Long and boring rambling regarding Excalibur

[Epsik-kun]

Let's start with a bit of an introduction to better show the context of this post. Feel free to skip it, though, as it isn't that important to the topic.

Spoiler

More than half a year ago I've made a thread regarding my view of Excalibur's position in the game and the complete irrelevance he has fallen into due to the set of changes he and the game received during the prior year or two. Even after that point, some of the changes to the game had continued to reinstitute the problem I had perceived.

However, after the release of the Chromatic Blade, I can finally say that DE have addressed the problem I've been talking about.

I consider the augment to be a beautiful solution to the situation, and I really hope that it will stay that way (as I hope the thing that's "treated as a bug at this time" will).

So, I have to put a disclaimer that I do consider Excalibur to be in a rather good spot currently and what I want to talk about are possible changes to reinforce his identity and to address some of the well-known problems he has, as opposed to a general "we need to fix him" statement. 
Another important moment, I will be talking about a high-level and highly optimized playstyle - balancing Excalibur around the Mercury had never produced anything good. He is nicely balanced to go through low levels as a starter frame with no access to optimized gear - expecting him not to steamroll through said content when properly geared is weird, to say the least.

What I want to talk about here is a number of balance, identity, and QoL issues of Excalibur. To put them into an understandable perspective, let me first share my vision of what Excalibur currently is - based on my own experience of playing Excalibur for quite a long time:

Spoiler

Excalibur is an all-around universal frame, possessing some niche tools for every mission in the game - similarly to the vast majority of other frames. What he currently truly excels at is dealing moderately focused damage to priority targets while still having relatively high AoE clearing potential - all of which is achieved via Exalted Blade.
Now, if you're going to argue that his AoE potential should not be addressed as merely "high", I'll allow myself to correct you by stating Exalted Blade is physically incapable of getting even remotely close to the AoE potential not only of skills - but even of regular melee weapons. To put it into simpler terms: Exalted Blade ain't going to outperform Maiming Atterax at AoE clearing - unless we're talking about some seriously overstayed missions, which is also a topic I want to address.

Judging from this position, I see Excalibur as either a damage-dealer/priority targets killer at the Sortie-level content or a frame with a great scaling into overextended missions. I am not saying that he can't or shouldn't do other content - like any other frame he's perfectly fine with deviating away from his "forte". However, I still believe that it is the "forte" what supposed to be in the center of the frame's identity.

And within this "identity" I see a couple of issues that are rather frustrating than game-breaking. Let's start with a well-known issue: Excalibur's durability

Spoiler

 

For a frame that only starts to shine on a high-level content, Excalibur is awfully frail. People sometimes address him as a "glass-canon" which is pretty hard to argue against in the context I'm talking about. However, I'm absolutely certain that Excalibur wasn't made with a "glass-canon" archetype in mind. Not only Excalibur is one of more durable frames - most of the frames that excel him in durability - especially against sustained damage - were either introduced relatively recently or had received new mechanics which enabled that.

And the important moment here, when frames do excel Excalibur in durability - they tend to do so by a landslide. Why is it important? Well, because while Excalibur never was a "tank" frame per say - he always had enough durability to trade blows with his enemies. During the powercreep of the last few years, he lost that aspect of his identity - that's why when a frame is decided to be able to "trade hits" it receives vastly superior endurance stats compared to Excalibur.
And I am not trying to bash on powercreep here - it's vital for a game like Warframe. Lack of progression makes the game stall. However, while powercreep should be opening new limits to push for, it shouldn't be killing aspects of the game.

So, offensively Excalibur is designed to be good for high-level content, however defensively he isn't capable of facing the said content.
Invulnerability of Slash Dash and CC potential of Radial Blind are great aspects used to reinforce the idea of Excalibur going toe-to-toe with his enemies, but the "used to" is the key part here. Slash Dash and Radial Blind will ultimately fail to save him from getting bursted down in a fraction of a second - and when it happens it is simply frustrating. These tools are designed to be used on reaction to what's happening on the screen - there's no room for a reaction when Excal is getting one-shotted. And it's not like the player is being punished for trying to jump over their head - it's the opposite, actually. They are just doing the only content where Excalibur is an objectively better choice than yet another frame with a stick.
And because of how the scaling in this game works, this isn't a problem Excalibur can realistically solve through modding. He is lacking the necessary tools that would allow the mods to scale properly. Going for the 5-mod survival combo might make surviving marginally easier, however, it won't significantly affect the level of content where his survivability will ultimately fall off. Not to mention, it will dramatically reduce his actual combat potential as Excalibur already has quite a few mods that can be considered "mandatory" essentially voiding the point of using the frame in the first place.

So, how the game addresses this issue? Revives and Naramon. While one-shots happen more often than they should - they are rare enough to be dealt with by just getting revived by other players or by some of player's 5/6 self-revives. I don't know about you, but for me dying is a frustrating experience. Especially when dying can't really be "git gud" around.
Regarding Naramon, I believe there are no people left in this game who don't agree on the fact invisibility is completely and utterly broken. Hence, a Focus school that gives universal access to invisibility is supposed to be broken too. Well, it's half-true. Making a broken mechanics universally available allows to cover some glaring holes of other broken universal mechanics. To put it in different words: "A frame can't survive in arbitrary content? Run Naramon, duh".
Now, I'm among the people who actually likes Naramon as far as Focus schools go (ahem, mostly garbage, ahem), but I don't think that over-reliance on Naramon for the sake of living up to his own identity is good for Excalibur. Naramon is great for effectively enabling viable melee builds for normally squishy frames thus allowing the builds to exits. But the Naramon being a required tool for Excalibur to fulfill his main role looks pretty weird to me. I have no problems with Naramon being required for Excalibur to do over 2 hours of solo Survival - it isn't the regular game content, it's something that Naramon enables the player to do - to combat the scaling system and see how far they can get. Some people, myself included, like it. However not using Naramon whenever applicable during, say, Sorties will give Excalibur so much unnecessary headache it isn't really worth it.

