Vauban & Ember Dev Workshop

[(PSN)PluggedInBabies]

Vauban thoughts:

- Teslas look much improved and I like the direction a lot!
- Minelayer still feels like the worst part of his kit. Even at a lower energy mini-Vortex, static damage turret, and horizontal bounce pads don't interest me. I will exclusively set it to Damage Amp mode every mission and never use the other modes. I honestly think giving him a slew of buff pads like Damage Amp and akin to Wisp would be a better route for Minelayer.
- Orbital Strike I really wish I had stats for because I can't gauge how good it will really be without range and damage numbers. The delayed timer on it doesn't do it any favors, as I will probably wind up casting a Vortex, dropping one, then my teammate comes flying by with an Atterax and they'll die before that big satisfying explosion can wipe them out. My response will roughly be "Well I sure am glad I spent 75 Energy on that."
- Vorstille definitely seems like the biggest winner in Vauban's kit and I think it looks amazing on paper against most factions, but the fact that it focuses on Armor and lacks a clause for Shield has me worried about his performance against Corpus. Maybe sap shields in Bastille and grant teammates Overshield generation over time relative to Shields being sapped?

 

Ember thoughts:

- The Passive stats seem too small. The raidus is very small and the boost is minor. If the boost were more like stacks about triggering Heat procs, it may work out a lot better though.
- Fireball would be a lot better if the explosion and napalm scaled off Power Range mods.
- Immolation is extremely difficult to gauge without hands on time and numbers presented. Right now I am not too happy about it since it adds an element of micromanagement to a character who did not have that before this rework or even now outside of this one ability. It feels like an island in her own kit. Ember being one of the earlier frames a player can get, I honestly feel like simple abilities would have been a better way to go. I would have much preferred this as a duration based buff like Turbulence or Shatter Shield. That said, a mixed Defensive and Offensive buff is cool to see on a conceptual level.
- Fire Blast changes are simple, nice, and very appreciated.
- Inferno I liked a lot from the footage provided, but I think I will downright love based on the description. The stream showed just clumps of enemies, but if its really targeting enemies locations and scattering the meteors around, this may become one of my favorite abilities in the game. Awesome execution of a proper "Nuke" ability, and my favorite part of Ember's rework for sure.
- That said, Ember's kit as a whole looks even more Energy thirsty than ever since it looks like she's going to be casting a lot more abilities. Adding a clause to her passive like "Enemies killed by Heat damage within 15m restore 5 Energy", "Restore 2 Energy per second per enemy inflicted by a Heat proc within 15m", or increasing her Base Energy would help a lot to alleviate her issues.

 

Thank you for listening, and good luck with the rest of their development!

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

They didn’t address the problem that was Vauban being to CC and gimmick oriented.

[(XBOX)ELM0Damian]

Enemies on fire are panicked and dont move. enemies who dont move dont spread fire and allies will also be killing enemies making more things spawn. so yes we will be knocking back alot of enemies because we are forced to cast her 3 if we want our energy. witch is a pointless drawback that doesn't need to be there it is counter productive to her new passive

[KaiTodd]

Will Ember's fourth a line of sight ability? Or will it target every enemy that is visible from the screen?

[Phthisis]

Instead of puncture grenades why not one that regens ammo? This is far more viable than puncture, unless you're going to make puncture into a better debuff where they take more damage. 

Speed pads are kind of meh. We already move fast enough in missions and with bullet jumping being a thing now, we can just skip huge sections of maps.

Seriously though, an ammo regen station for one of the grenades would be great, maybe a short term small nigh-indestructible wall to replace the speed one?

He is named after Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, the French master of Siege warfare and defensive doctrines after all. I'd expect his kit to play more into his concepts and ideas. 

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

Pretty solid overall. Would like more rollers if possible. But mobile cc is good for mobile game. 

Minslayer is aight. I like the tether grenade. Nail nade seems bleh. If it was puncture proc over impact I could see use for it. Vertical bounce nade seems good for gimmicky things. Didn't need that tho. Damage buff helps him not be just cc like his new 3 which is good. 

Orbital strike is too slow. Needs to be faster. I get the synergy with grouping enemies and then nuking but it still should be faster. Unsure about the scaling with enemy level. Probably should scale with enemy max ehp. 

 

4 is really good. Curious on what the buff is. Hopefully the strip time doesn't take forever. 

 

Was kind of hoping Minslayer got replaced. And it's a little upsetting that it still feels gimmicky heavy.

