Fixing Garuda... again

[(PSN)flashking13]

So I'm a Garuda main and I've pretty much been since she released and I really like her aesthetics but lt never seemed like they took full advantage of what they gave her. She's supposed to be this blood matronesque frame but they never gave her benefits from using slash. Now with her last rework they took away her ability to semi control her damage up passive (arguably her best feature) and made it so you have to kill a bunch of enemies which really makes no sense and It completely threw off the way I played Garuda. So I started thinking about ways to alter her kit a bit.

For the most part I've left the abilities the same since those aren't really bad its just the passive I have the biggest problem with So here is my change.

Passive: inflicting bleed (slash) damage fills the blood gauge increasing Garudas damage up to 100%, using the blood ball expends this gauge using the collected blood and tacking on the bonus. (Will expend it at any percent). Alternate idea: using bloodletting could expend the gauge 50% if you have that much built up before it saps your own health.

My biggest problem with Garuda is that they gave her claws, a gun and a 4 that uses the slash proc and never gave her anything to benefit from actually using it. I was leveling Gyre last night and I saw she actually gets a 10% crit chance for each electrical status applied to the enemy and I was thinking Garuda could use something like that. I obviously don't want it to be the same I just think she needs slash integrated into her kit.

 

[Leinal]

I mean, she's hella strong and complete, nearly perfection

One my 5favorites frames for sure

 

The only thing I would partially agree is that her Dread Mirror should accumulate inflicted damage or just slash damage done by her whole kit and not just from Dread Mirror itself. It would be much better being able to explode her Dread Mirror more often.

Also, an augment to explode around her, similar to her 4 augment.

I wouldn't touch her passive which probably the strongest passive in the whole game.

 

 

[Fenr3r]

I'd just like Blood Altar to be made mobile, having them locked to an area isn't very congruent to the pace of the game. Changing them to floating to the sides of Garuda, following her like eidolon lures as the enemies are suspended by Garuda's talons, would feel more natural to her playstyle.

[Grav_Starstrider]

21 hours ago, (PSN)flashking13 said:

Now with her last rework they took away her ability to semi control her damage up passive (arguably her best feature) and made it so you have to kill a bunch of enemies which really makes no sense

Wheezing along with 1HP left actually making you stronger makes less sense. She's fueled by the bloodshed she inflicts (kills). Makes way more sense, imo personally.

21 hours ago, (PSN)flashking13 said:

Passive: inflicting bleed (slash) damage fills the blood gauge increasing Garudas damage up to 100%, using the blood ball expends this gauge using the collected blood and tacking on the bonus. (Will expend it at any percent). Alternate idea: using bloodletting could expend the gauge 50% if you have that much built up before it saps your own health.

Helminthing over those abilities would make the passive fairly wasted.

21 hours ago, crazywolfpusher said:

The only thing I would partially agree is that her Dread Mirror should accumulate inflicted damage or just slash damage done by her whole kit and not just from Dread Mirror itself. It would be much better being able to explode her Dread Mirror more often.

Also, an augment to explode around her, similar to her 4 augment.

This is a better suggestion for improving her Dread Mirror Bloodball, imo

21 hours ago, (PSN)flashking13 said:

My biggest problem with Garuda is that they gave her claws, a gun and a 4 that uses the slash proc and never gave her anything to benefit from actually using it. I was leveling Gyre last night and I saw she actually gets a 10% crit chance for each electrical status applied to the enemy and I was thinking Garuda could use something like that. I obviously don't want it to be the same I just think she needs slash integrated into her kit.

But why though? She's got her own core identity of harvesting and using blood, Slash and Blood are just her THEMES, Slash doesn't have to be the core mechanic when Blood is already her core theme and mechanic.

1 hour ago, Fenr3r said:

I'd just like Blood Altar to be made mobile, having them locked to an area isn't very congruent to the pace of the game. Changing them to floating to the sides of Garuda, following her like eidolon lures as the enemies are suspended by Garuda's talons, would feel more natural to her playstyle.

