Why Vauban Sucks and Ways to Fix Him

[Mad5cout]

Vauban just got a "rework" that really didn't rework him at all.  He is the most expensive frame in the game to make and yet is arguably worse at everything he does when compared to frames with similar abilities.

1.  Tesla - 25 energy - this honestly might be Vauban's most balanced skill.  Decent range and damage at a reasonable cost.  I would like to see a better augment.  These static effects like this don't do basically anything in a game where you are moving so fast.  What might be better is something that made it do double arcs (with the same amount of charges).  Or perhaps something that would have the Tesla orbs chase enemies down to zap them.

2.  Minelayer - 50 energy - First things first - why is the rotation and casting for this ability backward from Ivara's specialty arrows?  This needs to be flipped.  Requiring a long hold to throw the mine is not intuitive and it essentially adds a very long cast time to this ability that makes it too slow to be useful.  Also, this is a lot of energy for what is essentially a weak proximity mine.  Again, static abilities like this don't do well in a game where you are essentially running all the time.  Even on defense type missions, other players kill most mobs before this becomes useful.  These have some good synergistic effects with Vortex BUT their effects are still very weak.  Consider the armor stripping effect of Saryn's spore in relation to a shred mine with meager range.  No contest.  Waste of time.  Mines need to be spammable and fast.  The effects and/or damage more substantial.  Or completely replace this with auto turrets.  Perhaps 3 at a time with an augment to add 2 more with slightly reduced damage.  Way more interesting and useful than these mines.

3.  Bastille - 75 energy - the skill that used to be great.  Power creep has made this meh.  I am not sure why on earth anyone would use this when you can use an Augmented Frost Globe, or Gara, or even a Khora at this point.  The biggest problem here is that it works with infested, but Corpus and Grineer just hang back and shoot through it.  At this point in the game, we have way too many skills like this that Vauban, I think, needs to find a different niche.  Maybe keep (but fix) the mines and make this skill the turrets?  Maybe a deployable laser fence that is about the size of volt's shield that does massive slash damage to enemies walking through (I am thinking Resident Evil style here) that can be used on choke points?  Something else.  This skill is basically pointless now.

4.  Vortex - 100 energy with a meaningless augment.  Why in the hell would I build for a vortex Vauban if I can just use Nidus larva?  So there are some differences - Vauban pulls things in continually for a duration and you can cast more than one.  But the max range on this thing is like 9.77 meters.  With nidus and a larva augment, I can spam that thing at half the cost and have a range of 30 meters.  This makes the multiple casts of Vortex meaningless.  And Nidus has other awesome perks to boot and is neigh invulnerable when played well.  Why on earth would anyone ever consider using Vauban and building for Vortex when this is the case?  On top of that, why would I ever use this augment?  A second, full cost cast to increase the length by 70%?!?!?!  Any idiot would realize you are better off just waiting until its over and recasting for a full 100% duration.  Perhaps the stupidest augment in the game.  Can we at the very least make Vauban's Ultimate as strong as Nidus' second ability, please?  Range increased, higher damage.  Maybe Vortex should cause armor reduction.  Maybe the augment could be something like an increase in range (size of the vortex) every time something dies in it.  Something... Anything worthwhile?!?!?!

This frame needs some serious love folks.  This last tweak was not even close.

[Chewarette]

6 minutes ago, Mad5cout said:

4.  Vortex - 100 energy with a meaningless augment.

Erm I'm sorry wut, best Augment in the game right now.

Regarding all his set, his problem is that he is, in fact, really fine. Of course, now his Bastille sucks because Stasis Limbo is ridiculously overpowered, but I don't really want DE to start empower every frame so that they can control the full map with one button. I'd rather they bring back Vauban into the game by decreasing the ridiculous powerlevel of the other frames.

Edited August 13, 2018 by Chewarette

[DeMonkey]

42 minutes ago, Mad5cout said:

Vauban just got a "rework" that really didn't rework him at all. 

It's almost as if it wasn't his actual rework, and just some minor tweaks in the mean time.

Curious that. 

