An Equinox Touch-up Concept

[Tyreaus]

This touch-up concept comes in 6 parts.

0. Passive - Energy Transfer

When changing forms, Equinox retains all stored ability values (Peaceful Provocation and Mend and Maim charges) and ability activation states.

When collecting health or energy orbs, Equinox receives 25% of the restored value as energy or health, respectively.

Reason: Equinox's current passive is lacklustre compared to newer Warframe passives. Even Oberon's passive, which rivals the Shepherd aura mod, feels stronger. While she has a varied kit to make up for this, an unranked Equilibrium as a passive is too little. Additionally, making the Energy Transfer augment innate and affecting Peaceful Provocation removes a major conflict between her form-changing design and abilities that ask she remain in one form. This also increases her overall fluidity by not requiring recasts for every form switch.

1. Metamorphosis

Pressing the ability key now changes Equinox's forms at no energy cost.

Pressing and holding the ability key imparts Equinox with her form's buffs for the entire duration for its regular energy cost. If Pacify and Provoke is active, allies in range also gain these buffs.
(This also casts Duality)

Buffs from Metamorphosis no longer decay, instead deactivating at the end of the ability's duration.

Cast times are reduced by 50%.

Reason: Currently, changing forms is both time and energy consuming. This leads to a reluctance to use Equinox's kit to her fullest. By separating the form-changing action from the buff action, alongside her new passive, players should feel encouraged to switch forms at will. To compensate, cast times are cut in half so that the current "change and buff" behaviour of Metamorphosis takes the same total amount of time.

2. Rest and Rage

Rage now imparts a Radiation effect on enemies, enabling and encouraging enemy friendly fire with an added multiplier on top of the existing damage multiplier (numbers pending testing).

Reason: Rest is in a good spot, but Rage has lagged behind by large amounts. This change allows Rage to be the inverse of Rest: where Rest provides crowd control with some damage potential in finishers, Rage provides large damage potential with smaller amounts of crowd control.

3. Pacify and Provoke

Pacify is changed to the following: Allies in range of Pacify gain damage reduction (numbers pending) from all sources.

Energy is drained for each ally in range (numbers pending).

Damage reduction values do not fall off with distance (to match Provoke).

Reason: Pacify is a very energy-hungry ability that often only benefits Equinox, as enemies near Equinox - where the damage reduction takes place - are much more likely to target her. By passing this damage reduction onto allies, the energy drain becomes much more manageable. Making Pacify and Provoke affect allies in both forms also matches Rest and Rage affecting enemies in both forms.

4. Mend and Maim

On release, Mend now imparts invisibility onto nearby allies, which ends for each ally when they reach a certain "damage dealt" threshold. Explanation:

Spoiler

When releasing Mend, several things happen:

1. Allies are healed, and the amounts healed are taken from the damage Equinox has collected.

2. After all allies in range are healed, the remaining damage is multiplied by (value pending - pencilling in 2). This value is given to all allies (not distributed).

3. All allies are made invisible.

4. As allies deal damage, "damage" being the end result after all modifiers, the value from step 2 decreases.

5. When the value from step 2 reaches 0, or the buff is dispelled in any other way (e.g. nullifier), the invisibility ends.

New Augment: Medicating Malice: This alters how Mend and Maim is cast to behave more like Rest and Rage with a large increase in efficiency. Explanation:

Spoiler

Upon cast, Equinox forms an aura around herself. Enemies killed within this field grant their shield and health values to Equinox's "damage dealt" pool. This is the same as current.

On release, Equinox removes the aura, but stores this damage dealt.

While Equinox has stored damage, she can recast Mend and Maim for small amounts of energy (value pending - pencilling in 10 energy per cast). Recasting affects an aimed-at target, as well as targets nearby, either dealing damage to enemies or healing allies depending on day or night form. This uses the same range and area-of-effect values as Rest and Rage.

To compensate for the smaller area of effect, Mend and Maim uses only the amount of stored damage required to heal or kill the targets in range. Because of this, Mend no longer grants allies invisibility.

Pressing and holding the ability button removes the stored damage and re-casts the aura.

Reason: Mend is underused primarily because of its inefficiency. There is little reason to spend millions of points in stored damage to heal allies when the damage can be used to clear out rooms instead. This change gives Equinox a reason to use Mend with higher values without waste. Likewise, the new Augment takes a different approach to the inefficiency problem, as well as giving players a different way to use Mend and Maim should they want something a little different.

End Result

What I hope this touch-up concept does is rebalance Equinox's disparate elements and provide a much smoother experience between her two forms. Right now, her Mend and Maim ability, as well as the Peaceful Provocation augment, ask her to remain in one form. Even outside of this, such as with Energy Transfer, changing is clunky and costly. And even outside of that clunky, costly, undesired form changing, some of her abilities - such as Rage or Pacify - are not worth their energy costs. With these changes, I hope to rectify all of those, not necessarily making Equinox better at the room clearing she is known for, but making her smoother and more varied.

Lasting Problems

While I am not sure how builds may go with this update, I do have a concern that Pacify and Provoke, as well as Rage, may still be underused because of their reliance on ability strength. Typical Equinox builds focus on ability range at the detriment of ability strength (via Overextended). This means Pacify and Provoke, alongside Rage, are made much weaker in those builds. This isn't unusual for min-maxing due to the nature of corrupted mods, which may mean it's a problem bigger than just Equinox, but it does threaten to undo what these changes are meant to accomplish. If anyone does have ideas on how to handle that, I would love to read about it!

...how to sign off...

I never know how to end posts like these. Uh. Let me know what you think of it? If you like it, don't like it, think something won't work for what it's intended to do...explanations would be super appreciated. If you have ideas for specific values where I put "value pending", that would be super appreciated too! I'm very much more hands-on with balancing so I'm not comfortable with theory numbers. And uh...oh, have a great day! 🙂