Banshee Ability Changes

[aminisi]

I have acquired a new voidshell skin, so I decided to level up a second Banshee Prime and create a Resonance Quake build. There were many trials and errors, as well as meaningful discoveries.

The final build uses 5 yellow Tauforged Archon Shards, Natural Talent, and Madurai to maximize the casting speed of abilities. With the effects of Madurai and Grimoire, the ability power is increased by +100%, reaching 306%.

What I discovered is that in a shield gating build, Banshee don't even need Catalyzing Shields and Brief Respite to survive. Since the minimum invulnerability time for shield gating is 0.33 seconds, using Sonar 3 times per second can maintain an invulnerable state. Therefore, by equipping just one Augur set mod, you can freely use the aura slot. Additionally, you can increase the ability efficiency to 175%.

Even if you accidentally go down, if you have spammed Sonar sufficiently, you can get back up immediately. With enough Sonar spam and using Terrify, Resonance Quake can kill steel Grineer soldiers to some extent.

Since the multiplier for Sonar is 15 times, if it is applied twice, it becomes 225 times, turning the 12000 damage of Resonance Quake into 0.9~2.7M. However, the effect of Sonar is unstable, so in reality, it feels like randomly killing enemies.

My impression of this build is that it has a decent level of practicality and is quite fun. However, there are two major issues.

The first is that it blows enemies away. While it's fine for solo play, it reduces the killing efficiency in multiplayer.

The second issue is that enemies who are blown away and downed may disappear from the map. It seems that they also disappear from other players' maps.

If it weren't for these two problems, I think it would be great to be able to spam it casually in multiplayer as well. It might be useful for missions where killing efficiency is not important.

I am not yet fully accustomed to this build, so my movements are a bit awkward, but I will post a short video for reference.
 

 

Edited April 2 by aminisi

[Tiltskillet]

On 2024-03-09 at 7:56 PM, Tiltskillet said:

On 2024-03-09 at 7:29 PM, Digital-Dreams said:

Sonic Boom: Give it the ability to strip armor like the augment does, it would be 50% at max rank but it can be increased by strength of course. Her augment gives so much more utility to her Boom, so I feel that should always be something it can do.

Did you know it already strips a flat 1/3 armor?

Fixed as of today, welp.

[Greysmog]

At least for me, I think you could easily buff Banshee while giving her some unique advantages to her kit. I'd rather her ability DPS increased since that seems to be her main issue overall.

Passive - Cacophony

Banshee now has her abilities receive a ability damage multiplier for each consecutive cast within a short time frame, similar to the Combo Multiplier from Melee weapons. Ability damage caps at a 4x multiplier and is expended after the next cast, rebuilding again afterwards.

Sonic Boom

Inherently has its raw damage multiplied for each enemy hit, scaling by 0.5x per enemy and scaling with Strength. Enemies that are hit are now knocked down instead of ragdolled. Increases Cacophony counter by 1x per cast and resets the effect once 4x is reached. Sonic Boom will not expend Cacophony charges while Soundquake is active.

Sonar

More consistently targets the torsos of enemies on consecutive casts, but the inherent multiplier is reduced to 300%. Scales Cacophony multiplier by 1x until it hits the 4x maximum, but doesn't reset the effect.

Silence

Now passively scales the Cacophony multiplier by 0.5x every 5 seconds while active, but does not reset the effect. With Silence active, the Cacophony passive scales up to 5x.

Soundquake

Scales the Cacophony multiplier by 1x per second, resetting the effect but continuously scaling it while casting. Banshee can now move while Soundquake is active, moving at reduced speed. While channeling, the ability starts at half range and drain, scaling up to full range and capping at double the energy drain over time. Banshee can cast all of her abilities while Soundquake is active. With both Silence and Soundquake active, the Cacophony effect scales up to 6x.

[aminisi]

6 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

Fixed as of today, welp.

I think it's understandable that DE would not tolerate it, because Banshee is too strong.🙂
My hope is that this will be the last nerf (including any unwanted reworks) for her.

[sXeth]

The passive is kind of weird because you’d also need to avoid being seen for it to matter and she has nothing really handling that.

