What I Think About Zephyr: A Look At Rework Possibilities

[Olphinator]

Today I would like to talk about a Warframe that needs an incredible amount of love.

That frame is Zephyr, the definitely-not-flight-capable flying frame.

In all honestly Zephyr is debatably one of the most pointless Warframes, in her current capacity, currently in the game.

Yes, she is able to buff allies’ movement and projectile speed, but once you move past that she just has a high mobility ability that has no real damage and is only useful for crossing PoE very quickly, a dive bomb that nobody uses because it is fairly pointless and does no damage, and large aoe cc from tornadoes. Or you can get rid of the cc and augment the tornados. So good.

Zephyr is in need of a rework and I’m not certain that anyone is too worried about actually giving her one, especially with the presence of PoE.

Here is what I propose; solid numbers to come later, description of my idea first.

 

Zephyr:

Passive Ability – EXTREMELY slow fall while in the air and increased aim glide time. [Press Crouch to fall straight down without waiting to glide down] This is open to much criticism. Please offer me other alternatives that might work. I just can’t seem to think of anything that wouldn’t be a large power jump.

1^st Ability – A medium range air dash. Activate the ability to dash in the direction that you are looking regardless of whether you are on the ground or in the air. A cone of air radiates ahead of you and continues flying once you have ceased movement. Distance traveled is affected by a combination of power strength and power duration. Size of cone is affected by power range. Distance the cone travels once your warframe ceases movement would be affected by power duration. Speed of projectile is affected by power strength. Enemies contacted by the cone projectile become staggered.

2^nd Ability- Zephyr creates a small vortex below herself that descends quickly to the ground, drawing in and knocking down all enemies within range. Duration of knockdown affected by power duration, radius of vortex affected by power range, damage inflicted affected by power strength. Damage inflicted would be Impact.

3^rd Ability- Turbulence [Because that name is just too good] Zephyr cloaks herself in a turbulent vortex of air that deflects incoming projectiles and most gunfire. The wall of wind does not stop beam based weapons or energy weapons.  (Unless this is too difficult to code and implement into the game, but I think it would be a really decent interaction that keeps the ability balanced.) The radius of the Ability is affected by power range. Power duration affects primary ability cast, but not the special interactions with her 1^st ability. Power strength affects trajectory of redirected shots [This is most likely impossible to implement. What I mean by this ability change would be that any shots fired at you would be redirected toward the enemy that fired upon you with increasing accuracy based on power strength.] Any shot redirected is affected by a small damage multiplier.

Special Interaction- If Turbulence is active when activating Zephyr’s 1^st Ability, she will not dash in any direction. Instead she will begin to hover in the air a distance from the ground and gain mid-air movement at 20% movement speed. Activating her 1^st Ability while in this mode will move her through the air at reasonable speed, affected by power strength, following the reticle around, but keeping her locked upright. The distance that Zephyr Hovers from the ground is affected by power range. Zephyr’s energy drains constantly while this ability is active and the drain is amplified while gliding around with her 1. Base energy draw of 15 energy per second to a minimum of 5 energy per second with efficiency/duration mods or something in line with that, having the cost maybe double when actually gliding around with her 1. [Here is the BEST part. Make Aviator will work while Zephyr is in the air. Because…yeah. It needs to be something that works.]

4^th Ability- Zephyr begins to channel and summons a tornado over the course of ten seconds. This drains an amount of energy on initial cast as well as per second that it is active and can be activated a second time to cast the ability early. All incoming damage is absorbed by the tornado and adds to the total damage that the tornado will do. Overall range of the ability is based on the amount of time spent channeling the ability. Max channel for a large area, quick cast for a small area of effect. The damage multiplier of this is not affected by power strength or any other modifications. A damage amplifier in the area of 25% is what I am imagining for the balance of the ability, but that might be too high. All enemies that are in the area of effect when the ability is cast are knocked down if they are within the inner radius of the tornado itself, otherwise they are staggered. Each enemy in the area will then have a percent chance to be staggered for the duration that they are present within the ability’s effective area at a base of 15% up to 50% with power strength modifiers [Possibly too much?]. Duration of the final tornado cast is affected by power duration.  Base and maximum radius of the tornado are based on power range.  The ability will randomly apply status afflictions based on the type of damage that is fired within the tornado. Base damage type is impact. (Low chance to actually proc 5-10% unaffected by power strength) If cast in the air, the tornado’s height will be based on duration of cast, short cast will sink to the ground and only be as tall as a regular short/quick cast.

