Zenistar got yet another nerf? (Stealth nerf?)

[Zahnrad]

Not really sure where to begin.

The Zenistar, it's a melee weapon that launches a Status AoE aura around it when deployed. It's a Login Milestone weapon.

On release it lasted for roughly 45 seconds (technically a bit higher since it took into account deployment time).

It took into account Range melee mods making the AoE larger and you could get some pretty silly high AoE potential.

With the Melee 3.0 the Zenistar really suffered as a result. It was changed for its duration to be tied directly to the Combo Count. At base it's 10 seconds (or 8 counting the 2 seconds to deploy) and at max it's 120 seconds.

This was an understandable change in my opinion even if I disliked it since it forced a more proactive use of the weapon. But the Zenistar was never really given anything to make it viable as a Combo Count weapon. Resulting in having to mod in Combo Count viability which takes away from the weapon making it weaker. As such I hadn't really used it since.

 

So recently I got the Rauta, Kullervo's shotgun that builds Combo Count. "Finally, something to make the Zenistar good again" and began trying it out.

Unfortunately I came across yet another nerf to the Zenistar...Testing it in the Simulacrum, with Primed Reach and a Range Riven I'm only able to achieve a Range of...9 meters away from the disc. Or 18m counting both directions.

 

While that may seem like a lot, looking up older Zenistar videos I came across people who were able to get the Zenistar up to 30 meters in radius.

It seems at some point the Zenistar was given a stealth nerf to its range for no reason. Even the Wiki doesn't seem to list this change.

That's not even getting into the Zenistar AoE without any ranged mods where it's range is a pathetic 2-3 meters

 

I don't like to judge or critique the balance of Warframe often but I can't help but feel like hypothetically if the Zenistar did have a range of 30 meters, it's damage is still too low for it to be a meta weapon. Considering there exists Warframes like Volt or Saryn who can delete entire tilesets of enemies with just a button press does the Zenistar really deserve to be shelved this hard? It already requires the Player to be within a certain distance or it gets automatically recalled.

If the reason the Zenistar is always being made worthless is because DE wants to avoid turning it into a turret then why not just rework the weapon entirely?

[Rathalio]

It's not a Zenistar nerf, quite long ago when they reworked melee, Primed Reach went from a % range increase to an absolute value of +3 meters. That's it.

Also in a real scenario today Zenistar still have enough range to make use of it tbh. Main issue though is that besides priming a little bit, it will never really do much damage to tough enemies anyways and never did. So I'm not quite sure what do you expect with that weapon. The times when Zenistar was a stupid afk weapon we didn't have neither Steel path or Arbitrations and were usually not going much more high lvl than 80.

[Zahnrad]

1 minute ago, Rathalio said:

So I'm not quite sure what do you expect with that weapon.

Status Application. That's something that will always be effective no matter the damage values.

As much as DE have tried, I've never been a big lover of the Warframe melee combat in this game, so I'm drawn towards weapons with more of a utility role or an interesting gimmick.

[Traumtulpe]

39 minutes ago, Zahnny said:

Unfortunately I came across yet another nerf to the Zenistar...Testing it in the Simulacrum, with Primed Reach and a Range Riven I'm only able to achieve a Range of...9 meters away from the disc. Or 18m counting both directions.

You're late to the party. Yes, this is the main thing that killed the Zenistar, melee range was multiplicative before - multiplying the AoE in size. Now it's a flat (and insubstancial) increase.

[Slayer-.]

11 minutes ago, Zahnny said:

Not really sure where to begin.

The Zenistar, it's a melee weapon that launches a Status AoE aura around it when deployed. It's a Login Milestone weapon.

On release it lasted for roughly 45 seconds (technically a bit higher since it took into account deployment time).

It took into account Range melee mods making the AoE larger and you could get some pretty silly high AoE potential.

With the Melee 3.0 the Zenistar really suffered as a result. It was changed for its duration to be tied directly to the Combo Count. At base it's 10 seconds (or 8 counting the 2 seconds to deploy) and at max it's 120 seconds.

This was an understandable change in my opinion even if I disliked it since it forced a more proactive use of the weapon. But the Zenistar was never really given anything to make it viable as a Combo Count weapon. Resulting in having to mod in Combo Count viability which takes away from the weapon making it weaker. As such I hadn't really used it since.

 

So recently I got the Rauta, Kullervo's shotgun that builds Combo Count. "Finally, something to make the Zenistar good again" and began trying it out.

Unfortunately I came across yet another nerf to the Zenistar...Testing it in the Simulacrum, with Primed Reach and a Range Riven I'm only able to achieve a Range of...9 meters away from the disc. Or 18m counting both directions.

