Ember: WoF easy-mode was only one of her problems.

[polarity]

The remaining problems with Ember are:

• Ember's abilities all rely on a damage type that scales poorly, unless complemented by some form of armor removal.  This very severely limits her viable weapon choice for a functioning, scaling build, to items that provide a high base status chance and attack speed/rate of fire, it also requires 2 mod slots to be devoted to toxic and electric mods, to provide enough corrosive procs to remove armor.
• While that build is perfectly viable at high levels, it is very much a glass cannon, highly reliant on movement, situational awareness, and use of cover to survive, stunning with Accelerant, clearing trash with Fire Blast, and picking off hard targets with weapons, before resuming avoidance or retreating back to cover.
• Not all players have the level of movement skill required for that playstyle, so for them, Ember's survivability makes her unplayable at higher levels.  The changes to WoF made that issue much worse.
• Not all players want to use the tiny selection of weapons that can provide the armor stripping to make the rest of her damage scale, so again, her lack of damage with the weapons they want to use, makes her unplayable at higher levels.

 

Suggested changes (values subject to testing):

Passive:

Completely remove the current version.  It is utter garbage, because it will not provide any benefit whatsoever for over 99% of time played.

Replace with:

• Ember's status chance on weapons, for fire damage only, is doubled after all other modifiers.

This would allow her to get a higher status chance for her single, ability-buffed damage type, instead of being forced to spilt her damage between elements, when using dual-stat mods to raise status.  It is also required because of the way the following buff cannot function when additional elements are present due to those mods.

and:

• Enemies that are affected by a fire status proc from Ember or her weapons will gain a temperature value on the target, based on the damage of the hit (so that a large hit or multiple small rapid hits can reach the same value).  When this temperature reaches a certain level, any additional fire damage will then bypass armor (other damage types won't), and the enemy will gain a glowing-white-hot effect (modified by energy color), along with a heat haze effect.

Over time, without additional fire procs to sustain it, temperature will drop.  Any other elemental proc type besides fire that originates from Ember will either reset the temperature value to zero or significantly reduce it (Subject to testing.  I/P/S procs have no effect on the temperature mechanic).  Essentially Ember is forced to use only fire elemental damage on her weapons if she wants to make use of the 2nd part of her passive, but the fact that it now scales well gives a very good incentive to make that sacrifice.

    

Accelerant:

Rather than being a damage multiplier, Accelerant's strength will instead come from applying an initial heat proc with a much higher temperature value than normal to its targets, to which Ember can then add to.  With sufficient power strength this will mean that the temperature value on targets that have been hit by Accelerant, will already be high enough for fire damage from Ember's weapons or abilities to bypass armor.  In combination, any additional strength as well as duration, will affect how quickly the temperature applied by Accelerant decreases on targets.
    
It may still be necessary to maintain some degree of fire damage multiplication on Accelerant, in addition to having the armor bypass mechanic.  The Flash Accelerant augment could allow other players to contribute to the temperature effect.
    

Fire Quake augment:

Using this mod will - in addition to it's stun effect - return World on Fire entirely to its previous function, removing the reduction in range over time, as well as the increase in energy cost, however, it will also cap the ability's damage to a completely unmodifiable 5% of target health, each time it hits them.
    
By having augmented WoF gain no benefit from power strength, players will instead focus on range/efficiency for their build, also reducing the power of their other abilities, essentially converting the glass-cannon into a CC frame that deals more moderate damage, more suited to less frantic playstyles, without returning any of the issues formerly present with WoF (you could just turn it on and walk through a mission to clear it, but you would have to walk pretty slowly to have it hit everything 20 times).
    
Separating WoF-as-pure-CC onto its augment would also permit a further increase in the unaugmented WoF's energy drain (possibly offset by a further, increasing damage over time, as well as a slowing effect on Ember over time), making it more of a high-cost, panic-use-nuke ability for when you have overextended or are otherwise overwhelmed, than something that is still used - albeit with constant recasting - for mission-long use.
    
