Saryn: What can she do that another can't do 10x better?

[CactiIsraphe]

Longtime Saryn player here, wondering wtf is up. Why does anyone think the state of the frame is anywhere near ok? What is her purpose?

Her augments would be great if they didn't take up a mod slot, but to have an even remotely useful build on her you can't afford to slot them. The augments seem to be geared towards an up-close brawler type character, which is not a role she should be considered for when there are other frames that have much higher chances of surviving and thriving in a melee role. Her stats and skills, even with augments and skill combos, don't make her as viable for a melee brawler role like many players seem to think she is.

She doesn't have the damage output she used to before her "fixes," even if you try to optimize duration and power to maximize her combos. Even then, other frames can run circles around her in terms of damage, so she's obviously not a damage focused frame. Her 4 does literally nothing compared to other frames unless you have all of the most expensive mods and forma her 4 or 5 times, but by that logic why not use those expensive mods and formas on other, more capable and useful frames? Her spores are too short range to really be worth anything, and viral isn't as great as people seem to thinks it is, especially when you have frames like Nova and Banshee that increase damage dealt to enemies to a degree that makes viral procs' hp reduction looks pitiful. Her 3 is useless and redundant considering how any weapon seems to be able to pop her spores, toxic status would be nearly completely useless if it didn't feed into her 4, which is my next point.

Why, by any line of logic, did anyone think Saryn's 4 as it is now would be a good idea? Using her 4 by itself does less damage than most frames' weakest attack skill, and in order to set her 4 up to do decent damage you need a good build and all of her other skills built upon each other. Any other damage frame has a one button skill that can rival her 4. While her 4 does have an element of cc, there are frames that do cc much more effectively and efficiently. It has far too long of a setup and too steep of a cost to be even remotely viable as an ability.

Because of the nature of her abilities and how they are required to feed into each other to be effective, Saryn is a stat hungry frame. While most frames have coherent enough abilities that all benefit from the same one or two stats, Saryn's abilities are greatly affected by power strength, duration, and range. Without a large number in all 3 of those areas Saryn can't stack up against other frames, and thus there's no reason to play her in settings that require warframe abilities to be used. Even with a build that favors those three stats, you'll likely have to give up power efficiency to boost the other stats to a meaningful level, which effectively weakens her ability to use her abilities unless assisted by another frame like Trinity. The worst change ever made to Saryn was "fixing" the way her 4 did damage faster with lower duration. There are still frames that at the moment of me writing this have skills that have positive uses for lower stats. Her 4's reliance on comboing all her other skills needs to be outright removed, it makes that ability too costly for what it is capable of doing and is too risky to set up at higher levels. A one button skill works just fine for her, you could make her 4 viable by making it able to be used on its own effectively, maybe as simply as boosting it's base damage to include the boosts it would get from her current ability combos. 3 could be outright replaced with something else, perhaps something that does damage or gives a debuff/buff or recovers something, having a skill purely for adding an extra step to another skill is ridiculous. That being said, her passive skill is only there to assist her 1's viral effect and setting up her 4 with viral and toxic procs.

It takes so much effort just to get her up to standard, and she has zero areas she can excel in other than status effects, which are not strong enough to base a frame off of. She desperately needs another rework, but the best course of action is probably just a restoration to what she was before. This is a mostly pve game, there's no reason to make frames this much weaker than other frames or their own initial release. Making frames substantially weaker than others just makes them not worth playing, and that's where Saryn sits right now. She's just not a viable frame for anything other than casual play where it doesn't matter what you pick. Give her a definite role, make her useful to a group and able to stand on her own without having to be babysat. Make her viable again.

[Wolfglaive]

She's perfectly viable, and she is viable without any pervasive use of Miasma or long-winded and consistent setup. She is far more viable at high levels of play in her current iteration than she was pre-rework. As for her "role", it's that of a melee-caster. Toxic Lash and Spore coupled with Saryn Prime's armor and energy values when modded make her wonderful in long endless, especially survival. Combine Spore with Nova's Molecular Prime and waves of enemies have effectively 1/4 health for extremely low-effort and upkeep.

