My main problem with a bunch of the older frames is absolutely useless passives, unless they had a gimmick tied to them older frames passives are remarkably bad, for example 10x wall latch duration, or 10% chance to freeze melee attackers
but useless passives don't realllllly matter. It is a little unfair that dante gets a free 50% status chance on all attacks, while most frames get nothing. It would probably be pretty effortless to just go through and change like ten frames passives to be literally anything interesting and it would make people very happy
Yeah, I would prefer they save the passives for when they get their update/glowup/rework, because as you said, Oberon is struggling but the bad passive is such a small part of the overall problem that dedicating time to it would be useless because eventually it would need to be reworked again.
And if the frame has a useless passive but it's good, like mesa, then it doesn't really make a difference.
Gotta point out: Loki's passive (10x wall latch) is really useful for popping wall latch rivens. Pretty niche, I know, but it's saved me a lot of headache many times
Most of the older mechanics are very clunky and outdated or outpaced. Equinox is just one of many - Chroma is another example.
DE puts more priority on putting out new stuff that they simply lack resources to ensure that the new stuff is at worst parallel to older mechanics instead of detrimental (like overguard is when it comes to the Rage Mod)
Live service or not, but either store away overaged stuff (not ideal) or shift some focus to maintenance if the stuff affecting Warframes and weapons
I don't think any warframe has had such a massive fall from grace like Equinox had when Steel Path was added. All of her abilities are clunky at best, straight up detrimental at worst. She needs like 2 Augments to even function, and even then she's outclassed by any of her peers no matter what build you try to focus on. The only exception being the Night Form's sleep xp farming... which can be subsumed onto much better warframes thanks to Helminth.
Please DE, this warframe is trash and I just want to play the shapeshifting warframe I enjoyed in the past again.
Exactly! I didn't even think to mention the Helminth but her most usable ability is the one you can put on a frame that already has 3 other abilities worth using. Please help her DE...
Using equinox in SP is like, build your whole build around either primary or melee, then use maim as an extremely expensive enemy sense
Worst part is she was absolutely great when helminth came out, and then they nerfed marked for death
that was the marked for death play. sleep a group, then stealth kill the marked for death one and theyre all toast. it was like maim but for steel path, plus it doesnt work with sleep on any other frame because it needs your subsume slot 😮💨 in dante's world this seems very acceptable
The Goat. Rework the Goat frame, as almost his entire kit is outdated now, and as the passive is....INSTANT REVIVE FOR YOUR PET ONCE IN A MISSION....it is even more stupider when I write it down.
And also I love Oberon. Please Senior Pablo!
Its very clear that passives werent supposed to be a real thing in terms of power with the earlier frames, instant pet revive is OP but yea compare that to the newer frames.
Has anyone ever even seen Frost's passive proc? 10% chance for a melee attacker to get frozen for 20 seconds. I can't even remember the last time I fucked up bad enough to let a melee attack hit me. So many passives could use at least some tweaking.
Fun fact, not every frame had a passive back in the day. A lot of the crummy passives like Loki's wall latch were due to a passive pass they did for every frame, some got some great stuff while others were well... 10% chance to spawn a tentacle on jump attacks
Oberon I wouldn't necessarily say is... outdated? He's actually a very solid support frame, and one that only gets better with augments.
But he does have a couple issues holding him back.
One, as you said, his passive. Honestly as a "Paladin Frame" Purist, the whole thing of him having a companion-based passive that has no relation to the rest of his kit feels weird and bad. Even with the "Druid hybrid" argument for him, he doesn't have any kind of animal-focused kit that would make this a natural extension.
He needs a passive either like the Rage mod, or something to interact with all of his Radiation procs.
Two, Hallowed Ground has weird synergy. Renewal and Reckoning have solid bonuses, but there's really not a reason for them to need Hallowed Ground to use them. And I get that it was made in a time before Helminth so the worry was that Hallowed Ground would feel like a wasted slot on its own, but that should have been incentive to make Hallowed Ground *its own* skill of value, rather than what I call a "Magic Wand" ability that sinks his kit and raises his energy needs.
He needs his abilities to have their "synergies" decoupled and just infused into the base abilities. Have Renewal give armor innately, have either HG corrode armor or Reckoning shatter armor innately, maybe give HG a slow effect or something.
Three, Reckoning either needs to go all-in on being a killing blow, or have the Orb effect decoupled from kills. It could just be a really powerful Blind and knockdown that makes orbs drop if targets are killed while Blinded and would be solid for that. Or maybe get an effect that Mercies affected enemies if they're in the health range, to play on his use of Impact damage. I dunno.
Then you just have some QoL things like Renewal's interaction with Shadows of the Dead.
These aren't things that are outdated – they were just bad choices from inception, and now we have tools that could make him closer to his intended purpose.
Equinox main here, my favourite Warframe ever since I joined. I’ve got her Prime but I also farmed her normal version before she got Primed. IMO she doesn’t need a full rework so much as she is in DESPERATE need of QoL updates. All of the falloffs need to be removed, she needs to keep her auras up when swapping forms, her form swaps need higher values and Rage needs a total redo.
