Bursas are unbalanced in sorties

[Thural]

1 minute ago, LightsFaith said:

There wasn't a need to make yourself look so high and mighty. I was honestly trying to answer a question. And with the post on the tonkor. Mine is able to kill them in around 10 shots (i didn't count when i was killing them). So you may not have a good build to kill bursas with.

 

I wasn't making myself look all high and mighty, I was reacting to your condescension, albeit a bit excessively.  You still haven't answered the question of how you managed to keep Hysteria from being nullified.

[Sormatte]

10 minutes ago, Thural said:

I wasn't making myself look all high and mighty, I was reacting to your condescension, albeit a bit excessively.  You still haven't answered the question of how you managed to keep Hysteria from being nullified.

They might have gotten lucky and not gotten any of the Isolator(?) Bursas to spawn. That said, it took around 2 1/2 mags from my lex prime to put one down for good. At one point, my squad got swarmed by around 8 of them at a single interception point. Needless to say we went down... alot.

Edited March 4, 2016 by Sormatte

[LightsFaith]

10 minutes ago, Thural said:

I wasn't making myself look all high and mighty, I was reacting to your condescension, albeit a bit excessively.  You still haven't answered the question of how you managed to keep Hysteria from being nullified.

Now you're using words out of context. I was in no way looking down upon you nor trying to make you feel small in any shape or form. If you're this determined to find out an answer about how to not get nullified whilst in hysteria then the answer is as simple as it is absolutely impossible to not get nullified. You could keep running around dodging a nullify bubble and attacking its back to kill it but you will still probably die to it. The poster who said that was probably just making a joke in which you are taking way too seriously to the point where you are attacking me so i ask you to stop being so aggressive towards me and please tone it down a notch.

Just now, Sormatte said:

They might have gotten lucky and not gotten any of the Isolator(?) Bursas to spawn. That said, it took around 2 1/2 mags from my lex prime to put one down for good. At one point, my squad got swarmed by around 8 of them at a single interception point. Needless to say we went down... alot.

I got 6 total bursas within the sortie. My teammates got downed a lot but it wasn't too difficult to complete. I went wukong and my allies were valkyr, rhino, and mirage. Everyone got downed a lot except me. I was probably lucky but i was being very aggressive towards bursas. I kept jumping over them and shooting them in the back whenever they turned to look at me. If you're also wondering what gun i was using it was a 5 forma tonkor with argon scope.

[Borg1611]

Today's sortie was the worst by far that I've ever seen (just the the third part). It wasn't just the Bursa's, it was the combination of an intercept map with Draco level respawn rates that included Bursa's on top of energy reduction. That energy reduction was killer, making it really hard to deal with the endless spawning Bursas. Took me 4 or 5 attempts to get a public group that could handle it and even in that group we were all probably were bleeding out a dozen times. Thankfully one or more of the people in our group had the instant res focus which helped a lot. 

I had to use a sort of hybrid between EV and Blessing builds on Trinity as a normal EV build made me too vulnerable due to limited duration and my normal Blessing duration build is kind of iffy between extremely limited range on EV/link and dealing with energy reduction. If you're not really careful (which is hard to do when there's half a dozen Bursas spawning on the map constantly) + aware of your energy levels it's easy to fall below even being able to cast EV, then you have to frantically find an orb. 

It's funny how you see people complaining about letting low MR people in sorties because they die a lot and what not. Then you get a sortie like today's sortie and you see MR 20+ people bleeding out just as frequently as everyone else. 

edit: Oh, and after all that effort, I got a freaking zenurik lens as my reward, which I did not need. Thanks DE!

Edited March 4, 2016 by Borg1611

[WinteRcat1]

I wholeheartedly agree with the OP. Bursas are, quite frankly, broken. Any individual challenge presented by his bullet points would be fine on its own or in combination with one or two other challenges. Having all of them at once, and especially the fact that multiple will spawn at once, causes frustration. Those who are defending Bursas are ignorant of the bad design. The idea of them is cool, and I would personally love to see them integrated well into future Corpus missions. But right now, they make it nigh impossible to enjoy Corpus Sorties or to solo Corpus missions on any level.

