Chroma Rework: More Active!

[(XBOX)GalvanizedChaos]

I don't know if Chroma is a super popular frame, but he is certainly my favourite tank, and I feel his abilities could stand some tweaks along with his passive. This suggestion is entirely made to round out all his powers and make him more fun and dynamic to play. Ran it by my friends first, and they approved, so here goes :)

 

-- Spectral Scream

This ability really embodies the unflinching, fearsome dragon fantasy Chroma has going for him, so I suggest very simply tweaks.

1. Spectral Scream takes primary weapon mods ( sans weapon-specific) and has it's range increased by 3m.

This will enable spectral scream to become a more appropriate damage, and status dealing ability.

 

-- Elemental Ward

Elemental Ward is an interesting ability in that it's utility is dependent on chromas energy color. While it does make for a significant change in how frames usually work, I find that it is too impactful on the aesthetic choice on Chroma, while too ineffective at diversifying his kit.

1. Elemental Ward has it's U.I. changed to be similar to Vauban's Minelayer, with the four base elements represented. Taping the ability scrolls through, holding activates. When activated the selected element becomes Choma's base damage type, until the ability is cast again. Chroma also receives a resistance to the selected damage type for the duration of the ability.

35 energy cost

20s duration

15% damage resist (scales with power strength)

This change empowers player choice, both in how Chroma looks, and how he interacts with the enemies he's facing at any particular moment in time.

 

-- Vex Armour

Chroma has a distinctive Sentient inspired look and adaptability as the basis of this power is epitomizes them. This ability is another I would like to fuel more player choice in the moment to moment action.

1. Vex Armour has the old (before my stated rework) version of Elemental Ward added into it's current form.

2. Vex Armour is now a toggle ability.

50 energy cost

6 energy per second

Again, this ability change empowers player choice; you will gain the utility of your chosen element, to suit the situation in combat. This also reduces the chance that your ability will wear off at an inopportune time, instead giving players an energy economy to manage.

 

-- Effigy

Shedding his pelt, Chroma gains a powerful sentry. Effigy is akin to a turret, and works as a more supportive ability.

1. Effigy is now a toggle ability.

2. Effigy paths, and attempts to stay within 7m of Chroma.

75 energy cost

6 energy per second

4000 health (affected by power strength)

Remove effect on credit drops.

With these changes Effigy will become a reliable defensive ability, capable of a supportive role both in active play, and more stationary play such as Defense. 

 

Finally, Chroma's passive.

Dragon's Hoard

Enemies killed by Chroma have an additional 20% chance to drop credits.

These are my highest hopes for Chroma, thank you all for reading, and thank you Warframe team for the phenomenal game!

[xmegarockx]

chroma dont need any change its fine and powerful frame as it is.

[(XBOX)JakeyBoy2639]

Yes. 

Effigy foremost. 

[Somb3rBivalve]

21 minutes ago, xmegarockx said:

chroma dont need any change its fine and powerful frame as it is.

He is a powerful frame, but his playstyle is very inactive, hence the name of this thread. You basically slap on your 2 and 3 and throw yourself at the enemy, rarely using ult and never using your 1 (because spectral scream is REALLY bad).

He needs health regen in his kit somewhere (because he WILL be taking health damage). Personally, I think it should be a flat HP per second while effigy is active so that his playstyle is going in, taking damage, using effigy to draw enemy fire so that the player can retreat, recuperate, and get back into the fight. Rinse and repeat.

Spectral scream also needs to do more damage since he's a dragon. Breathing fire (or whatever element) onto enemies should be his primary attack but it isn't. Making it scale off primary mods would work, but another idea is making it scale off of the vex armor damage buff.

[DangerDaddy]

He doesn't need a rework, you're right, but there's no reason why he shouldn't be looked at to see if he could be better regardless.

I don't like the idea of weapon mods effecting his 1, i personally feel it should leave an area of effect damage over time, instead of turning it into a more powerful useless ability, making it a useful area-control ability would be nice.

I really like the idea of not having colours hard-locked with elements, I like the idea being able to choose which element to equip for sure.Giving him an elemental resist would be nice, but most enemies don't actually really use elemental beyond fire/blast. but it should still keep it's old abilities, JUST changing the element, and giving it a little bit of resist makes it kind of pointless, give it a little bit of a buff, maybe make it a little shorter duration to compensate for the power boost.

