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The Deadlock Protocol: Protea Feedback Megathread


SilverBones

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In this Megathread, we want to hear your feedback on Protea and her swathe of new abilities!

  • PASSIVE - Every 4th Ability cast is granted +100% Ability Strength. 
  • GRENADE FAN - Activate to throw a cluster of shrapnel grenades, damaging and staggering nearby enemies. Hold to emit sticky shield grenades that latch onto allies and restore a large amount of shields. 
  • BLAZE ARTILLERY - Place a temporary rapid-fire turret that automatically targets enemies. Each successful hit increases its damage, causing projectiles to pierce enemies and hit multiple foes with a single shot. 
  • DISPENSARY - Deploy a cycling supply cache that can generate Health, Ammo and Energy pickups periodically.
  • TEMPORAL ANCHOR - Activate to drop an anchor point that records Protea’s state. Any damage dealt to Protea during the Ability will be emitted back to your foes upon deactivation. Deactivating Temporal Anchor will rewind Protea back to the activation point restoring all ammo, energy, shields and health. If Protea is downed while Temporal Anchor is active, Protea will automatically rewind to safety! 

If you have feedback to leave on the subject of Protea or her abilities, then please do so in this thread. Please remember that you should keep your feedback constructive and civil. If you like an aspect of Protea, tell us what you like. If you do not like an aspect, then tell us why, and what you would change to make it better!

Please bear in mind this is not a place to leave bugs you discover while playing. If you do need to report a bug, please use The Deadlock Protocol: Bug Report Megathread

Thank you!
 

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Time to do this. Feedback incoming.

Passive - Great passive with a nice little core gameplay loop.

Grenade Fan - for a DOT and CC ability it does its job. Not sure if I like the little hop before she throws though. The visual clutter from spamming shrapnel vortexes, while fun at first, quickly blinds the entire team. I do like the vfx though, so some limiters should be in place.

  • Shrapnel grenades arm themselves when they land on the ground, lasting for a new duration of 25 seconds at max ability rank.
  • When an enemy walks into the vortex range, the shrapnel grenade then creates the vortex to damage and stagger, renewing its duration to full.
  • Limit the amount of shrapnel and shield grenades to 9 or 12 active per type (3 or 4 casts). Helps game performance, saves players' eyes.
  • Make the particle effects on the grenades more translucent.

I like that they contribute to Temporal Anchor's implosion damage, just like Blaze Artillery does too. The shield satellites are pretty much perfect as they are, albeit it would be nice to have a timer under the shield/sec icon.

  • Allow shields restored to add to Temporal Anchor's recorded damage.

 

Blaze Artillery - did not expect to be able to deploy multiple guns, which is a nice surprise. Damage seems to be on low side requiring time to ramp up with the damage bonus. An actual duration stat on the ability page would be great.

Since it runs on a charge system, I was expecting it to interact with Dispensary's universal ammo pack somehow. It would be a nice synergy to refill plasma charges (thus also the duration) from Protea picking up those special ammo packs.

  • Keep the ammo system but remove the duration. Since Blaze Artillery fires so quickly, if there are enemies then it will last the same time, but if no enemies it can stay put as a security measure. Thematically Corpus.

 

Dispensary - resupply at the push of a button! Really reinforces the looter-shooter gameplay we have here. In particular, I wish it would put the supply cache where I point the reticle, rather than in front of where Protea's model is facing (Wisp's Reservoirs does this too). The pickups it drops do their jobs well. Although I feel that as an ability, it feels disjointed to the rest of Protea's kit.

  • Allow health restored by Empowered Health Orbs to add to Temporal Anchor's recorded damage.

 

Temporal Anchor - this is one of the most fun abilities I have had the pleasure to use in a while. The visuals and sound work, bravo team! It adds a depth of difference in each cast that keeps things feeling fresh.

Now, onto the ability itself: Temporal Anchor is an amazing survivability and sustainability tool, well worth its costs of energy and repositioning. However, on Warframe, mission progression is often forward, so the lack of effect from this ability except to cancel itself feels punishing and wasteful.

