Dev Workshop: Koumei & The Five Fates - Companion Reworks

[(XBOX)Roaring Toad]

Few things that should be fixed/addressed

Behaviour presets should be available for all companions, not just beasts. Same goes for new loot mods. Either everyone gets it or no one should get it otherwise you're just creating more disparity between companions rather than fixing it. 

Vacuum needs to be removed from companions as a whole and made into a accessability setting that can be toggled and adjusted to suit a players current build/needs and free up a slot on basically all companion builds. Seriously. it's been like 10 years, when is it finally going to happen? If not now then when? 

Sentinels should not require a mod just to be allowed to fire their weapon, that's a complete waste of a mod slot. 

Nothing for Venari? 

 

Edited yesterday at 02:17 PM by (XBOX)Roaring Toad

[GreyEnneract]

No Dethcube laser buff?
That thing is probably the worst ability in the game lmao

[Jarriaga]

Interested in looking at new companion weapon stats, but I'm very surprised Deconstructor was left as a Helios-exclusive weapon. 

[[DE]Momaw]

On 2024-09-27 at 11:09 PM, (PSN)Rayzoric-Umbra said:

My question is, what happens to those of us who still own Helminth Ferocity? Are we losing our mod? Cause I personally love my Helminth Ferocity and we were allowed to keep it since transmute mods couldn't be restored. 

There has been no discussion about deliberately removing this, but at the same time, deprecated content is not supported either.

 

On 2024-09-27 at 11:19 PM, Goldy said:

Can we get some clarification on the following:
Will Smeeta have an increased chance of proccing Loyal Retriever, or is it 13% like with all other beast companions?

The Retriever mods are beast-agnostic, all of them have the same probabilities.

 

On 2024-09-27 at 11:25 PM, mrkwabo said:

Am i missing something or do the new smeeta buffs only add up to 80%? Looks like 2 buffs are missing or the percentages might be off

Sorry about that, as noted in the disclaimer things are moving quickly so there might be errors 😅

Corrected list:

• 25% chance of Reinforced Shield
• 25% chance of Instant Reload (re-rolled if your current weapon doesn't need to reload)
• 20% chance of Free Ability Casts
• 10% chance of Bonus Critical Chance buff
• 10% chance of Bonus Affinity. (Affinity bonus has been increased to 3x)
• 10% chance of gaining a rare resource

 

On 2024-09-27 at 11:33 PM, (PSN)Vorenoxx said:

Can we get at least a toggleable option to see companion damage numbers? Would love to see more feedback from actual numbers so i know im doing something correctly when modding my companions, moreso with these upcoming changes!

It's a fair idea. Being discussed, but we're a little concerned that pet damage numbers might crowd out the damage numbers generated by the player which are probably more important. Either way, not a thing for the Koumei update but not completely off the table either.

 

On 2024-09-27 at 11:45 PM, DeltaPangaea said:

Could we get Spare Parts extended to MOAs as well as Hounds?

On 2024-09-28 at 12:27 AM, (XBOX)elementXGHILLIE said:

If Spare parts don't work on Moas, I'm convinced y'all just forgot they exist.

[Spare Parts] works with all Robotic pets which is Sentinels, Hounds, and MOAs.

[[DE]Momaw]

On 2024-09-28 at 4:58 AM, Yulfan said:

Yep, you totally forgot Venari

Just to be clear, Venari also gets a moddable set of Claws like all other Beasts, which means her damage is now SIGNIFICANTLY higher when modded.

[-Minibeave-]

Would love to see the new Beast companion loot mods be useable on MOA companions. They could really use some love, even with the Precept updates, I feel like they're still really behind.

[Tesla_Reloaded]

Does this rework going to include a fix for Dethcube's Vaporize? This mod causes Dethcube to get stuck after a number of usages, in this case Dethcube just stops doing anything.

[doodstamper]

Haundt get,s buf it those not need 

Sahasa get,s buf it needs so it will be more viable

If coolant leak works with manifold bond it will be interesting wat it those for sentinel side of things but mostly for carrier 

The moa maybe getting buf 2 if hard engage works with manifold bond 

But i don,t see dis rework having much of in pack in the mata

[Yulfan]

il y a une heure, [DE]Momaw a dit :

Just to be clear, Venari also gets a moddable set of Claws like all other Beasts, which means her damage is now SIGNIFICANTLY higher when modded.

Oh nice, a response. Thank for the confirmation.