With a scaling damage+penalty format, it could very well be a strong 'endgame' DPS ability with the right build, although that might require all 4 ability affecting stats to be present, and would be reliant on dedicated energy supply frames, or stacks of energy pizzas, as well as waiting for the damage to ramp up to a peak right before the Ember runs out of energy.  How stats affect it could change the peak damage, and how fast damage ramps up alongside energy drain and slowing effect (something I think would be an important balancing factor, on an ability that could otherwise operate as straight energy in > damage out, and on a frame that without Fire Quake, needs its mobility for survival).
    
    
    
Basically, the goals of all this are:

• Maintain a glass-cannon primary role for Ember, provide a wider choice of viable weapon loadouts for that role, further limit the use of WoF as something that can be used as a constant damage source, and tune it more to a high-damage-for-shorter-durations function that befits a glass cannon.
• Provide an alternative, more CC focused, support role for Ember, for newer or more casual players (knock enemies down, and apply heat procs to them so other players can do the damage.  Functioning in a similar way to a Corroding Barrage Hydroid, but with the focus more on CC than armor removal).
• Allow both roles to exist without detriment to each other, and also allow both roles to scale more effectively, without severely restricting viable loadout choice.
• No more cheese.

Edited March 17, 2018 by polarity

[Xana_Skullsunder]

This would go quite nicely with my "stack fire damage on EVERYTHING" build, and I'm always game more ways to play a frame.

[Terrornaut]

3 hours ago, polarity said:

The remaining problems with Ember are:

• Ember's abilities all rely on a damage type that scales poorly, unless complemented by some form of armor removal.  This very severely limits her viable weapon choice for a functioning, scaling build, to items that provide a high base status chance and attack speed/rate of fire, it also requires 2 mod slots to be devoted to toxic and electric mods, to provide enough corrosive procs to remove armor.
• While that build is perfectly viable at high levels, it is very much a glass cannon, highly reliant on movement, situational awareness, and use of cover to survive, stunning with Accelerant, clearing trash with Fire Blast, and picking off hard targets with weapons, before resuming avoidance or retreating back to cover.
• Not all players have the level of movement skill required for that playstyle, so for them, Ember's survivability makes her unplayable at higher levels.  The changes to WoF made that issue much worse.
• Not all players want to use the tiny selection of weapons that can provide the armor stripping to make the rest of her damage scale, so again, her lack of damage with the weapons they want to use, makes her unplayable at higher levels.

The majority of this is not a problem, and for me, with 950+ hours on Ember in all content but eid hunting, how I prefer Ember to be.  She needs work, I've been in a ton of posts over the years and have one I'm working on, but, I appreciate having to actually congeal my loadout with my build and goal. That makes sense as opposed to totally carefree/sloppy choose anything and be okay in whatever content without having to think or really do much.

Also, of course not all players have the level of movement skill required for that playstyle.  They won't get there by not trying either. And if people have a problem trying to get better in a video game, I have nothing friendly or complimentary to say to that.

Wof range scaling definitely messed everybody up on either side of the Ember spectrum - those that want to do damage at high level and be franticly moving about and nuking clusters of heavies and wiping out trash and those who just want to CC and stroll around and not have to worry much about threats.

3 hours ago, polarity said:

Passive:

Completely remove the current version.  It is utter garbage, because it will not provide any benefit whatsoever for over 99% of time played.

Replace with:

• Ember's status chance on weapons, for fire damage only, is doubled after all other modifiers.

This would allow her to get a higher status chance for her single, ability-buffed damage type, instead of being forced to spilt her damage between elements, when using dual-stat mods to raise status.  It is also required because of the way the following buff cannot function when additional elements are present due to those mods.

Wait...

3 hours ago, polarity said:

Not all players want to use the tiny selection of weapons

then

3 hours ago, polarity said:

ver time, without additional fire procs to sustain it, temperature will drop.  Any other elemental proc type besides fire that originates from Ember will either reset the temperature value to zero or significantly reduce it (Subject to testing.  I/P/S procs have no effect on the temperature mechanic).  Essentially Ember is forced to use only fire elemental damage on her weapons

....uhhh?
I understand that in the sentence I didn't include afterwards that you intend Ember to basically build up armor piercing for heat specifically, which is cool and a fine idea, but at the same time, you're suggesting the same thing you're expressing is a problem in your eyes.  You won't be able to use other elements on weapons, or split elements on different weapons...which..does...the same thing.

