Dev Workshop: Spores Revisited (Saryn)

[Huanthus]

32 minutes ago, amadeusgrim said:

arcane guardian should set you up

Do have it still hard hitting enemies will one or 2 hit you and if there is a swarm not even molt will help due to some of them not targeting molt and still hitting you

[seprent]

Just now, CF_HoneyBadger said:

First off YAY!!! RECAST-ABLE SPORES!! This makes me very happy because the spread just seemed so limited to enemies in a small cluster and not the map as a whole. WF is such a fast-paced game that staying and babysitting one cluster of mobs was painful.

On the other hand... The damage ramp up seems a little low from the description.  A max of 20 per second?  Yikes.  However, I'll withhold judgment until I can test these changes out. I hope I'm wrong though.

And can I request a QOL change? Can infected mobs show up as GREEN arrows on the mini map instead of red ones? It will make keeping track of the affected mobs easier. 

if i read it right is 2 per spore max of 3 per enemy so thats 6 damage per tick per enemy and you caped at 10 ramp up hosts so its 60 damage per tick ramp up that is unmodded with power strength is sure to easily reach 100 or more 

[P_Johann]

Looks like she will be VERY power hungry with these changes. No energy refund from popping spores with toxic lash as it was before and no spread on tick death will force players to spam spores. Also. This change is really pointless outside ESO. Especially on low level missions. Cast spore on enemy - enemy dies - nothing else happens - energy well spent. But in ESO lower damage rampup will mostly affect first minute or so mainly hurting focus gain from bonus period. 

[failedtodiet]

May I suggest with each enemy killed, spore damage ramp up by x2 the base growth value.

For example: 1 spore deal 1 dmg/sec. If an enemy infected by 3 spores get killed, the infection damage increase by flat 6.

This will prevent time gated damage growth, people will want to actively kill enemies to get more damage.

[atejas]

1 minute ago, failedtodiet said:

May I suggest with each enemy killed, spore damage ramp up by x2 the base growth value.

For example: 1 spore deal 1 dmg/sec. If an enemy infected by 3 spores get killed, the infection damage increase by flat 6.

This will prevent time gated damage growth, people will want to actively kill enemies to get more damage.

This is a good idea. Another thing I was thinking of is that popping a spore with toxic lash can add an amount of damage equal to half the percentage buff granted by lash.

[UprightMan]

Sounds ok so far.  But now will be more Energy hungry than ever before without some compensation, or in other words back to Zenurik.

-Beta tester ready aka PC player.

[Tomppak]

1 hour ago, [DE]Danielle said:

• Damage per second will “decay” (decrease over time) instead of vanishing once no infected enemies remain: 
  • First, the periodic damage you’ve accumulated will instantly drop by 20%, which will then commence the decay of the remaining damage by 10% per second (can be modded with Duration).
  • Decaying can be observed in the periodic damage meter located above Saryn’s ability icons. 
  • Nullifying effects (including Data-Conduits) increases the decay by 30% per second.

Is that 10% off from the amount of damage you had Accumulated in Total, or 10% off from the remaining damage? In short, will the damage reset to 0 after 8 seconds (20% drop instantly and the rest 80% decaying 10% per time) or will it decay gradually (80%, then 72%, then 64,8%, 58,32%, 52,48%, 47,24%, and so on, which would be a lot more forgiving).

From the first time I tried Saryn is ESO, Solo, it was clear that something needed to change. The proposed changes... Feel like they'll probably fix the most glaring issues in ESO regarding her, but I'm not sure if they'll leave her viable in ESO, and I'm fairly sure they'll make her even worse outside of ESO. The reason is this: How do you imagine her new playstyle will look? Trying to imagine that to the best of my ability, I presume it'll look like this:

Since spores don't spread themselves, but instead die out when the enemy dies to them, Saryn (or allies) will need to kill enemies to spread them.
Okay, cast spore. One enemy is now infected. Go and kill that enemy - all nearby enemies are now infected. So far, everything seems pretty similar to the old version. What you do next, is what changes. In old version, you could wait for the enemies to die, spores spread, more enemies are infected, spores spread, everything dies.
In the new version, you can wait it out... And the enemies die. You can recast to another group, pop the infected enemy, and wait a moment for the new group to die. Recast on a third group, rince and repeat.
Problem with this approach is, that any Other caster frame can do this same thing, except that they don't need to cast AND pop - they just cast, and the whole group is dead. Frost, Volt, Banshee, Ember, and so on. And, that death is instant - you don't need to wait for the spores to do their work. Or you could have just cast Miasma, and the group would be dead.
Another approach would be to cast spore, pop it, spread it to the enemy group. Pop another enemy near the edge of the group to spread the spores more, move to the next group, pop another, and so on. Basically just moving through group after group after group, popping one to ensure the spores spread. Same problem as before, though. Another caster frame going through those same groups, could have killed all those enemies in probably the same time.

