Frost: 2/5/2014

[thegooseking]

Then the point has failed, because you are flipping one monkey for another. If DE wants things to be balanced, player choice should be the only deciding factor of who to bring and why. Frames are not competing well against each other as of late, and instead of bringing those falling behind up to par, they lower the bar all around by nerfing the top dogs to lessen the required work needed on the lower tier frames.

 

Frost's nerf does little to help the balance of the game over all. If they want to have better Frame rotation in the community, they should make the sucky frames better, not the good frames sucky.

You can't do that, though. If you bring all the frames up, then not only is that more work than bringing one frame down, but it also has the knock-on effect of having to rebalance all the content in the game, which is even more work.

 

As someone else said somewhere, it's the principle of least change.

[Kishward]

Stands to reason it was changed because snow globe became the sole crutch needed to advance beyond DE's "balanced zone". Meaning enemies above level 40.

 

I'm not saying the change was the right one, it just seems that would be the largest factor in considering the reason for snow globe's change.

 

As has been made apparent in many threads already, defending the pod from way overscaled enemies was what made globe so powerful, but taken in context of balanced content, it was uneccesarily powerful. 

 

The solution is corrected/balanced scaling of unlimited defense/survival, IMO.

 

No clue how DE could accomplish this though..

[Ryme]

I think Snow Globe could've been balanced by just reducing transparency to 0% while inside. If the complaint is that people could just sit inside and kill everything in a room, well removing transparency solves that problem. You would still be able to shoot out from inside the Globe, but good luck hitting anything when you can't see what you're shooting at.

 

Since DE, like most developers, is unlikely to revert "official" changes, I think Ice Wave should be replaced with another ability.

 

For now, I'll call it "Encase"

 

How it works is that it'll be a targeted ability that you can only cast on other friendly targets (units and objects). It'll place them in a block of ice that will render them immobile, but immune to damage for a duration. The encased target can still rotate, shoot outwards with ranged weapons, and cast their own abilities. The ability can be ended prematurely by the "encased" target performing a melee attack. When the effect is ended, it shatters and explodes, freezing or knocking down enemies in a radius around it, maybe doing some damage too.

 

This will function primarily as a defensive support ability that a Frost can't cast on themselves. It will however, return functionality to them in defense, mobile defense, and even rescue/escort missions. It will also promote synergy and teamwork with other players.

Edited February 6, 2014 by Ryme

[eldorel]

Well, its ruined if the loot tables at wave 30 are completely different than at 100.  Off the top of my head I can't remember. 

 

But if wave 30, for example, becomes the threshold goal to reach...then whats broken?  You simply don't need to wade through 100 waves of easy mode play to get to the good stuff. 

 

If it becomes 30, again for example, then the new endgame for defnese simply becomes 30 and everyone is on equal footing for it.  Provided that the loot tables from 100, if they are different at all, are available at 30.  30, 100?  Who cares?  As long as its challenging, fun, and rewarding does the number of waves matter?

 

Even if the loot tables are identical between wave 30 and wave 100, then making abilities useless above 30 still prevents groups from running long survival and defense missions for the challenge and top tier loot. 

 

Look at the numbers, at wave 30 you are just hitting the t3 loot tables.  That's the difference between maybe getting one reward at wave 30, and getting 15 rewards for making it to wave 100.

 

If they want to balance the abilities to cap at wave 30 difficulty, then mobs can't continue to see exponential growth of damage and HP after that point.

 

Otherwise there is no point in even having the infinite defense and survival missions. Just replace them with a hard cap and force us to head for extraction.

[Serialkillerwhale]

No.

 

This is $&*&*#(%& as usual, it's just that we ALL have to pick godamn casters with sniper rifles or bows like latron prime and dread instead of something we WANT

[Celseus]

I no longer know what to do with my Frost now.

 

I max my Snowglobe. It doesn't even last 3 seconds on wave 15.

 

I max my Ice Wave/Avalanche. All other warframes kill/move faster than me.

 

I max my Freeze. It breaks the moment someone DAMAGES the target.

 

 

It's like telling someone that I/they could be a Clockmaker, then when telling me months later that clocks are no longer needed in this world. Frost is warframe's clockmaker.

[cesmode]

Even if the loot tables are identical between wave 30 and wave 100, then making abilities useless above 30 still prevents groups from running long survival and defense missions for the challenge and top tier loot. 