 

3 hours ago, polarity said:

Accelerant:

Rather than being a damage multiplier, Accelerant's strength will instead come from applying an initial heat proc with a much higher temperature value than normal to its targets, to which Ember can then add to.  With sufficient power strength this will mean that the temperature value on targets that have been hit by Accelerant, will already be high enough for fire damage from Ember's weapons or abilities to bypass armor.  In combination, any additional strength as well as duration, will affect how quickly the temperature applied by Accelerant decreases on targets.
    
It may still be necessary to maintain some degree of fire damage multiplication on Accelerant, in addition to having the armor bypass mechanic.  The Flash Accelerant augment could allow other players to contribute to the temperature effect.

You...want to give Ember...finisher damage, basically. That's what this pretty much boils down to, even if it has a windup to get to that point.  I mean, some frames can strip armor super easily, ash and banshee for example, but...yeah I can't really keep going with all of this.

Sorry man, good luck if your ideas register, but as someone who has played a lot of different Ember builds, I can't really stand behind these points and playstyle.  Priming enemies to have armor worn down is a cool concept though, that may assist at early and high levels.  Worth holding onto.

[Xana_Skullsunder]

Ash and Banshee both need Augments for armor stripping (which I've yet to see used by any significant number of players since Bladestorm and Soundquake alone render them unnecessary, to say nothing of their other abilities). Ember, though? Damage and the brief CC from Accelerant/Firequake/Fire Fright are all she has, so it's silly to not give that damage any way to work against the frankly excessive amounts of armor that enemies have in late-game stages.

You're also noticeably ignoring the part about being to reach that overheat threshold with a well-empowered Accelerant. The part about other proc types reducing the overheat should definitely be changed though, so fair enough on that point. Using heat damage to reach the threshold would be a cool way to reward players going all in on the fire theme, but shouldn't be any more 'needed' than the corrosive procs.

[Djego27]

Il y a 17 heures, polarity a dit :

The remaining problems with Ember are:

• Ember's abilities all rely on a damage type that scales poorly, unless complemented by some form of armor removal.  This very severely limits her viable weapon choice for a functioning, scaling build, to items that provide a high base status chance and attack speed/rate of fire, it also requires 2 mod slots to be devoted to toxic and electric mods, to provide enough corrosive procs to remove armor.
• While that build is perfectly viable at high levels, it is very much a glass cannon, highly reliant on movement, situational awareness, and use of cover to survive, stunning with Accelerant, clearing trash with Fire Blast, and picking off hard targets with weapons, before resuming avoidance or retreating back to cover.
• Not all players have the level of movement skill required for that playstyle, so for them, Ember's survivability makes her unplayable at higher levels.  The changes to WoF made that issue much worse.
• Not all players want to use the tiny selection of weapons that can provide the armor stripping to make the rest of her damage scale, so again, her lack of damage with the weapons they want to use, makes her unplayable at higher levels.

Ember does not require status for armor removal since years in any common content, including sortis(with the exeption of extra armor sorties). Heck I played Ember since my boar prime nerf till the advent of shotgun riven mods via crit, what one shots armored units with weapons like the rakta cernos or vhek in L100 sortis. What you describe as "scaling build" is effectively played literally limitless scaling against armor, given how little the actual HP on armored targets scales and mostly bottlenecked by DEs enemy damage/accuracy scaling to a point where you just could use a crit build as well, given the absurd and not needed damage buffs during the last years what moved the turnover point where status weapons shine already to silly levels.

Yes Ember is a damage frame that requires some player skill, does not has overpowered defences and proper weapon choice and modding at high levels. I for myself believe this should be the norm instead of the exception. You do not pick up "hard targets" with weapons, you did play L100+ back in the days without WoF and you shoot everything, because you play a incredible hard hitting weapon based frame instead the thing people complain about has scaling issues at L50, because they are to incompetent to move the frame around, mod and chose her weapons correctly, utilize a very strong damage bonus or status at all.