This doesn't seem like a feasible playstyle for content outside of maybe ESO and Sorties.
So, how do you imagine/desing for her to operate?

(I feel like: Saryn would probably shine in a trench-warfare style missions, something where you sit in the same place for a long time and kill enemies that are level 150 bombards and heavy gunners - something where you could actually benefit from the armorstripping Without the spores actually killing the targets. It's also nice that Spores target the most problematic enemy scaling mechanic - armor - but makes them a bit wierd against Corpus and Infested targets).
 

[YpsitheFlintsider]

Recastable spores. Decaying damage instead of vanishing (though 20/sec is pretty fast). None of that half range mess.

Tradeoff is cap on dmg tick cap. No spread on spore kills.

Buff to range and duration of spore damage. Nerf to damage rampup max and afk spore spread. Seems good.

[operative-verona]

You're giving her another buff? 😄
W A T 😂
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, it's just that I expected a relentless nerf.

[seprent]

4 minutes ago, Amebot said:

You're giving her another buff? 😄
W A T 😂
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, it's just that I expected a relentless nerf.

Toned her down all really did was slow down her damage ramp up which kinda needed slowing 

[Arniox]

2 hours ago, NotWhoItSeems said:

so now saryn is moving to a more casting build type? that sounds great,

though I would keep the spread on death from spore maybe at 4m or something like a melee range,

I would have to feel how it behave in game to know for sure if I would like or dislike those changes, it does look on paper to grant saryn some great potential

I agree. Her spores should still spread in death but with a reduced range of 5m or something. OR, the spores spread with the same range as before, but only spread a max of 5 enemies before it can no longer spread. In order to keep the spread going, you have to manually kill some infected enemies. 

@[DE]Rebecca @[DE]Steve how's those ideas? 

[Darzenis]

Right now her changed contagion seems alright on paper, besides the outright cancellation of spread upon death. Brings a slight interest in the resurrection of her previous energy return mechanism. What's troubling for my numerically untrained mind is her damage ramp up and its interaction with enemy scaling. 

How far fetched would it be if Toxic Lash added damage to spores? We would use her kit more and it would promote us to interact with our contagions more than an initial strike. By that same principle we could manually regulate the damage output for higher level targets.

[Fluffysbeans]

1 hour ago, taiiat said:

less silly to use, but this won't change a single thing about that Spores is an AFK Ability (and the entire Warframe is).

your one and only use of Spores is to Cast it on anything you see, and spray indiscrimminate AoE towards the Enemies to make sure it's hitting most of the Enemies. after that you have literally no interaction with Spores. literally nothing. it's a completely Automated Ability after you've Casted it.

It's like you read the notes and then forgot everything it said. Then you wrote your response, and forgot what you said yourself.
Notice the part where it says that spores do not spread when enemies die to them. If you just set and forget, you aren't going to get very far.
On top of that, you specifically said that you need to start the chain reaction, but then immediately complain that it's completely automated. A bit contradictory, hm?
If you or your allies aren't actively killing spored enemies with weapons or other powers, spores will not spread, meaning most of the 1 cast wins all mentality is mostly gone.

But if you're really going to be that big of a child about your frame not working, you could also just, I dunno, NOT sit still and instead actively play the game even as she is now?

[mrrobotto67]

Justo ahora, [DE]Danielle dijo:

Damage per second will “decay” (decrease over time) instead of vanishing once no infected enemies remain: 

• First, the periodic damage you’ve accumulated will instantly drop by 20%, which will then commence the decay of the remaining damage by 10% per second (can be modded with Duration).
• Decaying can be observed in the periodic damage meter located above Saryn’s ability icons. 
• Nullifying effects (including Data-Conduits) increases the decay by 30% per second.

 

This change makes me so happy.

[Sahysa]

2 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

Damage per second will “decay” (decrease over time) instead of vanishing once no infected enemies remain

  This and removing bio-kill-switch will make using spores more natural.  Full applause given. 

I think the values you used here for decay are slightly too punitive for recasting and nullification as it applies a soft cap to the scaling but we'll see how it plays.

2 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

We’ve outright removed spread on enemies that die to a Spore’s tick damage. Being the only wholly passive way to spread Spores, it allowed for that “set it and forget it” play style we were trying combat with Saryn in the original workshop. 

If that was the objective, why wasn't this done first?  I'm actually OK with this because spores still melt armor and with functional teammates, the damage should be able to stay high and ubiquitous.

