Kubrow Mecha Set QoL Suggestions

[Ordel]

ATM the mecha set for kubrows is pretty slept on imo. The QoL changes I outline here probably aren't gonna change that, but it'll increase the set's usability and make it less of a hassle to use. I don't really aim to ask anyone to crazily buff the set itself number-wise, but rather I just want to make it easier to effectively utilize in general and a little bit more exciting and rewarding at the same time.

Issue 1) Marked enemies are very hard to pick out from crowds

Atm the only indication we have of a marked enemy is a pretty tiny holographic kubrow head over that enemy. That becomes very hard to spot, especially in the middle of crowds, which is where this set of mods is meant to shine. Additionally, sometimes it's counter-intuitive to kill the crowd of enemies with one marked target in it because you won't get as much armor (killing the mark gives the user scaling armor based on how many living enemies are in the area; if you just wipe the crowd, you might get less of a bonus because part of the crowd would already be dead). Shy made a good video on it a while back to show that off: https://youtu.be/Td-GBKBGlb0?t=51

Proposition - Give a stronger visual effect/indication of a marked target. I think just tagging it with an automatic waypoint similar to how Demolysts are automatically waypointed to you would be totally fine, although with a different waypoint color and icon for clarity's sake. Additionally, I think it'd be fine to give a sort of swirling or pulsing effect on the marked enemy's model to have it stick out more for times when the waypoint wouldn't be easy to see eg. while ADSing, but I'd also be totally fine with just a colored icon waypoint onto marked enemies.

Issue 2) Team anti-synergy

Marked enemies, if killed by anyone besides the person using the mecha set, won't give any of its benefits (armor, aoe status proc, etc) on death. This makes the set hard to use in groups and imo severely gimps how good this set COULD be. It's hard enough to find the mark in the first place; finding it a little too late just to see a teammate blow it up can suck.

Proposition - Similarly to how Nidus was recently given a chance to gain stacks from enemies that die in his Larva to help remedy the team anti-synergy whenever someone nukes it, I think it'd be cool to give the user a partial bonus if a teammate kills the mark. Imo that could be implemented by keeping the values of the armor and aoe proc the same, however halve its effective range when killed by an ally so that the user would only get armor and spread procs for enemies within 15m of the mark instead of 30m. This makes it so that the mecha user isn't absolutely screwed over by a teammate detonating their mark, but it keeps the incentive there for the user himself instead of enforcing an "i'll just bring this set and let my teammates do the spreading for me" sort of mindset.

Issue 3) Mark inconsistency

At max rank, the set bonus reads the following:

"Companion marks a target every 15s for 12s. Killing the target applies their Status Effects to all targets within 30m."

My main issue with this is that I feel the time between marks is too large. If the marked enemies were more visually distinct, we wouldn't need 12 seconds to find them either. I feel that the range is perfectly fine as is, 30m is pretty generous. However, between difficulty in finding the marks and also the difficulty of effectively utilizing them before a teammate gets to them, I don't think it's very easy to set up the marks properly as it is now.

Proposition - Assuming the other two propositions (the automatic waypoint for marked targets and the partial bonus if a teammate kills your mark) are implemented, I think the last thing that'd make the set pretty good would just be more consistent uptime on marks. The simple way would be to just reduce the time between marks from 15s to I guess 7-8ish seconds, but that's boring (but would be totally appreciated). I would personally like to see a more active playstyle which rewards active player interaction and consideration; maybe keep the timer at 15s as it is now and have the cooldown partially reset depending on the amount of enemies affected by the mark and the amount of status effects transferred.

So, an example, with arbitary numbers (let's say 1s per enemy affected, 0.5s per unique status effect spread from the mark), it'd be like this (marks are the blue x, reds are nearby enemies): https://prnt.sc/10bykzo

Don't get too fixated on the numbers, I just want to share the general gist. Do good with the mechanic, get more opportunities to use the mechanic and be rewarded with damage/satisfaction/survivability/etc.

This rewards players that really try to set up the marks and play with this mechanic in mind by allowing them to accumulate their marks faster and output more damage, keep up their armor buff, and most importantly it'd be pretty fun to rapidly detonate marks in a big crowd by having it reset repeatedly until the crowd's done.