Vex armor doesn't need that much of a cost per second, not even ultimates have that high i don't believe. I like the idea of it following, similar to companions though.

[Windy_Wind]

2 hours ago, Somb3rBivalve said:

He is a powerful frame, but his playstyle is very inactive, hence the name of this thread. You basically slap on your 2 and 3 and throw yourself at the enemy, rarely using ult and never using your 1 (because spectral scream is REALLY bad).

He needs health regen in his kit somewhere (because he WILL be taking health damage). Personally, I think it should be a flat HP per second while effigy is active so that his playstyle is going in, taking damage, using effigy to draw enemy fire so that the player can retreat, recuperate, and get back into the fight. Rinse and repeat.

yeah he doesn't have many things going on, just press 2 and 3 and you are done, nothing else. Chroma is very tanky so I think he doesn't really need health regen, using life strike is more than enough for him. However, if they ever decide that chroma needs a real "passive" , maybe fire element will give him passive health regen.

[Dark_Chroma_Prime]

7 hours ago, (Xbox One)GalvanizedChaos said:

2. Vex Armour is now a toggle ability.

50 energy cost

6 energy per second

remove this and it´s a good rework

[(XBOX)GalvanizedChaos]

16 hours ago, MagiTwister said:

He doesn't need a rework, you're right, but there's no reason why he shouldn't be looked at to see if he could be better regardless.

I don't like the idea of weapon mods effecting his 1, i personally feel it should leave an area of effect damage over time, instead of turning it into a more powerful useless ability, making it a useful area-control ability would be nice.

I really like the idea of not having colours hard-locked with elements, I like the idea being able to choose which element to equip for sure.Giving him an elemental resist would be nice, but most enemies don't actually really use elemental beyond fire/blast. but it should still keep it's old abilities, JUST changing the element, and giving it a little bit of resist makes it kind of pointless, give it a little bit of a buff, maybe make it a little shorter duration to compensate for the power boost.

Vex armor doesn't need that much of a cost per second, not even ultimates have that high i don't believe. I like the idea of it following, similar to companions though.

I can see his 1 being retooled to a cc for sure, but I felt that would more or less be taken care of by a pathing effigy.

The resist on 2 isn't incredibly important to Chroma himself, Vex Armour is the most important ability in terms of his survivability. But the elemental resist coupled with Everlasting Ward, will make supporting your teammates just a little bit easier. With the wealth of enemies that use heat damage, the large chunks of damage toxic deals and infested mission, and the loads of sniper enemies that one shot with electricity, I feel that it would still be meaningful to the team.

 

As for the energy costs, I left them quite a bit cheaper than the most expensive abilities, but they're both quite powerful, so I definitely wanted them to be more than the super cheap duration abilities such as Embers world on fire.

[(PSN)crashtester17]

I like the ideas you got going here but making his vex armor a toggle would make regaining energy harder even with a rage mod on. A better alternative could be to keep it as a duration ability but give players the ability to refresh it.

 

I love the idea of giving Chroma the ability to switch his element in the middle of the mission but I don't think that his second ability should be what he uses to change. Giving that to his first would be a better alternative since it would encourage players to use his elemental breath more. It could even coordinate with his effigy by say casting effigy as an ice Chroma then switching to a toxin Chroma and breath toxin on your ice effigy to make it do viral damage. I also think that having his first ability use weapon mods would be nice. But, if you do that then his effigy should also use those mods when it uses the breath attack (which I'm all for). 

 

As for elemental ward, I think that it works fine as is now but could use some tweaks.

Fire Chroma could provide health regeneration in addition to it's increased health pool.

Toxin Chroma could provide increased sprint speed, melee swing speed, weapon swap speed, and reload speed. It would be like he's releasing chemicals in his body to invigorate himself while poisoning his enemies.

Ice and Electric Chroma function very well as they are now.

 

As for the effigy rework, the idea for effigy being mobil is nice but, if it's mobil and drawing enemy fire then it wouldn't be helping you avoid enemies for that bit of breathing room. That could be an interesting augment where it no longer draws enemy fire but instead it becomes mobil bombarding enemies with elemental assaults. A nicer change for it's base function would be to basically force enemies to attack it and then explode when it is dead or ends. It also wouldn't hurt to make it a duration ability that can be prematurely ended rather then a toggle since a most of the optimal builds for Chroma's second and third ability require blind rage. Having it become a toggle ability would change it so that transient fortitude would be used instead which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except for the fact that it would hurt his ability to regenerate energy. The extra energy could be used for encouraging his spectral scream to be used more frequently. 