Sonic Boom + Ice Wave is hilarious but that is a 2 ability Helminth combo (so you need cast speed and energy economy to really do it)

 By itself it’s a highly conditional enemy grouping where you need to line enemies up with a catcher wall. Which is yea, a bit underwhelming.

Silence is the most singularly unique effect in game by blocking enemies abilities. Which has more general app,cation then the short stuns. The no repeats eff3ct is what really holds it down though.

Sonar mostly suffers from the conflict with duration modding that silence causes.

Sound Quake, I don’t know how you really fix it. Animation lock abilities are hard sells, even Qorvex being invulnerable in is can still spit you out into bad situations.

Part of it comes down to “what is Sonic” in Warframe. Impact? Bleeding? (Overused). Same issue as the Water frames.

[AegidiusF]

Il y a 16 heures, Tiltskillet a dit :

Fixed as of today, welp.

Nooooo ! 😱

I was expecting this to become an "undocumented" feature. 😭

[Tiltskillet]

4 hours ago, AegidiusF said:

Nooooo ! 😱

I was expecting this to become an "undocumented" feature. 😭

I hoped for Documented Feature! :P  Plus some sort of buff for Sonic Fracture, like stripping shields.

Although Sonic Fracture still had a useful role, stripping armor on masses of enemies.  I'd go without it when I only cared about stripping mini-bosses.

[S7ORM]

On 2024-03-09 at 10:56 PM, Tiltskillet said:

Did you know it already strips a flat 1/3 armor?

Anyway, what's your plan for the augment?  It obviously couldn't be left as is and be remotely worthwhile.

 

It's quite powerful already.  Although I'd really enjoy adding a second stun when enemies exit the radius.  Either a short stun innately (though probably not on the Helminth version)  or added to Savage Silence; or a longer stun on a new augment.

 

I really don't think DE is ever going to intentionally make Sound Quake easier to afk with again.  It's either going to get reworked to be more active,  replaced with something very different, or just keep on being the worst ultimate in the game.

Allowing the player to pop into operator form while Soundquake is active would go a long way toward making the ability both better and more active.

[Vazumongr]

On 2024-04-04 at 2:25 PM, Tiltskillet said:

Fixed as of today, welp.

That's been there for years too ;-; I'm gonna just go with someone at DE saw your post and went, "Oh, that's not right." :<<<

But if someone at DE saw that, then that means they were reading up on the communities thoughts on a Banshee touch up :>>>

Edited April 7 by Vazumongr

[Tiltskillet]

9 minutes ago, Vazumongr said:

But if someone at DE saw that, then that means they were reading up on the communities thoughts on a Banshee touch up :>>>

It's been talked about elsewhere, including bug reports.    But we can call it "The Great Tiltskillet Sonic Boom Nerf of '24" if you like.  :P

[Unohound]

On 2024-03-25 at 12:12 PM, Tiltskillet said:

DE shared the top 9 most used Helminth infusions recently, and Silence was #8, making it more popular than about 60 others.  Of course there are a lot of outright bad options, but this still put it above some powerful and hyped choices like Pillage, Breach Surge, Ensnare, and Xata.

Anyway, I don't put too much stock into popularity, but it does look  like a significant number of people are finding more uses for Silence than you are.

 

Thats great its #8 but by far we all know Nourish, eclipse and roar and the most used by far. you make it sound like it's competing for top spot when it barely makes the list. Majority of the playerbase does not subsume it on anything other than exp/focus farm plus a handful of other frames. Nourish alone probably makes up more than 80%,  silence does have its use like anything else but coping so hard to deny a frame so old like banshee a rework? y'all really dont like nice things and it shows, Pablo could make her way better than she is now.

[Tiltskillet]

12 minutes ago, Unohound said:

Thats great its #8 but by far we all know Nourish, eclipse and roar and the most used by far. you make it sound like it's competing for top spot when it barely makes the list. Majority of the playerbase does not subsume it on anything other than exp/focus farm plus a handful of other frames. Nourish alone probably makes up more than 80%,  silence does have its use like anything else but coping so hard to deny a frame so old like banshee a rework? y'all really dont like nice things and it shows, Pablo could make her way better than she is now.

