Equinox: A Few Small Tweaks

[Joezone619]

These became obvious while on steel path. Equinox is a very nice balanced frame, but i believe steel path revealed some things about her that need to be tweaked.

Day:

Maim should ignore grineer armor (or at least a large percentage of it) as it is pointless on steel path, and almost doesn't damage grineer at all. But when used on corpus its a lot more useful, and the gap between corpus and grineer becomes obvious.

Edit: Specifically when you deactivate it and deal the charged damage around you, this specifically should ignore armor.

Night:

Pacify should be a static constant drain, not a drain per enemy. This is obvious if you go on steel path. Because of the insane volume of enemies, and the drain/enemy, if your not using zenurik energizing dash or any other special energy tricks, you will run out of energy in moments.

 

My biggest problem personally is her night form energy drains, she basically requires zenurik energizing dash, which really limits the focus schools you can use with her.

[SkyressZZZ]

With Sevagoth, and his separate builds for "himself" and "Shadow form", we need this on Equinox too, Night and Day form builds separately

[UUDDLRLRBA_START]

12 hours ago, (NSW)Skyress said:

With Sevagoth, and his separate builds for "himself" and "Shadow form", we need this on Equinox too, Night and Day form builds separately

I second this, and not only that, but have the 2nd form tag along like Wukong's 1 (i.e., free specter).

And since you can bring two Aura mods into the mission, I vote having both Aura's active (imagine the game-breaking that can happen).

[Andele3025]

14 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

These became obvious while on steel path. Equinox is a very nice balanced frame, but i believe steel path revealed some things about her that need to be tweaked.

Day:

Maim should ignore grineer armor

Maim has massive damage storage. By all accounts when in day form it should nuke SP with no issues after a pack or two.

14 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

Night:

Pacify if your not using zenurik energizing dash or any other special energy tricks

Thats its point. It doesnt lock off energy generation. Not to mention that 0.2~0.5 energy per enemy takes some 25~ enemies to get even close to the drain of regular channeled abilities.

14 hours ago, (NSW)Skyress said:

With Sevagoth, and his separate builds for "himself" and "Shadow form", we need this on Equinox too, Night and Day form builds separately

She doesnt. Both forms care for the same stats in similar amounts. 175%+ range for 2-3-4, efficiency for spam, strength for day 2/night 3 (maybe day form 1 if you care about the speed) if you want more damage at the cost of less reliable DR and at least ok/half base duration.

Far bigger issues would be fixing so that 4 keeps its stored scaling (and 3s when augmented) when swapping forms along with making the form swap instant instead of delayed, as how S#&$ mid mission form swapping is makes people go 100% ham dedicated on one form to then forget how the other works.

[Leqesai]

16 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

Pacify should be a static constant drain, not a drain per enemy. This is obvious if you go on steel path. Because of the insane volume of enemies, and the drain/enemy, if your not using zenurik energizing dash or any other special energy tricks, you will run out of energy in moments.

Hard disagree to this. If anything it should have an enemy cap like Gloom does. Per enemy cost is much more energy efficient than constant drain.

[(PSN)LordWengeanCe]

Don't know if I agree on this... Maim works fine for me on SP, except maybe on heavy gunners and bombards in Void, but I don't mind finishing a few enemies with melee after a nuke.

Pacify works fine with an efficiency build. Can maintain it without problems with Rage mod.

The problem with Equinox is that she's really too balanced. The only viable build for using day and night form in the same mission requires all stats not to go above 200% (as I said in a post a few days ago Range and Power strength do not easily go together, considering that we should go even with efficiency and health/armour/shield mods for survivability).

Totally agree on giving her different configurations for aspect. 

[(XBOX)Ampathetiic]

5 hours ago, UUDDLRLRBA_START said:

but have the 2nd form tag along like Wukong's 1 (i.e., free specter).

They would never add this, since the clone is the centerpiece of Wukong's whole kit, and offers a huge amount of power just for existing, so adding this would power creep Wukong into just being a tank with mobility. If you want a specter of your other form, the augment exists, and the addition of another mod configuration would give you more than enough space to fit it into your build.

 

3 hours ago, Andele3025 said:

Far bigger issues would be fixing so that 4 keeps its stored scaling (and 3s when augmented) when swapping forms along with making the form swap instant instead of delayed, as how S#&$ mid mission form swapping is makes people go 100% ham dedicated on one form to then forget how the other works.

