Proposed Banshee Tweaks: Boom/sonar

[Cheridan]

I'll start off by saying that Banshee is my favorite frame. While the recent changes to her powers addressed some of her problems (such as Silence being useless after enemy detection. Giving it a combat-oriented aspect was perfect), most people seem to agree that she's still a lower-powered frame. Here's a couple changes I'd like to see to help bring her in line with other frames:

 

Sonic Boom:

1.Please make this a 'free action', similar to Volt's Shock or Ember's Fireball, so that it does not interrupt reloading or other actions. Non-interrupting powers feels much better and improves the flow of the game.

2. Sonic Boom blows away projectile weapons, such as grenades or corpus energy blasts, reflecting them back towards the enemy. This is admittedly more of a "this would be neat" thing rather than a big game-changer, but it could come in handy.

 

Sonar:

At one point, Sonar was Banshee's signature ability. Over time, it has lost its lustre. It's no longer effective on most bosses due to their invincibility phases. Banshee, despite being designed as an archer/sniper, actually synergizes poorly with sniper rifles because they defeat most enemies in a single hit anyway -- Sonar is wasted there.

Sonar has another aspect besides damage: enemy detection. Enemies under its effect show up on the radar. But the radar is not always very useful in finding enemies above or below you, or those who aren't visible.

I actually find the most useful enemy detection ability to be Trinity's Link. The energy trails lead right to the enemy...

 

So, my suggestions for Sonar are:

1. Sonar weak spots are visible even behind obstacles like walls. This effect can already be used somewhat since Codex Scanners allow you to see through walls. However, switching to the Scanner before every shot is not very viable.

2. Any shot that hits a weak spot gains an amount of punch-through. Even just +0.5 or +1m would help increase the ability's usefulness against groups, which is important as fighting hordes is a large part of Warframe.

 

Both changes to Sonar synergize greatly with sniper rifles like the Snipetron Vandal and Lanka, which have innate punch-through, and the bonus punch-through on hits helps these weapons out against groups of enemies, which is where sniper rifles fall flat.

Edited September 7, 2014 by Cheridan

[Lukap99]

 

I LOVE IT

Edited September 7, 2014 by Lukap99

[Azawarau]

Eh...

 

None of this is needed

 

She actually synergizes perfectly with snipers on enemies that are extremely high level but sonar is more for spraying with pierce guns and taking out crowds easily

[Zero.No.Hikari]

That 2nd change would be pretty abusable if scaled.off of power strength. Now Boom being a free action sure. But Sonar needs something like an Aura effect that was given to Silence would make her awesome with a Jurassic.

[RealPandemonium]

Agreed.

 

It also might be good if Sonar and Slience had their mechanics switched, with Sonar being an aura-like effect and Silence being a radial ability (but fix it so that it forces affected enemies to be unaware.)