Ok, where you got "Improvements for Banshee: Hell No!" from that, I've no idea.  

 

[Unohound]

8 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Ok, where you got "Improvements for Banshee: Hell No!" from that, I've no idea.  

 

Please tell me what do you propose they change?

[Tiltskillet]

17 minutes ago, Unohound said:

Please tell me what do you propose they change?

Her most urgent need is better footwear.  After that, one handed cast and a secondary effect on Sonic Boom.  After that, I'd like Sonar to work on more targets.  After that, I'd love it if Silence had a second stun that applied when targets exited its radius.

After that, if DE could come up with a fourth ability for her since they forgot to put anything in that slot, that'd be swell.

[aminisi]

1 hour ago, Unohound said:

coping so hard to deny a frame so old like banshee a rework? y'all really dont like nice things and it shows, Pablo could make her way better than she is now.

What is the reason for reworking in the first place?

Banshee is old? Is being old a bad thing? To me, it seems wonderful that a character called old can be active with tremendous individuality and strength.
Banshee is weak? That is simply not true. The damage boost that allows even poor weapons to fight without problems in Deep Archimedea is increasingly being appreciated.
Banshee is difficult to handle? Difficult to survive? The existence of frames that are difficult to master is not a bad thing, but a good thing for the diversity of the game.
Frames getting stronger is for the benefit of players, so it's strange to deny it? Then should we also affirm the voices desiring further strengthening of Dante?

The significance of reworking should be to make that frame a unique and attractive option. And Banshee is already very unique, attractive, and strong. It's simply that its strength and how to use it are not yet known.

Easy reworking crushes the individuality of "unknown, or difficult to master but strong," and ruins the opportunity and process for players to rediscover and re-evaluate. And the result is a characterless "new" frame that "use abilities once or twice every 30 seconds to the extent that it doesn't interfere with shooting or melee, ensuring survivability while providing a somewhat unique experience." Shallow players may rejoice at this, saying, "The number of options that can be used a little bit for a change of pace has increased," but the diversity and flavor of the game will surely decrease. It's like adding a lot of sugar and other seasonings to a flavorful dish.

I continue to use Banshee for about 1-2 hours a day, and I still make new discoveries. My recent discovery is that if you strip armor with Pillage and spam Sonar, the Combustion Beam attached to the sentinel's Verglas will cause chain explosions and sweep away enemies. This has made it possible to generate more energy orbs.

What I think is good about Warframe is that even when you think, "There can't be any more builds than this," if you keep thinking, you'll reach a breakthrough. Not limited to Banshee, many frames and weapons have great potential, and it's wonderful that their respective enthusiasts continue to pursue those possibilities. In order to avoid losing the trust between developers and players that serves as the foundation for this, easy reworking based on wrong premises should not be done.

Edited April 24 by aminisi

[Unohound]

22 hours ago, Tiltskillet said:

Her most urgent need is better footwear.  After that, one handed cast and a secondary effect on Sonic Boom.  After that, I'd like Sonar to work on more targets.  After that, I'd love it if Silence had a second stun that applied when targets exited its radius.

After that, if DE could come up with a fourth ability for her since they forgot to put anything in that slot, that'd be swell.

I dont really disagree with you but i do think they could spruce her up a bit to make her feel more modern to play without destroying her identity. I really feel like her 1st ability should cc without blowing mobs to kingdom come, maybe a screech that paralyzes idk. I do want sonar to be something that can be applied way more fluidly to mobs instead of constant recasts, kinda wish silence did more than just cc, maybe a little minigame like octavias 3 (for more damage or a buff of some kind). Look at Hydroid, Zephyr and more recently Inaros. Frames can be tweaked and modernized to play more fluid and cool interactions without making them mesa or saryn. That's really all i want for Banshee. PS She needs sails on her boat shoes for increased fashion.

[Mr_Stach]

You know I've never really given banshee a fair shake but I went and did some stuff, testing things out much more earnestly. Really the biggest thing I'd say is her 4 needs a big tune up, like damn, and not just effectiveness but also the effect itself just needs a visual tune-up. I'm not sure if they could make it have some synergies or something, like it being able to benefit on the Sonar damage increases, or just anything.

