Dev Workshop: Spores Revisited (Saryn)

[Lanaestra]

I like the look of these tweaks for the most part, my main concern is only the %-based spore damage decay, with a fixed upper limit to growth rate, seems like it could be very stressful, with only a few seconds to find a new target before you lose the vast majority of the damage. I'd need to really play with it to see how it feels, I guess, but I think either a slower drain or an uncapped growth rate would be preferable. That cap of 10 enemies for maximum damage growth seems really easy to hit and I worry this might be a bit harsh of a limit compared to where she's at now. Y'all probably have better data on what most players are actually consistently achieving in terms of damage growth though, I guess, so maybe it's not as hard a hit as it seems. I guess it's just a little sad that it can't really go crazy in huge dense crowds any more.

[Kalvorax]

2 hours ago, Rambit23Z said:

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

unless something was changed with these hotfixes, Miasma is not supposed to spread spores anymore

[Samurai-Of-Laser]

after using this in practice, I can conclude that no spreading on tick kill needs to go. It makes it way too easy to not get a spore spread. and recasting just makes the damage way less

[Revantis]

I have died more in ESO tonight then ever before trying to run down these spores and keep damage around 3k with a power build at that. Spores feel less like an area of sickness now and more like a cleave mechanic. If i have to be actively hunting down and killing level 80+ enemies i cant be running off to regen as my damage decays. Frames like mesa have shatter shield so they can stand in the middle of everything and do what they do, kill everything.

The removal of spread on death is good and bad, its good because it forces more activity, its bad because it forces you to make bad choices to maintain damage. yes you can recast run around try to engage more safely, but at that point you arent doing damage anymore, you maintaining mediocrity in both damage and survival. I dunno what else to really say about it. She feels like she wants to be a battle mage like gara who is greatly underestimated in her ability to deal damage in an area, while also boasting 90% damage reduction, but she cant stand in a fight like gara, and she cant CC like her. ATM saryns ability to deal damage quickly is completely dependent on Toxic lash and Miasma, i am treating spores as cleave damage in a small area now.

[Jemades]

I think the spreading changes absolutely cripples the nature of Saryn. Spores killing enemies should absolutely be re-implemented.  

[Axalar]

Hello there.

So, I've been testing Saryn around after the update and think I played enough with her to give feedback.

She feels weaker than she was, as in it's way harder to evaporate an entire map full of enemies as fast as it was possible before, and it feels less satisfying.

Her gameplay is more active, but in a stressful maner. The damage of spores scales way more slowly than it decays. And you no longer have the "safety net" that was her spores spreading with reduced range when they killed and enemy. So now when her damages starts to aproach the point where spores kill the enemies in 2~3 ticks, you have to run to toutch the enemies to spread the spores before before they die. Competing with your own ability as some have put it. This, I think, induces players to behave more recklessly in order to avoid spore damage decay, which is a behavior that Saryn's kit does not support given her lack of survivability enhancing or strong CC tools. I think it also disencourages melee combat because at some point you won't be abel to reach the enemies fast enought with melee to keep spreading the spores. And while being able to recast spores now helps to amenizate this, it makes Saryn energy hungry again.

In ESO, her performance was not affected that much. Which feels like an understatement considering how awesome she was before. But she's still good at it. But outside ESO, even in high level mission it is impossible to keep high damage numbers for spores for some mission types. And this render the ability to simply being a corrosive proc dispenser.

So, after all this, I think either increasing the rate of the damage increase for spores or slowing damage decay would help. Maybe consider bringing back spore spread on enemy death with further reduce range and/or limit the number of enemies to which it can spread. Other option would be bringing back spores carrying toxin procs on spread in a more consistent manner. This would help increase Saryns short term and built up damage potential.

I would like to point out that I do understand why this changes were made. It was very easy to see the potential to spread some spores and hide in a dark little corner while enemies died in some mission types.

Oh. And Pablo, can you please make Molt attract enemy attention like Octavia's Mallet? I try to use Molt as an oh cra* button, but it is very frustrating when the enemies decide to simply ignore it and murder me instead, some times even with the molt closer to them than me.

[Zilotz]

2 minutes ago, Axalar said:

The damage of spores scales way more slowly than it decays. And you no longer have the "safety net" that was her spores spreading with reduced range when they killed and enemy. So now when her damages starts to aproach the point where spores kill the enemies in 2~3 ticks, you have to run to toutch the enemies to spread the spores before before they die. Competing with your own ability as some have put it.

