Nezha's Divine Retribution augment post-hotfix and his state in the game compared to other similar Warframes abilities.

[Noirshock]

Hello everybody!

Based on the recent change of Divine Retribution and after some testing, I managed to get some numbers to compare Nezha's divine spears to other abilities and augments that allow you to eliminate enemies while keeping them under relative control with crawl control capabilities.

Each ability will have a combination of Cunning Drift and Overextended for a total of 205% range. Why 205%? I'll explain that later.

Currently, Nezha with 205% (no augment installed) will allow divine spears to reach 38.95m of effective range, and as I show in the image below on the simulacrum, all enemies will be affected by this ability.

Now 205% (with augment) range will be cut to 19.47m and as you might notice, not a single enemy was touched by spears.

Now with that in mind, let's bring some Warframes to compare how their abilities perform under the same circumstances. 

Let's start with Frost!

Frost's Avalanche with 205% range has 30.75m of effective range. It will affect all enemies from the same position as tested with Nezha (ignore the one on the corner; he might have installed Warm Coat on his build!).

 

Avalanche have an incredible augment (Biting frost) which allows you to get 200% extra critical damage and critical chance, which works multiplicatively with the base stats of your weapons, allowing you to reach super crits (or red crits) easily with any weapon in the game. Not only that, but the ability itself allows you to strip enemy armor and freeze it, so you can enjoy your crit shots while Frost is inside of snow globe, fully protected.

And don't forget Icy Avalanche another Avalanche augment that gives free Overguard to you and your squadmates!

Next Xaku!

Xaku's Gaze at 205% range reaches over 25m and enemies will be affected by it. I "gazed" the enemy on the 2nd column, 3rd row, to show you how much range it will cover from the same position as previous tests. 

 

You can have up to two Gaze active at the same time and they will strip 100% of the enemy's shields and armor (with 200% strength) as long as they are inside the area of effect. That's an amazing 100m area of effect where enemies inside Gaze are going to be quite vulnerable to Grasp of Lohk or any weapon you have equipped.

 

Now Kullervo!

Storm of Ukko with 205% range reaches 20.5m and enemies from the first row will be affected by it.

 

With the recent update, Storm of Ukko got an augment too (Wrath of Ukko) which is amazing and I'm thankful! The new augment will allow you to teleport the area of effect to any place you teleport with Wrathful advance and the duration will be refresh by 6 seconds stacking up to the maximum duration of the ability in your build. The ability will deal 1000 slash damage per second (with 40% strength since Overextended is equipped), and you can stack each proc on each enemy by using Collective Curse, which means that the more enemies inside, more individual damage each enemy will get! And if it wasn't enough, you can chain enemies outside of the area to spread the effect even further! All that without considering your weapon's damage, your companion or the damage you can deal with Recompense, just the ability itself.

 

Finally Khora!

At 205% range, Strangledome reach 20.5m, affecting the enemies on the first row. The dome itself is only 10.25m but the grabbing effect is extended up to 20.5m.

Strangledome will grab enemies automatically as long as they get close to the effective range, all enemies affected will not be able to fight back, since they're chained and will share the damage received by Whipclaw (a pseudo exalted weapon), which can be paired with Accumulating Whipclaw to get and extra 35% stacking damage bonus to subsequent whipclaws as long as you hit 3 enemies. 

Strangledome also has an augment (Pilfering Strangledome) which increases your chance to get additional loot by 65%. And I almost forgot, 2 domes can be active at any time (for a total of 82m at 205%), each dome deal damage per second too!

I can bring more examples of other abilities, like Equinox or Octavia's kit *insert lighting sound* but I prefer not touch those subjects.

Something that is noticeable in this comparison is how other warframes have the capability to recast their abilities to spread their effect in a wider area; others have the option of having multiple of those abilities active at the same time; some don't even need weapons to deal damage to clear the area and all of them can go beyond 20m without penalties on their range.

Nezha on the other hand, needs to combine weapons, elements and chakram to get a similar effects while enemies are under the influence of the spears. You can't recast spears since once you do, enemies already affected by them will be release and it's true that you can go on an infinite loop of spamming them but it will lock you instead.

Now time to explain the 205%.