[Mad5cout]

1 hour ago, Chewarette said:

Erm I'm sorry wut, best Augment in the game right now.

Regarding all his set, his problem is that he is, in fact, really fine. Of course, now his Bastille sucks because Stasis Limbo is ridiculously overpowered, but I don't really want DE to start empower every frame so that they can control the full map with one button. I'd rather they bring back Vauban into the game by decreasing the ridiculous powerlevel of the other frames.

Literally a wasted cast.  Much more energy efficient to just throw a new one.

[nameomnz]

Tesla: It's not a very efficient ability as charged tesla may has the 100% proc the lightning arc is still RNG base, So you still need a bunch of them to be effective. Also don't your point on minelayer just destroyed the "Hold" mechanic of this? The moving tesla would be an augment. But I would like hold mechanic to go.

Minelayer: Though it pretty useless, But only for bounce. I always rotating between Concuss and Trip laser. Shred doesn't do enough for me so I never use it.

Bastille:

Spoiler

You know we're all fighting for the bastille change and khora mains will pays for the rework.

Vortex: I don't know what kind of vauban player would find this ability useless, Busy spamming bastille? Your point on the augment too. I guess that you've never tried to make a practical use of the augment. Don't get me wrong I want vortex to be better as I would like it to explode with a damage of the health of enemies that died inside it. But you need some dedication to vauban before outright calling it "suck"

Overall, Judging by the title of this thread. You failed to meet my demand. I expected you to come with a reasonably solution to the problem but what I got is just a few of hollowed suggestions. For this, I want you to come up with an actual rework and explain it in detail. Otherwise this thread would just be a rant that won't change much of him.

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

21 hours ago, Mad5cout said:

-stuff-

 

1: Tesla is a concept that could be made interesting. but atm everything good you listed about it is quite frankly extremely underwhelming. the augment needs to simply have each laser deal its own damage and have the damage be over time instead of once then not doing anything else.

2: Making mine layer easier to use is a core issue. Ivaras quiver behavies exactly the same as Minelayer requiring you to hold the ability key in order to launch the selected version.. the differance is her arrows have more varied and effective use while also having a true "you dont need to cast it constantly" nature that makes spamming them mostly not needed. Vaubans mines are usually too weak and pointless and i have made a topic

about reworking the mines specifically so that like Ivara, you dont need to spam any of them to make good use out of them. Minelayer properly reworked could be as good as Quiver, however replacing it with turrets...

the Minelayer is a representation of a IRL Combat engineers and their use of Explosives, laying/clearing mines. Vaubans Tesla IS a turret already, not a flipping grenade.

Spoiler

this and not

this.

it is rare to see this level of representation on a "combat engineer" that doesn't center around that god awful meme that penetrates any scifi depiction of the role.

 

I am not against the idea of a turret frame... but that is NOT Vauban, nor would any turret bs added to Vauban ever possibly be any good compared to a frame that was built around the concept from the ground up. Go make a Warframe concept instead

 

3: yes, it needs more than it has now thanks to overboard design with newer better frames. it doesn't need to be turned into a giant version of the Tesla Augment however >.>. there are lots of ideas that try and g

4: Vortex is one of the best ability's in the game. it may not have the range of Ensnare or Larva but the fact its got a long duration and constantly brings enemies in makes it much more capable than those two in many situations. the augment allows you to build up insane durations of over 5 minutes or easily maintain one indefinitely. the fact that people complain it is "more of the same" in terms of it being another CC ability in a kit containing effectively nothing but CC abilities is beside the point.. i do wish it had a "growing mechanic" where enemies killed it in add 0.5m range per kill or so up to an additional 10m range or so.

[Huanthus]

11 hours ago, nameomnz said:

I would like it to explode with a damage of the health of enemies that died inside it.

We have several weapons for that:

Jat Kittag

Sobek

Detron 

They al do what you want and IMHO they are pretty efficient on that

[nameomnz]

9 minutes ago, Huanthus said:

We have several weapons for that:

Jat Kittag

Sobek

Detron 

They al do what you want and IMHO they are pretty efficient on that

But what cant they do is stacking up the damage. My context here is "EnemIES"

Imagine feeding 3 heavy gunner into it then it exploded with the damage of 3 heavy gunner's health.