Did you just come back to the game or something? She's been like this for ages, and your post seems a bit anachronistic.

[Fishyflakes]

She's good for focus-farming.

She's also good for highlighting enemies in the Plains with her spores (way better than a Kavat or Nova).

[CactiIsraphe]

She has been like this for ages, and I've honestly almost forgot she even existed because barely anybody plays her in actual missions. She's not at all viable, you didn't even bother to read my post. Sure, there's a lot she can do, but every frame besides maybe zephyr can outclass her, many by multipliers in the double digits. Why even acknowledge spores' viral effect when it only doubles your effective damage dealt when there are frames that can boost effective damage by 30x or more by themselves? The point of this post is that, comparatively, Saryn is too weak. She fits no clear role because everything she can do, someone else can do better while not being a one trick pony.

[(XBOX)RAG is NAROK]

33 minutes ago, CactiIsraphe said:

It takes so much effort just to get her up to standard, and she has zero areas she can excel in other than status effects

You do realize that status is the new crit right? Especially with some of the new melee mods out there like Healing Return.

[CactiIsraphe]

there are a lot of things that look good when you read them, but aren't really that great in practice. Again, I've already gone into the whole status effect thing not being worth it when you have other things that increase effective damage by significantly more. Sure, status effects and ability buffs/debuffs do stack, but in that type of situation that still puts Saryn as your last priority. She just doesn't have enough to warrant taking her over someone else.

[(PSN)The_Verethragna]

As someone who has been pre-PoE Focus Farming on Hydron with Saryn and regularly dealing the most damage and getting the most kills, even when there's a Banshee or Ember in the room, I have one thing to say:

 

What?

[Nyaa314]

16 minutes ago, CactiIsraphe said:

She's not at all viable, you didn't even bother to read my post.

1) 235+ range 100+ strength 100+ duration

2.1) if the mission is stationary, cast molt, cast one spore per ~20 enemy levels on it, hit it with slam attack. spray survivors with gas ignis

2.2) if the mission is mobile, find an enemy, cast one spore on him, spray him and his friends with gas ignis

When you are tired of gas ignis, try status melee with toxic lash and condition overload

11 minutes ago, CactiIsraphe said:

She just doesn't have enough to warrant taking her over someone else.

40m aoe that works without los and doesnt impede enemy movement so you dont have to run to every spawn room to collect loot (I'm looking at you, Banshee) or to kill last bombard or nox or healer or disruptor (I'm looking at you again, Banshee).

[krc473]

1 hour ago, CactiIsraphe said:

Her augments would be great if they didn't take up a mod slot, but to have an even remotely useful build on her you can't afford to slot them

I slot two of her augments (Regen molt and contagion cloud). I can still wipe a room with her with no trouble what-so-ever. We must have different ideas of "useful"

1 hour ago, CactiIsraphe said:

forma her 4 or 5 times

Yeah, I have this many forma on many things. Forma allows for more effective capacity. Why is more bad? My Saryn (prime) has 1 single forma. The build is 100% viable. Where did you get 4-5 from?

 

Can you explain what you are trying to do with Saryn? What is your build? 

Edited October 29, 2017 by krc473

[Basqui]

Knowing how to use Saryn makes her one of the most powerful frames at high-level missions.
She's my go-to frame on corpus sorties, especially on shield-enhanced modifiers.
Capping enemy max hp to half of their value all the time is considered effective damage IMO.
I'm also one of the tenno who really liked Saryn on her press 4 to win days, but I never looked back when I can manage even without using her miasma.

