Khora Whipclaw feedback

[_Tormex_]

The last two major unheralded and unjust "changes" made to warframes were Khora nerfs. Khora is a good warframe, but very far away from broken. Her whipclaw's hitbox already was unintuitive and cumbersome. You didn't need to make it more difficult to hit things with it. I have found through over 120 hours of Khora that her whipclaw struggles with any sort of accuracy below 150% range, which is ridiculous by itself. Khora's third ability is Venari, which is game-breaking on paper but mediocre in practice due to the unreliable AI. You nerfed that when the action people were using was literally part of the hints on how to best use Khora. Khora's fourth abiility is strangledome which suspends enemies in hard to see places quite regularly. Placing a line-of-sight requirement, on top of the annoying and unstated requirement that whipclaw doesn't work if you are standing inside the strangledome for some reason, is a recipe for disaster.

If you were planning on making any changes to whipclaw, you should look at the unreliable cast targeting that routinely misses targets at close to point-blank range forcing re-casts of the ability in a game where energy conservation is key to success and survival. As it was before, Khora had a space-whip that exploded on impact (which also is never mentioned in-game) and it compensated for its inaccuracy by hitting a wide range of targets. Arbitrarily deciding to make some enemies immune to her space-whip for reasons that haven't been made clear is frustrating. This is especially true when the changes don't make any sense from a mechanics perspective or a lore perspective. And the changes will hamper the use of khora's entire kit.

Anyway, I hope that you will revisit the Khora nerf and either balance it with her other shortcomings to make the change fair or just remove the nerf since from my perspective it is completely unnecessary. Also, I would appreciate it if you would choose a different random warframe to nerf irrationally next time. Like Zephyr. Or Nyx. Or someone real OP like Grendel.

Edit: After playtesting some in extermination and survival mission gameplay, I only noticed the targeting of whipclaw failing occasionally. It seemed similar (if not less) than the targeting errors that I experienced with whipclaw before the change. So I am still annoyed with the delivery of the change(not telling us beforehand and only having one line in the patch notes at first), but it might not be as bad as it sounded or appeared at first.

Edit 2: The more that I have played the update, the more I have enjoyed it. I still haven't noticed a difference for Khora's whipclaw. The line-of-sight seems relatively loose. I think the biggest issue with the update is that surprises that sound negative aren't fun.

[_Tormex_]

On 2020-11-19 at 10:30 PM, _Tormex_ said:

The last two major unheralded and unjust "changes" made to warframes were Khora nerfs. Khora is a good warframe, but very far away from broken. Her whipclaw's hitbox already was unintuitive and cumbersome. You didn't need to make it more difficult to hit things with it. I have found through over 120 hours of Khora that her whipclaw struggles with any sort of accuracy below 150% range, which is ridiculous by itself. Khora's third ability is Venari, which is game-breaking on paper but mediocre in practice due to the unreliable AI. You nerfed that when the action people were using was literally part of the hints on how to best use Khora. Khora's fourth abiility is strangledome which suspends enemies in hard to see places quite regularly. Placing a line-of-sight requirement, on top of the annoying and unstated requirement that whipclaw doesn't work if you are standing inside the strangledome for some reason, is a recipe for disaster.

If you were planning on making any changes to whipclaw, you should look at the unreliable cast targeting that routinely misses targets at close to point-blank range forcing re-casts of the ability in a game where energy conservation is key to success and survival. As it was before, Khora had a space-whip that exploded on impact (which also is never mentioned in-game) and it compensated for its inaccuracy by hitting a wide range of targets. Arbitrarily deciding to make some enemies immune to her space-whip for reasons that haven't been made clear is frustrating. This is especially true when the changes don't make any sense from a mechanics perspective or a lore perspective. And the changes will hamper the use of khora's entire kit.

Anyway, I hope that you will revisit the Khora nerf and either balance it with her other shortcomings to make the change fair or just remove the nerf since from my perspective it is completely unnecessary. Also, I would appreciate it if you would choose a different random warframe to nerf irrationally next time. Like Zephyr. Or Nyx. Or someone real OP like Grendel.

Also, not everyone uses warframes the same way. Just because one person min/maxed their steel path Khora build doesn't mean that literally every other build for khora should have her whipclaw nerfed to the point of being unusable. At the moment, these "broken" builds require an augment slot, a min/maxed build for range and efficiency, and plenty of high level melee mods. Not every mission gives players the time and space to build up combo counters. For all of those missions, whipclaw woefully underperforms. In most extermination, sabotage, and mobile defense missions, dealing damage like this isn't tenable since it all is built on an augment mod, blood rush, and combo counter.

