Frost: 2/5/2014

[LascarCapable]

Snowglobe: Now has health that is increased with fusion (currently: 1500,2500,3000,3500)

 

You've just killed the whole Frame. Sorry.

 

Avalanche would be still a fixed damage ability without really something consistent behind. Ice Blast clearly won't be enough to save Frost from being totally useless in all kind of late defense/survival mission.

Edited February 5, 2014 by Einde

[XenosInfinity]

Face it, the old snow globe made a lot of things too damn easy.

"OH MY GOD! WE HAVE TO USE STRATAGY NOW TO PROTECT THE DEFENSE POINT, RATHER THEN HIDING INSIDE SNOWGLOBE!

OH WOE IS US FOR HAVING TO USE OUR BRAINS!"

Which is fine, when you have any way to actually approach a map strategically with some sort of permanent trap or chokepoints rather than a massive wave of enemies with facemelter beams surging towards you from three angles with no actual cover.

[spacedkadet]

Ember is useless, so the goal in making frost like ember is to make him useless too?

 

He will go from a one trick pony to a no trick pony.  Some changes just shouldn't happen, or at least not like this. He has been like this for over a year but suddenly it needs fixing? Did anyone complain about snow globe ever?

Edited February 5, 2014 by spacedkadet

[DJ_Redwire]

This is gonna put a hamper on high end defense. Once you get high enough, the enemies will slice through that health like it's not even there.

[lautalocos]

i really don´t care that much. this way, every warframe has the same chance of succes at defense (vauban of course has the upper hand against infested), but now without snow globe, defense missions will be balanced considering thatsnow globe has limited health

[NeloAngelicus]

Why? frost has made them to you to deserve this? I don't see nothing good about this ... why not leave it as is? Frost no longer viable at high levels...a shot of a enemy in a high wave and goodbye snowglobe...

 

RIP. Frost :-/

 

That's how I feel right now.

 

 

You Slapped me in the Face DE in the Face!

 

I hate you Guys >:(

Edited February 5, 2014 by NeloAngelicus

[Farren]

How about you discuss it in the thread, which this will probably get merged into anyway.

[-10no-Dark]

"Snowglobe: Now has health that is increased with fusion (currently: 1500,2500,3000,3500)"

REALLY?!??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Well, thanks DE for the MOST idiotic change of the year. I can't find non-censored words to express my frustration...

[Hyperion5182]

theres a difference between strong... and goddly.    Snowglobe was one of those ablities that made you invinisible and all you had to do was keep the enemy out of the globe cause they couldn't harm you while in it.   Even if you had a glode that lasts 5 minutes..  if you have the energy and cast it every minute you have lays of protection and I beleive a stacking debuff for people in the globe so even more goddly..  The globe needed changed.

 

It's been changed alright. Changed right into oblivion. Frost Prime was the first frame i farmed. I went for two weeks trying to get that last part in the void. Now it appears i'll have to sell that frame because it was just made pointless. COMPLETELY pointless for my playstyle.

 

The Globe was portable cover. I'm an LMG full auto type player. I used that globe to give me cover when there was none to be had. There is literally ZERO point to trying to play that way with this frame now at upper stages. 3500 damage? Even if it got all the warframe buffs possible it doesnt put it into a state that allows mid to high level gameplay. I sold my excal. I thought i'd never sell this frame. But i only have four slots i'm not made of money. Guess i have to sell this one too.

 

First i thought coming back here with all of defiance's near Funcom level screwups would be a good thing. Now my pride and joy has been turned into just another DPS frame except it has a useless third skill.

 

 

NovaframeOnline anyone?

Edited February 5, 2014 by Hyperion5182

[SquirmyBurrito]

hehehe nice to see that snowglobe is no longer the end all be all of defensive powers. Looks like Loki (and vauban) just became even more useful.

 

But maybe instead of giving Snow Globe an actually health value, maybe you should just change it from being 100% protection, to something lower. Extra points if you set it to slowly decrease in protection as time goes on. Because 3500 health isn't going to be enough, even with power strength maximized higher level enemies are going to tear through it exactly like you'd expect bullets to deal with ice.

Edited February 5, 2014 by SquirmyBurrito

[gnat6]

With the snowglobe change you have ruked up more than I thought was even possible thanks for killing frost.

