An actually productive Yareli topic

[Ceadeus]

Look we all know Yareli came out pretty bad.  It's clear a lot more went into her visuals than her actual gameplay.  However a lot of the topics I'm seeing regarding her are either just saying that and not elaborating or are giving very basic/misguided attempts at fixing her by just up'ing different numbers and such.  I think Yareli's kit has the potential to be interesting if it actually had a little more depth to it (pun fully intended).

Sea Snares
Initially seeing this ability I was actually fairly interested in it as it was an unorthodox method of CC and with the right factors it actually could've been a very useful tool, I was actually really hoping this would be her subsumable ability instead of Aquablades.  Instead, Sea Snares got virtually every limitation possible with very little actual benefit.  The range is short, the duration is short (and even shorter if it doesn't immediately catch something in its short range), the damage is small, and for some reason there's a hard cap on the amount of snares you can throw out.

To address Sea Snare's issues, I would like to take notes from Hydroid's puddle which is arguably the best part of his kit just with the most boring implementation.  I would like Sea Snares to have their duration removed and instead become a channeled ability, with each active snare increasing the drain.  Yareli would be able to throw out an infinite amount of snares for as long as she can sustain the energy drain, and the snares would have a significantly larger homing range so that they act better both as an active combat cast as well as a trap layer.  Sea Snares will now stack unused snares onto nearby targets to multiply the damage done for every snare, making the ability more viable both in crowd suppression and single target damage.  Sea Snares will also deal ramp-over-time % total health damage (obviously would need to be relatively small per snare to allow stacking to not instakill) and on a hold to cast will detonate all snares for their current % value. (IE: 3 snares all dealing 10% total health would detonate for a total of 30% total health of the target).  This allows for infinite scaling and relevancy at all levels of the game.

Merulina
Lots of people are currently hating on Merulina, and lots of them have very justified complaints; lack of modding, clunkiness in tilesets, restriction to secondaries, lack of any real unique mechanics besides DR.  However, I'm of the minority that appreciate Merulina for one simple factor: player freedom.  I like that we have Merulina and can use her for the same reason that I'm glad we were allowed to use Necramechs in missions despite them having similar navigation problems on certain tilesets, and that is that I like being given the freedom to not have arbitrary limitations on my gameplay that make no sense.

Now this freedom factor does not make Merulina good though, so that's what I hope to do with the following.  First and foremost, make Merulina knock enemies down into a ragdoll state.  This alone would make Merulina much more suited to utilizing the increased mobility to zip around the area CC'ing enemies and in turn giving yourself even better effective-DR.  Secondly, make riding over said ragdolled enemies hold them in Merulina's "wake", again, in much the same way that Hydroid's puddle currently functions, giving a low ramping DoT and allowing teammates to shoot the trapped enemies until Yareli stops moving and the enemies are released from the wake.  This would give Merulina a degree of offensive potential while still keeping it primarily as a CC/DR tool, while also allowing Yareli to pull in enemies affected by her Sea Snares for added damage output and better synergy.

I would also of course like to make the request that we be allowed to use primaries and melee and such on K-Drive but I understand that would require extensive animation work so I won't hold my breath for that one (again, pun intended).

Aquablades
This is really the most underwhelming part of Yareli's kit as far as I'm concerned.  It's not very interesting, not very effective at anything CC, survivability, or damagewise, and by far the least interesting potential subsumable ability from Yareli.  This is probably the one ability that I think should be entirely scrapped and redone with the only part kept to be the art for reasons that will be explained in the following.

What would I replace Aquablades with?  Aquablades of course.  But rather than the current iteration, the new Aquablades would be an exalted glaive as many people initially predicted them to be when we saw the concept art.  This might mean moving Aquablades to Yareli's 4 and Riptide down to her 3, but I think it would make her substantially more interesting.  The circling blades idea could be kept during the glaive's throw to both increase the effective AoE of the glaive to separate it as an exalted weapon over standard glaives and still inflict the same constant slash procs while also being supplemented by the standard power of glaives as melee weapons already.  In addition this could provide added synergies with Sea Snares and Riptide by either increasing their damage if thrown through (if it doesn't outright kill the enemy in Sea Snare's case) or by amplifying the detonation damage if a mid-air heavy attack is used within range of the snares or Riptide (more on Riptide interaction next).

Riptide
This ability in particular was quite the rollercoaster for me as seeing it initially be showed off on devstream brought the immediate concern to my attention of its quick detonation and how it showed the same problems as Hydroid's old tentacles where the CC potential only lasted a moment before the enemies were violently thrown around and made the grouping aspect irrelevant.  I later saw the Yareli Warframe Profile video which phrased the ability as "...ragdolling and holding them in place.  And upon deactivation, enemies are launched outward," to which I thought that meant they'd updated the ability to give you the choice of when to detonate it and release the enemies, which I was very happy someone had the foresight to address that issue... And then I actually got Yareli and found out that was false and it's still just automatic.  Not only automatic, but so quick in fact that the idea of it grouping enemies at all is almost entirely irrelevant since they'll be thrown before you can even interact with the cluster.  Not to mention a relatively small effective range and poorly scaling damage.

You might've guessed it by now based on the other abilities, but yes, Riptide would get the same treatment where it would be a tap to cast, channeled drain, with a hold to detonate.  There are two routes that can be taken to make Riptide more viable in my opinion, either the effective range can be massively increased so that Riptide is a much better "room"-level pull instead of just the targeted area, or with the ability no longer automatically detonating, it could be made to cast X amount of Riptide's that can then be used to create multiple vacuums throughout the area.  On top of this, the damage profile would also be changed to match Sea Snares' ramping % DoT that stacks if an enemy pulled into Riptide is already affected by Sea Snares, with the detonation of the snares providing better "nuke" potential from the % based damage as more enemies are clustered up in the Riptide to still keep the idea of the "more damage per more enemies" scaling that we have currently.

This wraps up my assessment of Yareli and how I would go about improving her.  If anyone has any suggestions, tweaks, or other inputs to make please do.  I give DE or any affiliates full permission to take any of these concepts or any variation on them and I waive any rights to intellectual property pertaining to this post on the sole condition that it is used to improve the Yareli warframe.