Currently in Warframe there's only 5 mods that allow us to increase range:

 

The only way to get over 200% is by using Overextended a corrupted mod that reduces ability strength by 60%. Nezha's kit works wonderfully around strength since you need it to increase the multipliers of Blazing Chakram (and the augment Reaping Chakram), Warding Halo, Divine Spears (now with the new augment) and your Helmint ability if you have one (Roar users, I got you covered!). With the recent change, Nezha not only got a range penalty, but more range mods will be necessary, reducing your modding options while strength was affected too! Previously, you didn't need overextended to compensate and you might be alright by just using Augur Reach, Cunning Drift and Stretch for a total of 190% range.

So, what happens to those who don't want excessive amounts of range? How are they impacted by this change? Your build will have diminishing returns. Fewer spears means less enemies under your control; it also means you have fewer targets for Blazing Chakram, fewer enemies to bounce means less damage, fewer enemies under the effect of chakram means fewer Health Orbs. Even with 205% and the sacrifice of strength that implies, Nezha can't even reach other Warframes with similar abilities, and 20m, it's not much considering how spears are supposed to give you room to breathe in high-density missions to counter range enemies (I'm looking at you random Rogue Culverin).

So what's the current status of Nezha? Well...

 

Even though I'm personally not a huge fan of getting a penalty on range (while getting one indirectly on strength and modding), reducing the damage will underperform against other abilities in the game and what I think was the original purpose of the augment: revitalize Divine Spears. I'm happy to say that it was achieved! But only for a week. 

So my proposal is reduce the penalty from 50% to 25%.  It's a middle ground that I think it will make everybody happy.

In a hypothetical case, with a reduction of 25% and 205% range, Divine Spears will reach 29.2m as you can see below:

 

Even on the screenshot, there's one enemy on the corner unaffected by the ability, just like in my test with Frost.

I feel this will keep Divine Spears in line with other abilities and will make a fair penalty for those who want to build for extreme range; they will get the ultimate punishment of committing half of their build to range, losing strength and reducing effectiveness on other abilities, while minimum or midrange builds will have a better time without making too many sacrifices. 

 

That's all from me! Thanks to everybody who read everything until this point, let's make Nezha great again with this incredible augment while keeping the conversation civil.

 

And as always, thank you for listening DE!   

 

Update!

Based on feedback from comments on this post, I made a section related to the effects on Radial Area and Eximus enemies.

So as you might know, Divine Spears is an ability that affects every enemy inside of an area; this area is reflected as a circle in the game, like this:

 

The purple area is the area covered at base range (100%) without augment. Enemies inside this area will be affected by spears.

Now let's see what happens when Divine Retribution is installed: 

That's quite a difference, isn't it? Well, turns out the 50% reduction with the augment isn't a 50%, it's a 75% radial reduction at any range. Since 50% is not half of a circle, at least not in terms of area.  

A more realistic approach to 50% will be a 30% reduction, like this:

 

And here is my proposal about 25% reduction:

 

Even after the reduction, a lot of area is lost in the process, but 25% still looks good compared to 30%. 

I originally didn't want to bring up the topic of radial area since it might be something that many players might not be aware of, I would rather prefer to show you how the reduction is quite noticeable from what you can see in front of you and still is! But this might help to clarify why 50% is a big penalty for Nezha.

Also, I forgot to mention how Divine Spears don't have any effect on Eximus, Bosses, Demolishers, etc.

 

Spears are meant to keep low-risk enemies at bay while we deal with the real threat (and get some juicy Health Orbs that keep us on track thanks to Chakram).

I'll track more comments on this post in case more important topics are brought from you guys. Thanks!

Edited April 6 by Noirshock
Updated based on feedback from the community

[ElRighto]

Great! 

Good examples, nice to read, good suggestion. 

It is worth remembering that the augment itself takes up space, which is a penalty.  Many of the listed abilities provide vulnerability or damage without any augments. 

Also, this augment does not perform very well in the later stages, where there are Eximus, OGs, etc. around.

[ShiroMrysky]

I approve of this post it's exactly what i was telling someone and they shrugged me off saying to play other frame that the nerf is fine and it clearly isn't. i have played other frames and this is exactly why i feel this was an extreme reaction to the people who maxed this out to its peak. The people who wanted to use it in balanced build or maybe even with reaping chakram augment are gonna feel spears is worthless if you need every range mod in the came to use the augment.. 

[WildstarsCCB]

FOA, thanks for your detailed analysis. But in my opinion, the nerf on range is totally nonsense.

On one hand, the DIVINE SPEARS itself is still not a pure damage skill, it can be ignored at all by overguard. This fact definitely divide it with other strong Tier-0 nuke in history, it's far from a simple "press button and everybody fk up" type. Besides, what really need to be adjusted is how we deal damage to the enemy affected by DIVINE SPEARS, rather than what specific range the DIVINE SPEARS affect.