I feel that this would be an amazing change for Zephyr while keeping her in a niche all her own. Yes, her 4^th Ability borrows from Nyx, Harrow, and Gara to some extent, but provides its own utility and could very well be used as a decent way to deal damage over a large area. While the need to cast her 1^st ability to move around in the air quickly may feel clunky and HEAVILY drain energy, it limits the INSANE utility and mobility that a full free-flight mode would give to an unrestricted Warframe. While I would love for Zephyr to have a free-flight mode, I do not feel that it would facilitate helpful tweaks and changes to her abilities at large. Zephyr needs to fit more precisely into the niche of utility defender and team support from the sky in my opinion. [For what my opinion is worth.]

 

 

Augments

Her augments could easily be changed to apply meaningful effects for the mod space sacrificed.

For her 3^rd Ability the augment could be changed to increase projectile speed for all allies and give them turbulence at full duration, half range and half efficacy, only redirecting 50% of the shots fired and with half the damage multiplier on redirected shots and grant you increased movement speed while in the air. This keeps Zephyr from infringing upon the one thing that Volt had in his arsenal to be useful for mobile combat (I don’t want to hear about volts shield being picked up by allies because that just…isn’t a great augment imo and should probably do something slightly different but that’s not why I’m here today) while still offering a perk to her allies.

Augment for her 4^th ability Could Cause the cast time, range, and power strength to be lowered, but allow you to cast more than one tornado at a time OR Cause you to summon three tornados that rotate around Zephyr and move with her while granting a small speed boost to you and any allies within the affected range (unaffected by power strength. Maybe a 15% flat base movement increase that is calculated on top of sprint boost and other sprint modifiers, or Scaling with power strength with a lower base multiplier could also be an option.)

Augments for her 1^st and 2^nd abilities are the most awkward to implement. Adding a residual area of effect on the ground when activating her 2^nd ability based on augment rank could actually be useful for a spammable cc combo with her other abilities. For her 1^st ability the augment could concern the projectile exploding to deal impact damage in an area based on mod rank for a flat amount of damage. This augment should not feature stagger, knockdown, or ragdoll of any kind in order to keep it from being too…annoying.

 

Visual Changes?

Insofar as visual changes are concerned I think that most of the abilities have resources that could be tweaked and used from their current status. I would love to Zephyr to have energy wings/jets sprout from her arms and legs when she is hovering/flying. It would be so majestic. Majestic AF

The channeling of her tornado could involve her doing an animation somewhat similar to her current 4^th ability casting animation, but with more swirling of the arms and hands and having the small tornado start to form while in her hands before she hurls it onto the ground and it does the thing.

 

TL;DR: Zephyr, Combo her 1^st and 3^rd abilities to create a semblance of a flight mode. Make her 2^nda simply fun to use cc ability that would actually have some purpose. Make a channeled tornado for her 4^thß I mean, does that need any modifiers? The casting of it alone would be amazing to watch. Visually add some form of energy wings or jets from her arms/legs/body to denote that she is “flying”.

[Birdframe_Prime]

Zephyr rework thread number 597... my god... it's full of tropes... (By the way, this isn't a shot at you specifically, my new Zephyr reworking comrade, but you've fallen into the trap of not reading the rest of the rework threads already here before posting, and I've been here long enough to find amusement in their repetition.)

