Operators Are Too Weak

[MekaDovah]

Ever since the War Within, my experience with Operators have been nothing short of a vexing nightmare, and it all boils down to one problem: they're too weak.

Fragile and armed with pathetic pea shooters (I miss that old doom laser), these little weaklings are the people who defeated the sentients in ages past? How? Did the sentients just sit around and let them plink away with their amps? Two of the longest, biggest grinds in the game (focus and amps) and it seems to be for absolutely nothing of value. A fully gilded built amp still takes too long to kill even the little sentients out in the plains. What was even the point? Focus can give them improved health and armor and it's still for nothing. All I ever see operators used for - outside of anything mandatory - is quick energy and travel. That's it.

Every event (War Within, Harrow, Eidolons, Kuva Siphons) that has required them has been a frustrating pain and I never want to use them because of how unbearably weak and clunky they are to use. They are, at best, a cumbersome, useless extra step to accomplish an otherwise simple task just to drag it out for an artificial, and false, sense of challenge. I do not accept that it's meant to be a challenge. If the only challenge that anyone can conceive of, in a game all about grinding to amass power, is taking that power away all the time, then why is anyone even bothering? I want to have my power challenged, not taken away to artificially create a so-called challenge. Otherwise it feels like I'm wasting my time.

I seriously think Operators need another look at on the drawing board because I'm dreading New War. I know it's going to require the operators and I know it's going to be a horrible experience because the Operator is just that unreliable and useless. Remember: making something mandatory doesn't make it useful. It just makes it annoying.

[(XBOX)Shodian]

I would suggest taking a look at their arcane and grabbing amps from Little Duck. Also, unlock the waybound nodes as soon as you can. You'll be able to equip the more important nodes all at once that way.

They're also not meant to just be played solo, they are meant to complement the warframes. A unity of mind and body. The Warframes and their weapons are still going to be the main damage dealers.

[CopperBezel]

The many millions of focus we have to collect, whether from Eidolons or ESO, to unlock the various unbindable operator passives are pretty endless, even if it's lightened somewhat by new things like Lua lenses. That said, with all of those passives and the right arcanes, operators can be comparable to weak frames in damage soaking ability and still provide a focus school of abilities.

The issue, then, is more in said schools. The lack of balance between them and the really awful extent to which many of the abilities focus on dealing pathetically weak raw damage is a problem. Right now, with Energizing Dash, Temporal Blast, and Inner Might (in that order), Zenurik has three abilities that compete with the best things any other school has to offer. Vazarin gets you something as nice as ED, Unairu gets you something as good as TB, Madurai and Naramon give you something on the level of IM if you're lucky. Meanwhile the trees are all full of garbage that deals meaningless damage while draining your operator energy.

And yeah, amps are decent in terms of raw damage, with the understanding that your'e using them situationally, if you have exactly the right build, which by itself would at least make them a viable part of the operator's kit as a weapon to use when you're already in operator mode. But without any form of armor-related strip, ignore, or damage vulnerability, they're not really helpful much of the time even at that. 

But yeah, even at the level of design intent, operators aren't meant to be hopping around killing things or competing with your frame, they're meant to offer some buffs and debuffs for frames to take advantage of. They give you rapid travel, the ability to jump out of a dicey situation, energy and health regen, etc., and in theory could give you other things, too, if there were more focus nodes or arcanes worth bothering with. As it stands, get Zenurik's non-damage abilities and all the other passives, get a Plaga + Klamora amp, get two Magus Repairs, and you have healing, energy, transport, and the ability to freeze demos and bosses. Which at least fills the design intent of operators as squishy casters who godmod, even if it gives you no real options along the way whatsoever. 

Edited February 8, 2020 by CopperBezel

[NinjaZeku]

24 minutes ago, MekaDovah said:

All I ever see operators used for - outside of anything mandatory - is quick energy and travel.

My Operator gives me Squad healing as well as mass CC (which works on certain otherwise immune enemies) and even scaling damage.

Magus Repair + Magus Lockdown is a fantastic combo that I can very much recommend.

[Loza03]

10 minutes ago, (XB1)Shodian said:

I would suggest taking a look at their arcane and grabbing amps from Little Duck. Also, unlock the waybound nodes as soon as you can. You'll be able to equip the more important nodes all at once that way.

They're also not meant to just be played solo, they are meant to complement the warframes. A unity of mind and body. The Warframes and their weapons are still going to be the main damage dealers.