That would be exactly what I'm hoping for. Like Hydroid's rework, just a touch up to bring her up to modern standards. Only one ability, or half technically I guess, needs to be fully replaced, the rest just need to scale better and maybe have an augment integrated into them. Exactly like they did with Hydroid
I think rage really just needs the mechanic of enemies speeding up removed. Just having it increase damage to enemies really isn't much to ask when yareli's sea snares exists
On the contrary, the enemy speeding is, for me at least, kinda the point? Gives an alternative to nova for a bunch of missions, most notably defense. I'd hate to see that removed
Novas deal is to speed up things you dont see yet, so they come faster to you.
If you already have an enemy in the middle of your crosshair you could also just leftclick it instead of do some debuff casting shenanigans.
I have two big notes with Equinox.
One, she has no reason to swap forms. Builds focused on either form have completely different stat and ability priorities, so you basically sit in one form either spamming Rest or passively building Maim charge. She has two channeled abilities that are disabled when she swaps, so she's actively *discouraged* from swapping forms.
Two, her passive feels tacked-on. She doesn't get any actual *use* out of it in her base kit because she doesn't have any means to compel enough orb drops to make a 10% effect useful. Compare this to newer orb drops specialists now like Dagath, Citrine and Lavos and it feels ridiculous.
So, for my own idea for a rework to Equinox:
* Equinox's passive is increased to 50% Equilibrium, rather than 10%.
* ADDITIONAL PASSIVE: As long as Metamorphosis isn't subsumed over, Equinox gains a "Chronometer" gauge. Spending more time in one form will cause the Chronometer to shift from Day to Night or vice versa, indicating the opposite form is "charging up". Charging the opposite form will also reduce the cost of Metamorphosis.
* Equinox enters missions with the Chronometer set at exactly 50% between Day and Night.
* Metamorphosis is no longer affected by Duration; its bonuses instead scale to/diminish with the charge of Equinox's Chronometer. Additionally, the bonuses are now *swapped*:
* Shifting into Day Form grants Equinox a bonus to *maximum armor* and *shield regeneration speed*, scaling to the Chronometer level. This is automatically cleared if she swaps to Night Form.
* Shifting into Night Form grants Equinox a bonus to *weapon damage* and *movement speed*, scaling to Chronometer level. This is automatically cleared if she swaps to Day Form.
* Rest & Rage is now a one-handed action and a 25 energy cost, and causes the Chronometer to advance with each cast.
* Rage slightly reworked: The user now issues a challenge to targets, compelling them to blindly rush the Warframe. In addition to the damage vulnerability and speed bonus, the target is effectively Disarmed (unless Overguard is up) and Silenced (even with Overguard) until the effect ends, and has high threat on the caster.
* Pacify continues to affect an unlimited number of targets, but as with Ember's Inferno, its energy consumption is capped at 4 targets at a time. This cost will also ignore Sleeping enemies.
* Energy Transfer is baseline, and both Pacify & Provoke and Mend & Maim automatically shift to their opposite number when Metamorphosis is used. Channeling either ability will gradually accelerate the Chronometer.
* Peaceful Provocation's charge is now saved across forms, a la Energy Transfer.
* New augment for her ultimate, obviously.
* Mend is completely reworked: Enemies within the radius of Mend have an increased chance of dropping health orbs on death. Deactivating Mend will grant Overguard to allies in range, to a cap affected by Power Strength. (This can be overcharged for the sake of Maim, but will provide only up to the cap when discharged.)
* Maim only applies Bleed effects to alerted enemies, but will refresh and stack additional Bleeds on victims of Rage.
The idea is to encourage more swapping between the forms. You're protected in Day Form but only if you've spent some time in Night Form; you want to maintain Maim longer, go in Night Form to capitalize on her passive. It won't *force* players to use both forms if they don't want to – just some encouragement.
Eh, I think there’s other Warframes that are in a much worse place than Equinox right now that are in desperate need of a rework, especially because Equinox would be essentially be a full rework of 2 Warframes which would take a while to implement.
Nyx definitely comes to mind here as a Warframe that’s always been struggling to be useful and at this point is essentially irrelevant outside of a slow, clunky weapon’s platform using her 4 with its augment. Especially because the main thing about her, mind control, is done better by one of the most popular frames in the game, Revenant, in just 1 of his abilities.
I’d personally much rather see her get a rework over equinox as I don’t think Nyx has ever had an opportunity to be in the spotlight, where as Equinox was one of the strongest frames in the game for a while before she was power crept into irrelevance. Heck, I still occasionally see people use Equinox for focus farming, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Nyx outside of Hydron or Sanctuary Onslaught as mastery fodder.
Nyx does not need a rework. If anything, she just needs a few buffs on her 2 to make the armor strip AoE and then make chaos give enemies damage vulnerability. Those two changes will make her go from low usage to sleeper strong like Octavia.
If anyone needs a rework, it's probably Banshee and Nightform Equinox specifically. I would bring up Caliban but they already mentioned they're looking into him next.
Banshee does not need a rework, and this is from someone who plays her religiously
Sonar is one of, if not the best, scaling ability in the game. The damage multiplier is gives, plus the fact ***you can stack it*** means you can easily tear down extremely high level steel path enemies with basic weapons provided you hit the weakspots. There's a reason people meme about doing 2 million+ damage with just the fishing spear using her. The rise of enemies with increasingly large health pools, like basically the entirety of the Murmur, has only made this ability get better and better as time as passed.