Gloom. You want to install Gloom onto her via Helminth. Blood Altar (and other stationary healing options like Nidus' Ravenous) are good for keeping stationary (mobile) defense objectives alive, and non-channeled ones are good for allowing additional/alternative sources of energy regeneration to apply to Garuda so you don't have to dance on the razor's edge by constantly killing tons of your own health.

[Fenr3r]

34 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Gloom. You want to install Gloom onto her via Helminth. Blood Altar (and other stationary healing options like Nidus' Ravenous) are good for keeping stationary (mobile) defense objectives alive, and non-channeled ones are good for allowing additional/alternative sources of energy regeneration to apply to Garuda so you don't have to dance on the razor's edge by constantly killing tons of your own health.

Helminth should never be a reason to not improve a warframe's base kit. However, turning Blood Altar into a passive radial heal for Garuda and any nearby allies without the need to deal damage while lacking Gloom's larger radius and slow effect, would help make it more of a consideration when using Helminth.

As for healing objectives with Blood Altar, which the ability can't even do at current. Having Garuda merely stand by the objective would end in the same result only now being more effective in doing so when it comes to sortie and arbitration defense where it would actually be relevant. 

[Fenr3r]

22 hours ago, (PSN)flashking13 said:

My biggest problem with Garuda is that they gave her claws, a gun and a 4 that uses the slash proc and never gave her anything to benefit from actually using it. I was leveling Gyre last night and I saw she actually gets a 10% crit chance for each electrical status applied to the enemy and I was thinking Garuda could use something like that. I obviously don't want it to be the same I just think she needs slash integrated into her kit.

The point of the slash is to tick down enemies so they reach the health threshold where dread mirror can instakill and charge her blood orb. Her gameplay loop being sending out Seeking Talons --> slash procs whittling down enemies -->using Dread Mirrior than throwing orb --> repeat.

[Grav_Starstrider]

4 hours ago, Fenr3r said:

Helminth should never be a reason to not improve a warframe's base kit. However, turning Blood Altar into a passive radial heal for Garuda and any nearby allies without the need to deal damage while lacking Gloom's larger radius and slow effect, would help make it more of a consideration when using Helminth.

As for healing objectives with Blood Altar, which the ability can't even do at current. Having Garuda merely stand by the objective would end in the same result only now being more effective in doing so when it comes to sortie and arbitration defense where it would actually be relevant. 

Ah, turns out you're correct about Defense objectives, but I'd argue that that should be what Blood Altar should be buffed with, simply being able to apply to Defense Objectives, even if only at a more reduced rate of healing.

At the end of the day, Gloom and Blood Altar are fundamentally different abilities. One is an AoE Lifesteal-granting channeled aura (so you can't even heal objectives with that either, actually) with a slow-cc effect, the other is one that doesn't rely upon the ally doing damage, is hard-CC against many things that are often CC-immune or resistant, is not a channeled ability, and can be applied multiple times in an area, and at baseline provides a full health heal from 1HP in only 4 seconds.

It really isn't that Blood Altar is bad, it's just fundamentally different. The answer isn't to turn it into Gloom 2.0 though. I think you'll find a number of players (like myself) who would prefer to keep them as way more disparate options instead of giving them this convergent evolution you're proposing.

Also like, the SFX and junk are already figured out for Blood Altar, turning it into some midair thing would require a rework of that. I'd rather they reworked/buffed a number of other Frames before touching Garuda (Hydroid, Frost, etc), and nerfed a few others (Saryn/Mesa, freaking omnidirectional and directional DELETE buttons, lol), or did further work on making the game more enjoyable with fundamental baseline game principle reworks (like they did with melee, ammo, for example, I hope to see them rework Looting so that the options we have are additive instead of multiplicative, or restricted to basic starchart resources so that for everything else we don't feel like we need to use farming frames/companions in order to get the most of the things we're hunting for. Reworking the Radars and Vacuums to be more innate but having the boosting mods still push the maximum amount higher, would be good, as would increasing their pickup/detection distances in Archwing and Open World spaces. Lots of things to do before claiming Garuda's Blood Altar is suboptimal).

