Time for a rework: How to make Ember a better arsonist

[angel_bee]

Hey all! 😊

I've been playing for almost two years now, and Ember is one of the most favourite warframes of mine! It's just really sad that she has so much potential and she falls so short of realising it.

I've had excellent ideas for a ember rework for a little while, and have discussed and thought through it a lot with members of my clan and people in the community. Seeing the amount of ember rework suggestions that come in everyday in the forums, I hope this is one of the better suggestions and it makes sense to everyone!

To recap the foremost issues that seem to be plaguing the viability of Ember's kit:

1. Her heat damage can barely hurt enemies at higher levels as they scale higher in armour and HP (level 80+).
2. The energy drain on her abilities is simply too high. And as a result...
3. There are too many factors to balance in a build that is based around her abilities. Here's a snapshot:

•       By the time you build for efficiency to negate the energy drain (using Narrow Minded or Fleeting Expertise), you sacrifice ability range or duration (which ironically, in turn, impinges on efficiency). Now let's say you try to fix the ability range by adding Overextended. Then you have not enough power strength to make a dent. So you put strength mods. And your build becomes diluted because you gotta have a little bit of each of the four stats: efficiency, range, strength nor duration, but this also means you can't stack up on any particular one without adversely affecting another. The situation becomes even worse if you try to fit in survivability mods into a damage-based build.
•       This situation starkly contrasts to the high viability of frames that are geared towards doing damage like Saryn and Garuda (two of the warframes with best design, in my opinion). Saryn can ignore efficiency and not have to touch duration to build high range and power strength (has high energy pool, can slap on Hunter Adrenaline or Rage to regenerate energy. Don't worry about dying, because she has high HP and armour and Regenerative Molt!). Garuda can ignore ability duration and not have to touch ability range in order to maximise ability efficiency and some power strength. Furthermore, both have armour-bypassing capabilities (corrosive, slash damage)
•           In summary, Ember cannot be built nearly as well as other well-designed frames like Saryn or Garuda to do damage, and on top of that, her lack of defensive potential means she'll also get stomped at higher levels.

4. Some of her augments should be incorporated as innate features of her abilities e.g. Fire Blast shouldn't require Fire Fright to cause enemies to panic. World On Fire should not require the Firequake augment to simply be able to knock down enemies. Mod slot is very valuable real estate these days.
5. Accelerant's stun is not long enough.
6. Her passive is too situational, as it's not often you get caught on fire. When you do get caught on fire, you take damage - a disproportionate penalty for a meagre amount of energy regen and power strength.
7. Her ability range is too limited, especially due to the last rework on World On Fire.

Here, I suggest changes that make Ember's abilities more logical, engaging and synergystic whilst preserving her basic concept as it is at the moment (i.e. no over-the-top wishful changes).

Passive: It's been suggested that Ember should be able to convert a proportion of heat damage dealt by weapons and abilities into true damage, as a reward/incentive to mod for heat damage. This is an excellent idea. Furthermore, to preserve Ember's interactivity with the environment, I believe that she should still be able to interact with not just fire but blasts.

Therefore the new passive ability Ignition should:

• Convert a proportion of heat damage into true damage, proportion is affected by power strength.
• Upon coming contact with fire patches (e.g. Napalms, fire vents in Gas City), ember can absorb this and throw it back at the enemy as a energy cost-free fireball. Damage could even scale according to original enemy damage, allowing for more viability for damage at higher levels.
• Upon coming contact with blast, instead of suffering a blast proc, ember has a chance of knocking down enemies around her occasionally.
• Ember takes less damage (or even no damage at all!) from heat status to enhance synergy and logical sense. It's because it's a little bit dumb to be damaged by heat if you are basically the god of fire. Just like when Volt takes damage from an arc trap. See: http://gph.is/2lnp32Z

Fireball: Fire spreads in real life, does it not?!?! So why don't the flames from Fireball spread amongst enemies??

