People be complaining about how melee is overtuned... Valkyr weeps for you all

[Hexerin]

I've finished raising Valkyr, and I gotta say... I'm glad melee is "overtuned" if the alternative would be what Valkyr is suffering. Valkyr's combos (<200%/s) feel horrible, and it takes ages to kill anything with them. At least her slide attack is alright, kills fodder usually in one slide. Sometimes requires a second slide, but I'm writing that off as a timing issue (activating the slide too early/late so missing on one of the 6x hits, I'm assuming). It's painful having to slide attack on every attack throughout a mission though, I couldn't imagine taking her into endless mission types.

The worst part is that this is despite her ludicrous exalted weapon's stats. Seriously though, 160% crit chance with 5.0x multiplier? And that's the baseline modded stats? What even are these claws though... makes how horrid the stance is even more depressing, knowing Valkyr could be absolutely amazing...

[taiiat]

Hysteria performs well if you just spam slide attacks.
but all the rest of the Animations aren't worth using, _{and i... kinda argue never were,} aye.

atleast Prolonged Paralysis does nicely to help bandaid the ??? Animations Hysteria has. but it also does for any other Melee Weapon, too!

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Depends on if you're expecting to do steel path grineer. 

I made a build where I stay in claws basically permanently, and do steel path Corpus just fine. 

Any buff to the claws is obviously welcome, though.

[Hexerin]

45 minutes ago, taiiat said:

Hysteria performs well if you just spam slide attacks.
but all the rest of the Animations aren't worth using, _{and i... kinda argue never were,} aye.

atleast Prolonged Paralysis does nicely to help bandaid the ??? Animations Hysteria has. but it also does for any other Melee Weapon, too!

I'm not talking about the animations, her animations are great IMO and make the attacks feel stronk if just performing them in a vacuum. I'm talking about the actual numbers and math that result in the actual damage being dealt, and thus how effective you are. The numbers are small, and thus your damage output is abysmal.

32 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Depends on if you're expecting to do steel path grineer. 

I made a build where I stay in claws basically permanently, and do steel path Corpus just fine. 

Any buff to the claws is obviously welcome, though.

I mean, literally anything melts non-Grineer. Grineer are the only faction in this game that scales up with levels. As such, I only ever talk about balance concerns in the context of dealing with Grineer, because that's the only context that has any relevance whatsoever.

Also, her exalted weapon itself is fine (well no, that's untrue, they're obscene). The issue is the melee stance itself is absolute trash, with horrid scalers. So what you end up with is that the obscenely powerful weapon ends up dealing pitiful damage due to the stance scalers, but because of how obscene the weapon itself is, it still manages to scrape by just barely. We need the scalers on the melee stance to be increased, not the weapon itself increased.

Like seriously, what even is this nonsense? Not even any forced status procs, like the slash procs which are normal for claw weapons.

Compare the above to a proper claw stance, below:

There's really no comparison, her stance is abysmally bad. Ultimately though, we really just need Melee 4.0, which keeps everything we currently have but allows the player to customize what combos they want in their melee stance. A lot of the issue with melee is that most weapon classes have combos that are great, but spread across multiple stances. So every stance ends up having one or two decent combos, and the rest are trash (be it feel/animations, and/or actual scalers/numbers/procs/etc).

Edited September 30, 2023 by Hexerin

[ReddyDisco]

I just use venka prime and eternal war valkyr, her exalted claws are so awkward i can't bring myself to use them.

[Hexerin]

1 minute ago, ReddyDisco said:

I just use venka prime and eternal war valkyr, her exalted claws are so awkward i can't bring myself to use them.

Which is a major problem. "I can't bring myself to use the frame's ultimate, character defining ability."

[GPrime96]

1 hour ago, Hexerin said:

I've finished raising Valkyr, and I gotta say... I'm glad melee is "overtuned" if the alternative would be what Valkyr is suffering. Valkyr's combos (<200%/s) feel horrible, and it takes ages to kill anything with them. At least her slide attack is alright, kills fodder usually in one slide. Sometimes requires a second slide, but I'm writing that off as a timing issue (activating the slide too early/late so missing on one of the 6x hits, I'm assuming). It's painful having to slide attack on every attack throughout a mission though, I couldn't imagine taking her into endless mission types.