 

[Fenr3r]

21 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Also like, the SFX and junk are already figured out for Blood Altar, turning it into some midair thing would require a rework of that. I'd rather they reworked/buffed a number of other Frames before touching Garuda (Hydroid, Frost, etc)

I mean not really, they're already just stuck on a spike so just decouple it from the ground and have it follow Garuda around. I do agree that there are other frames in far more dire need of a change, but with how long it seems to take for changes to come halting smaller QoL is pretty disheartning. It's out of the fact that I think it be such a simple change that I wouldn't think they lose any real significant dev time. Garudas main problem is her survivability, and with this minute change it would see her kit being pretty perfect.

[sunderthefirmament]

On 2022-10-04 at 11:08 AM, (PSN)flashking13 said:

My biggest problem with Garuda is that they gave her claws, a gun and a 4 that uses the slash proc and never gave her anything to benefit from actually using it.

Slash procs are incredibly desirable in high level Warframe content due to the way their damage ignores armor. You don’t have to further incentivize that for Garuda. 

[CopperBezel]

Having something happen on nearby bleed ticks would be thematically cool - I remember hearing a comment about that back when she was first released, and I still like it. It would work with her new passive too, just add 1% per bleed tick instead of 5% per dead enemy. I think it would have been better for gameplay as well - just like how melee combo builds faster against enemies you don't one-shot on the first hit, this version of her passive would grow very quickly against stronger enemies and be difficult to maintain against anything that doesn't live long enough to bleed. But there's really no chance they're changing that now. 

9 minutes ago, sunderthefirmament said:

Slash procs are incredibly desirable in high level Warframe content due to the way their damage ignores armor. You don’t have to further incentivize that for Garuda. 

Bleed is harder to come by and less useful since Revised, since physical damage types don't get disproportionate status weight anymore and armor values never get truly insane in normal content. 

More importantly, her passive is presently based on kills. Kills are incredibly desirable in Warframe content, and there are all kinds of things that further incentivize that for various frames, weapons, and mods.

4 hours ago, Fenr3r said:

I mean not really, they're already just stuck on a spike so just decouple it from the ground and have it follow Garuda around. I do agree that there are other frames in far more dire need of a change, but with how long it seems to take for changes to come holding up smaller QoL is pretty disheartning. It's out of the fact that I think it be such a simple change that I wouldn't think they lose any real significant dev time. Garudas main problem is her survivability, and with this minute change it would see her kit being pretty perfect.

What you're describing wouldn't make any sense visually or thematically. The ability is called Blood Altar, not Blood Banner or something, and the talon that impales the enemy comes out of the ground. If they wanted an ability that levitated an impaled enemy and dragged them around behind you, they wouldn't make something that looked like Blood Altar. They'd probably want a gibbet cage matching the Dread Mirror frame. New animations, new effects, a gilded version of the cage for the Prime version. And then I would never be able to unsee Garuda walking around dragging one of those wheeled IV stands.

Hey, why doesn't Prime Blood Altar follow your accent color? There's something that Garuda needs fixed. 

[sunderthefirmament]

8 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Bleed is harder to come by and less useful since Revised, since physical damage types don't get disproportionate status weight anymore and armor values never get truly insane in normal content.

It’s still meta. I don’t think DE should be making changes that make slash even more attractive. 
 