Basically, we can see the new DIVINE SPEARS as a round-version Expedite Suffering mixed with CC. And if you use some weapons that can cause a large amount of Slash, Fire or Toxic status effect at a long distance and in a short period of time（for example, Glaive Prime），coupled with the build that deliberately reduces the power duration, you will get a Very OP AOE. All you need to do is standing at ground, press 4 , deal damage and wait for the 4 finished, for which we may call it "unhealthy". 

To solve this problem, what should be nerfed is the efficiency of long-range weapons or glaives in causing status effect on enemies affected by DIVINE SPEARS (of course, this adjustment should be limited to the NEZHA user himself, otherwise it will cause trouble to NEZHA's teammates). Therefore, NEZHA players should consider whether to use weapons with a closer attack range but higher damage, or weapons cause lower damage for DIVINE SPEARS but could reach the enemy easier.  This adds more interest to the power and gives players space to think strategically.

Perhaps further adjusting the range of DIVINE SPEARS will satisfy DE and many players. But I personally think that the Augment of DIVINE SPEARS actually provides everyone with a better direction. The current environment of Warframe is ready to accept more and better AOE. We don’t really need to headshot hundreds or thousands of enemies one by one, but the choice of clearing the entire map with one click is obviously unwise either. DIVINE SPEARS for me (pre-nerf version of course) is just a good "middle" option.

 

[devoltar]

Fantastic breakdown. 50% was way too heavy of a nerf. Whenever you touch radial abilities you have to also realize that if you cut the radius of a circle in half, you are cutting it's circle of effective area by 3/4 - or for the sphere, 7/8. Since elevation is sometimes, though not always a factor depending on tile that means the actual effectiveness hit is somewhere between those two. That is huge, and that is why people feel like it makes spears useless. You can't even hit half the enemies you did previously.

Also, none of this accounted for the fact that spears are useless against a LOT of end game enemies these days due to overguard and eximus loading. It was just for clearing out fodder, which a large number of frames and weapons can nuke (as it is I already run around on Nezha with just atamos incarnon and clear rooms easily - I had fun playing with this build but it honestly wasn't any more effective in most of the content I play - late SP and netracells). Brozime's example run on Kuva Fortress has actually become an outlier that's not representative of the current state of the game (which is why he's talking about changing that). 

Edited April 6 by devoltar

[Noirshock]

1 hour ago, devoltar said:

Fantastic breakdown. 50% was way too heavy of a nerf. Whenever you touch radial abilities you have to also realize that if you cut the radius of a circle in half, you are cutting it's circle of effective area by 3/4 - or for the sphere, 7/8. Since elevation is sometimes, though not always a factor depending on tile that means the actual effectiveness hit is somewhere between those two. That is huge, and that is why people feel like it makes spears useless. You can't even hit half the enemies you did previously.

Also, none of this accounted for the fact that spears are useless against a LOT of end game enemies these days due to overguard and eximus loading. It was just for clearing out fodder, which a large number of frames and weapons can nuke (as it is I already run around on Nezha with just atamos incarnon and clear rooms easily - I had fun playing with this build but it honestly wasn't any more effective in most of the content I play - late SP and netracells). Brozime's example run on Kuva Fortress has actually become an outlier that's not representative of the current state of the game (which is why he's talking about changing that). 

Hi! I didn't want to touch radial area and how much was affected, since it can be complicated for unaware players on the topic. I wanted to keep it as simple as: "what can I see in front of me?" and from the screenshots, it's clear how the impact of this change is that noticeable, but since multiple players brought up that subject, I'll update my post with a new section related to it! Thanks!

[Simeoff]

This is good

hope @[DE]Megan @[DE]Pablo read this

[ElRighto]

In general, this is nonsense. 

If we compare Nezha without mods at all and Nezha only with an augment, then the option without an augment will be more viable and convenient. 

Now the ability without increasing the radius by 220-265% becomes a burden.

Any warframe can kill enemies within a radius of up to 11 meters, you don't even need abilities for this.

1. Take Stahlta, Tenet Envoy, Kuva Zarr or something Incarnon.  🔫

2. Focus on the slash and viral damage.  🩸

4. Increase the radius.  ↔️

3. Add mods for critical chance/damage and multishot.  🤕

You are gorgeous!  Now there is no need for Nezha, augment and complex selection of mods, an unusual way of playing.  And fun.