Exactly! You now must choose or jump into crowd of mobs that will shred you or lose all damage and mobs shred you after a few seconds anyway.

[MasterControl]

Alright, so I've had a little bit of time to play with it and get a feel for the new spores.

 

Hoo boy. I don't like it.

 

It really feels like a struggle to keep the ability going. I have to fight and outrun my own spores to be able to keep them from losing all of their damage immediately (this is especially a pain when you're trying to recast it on an enemy to keep your damage and they die in one tick) meaning it feels less like fun and more like a chore. As I feared, all the change has done is gone from one extreme to the other - instead of being completely afk worthy, it's now micromanagement city.  In enclosed maps, where one would expect a virus to do well? Not even sorta. If you can't see your enemy you're not going to spread your spores, they're going to die out, and you're going to be back at square one. I feel highly encouraged to use cheesy AOE weapons or Zenith to even have a chance of spore continuing for more than a few seconds.

 

I still suggest enemies spread spores on death with an extraordinarily short range (4m or less base) to continue to incentivize active gameplay, without making it feel like a mad dash all of the time to keep spores in check. A compromise of sorts.

[Kolchak]

14 hours ago, Azrael said:

Why do so many people keep saying this? I truly don't understand how Nidus does what Saryn does. Is there a completely different set of optional abilities on nidus that I just missed? Does Nidus have a Night Form like equinox that turns him into a better saryn? Or did everyone just forget what saryn does and pick the most obvious strong "toxiny" frame they could think of? Nidus's kit is completely different from Saryn's. Just because he has a 1 that kills enemies, doesn't mean it's the same ability or kit.

Saryn USED to have a different kit, now it's a S#&$tier version of his. Spore spread is limited to 16m from your reticle while you're firing (remember you'll always be reupping toxic lash from now on, just to babysit your spores, cause that's not annoying, right?) meaning you absolutely cannot bullet jump, keep situational awareness, interact with anything. The moment you stop hunting down a spored enemy, you're giving up your damage bonus, and starting all over. ALL of your attention is now focused on salvaging your spores from being a waste of energy as long as they are up. If you're playing alone, this is a manageable feat, too bad most of us never do that. Enemies killed by friendlies don't spread spores anymore, making every teammate you have a threat to your frame's usefulness. (Sound like anyone ELSE we've been mentioning?)

Spores: Within 16 meters of your reticle, 8 enemies are damaged until death. (And if I've prepped by spending 50 energy, and devote 100% of my attention and effort for the next few seconds, I can make the ability not a waste of 25 energy.)

Virulence: Within 16 meters of your reticle enemies die, especially bunched enemies (oh and lets not forget, if there's more than 4 enemies hit this costs NO energy at all, making it spammable, and I don't have to babysit it. I could get into synergy, but that's just beating a dead horse, this is just better already)
 

Molt: A decoy where you just were that disables and gathers things that are closer to it than they are to you. (Oh but it can explode for 400 damage! which actually makes it harder to spread spores since the effect would simply pop spores, reduce health, and either reapply the spores with the enemy having MUCH less health, making it more likely to see spore damage kill the unit, which ends spore's effects and your damage starts to decay. Is there such a word as De-synergize? Cause this thing's doing it. and all for 50 energy a pop.)

Larva: Within 12 meters of your reticle, you can disable and gather enemies for 7 seconds. And it literally synergizes with every other ability. And all for 25 energy, meaning recasting it should it wear off is no problem. 100% better in every way.

 

Toxic Lash: For 50 energy, you can reliably pop spores and get a situational buff. (This must be on, otherwise spores are useless, and will not spread with any consistency. This isn't synergy, this is the on button for your frame now. If this isn't up, you're doing it wrong.)

Parasitic Link: For NO energy, just a stack of the resource your free spammable virulence generates, you get to either boost a teammate's ability strength by 25% or disable an enemy and transfer 50% of the damage and all status effects that Nidus would take to that enemy. (Did I forget to mention that this also turns them into a turret, making them also launch virulence with each cast? Once again, 100% better.)

 

Miasma: For 100 energy you get a 5 second aoe viral proc and 350 damage viral a second, X3 if the enemy has spores. (Once again, another great way to prematurely end spores and lose your damage bonus for mediocre damage per energy cost. And boy does it cost.)

Ravenous: For NO energy just 3 stacks of the resource you get from your free spammable virulence, you create a healing field 16 meters wide around you that also creates 9 maggots that function like spores, but they're better cause you don't have to babysit them. Once again, getting further into the ability is unnecessary, It's already better by a wide margin.

