Building A New Frame- Can't Decide... Help! (Need Opinions)

[hobolyra]

I'm hung up on the next warframe to get. I can't decide between the following:

 

Frost: Heard he was better tank role than rhino and good damage as well.

 

Ash: I play in groups, is he more viable solo then grouped?

 

Banshee: Seeing her a lot. I don't stealth very well, but am willing to try/learn. Still, I normally play in groups.

 

Nyx: Some skills don't work properly I heard, and many teams shoot controlled enemies as they don't know any better. Worth the fustration?

 

Saryn: Heard some skills are bugged? 

 

Vauban: Heard it's currently OP though, and may get changed. Might wait on this one until I see the changes.

 

-----------------

 

So, what are your thoughts on these frames? Why do you like some and not others? What is more viable for group play (unorganized?) and on that note: I normally play MAG and am enjoying her, if that helps at all.

[Acyl]

Frost: I wouldn't say it's a 'better tank than Rhino', because it's totally different. Frost is a superior choice for defense missions, because he throws up a big defensive Snow Globe. It protects a spherical area around you. You can surround a cryopod with that. The thing is, obviously that's a power to block a single location - you deploy the globe, but then it's fixed to that location and you lose the benefits if you move outside of it. With that said, you can shoot out of the sphere from inside, and you can protect allies in there with you. You can also use it to trap enemies in place, and finally you can actually summon multiple globes at once. 

 

Frost does damage, but I wouldn't say the damage is that fantastic. He has a damage ultimate, but it's just average, and the earlier ice attacks aren't that great. Not really better than the attack powers of the more damage-focused warframes, probably worse. Do note that Rhino's damage has been upped, since I'm told Radial Blast does something like 1000 damage now.

 

Ash: I wouldn't really call it more solo-focused than grouped. The whole thing with teleporting to enemies and using smokescreen for extra melee damage works just as well, no matter if you're on a team or party. With that said, I prefer Loki to Ash. I feel Loki's powers are more useful than Ash's damage abilities. Ash is definitely easier to learn and use than Loki, though. More straightforward. But also less utility.

 

Blade Storm is really really awesome to see in action, but it hits a fixed number of enemies, and frankly I'm not keen about the gimmick - it teleports you around the area stabbing enemies one at a time. If you like it, go ahead, but I'd rather have a regular AoE ultimate that kills everything at once. I also don't like Ash's polarities, he has two V polarities, but most V mods don't affect all his powers, just one or two. Continuity only affects Smokescreen, for instance, it does nothing for his three other powers. Sure, nowadays you can use Forma to change and add polarities, but...

 

Banshee: You're pretty much on the money about the group thing, here. Her whole silence trick isn't really useful in a group. That said, that's just the one power. Her ability to mark areas on enemies (shoot here for extra damage) can be very useful in teams, especially on high level planets against harder opponents. It's a massive damage increase. 

 

Her damage abilities are pretty solid too, and notably do stuff like going through walls, knocking enemies down - it's a thinking player's warframe. 

 

Nyx: Aside from Frost and Vauban, Nyx is the warframe you want on a defense mission, and I'd say she's more valuable than either of the other two. Her skills work. The only real remaining issue is with Absorb when you have the Shade sentinel, because Absorb depends on soaking up enemy and ally fire to do damage. But Shade...cloaks you automatically. But you're not going to be spamming Absorb anyway. And if you're taking Nyx to do damage, then you're doing it wrong. Nyx isn't about the damage. Likewise, Psychic Bolts is sort of meh as a damage power. It's okay, it's better than people think - you need to know how to use it. But it's not great.

 

But Nyx is about Mind Control and Chaos. Those are the key powers. And the thing with Mind Control and Chaos, you don't use those powers to let enemies kill each other. That's just a bonus. You use those powers to stop the enemy from shooting at you and your team. You turn them from enemies into helpless targets. So it doesn't matter if your teammates start killing the enemies you've just tagged with your mindscrew powers - the power has already done its main job.

 

The downside with Nyx is that her powers aren't really useful on many boss fights. Mind Control flat out doesn't work on bosses. Chaos does, but Chaos doesn't actually cause enemies to attack each other. It causes them to attack anything that's nearby. That's usually another enemy, but if you use it on a boss who's alone, with no other enemies around...

 

Saryn: The only major current issue with Saryn is the difficulty in getting Venom spores to detonate, especially under lag conditions, possibly with some weapons, maybe if the spore clips into an enemy's body. Basically with Venom, you plant a spore on a target. It does damage over time. You can then shoot the spore - you have to target and shoot it - to burst the spore and spread that damage in an area of effect. 