 

So, the bottom line is: Excalibur technically can go through the missions he's supposed to be good at, but this process itself is rather frustrating and repetitive.

Another issue regarding the whole idea of being a priority target killer is the fact many bosses don't actually fall into the list of priority targets to kill which is rather counter-intuitive. 

Spoiler

I believe, any Excalibur player who've tried to fight Vay Hek or Lephantis quickly realized that EBlading them down is nigh impossible. Both waves and blade attacks refuse to hit vulnerable spots most of the time, and by "most" I mean "over 95%".
And given how much dedication Exalted Blade build requires and how little synergy Excalibur has with the usage of regular weapons, I refuse to consider the necessity of swapping weapons to be a good design, especially given the horrendous implementation of said swapping in Warframe and all the penalties that come with it for Excal.

 

Yet again, it isn't actually a "problem". Ultimately, the player can trash the idea of being an anime swoosh-swoosh swordsman, just swap to a gun and shoot whatever shiny spot they're supposed to shoot - likely with the help of teammates. That's unless they'll try to solo Sortie Vay Hek - then they're in for some quality time.

The last thing I would like to talk about is Excalibur's skill set and more specifically - the place Radial Javelin holds in it. I believe, most if not all players - Excal mains or not - agree on the fact Radial Javelin doesn't fit Excalibur's skill set, has no synergy with other skills and is rather useless.

Spoiler

Were you to ask me a year ago - "should Radial Javelin be buffed/changed/removed?" - I would likely answer "no". A year ago, there still was a reason for Radial Javelin to exist - two, actually. One being old Draco, another being old Void Defense.
Now, it doesn't really matter whether or not you personally like either of these - the fact remains, RJ build was useful. Not so much anymore.

It's not like the mission archetypes themselves are gone - it's about the necessity of high performance and optimization. A highly-optimized RJ-centered squad could produce anywhere from 30% to 100% better results compared to its more easily sustainable alternatives. My personal best was a bit over 1500 kills during a single cap2 wave (getting a thousand considered to be really good already). Yes, RJ Excal was very hard for EV to sustain, but the results were worth it, so people knew how to do it. This in its turn enabled the opportunity of using a similar squad for Void Defence (including T4D) which was the fastest way of doing 20 waves by far. And the fact EVs usually were able to sustain RJ, one could've even taken RJ to a resource farming (because killing three times as fast is better than having double drops) and have outstanding results.
However current "loot caves" are pretty far from being as profitable as old Draco was and neither they are as well suited for RJ to be the main DPS. And even if we assume he still can be top-DPS (which is possible but is unlikely) provided a near-perfect performance from the whole squad - the difference isn't really worth the effort anymore. And given RJ is out of the meta - you can't really expect an arbitrary EV to be able to sustain him, so all the other usages for the build are also quite limited. And even taking him to the Void Defense is quite questionable, as there's no real point in running quick 20-40 waves of Void Defence anymore - even if for the fun of the mission type itself.

So, the usefulness of RJ is limited to low-level Exterminations and why would you even bother having a dedicated separate build for that? Augment too is too bad to be good.

This concludes the list of my concerns for Excalibur and my thoughts regarding them.

Continuing to the actual suggestions to address said concerns:

There are numerous ways of balancing Excalibur's survivability ranging from tweaking his attributes to changing his skills.
I personally always felt that protection provided by Exalted Blade falls short far too often for a supposedly melee-oriented frame - we even had patch notes stating "Excal should go melee, so we nerf his melee options" (I didn't get it back then, I don't get it now, but whatever).

Adding some extra protection to Exalted Blade is one of the ways to address the issue.

Currently, Exalted Blade provides 60% damage reduction in an arc in front of Excalibur - much less than 60% from explosives. As far as I'm aware, manual blocking protects you from knockdowns but doesn't provide any extra damage reduction.

A possible suggestion here is to change EBlade defenses. For example - Exalted Blade could provide constant damage reduction from all sources and directions while having an active parry in the frontal arc. Let's say it'll be 50% total damage reduction and 75% parry - it'll add up to Excalibur having effectively doubled EHP during Exalted Blade while receiving only one-eighth of the damage directly from front - which puts the damage reduction slightly below the likes of what Trin, Nekros, or Nidus have while being far less reliable but paired with a powerful damage-dealing ability. Manual blocking in its turn could just provide the good old 100% damage reduction because honestly, it won't break anything. AoE partially bypasses block anyway.

Eventual (haha) Umbra release might be an opportunity to tweak with Excalibur's base attributes be it HP, Armor, or both.

Another option is to make use of Radial Javelin. The community had suggested countless possible changes to RJ - some offensive, some defensive, some CC oriented. I personally liked the idea of RJ using up and resetting the combo counter to get an insane one-time power increase (for example, x1.5 enables melee mods for RJ, x2 removes targets limit, x2.5 turns damage into finisher, x3 removes LoS restriction).
However, if we talk about survivability - RJ providing a source of damage resistance might be a good idea. For example, via making use of the actual mechanics in the game and giving Excal some amount of damage reduction for each target hit by RJ - let's say 5%. Though the duration should be like four times of what the augment has or it'll be rather useless (like the augment is).
Or, alternatively, the idea of changing RJ for a sword-barrier (a la Vergil from DMC series) is also quite popular.

