Why The Helminth Abilities Are Worthless

[(PSN)jmtm9423]

Hi DE and anyone reading this,

I just wanted to share my opinion on the Helminth abilities and how pointless they are and hope that DE actually listens for once. Just an FYI the abilities that won't be on this list are Empower and Infested Mobility because DE actually made these abilities correctly.

Master's Summon

First up we have this wasted ability slot. There is no actual purpose to using this, does anyone actually pay attention to their pets health bar? If you do and care that much about your companion why not use an ability like Blood Altar or Well of Life that way you can actually help your team too. I think a good change to this ability would be to allow you to force trigger a companions precept mod, I mean if you're going to make me waste FIFTY WHOLE ENERGY at least make it worth my time.

Rebuild Shields

How did you manage to make a shield healing ability worse than Polarize (Polarize isn't bad but as a healing ability it isn't the best)? You guys do remember Brief Respite and the Augur set mods exist right? I can easily get the same effect as Rebuild Shield and still have utility with these mods. Also Pillage and Condemn? Were you guys unaware that you were allowing these abilities to be subsumed, they have practically the same effect.

Perspicacity

This ability is a JOKE. Wakey wakey CIPHERS EXIST. And I can already hear you saying BuT sOrTiEs if you need to waste an entire ability slot and 50 energy to open doors I think you need to go play something else. Also not to mention you don't unlock this ability until rank 3, why not just make us start with it?

Energized Muntions

This ability is alright; however, 5 SECONDS OF BASE DURATION.

Marked For Death

Oh boy here we go. There was nothing wrong with this ability, was the whole point of Helminth not to give weaker frames a boost? Oh no it is the end of the world, Ash can wipe out an AoE of enemies roughly a 1/4 of the size of Saryn's spores careful he might become too OP and we don't want that. Thank goodness we have weaker frames with smaller AoE and lower damge outputs like Octavia, Mesa, Equinox, Baruuk, Ember, Gara, Wisp, Saryn. Also not to mention the amount of setup of this ability required compared to any other nuke frame who presses just one button and it's ggez.

Expedite Suffering

What is the purpose of this ability I see no reason to waste an ability slot on this. Wow cool I can make them take the same damage they would have take... but faster? by like 4 seconds? Am I missing something DE was this Rank 9 ability supposed to be something strong or what? Cuz the way I see it this does jack squat. Why would I use this ability to do the same damage I was already going to do when I could run something useful like Roar and do more damage?

Conclusion

Don't say WelL nOw wE hAvE to NeRf RoaR. Roar isn't the problem, it isn't broken you guys just don't understand how your own game works. You have created a game where MOAR DAMUG=GUD there is absolutely no point in me using any of these abilities listed above. There are so many better options than the Helminth abilities. The only reason for leveling up the Helminth is to unlock more subsume slots so I can replace the worthless abilities you refuse to replace (looking at you Ballistic Battery and Ripline). You have become so out of touch with your own community and game DE it is almost sad. Your comments the other day on the Devstream were so infuriating, jokes or not. Nerfing Mesa because her 1 is useless and everyone gets rid of it??? This is a quick tangent but why would I spend all that time charging an ability on 1 GUNSHOT on a frame whose ability is to be a living turret that fires 1000 bullets in the span of seconds. Anyway, if anyone read this and made it this far thanks for reading! I'm open to any input you guys might have and this was kind of fun to write. Let me know if you guys would read something similar with all the terrible regular abilities in this game. Byeeee

 

[kevoisvevo]

Empower is alright

[Kaggelos]

Dont wanna be the Grand Central Station of Negativity, but yes, I agree with you. Feels bad man...

*looks at M4D*

Edit; after the Fix on M4D

[(PSN)Yes-Man-Kablaam]

Honestly looking over a few of them I just disagree with you since there's just a few abilities I simply don't use on some frames and some of these sound simple for some ease to slot in. I'd like some augments down the line but debatably aside from Precipacity I think all are fine. Even then I can see myself putting that in on my Ivara cause I don't use ciphers and I don't use navigator.