The implosion itself has two facets, 1) as a finishing blow on weakened or other enemies, 2) as an enemy grouping method so that Shrapnel Vortex and Blaze Artillery can maximize their damage potential. Often times, if used as a finishing blow, Protea has to have collected enough damage from her attacks, meaning enemies nearby would have already been wiped out with mere seconds left for Protea to hop near another group of enemies. If used as a grouping method, it helps feed the next implosion since Shrapnel Vortexes slash a lot more enemies and Blaze Artillery's damage bonus per hit skyrockets if enemies are aligned for the plasma charge.

Overall, a solid ability. The rewind itself works well enough, stats and position reset at a whim. There are some suggestions I'd like to make:

  • Hold while active, instead of complete cancel, causes to the anchor to pass through the afterimages to return to Protea. Implosion does not occur, but Protea's stats are reset when her anchor reaches her. Protea is not invulnerable during this time.
  • Shrapnel Vortexes within an implosion gain Gas procs with their attacks.
  • Blaze Artillery firing through an implosion gains Radiation procs with their attacks.
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I currently feel that Protea's Blaze Artillery should be a 1-hand cast or have no interruptions.

Meta-wise, Protea's current build may end up being for higher Power Strength focusing on Dispensary and Temporal Anchor. Blaze Artillery and Grenade Fan's damage doesn't feel worth it for the time being.

For now, I feel making Blaze Artillery non-interruptible will be important.

 

LIST OF SUGGESTIONS FOR PROTEA [OLD]

  • Spoiler

     

    • PASSIVE
      • None atm
    • GRENADE FAN
      • Protea's current playstyle is very spammy which can be a turn off, and Grenade Fan's Shrapnel Grenades is also a bit concerning.
      • [Suggestion] Have the Shrapnel Grenades home in on the three closest enemies within Grenade Fan's range and let them attach to enemies
        • This could reduce the needed spam a bit and make the ability more easy to conserve uses
    • BLAZE ARTILLERY
      • [Suggestion] Remove the animation lock this ability has to make it feel a bit faster
      • [Suggestion] Remove ammunition of Blaze Artillery and exchange it as a toggle channeling ability that drains energy
        • Blaze Artillery doesn't appear to have a limit on the 50% damage bonus stacking and right now the short duration it has doesn't seem worth using it even with the armor stripping it has with Heat. The energy drain could be a ramping one if you feel it is too overpowered to use, but give this ability a little more appeal than it has now
    • DISPENSARY
      • VERY VERY slow and very stationary. You and your teammates will need to be nearby to gain some benefits for this ability
        • [Suggestion] Either ramp up the frequency Dispensary spawns resources or...
        • [Suggestion] Add an effect it it that causes enemies to drop bonus ammo/energy/health orbs if killed within affinity range of Dispensary
          • Dispensary already is too stationary and you are only allowed one of it on the field so a little add on shouldn't hurt
    • TEMPORAL ANCHOR
      • [Suggestion] Either increase the base range of the Implosion or
      • [Suggestion] Give Protea increase Speed/Evasion/Reload Speed/Attack Speed (your choice) while Temporal Anchor is active [cause part of her gimmick is time]

     

 

PROTEA CRITIQUE AND SUGGESTIONS [UPDATED - 6/18/2020]

So I have started to see what DE has intended to be a special playstyle for BLAZE ARTILLERY. The fact that BLAZE ARTILLERY's damage ramps up for each enemy it hits and since it also has punch-through, my outlook was that BLAZE ARTILLERY needed a group of collected enemies together to really feel worth using. However, there is one little fact I have not taken into account:

Protea's TEMPORAL ANCHOR's explosion is actually an "implosion." TEMPORAL ANCHOR pulls enemies into the epicenter of the explosion once the ability's 2nd phase is activated. With this in mind, I believe DE wants a combo with TEMPORAL ANCHOR  BLAZE ARTILLERY.

This combo is rather unique in its idea and could potentially make BLAZE ARTILLERY worth it, but the energy cost feels a bit too extravagant and a rather forced synergy with extra cost. We also can't truly say that BLAZE ARTILLERY used with this combo would payoff in the long run with other members of the team killing enemies.