[CactiIsraphe]

1 minute ago, Nyaa314 said:

1) 235+ range 100+ strength 100+ duration

2.1) if the mission is stationary, cast molt, cast one spore per ~20 enemy levels on it, hit it with slam attack. spray survivors with gas ignis

2.2) if the mission is mobile, find an enemy, cast one spore on him, spray him and his friends with gas ignis

When you are tired of gas ignis, try status melee with toxic lash and condition overload

40m aoe that works without los and doesnt impede enemy movement so you dont have to run to every spawn room to collect loot (I'm looking at you, Banshee) or to kill last bombard or nox or healer or disruptor (I'm looking at you again, Banshee).

here's something that will do more damage in less that one second: Pyrana.
 

Again, which is kind of annoying to repeat every time someone writes a new comment, Saryn doesn't bring anything to the table that can't be done much better by someone, or in this case, something else. To set up anything remotely useful with her abilities requires a lot of time and/or energy, and that's not good for high level play.

Maybe you guys just love the frame or have never really looked at other frames, but she's really not good enough anymore. Also, another thing I said before, what's the problem with her being stronger? What's your thought process in replying to this thread with so much laid out and saying "nah, it's good enough?"

 

2 minutes ago, Basqui said:

Capping enemy max hp to half of their value all the time is considered effective damage IMO.
I'm also one of the tenno who really liked Saryn on her press 4 to win days, but I never looked back when I can manage even without using her miasma.

I've already gone over how viral's effect only effectively doubles damage. You're doing the enemy's full hp in damage in half the time. There are frames with abilities that can boost their team's or their own damage output by 30x or more, and most of their effects stack. Saryn's viral proc is a drop in the bucket in comparison. People love to fixate on her spores saying that's her whole deal, but it's barely worth mentioning when the other buff/debuff frames exist. Using Saryn solely for viral proc makes her the worst one trick pony in the game.

Why even have miasma if it has no practical use? You just admitted that what was once her best ability is now so useless it might as well not be there. She's one of the frames that needs a rework desperately, but the playerbase seems to be oblivious to just how comparatively weak she is as a frame. She has a weak status effect that people think is stronger than it is, a weak decoy, a weak 30% melee buff that applies a weak status effect that does an extra 50% base melee weapon(which is the lowest damage weapon type) damage on hit and gives back minuscule energy, and then a really short hard cc that does almost no damage past level 30 unless you run a super expensive build and manage to get off her full combo. It's a trash set of abilities compared to other warframes, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise. She needs to have her hand held to get decent numbers, and brings nothing to the table that can't be done better by another frame. That's the title of the thread and I'm honestly baffled that it still hasn't clicked yet.

She's not even good as a jack of all trades type frame because her numbers in each area are not even remotely close to half of what a specialized buff, cc, or melee frame can do.

[Wolfglaive]

3 minutes ago, CactiIsraphe said:

-SNIP-

It seems as though you have an opinion which you are projecting as fact and people disagree with you. If you want the simple answer, it's this: use the other frames. Also, for most frames, your hyperbolic title can be applied. And for the record, you never give specific examples of your topic in the OP, you simply make statements about her abilities which sound exactly like the things people said about her when her rework dropped. So, forgive us for addressing your actual post instead of your title.

 

[Kirinketsu]

There are three Warframes out there that buff not only themselves but also the whole parties damage, two can buff all damage by 650% to 750% the other can buff weapon damage by 1,800% to 3,700%, there is also Corrosive Projection, running four of this mod will eliminate the enemies armor, just about everything in Warframe has armor, based on the class and the level determines how much armor an enemy will have, around level 100 most heavy class enemies will have somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 armor providing them with 96% and higher damage reduction, maybe my math is bad but last time I check 96% is higher than 50% "Viral Hp damage" and will also eliminate the need of reducing their hp by half, 50,000 HP divided by 50% at 8,000 armor will take 240,000 to kill over Corrosive procs, and if you are running both CP and Viral my question is why? why do you need that to kill enemies unless you are using unmodded weapons?