Known tropes of the Zephyr rework thread beginner:

Spoiler

1. Crouch to fall at normal gravity.
2. Dive Bomb is useless
3. Buff/Nerf Turbulence
4. Flying mode
5. Tornado should be one single funnel
6. Energy Drain (it's not channel, channelling is melee) abilities are somehow better than duration casts with either active cancel or recast-before-end-of-duration.

That said, eh, it would normally be a fair first attempt at a Zephyr rework thread except DE aren't going to do it. During a recent interview with DE the question about reworks was raised, they pointed out that after the immense working time for Limbo's new ability, compared with the amount of bugs and exploits it created, combined with the community backlash about not using community ideas, or how the actual new ability was somehow worse than the original setup... all reworks are going to be done within the existing abilities and setup of the frames. It's why Oberon and Hydroid didn't get new abilities, only mechanical fixes and updates. It's why Mirage's Sleight of Hand is only getting added to, not reworked.

Basically, we're stuck with the existing functions, we'll just be getting things added to them, or mechanical changes to how they achieve what they achieve.

Moving on!

Zephyr, the Air Caster frame that was never designed by DE to be a flying frame, and even the community thread that created her had her down as an air-casting martial artist, not a flying frame, although in the original 'he' did have an active hover that allowed 'him' to move faster. Actual Zephyr is not a flying frame and never was. Nice bird themed helmet though.

Passive: I'm not against the crouch to fall faster, but most players that really, really dislike her passive say the same thing: We should not need a button that restores a function other frames have as base. I think they find it personally insulting, at some level...

What I came up with to counter these people was... to ignore the problem, basically. Build a function into her existing movement that makes her movement faster and better so that they completely forget about the slow fall itself. As a result of a specific change to Tailwind, namely unlocking the fixed animation, you can do all sorts of things, like re-casting abilities, reloading, using Parkour to cancel the movement into something else and... soft landing. My solution was to put a function into Tailwind that meant when you Tailwind into within 1m of a walk-able surface (with angle-detection similar to the function we have in Bullet Jump currently so that you don't cancel out of a dash just for moving horizontally), you just... walk out of it. There's some conservation of momentum, so if you're going full speed you'll slide for a bit, but if you're heading more-or-less straight down, you just... land. No hard landing means you can walk, sprint, jump, bullet jump, roll, anything. It would make her movement faster overall if used actively, and put a really interesting skill ceiling onto her, especially in tile sets, rather than open Plains.

Seems like a pretty fun solution, right? Because now, after this change, we won't have the issue of accidentally aiming Tailwind at a doorframe or the wall above it, bashing our head there, not being able to move, having to wait for momentum to let us fall down, then walk through the door. Now if we miss-aim, we'll be able to Aim Glide out of the cast, cancelling it, and re-aim downwards, or use the inbuilt air steering that Zephyr has to re-orient ourselves, or use a bullet jump, or simply drop at the right time... It'll be easy.

Tailwind: This one I'm actually impressed by, it's a suggestion I haven't seen in about eight... nine months, the second ever iteration of it that I've read. A cone projectile that is launched from the cast and procs an impact or ragdoll on targets it touches.

And surprisingly, I don't have negatives against this, only indirect points about practicality and that current modding for long-duration means that you'll more often over-shoot the target. I kind of like it a little more because it would also, if it were to gain some 'meta' function with an augment or similar, promote low-duration builds that allow you to spam it. (Think something like 'cleansing wind' that allows the projectile to remove placed hazards, such as sapper orbs, napalm fire, gas clouds, mutalist tar and so on.)

You've kept the main function of high-mobility/low-damage and given her an option for getting out of narrow corridors.

A point? Don't remove the vertical launch. It's rare for an ability to have something that's so obviously capable of being a 'trigger' for buff actions. The vertical launch can be the trigger for buffing some other ability, like Dive Bomb (and yes, Dive Bomb will still be here, believe me on that) to make that function better too. DE originally designed Tailwind to have the vertical launch in order for it to buff the damage on Dive Bomb, since there wasn't any other function at the time that let us get the kind of height that Tailwind did.

