Dev Workshop: Spores Revisited (Saryn)

[blaes]

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[Rambit23Z]

The new Spores work pretty well, although I'm seeing less insane numbers, it is easier to maintain said numbers. Overall scaleability is still high. Managed 8 Zones of Elite Onslaught with 100% efficiency left.

Some cons: It's frustrating to try and maintain spore at times, even when playing as actively as possible, there are several times where I cast Spores and the enemy dies before I can even get a hit in.

Suggestion: Add a 1-2m radius where Spore tick death still spreads spores. This radius is UN-MODDABLE to prevent AFK playstyle.

[KiteoHatto]

Saryn now needs all 4 stats again to be functional, it's annoying.

Need str: For all skills

Need range: For 1 spread and 4

Need efficiency: To spam 1 now to build up damage and fight the decay

Need duration: To fight decay

 

It makes no sense that you have to "compete for kills" with your own spores or they won't spread.

[KennBone]

efi dont should count for decay or any element into spores  management,  like  @KiteoHatto say u feel force to balance into the 4 stats while focus on 2 max is the best way and open more buils mode. Im always love this touch on her.

[(XBOX)Thang Hung]

To say that the recent Sayrn rework was not a knee jerk reaction to ESO might be true. This rework 100% is, what you are doing is fine tuning Saryn for how you see fit that we play one game mode in a game that has more than one and frankly better game modes. Please take ESO 10% or less into your account of what you look to do from here, because in 6 months down the road that is where 10% or less of Saryn  players are going to be. 

The Spores don't spread when they kill the target thing is a horrible idea. Absolutely horrible.

I have played more than 1000 hours of this game in about 6 months time. I guess you could say I'm a pretty avid gamer. I love this game BUT, what I am seeing from both the community and DE right now I have seen before. The nerf this nerf that, this is OP that is OP topics I see pop up here everyday now I have seen it before and where it took a VERY large gaming community was down a very boring road. One that lead me (and a large chunk of that community) to play a different game. Trust me you don't want that DESTINY. (Pun fully intended)

You want to know what happens when you strive for 100% balance in everything that is in a game? You get just that! Everything becomes so balanced that it doesn't matter what character you use and it doesn't matter what gun you use and then everything becomes very bland and boring and you move on to play something else. Please, I beg of you not to go down that road. I don't want to play a different game, I want to play this one, hope you want me to play it too. 

[blaes]

@[DE]Pablo: so, after a couple tests, the damage growth is really slow. It is perfectly fine for low level content, but it takes a lot of time to get to something useful for high level stuff, especially when compared to the decay rate.

I see two ways of solving this : either

1. give players a way to manually ramp it up, here are two suggestions :
   • Molt feeds some damage to spores when it explodes. For instance, the amount of damage it absorbed during its invincibility phase is added to spores damage meter when molt is destroyed.
   •  A small part of the damage inflicted by toxic lash on an infected enemy feeds spores damage meter. nothing too crazy, maybe 1% out of the 30% increase (2% for melee).
2. or diminish the decay rate. For instance, instead of a % of current damage, make it decay by the max growth rate (for 10 targets).

Personally, i'm more in favor of a fast ramp up and a fast drop off, to make the gameplay more engaging, but either solution would work fine in my opinion. Mechanically, i think that spore is in a pretty nice place right now, and, excepted for the disparity between growth and decay it feels pretty good.

[Abvex]

Bring back spore spreading on death please.

[-Virtuoso-]

Other than decay meter completely disappearing in multiple cases where it was way far from decaying the DPS looks good and spore spread is healthy. Thanks for the awesome spore update but please check into the spore damage decay meter disappearance issue. Thanks!

[CuteFoxyFox]

Just played new Saryn.

Still spores not spreading when target dies is a really big pain. Let me quote my ideas how I would fix it my way or @[DE]Pabloway 🙂

Let me try to give everybody some ideas that we can come up with something.

- Spores relocated on another enemy that died from spores have its damage reseted. It means when having a room full of sapawning enemies it would not be so much pain.

- Spores spread from death from spores could be lower 4m? 2m?

- Spores spread from death from spores would be restricted to 4 or less. It means when enemy dies from spores, they go on, but for limited numer of enemies. This idea would keep Saryn some energy since she isnt so much "Not energy hungry"

- Spores spreading via death by spores consume energy per spread but do not consume if enemy is killed via player means.