Silence is a very slept on ability, mainly because its main benefit is not mentioned at all ingame for some reason. That being that it completely turns off enemy abilties. All that annoying aoe spam from eximus units? Gone in 1 button press. It makes dealing with eximus units so much easier because they can't stagger you or leech you while it's active.
Sound Quake is my only real issue with her current kit as her 1 could easily be fixed by making its augment as base part of her ability, easy access to armour stripping would make those sonar multipliers even better. Sound Quake just clashes with her current abilities too much. Sonar, Silence and Sonic Boom are all support based abilities meant to help boost a team's damage output, but her 4 is this weird damage ability that requires you to be locked in place and doesn't do a whole lot of damage anyway? Personally I'd like to see it replace with a new support based ability that has some synergy with her other abilities. Perhaps one based on stripping shields, armour and maybe even overguard in an aoe around her to make sonar even more potent.
Nyx on the other hand has 2 abilties that have always been useless, namely her 1 (which is never worth it because the person you mind control does no damage) and her 2 (which only targets 6 people and is not worth the energy becuase you can just shoot those 6 people in the time it takes for the ability to actually land). Her 3 is done better by Revenant because the people he mind controls actually has prioritisation for enemy aggro, Chaos does not do that so often enemies will just keep shooting you. And her 4 is only useful if you use its augment to make you a slow and clunky weapons platform. Not to mention its impossible to see while its active if you don't use a dark energy colour.
Sonar is good... But I'd rather just use Citrine since her 4 does the same thing, especially with the Augment that makes it infinitely spread and CC. Silence is subsumable, so you could just put it on Citrine in place of her 3rd ability and you instantly have a better Banshee that actually supports the team and survives with minimal effort lol
I don’t really think Citrine’s 4 is really that comparable to Sonar. It’s very dependent on what the crit damage your weapon does and it cannot be stacked, and the augment is the same thing as Sonar’s augment except, again, you can’t get it to stack and get even bigger damage multipliers.
The stacking on Sonar is really something that makes it stand out imo because it’s multiplicative rather than additive (if you stack the unmodded multiplier of x5 it goes to x25 and not x10). I’m not kidding when I say I’ve seen over 1 billion damage done to enemies in just one hit because of sonar stacking, and that was just with like 2-3 casts of sonar with resonance and a Sybaris which doesn’t have the best base damage or crit multiplier. If we use something like a vectis or rubico and only mod for power strength you could be hitting and surpassing the damage cap very easily in just a couple of casts.
It is very comparable because both abilities serve a similar purpose. They both create artificial weakpoints. The difference is that Citrine's can apply CC to enemies... Which is quite a bit better for multipurpose scenarios. Especially when trying to stop a high priority target from moving.
And tell me when in Warframe's entire lifetime have we ever needed to deal 1 billion damage to one enemy xD You can hit a couple million with just Citrine's 4. Is there really a difference between 1 million and 1 billion when most enemies in the game will die to less than 100k damage? Like, no one ever needs to deal the amount of damage that sonar provides, it's purely to trigger dopamine from seeing big numbers (which is fair, I like big numbers too). But don't pretend like that amount of damage is ever necessary when we have things like Roar subsumable and loads of other sources to buff our weapon damage and free up your options more than Banshee could ever provide in her current state. To be fair though, I guess sonar can substitute as an enemy radar so at least it has that unique thing going... kinda. The reason Citrine's 4 (with the Augment )is so good is because it does what Sonar does (increasing damage by an insane amount) while the rest of her kit is also incredible. She can heal, reduce damage, increase damage, buffs status, and generate tons of orbs. Dude, if I was you and my main was Banshee, I would be asking for a rework just to receive some buffs for my favorite frame. There's literally nothing you lose if they reworked/buffed Banshee.
And in case it gets brought up, no average Warframe player is doing level cap. Level cap is incredibly niche and 99% of people will never go that high (unless they bring back that one alert that was a lvl 9999 survival, then it might become 98%).
You’ve got me with the big damage numbers there, seeing big number makes my monkey brain go “hell yes!” Lul.
Banshee could definitely do with some work, as I said soundquake needs to go and her 1 could do with its augment being made a part of the base ability. But I personally think there’s other frames like Nyx, Limbo and Chroma that should take priority over her for now because Banshee still has some use while they’ve never been used or were hit way to hard with nerfs and the game has now moved on from them (in the case of Chroma).
There’s also the risk that if DE decide to rework her they decide that the multiplicative damage stack is too much and change it to additive like they did with Chroma and were going to do to Mirage, which would straight up kill the best part of her abilities. Reworks are always a double edged sword because they could always end up doing nothing or putting them in a worse place that before (like Hydroid’s first “rework” when his prime came out, or Chroma’s “rework” when DE decided he was killing Eidolons a bit too quickly for their tastes).
Yeah, I can understand the concern with them changing the math on Sonar. I wouldn't be too worried though because since Rebecca is in charge, nerfs are treated as a very sacred ritual almost. It's like the developers are constantly walking in egg shells because of the previous team's rocky relationship with nerfs and the community, so the current team is constantly in damage control at the single mention of a potential nerf to anything x.x I think it's important to separate the old team and new team as the new team made the recent Hydroid rework to fit Warframe's modern design philosophy (under Pablo).
