Vaubans Minelayer Rework: Lets make it good

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

 

 

Ok so its no secret that Minelayer is generally considered a mostly useless ability.. with outdated mechanics present and a general lack of function for the cost due to certain traits i wish to address... i am a firm believer that if something is bad, it can be made good. thus i will not be discussing the replacement of any specific mine or even the minelayer ability in general..

as another forward, Vauban is a "Combat Engineer". this specifically refers to the role of combat engineers in modern combat.. if we take a definition straight from wikipedia...

Spoiler

 

"A combat engineer (also called field engineer, pioneer or sapper in many armies) is a soldier who performs a variety of construction and demolition tasks under combat conditions.

The combat engineer's goals involve facilitating movement and support of friendly forces while impeding those of the enemy. Combat engineers build, repair and maintain buildings, roads and power supplies. They employ explosives for construction and demolition projects, and clear minefields using specialized vehicles. Such tasks typically include constructing and breaching trenches, tank traps and other fortifications, bunker construction, bridgeand road construction or destruction, laying or clearing land mines, and other physical work in the battlefield. Typically, a combat engineer is also trained as an infantryman, and combat engineer units often have a secondary role fighting as infantry.^{[1][2][3][4][5]"}

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_engineer}

 

Vauban very much fits this, with his mutli purpose explosive box, ability to create "safe zones" with Bastille and using Vortex to close routes of approach almost entirely and little turrets in the form of his Teslas. For my purposes i will be only exploring Minelayer and its contributing factors.

 

Before i get into each mine type...Let me talk about the control setup for Minelayer.

Hold to cast and tap to change mines. For the most part this is really bad considering the current "reaction use" of minelayer. Presetting mines is generally pointless compared to throwing one quickly. My changes reduce or remove the need to cast constantly by making all mines able to repeatedly preform their functions for 5 minutes base duration. This totally changes the meta of how mines are used making prelaying mines easier.

REGUARDLESS OF THIS, i believe that it would be more effective to reverse the control setup. Tap the ability key to cast and hold to swap. this allows repeat casting to be the priority and much easier to do.. i believe this change should also be applied to Ivaras Quiver as she does suffer similar issues when needing to repeatedly cast her selected arrow. in general i do think that having this ability setup for easier casting vs easier switching would be more beneficial considering the speed and movement focused nature of this game. you are more likely to need to cast your selection than change your selection in my experience. However i will also point out that this change would drastically slow down swapping. Further changes, such as the implementation of a Selection Wheel to the UI would be ideal to allow more precise swapping of mines without having to cycle. There are other more dedicated topics to this, and the primary goal of this topic is to address the usefulness of the mines themselves.

 

Additionally i must make one GLOBAL change to prevent these changes from inevitably becoming OP

• Limit of 5 of Each mine type may be active at any given moment... this means a total of 20 mines can be spread around.

I will be changing each mine type to have much more long term use. My biggest goal is to give universal long term benefits to placing any type of mine. The most common complaint i see is that for the effort done to fully trap a room to little benefit is gained.

as a note, i will list Changes in a bullet point list, then summarize overall changes with a second bullet point and general comments.

 

 

 Bounce mines

 Currently little more than a relic from before Parkour 2.0, this ability provides a "bounce" to anything that crosses into its activation radius.. Its original use was to "jump players" higher than they could jump on their own. currently players can usually jump higher than it can boost them and its only use is CCing a single enemy. Lets go ahead and see what it can do with some extra effects.

• Now Disarms enemies, Dropped weapons are pulled to the center of the mine.
• Number of bounces now scales with ability duration. (12 bounces at 300%)
• Bounce Explosion Radius affected by Ability Range, enemy detection radius is not
• Only bounces players if they jump in its explosion or effect radius while the mine is primed (visually recognizable with the ring pulses)
• No longer has a cooldown to bounce players, Bounce capacity is still consumed however.
• Players bounced have 20% increased Parkour speed and jump height for 10s (affected by duration and strength)

These buffs have several effects i feel i must explain separately.

