Unairu void spines needs to be replaced

[Xaxma]

With the possibility of shield gating coming to Warframe, I thought it would have provided a good opportunity to give Unairu a concept unique to it: Health Gating.

Why they had to reintroduce damage reflection is beyond me, and for the first ability of the Focus, it's absurd considering that the reflected damage, minimal even of itself, is going to get reduced again by armor. Besides, there's no way you could possibly spec a frame to be tanky enough to even utilize this properly given the nature of damage 2.0.

Which leads me back to the point earlier of gating health. Instead of spines, Unairu should provide a momentary period of invulnerability that prevents you from being brought past 1 HP for a few seconds on a 30/25/20/15/10 second cooldown.

Unairu should be categorized as the defensive focus, as in it keeps you alive. I don't see how the void spines contribute to that identity when you're supposed to be ridiculously tanky to even use it in the first place. 

[blazinvire]

To say nothing of the fact the damage reflection is completely superfluous due to the disparity between enemy damage and enemy health.
I have never been in a situation where I felt any damage that I've reflected has changed anything in any meaningful way whatsoever.

The only thing void spines has actually done is help me find who's shooting at me in PoE's clusterbomb of foliage, due to the fact I can just aim in the general direction of the fountain of 1s flying out of a distance bush.

[Mr._Clean]

29 minutes ago, blazinvire said:

fountain of 1s flying out of a distance bush.

So true. I laughed at how true this is.

[Xaxma]

1 hour ago, blazinvire said:

To say nothing of the fact the damage reflection is completely superfluous due to the disparity between enemy damage and enemy health.
I have never been in a situation where I felt any damage that I've reflected has changed anything in any meaningful way whatsoever.

The only thing void spines has actually done is help me find who's shooting at me in PoE's clusterbomb of foliage, due to the fact I can just aim in the general direction of the fountain of 1s flying out of a distance bush.

It probably wouldn't be so bad if only it  took some of that damage from your own Warframe stats (Power Strength? Armor?) and/or it ignores enemy defense. But honestly, this sounds more like an appropriate passive for Naramon considering their identity in the lore is "counterattack" Focus. 

[Xixott]

Yeah... Seeing 1's and 2's coming off of an enemy that is hitting you for hundreds of damage does feel a bit weak. 

[Cynthia-]

In order for reflecting damage to actually be any good they would need to make the reflected damage act as if you had no armour and the enemy had no armour. It may even need to do more damage than the enemy does to you in order to actually feel like it's making a difference. Especially since enemy health and damage scale in a way where health quickly surpasses damage hundreds and thousands of times over.

[Epsik-kun]

It's been brought up several times since Focus was implemented - damage reflection will never work in the type of a game Warframe is. It cannot be balanced with tweaking the numbers. It will always be broken - the concept itself is flawed. You can make frame return 5000% of damage it receives and the ability will simply be

a) Broken on low levels;

b) Utterly useless on high levels.

And I honestly can't see another explanation for DE bringing it back for the Focus 2.0 other than them stubbornly refusing to admit they had screwed up with the whole concept of the passive, to begin with.

[blazinvire]

Just don't think they really know what they're doing in general; they're trying to emulate a 'Mountain splitting the sky' and 'Outlasting the enemy to avoid the conflict entirely'.

Maybe if they spin the petrification thing into void spines, make something scalar that ignores Warframe's silly ancient damage system entirely.

Like: When something hits you, their max health is reduced by like, 1% or something, and they move slower and slower until they permanently turn to stone once they're under a health threshold.

Kind of represents wearing the enemy down, and if it's a percentage of their health or something similar it'll scale regardless of level.

[Fallen_Echo]

1 hour ago, Xaxma said:

With the possibility of shield gating coming to Warframe, I thought it would have provided a good opportunity to give Unairu a concept unique to it: Health Gating.

Why they had to reintroduce damage reflection is beyond me, and for the first ability of the Focus, it's absurd considering that the reflected damage, minimal even of itself, is going to get reduced again by armor. Besides, there's no way you could possibly spec a frame to be tanky enough to even utilize this properly given the nature of damage 2.0.