 

This is why we're calling her a worse Nidus. She fills the same rolls as him, and has a similar degrading resource, but she's worse at that job, she restricts your options more, she has less synergy, she competes with allies more, and she's energy hungry to boot. She used to give you plenty of options, synergise just as much, didn't compete with allies at all, and was much less energy hungry. She filled a different role: constant reliable wide range damage without micromanagement, crowd control with high survivability. She used to have a point, now she's just obsolete.

[Leuca]

@[DE]Danielle Is there a way to differentiate between spores causing deaths on enemies that have been damaged by other sources and enemies that haven't? It's kind of lame to do 95% of an enemy's health with a headshot/Miasma and then have a spore tick kill it, only to have it not spread.

[Talaiar]

Saryn is much less fun than she was.

As many others have said: removing [Spread On Spore Kill] was a bad move because Saryn players now have to 'chase their own ability' or suffer the consequences.

I don't want to be competing with my own Warframe's mechanic in order to have fun. This isn't StarCraft Micromanager.

 

This nerf has affected Saryn almost universally. She has MUCH less damage, MUCH less survivability (due to chasing spores), and MUCH less mana effeciency (unless you're running an Ignis / AoE weapon).

 

All-in-all, she is MUCH less fun. Yesterday I was having fun trying to see how many enemies I could 'infect' with just 1 spore. Today I'm pulling my hair out trying to keep the masochistic Decay Rate from "punishing me" for the removal of [Spread On Spore Kill]. Frames should never, ever, ever feel punishing to the player. They should feel rewarding.

 

Not a good Hotfix at all. Saryn is going back on the shelf for me. It sucks, because I was all set and ready to buy cosmetics for her... but not if she stays in this state 😞

[Windy_Wind]

10 enemy cap is not good enough, it should be 15 or 20

[MechaKnight]

The Spores decay is way too strong. Please fix that. Also the enemy cap combined with the rate of decay ruins the ability.

[Jimmy_TheBear]

We went from casting it a few times in a corner, to just casting it a ton in a corner... Once you pass lvl 12 EOS, it turns right back into the same hide and wait game mode... 

Altho you did make the press 4 to win build a lot stronger with this, now that pressing 1 to win is way weaker....    

[den2k]

15 minutes ago, Jimmypdp said:

We went from casting it a few times in a corner, to just casting it a ton in a corner... Once you pass lvl 12 EOS, it turns right back into the same hide and wait game mode... 

Altho you did make the press 4 to win build a lot stronger with this, now that pressing 1 to win is way weaker....    

Try playing to win.

[LuckyCharm]

I've found my spores take forever to kill anything now, in todays mobile defense sortie for example my total spores rampup damage sat around 450 for the mission which is super low, but between the massive decay even running more than 100% power duration I was losing 70%, sometimes more, of it before i found another enemy target. 

Comparing that to pretty much any other nuker ability is like comparing a can of flyspray to a flamethrower. One kills bugs, the other kills the bugs, the house, the lawn and pretty much anything else in its way. It feels like it lost so much power it hardly feels like the same saryn

[den2k]

2 minutes ago, LuckyCharm said:

I've found my spores take forever to kill anything now, in todays mobile defense sortie for example my total spores rampup damage sat around 450 for the mission which is super low, but between the massive decay even running more than 100% power duration I was losing 70%, sometimes more, of it before i found another enemy target. 

Comparing that to pretty much any other nuker ability is like comparing a can of flyspray to a flamethrower. One kills bugs, the other kills the bugs, the house, the lawn and pretty much anything else in its way. It feels like it lost so much power it hardly feels like the same saryn

Spores is the first ability. Some examples of first abilities:

* Iron Charge
* Blazing trail
* Fireball
* Freeze
* Shock
* Smite

Hardly the 'Nuke' Stuff.

[LuckyCharm]

3 minutes ago, den2k said:

Spores is the first ability. Some examples of first abilities:

* Iron Charge
* Blazing trail
* Fireball
* Freeze
* Shock
* Smite

Hardly the 'Nuke' Stuff.

Then why is it that all her damage was transferred from miasma's press 4 to win to spores with the last rework, this one tried to keep spores as the focus and now it's gone and nerfed it completely while leaving miasma where it was nerfed to while claiming that it's in a good spot. Hell my miasma only kills starchart level enemies relatively quickly. Damage certainly wasn't given to molt since pre-rework that one had duration rather than hp+dura too. And as for toxic lash that seems to be the only beneficial change with spores the way it is. And it definitely needed the range change simply because you have to pop your spores with it now. 