With that said, I have a few suggestions to make on Protea:

  • PASSIVE
    • [OPTIONAL IDEA]
      • Make Protea's Passive be gradual. If Protea needs to cast so many abilities to get that 100% Power Strength, I thought of making the Power Strength be more gradual. [0 bar in Protea's Passive = +25% Power Strength, 1 bar in Protea's Passive = +50% Power Strength, 2 bar in Protea's Passive = +75% Power Strength, 3 bar in Protea's Passive = +100% Power Strength]
      • You could also inverse the Ability Efficiency of Protea base don the bars. Make it easier to spam more abilities in the early run then gradually reduce that Efficiency the more you spam them. [0 bar in Protea's Passive = +30% Power Efficiency, 1 bar in Protea's Passive = +20% Power Efficiency, 2 bar in Protea's Passive = +10% Power Efficiency, 3 bar in Protea's Passive = +0% Power Efficiency]
  • GRENADE FAN
    • Have The Shrapnel Grenades pull enemies into its center
  • BLAZE ARTILLERY
    • Make the rounds that fire and hit enemies create a secondary explosion dealing a small radial AOE damage.
  • DISPENSARY
    • VERY VERY slow and very stationary. You and your teammates will need to be nearby to gain some benefits for this ability
      • [Suggestion] Either ramp up the frequency Dispensary spawns resources or...
      • [Suggestion] Add an effect it it that causes enemies to drop bonus ammo/energy/health orbs if killed within affinity range of Dispensary
        • Dispensary already is too stationary and you are only allowed one of it on the field so a little add on shouldn't hurt
  • TEMPORAL ANCHOR
    • Either remove the Implosion from Temporal Anchor to replace for higher damage multiplier + base explosion damage OR add some special debuff to enemies hit by the Temporal Anchor AOE burst

 

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Why is your ability balance philosophy so drastically different from weapon balance? Every time you release a weapon, you try to one-up the OP factor of the last one, and you've had two weapons that were so far outside the normal boundaries that they were drawing more than half of the usage rate.

But then you drop Blaze Artillery, and it's an ability that lasts all of 3 seconds, does negligible heat damage that, for some reason, isn't using Vauban's level scaling, and then to top it all off, it -barely- levels up. Which is a shame, because I did think for a bit that it could be useful, but sadly, it is horribly undertuned, much like virtually all abilities that -don't- actually attack an entire cell all at once. 

The fan grenades are okay-ish, probably because slash procs, but they're terrible to place. Somewhat compensated for by the placement in triplicate.

The delay on the Dispensary is a bit annoying, as most of its duration ends up being spent on nothing, which is quite feel-bad. Rather than having power strength give a chance of extra drops (Chance based is bad anyway), have it diminish delay timer.

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Kinda disappointed the turret is not a proper duration based deployable (doesnt feel very engineer like to me), her 1, dear god, the screen blinding burn when spammed is unreal, esp with more than 1 protea, her 3 is ok, her 4... situational for me so far.

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wKIAi1u.jpg

IM BLIND!!!!

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Grenades: Ok, probably her most useful ability.

Turret: Needs to be duration based. It already has a limited arc, but having limited shots is plain dumb.

Dispensary: Can we please select what we want the dispensary to drop? We already have better, easier ways to gain ammo, health, and energy. So, this needs massive buffs and the ability to select what we want it to drop. 4 modes: 1) Mixed 2) Health 3) Energy 4) Ammo. Tap to select, hold to deploy. Remove it's duration and make it so that stat affect the frequency at which it drops pickups (The more duration the faster it drops, the less, the slower it drops pickups).

Rewind: It's bad, and it can't be fixed because it's a thematic ability based on bad mechanics and planning. Guess the easiest way to "fix" it would be to release an augment that doesn't make you go back to the previous position. 

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I would rather uninstall this game for ever, not gonna do any radio towers solo with my nervous problems. Can do defence lvl 100+ with no problem, but no interception, not even lvl 1 with this kind of map as it is on 1. operation.

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3 minutes ago, ixidron92 said:

Rewind: It's bad, and it can't be fixed because it's a thematic ability based on bad mechanics and planning. Guess the easiest way to "fix" it would be to release an augment that doesn't make you go back to the previous position. 

