Turns out, being punished for managing a resource correctly isn't fun

[BalaDeSilver]

Ember isn't really fun to play. Her 2 makes it so casting an ability increases damage at the cost of managing a resource, that being energy. Problem is, there is no real good way to properly manage that, as you can either ignore the energy drain and have less damage or eat the energy drain and have no energy to cast anything. There is no reward to manage her, there is only punishment, and for no reward since she doesn't even do that much damage.

Maybe after you guys tweak Nyx and Trinity, you can take a look at Ember, since she is kinda middle of the pack in terms of strength, unlike the former 2, but she is a real struggle to play with. Maybe try and incorporate some aspects of World on Fire to it, without the demolition of low level missions, especially the old Firequake augment. Maybe reverse how her 2 works, so it drains energy when it's not fully charged, but doesn't when it is, with her 3 still draining the meter, to actually reward casting abilities, and make it risky to strip armor and coat enemies in fire.

Also, a flat increase to her damage would come in handy, too, she isn't really a damage dealer, despite her classification as a nuker/damage dealer caster.

[BalaDeSilver]

Addendum: removing her 1 hold to cast like Hydroid would also go a long way (and making it good, too, that'd help)

[Drachnyn]

I always compared new ember to the firemage from vermintide. That character takes massive damage when overheating but the spells are in context also very powerfull and cooling down feels much better. With ember you dont have vastly stronger abilities than other frames and you face the kinda boring risk of just running out of energy. Not even cooling down feels good because once you spam her 4 a couple of times you need to spam fire blast even more because it doesnt properly reduce the heat gain, mostly just current heat. It's much more convenient to just turn immolate off and on again.

Turning overheat into a benefit is imo the direction DE should take ember in.

[Chewarette]

3 hours ago, Drachnyn said:

It's much more convenient to just turn immolate off and on again.

There is no situation where this is true tbh. The ramp-up at the beginning is way too long for it to be an interesting strategy.

Ember is quite OK to be real. Armor stripping, damage reduction, AoE, only her 1 is meh and the 4 being heavily affected by LoS sucks - I can understand for some abilities, but for Inferno it doesn't make the slightest sense.

Of course, she falls short if you compared to the other meta choices of planet-nuking warframes, but in term of balance, Ember is a lot more consistent that Saryn, Dante or Mesa. Do not forget she's still powerful enough to deal with the entire starchart + lots of SP content. I didn't have the opportunity to test her in EDA but I'm sure she can be a very decent pick here as well.

I really think some tweaks would be more than enough to make her good. But is it needed to make her overpowered to align her with other Hit-4-to-win Warframes just because she's a bit below ? Not sure.

[MaxTunnerX]

Ember always confused me. She seemed like a nuker, felt like a nuker, but wasnt nuker at all. it was all just for show. Whatever makes her deal as much damage as she looks she does would be appreciated. A frame that needs you to wear sunglasses but doesnt do anything is worthless.

Edited May 10 by MaxTunnerX

[Drachnyn]

vor 5 Stunden schrieb Chewarette:

There is no situation where this is true tbh. The ramp-up at the beginning is way too long for it to be an interesting strategy.

Well neither of her methods of cooling down feel good to use. Either you have to spam fireblast over and over again because it only takes away very little heat gain per second or you turn the entire frame off and on again.

vor 5 Stunden schrieb Chewarette:

Ember is quite OK to be real. Armor stripping, damage reduction, AoE, only her 1 is meh and the 4 being heavily affected by LoS sucks - I can understand for some abilities, but for Inferno it doesn't make the slightest sense.

Of course, she falls short if you compared to the other meta choices of planet-nuking warframes, but in term of balance, Ember is a lot more consistent that Saryn, Dante or Mesa. Do not forget she's still powerful enough to deal with the entire starchart + lots of SP content. I didn't have the opportunity to test her in EDA but I'm sure she can be a very decent pick here as well.

Okay but then she doesnt need to increased energy drain during overheat at all. She's not good enough to justify it and that was this way since the rework.