There is no lack of damage with the weapons people "want" to use given you can make nearly every weapon in the game L100 viable on Ember for damage. I do not know a single player that fully unlocked Embers potential having issues with the damage on weapons they want to use and assuming you get there and learned to play Ember via status it is incredible unlikely that you want to go back to your "meta" weapons, given that by accelerant status weapons perform just like meta weapons for the most part on Ember damage wise with the added bonus of providing "theoretically" unlimited scaling against armor and stun locking everything in your path.

Il y a 18 heures, polarity a dit :

Passive:

Completely remove the current version.  It is utter garbage, because it will not provide any benefit whatsoever for over 99% of time played.

Replace with:

• Ember's status chance on weapons, for fire damage only, is doubled after all other modifiers.

This would allow her to get a higher status chance for her single, ability-buffed damage type, instead of being forced to spilt her damage between elements, when using dual-stat mods to raise status.  It is also required because of the way the following buff cannot function when additional elements are present due to those mods.

and:

• Enemies that are affected by a fire status proc from Ember or her weapons will gain a temperature value on the target, based on the damage of the hit (so that a large hit or multiple small rapid hits can reach the same value).  When this temperature reaches a certain level, any additional fire damage will then bypass armor (other damage types won't), and the enemy will gain a glowing-white-hot effect (modified by energy color), along with a heat haze effect.

Over time, without additional fire procs to sustain it, temperature will drop.  Any other elemental proc type besides fire that originates from Ember will either reset the temperature value to zero or significantly reduce it (Subject to testing.  I/P/S procs have no effect on the temperature mechanic).  Essentially Ember is forced to use only fire elemental damage on her weapons if she wants to make use of the 2nd part of her passive, but the fact that it now scales well gives a very good incentive to make that sacrifice.

 

This would nerf Embers damage output against every single faction. Fire is already the dominant damage/proc type on your weapons and pushing other procs like viral/radiation further down the line is not something you want at high levels. Assuming you would actually shoot stuff and use accelerant with the Ember that is in the game right now you do not need the ability to bypass armor given that most stuff dies in split seconds anyway outside of silly high levels.

Il y a 18 heures, polarity a dit :

Accelerant:

 

Rather than being a damage multiplier, Accelerant's strength will instead come from applying an initial heat proc with a much higher temperature value than normal to its targets, to which Ember can then add to.  With sufficient power strength this will mean that the temperature value on targets that have been hit by Accelerant, will already be high enough for fire damage from Ember's weapons or abilities to bypass armor.  In combination, any additional strength as well as duration, will affect how quickly the temperature applied by Accelerant decreases on targets.
    
It may still be necessary to maintain some degree of fire damage multiplication on Accelerant, in addition to having the armor bypass mechanic.  The Flash Accelerant augment could allow other players to contribute to the temperature effect.

You do not need a initial heat proc given that stuff under effect of accelerant does die against a fire modded weapon incredible easy already. With sufficent power strenght and weapons you will one hit stuff in sortis, given that Ember is capable 300k+ dps already, before you go into fully armor ignore builds. Basically you would nerf accelerant into the ground against any non armored target and even armored targets in any content people are capable to play with Ember.

Il y a 18 heures, polarity a dit :

Fire Quake augment:

 

Using this mod will - in addition to it's stun effect - return World on Fire entirely to its previous function, removing the reduction in range over time, as well as the increase in energy cost, however, it will also cap the ability's damage to a completely unmodifiable 5% of target health, each time it hits them.
    
By having augmented WoF gain no benefit from power strength, players will instead focus on range/efficiency for their build, also reducing the power of their other abilities, essentially converting the glass-cannon into a CC frame that deals more moderate damage, more suited to less frantic playstyles, without returning any of the issues formerly present with WoF (you could just turn it on and walk through a mission to clear it, but you would have to walk pretty slowly to have it hit everything 20 times).
    
Separating WoF-as-pure-CC onto its augment would also permit a further increase in the unaugmented WoF's energy drain (possibly offset by a further, increasing damage over time, as well as a slowing effect on Ember over time), making it more of a high-cost, panic-use-nuke ability for when you have overextended or are otherwise overwhelmed, than something that is still used - albeit with constant recasting - for mission-long use.
    
