Ember, Oberon, Saryn And Nekros Need Buffs

[Doughalo2]

These guys all need buffs. I love them but late game they are hard to either dish out the dmg or stay alive. Worst are the ults so bad on higher level enemys or just low dmg cc etc.

 

These i struggle to use solo the rest of the frames are better to solo with.

[(PSN)bluerazorsedge]

There is nothing wrong with Nekros. Oberon and ember do need a buff, but then someone on here will cry to nerf them.

[Tali]

you are not using Saryn properly then, only her contagion needs a buff. While Nekros(minus desecrate) and Oberon does needs a buff but im unsure about Ember

Edited May 23, 2014 by Aeon66

[VKhaun]

Ember needs QoL help. Accelerant helps her damage scale against appropriate targets better than most, but trying to use any of her skills and accelerant is a lot of time spent animating instead of playing. IMO, make 4 a toggle like they did with some other skills recently. Then you can run around with it on doing accelerant as needed and shooting close targets to finish them off, or shooting distant targets to defend yourself at range. Not bad gameplay. Good for low mag weapons like Tigris, Hek or various snipers.

 

Oberon needs a rework IMO. His skills have no utility and his ult actually assumes it kills things before it gets it's secondary benefit. His heal will never matter as long as we have a potion bar of spammable HP packs made of nanospores. He just needs overhauling. I don't see a magic bullet and if you shoe-horned in random utility on all his skills it would just seem odd and hap hazard IMO. Buff 3 and 4, remake 1 and 2.

 

Saryn I don't play and I don't see played often. I wouldn't comment.

 

Nekros is a great frame. The game just doesn't call for his ultra-survivalist style right now. I say leave him alone because he's fine. One day we'll have a game mode with fewer, tougher enemies or we'll have incentive to use level apporpriate gear vs the hordes everyone is so accustomed to pwning with OP guns way above their level... Then you'll want fears and decoys... Then you'll want a real Nekros...

Desecrate needs a new format, because spamming 3 is boring and results in very boring builds. Make it a toggle that fires periodically, make it 100% to hit every target so you don't have to spam it, or make it guarantee some minimum number of targets per shot, scaling with power strength. I don't know. Just something more fun than 3333333333333 until carpel tunnel sets in.

 

 

 

My 2¢.

Edited May 23, 2014 by VKhaun

[Tulzscha]

Thread title edited for clarity.

[Sedant]

Nekros isn't supposed to do damage, hes a lootbot through and through. All of his other abilities are semi-useless. My advice for him is simply range/efficiency and what ever survivability mods (redirection, vitality, fortitude and sure footed) or utility mods (thief's wit and master thief) you feel like using after that but equipped only with desecrate and natural talent.

Edited May 23, 2014 by Sedant

[Syzodia]

you are not using Saryn properly then, only her contagion needs a buff. 

This.

[5stareraser]

Ash pls ?

[Carl_Bar]

Since it got ignored in the othe thread i'll throw in my Oberon post from there:

 

Ok a littlie Oberon post. I will hold my hand up and say I’m a newish payer, (4th week now), and this is entirely from looking at him stats wise and seeing how him and his abilities fare. I will also warn you I’ll be doing some Mag comparisons, (where appropriate).

 

Before I start in on Oberon himself I want to do a littlie talk on shield vs health as primary hitpoint pools. For the sake of separation I’ll wrap this bit in spoiler tags.

 

Both options are ways of increasing effective health. Warframe has 2 primary aspects to it’s effective health system.

 

Tank Effective Hitpoints and Level Effective Hitpoints.

 

Since they’re my own terms a quick explanation of each.

 

Tank Effective Hitpoints is a measure of how much raw damage you can absorb in a short period without abilities.

 

Level Effective Hitpoints is the maximum total damage, (not including abilities), you can absorb over a whole level.

 

To touch on the latter; For Health this is limited strictly by the amount of health orbs you can pick up, (Healing granted health generally far exceeding the maximum health of the warframe, and thus the Level Effective Hitpoints provided by the frames initial start of level health). Whilst Shield’s are limited only by the amount you regenerate. In practise the need to hide and your kill rate vs enemy spawn rate will be the normal factors in limiting this from a theoretical infinite. Simply put no matter how well you play, unless you can get somewhere the enemy can’t hurt you and stay there the maximum percentage of the time you can hide regenerating will be limited by the need to be able to stop enemies shooting at you. Between multiple attack angles and enemies running around cover there’s a finite amount of time you can hide. Unless your barely adequate gear wise for the level however your far more likely to be limited by your kill rate since that will have a sharp effect on how much damage you take per second on average and thus how much health you lose to thus actually regenerate.