Having a Sound based warframe is cool, the Armor strip on the 1 is good, sonar and silence are both great. I just feel like Banshee is a bit disjointed and would like to see some extra interactivity in the kit. 

Anyways those are my thoughts, I know there's a lot of people with hundreds of hours and countless builds or whatever, but at the end of the day, if the first thing you do with banshee is Subsume something off, then what does that ability need to be useful? 

[aminisi]

It is very difficult to modify Sound Quake. I have already posted the reasons in the topic. Dante's Nerf reconfirmed that wide-area damage abilities without line of sight checks are a problem for DE. I also posted in this topic that Banshee can currently utilize Resonance Quake because Sonar can increase ability damage by hundreds of times. The fact that it can be operated at this point means that a simple damage boost will result in performance that DE considers problematic.

In fact, if there are multiple Banshees, the damage boost can reach tens of thousands or even millions of times, so Resonance Quake can be considered dangerous even now. If Banshee's usage rate increases due to strengthening, it is possible that this synergistic effect will naturally occur or be intentionally used. (I don't like playing in a semi-neglected manner, so I don't actually know how efficient and meaningful it would be.)

My current Banshee can increase damage by 15 to 200 times and reduce armor to 0 by combining Pillage and Grimoire. Even though it was a Steel Path mission, a Volt who realized that enemies could be defeated with Discharge was spamming Discharge to gain kill counts. Thanks to that, my Sentinel clone's kills decreased, and energy orbs stopped generating, which was troublesome. It may already be in a dangerous territory depending on the combination.

Even without relying on area-of-effect abilities, my Sentinel clone turns into a killing machine and slaughters enemies, effectively achieving the same result. This is one of the reasons why I feel Banshee is too strong in the current environment. With 4 Banshees and 12 Sentinel clones, it would be hell for the enemies.

If Sound Quake and Resonance Quake were to be adjusted, it would likely be one of the following:
- Replace Sound Quake with a completely different ability or add additional effects such as CC
- Add line of sight checks instead of strengthening
- Nerf Sonar (set an upper limit on the multiplier, prevent ability damage from increasing, etc.)
I believe it's better not to forcibly modify it, as nerfing for the sake of strengthening would be putting the cart before the horse.

I have been a fan of Banshee since the days when Sound Quake was strong, so I would be sad if Sound Quake became a completely different ability. In Japan, it is affectionately nicknamed "dogeza" because its motion resembles the traditional supreme apology pose called dogeza.

By the way, I recently found out that there seems to be a limitation of up to the square of the Sonar multiplier, mainly for humanoid enemies. Therefore, Sonar and Resonance Quake work more effectively in Entrati Lab, where there are many non-humanoid enemies. Especially for The Anatomizer, for some reason, the damage boost is multiplied across the entire body for each Sonar, making it easy to output 2 billion damage.

[Tiltskillet]

1 hour ago, Mr_Stach said:

I'm not sure if they could make it have some synergies or something, like it being able to benefit on the Sonar damage increases, or just anything.

It can benefit from Sonar, as long as the right body part is highlighted.   Generally the torso on conventional enemies.

 

20 minutes ago, aminisi said:

By the way, I recently found out that there seems to be a limitation of up to the square of the Sonar multiplier, mainly for humanoid enemies.

I was aware of the limit per Banshee, but didn't know there were units it didn't apply to.  Besides the Anatomizer, which ones are you certain of? 

Sounds like a pretty obvious bug to me unfortunately.

[aminisi]

29 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

I was aware of the limit per Banshee, but didn't know there were units it didn't apply to.  Besides the Anatomizer, which ones are you certain of? 

Sounds like a pretty obvious bug to me unfortunately.

From what I've verified, non-humanoid units generally have a multiplier of 3 or higher. For example, mechanical enemies and animals.

I was also aware that the Fandom states the limit is squared, but since I could clearly confirm a multiplier of 3 or higher in-game, I thought that was a mistake. Before testing, I thought enemies with only one body part might have a multiplier of 3 or higher, but on the contrary, I could only confirm a multiplier of 1 for single-part enemies. I speculate that the humanoid-only squared limit might be in place to protect important enemies like Kuva Liches.