[Mad5cout]

6 hours ago, (PS4)ForNoPurpose said:

-things-

 

I actually don't mind how Tesla itself works.  It is only a tier one ability, so it isn't supposed to kill an entire map of mobs (I'm looking at you Saryn).

I think we all agree that minelayer is one of the primary issues here.  And maybe minelayer and tesla need to be switched in the ability order.  The main synergy I find here is using Vortex to pull in mobs and then use a shred mine to strip armor.  But that said, we are stacking that up again with a Nidus Larva that can spam his first ability under that has so many stacking synergies it's ridiculous and several other frames that can strip armor much much faster than a shred mine (looking at you again Saryn).

Not sure what your grudge against turrets would be, although I agree tesla is basically a mini-turrent like thing.  Is it because it is overdone?  We are talking about space ninja's here, not the US military.  To try to say that simply because the military engineers don't deploy turrets means engineer classes in games can't do so I think fundamentally is flawed logic.  In any case, we need a replacement skill for bastile and it would be great if it were something more active.  Almost all of Vauban's skills are based on casting something on the ground and waiting for enemies to run into it.  This makes him sort of only useful in defense-oriented missions and only then if your team is lazy AF.

I am glad we can find common ground on Vortex.  To me the offset for something like Larva would be the idea that this would either get a flat range boost, be able to grow in size, range, and damage as time goes on or enemies die or the more vortexes you throw inside.  Something there has to scale better than it currently does for it to be useful.  Getting Vortex to even a 9.77 meter range requires all three range mods and that effectively nerfs it's damage to almost nothing.  I have a Kripath Zaw with longer range than that.  I can just sit and spin and the room dies anyway.  Why waste 70-100 energy or so on a cast?  I feel like the only reason people use this skill on Vauban at all is because the rest of them are completely useless.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

He sucks because he didn't age well.  Typically frames that have cc as a main point these days also have something else.  Booben only has CC and aside from his 3 and 4 it's not even decent and consistent cc.

His new passive is great.  But they need to have him bring different/better cc to the table along something else.  I've always wanted to see a pylon that spits out ammo and maybe some other stuff akin to the mercenary character from mass effect 3's MP.

[Dromar7]

I like Vauban a lot but here is much to be desired from his Kit. Some of it looks very good on paper but falls on its face when used in many different scenarios.

I think his traps and mines need to be easier to setup by making him spit out a bunch of Tesla's at once or making them last indefinitely with the added catch of draining a minuscule amount of energy when triggered each time.

Minelayer never felt good or rewarding to use since I just shoot whatever triggered the mine and move on without any consequences other than wasting the energy and time laying the mine. On higher levels the mines might be better but you got your Bastille and Vortex for mass CC and its just better to save energy for those instead.

The augments all feel like a waste at this point and I'd rather let mobs into my Bastille because the stuff already caught inside dies super fast anyways. Also Vortex augment is a 30% duration scam.

 

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

18 hours ago, Dromar7 said:

I like Vauban a lot but here is much to be desired from his Kit. Some of it looks very good on paper but falls on its face when used in many different scenarios.

I think his traps and mines need to be easier to setup by making him spit out a bunch of Tesla's at once or making them last indefinitely with the added catch of draining a minuscule amount of energy when triggered each time.

Minelayer never felt good or rewarding to use since I just shoot whatever triggered the mine and move on without any consequences other than wasting the energy and time laying the mine. On higher levels the mines might be better but you got your Bastille and Vortex for mass CC and its just better to save energy for those instead.

The augments all feel like a waste at this point and I'd rather let mobs into my Bastille because the stuff already caught inside dies super fast anyways. Also Vortex augment is a 30% duration scam.

 

yeah thats why i suggested giving concuss and shred the ability to re-arm themselves.. then those mines become able to preform their act multiple times and there is real reason to placing mines around the battlefield.

also Shred needs to work like a corrosive proc, then it would be much more useful overall.