If Excalibur receives means of actually surviving the content he's good against - it might be a good opportunity to tune down Excal-Naramon synergy a bit by preventing waves from activating Naramon. Doing it as it is now will be a huge unjustified nerf, but if Excalibur becomes capable of actually getting in on the enemies without dying - it is pretty reasonable.

And finally, regarding the EBlade being effectively useless against some bosses - it might be a good time to finally give Exalted Blade a god-forsaken Charge Attack. Especially if the rumors of Charge Attacks moving to the reload button are true.
To be more specific - Charge Attack for Excalibur could be a thrust that doesn't send waves but instead has a hitscan targeting which would allow Excalibur to attack "sweet spots" of bosses (and headshot regular stuff if the player likes it). I do understand that the thought of a not absolutely useless Charge Attack is quite frightening, but there's a first time for everything.
For the fun factor, it could also have a forced Puncture proc, while pause combo could have a slash one - so switching combos would be actually useful.

So, what I've intended to be just a bunch of quick suggestions somehow ended up being far too long with me going overboard explaining my thought process and reasoning behind these suggestions. It was too late to stop anyway so here you have it.

If there's a single soul who managed to make it through - I would love to hear any of your thoughts, whether you agree with me or not.
 

Edited June 18, 2017 by Epsik-kun

[Xion]

I agree that 2hrs in Surv isn't really feasible without Naramon, but that's because we're not intended to go up that high because of bullS#&$ enemy scaling. I personally haven't had problems with bringing him to Sortie level missions. I even brought him to the 3x Physical Enhancement sorties we got for 3 days straight after his augment came out and had little to no problems surviving because of Slash Dash paired with Life Strike.

I would like a buff to RJ, but I don't think a stackable damage resistance buff like that would make sense on the ability itself, but I would like to see it on the augment, since as you've pointed out, the augment atm is absolute trash. I'd like to imagine that when we have Exalted Blade out, we get a sort of Exalted suit of armor that gives us bonus damage reduction. That could be cool to see while also establishing him as a sort of knight class. 

Spoiler

A suit on a suit, as you would.

Also, there are a lot of "glass cannon" frames that only excel at end game, like for example Banshee. I think that Excal is beefy not so that he can take enemies past lvl 150, but so that newer players have an easier time with the game and hopefully play for longer.

The whole EB vs Vay Hek or Lephantis doesn't really mean anything when you consider that most damaging abilities don't work on these bosses either. That interaction, or lack thereof, and nullifiers were created so that players couldn't just steamroll through content without using the vast collection of guns in the game.

That being said, while I do like buffs, I don't think Excal needs to be buffed. Especially when other frames, specifically other starter frames, are in such terrible places right now. 

[Djego27]

So basically 1 year ago:

A strong on demand CC does cost energy, similar to other frames.

A melee ability got damage falloff at range(remember all the players spamming EB and never use it at all at melee range back then?).

Parasitic aura stacking is broken and especially noticeable on channelling frames, similar as on other channelling frames.

Endless rewards where removed from the void, what is kind of a pity, given that I also did enjoy 1h+ solo runs(however without cheese).

Introduction of shadow dept mods was bad for melee, instead of fixing basic mechanics we got band aids like body count and "yeah all hits should red crit, because melee is so weak!" nonsense.

Duration and Efficiency changes where a buff to all channelling frames, you just can't dump all duration any more, however negative duration works just as good as before the changes.

About your current post:

Why not nerf the maiming strike attarax? I mean all what people do is slide attacks with quick melee without aiming, combos or melee builds. This has as much to do with melee combat as my glaive prime build on throwing channelling scaled up fire damage for life strike on Ember.

Where do you draw the line if a frame is not a glass cannon? There are a lot of frames with less armor and without having her melee out all the time for life strike. Most of our frames die in a single hit at higher levels, the HP mods don't really matter, same as the armor value. This is mostly because DE uses a damage scaling mechanic that was never meant to produce good results at this levels, because we did not really play that levels often. Fast forward a few years we do L100 dailies, run around with weapons that one hit kill L100 targets, DE given up on the idea of status as a scaling mechanic for specific weapons that do not have a lot of damage by simply throwing it at high damage weapons as a bonus(like EB or literally any prime weapon during the last year) and we are given tool that can bypass the mechanic by invisibility, god mode or insane EHP pools(at least to a certain point).

DE should fix her enemy scaling mechanic into something that is actually playable with most frames and leaves room for taking hits and actually play the game without screwing around or being afk instead of the band aid solutions. The "git gut" would only apply to a game that is designed around a high skill cap, what warframe is not, you can easily see that in sortis where you revive mesas like 6 times with Nyx and get told to not use chaos(takes to long, nobody got time for that, just revive us, blablabla while not even managing to pull ahead in damage against nyx). However tanks should also nerfed down, because you should not have 15k+ EHP or 90% damage resistance, instead tanks should have abilities that draw agro to them, making them a viable asset to the team by protecting less durable things with her actions(like in any other multi player games).

Applying a broken mechanic to everything is not making it better, it just showcases how bad a mechanic without counters but massive benefits acts in a game with a lot of other broken stuff in it. Naramon does not enable viable melee builds, it literally removes any importance of armor, defensive abilities, CC or playing melee properly. It would be as if you give people a gun that one hits every target, the player can not take damage while wielding the gun for 6s after shooting and claiming this would improve gun play in the game.

As stated in a discussion about melee saryn(that actually can reach 80+ minutes in T3S solo without cheese what is solid for a melee frame) nearly a year ago as soon as you balance with naramon in mind that goes right out of the window, given that the lack of tanking does not matter at all and the stealth multipliers on gas procs are just ridiculous to a point where saryn is objectively the best melee and best AOE damage frame in the game at the same time, what is not true as soon as you remove a absolute broken mechanic.