This! I feel actively punished for wanting to make the best of my two forms, so I just sit on one of the two for the entire mission, which isn't very enjoyable, as Equinox then only has 3 abilities, with only one of those 3 having any gameplay to engage with.

[Leqesai]

14 minutes ago, (XBOX)Regxxh said:

They would never add this, since the clone is the centerpiece of Wukong's whole kit, and offers a huge amount of power just for existing, so adding this would power creep Wukong into just being a tank with mobility. If you want a specter of your other form, the augment exists, and the addition of another mod configuration would give you more than enough space to fit it into your build.

 

This! I feel actively punished for wanting to make the best of my two forms, so I just sit on one of the two for the entire mission, which isn't very enjoyable, as Equinox then only has 3 abilities, with only one of those 3 having any gameplay to engage with.

Problem with the augment is the duration and poor AI. Triple the base duration and it would be great.

AI is its own issue bit we wont see that improved, i think.

[(PSN)LordWengeanCe]

51 minutes ago, (XBOX)Regxxh said:

This! I feel actively punished for wanting to make the best of my two forms, so I just sit on one of the two for the entire mission, which isn't very enjoyable, as Equinox then only has 3 abilities, with only one of those 3 having any gameplay to engage with.

I have seen many times this topic but I don't understand how it would be beneficial. Not saying it wouldn't be nice but more strength on day form is pointless... Which ability would benefit from that? And the problem for me remains, day equinox is too squishy without her pacify and with a modding system split between range/strength/efficiency and survivability mods. Play as night all game and sometimes switching to nuke (with her 4th augment) is not playing Equinox for me.

[Joezone619]

In my experience, equinox is one of the rare warframes that have more trouble with grinner then corpus. Their high numbers drain her night form's 3rd too much, and since her day form's 4th doesn't ignore armor (at least not with the deactivation damage), it can take a colossal amount of damage saved up just to start doing damage to grinner with it.

Meanwhile with the corpus, they got numbers too, but since they're easier to kill, this is easier to manage with her night 3rd. And day 4th actually does damage to them, as they have no armor it takes much much less damage saved up to kill them then the ginner.

[Mr.Holyroller]

On 2021-04-25 at 7:25 AM, Joezone619 said:

These became obvious while on steel path. Equinox is a very nice balanced frame, but i believe steel path revealed some things about her that need to be tweaked.

Day:

Maim should ignore grineer armor (or at least a large percentage of it) as it is pointless on steel path, and almost doesn't damage grineer at all. But when used on corpus its a lot more useful, and the gap between corpus and grineer becomes obvious.

Edit: Specifically when you deactivate it and deal the charged damage around you, this specifically should ignore armor.

Night:

Pacify should be a static constant drain, not a drain per enemy. This is obvious if you go on steel path. Because of the insane volume of enemies, and the drain/enemy, if your not using zenurik energizing dash or any other special energy tricks, you will run out of energy in moments.

 

My biggest problem personally is her night form energy drains, she basically requires zenurik energizing dash, which really limits the focus schools you can use with her.

If maim ignored armor it would be completely overpowered as it was back in the day with running full corrosive projection comps.
I don't want equinox to get overpowered and then get hit with the nerf hammer or a rework that messes her up.
Corpus get to ignore maim with nullifier bubbles and grineer have high armor. 
You either have to bring armor reduction/stripping or get used to how much damage you need to collect before releasing maim.
Luckily, grineer also have large hp pools and its not too hard to ramp up 200/300k dmg.
Aside from that, you can use maim with the augment Enegry Transfer to set up infinite CC from the slash proc provided you ahve enough energy to maintain swapping. Its tedious, but it works.


With Nova's MP and Sevagoth's Gloom, I also feel like Pacify is very underwhelming, but she makes up with it via rest and the augment being one of the better abilities in the game.

[UUDDLRLRBA_START]

17 hours ago, (XBOX)Regxxh said:

They would never add this, since the clone is the centerpiece of Wukong's whole kit, and offers a huge amount of power just for existing, so adding this would power creep Wukong into just being a tank with mobility. If you want a specter of your other form, the augment exists, and the addition of another mod configuration would give you more than enough space to fit it into your build.

Heh. The on-call RJ crew already has a fully modded weapon (complete with Rivens) allowed.

Imagine the awesomeness of leaving one Equinox form somewhere (HOLD POSITION) and then pressing your 1 to "warp" to its position (your previous Equinox form will be where you placed it, unless you left it on FOLLOW PLAYER).