 

Look at the numbers, at wave 30 you are just hitting the t3 loot tables.  That's the difference between maybe getting one reward at wave 30, and getting 15 rewards for making it to wave 100.

 

If they want to balance the abilities to cap at wave 30 difficulty, then mobs can't continue to see exponential growth of damage and HP after that point.

 

Otherwise there is no point in even having the infinite defense and survival missions. Just replace them with a hard cap and force us to head for extraction.

 

I agree.

Which is why I think "patching" up one frame's ability without addressing the overall larger picture was a mistake.

 

If what I think is correct, which it very well may not be, I see and understand their logic.  Their execution is flawed.

[cesmode]

This abomination of a patch MUST be fixed.

 

A skilless "loliwin" weapon like Latron with no ammo management feature cannot if this game is to remain balanced, be more powerful than a skill-based ammo-management based weapon like Soma.

 

Frost is now useless, as DE has some kind of hate on for "Warrior" frames and forces us to use "Mage" frames.

I agree about the part of the Latron..rather your logic behind it.  Same can be applied to Ogris.  A nova sitting on a perch priming everything and popping everything is just IWIN and brainless.

 

Why have all of the weapons, frames and abilities in the game if you can do something like that?

[ToeSama]

You can't do that, though. If you bring all the frames up, then not only is that more work than bringing one frame down, but it also has the knock-on effect of having to rebalance all the content in the game, which is even more work.

 

As someone else said somewhere, it's the principle of least change.

 

Frost was in a decent place. With the buffs to his other abilities, he might have found himself in a good place. Snowglobe's nerf turns him from a defensive frame to a battle caster, and with the mess that is Damage 2.0's enemy resistances, that job is less than undesirable once you get into the higher levels if you're not facing specific opponents, and even then it's only a marginal increase of damage that is barely worth noting. Right out of the box, this change already calls for drastic rebalance of almost all content in the game, because it makes Frost's new job nigh obsolete from the very first step out the door. They could have changed His 1 and 4 as they did and left it at that, and he would have been as viable a battle caster as he is without the changes to his 3.

 

This change, literally, did nothing useful, and only increased the work load to make Frost a viable frame with this direction even further...

 

Meanwhile, Ember still sucks as much as she did way back when, and has only gotten worse. Oberon was born into obsolescence since 11.5 launched with no noticeable changes to improve him, and Necro is still only worth using for the bonus drops off of Desecrate.

 

This is nothing new, of course. It's the same thing that always happens. They concentrate efforts in one direction and completely break something on the other side of the tracks. DE could stand to rework almost all of the game systems, because hardly any of the systems are working as well as they were around update 7 or 8. I'm not sure how one is suppose to consider update 12 superior in terms of anything when the game as a whole played so much better back in the old busted &#! damage 1.0 days...

Edited February 6, 2014 by ToeSama

[Serialkillerwhale]

How can the same be applied to ogris?
ogris has it's charge, projectile and most importantly, you can kill yourself with it.

 

that's why it's powerful equivalent exchange.

 

Rhino and frost were meant to be the most powerful, they were slower, Heavy Weapons guy, Zangief, they're more powerful at the cost of speed (And russian accents) now Frost is the joke character.

 

Balance is based on give and take.

 

Power, speed durability. Pick two.

 

Ammo efficency, damage, no random drawbacks, pick two.

[(PSN)wintersandman]

Mag's Bullet Attractor is an offensive buff, that is only good defensively on Heavy Gunners. It also only effects one target at a time.

 

Nyx's Chaos was one of the alternatives to Snowglobe already. Frost was one of the Kings of Defense, Nyx was the Queen.

 

Loki's Radial Disarm is one of the reasons he is regarded as a late game frame, the other reasons being he only has utility abilities that keep him alive and allow him to get into positions to strip enemies of their weapons. He was welcome on defense because he could neuter very dangerous enemies that would otherwise just blow them team away with their powerful weapons. It also disables the Grineer heavy units ground stomp. Loki was the Joker of Defense.

 

Vauban's Vortex and Bastille already made him one of the Kings of Defense, now that Frost has been nerfed, there is only one King remaining.

 

Saryn's Molt was as useful for defense as Loki's Decoy: Completely useless unless the targets were radial disarmed.

 

 

Frost's snowglobe was needed for high wave defense because enemy scaling gets a little nuts the closer it approaches level 40 and beyond, which basically means T3 Voids, Ceres, and Pluto. Frost simply does not have enough energy to spam snowglobes every 2 seconds, which is how long it takes for the snowglobe to die at this level.