One of the worst factors is that, besides having multiple Bursas spawn together, they also spawn with all the other enemies, and they synergize well with them. Try taking down a Bursa while it's surrounded by Sappers, or you're invisibility or invulnerability abilities are negated by Nullifiers or Sappers and Combas. If, like the aforementioned enemies, they only spawned one or two at a time, and they didn't spawn on every mission type on every world, then I might even accept them with their current bad design.

[LastTouch]

Bring a Blind Mirage and you can do nartas before they can think of attacking

 

[carnaga]

3 hours ago, Master-Ouroboros said:

Wanna know how I completed today's sortie 3, and with ease?

 

  Hide contents

Four Valkyrs, problem solved.

 

I don't want to run valkyr :<

Luckily we managed to complete it. Thought this mr12 guy with a valkyr <--- he shined in that mission :) He had no probs against bursas and prolly was pissed cause we died there few times xD The biggest problem I personally had on that mission was the ospreys and occasional mine fields >:(

Edited March 4, 2016 by carnaga

[Rhekemi]

I've found Mag's Bullet Attractor (in conjunction with powerful primaries/secondaries, and some warframe abilities) helpful on taking down Bursas in sorties. 

And of course, when the opportunity presents itself (based on the mission) to reset alarms, always reset alarms. That helped cut down our Bursa spawns to 0 in the Corpus sabotage a few days ago (after we failed it the first time when Bursa's mopped the floor with our candy asses).

I highly recommend trying a well built Mag and using Bullet Attractor on a Bursa.

But in an Interception sounds painful (haven't done today's sorties).

They are overpowered to me, too, yet a part of me is hoping they don't nerf it into the ground and remove at least some level of challenge.

I would be all for making them retain power and effectiveness (against their own faction) once hacked. It would be pretty satisfying if they lasted a hot minute.

Edited March 4, 2016 by Rhekemi
spacing issues

[AethonWalker]

I didn't do the sorties, but so far Bursas have been a fun addition to Corpus ranks when they do pop in. It sounds like the big issue here is just that the spawn rates were too high, which iirc has more to do with their levels. After all, don't the more high priority targets spawn more often when enemy levels get higher? If that's the case, the problem for Bursas in a sortie has to do with scaling, so the obvious answer would just be to bring their scaling down a notch or two for the sorties.

[carnaga]

44 minutes ago, AethonWalker said:

I didn't do the sorties, but so far Bursas have been a fun addition to Corpus ranks when they do pop in. It sounds like the big issue here is just that the spawn rates were too high, which iirc has more to do with their levels. After all, don't the more high priority targets spawn more often when enemy levels get higher? If that's the case, the problem for Bursas in a sortie has to do with scaling, so the obvious answer would just be to bring their scaling down a notch or two for the sorties.

I don't like to run with Valkyr, Rhino, Ash, Mirage, Atlas, Loki, Limbo (several reason but mostly it's because of OP things on certain missions). But I do love Saryn and with her (+ Rakta Crenos) I can deal a lvl 80 bursa without any cc in a solo play (prolonged fight). For the recent Corpus Sortie 3 I chose Nova and Sancti Tigris cause I thought about my team and slo-mo enemies. Well, I died there bunch of times on these ospray mine fields.

Anyways the problem (I had) with the the recent Corpus Sortie 3 interception was this:

We got 100% transmission on the first wave of the interception. Bursas are spawned near the end of each round.
Lotus says: "Kill the remaining enemies".
Me thinking: wow, cool. The first wave was pretty easy and now we can deal the bursas with our own phase :)
Game decides: You haven't killed the remaining enemies. Lets start the next wave immediately.
Me thinking: WTF is happening? Lotus??!?! We have like 20+ enemies and 3 bursas on the map and you start the next wave!?!?!
At this point we had to disengage from the fight to capture the towers. And soon we had bunch of bursas to deal with. And this was repeated till the end of the mission.

Edited March 4, 2016 by carnaga
Corrections...

[AethonWalker]

1 minute ago, carnaga said:

I don't like to run with Valkyr, Rhino, Ash, Mirage, Atlas, Loki, Limbo. But I love Saryn and with her (+ Rakta Crenos) I can deal a lvl 80 bursa without any cc in a solo play. For the recent Corpus Sortie 3 I chose Nova and Sancti Tigris cause I thought about my team and slo-mo enemies. Well, I died there bunch of times on these ospray mine fields.