The worst part is that this is despite her ludicrous exalted weapon's stats. Seriously though, 160% crit chance with 5.0x multiplier? And that's the baseline modded stats? What even are these claws though... makes how horrid the stance is even more depressing, knowing Valkyr could be absolutely amazing...

Honestly, the stance can really affect a Melee’s performance more than stats. For example, 2 Handed Nikanas got a stance that makes them feelmlike you’re swinging mud without a chunk of attack speed increases and don’t add that much into light attack damage so they are reliant onntheir heavy attack damage and the stance is ignored, tonfas have Sovereign Outcast which gives Tonfas strong slash procs on every light attack no matter the Tonfa while having good animations for their performance. Besides that, another problem is the atrociously low status on Valkyr’s Claws with no way to increase it significantly like with Baruuk or Excal with their augments (lower status than Khora’s Whip). High crit dosen’t matter if you can’t reliably proc status without Acolyte Mods.

[Hexerin]

7 minutes ago, GPrime96 said:

Honestly, the stance can really affect a Melee’s performance more than stats. For example, 2 Handed Nikanas got a stance that makes them feelmlike you’re swinging mud without a chunk of attack speed increases and don’t add that much into light attack damage so they are reliant onntheir heavy attack damage and the stance is ignored, tonfas have Sovereign Outcast which gives Tonfas strong slash procs on every light attack no matter the Tonfa while having good animations for their performance. Besides that, another problem is the atrociously low status on Valkyr’s Claws with no way to increase it significantly like with Baruuk or Excal with their augments (lower status than Khora’s Whip). High crit dosen’t matter if you can’t reliably proc status without Acolyte Mods.

If her stance had similar scalers to other claw stances (so sitting somewhere around 500%/s), she wouldn't need status (and thus the innate 10% status wouldn't matter).

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

Once upon a time, people were able to use her 4th at 100% uptime WITH energy to spare. Now the alternative is to subsume Gloom, mod in Rage, then spam Venka Prime.

[Hexerin]

21 minutes ago, (PSN)jaggerwanderer said:

Once upon a time, people were able to use her 4th at 100% uptime WITH energy to spare. Now the alternative is to subsume Gloom, mod in Rage, then spam Venka Prime.

Once upon a time? I'm keeping her Hysteria up with 100% uptime right now. I wouldn't say I have "energy to spare", however I'm also not using Arcane Energize in the build.

[Tiltskillet]

3 hours ago, taiiat said:

Hysteria performs well if you just spam slide attacks.

Which afaic is essentially as awful as just spamming slide attacks and performing poorly. :P

[Zakkhar]

Valkyr is only for the Warcry/Eternal War buff, which you can subsume on anything. So there goes Valkyr. Her Exalted is worse than Garuda Talons (without weapon equipped). She is essentially just a tanky frame you can build your weapon on, just like Inaros.

[taiiat]

5 hours ago, Hexerin said:

I'm not talking about the animations, her animations are great IMO and make the attacks feel stronk if just performing them in a vacuum. I'm talking about the actual numbers and math that result in the actual damage being dealt, and thus how effective you are. The numbers are small, and thus your damage output is abysmal.

since Hysteria isn't that well suited to applying Status and has some Modding limitations, sure.

however rather than just adding higher Multipliers to the Stance, i think what i'd go for is some sort of debuff that builds up on Enemies as you hit them. sortof like a 'traditional' Hit Counter you'd normally see in Arcade games. 
you could even have two forms. a global Counter and a per Enemy one. like uh, just copy that Circuit Decree of Enemies take 10% more Damage per hit.
then for the Global, just convert the normal Hit Counter special for Hysteria. reduce the Counter from 220 total to like... 50 total, compressing the Multiplier steps accordingly. and have that provide that 4x Damage that some other Melee Abilities are able to Mod into.
also let the Radial parts of Hysteria both contribute to and benefit from that Hit Counter. >.>

 

i still hate the Animations though. they're clunky while also being very generic.

• Neutral is just horrendous. there's nothing good about it at all.
• Forward is bad, but atleast it's a bit better than Neutral, it's less generic.
• Forward Block is sortof passable, but it's too long, good thing Neutral is bunk though, could just split this into two pieces...
• Block just feels jarring to use.

but they're all accursed with being jarring and clunky to use. i'm not really sure how to describe/pin the issue, maybe it's too much 'pausing for dramatic effect' or something, and so makes it feel like it's ""stuttering"", to so speak, or something like that. and if you increase Attack Speed enough to 'fix' that, then it's all just a random mishmash that you can't follow anyways.

