How to train your tornado(s)

[(PSN)Hopper_Orouk]

I guess i can't get enough of zephyr

She's the first warframe i immediately had my eye on when i first started playing 

And i still go back to her (if it just wasn't for her lack of good skins she'd be my 24/7 main)

She's got her awesome rework that fixed most of her problems

In my opinion i think the main problem she suffers from is the lack of any control over her tornadoes...with or without the mod funnel cloud

The problem is the tornados work against each other...some tornado will steal an enemy from another tornado making it hard for you to focus your damage on a tornado when enemies are flying between them 

The option to steer the tornado with your aiming also works against you because you still can't control which one you want to move and they still won't stay in one place 

 

With the funnel cloud augmentation it's even worse 

Because the option to steer the tornados completely breaks, it won't work and they won't go where you want them to go 

Because i think they are programmed to go after enemies, but are also programmed to go where you're aiming so the result is just them going back and forth 

The proper way i managed to make use of them is to not aim at all and just use my first as my damage ability (yes i'm the one player that equips target fixation and uses tailwind in close quarters combat)

 

Now my suggestion:

Why can't we control the tornados the way we can control nova's antimatter drop? 

Remove the tornado's enemy priority completely and just let them always go to where we're aiming 

A simple fix that will help improve zephyr very very well

 

Which brings me to part two of this thread 

In this part we're delving into a slight rework into her airburst...so if you don't care about some rework shenanigans you can just leave this part

So imagine my suggestion above was implemented 

my idea is instead of making airburst increasing the height of a tornado why not making airburst COMBINE tornados into a bigger stronger one?

Since now we can easily control them and gather them close to each other it'll be easy to use airburst to COMBINE all tornados into one and have a one huge tornado with the sheer force of 3(or 12 if you use the augment) tornados

With this one big tornado you can control it better because it's just one 

It's easier to pick enemies up or to just pull them with the augment 

And it'll have the same damage over time value but the damage transfer is based one the original tornados

So if you had 3 tornados and combine them into one that tornado will transfer 3x the damage you deal

If you have 12 with augment and combine them that tornado will deal 12x times the damage you transfer 

 

It's literally the same mechanic as it was before but the only difference is it's a lot focused and less random 

This time you have greater control over your ability

 

 

Edited August 21, 2019 by (PS4)Hopper_Orouk

[(PSN)Hopper_Orouk]

Sigh

Ok you're my last hope @Birdframe_Prime

review

[Birdframe_Prime]

11 minutes ago, (PS4)Hopper_Orouk said:

Ok you're my last hope @Birdframe_Prime 

Fear not

Spoiler

And I have to say that you've hit on a specific point, just gone about fixing it in the exact opposite method to the one I would use.

AI controlled abilities are not very good in Warframe, it took DE specifically coming up with an advanced, aggressive version of their Spectre AI in order to make Wukong's new 1 work, and there are still quite a few problems with it (such as the confusion when it teleports back to you and ends up on a box or rock that isn't navigation-meshed to give it pathing options).

What you can do, however, is limit the AI's need to actually think, and at that point you have something that you can rely on.

That's what leads me to my own version. But let's talk about your version for now.

The reason we can't control Tornado the way we control Anti-Matter Drop is because AMD is supposed to be a targeted ability, it has the lee-way of being driven to a location and then detonated because it's a charge-up ability, with a cap rather than continuous damage, AMD is not supposed to persist and AMD is not capable (even with its augment) of being placed over objectives as an invulnerable line-of-sight blocker and CC generation. It's also very, very slow unless charged to max, and even then it's slower than the base sprinting speed of a Nova, meaning that even with the augment that allows Nova to absorb ranged damage like a Turbulence function with teeth, she isn't always going to keep it with her. So if your Tornado worked the same way, it would be even worse because it would trail behind at an immense distance with her running and jetting around. (Why would it do this? Because if it kept up with her it would be a bowling-ball of CC that an extremely fast frame like Zephyr could exploit insanely.)

If Vauban's Vortex also provided a 5m Radius of invulnerability around the point it landed, and shooting it transferred your damage in the way that Tornado does, then honestly the ability would be considered too strong. Throw that on a Defense objective and never bring a Frost or Gara ever again. Enemies can shoot through it, however, which is why Vauban's Vortex and even his Bastille are not still the meta for defenses in the current method of game play that they once were.