[BalaDeSilver]

8 hours ago, Chewarette said:

There is no situation where this is true tbh. The ramp-up at the beginning is way too long for it to be an interesting strategy.

There are many situations where that is a viable strategy. If you need to spam Inferno to kill stuff because she has little upfront damage, even with Archon Vitality, all of a sudden the heat per second becomes too much to deal with by just casting Fire Blast (assuming you want to keep any semblance of energy management). You can either take the energy drain of being overheated, kill your energy economy by spamming Fire Blast or turn the warframe off and on again. All 3 options feel bad and doesn't have much of a reward for good play.

On paper, Ember is great, she has good DR, armor strip and good DPS, but when you actually play her, you find out that in order for all of that to be true, you must give up all your energy because keeping the good part of Ember means an infinite energy drain per second.

Maybe let's take some lessons from old Ember, because I do genuinely think she was better designed back then, if you only took high level play into consideration (she was way too good at low levels due to WoF and that was a problem, but she was overtuned to that scenario when she was reworked). Maybe you keep around the same drain per second as WoF had, with no ramp up, to Immolate, keep all the bonuses it currently gives and make the fire rings from Inferno stack heat procs because Ember doesn't have that much damage anyways, so maybe heat stacks could be her damage source (I am well aware Archon Vitality exists. It'd still be weaker than Saryn or Mesa.)

By keeping an energy drain on her, it makes her energy economy significantly worse already because it turns off energy per second buffs such as Energy Siphon and Wellspring. Making it so that is a desirable state would be enough to keep her energy in check, especially since Exothermic doesn't stack with Strength. The energy bonus from that is smaller than one would think at first, while still being a worthwhile mod. It is surely better than the current state where turning her off and on again is a viable strategy. Also, I'm suggesting these with the idea that Fire Blast would still cool her off, being a cost to stripping armor.

Also, bring back Accelerant in some way, it was fun. Maybe Fireball applies damage vulnerability to fire on whatever it hits. That'd be cool.

[Chewarette]

4 hours ago, Drachnyn said:

Well neither of her methods of cooling down feel good to use.

And just like that, a full armor removal ability is something that feels "bad" to use somehow

37 minutes ago, BalaDeSilver said:

There are many situations where that is a viable strategy. If you need to spam Inferno to kill stuff

Then you're fighting against level 20 enemies and hence you don't even need her 2. If you need to use 20 Infernos to kill enemies, it means using her 3 beforehand is required anyway as it's high level enemies.

I have no problem against SP enemies. Sure, not level cap, but who the hell cares about balancing stuff around level cap ?

I can't think of any situation where you need to spam your 4 without ever having to use 3. Only low level S#&$ where her 2 is not required.

Edited May 10 by Chewarette

[Drachnyn]

vor 4 Minuten schrieb Chewarette:

And just like that, a full armor removal ability is something that feels "bad" to use somehow

Yes that's exactly what I said...

[BalaDeSilver]

4 minutes ago, Chewarette said:

it means using her 3 beforehand is required anyway as it's high level enemies.

Her 3 is only a full strip when she has full heat... Which you can only get to when you spam 4... 

Also, Murmur, Infested and Corpus exist. Only one of those actually have enough health to live long enough to be a problem, but her 3 isn't a magic tool that solver all her problems, it rather plays into her problems by only being good at a very high penalty that doesn't feel worth to be at because your energy drops faster than you can spam it at very high levels. Especially on Circuit.

[Chewarette]

16 minutes ago, BalaDeSilver said:

Her 3 is only a full strip when she has full heat... Which you can only get to when you spam 4... 

Also, Murmur, Infested and Corpus exist. Only one of those actually have enough health to live long enough to be a problem, but her 3 isn't a magic tool that solver all her problems, it rather plays into her problems by only being good at a very high penalty that doesn't feel worth to be at because your energy drops faster than you can spam it at very high levels. Especially on Circuit.

It's highly unlikely that enemies in range have 100% of remaining armor though.

Heat

PT_IMMOLATION

Ignite On Enemy: Deals 50% of the base damage as  Heat damage per second over 6 seconds (increase by Heat mods, can be refreshed) while causing the target to panic for 4 seconds and stripping up to 50% Armor. On Player: Deals 50% base  Heat damage over 6 seconds and strips up to 50% Armor.