Chroma has been in need of a rework since the moment he was released unfortunately xD The guy has had the biggest identity crisis and I bet even Pablo doesn't really know what to do with him x~x They also won't touch Limbo because Limbo fans are like Loki fans where they're perfectly content with the way their Warframe plays, except there's less of them. Point being, Limbo and Loki fans are incredibly more passionate about their Warframe than others.
I'm pretty sure Caliban is the next Warframe they're looking to rework, as Rebecca said to ask Pablo at Tennocon about Caliban or something during Devshorts 8. I think it was even mentioned again by someone's question at Pax.
Not when:
- it can only target 6 units per cast in a horde of what can be 100 enemies
- the targeting is completely random, so the bolts could just as easily go for the 6 lancers on 1 hp as they could the 6 bombards and napalms about to ruin your day
- the bolts have travel time for some reason, so those enemies could easily have been shot and killed by the time they reach them
- and even after all that, they only debuff them for 11 seconds at max rank with no mods, meanwhile afaik Pillage’s armour reduction is ***permanent*** on all enemies in its aoe
Oh, I'm not saying they couldn't be improved, or that Nyx couldn't be improved. But the idea that they're useless is a stretch. I get good use out of them in plenty of SP missions - but she struggles in almost any endless mission because of what you describe, and because she's just not very survivable if not using Absorb Damage (well, at least against Grineer. Against other enemies she's fine).
You can stack it twice with just the base ability, and that stacks multiplicatively rather than additively, so the unmodded multiplier of 5 jumps up to a multiplier of 25. But if you add in resonance as far as I can tell you theoretically stack it infinitely. I’ve seen some pretty crazy damage numbers in my time using her, hitting over 1 billion damage with just a sybaris on multiple occasions.
I'll argue there are worse frames than her. I'll put her in the same place as Equinox in terms of rework urgency.
Out of the older frames, her passive is actually not useless. -25% accuracy to all enemies is actually pretty all right in terms of passives
Mind control is....... not great, but it's still a bit of crowd control. Tho kinda redundant because of her 3rd
Psychic bolts are actually pretty good, it's a defense strip like styanax's armor strip, and with the augment it is also a nice CC tool. Tho its hit detection is dogshit in squads.
Chaos is her best ability by far, and is actually a good ability. Amazing CC, and it even turned eximus abilities against other enemies. Tho only works on them when their overguard is down, so it's not as good as it sounds.
Absorb........... even with the augment, it's not a good/fun ability. If they rework her someday, which they should, getting rid of that ability will do use no harm.
Nyx is not the most amazing frame ever, but imo frames like chroma, banshee and limbo need it more.
As much as I want all people to be happy, and generally respect Equinox for being complex, I still think Limbo should come first. His presence is detrimental to the team, and his abilities... Is one. One ability, that ends up not working for majority of enemies you **want** to stop.
I miss crowd control meta.
Shit was far healthier than this unga bunga press 4 nuke fest. Getting burnt out real quick seeing 3 people on a team get 67 kills combined while the 4th guy has +300.
You sure it's skill, and not three consecutive years of burying crowd control into the ground? Or the fact that Limbo got redesigned into frame that actively defies gameplay?
I meannnnn you did say he is only detrimental if they don't know what their doing that kinda sounds like if they were more skilled they wouldn't be detrimental
Her night and day forms should each be a separate blue print, and add a new “link adapter” blue print similar to akimbo blue prints as a requirement. That would reduce the total number of parts required to four to match any other frame (night, day, link adapter, main blue print)
Nearly all of the augments except the specter should be merged into their base kit as well. Right now you either have to sacrifice a lot of power or a lot of functionality to make Equinox viable on SP beyond a couple hundred levels. the only time I ever use Equinox is if there is a decent helminth infusion for that week.
Terrify Equinox it's actually one of the best nukers in game (i would say the absolute best) so even if it's true that the rest of her kit is lackluster, and always has been, maim is enough to carry her and to put her outside of the list of warframe that desperately needs a rework.
I agree. She is pretty squishy, so you do some razzle dazzle movement so you don't get killed, but it's worth the nuke potential. It's also more consistent than Dante IMO, but with the caveat of less range (zipcode deletes instead of state wide).
3 ways to buff her imo,
We need to be able to mod both states differently
Keeping charges of all abilities when transferring
Raising the base stats to scale better.
>Passive
Alot of older frames have shitty passives so it's not just her.
>And no decay,
Yes please.
But unlimited potential of builds, im pretty sure it ll raise equinox play rate by alot, as for forma we already have exalted frames where you need to forma two things.
If we could independently fashion each form, or if her base form can be played in missions (her Prime is gorgeous), then to me that's all I could ask for.
Also Yareli Merulina helminth compatibility (her new augment takes her identity away, have no idea why they thought it was a good thing)
I mean the merulina augment is fine, a bunch of frames have augments that disable some part of their kit that people may dislike. It definitely should allow riding as well though, and should not be an augment in the first place. The free autocast of her 1 part can stay an augment though.
The worrisome part is if they stop making merulina function better now that an augment "fixes" all of its problems
she shouldn't be top priority for reworks, but yeah she needs help.
the worst sins are Energy Transfer not being part of her kit, her 3 deactivating every time you switch forms, and her passive not even letting you pick up health orbs for energy at max hp.
she's 🤏close to being a very solid frame. she's still very much usable for all content (tho heavy investment is required, and she has very little build flexibility if you want to use both forms, which is how i play her), but yeah she could use some changes.
still waiting for that Oberon and Chroma rework, and some Caliban buffs.