 

also for actual confusion on expedite suffering there are a few guns that can output stupid amount's of slash and toxin procs that will over time waste some of the big enemies. Currently my Saryn uses Acrid which has the syndicate mod of +200% status duration. it has 2.5 multishot and I use toxic lash and poison proc some of those grineer to hell and back with a full clip they will eventually die but hey if i want to make it go faster just boom. Nagantaka is another good gun to use with this as it always does a slash proc on the enemy just saying even if uses are NICHE that doesn't mean they don't have a use you just need to look a little more before running on here to shout about it.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

20 hours ago, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

 

Rebuild Shields

How did you manage to make a shield healing ability worse than Polarize (Polarize isn't bad but as a healing ability it isn't the best)? You guys do remember Brief Respite and the Augur set mods exist right? I can easily get the same effect as Rebuild Shield and still have utility with these mods. Also Pillage and Condemn? Were you guys unaware that you were allowing these abilities to be subsumed, they have practically the same effect.

Just saying, not everyone has every frame.  Rebuild shields is a decent thing to have if you don't have harrow or hyldrin to subsume/don't want to.

20 hours ago, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

 

Energized Muntions

This ability is alright; however, 5 SECONDS OF BASE DURATION.

I'd give it 100% up time tbh.  Would rather have a bottomless clip for a short duration than ammo efficiency sorta for a long duration.

20 hours ago, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

 

Expedite Suffering

What is the purpose of this ability I see no reason to waste an ability slot on this. Wow cool I can make them take the same damage they would have take... but faster? by like 4 seconds? Am I missing something DE was this Rank 9 ability supposed to be something strong or what? Cuz the way I see it this does jack squat. Why would I use this ability to do the same damage I was already going to do when I could run something useful like Roar and do more damage?

I look at it as basically a mini Garuda combo.  The problem is it's limited by the AoE.  It really should be a regular circle around your warframe.  If it was like that I could see it being used on some frames.

 

[Tiltskillet]

23 hours ago, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

Expedite Suffering

What is the purpose of this ability I see no reason to waste an ability slot on this. Wow cool I can make them take the same damage they would have take... but faster? by like 4 seconds? Am I missing something DE was this Rank 9 ability supposed to be something strong or what? Cuz the way I see it this does jack squat. Why would I use this ability to do the same damage I was already going to do when I could run something useful like Roar and do more damage?

Apparently, if you have positive power strength, it  does proportionately more damage.  I am not saying it doesn't need improvement--only that it doesn't lock you into the same damage you would have done anyway.

[(NSW)MoonlightSerenade]

23 hours ago, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

Perspicacity

This ability is a JOKE. Wakey wakey CIPHERS EXIST. And I can already hear you saying BuT sOrTiEs if you need to waste an entire ability slot and 50 energy to open doors I think you need to go play something else. Also not to mention you don't unlock this ability until rank 3, why not just make us start with it?

I actually put this on one of my configs for Ivara to use since I have problems with hacking in sorties, so to me it was more than worth the slot. I do not have to panic anymore and its been a huge help for me.

[Xepthrichros]

When a post is long, I usually can find something to disagree with.

But, this time. I agree with every word you said. 

[Colyeses]

1 hour ago, (NSW)SongOfTheSea said:

I actually put this on one of my configs for Ivara to use since I have problems with hacking in sorties, so to me it was more than worth the slot. I do not have to panic anymore and its been a huge help for me.

Doesn't Perspicacity not work in Sorties?

[(NSW)MoonlightSerenade]

1 minute ago, Colyeses said:

Doesn't Perspicacity not work in Sorties?

Used it yesterday and it worked.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Energized Munitions could be 10 seconds instead of 5, but if so, it shouldn't scale with duration mods anymore.