 Let us talk about Saryn, I am a long time player, this account was made around Dec 2012, I played Warframe quite regularly up until I quit playing and took around two year break this was maybe a month after Saryn was reworked Dec 2015 after U 17.10. Saryn use to be my goto frame for clearing and farming, she could finish a 200+ kill extermination mission solo within 40 secs to 2 minutes based on the map size and could solo void towers or farm flawlessly up until wave/time 50 minutes with build 7% duration, 135% efficiency, 235% range, and 224% Strenght, keep in mind Exilus Drift and Energy Conversion was not in the game get, this build allowed Saryn to spam her 4, Miasma nearly none stop while hitting everything within 35M if not more for around 12,000 to 14,000 damage within one to two seconds, due to the way negative duration worked with Miasma, if you removed Overextended your damage received 60% power strength boost allowing you to now do 19,200 to 22,400 damage every one second to enemies within 22m, Now I do not know how long it takes you to set up Saryns new Miasma combo but it takes myself around 6 to 8 secs to just apply Toxic or Viral, and Molt that allows for her Miasma to do around 90,000 damage in  around 9 seconds on top of costing a ton of energy and set up to do, in that same time old Miasma Saryn could dish out 180,000 damage to everything within 22m, while needing no set up other than maybe an Energy Pad, 180,000 damage might seem like a lot to some and to others it seems weak, well yes and yes, it was weak once you started fighting levels 180s+, but when combined with the best group ability buffer at the time Mirage and her 631% damage buff, your Miasma now hits for 146,200 every one second, Saryn killed all of the things, Saryn, Mirage, and Trinty could last for days, 

I played Saryn maybe one or two times after her rework, I remember thinking hey her new 1 is really cool and by the end of the missions I was amazed at how bad she had now become, she straight up sucked and was weak compared to how strong she used to be. I do not know if it was cause DE did not want a spam 4 and win frame, if people really knew how strong she was and wanted her nerf, or if people had no idea how strong she was and cried for a make Saryn great rework but she went from being one of my top, top strongest Frames in the game to being on my weakest Frames list. If you really think she is as good or better than she use to be then you must have never played her before her rework.

Also this idea people have she is a melee Frame? why or how, what makes her a top or good melee Frame, why play her over, Ash, Chroma, Loki, Volt, Titania, Wukong or Zephyr, each of these Frames are leagues better than Saryn when it comes to Melee

Edited October 29, 2017 by Kirinketsu

[CactiIsraphe]

3 minutes ago, Wolfglaive said:

And for the record, you never give specific examples of your topic in the OP

There are 30+ warframes at the moment, going into exact detail of the full capabilities of each frame would take forever, people can just read the wiki if they want frame breakdowns. I did mention that some warframes suited to support, like Banshee, are capable of giving double digit damage multipliers e.g. sonar at level 30 having a base 5x multiplier, mine sits around 12.25x and i don't have her built solely for power, only at 245%. So at base, Banshee's 2 is 2.5x more damaging at 5x and has a much wider spread at 35m than Saryn's 1 which is effectively a 2x multiplier and can be spread up to 16m away.

There's also the key detail that status effects are different than element damage. I've already gone into the status effects she inflicts at a 100% rate because of her 1 and 3, but they are not enough to warrant them being viable skills. They're just weak once you get to lower mid-level gameplay.

[Nyaa314]

1 hour ago, CactiIsraphe said:

here's something that will do more damage in less that one second: Pyrana

To all enemies in 40m range? No it won't.

[CactiIsraphe]

8 minutes ago, Nyaa314 said:

To all enemies in 40m range? No it won't.

It'll do more damage faster. By the time you set up miasma for damage you can mag dump a pyrana several times over. My pyrana has cleared high level rooms faster than I've ever seen any Saryn's ability combo do, but i suppose that's not hard running +180% multishot on something w/ nearly 2k slash and 3k corrosive w/ a 5.2 fire rate.

[Nyaa314]

Okay, you are right, we are wrong, pyrana > saryn.

[Ivan_Rid]

2 hours ago, CactiIsraphe said:

There's also the key detail that status effects are different than element damage. I've already gone into the status effects she inflicts at a 100% rate because of her 1 and 3, but they are not enough to warrant them being viable skills. They're just weak once you get to lower mid-level gameplay.