I played frost and did these levels that you are talking about. It was boring as hell to be a bubble boy especially since people wanted to go rambo and not coordinate. I have quit playing my frost just for this reason. No other frame is treated as you are here for x. No one tells a Rhino - just stomp and save all your energy for it. Or a trinity to only cast blessing. In reality they could have dumped everyone of frosts abilities but snow globe and no one would notice. But you would sure notice if other frames lost some of theirs.

How I cleared the map was me as Loki and a friend as Nyx. 

My point is that there needs to be more strategy than, "Hey the frost has his bubble up the defense objective is ok." 

There is no strategy to that. 

How many threads are there out there that say endless defense is impossible with out frost. There has been a ton. It is also entirely not true. 

Again the changed the ability to be an emergency trigger instead of a spammed ability. 

[Brasten]

Okay... Communication... that's a thing DE still needs to work on.

This adjustment on Frost is prime example of not giving enough detail.

If DE had said that IceBall/Freeze Proced Cold (which could be assume by saying it worked like Ember's Fireball)

Or that Ice Wave Proced Cold

Or the new animation and Freeze duration on Avalanche, and if that freeze is impacted by power duration

They would have saved themselves the largest amount of blowback on this thread. Details will only help you with the community. The less you say, and the more you try to keep secret or as a surprise, the worse things will go. Digital Extremes does not have enough community credit to be TRUSTED. There is almost no trust anymore. Maybe once you have regained some measure of trust in what you're doing and how you're doing it will you be able to be "sneaky" or "cagey" again. I leave that Rebecca and Megan as the community contact points to pound that into the team leads heads. The community is not just you're consumers but we are also your Beta Testers, its in that agreement we agreed to.

=======

New Frost Feedback

Freeze/IceBall - Like Ember's Fireball this needs to be Hit-Scan in the same fashion as Ripline. It isn't very lag tolerant and hitting moving targets can be a pain. It's also still firing at an odd angle, impact is slightly to the left of center. Making it Hit-Scan after the fashion of Ripline would fix both Freeze and Fireball. Although I still see the damage dealing Ice Ball as a solution to the problem no one was talking about. Freeze's problem was that it wasn't doing the CC it said it should be doing. It still isn't quite because its still difficult to land on anything that isn't sitting still or standing within 10< meters.

Ice Wave - You should have told us it now can Proc cold. Really. That would have lessened the blowback here. It would be nice if that cold slow could last longer, but its good that its now there.

Snow Globe - Realizing that HP isn't going away, I'm a more than a little upset that it still has a Duration component. Or rather that the duration can be considered rather short when put up against the HP damage. As to the HP Pool and Higher level play balance.... Look to the Lephanits fight. The Lephantis has a Damage Cap system that keeps High Tier player from outright wreaking that boss with one shot weapons. Putting that kind of Damage Cap on Snow Globe's HP Pool will allow you to balance the top end of where Snow Globe should be breaking when under sustained fire from your "balance point" leveled enemies. As enemy damage scales, the Damage Cap would help keep it from outright breaking Snow Globe and rendering it useless. With a Damage Cap it will remain as useful as it was against your "balanced" enemies.

Avalanche - Again, you should have told us about the new animation and the change in the Freeze part of it. That would have again helped with the backlash. By bring back the older CC/Hold aspect of Avalanche it helps take some of the weight off Snow Globe by giving Frost some form of Crowd Control. I need to go in and test more, but if you haven't made that Freeze portion of Avalanche increase-able by Duration, that needs to happen.

=====

Make Freeze Hit-Scan

Increase the duration of Slow from Ice Wave

Give Snow Globe a Damage Cap like Lephantis

Make Avalanche's freeze Duration boostable.

Do these things and you may not have killed off Frost and actually made him better.

[cesmode]

How can the same be applied to ogris?

ogris has it's charge, projectile and most importantly, you can kill yourself with it.

 

that's why it's powerful equivalent exchange.

 

Rhino and frost were meant to be the most powerful, they were slower, Heavy Weapons guy, Zangief, they're more powerful at the cost of speed (And russian accents) now Frost is the joke character.

 

Balance is based on give and take.

 

Power, speed durability. Pick two.

 

Ammo efficency, damage, no random drawbacks, pick two.

 

 

Again, in a defense mission via a vauban jump pad or a Nova port, port up to a pirch where enemies can't get to you.  Rain hell down on all of the mobs that are CC'd and primed. 