Actually, something that could fix it is if it boosted power efficiency while active so you can spam -everything- and then rewind your energy. 

But that would also depend on the rest of her abilities actually being worth casting.

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Justo ahora, LadyEsti dijo:

I would rather uninstall this game for ever, not gonna do any radio towers solo with my nervous problems. Can do defence lvl 100+ with no problem, but no interception, not even lvl 1 with this kind of map as it is on 1. operation.

There are 2 towers ffs. Deploy an specter in one if you want easy mode. Also, this is the wrong thread. This is the right thread: 

 

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Justo ahora, Colyeses dijo:

Actually, something that could fix it is if it boosted power efficiency while active so you can spam -everything- and then rewind your energy. 

But that would also depend on the rest of her abilities actually being worth casting.

Her abilities aren't spammable. So, even if you've got to cast them for free, you wouldn't get any advantage. It could work, however, if you get no limit to how many turrets and grenades you can deploy, but the copies disappear after rewinding. 

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Just now, ixidron92 said:

It could work, however, if you get no limit to how many turrets and grenades you can deploy, but the copies disappear after rewinding. 

I think I read a tip saying they don't. And there's no limit to turret or grenade deployment, AFAIK.

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hace 28 minutos, Colyeses dijo:

I think I read a tip saying they don't. And there's no limit to turret or grenade deployment, AFAIK.

I'm pretty sure the limit is 3, or at least I can't count more than 3 copies of the slash grenades (9 total) at once.

Edit: Just tested it in a controlled environment with infinite energy and yeah, you can deploy as many as you want. Tough the turrets still have a 3 second duration. 

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Some quick feedback from my first impressions of her:

  • I don't like the jump when using her first ability. It feels weird being popped up in the air just to throw grenades when Vauban doesn't.
  • The visual effects on her grenades are pretty disruptive. I had a yellow energy Protea in my game and it made it difficult to see anything around them.
  • I feel like the turret should have its current time limit multiplied by 1.5 or 2 times, so it can have some downtime without losing shots.
  • It feels bad to have a time limit, an ammo limit, and an angle limit all at the same time on the turret. I hope one of these gets changed or removed.
  • I don't like the way the turret deploys in front of you with the angle limit. I noticed that when jumping towards enemies and using the turret in the air, it's possible for it to end up above the enemies' heads and be unable to shoot them. I think it should deploy directly above or slightly behind you.
  • Dispensary doesn't feel super impressive but might be more noticeable in harder content.
  • It may just be low ability level/power strength preventing me from actually doing a lot with it, but it feels difficult to gauge the impact of Temporal Anchor's blast wave. Since your camera's getting dragged around, damage and affinity numbers are hard to read or see so it feels like it's not doing much of anything, even if it's actually doing a lot.
  • Temporal Anchor doesn't rewind proc effects, which feels strange considering its theme.

I think Protea would have been better served being built as a full building or full time-manipulation frame, rather than having one time-manipulation ability being given top billing. It feels a bit out of place with the rest of her kit. Her abilities are interesting and bring new options to the table, though, so I hope she gets some more attention in future updates to tie her together a bit more tightly.

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8 minutes ago, gallowsCalibrator said:

Some quick feedback from my first impressions of her:

  • I don't like the jump when using her first ability. It feels weird being popped up in the air just to throw grenades when Vauban doesn't.
  • The visual effects on her grenades are pretty disruptive. I had a yellow energy Protea in my game and it made it difficult to see anything around them.
  • I feel like the turret should have its current time limit multiplied by 1.5 or 2 times, so it can have some downtime without losing shots.
  • It feels bad to have a time limit, an ammo limit, and an angle limit all at the same time on the turret. I hope one of these gets changed or removed.
  • Dispensary doesn't feel super impressive but might be more noticeable in harder content.
  • It may just be low ability level/power strength preventing me from actually doing a lot with it, but it feels difficult to gauge the impact of Temporal Anchor's blast wave. Since your camera's getting dragged around, damage and affinity numbers are hard to read or see so it feels like it's not doing much of anything, even if it's actually doing a lot.
  • Temporal Anchor doesn't rewind proc effects, which feels strange considering its theme.