New Ability: While I'm honestly convinced that it's not going to happen, this isn't such a bad one and deserves talking about. Except it suffers from the same issue that Dive Bomb currently has; only being an air cast. It's entirely situational based on whether you're high enough for it to spawn the funnel. On the other hand, if you make it so that the funnel spawns regardless of height, then you might as well make it a radial cast on the ground too, and then you're running into completely different balance territory, where you'll be able to basically pull enemies into the middle of where you're casting your other abilities... eesh... good fun, but possibly something that needs thinking about more in depth than your explanations have done.

Looking at it from another light, this really is just a non-self-displacing reskin of Dive Bomb with its augment. And when you think of it like that... why not just fix what's wrong with Dive Bomb? There's so much you can do with an ability that's a radial knock-down/ragdoll cast with incredibly fast activation at low height, scaling damage from height, and all the options that this can open up.

Turbulence: While I can understand your confusion about how this deflects lasers... I cannot support the decision to remove this function. Turbulence is one of the top three defense casts in the game because it literally negates ranged hitscan and projectile weapons (lasers count as a projectile in Warframe, that's why laser weapons are so bad in comparison to other weapon types). Every single other defense cast in the game is based on percentage damage reduction or creating an over-shield style of defense to mitigate damage for a fixed value. There is no other ability that completely turns off ranged damage, and it's pretty much the biggest strength that Zephyr, a frame adept at evading melee range, can have.

The strength-based deflection... I'm not convinced and I can poke holes in it. Reflected damage is never as good as people want it to be, enemy damage scaling is never as high as their stat scaling, so they will never actually do enough damage to themselves in a short period to actually kill themselves. The damage multiplier might help, but then you're adding power to an already fairly powerful ability, one that DE has updated consistently for three years after its release to be exactly where they want it to be... Basically the only way you'd get this kind of interaction is if you did nerf the defense side. Another un-expected consequence of this; in the standard Overextended build to exploit Turbulence's max-range defense capabilities, this would mean that projectiles like rockets would barely change direction at all, and any object that you're trying to protect, like a pod or even a team-member, will still get hit. On top of that, if the rocket is not being deflected at a hard angle at the edge of Turbulence, then it will instead hit the ground near you and explode with you inside it's AoE blast, killing you anyway. The current Turbulence, as long as you are standing at a distance from the attacker, is the perfect defense against ranged enemies, there's no reason to build in this kind of weakness to it.

The hover mechanic, as a particular moment of confusion, has me asking just... why? I mean, why would you want to slow her down in the air? Why would you change the base function of Tailwind, which is an amazing mobility cast, to be the opposite if her bread-and-butter defense ability is active (and it should be active all the time, to be honest)? There's absolutely no reason for Tailwind casting to ever actually stop Zephyr in mid-air. It makes no sense from ability design mechanics.

More to the point, with your existing changes to Turbulence, you'd now be a sitting duck. In the air with nowhere to go, reliant on Tailwind to move you now that you're hovering and moving at 20% base speed. Gone is her fast movement, gone is the ability to duck behind a pillar when your Turbulence goes down for a brief second between casts... not to mention being unable to use things like Life Support, consoles, revive a team member and so on without turning this function off, so I just don't understand how this function helps Zephyr. It would help a couple of other frames, where their abilities and other buffs would mean it was amazing to hover above the battle, but just... not Zephyr.

Genuinely... I just don't see how any of these changes 

Tornado: I find myself putting this ability under the same category as your new 2, it's not precisely a bad ability, but it doesn't have the same potential as simply fixing what's wrong with the existing cast. It also doesn't just steal from the listed other frames, it also steals from a frame that literally does the short duration storm around the player function; Inaros.

I could write you a small dissertation on what's wrong with Tornado, what it was supposed to be, what it could be, and how to fix it. I actually do go into it on my own threads. I've tried dozens of variants that would replace it with something new (except now DE aren't replacing abilities... thanks guys, way to cramp my creativity) and I keep coming back to the simple concept that all of Tornado's bigger issues stem from the smallest part of it; the AI is free-roaming and can wander off. That fact is what makes the rest of its functions worse by comparison to every other persistent CC cast.