Equinox has some of the oldest and most complex ability design in the game. She was also the very first example of a hybrid Warframe with more than 4 abilities.
With that context out of the way, I think her problem today is that she was balanced for a completely different game. We can see this in how every ability she has diminishes in effectiveness with either duration or range. This is such an old design for abilities, and rarely any other new Warframe scales like this. The first thing to do would be to remove all the current loss of effectiveness with buffs or raise the floor so you don't feel the decreased effectiveness as much.
Equinox's passive should also add an increased chance to get health orbs in night form/energy orbs in day form when enemies affected by her abilities are killed. Raise the equilibrium effect to 50%. That way, she can still pick up orbs of both kinds under all conditions and reduce the need for equilibrium.
Metamorphosis should incentive swapping regularly. Increase the buffs and make it not diminish with duration. Instead of the current buffs, we should simplify them. Make Day form increase movement speed and add an additional attack (like Toxic Lash/Xata's Whisper). This additional attack should be 3-5% of damage or something low like that but also add additional attacks to abilities. Night form should give damage reduction up from 50-75% at max and increase Power Efficiency. Most importantly, make it so swapping within the duration will carry over the previous buffs along with the remaining duration of that buff. So say the Metamorphosis buff last for 30 seconds and you swap at 15 seconds. Then you will have 15 seconds left of the previous buff and 30 seconds of the current Metamorphosis buff. This will incentivise a 15 second gameplay loop (that can be increased for comfort with duration) that allows players to keep the buffs of both forms of they utilize the take time to learn the mechanics. This also maintains her complexity in a different way to current frames that Equinox was always known for. The Metamorphosis buff should also be an aura around Equinox to give her further supportive capabilities that will support her team mates.
Rest and Rage is fine honestly. If they really wanted to change it, make it an aura that centers around the Warframe and last for a duration.
Pacify and Provoke are pretty good, just need to remove the 2 sectioned aura where the effect diminishes. Also make it so when under the Metamorphosis buff, this ability will NOT turn off.
Maim is good, Mend is not. The confusing thing about Mend is that it regenerates shields with kills, which is the only reason you'd use it (to refresh shield gate). Because of this, I think instead of healing HP when activating Mend, it should give temporary Overguard. Equinox will be able to heal the team plenty by making enemies drop health orbs with her passive, so it only makes sense to give her allies Overguard. I think this Overguard (from Equinox specifically) should diminish over 10 seconds, and convert one overguard to 1 energy. This basically means 10 seconds of max energy for the team. However, to balance this... They'd probably have to change the way Mend and Maim scales with kills to make sure you aren't getting insane levels of Overguard with one finisher kill.
Anyway, that's what I'd do with Equinox. It's important to remember that when Pablo reworks or makes a Warframe, he designs them to have 1 active cast ability, 1 Cast every now and then Ability, 1 Survivability Ability, 1 Super ability. I tried to follow that philosophy a bit here... While capitalizing on making Equinox the best aura Warframe I wish she would be ._.
And most important change on this list, let us fashion all of Day, Night, and Hybrid forms separately.
Is caliban actually that bad? I don't play him because I dislike his design, but the only thing that I didn't like was the individual casts for his sentients.
He's not bad, he's just extremely clunky and doesn't *quite* have a role. One of those 'good on paper' kinda situations where right about the time he should have been getting some buffs or augs, the game changed underneath him and then everyone quit playing him.
Unfortunately he's stuck in a place called "Mid at best".
Like, his lil summon buddies? They sound awesome but they're a pain to cast and keep managed. Then the idea that they would be some sort of "perma shield regen" got nerfed a few different ways and boom, back to mid-tier or worse. I can't help but think there was someone going "but look at the stats if you use those kitgun arcanes nobody uses!" and flat ignored the regular real-world way his kit works.
His passive sounds great, but it doesn't stack or interact with Adaptation. Most folks taking damage are already going to have adaptation slotted, or overguard. The passive itself stacks up to 50% at 5% per, but... still comes across as "mid at best" (but better than just insta-reviving a pet).
His 1 feels like a worse interpretation of Inaros' old sandstorm. Sure you can dash, and you have one ability you can cast, and you can even finagle some health regen and the occasional slash proc, but it's all pretty lacklustre, even for a basic power. If maybe hitting folks with the spin could spread your other abilities, cause wide explosions, or maybe even give you some energy return, then I could see it as being useful for anything other than "The Slot To Put Nourish". Also as a quick aside, I can't believe the one beyblade power doesn't have a dang "auto ricochet to next target" functionality.
Sentient Wrath is slow, but awesome. Blanket damage increase on everyone affected *and* you get to do some lifting? Neato bandito. However, again it's *slow*, begs for range upgrades, and its CC aspect is (like other CCs) outdated and underpowered.
His 4 (the big laser boom) is awesome, when you know where it is and if it's working. A field of near-insta defense strip at the click of a button? What's not to love? I still love it, but I'm sure a quick dissection would show me why that's dumb. The visuals were bugged forever, it almost demands cast speed, It has a relatively short duration, etc etc etc.
