[Warframe Concept] NEBULA - sniper frame

[avilionn]

NEBULA - SNIPER WARFRAME
ATTENTION: read the full description of the warframe concept and story behind this before leaving any comments. Also, if you want to crit this, give me constructive critisism instead of straight up lame comments like "this is not creative" or "why not buff weapons" and etc.

"This is Nebula. Ranged and interstellar."
"Not built for close and melee combat, Nebula is a long range sniper."

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BASE STATS

Health | 75.0 (225.0 at rank 30)

Shields | 175.0 (525.0 at rank 30)

Energy | 175.0 (262.5 at rank 30)

Armor | 100.0

Sprint Speed | 1.2

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PASSIVE

Nebula has increased accuracy and silenced sniper guns.

• The additive accuracy ranges at +25% / +50% / +75% on each shot.
• To particularly specify, only guns like Rubico, Snipetron and Knell will be silent.

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ABILITIES

I. COMET MINE

Nebula shoots out an atomic projectile that explodes with bright light, leaving behind smoke that blinds and procs enemies with radiation.

• The projectile has medium-fast flight speed, has a straight flight arc and is not affected by power Strength mods.
• The initial Comet Mine explosion does NOT deal any damage. Only radiation proc deals damage to enemies.
• Radiation proc deals 10 / 20 / 50 / 100 damage per second.
• Base smoke radius is 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 meters.
• Base smoke duration is 2 / 3 / 4 / 6 seconds.
• Blind and radiation proc duration is 4 / 6 / 8 / 10 seconds.

Base energy use on cast is 25 energy (affected by Efficiency mods).
This ability is affected by Range, Strength and Duration mods.
 

II. DECELERATION NANITES

Nebula deploys her nanite bots that will seek out and latch onto enemies, exploding with blast and radiation damage, leaving behind energy charged spheres that will slow down enemies inside of it. If Nebula and allies pass through the energy spheres, they gain increased movement speed for a limited time.

• There are only 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 nanite bots deployed per cast, but they won't explode upon another cast while other nanite bots are "alive".
• The explosion radius is 4 / 6/ 8 / 10 meters.
• The explosion deals 100 / 150 / 250 / 400 radiation damage and 50 / 100 / 200 / 350 blast damage.
• Explosion does NOT proc nor has a chance to proc enemies at all.
• The energy sphere radius is 4 / 6 / 8 / 10 meters.
• The energy sphere duration is 1 / 2 / 3 / 5 seconds.
• The energy sphere base slow down is 10 / 15 / 20 / 35 %.
• Slow down inside the sphere is affected by power Strength mods.
• If the power Strength is below 100%, the enemies won't start to speed up unlike Nova's Molecular Prime.
• Movement speed increase is affected by power Strength and Duration mods.
• Base movement speed increase is 5 / 10 / 20 / 40 %.
• Movement speed buff lasts for 4 / 6 / 8 / 12 seconds.

Base energy use on cast is 50 energy (affected by Efficiency mods).
This ability is affected by Range, Strength and Duration mods.

III. DIFFUSION

Turning into crystal clear ionized matter, Nebula diffuses herself, becoming invisible. However, the closer in proximity she is to an enemy, the more visible she becomes. Also, while Diffusion is active, Nebula and allies within affinity range will gain additional reload speed and fire rate.

Ability's energy drain is 5 / 4 / 3 / 2 energy per second.

While Diffusion is active, energy can be increased through energy pickups.

While Diffusion is active, energy can NOT be increased through for example Trinity's Energy Vampire, Harrow's Thurible and etc.

Alarming gunfire will not temporarily disable invisibility, but will be heard by enemies if you haven't modded for silenced gunshots.

Invisibility does not have any movement limitations like Ivara's Prowl.

Each enemies' range of invisibility wear-off is 20 / 17 / 15 / 10 meters and invisibility auto-deactivation is 7 / 6 / 5 / 4 meters.

Invisibility wear-off and auto-deactivation ranges are NOT affected by power Range mods.

Additional reload speed is +0.3 / +0.5 / +0.7 / +1 second(s).

Additional fire rate is +30% / +40% / +60% / +90%.

Additional reload speed and fire rate are additive stats.

Additional reload speed and fire rate are NOT affected by power Strength mods nor pistol / primary reload speed and fire rate mods.

Base energy use on cast is 50 energy (affected by Efficiency mods).
This ability is ONLY affected by Efficiency and Duration mods to improve energy drain.

