Ambassador Feedback

[Artekkor]

After 3 formas and a total of 110 ranks leveled up via kuva hunts i feel like sharing some thoughts on this peculiar weapon.

Primary Fire (full-auto) is fine for the most part, although innate electricity really makes status builds less effective due to being unable to mod it for optimal Viral + Heat combo.
Corrosion + Heat proved subpar (because Viral status effect is just that much better than Corrosion one and Heat can't compensate) while Viral + Electricity kinda works, but still not that good.
Very... interesting choice of critical stat. Low chance, but high damage if it does crit.
So with classic 2 crit mods it looks something like 35% for x6 damage, which is alright for a weapon with firerate of 13.
Although one still wishes that critical chance was slightly higher still to compensate for inferior status capability. Maybe like 16%? Please?

Its the Secondary Fire (charge), however, that requires most attention and collects most of the criticism.
The concept behind it is very cool. Having mode switch act as alternative reload allows some interesting tactical tricks like switching to the other fire mode right before ammo runs out, getting a couple of kills that way, and then switching back again instead of reloading.
The problem is: secondary fire doesn't perform well enough to even be an option. Primary Fire, despite all its fault, is simply superior here due to a multitude of reasons.

Issue #1: Low Impact / Bad Damage.
The secondary prime doesn't hit as hard as it should for the effort put into using it. It hits quite hard when it crits, but it only has a 40% crit chance with Point Strike which means its more likely to NOT crit and deal no damage whatsoever. Status procs are of no use on it either. There's no use for procing a single Viral for this much effort and if it procs Electricity... Well, its not Heat, is it?

Issue #2: Bad ammo management.
This is a double issue.
Not only having only 2 shots is bad because of Issue #1, but it conflicts with the weapon's unique mechanic of alternative reload.
If i take 2 shots - i'm forced to reload properly, which means to switch back to primary fire i have to basically commit to a double-reload which is a whole 5 seconds of down time.
So, presumably, the "optimal" way of using Secondary Fire is to take a single shot and then immediately start switching back to Primary to avoid reloading properly. Which is horrible because a single charged shot does nothing.

Issue #3: Broken AoE function.
Sometimes i don't believe its AoE at all. I shoot into a crowd of enemies and enemies seem to be damaged completely at random, sometimes not taking damage if the shot was right under their legs. The only stable feedback i got is that if i shoot the enemy directly - that way he'll take damage for sure. But not those around him.
Which means: for stable effect the user has to aim for a direct hit. Which often misses, wasting the entire shot.
This is not even a balance issue, this is just literally broken and requires fixing.
FIXED(?)

 

I see 2 ways on how to improve secondary fire.

Option 1: Just buff it.
 - Give it like 36% default crit chance for a 90% crit chance with the mod which will greatly improve the stability and capability of damage dealt by charged shots, making them worth it.
 - Maybe buff status to like 35% while at it as well.
 - Slightly buff AoE range, after fixing it of course
 - Reduce ammo consumption of charged shots from 48 to 47. What this will do is that after taking 2 charged shots there will be still 2 points of ammo left. This will prevent auto-reload and give the player a chance to make a decision: do i want to continue using this, or do i want to switch back to primary. He can't take the shot with 2 ammo either way and is forced to either reload or switch.
Same effect can be easily achieved by simply buffing magazine capacity from 96 to 98 (97 will work too, but uneven numbers are ugly, unless it ends with a 5).

Option 2: Make it more aggressive.
 - Greatly decrease ammo consumption from 48 to either 12 or 8 (from 2 possible shots to 8 or 12 respectively).
 - Increase charge speed by ~50%.
These changes will allow to aggressively spam the charged shots in semi-auto fashion which will work out relatively well with the current stats of the charged shot.
The ammo consumption will also take care of the reload/swap issues because the player will have a proper choice: does he wants to commit to a final 8th/12th shot or he wants to switch.

[Aldain]

37 minutes ago, Artekkor said:

Primary Fire (full-auto) is fine for the most part

Hard disagree from me.

It is the same base damage per bullet as the Braton, with a Crit Chance that belongs on a low Crit multiplier weapon like the Quellor, but paradoxically has a Crit Multiplier only 0.2 below the Soma Prime.

Either the base damage needs to go up on the Full-Auto mode or the Crit Chance does, because right now using the full-auto mode is basically pointless.

Every single aspect of both fire modes are completely overshadowed by the Stahlta, the only advantage it has is being hitscan, but that's not worth having almost every other stat dramatically weaker than the Stahlta.

