Titania Needs Some Love

[Cocoescap]

Recently I picked up Titania because I like to see whether people are right or not when saying frames aren't good (not sure which frame I plan on using next). I forma'd her 5 times to make her as good as I could possibly and played around with her a lot. My playing has produced some sad results. Titania is not garbage, but her roles are easily outclassed by other frames and her abilities feel lackluster with too much of a focus on Razorwing's usefulness without much synergy between her other abilities.

First off, things I find pleasant:

• Her Dex Pixia are surprisingly good. With a proper build I haven't been able to find enemies that really survive against a barrage of bullets from the Dex Pixia. It has good damage and a great fire rate so it feels amazing to use. I managed to get a really solid build for her Dex Pixia without any forma as well so that's another bonus.
• The Razorflies also do a surprising amount of damage. Combined with her Dex Pixia, Razorwing can end up doing a lot of damage. *insert obligatory Flex Seal meme*
• Tribute has some really nice buffs like slowing enemies and reflecting damage. The buffs are also not affected by ability stats, which turns out extremely useful.
• On a personal note, I find it really fun to zip around the battlefield in a mini archwing.

Now for some things that are less than good:

• I think her Spellbind, Tribute, and Lantern are too clunky to use normally.
• Her survivability is pretty bad, she does get 50% evasion in Razorwing, but that doesn't help when there are tens of enemies all firing on her as soon as her Razorflies die.
• Her passive is useless when in Razorwing as well.
• Her Diwata is a little on the sub-par side being neither crit- nor status-based. I used 4 (only needed 3) forma and I still can't get amazing use out of her melee other than clearing out low-level enemies fast because she has auto-targeting like a normal archwing. With high-level, it'll take a few hits at best to kill each enemy which leaves you open to being damaged.
• On another personal note, her super long neck sort of creeps me out.

Now, I'm no balance expert and I'm certainly no game maker, but I have a few suggestions that could make Titania more useful:

• Let Aviator work in Razorwing. It certainly wouldn't alleviate all of her squishiness, but combo'd with her 50% evasion, she may actually have a bit of survivability since 65 armor can really tank nothing and she's constantly in enemies' faces when using her Diwata.
• Lantern and Spellbind should have increased ranges. Narrow Minded is almost a must have since your range has no effect on Razorwing and duration will let you stay in Razorwing longer. Since her other abilities are mostly sub par, this is a pretty good trade off, but if she was to have better use with them, their ranges could be increased to encourage players to also use them since they have potential to be useful. Also, a high duration helps Razorwing and hurts Lantern so if it could have a cap of time until explosion, that would help.
• Her Razorflies die off too quickly a lot of the time. Titania needs a way to refresh her Razorflies that doesn't involve her exiting and reengaging Razorwing. It could be that when her Lantern explodes and kills enemies her Razorflies are refreshed. This would add synergy between her abilities which she sadly lacks.
• Her Spellbind has virtually no usefulness, it is a small bit of CC and gives allies immunity to status effects. Her CC doesn't pair well with the rest of her kit since it's better to just kill the enemies by shooting your Dex Pixia for a couple seconds rather than spend that couple seconds fumbling around with your first ability. It's fun to watch enemies float away helplessly, but it just doesn't hold any practical use. I have no idea what to do to this ability to make it better, but I'm sure someone else has some insight.
• Her passive holds no value in Razorwing. It would probably benefit her to have a secondary passive that's active while she's in her Razorwing. However, her passive isn't particularly useful other than having a faster bullet-jump so scrapping the entire passive isn't a bad idea.

All that being said, I in no way dislike Titania, I actually find her quite fun. Sadly, it feels like her kit should revolve around Razorwing since that ability seems to have the most utility. Most of these issues could probably be solved by making Razorwing not so blatantly the best ability she has. Her CC isn't great and there are actual CC frames that'll do that job much better. Tribute is sort of fun to use, but it feels as if you have to go out of your way to use it, but it's almost necessary as it adds a lot of survivability through dust, thorns, and entangle. It's very easy to just disregard this ability though as it is really easy to forget about using, and in terms of buffing, they aren't really buffs (except for Full Moon, but that's for companions) but instead debuffs for enemies. Debuffing is a role that's better handled by hard CC. Since Razorwing has such a high value in Titania's kit, Lantern really ends up being useless since it has a relatively small radius and too long of a timer. The Razorflies need more synergy with the rest of Titania's kit.