But a lot about Venari is left in the dark, and it's worrisome.

I pointed it out in my previous comment that the stat buffs other kavats are to receive will make them outperform the actual exalted kavat. But after reflexion, i realized that it's not really relevant because it's only for auto-attacks, and we know Venari doesn't rely on that to do damages but rather on Snare, the move she perform in Attack stance (and by default if something is subsumed over Venari).

But then, what about Snare itself? By default, it does 5 hits inflicting 350 slash damages, but only damages and elemental status mods can affect it. It has 0% crit chances unmoddable. Will it still be the case after the update? Especially since we tend to equip crit chance on Venari anyway for Tenacious Bond, but it's still a dead stat for her currently. Can it not receive a buff by unlocking crit chances to make it more relevant?

It is also not affected by Swipe (duplicate the attack on 4 targets), which is a real letdown. Same thing with Shields, since Venari has none, hindering heavily her survivability (i know Link Redirection is a thing, i use it myself, but it's still laughable). And overall, could you make more mods and precepts work with Venari, like for example all the Bond mods that reduce respawn time? Because currently, absolutely none of them has any effect on Venari.

And what about IA? Will Venari be able to equip the new stance mods? Will it change her IA like other kavats? Because currently, Venari's IA is deeply messed up. When nothing is subsumed on it and you can use freely the stances, Venari usage of stances moves (Snare, Swipe, Heal) are very random and unreliable. Paradoxically, subsuming something else on Venari will make her perform better because it force her to spam Snare again and again. Have you planned how Venari will interact with these new AI?

As i said, we actually know absolutely nothing (minus the fact that she will receive her own moddable Claws like others) on how the Beast companions changes will affect the sole and only Exalted Beast companion in the game. Because right now, everything suggests that all other Beast companions will outperform Venari in one way or another.

Edited yesterday at 05:13 PM by Yulfan

[(XBOX)elementXGHILLIE]

1 hour ago, [DE]Momaw said:

[Spare Parts] works with all Robotic pets which is Sentinels, Hounds, and MOAs.

Thank you for the response!
Any other MOA changes we could expect? I feel like they need a buff in utility. The precept buffs are great, but I never thought their CC needed buffing. 
Hounds are better with damage, sentinels have more utility, beasts are better in both ways.
I feel like people who use Moas, myself included, don't use them because they are the best, but because we are partly attached.

I made a post a little while ago, that if we don't get major MOA changes, add a precept that allows us to equip a sentinel as well and that sentinel shares the MOAs HP, uses the same weapon but does % less damage, and gets 2 mod slots. The mod slots is the utility buff, meaning we can run the niche sentinel mods and not be punished. 

[(PSN)TwilightGrim]

How will this effect the summonable companions from abilities that you don't directly interact with like inaros sand cats and nekros secondary summoned beasts?

[Krisprime256]

I get what your doing as i love my smeeta kavat but i also run other companions as well though i feel my beloved smeeta isnt going to be special anymore with this nerf and or change to charm if i really need resources a booster is a much better option in my opinion vs a smeeta i honestly believe it is because some tenno may not have been able to produce/farm one as i did and they are upset because of RNG. Now the question is why punish others for having one? Thats not fair. I am very sad with this change and it is ruining the individuality of that pet/companion. And tbh the smeeta is probably going to be the least used companion now in Warframe as some of Warframes content creators have said the same thing and think the smeeta will be useless now. Please dont nerf.

[Einheri.]

There is no need to force the pet to run ahead.
1) The pet will constantly die because it will be attacked first.
2) It will distract the enemies, make them twitch, this will complicate aimed fire.

Just behind only.

think about it carefully

[Malurth]

Quote

For some players, collecting loot is the most important part of any mission so anything that contributes to giving you MORE loot is so important that no alternatives can compete. Our intent is that opening the resource boosting part of Charm to all Beasts will increase your freedom in pet selection.

but this is just keeping the smeeta problem and making it less bad...your selection of 10 different mini smeetas, but no moas/hounds/sentinels for you if you care about loot?

pets 2.0 expectation/hope: charm loot deleted, major companion rebalance, tons of variety and viable options

pets 2.0 reality: loot panzer vulp replaces smeeta

[Traumtulpe]

On 2024-09-29 at 1:54 PM, Solarmatt said:

Really hoping you have a look at the Vasca Kavat, they really need some love. At least increasing Draining Bite's Heal to something decent would help

...I legitimately forgot they even exist. That's how bad they are.

