Gara QoL Suggestions

[CrownOfShadows]

I recently picked Gara back up and was playing her a bit, every so often I check her out again y'know? While very strong and versatile, she's also pretty annoying to play. Almost all of the problems with Gara stem from losing her stacks.

Hit a nullifier bubble? Jump off a cliff? Die? Forget to cast 2? Or even fight in Last Gasp for a little too long? Get knocked down or staggered at exactly the wrong second? Lose vision of your HUD (mag proc) and not be able to see the timer in time? Focus on something besides the timer for a little bit? Suddenly 90% of the reason for playing her evaporates and she has to start over from scratch.

So some suggestions I have TWIMC. I'm recommending at least one of these (not all of them):

1. Decay. Instead of all her stacks falling off immediately make them decay. I think this is a very fair QoL and is overall the best possible solution. Adjust the decay rate as balance dictates. I'd also recommend pulsing the ability icon red during this time until it decays completely just to alert the player that it's happening and they are rapidly losing stacks. This way it's not the end of the world if any of a dozen mistakes happen. If you still wanted you could include a base penalty, like you lose 20% of your stacks up front and decay from there.
2. Base Duration. Double (or otherwise increase) the base duration of her 2, this would make it a little more forgiving. She needs monster duration, monster range (unless you're subsuming over vitrify for some reason), high efficiency, and strength if possible. She needs to build for all 4 stats, while also spamming (so high energy output), and also ofc survive. So help her out a little in the duration department, cut down on the intense ability spam she has to do, and make it less likely to 'miss' keeping it alive.
3. Secondary Refreshers. Make it so casting her 1 and/or her 3 also refresh her 2. This would introduce some variety into the needed upkeep of this ability and make it more natural to maintain. The danger here is probably that it's too easy to keep it up, but if no other improvements were made I think this would be fine. This is just another way of keeping her stacks alive with less maddening maintenance.
4. Cap & Stack. Instead of fixing the maintenance problems we could lean into them harder. This is the reverse strategy, where we make losing stacks even easier, but make gaining them easier and faster too. For balance reasons we'd have to cap them in this case though, which will doubtless hurt much of the allure of Gara while ironically making her too strong of a pulse nuker (more than she already is), although maybe there's a way to do this cleanly.
5. Pause Timers during Last Gasp.

One other thing I'd recommend is that she gain overgaurd while casting her 4. Not much, just like 100-500 og or something, or alternatively some overshields. The animation is so incredibly long when held that she almost needs extra protection during it. Or alternatively speed up the animation considerably. (I'm running 2 regular casting shards on her, she still feels sluggish in actually all of her animations).

I'd like to emphasize that I am what I'd call a casual Gara player, so if any Gara mains want to weigh in feel free. Since her dmg has no cap I understand where DE doesn't want to make it easy to maintain, but at the same time.... man does it seriously suck to lose ALL your stacks in the blink of an eye.

[(PSN)AbBaNdOn_]

I like the first two options...   Stack decay especially would be awesome,  but man how would that be calculated?   Just lose a % of the stored damage every few seconds?  That's pretty easy I guess.  

--I love Gara,  I don't really understand how to make her melee massively buff the damage you do from shattering your walls...but I stack up damage.. 

I haven't used her in awhile but one of the problems I had is her splinter bubble size vs wall size vs melee range lol.   I've done it both ways and tried to make a massive splinter bubble which was cool but that also lead me to discover I was killing everything before I could melee them which in turn was nerfing myself to getting as much splinter damage as possible.   Inversely if you make splinter bubble tiny so you can actually melee stuff and build combo... then you screw up how big you can make your walls..

So I guess a fix I would wanna see is that her splinter bubble would count as melee hits and help build combo ?  lol.  

-- Another tiny tweak i'd like to see on her is to KILL the SFX on her 3 spectro syphon? forget the base name vs augmented name lol.  That annoying as hell to me it has to be annoying to everyone else in squad....  If anything just play the glass chime sounds as you cast it,  but not the ENTIRE DURATION its up....  