I think Protea would have been better served being built as a full building or full time-manipulation frame, rather than having one time-manipulation ability being given top billing. It feels a bit out of place with the rest of her kit. Her abilities are interesting and bring new options to the table, though, so I hope she gets some more attention in future updates to tie her together a bit more tightly.

Also hooks from ancients and scorpions cross time and space and will drag you even after temporal anchor.

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So, the more I play with her, the more everything feels underwhelming. There are just so many restrictions, and the numbers are so low. I just tried to maximize efficiency and energy to spam lots of turrets and grenades, but the damage isn't great, and when I try to maximize strength, you don't get to deploy as many, but the damage is still awful, to the point that if feels you're outputting more dps by sheer quantity rather than quality.

The jump she does before deploying grenades is just awkward and throws accuracy out of the window, not to mention the grenades bounce off of surfaces before activating.

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(1)Her Grenades have no visual differential between the damaging and shield buffing ones.also when you have the buff it has no duration counter.

(2)turret has no duration number in seconds, instead the duration is based off the "plasma ammo" it has which means if you have 15 plasma ammo if it was shooting the amount of time it would take to fire those 15 rounds is its duration. the duration ticks down even if it is not engaging an enemy. the range is also really short and the fov seems bugged.

(3)once the dispenser deploys its initial round of pickups it will only drop another one when all the drops of that type are picked up. example: if you picked up the universal ammo drop it will drop 1 more ammo drop. it doesn't continually dispense.

4()her ult works pretty much as it says no major notes here.

 

 

ive only been playing her for about an hour so i'll update with more feedback as i notice things.

edit: turret seems to have problems targeting enemies at different elevations than itself.appears to shoot thru arctus eximus shields not sure if intended. also has problem tracking and hitting moving enemies. misses alot of shots.

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The main issues I currently have with protea are:

Grenade Fan: Overall solid. The damage isn't great but it does offer surprisingly potent CC which is fine enough for it's range and cost. The shield grenade however could come out a bit smoother. You have to aim down to cast it on yourself or else you have to walk forward 5-10 meters just to collect your own ability.

Suggestion: Have the grenade automatically give you a shield when you cast it so you can instead focus on throwing the orbs to your team and still get the buff. Also let grabbing a new ball refresh the buff and/or replace it with a stronger one, if I have her passive queued up I have to wait till my current buff is gone until I can get the stronger version.

Update 28.0.4 edit: "Grenade fan is now 10 seconds across all levels instead of level 1 and 3 being higher". I didn't comment on the duration here because I figured it being shorter was not intended. 10 seconds is really low! At least, for the shield grenade specifically. I understand just how much protea can spam, but needing to refresh my shield buff every 17.5 seconds with 175% duration is not ideal when I have another ability with an insanely short duration I'm constantly using. For the shrapnel grenade it's perfectly fine.

Blazing artillery: It just doesn't have the right punch for how much you have to use it. First, it shouldn't interrupt combat to cast as the duration is so small you spend 25% of a single turrets duration just casting it. Second, the damage is okay at helping you clear trash but again for an ability that isn't exact "set it and forget it" it doesn't do enough to make it truly worthwhile for how much it interrupts the flow of combat. Not only that having multiple isn't even that powerful because of the firing angle. You'll either do some solid damage to a single hallway or do mediocre damage to everything. Plus that damage only feels like it becomes noticable towards the end of its duration instead of feeling like it's decent at the start. It sucks that I can spend 100 energy spamming turrets and get a spread out effect that's much weaker than same cost single abilities. I understand it was likely made this way because of temporal anchor, but I don't use temporal anchor because of this!

The worst part is probably the combo mechanic. It makes the ability very inconsistent in terms of performance. Enemies in a straight line? enjoy an 11x combo! Enemies spread out? yeah you'll only hit about 5x. This is worsened by the fact that the turrets do not focus, they shoot everything randomly so even if there's a straight line coming at you that would be able to rack of big damage from the destroy everyone else with, it won't go for that. 

Suggestion: Make it a one handed animation to keep up the flow of combat and improve its scaling. Probably tweak how the damage multiplier works because it makes the ability pretty inconsistent. I would personally like it have a stronger per hit growth but not grow from penetrating just so it's consistent.
 