What you would propose, and to a factor of 10 with your rework proposal, is the ultimate AFK device for any pitched mission, any Defense, Mobile Defense, camping Survival, Interception... all of it. You could place a Tornado funnel at the location you desire and have nearly a minute of complete and total invulnerability while enemies are completely unable to approach their desired objective. Well, unless there's Nullifiers, but Grineer and Infested don't have those ^^

The whole reason Tornado moves around is because DE are very clearly aware of that, and even Octavia doesn't have that level of AFK potential because even when augmented to put one on either side of her, her 1 doesn't have enough draw to prevent all enemies from targeting a Defense objective or from damaging you when you're not invisible. (Octavia is amazing, but she's not perfect.)

More importantly, I think you're missing something very, very important that Zephyr can do with Tornado (or a buffed version of it) that she literally couldn't do with your manual steering version of it; Leave. Zephyr can, effectively, leave her Tornado to do a job while she carries on doing other Zephyr things. Like face-planting into walls, yes, and the floor... yes... but that's the thing, you can Tailwind off into the distance and know that Tornado is still where you left it.

Or you should be able to know that.

Again, this is why I came back with my version.

In an ideal world, Tornado would move fast, target aggressively, but be limited in how much it can do that. Wu-Clone has a 30m radius that he can go out to, and then gets recalled. If he could run freely he would wander off, chase spawns, go into other rooms and generally not be where you need him. And that's the exact problem that Tornado has, it has no range that it can't go beyond, and no direct ability to spawn it where you want it, rather than where it wants. It still has this element of causing chaos that DE gave it with the original iteration, and that's not good enough. We agree on that for certain.

It does need to have that ability to be directed, reliably, but making the ability all-manual is a trap for us as players.

Now, picture this instead:

You cast Tornado, the four funnels appear at your aiming reticule as four distinct entities that you can immediately target with Air Burst, shoot to charge with damage, and will immediately deny the area you've cast them on. You can use this specifically to defend a point, target a group of enemies, a doorway, or similar. They then move outward preventing this ability from permanently denying an area so that it's at least an attempt at balance.

Funnels move fast and track the nearest target to them aggressively, and move on the moment they have that target captured. Funnels can only move up to 50m away from that original casting point, meaning you can always locate them, they never wander off, they never go chasing spawns into the next room unless you cast it in a doorway and they can reach that next room.

This is the base state of the ability and would be a buff as is. But it's not all I would pitch.

Picture an Air Burst cast that actually controls enemies rather than ragdolling them, lifting them for a short period like a mini Bastille, so that you can shoot them while they're incapacitated.

Now imagine that doing so also marked enemies for priority attack from Tornado funnels, even after the main lifting portion of Air Burst has ended. The nearest funnel to an affected enemy would navigate to that area and attempt to capture all surviving enemies.

Throwing an Air Burst into a Tornado funnel would actually buff it, allowing it to move faster than the new buffed speed, but also forcing it to hold enemies for a set number of seconds so that they are guaranteed a certain amount of status and a certain number of damage ticks at minimum before enemies are able to be dropped. This combo would mean that when you Air Bust another group of enemies, a faster, longer-lasting CC would then come in to give you even longer duration on that time the enemies spend helpless, as well as begin dealing damage, plus whatever damage you pump into the funnel itself.

This would be natural synergy between abilities, rather than forced, because you have those two abilities work at base, do a specific function at base, but then combine to create something better just for using them near each other.

The tl;dr portion of this is simple:

Rather than having to manually control Tornado at all times, creating potential AFK mechanics stronger than any yet seen for the purpose, create an actively controlled Tornado that relies on you actually targeting enemies and causing two abilities to interact to become stronger, but you can also rely on the ability to stay where you put it for the duration (even if enemies aren't always immediately affected by it) to do its job.

That, to me, is a better way of handling Tornado.

You might not agree, but then I won't hold that against you, everyone has their own opinions ^^

[(PSN)Hopper_Orouk]

24 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

You might not agree, but then I won't hold that against you, everyone has their own opinions ^^

No actually i get it now

AMD and tornados aren't the same 

One is a slow controllable projectile and the other is an Ai based Aoe 

I also encourage the idea to make airburst increase the speed of the tornados...instead of it's height(never understood why they added that)

But i think the intent behind airburst was just a normal damaging ability that basically does some minor ragdolling cc