[Cicasajt]

not every weapon needs to be strong. what DE needs to do is lower the mastery requirement of weak weapons and make them easy to obtain. by the time you reach mr10 and farm ambassador you have nothing but better options, and that is the real problem with this gun

[Aldain]

52 minutes ago, Cicasajt said:

not every weapon needs to be strong.

By this logic DE should just stop making weapons entirely because things like the Kuva Bramma have long since made any single target weapon outrageously redundant.

No, not every gun needs to be the next stage of power creep, but if releasing purposely bad weapons is all DE has left then they shouldn't release anything at all.

[Artekkor]

2 часа назад, Cicasajt сказал:

not every weapon needs to be strong. what DE needs to do is lower the mastery requirement of weak weapons and make them easy to obtain. by the time you reach mr10 and farm ambassador you have nothing but better options, and that is the real problem with this gun

Or - more appropriately - make Ambassador actually worth its MR10 requirement and bazillion years of Railjack grind that it requires. I just bought it from market the second i saw what i need to do to grind it. No, i'm not doing that.

And again - my criticism wasn't even the gun as a whole. Its specifically secondary charge mode which is worse than auto-mode by a big margin because its not worth 2 seconds of reload-switching and 48 ammo it uses to take a shot. Those 48 ammo are better spent shooting primary mode which will end up simply dealing more damage thanks to all the viral procs its going to apply.

In other words: half the gun is balanced worse than the rest of the gun. In which case why have alt firing mode in the first place. That's just bad game design.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

27 minutes ago, Artekkor said:

Or - more appropriately - make Ambassador actually worth its MR10 requirement and bazillion years of Railjack grind that it requires. I just bought it from market the second i saw what i need to do to grind it. No, i'm not doing that.

And again - my criticism wasn't even the gun as a whole. Its specifically secondary charge mode which is worse than auto-mode by a big margin because its not worth 2 seconds of reload-switching and 48 ammo it uses to take a shot. Those 48 ammo are better spent shooting primary mode which will end up simply dealing more damage thanks to all the viral procs its going to apply.

In other words: half the gun is balanced worse than the rest of the gun. In which case why have alt firing mode in the first place. That's just bad game design.

Yup

also note, the Alt Fire is basically an inferior Opticor Vandal

Combine with the horrible 2 second mode swap

and I'd be better of just equipping the real Opticor Vandal as primary, and an Auto Pistol as Secondary

it would give me the same Functionality as the Ambassador, except without terrible ammo economy, and swapping modes would be near instant.

 

At a bare minimum, the Ambassdor Mode swap needs to be as fast as a Primary/Secondary swap. Otherwise I don't see any reason why I'd use it.

[Tiltskillet]

I didn't use it a ton--although I liked it enough I plan to return to it eventually--but the biggest thing I wanted was better base reload speed.  Which would speed up the mode switch as well.  Also when it auto reloads in AoE mode there's what feels like a particularly long delay before it starts.  Circumventable with manual reloading, but still annoying.

Like a lot of weapons, it was way more fun to use on Harrow.  (Who also happens to fix a lot of its crit disparity.)

Just having a quick look at its stats on the wiki's weapon comparison table, the auto mode looks pretty comparable to other MR10 weapons like Tenora and Baza Prime.  Again though, I don't know the weapon that well, especially the AoE mode.

[Aldain]

13 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Just having a quick look at its stats on the wiki's weapon comparison table, the auto mode looks pretty comparable to other MR10 weapons like Tenora and Baza Prime. 

The Baza Prime has double the base crit chance of the Ambassador at the cost of 8 base damage, even the regular Baza has almost double the base crit chance of the Ambassador for the same cost of 8 base damage.

The reason why the Baza works and the Ambassador doesn't (I've pumped 5 Forma into the bloody thing by the way) is because a 14% base crit chance will barely scratch 42% with a corrupted mod while anything above 20 can get far more consistent than "4 in every 10 bullets will crit".

As long as it shares the same base damage per bullet as the Braton (with only 2% more crit chance) the auto fire mode will never scale upwards in any meaningful way, the solid status chance doesn't save the weapon either because there are much better status weapons that apply status to more than one enemy at a time.

To put things in perspective, the Ignis Wraith has a better crit chance than the Ambassador (with nearly the same crit multiplier), more base damage and more status chance and can hit multiple enemies at the same time and reloads almost a whole second faster.

The Ambassador stands out in no way but amazing aesthetics, functionally there are any number of guns (even non-AoE ones) that outperform it eight ways to Sunday.

[Tiltskillet]

34 minutes ago, Aldain said:

The reason why the Baza works and the Ambassador doesn't (I've pumped 5 Forma into the bloody thing by the way) is because a 14% base crit chance will barely scratch 42% with a corrupted mod while anything above 20 can get far more consistent than "4 in every 10 bullets will crit".

