Dev Workshop: Spores Revisited (Saryn)

[Edzhang]

This is what saryn needs.. thx for the changes.. been able to recast spore and the need to keep shooting at them and not leave the spore to kill enemies themselves is the way to fix afk playstyle..

[Nyaa314]

9 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

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

Huh. So it's a global variable? If all the spores run out and I cast new one after 3 seconds, it will start at half the damage of old spores?

9 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.

I propose this changed to 'no spread if more than X% of enemy health was taken out by spores', X being 75 to 95. So if the enemy has spores ticks, miasma ticks, and is being shot at by Ignis, all three don't compete who lasthit it with 33% chance (or 50% if it's only spores and miasma) of gimping yourself.

[den2k]

9 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

• Can be re-cast while active and will no longer detonate all active Spores:

• Fixed inconsistent spreading ranges:

• Changed: Damage growth is determined per enemy infected, so 2 damage (can be modded with Ability Strength) per enemy infected by Spores every second up to a maximum of 10 enemies.
•  
• Damage per second will “decay” (decrease over time) instead of vanishing once no infected enemies remain: 

You really want me to start using Saryn more often, don't you? I built her right after the rework and found her satisfying but a bit off and unpredictable, I will definitely try her post update. These changes really sounds like fun!

[MiMiren]

I support the changes. However 2 things you should consider with this.

1. Allies being able to spread spores for 100% range might cause Saryn to become "cast and forget it" in some scenarios.
2. Can we make it so saryn casts all 3 spores on an enemy immediately? The spore spread is the way for saryn to proc and damage multiple enemies. Currently without the spreading, the spore aren't effective when cast on one enemy. It shouldn't be necessary to cast spores on the same enemy 3 times, when we can cast it once and spread it round to achieve 3 spores anyways. The difference is too big and unnecessary in my opinion.

[lennieplop60]

I might be intrrpreting this completely wrong, but 20 damage per second doesn't sound like an amount that will even tickle any enemy above level 10. 

[doomagent13]

Being able to recast Spore on a new group of enemies without removing it from a previous group will be much better.  To be honest, detonating all spores never really made sense when leaving them would definitely kill the victims.  Needing to detonate the current batch of spores before you could use Spore on another group of enemies makes even less sense.  Having it not spread at all when a spore kills seems likely to cause complaints of it "stealing" kills, preventing it from spreading to other enemies.  If some non-Spore damage has been done to an enemy that dies to a spore, it should spread.

 

Unless I misunderstood something, any enemy hit by Spore is guaranteed to eventually die without any further interaction, unless the spores get removed by something. (With Nullifiers being the main, if not only, way for spores to be removed without spreading to other enemies.)  Although your sentinel/companion would kill faster at anything but the lowest levels, this seems like a rather questionable situation, particularly for a first ability.  The only ability I can think of that might come close to such a guarantee of a kill is Link, and even that comparison has issues.  Every other ability requires some interaction and/or has a limit to the damage it can do.

 

To be honest, I think you've gone the wrong direction with Spore.  It was a contagious debuff that was unlikely to be lethal unless you got it carrying toxic damage.  Now, it does lots of damage, with a minor debuff that is mostly useless against 2 of the 3 main factions, and only somewhat useful against the 4th.  My suggestion would be to get rid of the scaling damage, switch the damage type to toxic or viral, put back a duration, and have any popped spore spread all status effects the victim was suffering from.  It may not have gotten very many kills, but seeing the constant viral statuses was rather satisfying.

 

Personally, I mostly liked the interaction between Saryn's abilities, although I can see how some players would have trouble understanding them.  The only interaction that I found hard to work with was getting targets afflicted with both toxic and viral in order to maximize the damage from Miasma.  I ended up primarily using Miasma for the brief stun, usually to revive someone.  The interactions between Spore, Molt, and Toxic Lash were fairly straightforward and easy to use.

[zentora7]

Totally seems to be an interesting idea for Saryn to be a more engaging frame in the game. However, these changes to spores cause a bit of concern to being an indirect nerf to miasma as well. For quite a few players, miasma was sometimes used to help spread spores since it would accelerate the deaths of enemies infected by spores but with these updates, that would not actually be a good thing anymore. Perhaps a suggestion to maintain the potency of miasma while maintaining the engaging nature that these changes aim to achieve with Saryn is to make the spores spread on death only during miasma or maybe even make miasma spread spores to those that are affected if miasma hits an infected enemy. This will maintain miasma at it's current potency without encouraging the set it and forget it play style. Just an idea.