And “normal content” is now much higher level than ever before. Archon Hunts are now among the most rewarding content in the game, along with Steel Path. Armor scales to ridiculous degrees in both of those types of content. Even if DE didn’t intend Steel Path to be anything more than a challenge/bragging rights area, it is now something else. Weapon arcanes and the steel essence shop made sure of that. Not bragging, but I just cleared Revenant Prime’s prime access in a few hours thanks to my saved up steel essence. My point is that DE is adding more and more reasons for players to engage with higher level content, and in this content armor does get pretty absurd. Slash procs are one way to ignore that.  They’re more than good enough on their own, and so is Garuda, without any scripted synergies between them. 

[CopperBezel]

I don't disagree on SP and Archon Hunts. Until Archon Hunts happened, there was still a ghost of a case to be made that SP was "optional" in a way that other things aren't, but that's not the case now. And those mean enemies with armor that can amount to 97%ish damage reduction, which isn't exactly back to where it was before Revised but certainly a hell of a thing to just switch off. (Of course, we also have fast and permanent armor strip again.)

That said, I just don't really see the argument that something is too meta to incentivize. Again, Garuda's passive is based on kills, something she was going to do anyway. I'm saying it'd be a neat thematic link if it was based on bleeds instead, with the assumption that that's also something she's going to do anyway. The real problem would be having a passive that depended on using something that wasn't competitive - see Archon Flow.

I agree that if something like this would completely discourage using weapon builds not based on slash damage, that'd be an issue, but I don't think it would, because with enough tough enemies around, her 4 alone would fill that up pretty fast.

[George_PPS]

On 2022-10-04 at 9:08 AM, (PSN)flashking13 said:

Now with her last rework they took away her ability to semi control her damage up passive (arguably her best feature) and made it so you have to kill a bunch of enemies which really makes no sense and It completely threw off the way I played Garuda. So I started thinking about ways to alter her kit a bit.

 

Is she your only main? Such detrimental nerfs and arbitrary changes have been implemented on many frames weapons and mechanics to properly “balance” the game since 2017 or so. If you are having fun to abuse these features, it’s not allowed and will be found and nerfed or removed. 

[CopperBezel]

Please, half of these "nerfs" target particular features but ratchet others up. I have no doubt the motivation for the change in this case was that they wanted to make Garuda more survivable, I.e. entirely ditch the risk-reward aspect of her passive, but they still needed the player to do something to get to turn on double damage. If they'd removed the extra damage outright, there would be riots, but she also can't have it just for free all the time. I sincerely doubt they see it as a nerf - the strategy with frame tweaks concurrent with Prime releases is always to buff or streamline them a bit to help sell those Prime Access packages.

Wukong and the Bramma they're nerfing for "having fun" (winning too fast.) They weren't worried about Garuda. 

[Fenr3r]

Bloodletting's role now is to just keep Garuda topped up on energy no Zenurik required. She combos quite well with Madurai now, and I don't really struggle to keep up her blood guage at max even in steel path.

[Fenr3r]

6 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

What you're describing wouldn't make any sense visually or thematically. The ability is called Blood Altar, not Blood Banner or something, and the talon that impales the enemy comes out of the ground. If they wanted an ability that levitated an impaled enemy and dragged them around behind you, they wouldn't make something that looked like Blood Altar. 

Blood Altar's spikes are just her talon's, she's based on the Garuda from Hinduism the king of birds, her talon's act as both her claws and feathered wings. She already sends them out flying like Hawk's from MHA for Seeking Talon, so why would them floating for Blood Altar make any less sense?  They don't need to redesign if it take so much time to altar its current model. Staying air born is plainly ingrained in her design, having a ground locked ability is incongruent with that intent.

[Grav_Starstrider]

14 hours ago, Fenr3r said:

Garudas main problem is her survivability, and with this minute change it would see her kit being pretty perfect.

Her survivability is great if you don't overdo or overly rely on Bloodletting, you use Dread Mirror effectively, keep your kills rolling to keep enemy numbers down, and occasionally using the Blood Altar to recover health when needed, especially if you literally use any shards, arcanes, or mods for survivability purposes.