Boss design is not really the strong suit of warframe, given that the only tool DE can use is "lets make it immune to all damage" what would work if it would not be bound to small hit boxed, opportunity windows you might miss during a reload and playing a mini survival against normal units that re spawns while fighting a boss, to make it less boring that you can not shoot the boss most of the time.

They nerfed the waves, not the blade. Melee is not spamming quick attack E, it is also not waving EB at range, it is actually killing stuff with your melee weapon at melee range using combos, knock downs, movement, channelling, CC and various other abilities, like blind in combination with EB what makes armored kills super easy. It is actually got a few more mechanics to it then gun play, even if most of the mechanics are unfortunately not really that polished(channelling, animation overriding knock downs or CC, the massive energy use on melee frames that is hardly sustainable with rage at high levels, QT stagger etc.).

I do not see how Excalibur needs more survivability, just because he is not a EHP brick? You can melee with a lot of frames quite effectively that have no damage reduction and even less EHP on them then excalibur that this frames do not have a ability to trigger finishers or a incredible high scaling melee weapon build into the frame(what EB is, just check it out how it actually performs for melee combat at high levels).

I think RJ should give 75%(affected by power strength) to your effective melee counter against a target that you hit with a melee weapon(not with the wave) for 12s, so it would be a nice addition to the augment, that is actually not bad, if you hit with all javelins it gives extra melee base damage what scales up with all other modifiers.

 

[Vanrythzx]

i think his other abilites should synergy's with EB, giving them special effects while EB is active.
changing his other abilites won't do anything, i still wouldn't use them, EB is too strong, why whould you use any other ability of his if you just can onehit everything regardless of the enemy lvl? 

[Epsik-kun]

On 6/18/2017 at 6:26 AM, Xionyde134 said:

I personally haven't had problems with bringing him to Sortie level missions. I even brought him to the 3x Physical Enhancement sorties we got for 3 days straight after his augment came out and had little to no problems surviving because of Slash Dash paired with Life Strike.

I agree that Excalibur generally "can" take hit against level 100 enemies - even on x3. I even remember myself doing T4S solo and taking hits (a single hit, actually - the second will kill Excal) from over level 100 Bombards with x3 damage buff prior to Focus becoming a thing. What I'm addressing is the way Excalibur gets bursted down when a bunch of high-level enemies by a chance decides to shoot him all at once. I had experience of being killed from full health between consecutive Slash Dashes - which is a less than a second wide window. 
Excalibur is designed around outplaying his opponents and has a great toolkit for that. However, the current game state doesn't really allow this playstyle to be reliable due to the mix of both numbers and various obnoxious mechanics.
I've done plenty of amplified damage sorties that were a breeze, but so I've done plenty of ones the were disgustingly frustrating. Not hard or challenging - only frustrating. Enemy composition and spawn rates that can and eventually will completely screw you over - these differ from sortie to sortie. Sometimes you won't even need the enemies to have a damage boost to roll Excal over.
Of course, there's a rather simple counter play to that - not rushing in melee. Excalibur will have no problems surviving if he maintains his distance, however doing so kinda defeats the whole idea of the frame, as there are much better options for mid-range. Not to mention, DE likes to pretend they want Excalibur to go melee.

On 6/18/2017 at 6:26 AM, Xionyde134 said:

Also, there are a lot of "glass cannon" frames that only excel at end game, like for example Banshee. I think that Excal is beefy not so that he can take enemies past lvl 150, but so that newer players have an easier time with the game and hopefully play for longer.

Banshee is funny because unlike Excalibur she has no problems of getting her job done. Banshee is an example of a glass-cannon concept being done right - the excessive firepower she possesses feels counterbalanced with her fragility as opposed to the feeling of doing something she isn't supposed to do. Also, people love to complain about how Banshee sucks and dies all the time.
Meanwhile, the early game doesn't need a "beefy" frame, especially given the fact Mag is also an option for the early game. Even without any kind of sustain, going through the early game is fairly easy.

On 6/18/2017 at 6:26 AM, Xionyde134 said:

The whole EB vs Vay Hek or Lephantis doesn't really mean anything when you consider that most damaging abilities don't work on these bosses either. That interaction, or lack thereof, and nullifiers were created so that players couldn't just steamroll through content without using the vast collection of guns in the game.

And why is Vay Hek universally considered to be a terrible boss, I wonder? Game design decisions aside, most of the damaging abilities in the game don't require the level of dedication to the build EBlade requires nor they have such a strong counter synergy with the regular weaponry. Generally, abilities used complementary to the guns as opposed to being the primary/only source of the damage. Exceptions to that principle are usually AoE nukes that can be specced for. However, these builds are niche and primarily used for either low-level farm or killing hordes of popcorn enemies - which is pretty much the opposite of the "focus priority targets" idea. Of course, there are a few abilities which fall precisely into the same category with Exalted Blade. However, them having the same problems as EBlade isn't something good as all of these abilities should have means of dealing with "hit me here" bosses - I'm only talking about Excaliburs because it's an Excal thread.
And the nullifiers' concept only reinforces this point, actually - Exalted Blade can deal with nullifiers just fine.

On 6/18/2017 at 10:39 AM, Djego27 said:

About your current post:

To be honest, I have trouble following you here. You seem to have a flawed idea regarding the direct and indirect changes Excal received, as what you're saying is not what really happened.
For example, let's take the duration/efficiency change - it was a major nerf to Excalibur who used to run with high negative duration builds. The balanced all-rounder build ended up being fine due to the realization Efficiency wasn't actually capped at 175%, but the Power Strength builds were rendered useless. Spin Blind change did the same with Narrow Minded Strength builds, however, they were re-enabled in solo by the Naramon change that made it force stealth multipliers onto everything.
The duration/efficiency change was an objective nerf mechanics-wise, actually. The reason being, while positive duration has diminishing returns for decreasing skill costs, negative duration increases costs exponentially. Only the frames who were running Duration builds already were buffed by that change.
The same goes for the wave/blind change. The damage fall of on waves forced no one into going melee - if it forced people to do anything, that would be stopping playing Excal. Meanwhile, slapping energy cost onto Spin Blind not only removed a good reason for going into close range, to begin with - it actively punishes players for using a basic mobility option.