[TTraw]

I feel like companion's precepts weren't rebalanced well enough.

A lot of these buffs seem "eh" at best and a lot of the underperforming mods just weren't looked at, like at all.

Because of this, I fear that everyone will just end up using Panzer with Charm 2.0, because he clearly seems like the best beast option all around right now.

The rest of the rework seems great though!

[Halo]

4 hours ago, [DE]Momaw said:

There has been no discussion about deliberately removing this, but at the same time, deprecated content is not supported either.

Any information based on the Helminth Chargers getting any semblance of a base stat bump? 

Still bummed they're getting a damage nerf, a mod-bug fix, and just tweaking Trample.

[(PSN)XeroMovement]

Since it’s companions 2.0 can we get a Vigor mod for companions?

[Floofasus]

Quite disheartening to see the Helminth Charger done dirty like this. I’ve had my beloved Snausage for many years and have quietly hoped that they would see some TLC to smooth out the rougher edges, but this change really doesn’t alleviate many of their issues. The ‘updates’ the Charger is receiving for the big and long, long, long awaited companion rework are... a long-needed bugfix relating to the Strain mod set, occasional corrosive procs, and an overall reduction to its base damage. Ouch. Meanwhile we have a sentinel weapon being boosted from a measly 35 to a whopping 500 base damage, with the option to equip a variety of the player's weapon mods and even its very own riven mod.

The new Posture mods seem interesting, but with any other companion able to equip them as well, I’m not sure how the Charger is meant to keep up with them. Only 5% status chance is abysmal, and 10% critical chance isn’t exactly stellar; it feels like a roundabout way to increase the Charger's stats, as if we're expected to rely on Trample to increase them rather than simply increasing them outright like the rest of the companions, forcing an extra, unnecessary step in the process that makes survivability and damage output more unreliable than it needs to be, making an already tight build tighter just for a mod that periodically gives a semi-random improvement. The Charger already struggles to keep up with other beast companions when you consider the utility they bring to the table with their various precept mods, and leaving its base stats untouched without the use of Trample to boost several of them (randomly, dependent upon the number of enemies hit, and at the cost of a mod slot, too) means it can’t even make use of several of the more prominent Bond mods, which just makes it feel even worse, because its combat capability is lacking and it isn’t really even suitable for use as a source of buffs or utility. Trample now offers some crowd control and damage on its own, but Proboscis remains untouched and effectively useless.

I understand that with the new Posture mods, the potential for the Charger to deal too much damage is a concern when you take into account the additional benefits the Strain set provides, but the Strain set is fairly difficult to acquire, fairly expensive to purchase, and already occupies two mod slots on your Charger, a mod slot on your melee weapon, and another mod slot on the Warframe itself, which is quite the steep cost for the fairly mediocre benefits they offer -- especially when you consider what they're likely to be replacing elsewhere on your build.

Quote

Strain set effect: Maggots are now created with their AI fully aware, which removes a pause they needed to wake up.
Strain Eruption: Now always applies Corrosive status to enemies in range when Maggots explode
Strain Fever: Fixed this effect not actually giving extra damage per cyst, was stuck at 40%. Now properly gives +40% damage per each cyst, and has a HUD buff for visibility.

- Strain Consume occupies a Warframe mod slot for only a whopping 4% of your missing health restored every 25 seconds or so, and only for maggots which die within 5m of your Warframe. Maggots already spread out and latch onto random enemies, and now that companions will be more aggressive, what are the odds that your maggots end up spread across the room, well away from you? Combine that with a smallish radius and very little control over where they'll burst, and it offers very little. I worry that the healing aspect may as well not exist with how little you receive and how infrequently you receive it, and you’ll be left chasing them in the hopes of getting a very unimpressive 4%, maybe 8% of your missing health back if you want the mod to actually do anything for you. At the very least, make it maximum health, or give it an armor bonus, or something, because dropping a Warframe mod for this is hard to justify. Even if you happened to catch all 8 maggots, which seems unlikely, you're only looking at getting 32% of your health back, which isn't even all that much in such a fast-paced game when you take into consideration how slowly they spawn.

