Suggestion for an update to Stalker's storyline (Spoilers)

[Zoh_Veldae]

This suggestion aims to give a new use to the Stalker, a new quest involving him and a possible conclusion to his storyline.

As this will involve heavy spoilers for the quests, I will leave everything within a spoiler to avoid… well… spoiling the story for those who haven't completed it yet.

View at your own discretion, as this will contain spoilers for several mainline quests in the game

Spoiler

As of now, the Stalker is on Hunhow's side. Geared up with Sentient equipment and being guided by his hatred of the Tenno. After the quest "The Second Dream" we hear nothing else about him, save for a few random encounters when he tries to kill us (emphasys on 'tries'). 

My suggestion will be a quest where we directly confront Stalker and Hunhow and perhaps save/kill Stalker once and for all. This will also include a suggestion of mine for a new Umbra warframe.

Now, to start at the start, my suggestion for the story would be this: Hunhow is getting tired of Stalker and his constant failures and wanning hatred and dedication to his revenge and by extent Hunhow's revenge. Knowing that Lotus is Natah once more, he decides to aproach her. Now, for this I'm not going to acertain anything until DE themselves decide either A) Natah is receptive of Hunhow or B) Natah still hates Hunhow and wants nothing more than to get rid of him for good. The point is for Hunhow to acquire Amalgam technology. If A is chosen, he will just ask Natah nicely and she'll oblige. If B is chosen, then maybe he'll just covertly acquire the tech due to some "fatherly connection" like he used during Second Dream to know where Lua was. In either case, Hunhow would get Amalgam tech and start harvesting Stalker's warframe for materials to create an army of Amalgam Stalker Replicas to do the job Stalker couldn't do. This is, of course, against Stalker's wishes, and we would have to rescue him from Hunhow. After perhaps a long harduous series of battles within, let's call it "Hunhow's fortress", we finally reach Stalker, chained and mutilated. In this situation, we would have a choice to either kill Stalker (dark moon alignment) an put him out of his misery or save him (light sun alignment) and help him to freedom. In either case, sadly it's necessary that Stalker dies, so if we kill him, that's that. If we save him, he will later succumb to his injuries. All this is for us to have a way to obtain the parts of his Warframe, which I would like to suggest it be Ash Umbra.

Why Ash Umbra? Mostly due to how the original Stalker encounters worked. He would fight as an NPC warframe with several copied abilites from other warframes. Most of his abilities come from various warframes, but some distinctly come from a single one: Ash. In his original iteration, Stalker is capable of utilizing Smokescreen, Teleport and possibly Shuriken (althought that might just be him using his Despair throwing knives weapon, not an ability) all of which are abilities of the Ash warframe. All his other copied abilities come from several other warframes like Nyx, Oberon, Excalibur and Mag, but no 2 abilities from the same frame, except Ash's. While this in of itself may be grasping at straws just to get an idea across, Ash Umbra would also fit Stalker better for being an assassin-type of warframe. The "Umbra" part would probably be explained in a similar way to Excalibur Umbra: a person used to build a Warframe, but their conscience still active. In Stalker's case, he, after the Tenno slaughtered the Orokin, would try to find a way to get revenge and decide to become a Warframe himself, puttting himself throught the procedure all for the sake of vengeance. And that feeling of vengeance would keep his conscience active even when turned into a warframe, allowing him complete independent action much like Excalibur Umbra.

The quest itself, after being completed would award the Ash Umbra warframe for us to build much like Excal Umbra (althought having it be built midway of the quest like Excal would also be viable in some way, but not really vital to this suggestion in particular) and use as we see fit. And in doing so, we would also unlock Replica Stalker encounters and Stalker Mode.

The Replica Stalker encounters would be using the Amalgam Stalker Replicas that Hunhow would create as his new army which would mostly work like Shadow Stalker but with a small twist: each encounter in missions would feature *multiple* Stalker Replicas all attacking the targeted player at the same time. More replicas would be present according to how many players are in that particular squad (similar to the gimmick of the Hyenna Pack boss fight). This would not only present an actual threat and challenge but also grant multiple rolls at Shadow Stalker's drop table, making it slightly easier to acquire his weapons (or just drastically increase the supply of Dread bow blueprints).

Stalker Mode would be available optionally while equipped with the Ash Umbra warframe. An in-game lore excuse for this would mostly be along the lines of "Hunhow is now more dangerous than ever with an entire army of Stalker Replicas, we need to put on the Ash Umbra warframe and antagonize other Tenno a bit to toughen them up for the real thing"

The Warframe itself, Ash Umbra, would mostly work like Excal Umbra, possibly keeping the independent action ability and (this is just my personal little suggestion) his Ultimate ability Bladestorm be replaced with an ability called "Shadowstorm" utilizing all of Bladestorm's mechanics, plus possibly an anti-sentient effect like Excal Umbra's Radial Howl and maybe a few new graphic effects.

Summarizing this whole suggestion, this new quest to rescue the Stalker would have the following benefits:

•  Spotlighting Stalker and providing answers as to his origins
•  Give a somewhat dramatic yet satisfiying conclusion to Stalker's storyline
•  Increase the challenge and rewards of the Stalker assassin random encounter
•  A new warframe, Ash Umbra
•  A nice continuation of Hunhow and the Sentient War's story

 

Hopefully this will all be understandable, the ideas may be all over the place but I hope it will serve as a good suggestion for DE's endeavors.

Than you for your time

 

[Marine027]

More story overall would be nice but since they stepped down on even quests for Warframes, it probably not gonna happen.

 

Side note:

Shadow Stalker i think only appears gameplay wise, Story wise he vanished after Second Dream with him broken free from Hunhows control when we broke the Sword.

But assuming he will appear in the New War again hopefully in some way. (I really want more backstory overall to a lot fo Frames and certain enemys, Stalker, Gustrak, etc.)

[Kaggelos]

I agree on all of your ideas. Kudos to you good sir ^^