Also, I believe we have vastly differing views on the game while your main arguments are directed not onto the Excalibur himself but on the game mechanics and, for some reason, player base.
Fixing mechanics is a long process, not to mention some of the said mechanics exist for a reason - giving reasonable tools to face the mechanics is much faster and can often be better than removing/changing the mechanics themselves as well as fail-proofing against future game changes. And I honestly don't see any reason to increase current Excal's sustained damage.

23 hours ago, Vanrythzx said:

 

i think his other abilites should synergy's with EB, giving them special effects while EB is active.
changing his other abilites won't do anything, i still wouldn't use them, EB is too strong, why whould you use any other ability of his if you just can onehit everything regardless of the enemy lvl? 

 

Well, RJ was used back then in Draco days. However, there are many ways of making useful abilities. Slash Dash is useless damage-wise in comparison to Exalted Blade, however, it's a great mobility tool and an amazing panic button. Radial Blind is a great CC and would've been widely used even if it didn't provide damage increase and finisher prompt. Were RJ (or any other skill, were RJ to be changed) to provide a decent lingering defensive effect for Excal, players would consider using it.

[AlphaPHENIX]

You weren't kidding when you said long...

[Ventura_Highway]

I think it's a mistake that furious javelin exists.

I don't think a frame with the capacity for wiping squads out with blind + exalted blade needs more damage.

If I had made that augment I think I would've liked to see some damage resistance buff applied instead, and the augment to be on slash dash instead of javelin, since I use slash dash as a gap closer anyways.

[Magneu]

Very good post about Excalibur and his problems. He's a frame that is (for me) very fun to play at most levels, but at sortie 3 levels (to say nothing of enhanced sorties), it's swapping between Slash Dash spam, Blind spam, and keep channeled Life Strike always on and praying that a sniper/bombard doesn't burst me down.

Having a single source of CC, especially one as visually "loud" as Radial Blind isn't fun. It feels spammy and repetitive. However, without it, Excalibur goes down rather quickly as enemies can fully unload on him from a distance. Even the flat 60% damage reduction, the remaining 40% of which is mitigated by 61% of his armor with Steel Fiber, fails to keep him alive at level 100, as burst damage is lethal. And because he has a single radial CC move that has a cooldown, along with a slow-animation backup CC, more often than not you'll find yourself dead mid-animation. If bullets Exalted Blade blocked were reflected to enemies a la Shatter Shield augment/Ice Elemental Ward, and got some sort of CC (impact proc, w/e), that would largely solve his problem with traditional gunfire enemies. Burst damage still remains though, which is where he relies on spamming CC.

With Chromatic Blade, Corrosive/Blast status combos have become viable. As a result, the new meta for Excalibur is spamming sword waves that shred armor and keep enemies down. However, this is limited to the area Excalibur is currently swinging at. However, Blind is still his go to CC.

 

All of this Blind spam and Exalted Blade spam could be avoided simply by changing Radial Javelin from a boring (although cool looking, that animation is amazing), non-scaling, radial "nuke" into a defensive ability. It could summon javelins to deflect projectiles. It could send javelins out a la Null Star to stun enemies. It could offer a flat resistance. It could do a lot of things besides be a useless ability above level 50 for non-optimized builds. In addition, a bump to base stats (especially health and armor) would go a long way to keeping him viable as a melee-centric frame; aside from above average armor, he's just as tanky as Hydroid.

And that is where I hope Umbra comes in.

DE alluded to Umbra frames having abilities that are different from traditional frames a while ago, IIRC. Not dramatic, but simply tweaks from the base ability. I sincerely hope that Excalibur Umbra becomes the Excalibur that gets some sort of scaling defense to become more than a Blind-and-wave spamming frame he is now.

[askaninja]

Leave Excal alone; he is fine the way he is. 

[(XBOX)Ubern00ber88]

I think a lot of his survivability problems came when they nerfed the frontal damage reduction while in exalted blade from 100% to a measly 60%. Heck even at 100% they could still shoot you in your sculpted &#! so unless you backed in a corner you weren't completely immune. I'd like to see that DR buffed back up some to help Excalibur tank a hit or two again.

[Magneu]

7 hours ago, (Xbox One)Ubern00ber88 said:

shoot you in your sculpted &#&#33

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Forgot about that 100% DR. Never even considered changing that to help survivability. Even increasing it to 90% would help tremendously. 

[Dragazer]

100% agree with you here, Excalibur is just an unfortunate case of DE listening to whiners and getting a frame unjustly overnerfed. 

The wave and slide blind nerf cheeses me the most.

They nerf the wave dmg because they wanted him to be more of a close range fighter, but then nerf the slide blind one of his few tools to survive close up. And then the auto parry gets nerfed 100% to 60%

I mean wtf? Last time I checked weed is still illegal in Canada, so idk what was going on when they decided to makes those nerfs

Edited June 21, 2017 by Dragazer

[Epsik-kun]

I can get behind the 100% frontal DR nerf. Though, I can't understand why was it nerfed all the way down to 60%. In my opinion, two layers of DR (360% and frontal arc) would be a nice solution to the survivability problem while allowing some sort of an adjustment to RJ that can make it into a rewarding nuke. 