[ChromeKat]

6 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

They didn’t address the problem that was Vauban being to CC and gimmick oriented.

Not every frame has to be the next new Saryn/Chroma/Equinox. From my playthroughs with Vauban, the main thing I find is that his CC was mediocre by 2019 standards and 3/4 of his kit don't even work well (Vortex included, cause it scales awfully with range) and a ton of outdated or impractical abilities. DE increasing his CC potential, and giving him minor utilities outside of just CC+CC+CC+CC looks fine.

5 hours ago, Phaeronimus said:

Poor man's tether mine....what utility is it suppose to provide? Reeling enemies into an existing Bastille? Hm,interesting..or we can just..ya know..throw another Bastille out there,crowd controling a second batch of enemies..

I would see it as a cheaper Vortex tbh, also its 4x cheaper than a Bastille/Vortex so I'm certain you can be more imaginative on what you can do with it at times since CC-ing a small mob feels redundant with 100 energy. Nail turret and zoom pad would be less utilised, yea unless more tweaks on how much of an influence happens.

4 hours ago, Maka.Bones said:

Once again,the animation lock...just why? 

They said they're still trimming down the animations to speed it up at 46:15 on the devstream. Also, they mention Bastille removing armor over time and giving you and allies inside an armor buff. 

[Phyrak]

Just a thought.

Vauban struggles with survival if you mistime your Bastille or get a stray rocket to the face.

Perhaps alongside the passive armour buff which appears like it occurs only in the area of Bastille - why not apply a layer of damage reduction on top just for Vauban so he can survive at least one larger hit as well as the armour from Bastille. Just so he isn't forced to be stuck to one stop and in and around corners.

After all, Vauban's base stats aren't the greatest compared to other frames - an extra bit of damage reduction will really help him in later levels

[ZetraThorn]

Overall seems good. Though I have some concerns.

 

Ember: why immolate is a skill and not a passive? It would have been better to make it passive.

Also currently it has a severe downside. Loosing all of your energy is very high price.  Maybe so something like games redline? Up to 100% heat it gives damage resist. When you overheat 100 to 200 gives damage amp instead but no DR at all. If you reach 200 you discharge all your meter as a blast and skill resets to zero? As for the third skill.  To add to current functionality when you are overheated it would drain overheat and would do an accelerated effect in addition. Is making enemies vunervunerable to to fire.

 

For the Vauban. 3 looks freaking dope. Though seems a bit too slow. Probably should be fine only if it has giant AOE.

[Maka.Bones]

Honestly think his Tesla limit should be increased to 6, and should maybe get more uses than that. 

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

49 minutes ago, RWBY-WhiteRose said:

Please leave accelerant in. Fire debuffs are nice and all, but we need stuff in the way of raw weapon damage (like current ember can do)

Heat damage is being reworked as well to melt armor off targets. So I don't think that will be necessary.

[Sohaya-]

36 minutes ago, (XB1)Knight Raime said:

e it doesn't ragdoll enemies that are heat procced. 

Wait what I never knew

To be honest, it would be nice just to have an innate heat damage buff while retaining the charged fireball’s damage right now, just so ember players don’t have to give their play style a 180.

40 minutes ago, GinKenshin said:

let's actually play the rework to see if accelerant is 'needed' 

Good point.

41 minutes ago, GinKenshin said:

again, fire procs do that now

So does her current reworked 3. I’m trying to make it more consistent with her current kit. Really all my suggestion is is adding heat damage buffs back into get jit innately.

That said the propagating fire proc was something I didn’t think about too much, and her debuff potential might make her somewhat viable with her current kit. I don’t know anymore, I’ll get my hands on her and see if she needs that buff or not.

[Maka.Bones]

53 minutes ago, RWBY-WhiteRose said:

Ember’s best ability used to be accelerant. It let enemies take more damage, and it also granted good self buffs.

Instead of moving that to her 3, it was flat out removed in favor of fire blast, and the buff potential is gone from that too.

Hear me out: ember still needs a fire buff inbuilt into her kit. Could you please modify accelerant and make it her 3 again? Ragdolls are a meh form of cc especially when you have the reappliable panic from the fire proc, which is already spread everywhere by her 4. I’d suggest having accelerant strip armor instead of priming enemies directly, increase the range and then leave that in place of the god-awful anti-synergetic ability that might me her new 3. (Knocking mobs out of range of her passive)

Please, @[DE]Steve (Can’t find Scott)

Her new fireblast is actually better than accelerant, believe it or not. 