Edited April 6 by ElRighto
Damage type corrected

[DimkaTsv]

4 часа назад, devoltar сказал:

Whenever you touch radial abilities you have to also realize that if you cut the radius of a circle in half, you are cutting it's circle of effective area by 3/4 - or for the sphere, 7/8. Since elevation is sometimes, though not always a factor depending on tile that means the actual effectiveness hit is somewhere between those two.

Actual effective area change is more often than not is way less than 75 or 90% (in case of 50m vs 23.85m circle and sphere). 
Due to fact that at least parts of effective area will be out of bounds for enemies, and more radius you get, more area is getting out of bounds compared to actually useful area. 

It will depend on tileset and your specific location as you said. But in common case AOE reduction is about 40-60% (aka up to 75%). 

For example this is circle area vs effective area on tileset.
 

For example, if you have 50.35m radius vs 23.85m radius,
50.35^2*п=7964.32
23.85^2*п=1787.01
1787.0/7964.32=0.224*100=22.4%

But (sorry, not geometry expert, so i will approximate areas here to rectangles instead of cropped circle fragment) but you are fighting in corridor 20 meters wide your loss is NOT 75%.

50.35*2 (it is radius, duh)*20=2014
23.85*2*20=954
954/2014=0.4737*100=47.37%

Meaning that practical loss would be 52.63% instead of 77.6% which could be though from base area calculation. 

And if you do AOE volume difference will be even more drastic. 
23.85^3*п=42598
50.35^3*п=400800
42598/400800 =0.1063*100=10.63% with raw volume of sphere

But, again, in reality actually useful volume difference will be like 40-65% approximately.
While taking in account out of bounds via useful area based on same corridor of 20m width and 15m height, difference will look like this:

23.85m radius = approx (23.85*2)*20*15=14310 (as it fits in XXlength*20width*15height in meters virtual hall completely)
50.35m radius = approx (50*2)*20*15=30210
14310/30210=0.4737*100=47.37%. Aka 52.63% loss instead of 89.37% you could see with raw volume diff.

 

Actually now that i noted, both of these differences came down to 52.63% loss. For both area and volume calculation. 

-------------

But don't get me wrong. I also agree that 50% nerf was too much. 25-30% would've been better option.
I am just pointing out that raw area calculations are quite deceptive in terms of real percentage difference. 

Edited April 6 by DimkaTsv

[ElRighto]

15 часов назад, Noirshock сказал:

Now let's see what happens when Divine Retribution is installed: 

Bravo!  Very clear demonstration!

48 минут назад, DimkaTsv сказал:

But (sorry, not geometry expert, so i will approximate areas here to rectangles instead of cropped circle fragment) but you are fighting in corridor 20 meters wide your loss is NOT 75%.

50.35*2 (it is radius, duh)*20=2014
23.85*2*20=954
954/2014=0.4737*100=47.37%

I don't think it's considered that way.  There is a lot of loss at the corners if we have a small radius. 

It also seems possible that we are standing not in the center of the room, but against the wall.  And this does not take into account the huge rooms on the Gas City, Lua, Zariman, new Labs tilesets and open worlds.

[DimkaTsv]

14 минут назад, ElRighto сказал:

I don't think it's considered that way.  There is a lot of loss at the corners if we have a small radius. 

Good argument. I was not good enough to calculate part of circle, and that approximation could've also given skewed results. 
 

14 минут назад, ElRighto сказал:

t also seems possible that we are standing not in the center of the room, but against the wall.

Sure. Point was that relative difference in area measured in ratio or percentage will highly depend on environment and placement. It won't ever go above raw area/volume percentage though. And tendency is that with larger radius you lose more useful area/volume simply because mobs cannot spawn out of bounds, in air or under ground. And with radius increase often enough larger and larger percentage of total area/volume becomes useless. 

Edited April 6 by DimkaTsv

[ElRighto]

36 минут назад, DimkaTsv сказал:

And tendency is that with larger radius you lose more useful area/volume simply because mobs cannot spawn out of bounds, in air or under ground. And with radius increase often enough larger and larger percentage of total area/volume becomes useless. 

Fair! 

But we see DEs constantly increasing the scale of rooms. We look at the Corpus ships before and after the rework, at the new tilesets.  Now there are only five or six tilesets, where we will be limited to rooms of 20 meters each. 

Rather, a large radius becomes a necessity.  This way you can remove weak enemies under your feet and concentrate on dangerous opponents.

 

Of course, purists and lovers of pure Nezha can come running and say that he is wonderful, delightful and beautiful without any augments or foreign abilities. 