 

Tank Effective Hitpoints are largely the same, (barring armour which I will discuss in a moment), for health and shields since the scalars available are the same for both and the max base shield and max base health sizes are the same at 150. Some warframes are a littlie weird in that they don’t have either at 150 and instead posses both at modest numbers. These warframes if setup with just a single mod slot used will have lower Tank Effective Hitpoints, but can have the best at the cost of more slots and mod points.

 

Armour affects both types of effective hitpoints. Simply put it reduces damage to health which can be viewed more simply as a multiplier on your health value. This means that frames with high health typically have better Tank Effective Hitpoints. It also multiplies any healing received. At the extreme end Valkyr with maxed steel fibre multiplies all incoming healing by an effective 5.4 times. However most have a 1.21 multiplier without steel fibre, less for those below the average 65 armour.

 

As a rule Tank Effective Hitpoints are an important value to get above a certain level to prevent one mistake needing a revive. But that doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have a good enough Level effective health as even with flawless play a low value on the latter will lead to death of a thousand cuts.

 

 

Ok onto Oberon.:

 

In terms of basic warframe stats he’s very middling in terms of speed, shields, and stamina. He does posses good but not the best health maximum. However he only has average armour. Those last two in combination with the basics of his abilities are a bit of an issue. Without going into detail on each ability, (that’s the next section), his abilities in general are a mix of direct attack and health restore based defensive without any being exceptional team level abilities. This presents a bit of an issue in a few ways. It’s health focused hitpoint pool as well as it’s defensive abilities being focused on health healing all push it toward using health as the primary hitpoint source, but due to it’s poor armour it’s very inefficient at restoring it’s hitpoint pool. In short it has poor Level Effective Health and that’s a really bad thing. If it’s abilities where strongly team focused with awesome team level effects, (as some other low survival frames are), then it’s poor soft-stats would be offset by strong abilities. But with it’s very direct and limited team level abilities that’s not really the case here.

 

Abilities:

 

Besides the specifics that I’m going to go into below there is a general issue with Oberon’s abilities. 3 of them deal partially or wholly radiation damage. Whilst this is awesome vs Phorid or Greneeir it’s poor vs normal corpus, awful vs elite corpus and most bosses, and utterly atrocious vs most infested. This means his damage dealing abilities suffer vs the majority of the enemies in the game because of his truly awful damage choice type. To be fair two of his abilities mix it with impact which averages it out vs corpus, greneeir, and bosses, but that still leaves it awful vs infested and still results in noticeably lower damage values than the raw numbers behind the scenes say they should be.

 

Now for Specifics.

 

Smite: Deals a moderate amount of direct damage to a single target then releases several projectiles from said enemy to deal lesser damage to nearby enemies. The biggest issue with this ability is that enemies rarely group up in nice convenient non-cover blocked 2D configurations with the 12.5 meter spacing. So your not likliy to hit that many enemies with the AoE because they’re likely aren’t enough in the range or their protected by elevation or cover. And for it’s cost the damage isn’t enough for a single target to justify it. To bring up a Mag comparison, her Pull which is the same cost will hit enemies out to the maximum range in a broad cone. Thus so long as they aren’t too spread out it deals with enemies spread amongst intervening cover, at different range and at different elevations allowing for large numbers of targets to be struck simultaneously. It does less damage per target, but with that AoE effect it’s still very potent against large groups and it has a nice ragdoll effect as an extra. It simply deal poor damage per energy for what is primarily a single target ability.

 

Reckoning: This ability deals a fair amo8nt of damage in a very modest AoE. That said unlike smite it’s slightly larger AoE and doesn’t care about cover or elevation. It also has a nice strong side order of healing benefit. In many ways this ability is the ultimate, (no pun intended), example of Obroen’s philosophy. Unfortunately the enemies you’ll most need the healing aspect against, (i.e. those with high damage output), are also the ones with the highest health and thus the lowest likelihood of dying. Even if only some of the enemies survive, they may well prevent you collecting health orbs dropped by other enemies. And for it’s energy cost the damage and radius alone are unimpressive, it needs the healing to justify the cost.