- Strain Eruption deals 4% of an enemy’s current health within 8m, with 8 maggots potentially overlapping to deal a total of 32% -- but you have no control over which enemies your maggots latch onto, meaning the damage they deal is completely unpredictable and, when they attach to weaker enemies, not even particularly reliable, as it’s also reduced by the enemy’s damage reduction. And that’s assuming the best case scenario where the enemy targeted by the maggot is in pristine condition and at max health, too. The one new addition the Strain set received is applying Corrosive, but, again, given the fast-paced gameplay of Warframe, this addition seems... okay? It provides very little benefit when the maggots tend to spread out rather than focus on one particular enemy, meaning that you end up with a bunch of scattered enemies with 1 or 2 Corrosive procs on them lasting for only a few seconds. Which, again, I worry will be made worse by the maggots spawning from the Charger, which is now liable to be running off, away from you, to engage enemies. That's just not enough armor strip to be noteworthy, and it's going to run out before the next batch of maggots spawn, so they don't even get the benefit of reduced armor when they themselves deal damage, and because they'll be elsewhere, you probably won't be right next to them to capitalize on any weakness it does create. Combine that with the slow ‘recast’ of 8 new maggots spawning and it’s honestly rather difficult to take advantage of this effect unless you’re actively grouping enemies and happen to get lucky and pull in the ones that have maggots on them for the most overlap. In that scenario, it's much more usable, but it still only provides sporadic bursts of damage and armor strip that you don't have very much control over. 

- Strain Fever increases your Charger’s damage by 30% for each cyst growing on it, according to the mod in game, rather than the 40% it was implied to have meant to be here. Assuming it’s being increased/fixed and functioning properly, the issue still remains, albeit to a lesser degree -- this damage buff slowly increases until the cysts burst, the buff resets, and the process repeats, but this means that for the majority of Strain Fever’s duration, you’re still getting considerably less damage than you get from Maul, which is active at all times and increases damage by 330%. Problem is, even at the maximum number of cysts, the damage increase the Charger receives is 320%, and unless I'm mistaken, this only lasts for one second before the cysts burst and the buff resets. That is long enough to possibly attack one time, if an enemy is nearby. In the worst case scenario, this is practically nothing, and in the best case scenario, if it lasts for the entirety of the 8th cyst's growth cycle rather than activating once it's fully grown, it still only lasts about three seconds, which is... not really much better. You essentially never receive the full bonus, because it won't effectively reach that to any degree that allows you to make use of it. Between that, and the cost to fit 4 mods across your Charger, your Warframe, and your melee weapon, that's a lot just to get a worse version of Maul that's only at its peak strength for one second.

- Strain Infection suffers from the same issue as Strain Fever, while increasing your own melee critical damage as opposed to increasing the Charger's melee damage. At max, you receive a sizable 160% boost, but again, see the above, where you only receive this bonus for a very brief period, and otherwise receive a lower bonus that already slowly increases until it resets. It's... better than Strain Fever, but not by a lot.

In essence, it costs you 4 mod slots across your Charger, your Warframe, and your melee weapon just to get:

- A worse version of Maul that never quite surpasses it and almost matches it for only a few seconds.

- A somewhat worse version of Organ Shatter that only surpasses it for eight or so seconds, averaging at about 60% bonus critical damage vs Organ Shatter's 90%.  

- A rather unreliable source of healing that only replenishes missing health, making an already situational and slow heal even more unlikely to benefit you.

- A rather unreliable source of radial damage that could potentially provide some decent, but very occasional, slow armor strip.

I can live with the damage reduction to the Charger. I’m not terribly happy about it, even more so the lack of any boost to its other stats, but what I’m most concerned for is the state of the Strain mod set. It’s quite disheartening to see the lack of attention toward it, doubly so when it was promised attention previously and never received it. The Strain set bonus is, more than any numerical benefit, most notable for making your companion larger over time. That's it. It... isn’t great. If I have a full mod set specific to this companion equipped spread across half of my loadout, I’d hope it would provide a very solid benefit for myself, my companion, or both, but as it stands, I weaken my build somewhat just because I love having a big lad running around with me in missions.

Some of this could be alleviated if there was any synergy with the maggots and Nidus, who the Charger shares a heavy thematic overlap with and shares a store bundle with. It’s quite disappointing that the Strain mods don’t interact with Nidus’ abilities, because having maggots spawn and no way to detonate them yourself really does just feel lackluster. If the Strain maggots acted similarly to the maggots spawned by Nidus’ Ravenous, for example, and you didn’t have to wait for them to burst on their own, but could cast Virulence on them and force them to burst, you could at least somewhat control when they heal you, deal damage, and apply corrosive procs -- but even that is still reliant on their lengthy respawn time and where they run off to. Not to mention, with how small they are, how difficult it is to see which enemies they’re attacking.