[jinsaotomex4]

Do they? We don't even need to test the actual changes with snowglobe to see how bad it is. Take rhino, max out power strength on him and you'll get roughly the same damage cap as SG at max level, and then go stand around and get shot. It'll fall pretty fast, and SG will fall faster because it's huge, and it's immobile.

They don't play their game enough and it's clear as day to see this. They also don't do high end runs otherwise they would notice in 2 seconds how incredibly crappy 90% of the frame skills in the game are on enemies past level 40.

[helosie]

So many other frames have such lovely abilities for defense, Vauban's bastile, Nyx's chaos, Necros' fear..

I could go on, but the point stands that there are other stratagies out there then snowglobe.

[Jinmori]

It works for me. I'd like to say though that frost ult need something more than damage, like someone said earlier on the topic, at higher lvl the ult doesn't do any damage, a crowd control effect on it would make it way better and make up for the fact that snowglobe now has hp (which i think is a good idea).

I've always seen frost as an alternative to rhino, the difference being you have chosen for him to be more of a bunker than a mobile tank. Now that things are changing, the best idea would be to give him something to compete with the big overused rhino.

Also maybe upgrading just a little bit his movement speed would be nice too.

 

Either way i'm fine with those changes. Frost needed to be looked at, that's sort of what i was expecting (not so soon tho). 

[-10no-Dark]

"Snowglobe being a solely duration based skill created issues of viability of other frames in the "Defense" mission types,"

Lets put it simple, other frames are just useless in defenses.

[K_Shiro]

Iceblast. Not another simply damaging ability - even talking about it being similar to Fireball... freeze those enemies, and make them fragile. Now that's a skill.

 

Avalanche. Same as above. Seriously, I don't want to act like a spoiled brat but this kind of solution couldn't be worse. We have like a bunch of damaging ultimates - I don't see why is that good. People used Avalanche's glitches to freeze everyone for a reason. Why not learn from that and make it into a long term freeze effect that makes enemies fragile? The effect is there, you don't really have to sweat blood to make it happen.

 

For me, these changes seem... the easy way out. For the globe to get health is kinda acceptable, I don't like it but it's the easiest way to make it more reasonable. An invulnerability globe is not exactly good for gameplay, it made itself pretty mandatory if you wanted to defend a point against incoming fire and haven't had the firepower to kill everything in seconds or at least keep them stunned.

 

-

-

 

As for my idea on how to solve Frost's problems:

 

...

As my first ever built frame, Frost has a special place in my heart. After I got Frost Prime I've formad this guy so hard, that only the aura slot is unchanged, and only 1 ability slot. Yes, 3 ability slots ended up as different poralities. I love this frame yet I was more than willing to trade 3 abilities for simple mods and never looked back. I'm only using Snowglobe. So here comes whining 2.0.
Most of his abilities fall short compared to other frames' (actually pretty badly), which endorses the use of his only truly useful ability (snowglobe) which is pretty overpowered, way more than bastille.
While the ideas themselves/themes are good, the results seem... lacking. No, not the damage, contrary to popular belief it's not like every frame must have tons of damaging abilities. In fact since Rhino is the other tank and he has proper attack abilities, I would prefer Frost to be a CC frame, especially since freezing powers are usually best for that. Anyways, here comes my "idea pack" of Frost.

1. Freeze
This ability is practically useless or at least not worth anyone's while.
- Only hits one enemy.
- Even useless against bigger enemies since hard to aim, thanks to the projectile shooting towards the direction you face towards at the end of animation, so you better time your shots well.
- Oh, projectiles are quite slow, so even harder to hit.
- Meager damage.
- Freeze effect breaks easily and usually pretty fast anyways.
These render this ability a "never again" choice if you have other possibilities for that mod slot. You can force it, I won't doubt that but those thinking logically see my point anyways.

So what I would do with it - endorsing the use of Frost as a CC frame:

Range: 50m, 3m aoe on impact location, enemies further away from the center of this aoe suffer weaker effects, latter affected by power range mods.

Frozen duration: 5/7/9/11 or if the enemy suffers more than 35% health damage from a single hit (both affected by power duration mods - or latter from power strength).

- No initial damage.
- Frozen targets suffer incoming damage buff, increasing every kind of physical damage, cold damage and blast damage dealt to them by 25/50/75/100%, affected by power strength mods.