IV. ION HAZE

When this ability is active, Nebula disintegrates for a short time, becomes stationary and deploys ionized gas clouds that deal toxin and radiation damage over time. Once the clouds have been disabled by themselves or manually, Nebula and allies within affinity range gain a damage multiplier that can also be further amplified by how many enemies have died to Ion Haze. The damage multiplier is further increased on sniper guns.

• During Ion Haze, Nebula becomes completely immobile, unarmed, invincible (similar to Nyx's Absorb) and invisible.
• Clouds' range is 10 / 12 / 17 / 25 meters.
• Clouds' deals 100 / 150 / 200 / 400 radiation damage per second and 25 / 50 / 100 / 150 toxin damage per second.
• Clouds' lasts 2 / 4 / 8 / 16 seconds.
• Ion Haze cloud damage does scale with how many enemies are inside the clouds.
• Ion Haze cloud damage does scale with how much armor enemies have.
• Ion Haze pre-buff cloud phase is NOT affected by Duration mods, meaning that if your Nebula is max rank, your Ion Haze will last no longer than 16 seconds.
• Buff damage multiplier is 1x / 1.2x / 1.5x / 2x on all guns and damage multiplier on sniper guns is 4x / 4.5x / 5x / 6x.
• Damage multiplier does scale with how many enemies died by Ion Haze's gas clouds.
• Damage multiplier is NOT affected by power Strength mods.
• Damage multiplier scaling is NOT affected by power Strength mods.
• Ion Haze buff lasts 30 / 35 / 45 / 60 seconds.

Base energy use on cast is 100 (affected by Efficiency mods).
This ability is affected by Range, Strength and Duration mods.

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NAME AND CONCEPT BEHIND NEBULA AND STORY OF CREATING HER

I. Where it all started
The other day two years ago when i started playing warframe i discovered that the developers (DE themselves) stream their game, particularly weekly Prime Time on thursday and every other friday Devstream. After watching a few Prime Times, i found out that there is such a thing in community designing your own fan warframe concepts, and after a little bit decided to start my own concept about a year ago. Since i sucked and still suck at drawing, i've had so many problems trying to not create bland designs and wanted to fit with the theme of sci-fi, but at the same time not giving the frame a very robotic feel sort of. After a while i did take a break from trying to sketch out my warframe's design. A few weeks ago i started drawing the concept again and i did have a few cool designs and today i finalized one of my favorite sketches i have done for her.
For a while i did have vision for my warframe and wanted her to be female, but for the name at first i've had absolutely no ideas. Then after a week, i did decide to name her Nebula, because i wanted her to use sort of smokes and clouds sort of to her advantage (if you don't know, nebulas are space clouds made of plasma and ionized gases that are aftermaths/residues of supernova star explosions). Then the other day i thought to myself "no, name Nebula would be a very common name in Sci-Fi games and maybe movies, i should probably come up with something else". And after that i stopped concepting her. Like i said earlier, i did start concepting Nebula again and ended up with the picture below (i am not a pro artist and i know i really suck at drawing, plus the helmet design is still sort of work in progress).

II. Nebula's Design
This is going to be short, because i already kinda knew what i wanted her to look like, but i did have some problems and changes. One of the bigger problems was the helmet being too simple, other than that every problem is pretty minor. One of the ideas i have had in my mind is to have her wear this sort of dome-shaped dress cage, inspired by the vintage dresses and stuff, but at the same time i kinda don't want it to be too big due to clipping issues. But the dress cage is metallic and has this sort of grid pattern-like look. Another idea i had is instead of giving her helmet sort of a hood like like Ivara's default, i covered half of her helmet diagonally similar to Mag's Orbit helmet from that one tennogen skin, but it doesn't float, so that on one side she has an eye sort of, but not completely blindfolded like Mesa's default helmet. And then i've had this vision for her arms, giving sort of a dress / oversized top look by giving her sleeves that get bigger at the end.