 

3 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

Which afaic is essentially as awful as just spamming slide attacks and performing poorly. :P

it's effective, atleast. do one slide attack through your dogpile from Prolonged Paralysis, and the entire room is dead at once. maybe one or two Enemies are left barely alive but close enough.
or if they're stacked up well enough, do one Ground Finisher

[Silligoose]

7 hours ago, Hexerin said:

I've finished raising Valkyr, and I gotta say... I'm glad melee is "overtuned" if the alternative would be what Valkyr is suffering. Valkyr's combos (<200%/s) feel horrible, and it takes ages to kill anything with them. At least her slide attack is alright, kills fodder usually in one slide. Sometimes requires a second slide, but I'm writing that off as a timing issue (activating the slide too early/late so missing on one of the 6x hits, I'm assuming). It's painful having to slide attack on every attack throughout a mission though, I couldn't imagine taking her into endless mission types.

The worst part is that this is despite her ludicrous exalted weapon's stats. Seriously though, 160% crit chance with 5.0x multiplier? And that's the baseline modded stats? What even are these claws though... makes how horrid the stance is even more depressing, knowing Valkyr could be absolutely amazing...

Though I'm not a massive Valkyr enthusiast, her claws work fine in y experience.

Whilst you bring to light the overall stance combo damage multiplier discrepancy, how does the actual damage output compare when accounting for the different weapons' stats as well? How does it compare in terms of performance?

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

4 minutes ago, Silligoose said:

Though I'm not a massive Valkyr enthusiast, her claws work fine in y experience.

Whilst you bring to light the overall stance combo damage multiplier discrepancy, how does the actual damage output compare when accounting for the different weapons' stats as well? How does it compare in terms of performance?

It definitely performs just fine but it wouldn't hurt if it got access to every melee mod.

The claw is the least of her issues, her 1 and 3 aren't good at all

[(PSN)robotwars7]

Valkyr needs a rework, plain and simple. I'm hoping that now Hydroid's out of the way, frames like Valkyr and Inaros will be looked at next: it's vital that we work to keep up the pressure on the devs regarding reworks, and don't let them ignore these frames any longer. obviously keep it constructive, rather than just spamming "rework X" in stream chats, but if anyone feels they know how to rework a frame, make a thread on it: don't be shy!

 my own personal rework for her:

-Rip-line has increased range and now pulls lighter enemies (smaller than Bombards and other heavies) towards you, pressing melee as you reel them in performs a devastating claw attack that deals very high damage. against heavier enemies, Valkyr reels herself in and automatically performs an acrobatic attack that deals very high damage and a guaranteed slash proc. 

- War Cry remains as is.

- Paralysis gets a ranged buff and the Augment added to the baseline, the Augment can be changed to provide a different additional function.

- Hysteria's damage resistance works based on how many enemies you hit: if you are constantly landing melee attacks, you will keep your invincibility, no worries, but as time goes on without attacks, damage reduction decreases to a minimum of 50%. this encourages the player to keep moving and closing in on enemies, charging into groups etc. and generally being aggressive. it also synergizes with ripline, which you can use to close the gap on enemies sooner and keep on slashing! with a little practice, you'll become a fast moving, relentless monster, like a crazed mix of Spider-man and Wolverine, but with rabies... and on meth.

- her stance for Hysteria needs tweaking, it just needs nothing but ultra fast attacks for the majority of the combo, and lots of multi-hits, thoguh for added flavor, the final hit of the combo can be a longer-reaching acrobatic move with an enhanced multiplier and guaranteed procs: this move is designed to maximise the chances of the enemy being killed by the final move of the combo, so that Valkyr can quickly move on to her next unfortunate victim!

essentially, this valkyr focuses on making her a incarnation of pure violence and brutality that overwhelms enemies with speed and furious melee combos, which IMO is EXACTLY what Valkyr is all about!

[ShogunGunshow]

11 minutes ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

Valkyr needs a rework, plain and simple. I'm hoping that now Hydroid's out of the way, frames like Valkyr and Inaros will be looked at next

Yeah no.

Caliban should be next.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

4 minutes ago, ShogunGunshow said:

Yeah no.