 

While that may seem like a lot, looking up older Zenistar videos I came across people who were able to get the Zenistar up to 30 meters in radius.

It seems at some point the Zenistar was given a stealth nerf to its range for no reason. Even the Wiki doesn't seem to list this change.

That's not even getting into the Zenistar AoE without any ranged mods where it's range is a pathetic 2-3 meters

 

I don't like to judge or critique the balance of Warframe often but I can't help but feel like hypothetically if the Zenistar did have a range of 30 meters, it's damage is still too low for it to be a meta weapon. Considering there exists Warframes like Volt or Saryn who can delete entire tilesets of enemies with just a button press does the Zenistar really deserve to be shelved this hard? It already requires the Player to be within a certain distance or it gets automatically recalled.

If the reason the Zenistar is always being made worthless is because DE wants to avoid turning it into a turret then why not just rework the weapon entirely?

Zenistar was an awesome weapon, used to use it to help cover me from enemies that might be coming in behind you sort of like having a spectre out without having a spectre, my Zenistar could kill high level enemies back in the day and had a nice range that could expand with a mod called Spring_Loaded Blade, but since the 3.0 DE absolutely destroyed the disk side of the weapon by introducing melee combo into it, I know it can go for longer if you get the combo up to 12x but I just liked the 49 seconds at a time.

There are way more better melee weapons if you just want to use it like a hack and slash but to tie to combo to the disk for myself really destroyed it.

Have tried to rebuild it but you lose a ton of damage to beef up the combo side of it, for me it's not a usable weapon anymore.

As already mentioned I doubt even my Zenistar would cope with all the reworked enemies we have now, who knows?

[Hayrack]

Yep. It's + flat 3 m additonal range.

Spring-Loaded Blade (stack of +2 m) and (probably, theoretically) Motus Impact (+2 m) could extend it a little more.

[Zahnrad]

15 minutes ago, Slayer-. said:

Have tried to rebuild it but you lose a ton of damage to beef up the combo side of it, for me it's not a usable weapon anymore.

I really hope they consider making an Incarnon. Doesn't even need to increase the damage, put a bunch of things to assist in combo count like Combo Duration would be amazing.

[Slayer-.]

1 minute ago, Zahnny said:

I really hope they consider making an Incarnon. Doesn't even need to increase the damage, put a bunch of things to assist in combo count like Combo Duration would be amazing.

That would make it viable once more I'd say.

[PollexMessier]

7 minutes ago, Zahnny said:

As much as DE have tried, I've never been a big lover of the Warframe melee combat in this game, so I'm drawn towards weapons with more of a utility role or an interesting gimmick.

I absolutely LOVED mele right up until the point that guns started to out-damage mele weapons. Rendering them basically pointless because why get locked in a mele animation wailing on a lancer for 5 seconds when the gun in my hand works better at any distance and doesn't require me to stop moving?

The moment that happened my love of the game started taking a massive nosedive cus I'm not really fond of shooters at all, and love hack&slash games. And warframe went from optionally a hack and slash game with occasional required guns, to just a shooter with an excessively complicated mele system that can't compete for damage.

I don't really understand why mele's been so wrecked aside form DE just being incompetent at balancing. Mele should be stronger than guns cus otherwise what is even the point of using it? Where as guns always have a use regardless of how much stronger mele is because sometimes you just need range and precision or mele is just not an option, like with many if not most bosses. It just feels dumb.

[quxier]

28 minutes ago, Zahnny said:

As much as DE have tried, I've never been a big lover of the Warframe melee combat in this game, so I'm drawn towards weapons with more of a utility role or an interesting gimmick.

With Naramon and 2x combo after slamming (for some time) and some mods you can gain combo in "reasonable" time. Of course some weapons gains combo much faster (Stropha - even 1 hit, Praedos with slam perk gain it quickly as well).

5 minutes ago, PollexMessier said:

why get locked in a mele animation wailing on a lancer for 5 seconds when the gun in my hand works better at any distance and doesn't require me to stop moving?

Why stand when you can move? Unless you are using heavies then you can just move. Even with heavies you can cancel and slide-move.

7 minutes ago, PollexMessier said:

I don't really understand why mele's been so wrecked aside form DE just being incompetent at balancing. Mele should be stronger than guns cus otherwise what is even the point of using it? Where as guns always have a use regardless of how much stronger mele is because sometimes you just need range and precision or mele is just not an option, like with many if not most bosses. It just feels dumb.

The problem with warframe is that it has a lot of enemies at the same time. AoE or quick weapon (fast rate of fire or melee attack speed) is very reasonable feature of your weapon. With single target enemies (e.g. Angels) there are some reason to use slower/smaller weapons. For example my K.nukor is fine with average enemies but it's not great against Angel.

