Styanax feedback

[vixenpixel]

After playing around with Styanax and putting the essential formas and so on and so forth, I wanted to give some feedback on what works and what doesn't. 

His 1, 3 and 4 are quite nice and useful. Levelling up the frame was an absolute breeze with Final Stand.  

The theme of the frame is really cool, I like everything about it. The only troublesome ability from my experience, is the Tharros Strike. It's unwieldy with a too short range. Pending the inevitable nerf to the Terrify Nekros ability that you can put on his 2 to give him a MUCH better aoe armor strip (something I took the liberty of doing because in comparison the tharros strike is incredibly bad), I'll stop comparing it to Terrify because since of the buff to Nekros 2 simply nothing in the game that has armor strip is comparable save for the ultimates on oberon, Frost, mag and what not. The buff to Terrify is good but I'm not holding my breath on this one. The diminished effect in Helminth will come. 

On to Tharros Strike. Styanax' 2 could have been a must-pick on frames for the armor shred, if the ability wasn't so hampered by it's own mechanics. Everything about this ability is on paper very interesting but when it comes down to it, the extremely low base range, the long cast time and the full body animation makes it very clunky at best. Often when playing him, I've found myself casting his 2 only to sigh to myself for how many of the enemy remain untouched by the ability (that's with range mods). To have any real use for the ability you need to cast it in absolute melee proximity of enemies but the cast time and the fact the ability doesn't allow you to use a weapon at the same time, mean that the enemy will have several moments to hit you.  Additionally, there is a break in the flow when playing Styanax as you go to cast his 2 and everything stops (except for the enemies). This feels fine for a defensive ability like his 3, because you can take a distance from the throng of enemies to quickly buff up before joining the fray, or recast between mob groups. When you are in the thick of combat and you need to cast his tharros strike, is when you don't want to stand still. The low cost of this ability suggest a spammable type of ability but the design of it's cast is fatigueing.

If only one of these issues were not the case, it would be easy to fix the other with modding, like natural talent and the assortment of range mods. He is a medium range type of frame, I feel like. He has defensive buffing abilities but he is not quite the tank required to utilize a short range armor strip you can't cast on the fly. That's more like Inaros territory, but even then, nobody likes to stand still and do nothing without getting some extreme bang for your buck - like Frost or oberon 4. They are SO good that they easily make up for the issues of "full body animation" and "long cast time".

For Tharros strike my suggestion is to remove the full body animation coupled with a range increase to 12. Let him move and fight while he casts this ability because it plays alot more like other abilities of it's type; like nyx chaos bolts and ash shuriken while also speaking to the theme of the character. 12 range, I feel, would balance this ability since it's much more feasible to mod to proper range. Throw on stretch and you get an 18m range, which is decent.