I would personally mold Titania to focus around her Razorwing ability as it is extremely fun and separates her from other frames quite drastically. However, her issues of synergy would be solved if Razorwing was taken away from the focus of her kit and instead made her kit focus more on her Tribute debuffing and Lantern attraction. This would probably see her still be pretty unpopular as she would end up being a CC frame easily outclassed by other CC frames like Vauban. Titania's value comes from how fun it is to be a tiny little bug flying around destroying enemies like the prima donna butterfly she truly is. Once she becomes better and more and more people start using her, meta uses of Titania will spread around and more and more people will learn her kit in-and-out, but as it stands, she provides good damage, but no AoE (outside of her Lantern) to clear enemies anywhere near as fast as other frames. I plan on using her a lot more even if she is never touched by DE again. Hopefully DE will fix Titania for the better.

EDIT: I'm not entirely sure if Trinity's Energy Vampire will restore energy to Titania while in Razorwing unlike other channeled abilities. It may have just been me not being entirely aware of my energy pool, but I don't think I received energy from Trinity's Energy Vampire at least a couple times, so at best it's buggy. I also thought about how you can't revive in Razorwing, but I'd want that more for QoL rather than actual balancing.

 

P.S. other things I would change includes the description to her Tribute ability, the buffs are not random and I focus on which enemies to use it on depending on the debuff they'll give me, and I would shrink her neck a few inches since it really does creep me out.

Edited August 14, 2018 by Cocoescap

[DreisterDino]

I would welcome some changes to her first 3 abilities, a range increase you proposed might be the least they should do.

I didnt play her a lot (maybe one of my least played frames so far^^) so i am not an expert, but imo her 1 and 2 are pretty useless and not fun.

Her 3 might be a good CC with some dmg-potential at least with a slightly bigger range.

 

Her 4 is awesome and a lot of fun, i played her yesterday in the Sortie against the Hyana pack just because i wanted to try something else, and man was i surprised!

I have no forma on her or her weapons, still she did awesome dmg and i managed to kill the Hyanas really fast while they couldnt do anything against me since i was flying 🙂

 

Edit: Didnt they mention some time ago the Titania will get a rework?

Edited August 14, 2018 by DreisterDino

[Vryheid]

I would love one of Titania's debuff abilities to apply numerous random status effects to enemies across a range-independent radius. Not only would this give her a means to potentially deal with armored enemies more easily (lots of Corrosive procs) it also feeds into Condition Overload and Healing Return on Diwata, making the Razorwing melee actually hit seriously hard on affected enemies while giving Titania a constant source of healing. This would synergize really well with Razorwing and its augment and patch up her frailty somewhat. Currently her best source of healing in Razorwing form is with Life Strike hits from channeled Diwata blows, but having to waste time holstering and unholstering to switch to melee while flying out in the open leaves you seriously vulnerable and wastes valuable energy spent channeling. Healing Return would be a perfect match for Titania if she could spit out status extremely easily.

I also think that its unfair to Titania that both her base energy and health/armor are lower than average- she ends up not getting enough survivability from either Quick Thinking or dedicated Vitality builds and has to use some wonky setup mixing both mods with with Hunter Adrenaline to have any significant survivability at all. No other frames have this problem to the degree Titania does.

Edited August 14, 2018 by Vryheid

[Cocoescap]

35 minutes ago, DreisterDino said:

Her 4 is awesome and a lot of fun, i played her yesterday in the Sortie against the Hyana pack just because i wanted to try something else, and man was i surprised!

I have no forma on her or her weapons, still she did awesome dmg and i managed to kill the Hyanas really fast while they couldnt do anything against me since i was flying 🙂

 

Edit: Didnt they mention some time ago the Titania will get a rework?