I can imagine the practical applications of this (kinda like RJ tactical warp, but with yourself).

[(PSN)LordWengeanCe]

21 hours ago, (XBOX)Regxxh said:

They would never add this, since the clone is the centerpiece of Wukong's whole kit, and offers a huge amount of power just for existing, so adding this would power creep Wukong into just being a tank with mobility. If you want a specter of your other form, the augment exists, and the addition of another mod configuration would give you more than enough space to fit it into your build.

Don't see how an improvement to Equinox would make Wukong less effective, and I bet that many Wukong players don't play him just for his twin. It's like saying that people don't play Harrow because his Condemn is overpowered by Equinox's Rest or vice versa. It's a matter of preferences.

And I don't see why Equinox, the duality Warframe, should be at this point still considered the duality Warframe. By her abilities? No. By the fact that efficient builds on her require focusing on a single aspect of her playstyle at once? No. By her multiple skins? Maybe. A twin (which btw isn't a twin under any point of view) of her would of course greatly improve her during gameplay but it also makes sense considering her concept.

[(XBOX)Ampathetiic]

11 hours ago, (PSN)LordWengeanCe said:

Don't see how an improvement to Equinox would make Wukong less effective, and I bet that many Wukong players don't play him just for his twin.

It would not make Wukong less effective, since nothing is being removed from his kit, but it would make his clone (which is his signature ability at this point) no longer unique to him. People often say "Why play this frame when that frame does it better?", which is why frames need abilities that combine together to make the frame feel different enough (or fulfill different roles) from another frame. Copying Wukong's twin onto Equinox doesn't invalidate Wukong's existence, because they still do different things, but it's a bad step to take when designing any frame, because it misses the chance to create an ability that's different from other abilities.

12 hours ago, (PSN)LordWengeanCe said:

And I don't see why Equinox, the duality Warframe, should be at this point still considered the duality Warframe.

Thematically, she still is the duality frame. She's designed visually around day and night, and her kit is designed around swapping between offense and defense. The problem is that it's more efficient to build for one form, which is why changes should be made to encourage the player and reward the player for swapping forms and utilizing the entire kit. That's why allowing the 3 and 4 to keep their charges across forms would be good, because it removes a reason for the player to avoid swapping forms. Other actions should be taken but that's a good starting point.

However, Equinox should still have the ability to build for one form if the player wants to, because if the player decides that they only want one role between support and offense, they should have that option. This is why I think Day form needs the most work done, since Night form is already viable enough as it is, but Night form could maybe use some tuning down to balance the two forms out.

[Tyreaus]

Just on the "eternal clone" idea: there is a noteworthy difference in how Wukong's clone uses the opposite melee / ranged weapon as the player, which means an effective Wukong clone has the player using melee. If the Equinox clone uses the same weapon as the player, then an effective Equinox clone has the player using a ranged weapon. That difference alone could separate use cases. Then add in things like lack of Ability Strength health scaling on Equinox (so the spectre is a lot less tanky but perhaps a touch more powerful) and inversion of abilities between the player and the spectre on Equinox (one uses Day form, the other Night) and you end up with some healthy distinctions between the two.

Not to mention Equinox and Wukong are quite different Warframes, all things considered. I don't think a spectre on Equinox is going to take away from Maim being her centrepiece, and so the relationship between the two doesn't seem likely to shift a lot.

I don't think it's a problem of "uniqueness" because the augment already exists. If Wukong is meant to be the absolute only Warframe with a clone spectre, and giving a clone spectre to anything else creates a huge issue, then the Duality augment is a problem. But everyone seems to be shiny with the augment. So...to me, if it was going to cause a problem or overshadow Wukong, it would've done that by now with the augment.

Not saying it should be that way, just saying it could work without murdering a monkey.

Anyway.

On 2021-04-25 at 7:25 AM, Joezone619 said:

Maim should ignore grineer armor (or at least a large percentage of it) as it is pointless on steel path, and almost doesn't damage grineer at all. But when used on corpus its a lot more useful, and the gap between corpus and grineer becomes obvious.

This is more a problem with armour scaling contributing so much to EHP values, which inflates the kills necessary to take out a second group. (Because an enemy takes, say, 1,000 damage to kill, but only grants 50 on death, compared to other factions that might grant 500)

So, would rather see armour fixed or have armour accounted for in the "damage granted on kill" part of Maim. E.g., if a target is armoured, it grants 100% of enemy's health at base instead of 75%.