But let’s be objective: this frame can barely live (and only because of the third ability), he can slide on his soft spot, leave flimsy fire, make enemies a little more vulnerable and CC those whom you don’t need to be afraid of anyway.  As a reward, he will receive health spheres. 

Even old Loki with two useful abilities (without augments) looks like Chad compared to him.

[Angelhk]

Hope DE read this post.

20~25% is considerable 

IMO they need to remove the nerf completely, is the frist time in years nezha receive a pretty buff and they destroyed in 1 week, if they keep divine retribution augment this way just delete it from the game.

 

[TheTundraTerror]

18 hours ago, Noirshock said:

So my proposal is reduce the penalty from 50% to 25%.  It's a middle ground that I think it will make everybody happy.

I would be much happier if they reduced the shared damage by a nice, simple (not firm) 50% that can't be modded.

Or, at the very least, not reduce the base range.

That said, the fact that it requires you to use one of your 8 mod slots, doesn't help against anything with Overguard nor Acolytes, and the ability can't be recasted to catch new mobs like Rhino's Stomp, the nerf should just be reverted.

Edited April 6 by TheTundraTerror

[Lizardon031]

Very good post! Very good analysis and information!! I do agree with everything the OP has said

...My Personal Opinion is that the nerf is unlawful due to the following reasons:

- Due to the difficulty scalding of late game events. (Early - Mid game does not matter as any warframe build can relatively comfortably do those). The potential ceiling of this augment synergy in a focused build will not gain Nezha complete dominance or make others irrelevant due to certain types of enemies and enemy abilities that exist in late game (i.e Eximus, Overgaurd, Acolytes, etc) - that divine spears do NOT effect.
- The nerf not adjusting the range to be comparable to other warframes with augment synergies that depend on range. The OP has made extensive detail on this so I won't need to elaborate further.
- The scarce diverse RELEVANT UNIQUE builds existing for Nezha. As to the OP's points and the general Nezha player types - there are very very very scarce builds that can at least adequately perform in later game content. This augment presented a new defining characteristic for Nezha that was unique to Nezha. Now with this nerf, we are back to making clone builds of other warframes that mostly have better overall utility and consistency than Nezha.

I believe there are alot more points to be made and more frustration from other players that love Nezhas design and were delighted at the augments introduction that gave him some more concrete relevance in the meta. However, now with the nerf the general feeling I get is: "Why pick him up? He has nothing..."

I implore to please revert the range nerf, as it does not make any sense in the context of the current game meta we are in right now.

To a more subjective personal opinion, that has been stated many times - Everyone likes different play-styles a designs. Just because there may be, for example, a best build/warframe - doesn't necessarily mean everyone is gonna drop there inventory and arsenal and full migrate to that warframe/build. Most people play what they like and want. Removing the capability to make what you like and want really good and relevant because your are scared that 'it may be too effective'. There are many existing warframes that have way more effectiveness and multiple options than this ONE that Nezha could potentially have again.

[Sabbbx]

Excellent post. Hopefully they rethink the decision.

[RA1313ITS]

Great post!  Hope DE takes it into consideration 

[Ellniko75]

Just to add something, apart from the eximus enemies which the spears don't affect, I want to say that 25 meters might have been a lot on early warframe days, but with the new tilests (zariman and cavia), the rooms have become much much bigger, and therefore there's less enemy density. 50 meters is quite a lot, but on the cavia tileset you'll find plenty rooms which you can simply not nuke since they are too big.

[crazywolfpusher]

19 hours ago, Noirshock said:

Spears are meant to keep low-risk enemies at bay while we deal with the real threat (and get some juicy Health Orbs that keep us on track thanks to Chakram).

Spears without the augment does exactly that, isn't?

 

I think the nerf was necessary, no other frame was able to Nuke Steel Path on a 50m radius, through walls, no LoS, from the get go of the mission. With ZERO drawbacks.

Let's compare it to the most popular nukers that go through walls:

• Saryn need build up spores, doing damage is her whole gimmick. It cannot shine on a full squad, can be disrupted by a Panzer Vulpaphyla.
• Equinox need armor strip, build up dmg, has dmg fall off. Struggle to stay alive.
• Gauss, well Gauss is Gauss. Not defending this guy.

 

Anyway, my point is, Nezha being able to nuke steel path enemies, with almost any weapon on a 25m radius through walls, still nuts.

[Vermillion-Code]

2 hours ago, crazywolfpusher said:

Spears without the augment does exactly that, isn't?