With a scaling damage+penalty format, it could very well be a strong 'endgame' DPS ability with the right build, although that might require all 4 ability affecting stats to be present, and would be reliant on dedicated energy supply frames, or stacks of energy pizzas, as well as waiting for the damage to ramp up to a peak right before the Ember runs out of energy.  How stats affect it could change the peak damage, and how fast damage ramps up alongside energy drain and slowing effect (something I think would be an important balancing factor, on an ability that could otherwise operate as straight energy in > damage out, and on a frame that without Fire Quake, needs its mobility for survival).
    
    
    
Basically, the goals of all this are:

• Maintain a glass-cannon primary role for Ember, provide a wider choice of viable weapon loadouts for that role, further limit the use of WoF as something that can be used as a constant damage source, and tune it more to a high-damage-for-shorter-durations function that befits a glass cannon.
• Provide an alternative, more CC focused, support role for Ember, for newer or more casual players (knock enemies down, and apply heat procs to them so other players can do the damage.  Functioning in a similar way to a Corroding Barrage Hydroid, but with the focus more on CC than armor removal).
• Allow both roles to exist without detriment to each other, and also allow both roles to scale more effectively, without severely restricting viable loadout choice.
• No more cheese.

It is highly unlikely that DE will just remove the change they did and beef it up with finisher damage. WoF is pure CC at high level on Ember, given you play a weapon based frame(where nearly all of Embers damage is located, even if the majority of the player base ignores this feature).

I for myself utterly hate the casual/layed back fire quake players in sortis, they are incredible incompetent with her own frame while at the same time nerfing the damage output of the hole team by removing the capability to do head shots. In my opinion, the second you put fire quake on Ember you should instead go to the main menu and select another frame, it is this terrible of a mod and only perceived as useful because the general Ember player is unfortunately really this incredible poor at his frame and game.

What you basically suggest is gutting accelerant as damage buff and make people put fire damage on her weapons and shoot targets with it. A problem that is not even there if people would do just that with the current accelerant. Every single complain about Embers damage during the last few years boils down to people not utilizing this simple mechanic. Future more you open up Ember to cheese with percentage based damage(what is easy to exploit with viral and stacking Embers) while this change would also nerf WoF for 99% of the current Ember players, that are incapable to play frame at high levels anyway.

 

[Djego27]

Il y a 8 heures, Xana_Skullsunder a dit :

Ash and Banshee both need Augments for armor stripping (which I've yet to see used by any significant number of players since Bladestorm and Soundquake alone render them unnecessary, to say nothing of their other abilities). Ember, though? Damage and the brief CC from Accelerant/Firequake/Fire Fright are all she has, so it's silly to not give that damage any way to work against the frankly excessive amounts of armor that enemies have in late-game stages.

You're also noticeably ignoring the part about being to reach that overheat threshold with a well-empowered Accelerant. The part about other proc types reducing the overheat should definitely be changed though, so fair enough on that point. Using heat damage to reach the threshold would be a cool way to reward players going all in on the fire theme, but shouldn't be any more 'needed' than the corrosive procs.

Ember already one shots stuff in sortis with just accelerant and reinforcing fire based crit scaling with augments, arcanes, companions, anti faction mods and the various OP crit mods.

You are not "going all in" for putting fire damage on your weapons on Ember, if you do not you just play your damage frame incredible bad given that you do no damage(yes this is the level of 99% of the Ember players). However different to other frames and how accelerant is set up, this play style can also be mixed and matched with various status mechanics to a point where Ember is just as good as Ash, Trinity or Banshee when it comes to defeat high level armor. 

[Bratty_Child]

How about the same circle bar system as of Atlas and Nidus have to be another Ember's passive?

 

Increase damage and fire chance based on how much energy spent and/or how many ability casted. Decays at whatever rate seems suitable.

This won't fix WoF but it will help Ember scales on later game.

[Terrornaut]

On 3/18/2018 at 4:16 AM, Djego27 said:

It is highly unlikely that DE will just remove the change they did and beef it up with finisher damage. WoF is pure CC at high level on Ember, given you play a weapon based frame(where nearly all of Embers damage is located, even if the majority of the player base ignores this feature).