 

This means that if the target just flat out dies before you manage to burst the spore, there's no spore spreading. It means if you can't hit the spore, there's no area of effect. This can be tricky on a fast-moving team, or if you're lagged to the host. But it doesn't mean Venom is useless...you can stack multiple Venom casts on a single target, say a boss or heavy unit. And under good conditions when you CAN burst the Venom...well, okay, I'll be frank. I personally suck with using Venom, but I've seen good Saryn players take out big crowds of high-level enemies with good Venom use.

 

Vauban: It's not really OP period, it's just OP specifically on defense missions, you need to understand the context of the complaints. Think about it for a second - many people farm defense missions. If you look at any planet, you'll see it's defense and mobile defense that have the most people playing. And that's where Nyx, Vauban and Frost do ridiculously well. On a defense mission, Vauban can leave Tesla grenades lying all over the map, until it's like a fairy puked sparkly dust everywhere. 

 

But once you take Vauban out of that context - you're talking about a warframe that has the lowest shields and health next to Loki, but unlike Loki, doesn't run very fast. Vauban is a slow-moving warframe. His powers are very good, but the deployment range on them is short...they're all grenade throw powers, basically, but he doesn't throw very far. Nyx and Rhino got recent nerfs, because they had powers where you could press one button and damn near solo the entire game. Vauban can't do that.

 

The Tesla thing gets attention. I won't be surprised if there's a cap placed on the number of Tesla you can have out at a single time, but really it's only an issue in a defense context. In any other highly mobile mission, you're not going to have the time to seed a room with twenty million Tesla. Two or three, four or five, maybe - but normally things are just going to die without you being able to construct some kind of clever trap corridor of death. Your team isn't going to wait for that. By the time you drop that many Tesla, your team's going to have killed everything in the room. And they're probably a couple rooms over there already.

 

You can cover a boss with Tesla grenades, but reasonably that's not that much of a game changer. Like Nyx, Vauban's somewhat less useful facing a regular boss or a Stalker. Not useless, but less useful.

 

His powers are very very good, don't get me wrong. But they're also bugged, and not in Vauban's favour. He's gotten some bug fixes lately, but I don't know if all the issues are fixed yet. I've personally seen his powers completely fail to go off on a few occasions. If you're talking about a warframe to possibly avoid due to existing bugs, you don't want to avoid Nyx or Saryn. You want to avoid Vauban.

 

"Alright, I have a nice cluster of enemies right here - VORTEX!...uh...Vortex? Hello? Vortex? Ohcrapohcrapohcrap damnit BASTILLE! Oh what the hell, is that not working either---AHHH RUN AWAY RUN AWAY."

 

I'm guessing my teammates were wondering why I dashed straight out of that room after having dashed into it. I'm not proud.

Edited May 27, 2013 by Acyl

[PancakeChef]

I could use help with this as well. So far I got a Rhino and I'm looking for a good end-game warframe that is lighter.

[Wertron]

I've only played with MAG, Banshee and Excalibur so far... So I can only offers some information regarding Banshee.

 

Stealth isn't my thing, but believe me when I say this, Banshee can work very well without Stealth! As Acyl said, Banshee offers a lot of good group features, namely three of her skills.

 

Sonic Boom - Great for pushing enemies away from hot spots, like fallen Tenno or then CryoPod in Defense Missions. another great feature is that Sonic Boom can knockdown enemies, which makes it easier to kill them! It's also extremely cheap to use!

 

Sonar - Dots the enemies with orange spots, which is their weak points. All players in the group can see these orange spots, so if the group is aware of the effect, you can clear areas really fast!

 

Silence - I consider this a Stealth skills and therefore I don't use it.

 

Sound Quake - Big damage fields that is able to penetrate any structure (Crates walls, floors, pillars). it's a pulsating effect and during the period of the casting, any enemy entering the field will be "stunned" and get a small knockback while in the area of effect. This skill is great for Defense Missions because the damage is great and while the enemies are "stunned" your team can rush in and shoot the the stronger enemies down!

 

Regarding weapon setup, she can run with anything I've used so far.

As for Primary I've used Boltor and HEK.

Both are able to hit the Sonar orange spots (can be a little tricky with Boltor).

 

Secondary I've used Viper and LEX.

Using Sonar and LEX can kill anything really REALLY fast and from a safe distance! Viper is still a work in progress but it got potential!

 

Melee Weapon I've used Scindo, Fang, Heat Blade and Glaive.

NOTE; I haven't tested if melee weapon is able to hit the weak points when using Sonar. all the melee weapons I've used work really well with Banshee. Most of the time I use Fang, since it has a wicked fast attack speed. Using Sprint+Jump+Melee attack with Fang makes you fly insanely fast which is really helpful when your team needs some support.

 

Hope this helps deciding which Frame to pick :)

[PancakeChef]

Yeah, stealth really isn't my thing either and I like playing in groups. I do have almost all of what I need for a Banshee though, should I try her out regardless? The only other frames I can think about getting is Frost Prime or Nyx.