Well, it's a bullet hose not a sniper rifle.  It doesn't need great crit consistency to leverage its crit damage. 

But yeah, looking at some modded numbers for a really basic "neutral" build:  Am. Serration, Bane, Split, Point Strike, Vital Sense, Primed Cryo, 60%toxin, Vile Acc

Ambassador / Tenora / Baza Prime

Burst: 39450 / 41322 / 57286

Sustain: 23397 / 30174 / 36244

Status per second (before multi): 10.5 / 5.7 / 7.90

Better status application, but significantly worse damage.  Although those numbers don't account for the Tenora spool up or the Baza Prime fall off. 

I think I prefer it to the Tenora, but, you're right,  I'd rather use the Baza Prime as an auto weapon despite the fall off.  But...is that a surprise comparing a recent prime versus a baseline MR10 weapon?  And just from those numbers it doesn't seem like the Ambassador auto is outright broken by its low base damage and crit%.  Yeah, the base damage does seem to be holding it back, and this could get worse with Arcanes, more high end mods, and rivens.

And while I'm not looking at the AoE mode directly, it does exist.  Tenora has a useful but single target altfire, the Baza has nothing.  Fix what is probably just a bug with AoE damage application, and Ambassador offers something useful the other weapons just can't.  (And once again, more reload speed would help it out in that role and give it better sustain.)

Anyway, I do acknowledge that your actual experience with the weapon is a lot more pertinent for feedback  than raw numbers I'm just throwing out there.  You've got me intrigued enough though I want to put more forma into the weapon just  so I can do some comparisons on actual targets.

(Hopefully this doesn't sound  argumentative.  I spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the numbers that I wanted to put this out there for some context.)

[Aldain]

8 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

Hopefully this doesn't sound  argumentative.  I spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the numbers that I wanted to put this out there for some context.

Not at all, you're right that the weapon works theoretically, the problems stem from application to the current state of Warframe and the basic build you're using is moderately different from what I've been using (yours is likely better). No Primed Cryo sadly, been using Corrosive+Heat instead of Viral because Viral just can't keep up against Grineer with how low the base damage is and I used Critical Delay instead of Point Strike because 20% less fire rate doesn't really hurt the gun as badly as you'd think imo, I also doubled up on the crit multiplier with both Vital Sense and Hammer Shot (weird I know, but having both makes the multiplier ALMOST make up for the low base damage and helps it apply Corrosive more consistently).

In my testing I found adding Fire Rate doesn't help much and instead creates this questionable state of causing wasted ammo as well as causing significantly more time spent reloading. That's why I went the route of Critical Delay. Really the problem with the Ambassador outlines the overarching issue with a lot of Warframe's weaker weapons, because everything relies on multipliers low base stats are that much harder to overcome.

As for the AoE...

8 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

And while I'm not looking at the AoE mode directly, it does exist.  Tenora has a useful but single target altfire, the Baza has nothing.  Fix what is probably just a bug with AoE damage application, and Ambassador offers something useful the other weapons just can't.  (And once again, more reload speed would help it out in that role and give it better sustain.)

I think I can safely say that it currently is bugged, the AoE shot is supposed to have a 6m radius from the point of impact but I've found more often than not the AoE blast will even miss the enemy it hits directly. Even if it did work it doesn't compare well to other Full-Auto rifles with an AoE secondary (namely the Stahlta, Tenet Tetra and Trumna to name the 3 most popular alternatives) primarily because the AoE has a base crit chance of 16%, which is dramatically lower than all three of the listed weapons (The Stahlta even has a higher multiplier on the AoE shot).

The Full-Auto modes on those guns are also debatably better due to the base damage being higher and synergizing with the higher base crit chance (though the Stahlta's 1.8x multiplier on the full-auto mode is not very good I'll admit), but they're all capable of being much more reliable due to just flat out being better.

Which brings me to the last point I want to discuss:

8 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

But...is that a surprise comparing a recent prime versus a baseline MR10 weapon?

The Ambassador doesn't even compare well to the regular Baza, and that's an MR7 weapon that doesn't need to be farmed from 4 different Survival C Rotations in Railjack.

Even amongst its peers, the Ambassador just has nothing that makes it unique or a viable alternative, hek, the fact that to change fire modes you need to wait for time equal to a reload compared to others where it is on demand with the Alt-Fire button (at worst it needs to swap like with the Tenet Tetra) and you have a weapon that is slower, weaker AND not even capable of making up for that weakness with a solid crit chance/multiplier like how the Baza does.