 

Finally, his passive being a means of farming credits could be made a part of his passive. Something a little more fitting would be he does more damage with elemental weapons and attacks, or status procs do more damage when they proc

Edited July 13, 2017 by (PS4)crashtester17

[Somb3rBivalve]

22 hours ago, Windy_Wind said:

yeah he doesn't have many things going on, just press 2 and 3 and you are done, nothing else. Chroma is very tanky so I think he doesn't really need health regen, using life strike is more than enough for him. However, if they ever decide that chroma needs a real "passive" , maybe fire element will give him passive health regen.

Life strike works, but I don't like relying on stuff like that for a frame that is literally designed to be able to take health damage. For that simple reason, I think it needs to be in his kit somewhere.

A single mod should not be a such a large band-said for so much of his kit and overall ability to sustain in combat.

Assuming that elements cannot be cycled in combat, I also don't like the idea of putting regen onto fire either. In that case, I think it needs to be available regardless of element chosen.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

Some solid ground work.  That would make his 1 more usable for sure.

His 2 suggestion is nice and is what is honestly needed.  Being able to bring all elements into a mission will boost his kit's flexibility a lot.

I am not fond of removing the old vex armor though.  Him being a frame that takes damage to live and do more damage is a fun concept in my opinion.  And already with things like quiver/mine slayer you can have more than one active at once.  so we wouldn't need another ability just for that effect.

Vex armor just needs to be refreshable and it's gold.

I'm pretty fine with how his effigy works at the moment.  as it's a nice thing to have in some tight spots.  and it has it's own dedicated builds.  It's just not used much because of the energy up keep imo.

I'd rather a different passive tbh.  But I don't have any ideas of my own off the top of my head.

[Genitive]

I don't like your idea for passive. I'd prefer some sort of built-in Rage; since receiving damage makes Chroma more powerful it can as well restore some of his energy.

Fire Elemental Ward could also regenerate his health instead of providing some flat amount of it as it is now.

[Gurpgork]

On 7/12/2017 at 5:53 PM, (Xbox One)GalvanizedChaos said:

Elemental Ward has it's U.I. changed to be similar to Vauban's Minelayer, with the four base elements represented. Taping the ability scrolls through, holding activates. When activated the selected element becomes Choma's base damage type, until the ability is cast again. Chroma also receives a resistance to the selected damage type for the duration of the ability.

On 7/12/2017 at 5:53 PM, (Xbox One)GalvanizedChaos said:

Vex Armour has the old (before my stated rework) version of Elemental Ward added into it's current form.

These seem to be the most popular proposed changes to Chroma, and no matter how many times I see them, I just can't bring myself to like them.

My biggest beef with this isn't necessarily the possibility of element switching (I'll get to this in a sec), it's more the way you've proposed to do it. Essentially what you've done is taken two abilities with very different and distinct mechanics, and merged them into what would likely become the most unnecessarily complicated ability in the game. I mean, the mechanics of each Elemental Ward and Vex Armor are fairly nuanced and can be tricky to understand on their own. Put them together? You'll have an absolute mess of an ability. Can you imagine trying to explain how it works? Some of the effects would be persistent, some would require buildup, some would depend on your chosen element, some would not, one of them has two percentage-based armor buffs that work differently and somehow stack with each other... It would be a mess.

And you've done this to make room for an ability that does next to nothing on its own. It really seems to be there just to switch elements. The elemental resistances are good for flavor, but we only have a handful of enemies that deal damage in each basic element, and Chroma gets massive damage reduction from Vex Armor anyway, so the usefulness of it would be extremely limited.

I have my disagreements with giving Chroma the ability to switch elements in the first place (I think each Elemental Ward merits its own ability slot, and it would be better to buff the underused Wards instead of just giving him the ability to switch through them at will), but if you're going to do it, just make Elemental Ward itself function like Quiver or Minelayer. Make tapping it swap elements, and holding it cast the current version of Elemental Ward. It would be a lot less work for the developers, and it would keep Chroma's kit from being more complicated than it needs to be. 

[(PSN)ST-ChaoticMayhem]

I like the Elemental Ward idea. But would that also effect his one and four? Since they are currently effected by his energy color.