Which leads me back to the point earlier of gating health. Instead of spines, Unairu should provide a momentary period of invulnerability that prevents you from being brought past 1 HP for a few seconds on a 30/25/20/15/10 second cooldown.

Unairu should be categorized as the defensive focus, as in it keeps you alive. I don't see how the void spines contribute to that identity when you're supposed to be ridiculously tanky to even use it in the first place. 

This node only needs one change, the reflected damage is blocked for you.

Currently if i remember right if you reflect 25% you will still get hit by 100% attack power. Wouldnt it been better if it would reflect 25% and you get hit by 75% attack power?

A change what makes this node much better.

[blackheartstar_pc]

14 minutes ago, ChaosSabre said:

Hey at least it's not the zenurik melee channel efficiency trash.

What? The main reason I used Zenurik before was for unlimited channeling. I was concerned after hearing Focus 2.0 planned on removing Energy Overflow that channeling would become to expensive to use again, but thankfully it received this passive. Not sure how it can be considered trash.

[Fallen_Echo]

1 hour ago, blackheartstar_pc said:

What? The main reason I used Zenurik before was for unlimited channeling. I was concerned after hearing Focus 2.0 planned on removing Energy Overflow that channeling would become to expensive to use again, but thankfully it received this passive. Not sure how it can be considered trash.

Chanelling in itself is trash. Its a half finished partially broken weapon mode what has no real usage compared to well any other melee mode.

[Epsik-kun]

20 hours ago, ChaosSabre said:

Hey at least it's not the zenurik melee channel efficiency trash.

Yeah, it isn't. It's worse. There's a difference between providing marginal energy cost reduction to a marginal on-demand damage increase and providing nothing at all.

[Misgenesis]

Its so useless i have to wonder how it even got included. Disappointed that the armor passive wasnt made a flat number either as its entirely useless on low armor frames.

Really missed an opportunity here

[DeltaPangaea]

I wish it was good. I really do. But it ain't. It's a flatly pathetic amount of damage it reflects.

What you could do though, is make it a % chance to reflect the attack itself, negating its damage in the process.

So rather than all the time reflecting whatever percent of damage and doing friggin' nothing, you instead have that whatever percent chance to completely reflect an attack. Specifically, something like [x]% chance to reflect attacks at [y]% strength, where the strength scales up past 100%, up to like 200 or 250.

Or it could do something related to melee-blocking. Increase the % of damage blocked perhaps? Additively not multiplicatively, so depending on the rank and weapon you're blocking with, you can hit 100% damage blocked even when not channelling.

Or combine them. Make it need you to be blocking, but ramp up the % of activation and strength?

Also.

Swap Void Spines and Stone Skin's places on the tree. As-is, Unairu has a tax of a useless node that everyone has to suck up and serves no purpose. Stone Skin is actually helpful and more representative of a basic Unairu ability.

On a tangent, what is this 'shield gating' I've heard mentioned a few times now?

[Epsik-kun]

3 hours ago, ChaosSabre said:

Except channeling is even worse than unairu damage reflection. At least unairu won't drain all your energy in a few hits and do exact same damage a channel would.

Look, we all know that Channeling sucks, but what you're saying is mathematically and factually incorrect. When Unairu does "exact same damage a channel would" your frame is dead - end of the story.

Meanwhile, Channeling is actually used by actual people during the actual gameplay in the actual game. Channeling is a fair 50% damage increase as long as Combo Multiplier isn't involved, which makes it useful for stealth affinity farm - for both regular attacks and prompted finishers. Life Strike is a powerful mod for sword-only gameplay and it uses Channeling.

[Misgenesis]

On 10/24/2017 at 2:35 PM, DeltaPangaea said:

On a tangent, what is this 'shield gating' I've heard mentioned a few times now?

Any amount of shield left would block damage that would otherwise drain your shields and go into health damage.

Instead of being one shot by those pesky Napalms, they require a second shot.

Edited October 25, 2017 by Misgenesis

[DeltaPangaea]

3 hours ago, Misgenesis said:

Any amount of shield left would block damage that would otherwise drain your shields and go into health damage.