I've said it before on the topic of the Ambassador, but right now the gun is a walking identity crisis, it's a Frankenstein's Monster of a gun cobbled together from various different design philosophies that all simultaneously clash with each other creating a gun actively working against any possible niche it could fill out.

[Tiltskillet]

After playing with it some more, I thought of another thing that it's practically crying out for:  some inherent body punch through.  This would make it work so, so much better as a multi tool weapon for me.  (But more on that later.)

Although what would really make it special would be a separate load out for each mode.  Too bad that seems implausible to the point of absurdity.  Anyway, I'll gladly settle for the only moderately implausible goal of DE making the weapon have a pay-off for the non-instant mode switch. 

2 hours ago, Aldain said:

I think I can safely say that it currently is bugged, the AoE shot is supposed to have a 6m radius from the point of impact but I've found more often than not the AoE blast will even miss the enemy it hits directly.

While I'm not seeing the radial attack miss a directly hit target, I'm definitely experiencing the other screwyness.  After a little sim testing, first  I thought the AoE was just way smaller than the Arsenal states, like less than a meter.  But it turned out that if I hit landscape instead of mooks, the AoE was much, much closer to the 6 meters we're led to expect.   Even when hitting the ground though, I think it might also have an odd shape, like maybe a half circle or something.  And Firestorm doesn't change the Arsenal stat or seem to have any effect that I could discern.

 

So back to the punch through...the wiki says the AoE can go through walls, although I can't say I've seen that in the Sim.   (But the blocks in there don't seem PT penetrable except by the Zenith, so that's hardly conclusive.)   If there's anything to that though, maybe this is some sort of attempt at making a form of AoE that leveraged PT--which would be a helluva thing  if it worked.

But that's just speculation.  What isn't speculative is that the radial attack is currently a mess.

[Aldain]

41 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

While I'm not seeing the radial attack miss a directly hit target, I'm definitely experiencing the other screwyness.  After a little sim testing, first  I thought the AoE was just way smaller than the Arsenal states, like less than a meter.  But it turned out that if I hit landscape instead of mooks, the AoE was much, much closer to the 6 meters we're led to expect.   Even when hitting the ground though, I think it might also have an odd shape, like maybe a half circle or something.  And Firestorm doesn't change the Arsenal stat or seem to have any effect that I could discern.

I used it a bit more a while ago doing some late night relic cracking, I think it might be a host/client issue causing that problem now that I've actively observed it. Some of the more laggy hosts I ran into made the AoE not even register when hitting the ground sometimes.

Perhaps there's something wrong with the natural "AoE Punch-Through" like you said, like a direct impact has the AoE absorbed by the enemy it hit, I'll need to test that out on an enemy clump next time I sit down with it.

[Artekkor]

5 часов назад, Aldain сказал:

Not at all, you're right that the weapon works theoretically, the problems stem from application to the current state of Warframe and the basic build you're using is moderately different from what I've been using (yours is likely better). No Primed Cryo sadly, been using Corrosive+Heat instead of Viral because Viral just can't keep up against Grineer with how low the base damage is and I used Critical Delay instead of Point Strike because 20% less fire rate doesn't really hurt the gun as badly as you'd think imo, I also doubled up on the crit multiplier with both Vital Sense and Hammer Shot (weird I know, but having both makes the multiplier ALMOST make up for the low base damage and helps it apply Corrosive more consistently).

For reference my optimal build for the moment looks like this:

Damage | Multishot | Crit Damage | Crit Chance
Primed Cryo Rounds | 60/60 cold | 60/60 toxin | 60/60 Electricity

This build sort of works fine, as i have no particular issues with average grineer up to Level 80. They usually die to average 5 shos to the head, probably because one of those shots crits and with that crit multiplier it destroys.
However, the gun struggles badly with heavy units like gunners and bombards, usually requiring a good 15-20 shots to the head for a kill.

I'm not sure about going for corrosive build. Ever since DE buffed viral and nerfed corrosive procs - corrosion became obsolete on guns with status potential.
Viral outperforms corrosion basically always (as long as target can be status'd) due to how insane the 10 stacks of viral are with that +300% damage. I tried doing corrosion, but it doesn't seem to work as well. Might test more later.

[Aldain]

4 hours ago, Artekkor said:

I'm not sure about going for corrosive build. Ever since DE buffed viral and nerfed corrosive procs - corrosion became obsolete on guns with status potential.
Viral outperforms corrosion basically always (as long as target can be status'd) due to how insane the 10 stacks of viral are with that +300% damage. I tried doing corrosion, but it doesn't seem to work as well. Might test more later.