In games with much less enemies melee has reason to exist. For example in Assassin creed you have bunch of enemies but you are dealing with one at time.

[Slayer-.]

I just tried my Zenistar during a solo run level 130-140 Steel Path Infested Survival, it killed them, not fast but the numbers were reasonable though, and the damage doesn't seem to be there like it once was at the same time not really feasible for today's play as to be expected.

With a set combo on the weapon you can get it to last as long as the old days and maybe still stack damage, I have a riven combo count of +33.3 Initial Combo +276% CC x2 for heavy attacks -68.8% for slide attacks, I only need to hit about two or three enemies to make it last way longer than you'd want anyway seeing fighting can move around

You've got me thinking about it again, but I dare say it will be short lived testing session again because Grineer will destroy my hopes and laugh at it with their tanky stats.

Corpus no idea yet straight toxin would be interesting to test, damn forgot it has innate heat on it but I'd say the old Zenistar disk needs to settle back down in the nursing home and relive the old days.  As it is, doesn't really work as a hybrid imo.

[PollexMessier]

27 minutes ago, quxier said:

Why stand when you can move? Unless you are using heavies then you can just move. Even with heavies you can cancel and slide-move.

If the enemy doesn't die in one shot with mele (Which nowadays at high levels is almost always) you ether have to stand there and wail on them until they do, dance around them awkwardly and miss half your swings, or ignore it, keep moving and.... waste your time cus if the enemy's not dead it's still just as much of a threat as it was before. and chances are you're in one of the many mission types where taking your sweet time killing enemies results in failing the mission.

OR

I could shoot the enemy in the face with a shotgun as I blitz past them and they get vaporized, guaranteed every time. Or even if I'm using a gun that doesn't one shot literally everything in the game, I can be dealing damage as I approach and they're dead before I even get into mele range. And then AOE guns just render mele totally and completely obsolete because they do the one thing mele has over guns, better. Hit multiple enemies at once.

[quxier]

2 minutes ago, PollexMessier said:

27 minutes ago, quxier said:

Why stand when you can move? Unless you are using heavies then you can just move. Even with heavies you can cancel and slide-move.

If the enemy doesn't die in one shot wit mele (Which nowadays at high levels is almost always) you ether have to stand there and wail on them until they do, dance around them awkwardly and miss half your swings, or ignore it, keep moving and.... waste your time cus if the enemy's not dead it's still just as much of a threat as it was before. and chances are you're in one of the many mission types where taking your sweet time killing enemies results in failing the mission.

Except eximus, you can CC them. There are slams, which when executed right, are super fast and not blocking.

I don't think I miss many melee attacks. Maybe it's one of those melee option I've checked long time ago.

5 minutes ago, PollexMessier said:

I could shoot the enemy in the face with a shotgun as I blitz past them and they get vaporized, guaranteed every time. Or even if I'm using a gun that doesn't one shot literally everything in the game, I can be dealing damage as I approach and oh wait they're dead.

Well, you can do it with melee as well. Slash them and... wait they are death.

 

[GPrime96]

1 hour ago, PollexMessier said:

I could shoot the enemy in the face with a shotgun as I blitz past them and they get vaporized, guaranteed every time. Or even if I'm using a gun that doesn't one shot literally everything in the game, I can be dealing damage as I approach and they're dead before I even get into mele range. And then AOE guns just render mele totally and completely obsolete because they do the one thing mele has over guns, better. Hit multiple enemies at once.

And there’s Incarnon Genesis which widen that gap even more

[FiveN9ne]

It's still fine in those aspects but you need a riven with Range and Initial Combo +2 -1. I get around 20m radius and 40s duration with 60 Initial combo, which is perfectly fine. For status application and camping it's still fine, but i liked using it with old Gas and old CO. Having armor strip it could kill lvl few thousand old enemy scaling. Now i barely use it because i don't see the value as much.

[Voltage]

The issue with Zenistar is that it was used exclusively for AFK before DE added the timer to the disc, and after that, it was primarily used to be a low-input weapon. It's pretty hard to keep Zenistar's disc as effective while not enabling idle behavior, so this is the best we got. With that said, it is still certainly sad compared to it's former power, like Telos Boltace, even though we have large room clearing options and AFK Specter gameplay all over the game now.

[Slayer-.]

4 minutes ago, Voltage said:

The issue with Zenistar is that it was used exclusively for AFK before DE added the timer to the disc, and after that, it was primarily used to be a low-input weapon. It's pretty hard to keep Zenistar's disc as effective while not enabling idle behavior, so this is the best we got. With that said, it is still certainly sad compared to it's former power, like Telos Boltace, even though we have large room clearing options and AFK Specter gameplay all over the game now.