- Prematurely breaking frozen status damages (cold and impact damage, 20/40/60/80) and knocks down those in range (3m aoe + power range mods).

- After frozen status dissipates (either normally or prematurely) enemies are affected by cold's status, slowing them for a while.

 

2. Ice Wave
I like the description, "dealing heavy damage". Pretty much a joke with the Damage2.0 introduced. So, since Ice Wave was never really a specifically good damaging power (only adequate that looked "cool") I believe it could too use some rework.
Currently Ice Wave has meager damage and actually no real use (Avalanche is simply outclasses it, even with the higher cost), especially against higher level enemies. So I would do the following:

- Ice spikes form on the ground, enemies hit by the growing shards get knocked to the ground.
- The spikes stay, like some kind of ice trap, any enemy touching them get's damaged and slowed, since it's proper cold damage.
- The damage itself could be overall the same as now but like this: 60dps - 140dps for 5 seconds. Only the damage and range changes with upgrading the ability, the duration is only changed by power duration mods. The damage is counted as Damage per sec thus with higher duration the overall damage grows too. On a sidenote, damage should only partially consist of cold damage since in case of ice spikes, getting skewered might be a bit more of a problem than getting a cold.
- Focus-like mods could affect the strength of the slowness effect too - it seems fairly logical.

 

3. Snow Globe

Okay, in all honesty, none of the other abilities Frost has can measure up to this. Hell, it's the most powerful defensive ability in-game, beating Blessing and Bastille. While Blessing has redeeming qualities, it's a tier 4 ability, which works against it if we want to compare it to Snow Globe (tier3). Meanwhile Bastille seems perfect (ceasing any retaliation of enemies), but only in a very limited range (2 enemy races mostly consist of shooters so this is bad), against rather limited number of targets.

Snowglobe provides near-perfect protection against ranged attackers (with the exception of railgun moa and the ridiculous aoe of missiles/jetpacks) for a rather long time and a very nice area of effect. Only problem comes from enemies that enter the globe but even they are slowed quite nicely so even that downside is not that much of a downside.

Yes, all-in-all snowglobe is not that much better (not like Molecular prime vs Avalanche) but it certainly is.

 

I simply hate the fact the the mere presence or absence of a Frost with Snow Globe can drastically change the outcome of a defense mission. Try T3 defense with and without globe - you will see what I mean.

I would drastically change this ability, in a way that many might even consider that nerfing.

 

Winterhail/Blizzard/Snowstorm

Description: Frost takes control of the surrounding moisture, forming it into a raging storm of razorsharp ice, hindering ranged attacks and damaging enemies that venture inside.

Frost creates a storm made of icy shrapnels, dealing cold and slash damage to those inside, while weakening ranged attacks passing into/through the globe.

Range: 5m, affected by power range mods.

Duration: 30s, affected by power duration mods.

Damage: 15/30/60/90 per second, half slash, half cold damage (thus the overall damage is way lower than Ember's FireBlast), affected by power strength mods.

Enemies are slowed by 40/50/60/70% (or 67% on top if that had any meaning to be 67 instead of plain 70%).

Damage mitigation from ranged attacks is 30/40/50/60%, preferably affected by power strength mods.

 

This way we get a worthy T3 ability which is still way less illogical and "absolute defense" than the current Snow Globe.

 

4. Avalanche

Avalanche itself is not a bad ability by nature it's just that we have seen the near-exact same ability on other frames, countless times. It's nothing creative, only a large aoe damage spell, like that of Saryn, Mag etc. - even Volt is different since his Overload hold the possibility of higher damage thanks to the objects around, and Rhino has his "aftereffect" of floating enemies, making his über a "small" bastille for the recently (or soon to be) deceased.

 

Here comes the "I would do the following" part:

Make Avalanche into something like Molecular Prime, an ability not dealing damage by itself (for MP you have to start killing the enemies since the effect only deals aoe damage if affected enemy dies - after then though... well you have seen dominos, so you get the idea).

 

Description: Summons a treacherous landslide of ice that instantly freezes enemies in the vicinity rendering them immobile and highly vulnerable to incoming physical and cold damage.

Range: 15/18/22/25m, affected by power range mods.

