mind,with her passive turning it into pseudo bleed and her abilities using it as a base to operate.

@BansheePrime it's really #*!%ing good but nobody ever notices :S

@Arcira I'm guessing in a way that benefits ember and is not a headache to code 😛

@Xepthrichros with a snap of her fingers she could make half of the defence wave disappear 

@zhellon yeah but those screw everybody over anyways

By the way, thanks for making her Fire Blast like my Incinerate ability from my Rework. I feel pretty good that you liked my idea. I just wish that you would have left some feedback on it.

[Yamamoto-kun]

 

On 2019-06-06 at 11:41 AM, (PS4)MyUnhealthyHobby said:

By the way, thanks for making her Fire Blast like my Incinerate ability from my Rework. I feel pretty good that you liked my idea. I just wish that you would have left some feedback on it.

You...are welcome? I did not happen upon your post untill now tbh but if you want some feedback,here: make your writing cleaner.

On 2019-06-06 at 11:15 AM, (PS4)MyUnhealthyHobby said:

That snapping fingers looks quite familiar 🤔

Yeah inspired by Roy Mustang's fire alchemy. 

[(PSN)chibitonka]

hate Wof tbh.

World on fire and all it's doing is pumping fireballs into pyres that pump outta the ground? Seems very unfitting for such a name.