So maintaining your heat between 75 and 99% is usually enough to armor strip everything in range.

Edit: Anyway, I'm not saying Ember couldn't deal with some tweaks, I enjoy her so any benefit would be great. But saying she's underpowered is not true, she's properly balanced, just less OP than the other meta warframes, but is "full level 1000 room cleaning in one ability use" the real balance we're striving for in this game ?

Edited May 10 by Chewarette

[BalaDeSilver]

1 hour ago, Chewarette said:

So maintaining your heat between 75 and 99% is usually enough to armor strip everything in range.

 

You know that's multiplicative with Fire Blast, right? So if Fire Blast would remove 90% of armor, the remaining armor would be 5% because the heat proc removed 50% of the remaining armor. At higher levels, that's decreasing DR from 99% to around 95%. It's not a lot.

I'm not asking her to be the best one button room clearing in the game, just for her gameplay loop to not be self impairing. Either incentivize her to be at max heat or not, because punishing both doesn't feel really good to play as.

[sunderthefirmament]

8 hours ago, Chewarette said:

And just like that, a full armor removal ability is something that feels "bad" to use somehow

It is when it’s Fireblast with its wonky LoS. Or has that been fixed with all the Dante drama?

[Xylena_Lazarow]

Ember's kit features a useless 1, the worst DR skill in the game on 2, the worst armor strip in the game on 3, and a 4 that remains a mechanical and thematic mess (that's a meteor, not an inferno, and it's slow to kill even armor stripped enemies). She's not literally unplayable, but she's outclassed by other frames in every way. Accelerant used to be a ton of fun, gave her unique mechanics and defined her pyro tech theme, but they deleted it and kept useless Fireball to make her a caster mage. Bottom 5 frame, WTB old Ember.

[Birdframe_Prime]

Suggestion from another thread carries over here, every time when Immolation is the core problem.

After some of the recent changes to abilities, a policy that I feel is great is the idea that the ability should give its base effect for the button press, and then an additional effect for building the meter, and then adding a specific effect for lowering the meter.

Managing a resource should have an effect for gaining and an effect for expending it.

So, here's the proposed change from the other thread:

Spoiler

Immolation: Cast to gain 75% damage reduction, affected by Strength up to 90%. Activates Immolation meter. Abilities gain additional damage based on Immolation meter. Immolation meter increases slowly over time and gains a percentage amount for each Ability cast while active.

At maximum Immolation, Ember ignites and gains additional effects on all three of her other abilities that functionally improve her synergy. While at maximum Immolation, Ember's 1, 3 and 4 cost 0 Energy. While at maximum Immolation, Ember begins draining energy at 3 per second and gains an additional 1 energy per second drain for every Ability she casts, affected by Efficiency.

At any time, Ember can press the Ability button again to Vent her accumulated Immolation meter and gain Heat damage on her weapons for a Duration. Additional damage is based on the percentage of the Immolation meter spent, affected by Strength.

Ability buffs at max Immolation:

Fireball: Deals multiplied damage to enemies based on how many existing Heat procs are active on them (maximum 10 procs for calculation)

Inferno: Deals multiplied damage to enemies based on how many existing Heat procs are active on them (maximum 10 procs for calculation)

Fire Blast: Procs 10x Heat Status effects on enemies instead of 1.

The idea being that the level of Immolation meter does not affect the DR. There is no need to have a separate ability to 'vent' Immolation's effects. That the Energy Drain starts low, and can end up high if you abuse it, but it also has that trade-off for having free casts of her 3 and 4 until the drain gets problematic. And before the meter builds up, the Ability spam is necessary.

Then players that really want to push synergies can use the new Venting option to gain weapon damage. Also, my attempt at a budge Accelerant by letting her abilities deal more damage the more on-fire enemies are ^^ 

Other synergies remain, such as Fire Blast's armour strip based on the Immolation meter percentage, her Passive, and the combo function of Fireball too.