Anyways the problem with the the recent Corpus Sortie 3 interception was this:

We got 100% transmission on the first wave of the interception.
Lotus says: "Kill the remaining enemies".
Me thinking: wow, cool. The first wave was pretty easy and now we can deal the bursas with our own phase :)
Game decides: You haven't killed the remaining enemies. Lets start the next wave immediately.
Me thinking: WTF is happening? Lotus??!?! We have like 20+ enemies and 3 bursas on the map and you start the next wave!?!?!
At this point we had to disengage from the bursa fight to capture the towers. And soon we had bunch of bursas to deal with. And this repeated till the end of the mission.

I gotta say, I don't like running with some of those frames much either just because I've overplayed all but Atlas and Mirage, and Limbo isn't doing too well anyway. With that in mind, that other bit sounds slightly horrifying since the bursas put up more challenge than the Hyena pack imo, with the exception of the constant slow effects.

[Justice_Ember]

2 hours ago, Borg1611 said:

WwI had to use a sort of hybrid between EV and Blessing builds on Trinity as a normal EV build made me too vulnerable due to limited duration and my normal Blessing duration build is kind of iffy between extremely limited range on EV/link and dealing with energy reduction. If you're not really careful (which is hard to do when there's half a dozen Bursas spawning on the map constantly) + aware of your energy levels it's easy to fall below even being able to cast EV, then you have to frantically find an orb. 

It's funny how you see people complaining about letting low MR people in sorties because they die a lot and what not. Then you get a sortie like today's sortie and you see MR 20+ people bleeding out just as frequently as everyone else. 

Wow! You had to think for yourself and make a build that worked for that particular enviroment? How crazy is that! Yeah definetely Bursas are too OP if they force you to actually think of them as a threat and build accordingly. 

I did the Sortie today with 3 clan mates, we are all MR20 and we had fun, had to do the last mission 4 times because we didn't consider Bursas at first, then we forgot about energy reduction, finally came about something similar to a working strat but had to abandon because it wasn't working, then we fixed some issues with our teamplay and got it, got 50 cores, but hey, it was 25-30 minutes of a fun and chanllenging mission, you know, like a Sortie is supposed to be. :D

[Borg1611]

1 hour ago, zzzNitro said:

Wow! You had to think for yourself and make a build that worked for that particular enviroment? How crazy is that! Yeah definetely Bursas are too OP if they force you to actually think of them as a threat and build accordingly. 

Wow, random nonsensical smartass remark! How crazy is that?!

 I actually didn't say Bursa's were OP, I specifically said it wasn't the Bursas, but the combination of the map/spawn rates and the energy reduction on top of the Bursas that made today's sortie the most difficult I'd seen so far. If the sortie rewards weren't laughable garbage, even to newer players, the difficulty would be worth the effort, but it's currently not. 

1 hour ago, zzzNitro said:

I did the Sortie today with 3 clan mates, we are all MR20 and we had fun, had to do the last mission 4 times

The fact that you failed multiple times with a organized group of MR20+ clanmates when plenty of other sorties are easily soloed kind of speaks to how messed up sorties are. There shouldn't be that big of a gap day to day in difficulty. If they want them to be challenging, fine, make them all challenging and make the rewards worth the effort. 

 

1 hour ago, zzzNitro said:

like a Sortie is supposed to be

Intentionally designing them to be high effort low reward is terrible design. They either need to lower the effort or increase the reward. I would personally vote for higher reward. There are numerous suggestions on how they could do that here and on reddit (assuming they haven't already made changes in 18.5, which would be a nice surprise). Personally I think they should give us an arcane on top of the random reward since a lot (if not most) people have no desire to raid in this game.  Then the difficulty of something like today's sortie would be justified. 

[Xbalanque84]

I think a bigger issue is the game-breaking lag caused by being swarmed by 4 bursas at once. It took me about a dozen tries to beat this sortie (only to get 25 cores, F*** you very much RNGesus), and every single time the parties I was with experienced massive lag spikes whenever the bursas showed up. Not only did this leave us vulnerable to attack and points open to capture, it crashed my game twice. As if bursas weren't OP enough, it seems having more than one in the same room is literally killing the game.