III. Ability set and my friends' thoughts so far
So, when i was concepting my warframe, i didn't really have a theme for her, until recently discovering that not a lot of players use sniper guns. In fact, the other day i took my fully built Vectis Prime with a critical build, and tested it out on a 110lvl corrupted bombard without any buffs and whatnot, and surprisingly for an almost high damage and high crit weapon, Vectis Prime did barely any damage on one shot, being a sniper with 2 bullets (1 if you're using Depleted Reload) in magazine. After that, i kinda realized that some other sniper rifles and sniper pistols might have some problems in end game scenario by themselves as well (example being endurance survival runs for 60+ minutes). And so, i thought to myself "i could just ask Digital Extremes' Warframe team if they could buff snipers". BUT, i thought it would be better if there was a warframe that would buff snipers not only for herself, but also allies nearby as well, with the addition of providing crowd control for the team. I was designing the abilities on my own with the help of my friends and clanmates, and i wanted Nebula to be fairly balanced and sort of keep the long range sniping being a thing, but at the same time give people fun with crowd control abilities like Deceleration Nanites. Also one of the goals for her that i've had was to make sure that the community (or at least my friends and they all have different playstyles) would like the concept, and so far people have been telling me that they would play this kind of warframe at least for having fun, which makes me very very glad.

Thanks for reading this VERY long topic about my concept for a sniper warframe. If you have any suggestions for anything, may it be balancing out stats, abilities, or even new ability ideas, feel free to leave comments for that. Also, tell me if you would actually like to see this kind of warframe in the game, or maybe this exact one.
Fellow tenno Damien out~
Peace o/

Edited August 23, 2017 by Damien-EN-

[tarfeef101]

Passive alone makes me want to run it lol

 

Otherwise a couple things

 

• dmg numbers seem kinda high, and i'm not sure if these abilities (1 and 2 especially) really fit the long range sniper theme, maybe including cast range would be nice.
• the 75 energy cast cost on a drain ability is HUGE
  • the drain over time is really low at 1 for a base drain
• Given the fact that you have no movement restrictions, I'm not sure that the fire rate and movement buffs are necessary. Seems too much. Range for detection seems alright, but ofc would have to test it to really find out what seems reasonable.
• I'm personally never a fan of an ability (ult in this case) that makes you immobile, but if that's just me, I don't know. I'd prefer a buff I could use after just a cast.
• Her first abilities are nice to have some CC, but it could get tedious to repeatedly use them to keep things slowed unless you have someone handling that on your team already. A longer lasting AOE for her #2 slow, similar to ice wave impedance would be better for what I like using snipers as. Even at the expense of damage. This is gun-focused frame, right? I'll use my gun to kill em.

[avilionn]

9 minutes ago, tarfeef101 said:

Passive alone makes me want to run it lol

 

Otherwise a couple things

 

• dmg numbers seem kinda high, and i'm not sure if these abilities (1 and 2 especially) really fit the long range sniper theme, maybe including cast range would be nice.
• the 75 energy cast cost on a drain ability is HUGE
  • the drain over time is really low at 1 for a base drain
• Given the fact that you have no movement restrictions, I'm not sure that the fire rate and movement buffs are necessary. Seems too much. Range for detection seems alright, but ofc would have to test it to really find out what seems reasonable.
• I'm personally never a fan of an ability (ult in this case) that makes you immobile, but if that's just me, I don't know. I'd prefer a buff I could use after just a cast.
• Her first abilities are nice to have some CC, but it could get tedious to repeatedly use them to keep things slowed unless you have someone handling that on your team already. A longer lasting AOE for her #2 slow, similar to ice wave impedance would be better for what I like using snipers as. Even at the expense of damage. This is gun-focused frame, right? I'll use my gun to kill em.

well, since warframes are technically "ninjas" i thought the smoke mine wouldve fitted that kind of thing as well, plus cc is something you will always need. for example, if the enemies dont die by Deceleration Nanite's explosion, Nebula would have some time to get a kill on an enemy or multiple enemies with headshots.

also, i did revisit the energy cast and drain for her Diffusion, thanks for telling me.
and last but not least: the reason why i give her additional reload speed and fire rate is because one of my friends suggested the use of sniper combo stuff, which it really makes the ability benefit her sniping skills besides her 4th and first 2 cc abilities
the ultimate will stay as it is for it being unique. and yes, i feel the same about stationary abilities, but you gotta make some sacrifices for awesome powers. :^)

[tarfeef101]

1 hour ago, Damien-EN- said:

well, since warframes are technically "ninjas" i thought the smoke mine wouldve fitted that kind of thing as well, plus cc is something you will always need. for example, if the enemies dont die by Deceleration Nanite's explosion, Nebula would have some time to get a kill on an enemy or multiple enemies with headshots.

also, i did revisit the energy cast and drain for her Diffusion, thanks for telling me.
and last but not least: the reason why i give her additional reload speed and fire rate is because one of my friends suggested the use of sniper combo stuff, which it really makes the ability benefit her sniping skills besides her 4th and first 2 cc abilities
the ultimate will stay as it is for it being unique. and yes, i feel the same about stationary abilities, but you gotta make some sacrifices for awesome powers. :^)

Well, i think at this point we gotta admit warframes aren't ninjas. Ash and loki are ninjas. Rhino is a loud raging meathead, titania is a fairy... The ninja thing died the second it came to be, really.