Considering that DE are giving us a change in Health, Shields and Armour in the next update, I feel that giving Ember the opportunity to combo up her Passive, Immolation, Fire Blast and the combo on Fireball to be able to deal a potential 240k Heat damage with a 100% status chance straight to the head of an un-armoured Heavy Gunner and a hefty chunk of that to a radius nearby...? That's... that's a worthy change to the frame.

Things I agree with from this and other threads also include removing the charge-time from Fireball, and switching Inferno's animation from the meteor strike to the pillars of fire from World on Fire (no change to the actual Ability, just the animation, because it fits a lot better).

But OP's right. Managing this meter is not in any way rewarding at the moment, and doing so should be.

[keikogi]

On 2024-05-11 at 5:25 AM, Birdframe_Prime said:

Managing a resource should have an effect for gaining and an effect for expending it

I really feel like player frustation with ember heat managiment issue is a visual desing problem and power output problem. Because of these issues the player feels like the mechanic only exists to punish ember and never reward her.

What I mean by this Literally no one cares if he took 100 or 10 damage from as shot, the player has not way to really take note of it becasue inconsistenty damage from attacks ( level sacling makes memorizing break points meaninless ). So the player will only ever the scaking DR if it fails hard enought and get him killded. To compound player frustation its not like 90% dr is something sarticulary hard to come around , citrine ofers it squad wide at arguably lower upkeep and gara has dit too. 

On 2024-05-11 at 5:25 AM, Birdframe_Prime said:

Managing a resource should have an effect for gaining and an effect for expending it.

So, here's the proposed change from the other thread:

Because of that issue of lack of visibility of good states even a good idea like yours would not feel that good to play because outside of looking at damage numbers the player just has to look at the hud elements to ever notice. Audio cues and new particles and ranges for the skills would be necessary for the player to feel good about the new skills. 

For example if instead of meteor shower the full charge version was just 1 massive meteor with no target cap and increased damage ot would feel more impactfull 

The other desing issue is the functional overlap of her 1 and 4 , the one should be pivoted to the ground fire part. Make the fire patch way bigger and make its damage equal to the sum of the fire procs inside só its a set up tool or ground dental tool.

 

[BalaDeSilver]

33 minutes ago, keikogi said:

I really feel like player frustation with ember heat managiment issue is a visual desing problem and power output problem. Because of these issues the player feels like the mechanic only exists to punish ember and never reward her.

There is no visual only problem with Immolate. The main problem comes from being punished for being at high heat and being punished for being at low heat. There is no win scenario for Ember and no amount of feedback would fix that issue.

At anywhere below max heat, you won't have as much DR, damage and armor strip, so it's bad to stay there. At max heat, you won't have energy at all, so it's bad to stay there.

I can see a design idea where the point is to keep at max heat and max heat accretion so whenever you press 3, it resets the energy drain, but you almost instantly go back up to max heat, but even then you'd need an insane energy regen. Something like having Energyze, Nourish, Equilibrium (or shards) and Exothermic, all at once and still coming short of the energy required to keep that loop up. Maybe if you add a Dethcube with Synth Deconstruct, Duplex Bond and Energy Generator as well to top it all off. That is an insane amount of energy regen just so she can do half as much damage as most other caster frames (Volt, Saryn, Gyre, Hydroid, etc) and pale in comparison to weapons platform frames (Yareli, Rhino, Citrine, Voruna, etc).

Honestly, if Immolate really is designed around the loop I just described, it's really not a good design (as if any other situation would make it a good design). Her old design ethos of being a caster weapons platform was really interesting and I believe it's a mostly universal sentiment that we miss it.

Edited May 12 by BalaDeSilver

[Azamagon]

Yes, Immolation is poorly designed and needs a revamp. What @Birdframe_Prime said sounds way more fun, for example.

Also, I genuinely miss the previous Ember, World on Fire with the knockdown augment was so much fun on higher level content, paired with Accelerant for the weapon heat-boosting. Good times. Shame it made low levels a cakewalk.

Overheat, while technically a good ability, is (as already discussed) a poorly balanced ability. Inferno is almost worse though, due to how insanely spammy it is.

