Unpopular opinion: I like the ash rework

[ljmadruga]

I’m slowly but surely getting to the point where I am running out of things in this game to pump forma into and max out.

I recently got back into playing ash out of pure boredom and wanted to max him out.

Having done a LOT of raids, I had a full set of arcane trickery. Those who know what this does know where I’m going with this.

For those who don’t know, arcane trickery has a 10% chance of turning a warframe invisible for 20 seconds on a finisher.

Teleport, with its augment, opens enemies to finishers.

Bladestorm’s animations also each count as a finisher. More enemies=more finishers=more chances at invisibility.

This opened ash to a more fast-paced playstyle focused on teleporting everywhere and killing everything. I even tanked my duration to 15% to use smokescreen as more of a stun.

Thanks to bladestorm being more interactive, this made the play style all the more fun and enjoyable for me. I’ve been having a blast in sorties with ash.

HOWEVER

There are a few things that I wish were tweaked and added.

- I wish bladestorm’s focus mode targeted a small 20-25 degree cone area (like mesa’s peacemakers) instead of a single target at the reticle. Also I think only one look should mark an enemy enough times to kill it. The reason I say this is that the screen shake from moving my mouse to highlight every single enemy in sight 3 times makes me a bit nauseous.

- Ash should be able to press 4 once bladestorm’s activates to cancel himself out of the animations and leave his shadows to do the work. Again, while those animations are awesome and badass, they are disorienting at times.

- maybe some synergies with ash’s abilities while in bladestorm’s focus mode? Like...

- using teleport while in bladestorm’s focus mode will teleport ash to a target as well as spawning holograms to take care of any nearby enemies within the cone area?

- dodging while in bladestorm’s focus mode will cast smokescreen at 50% cost

Other suggestions

- I think teleport would be even more useful if it teleported ash say 10m if there is no target in front of him, but can only be chained 3 times. This would open up a whole new world of parkour.

- I think smokescreen’s duration should have a base of 10 seconds at max instead of 8. It would make that ability more usable while not overtaking Loki. Also, stun locking enemies with a negative duration smokescreen is borderline insane.

- Maybe have smokescreen’s Augment be affected by power range and buff the base range to 15m? I would love to experiment with more support roles for ash.

[Illuminat442]

I miss the old blade storm but I know why they changed it but still the old bladestorm for ash I did enjoy.  I do like your suggestions

 

[Xaelroa]

9 minutes ago, ShadowWolf442 said:

I miss the old blade storm but I know why they changed it but still the old bladestorm for ash I did enjoy.  I do like your suggestions

 

What's funny is that they introduced equinox which has the same problem as old bladestorm. Then changed limbo to be able to do basically the same thing with the right setup.... oh and world on fire ember would like to add her hat to the pool of "we can do what ash did".

[Illuminat442]

yep don't forget mesa 

[(PSN)CoolD2108]

Kinda past the toppic but you wanna try using arcane strike in combination with trickery. Kinda lowers the chance (18->10%) compared to 2 sets but gives you a boost to BS's speed, what's is main progression dps wise. Not sure for how long but the attack speed off melee rivens also affects it still.

More speed makes abortion etc kinda irrelevant.

On topic: i'd appreciate easyer targeting cause QoL, even tho one may argue that the goal of the rework was to move it away from beein an AoE ability in the first place.

 

The current state allows it to be assist, to give you results without making it too dominant over the other aspects of him, how it was before the rework for the vast majority of his players, and bluntly, it's still good for what it is.

[Nazrethim]

13 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

I’m slowly but surely getting to the point where I am running out of things in this game to pump forma into and max out.

I recently got back into playing ash out of pure boredom and wanted to max him out.

Having done a LOT of raids, I had a full set of arcane trickery. Those who know what this does know where I’m going with this.

For those who don’t know, arcane trickery has a 10% chance of turning a warframe invisible for 20 seconds on a finisher.

Teleport, with its augment, opens enemies to finishers.

Bladestorm’s animations also each count as a finisher. More enemies=more finishers=more chances at invisibility.

This opened ash to a more fast-paced playstyle focused on teleporting everywhere and killing everything. I even tanked my duration to 15% to use smokescreen as more of a stun.

Thanks to bladestorm being more interactive, this made the play style all the more fun and enjoyable for me. I’ve been having a blast in sorties with ash.

The ability isn't really interactive. It has two ways of using it: Mark then go mad trying to mark as much as  possible or Activate and just let it on and kind of forget about it. One is very annoying to use and the multimark adds nothing to the ability. The latter is the most effective way but you may notice that BS then has zero effect in actual gameplay (besides turning everything sepia). The cutscenes being done one by one means you get stuck for as long as many enemies you marked, which is VERY slow for a damage dealer in this game.

13 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

HOWEVER

There are a few things that I wish were tweaked and added.

- I wish bladestorm’s focus mode targeted a small 20-25 degree cone area (like mesa’s peacemakers) instead of a single target at the reticle. Also I think only one look should mark an enemy enough times to kill it. The reason I say this is that the screen shake from moving my mouse to highlight every single enemy in sight 3 times makes me a bit nauseous.

That targeting QoL is needed really.

Another thing would be to tie multimarks to the ability level and not how long you stare at enemies and not cost additional energy (45 energy per enemy is frankly insane).

13 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

- Ash should be able to press 4 once bladestorm’s activates to cancel himself out of the animations and leave his shadows to do the work. Again, while those animations are awesome and badass, they are disorienting at times.

This would be a tad too powerful. World On BladeStorm was DE's first idea, and it was deemed by pretty much any savvy player and DE as broken. So they scrapped it...and went for the SECOND dumbest idea ever.

13 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

- maybe some synergies with ash’s abilities while in bladestorm’s focus mode? Like...

- using teleport while in bladestorm’s focus mode will teleport ash to a target as well as spawning holograms to take care of any nearby enemies within the cone area?

- dodging while in bladestorm’s focus mode will cast smokescreen at 50% cost

What you are suggesting here is make BS a Super Mode instead of a Nuke, which is honestly one way to solve the problems. Specially considering Fatal Teleport and Blade Storm do the exact same basic thing.

13 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

Other suggestions

- I think teleport would be even more useful if it teleported ash say 10m if there is no target in front of him, but can only be chained 3 times. This would open up a whole new world of parkour.

10m is roughly a bulletjump with default mobility. Why not 25-30m to the aimed surface?

13 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

- I think smokescreen’s duration should have a base of 10 seconds at max instead of 8. It would make that ability more usable while not overtaking Loki. Also, stun locking enemies with a negative duration smokescreen is borderline insane.

Funny thing: Invisibility and SScreen are actually almost the same in terms of Duration/EnergySpent. So SScreen is actually superior now thanks to it's better mobility and radial stagger. I think at best SS should be paused during BS, so the slowstorm doesn't dump you on the army that respawned when you were doing stabby backflips with a drunk cameraman.

Math:

Spoiler

Invisibility: 50 energy, 12s duration.

Smoke Screen: 35 energy, 8s duration.

Let's say you spend 700 total energy on both.

That's 20 casts of Smoke Screen, for a combined duration of 160s

Invisibility it's 14 casts, for a combined duration of 168s

 

13 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

- Maybe have smokescreen’s Augment be affected by power range and buff the base range to 15m? I would love to experiment with more support roles for ash.

That's been requested since, well, ever. It makes no sense that range isn't affected.