 

And I can see the use for it as a first ability, but i wouldn't see it being used as often as ivara's quiver or anything. But since the other powers are good, that's fine. Many frames have useless first abilities, and this one is at least situationally nice, just too tedious to recast all the time to rely on it.

 

I get why you would add that buff, but a) it copies off of harrow SO hard, and b) IMO it's just too much given that the drain can go so low, and unlike prowl it isn't restrictive movement-wise. Trust me, I'd love to have it, but I'm trying to be realistic.

 

I would again like to see the slow from her #2 be a bit more viable for use, 10s for spheres is a bit low, the range doesn't appear to be great, and the slow is actually too high, of all things. 200% strength would make enemies stand still.

[avilionn]

9 minutes ago, tarfeef101 said:

Well, i think at this point we gotta admit warframes aren't ninjas. Ash and loki are ninjas. Rhino is a loud raging meathead, titania is a fairy... The ninja thing died the second it came to be, really.

 

And I can see the use for it as a first ability, but i wouldn't see it being used as often as ivara's quiver or anything. But since the other powers are good, that's fine. Many frames have useless first abilities, and this one is at least situationally nice, just too tedious to recast all the time to rely on it.

 

I get why you would add that buff, but a) it copies off of harrow SO hard, and b) IMO it's just too much given that the drain can go so low, and unlike prowl it isn't restrictive movement-wise. Trust me, I'd love to have it, but I'm trying to be realistic.

 

I would again like to see the slow from her #2 be a bit more viable for use, 10s for spheres is a bit low, the range doesn't appear to be great, and the slow is actually too high, of all things. 200% strength would make enemies stand still.

to be honest, i designed Nebula's 4 to be inspired by Harrow's 4, because, we all know other warframes sometimes get inspiration off of previous warframes. for example, as you know by now, Mag's polarize does act like Nova's molecular prime in a way that it uses duration mods to increase the bubble's range. or how Nova's antimatter drop can act like mini Nyx's absorb. just wanted to point that out.
about Diffusion drain and technical stuff. it does have restrictions in a way that you cant be invisible if youre too close to enemies (and its actually not affected by range mods, its fixed). so its kind of one of another sacrifices the ability makes.
and last things about Decelerating Nanites. 1. range is low, but the trade off is decent duration and slow down 2. range can be modded 3. i did fix the number on base slow down stats, so that shouldnt seem overpowered as much

p.s. - people still seem to like the first ability no matter what for its great cc use, so i kept it as it is

[tarfeef101]

5 hours ago, Damien-EN- said:

to be honest, i designed Nebula's 4 to be inspired by Harrow's 4, because, we all know other warframes sometimes get inspiration off of previous warframes. for example, as you know by now, Mag's polarize does act like Nova's molecular prime in a way that it uses duration mods to increase the bubble's range. or how Nova's antimatter drop can act like mini Nyx's absorb. just wanted to point that out.
about Diffusion drain and technical stuff. it does have restrictions in a way that you cant be invisible if youre too close to enemies (and its actually not affected by range mods, its fixed). so its kind of one of another sacrifices the ability makes.
and last things about Decelerating Nanites. 1. range is low, but the trade off is decent duration and slow down 2. range can be modded 3. i did fix the number on base slow down stats, so that shouldnt seem overpowered as much

p.s. - people still seem to like the first ability no matter what for its great cc use, so i kept it as it is

Well to me, 10m isn't that high. Especially when you know you're gonna need good duration/efficiency for #3, you can't really max out range. So even with 200%, that's only 20m. That's not very much. Think about the size of ice wave for frost (also a second ability). So much more area of effect.

As for the power of her #3, I still think that's too many upsides. 10m is a short distance in warframe. You'd have to be very close for it to wear off. That's powerful enough to me.