If DE could somehow merge old and new Ember, reward managing Overheat without nuking her survivability or armorstripping potential, and finally make her 1 useful - I'd be very happy!

[Raarsi]

Only suggestion I could think of is having her heat gauge simply not drain energy when capped and then have it completely drained on the next cast of Fire Blast or Fireball, with the damage reduction component from Immolation based even more on how much heat gauge is stored.  That way, it still brings the risk/reward element of dropping your damage reduction to unleash bigger damage, and also have that increased damage factor applied to Fireball so it's not an instant helminth slot.

[(PSN)rexis12]

On 2024-05-11 at 12:26 AM, Chewarette said:

It's highly unlikely that enemies in range have 100% of remaining armor though.

That's not how armor removal works in relation to abilities and status Procs, Armor removal from Heat and Corrosive are Multiplicative and will always have a little bit left.

How do you not know this?

 

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, (PSN)rexis12 said:

That's not how armor removal works in relation to abilities and status Procs, Armor removal from Heat and Corrosive are Multiplicative and will always have a little bit left.

How do you not know this?

On 2024-05-10 at 7:26 PM, BalaDeSilver said:

You know that's multiplicative with Fire Blast, right? So if Fire Blast would remove 90% of armor, the remaining armor would be 5% because the heat proc removed 50% of the remaining armor. At higher levels, that's decreasing DR from 99% to around 95%. It's not a lot.

You're not wrong, from this specific perspective, because under the current system it's basically 100% or they've still got millions of effective health. And, as mentioned, it doesn't add flat, so removing percentages will never result in 0 Armour.

However... you can see their point; with the way Ember spreads Heat, enemies won't have 100% armour at nearly any time when they're in range. At most they'll have 50%. And with the changes DE are implementing in Jade Shadows, we're going to make that really matter because enemy armour will have a cap.

On top of that, because Ember's Fireblast's reduction is permanent, not duration based, the other player is actually even more right, because even with just Neutral Strength, two casts at any point (regardless of level of Overheat) is enough to fully strip armour.

So... yeah... There is something to what the other player is saying, even if they're wrong about the maths.

We really just need to fix up Immolation. The rest of her kit is actually not all that bad... if. That's a big If, I know. That If is doing a lot of work. All we can say is that if Immolation can be fixed to make it work with her kit better, then having a sup-par 1st won't matter, having a conditional armour strip won't be a drawback, and having her 4 not be World on Fire won't matter either. 

[BalaDeSilver]

I played this exact Ember build for 30 minutes straight in SP Albrecht Lab Survival opening relics and I have more thoughts:

9 hours ago, BalaDeSilver said:

I can see a design idea where the point is to keep at max heat and max heat accretion so whenever you press 3, it resets the energy drain, but you almost instantly go back up to max heat, but even then you'd need an insane energy regen. Something like having Energyze, Nourish, Equilibrium (or shards) and Exothermic, all at once and still coming short of the energy required to keep that loop up. Maybe if you add a Dethcube with Synth Deconstruct, Duplex Bond and Energy Generator as well to top it all off. That is an insane amount of energy regen just so she can do half as much damage as most other caster frames (Volt, Saryn, Gyre, Hydroid, etc) and pale in comparison to weapons platform frames (Yareli, Rhino, Citrine, Voruna, etc).

1 - Her armor reduction doesn't matter at all (at least not against Murmur). It still has such a problem with LoS, there was a Zephyr in the group and I couldn't remove armor from the Mechs because everything was either ragdolled or behind waist-height railings, preventing me from stripping them altogether. Maybe this is fixed with Jade Shadows, but I can only comment on what I can play here, and I couldn't strip as effectively as I wanted.

2 - I could consistently maintain a state in which I could cast 3 and it took less than half a second for the meter to fill back up to 90%, and the problems I found weren't even with energy (since I had such an overabundance of it due to the setup I described), but in the fact that no matter how much you hate them, Nullifiers and Magnetic procs still exist and they will still cancel your abilities. Due to me never having the meter below 90%, even a single frame of 0 energy would cancel Immolate, making me restart the whole loop of casting Inferno over 10 times to get high heat accretion. Maybe that can work with some yellow shards, but the weekly reset hasn't happened for the week yet, so I'm all outta yellows to shorten the time it takes to accumulate accretion.