 

Renewal: Oh boy long winded time. Sorry. This skill has several issues. Remember I talked about Tank Effective Hitpoints. Well the issue with this skill is that unless your running with a team that’s setup for using Health as it’s primary source of Tank Effective Health, the team your running with probably won’t be able to afford to take significant health damage as doing so risks being one hit killed by some heavy. This means the skill gets relegated to healing up when something gets past the shield tank or shield bypassing damage happens. At the same time the issue that most frames have awful armour means that most don’t get anywhere near enough healing from sources other than your ability, this means the ability needs to be drastically more energy efficient, (in terms of hit-points healed per energy), than a shield heal.

 

And that last point brings me round to my second Mag comparison. Shield polarise if used on a frame with just a maxed redirection slotted heals between 275 and 550 effective health with no power mods. Renewal heals 200 health, which with 65 armour becomes roughly 250. Thus in virtually all situations shield polarise heals more, at the top end drastically more, yet it costs 2/3 the energy, is instant, and has a not exactly modest secondary offensive component tacked on. At the top end it’s like 5 times more energy efficient and has an offensive component.

 

That’s how awful renewal is.

 

Hallowed Ground: Hallowed ground quite aside from it’s raw design issues has one other issue that occurs to many abilities on many frame. Quite simply put in general the best abilities in game are those that can be effectively maximised. That is boost one of the three of power strength, power range, or power duration and get a significant boost to the ability effect without the attendant negative corrupted mods inflict doing anything negative to the ability in question. In general the best frame have several abilities upon which the same type of maximisation works effectively.

 

Obviously the above are 2 general rules, not hard and fast rules. But hallowed ground is a prime example of an ability that suffers at the hands of this. There’s no way to effectively maximise it without some other aspect suffering heavily in a severely detrimental way and you can’t maximise any other ability the Oberon possesses without the same uselessness being inflicted.

 

On top of that it has severe mechanical issues. First and foremost until max rank the area is pitiful, and even there it’s only passable with move able to run through the area of effect fairly rapidly. It’s pure radiation which really sucks vs anything but greneeir and phorid so it’s very faction specific. And even against greneeir a combination of armour effects and fairly low DPS mean it’s unlikely to kill them before they pass through. It’s also a bit hard to use offensively due to it’s area in wider spaces. It’s ok at chokepoints, but their much more prevalent and important in defence and survival than anywhere else. Though sabotage does make some use of them too. Even then though without serious duration boosting it’s uptime is so low that you’ll be constantly running back and forth to refresh which kind of defeats the point of sealing a chokepoint anyway.

 

 

Okay now I’m going to split my suggestions on fixing up. The first pass will just be a sort of TDLR of the above points compressed down to area’s of note that probably need addressing. The second section will cover specific suggestions from me. I’m splitting them like this because as I noted I’m somewhat new to the game and I don’t want this devolving into a “new guy doesn’t have a clue he’s a moron, this is OP, whaaa, whaaaa, whaaaaa”, level of responses. For the same reason I’ll spoiler my specific idea’s.

 

General response:

 

Warframe softstats: Whilst to some degree it’s going to depend on what exactly happens with powers a firm look at total armour for Oberon is in order. Certainly not to Valkyr levels and maybe not to rhino levels, but the current is not ideal for a health healing based effective hitpoints survival style, maximum health and shields don’t present major issues however for that style and the high shields are actually benefical.

 

Abilities in General: A long look at the damage types is pretty mandatory and a firm decision on which type of maximisation his abilities should work off of is absolutely in order.

 

Smite: A long look needs to be taken at the intent here, ultimately though any combination of raw damage modification, AoE effectiveness modification, or Energy cost modification which meets the need to be more energy efficient relevant to it’s effect.

 

Reckoning: This has no easy answer, but a long look at how it achieves it’s purpose, (or rather struggles to do so often), needs to be done and some serious thought given to how to make it achieve it’s aims even when it doesn’t secure kills.

 

Renewal: If this is intended to be a team wide health healing based survival tool it needs rather desperately a look at some way to overcome the typically poor effective hitpoints from health many warframes and builds will have as well as a very drastic improvement in healing to energy cost to account for the likely higher required healing rate compared to a shield heal skill due to limited non-skill based health healing available in most frames and/or builds.

 

Hallowed Ground: Really know idea what the focus should be here, there’s so many issues that there’s no clear single concept to focus on improving.

 

 

 

Ok my specific suggestions, as I said spoiler tags:

 

 

Warframe Softstats: Given what I’m going to be doing with abilities a massive buff probably isn’t necessary, but a buff to between 100 and 150 armour is probably still ideal. Not sure on specific number though, would want to playtest to get that nailed down.