Your ability isn't all that bad in concept, I'll be honest, but has problems with the mechanics; drain functions are terrible, they are designed to be punishments for abilities that used to have a duration and were considered too essential to the kit to get rid of or replace some other way, and so they made the cost be a constant drain, prevent energy gain from any pads, frame abilities or regen and some of them even have ramping costs instead. Duration casts can gain energy back during them, which by a flat margin makes them better, and duration casts keep going even if you have no energy. The small base range of the cast and the lack of any ragdoll negates the speed and range of Tornado's initial CC as it is now, and also reduces the overall CC. Causing it to be an expanding ring will force Zephyr into immobility again, and you've created ability redundancy in it by making it damage absorb while your third cast already does damage mitigation. If your base range is too small, your own Turbulence will prevent it from gaining damage, in fact it still will if you're using Turbulence anywhere near the edge of the cast, and once it's at a large range, your Turbulence might as well be not on. Unlike Gara's 2 and 4 combination, these two abilities inhibit each other, not strengthen. Gara's 2 does damage reduction, not prevention, while her 4 is designed specifically to refresh it and even stack damage into it when destroyed on purpose.

And then you're trying to change a CC cast to a damage cast, which again I have to wonder why... Fix Tornado as it is and you'll have a perfect defense-based fire-and-forget ability that provides long duration CC and reliable elemental procs, with reliable low-end damage that would compete with other casters like Vauban, Frost and even Hydroid. As a damage cast, your Tornado might have scaling damage returns, but it's entirely reliant on you being locked in place for 10 seconds to get the max range and function out of it. That just doesn't sit well with the way the rest of Zephyr is designed for movement, evasion and the ability to crowd-control on the move.

Augments: The reason you're finding it difficult to place the augments for her 1 and 2 is because you're changing them up in ways that make them more... specificly driven to what you wanted out of the abilities. Namely, less CC and more damage, which Zephyr isn't all about.

Her Tailwind augment I already made a suggestion, but there are others, like making a wind tunnel that allies could follow you through, in the way of Warp, but duration based rather than usage based. This would be even more fun with the ability to cancel out of the movement and recast, you could create little roller-coasters in the air for your team to follow ^^

The augment for Dive Bomb, if Dive Bomb were fixed up for better control, usability and reliability, would only need to make the base pull range wider than the impact to pull in enemies that wouldn't normally be hit by the damage or CC'd by the cast. But for your new ability, there would be other augments, like suspending enemies for a short duration if they're pulled in, or causing all enemies pulled in to impact each other for additional damage.

Jet Stream already applies the bonuses to anyone in range, including the projectile speed buff, but giving it to allies too? That would only be done if you were to pay an additional cost per ally, no way they could get it themselves passively just by an augment.

And Tornado... again, if it was just fixed, instead of changed out completely, then there's a slew of augment ideas for it. Since yours is already based around damage and the held-cast to extend the range, yours would have to be utility rather than more damage. It really limits your choices. Maybe switching out the base damage for an elemental type? Based on your equipped gear? So it does a combo of the damage types you equip, but the total damage doesn't change, only scales up with damage absorbed like normal? Not sure, but that could be fun.

Visuals: her Deluxe Skin is the only place you'd get these, and the guy designing it already has it as the base design of what he wants. The assets would take more change than you'd think, unless they used existing assets from elsewhere, I don't see that happening with the way DE are currently working.

tl;dr

Your rework needs work, and I think you should find inspiration in the 596 many other Zephyr threads on here, there's plenty to choose from. A good read is this one from one of my good friends:

Or, if you're curious as to what in the heck I'm talking about, how Zephyr's existing kit could be in any way better, then check out mine over here:

Read them through, see what you think, comment on them if you like. Then come back to your rework, see if they've given you some ideas.