3 - Ember doesn't do damage. Really. Since Fireball is but a tickle on enemies and Inferno has such low upfront damage and long intervals between its damage ticks, I was barely dealing damage with abilities. What I was doing, however, is sustaining the entire firepower of a Rogue Voidrig on myself without losing even 10% of my health (99% total DR with Adaptation). She is surprisingly tanky with this setup, more than I ever though she'd be, but all the damage I cold deal came from my Bo Prime, and even then it was really low single target (but insane AoE, which is Bo's whole appeal, plus Inferno has good range). If you want to build Ember for nuking, this build idea ain't it, but I did find it fun to play her as a tank.

4 - That was surprisingly stressful as well. I couldn't forget for one second that I had Immolate active, to occasionally pres 3 and then 4 several times. Running after energy was crucial to keep the combo up. It's fun for a 30 min run, but playing that for much longer might prove very tiring, especially if stripping were a requirement, since you'd have to cast 3, then spam 4 a couple times before casting 3 again.

5 - I still had fun. I want to stress this, Ember isn't a Caliban, or a pre-rework Hydroid. She's closer to pre-rework Inaros, where she's strong in her own way, not even close to being a bad Warframe, strength-wise, but she is very unfun and not even one-noted. More like zero-noted. She isn't rewarding as she could be, and that's a shame. Just a smidge more upfront damage from her, maybe simply changing Inferno to tick more often, or changing Immolate's damage increase a little bit would suffice in that front, then completely changing the meter mechanic to be less punishing and giving it a clear gameplay purpose that doesn't create a lose-lose situation for the player. Also, double Fireball's range and napalm duration, make it a full on Kuva Ogris kinda fireball with the weapon augment, without the hold to cast. I'd still subsume Fireball away, but that'd create a B mod page where I don't do that and focus on Fireball.

Those are my new thoughts on Ember. She's definitely not the worst, that title goes to Caliban, but she is the antithesis of a fun Warframe to play.

[Xylena_Lazarow]

13 hours ago, BalaDeSilver said:

I still had fun... but she is very unfun

I agree with most everything you wrote but this had me laugh.

Competitively, Ember is outclassed across the board. Casually, she's unfun sweaty micromanagement.

If that doesn't scream "bad Warframe" I dunno what does. Sure unlike Caliban you can at least tell what Ember is supposed to do... but she's really bad at it.

[BalaDeSilver]

7 hours ago, Xylena_Lazarow said:

Casually, she's unfun sweaty micromanagement.

This is what I meant. She's sweaty, I had to constantly worry about my energy, but for short bursts that can be fun. Anything over 30m survival would most likely tire me out, tho...

[Venus-Venera]

vor 9 Stunden schrieb Xylena_Lazarow:

I agree with most everything you wrote but this had me laugh.

Competitively, Ember is outclassed across the board. Casually, she's unfun sweaty micromanagement.

If that doesn't scream "bad Warframe" I dunno what does. Sure unlike Caliban you can at least tell what Ember is supposed to do... but she's really bad at it.

protea is actually even worse. but even there I can spam their strange skills with new arcane with free energy cost. Maybe someone likes to play something like that on a console... but I don't do such nonsense on a PC.
and too many warframes have lousy gameplay. The next candidate would be Ocatvia, where you simply have to keep 4 skills on CD like a bot without tactics, sense or understanding. and also jump like in a mental asylum so that the buffs are activated?

Well, all I can think of is a bunch of swear words. I don't even want to know what the "designers" were thinking...

But maybe they hired super cheap designers who were kicked out after Blizz D3 flop. Because back then I often saw cool messages in the chat like "1111111132344323222112121221321321". do you know what that means? yes... macros. but shh! Write quietly and don't tell anyone... anyone could write a macro, activate it and then play with foot. and that's not sarcasm or a joke. that was really true!

hopefully warframe won't sink that low...