Ember Re-Rework

[Arcira]

17 hours ago, Djego27 said:

As you can see a crit pellet with 512% base damage on the weapon(ppb + riven + arcane) does 6832 damage head shot damage without accelerant. In the second screen shot with accelerant and 170% power strength + 85% more fire base damage by flash accelerant that number changes to 25267 what equals a effective damage increase of 270% against a non armored unit(what it pretty much is after the first few rounds). Assuming we remove the first 6 rounds what it takes to strip the armor with a boar prime we look at 31 vs 10 rounds spend, what again mirrors this damage increase(give or take 1-2 rounds by inconsistent modifiers like status distribution, bleed procs or crit).

While I agree that Embers power is a lot less pronounced then in say 2014(where status shotguns worked differently and people did 1/4 of her current damage at best) and DE refuses to fix enemy damage scaling for the sake of throwing incredible overblown survivability on certain frames without any damage penalties, it is certainly not a Ember exclusive problem but more so a problem with the game as a hole.

Accelerant is a soft CC, given that it can be overwritten by nearly all enemy animations and does not disable units without a stun animation(drones for example) compared to real hard CC like Bastille or stomp that completely suspends units for the duration. However it is fairly cheap to cast, you cast it anyway for the damage buff and got a quick casting animation, so all things considered it is very effective at high levels in keeping you alive, if you compare it with a frame like saryn that only has the CC on her 4 with a much longer cast animation what on top of Ember plays herself like a charm at high levels.

Fire quake only appeared good to certain people because they did no damage to begin with. It is effectively removing nearly all extra head shot damage from your team and focusing on units that die fairly quick is not really that hard, where people do struggle is when they have issues to kill stuff, what should not realistically happen with Ember at something like a L100 sorti, not even solo. Negotiating the extra CC of status weapons is fairly silly and you can test that incredible easy by just jumping in a void survival solo and stay for over a hour with a status weapon that does disable what it hits and then with weapons that do not. You might see a significant difference long before the 1h mark in staying alive.

It looks like you are using the same build with and without Accelerant but the actual problem is slot efficiency. Meaning is it worth spending a slot  for heat damage mods if you could take another one? While for shotguns the answer is quite easy because you need that 100% status chance anyway and the +60% damage bonus from Blaze are unmatchable (maybe crit build would provide a similar ttk not sure though), for other weapon types it´s not that simple.

Let´s take a look on another example with rifle weapons:

https://imgur.com/v6BZoej

compared to

https://imgur.com/SdtPkcK

The difference in those builds are 110.6% multishot against 112.1% heat damage. Heat/Accelerant build against lvl 150 Corrupted Heavy Gunner Eximus (Leech) 20-30 rounds (ttk 3.2-4.8sec) while Multishot build needs about 25-35 rounds (ttk 4.0-5.6sec). On paper this migth be a huge difference but practically there is not that much use beside a little bit ammo in exchange for energy eco maybe. The higher the enemy lvl the more important this difference may become but to be honest I don´t see Ember surviving in a  lvl 150+ environment.

I could try to increase the heat damage part further but there is not much I can replace in order to increase ttk. Btw my attackspeed build reaches an average ttk of 4sec as well without the need of casting a spell first.

As I said lack of (weapon) damage was never a problem and the new buffs don´t change that at all. Fire Quake´s major purpose (at least for me) was survivability. It wasn´t even very good compared to possiblities other warframes have but at least it was somewhat viable. Now people suggest to spam Accelerant or WoF. So thats the new interactive gameplay?

The only thing that has been achieved is that Embers abilities are even less impactfull while 60% of her kit (passive 1st and 3rd) were and are pointless anyway. At least I can spamm charged Fireball at extract for fun I guess. Whatever playing her without any abilities wouldn´t make that much of a difference now.

Edited May 22, 2018 by Arcira

[RealPandemonium]

15 hours ago, Djego27 said:

While accelerant has it's fair share of bugs, not granting the damage buff(outside of boss like units, what is bugged since the CC resistance changes) i

I have observed Accelerant's stun to be pretty consistent in the more recent patches, even taking priority over ground slam animation and the like (it still comes out if you try to cancel it too late, though.)  Do you have any reproducible examples of it behaving inconsistently?

[Djego27]

Il y a 21 heures, Arcira a dit :

stuff

Well ammo economy goes a long way at higher levels for solo, especially on weapons that are not that ammo efficient. For example my corrosive/fire prisma grakata would need 200-260 rounds to kill that L150 leech eximus heavy gunners without accelerant and 80-140 with it(the inconsistency is mostly based around the spread the proc what makes the effect less predictable to benchmark).

While I do agree that frame based damage buffs in the days of rivens, arcanes, cat buffs and all the weapon buffs are far less important then they where years ago, it is still, depending a bit on the weapon a fairly powerful thing to have. Back in 2014 the Boar prime for example did 1700 something heat damage(incendiary coat + blaze + scattering inferno) and L100 against armor was considered for most without 4CP difficult.