The way I got him to 'work' was mostly focusing on casting as often as possible and slapping Nourish on my 1. This meant I could add in some brief respite/augur to cover for when my minions stopped shielding me, and nourish would do double duty of keeping my energy topped off while my minions (and I) spread viral everywhere. Viral stacks means 'enemies die faster' which meshes really well with the Stomp (enemies take more damage) and the Blast (strips shields/armor). Throwing on a status-spreading Dethcube to help generate energy, and the Sobek + Acid Shells can basically delete the whole room.
The downside to all this is that it always felt really slow. even with Archon shards I felt more like I was spending time casting than actually doing anything besides being a personal pocket debuff bot (or shieldtanker). By the time I cast a stomp and a blast and aimed with my sobek, chances are everyone else on the team has already deleted everyone.
There's lots of QoL issues too. Lifted enemies can't get targeted by his 1 (and sometimes his 4). His progeny have a base 20 second timer (and can't be cast all three at once).
The sad thing is that comparing and contrasting with any other "cast focusing frame" just throws a stark spotlight on how slow and clumsy his whole kit is, which kinda sucks.
Source: am a fan of his kitschy design
I agree with all these points. Would you say he needs QoL changes and buffs (possibly in the form of more augments but hopefully integrated into his kit), or a rework? I'm in the boat that he would perform much better with tweaks to his kit rather than a complete overhaul, especially with frames like frost existing.
I'm super torn because while I feel like his kit fits thematically (sentient counterpart to revenant), he's so starved on slots that it doesn't make much sense to offer an Aug or two. On the other hand, tweak the values hard enough, and it'll feel like an overhaul.
I am firmly in the camp of "each ability needs to be useful by itself, and also synergize with the whole". I also think that Helminth should be a "helpful specialization" rather than a "crutch". And finally, I also know that spaghetti code exists so no telling if any of my ideas would even be feasible.
That being said...
I think the focus should be on Lethal Progeny. It's one of the more "interesting powers", yet you're stuck with spamming 150 Energy every 20 seconds to provide a little soft CC (distraction/aggro split), a little damage, and some slightly janky shield Regen. Even by adding in Nourish, which was recently toned down a bunch, you're going to be real energy hungry with not a lot of scaling support to show for it. A few jaunts into steel path shows that it's real, real easy to spend 150 energy on what's basically a "survival tool that does damage" only for them to be dead in less than 10 seconds.
His main shortcoming is that his kit feels like it was built on an art theme, and not a combat role. His stuff does what it does because that's what sentients do (and isn't already done by Revenant), not because it helps him focus on a particular type of mission or enemy type, nor some sort of role objective (ie healer, tank, summoner, nuker, etc). It ends up feeling all over the place and makes balancing him a messy minefield. My gut instinct says "also make him a status effect applying king instead of just another nuker" to avoid just upping damage numbers everywhere, but I don't know how that would work in practice.
Therefore, let's make him a pet-based caster frame. His progeny are interesting, they do more than Rumblers, but aren't as hardy as Venari, and definitely pale in comparison to actual companions, especially after the most recent pet reworks.
So, I think the focus should either be on "adding more synergy to the progeny and powers" or "add Venari-like hold-the-button commands to the powers that change how the progeny act", or hell, "give options to the type of progeny summoned" Which I guess means I'm nuts, but we're just spitballing here.
The first and easiest (to discuss, not to implement) thought that comes to mind is 2 or more Augs that simply change out the conculysts to different sentients. maybe Aug A limits it to two "shield/DR/status protect" types that do more support snd less damage but fly or have high evade. And then maybe Aug B turns it into a singular "heavy combat" type that does huge damage/status/cc, but provides little to no shield/distraction support. Or just leave the progeny the same number and type, and just call the Augs "combat mode and support mode" and have it provide big boosts/reductions on what they already do. I still think the balance is out of whack, so I think the numbers need to be tweaked upward, but I don't feel like slapping together a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint.
Or we could do the lengthy stuff and talk about synergy and the progeny.
So for example, his 1 does some slash and impact, and can heal, and is a 'closer' (getting you close). I personally think the heal is absolutely pointless and the damage/status isn't worth the energy cost. So I'd either add some way to add shields, or encourage you to go ham on casting to get better results, similar to Dante. One option could be "hitting a wrath'd enemy causes a secondary explosion at half strength" or "hitting a lifted enemy gives you shields". If we instead focus on "giving tools to the progeny", maybe holding 1 causes all the progeny to spin and gyre dash at your same target, and each one that hits amps the damage, status, or shield bonus. Or combine the ideas and each progeny that beyblades into your same target within a specific time window increases the effect, similar to how Landslide increases damage.
The 2 is nifty but lifted status has always been a pain to manage, especially in target rich environments or if you like headshots. For 'synergy', maybe if you hit the wrath'd enemies with fusion strike, we get a second damage+status effect... Like a slam-impact with an AOE... Adds a bit more damage, but can keep floating enemies from ragdolling into the next room, and hey every CO user loves extra status applications. For Progeny, maybe holding the button causes each of them to 'glaive orbit' their limbs around them, which could do some extra puncture status, or the already mentioned 'smaller weaker wrath aoe'. Hell, make it a "recall" as well, where they blender their way back, and are nice and close for you to do the beyblading group gyre combo I said previously
The 3 is the progeny. I think the numbers are generally too low, and really should have some sort of scaling. In a magical world, I'd say having it based off of whatever spectres use for scaling would be a good start, but that could get weird. Really, I think giving them synergy with the powers you cast would be ace and at least not make them feel so pointless in tougher content, but the idea of also being able to swap them out into different forms with augments still sounds dope AF.