SUGGESTION: Allow some leniency for engaged enemies.  If a target is taking damage from multiple sources, such as miasma or a low damage weapon, and spores happens to kill the target (Kill-steal), allow the spore to spread as if it not killed by spores.  A 1-second check for other damage or non-corrosive status effects should do. 

2 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

Sitting back and watching Spores destroy a map didn’t fall in line with that fun factor we were looking for with Saryn, and especially not for the other members in Saryn squads.

Admit it, it was actually fun though.  TBH, my Saryn was more annoyed with other squad members.  People who play the game for excessive hours enjoy not needing to kill everything.

We need to supply some ideas for reworking underused frames so the meta(?) frames stop getting "reworked."  They aren't problems, they are symptoms. 

[Neofaucheur]

2 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

We’ve outright removed spread on enemies that die to a Spore’s tick damage. Being the only wholly passive way to spread Spores, it allowed for that “set it and forget it” play style we were trying combat with Saryn in the original workshop. 

Please, make sure that, if an enemy is killed by a spore within a few (or even one) seconds of being damaged by any other source (like a play weapon, proc or Saryn's 4, for instance), it still propagate the spores to other enemies. I believe it wouldn't go against the design of not allowing a "fire and forget" play style and help alleviate the frustration of having spore not spreading because of an unfortunate timing in damaging them.

Now if only you could also fix the spawning mechanism in Onslaught that often cause the map to be empty after all the enemies get killed within a short span of time, that would be awesome... (although making damage decay instead of disappearing should help in that regard).

[NuclearCommunist]

Just delete her and ember already.

[seprent]

5 minutes ago, NuclearCommunist said:

Just delete her and ember already.

Why are you so salty?

[YpsitheFlintsider]

7 minutes ago, NuclearCommunist said:

Just delete her and ember already.

[Madway7]

So about the set and forget playstyle.

Why didn't you guys just remove the infinite duration in addition to the not spreading on spore tick damage instead?

Like return the old base 10 second duration. Iirc before it wasn't hard to keep them up but it required spores being popped constantly meaning you couldn't just cast and afk.

 

[Ar0ndight]

Am I the only one wondering how exactly will Saryn work without the spread on death?

In low level missions casting spore on an enemy might instakill it meaning no spread. I thought these tweaks were supposed to help Saryn in regular missions?

Please for the love of all that is sacred don't nerf Toxic Lash and Miasma as well. You do that and we're back to old Saryn.

[Sahysa]

5 minutes ago, seprent said:

Why are you so salty?

Probably because when they change frames like that with (in the case of Spores 3.0) or without (in the case of Ember) believable justification, they assault the player's identity and self expression which makes them want to spend less time here.  For those players, those frames have been removed and replaced with an impostor.  But we digress....

I find it funny (ROFL!) exactly how overpowered this unnecessary rework turned out.  The journey alone can be worth it, but this effort should really be spent on reviving dead frames or making new ones.

[SordidDreams]

12 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

a max limit of 10 infected enemies

As long as that number scales with power strength, I think it's okay.

While I'm sad to see my ESO destroyer nerfed in this way, the reality is it was inevitable. ESO is a very specific game type with a much higher enemy density than any other mode, so anything that spreads from enemy to enemy in an unlimited way is going to be way more powerful there than it should be. The obvious solution, then, is to not make things spread in an unlimited way.

Just please don't go overboard with this, it's so nice to have a reason to play Saryn again, even if only in this one game mode.

Nevermind, I misunderstood.

[seprent]

3 minutes ago, Sahysa said:

Probably because when they change frames like that with (in the case of Spores 3.0) or without (in the case of Ember) believable justification, they assault the player's identity and self expression which makes them want to spend less time here.  For those players, those frames have been removed and replaced with an impostor.  But we digress....

I find it funny (ROFL!) exactly how overpowered this unnecessary rework turned out.  The journey alone can be worth it, but this effort should really be spent on reviving dead frames or making new ones.

Still flat out saying remove frames that dont fit what they liked about the frame or what the frame once was is really stupid why i asked why was he so salty 

its like saying if i dont like or want it no one gets it 

[seprent]

1 minute ago, SordidDreams said:

As long as that number scales with power strength, I think it's okay.

While I'm sad to see my ESO destroyer nerfed in this way, the reality is it was inevitable. ESO is a very specific game type with a much higher enemy density than any other mode, so anything that spreads from enemy to enemy in an unlimited way is going to be way more powerful there than it should be. The obvious solution, then, is to not make things spread in an unlimited way.

Just please don't go overboard with this, it's so nice to have a reason to play Saryn again, even if only in this one game mode.

10 hosts for ramp up damage the amount of infected is still uncapped