Expedite Suffering is, as mentioned above, probably a lot stronger with off-meta builds, say ones that make use of long duration bleeds as you can then get that damage up front if you suddenly need, or want, to delete a bunch of enemies instead of waiting out the procs.

Empower's 50% more power strength for the cost of a skill you probably weren't using and a tax on your energy pool you likely won't feel.

Marked for Death was broke as #*!% in its previous incarnation and only human waste would defend it, however, its current iteration is a bit too niche and too reliant on multiple damage buffs and debuffs to really be practical.

Perspicacity, a niche tool for a specific job. Again, the opportunity cost is quite low and hey, it beats bothering to build ciphers. More missions where ciphers don't work and failed hacks have more dire consequences would be appreciated, though.
 

[(PSN)mahoshonenfox]

They are the default out of box stuff. Why would you ever use Rebuild Shields after you get Condemn or Pillage? They're just starter stuff you can ignore after you donate more warframes in there.

[xcrimsonlegendx]

Honestly yeah, I hate most of them.

However, I really just wish they had some effort put into the themes. Like something interesting visually. Press a button to get stronger, press a button to hack a console, press a button to heal your dog. Like can't they have some kind of interesting theme, summon an infested pod that gives you a damage buff or I don't know, fire a wad of tentacles at a console to hack it for you. Not only are the abilities themselves boring in their functionality, they're boring thematically and visually too.

[(PSN)thegarada]

I disagree regarding much here.

Empower and infested mobility are good skills. I use the the instant hack skill on one my setups for Ivara. Why build and use cyphers when I can use energy? It is niche, and that is how most of the Helminth skills were expect to be. The shield one is okayish for a newerish player that just unlocked the Helminth. Same for the pet one. They are not meant to compete with roar. 

Marked for death and expedited suffering are the the 2 skills that have issues. Unlike the previous ones, they are not niche or stepping stones, but also do not work for different reasons.

In any case, for one size fit all skills they are mostly fine. I was not expecting them to be competitive with frames strongest subcemeble skills.

[xombob89]

I have to disagree with some of the points here. 

Auto hack is not entirely useless ability, I put it on my loki for Sortie spy missions because theres no other skill he would need more there. You literally just have to run there and hack stuff, I dont even kill anything unless I have to so there's no downside to using that ability imo. Sure I CAN hack them all manually and quite quickly but its boring after 100k times youve done it and theres always small chance something goes wrong and you have to be as fast as possible so this skill provides few extra seconds. Its niche sure but they dont all have to be nuke abilities to find some use in a separate config. 

Also I think some of these were ment as "early" abilities for those who dont have anything better subsumed at that moment, or just pure alternatives. 

 

But I do agree about that Masters Summon skill, I dont think Id ever need to use that because as you said youll rarely pay attention to the pets health, likely they'll die in a quick crossfire with no time to react anyway. Maybe for a MOA with that protective bubble it might be OK but even for that unlikely Ill waste a slot. 

[(PSN)jmtm9423]

40 minutes ago, xombob89 said:

I have to disagree with some of the points here. 

Auto hack is not entirely useless ability, I put it on my loki for Sortie spy missions because theres no other skill he would need more there. You literally just have to run there and hack stuff, I dont even kill anything unless I have to so there's no downside to using that ability imo. Sure I CAN hack them all manually and quite quickly but its boring after 100k times youve done it and theres always small chance something goes wrong and you have to be as fast as possible so this skill provides few extra seconds. Its niche sure but they dont all have to be nuke abilities to find some use in a separate config. 

Also I think some of these were ment as "early" abilities for those who dont have anything better subsumed at that moment, or just pure alternatives. 

 

But I do agree about that Masters Summon skill, I dont think Id ever need to use that because as you said youll rarely pay attention to the pets health, likely they'll die in a quick crossfire with no time to react anyway. Maybe for a MOA with that protective bubble it might be OK but even for that unlikely Ill waste a slot. 