[Fenr3r]

2 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Her survivability is great if you don't overdo or overly rely on Bloodletting, you use Dread Mirror effectively, keep your kills rolling to keep enemy numbers down, and occasionally using the Blood Altar to recover health when needed, especially if you literally use any shards, arcanes, or mods for survivability purposes.

Just comes from the weakness of single directional shield abilities like Dread Mirror in a hoarde game. You can end up being flanked and swarmed on occasion.

[CopperBezel]

7 hours ago, Fenr3r said:

Blood Altar's spikes are just her talon's, she's based on the Garuda from Hinduism the king of birds, her talon's act as both her claws and feathered wings. She already sends them out flying like Hawk's from MHA for Seeking Talon, so why would them floating for Blood Altar make any less sense?

Because spikes or feathers are the sort of thing we expect for magic guided missiles. Blood Altar is a spike that comes out of the ground to impale a body. If you want birds, you could compare it to shrikes, small predatory birds that impale their prey on the large thorns of particular trees. Appropriately also known as butcherbirds.

In essence it's a body on a pike, and that's an image that makes sense if the pike is attached to something, Nothing about Garuda's talons implies they can levitate in place or carry a load. It would look lazy as hell. 

7 hours ago, Fenr3r said:

Staying air born is plainly ingrained in her design, having a ground locked ability is incongruent with that intent.

 It gives her a choice between making full use of her mobility and only occasionally dropping on an enemy for a quick heal, or fighting a mob on the ground inside the circle with enough health regen to tank whatever's coming at her. It's good to stay mobile until you need to clear out a dense mob and drop into them with a Blood Altar. Unfortunately, most frames don't have interesting choices to make with their power sets, and a lot of them get everything all of the time. 

[GPrime96]

On 2022-10-05 at 7:42 AM, Fenr3r said:

I'd just like Blood Altar to be made mobile, having them locked to an area isn't very congruent to the pace of the game. Changing them to floating to the sides of Garuda, following her like eidolon lures as the enemies are suspended by Garuda's talons, would feel more natural to her playstyle.

Honestly, any improvements to Blood Altar synergizing to her mobility would be dope. Gloom is a better example of a healing ability for Garuda, CC slow and instant heal.

[Grav_Starstrider]

Arguably with her one-directional shield, and the way she's supposed to be picking off weaker targets with her Dread Mirror pounce, and the way her Blood Altar is stationary, and how her Seeking Talons target a cone in front of her, I feel like y'all are just missing the fact that she isn't supposed to let herself be flanked, or be in the thick of it among a ton of enemies in a hyper-mobile way. She makes more sense as someone to find a corner in which to camp with a Blood Altar and let fly Talons and shooting and meleeing and finishing off tankier enemies the moment they hit Dread Mirror insta-kill range, allowing you to keep the Mirror shield up and protecting you from the only directions enemies are coming from.

If you're pushing ahead, you're supposed to be doing so with the intent to CC every threat with the Dread Mirror knockback, and Blood Altar several enemies in an overlapping spot so that your newly indefensible position is just letting you health-tank what you aren't blocking with your Mirror. Her Blood Altar has mobility, it's just point to point instead of passive/free-form. On 220% range (almost maxed Overextended and Stretch are all that's needed for that) you can traverse 66 meters in a flash, in a second. Faster than my Gauss seems to cross that same distance.

She should be going from defensible position and point to point, based on her design intent as far as I can determine. She wouldn't have a one-directional shield if she was meant to be moving around like crazy. She just gets excellent point to point mobility to compensate for that.

And again. If you DO want to play her like that, completely against how she's seemingly designed, you can just throw Gloom, Arcane Victory, Reave, Tharros trike, Voracious Metastasis, Well of Life, Amalgam Daikyu with a Nikana, or any melee with Life Strike or Healing Return, or the Furis with the lifesteal Augment, there's tons of options that don't leave you as relatively restrictively non-stationary. OR just pump tons of range onto her instead of using it as a dump stat, and her Blood Altar area will be larger and less restrictive to you. The overwhelming complaints or criticisms I'm seeing here are "slash should be better" (ha, ha, Impact and Puncture are staring daggers at you) and "Blood Altar should be more mobile". It's counter to her very design. The design itself is fine, you just don't actually enjoy Garuda's intended design as much as you're enjoying how you want to play her. In which case, you just need to suck it up and use the alternative available options for healing for her instead of requesting changes to her kit.