I used her in the Hyena Pack sortie as well, she was super fun against them.

And with the rework from DE talk, I never heard it myself, but given her popularity there's no doubt in my mind that someone at DE has at least thought about it.

[Cocoescap]

27 minutes ago, Vryheid said:

I would love one of Titania's debuff abilities to apply numerous random status effects to enemies across a range-independent radius. Not only would this give her a means to potentially deal with armored enemies more easily (lots of Corrosive procs) it also feeds into Condition Overload and Healing Return on Diwata, making the Razorwing melee actually hit seriously hard on affected enemies while giving Titania a constant source of healing. This would synergize really well with Razorwing and its augment and patch up her frailty somewhat. Currently her best source of healing in Razorwing form is with Life Strike hits from channeled Diwata blows, but having to waste time holstering and unholstering to switch to melee while flying out in the open leaves you seriously vulnerable and wastes valuable energy spent channeling. Healing Return would be a perfect match for Titania if she could spit out status extremely easily.

Yeah, if I were going to change the Diwata, I would like it to have more status. I feel that since it doesn't have nearly enough status that it is too lackluster to be of assistance during anything beyond level 30. I would also not go with a more crit-based buff to the Diwata since the critical chance and damage mods can't hold up to status since using Maiming Strike would be nigh impossible with Diwata and again, wouldn't be able to provide the healing from Healing Return and still force players to use Life Strike. When using Life Strike, I'm a little ashamed to say, I died a couple times fumbling around when switching weapons. The need to channel really hurts the Diwata and I fully agree with the Healing Return being an almost perfect match.

[Aeon94]

They mentioned Titania will get rework.

One of tweaks ;

On 2018-08-04 at 12:20 AM, [DE]Taylor said:

Titania’s Razorwing will no longer take collision damage.

A good start , right ? :D

15 hours ago, Cocoescap said:

1. Let Aviator work in Razorwing. It certainly wouldn't alleviate all of her squishiness, but combo'd with her 50% evasion, she may actually have a bit of survivability since 65 armor can really tank nothing and she's constantly in enemies' faces when using her Diwata.
2. Lantern and Spellbind should have increased ranges. Narrow Minded is almost a must have since your range has no effect on Razorwing and duration will let you stay in Razorwing longer. Since her other abilities are mostly sub par, this is a pretty good trade off, but if she was to have better use with them, their ranges could be increased to encourage players to also use them since they have potential to be useful. Also, a high duration helps Razorwing and hurts Lantern so if it could have a cap of time until explosion, that would help.
3. Her Razorflies die off too quickly a lot of the time. Titania needs a way to refresh her Razorflies that doesn't involve her exiting and reengaging Razorwing. It could be that when her Lantern explodes and kills enemies her Razorflies are refreshed. This would add synergy between her abilities which she sadly lacks.
4. Her Spellbind has virtually no usefulness, it is a small bit of CC and gives allies immunity to status effects. Her CC doesn't pair well with the rest of her kit since it's better to just kill the enemies by shooting your Dex Pixia for a couple seconds rather than spend that couple seconds fumbling around with your first ability. It's fun to watch enemies float away helplessly, but it just doesn't hold any practical use. I have no idea what to do to this ability to make it better, but I'm sure someone else has some insight.
5. Her passive holds no value in Razorwing. It would probably benefit her to have a secondary passive that's active while she's in her Razorwing. However, her passive isn't particularly useful other than having a faster bullet-jump so scrapping the entire passive isn't a bad idea.

1 - It should be a thing since her release.

2/4 - Not just stop with increasing ranges but also ;

• Make Lantern float above ground ( similar to Trinity's Well of Life ).
• Make Spellbind like Domino ability in Dishonored 2.  Damage dealt to any enemy that is affected by Spellbind will be shared among all affected enemies. ( like sharing fates )

3 - I'd love to see Lantern to spawn Razorflies on explosion. Razorwing can also spawn new Razorflies with intervals.

5 - As for passive ; 

•  After each ability cast , Titania grants 25% Evasion to all allies in affinity range for 10 sec ( including herself ). 

Couldn't come up with another passive idea. :)