-- My walls are as transparent as I can humanly make them for the benefit of squadmates/myself.  But if I cast a huge diameter wall I can really have problems finding the edge to smash with her 1 lol.  It would be awesome if 1 would shatter the wall from ANYWHERE inside the wall's diameter....  

[Xzorn]

I played Gara a good amount back in the day. She kinda became this rotating splinter thing after her wall was destroyed.

The revamp of her wall requires you let enemies inside the area you intend to protect for it to have any HP at all which is counter intuitive. Spectrorage helps a little with this but since you can only have one active at a time and some enemies are going to completely ignore it. The help is minimal.

I would personally try to change her so that she doesn't feel like this rotation splinter thing. Bring back more of her CC / Defense potential. Have her wall also absorb Spectrorage as it's life value for instance. Allow her to cast more than one. Give Shattering Last it's own mod setup because she's actually a pretty decent melee frame. I used to go full on Elemental Status with her and let Splinters deal the damage. A spores-like interaction might help but I feel she needs some of her tricks back and improved.

I personally don't have a problem with Splinter upkeep at 203% Duration with Tau Cast Speed but it does still feel like a chore.
Lets not forget she's supposed to be able to protect others with Splinters too which doesn't work at all these days.

If they went with a Spore-like interaction and mixed in "Glass Shards" from her abilities for everyone to increased duration/damage. That might be interesting.

Far as losing buffs. That's just become a cherry pick thing at this point which follows no logic.

[DeathOfASaint]

they can also add scaling to her 2 so it won’t be as annoying to restack

whenever you cast mass vitrify, enemies hp during the starting animation gets added to the wall

just let a portion of the walls hp% get added to splinter storm 

[(PSN)AbBaNdOn_]

1 hour ago, Xzorn said:

I played Gara a good amount back in the day. She kinda became this rotating splinter thing after her wall was destroyed.

The revamp of her wall requires you let enemies inside the area you intend to protect for it to have any HP at all which is counter intuitive. Spectrorage helps a little with this but since you can only have one active at a time and some enemies are going to completely ignore it. The help is minimal.

Part of the 4th ability is using it to turn guys to glass,  in that regards it makes since glassing enemies adds to the walls HP.    She can play defense but she is so much better as offense.   Spectro I think is her better defensive skill, if U mix it with a hound with Repo Audit lol.  (Unless you glass over a mob/eximus to make wall insanely strong).

[Xzorn]

2 minutes ago, (PSN)AbBaNdOn_ said:

Part of the 4th ability is using it to turn guys to glass,  in that regards it makes since glassing enemies adds to the walls HP.    She can play defense but she is so much better as offense.   Spectro I think is her better defensive skill, if U mix it with a hound with Repo Audit lol.  (Unless you glass over a mob/eximus to make wall insanely strong).

 

When she came out she was the whole kit. Debuff, CC, Damage and Protection. Her wall was Snow Globe 2.0.

Her wall didn't need to glass enemies. Nor did it break apart in pieces. It was just strong with a strong dual purpose.

You get to a point allowing an enemy to get a few shots off is death to the defense objective which is why it's counter intuitive.

[CrownOfShadows]

On 2024-02-24 at 9:15 PM, (PSN)AbBaNdOn_ said:

I like the first two options...   Stack decay especially would be awesome,  but man how would that be calculated?   Just lose a % of the stored damage every few seconds?  That's pretty easy I guess. 

Yeah there'd be 3 ways of doing it I suppose:

1. stack by stack (not a good option probably because once you have a ton of them this wouldn't even hurt at all)
2. percentage (yeah probably the way to go)
3. rate of decay based on stacks (basically a different way of doing percentage, but the % is very low at first so you don't lose hardly any and then as you get higher and higher so does the penalty. This is an okay solution but it might end up feeling pretty lousy too, but there's a lot more math tweaking you could do with this to adjust the curve. I have a feeling this would be the game dev preference just because it would probably be more balanced than a linear % - i suppose you'd have to have the ultimate ceiling you're judging against at 2.1 billion though? not sure)