Thoughts on the revised Fireblast, and also what is going on with Yareli's 3?

[(PSN)Jedi_Arts_]

I know it has been a while since this nerf hit to the helminth subsumed Fireblast, but I just wanted to weigh in on how odd it is for this ability to be in it's current state. 

So a bit of background, at the beginning of the Helminth system Fireblast was a static 75% armor strip unaffected by strength. This isn't really unprecedented, as the are plenty of abilities that have static values like this. But what it did was create a situation where this ability was used with negative strength values without any downside. And Overextended was essentially just a +90% range benefit with no drawbacks. 

I can tell DE really hates it when people dump power attributes in their builds, so I wasn't surprised when they somewhat recently changed Fireblast to be affected by strength mods. In fact I've always been anticipating this happening eventually, as an "enjoy while it lasts" type of thing. BUT..

What I couldn't have anticipated was the nonsense change that happened instead. The ability is affected by strength mods, yes.

But only negatively. 

That's right the ability scales down but not up. Negative strength at 40% with Overextended can make this armor strip go at low as 30% but the ability will never go above its cap of 75% no matter how much +strength your value is.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know if there is a single other ability that functions like this. This feels like an overreaction to the Negative strength builds to employ a design choice like this. It feels like someone caught onto the kind of builds people were using and decided to go the extra mile to make sure this ability got the hammer.

This ability should just be affected by strength, period. In both directions, simple. I mean, wasn't the goal of the recent armor strip mechanics changes to make armor strip abilities more viable. (Considering the developers still don't feel like tackling the fundamental problem of  enemy armor scaling being based on crazy high DR% in the first place). Anyways, with Fireblast if you can't build negative strength anymore, there should at least be a way to max the ability at 100% so you don't have to spam cast it.

 

 

 

I also wanted to touch on something strange I've noticed while playing Yareli. Her 3rd ability when augmented allows you to take her blades and fire them off into crowds. It kind of feels like having a really good scaling gun as an ability. But the success of a good gun also depends on it's fire rate. And lately I've noticed that no matter what I do, it fires super slow. Which is weird because it wasn't this way when the augment released.

It has been doing this weird thing where it will fire off 2 shots just fine, but then has an awkward long pause where you can't fire off anything. Even with ability casting mods, which should improve the fire rate, it cannot avoid doing the awkward 2 shots and stutter thing that's it's currently doing.

It feels like a bug honestly. In which case, this really needs to be addressed. Yareli is already a frame that has been in a struggling design position since launch, and that 3rd augment does a lot for her. I personally think it's the only thing saving her from being one of the worst frames in the game. So you can imagine my concern about her if her saving-grace ability is bugged to be really annoyingly slow right now. 

[Birdframe_Prime]

The goal of recent armour strip changes was to condense all percentage based armour reduction methods into a consistent formula so that there weren't four different percentage calculation methods. There are now only two types of armour strip; percent based and flat number based. (And before anyone jumps down my throat, Shattering Impact is flat number based, too, applied to base armour rather than level-scaled armour like the Abilities Polarise and Pillage are.)

And it's interesting that you should wonder why this is capped, because quite a lot of the Helminth abilities are capped in various ways. Usually when they are Altered for Helminth they only have 50% of their base effects, and it's usually the most important effect that's diminished.

Gauss' Thermal Sunder damage is 50% of his Battery and it doesn't armour strip because of no Redline, Mag's Pull is 50% of her base range, Mirage's damage bonus and damage reduction are capped at 150% and 75% respectively, Larva is actually a bit lucky, as it's more than 50% the base range, Protea's Dispensary is 50% its base Duration, Rhino's Roar is a little over 50% its base damage bonus, same with Valkyr's attack speed buff from Warcry, Wukong's Defy has 50% its base Armour bonus.

Other abilities suffer more, where Grendel's Nourish has the self-heal (the literal part of it people want most on some other frames) is completely removed, and the max effect of its retaliation is only 10% of the base ability. Ivara's Quiver only has the Cloak and Noise arrows, not the Sleep or Dashwire which are considered the more powerful functions (especially with Empowered Quiver).

When they alter stuff for Helminth, it genuinely seems to be that they don't want the same kind of functionality that the base frame has access to.

Ember's armour strip is 50% of her base Immolation meter (since the base armour strip on Ember is 50% and the max is 100%) and is capped there even with Strength. The ability to get that same strip with negative Strength was removed because Ember doesn't have that function, and it made the Helminth version better than the base version.

When the stated purpose of altering abilities for Helminth is to make them lesser versions to what the base frame can produce, that's the goal.

So DE making a change to actually bring that in line again is entirely expected.

Whether we actually like that or not...

 

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

Yes, infused Fireblast is S#&$ty because it requires a double cast to remove all armor.

It being negatively affected by having strength <100%, but not by >100% strength has always been a thing. It should not be a thing I agree.
Guess they really wanted to emphasize the heat meter mechanic.

2 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

The ability to get that same strip with negative Strength was removed because Ember doesn't have that function, and it made the Helminth version better than the base version.

Base and Infused have always been affected by negative strength. There was never a point where one was affected by negative strength and the other wasn't.

[Birdframe_Prime]

10 hours ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

Base and Infused have always been affected by negative strength. There was never a point where one was affected by negative strength and the other wasn't.

Literally what the OP said:

17 hours ago, (PSN)Jedi_Arts_ said:

So a bit of background, at the beginning of the Helminth system Fireblast was a static 75% armor strip unaffected by strength.

I'm not bothered to go back through all the patch notes. If it existed, it was removed, and if it was removed, having it be different from/better than the base Fireblast was why.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

3 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

I'm not bothered to go back through all the patch notes. If it existed, it was removed, and if it was removed, having it be different from/better than the base Fireblast was why.

Which is why I pointed it out to both of you that such a scenario never existed, so part of OP's grievance is unfounded. There was no "nonsense recent change that recently happened", it was always like this.

[Birdframe_Prime]

14 hours ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

Which is why I pointed it out to both of you that such a scenario never existed, so part of OP's grievance is unfounded. There was no "nonsense recent change that recently happened", it was always like this.

Fair enough, but you only quoted me. Answered your post because of that.