[Rambit23Z]

7 hours ago, Kalvorax said:

unless something was changed with these hotfixes, Miasma is not supposed to spread spores anymore

It's not that it spreads spore innately. Let me explain; If Spore gets the killing blow, it does not spread, If Miasma gets the killing blow, it does spread. And since both are DOTs that makes it a gamble on whether they spread or not. Just feels a little bit clunky to have such uncertainty in her kit.

[Luterro]

I tested her a bit more today and got a few insights. I know a lot of people mentioned it above, but i think that the more we'll underline the most crutial aspects, the more chance that DE will consider changes.

First and foremost the damage decay is unproportional to the time that is required to build dmg. On ESO you build your dmg for a minute to lose vast majority of it in 3-4 sec. Not to mention missions like defence where a pause between waves of oponents is part of design. But seriously in current state playing her can be rly stressfull, especially on higher tiers, where ability to output high dmg often affects survivability. Im not a supporter of faster dmg stacking. 10 cap sounds quite resonable (15 or 20 would be better in my opinion), but dont force us to moding her for duration just to keep stacked dmg (which in fact is also sub-optimal solution -like a band-aid on artery).   

What struck me rly hard is that your team mates are now your worst enemies in some situations. was runnin ESO with fellow equinox. With over 2k dmg stacked i try to put new spores on spawned enemies and press button, in the very same moment my team mate nuked them with maim. And all my stacked dmg just vanished. Thats rly not fun at all.

Reassuming, I love the direction you heading with her, Gameplay now requires more active approach and i rly hated "press button and forget" mechanics, but in current state gameplay is a bit stresfull 'couse of fast decay of dmg, and risk that youll lose it all by casting ability on enemy that will die before it reaches him.

Much slower decay would be (in my opinion) a solution that could balance that the spores no longer spread when they kill enemy. It would be realy beneficial to the gameplay if you had a few seconds to spare when your spores kill the last infected oponent, not worrying about that when youll find next one, your dmg will be cut in half or so.

I hope that current state is not Saryn's final shape, and look forward to more changes. cheers

[KyrusDarkstrider]

this change is complete garbage.. first we lose the ability to multi-cast spores. then oh wow, we get it and they remove the spore spread because SOME people use a set it and forget it style of saryn? for one of the harder frames in the game to get, it's been nerfed so far down to the ground.. Spore's entire point is to spread, maybe make it a %chance to spread rather than remove it completely? 2m, 25% chance to spread? I mean, we get a 15% chance on Kavats to get its drop.. so why can't that idea be put into things like this?

[KyrusDarkstrider]

1 hour ago, den2k said:

Try playing to win.

Try not telling people how to play a game. Just because YOU don't like the playstyle doesn't mean others don't want that sometimes. Also, if there's 2 Saryns in a squad, one might as well sit and do nothing, because they don't cooperate anymore

[radastir]

Saryn feels much more boring after her rework. While I think it is a good idea to make the spore damage scaling the other parts of the rework just took too many playstyle options and synergies between the abilities away from her. Before that you could alternatively either cast spores on the molt and/or detonate it then with her 4, and/or you could use a Concealed Explosives build.

Now only "press 1 and 3 and use an aoe-weapon or melee" remains.

For star chart nuking (because enemies get murdered too fast to even be able to cast and spread spores effectively now): Go full $&*&*#(%&ed with range and efficiency and spam 4 (business as usual).

Her abilities feel disconnected and boring to use now. Please bring back her old set of synergies.

[KyrusDarkstrider]

56 minutes ago, radastir said:

Saryn feels much more boring after her rework.  [snip]

Her abilities feel disconnected and boring to use now. Please bring back her old set of synergies.

If there's another saryn, whichever one is weaker might as well just be a pretty wall decoration too because they cancel each other out now

 

A frame I very much enjoyed is now pointless..

 

Well, back to Khora.. set and forget frame.., at least she doesn't cancel herself out

[tischkanteVS]

Favorite Frame killed.

just gotta log in for daily bonus now

looks to me like the majority couldnt handle saryn so gotta make that thing into this crap

whole map aoe viral was good enough

and saryn was crap against grineer with insanely armor anways because gas for spores, except if you had a mag or 4x cp on team

she was fine and now shes utter crap

#donewiththis