 

My little two or three man group has reached high levels doing this.  It makes the game mindnumbingly boring watching the ogris wave after wave obliterate primed targets. 

[Serialkillerwhale]

exactly, you work around the weaknesses.

 

That's how you win.

 

Great work, seriously, no sarcasm.

[Oizen]

The issue with Snow globe is its &!$$ HP and absolutely no way to mod it back to usefulness.

 

If you up its HP to Max, you loose the ability to spam it when you need to in Higher Defense. And It doesn't even gain sufficent HP from the mod. It goes up to 77 cost in energy, but still falls insanely fast.

 

 So there goes two arguments people are making in favor of this nerf, by people who probably dont even play frost.

 

Honestly, Im kinda sad with this. Frost was my favorite. Now I dont even want to play him

Edited February 6, 2014 by Oizen

[TankHunter678]

I played frost and did these levels that you are talking about. It was boring as hell to be a bubble boy especially since people wanted to go rambo and not coordinate. I have quit playing my frost just for this reason. No other frame is treated as you are here for x. No one tells a Rhino - just stomp and save all your energy for it. Or a trinity to only cast blessing. In reality they could have dumped everyone of frosts abilities but snow globe and no one would notice. But you would sure notice if other frames lost some of theirs.

How I cleared the map was me as Loki and a friend as Nyx. 

My point is that there needs to be more strategy than, "Hey the frost has his bubble up the defense objective is ok." 

There is no strategy to that. 

How many threads are there out there that say endless defense is impossible with out frost. There has been a ton. It is also entirely not true. 

Again the changed the ability to be an emergency trigger instead of a spammed ability. 

Well, sounds like Frost simply was not the right frame for you. I loved playing my frost and being the cornerstone of the team and supporting them to keep the objective and them alive. Though I know of those rambos you speak of. Corridor Heroes that people were complaining about not too long ago. The ones that people leave to die or let the objective die because of them going rambo.

 

By the way, plenty of people say to build trinity for that 25 energy good duration blessing simply because it frankly is overpowered. Trinity could easily dump every ability but blessing and no one would notice nor care. Rhino could drop everything but stomp and Iron skin and no one would notice or care. Ember can dump every skill but World on Fire, no one will notice or care.

 

 

 

For the record, Frost's current snowglobe is not an emergency button. It dies too quickly to function for that. In T3 Towers, and defenses on Ceres/Pluto it dies before the casting animation is done. Frost's emergency button was the old avalanche which forced enemies in a large radius to stop attacking and go into a panic state for the 4 seconds that was its casting time. A pity DE nerfed that when they gave it a fast cast. Took away that good bit of CC. Would rather have Saryn's Miasma, at the very least that is a 4 second stun.

[tris1]

The issue with Snow globe is its &!$$ HP and absolutely no way to mod it back to usefulness.

 

If you up its HP to Max, you loose the ability to spam it when you need to in Higher Defense. And It doesn't even gain sufficent HP from the mod. It goes up to 77 cost in energy, but still falls insanely fast.

 

 So there goes two arguments people are making in favor of this nerf, by people who probably dont even play frost.

 

Honestly, Im kinda sad with this. Frost was my favorite. Now I dont even want to play him

same here suprisinly i played a few games not loged into warframe since then that was a few hours after the update

[(PSN)wintersandman]

Well, sounds like Frost simply was not the right frame for you. I loved playing my frost and being the cornerstone of the team and supporting them to keep the objective and them alive. Though I know of those rambos you speak of. Corridor Heroes that people were complaining about not too long ago. The ones that people leave to die or let the objective die because of them going rambo.

 

By the way, plenty of people say to build trinity for that 25 energy good duration blessing simply because it frankly is overpowered. Trinity could easily dump every ability but blessing and no one would notice nor care. Rhino could drop everything but stomp and Iron skin and no one would notice or care. Ember can dump every skill but World on Fire, no one will notice or care.

 

 

 

For the record, Frost's current snowglobe is not an emergency button. It dies too quickly to function for that. In T3 Towers, and defenses on Ceres/Pluto it dies before the casting animation is done. Frost's emergency button was the old avalanche which forced enemies in a large radius to stop attacking and go into a panic state for the 4 seconds that was its casting time. A pity DE nerfed that when they gave it a fast cast. Took away that good bit of CC. Would rather have Saryn's Miasma, at the very least that is a 4 second stun.