Instead of being one shot by those pesky Napalms, they require a second shot.

That... actually would be very nice.

3 hours ago, Epsik-kun said:

Look, we all know that Channeling sucks, but what you're saying is mathematically and factually incorrect. When Unairu does "exact same damage a channel would" your frame is dead - end of the story.

Meanwhile, Channeling is actually used by actual people during the actual gameplay in the actual game. Channeling is a fair 50% damage increase as long as Combo Multiplier isn't involved, which makes it useful for stealth affinity farm - for both regular attacks and prompted finishers. Life Strike is a powerful mod for sword-only gameplay and it uses Channeling.

I think some people are just much more fond of combo multipliers. Combo Multipliers favor multihit weapons to crank up the multiplier faster, while channeling HATES multihits. Channeling loves slow motherfuggers, or else yeah, I guess you will chew through energy instantly.

[Mu_Gera]

I'd rather have a 20% chance to reflect all of a damage instance, even though it'd still wouldn't be much of a damage improvement, it would at least help survivability wise. Though I'd up the chance, since 20% is pretty bad.

[DeltaPangaea]

1 minute ago, -Bv-Ramael said:

I'd rather have a 20% chance to reflect all of a damage instance, even though it'd still wouldn't be much of a damage improvement, it would at least help survivability wise. Though I'd up the chance, since 20% is pretty bad.

I think 20% chance to ignore any instance of damage would be pretty nice, actually, even without reflection. That's 20% less damage you're taking on average, regardless of the frame's armor, or if it's hitting shields, or whatever.

What would be nice though, is if we got a sound effect when it worked. The volume of which being proportionate to the damage of the shot deflected. So if it's a Lancer shooting you, you don't really hear it. But if it's a Ballista, you just hear it ping off you. Y'know, so you know it's working. Ability feedback is important.

[DeltaPangaea]

1 minute ago, ChaosSabre said:

It's useful in niche situations. Same applies for Unairu. If you got a Inaros with Hirudo you can have some kind of bad aoe dot. Even if it's bad it doesn't use your energy. And that's the problem with channeling. If you are running anything that is a high level you'll drain your energy in instant. I'd rather have a bad dot that is always active than a bad channel passive that drains my energy. They could have easily just made that node the old energy regen. You still get the same thing with zenurik dash it's just way more annoying to do. Hell I forget I have it till my energy is out most of the time.

I'd rather not get use of an ability because I'm not using a certain playstyle than not get use of an ability because it's literally too weak to be useful.

When you say 'bad AoE DoT', it's REALLY bad. The Fountain of Ones is real.

[Epsik-kun]

4 hours ago, DeltaPangaea said:

I think some people are just much more fond of combo multipliers. Combo Multipliers favor multihit weapons to crank up the multiplier faster, while channeling HATES multihits. Channeling loves slow motherfuggers, or else yeah, I guess you will chew through energy instantly.

Well, you still can effectively apply Channeling on prompted/ground finishers and such. And Life Strike is good on any melee.

2 hours ago, ChaosSabre said:

It's useful in niche situations. Same applies for Unairu. If you got a Inaros with Hirudo you can have some kind of bad aoe dot.

Here's the point you're getting wrong. The enemy is able to deal less than 5% of your frame's DPS output. And the enemy has EHP from tens to thousands of your frame's EHP. In the whole game, you will never encounter a situation when the damage from Unairu matters.

 

What's also important - assuming DE decides to address crap passives - Channeling can be made useful without changing its core mechanics by just tweaking the numbers. Meanwhile, damage reflection in Diablo-esque games is a flawed concept that never works because of the whole "inflated player damage + inflated enemy HP" thing. In Warframe it's not only the case - it's rocked up to eleven. It is conceptually impossible for plain damage reflection to work adequately in the game. Tweaking the numbers can make it
a) worthless (like now);
b) overpowered (if we multiply the damage by a million);
c) scaling from OP to worthless depending on the enemy level (if we multiply the damage by a thousand);
but literally never will it be balanced.