Freeze duration: 7/10/13/16s or broken by hits bigger than 50% health (both affected by power duration mods - or latter from power strength).

Otherwise same as in case of Freeze, detailed above.

 

It would be nice if Cold damage itself could never break frozen status (maybe add to the timer a bit?).

...

 

For those interested in the full article/topic/post: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/79196-concepts-of-mine-consumables-merchant-gambler-and-void-cause-i-like-that/ (in case you did not know, the same link can be found on that little twisted arrow at the top right corner of the quotation.

Edited February 5, 2014 by K_Shiro

[Brasten]

Ice Blast... okay. Although if Freeze just had hit scan targeting and didn't break on damage, just duration, it would have been workable fine.

 

No buff to Ice Wave? No Procing? No additional damage?

 

Avalanche, good good, just a tap in the direction it needed. 

 

Snow Globe... I'm wondering if this got live tested in T3 Defense like other people have asked. I realize DE is balancing around a max level of around 30, but they either need to do that full on and start hard capping enemy stat growth OR start thinking about ways players can scale to match.

 

3.5k HP seems low, we'll see what it looks like in mass testing. Just be ready to push some hotfixes to move that value around.

 

======

 

Now, since this is likely going to stand. What this brings up is if there will a Meta-Strategy around using Slow Globe in Defense. For example shrinking the Size with Corrupt Mods and having the team fight OUTSIDE the globe.

 

Also it will be interesting to see who double or triple bubbles will work.

 

======

 

 

Lastly.... Really? You would do this with Snow Globe but not Overheat? Really?!

Edited February 5, 2014 by Brasten

[Smoulder]

Well, thanks DE for the MOST idiotic change of the year. I can't find non-censored words to express my frustration...

 The year is still young.

[Valiant]

Knew he'd get health added to his globe eventually.

 

As some people have mentioned, 3500 definitely sounds low, regardless of whether you can use power mods to boost the HP. I'd like to know how much it boosts the HP. In addition to this, I think Frost/Prime needs an energy boost especially seeing how he's going to be using strength mods a lot more.

Edited February 5, 2014 by Naith

[NDroid]

Seeing as how I've always wanted to see Frost become more of a CC oriented frame rather than a damage dealing one I would've liked to see a few other tweaks. To go into more detail:

Does Ice Blast still have a CC element? Otherwise a single target pure damage power becomes underwhelming very quickly, even if it only costs 25 energy.

Ice Wave could really use a 100% proc chance to have any function at higher levels.

The casting speed improvements to Avalanche are nice but I think most people would have preferred the enemies to stay frozen for longer instead of the extra damage.

Finally- Snow Globe. I can understand the motivation for changing it but seeing as how high level defense missions heavily rely on this one ability I imagine this change will have a lot of repercussions. The health values mentioned in the post do seem fairly low even if they're boosted by power strength. I think a better version of the same idea can be found in the Frost section in this post by Volt_Cruelerz:

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/117028-balance-adjustments-to-frame-lineup/

It also contains a more interesting proposal for Ice Wave.

[SPiRALFACToR]

the only ability i had equipped on my frost was snow globe because thats the only thing frost has going for him past level 40.

now that snow globe has an extremely low health cap i guess frost can join my valkyr in the corner of shame.

[KvotheTheArcane1]

They don't play their game enough and it's clear as day to see this. They also don't do high end runs otherwise they would notice in 2 seconds how incredibly crappy 90% of the frame skills in the game are on enemies past level 40.

Exactly, it would take roughly a couple minutes in say, T3 defense to show that this change is bad.

[xRufus7x]

Ok im not onew who likes torant but seriouly what the hell DE there was nothing and i mean NOTHING wrong with frosts snow globe now it looks like its gonna be garbage and damn near impossible to solo a T3 void defense thank you for effectively killing my favorite warframe

The problem is that it makes it easy to to solo a T3 Defense. While I agree that the health values need adjusting this is a good change overall.

[letir]

3500 hp... about 9000 in max build... freaking useless.

 

Enemies have INSANE scalling. Our powers are not, that's the problem.

[BiancaRoughfin]

3500 Health on max rank for Snowglobe? Why not make the glove slowly shrink as it takes damage and collapse when it gets half the size causing ice damage and slow enemies in a large area?