Caliban should be next.

alright I'll give you that, Caliban needs love too, but Inaros and Valkyr have gone WAY longer without attention. look how long long Hydroid went before his rework was even announced. I'm afraid Caliban's gonna have to wait a bit lol.

[Hexerin]

11 minutes ago, ShogunGunshow said:

Yeah no.

Caliban should be next.

6 minutes ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

alright I'll give you that, Caliban needs love too, but Inaros and Valkyr have gone WAY longer without attention. look how long long Hydroid went before his rework was even announced. I'm afraid Caliban's gonna have to wait a bit lol.

Every time I've encountered a Caliban, the dude ends up steamrolling literally everything without breaking a sweat. I don't see why everyone keeps banging on about a rework for him, the frame is beyond strong.

[ShogunGunshow]

2 hours ago, Hexerin said:

Every time I've encountered a Caliban, the dude ends up steamrolling literally everything without breaking a sweat. I don't see why everyone keeps banging on about a rework for him, the frame is beyond strong.

Caliban's 1 is piss-weak even by Warframe damage-cast standards. 

His 2 is a janky, middling damage amp that gets canceled by any impact or stagger effect.

His 3s don't even do the thing you want them to do half the time, which is feed you shields, and otherwise get owned like any other AI companion does on Steel Path. 

His 4 doesn't vacuum properly anymore. His 4 used to be KB on release but people complained and DE quickly made it a vac, but, instead of getting vacc'ed now, enemies just sort of fall over after moving a few feet in the direction of the explosion. Just for extra fun, the fallout zone's visuals are bugged, and don't even appear when you're a client, only the host. And this is STILL Caliban's best ability, because hey, at least fallout zone strips enemy defenses - but this is also a thing LOTS of other frames can do at this point.

He just lacks any cohesion in his abilities. Which you could maybe say is on-brand considering his appearance, but doesn't change the fact that he still sucks to play.

He is not 'beyond strong,' and if a Caliban was clowning on you it was because he was either using busted weapons or you were playing badly. 

[Silligoose]

7 hours ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

It definitely performs just fine but it wouldn't hurt if it got access to every melee mod.

The claw is the least of her issues, her 1 and 3 aren't good at all

Exalted weapons not having access to certain mods feels silly.

Her 3 seems fine, as it is cheap crowd control. Her 1 could use a little love, though in all honesty that seems to be more due to the game's lategame gameplay regression towards en masse killing of extremely flimsy enemies, as well as the complete negation of certain mechanics (eg cc) by certain enemies withint the game overall, which in turn devalues single target offense and affects various single target options negatively. This is exacerbated by overpowered options that have become a baseline due to the being global options, for example by way of Helminth.

Personally I'd rather see DE veer away from the dumbed down gameplay and band-aid fixes, as opposed to reworking single target abilities to conform with said regressed gameplay. That being said, I would mind an option that allows for either the pulling of an enemy, or moving towards it.

Edit: Why do you think her 1 and 3 aren't good at all?

Edited September 30, 2023 by Silligoose

[(PSN)Unstar]

Judging the state of melee based on Hysteria is kind of like judging the state of melee based on the Heat Sword; your results are going to give you data on that specific weapon far more than the overall system.

There was a time when Hysteria was worth using, but in my opinion that time has long since passed.  Prevents you from using ranged, lackluster combos, and Hysteria doesn't even truly make you invincible since getting hit with an energy-draining attack can instantly empty a full energy pool and kill you.  Hysteria melee becomes passable if you use the heavy attacks to instant-kill, but it's repetitive and simply not worth it when you could have all that and more by just equipping a good melee weapon and using a tanky frame that won't be one-shot by gimmicks.

[PR1D3]

Honestly if there was ever a Valkyr change the #1 thing that needs to be evaluated is her moveset in Hysteria. Those combos are super, duper old and they show it.

[ShogunGunshow]

44 minutes ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

Prevents you from using ranged

You can used ranged with Hysteria, you just temporarily lose your invincibility until you equip your melee again.

  

5 minutes ago, PR1D3 said:

Honestly if there was ever a Valkyr change the #1 thing that needs to be evaluated is her moveset in Hysteria. Those combos are super, duper old and they show it.

  The #1 thing Valkyr need is her 1 to be completely redesigned. 

Edited September 30, 2023 by ShogunGunshow

[ShogunGunshow]

God I forgot that Caliban doesn't even have an augment. For anything. And he was released actually almost two years ago.