If the core mechanics are changed - the reflection percentage grants the same amount of the damage reduction or the damage reflected is linked to warframe's mods and weapons rather than damage incoming or it procs like crazy - it can work. But as it is now - it's conceptually garbage.

[Epsik-kun]

1 hour ago, ChaosSabre said:

Life Strike is actually terrible on fast low damage weapons.

There are no "fast low damage weapons" which are viable on their own while Life Strike is somehow terrible on them. Due to the same reason damage reflection achieves nothing in the game, all sources of life steal are incredibly powerful. You can take something like PDC with their 35 base damage and it'll still provide you decent heal/energy ratio on regular attacks because said 35 damage is skyrocketed by damage mods, buffs, Blood Rush, Condition Overload and whatnot. And any weapon has access to sliding attacks, ground finishers, and prompted finishers - all of which deal considerable damage in a single swing. 

1 hour ago, ChaosSabre said:

While channeling and damage reflections are both terrible passives imagine if damage reflection took away your energy as well every time a enemy hit you.

"But it's free" is not an argument. There's an opportunity cost which is wasted on the passive because passive does literally nothing - which is something you refuse to accept for some reason.

Your main issue with channeling seems to be its energy cost - rejoice then, the energy cost of channeling is precisely the thing Zenurik affects to a considerable degree. If you think that Channeling is never used by anyone - you are wrong. Modding for Channeling specifically is stupid because channeling mods are terrible in comparison to regular mods - but that doesn't mean using Channeling is stupid. Life Strike is one of the ways of using Channeling, it works on every single viable melee weapon in the game - slow or fast hitting, and that's a fact. If you think it doesn't - you are wrong yet again because it factually and evidently does.

So, if we are comparing lowering the energy cost of a mechanics that while being niche is actually used by players versus literally nothing. And you are saying that something is "way worse" than nothing. That's precisely what you're trying to prove here.

I'll go even further and say that Zenurik's passive on its own is quite strong actually, it's just linked to a massively weak mechanics that's limited to either QoL during stealth affinity farm or self-healing. The fault here lies not in the passive itself, but in the mechanics it's supposed to support. Meanwhile, Unairu's passive does literally nothing because it's designed in the way it can't do a thing. The passive itself is conceptually and inherently garbage.

So, if you personally can't find a way to use Channeling in the actual gameplay - no need to project it onto other players. Zenurik doesn't force you to use Channeling in any way, so it has no downsides. However, Channeling itself has its uses. For frames like Excalibur, Channeling not only "has uses" but can be build-defining. A passive that can support builds has its uses, meaning it isn't useless by definition. Meanwhile, Void Spines is useless.

[DeltaPangaea]

9 hours ago, Epsik-kun said:

-Snip-

Don't forget how Void Spines is THE FIRST NODE IN THE ENTIRE TREE.

Channel Efficiency though, is just there. It's not required for literally anything else. If you don't do channeling, you can just... not take it. There is no penalty to not sinking points into it. Everyone who goes into Unairu however HAS to take Void Spines.

[DeltaPangaea]

1 minute ago, ChaosSabre said:

Yes but if you do channeling and if you slide into a group of enemies it's possible to lose all your energy in a single swing. And fast weapons do drain it fast. I have Prisma Dual Cleavers and even if I use the channeling with zenurik one combo can drain over 80 points of my energy. If there are multiple enemies It can go from full to gone in an instant. Saying it's op coz weapons that are op can make a trash mechanic op is not something that makes it better. If I take a max health and armor inaros with my healing return nami skyla prime and never die I can say  that Unairu deals tons of damage just coz enemies keep hitting themselves and not being able to kill me so one person can eventually kill themselves without me ever hitting them I can say that is good as well. But actually both of those nodes are terrible.

The point is that Channeling does measurably more damage. And no heckin' crap you're going to spend a lot of energy on fast-hitting weapons, that's how Channeling WORKS.

Energy is never just lost without benefit unless you overkilled something hard enough that channeling was unnecessary, in which case you can just turn it off.

[blacklusterseph]

I'm also really disappointed by Unairu's passive, practically and thematically. I wonder what scenario it was tested under where it seemed like a good idea.