[Azrael]

9 hours ago, Kolchak said:

The new workaround to a broken Saryn: make Nidus, he does what she does, but better.

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.

[An8rchy]

I'm ok with this but the decay values.
Like yes, decaying is good and apreciated, bu 10% per second is quiet fast, on a nulli bubble makes sense but, passively is quiet a lot 
if it was 10% per 5secs  or 1% per second seems fair 

On this topic also, will the decay Auto start after theres no infected (So when theres no infected enemies the dmg drops instantly then decay kicks in) or is there a "grace" period like 5 secs after no enemy is infected to decay to kick in. 

Because in my eyes if u only get like 1 / 3 enemies at the time and u kill them w/o them spreading because lack of enemies, you would get punished automatically. My only pickle with it

[Breaking_Bad]

Just make spores detonate on "hold 1 "button

 

[Larhah]

I love it! Fixes the big problem I'd had, with the recast destroying your combo, but unkilled enemies being too slow to help spread spores on a non-defensive mission. I do hope that this re-rework will also fix the fact that on void fissures, an enemy becoming corrupted removes all the spores on them without spreading any. Other people had mentioned that too, but it's the one thing that seems like an unintended nerf from the first rework.

Saryn is beautiful, and I'm looking forward to when the changes are finished, and she's as fun to play as she is to fashionframe! Thanks [DE]Pablo!

[Shonaney]

vor 14 Minuten schrieb An8rchy:

I'm ok with this but the decay values.
Like yes, decaying is good and apreciated, bu 10% per second is quiet fast, on a nulli bubble makes sense but, passively is quiet a lot 
if it was 10% per 5secs  or 1% per second seems fair 

On this topic also, will the decay Auto start after theres no infected (So when theres no infected enemies the dmg drops instantly then decay kicks in) or is there a "grace" period like 5 secs after no enemy is infected to decay to kick in. 

Because in my eyes if u only get like 1 / 3 enemies at the time and u kill them w/o them spreading because lack of enemies, you would get punished automatically. My only pickle with it

You could mod the decay time with duration (also the auto decay after some seconds sound nice but we have to look into how the duration affects the decay)

I like these changes, but:

The base status % of spores should be increased slightly, so saryn could better fit in to proc down armor while working with good range and duration, less strength.

If enemys get killed by spores, they should leave a cloud behind, with x range and y duration that effects enemys passing by, infecting them with spores. (could be sth like 5m with 280% range and 5 seconds with 300% duration)

If the dead cloud option isnt an option, may apply the cloud to all infected enemys, so each infected enemy pass the spores to their friends staying to close.

And maybe increase the base buff time of molt slightly, or add the cloud to the molt, so enemys attacking it get infected.

Thanks for the changes.

[greiff]

Few thoughts:

- With her Spores now recast-able (although casting on infected enemy only cost 50% of original energy) she will be back to previous energy hungry form. So is it possible to reinstate the Toxic Lash's passive, which grant small amount of energy regen?

- Enemy cap for damage escalating factor at 10 is fairly low, especially if you consider certain map/tile set such as Onslaught and Survival where maps were vast and spread out, not to mention the periodic lack of enemy spawn, yes you are promoting an active game play, but its becomes more of a "nurturing spores" gameplay, rather then a game play to kill horde of enemy, because i will not have the incentive to kill of the enemy, i want to keep them spreading....

- Enemy died off damage tick should at least still spread with reduce range. Consider this scenario: You have a volt, a banshee, a saryn and an equinox in your squad. While you cast spores and manage to spread through a good cluster, between the other 3, the chances of your spores damage tick killing off an enemy after all the damage from others is extremely high (volt cast his 4, equinox day form cast his 4, banshee did a little 4, most will be near dead, if not completely gone... and now your damage tick finish it off.... with that your spores will just die off along with it....) Its like back to the riven challenge that require you to do the final shot on sentinal... you are fighting your team mate to get the last kill hit.....

 

Suggestions for changes:

- Perhaps introduce soft cap: Once the number of 10 enemy infected reach, every other enemy infected after will have a reduced damage escalating factor, say 10-15%. It still encourage active play as we still have incentive to keep spreading and keep growing the spores colony, but without overpowering other player and their choice's frame.