• First, the disarm allows the mine to trap enemies into a loop where they get bounced/disarmed and have to run back to get their weapon only to get bounced again.
• Increasing number of times bounce mines can activate makes the ability better in this CC role as well as in providing players with the newly added parkour buff.
• Having the bounce "explosion" increase with ability range allows for more enemies to be affected, allowing the ability to CC loop more than one enemy potentially.
• Having the Bounce affect only trigger on players jumping/parkour in the explosion radius reduces the "trolling Nature" of the ability while allowing players to fight on top of a mine and use it defensively.
• removing the cooldown allows a single mine to easily provide its buff to all players who want it while moving to an objective.. simply jump near the mine or bullet jump
• adding a Movement buff to players who trigger the bounce gives it use as an mobility booster again...

The goal is to improve the fun CC nature of this ability, while preserving the abilities roots as a player mobility enhancement. the most notable chance and the one i want added most, is the mobility buff when a player makes use of a mine. think of it as getting bounced makes you more bouncy, a good combat engineer is key for facilitating movement. i wanted the Bounce mind to be able to very quickly provide its movement bonus to the entire party without players having to wait on it to re-charge.

 

Trip Laser

Here we see a pretty cool looking but nearly useless ability.. it does only one thing... briefly stagger or ragdoll any enemy that passes it. ultimately the delay on enemy movement that this ability causes is minimal however. while it is fun to see a Moa topple over, it has no use beyond this. that said, this ability could be REALLY useful with only minor adjustment, and one major addition.

• Base duration is now 300s. Does not scale with ability duration
• Enemies who are affected by the trip laser are affected with a 40% slow for 20s.
• This new slow effect is modified by ability duration and strength.
• Slow caps at 90%
• Slow loses effectiveness from 100-10% of its effect as the duration ticks down. roughly a equal 10% slow lost for every 10% duration that has passed. (at base 4% slow lost every 2s)

Two major effects are gained from this, with the idea that a enemy trips and has to slowly regain their movement speed.

• Enemies moving through the laser compress far greater than before and are CCed for a useful duration.
• This gives Vauban the ability to create cheap, energy efficient choke points.
• Slow effect also slows down the stagger or fall.
• enemies who fall over due to running over the laser are forced to fall and get back up in slow motion, stopping them in place for a longer duration than slower enemies who only stagger.

Max duration and enough Power strength to max the slow effect, it now afflicts a enemy who gets tripped or toppled over with a 90% slow that lasts 60s. this maxed out slow degrades 9% every 6s untill the last 6s where it is only 9% slow. This complex but simple addition turns the laser from a speed bump, to a genuine roadblock.. instead of briefly staggering the flow of enemies this will condense them noticeably. Additionally with the base duration now being a flat 5 minutes players can trap and forget. Overall this makes Trip laser a counter option to having a frame like Nova without totally replacing her ability to give the entire map a long term slow effect. it remains less effective in open areas but its ability to stem the tide of enemies going down a hallway is now Dramatically improved. Range does not really affect trip laser and i am mostly fine with that.

 

Shred

This is often considered his best mine.. it has some damage and armor stripping. it does however still have problems. At Max range it only hits around 9.6 meters and needs 150% additional power strength to only temporarily fully remove enemy armor. for the most part its effects are fine but the energy efficiency could be addressed by changing how they apply.

• Mine is no longer destroyed on trigger. instead the mine goes inactive and re-arms after 30s (decreased by 50% ability duration)
• Armor Debuff now functions like a corrosive proc. Acting as a perminant % based reduction affecting total armor.