Define "lower mid-level gameplay". For some people endgame is lvl9999, mid-level might be absolutely anything.

And yes, Miasma is crap for damage, and ability combos are red herring which wont lead you anywhere - what you need is a ability+weapon synergies, just like with Mag. Ever since Rivens became a thing Saryns potential skyrocketed.

Overall my Saryn works fine as an AoE nuker, and thats even if Im not going full tryhard with Arca Plasmor or Lanka (and Lanka got almost twice as good with PoE).

Lvl100 Bombards start popping out at about 50mins of Axi survivals, and rarely if ever met on pubs. They are also fine for simulating generic Sortie3 enemies.

 

[Hellmaker2004]

Saryn was good at the start of her rework. But at this moment she is no longer good. Miasma although does deal a lot more damage than before, also requires way more energy for that.

 

Spore is great in theory. But Spore is still bugged / gutted so hard into the ground it does not work anymore.

In her current form all she can do is spread viral reliable. And that is about it sadly. I love when Spore IS working, but that occurs less often than a solar eclipse.

 

So what is wrong with Spore currently?

Spore does not spread Toxic if you overkill the target, this forces you to have very specific mods that are aimed at your current target both for resistance to damage types, but also there armor and level.

Spore have a weird inconsistency where it block itself from applying, this result in extremely low Spore values.

 

Currently Saryn is her own worst enemy due to all her restrictions and this saddens me. She used to be good after the rework. At first she was clearly suffering from the gas bug. But somewhere along that time they either managed to screw up spore or it might never have come to anyone's attention due to the gas bug. The end Result is the same, currently she provides nothing reliable outside of Viral spreading.

[(PSN)Amu_Lambo_Ginga]

9 hours ago, Kirinketsu said:

Also this idea people have she is a melee Frame? why or how, what makes her a top or good melee Frame, why play her over, Ash, Chroma, Loki, Volt, Titania, Wukong or Zephyr, each of these Frames are leagues better than Saryn when it comes to Melee

Ummmmm.............. 

Diwata, similar to Hysteria and Exalted Blade, has its own unique statistics.

Base damage is 50 / 80 / 120 / 160 per hit, affected by Ability Strength.

Base damage distribution is 15%  Impact, 75%  Puncture, and 10%  Slash.

Attacks 1.08 times per second, and can only hit one enemy per attack. When attacking, Titania will dash a short distance to her target.

150% critical damage multiplier with a 5% critical chance and a 10% status chance.

Diwata is also affected by equipped melee mods including:

Base damage (e.g., Steel Charge), physical damage, elemental damage, faction damage, attack speed, channeling (e.g., Life Strike), range mods (e.g., Primed Reach), critical damage, critical chance, and status.

Diwata is not affected by the equipped melee weapon's stats, weapon augments (e.g., Justice Blades), class-specific mods (e.g., Covert Lethality), Riven Mods, or stat-modifying skins (e.g., Manticore).

Straight from wiki...

[hukurokuju5]

PROS

poops on the majority of the starchart 

mass viral proc is great

 

CONS

they nerfed spore hard ( no more exponential popping; was  a bug anyways)

virtually no CC

and her solo* survivability isn't great at higher levels

 

 

she 'aight

 

 

[Hellmaker2004]

7 minutes ago, hukurokuju5 said:

PROS

poops on the majority of the starchart 

mass viral proc is great

 

CONS

they nerfed spore hard ( no more exponential popping; was  a bug anyways)

virtually no CC

and her solo* survivability isn't great at higher levels

 

 

she 'aight

 

 

The two biggest cons are not that they nerfed Spore. Her two biggest Cons are

A: Toxic does not carry over from overkill. Causing the most optimal build to be the one where you can deal 99.9% Of a mobs health, this is realistically impossible to do and yet required since she scales with the amount of damage you do.