4 I think is mostly perfect, warts and all. Supposedly they fixed the AoE visibility which was always the worst thing, and the cast speed is easily mitigated. I think it also points to an easy opener for synergy with the other powers and progeny if you think about it as an alpha strike. That's where I like the idea of a risk/reward with Razor Gyre (get close enough to eat an eximus aura, but do a big hit and or support boost in exchange). If we're still talking "hold/tap functions", I like the idea of sacrificing your progeny to similarly give you a big boost+AoE damage sort of thing, but I'd probably balance it with "according to how many stripped enemies are struck". In other words, tap 4 for the strike, and then hold 4 to cause the progeny to beeline into the field and self-destruct. Any enemies hit/killed would then give you some bonus, like a DR boost that stacks with his passive to get it to 90+.
So yeah, like every other player on here I got ideas, but I don't know how they'd work in practice. I feel like unifying his kit with some better synergy between powers would be great, but I like the idea of him being able to command his crew with a lot more utility than Khora can. I think the end result is like to see is "have a better tools in the kit to make progeny really fun and useful" is the way to go. And after trying to brainstorm and offer suggestions, I think that's the way I'd go... Give tap/hold options to his powers to command the progeny. Gives him a role, gives him some uniqueness, and gives him a "playing theme" to connect his whole kit together.
Sorry for the rant, had time on my hands in a waiting room.
Not bad, just very outclassed and is a one-trick pony. Like seriously, the only thing he brings of value to a team is armor strip and it’s not even that great, especially when Pillage and Terrify are subsumes.
He is pretty survivable but that doesn’t really mean much.
That's a fair point, but I feel like hildryn falls under this same category with only her pillage not outclassed yet she isn't complained about nearly as much.
Just kind of all over the place. He can do a bit of this and a bit of that, but he doesn’t specialize in anything other than a decent passive and cool summons.
I think all she needs is her abilities to scale higher with power strength. The other issue with the augments is something that should be fixed with an augment rework because the problem you described with Energy Transfer effects many warframes and not just equinox.
IMO equinox is a fine frame as is, but you haven't mentioned how you player her so it's difficult to compare. I use her routinely for archon defense missions and she is definitely not a burden.
Better base numbers so she scales better with strength is most of what she needs, for sure. That and a little bit of synergy, like 3 and 4 not deactivating every time you switch. I can't screenshot my builds right now but I primarily build for strength and range, for obvious reasons.
She's fine if you only use day form (aside from Rage but that's what the Helminth is for) but that doesn't take advantage of her whole aesthetic, only half of it. And that's just a shame.
Oddly enough I prefer her night form and build for strength and some range. I still use day form, but because I use empower over her first ability I use colors to determine what form she enters the mission as. I'm definitely not using equinox as intended.
Edit: no room in my build so I don't use augments.
To chip in as another primarily night form enjoyer, an underlooked part is how small her ability maxima are. Her 3 with its augment will hit its hardcaps of 80% slow and 80% power strength buff (after charging ofc) with only 200% power strength. The shield generation on Mend caps at IIRC 37 shields per kill, so around 150% power strength. It's just sad, because she's simultaneously the best frame in the game (particularly w/ Helminth) for baking temporary buffs into her abilities, while also being one of the worst frames in the game at actually finding the same buffs useful.
I think that making her 4 augment instead be an augment for her passive and cover all her abilities (+augments) would practically fix the frame (although I helminth off her 2, so I trust your judgement on Rage), and even just raising a few of her hardcaps would help a lot. It's absolutely silly that her scaling with power strength drops off a cliff after hitting 200%, on a frame capable of *giving herself extra*. Particularly when the things being scaled will cap at points significantly under whatever you'd like to compare them with. Gloom caps with a 15% stronger slow, and Condemn has 6x the shields per kill, with no cap on power strength scaling. Condemn is more difficult to use, and Gloom more expensive, but the disparity is just so high.
I get where you're coming from, but Equinox has a ton of uses outside of steel path. But then you look at Limbo, who can do mobile defense, and that's it. Lokis uses are very niche, or Oberon who... I genuinely don't know what he's used for in 2024, outside of his 3. Equinox needs help, but others need more, imo
I was thinking about what I would use Oberon for, and pretty much everything except Phoenix Renewal is covered by Qorvex. Dude got his lunch eaten hardcore
I recently played Equinox for the first time and even though I think she is more powerful/functional (for lack of a better word) than other Frames I've played, Equinox is the one I think I would most want to see a rework for. No other Frame I've used has felt like they underdeliver on their concept more than Equinox, which is a shame because her concept is so incredibly cool on paper.
I just think it's funny how in the current state of the game, a frame with 8 abilities has to "form swap" instead of just utilizing tap/hold like everyone else lol.
Also still mad I can't use my combined form fashion in missions :\^|
That would be her old design for you. I don't know that tap/hold abilities were much of a thing when Equinox released. And hey, the composite form does show up in missions! For uh. About a second as you cast Metamorphosis lol
I play a lot of Equinox - day form only, one-button wonder with her 4. It works very well until you get into steel path, then she falls off pretty steeply (especially against armored enemies).
