Jump to content
Dante Unbound: Share Bug Reports and Feedback Here! ×

The Umbra Issue - OR Why Umbra is Worse Than a Sentinel


Prince-of-Space
 Share

Recommended Posts

Me and three buddies all finished the Sacrifice quest at the same time. The idea of Umbra fighting alongside your operator is a cool idea that DE has told us we're getting, and its finally here! What a cool idea, right? 


I'd be inclined to agree, except that it sucks. Really badly. 

 

I had previously said to one of my friends, hey, when an Extermination sortie mission comes up, we should all squad up with Excal Umbra and get out of our frames and just let Umbra do all the killing. See who's is the best Umbra! 

Today, we had an Extermination sortie mission. It was perfect! So soon after I had had the idea! So we formed a 4-man squad, Excal Umbras all around, and set off. 

And boy was it a disappointment. 

One of our players couldn't even leave his Warframe, no idea what the issue there was. But the rest of our Umbras were just... Idiots. 

I run my Umbra with a Baza, because I like the idea of popping in an out of engagements, taking high accuracy headshots, before ducking away to reload. The way I have my Baza set up, it can down level 100 Corrupted Heavy Gunners in two clips to the head. In any normal mission, two or three quick headshots is usually enough to down an enemy. 

My two other friends were running with a Tenora and a Supra Vandal. 

We saw many things go just... Poorly. My Umbra and the Supra Umbra standing face against a rock, shooting into it while an enemy took cover behind it. 

The Supra Umbra's wild erratic firing that meant 3 of every 10 shots fired actually landed even remotely close to an enemy. 

The Tenora Umbra standing DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF AN ENEMY and shooting directly between his feet. 

Thats not even to mention other bugs, such as firing straight through an enemy with no interaction - it was as if the enemy wasn't there (I was host, so there was no lag, no issues like that). My friends also reported similar issues. 

It took us a good 5 minutes for our three Umbras to kill approx. 30 enemies. Something that we could have done in less than 2 minutes with our eyes closed. 

There was even one situation where all three of our Umbras were standing in front of an enemy, firing erratically, and the only damage the enemy took was from our Sentinels. 

 

I understand, DE, that AI is hard to make, and the Specter AI is shoddier than the enemy AI, but... Don't you think you could have at least made it USABLE before we actually got Excal Umbra? 

If this is how Umbra is going to be in the future, then I am very, very disappointed. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I also noticed the  "such as firing straight through an enemy with no interaction - it was as if the enemy wasn't there" happening, i just chalked it down to aus net being aus net.. I did notice if ya shot at crotch height ya sometimes hit the enemy.

Also aye, the AI is not the best, go play around in the simulacrum... It just keeps falling off the edge around the corners.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dunno, i run around with the Tigris Prime and my Excalibroken prime is a damn aimbotting machine, not even the time to finish the reload animation he already shoots the next target.

Might be a problem with the kind of weapon, but in the end it's an AI, and we all know ho DE's AI works.

Pw3Qub91dqRd-R3xLI-8UunxaZJRp7mFjpAZmS3t

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, polarity said:

Good AI takes a ton of processing to analyze a large number of possible choices to pick the best one.

Warframe has to run on toasters, that already have difficulty hosting the game under some circumstances.

At least give Umbra the enemy's AI, which, while idiotic at best, is still better than the Specters. 

If they can't do that, give them the same aiming algorithm Nullifiers have, #*!%ing A****** oneshotters. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If a 4 man team could sit back and let their specters do the work...what kind of game is that?? I get that you don't want them looking like complete clems but really should a frame that was given to you with very little work in a pretty short quest carry you? Just my opinion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, (PS4)goodboxgonebad said:

If a 4 man team could sit back and let their specters do the work...what kind of game is that?? I get that you don't want them looking like complete clems but really should a frame that was given to you with very little work in a pretty short quest carry you? Just my opinion.