I understand the use for perscipacity in Sorties but personally I'd rather use Infested Mobility over Perscipacty but thats just a me thing. Also I don't like the idea of treating them as "early abilities" is that A this system was supposed to be meant for somewhat verteran players, not day 1 Excal's. And B It is such a huge resource investment to unlock some of the later abilities so I just feel they should have more of an impact.

Thank you for your input!

[(PSN)jmtm9423]

2 hours ago, xcrimsonlegendx said:

Honestly yeah, I hate most of them.

However, I really just wish they had some effort put into the themes. Like something interesting visually. Press a button to get stronger, press a button to hack a console, press a button to heal your dog. Like can't they have some kind of interesting theme, summon an infested pod that gives you a damage buff or I don't know, fire a wad of tentacles at a console to hack it for you. Not only are the abilities themselves boring in their functionality, they're boring thematically and visually too.

That is something I didn't even think of but your 100% right. It is pretty underwhelming feeling casting the abilities they do feel like they are missing some polish in the animation department. You would think something like Empower would make me look powerful not just flex lol.

[DrivaMain]

I disagree on expedite suffering. You can just stack a lot of slash procs with a hunter munitions weapon or a slash focused status weapon at 1 target and then cast ES to annihilate everyone in the cone. I argue it may be the “top pick” Helminth ability after the mark for death nerf.

[quxier]

On 2020-09-22 at 7:29 PM, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

This ability is a JOKE. Wakey wakey CIPHERS EXIST. And I can already hear you saying BuT sOrTiEs if you need to waste an entire ability slot and 50 energy to open doors I think you need to go play something else. Also not to mention you don't unlock this ability until rank 3, why not just make us start with it?

Ivara's navigator isn't good. I can accomplish it with stealth. So one slot to go.
50 energy isn't big deal. And I don't like hacking alarms on time, especially on time. So it's win-win situation for me.
And Ciphers, parazon's autohack, moa... Ciphers cost something (not too much for not-new players) but you can forget to make them. There are 100x but you may not be in such clan. Parazon's isn't activated very often, so "no" for this. And Moa... almost all companions are worse than Carrier in general situations and I don't like to change my companions.
So having auto-hack Ivara is huge win for me.

 

On 2020-09-22 at 7:29 PM, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

Energized Muntions

This ability is alright; however, 5 SECONDS OF BASE DURATION.

I wonder if it can be used for some fast guns/gunblades.

On 2020-09-22 at 7:29 PM, (PS4)jmtm9423 said:

Master's Summon

First up we have this wasted ability slot. There is no actual purpose to using this, does anyone actually pay attention to their pets health bar? If you do and care that much about your companion why not use an ability like Blood Altar or Well of Life that way you can actually help your team too. I think a good change to this ability would be to allow you to force trigger a companions precept mod, I mean if you're going to make me waste FIFTY WHOLE ENERGY at least make it worth my time.

If it revives Sentinels/kavats/kubrows/etc.... then it would be nice. But now if they take damages then it means either
- they needs little heal - self heal or heal on melee is enough
- enemies kills them faster than you/they can heal them - this needs revive which this ability doesn't have





 

[RobWasHere]

15 minutes ago, quxier said:

 

If it revives Sentinels/kavats/kubrows/etc.... then it would be nice. But now if they take damages then it means either
- they needs little heal - self heal or heal on melee is enough
- enemies kills them faster than you/they can heal them - this needs revive which this ability doesn't have
 

It revives from any distance instantly as long as its in bleedout state. It cannot revive 'dead' pet/sentinel.

[quxier]

2 minutes ago, RobWasHere said:

It revives from any distance instantly as long as its in bleedout state. It cannot revive 'dead' pet/sentinel.

It's little better... but still bad. thanks

 

[KlaussKlauss]

11 hours ago, TheGrimCorsair said:

Marked for Death was broke as #*!% in its previous incarnation and only human waste would defend it, however, its current iteration is a bit too niche and too reliant on multiple damage buffs and debuffs to really be practical.