Dispensery: The health orb is fine. The ammo is amazing. The energy is awful. It takes 6 seconds to deploy every set of energy and with 325% (225+passiive) it's an 85% chance to get a 2nd orb. All that bonus strength for 50 energy every 6 seconds. You need some weird or excessive setups to make the energy part work. You either get arcane energize or you use equilibrium + combat discipline (she barely takes health damage so you kind of need this to make it work). Overall this ability scales extremely poorly strength. This is also just for protea, if you're her team mates who are less cognizant of the dispenser (it's tiny and even I lose track of it) they get even less out of it unless I use energize to force feed them energy.

Suggestion: I don't think the energy part should be absurdly effective, but it could stand to be way better. I was thinking upping the base double orb chance to scale up better and make it so strength affects the speed at which orbs are deployed to some extent. Only one set of a drop can exist per dispenser so it's not like there would just be stockpiles everywhere.


Temporal anchor: Honestly a fine ability. I don't feel the need to use it specifically because her abilities just don't get you anything from spamming them. The turrets can be decent supplementary while your attacking but when you focus on them like the ability give you the option to, they are very below average, her damaging grenades are just for CC and are so low cost that even with negative efficiency you can spam them anyways, and her dispenser has a max of 1 and recasting just resets it. It also give TONS of ammo so I the ammo part of temporal anchor isn't a selling point. So really I just use it to not die if I think I might make a mistake or make a small explosion when I do a lot of damage. 

She's really fun and her kit is solid at its core, it's just that her numbers feel a little on the low side. She feels a little clunky with one fairly short duration abilities and an insanely short duration ability that doesn't get a lot done. It feels like I'm spending more time casting because of all the short duration abilities than I am able to weave them into my normal play. I play a lot of frames that are heavy on ability use and I don't think any of them compare to what you have to do with protea to have similar or worse results.

 

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Ok, I found the way to play her. Pure efficiency and spam. In the end, turns out that Protea follows the soviet model, quantity is a quality on its own. Don't bother increasing power strength. Why deploy one turret that deals 500 damage when you can deploy 10 turrets that deal 100? Why deploy 6 grenades when you can deploy 60 and cover the entire map?

Best part is, you need 0 formas for that build.

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It kind of hurts my heart to hear that she is so spam-heavy with her abilities. I am surprised that the turret isn't really a turret. It is more like a semi-autonomous damage ability that has auto target and a delay before releasing its full potential.

 

We don't have a true turret frame and it is really weird that we don't. Why the turret isn't duration based with some kind of synergy that boosts duration is beyond me.

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hace 1 minuto, Leqesai dijo:

It kind of hurts my heart to hear that she is so spam-heavy with her abilities. I am surprised that the turret isn't really a turret. It is more like a semi-autonomous damage ability that has auto target and a delay before releasing its full potential.

 

We don't have a true turret frame and it is really weird that we don't. Why the turret isn't duration based with some kind of synergy that boosts duration is beyond me.

To be honest, I think everyone was expecting a turret ala TF2, and instead we've got a turret that lasts 3 seconds and isn't even a turret, just Ember's meteorites redux on a delay.

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Initial impression:

I enjoy Grenade Fan well enough, it does its job, and it does it reliably.

I would much prefer it if Blaze Artillery were able to refresh its duration (or ammo w/e) while engaging enemies, currently only seeing a 6s duration, if that, because of how quickly it chews through ammo.  I get that you don't want fire & forget, but it's pretty rough to justify that 50e base cost for something so short lived.  So that it would ramp up while engaging enemies, but then disappears quickly during lulls in battle.  It would give it more reliability without sacrificing the anti-fire & forget sentiment.

Dispensary is funny because it gives you a way to basically perma-proc Energy Conversion, which is pretty comfy for playing.

Temporal Anchor is pretty okay, it's exactly what I expected out of it.