Edit: I didn't actually understand what AFK Macros were before, so this comment is less on topic than I thought it was.

[Yamazuki]

Whipclaw is pretty much an exalted melee. Some other similar abilities and melee already functioned like this. Mesa's PMs even require los and it does less damage than Whipclaw. There are other abilities that also require los while being a million times worse than Whipclaw. 

The nerf does little to nothing to her unless you used her to afk in a room immune to damage.

The idea she requires intense investment compared to anything else is also absurd. Unless you plan on never using anything but Khora's Whipclaw, all the mods are used elsewhere but her augments, which are cheap, formas put into her, and the riven on melee (which isn't even required). When it comes to formas, she requires 0 for herself and the Kavat, and the melee weapon used is just ~4. That's pretty low investment compared to Warframes that use exalted melees that also use ~4 on their weapons and then some on themselves.

Even with the nerf, she's still better than most other Warframes.

[CatNV]

I am really sad Khora's Whipclaw is now partially unusable. The LoS detection doesn't work as intended because judging the distance between where the Whipclaw will hit and the current\future location of an enemy is not done with a crosshair, but a vague aiming direction. Whipclaw is not an Ogris, being accurate with it is extremely difficult. The result is that Khora now just performs extremely poorly in enclosed spaces, which is most spaces. When her kit is clearly designed to work best in small-to-medium spaces. Sure, Khora is good and maybe ought to be tweaked but her Whipclaw is her bread and butter ability; without it she is just a mediocre CC frame.

This very much seems like a nerf to Khora to punish a small group of people who are overperforming using her, and in effect punishing everyone. This is not a good way to reduce her power roof.

[Merrcenary]

ability to get millions of damage just by pressing 1 button with 40% strength definitely not broken
imo DE need to make her whipclaw an exalted weapon like valk or excalibur and problem solved

[Aarrathum]

The biggest problem with this line of sight nerf is it make one of the squishyist frames also have a hard time preempting threats because of combersome usability issues. The amount of difficulty added in areas with rough terrain is kind of rediculous.

Something like a path of travel check would be the correct solution in my mind. If there is a clear and open path for the shockwave to travel around corners, but not through walls it would still be nerfed, but not feel combersome and unrewarding to play.

For those that bring up her damage numbers. yeah they are high, but there are a number of other play options that have a similar kill potential in normal missions. Instead of nerfing a frame that is fun to play into the dirt, why not actually buff frames up to khora's level?

[(PSN)Vexx757]

What was it scot said again? that their will be no nerfs, that the revisit will focus on buff instead of nerfs. Even through idk about Khora I do care about warframe getting nerf because of the damn meta plus you went back on your word, this is why ppl get upset with you scott and your upset that Brozime is being harsh it`s because of this, then you make jokes about nerfs when it`s not funny which proves you don`t play your own game coz you would understand that we don`t like our main frame getting nerfed in to the bloody ground. 

This is why we prefer Pablo over you, he was in charge on Nezha, Oberon, Saryn, Nidus, Harrow and Protea and for the most part they are good, he plays and understands the game, you don`t and that`s why you are going to continually get ppl cussing you out. You are the one that make Ash have the awful marking mechanic to where his bs is garbage at activation speed. Nextime I don`t want to hear you moaning and groaning about ppl getting upset with you, coz you are reaping what you sow and no I'm not going to say it`s DE coz it`s you.

And watch the next devstream, I bet he`s going to make jokes about it.

[ShortCat]

Whipclaw offers insane damage on a cheap & spamable ability; absence of LoS paired with simply build requirements made it even more broken and convenient. The fact that Whipclaw did not require any power strength for massive damage is the icing on the cake.  Khore's kit combines a potent DD, hard AoE controll, extra loot as well as utility in one compackt packege. Since her top damage was not touched with this update, only its application got some boundaries, I would say she needs even more down-tuning.

[PublikDomain]

This is the wrong way to nerf Khora. It does nothing to address her spammy gameplay, and it does nothing to address her damage output. All it does is add a dice roll to every Whipclaw going forward. "Will my attack hit? Is there a pebble in the way?" And the reason for this change? To prevent corner camping on a tile in a now-dead gamemode. It's Viver all over again.

Line-of-sight was specifically removed from Ensnare in U22.20.

Line-of-sight does not exist on other explosive weapons.

Line-of-sight should not exist on Whipclaw.

Give Whipclaw a damage falloff and be done with it. Heck, you could take away 90% of my damage and I'd still prefer that nerf over my ability randomly not working because a rock was in the way. Terrible, terrible change.