Its not about sitting back and allowing the Specters to do the work. What we as a squad did was out of fun and making a joke, but we soon realised that... Oh. Wow. Thats... Really bad. 

At the same time, if I can go operator and do 90% of the work, then what is the point of my warframe being able to move and fight with me? At that point I might as well just be in my warframe the whole time, like we were before, instead of trying to utilise this cool and unique ability that Umbra has. 

Secondly, I really don't know where you're getting this "really should a frame that was given to you with very little work in a pretty short quest carry you" from. 

We have had to play through the entire game, beat the second dream, the war within and chains of harrow to get to this point. We've had the hard stuff. This is the reward we get for sticking through the game up until this point. Its not like Titania's quest, where all you need to do is finish second dream, or Inaros' quest, where all you have to do is buy it off Baro. 

We've put in the hard work for Umbra, and its just... Not worth it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Aim-Bot partners always work better with hammers than with scalpels.

Give him a Vectris Prime or a Vaykor Hek and you'll see bodies left and right.

Mod in some punch throug tho. As the AI wan't to shoot the next target in its "zone" not in it's sight.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A new player can complete the prerequisites in a very short amount of time. If they wanna hand me a free warframe with a shotty AI Ill graciously accept but I play warframe for the grind. I doubt they'll do anything with the AI on umbra in my opinion. It would be a never ending balancing act and their time would be better invested in let's say more quests within the next year would be nice. I can't wait to play it on console so I can see if it's as bad as yall say it is. Maybe I'll get some laughs out of it. I've never seen my specters do anything that I haven't seen real players do. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think that now that the weekend is over, DE will look at all the feedback about Umbra himself and start working on changes and stuff for him. At least that's what I hope, I've been waiting since the second dream of us being able to fight alongside our frames, actually, even way before that when we didn't even know about the operators. Now the possibility is here, but the execution of it is kind of meh at the moment.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a... unique viewpoint, as I used the "Umbra as Specter" ability while I was trying to level Amps I had just gilded for Mastery. I didn't spend that much time observing Umbra, but since I'd equipped him with a Nukor for the damage debuff, I noticed that he'd be firing in one direction, while the visual effect from the nukor debuff appeared on an enemy in a completely different direction. From this, I believe that Umbra may actually be hitting enemies, it just doesn't look like he's hitting them, as the animation maybe doesn't exactly line up with what is actually happening. Still a bug, just not as bad as it might seem, gameplay-wise.

I do second the person who recommended putting punchthrough on your weapon. Just like Sentinels, and probably Specters, Umbra probably likes to try to shoot enemies through their cover, whether he can or not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

my Umbra is quite Competent with the Arca Plasmor, with other weapons I encountered the same Accuracy problems (Blindly firing in the general direction of the Enemy).

But with the Arca Plasmor he's doing a good job in killing things 🙂 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The AI tends to fare pretty well with Heavy hitting weapons like shotguns. I use a Corinth and when I pop out of the frame it does a decent job at killing stuff with it, when it actually shoots at stuff that is. And it is a piss poor AI indeed, pretty much on the level of the worse the game has had so far, that's for sure. And making it still vulnerable to damage when you're in Operator mode is just plain dumb, completely kills the interest of the whole thing for me. Might as well give us the option to opt out of the AI-controlled frame and make it an invulnerable, immboile meatsuit like all the others when you're in Operator mode, at least we don't have to babysit them then. I say make Excal Umbra invulnerable when in Operator mode, I really don't believe it would be game breaking or overpowered at all considering how poorly it tends to perform when it comes to killing stuff.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, Prince-of-Space said:

At least give Umbra the enemy's AI, which, while idiotic at best, is still better than the Specters. 

If they can't do that, give them the same aiming algorithm Nullifiers have, #*!%ing A****** oneshotters. 

I am curious why the spectre ai is worse than the npc version we fought. Shouldn't it be the same ai? 

 

Spectre and pet ai is notoriously sub par. But de has said there is a pets 3.0 coming so maybe they plan on addressing this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...