- If enemy is effected by poison or viral damage spores spread even via Death from spores

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Those are just my ideas. And If we are by changes I would like to add one more thing.

Saryn Molt

- Can we get any animation for the range enemies would shoot it? Like octavia has circles around her skills, can we get anything like this for Saryn?

Usually I do not feel safe when using molt cuz... I dont know where am I safe. 10m from molt? 20m from molt?

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Thank you and @[DE]PabloI belive in you 🙂

[Sasuda]

4 hours ago, TyrianMollusk said:

It was a) a play style control issue, and b) because the rework was designed around spores dying out which you could have trivially prevented by storing them on your molt.

Sorry I think you need to reread that, Miasma + Molt bomb doesn't store Spores on Molt.

They also just changed Spores to not be dying out as often, because it was extremely effective in specific scenarios, but not particularly great across most other scenarios.
I also pointed out ways in which play style control issues could have been solved.

Not to mention even if they kept the 1 cast + detonate method, if Casting Spores + Molt still functioned it would actually mean you can't just store them on your Molt since you'd need to cast it again. The only difference it would make is Molt could allow Saryn to cast Spores from a safer position. Which I'd also be fine with, though I didn't suggest that. I also welcome suggestions and disagreements, if you have any to what I did suggest.

In any case they've already changed Spores

Also if you really are thinking of the Miasma + Molt interaction, what exactly was the playstyle control issue with it?

[Zilotz]

That's a massive NERF to Saryn.

1) Huge nerf of ramp up damage - from 200+ to just 20(with 100 str)

2) Huge nerf in spread  - enemies that die from spores are a waste of energy to cast. And "set it and forget it" never worked more than a few seconds(3 to 5 seconds that was sometimes enough to gain energy for one more cast).

I'm really disappointed with the result.

P.S. Decay is so strong that it does not matter if you have decay or falling to 0.

[Luterro]

After few hotfixed saryn's testdrives i must say that changes are generally heading in good direction. Love the idea of more active gameplay instead of "cast and forget" mechanic, but there are 2 things that feel strange.

For one, current changes makes Saryn the energy hungry monster again, and this is something that we all hoped will never happend again. In curent state, Need of high efficiency is blocking a number of different builds (for ex. str and range oriented) or forces us to play saryn in team with energy providers like EV Trin.

Second thing is even more strange. With complete removal of spore spreading after it kills the oponent, it (as someone wrote above) forces you to race with your own ability. If you get the oponent first and manage to pop the spores you run to next fellow with hope that he wont be killed by spores before you reach him.

I totally get it why You try to remove the mechanic that allows player to wipe whole map full of waves of respawning oponents with one button push. Its boring as hell and frustrating for rest of team members that are unable to even see the enemy. But on the other hand runing like crazy and hoping to beat your own skill is not a good solution in my opinion. I guess that the best solution for that situation would be either changing energy regen ways for Saryn (maybe return of toxic lash energy regen? ) or return of spores spreading after killing oponent but with hard cap on number of affected enemies.  

[P_Johann]

Tried few ESO runs and couple low level relic missions. Damage is fine but she feels incredibly clunky and i spent most of the time looking at the corner of my screen trying to keep spores active as watching "decaying" process is really frustrating. It is also feels very bad on low level missions where damage ramps up to a certain level just enough to oneshot enemy with spore and continue decaying process.

Not happy with update. Didn't really matter in ESO past first wave/room, but made her significantly worse everywhere else. Also being constantly worried about some counter in screen corner is not something i look for.

[Rambit23Z]

Also, using Miasma makes it a 50/50 whether the spores will spread or not.

[10-08]

I found this out yesterday during a onslaught run, but if a Grineer Manic has spores attached when doing its "disappearing" action, the spores float in mid air and last indefinitely, allowing you to stand there and hit the spores spreading them for the rest of the mission. I may have hit the Manic with my melee and it took damage from the strike (thus disappearing) before the attack popped the spores? Onslaught goes by so fast it can b tricky to catch such things but the perpetual pimple popping party was....interesting.

[TyrianMollusk]

1 hour ago, Sasuda said:

Sorry I think you need to reread that, Miasma + Molt bomb doesn't store Spores on Molt.

Quite so.  People talk so much about Spores+Molt bombing/turret/whatever, I totally misread that. Sorry for the confusion.

[blazinvire]

Oh my god she feels so much nicer to play now.
Maintaining spores is no longer stressful and I don't feel energy starved like before due to mishaps.