[alergiclaprosti]

Just wait for the Sentients of that level.

[TheLexiConArtist]

11 hours ago, EvilChaosKnight said:

Quite funny. Different people bring up concerns about the Bursas but the same defense squad deploys every time trying to parrot the same arguments how Bursas are "fine". Most of said arguments don't even hold any value like your note about the armor.

The only actual Corpus unit with armor was Oxium Osprey. And guess what? You don't even need to kill it, it can just suicide ram into you and save you the trouble. Heavy Gunners only have 150 more armor than Bursas (350 vs 500), 2400 less proto-shields and 2200 less health (2500 vs 300). They also lack huge mobility, have spin-up time for their guns and lack CC for the most part.

And Handspring sometimes doesn't work. Anyone who fought Bursas a lot knows this also.

So on and so forth. Even common sense is against you the moment you look at the base stats of faction heavies and then compare them to Bursas. 

No, Bursas are not fine. Get off your high horse of denial and accept the fact that democracy isn't in your favor here. :P

 

"Only" 150 more armour? Scaling up to Sortie levels magnifies that many times over. How much easier is it to kill a high level Grineer Butcher than a Lancer, or Trooper? That's only 95 and 145 base armour difference respectively. I'm pretty sure the difference is noticeable (except when you're running multiple Corrosive Projections anyway).

2400 less protoshields? Bursas have a base 700 non-proto shield. Damage can bypass shields pretty easily, too. Falsehood.

2200 less health? Bursas have base 1500 health. 1200 difference, not 2200.

The heavy units also have the luxury of Eximus variants, too.

 

Handspring isn't certain, but it's better than nothing. Abilities that block knockdowns, as well as uninterruptible animations (which I can get swinging a dagger, much less a heavy weapon) work just fine. Also, CC.

 

11 hours ago, Yuni_Hermit said:

Thank you, yes. The problem is not just that they have too much armor, it's that it's out of PLACE in this faction. You need different elements to fight armor, and Oxium Ospreys just suicide. Even 'less armor than a heavy gunner' becomes insane at level freaking 100. On Grineer that's fine, everyone brings Corrosive Projection, it's a faction thing. But forcing everyone to do that on Corpus sorties as well is the problem, there's no other usable sortie aura at that point.

 

Normally having to bring tons of different elements is a Corrupted and Sentient problem, not -corpus-. There's no grineer units with shields other than bosses, either! Bursa knockdowns bypass handspring on one of the types, because they have an effect where the knockdown duration is 3 times as long. Handspring doesn't do anything against the electro-tethers either. Terrify doesn't affect bursas, there were no nullifiers in the mission, thankfully. I terrified the bursa, he just kept stomping and chasing me around, and all other crowd control has severely reduced effects, with heavily diminishing returns.

Yes they are 'high priority targets', but that doesn't help at all if they spawn in endless numbers.

 

Oh, and as for 8 hyenas at once being 'par for the course'? That was an EVENT. This is a daily mission!

Handspring doesn't work? Go for Constitution and/or Sure Footed. Or, again, use the other options available to you.

I don't even bring CP to Grineer sorties, much less Corpus. Still manageable.

EVERYTHING is unbalanced in sorties. That's the point. It's artificial difficulty, I agree, but it is what it is.

7 hours ago, Thural said:

I had 10 at one point, good times, good times.  My Chroma/Tonkor duo, which can get 3 million damage on Draco, was doing 30s

7 hours ago, Thural said:

I'll have to try that, it might be aoe weapons that don't work

That is exactly the case. Explosive hit a predetermined point; against humanoids it's a headshot, against Bursas it's in the not-immune-but-not-a-weakspot parts.

 

======================================================================================================================

Bursas are not completely fine. But all this hyperbolic crying about them actively works against the legitimate criticisms.