[ . . . ]

What you basically suggest is gutting accelerant as damage buff and make people put fire damage on her weapons and shoot targets with it. A problem that is not even there if people would do just that with the current accelerant. Every single complain about Embers damage during the last few years boils down to people not utilizing this simple mechanic. Future more you open up Ember to cheese with percentage based damage(what is easy to exploit with viral and stacking Embers) while this change would also nerf WoF for 99% of the current Ember players, that are incapable to play frame at high levels anyway.

This is...basically it.  If they switched %health per second drain to work only from one source at a time, so you couldn't stack 2 or 3 Embers, one to viral, the other to radiation/blast everything down while they all stand around and kill enemies at the same speed and same effort as level 10 stuff even if they're vs level 300...then ok. If you started a %hp drain and then made it scale down after a couple seconds, ie flat damage oncast + %hp that scales down to a very small HP, you'd basically be where we are now.

First part is important as well. Ember is a weapon based frame.  I don't get how DE calls her a caster frame, its just bad verbiage that doesn't mean anything, and there are probably 10 other frames that fit the description of a caster frame more reasonably.

[Andaius]

11 hours ago, Terrornaut said:

This is...basically it.  If they switched %health per second drain to work only from one source at a time, so you couldn't stack 2 or 3 Embers, one to viral, the other to radiation/blast everything down while they all stand around and kill enemies at the same speed and same effort as level 10 stuff even if they're vs level 300...then ok. If you started a %hp drain and then made it scale down after a couple seconds, ie flat damage oncast + %hp that scales down to a very small HP, you'd basically be where we are now.

First part is important as well. Ember is a weapon based frame.  I don't get how DE calls her a caster frame, its just bad verbiage that doesn't mean anything, and there are probably 10 other frames that fit the description of a caster frame more reasonably.

She IS a caster frame. All of her abilities either deal direct damage or boost the damage her abilities do. You use them consistently during battle, and they have much impact on how that battle turns out with smart use of said powers. She can deal out quite a bit of DPS with only her spells as well. It just with heat based damage multiplication of Accelerant she can make use of it to combo weapon damage to stupidly good levels as well.  My personal favorite is sticking a Tigris variant with corrosive/heat mods and stupid amounts of damage amp with punch trough into bunches of enemies and see all the number confetti that it throws up.

[Terrornaut]

11 hours ago, Andaius said:

My personal favorite is sticking a Tigris variant with corrosive/heat mods and stupid amounts of damage amp with punch trough into bunches of enemies and see all the number confetti that it throws up.

Which is how I play her, though not too often with tigris, but same thing still.

But what you said doesn't distinguish her as a caster frame. Its a frame that has to repeatedly use abilities to affect the battlefield and their performance. How is Loki not a caster frame? Nyx? Harrow definitely is.  Saryn? Oberon?  Atlas? So on.

A caster frame is a poor descriptor imo.  There are only a handful of frames that can get by using one ability now and then, or none. Rhino, Nezha, Valkyr, Zephyr.

Either way, its just vague semantics and not too important really.  They just need to get her kit to a better place instead of just throwing something on the wall, nodding in satisfaction, and strutting on to the next design board.

[Huanthus]

On 3/17/2018 at 8:10 AM, polarity said:

Enemies that are affected by a fire status proc from Ember or her weapons will gain a temperature value on the target, based on the damage of the hit (so that a large hit or multiple small rapid hits can reach the same value).  When this temperature reaches a certain level, any additional fire damage will then bypass armor (other damage types won't), and the enemy will gain a glowing-white-hot effect (modified by energy color), along with a heat haze effect.

Its a bit hilarious that when i suggested something similar pre-rework people easily dismissed it and no one  provided feedback only when the jerf hammer hits ppl start complaining haha

 

[polarity]

1 hour ago, Terrornaut said:

But what you said doesn't distinguish her as a caster frame. Its a frame that has to repeatedly use abilities to affect the battlefield and their performance. How is Loki not a caster frame? Nyx? Harrow definitely is.  Saryn? Oberon?  Atlas? So on.

A caster frame is a poor descriptor imo.  There are only a handful of frames that can get by using one ability now and then, or none. Rhino, Nezha, Valkyr, Zephyr.