 

B: Spore are blocking each other when you use any sort of AoE weapon, this includes Melee weapons. Hitting more than one foe even if  you only initially spored one target causes Spore to behave extremely erratic and overwrite itself.

 

So i would not call her aight since she currently does not fill any role besides reducing the required damage you have to deal to enemies by half. Something a lot more frames can do and still provide other effects for you or your team.

[Misgenesis]

Putting aside your title which can be applied to anything, you are right about the melee part. As much they want to push Saryn as a brawler she isnt one because most importantly, she doesnt have the stats to back up melee against levels that matter.

Her rework was a move for the better but its just a damn shame they fire and forget after a few fixes like they do with other content.

13 hours ago, Kirinketsu said:

I played Saryn maybe one or two times after her rework, I remember thinking hey her new 1 is really cool and by the end of the missions I was amazed at how bad she had now become, she straight up sucked and was weak compared to how strong she used to be. I do not know if it was cause DE did not want a spam 4 and win frame, if people really knew how strong she was and wanted her nerf, or if people had no idea how strong she was and cried for a make Saryn great rework but she went from being one of my top, top strongest Frames in the game to being on my weakest Frames list. If you really think she is as good or better than she use to be then you must have never played her before her rework.

And you must have not put much time into her new kit since her rework, well, you admitted to not having done that. The reason is as you said, she was used for her press 4 to win negative duration bug/exploit which caused unintended amounts of damage.

Spore with the right build and weapons is far better than old Miasma ever was.

Edited October 30, 2017 by Misgenesis

[CactiIsraphe]

Idk why people still actually think spore is good. It's aoe is far too limited, it spreads unreliably, and viral status effect doesn't stack up against all the other frames with damage buffs or enemy defense debuffs. There are also ways to get virtual 100% viral procs on weapons that you could realistically use at much higher level play than you could have an actual use for Saryn at. I'd say an honest end point to her usefulness is level 30, anything after that there are better frames and/or weapons that can do the same things she can but better. I hate to talk it up so much, but it's the one example I use and am familiar with: the pyrana. You can set up the pyrana to have 50% or higher status chance and use mods to give it enough spread to virtually guarantee a status proc faster than frames can cast abilities. With there already being mods that extend status effect, Saryn's 25% status effect duration is just redundant, and status effects other than corrosive are much less useful than people want to admit or even realize. With the state of how slight the benefits of status effects are, basing a frame solely on status effects doesn't cut it. There are better supports, her melee skill isn't useful to anyone except new players and people who can't build melee weapons decently, her molt is a poor imitation of decoy and is only really useful if you use regenerative molt to heal yourself while solo, but why not just run a healer who can do more ability damage anyway? Her 4 is decent cc, but there are frames with better aoe cc so she's no worth picking over them.

 

Making the counter argument to this thread that "if she's so much worse at doing things than other frames, people should just play other frames" is stupid. This is the feedback section, I'm giving feedback on how a frame has no purpose as is. If you have opinions on her being your favorite frame to run for xyz that's fine, but I guarantee that if you've put in the time to progress through the game there are singular items that you can build to be more useful than her entire ability set.

[Hellmaker2004]

The problem is that Spore used to be really really good, it had a x8x8 multiplier and it used to not only stack the spore damage, but also the toxic damage. Somewhere along the line this was fixed.

 

Now the x8x8 multiplier was a bug, that was good that they fixed it. However somewhere along the line everything else simply got "fixed" as well. Sadly i am not sure where when or how it did get fixed. What we are left with now is a Spore mechanic that sometimes work, and sometimes it overwrite itself with pretty much the baseline damage. 

 

And i think that is part of the problem as well, i myself used to be a heavy defender of the Saryn rework at the start. Because i not only saw what she was capable of but i also experience it, now however she fall behind so fast it is insane.

 

Also for reference,  Toxic damage might still stack when it does not bug. This is something i have not had the time to test. The big offender however is still Spore bug that for some reason overwrites the spread damage and replaces it with pretty much minimal damage.

Edited October 30, 2017 by Hellmaker2004