I mean you're welcome to ask and criticize, open forum, but you might get more people like me telling you that we think your playstyle/expectations in conjunction with your insistence that you don't just want to use Gloom, are the problem, not her own kit. It's to be used more defensively and to heal objectives and allies without dependency on the recipient dealing their own damage. And if DE happens to agree with my assessment then like, good luck convincing them to completely flip on her design? I don't see it happening though.

[Birdframe_Prime]

8 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Her Blood Altar has mobility, it's just point to point instead of passive/free-form.

Odd to be seen agreeing with you in the same hour I disagreed with you on another thread, but this is actually right.

It's so odd that people forget that Capture, Rescue and Exterminate are not the only modes of play in Warframe and it's okay for a frame to have abilities that are not perfectly suited for these things. (You could even argue that she's perfect for Exterminate too, because you're clearing what's in front of you, and only on the Lua tile-set do you have enemies consistently pop in behind you, because DE forgot to enable the same spawning function they did on every other Exterminate.)

Aside from Blood Altar not healing Defense pods she's great at every other mission where going point-to-point or staying still is necessary. There's plenty of missions where staying more-or-less stationary for a while is actively encouraged. Going from point-to-point and holding those points is completely normal.

I mean, alphabetically there's... Arena, Assassination, Assault, Defection, Defense, Disruption, Excavation, Free Roam (most Bounties), Infested Salvage, Interception, Mobile Defense, Sabotage (all except the Fire hazard have some element of mobile defense), Sanctuary Onslaught, Survival, some aspects of the Void Zariman missions, and even the Volatile mission on Railjack. All of these will encourage Garuda's play style.

The only missions where they're pure run-and-gun or you don't spend long enough in the same place for dedicated Garuda play are Capture, Exterminate, Hijack, Rescue and Spy. And, as I mentioned, an argument can be made for Exterminate to be ideal for Garuda play too. If you include some of the aspects of Bounties, or specifically the Fire hazard mode of Sabotage, or the few aspects of the Void Zariman missions like Flood, that's still not a lot of problems. So arguably between 5 and 7 mission types where Garuda's kit is a little weak, where her healing isn't ideal, out of 27 or so?

Why is that even a problem? No frame is perfect for every mission type, some frames are barely perfect for a half dozen. The fact that Garuda has a base healing option that's entirely stationary once cast is not a big issue.

[Grav_Starstrider]

7 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Odd to be seen agreeing with you in the same hour I disagreed with you on another thread, but this is actually right.

Technically you didn't really think it was wrong as far as I was interpreting, just not worthwhile enough to be a priority :p

7 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

The fact that Garuda has a base healing option that's entirely stationary once cast is not a big issue.

All of my yes to all of that, but especially this since Gloom exists.

If they're just too lazy to farm a second (or first) Sevagoth, or want to have Gloom in place of Blood Altar AND another Subsume on something else, like Blood Red Bleed-inducing Aquablades over Bloodletting because they actually just use Zenurik and Energy Generator and Arcane Energize or something, then at that point it's just getting greedy, and they need to instead be asking for a Helminth-based Frame that can equip any 2 (non-mutually-exclusive buffing) Subsumes alongside Helminth abilities and a baseline ability, so that they can have Gloom and Aquablades on the same non-Yareli/Sevagoth Warframes.

[Wolfwaffe]

On 2022-10-06 at 8:57 AM, Fenr3r said:

Garudas main problem is her survivability,

Sorry, but you simply don't know how to play her.