Naramon and survivability

[Agall]

Naramon is something I'll look at every so often and think, "maybe its viable now", something the recent adjustment has triggered again (making its +damage% apply to melee).

I've been primarily a melee only player for the last 11 years and I've noticed that I almost always have the highest %damage taken. This is an obvious result of being right in the face of the enemy, who would otherwise miss 99% of their shots like a Stormtrooper. At the higher end, this gets even more complicated with every enemy having overguard and some sort of AoE mechanic. This usually spirals into spamming Unairu or Vazarin immunity to just survive.

Naramon still has one major issue; its a melee focused school with no defensive enhancements, where melee builds take the most damage.

This is especially problematic for some Warframes of importance with melee focused builds, Warframes like Excalibur, Kullervo, and Inaros (kind of).

-Excalibur has no innate mitigation features which requires intervention past health/armor/shields to survive Steel Path. Partly due to Slash Dash's health only immunity.

-Kullervo does have an overguard mechanic, but it can be difficult to maintain immunity with due to its short immunity period that makes him surprisingly easy to die with at the high end.

-Inaros simply has no gate to prevent him from getting 1 shotted. I've had this be a problem in normal missions, a few instances of Sortie disruption missions and getting randomly 1 shotted.

I believe there's a few simple ways to change this with various impacts to the meta, the absolute requirement involving some sort of melee gameplay:

-Add the Duviri Decree, "gain overguard on melee" which I've found to provide sufficient intervals of immunity to survive long circuit runs. This would allow Excalibur to better manage shield uptime, Kullervo to better manage overguard uptime, and Inaros to not get randomly 1 shotted (hopefully).

-Grant a short immunity transferring into Warframe that's extended by performing melee kills or add it as a feature to Naramon's #2. Something like a 1.3-2.5 second immunity transferring in that's extended by 1.5 seconds or so up to 5 seconds upon getting a melee kill. This would allow Warframes like Excalibur to regain shields and Kullervo to rebuild overguard during this Window before engaging in the next battle. If you're not killing fast enough to maintain the immunity, you'd then have to reapply it like with Unairu and Vazarin's fixed durations. Restricting the immunity to performing a finisher with Naramon's #2 would definitely be balanced, but potentially too restrictive with how buggy finishers still are. It would also make any -finisher riven completely worthless with Naramon 😄. Even if this is only health immunity, it would at least meet most of its requirements.

-Add a pillage like overguard/shield/health/armor drain feature to Naramon's #1. Its an idea, but I think it would change the meta too much. It would likely out perform Unairu's strip so non melee builds could be incentivized to use it.

-Maybe a combination of these buffs? Provide #1 with a strip feature and #2 with an immunity/overguard. That would be, uh, quite powerful, but us masters of the Old Ways would be happy.

[kerozen666]

While i agree that Naramon absolutly should be something else than the combo counter school, i don't think it should necessarly be buffed with defense. Giving it a defensive boost would only be a band aid solution for a bigger problem, which is actually having to tank hits that even made people consider that need. 

The real issue is that enemy damage grow indefinetly and  extremely fast, and exceed the manageable amount in standard SP missions. This post and your story is a decent case for why enemy damage scaling should be capped. We should not have to go through hoops to survive in basic melee. The swordsman frame should be able to stand on his own in melee. And a cap would not just help naramon, it would help almost every single build in existance since the survivability pressure will be a lot more manageable and not just encourage nuking or tanks.

Now tho, if your changes are to be considered over a cap, all i'm going to say is: please don't put more barrier between inaros' health bar and damage. we just had the longstanding overguard problem solved for energy, let's not create another one

[KRYPTR0N]

On 2024-09-03 at 9:43 PM, kerozen666 said:

While i agree that Naramon absolutly should be something else than the combo counter school, i don't think it should necessarly be buffed with defense. Giving it a defensive boost would only be a band aid solution for a bigger problem, which is actually having to tank hits that even made people consider that need. 

The real issue is that enemy damage grow indefinetly and  extremely fast, and exceed the manageable amount in standard SP missions. This post and your story is a decent case for why enemy damage scaling should be capped. We should not have to go through hoops to survive in basic melee.

Youre absolutely right. I'd rather fight enemies that are actually mechanically difficult and interesting than just something that does a ton of damage. As an excalibur main, i've had so many survivability issues and have tried so many things to remedy it that its getting tiring. I just wanna be slishy slashy ninja sword guy man

[Agall]

1 minute ago, KRYPTR0N said:

Youre absolutely right. I'd rather fight enemies that are actually mechanically difficult and interesting than just something that does a ton of damage. As an excalibur main, i've had so many survivability issues and have tried so many things to remedy it that its getting tiring. I just wanna be slishy slashy ninja sword guy man

Survivability on Excalibur is something I solved with a properly built MOA and Unairu/Vazarin. Prime gives me the privilege of running Vazarin without consequence, Umbra really needing Unairu with the knockdown immunity it provides. Either way, they both work, and I ran Unairu for years before switching to Vazarin only a couple months ago.

[KRYPTR0N]

6 minutes ago, Agall said:

Survivability on Excalibur is something I solved with a properly built MOA and Unairu/Vazarin. Prime gives me the privilege of running Vazarin without consequence, Umbra really needing Unairu with the knockdown immunity it provides. Either way, they both work, and I ran Unairu for years before switching to Vazarin only a couple months ago.

The knockdowns are no problem for me. but i keep getting one shot out of nowhere or by things that i notice too late like blitz eximus or whatever those white rings on the floor are in the sanctum and as stated before, slash dash only has health i-frames so those can really catch me off guard. Stacking adaptation on top of 1000+ armor and even adding quick thinking has not helped with no getting one shot so i dont even bother with that

[Agall]

1 hour ago, KRYPTR0N said:

The knockdowns are no problem for me. but i keep getting one shot out of nowhere or by things that i notice too late like blitz eximus or whatever those white rings on the floor are in the sanctum and as stated before, slash dash only has health i-frames so those can really catch me off guard. Stacking adaptation on top of 1000+ armor and even adding quick thinking has not helped with no getting one shot so i dont even bother with that

I have no problems with level cap as Excalibur in my setup. The only times I get downed is from my own fault, usually its me just deferring going operator to hit space bar twice at the ground.

[Zakkhar]

On 2024-09-03 at 7:54 PM, Agall said:

Kullervo does have an overguard mechanic, but it can be difficult to maintain immunity with due to its short immunity period that makes him surprisingly easy to die with at the high end.

Overguard makes you take more damage because it doesnt have any DR (like shield and health do) and doesnt cut the damage like shield gate does. Although unsure if that damage counts on the Mission end screen. Evasion/shield gate/rolling guard tanking may be better idea. Other/additional option is having very strong CC Status spread all around you (cold, rad, heat, lifted), either by priming yourself or via Companion. Or just play Rev/Slamkong and take no damage.

I do not run lvl cap, so I am aware my position may be useless to you.

 

Edited September 10 by Zakkhar

[Agall]

25 minutes ago, Zakkhar said:

Other/additional option is having very strong CC Status spread all around you (cold, rad, heat, lifted), either by priming yourself or via Companion. Or just play Rev/Slamkong and take no damage.

I likely haven't explained fully how important my MOA companion is since it provides this, on top of its shield buffer precept that everyone uses on sentinels/MOAs. Between standard shield mechanics with a MOA and Vazarin/Unairu as a backup, its plenty sufficient to play level cap and any content. I also know its not very skill dependent since I can run the same build on a controller when playing on my Ally X as an actual handheld and not docked with an eGPU.