The arcanes are problematic for two reasons. For one, Lockdown's the same kind of thing as other nuke items, so if it weren't one of the few things keeping them relevant in modern-day Warframe Combat, it'd be on the chopping block for a nerf, and rightly so. Scaling AoE damage, Survivability (via Void Modes invisibility) AND crowd control, all in one arcane? I feel like it's in a Kohm Riven dispo situation. The others are more or less band aids to another problem relating to the amps, or so niche there's not much use in using them.

That problem being that void damage is awful, no matter what way you slice it. It's the only damage type to have exclusively negatives, no positives, both of which are severe. They deal innately 50% reduced damage to fossilised health, which is what all heavy infested use, most notably healers which gives all surrounding units 90% damage resistance. The other weakness is to the entire Grineer faction. Both Grineer health types take innately 50% reduced damage from void damage, on top of armour scaling, which only Unariu and Madurai have any ability to counter - one which takes the enemy out of combat range, and the other being highly inconsistent and weak even when it does work. Honestly, I'm half-convinced that the reason the Corpus are the only faction without damage resistance is because Sentients use Robotic health type. And the less said about the status effect the better.

 

As for 'they're not meant to be played solo' - neither is Trinity or Harrow. They're support frames, just as Operators are support to Warframes. Yet they have their fans who are more than willing to use them solo for self-support. And even beyond Warframe, it's not uncommon for 'support' characters to have loadouts and setups geared towards a more independent playstyle - Battle Engineer/Medic in Team Fortress 2, Clerics in Dungeons and Dragons, or Prowlers in Monster Hunter: Generations - the latter especially so, since they're quite similar to Operators being smaller and weaker than Hunters, but with extra mobility and utility.

Besides, it does seem that the Operators are supposed to have some degree of independence - the Schools DO seem to support more combat-focused playstyles in theory. Madurai, for example, offers direct damage buffs to most Operator abilities, in both AoE and long-range burst formats, Zenurik offers a variety of damage-over-time abilities and Unariu has the ability to make your Operator more tanky which is useless if you're not using them. They're quite weak abilities, yes, but what's the point in the attempt if you were never supposed to use them?

 

Lastly, this is a lot more subjective but... wasted potential. I mean, these are kids with superpowers that even the mighty Orokin feared, derived from an eldritch hellscape where physics need not apply - and they are literally described as 'one of the most powerful forces in the known universe'. We play as Warframes which can bring down meteor showers, open portals to other dimensions and devour souls, but the limits of the, raw, untapped source of all those powers can muster is a dinky fireball, an electrical light show and a laser beam?

[CopperBezel]

The last thing that would make sense in a game called Warframe is to discover that the warframes were just training wheels for superhero kids. There's also nothing in the lore to support what you're describing and plenty to counter it. Operators already themselves require amps, that is, amplifiers, to deal damage using their void abilities. Why wouldn't you expect warframes to have a similar effect? The lore isn't quite clear on whether warframes' abilities are actually being powered by the operators to begin with - Umbra says hi! - and the best ability any operator has is transference.

As for the combat elements of the focus schools, yeah, that's an issue. Things like Magus Lockdown ought to be in the schools rather than in arcanes. Possibly those ones relating to amp damage, too. The whole focus system is a mess. 

But it remains that a frame with the ability to pop out an operator is significantly more powerful than one that can't, and increasingly so as you work through all the focus and other farming required. Because, again, it's having a tiny teleporting Trinity inside you at all times. That is far from nothing.

[DrivaMain]

Operator is not really weak, they offer A LOT of utility. But I agree, some of the focus nodes are hilariously bad and some nodes become a “must have” in normal gameplay and not to mention the grind to unlock the operator’s potential.

In terms of operator only combat. Void Damage is probably the worst damage type in the game. Why does the grineer are extremely resistant to it? Void Status is just a weaker version of magnetize. If we just make Void Damage the only neutral damage against all faction and replacing the status effect we could see more people considering operator in standard gameplay.  

[OmegaVoid]

46 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Void Damage is probably the worst damage type in the game. Why does the grineer are extremely resistant to it?

Grineer were genetically enineered by the Orokin to be their manual labour workforce. And the Orokin used Void energies in a lot of their tech.

So it'd make sense for the Grineer to be made resilient to an energy type which they might be exposed to damage from.

[Foxyboi95]

That's kinda the point. The operator is a CHILD that's been sleeping for god knows how long. Plus why make them tanky when the warframes are a thing. For now, the only real need for them is eidolons and the sentients, everything else can be done with frames. Tho this will most likely change when the diveri paradox comes out.

[schilds]

They used their warframes to kill the sentients.