[(PSN)camwyn-xenos]

I wish players would uneqip there melee and then tell me whipclaw is overpower, because on its own its pitifully. Statsticks are the problem with most of the op damage frames not the base ability, and while Statsticks remain part of the problem you cannot balance a frame properly. 

Don't believe go try whipclaw without a melee on!!

[_Tormex_]

1 hour ago, (PSN)camwyn-xenos said:

I wish players would uneqip there melee and then tell me whipclaw is overpower, because on its own its pitifully. Statsticks are the problem with most of the op damage frames not the base ability, and while Statsticks remain part of the problem you cannot balance a frame properly. 

Don't believe go try whipclaw without a melee on!!

If the sortie is ever a primary or secondary only mission, my khora gets wrecked lol

[CatNV]

 

20 minutes ago, _Tormex_ said:

If the sortie is ever a primary or secondary only mission, my khora gets wrecked lol

I wish for one day a world where pseudo-exalted weapons are abolished, so Khora, Gara, and Atlas can all use real exalted weapons like all other frames. Thus eliminating the problem that people who spend ungodly amounts of forma and kuva on getting a ridiculous stat stick are the only ones who can play a frame at the level they are judged by. Sure, I am one of those people and I hit for massive amounts from the start; to the point where I don't bother with combo multipliers because it's not worth the effort. But then you take away the melee weapon and the frame is downright useless. The problem isn't that Khora's Whipclaw is too powerful; it is that it interacts with a legacy mechanic that was killed off for a good reason. If you could not put a riven or syndicate weapon-mod on the Whipclaw this would never be a problem.

All this does is make the frame clunkier while it still deposits damage in many digits. It encourages AFK-building because it's the only reliable way to play her while it makes her worse for every single player who isn't a minmaxer. The endless mission farming has been killed, roll back this awful nerf. The issue isn't her versatility it is the damage output from the ancient and bad mechanic that is pseudo-exalted. Maybe then as well you can play Khora with the melee weapon you want rather than the one that you built to play Khora with?

[_Tormex_]

2 minutes ago, CatNV said:

Maybe then as well you can play Khora with the melee weapon you want rather than the one that you built to play Khora with

Getting to build whipclaw for crit and her melee for status would be so nice. Especially since condition overload is a wasted mod slot on khora currently.

[CatNV]

4 minutes ago, _Tormex_ said:

Getting to build whipclaw for crit and her melee for status would be so nice. Especially since condition overload is a wasted mod slot on khora currently.

Absolutely. I always liked Khora for being so versatile, and then you realise her kit inherently pushes towards using a statstick because otherwise you have no damage. Then you end up with having such a dull weapon loadout. I'd gladly sacrifice my fancy riven for having a separate mod loadout for the melee weapon. This nerf pushes her further towards ungabunga whipclaw spam, which is such a sad way to play her.

[_Tormex_]

3 minutes ago, CatNV said:

Absolutely. I always liked Khora for being so versatile, and then you realise her kit inherently pushes towards using a statstick because otherwise you have no damage. Then you end up with having such a dull weapon loadout. I'd gladly sacrifice my fancy riven for having a separate mod loadout for the melee weapon. This nerf pushes her further towards ungabunga whipclaw spam, which is such a sad way to play her.

Exactly. Ironically, by trying to make the spammy, annoying, and "gamebreaking" playstyles less rewarding, DE has pushed khora towards that being the only playstyle that is tenable.

I will say that I would be disappointed briefly if DE made whipclaw an exalted weapon just because I really like my Jat Kusar build and am incentivized to use it with khora. But the exalted whipclaw would be much better in the long run.

[Spectre-8]

Khora was a good start , now everything should be balanced to be inline with Khora's changes - no more warframes and weapons that ignore LoS .

[(PSN)dday3six]

1 minute ago, Spectre-8 said:

Khora was a good start , now everything should be balanced to be inline with Khora's changes - no more warframes and weapons that ignore LoS .

Might as well just break everything...

[_Tormex_]

2 minutes ago, Spectre-8 said:

Khora was a good start , now everything should be balanced to be inline with Khora's changes - no more warframes and weapons that ignore LoS .

 

Just now, (PSN)dday3six said:

Might as well just break everything...

Lol that was exactly what I was thinking

[Spectre-8]

38 minutes ago, (PSN)dday3six said:

Might as well just break everything...

Fixing but hey to each their own .

[Leqesai]

3 hours ago, (PSN)camwyn-xenos said:

I wish players would uneqip there melee and then tell me whipclaw is overpower, because on its own its pitifully. Statsticks are the problem with most of the op damage frames not the base ability, and while Statsticks remain part of the problem you cannot balance a frame properly. 

Don't believe go try whipclaw without a melee on!!