Minimal Changes here, to be expected with his best mine.. With it my only real goal is to increase the long term benefits of the mine. To summarize:

• Shreds can now deal damage over time and repeatedly armor strip thanks to being able to re-arm.
• Armor reduction can now stack
• because reduction acts on the current armor of the target, diminishing returns take place that prevent the strip from being able to too easily strip an enemies armor 100%
• Far fewer casts of shred mines is needed making the ability drastically more efficient.
• duration is only needed to speed up the re-arming of the mine.

No other frame has an ability that when cast, constantly strips armor on any enemy that enters an area without further player input.. With max duration the mines can trigger a % armor reduction every 20 seconds. when a target is affected more than once, say a Corrupted heavy gunner with 50000 armor and a mine of 50% reduction: first mine reduces armor to 25000, second to 12500, third proc to 6250 etc etc. having higher armor strip is more useful. same example with 90% reduction of course drops to 4500 on the first hit 450 on the second 45 on the third.. stacking your 5 shreds on top of each other can allow for 5 armor strips instantly when a enemy crosses over. you can do this or spread out higher % str ones to affect more enemies. this function is to balance the armor stripping.

 

Concuss

Concuss mines are in a weird place... their most useful trait is the radiation proc which is not affected by duration and only enemy radiation resistances. Deafen has minimal use on already alerted enemies. the stun is also for the most part pointless. i am honestly unsure what to do here, but i like the idea of the Concuss mine being a flashbang. 

 

• Mine is no longer destroyed on trigger. instead the mine goes inactive and re-arms after 15s (decreased by 50% ability duration)
• Applys a Accuracy Debuff of 50% (not affected by mods) for 5s (affected by duration)

so yeah its now basically a self re-arming flashbang mine. Blinding, deafening, confusing unfortunate enemies who get affected.

• mine stuns enemies every 15-10s
• Radiation is applied very often
• Enemies are now deafened and nearly unable to attack players.
• Ability that automatically opens enemies stealth damage for a brief duration
• re-arm allows the mine to keep radiation procs on enemies for good CC.

 

this mine now constantly applies radiation, prevents enemies from noticing gunfire, and reduces their accuracy... its pretty good CC while giving the party additional protection against enemy attacks. 

 

 

Some additional Notes..

the re-arm times of Shred and Concuss is only affected by half the ability duration value to reduce the need to have the re-arm rate extremely slow without mods or having a flat re-arm speed totally unaffected by duration. this allows the re-arm speed to be useful at base 100% duration but still gain some benefit to duration without needing it. i considered a flat value but this would make shred in particular completely unaffected by duration and i want how you mod your frame to matter on every ability if i can help it.

Limiting the number of each mine you can have active to only 5 per mine type is needed to allow these buffs to work and give Vauban a feeling more that his minelayer is a more long term fortification to an area rather than a one off fortification where you need to have tons and tons of mines in a mine field for it to be fortified for any duration. making true minefields in this game costs way too much Energy even with the 300s forced duration and because these mines are not really intended to kill, multiple mines are wasted on individual enemies. it is for this reason that i went the route of giving mines the ability to re-arm and preform multiple actions vs lowering the cost to extremely low values or the like. tactically setting up large minefields is also very slow and this game is too fast paced for such an action to be regularly preformed.

Making Bounce useful again was tricky... its intended purpose is to aid players in moving around maps, but is totally pointless due to parkour.. i wanted to bring this function back while also increasing the niche use of enemy CC by flinging them around.

Concuss is even trickier... to be fair, Vaubans role is rarely that of stealth so deafen alone is almost pointless. Almost. the best thing from this mine is the radiation proc, which isnt affected by ability duration. try this for yourself, 40% duration and 300% duration the radiation proc lasts the exact same duration. a good buff would be to let the radiation proc be affected by duration but that makes the mine cross territory into Blessed Ground and Chaos with the augment. so... yeah flashbang in mine form.

your Goal with Vauban should be to have a mix of mines placed around where they will be the most useful. Choke points or on paths the AI tends to run through single file is the perfect place for a trip laser. open areas where enemies cluster is perfect for a Shred or Concuss. Bounce mines keep a enemy occupied or buff allies ability to traverse the map. i wanted Vaubans Grab Bag to be as useful as Ivaras Quiver at the least..