Regarding the Anatomizer, it's probably a bug. It has multiple parts, and while each part is individually colored by Sonar, attacking anywhere increases the damage. It's the reason why abnormally high damage can easily occur in the Entrati Lab.

For testing, I recommend using Overextended to reduce Sonar's multiplier down to 2. It's also a good idea to extend the ability duration. Additionally, I was worried that there might be a limit to the number of Sonar stacks on a single enemy, but since I confirmed that humanoid enemies can have their entire body affected by a squared damage boost, it seems to stack to at least that extent. In other words, maximizing ability casting speed and spamming Sonar is not meaningless.

Furthermore, using Power Donation to reduce ability strength to 10% will result in a Sonar multiplier of 0.5. This means that each Sonar application can halve the damage dealt to enemies. It might be fun to use this on the Anatomizer as a prank.

[Tiltskillet]

40 minutes ago, aminisi said:

I was also aware that the Fandom states the limit is squared, but since I could clearly confirm a multiplier of 3 or higher in-game, I thought that was a mistake. Before testing, I thought enemies with only one body part might have a multiplier of 3 or higher, but on the contrary, I could only confirm a multiplier of 1 for single-part enemies. I speculate that the humanoid-only squared limit might be in place to protect important enemies like Kuva Liches.

I played around with it with a Moa in the Sim.  At first I thought you were mistaken, as I wasn't able to get more than two stacks worth of damage for a while.  But then I got a  3x, and it happened a few more times after that.   It was not exactly easy or consistent.  Usually with 15 casts, I'd still only get 2x.   I imagine this would be more practical with a bunch of enemies and Resonance, but the behavior strikes me as maybe buggy.  I'll play with it some more tomorrow.

I did confirm the Anatomizer problem.  Pretty funny stuff.

[aminisi]

11 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

It was not exactly easy or consistent.  Usually with 15 casts, I'd still only get 2x.

I set my ability efficiency to 75% and test by casting 60 times until I run out of energy. Since I usually maximize my ability casting speed and spam it 2-3 times per second, it takes about 20 seconds to finish. If I extend the duration of Sonar to 60 seconds, you should be able to verify the results in the remaining 30 seconds.

[Tiltskillet]

18 hours ago, aminisi said:

I set my ability efficiency to 75% and test by casting 60 times until I run out of energy. Since I usually maximize my ability casting speed and spam it 2-3 times per second, it takes about 20 seconds to finish. If I extend the duration of Sonar to 60 seconds, you should be able to verify the results in the remaining 30 seconds.

Yeah, playing with this some more on Moas it seems to me like the game is trying to prevent multiple overlaps.  And occasionally fails.  It's not striking me as practical for one Banshee.

I tried a couple more non-humanoid units:  Rollers, and Arcocanids.  Rollers seem limited to 1x, which surprised me.   Arcocanids I didn't observe any 3x, although I didn't try for more than a couple of minutes.  I could get 2x, but still got a significant number of 1x even when I had them positively smothered with Sonar.  Don't know what's going on there.

[PennywiseTheClown123]

Why not treat Banshee’s Soundquake like a combination of Cataclysm and Mallet? She targets a spot, sends out sound wave from that expands out from the epic center allowing her to move so she won’t be vulnerable, get rid of the stun or stagger, and the ability scales for a certain duration? As it ends, it creates a giant explodes base on the scaling damage or enemy level or whatever. Maybe the amount of enemies within the Soundquake adds a multiplier to the Explosion with a guaranteed chance to hit the sonar weak spot. l Then treat the Augment like Gara Splitter Storm where the every couple of second Banshee sends out a Soundquake pulse and scale it with the enemies but the further the pulse is the less damage it does with the epicenter, Banshee herself, doing the most. Kinda work in unison with Silence’s Neutral Range.

Edited April 29 by PennywiseTheClown123

[Mr_Stach]

Well depending on how "blasty" the blast update is, Soundquake might be getting a bit of an indirect buff. But for being completely immobile it needs to just do more.