Here, I'll even supply some that are a bit more founded (even if these problems can currently be overcome, they are a little imbalanced):

• Spawning in low level missions is questionable, they probably should be relegated to 20+ like Manics.
• Chaining enhanced knockdowns should be looked at in group cases where it can cause overlapping denial that cannot simply be jumped over.
• Turn speed when in 'defensive mode' is a little excessive and necessitates CC to get more than only the briefest window for damaging the weak point.

[Diseenith]

Honestly it feels like people just hate bursas because the normal stuff isn't as effective against them. Notably tonkor and staticor do all of nothing to them due to how explosives work. I go in there corrosive projection, a mag, a trinity (EV), an excaliber, and a mirage and its pretty easy. Or just mirage + EV, because that blind is crazy.

 

[hukurokuju5]

i think the COMPLETE DAMAGE IMMUNITY is too much... 

[-CdG-Zilchy]

9 hours ago, Thural said:

I wasn't making myself look all high and mighty, I was reacting to your condescension, albeit a bit excessively.  You still haven't answered the question of how you managed to keep Hysteria from being nullified.

It's not hard to dodge the glowing green nullifier ball, Isolator Bursa's shriek before firing it. Why shoot 10 times when Paralysis can open them to finisher damage. Btw MR is a bad way to assess skill level, I played the other day with a clueless MR 20 with only 300hrs game time. 

[DuckCat]

1 hour ago, EDYinnit said:

"Only" 150 more armour? Scaling up to Sortie levels magnifies that many times over. How much easier is it to kill a high level Grineer Butcher than a Lancer, or Trooper? That's only 95 and 145 base armour difference respectively. I'm pretty sure the difference is noticeable (except when you're running multiple Corrosive Projections anyway).

2400 less protoshields? Bursas have a base 700 non-proto shield. Damage can bypass shields pretty easily, too. Falsehood.

2200 less health? Bursas have base 1500 health. 1200 difference, not 2200.

The wiki claims that they've got 2500 robotic health, but the codex says 1500. The latter is probably the correct value.

But even so, 350 vs 500 ferrite armor doesn't actually matter all that much at level 100. The Bursas' base level is 1, while the Heavy Gunners' is 8. The total damage reduction for Bursas is thus 95.07%, while the Heavy Gunners' is 96.07%, so about a 20% difference in damage dealt. The total health of the level 100 Bursa (assuming 1500 is correct) is roughly 220k, while a level 100 Heavy Gunner has around 38k. I don't claim to know all about the math behind Warframe's enemy scaling, but it would seem that the effective health of a level 100 Bursa is then close to 4.5 million. The Heavy Gunner would have just short of 1 million (or half a million, taking the head shot multiplier into account).

Obviously, corrosive damage can melt Bursas, but corrosive damage also sucks against units with proto shields and doesn't grant any bonuses against normal shields or flesh, and none of the remaining elements are particularly useful against Corpus. So it feels a little off to mod a weapon for a single enemy and lower your effectiveness against all others. And this last part is the biggest problem I have with Bursas. Corrosive damage was already among the more useful damage types before the recent Bursa re-implementation. Now there's hardly any reason to switch mod configs on your weapons, unless you're able to find a coordinated squad with corrosive projection auras.

[Spkr4theDead]

15 hours ago, Yuni_Hermit said:

I was doing the third sortie today. Corpus, interception, level 80-100.

 

The mission was doing fine, going as normal, then I came to realized how unbalanced level 100 bursas are. I've reduced this to bullet points.

 

1: Enormous armor on a corpus unit, to the point where even good elements (corrosive, magnetic) are ineffective. (Off-faction heavy armor, forcing corrosive projection against corpus)

2: Insta-kill, massive area damage (even my heavily armored frames were going down in a single bomb)

3: Huge crowd control (tethers, knockdowns, etc. Get knocked down once and you are dead/downed before you can get up almost guaranteed)

4: If you hack them, the other enemies kill them in -seconds- (despite how deadly they are against tenno, their stats seem to go down when hacked, as even crewman with Deras mow them down like grass once hacked)

5: Immune/resistant to almost all status ailments (Terrify does nothing, any status ailment is shortened, and is even shorter with repeated casting)

6: Immune to damage from many angles, despite heavy crowds keeping you from positioning yourself (it's hard to flank a front-shielded bursa when they are surrounded by a crowd of enemies, including MORE bursas)

 

All of the above combined make the enemy nearly -impossible- to deal with in a high level sortie. It's downright unfair and every single warframe is ineffective against them. Screw Razorback, Nerf Anyo should have just deployed an army of bursas. And they just keep -spawning-. Either reduce their frequency, make status ailments WORK, or give them SOME other kind of achillies heel.