 

I think the nerf was necessary, no other frame was able to Nuke Steel Path on a 50m radius, through walls, no LoS, from the get go of the mission. With ZERO drawbacks.

Let's compare it to the most popular nukers that go through walls:

• Saryn need build up spores, doing damage is her whole gimmick. It cannot shine on a full squad, can be disrupted by a Panzer Vulpaphyla.
• Equinox need armor strip, build up dmg, has dmg fall off. Struggle to stay alive.
• Gauss, well Gauss is Gauss. Not defending this guy.

 

Anyway, my point is, Nezha being able to nuke steel path enemies, with almost any weapon on a 25m radius through walls, still nuts.

Saryn does not need to build up spores, let alone with emerald shards.

Gyre exists.

Garuda exists.

Frost breach surge exists.

Mesa exists.

Voruna exists.

Gara exists.

Dagath exists.

Khora.

Xaku.

Protea.

Kullervo.

I'm not buying your rhetoric that Nezha was so far above everything else in the game. "no other warframe" is just flat out wrong. Was the augment strong? Sure! Should the range be nerfed by about 25% ish? Sure! But to pretend he was so far and above everything else in the game is just patently wrong. Also, any weapon? That's just completely wrong as well. The weapon had to be specialized to the augment. Yeah, people used heavy slash procs from melees and weapons like the phantasma, but if you think any weapon + the augment was destroying steel path with 1-3 bullets you just flat-out did not use the augment at all.
 

Edited April 7 by Vermillion-Code

[ShiroMrysky]

6 hours ago, ElRighto said:

Bravo!  Very clear demonstration!

I don't think it's considered that way.  There is a lot of loss at the corners if we have a small radius. 

It also seems possible that we are standing not in the center of the room, but against the wall.  And this does not take into account the huge rooms on the Gas City, Lua, Zariman, new Labs tilesets and open worlds.

So i knew i wasn't crazy when testing this in simulacrum. it does do exactly this with the base 9.5m the corner mobs are consider +10 meters so they don't get speared  Shout out to you for doing this red line corner representation and Noirshock for this whole post. I was explaining to a friend how this 9.5m is overkill and they immediately tried to tell me go play other frames 9.5m is good. i'll admit to spending majority of my play time on nezha but i've played enough other frames to know when range feels bad.

[FelisImpurrator]

Excellent post with great, evidence-based reasoning. I think 25% less range is a good place to have it. Very fair for the sheer power.

[Neightrix]

Impressive post.

I was thinking of something more complicated, like the augment increasing base range by 40%, but also reducing the effectiveness of range mods by 75% when the augment is equipped (Oberon's 2 range is already like this). This would give a max range within what DE wants, as well as ease up on the the build requirements for players since you won't need every single range mod.

But I'd also take the 25% change you suggested.

Edited April 7 by Neightrix

[oemedivad]

You didn't compare the only ability that is actually similar gameplay-wise, Kullervo Collective Curse, which has a slightly bigger area but has LoS and a cap on damage redirection.

Divine Retribution, on the other hand has no LoS requirement, can be made to be a strip and on the explosion has an Expedite Suffering effect with a damage multiplier.

Let's be honest here: I love the power fantasy, but I'm worried about power creep. The same is true of Dante and his absurd numbers.

Sometimes you have to prune some branches to keep the tree healthy.

From all of this, I'm more interested in how these things managed to pass QA.

[crazywolfpusher]

1 hour ago, Vermillion-Code said:

Saryn does not need to build up spores, let alone with emerald shards.

Gyre exists.

Garuda exists.

Frost breach surge exists.

Mesa exists.

Voruna exists.

Gara exists.

Dagath exists.

Khora.

Xaku.

Protea.

Kullervo.

I'm not buying your rhetoric that Nezha was so far above everything else in the game. "no other warframe" is just flat out wrong. Was the augment strong? Sure! Should the range be nerfed by about 25% ish? Sure! But to pretend he was so far and above everything else in the game is just patently wrong. Also, any weapon? That's just completely wrong as well. The weapon had to be specialized to the augment. Yeah, people used heavy slash procs from melees and weapons like the phantasma, but if you think any weapon + the augment was destroying steel path with 1-3 bullets you just flat-out did not use the augment at all.
 

None of those frames you listed can Nuke steelpath enemies on a 50m radius through walls.

_{btw The weapon doesn't need to be Torid tier, so yeah, most weapons that can inflict a good chunk of status, ideally slash which is the most common thanks to Hunter Munitions lol.}