It did crazy numbers, but wouldn't have been meta because there is much better room clear in Warframe. It was good only for unnecessarily long endurance and some gimmicks on demolists. 

I had fun with the M4D meme builds. Why be so harsh about it? Why must you be human waste to want to have fun in a game that is already essentially a baby-easy mode PvE with time-gated week-long grind for fodder gear? 

But yea, Helminth System was and probably will remain hot garbage. Throw it in   T H E   C O N C L A V E 

 ! 

[Teridax68]

I would probably formulate it differently, but I agree that the abilities on offer are, shall we say... not great. For me, it's the double whammy of A) most of the Helminth abilities being highly situational to begin with, and B) them underperforming at the one thing they're made to do. Rebuild Shields has no business having a cooldown, for example, when other abilities exist that do the same thing, don't have a cooldown, and do other powerful things on top. It's this disappointing selection, coupled with a whole bunch of other mediocre or nerfed abilities, that make the Helminth System feel a lot less interesting than was promised.

To some extent, though, I think the system is doomed to give us underwhelming abilities, because our power-tiered abilities mean that either Helminth abilities remain mediocre, or abilities can't be allowed to go under a certain power level because they'll be automatically replaced. Most older frames are practically guaranteed to replace their 1, for example, because those tend to just be weaker versions of their 4, and when the competition is, say, an un-nerfed Roar, any frame would have to have a pretty powerful 1 in order to not just have Roar instead. Effectively, either the Helminth system continues to limit itself to okay-ish abilities at best, or the game power creeps us even further, in addition to the basic power creep that comes from replacing any dead ability with Roar, Larva, or any other decent Helminth ability. It's ultimately not that beneficial to us players, and makes the situation all the more difficult for DE moving forward on ability balance and design.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Some people in the community think just because they personally can't find a use for something, then it's universally useless. 

Maybe just understand that you don't like it, so you alone shouldn't worry about it. 

The Helminth wasn't just a way to add more nukes or instant damage. 

Unless you're gonna add some actual feedback like ways to improve the abilities then this isn't wasn't very good feedback. You were just yelling and ranting. 

[ghoti0315]

2020/9/23 AM1点29分 , (PS4)jmtm9423 说:

Hi DE and anyone reading this,

I just wanted to share my opinion on the Helminth abilities and how pointless they are and hope that DE actually listens for once. Just an FYI the abilities that won't be on this list are Empower and Infested Mobility because DE actually made these abilities correctly.

Master's Summon

First up we have this wasted ability slot. There is no actual purpose to using this, does anyone actually pay attention to their pets health bar? If you do and care that much about your companion why not use an ability like Blood Altar or Well of Life that way you can actually help your team too. I think a good change to this ability would be to allow you to force trigger a companions precept mod, I mean if you're going to make me waste FIFTY WHOLE ENERGY at least make it worth my time.

Rebuild Shields

How did you manage to make a shield healing ability worse than Polarize (Polarize isn't bad but as a healing ability it isn't the best)? You guys do remember Brief Respite and the Augur set mods exist right? I can easily get the same effect as Rebuild Shield and still have utility with these mods. Also Pillage and Condemn? Were you guys unaware that you were allowing these abilities to be subsumed, they have practically the same effect.

Perspicacity

This ability is a JOKE. Wakey wakey CIPHERS EXIST. And I can already hear you saying BuT sOrTiEs if you need to waste an entire ability slot and 50 energy to open doors I think you need to go play something else. Also not to mention you don't unlock this ability until rank 3, why not just make us start with it?

Energized Muntions

This ability is alright; however, 5 SECONDS OF BASE DURATION.