It also depends a bit on the style of the weapon, where it is least pronounced on high crit damage weapons(mostly by the extra slots required for crit mods) while it is most pronounced on status weapons with status modding, given that the 60% mods come at close to no damage loss. As for your weapon I do not see any mod setup where it would do more damage on Ember outside of maxed primed anti faction mods instead of heavy calibre. The only other thing that would come to my mind extra status from scorch for additional corrosive procs would outperform the damage loss on the other elements, assuming you raise armor protection even more by level. I have a similar situation with my mara detron, where there is not really much that could change the weapon.

This is outside of a status riven to turn it into a status shotgun, but with the current damage and status, just putting corrosive on it by switching ice storm with jolt will drop that L150 eximus leech corrupted gunner in 8-13 rounds on my Ember, depending on procs, what still rivals some of the strongest anti armor status weapons in the game at levels far beyond sorti or what you would realistically play on a day to day basis.

With 170% power strength and flash accelerant that weapon does 75k+ damage per single shot(150k effective after the viral proc) on Ember, even if I using it on another frame feels nearly the same in a sorti, given given that even 21k(what is 42k after the viral proc) with aura protection disable and great CC by the fire procs punches through anything but very high armor levels(where you just switch out viral for corrosive) incredible effortlessly.

I think I was the only person that pointed out in the secondary shotgun thread how silly the first detron change was(before DE buffed it again) given that the weapon performed fine before(without any rivens) and you had reasons to chose the brakk(even if it was not really the superior weapon the community did preach it is, especially not a higher levels where better proc distribution on elemental weapons come into play and where disabling that massive AOE damage reduction based on aura protection becomes important).

Firequake basically did cost you head shot damage modifiers, given that targets got constantly knocked down. It further made weapons with punch trough and spread like my boar prime considerable less effective, given targets will be constantly between knocked down, getting up and standing for brief period's of time what never does produce ideal results no matter where you aim. Between the damage loss, slot loss and questionable effect, given that WoF only hits a limited number of targets per second, while your weapon and acclerant can high far more at the same time it always did look to me as a very poor mod choice, even if it was praised by so many you tubers for reasons that I do not as it is and probably will never understand.

I never use charged fireball, given that it is a dps loss, however the napalm like effect for a few seconds is clear buff if you need some quick CC during reload or if you use something like a bow/sniper(depends on the map). Fire blast also got buffed by providing a damage buff for weapons now, then again you are correct that weapon damage is hardly a problem this days, much less so on Ember if you use accelerant and mod weapons around that.

Spamming accelerant for CC is nothing new(since the change that accelerant does restun before the timer resets) at higher levels on Ember, even with the old WoF. Spamming WoF is new, but then again it was like that before it became a channelling ability, even if it hardly found any use at high levels given that the long cast animation made it a death trap. Is that interactive game play? Well it forces you as a player to take action to keep going or just stay alive. Is that good? Not really but at least it breaks the vicious circle of Ember being perceived as frame where you just hit 4 and it plays the mission for you and people perceiving the frame just as one ability, even if there are a lot of fairly interesting mechanics beyond that. Heck there is even a real high level damage frame in there that does not even has the issue of struggling to do damage at high levels, even if they complain about that since years.

A lot of people complained here on the forums about Ember being everywhere at low levels, playing her mission for them by pressing 4. Was it a creative and good change to WoF? Most likely not, it just put WoF back to where it was 2 years ago(outside being a death trap to even press the button), what I do not see as such a bad thing, given I played the frame back then as well and liked it. Did it move the problem from Ember to other frames? Yes it did, however that is on DEs side to fix, given that people will always take the most easy route and if everything else is a bit less easy, people actually would most likely play the current Ember again, because it does if you watch timers a bit and press 4 a bit more just as good as before(while being less energy efficient, then again that never was a problem in the last 2 years until you get swarmed by energy leech units at higher levels, even if they most likely would still not utilize fire damage on weapons for scaling).

Le 22/05/2018 à 04:37, RealPandemonium a dit :

I have observed Accelerant's stun to be pretty consistent in the more recent patches, even taking priority over ground slam animation and the like (it still comes out if you try to cancel it too late, though.)  Do you have any reproducible examples of it behaving inconsistently?

Well I did not play that much in the last few months and mostly on Saryn till the rework. However I did not notice differences when I did play Ember(I seen 2 units breaking out of a fire proc for a know down and one out of the acclerant stun in my sorti today). I probably would require a lot of time to test if the mechanics did change, even then it is hard to put a absolute verdict on mechanics that to some degree do vary(because of coding, bugs, lag, client\host issues or something else). I currently still try to figure out the current Saryn changes, where I am at this point convinced that toxic transfers are gone for good and I still fail to figure out why some other players do more damage then me with the frame, given that what spore transfers is not 100% for host as I assumed before. Watching other players also gives me no real clues and from my practical experience you can hardly sustain 2k+ damage on the display(even if that display might be most likely bugged, given that it at times did not show up, even if I had spores on some units).