[Xaero]

After reading through this I actually started wondering what's wrong about my Excal since at sorties I get top dmg in 90% of the games and almost never go down while regularly reviving my whole team.

Talking about particular abilities' usefulness, I can agree on RJ part - it's completely useless and perhaps should be replaced with something worth spending energy on. Maybe some kind of a defensive ability.

I also don't use Slash Dash in regular gameplay, precise bullet-jumping and rolling work faster and require no energy. The only use of this ability I see is unveiling the Rivens with the task of maintaining 3x combo counter due to its augment. Conclave players may also have a use for this ability. But that's all.

Edited August 22, 2017 by Ksaero

[EpicBred]

A very good post about excals current problems, I agree with you for the most part. But theres one big problem you forgot: the invisible radial blind cooldown. The ability is meant to be used reactively like "oh theres an enemy". But the way it usually is now is "oh S#&$ theres another enemy" because LoS didnt properly work again. This situation is extremely bad, since the level at which excal gets one shotted is relatively low compared to other frames. I dont think they will fix the LoS mechanic, but DE should at least remove the cooldown.

As for being tanky and having a different 3: First of all i think changing his base stats would be very fitting. As a melee frame he should have high health and armor, im fine with lower shield for that, maybe like ash. The "swordsman" should definately have more health than the "sneaky ninja" if you ask me".

Increasing his front block in exalted blade back to 100% sounds very reasonable to me. But I dont agree with the flat 50% DR. I would put that into his 3rd.

About this new 3rd, I once heard someone suggest a big singularity that pulls enemies into melee range. That is the best idea I came across yet! Since DE has shown some laziness regarding reworks recently, they could just keep the current animation and add strings to the javelin-skanas he shoots around when he sticks the sword into the ground, enemies stumble on hit, and when he pulls the sword out of the ground, he pulls all hit enemies to him knocked down. Augment: excal pulls a percentage of the enemies armor and shield (so it isnt useless against corpus) to himself for a few seconds, the percentage scaling with strength and the duration with duration. This adds a damage reduction for a few seconds (not sure how long it should last at base) that scales with enemies , but he still has to work for it. I think 5% armor/shield per enemy at base would be good!

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

Very nice post.  I like your suggestion of 360 degree DR and just a bit more of it up front when in his 4.

It would be cool if his 4 synergized with his other abilities though.  Like I know you can use slash dash with his 4 but I don't think it does anything with it beyond a damage increase.

I think the best change for his 3 would be to turn it into a defensive thing.  Where he has the swords rotate around him giving DR.  and when they get destroyed you can see them pop away.  tapping the ability again would cast the blades (what is left of the initial cast if any) get shot out and pin targets to a surface which makes them take a few slash procs of damage before they are released from what they are pinned to.  And if you just wanted to use it for that for the slash procs and minor cc you could just hold to cast the ability for the normal thing instead of the ring of swords around you.

I wouldn't know how to make any suggestions on his augments.  But i'd like to maybe suggest some ideas on synergy with his 4. and talk on his 4.

So lets start with his 4.  I would personally really like it if casting it behaved like ivara's 4.  where you have the initial cost of casting.  and additional cost per shot you fired.  But no draining.  This imo would be essential if we want to go the route of making his abilities synergize with his 4.  I think it should have it's own combo set like valkyr's 4 does.  And charging up your melee while in your 4 sent out waves instead.  But they would be bigger and slower.  sort of like an AOE effect.

Synergy with his 1: I think enemies hit by it should "bleed" with a slash proc.  just a few ticks.  If he manages to kill an enemy with slash dash 1 of 2 things i'd like to see.  Either he'd get a fixed amount of energy per kill with it.  OR a temp movement speed increase.

synergy with his 2:  If you manage to kill an enemy while they are blinded with his 4 out Potentially let it cast blind again sort of like how resonating augment works for banshee?  Not sure on the synergy for this to be honest.

synergy with his 3: instead of the swords surrounding him going away after taking x amount of damage They instead will fly out when they hit the damage threshold to try and hit an enemy.

Of course at this point it sounds more like i'm coming up with a new frame.  So apologies for the rant.  But yeah your DR on EB sounds solid.  and the suggestion I made to his 3 is what i'd do.  the rest I said can be basically ignored aha.

[PsyBaNi]

Hi,

The skill set is fine imo, the durability too , the dmg too, i can easily do mot 40-60min solo with him.

and has 1 of the gratest cc setups for teamplay.

1 of the best frames atm imo

[Azamagon]

As for the OP, I agreed with a lot of what you are saying. If I may, I just wanna say my thoughts Excalibur first:

About his allroundedness:

1) He is a starterframe. Imo, that means he should be quite good from the getgo (so you can actually do early content), i.e. have a rather low skillfloor. This shouldn't stop him from having a high skillceiling though. I guess he fulfills this quite decently.

2) His skillset is;

Slash Dash - Rather bleh for starting content (mostly overkill, rather bad as a gapcloser), but amazing on higher content and when you have gathered better mods (invulnerability, high damage, easily spammable with efficiency mods)

Radial Blind - Great skill for all levels... however...

Radial Javelin - The skill that makes far too many newbies think that Radial Blind is rather bad, due to RJ's nuking power and ministun. Lategame, this skill is also entirely redundant with RB in the kit, since RB is a better CC-tool by far. Not to mention, RB helps with his melee damageoutput.

Exalted Blade - An extremely strong melee weapon, no doubt. Very useful throughout all content.

His augments? ALL four help with melee output in some way -> Combo counter, stronger finishers, more damage, damagealteration+status.

Then, look at the other starterframes; Volt and Mag. If you look at them with very abbreviated descriptions, I see Volt as the allrounder and Mag as the caster. Excalibur seems like the tanky melee choice.