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This is about 4.5 hours with Protea, both in mission and in simulacrum with the build below so any thoughts below are initial impressions. 

xVJGjZk.jpg

General Impressions: The combination of weak, non scaling damage abilities with no one handed abilities ruins her. There is no limit to the amount of grenades and a soft cap on how many turrets she can have meaning that in order to do any damage, 100% of the players time is dedicated to spamming abilities. There is no time to melee or shoot. Only spam. 

Her abilities are all very visually busy. Combine that with her reliance on spam means there is a ridiculous amount of visual clutter on screen at all times just from Protea alone, forget other warframes which makes her frustrating to play with. Seriously. Who the hell wants to play with this:

xUfTPbE.jpg

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For fairness this is temporal anchor ALONE at 100 effects intensity. Still unplayable IMO:

gG9FX8n.jpg

Her kit is disjointed. Her 1, 2, and 3 seem designed to make her excel at static defense missions however her 4 encourages hyper aggressive gameplay, which is completely absent from her kit.

She has very good sustain from her 1(hold), 3, and 4 and is acceptable in a support role.

Passive: fine as is. could use a boost in duration as well.

Grenade fan (tap): Clunky and weak. The extra bounce at the end before grenades are thrown is not intuitive to aim with and adds nothing substantial to the warframe's mobility options. Base range is low. Base damage is low. Visually very busy with almost every color.

Grenade fan (hold): great support ability. Gives protea great sustain. Good base duration.

Blaze Artillery: Weak and limited. Scales with nothing (seriously when will you learn to scale abilities). Very limited number of shots (so average damage multiplier is ~4-5x). With a 200% power strength build I get at most 5k damage a slot. Compared to primary weapons that is laughably low. Shots affected by armor. AI can be slow to aim. AI requires full body line of sight. Shots appear to be projectiles and can miss. Completely reliant on spamming this 2 handed ability before it does any noticable damage. With 218% duration I can have ~4 turrets out at once. Factoring in the damage per shot... my corinth prime's secondary fire DPS is better.

In the image below, it took 4 turrets, or approximately 228 energy to kill one corrupted heavy gunner in ~5 seconds. The upfront damage is laughably bad although I did see a single 11k fire proc before the gunner died. It doesnt matter. TTK and cost effectiveness of the ability is so bad you're better off using your regular guns.

wR4bNyP.jpg

Dispensary: great support ability. Very strong in static defense scenarios. The ability to generate health and energy orbs on demand is fantastic with good synergy with arcanes and some of the conversion mods. Unfortunately this is a static ability and requires the players to camp one spot while it slowly spits out resources. It feels out of place with the rest of her kit and is not very visually apparent. 

Temporal Anchor: Its ok. Base range is good. More sustain. Makes absolutely zero sense in an engineer character's kit that emphasizes static defense but I suppose it fits Protea's reliance on spam. Ridiculously visually busy especially on higher duration builds. Reduce the visuals by at least 50-70%.

 

Suggestions

Passivefine as is. Given her reliance on duration, I would like to see a bonus to duration every 4th ability as well.

Grenade fan (tap): Limit to 6 shrapnel grenades out at once. Double base range. Make one handed. Increase casting speed. Boost base damage and implement scaling with enemy level similar to Vauban's flechette orbs.

Grenade fan (hold): Fine as is.

Blaze Artillery: Limit to a max of 4 turrets out at once. Make it a one handed ability. Keep current base damage and ammo as is BUT it scales with secondary mods.

Alternatively: keep base damage as is. Turret is now an exalted weapon with its own modding screen

Dispensary: make it a tap to select, hold to cast type ability. Only one dispenser of each type can be on the field.

Health dispenser: function exactly like the health tower air support. Can use immediately, has limited # of charge.

Ammo dispenser: see above except for ammo.

Energy dispenser: once placed, generates small energy orbs (25 energy) once every 10 seconds.

Alternatively: when placed, it projects a shield very similar to volt's electric shield but not as powerful. 80% damage reduction for anyone behind it and shooting through it gives a small damage buff so this way there is some synergy with the turrets. 

Temporal Anchor: its uhh. fine as is mechanically. Visual effects need to be dramatically decreased. Ideally I would replace this ability entirely with some kind of "supercharge" ability that triples to quadruples the stats of Protea's next ability cast. Save the temporal anchor for a time manipulator warframe.

 

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