New Teammate Buff Mechanic Needed

[Kyenhael]

It is not often that people stand still in the same place in WF. Unless you're camping survival or defense, people are zapping around everywhere. This makes it incredible difficult to cast buffs on teammates. As someone who has been playing a lot of Gara lately, I find it extremely frustrating to try to keep everyone buffed with Splinter Storm. Even with Mass Vitrify refreshing it, people still often don't come back in time to get refreshed or sometimes run into Nulifier bubbles. I'm sure Gara is not the only one with this problem. Any frame that has ally buffing skills or augments face the same problem. Therefore, I'd like to suggest, or gather suggestions to address this issue. 

My first suggestion is to add teammate select button. Maybe default to 6-9 or something else, but customizable as all the other keybindings. Then you can hit a key to select a teammate and your skill key to buff it without having to line up your crosshair with other players.

My next suggestion is to make it so that holding the skill button it will attempt to cast the ability once for each teammate in your squad, automatically targeting it and casting the skill. This would be more controller friendly but maybe a little more automated than I would like.

Leave your thoughts or suggestions below. Maybe there's something that I've been missing all these years that already makes buffing teammates easier. If so, do share. If not, let's try to get DE to streamline the buffing process so us support players get a little more enjoyment out of buffing our teammates.

[Prof.549]

3 minutes ago, Avalean said:

It is not often that people stand still in the same place in WF

Then they don't need your buff. I'm always keeping my eye on buff timer and buffer position if i require a buffing. Sometimes i just don't care and running around. It's ppl choise. Relax and enjoy your own game. If they'd need it - they'd come.

Edited July 1, 2018 by Prof.549

[Kyenhael]

Well I think maybe that is a slightly different problem perhaps. People are so used to played Warframe solo while in a group, meaning not expecting buffs or heals or any help other than damage, that they don't even realized they got a buff. They might not even pay attention to what frames are in the group or what kind of benefits they can get from them. Or they might even not want to ask for buffs because they are used to playing with randoms in public matches who never buff anyone and get salty when asked to.

Either way, I think making buffing party members easier would make everyone's life better in the end.

[DreisterDino]

Gotta agree with Prof.549 here, i think in 90% of public matches i dont care or need any buffs from teammates.

Game is not hard enough to make most of us need those buffs..

i mean, do you go down that often in the average mission type that you need damage reduction? no..

Are your wepons not doing enough damage to kill lvl 30 enemies? guess not so no damage buff needed.

 

The only case i can think of where buffs are needed are bosses in stage 3 Sortie, and in that case you are close enough together to hand out those buffs

On the other hand, if i wanna do a long run or Tridolons i might need buffs, but then i dont run public but with clanmembers and we usually talk to each other so we can talk about giving buffs to each other.

[Kyenhael]

Well it never surprises me when people keep going down on supposedly easy public matches. I guess no one is at the level of play where 90% of the game is easy to them. We have to remember that not every player is MR25 with all mods maxed. To me playing support frames is about being able to jump into a group and help the team succeed. Or maybe jumping into a match and making the group go farther than they thought the group could. I love the feeling the group gets when we realize "well we are doing pretty well here. maybe we can stay another 1k cryotic on the excavation for fun". If buffing others was not only easier but also a bigger part of the community mentality, I think they game would be greatly improved. Perhaps it's my rpg background speaking here.

 

As for everyone being close together, that's only half of the issue. As I said in the original post, with all bullet jumping and parkour going (plus latency issues), it can be difficult to target other players. Even making the "buffing crosshair" larger, so that aiming in buffing doesn't have to be so precise, would be very helpful. As it is, I find myself quickly giving up on keeping up Gara's 90% damage reduction on the whole squad at all times.

 

Another quick solution would be to just turn all single target buffs into team buffs similar to Oberon's renewal.