So... maybe he should be viewed a little bit less (but not entirely) as an allrounder and maybe focus on him being a melee-oriented, semi-durable Warframe?

And I think all that could be changed simply by changing Radial Javelin. Making it a "Sword Barrier", as mentioned, could help with his durability as well as his kit-redundancy (even if Radial Javelin's effects could still be entirely intact as well). Think of Sword Barrier as this:
* Costs 75 energy and lasts for X seconds.
* When active, damage taken is reduced by X% (from all directions, filling the suggestion you had for Exalted Blade, OP).
* When active, he could also get some extra melee-oriented bonus, such as; All the barrier-swords cut nearby enemies when Excalibur does a melee attack (i.e. he gets a radial melee-effect). Damage of the swords is X% of your melee weapon's damage (say, 25%?) and they can all add to the melee combo counter. This make him furtherly good with ANY melee weapon (due to more durability and mild AoE-melee), rather than only meleeboosted via Radial Blind and/or simply pidgeonholed to spam his E-blade.
* When the ability expires, either by running out of duration or if it is deactivated early  (by recasting the ability), the current Radial Javelin effect takes place, meaning he keeps his nuke too!

That would keep it intact (although requiring a bit more buttonpressing, but eh), while also giving him some survivability and further melee-bonuses he could deserve to have, being the Swordframe and all.

Also, a simple change to suggest for its augment; It no longer only grants melee bonus, it also adds Damage Reduction for the duration (same value as the melee bonus, but unaffected by Power Strength, or at least capped). Sure, the augment could probably get a more interesting total revamp, but as I said, a simple change.

Further look at his kit:

So, I already suggested changes to Radial Javelin so it had additional niches to fill (survivability and mild melee-AoE), rather than being redundant at high levels. But the rest of his kit could need some look at too.

Slash Dash
Honestly, I only find the current version of this skill good for the i-frames it provides. But I really miss the old version's simplistic badassery (but I definitely don't miss its weak damage). While I would prefer to revert it (except for the damage) to how it used to be, that might be a too selfish request. However, how about this:
Holdcasting it causes the old version's dash (a straight dash-through, more akin to Rhino Charge). It would still have the new damage, and it could still also have the up/down-aimability of the newer version. But the heldcast attack no longer does the targetted dashing, just a rapid longrange dashthrough as in the old days.

Augment is fine, imo (especially if my suggestion is added, as then you'd more reliably be able to hit multiple enemies per cast)

Radial Blind
Imo, this ability doesn't really have any issues.
Something that is a bit of an issue though, is finishers. If we had an OPTION (via the optionsmenu) to make finishers triggered either with the meleebutton (like now) or with the contextbutton (default X), I bet no one would complain.

Augment is complete overkill and is one of those things that further cements him as a high level and/or priority target killer (as the OP mentions). I mean, sure, it could stay as it is ... but why not tack something little extra on it so it has a use on lower levels too? Like, with the augment, finisherkills from Radial Blinded enemies now grant some healing (and if health is full, gain shields into overshields?). This would help him and his allies capable of enduring melee combat a little further, and also makes finishers feel a little bit more rewarding to boot.

Exalted Blade
Generally fine (augment too), but the special attacks and combos need a reason to actually exist. Something noticeable on both highend and lowend content.

For example:

• Lancing Justice - Remains as is as the main spamcombo.
• Virtuous Slash (Pause combo) - All added combos' bladewaves travel faster and are slightly wider. Further, all the bladewaves of these added combos proc impact, and the last bladewave also forces a slash-proc. Good for dealing with tough and/or slow targets, especially for those which you don't wanna get close to and/or can't use finishers on (like certain bosses).
• Cutting Poise - (Block combo) - All added combos' bladewaves travel faster and are slightly wider. Further, all the bladewaves of these added combos are extra wide and the last wave also procs impact. Good for crowds.
• Equal Laceration (Hold combo) - All added combos' bladewaves travel faster and are slightly wider. Further, the added combos spawn 2 bladewaves each, with the final strike causing 3 bladewaves ("on top" and/or "below" the main one, looking kind of like a clawslashes). All the bladewaves of this combo all travel EXTRA fast too. Good for "shotgunning" tough and/or agile targets from afar, or if you simply aren't good at aiming :P
• Judged Severance (Slide attack) - No longer costs energy, or if any, only max 10 energy (before efficiency)

Passive
Honestly, I don't like it. Its bonus just pidegonholes him. I'd rather he had something more "melee generic", a la Wukong's passive (extended melee timer). I mean, the Swordsman emphasis is already visualized in all his abilities, no need to pidgeonhole his passive too. But I'm probably the only one that thinks like that?

Bosses and weakpoints:

OP, I understand why you suggest what you suggest (a thrust chargeattack for attacking weakpoints). But that's dealing with the symptoms (melee can't hit weakpoints well) rather than the root cause (hitbox issues). I'd rather they made it so attacks with wide hitpatterns (such as melee, EB's bladewaves etc) would have a detection check throughout the entire attack (at least for bosses and such). So, if the attack went through an enemy's weakpoint(s) anywhere during its entire swing, rather than just detecting the first contact point of the attack, the weakpoint would be hurt (I think that is why 95% or more of "wide" attacks like melee etc constantly "miss" weakpoints).

Edited September 5, 2017 by Azamagon
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[13QZXXTTX]

I can say this post been quite long. (Just long enough for Rants).

On 6/20/2017 at 7:10 PM, Dragazer said:

100% agree with you here, Excalibur is just an unfortunate case of DE listening to whiners and getting a frame unjustly overnerfed. 

The wave and slide blind nerf cheeses me the most.