Therefore the new Fireball should:

• Retain the same cast and appearance as it is right now, except:
• Last on an enemy indefinitely (kind of like Saryn's spores, but the way it spreads is different and due to the proposed passive, probably does not need to grow in damage over time, see below.)
• Spread to unaffected enemies when they hover too close to an enemy already on fire. This could be some small radius like 5 m, affected by range mods (the current radius of the flame patch)
• The heat status chance should be a decent number, possibly affected by power strength mods. In that case, the rest of Ember's kit must include a way of somehow forcing fire to spread amongst enemies. (again, see below)

The augment Fireball Frenzy: it has been criticised by some because they feel heat damage is unsatisfactory. I think it should stay, considering we have reworked the passive to enhance heat damage.

Accelerant: The new Accelerant should stun enemies for a bit longer and the heat damage bonus should stack on multiple casts - although the multiplier should be decreased accordingly.

Considering the proposed passive ability, Accelerant should increase the heat damage BEFORE a proportion of it is converted into true damage by the passive. Also, considering the proposed Fireball, Accelerant could synergise with it by enhancing the spread radius of the Fireball flames. For example, +100% range (affected by range mods)

The augment Flash Accelerant: honestly, it is amazing in its current state, causing the damage bonus of Accelerant to scale by the square of Ember's power strength. I love this. I really do. However, considering the latest (very, very welcome) augment rework, Fireball Frenzy already gives (more) heat damage to team-mates in range, we have to minimise the overlap in features.

Therefore the new Flash Accelerant could be something like:

• Same casting speed bonus, but in addition:
• Allows allies in range to possess the heat damage to true damage conversion of the proposed passive.

Fire blast: Fire Blast is supposed to facilitate CC by knocking enemies back and the persistent ring of fire helps with defending objectives. Currently, the ring of fire has a range far too low to be able to accomplish that, which cannot be increased by range mods. The first thing to do would be to allow the persistent ring of fire to be affected by ability mods. It should also be innately capable of causing enemies to panic without having to equip the Fire Fright augment.

So now to the augment, Fire Fright. As a reminder we are operating with the philosophy that all augments must be unique and give legitimate quality of life.

One thing that someone mentioned that reeeeally turned heads was the possibly of Fire Blast/the ring of fire having different properties/mechanics according to Ember's emissive colour (similar to Chroma's Elemental Ward, but enabled with an augment, which Chromatic Blade is the precedent here). So maybe you could have heat-based elemental themes like Gas, Radiation, Blast and Heat for the ring of fire. An example of how this could be implemented would be the following:

ORANGY-RED COLOURS = HEAT ALIGNMENT.

ALLIES GAIN HEAT DAMAGE FROM ALL SOURCES WHILST IN THE RING. THE FLAMES ALSO HEAL THEM OVER TIME.

And for Gas:

GREENISH COLOURS = GAS ALIGNMENT.

ALLIES GET GAS DAMAGE. IN ADDITION, THE RING OF FIRE DOES GAS DAMAGE INSTEAD OF HEAT DAMAGE, AND THE ASSOCIATED GAS STATUS INSTEAD OF HEAT PANIC.

These elemental alignments could prove to be indispensable when fighting adaptive shielding bosses like the Profit Taker!

Finally, World On Fire! As it currently stands, World On Fire is very taxing on energy pool, even with very high efficiency/duration. The range of damage can get quite low as well. Despite good intentions by DE to make it less "set and forget", the channelled nature of this ability predisposes the player to "set and forget" no matter how the numbers are tweaked.

Now I previously mentioned that if Fireball were to spread like a flame patch realistically would in real life, there must be something in Ember's kit to force the fire to spread to large groups of enemies. I believe this job should be for World On Fire.

Earlier, I acknowledged the proposed Fireball would be a little similar to Saryn's spores. Now let's have a quick look at Saryn. Her spores spread with high base range (16 m) whenever you kill an infected enemy with allies, weapons or Miasma (which also 4x the Spore damage). This was very successful in making Spores less of a "minimal actiona and input required" ability.

On the other hand, for the proposed Fireball, base range of spread must be comparatively low (say 5 m) to preserve the uniqueness of Ember's abilities. Ember is a psycho arsonist woman who just wants to see the world burn, right? Let's have her douse her enemies in fuel and make them scream in agony.