 

Abilities in General: Swap the current damage types, (both), for shield and armour bypassing heat damage. The armour bypass keeps it scaling and the shield bypass sidesteps it’s one weakpoint nicely.

 

Whilst 3 of the existing abilities already meet this point, (hence the choice), my maximisation goal will be to emphasise power strength whilst de-emphasising Power duration, since you’d never maximise power strength without clawing efficiency back at the cost of duration, power efficiency being more valuable than anything else by default, (a bit of a balance flaw if where honest).

 

Actually as an aside I think all abilities who’s damage does not explicitly target enemy shields should bypass armour and shields, would keep direct damage abilities scaling much better into high level.

 

Smite: Reduce to 15 energy, remove the spit out projectiles so it just deals single target damage and make it apply a power maxamisation scaling heal of 25/50/75/100 health to Obroen only, spread over 10 seconds, (not affected by power duration). If recast whilst the heal is ongoing it does not stack, nor does it refresh the duration.

 

The intent here is to create a fairly power efficient single target damage skill which also packs a nice self heal to give Oberon solid self only self sufficiency in the Health healing department. The fixed duration and lack of stacking or refresh prevent spamming for virtually infinite burst healing however.

 

Reckoning: No longer drops health orbs. Instead every enemy hit by the damage heals every friendly target within 15 meter’s (scaling with Power Range), for 5% of the damage dealt, (does not scale with any power modifier). Damaged Enemies that survive are affected by a debuff that causes them to release another healing burst every 10 seconds thereafter for the same amount of health. This debuff lasts until they die.

 

With the enemies now releasing an AoE healing burst instead of dropping orbs there are no more issues with Orbs landing somewhere where enemy action makes collecting them impractical, and the continuous bursts over time ensure that if it’s something tough enough to survive he damage, (and therefore generally highly damaging), it will continue to provide extra healing to aid the team in defeating them. Thus in affect allowing the healing to scale to match the threat level of the affected enemies.

 

Renwal: Heavily re-worked. Now a toggle skill with an activation cost of 25 and a per second cost of 5. On activation it instantly heals all Teno within 20 Meter’s for 50/100/150/200 health, and then heals them for an additional 5/10/15/20 Health per second. Healing scales with power strength. All Tenno which receive healing also gain a 10 second duration buff, (does not scale with power duration), which grants them 300/600/900/1200 extra armour, (does not scale with power strength), this armour is not multiplied by Steel Fibre, but is multiplied by any warframe abilities.

 

Fairly basic and obvious. It provides an initial burst for any critical Tenno then a steady over time affect to handle steady amounts of incoming damage whilst a significant armour buff ensures even low health frames without health increasing mods have enough raw effective hitpoints from health alone that they’re not in danger of a one-shot if they try and use the healing as a full blown main hitpoint restore.

 

Hallowed Ground: New effect. Hallowed ground sanctifies the ground in a 20/30/40/50 metre radius around cast point. This deals an initial pulse of 5/10/15/20 damage to all enemies in the area, and heals all friendly for 5/10/15/20 health at the same time. It deals a further pulse of healing/damage every half a second for 20/30/40/50 pulses. The damage, healing, and number of pulses all scale with Power duration. The pulse rate does not scale with any power attributes. Enemies struck by the damage are also debuffed for a period of 1 second, (not affected by power duration), reducing their speed by 60%, (Does not scale with any power attribute), suffering a 30% reduction in outgoing damage, (Scales with power strength), and receive 30% more incoming damage, (Also scales with power strength).

 

A fairly heavy re-work. Chokepoint only skills are just too limited in practical application IMO to be workable. With this Hallowed Ground becomes a very broad area skill with multiple limited magnitude effects. With the exception of the slow no single effect is super powerful, damage, healing, debuffs are all limited in magnitude, it’s strength is in the combination of these effects and the very broad area it affects.

[Tali]

Ash pls ?

but he already got a buff and a good one

[Love2Camp]

but he already got a buff and a good one

What? He did? What was it? Must've missed it :< (legit question, not sarcasm)

[RealPandemonium]

Saryn has the best 4 for farming in the game, and Ember has the strongest damage ability in the game (1+2 combo.)  Nekros needs AI improvements for his 4 and recastability for his 2.  Oberon needs his 3 to be adjusted for better usability and some more flavor for his other abilities.