I actually switched to Loki because then I could at least move. Snow globe was like creating a bubble that you had to stay within or die. 

Yes people wouldn't notice if an ember only had world on fire. But the point is that they are pigeon holed into just casting those abilities like a frost is with snow globe. It actually kills a frame that I love. I have actually been in the process of ditching snow globe off my frost all together before this update even came across. Frost is my most used warframe but being a one trick pony is not up my alley, which frost has become. 

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein

I was going insane with Frost. 

[LennoFF]

The problem is that when you form a tactical squad, you choose and want players with different abilities.  You want a CC guy, an offense person like Nova, and healer like Trin and a defense like Frost.  Just because a (in my opinion) good Frost player stayed on the pod, doesn't mean he was unbalanced!  It means he knew his role in the bigger picture of the objective.  Having no true real life experience, I am going out on a limb saying that in combat, you have medics, snipers, support, etc.  You're not going to remove some of the medics medical supplies and give them guns and say "OK, now you're balanced."  And then take away ammo and weapons from a combat person and give him medical supplies so he's more balanced.  Everyone has a role, and it's important that not everyone is the same.  I don't know what's with everyone obsession with balance and making everyone the same, and making all the guns balanced and the same.  It's illogical, unrealistic, and makes for a boring game where you feel more like you're changing skins rather than actual Warframes. 

 

I too was on Xini, and my globe, while still in my duration setup, lasted 2 seconds on wave 5.  That's absurd.  And like another poster said, now we need to mod it (after my 3 forma) for strength, which throws off efficiency and duration, LOL.  It's a lose lose battle with frost and I don't expect to see him much anymore. 

[main_antagonist]

I've made a duration/tank build, small snow globes and I'd spam them everywhere for myself to take cover in because it was energy efficient.

 

Sometimes I'll run around making little triangles about 2-5 metres apart half cast into a wall so they don't get in the way of projectiles making it easy for me to pick off the slow-mo approaching enemies, typically used when I play infested for fun.

 

I think avalanche should stay the same but we could remove ice wave because it goes though the ground and doesn't travel up hill (maybe that's been patched but I stopped using it for that sole reason)

 

Preferably I want to split the slow crowd control effects from snow globe and have them to cast at will in a line or circle doesn't bother me what shape really to make ice traps and snow globe having health sounds fine to me.

 

The snowglobe visuals are in need a remake because shooting though a globe can hurt your eyes if you play frost for a while maybe have the wind swirling around him like he's in a blizzard or where it was cast but instead of having ice up making hard to see we could instead have solid thick lumps of ice or snow flakes appear where the projectiles impact where the globe used to be??? = Easier visibility and cooler visuals ... cooler visuals lol.

[Blazer-X]

Except you were expecting and probably got the same result, so not really insanity. Just doing the same thing over and over again.

[CyberneticSaturn]

Which was the whole point. If you'd tried to take Nyx before, people would have said "lol y u no take frost noob".

 

So the solution was to make it so if you try to take frost instead of Vauban or Nyx they go "lol y u no take nyx noob"?

[(PSN)wintersandman]

Except you were expecting and probably got the same result, so not really insanity. Just doing the same thing over and over again.

I was expecting different results but i was doing bubble bubble bubble. Which was driving me insane. 

So I don't see the relevance of your post.

[NeopetsMaster4432]

Frost now needs to cast his globe twice per wave against level ~60 enemies in a T3 defence.
He might be less useful against level 100 or so enemies, but he's still the king of (non-infested)defence missions, by far. :P

This seems like a reasonable change because invincibility for both his team the defence pods would just be silly against level 100s, as it was before.
He is now balanced.

[Celseus]

You're one of the few people that play frost correctly. Ive played with people that just place snowglobe then go afk to watch porn or something stupid

 

Then they die. The moment a Napalm sees them, the moment an Ancient sees them, the moment a Shockwave MOA goes near them. They die.

 

I'm not playing Frost correctly, I'm playing warframe correctly. Frost was NEVER a "afk and snowglobe" frame, only people who never played Frost will ever assume he was. Because he never leaves his globe, does not mean he's doing nothing. It's simple, you afk, you die.

 

And this misunderstanding that Frost can afk, should not be the basis for nerfing Frost -because he can't. If you were complimenting me, I appreciate it. But I felt that you were trying to justify this nerf with this reasoning, to which I don't see myself agreeing with logically,

Edited February 6, 2014 by Celseus