Marked For Death

Oh boy here we go. There was nothing wrong with this ability, was the whole point of Helminth not to give weaker frames a boost? Oh no it is the end of the world, Ash can wipe out an AoE of enemies roughly a 1/4 of the size of Saryn's spores careful he might become too OP and we don't want that. Thank goodness we have weaker frames with smaller AoE and lower damge outputs like Octavia, Mesa, Equinox, Baruuk, Ember, Gara, Wisp, Saryn. Also not to mention the amount of setup of this ability required compared to any other nuke frame who presses just one button and it's ggez.

Expedite Suffering

What is the purpose of this ability I see no reason to waste an ability slot on this. Wow cool I can make them take the same damage they would have take... but faster? by like 4 seconds? Am I missing something DE was this Rank 9 ability supposed to be something strong or what? Cuz the way I see it this does jack squat. Why would I use this ability to do the same damage I was already going to do when I could run something useful like Roar and do more damage?

Conclusion

Don't say WelL nOw wE hAvE to NeRf RoaR. Roar isn't the problem, it isn't broken you guys just don't understand how your own game works. You have created a game where MOAR DAMUG=GUD there is absolutely no point in me using any of these abilities listed above. There are so many better options than the Helminth abilities. The only reason for leveling up the Helminth is to unlock more subsume slots so I can replace the worthless abilities you refuse to replace (looking at you Ballistic Battery and Ripline). You have become so out of touch with your own community and game DE it is almost sad. Your comments the other day on the Devstream were so infuriating, jokes or not. Nerfing Mesa because her 1 is useless and everyone gets rid of it??? This is a quick tangent but why would I spend all that time charging an ability on 1 GUNSHOT on a frame whose ability is to be a living turret that fires 1000 bullets in the span of seconds. Anyway, if anyone read this and made it this far thanks for reading! I'm open to any input you guys might have and this was kind of fun to write. Let me know if you guys would read something similar with all the terrible regular abilities in this game. Byeeee

 

Master Summons is a good way to instant revive your pet with a '1' button, especially those suicidal as f*** cats and kubrows. It is worthless in most cases but Nekros actually works quite well with it, especially if you are with a farming build without much duration.

Rebuild shields allows you to restore all your shields while using Hildryn's 4. I think the only flaw with this ability is 12 secs cooldown (heck) and if they want to make this useful for shield gating they should make it like 5 seconds cooldown or something. Condemn exists but HARROW lol

Loki has TWO kinda useless ability, so why not using one of these two slots to make your sortie spy missions easier by using Perspicacity?

Energized Munitions 5 seconds base duration is at least fine for me. Adding 75% ammo efficiency means that 1 ammo = 4 shots. It makes your (for example) Twin Grakatas last longer for a magazine, or Exergis for some more insane stuff.

Marked for death, in my opinion, wasn't executed properly. You actually finisher killed one guy and r0 arcane trickery proc'd. No no no no. Also making every frames that opens up finisher a DPS in ESO wasn't DE wanted to do. And at last they nerfed it to the ground, Welp, story end.

Does status duration works on Expedite suffering? LoL but wait, it takes slash/toxin procs from ONE target? ewwwwwwwww no

My thoughts though, WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO NERF ROAR. Is Roar good? Yes sure, but the major problem is the other abilities being useless as f***, not roar being too OP. Let's not laugh at Ballistic battery just yet, but decoy? Tesla Nervos? Terrify? What in the planet Earth DE is thinking when adding these no-use abilities?
Helminth is something which allows people to try out some synergies, not something to make a warframe from NOT VIABLE to BARELY VIABLE. I believe Rebecca just said "If every ability was good then what would you do with Helminth?" but that isn't an excuse to make certain abilities pieces of s**t! If you were to add damage-buffing abilities, just please expect a hell lot more popularity more than others, since you guys made a game where DAMAGE=WIN. The worst part of it is, the one who made that without noticing, is DE themselves.

Please DE, don't define "broken" based on popularity. 63% damage increase for 200+% strength looks good but for builds which has only 130% strength it isn't that effective at all. Saryn is popular in ESO because other "DPS" frames suck in ESO. Saryn is just some frame which could really perform well in terms of DPS.