They nerf the wave dmg because they wanted him to be more of a close range fighter, but then nerf the slide blind one of his few tools to survive close up. And then the auto parry gets nerfed 100% to 60%

I mean wtf? Last time I checked weed is still illegal in Canada, so idk what was going on when they decided to makes those nerfs

Yeah, some peoples have those "OOH BIG IDEA", but am going to start treating it as "CoD Kid Syndrome" at this point. (Not cut out for Mature Game, sad).

Anyway, I want to keep my reply short, Good Luck "Re balancing" Excalibur". Alongside the Reworks, after Nerfs, going to play. Of course not Excalibur, but I do not want bad intention on most WarFrames to begin with. 

POINT IS: Being FORCE to play Team CoOp is not fun either, and having to do Conclave, is not the best idea on say Online Games, but hey, it just the Genre(MMO)  >Quantity< out numbered >Quality<. (Quantity of Games same thing, versus a few Games that has Quality going).

[DE] FOCUS on Quality and with Touch of how they envisioned WarFrames being different + Tennos who actually care can finish this "Extraordinary Work". See you Tennos at PoE and even more. (Don't support begging of large ammount of ).

[Epsik-kun]

@Azamagon, I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything you've written.

I do agree that while Excalibur is an all-around universal frame (as in "he works in any mission"), he isn't an "allrounder" per say - Volt indeed fits this role much better. Excalibur has close to no synergy with firearms and his whole kit just screams "go melee" at the player. RJ might've screamed something else, but the player won't have enough energy to cast it early on anyway.

An ability to use no-targeting Slash Dash (like via hold-casting) was suggested numerous times and I personally would love to have it as an option - I do agree that later in the game the value of Slash Dash lies mostly in its mobility potential and invulnerability frames - both of which would benefit from manual aiming.
The same goes for the ability to move prompted finisher to the Use key - it was asked for since forever. To be honest, it's a mystery to me why isn't it already implemented.

The whole Sword Barrier concept is indeed one of the few plausible solutions to Excal's problems - quite popular one. Actually, if it's balanced properly, it might make a no-EBlade melee Excal builds actually good and viable (on the game scale).
But I would hate to see the RJ augment becoming Excal's main source of damage reduction. While I do understand it's indeed the "easiest way", it's also the worst way of addressing the issue. There are quite a few reasons RJ augment doesn't work currently (build space, awkward stat-line, huge sustain energy costs, inconsistency of its working mechanics itself) and unless all of them are addressed in a complete augment overhaul (and you can't really address the mod space issue with EBlade builds already having so many mandatory mods) - it won't solve anything.

I'm not a fan of Excal's passive too, but mainly for the reason of it being rather weak and unnoticeable. I wish it at least was multiplicative to the mods. There's nothing wrong with making it universal too, even thematically as "Sword Only" in Warframe is a recurring concept and it always means all melee as opposed to specifically swords. As it's now it's basically "EBlade has a tad bit higher stats the Ability screen suggests".

Regarding combos, I personally would be content with different combos of EBlade forcing different IPS procs (like the block combo forces Impact currently) for the purpose of using them with Condition Overload Chromatic Blade, but having them to be actually useful on their own is obviously a better option.

A long time ago I've written a couple of suggestions regarding the possible changes to Excalibur, one of them was precisely about separating the purposes of his combo options (melee on the go, radial AoE combo, single-target combo and long-range linear AoE nuking combo). I still think that getting combos to have different purposes rather than just flavors is a better way to build melee.

And regarding EBlade and bosses' weak points - of course, you're completely right here. Instead of getting a tool to bypass a broken (and stupid) mechanics, fixing the issues of the said mechanics is a much better solution.
But, man, I just want for Excal to have a godforsaken Charge Attack already and I want to be able to slap Vay Hek/Sargas Ruk with EBlade. I don't ask for much.

Thank you for taking your time writing your thoughts - I'm glad to see people who have a similar view of Excal.

[Azamagon]

1 hour ago, Epsik-kun said:

@Azamagon, I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything you've written.

-snip-

The whole Sword Barrier concept is indeed one of the few plausible solutions to Excal's problems - quite popular one. Actually, if it's balanced properly, it might make a no-EBlade melee Excal builds actually good and viable (on the game scale).
But I would hate to see the RJ augment becoming Excal's main source of damage reduction. While I do understand it's indeed the "easiest way", it's also the worst way of addressing the issue. There are quite a few reasons RJ augment doesn't work currently (build space, awkward stat-line, huge sustain energy costs, inconsistency of its working mechanics itself) and unless all of them are addressed in a complete augment overhaul (and you can't really address the mod space issue with EBlade builds already having so many mandatory mods) - it won't solve anything.

-snip-

But, man, I just want for Excal to have a godforsaken Charge Attack already and I want to be able to slap Vay Hek/Sargas Ruk with EBlade. I don't ask for much.

Glad that we agreed on so many things :)

Let me just correct something:
I dunno if you saw, but I suggested to BASELINE give Sword Barrier some decent damage reduction. The augment would just give more of it (in line with the augment's unmodded melee bonus, so the augment both boosts offensive and defensive capabilities at once).
Further, the reason I suggested that the augment gives this additional bonus is because when the ability ends (i.e. when the blades are launched) he no longer has his ability's defenses. But if he has that augment, if the blades hits a decent amount of enemies, his defences would still remain rather high, making him less vulnerable between recasts of Sword Barrier. Then, if he rebuffs himself with Sword Barrier while the augment's buff is still remaining, he'd just become MORE durable.

As for the charge-attack: I think giving him some kind of semi-wide radial AoE attack (similar to Link's one, from pretty much any Zelda-game) would be a good option for that.

Edited September 17, 2017 by Azamagon
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