 

New Notes: 

Regarding the casting of the ability.

Edited August 15, 2018 by (PS4)ForNoPurpose
Better title

[LascarCapable]

The biggest issue with minelayer is the mine selection. You have to cycle through four different abilities in order to pull out the one you want. It's annoying to do, it takes time to pull out, and if you miss the right one you have to cycle through all over again. That system makes it hard for you to use the right mine at the right moment, and by itself it's a big issue, though it's definitely not the biggest issue Vauban has.

You definitely did some effort to attempt to fix every single components of minelayer, though you may have overdid the buffs. But you forgot to fix the most important aspect of Minelayer : the mine selection system. Try to come up with something that would allow a much more snappy way to pick the mine you wish to use, or rework the ability to your will so we don't have that issue anymore.

[Fatern12]

So could they use the pop out menu other games use where you hold the button and it pops up the menu and you could map the mouse/directional stick to it so you push the cursor in the right direction.  I believe the term is radial menu.

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

The issues with the selection system are freely shared with Ivaras Quiver and Khoras Venari commands.

Tho it is an issue to be addressed universally, it is not specifically my goal with this topic.

My goal is simply to give examples, or to demonstrate various ways of buffing the differant mines to make them easier to use as well as more useful. I really like the concept of a bag of tricks and enjoy ivara a lot despite the annoyance of selecting arrows.

I will however say that maybe reversing the hold and tap functions would be nice. Venari is easier to use than the other two. Add in a proper selection wheel when holding is ideal, however i feel that is something to be discussed reguarding UI elements.

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

I have reworked some details, and added some additional notes regarding the casting of minelayer.

I do believe that Minelayer and Quiver share the same issues. both need to be easier to repeatedly cast as your more likely to want to cast your selection than change your selection.

Additionally i want to point out that there needs to be a way to directly select a specific mine for more accurate swapping. ideally a mini item wheel as has been described in other topics, however the ability to Cycle should still be present. perhaps even hold to cycle automatically the longer you hold it down (with a roughly 0.5 delay between each change).

The problem however with making swapping requiring holding the key, is that you dramatically slow down the already somewhat slow act of swapping mine selection. you go from tap, tap hold to get to and cast a specific mine to Hold... hold... tap. overall i do think it would be better to have quicker casting vs quicker swapping... but i would like to put forward the idea of having the ability to invert this control as a Game Settings option.

 

i really do like the idea of these "bag of tricks" abilities that give multiple options in one ability slot as it gives the frame far more options than warframes usually have.  

[OptimumBow0]

I was skeptical of your ambition, but dang, this has changed my mind from doing away with minelayer to keeping it. Solid suggestions, especially on Bounce. Trip Laser is good, Shred is a no-brainer change (I like the re-arming mechanic, definitely fits in with Tesla). Personally do not care for flashbang, but it's technically useful and others would appreciate it, and it's at least differentiated enough from tesla's CC. Worth the extra energy, too.

I think the energy/instance economy could also be re-adjusted (35-40 ish energy per cast from 50) to further encourage usage. It's probably good as is, though.

As for the cycling QoL, I have often wished I could use the scroll-wheel to go through the mines. It's much faster, more natural, you can go back and forth, and it doesn't incapacitate your left hand. It would be much more appreciated than the scroll wheel's current role as cycling through abilities when we all have the 1-4 keys down pat.

An option to further help minelayer (this may go too far) is to allow players to disable the mines they do not wish to use. Bit of a stretch, could be a bad idea, but it would remove some of the "clutter". Of course you'd just have people running only shred, yet with your suggestions they may be running a risk of regret. 

I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, REALLY hope the devs have seen this thread.