Either way, its just vague semantics and not too important really.  They just need to get her kit to a better place instead of just throwing something on the wall, nodding in satisfaction, and strutting on to the next design board.

Caster would come from your typical fantasy MMORPG, where they're a cloth wearing class that focuses on AoE and ranged damage (as opposed to melee brawler / assassin / cleric / ranger).

You're right though that Ember (like Sonar Banshee, AD/MP Nova, and the ranger/cleric headshotting multi-class Harrow) is more of an enhancement frame, which in an F/TPS game makes sense to apply to ranged weapons rather than melee enhancement, like you'd see with WoW's enhancement shaman, or GW2's elementalist (thinking dual-dagger lightning-whips, although overall that game's weapon/ability interaction is on its own level).  Frost, Hydroid, Nyx, Mag and Volt are much closer to your typical casters in at least their abilities.

---

When I say Ember's fire damage scales poorly, I think I need to point out that I'm not one of those people who thought endless missions were something the developers needed to balance around.  With endless Dark Sectors / kuva farms coming up though, everyone needs to rethink their stance on >100 scaling.

What I have been concerned with is kuva floods and sorties.  Specifically elemental enhancements, armor enhancements and eximus strongholds, all of which add damage resistance on top of high levels.  I found in those cases that without armor stripping I couldn't rely on a vaykor hek or tigris prime with just fire damage and accelerant, and the fire and reload rate on those wasn't high enough to strip armor quickly by adding in corrosive, leaving me only able to clear trash (and something I've experienced in this game from the start, is that most players will not prioritise hard targets, and favor clearing trash as a way to chase damage meters, so I prefer to take the role of giant-killer in the group).

Other frames' weapon-damage boosting abilities don't fall off completely outside the use of a very specific weapon build (fire rate/status/corrosive/fire) like Accelerant does.  It's worth pointing out that the fire/corrosive supra vandal build I use on my high-scaling Accelerant Ember is on a whole other level when switched to gas and used with a Corrosive Barrage Hydroid (8x CBombards @ 140 killed in under 5 seconds).  If a frame is supposed to be primarily a damage dealer in this game, then in many cases they are provided with some form of armor reduction/removal in order to perform that role, in case a support frame isn't present.

---

The temperature mechanic makes sense from the point of view that armor is not going to block heat indefinitely (the breakable-windowed-spaceship and frozen planet inhabiting corpus, with their environment suits, would probably have better protection from hot and cold, while toxin weakness makes no sense at all for men in space-suits).  Also why would anyone be panicked by something that poses no real threat to them, because their armor is blocking its damage?

Perhaps removing temperature build up when another proc happens is the wrong move, but it would not make sense for other damage types to bypass armor, just because heat has passed through it.  Maybe they should just apply through the still existing armor as normal, and the incentive to favor fire could come from a passive that applies both a doubling of fire status chance and a doubling of its effect duration (both damage and panic effect).

---

I could live without Ember having any kind of long range WoF based CC, but we're kind of stuck with the issue that for far to long she was recommended to just about everyone as the frame to pick if you wanted to play with the absolute minimum of effort, so we're stuck with a community containing a large number of whiny scrubs, salty because they now have to do more than push a button and walk.

Quite frankly I feel the game should never have catered to their playstyle in the first place, and the devs should put their foot down about how the game isn't going to be farmville-casual, requiring less player skill/action than even the dumbed-down casual friendly WoW dungeons and raids.

For a shooter, Warframe has IMHO the best gunplay and mobility of any shooter game I've played (and as a LAN party attendant since the original DOOM, that's probably over 100 FPS games to compare it to), with a satisfyingly high experience ceiling that could reward player skill in those areas, if it wasn't for all the ability cheese (and to some extent melee cheese with long range or maiming strike, or ranged cheese with weapons like an amprex or ignis through most of the starchart).

By all means wipe out crowds with a single hit, but at least have it take some setting up first, so it doesn't end up feeling like as you progress you're using more and more cheat codes.

I just hope that the devs have heard all the complaints about the grind, and are removing all the cheese so that they can replace it with some actual difficulty.

