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PSA: [PC] Upcoming Changes to Gara's "Mass Vitrify" (Bonus Volt Info)


aidan890

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25 minutes ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Sorry, that was my misinterpretation, no, the health will not be increased by damage absorbed during casting.

 I've been patiently reading the posts in this topic but I'm going to be honest. This is a flat nerf with no trade offs and comes as kind of a surprise, given that Gara's primary area of use is the plains. I assume you at DE heard the cries of people being frustrated with what amounted to a two-dimensional power, given how Gara's ult now expands downwards. Consider the following;

1: Gara's 2 makes her a functional active tank, having a well-rounded Gara build with moderate duration, efficiency, range, and power is preferred here, making 'all' (I'll talk about her 3 later) her abilities useful. Tying one of her powers to Armor and Health mods forces players to mod her like a 'passive' tank, on par with Rhino/Valkyr/Inaros etc. This (as many others have already said) makes it impossible to build a well-rounded Gara. People who play her as a tank will prioritize remaining tanky over helping their team, while people who prioritize their team will be forced to shunt some of their other abilities to do so.

2: As many people have already said; Frost's 2 is simply too powerful to make this change reasonable. When you look at how flexible Frost is with a build and how his 4 functionally 'turns enemies solid' in almost exactly the same way Gara's does... but faster, I think you will see the problem; Frost benefits enormously from efficiency in a way Gara no longer will. He can spam cast both his defensive 2 and his 4 to not only put up a nigh-invulnerable duration-less barrier, he can similarly crowd control his foes and open them up to more damage. This change will flatly make Gara less useful than Frost.

3: I don't see the need for this. Gara has a couple incredibly powerful weapons in her toolkit. I could see reducing the base Damage Reduction of her 2, making it scale more with power strength so that you don't almost always end up with 90% reduction on it without building for Power Strength. I can see putting a hard cap on the number of times her 2 will absorb damage, so that she no longer steamrolls enemies. Remember Ember's Overheat? That super 'over powered' ability you took from our other CC/Damage casting femme fatale? It's literally Shatter Shield, you brought Overheat back as Shatter Shield, only... now it's not OP for some reason? Despite infinitely scaling damage output?

4: Gara's 4 and 2 are the only powers of hers that scale effectively, her 1 and 3 are effectively hard-capped to a certain level of play. The 1 remains viable in its use with 4, but her 3 is functionally meaningless beyond level 15? It's meager soft CC combined with almost no damage makes it comparable to Loki's Decoy at best. By downgrading the usability of Gara's 4, you will not be 'balancing' Gara, you will simply drive people concerned with 'the meta' away from playing her.

In closing, I flatly don't see the point of 'nerfing' anything in a horribly unbalanced PvE game. I don't mean to be insulting, PvE games will always be unbalanced on some level, AI just isn't capable of sufficiently challenging players without resorting to things like 'dealing obscene damage'. I understand that. What I don't understand is this haphazardly enforced sense of balance wherein it is okay for some frames to utterly dominate high levels of play, rendering the *vast majority* of equipment in this game completely useless. (Looking at you, Nova and Frost.) While you Nerf some frames (who flatly don't need it) and refuse to buff other frames who wouldn't be in the meta even if you gave them the buffs people have been asking for. (Volt, Zephyr) I don't see why other frames, meanwhile, like Oberon, get reworks that not only make them 'good', but bump them directly into top-tier, and that isn't considered 'unbalanced'.

Warframe is a numbers game, min-maxing with customizable equipment is inevitable. Please stop punishing the majority of players for the tricks that a couple outliers manage to pull off by manipulating those numbers, while rewarding same old same old boring playstyles without ever making a move to 'balance' (again, nova, frost) these 'uncontested' top-tier frames.

Sincerely; someone who is still very frustrated that Ember is a meaningless CC frame who falls off around level 40. Especially since Gara is now a better version of the original Ember.

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2 hours ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Hey Tenno,

Just wanted to drop in here and give a little update on some upcoming changes to Gara’s fourth ability: Mass Vitrify. Coming in the next update, this ability will no longer be invulnerable to damage. It will eventually break apart in sections when enough damage has been dealt to that specific section of the glass wall.

The wall’s health is determined by both your ability power strength and armor mods, just like Frost’s Snow Globe. This will give your enemies a few extra options for dealing with Mass Vitrify, leading to some more dynamic encounters when using the wall defensively. 

Please use this thread to discuss any questions or feedback. 

Thanks, Tenno!

Edit: Apologies Tenno, I have moved the Topic to the general news board to allow all users to contribute to the thread.