[Jishmael]

Currently is use Ash who in my opinion suits a stealth play style and a beat the cr*p out of everything play style. For me its is mainly the weapons that you choose to play with him. With the right mods equipped he can play well in most situations

[Acyl]

I think the key takeaway point is there aren't any weak warframes. There are warframes that many people think need further buffs, like the current Rhino and perhaps Ember. But there's no warframe where there's massive consensus that jeez no, this warframe sucks, do not take this warframe ever. To a large degree, what's good for you depends on your priorities and playstyle.

Do you value an 'oh crap' button to avoid damage and keep yourself alive? Then you want Rhino, Frost, Loki, Ash...maybe Ember. Do you want to do a lot of damage with attack powers? Then you want Ember...and so on. It's what you're looking for, it's not the raw warframes themselves. The warframes are what they are. I think some stuff needs to be buffed. Some stuff may need to be nerfed. But at the end of the day, everything is at least viable.

[hobolyra]

Some really awesome Posts here, and especially a big thanks to Acyl for that post. Very informative, especially as I didn't know Vauban had that many bugs. (Then again, he is the newest kid on the block)

 

OK, lets try and throw some more details down in terms of play style-

I don't stealth at all, as I play in groups the majority of the time. I want a frame that has some good group dynamic in terms of CC without being pure support. I would Also like some decent damage output if need be- survivability is always good but I don't need anything "tanky" as I don't like staying one spot to long on missions. I think I've used one respawn in all of my time playing as I don't go down- I know when to GTFO and find cover. I do like the mass damage and "Oh crap" thing MAG has with her ultimate, so some sort of ultimate more than pure damage would be nice.

 

With that criteria and style in mind, Banshee is looking good to me after reading your posts, as is Nyx. 

 

Nyx: I don't take Shade so the cloaking issue won't really happen with me, and the pure damage only moves like psychic bolts aren't the reason I would take her anyways. She definitely seems like a defend farming warframe over some of the others, and I only just started doing such things.

 

Banshee: While she sounds almost perfect for what I want, reading people's thoughts on SQ and the nerfs make me hesitate. She has almost no armour but isn't invincible while standing in a prone animation position for up to 7 seconds? That's a death waiting to happen on hard levels of defense and so on.

 

Both only having a base armour of 10 is what is scaring me away from these warframes, but does armor even effect shield depletion, or only health damage? If it only effects health then it shouldn't matter much to me as I tend to keep shields up and avoid health removal. 

 

So, I started looking more closely at Saryn- and I think I've found my match. Good close combat utility, survivability, damaging ultimate, and a CC target distraction? SOLD!

 

So yeah, I've decided on Saryn being my 2nd frame (I don't count the founders frame) and am still on the fence if I make another from banshee or Nyx. Still looking for input incase others are deciding and need help as well.

[Opinions]

So, how can I help?

[krisp]

Frost: great support for grineer/corpus defense missions, snow globe prevents cryopod damage. Great aoe on 4th skill.

 

Banshee: great ultimate, great support with Sonar. Don't think for a moment that she's stealth-focused. Only one skill is stealth-based and you'll probably ignore it anyway. Also the "she's not invincible, oh noes" concern is moot - you permastun enemies while casting anyway. Equip the power range mod and you won't have anything to worry about in 99% of the situations.

 

Anything else is mostly up to personal preference. You already have an AoE ulti frame, so even the two above aren't mandatory. Frost looks damn good in those pseudo-robes, slow as he may be.

 

Saryn has a shorter-range but more damaging ultimate. She fits Excalibur's niche in that regard, but has some distraction powers too. Again, there's no right or wrong here.

 

Armor is a non-issue, it doesn't mitigate shield damage. Don't try to min/max stats, the draw is always in the intricacies of the skills and how you use them.

Edited May 27, 2013 by krisp

[Sharcoth]

If you prefer playing in groups, Frost is good to use. Frost's damage is just about average but he can be real useful in defense missions and such.

[Acyl]

Glad we could help narrow it down for you. As krisp said, armor only affects health damage, not shields, so that shouldn't matter.

 

Saryn is a solid choice. She's a very good all-rounder. If you do get a chance to use Venom right, that's cheap distance AoE damage right there, or something to stack the DoT on bosses - keeps their shields from regenerating if nothing else. Molt's a decoy, obviously, but you can effectively use it as temporary durability if you cast Molt and then don't move out of the resulting shell. Enemy attacks will tend to hit the decoy first. Contagion's melee boost is really very huge.

 

Do note Miasma doesn't have very good range compared to some of the other 'kill everything in an AoE' though, and I'm not sure a Stretch mod would be worth it on Saryn given that it wouldn't do much for her other powers.

 

She is quite a slow-moving warframe, though. That's worth saying. Personally I don't like playing Saryn without sticking a Rush mod in somewhere.