Ember never had issues with flesh enemies, but she ALWAYS had issues against armored enemies--even when considering accelerant. The new fireblast allows ember to strip armor, thereby allowing her to kill armored targets... making accelerant basically completely unnecessary since she can already kill anything unarmored. 

Her new 3 also won't be knocking back enemies that are already ignited (most of us missed that it doesn't knockback ignited enemies... but yeah, we're good there) 

[Maka.Bones]

33 minutes ago, (XB1)ELM0Damian said:

Enemies on fire are panicked and dont move. enemies who dont move dont spread fire and allies will also be killing enemies making more things spawn. so yes we will be knocking back alot of enemies because we are forced to cast her 3 if we want our energy. witch is a pointless drawback that doesn't need to be there it is counter productive to her new passive

Her 3 won't ragdoll enemies that are ignited... and yes they'll still spread fire to other enemies, because other enemies that aren't ignited will still want/need to approach ember.... since they can still move. 

Not to mention that Rebecca wasn't within range of the passive, when she killed many of those mobs.... Meaning that we won't be needing to be UP CLOSE to every single mob, to kill them... We won't need our passive to kill enemies, it's just a nice perk we get to use if we want to. 

[Maka.Bones]

5 minutes ago, RWBY-WhiteRose said:

Wait what I never knew

To be honest, it would be nice just to have an innate heat damage buff while retaining the charged fireball’s damage right now, just so ember players don’t have to give their play style a 180.

Good point.

So does her current reworked 3. I’m trying to make it more consistent with her current kit. Really all my suggestion is is adding heat damage buffs back into get jit innately.

That said the propagating fire proc was something I didn’t think about too much, and her debuff potential might make her somewhat viable with her current kit. I don’t know anymore, I’ll get my hands on her and see if she needs that buff or not.

her 2 will already buff her heat damage.... That's partially the point/function of her overheat gauge, that comes along with her 2

[Aldain]

45 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

They didn’t address the problem that was Vauban being to CC and gimmick oriented.

^That.

I can live with Tesla in the state they've turned it into, but Minelayer should have been scrapped entirely, 2 out of 4 of the mines are not really worth the (even reduced) energy, one depends on how the scaling of the ability works and one is just a "fire-and-forget" damage buff.

At least the Orbital Strike has some punch (both visually and hopefully in damage) and they reduced the redundancy of Vortex and Bastille by adding them together into one slot.

But come on, were these really the best ideas they had for Minelayer?

[selig_fay]

Только что, Aldain сказал:

But come on, were these really the best ideas they had for Minelayer?

Damage boost? You can't deny it's a powerful feature.

[Aldain]

Just now, zhellon said:

Damage boost? You can't deny it's a powerful feature.

Powerful, maybe, but it is also the most vanilla and thematically dull idea that anyone could come up with, it is a Rhino Roar in pill form.

Just buffing damage is the cop-out way to design an ability, and realistically most people will likely just use that damage boost mine and ignore the other three as a whole.

[Maka.Bones]

12 minutes ago, Aldain said:

^That.

I can live with Tesla in the state they've turned it into, but Minelayer should have been scrapped entirely, 2 out of 4 of the mines are not really worth the (even reduced) energy, one depends on how the scaling of the ability works and one is just a "fire-and-forget" damage buff.

At least the Orbital Strike has some punch (both visually and hopefully in damage) and they reduced the redundancy of Vortex and Bastille by adding them together into one slot.

But come on, were these really the best ideas they had for Minelayer?

Ripline is a cheaper, and mobile version of bastille (more spammable). You could put it on your kubrow, or maybe even on your tesla balls (I really hope we can put ripline on tesla balls)

Damage buff should be explanatory why it's good

The movement tile is a bit weird, i'll agree there... seems small for what it should be doing, but it still has good potential for mobility. I think it should be a tad bigger, and not force movement but instead give HUGE movement speed buffs, for like 3-10s... by huge speed buffs, I mean like 500% speed increase. It would also be helpful if they made the area similar to titania's passive, where it'll function even if you're just hovering over it but close to the ground)

and the nail mine..... yeah i'm not sure there either... I'm really hoping that 

 

So far I only see one potentially bad mine, and one "meh" mine... the others are actually really good still. 