That much armor does not belong on a REPEATEDLY spawning -corpus- unit. Only corpus bosses have armor normally, and there's dozens of bursas in a high level sortie. Would you ask us to fight 8 hyena pack at once, repeatedly, in the same mission? Then why is the same happening for bursas!?

Edit: Typos

Ash :)

[WinteRcat1]

On 3/4/2016 at 4:57 AM, Diseenith said:

Honestly it feels like people just hate bursas because the normal stuff isn't as effective against them. Notably tonkor and staticor do all of nothing to them due to how explosives work. I go in there corrosive projection, a mag, a trinity (EV), an excaliber, and a mirage and its pretty easy. Or just mirage + EV, because that blind is crazy.

 

People have many complaints about Bursas, from their ridiculous implementation in Sorties, which has been discussed here, to their appalling design making low-level Corpus missions nigh impossible for solo players. No where have I seen people complain about them forcing us to use something other than our most common weapons. Though I haven't seen it directly stated very many places I, and I assume others, resent the fact that one of the only solid ways to take them out without grinding your teeth in frustration is the same stale team comp everyone is sick of in the meta. Corrosive Projection, which is annoyingly necessary on Grineer sorties, shouldn't now be necessary on Corpus Sorties too. Mirage + EV, and throw in a mag and excalibur since it's a Corpus mission. That's boring, and it just contributes to the growing problem that CC is replacing both skilled play and all other possible team comps.

It would help a lot if the Bursas' behavior was adjusted so that if you isolated it and maneuvered around it you could get to it's weak spot rather than it being able to turn on a dime, and/or other forms of CC worked on it besides Blind and Freeze. Nyx's ability's, which I find more interesting and adaptable than Mirage's, are completely useless against Bursas. Knockdown and even Knockback procs don't affect Bursas. Rip Line and Pull do nothing. They're invulnerable to all but the most overplayed and overpowered tactics.

I would personally prefer they followed more after their original design and were invulnerable to all CC, but moved slowly, attacked slowly and responded slowly. They should be dangerous, but we should be able to systematically deal with them. Even a solo player should be able to avoid their high-damage attacks, take out the surrounding enemies, and then maneuver behind them to attack their weak spot. And of course, they shouldn't be spawning one on top of another.

[Specific.Zod]

Bursa is heavy armoured units. I don't mind when they are fast on 2 legs like MOA, but in armoured state, bursa moves faster than crewman is questionable design. As for nyx, mind control last about 6 seconds in duration built first time, that's enough for nyx jump behind and shoot the panel. Bolt can be used to momentarily stagger bursa, and chaos will turn bursa against crewmen and tech, you can practically hold bursa out of capture zone long enough if there are 1-2 techs spawn with, unless there is a nulifier.

Bursa should move slowly, attack averagly , and respond quickly.

[Talluna]

Not to mention you can't fight them when you're too busy picking yourself up after they do that repeated floor knockdown.

[carnaga]

On 5.3.2016 at 5:44 PM, Specific.Zod said:

Bursa is heavy armoured units. I don't mind when they are fast on 2 legs like MOA, but in armoured state, bursa moves faster than crewman is questionable design. As for nyx, mind control last about 6 seconds in duration built first time, that's enough for nyx jump behind and shoot the panel. Bolt can be used to momentarily stagger bursa, and chaos will turn bursa against crewmen and tech, you can practically hold bursa out of capture zone long enough if there are 1-2 techs spawn with, unless there is a nulifier.

Bursa should move slowly, attack averagly , and respond quickly.

My brain says that heavy units should be slow.

 

Spoiler

 

This is similar with zombies. Traditional zombies are brain dead with low motoric skills -- because they are brain dead.

But now they are usain bolt speed runners that go 50 kmh, flip cars and busses over and devour everything they see