The abilities are designed with melee mods in mind. Suggesting players not use a melee when using the ability is ridiculously stupid.

The issue isnt stat sticks. The issue is whipclaw is a 10m nuke due to its base crit stats. They should reduce the crit chance from 50% to 5% like atlas and gara while removing this line of sight change.

[PublikDomain]

21 minutes ago, Leqesai said:

They should reduce the crit chance from 50% to 5% like atlas and gara while removing this line of sight change.

The Crit Chance is 25%, not 50%, and Gara has 0% Crit Chance. But either way, nerfing the peak damage doesn't address how she gets played. Either the damage is nerfed too much and it's no longer worth casting (hello Fireball) or it isn't nerfed enough and it still trivializes most content in the same way it does now. Like you say,

21 minutes ago, Leqesai said:

The issue is whipclaw is a 10m nuke

And the LoS doesn't affect this. You can still nuke with the same damage in the same range, you just have to be out in the open to do it. But the power of the nuke doesn't come from the damage alone; plenty of other things nuke and can deal high damage and even hit through walls. The issue is that the damage hits everything in range equally. No matter where an enemy is, if it gets caught by Whipclaw it takes the full damage. Instead of gutting the damage and turning Whipclaw into an ability that isn't worth casting (cough Fireball), DE could instead add a damage falloff like any other AoE weapon. This has already been done with AoE weapons, where the only downside is DE's terrible design decisions regarding self-stagger. A falloff would address the problematic part of the nuke - that it can cover an area with very high damage - while still allowing for the high damage numbers when you need them. You'd just have to aim and use her other powers to combo more often. Which on paper is similar to the LoS nerf, except LoS has never worked well in any application in this game and doesn't address the damage of Whipclaw at all.

[Xikto]

[Deleted]

[HunterDigi]

Modding Khora's whip is also a really unintuitive thing, you can't trust any of the stats you see in your melee, not even elements, you must calculate the stats yourself by just using the mods and the listed stats on the wiki.

The fact that you can even use your melee mods for whip is burried really deep into the hints button, near last when cycling... and it's only in the abilities screen.

Khora really needs her whip to be individually moddable but that also means she'll be severely nerfed since you'd have no rivens and no specialized mods (like jaw sword's +100% dmg thing).

And it would also severely impact build diversity due to the lack of rivens involved, but at least it would be more user friendly.

So yeah it's a tricky thing to change now because it will be a huge nerf unless they bump up the base stats of the whip to compensate for lack of riven, if they want to keep its usefulness.

 

 

1 hour ago, Leqesai said:

The issue is whipclaw is a 10m nuke due to its base crit stats. They should reduce the crit chance from 50% to 5% like atlas and gara while removing this line of sight change.

It's a 50m+ nuke if you add in the dome which propagates 50%(?) of the damage dealt to one of the caught targets to all other caught targets... and it can chain through more domes if they overlap their targets.

 

There's also some Narmaon bug that grants significantly more critical chance making Khora way more powerful than she actually is.

I don't know how it triggers but I never saw it as host, it usually happens only as client and probably has something to do with the void mode critical thing.

And so significant that I was dealing red crits at 2x combo multiplier, which is certainly not because of my build as I didn't have consistent red crits at 8x earlier in the same mission (using blood-whatever mod which adds chc per combo).

 

And reducing the chc would make it even worse for players who don't know how to min-max it and don't have a god-riven for it.

 

  

1 hour ago, PublikDomain said:

except LoS has never worked well in any application in this game

Well... larva is insanely useful because it has LoS check so it limits the amount of enemies it gets stuck, unlike Vauban and Khora for that matter xD But at least Khora can damage all her caught enemies with the whip.

 

EDIT: I tried the whip just now and yeah it's pretty bad and unsatisfying when anything can block your damage... it was kinda annoying before when your venari or pet got in the way and prevented your hits, but now it seems to occur even more with any geometry.

[(PSN)dday3six]

3 hours ago, Spectre-8 said:

Fixing but hey to each their own .

Adding Line of Sight requirements to everything isn’t fixing. It’s breaking, pure and simple. The sheer amount of weapons and frames that would go from useful to trash would staggering unless the environments of everything outside of open world areas was reworked. I’m not remotely sure how you can see it as anything else. 

[Spectre-8]

1 minute ago, (PSN)dday3six said:

Adding Line of Sight requirements to everything isn’t fixing. It’s breaking, pure and simple. The sheer amount of weapons and frames that would go from useful to trash would staggering unless the environments of everything outside of open world areas was reworked. I’m not remotely sure how you can see it as anything else. 

Also target cap - can't have one without the other , do we still disagree ?