The entirety of the mod set combines to enhance the set bonus, but the bonuses are significantly worse than their counterparts until the very end of the cyst growth cycle, at which point they’re still lower, but at least provide more reasonable, but very, very brief benefits. They don’t need to give stacks of mutation like Nidus’ Ravenous maggots do, but at the very least make them prefer to target heavier enemies, and/or deal a percentage of damage based on the chosen enemy’s maximum health, rather than current health, or make them spawn more frequently and change the buffs given by Strain Fever and Infection to linger for X seconds after reaching 8 cysts rather than completely resetting one second later.

...

Bit more long-winded than I intended for that to be. Otherwise, I think the changes to companions look interesting. I don’t know how I feel about the varied base stats between the different companions as opposed to keeping them all the same, but relying on the subspecies to provide 'flavor' via precept mods, but I’m not opposed to it. I’m waiting to see how they all work out, and how they interact with the Bond mods and so forth to form an opinion on that. The sentinel weapon changes are exciting and I’m very eager to mess around with those. I do agree with several people who have voiced their concerns about how sentinels still require a mod to use their weapon, making their builds quite tight, especially with the still semi-recent Bond mods, whereas talk of beasts is frequently mentioning lessening the build requirements by adding a moddable weapon to free up slots for more utility/survivability and so on. Outside of stealth gameplay, where you don’t want your companion shooting to alert the enemy, I can’t see a reason not to allow sentinels to attack without the need of a mod. If you do still want to keep that feature, perhaps a 'Posture' mod slot on the sentinel or their weapons that allow you to add a ‘Posture’ mod to determine range of engagement. The addition of a pacifist mod that would prevent them from attacking, or the absence of the ‘Posture’ mod altogether would prevent it from attacking, but also free up a single slot on the sentinel, making building them slightly more forgiving.

Either way, I'm quite pleased with the overall direction of the changes.

[LittleLeoniePrime]

7 hours ago, [DE]Momaw said:

The Retriever mods are beast-agnostic, all of them have the same probabilities.

any plans to skip the "beast only" step this time and go straight to "all companions"? a lot of peoples feedback here seems to be that we don't want this to be another Vacuum situation.

[(XBOX)GarnetReaper716]

I have a question, does the new beast mod work with Venari and can they stack if u are using khora and a beast companion and both have the lucky mod?

[Wolvjavin]

So just reviewing the weapons... this did nothing to really dethrone or increase variety of sentinel weapons. I give a pass on Artax, starting sentinel weapon and all. But the rest? Especially the Primes? This is lackluster. Vulcax is the only one that keeps up with it DPS wise. However Verglas doubles as a primer and pairs well with Contagious Bond to the point that it will always maintain a better KPM. Right now nothing primes like Verglas Prime. Nothing out DPSes Verglas Prime. Nothing out utilities Verglas Prime when paired with bond mods.

I'm hoping they at least buff the other prime versions more to compete. Like Deth Machine Gun Prime should not be worst in every single stat that matters. Sure it has a 25% higher magazine capacity, but it's going through triple the ammunition for the same result.

DE if you see this please compare the other guns to Verglas Prime and buff with it as a baseline. Right now this does basically nothing to change the sentinel weapon meta, with Vulcax being the only viable one that at best keeps up, and at worst has less utility.

[_Anise_]

11 hours ago, Jarriaga said:

Interested in looking at new companion weapon stats, but I'm very surprised Deconstructor was left as a Helios-exclusive weapon.

the text "Previously: Helios Sentinel attacks" now "Increased the seeking cone" ... maybe?

anyway some interesting bits pulled from twitter, this is official (PabloMakes/status/1840802325599846729,PabloMakes/status/1840805158642491556)

• Venari DOES indeed get a "claw" despite it not being listed in the dev workshop post.
• Venari can't equip lucky catch. "we aren't that goofy" (you are sometimes!)

[Adammakesfilm]

Could we make vacuum/fetch just a default part of a Warframe or Companion, it's such a necessary mod so I already start having one of my companion slots taken from it

[DawnoftheWhiteFury]

12 hours ago, [DE]Momaw said:

Just to be clear, Venari also gets a moddable set of Claws like all other Beasts, which means her damage is now SIGNIFICANTLY higher when modded.

Is she going to be given shields without needing Link Shields finally? She currently completely lacks them.

Edited 18 hours ago by DawnoftheWhiteFury