[Feystar]

With the armor granting boons, I think it'd be neat to have some kind of healing stuff, maybe an augment for his damage boost latcher that grants a minor regeneration effect, some kind of healing nanites? Though I know that's not really what his kit is focused on, I just think it'd be cool, I really like playing support. xD

[(XBOX)ELM0Damian]

9 minutes ago, Maka.Bones said:

Her 3 won't ragdoll enemies that are ignited... and yes they'll still spread fire to other enemies, because other enemies that aren't ignited will still want/need to approach ember.... since they can still move. 

Not to mention that Rebecca wasn't within range of the passive, when she killed many of those mobs.... Meaning that we won't be needing to be UP CLOSE to every single mob, to kill them... We won't need our passive to kill enemies, it's just a nice perk we get to use if we want to. 

Bad reason to keep a bad part of the kit we shouldn't have to ignite enemies to make the ability function better. It just feels like you are defending this for no reason i get it its new but its not like im saying the whole ability is bad just the part that is mosly agreed on being pointless. It doesn't feel good for you or your teamates to want to shoot something but have it flung around. you are forced to push 3 to not lose energy that means even when you dont have ignited enemies and that will throw them around and force you and your team trace them around the ground to kill. Im not trying to make this ability worse just better and more consistent.

[Aldain]

1 minute ago, Maka.Bones said:

The movement tile is a bit weird, i'll agree there... seems small for what it should be doing, but it still has good potential for mobility. I think it should be a tad bigger, and not force movement but instead give HUGE movement speed buffs, for like 3-10s... by huge speed buffs, I mean like 500% speed increase. It would also be helpful if they made the area similar to titania's passive, where it'll function even if you're just hovering over it but close to the ground)

The biggest issue with that mine is the same as bounce's player utility, bullet jumps and parkour exist and can be faster for no cost.

Even if it gives a buff similar to how Wisp's does it doesn't really have a place unless it also gives a melee attack speed buff, but then you just have the same ability as Wisp.

They tried to be clever with the ability, and I'll admit it is unique, but...it just really is pointless.

As for the Ripline mine, and I can't believe I'm actually saying this, I'd rather use Tesla because it stuns enemies in place making them easier to shoot in the head than enemies being dragged towards a wall or pet or player.

I don't have a problem with the damage buff per say, but it is just kinda...boring as for the Nail mine...I hope they at least make it a decent area damage-over-time ability that can at least kill a few weaker enemies while Vauban covers other areas.

[Maka.Bones]

17 minutes ago, Aldain said:

As for the Ripline mine, and I can't believe I'm actually saying this, I'd rather use Tesla because it stuns enemies in place making them easier to shoot in the head than enemies being dragged towards a wall or pet or player.

But why not both??

and yeah I wish they had given him a flashbang that opens enemies to finishers, instead of the nail mine.... would've been more creative and useful for teammates too. 

BUT if the nail mine has long duration, AND it can pop bubbles, then maybe it'll be worth?

 

Edit: Also, no matter what you say I'm not gonna complain about a cheap damage buff.... That just makes you sound like a kid complaining that they got chocolate ice cream, instead of rocky road or chocolate fudge. I WILL SAY that it would be nice if it offered variety of damage type options within the damage buff.... Like if it was an "augmented ammo" damage buff... But i'm still happy even though it doesn't. 

Re-edit: I do agree that the kit still feels like it lacks a bit of creativity or ingenuity though.... It still feels a bit plain. 

[(PSN)Lei-Lei_23]

Why. Is. Bastille/Vortex. Still. A. Power 4?!

Please DE, I implore you. Make Orbital Strike his Power 4 and keep Bastille/Vortex as a Power 3! I don’t want to see Bastille/Vortex as a 75-100 cast cost ability! At least amuse us that it can potentially be a 50-75 cast cost ability as a Power 3!

Digital Extremes.

Scott!!

[mchaggis79]

Please get rid of that meter for Ember.  Those meters for gauss, baruuk, etc., all cause micromanaging and babysitting of it which is incredibly boring at best and annoying as hell at worst.  I have no problems with a damage reduction ability like gara's shield or mesa's, but please kill that meter with fire (pun not intended).

Vauban's rework looks decent.  Can't say much about it since I've never cared much for vauban.  The only suggestion I have is getting rid of that mario kart speed boost thing and replace it with something else.  Doesn't seem useful in any situation and will most likely just be used to throw fellow players off the edge of maps.