Proposed World On Fire:

• On single click, Ember may spray fuel in an area of a certain radius (affected by range mods), and all enemies doused in fuel are very susceptible* to being set alight by flames from Heat status, be it environmental or from Ember's abilities. *Very susceptible could mean that the doused enemies could attract flames from a greater distance and take more damage when they are eventually set alight.
• Furthermore, I think it useful that if amongst a group of enemies doused at once, at least one of the enemies were already on fire to begin with, then the whole mob will be set alight and begin to panic.
• Most importantly, doused enemies will ALWAYS PANIC, FLAIL AND RUN TO THEIR ALLIES IN A FUTILE ATTEMPT TO SEEK HELP PUTTING OUT THEIR OWN FLAMES. This is not a Heat status effect, but a property of World On Fire. So In this fashion, enemies on fire will actively seek out unaffected enemies, so that eventually they too will catch on fire and (hopefully) die. This is how Fireball will be effectively forced to spread amongst enemies. The flail and panic duration should be affected by duration mods.

The augment Firequake: Someone on the forums previously suggested that Ember should leave burning trails on the ground, and that was quickly shot down by other people who pointed out that it will be too similar to Nezha's Fire Walker. Well, to be honest, I feel like Nezha is impinging on Ember's territory with that ability, and not the other way around. That is a debate best left for another day but it means that Ember should be OK to have a similar ability without her feeling like a carbon copy of Nezha.

So I propose Firequake:

• On holding the ability key #4, Ember splashes volatile fuel on the ground in front of her. This should drain energy at a flat rate as Ember pours the liquid. At any point if an open flame (e.g. from Fireball, Fire Blast, even napalms) touches the trail of fuel on the floor, the whole trail is instantly set alight. Ember can pick up these flames and hurl them as free Fireballs. The base damage of the fire on the ground can probably increase the longer Ember has poured the liquid fuel.
• I came up with this myself. I thought this is real cool because it adds another dimension to Ember's abilities whilst being true to her nature, and some people can even light entire maps on fire just for the memes haha

Support for this rework:

• In summary, most of Ember's damage should be coming from Fireball (similar to Saryn's Spores as a precedent) with Fire Blast being a neat little defensive tool and Accelerant, World On Fire synergising with Fireball.
• Using the entire kit that I just proposed (without augments), you would have to just stack power strength and ability range and have a reasonable amount of medium ability duration.
• Then the gameplay would be:

1.      Cast Fireball on enemy. Enemy remains in one spot.

2.      Cast World On Fire. Enemies flail and spread flames.

3.      Cast Accelerant. Flames spread more.

• This proposed kit also GREATLY encourages players to mod for heat damage on weapons, being able to deal true damage, with an even high proportion of damage converted to true damage if you have high ability strength.
• Abilities are much more interactive and less "set and forget". Repeated casting of Accelerant or World On Fire is required to maintain spreading of flames.
• Furthermore, you can build for a plethora of purposes because the augments take Ember's skillset to new heights.

I hope that it is apparent that a rework of Ember should proceed in the rough direction I have described, as it addresses the issues that most people in the community have with Ember's abilities and the mechanics are more logical.

Hopefully these changes will help Ember reclaim her righteous title as a crazy sadistic arsonist.

xoxo

Edited September 23, 2019 by angel_bee

[peterc3]

11 hours ago, angel_bee said:

Passive: It's been suggested that Ember should be able to convert a proportion of heat damage dealt by weapons and abilities into true damage

This is an awful idea and isn't remotely sane. Just convert a portion of the Ignis damage into True Damage? Any high DPS weapon modded for Fire?

11 hours ago, angel_bee said:

Ember takes less damage (or even no damage at all!) from heat status

Elemental frames will likely never have resistance or immunity to their elements. Not only is it odd to have a handful of frames with an extra part to their passive, it only benefits Saryn and maybe Ember, Frost would have a useless passive and he and Volt would almost never benefit from it.

[Blexander]

25 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

Elemental frames will likely never have resistance or immunity to their elements. Not only is it odd to have a handful of frames with an extra part to their passive, it only benefits Saryn and maybe Ember, Frost would have a useless passive and he and Volt would almost never benefit from it.

If I remember correctly, DE themselves stated that elemental immunity for their respective frames wouldn't be a thing either in the near future, or ever (don't quote me on the last part).