The question is how many stacks of Viral does it take to reach the same effective multiplier as removing the 80% cap of armor?

Corrosive also has the +75% extra damage against Ferrite Armor as well as the other benefits it brings against armor.

I find it works better up-front when focusing on a single heavy since the armor is being removed faster than Heat Status procs alone, and pairing the two together can get armor down to 10% of what it usually is. Heat alone will only get the armor of a level 80 Heavy Gunner down by 50% (which is still about 2,600 armor according to the wiki) which still totals out to almost 90% damage reduction.

Viral works better with sufficiently high base damage, the Ambassador's base damage is so low that even the max multiplier still makes it tickle things, that's why I moved over to Corrosive+Heat, because it does punch through armor better when a weapon doesn't have the raw damage to make good use of Viral's multiplier.

[Tiltskillet]

6 hours ago, Artekkor said:

Damage | Multishot | Crit Damage | Crit Chance
Primed Cryo Rounds | 60/60 cold | 60/60 toxin | 60/60 Electricity

I'm doing Viral / Electric as well, but with Shred (since I'm ignoring the AoE mode until it gets fixed) in place of Primed Cryo  and Hammer Strike instead of Vital Sense.  When I have another forma in it, I'll have to decide whether to replace the 60 Cold with Primed Cryo.   For now though, I'm enjoying the electric procs.

It's kind of too bad the weapon has zero IPS, or else Galvanized Aptitude would be more tempting.

[Tiltskillet]

I did a quick search and didn't find any bug reports about the weapon's AoE issues, so I made one here:

If anyone wants to add more testing/observations--or mock some of mine!-- that'd be great.

[Aldain]

17 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

If anyone wants to add more testing/observations--or mock some of mine!-- that'd be great.

I'm going to go a few quick tests with Punch Through and will add my findings to that topic.

...Though I still think even if they fix the AoE the weapon itself still needs some buffs.

[PublikDomain]

On 2021-08-08 at 3:27 AM, Artekkor said:

Issue #3: Broken AoE function.
Sometimes i don't believe its AoE at all. I shoot into a crowd of enemies and enemies seem to be damaged completely at random, sometimes not taking damage if the shot was right under their legs. The only stable feedback i got is that if i shoot the enemy directly - that way he'll take damage for sure. But not those around him.
Which means: for stable effect the user has to aim for a direct hit. Which often misses, wasting the entire shot.
This is not even a balance issue, this is just literally broken and requires fixing.

This sounds a lot like the issues presented by the Khora LoS change. Wondering if it's related.

[Famecans]

this mechanic is bad:

"you're out of secondary shot ammo but should switch to primary shot as there is still ammo"

this mechanic tries to encourage us to switch the mode but the switch should work automatically because the only thing I can think of is:

"I'm going to switch to the secondary weapon because the primary weapon is empty mas didn't automatically switch to secondary"

I think the tenet tetra uses the same mechanics.

[Artekkor]

17 часов назад, PublikDomain сказал:

This sounds a lot like the issues presented by the Khora LoS change. Wondering if it's related.

Probably. My friend reported similar issues with a number of LoS dependant AoE abilities.

[Tiltskillet]

Haven't tested it yet, but in the PC patch notes for today:

Fixed the Ambassador not triggering its Alt Fire radial attack when it hits an enemy.

[Artekkor]

24 минуты назад, Tiltskillet сказал:

Haven't tested it yet, but in the PC patch notes for today:

Fixed the Ambassador not triggering its Alt Fire radial attack when it hits an enemy.

Nice. We're seeing some progress.

[Aldain]

26 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Haven't tested it yet, but in the PC patch notes for today:

Fixed the Ambassador not triggering its Alt Fire radial attack when it hits an enemy.

Wow, that was quick.

...Now if only they'd make the base damage and crit chance not hilariously weak.

[Lirka.]

On 2021-08-08 at 4:26 PM, (PSN)haphazardlynamed said:

Yup

also note, the Alt Fire is basically an inferior Opticor Vandal

Combine with the horrible 2 second mode swap

and I'd be better of just equipping the real Opticor Vandal as primary, and an Auto Pistol as Secondary

it would give me the same Functionality as the Ambassador, except without terrible ammo economy, and swapping modes would be near instant.

 

At a bare minimum, the Ambassdor Mode swap needs to be as fast as a Primary/Secondary swap. Otherwise I don't see any reason why I'd use it.

Yeah the mode swap should include the charge-up of the weapon. So when you're in rifle mode, holding the m3 button would charge it AND do the animation. 

[Aldain]

Well they got the AoE bug fixed on PC...but not Switch apparently.