 I used it a lot but not for AFK. 

[Voltage]

Just now, Slayer-. said:

 I used it a lot but not for AFK. 

Yeah well, that's like saying you enjoy Specters to help out in specific missions, but people AFK for Affinity and Survival with them. Zenistar's main (and massive) use-case was for idle camping gameplay.

[Slayer-.]

3 minutes ago, Voltage said:

Yeah well, that's like saying you enjoy Specters to help out in specific missions, but people AFK for Affinity and Survival with them. Zenistar's main (and massive) use-case was for idle camping gameplay.

Don't use spectres, but I can see why it was used, if there is an easy way to do something players will find it.

[RobWasHere]

4 hours ago, Slayer-. said:

I just tried my Zenistar during a solo run level 130-140 Steel Path Infested Survival, it killed them, not fast but the numbers were reasonable though, and the damage doesn't seem to be there like it once was at the same time not really feasible for today's play as to be expected.

With a set combo on the weapon you can get it to last as long as the old days and maybe still stack damage, I have a riven combo count of +33.3 Initial Combo +276% CC x2 for heavy attacks -68.8% for slide attacks, I only need to hit about two or three enemies to make it last way longer than you'd want anyway seeing fighting can move around

You've got me thinking about it again, but I dare say it will be short lived testing session again because Grineer will destroy my hopes and laugh at it with their tanky stats.

Corpus no idea yet straight toxin would be interesting to test, damn forgot it has innate heat on it but I'd say the old Zenistar disk needs to settle back down in the nursing home and relive the old days.  As it is, doesn't really work as a hybrid imo.

Try it with Wrathful Advance - as long as buff lasts, deployed disc will red crit and buff will be refreshed when you use its hold teleport function (otherwise it will heavy attack again and return the disc)

[Slayer-.]

2 hours ago, RobWasHere said:

Try it with Wrathful Advance - as long as buff lasts, deployed disc will red crit and buff will be refreshed when you use its hold teleport function (otherwise it will heavy attack again and return the disc)

Interesting, thank you I'll look into it for something to mess around with. 👍 I like toying with quirky weapons.

[Zahnrad]

5 hours ago, Voltage said:

AFK Specter gameplay all over the game now.

I know it wasn't directed at me but I love using Nidus Specters for their Power Strength buff to augment my other frames.

[Voltage]

5 minutes ago, Zahnny said:

I know it wasn't directed at me but I love using Nidus Specters for their Power Strength buff to augment my other frames.

There's a line in the sand DE needs to draw with Specters. When it comes to utility and defense, there are plenty of healthy options for the game that are cool and fun, like Protea and Nidus. Offensively speaking, Specters should be no where near replacing a player, and outperforming players should be entirely out of the question.

In regards to Zenistar, I think the initial changes in the melee update made it pretty clear that they wanted to distance the weapon from that use-case and bring it in line as a heavy blade with a quirky side perk, not "the AFK melee weapon from login rewards" tons of people used it as and referred to it as.

[Slayer-.]

8 hours ago, Voltage said:

_{^{There's a line in the sand DE needs to draw with Specters. When it comes to utility and defense, there are plenty of healthy options for the game that are cool and fun, like Protea and Nidus. Offensively speaking, Specters should be no where near replacing a player, and outperforming players should be entirely out of the question.}}

In regards to Zenistar, I think the initial changes in the melee update made it pretty clear that they wanted to distance the weapon from that use-case and bring it in line as a heavy blade with a quirky side perk, not "the AFK melee weapon from login rewards" tons of people used it as and referred to it as.

To be honest I'd never even known or heard of the Zenistar being used as an AFK exploit tool before you mentioned it, back in the day when I used the Zenistar it was an active combat weapon for me, never even crossed my mind to use it for that, not that I would because I hate AFK players who ruin it for the rest of us legit players, mainly because they get stuff nerfed because of their actions.

[Zahnrad]

10 minutes ago, Slayer-. said:

mainly because they get stuff nerfed because of their actions.

To be honest I wonder if there's even a point to nerfing them anyway. The people who do want to AFK farm are likely doing it in solo anyway. And if you nerf one thing, they'll just jump onto the next best thing (which currently is nuke frames that are way more effective anyway)

I don't agree with AFK farms but there's a part of me that just kind of thinks..."Is this really worth spending resources on changing?" since it's a PvE game, rather than a PvP game. I might not like AFK farmers but I do think in many games it is a valid way to play based on the circumstances.