On 2021-04-25 at 7:25 AM, Joezone619 said:

Pacify should be a static constant drain, not a drain per enemy. This is obvious if you go on steel path. Because of the insane volume of enemies, and the drain/enemy, if your not using zenurik energizing dash or any other special energy tricks, you will run out of energy in moments.

This would make more sense if Pacify were altered to be a DR to allies in radius. Otherwise a basic enemy cap, ala Sevagoth's touch-up, makes more sense.

The energy drain can be pretty excessive, don't get me wrong. But if it's mechanically fine and only has issues in magnitude, why change how it works? Why reinvent the wheel if the tire just needs a little air?

On 2021-04-25 at 7:38 AM, (NSW)Skyress said:

With Sevagoth, and his separate builds for "himself" and "Shadow form", we need this on Equinox too, Night and Day form builds separately

It'd be nice but I don't see it worth the effort. Both her ability sets are focused primarily on range and duration, much less on strength, in pretty much equal measures. And, barring Rest and Rage, they tend to pull from the same stats on both sides (both Pacify and Provoke lean on Strength, for example). So it's hard to see where you'd want to make one side substantially different, unless you're going for some strange Pacify slow build on Night form and a Maim build on Day form for...some reason. (Though, at that point, Gloom is a thing...)

On 2021-04-25 at 10:22 PM, Andele3025 said:

Far bigger issues would be fixing so that 4 keeps its stored scaling (and 3s when augmented) when swapping forms along with making the form swap instant instead of delayed, as how S#&$ mid mission form swapping is makes people go 100% ham dedicated on one form to then forget how the other works.

Besides some of her abilities being underwhelming compared to their counterparts (*coughRagecough*), which doesn't give many great reasons to swap very often even if it were free, pretty much this.

On 2021-04-26 at 1:38 AM, (PSN)LordWengeanCe said:

The problem with Equinox is that she's really too balanced. The only viable build for using day and night form in the same mission requires all stats not to go above 200% (as I said in a post a few days ago Range and Power strength do not easily go together, considering that we should go even with efficiency and health/armour/shield mods for survivability).

The practical problem is that her most potent abilities rely only on range, and optimal range builds tank on strength. Lacking strength means Pacify and Provoke, Rage, and the shield gain of Mend all get trash-binned. That different stat dependencies on abilities ends up putting one ability above the other isn't a new problem, but Equinox does a fine job exemplifying it via sheer numbers.

[(PSN)LordWengeanCe]

12 hours ago, (XBOX)Regxxh said:

Copying Wukong's twin onto Equinox doesn't invalidate Wukong's existence, because they still do different things, but it's a bad step to take when designing any frame, because it misses the chance to create an ability that's different from other abilities.

Thematically, she still is the duality frame. She's designed visually around day and night, and her kit is designed around swapping between offense and defense.

Gauss and Volt are built around the same concept that is speed, even though Volt's abilities are base on electricity his signature is speed and I still find them very original. To some extent the same could be said about Chroma and Lavos, both reptilian elementals in their concept. Nekros and Sevagoth are also very similar to me. The originality of a Warframe doesn't depend only on signature abilities but it's a set of elements (Concept, abilities, performance, design and maybe more since it all depends on the subjectivity of the player).

Said so, about Wukong... if you would ask me what is his signature for sure I wouldn't say his twin. His exalted weapon and the fact that he can become mist are more relevant to me (as I said before it's all subjective).

10 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

Besides some of her abilities being underwhelming compared to their counterparts (*coughRagecough*), which doesn't give many great reasons to swap very often even if it were free, pretty much this.

The practical problem is that her most potent abilities rely only on range, and optimal range builds tank on strength. Lacking strength means Pacify and Provoke, Rage, and the shield gain of Mend all get trash-binned. That different stat dependencies on abilities ends up putting one ability above the other isn't a new problem, but Equinox does a fine job exemplifying it via sheer numbers.

1. That's one reason why I think that her 3rd augment should receive an upgrade but it shouldn't not be considered the main rework she needs because it wouldn't matter that much in the end.

2. Don't know if I understood correctly but that's the motive that I need to ask for a double modding system for her. Her abilities are mechanically the same for both forms (meta, aoe, aura, aura) but have different interactions with her stats. 

Also an expression of her balance between the duality can be let players use a 3rd Equinox when both forms are united and use different combos with her abilities both from night and day form with the penality of lower stats (ex. for a shields build you can combine Mend with Provoke). Partially solving the problem of strength in Night form and survivability in Day.