Though slight concern with the spore ticks, as much as I understand the desire to avoid set and forget, spore ticks are now sort of 'kill-stealing' and ruining the spore chain.
I think there needs to be some sort of grace period or some kind of interaction, like if anything dies by spore ticks a second or so after being struck by an active ability or weapon, it spreads as though a player killed the enemy, but obviously something neater than that so running scripts don't destroy the game.

Maybe some sort of Patient Zero effect, where spore tick deaths cause spread the first 1-3 times, but killing spored enemies and recasting spore resets the effect.

Otherwise: I CAN PLAY MY SARYN AGAIN!

[Sasuda]

Just now, TyrianMollusk said:

Quite so.  People talk so much about Spores+Molt bombing/turret/whatever, I totally misread that. Sorry for the confusion.

No worries, best of luck in exploring improving Saryn to you

[-RS-Covenant]

"Decaying" "Decaying" "Decaying"...

[-RS-Covenant]

"Decaying" That just about sums up how I feel about this re-work.

[Amazerath]

New Spores don't feel fun. They feel like trying to sail on a boat that has a leak. It's a constant struggle that doesn't feel satisfying even when you manage to scoop most of the water out. You're always worried you're gonna sink.

 

To list a few of the problems I noticed:

- Spore damage takes too long to build and decays too quickly. It only works ok when you're doing Elite Onslaught or very similar content. But if you go anywhere else it just doesn't hold up. Your damage will repeatedly decay to zero before you can even find a single enemy, which is frustrating.

- Saryn is too squishy for slow build-up mechanics. Every second you spend waiting for your damage to build up is another second you spend taking damage from enemies. But unlike Nidus, Saryn has very limited defensive and crowd control options. Her kit was not built for the amount of stress she has to endure in order to properly benefit from the new Spores.

- You often don't notice when Spores are decaying or gone. You can notice it when everything is calm because you can hear the noise. But when you're busy in the middle of a noisy fight (or using voice chat) you don't pay attention to the sound. Then when you look at the counter you notice it isn't even there anymore. So you're kind of forced to constantly glance at it to make sure the power is still working and that doesn't feel great.

- Spores from multiple Saryns don't work well together. This encourages Saryn players to avoid each other or compete. It has no place in a coop game and needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

[Tomppak]

Okay, just ran Saryn in ESO, solo, exactly the same build as before the change. Got to zone 6, got distracted by what happened with the stream, and lost out at the beginning of zone 7.

She's still pretty powerful, but the spore decay is... Too fast. Between noticing that the spores are gone and recasting, I've lost a great deal of the damage. It's... Not fluid gaming to constantly peek at the corner to check if you still have spores or no. Maybe the spore damage could start higher instead of from zero? Set a flat floor of, say, 200 dmg (or something, I have no idea what the number should be). Alternatively, give the spores a shor grace period (maybe 3 seconds, scaling with duration?) before they start to decay. Even in todays Mobile Defense sortie (which, being defense, should be somewhat enemy intensive), I found myself struggling to keep up the spore damage. Sometimes, enemies don't just spawn, or they get killed before you get to them.

Also, it seems like Spores count as a channeled ability. I'm 95% sure that my Saryn got killed while I was in transference and playing as the operator.

[Tomppak]

In addition, the spore augment feels like a drawback. Sure, the damage upgrade is very nice, but when your spores are decaying and you're desperately trying to land a spore into the enemies your friends are currently killing, hitting an ally on accident and not necessarily even noticing it immediately, is very annoying. Is there ANY chance that casting spore on an ally would count as an actual spore for keeping the damage from decaying and ramping up the damage? If it did, that could solve a lot of the problems she has in non-ESO content!

[tarfeef101]

decay seems a bit fast IMO, cap also seems to be sort of WAY lower than before... 

but i am happy to see if the decay rate allows, that she will become more viable in game modes like def, int, where previously the dmg was much less significant on higher waves (at least initially)

[SyBuhr]

4 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

- Spores from multiple Saryns don't work well together. This encourages Saryn players to avoid each other or compete. It has no place in a coop game and needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

I think this is the most critical issue, considering the game is meant to be multiplayer PVE.

Also, it would be awesome to have an outline giving us an "x-ray-outline" view of enemies who are afflicted with spores, that way we are not just chasing some numbers in the game. Those are really the only two quality-of-life changes I could think of, that others may not have stated.