Conclusiony stuff:

The thing about the mecha set is that you do have to give up a pretty hefty sacrifice: 2 warframe mod slots (including your aura), 2 pet mod slots, a pet if you weren't already using kubrows, pet upkeep unless you've got the nutrio, pet survivability in-mission to name some. ATM it doesn't feel very worth that cost to use this mod set, and it doesn't live up to the status spreader dream that I'd hoped it would be.

I also know that there's way better ways to spread and use status in the game, but I'm gonna go ahead and say that I'm just not really a big fan of kukoring everything and then mashing E. It was fun a really long time ago, now it's not. I'm also not the type of person to find fun in minmaxing, so there's that too. I'm just asking for a viable and more exciting alternative to the normal priming that's in the game atm, and I want the mecha set to fall into a 'not the best but niche, fun, and viable' type of category.

 

[PhiThagRaid]

On 2021-03-03 at 10:17 AM, Ordel said:

Issue 1) Marked enemies are very hard to pick out from crowds

First problem is that the mark uses the enemy's energy colour, eg. Light blue for most enemies, dark orange for some corpus units and purple for the deimos wall crawling guys.

Change that to the kubrow's/kubrow's armour's energy colour and it would make it so players can select what they want to see it as.

On 2021-03-03 at 10:17 AM, Ordel said:

I think just tagging it with an automatic waypoint similar to how Demolysts are automatically waypointed to you would be totally fine

I'd say this is going a bit too far, personally I'd suggest marking the enemy on the map with a unique colour, something similar to the Saryn augment. This could be made to synergize with Animal instincts to only show within the range your kubrow can "see".

On 2021-03-03 at 10:17 AM, Ordel said:

Issue 2) Team anti-synergy

I think having someone else kill your target with their builds is already incentive enough to kill it yourself. They might spread useless statuses or be running a crit build that spreads no statuses. 

So I think the set effect should be consistent no matter who killed the target.

Mecha pulse could be made more team friendly, though. How about sharing the effects between the killer and the marker? Eg. Calculate the total armour gained by both players and split that between the 2 players. If only 1 player has MP on he will get half what he would've got by killing it himself, the other getting the other half even without the mod. If both players have the mod at the same level they both would get the full effect.

On 2021-03-03 at 10:17 AM, Ordel said:

Issue 3) Mark inconsistency

I haven't really had problems with the Mark's taking too long to show up, but won't mind a mechanic that speeds it up.

I think absolute time reductions might be too strong and percentage reductions would work better.

I do like the idea that the more people targeted the faster the cooldown drops, but I'd also be happy with halving the time once the target dies.

[(PSN)Onder6099]

Mecha set doesn´t fit to every mission, best usage has in Def, ESO, Salvage. For best result I recommend to use AoE Elemental abillities such as Saryn´s Spores or Ember, Arsenal such as Torid, Pox and  Syndicate weapons, My goto in these days is Cedo´s with her secondary fire, in that case You don´t need to care where the marked Target is and, in most cases, Mecha Empowered grants that Target dies first. Mecha Empowered is Aura which allows Allies to get the buffs, so if You´re not rely on Armour buff, the result is same, to kill Enemies as much as possible. I still didn´t realized how it works without Mecha Empowered, probably nobody gets the Armour buff except You even if the Target is killed by Ally, just My thought, communication in Pugs is meh. Set bonus is OK, I will increase it to "every 20s", here is why: The previous Armour buff is overwritten by new one, so it can easily happen that 120% buff overwrites buff with 960%.

Bad Engluch, I know, sorry

[PhiThagRaid]

12 minutes ago, (PSN)Onder6099 said:

Set bonus is OK, I will increase it to "every 20s", here is why: The previous Armour buff is overwritten by new one, so it can easily happen that 120% buff overwrites buff with 960%.

I think the overriding is a good thing for gameplay, as it encourages you to plan each marked kill, if you could just refresh the duration by killing the target you would set up the armour once a mission and just wipe the map to continuously have the buff. The whole set's design is based around getting you to target the enemy that has been marked by your Kubrow instead of just wiping the map indiscriminately.

[(PSN)Onder6099]

2 hours ago, PhiThagRaid said:

I think the overriding is a good thing for gameplay, as it encourages you to plan each marked kill, if you could just refresh the duration by killing the target you would set up the armour once a mission and just wipe the map to continuously have the buff. The whole set's design is based around getting you to target the enemy that has been marked by your Kubrow instead of just wiping the map indiscriminately.

Overriding is OK, I disagree with shorten the delay between marks, I described why. First come, first serve, until You find the Target it can already be killed by Aly.