- Enemy died off damage tick spread at 50% or less range. Again if the idea of spores is to spread and be a DOT rather than a 1 cast wonder, a mechanic that kill off the spreading pattern seems unfitting.

- Damage decay should be reduce to 2-5% per sec. Considering situation like survival and defensive where spawn time between waves are big, and in some case of slow host, it will take more than 10 second for wave to spawn because of lag....

 

Quality of life suggestions:

- When an enemy is infected, beside the infected meter on lower right, can it be shown on minimap too? So it helps us navigate the map a little better to encourage active gameplay.

- As mentioned above, please consider reinstate her passive energy regen on Toxic Lash on spreading spores.

- Please look into the case of a squad team having more than 1 Saryn. At the moment in case of having more than 1 Saryn, they are literally fighting to spread their spores, and you end up with case of either one of them leaves because a person's build is not as strong/wide, and he cant really play(not even going to mention host migration), which bring us back to the case now where as suggested by DE Saryn is taking the whole play to herself, and leaving others nothing to do.... I suggested in original Saryn workshop post that if there are 2 Saryn or more, Saryn 2/3 should still be able to cast her spores on an already infected enemy by other saryn, an it will spread just as in any other case, rather than me just spreading someone else's spore

 

Questions for clarity:

- If i read it correctly, the 20% reduced damage and 50% energy cost only apply on casting spore on an already infected enemy, by me. Correct?

- Is the 100k damage cap still there for the spores? Why wouldnt you lower the cap, but increase the cap number on enemy infected for damage multiplier for the name of balance?

 

cheers

 

[seprent]

32 minutes ago, lennieplop60 said:

I might be intrrpreting this completely wrong, but 20 damage per second doesn't sound like an amount that will even tickle any enemy above level 10. 

20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 = 600 total damage dealt to at-least 10 people and each of those ticks has the 50% corrosive proc chance 

and toss in power strength well hmm going about in pure just doubling it so we go to 200% it be 1200 with if my memory is correct 100% chance to proc corrosive per tick 

armor gonna go poof then if you do run out of hosts for spores you got a grace period (effected by duration) to get a new host for spores and start up again so you dont lose ALL your built up damage

doesn't sound like much damage on paper but your spreading it to a on average 20-30 people

[ngrazer]

10 hours ago, [DE]Pablo said:

Unfortunately this led to people casting Spore once and hiding while Spores played the game for them, so that couldn't really stay.

So... was there a problem with capping the damage per tick or something? Like, you know, how she initially worked, pre-'rework', with ~100 damage per tick cap?

I don't need Saryn as 'small groups of enemies killer' since we have enough frames to play that role already. I've been using new Saryn as an aoe armor ripper - a niche where post-rework she fitted just fine. Good job on taking that away.

Now we can't spread spores with enemies dying from spores AND we can't use spores on a Molt.

But whatever, I don't even care anymore about this 'rework'.

[BimplescrumpTheWise]

As a long time favorite of mine, I like almost everything about these changes. However, one of, if not the most, satisfying mechanics in the game for me is watching a lone enemy succumb to the spore damage and seeing it leap to the others around it.

I think the damage scaling cap will really help keep her in line in things like onslaught but the removal of the spread just discourages actually building power strength because you do not want the spores to kill their target any more. You only want the corossive procs so you can kill them with weapons. At that point you have yet another frame who needs separate builds for each ability to be useful, killing what is currently so fun about her.

[seprent]

5 minutes ago, greiff said:

- Is the 100k damage cap still there for the spores?

Yes its still capped at 100k and i havent seen anyone reach it

[seprent]

10 minutes ago, ngrazer said:

So... was there a problem with capping the damage per tick or something? Like, you know, how she initially worked, pre-'rework', with ~100 damage per tick cap?

I don't need Saryn as 'small groups of enemies killer' since we have enough frames to play that role already. I've been using new Saryn as an aoe armor ripper - a niche where post-rework she fitted just fine. Good job on taking that away.

But whatever, I don't even care anymore about this 'rework'.

She can still do this as its not just a once cast and done you kinda gotta take care of it but if your going for a move and kill/shoot you might already have lash on so your spreading whenever you hit something the damage has been lowered yes but you can still get 100% corrosive pocs a tick with power strength spread around to an infinite amount of people if your being active spores wont really burn out it seems unless you idk walk into a nullifier or a equinox kills all your infected and you gotta scramble to preserve your built up damage

This change is summed up to lowered damage but also given a method of preserving your already built up damage rather then completely starting over like it is now

[DConagher]

There's only one slight problem with this: There can be something quite satisfying about seeing the map melt, even as not the Saryn in a Saryn squad. Either way, sounds like a slight touch-up, will require research (again).