[Huanthus]

1 hour ago, polarity said:

Caster would come from your typical fantasy MMORPG, where they're a cloth wearing class that focuses on AoE and ranged damage (as opposed to melee brawler / assassin / cleric / ranger).

You're right though that Ember (like Sonar Banshee, AD/MP Nova, and the ranger/cleric headshotting multi-class Harrow) is more of an enhancement frame, which in an F/TPS game makes sense to apply to ranged weapons rather than melee enhancement, like you'd see with WoW's enhancement shaman, or GW2's elementalist (thinking dual-dagger lightning-whips, although overall that game's weapon/ability interaction is on its own level).  Frost, Hydroid, Nyx, Mag and Volt are much closer to your typical casters in at least their abilities.

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When I say Ember's fire damage scales poorly, I think I need to point out that I'm not one of those people who thought endless missions were something the developers needed to balance around.  With endless Dark Sectors / kuva farms coming up though, everyone needs to rethink their stance on >100 scaling.

What I have been concerned with is kuva floods and sorties.  Specifically elemental enhancements, armor enhancements and eximus strongholds, all of which add damage resistance on top of high levels.  I found in those cases that without armor stripping I couldn't rely on a vaykor hek or tigris prime with just fire damage and accelerant, and the fire and reload rate on those wasn't high enough to strip armor quickly by adding in corrosive, leaving me only able to clear trash (and something I've experienced in this game from the start, is that most players will not prioritise hard targets, and favor clearing trash as a way to chase damage meters, so I prefer to take the role of giant-killer in the group).

Other frames' weapon-damage boosting abilities don't fall off completely outside the use of a very specific weapon build (fire rate/status/corrosive/fire) like Accelerant does.  It's worth pointing out that the fire/corrosive supra vandal build I use on my high-scaling Accelerant Ember is on a whole other level when switched to gas and used with a Corrosive Barrage Hydroid (8x CBombards @ 140 killed in under 5 seconds).  If a frame is supposed to be primarily a damage dealer in this game, then in many cases they are provided with some form of armor reduction/removal in order to perform that role, in case a support frame isn't present.

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The temperature mechanic makes sense from the point of view that armor is not going to block heat indefinitely (the breakable-windowed-spaceship and frozen planet inhabiting corpus, with their environment suits, would probably have better protection from hot and cold, while toxin weakness makes no sense at all for men in space-suits).  Also why would anyone be panicked by something that poses no real threat to them, because their armor is blocking its damage?

Perhaps removing temperature build up when another proc happens is the wrong move, but it would not make sense for other damage types to bypass armor, just because heat has passed through it.  Maybe they should just apply through the still existing armor as normal, and the incentive to favor fire could come from a passive that applies both a doubling of fire status chance and a doubling of its effect duration (both damage and panic effect).

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I could live without Ember having any kind of long range WoF based CC, but we're kind of stuck with the issue that for far to long she was recommended to just about everyone as the frame to pick if you wanted to play with the absolute minimum of effort, so we're stuck with a community containing a large number of whiny scrubs, salty because they now have to do more than push a button and walk.

Quite frankly I feel the game should never have catered to their playstyle in the first place, and the devs should put their foot down about how the game isn't going to be farmville-casual, requiring less player skill/action than even the dumbed-down casual friendly WoW dungeons and raids.

For a shooter, Warframe has IMHO the best gunplay and mobility of any shooter game I've played (and as a LAN party attendant since the original DOOM, that's probably over 100 FPS games to compare it to), with a satisfyingly high experience ceiling that could reward player skill in those areas, if it wasn't for all the ability cheese (and to some extent melee cheese with long range or maiming strike, or ranged cheese with weapons like an amprex or ignis through most of the starchart).

By all means wipe out crowds with a single hit, but at least have it take some setting up first, so it doesn't end up feeling like as you progress you're using more and more cheat codes.

I just hope that the devs have heard all the complaints about the grind, and are removing all the cheese so that they can replace it with some actual difficulty.

Well i actually play ember with a ignis wraith(rad+viral) ,  atomos(corrosive+fire)  and an silva and aegis prime with  condition overload and gas damage and dont have too much trouble with any mission other than element enhacement ones so i agree with your point that the ones that are the most salty about thw nerf are scrubs