What about Spectrorage?  Any changes coming to that?

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So, despite all the people who "worked hard" to get the resources to build her and all the people who "worked hard" to Forma her, you're going to invalidate all that hard work by adding more negatives to her 4 when it's already open from above, duration based, and already has the issue of mobs seemingly be able to slip through? Now you're adding health into the mix without the ability to stack said health when Frost can do so with a third ability? Also, no one runs armour mods with Gara. 

Welp, back to Frost.

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Unless there's some kind of tradeoff (no duration, special effect from walls breaking from shots, etc), this doesn't really make the meta less broken. Frost has never been nerfed, and yet all of his abilities can shut down everything at the same rate, much faster, for less mod investment. Gara's wall is not foolproof (it's useless in the plains and is vulnerable to teleports, nullifiers, and platform jumping animations of enemies, plus duration based and takes a few seconds to cast), and the wall's sizing has to be timed exactly and the higher you cast, the less coverage you get on enemies at close range on the ground, problems that frost doesn't have to deal with because he is always going to be better at area denial (instant snowglobe pushing and slowdown no matter what, up to four globes cast, infinite duration and effectively infinite health as long as you keep stacking, instant area freeze stun with avalanche) than Gara.

Compromise: when that wall's section breaks, it should have the same effect as breaking the wall manually, but only in a radial area related to the size of the piece of wall breaking. This way, it won't immediately cause a loss if that wall's section is broken, and gives players time to deal with the problem.

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I just don't understand DE's thinking of constantly turning frames into 1 trick ponies. Gara i was having fun she was useful in most of her skills probably the single most frame i used all the skills on. Now she's going to be nothing but a 1 trick pony of pressing 2 then 4 then break with 1 run around yay everything melted rinse repeat. Not like i wasnt doing that already but now its all shes gonna have :(

 

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Dear DE, can you have the damaged sections collapse the ring into itself to compensate for a break in the wall, after a 1 second delay? For example, if an enemy breaks the wall, they can shoot through the hole in the wall for a second before the ring slams together again, and its diameter shrinks as a result?

I know this may not make sense from the ability's vitrification process, but I would really like to have the ring shrink while maintaining 360-degree shield if we're going down this road. This is because if you're using the #4 and the enemies are piling in through one corridor, they will break that part of the wall first and stream in, thus making the rest of the wall useless and most players will just end up recasting the ability to compensate.

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4 hours ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Just wanted to drop in here and give a little update on some upcoming changes

Thanks for the communication.

 

Haven't read the thread, so pardon me if I'm repeating others' points.
As to the change: What is the design intention here?
What's the intended niche? Intended use-case?

Because it looks to me like what you're doing here is killing MV's defensive ability past the mid-late star chart, leaving Gara with a individual-targettable %DR and a melee-range nuke.
And while %DR buff's nice, CC is king (don't need DR if you're not taking damage after all), putting her far behind Frost in actual usefulness.


We have 4(ish) location defense abilities: Snow Globe, Cataclysm, Energy Shield and Mass Vitrify.

The comparison with SG is "obvious": they're both a round thing you place between an area and an enemy.
But it's a bad comparison.
SG's got instant deploymeny, an unlimited duration, being entirely HP based, but with a damage absorption phase as well as being stackable, expels/debuffs enemies inside, and not unique in that you can have up to 4.
MV, would be completely diametrically opposite, if not for the 'expel/debuff enemies inside' aspect.

A much better comparison would be to Cataclysm:
Both duration based, both with an exclusivity (MV's impassable, Cata segregates Rift and non-), both with a disable on enemies inside (Stasis for Limbo, vitrify for Gara) and both are unique (only 1 at any given time).
With MV you can fire out from the safety of inside. The Rift mechanic (and Stasis) disallow that for Cata.
Cataclysm shrinks, where MV allows the player to set its size dynamically, and is constant once placed, but Cata's a sphere where MV's a band with restricted vertical protection.


If the mentioned changes are all that happens, this change single-handedly turns MV from a powerful-but-limited alternative to SG/Cata into a strictly worse variant of all the rest:
vs. SG: Same limited HP mechanic, but no stacking or absorption to let the player compensate, and unique to boot while not even providing complete coverage before you lose any sections.
vs. Cata: Both unique, but MV's HP (e.g. basically useless in high level content) vs duration, and while it (potentially) allows defensive fire, it (situationally) doesn't actually provide cover.
vs. ES: HP vs. Duration, both made of limited segments, ES's more flexible (due to manually placeable segments) but MV has easier deployment.

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