[LSG501]

6 hours ago, Chroia said:

Could you clarify what you're talking about here?

Granted that I haven't read much on the forums recently, recasting currently does not spread spores, just removes them for an extra tick of damage to infected enemies,
so I assume you're not talking about that?

One of the biggest issues that many of us saw with the 'current' rework was that spores had issues spreading, so basically if you popped the spore by pressing 1 a second time it just didn't really spread.  The actual ability to pop them manually (without needing another ability etc) was quite handy imo.

[seprent]

9 minutes ago, Liberty.Prime said:

As a long time favorite of mine, I like almost everything about these changes. However, one of, if not the most, satisfying mechanics in the game for me is watching a lone enemy succumb to the spore damage and seeing it leap to the others around it.

I think the damage scaling cap will really help keep her in line in things like onslaught but the removal of the spread just discourages actually building power strength because you do not want the spores to kill their target any more. You only want the corossive procs so you can kill them with weapons. At that point you have yet another frame who needs separate builds for each ability to be useful, killing what is currently so fun about her.

the damage was tweaked and given a ramp up cap i think building Power strength you will be fine if you want that 100% proc chance 

[Brahmastra12]

I think removing spore spread on death is a very bad idea. Especially when there is a cap damage stacking, Saryn is going to having a much harder time spreading her spores, to the point of making her survivability much lower. Since Toxic Lash encourages melee, the situation is "engage or do nothing" or "engage and get killed quickly" in higher levels. Sure, there is molt, but providing how 1 is changed and Toxic Lash needed to be active almost 99% of the time, Saryn would be very energy-hungry, removing one of the better parts about Saryn being energy efficient originally allowing players to focus on range, duration, and a little bit of strength. I understand the problem with set and forget, so maybe instead of removing it completely, the spore spread on death range is lower than its counterpart conditions. I would encourage the cap damage stacking itself scales with the number of infected, like 25 inflected is capped at 10, 55 inflected is capped at 20. This way, Saryn's damage performance would not fall off when the enemy in increasing levels scales exponentially.

[Rambit23Z]

I wonder how much duration affects the decay. I may have to revise my build with 73% Duration, Which is going to be difficult without going below 199% strength for that sweet (almost) guaranteed Corrosive proc.

Really like the Recast and Decay additions.

[GhostLacuna]

11 hours ago, [DE]Danielle said:

(If you’re just learning about Saryn’s “Revisiting”, this is a follow up of the original workshop changes that went live in update 22.20.0)

If you’re a frequent workshop peruser, you might recall this bold 16 font-size section in the original Saryn Revisited 2.0 dev workshop thread:

Well, here we are! We’re coming up on a week of having reworked Saryn on PC, and it’s clear from what we’ve been reading in your feedback that you’ve all been busy testing her new kit. At the forefront of this workshop is Saryn’s Spores - Being the more drastically modified ability in the first iteration, change was to be anticipated!

In this workshop we’ll aim to break down the changes to Spores coming in a future PC update. Feedback is welcomed and encouraged as long as it comes in its most constructive of forms. And yup, you guessed it! Everything you read below is subject to change prior to and after launch. 

So let’s get into it! Here’s what we’re looking at changing with Spores.

• Can be re-cast while active and will no longer detonate all active Spores:
   
  • Based on feedback, detonating on recast felt like an unnatural transition from Saryn’s original makeup. So in an effort to maintain her roots, we’ve removed the detonate mechanic on recast so that Spores can be cast onto multiple targets.
    
    With this came the need to find a space where Spores’ escalating damage and its reinstated recast “sans detonation” can live harmoniously together. That said, recasting on infected enemies will put new Spores on a target with a 20% decrease to its periodic damage for 50% of the Energy cost.

• Fixed inconsistent spreading ranges:

  • The most common report we received requested we look the seemingly inconsistent spreading nature of Spores. After rummaging around in the code for an answer, we discovered an unintended mechanic that determined range based on the specific action taken (we’ll call this “spread condition”).
    
    Currently, if you do anything other than directly shoot a Spore or hit (but not kill) an enemy while Toxic Lash is active, the range is half of its intended value. In order to fix these inconsistencies, we’ve removed this mechanic and established a new standard base range across the board regardless of spread condition: 

  • Spread Condition	Old Base Range	New Base Range
    When shooting a Spore	16m	16m
    When hitting (but not killing) an enemy with Toxic Lash active	16m	16m
    When killing an enemy with or without Toxic Lash on	8m	16m
    When an ally kills an enemy	8m	16m
    When a Spore’s tick damage kills an enemy	8m	NA*

    *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. 

• Spores’ damage growth over time per Spore is now determined per enemy infected. And with it, a max limit of 10 infected enemies to maintain a max damage growth limit over time. To better explain this change and how it all breaks down, let’s explore it further by comparing its current state to its changed state:
   
  • Current: Damage growth is determined per Spore, so 1 damage per Spore every second. For example, let’s say there are 5 enemies. You cast Spores on one of the enemies in that group. 3 Spores are now active on that enemy. Damaging that enemy with Toxic Lash disperses a single Spore to the surrounding 4 enemies for a grand total of 7 Spores (4 enemies with a single Spore + the 3 original Spores on cast). This maintains a damage growth of 7 damage every second. 
     
  • Changed: Damage growth is determined per enemy infected, so 2 damage (can be modded with Ability Strength) per enemy infected by Spores every second up to a maximum of 10 enemies. So, using that same example, 5 infected enemies would set the damage growth to 10 damage every second (Modded damage growth of x * # of enemies infected up to 10). Reaching 10 infected enemies would set the maximum damage growth at 20 every second.
    • Edit: To clarify, the number of infected enemies is uncapped! You can infect more than 10 enemies, but the damage growth is dependent on that max. 
    • For the sake of best describing the intent of this change, we’d like to point out some of the unexpected irony between both workshops. While work on Saryn began very early on this year, the first assumption was that change was amidst her performance in Elite Sanctuary Onslaught. What actually ended up transpiring (post rework) was quite the opposite. Saryn as she is now continues to take charge in Onslaught (more so now than before). However, she’s a bit of a “one cast wonder” in Simaris’ realm. 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.
• 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.

We’ll be updating the workshop with new information and changes to Spores as they come up. Thank you for your feedback!

Fantastic changes 😄

the ability to recast spores and the changes to the spread mechanics will open her up to play with a more diverse set of builds instead of 250-280 range being the thing you mooded for regardless due to how bad spore spread was below those ranges.

Setting it to max 10 to ramp up damage but no limit to the amount of infected you can have is fair and make sure we play her as a caster instead of a afk hiding gardener waiting for her spores to reach full bloom.

Cant wait to try these changes. It seemsthey would fix the inconsistant spread issues as well as make her work both in the starchart and sorties,SO,ESO and kuva survival.

 

[seprent]

9 minutes ago, Brahmastra12 said:

I think removing spore spread on death is a very bad idea. Especially when there is a cap damage stacking, Saryn is going to having a much harder time spreading her spores, to the point of making her survivability much lower. Since Toxic Lash encourages melee, the situation is "engage or do nothing" or "engage and get killed quickly" in higher levels. Sure, there is molt, but providing how 1 is changed and Toxic Lash needed to be active almost 99% of the time, Saryn would be very energy-hungry, removing one of the better parts about Saryn being energy efficient originally allowing players to focus on range, duration, and a little bit of strength. I understand the problem with set and forget, so maybe instead of removing it completely, the spore spread on death range is lower than its counterpart conditions. I would encourage the cap damage stacking itself scales with the number of infected, like 25 inflected is capped at 10, 55 inflected is capped at 20. This way, Saryn's damage performance would not fall off when the enemy in increasing levels scales exponentially.

Toxic lash does encourages you to melee due to double damage on melee attacks but you can just ya know use a ignis or something for mass spread since it effects all weapons 

and since the damage is capped on ramp up hosts the damage is slower yes but if you have power strength it will climb up faster and shred armor like wet paper vs well really anything its wet paper not very strong to a infinite amount of people and if spore do burn out of hosts via itself or outside means you have a depending on duration grace period to find a new host and spread it again rather then completely start over 

your concern is appreciated but i think DE just removed the spread on death to prevent one cast run and hide and let it do all the work while you twiddled your thumbs waiting (you may not have done that but you get the idea) De kinda oops and traded spore turret for spore kinda did everything itself with out your input after it reach critical mass of spread and kill ratio wich if you built power strength could be like right when you casted it then casted lash then shot the poor guy