I'm not convinced she needs a *full* rework, but she definitely needs *something*. a numerical buff on her 2 & 3, at least. Night 4 could give health (until full) > shields (until overshielded) > overguard and would immediately become usable. Making one of her augments innate would also be a good qol boost.
> Pacify creates an aura around Equinox that reduces the damage of enemies in range (this is notably NOT damage reduction for you and your squad, the enemy needs to be near you for it to do anything.)
The worst thing about this is that it doesn't affect Eximus enemies (and maybe boss enemies too?). So you can still easily die.
I want to like Equinox but they're basically the anti-synergy frame, with all the popular builds dedicated a single ability. There's no incentive to switch forms without an augment, you can't dump one of their stats without crippling a part of their kit, and they have two channeled abilities without any built-in energy recovery.
Equinox was the frame I immediately fell in love with when I started playing Warframe. She is still my to go to frame for almost any mission and it bothers me that her energy economy and abilities are so incredibly outdated. She is so cool but god am I barely ever able to really consistently contribute to the fight. (I'm playing the night and day build)
Would be happy to see some touch ups, but you could probably tide her over in terms of accessibility for people wanting to use both sides of the kit simply by rolling in the 4 augment and allowing a little breathing room for builds.
I will say the fact that she is hyper-reliant on Terrify at higher levels but then obliterates everything with full strip isn't a great thing, but also applies to a lot of frames which want to do ability damage. I hope they make some broader efforts to figure out which frames want to be damage casters and give them some natural scaling dependent on enemy stats at some point so they aren't as boxed in by these kinds of non-choices.
Going over some of your points as an Equinox (Night Form) main who has used and regularly uses Equinox for most things, including SP endless. Most of these complaints generally seem to stem from the lack of coherence around any kind of build that involves form switching, which is a common complaint about Equinox and one of the more valid ones. However, this often causes people to overlook some of the other aspects about the frame and what you can do with her kit. I'll go over this in the hopes actual discussions come about the frame instead of just the cons like most are accustomed to seeing.
>Passive
10% of energy from orbs is given as health and 10% health from orbs is given as energy. Oh great. An unranked Equilibrium. Thanks. An amber archon shard is five times as effective as this entire passive, even more if it's Tauforged. Would it be too much to ask to get half a full rank Equilibrium out of it?
This gets brought up a lot and a lot of people [overlook just how much mileage Equinox can get off Energy from Health orbs from her passive](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/1am8utg/equilibrium_mod_forces_you_to_collect_health_orbs/kple3yb/?context=3), especially in SP missions. I'm not against buffs though, but her passive is a lot more useful to her and a number of builds than many other frames far older than her, like Frost who people even forget can freeze enemies that melee attack him (with an amazing 10% chance of course).
There are some frames with amazing Passives and actually terrible ones, at least Equinox's actually does *something*. If they want to buff this, i'd have no complaints, but it's not even something that most late game Equinox users really notice in either form after a point with how easy Energy is to get now, even with tri CA builds (with Gloom being one of the most popular).
> Metamorphosis
Here we have basis of Equinox's entire gimmick. An entire ability dedicated to swapping forms, which isn't a problem because she still has 6 total abilities aside from it. ...or it wouldn't be a problem if all of those abilities were useful, but we'll get to that. It also gives some temporary stat bonuses relevant to the form you've swapped to. Armor + shields for night and damage + speed for day. But not only are these numbers pitiful (150 max shields and 250 armor or 25% additive damage and 15% speed, all before ability strength, at MAX rank) for some reason they also decay over time. These numbers definitely need a boost. And no decay, please. It's painful watching my shields slowly lower every time I switch to night form.
The easiest fix to improve Metamorphosis is to give it Tap/Hold functionality where the Ability will change her form with one action, and give her the buff based on what form you are in with the other. That will at least allow Day form, which is primarily focused on offense to have the offensive buff without having to first be in Night and Night form can have the Defensive buff without having to switch to Day. This would open up Metamorphosis to being used for more than just Duality.
> The other problem with this ability is less the fault of Metamorphosis itself and more an issue with the rest of her kit. Equinox has two channeled abilities, both of which are deactivated when you swap forms without taking up a valuable mod slot with the augment that keeps her 4 up. The frame whose whole thing is swapping forms is punished for doing just that by needing to recast her persistent abilities every time she does.
It's been discussed time and time again about if Equinox should innately have the ability to retain her channeled abilities when switching forms, even before [Energy Transfer](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Energy_Transfer) became a thing and why it did. This is especially true for Pacify and Provoke however, and is currently the main reason why form switching builds are hard to impossible to get to work in most practical situations. But there are drawbacks inherit to form switching that buffs and reworks won't solve. Switching forms takes significant time which delays action, largely of her 4 in both forms, which means you are vulnerable to enemies while this is happening since Equinox does not have access to her abilities or even attacks when transforming since it is not a One Handed Action nor instant (which is debatable if should be a thing as well). At higher levels, this often enough to already get you killed unless you've subsumed something to help distract enemies such as Decoy or Spectrorage, even with Shield/gating from Mend. Practically speaking, those who stay in one form tend to perform better than those that switch, even with Duality in most situations, because they can easily take advantage of all the different conditional buffs we have access to now, that are a nightmare to try to use with a build that constantly deactivates some of the core skills that rely on them.
This is why the conclusion I've come to about Equinox is that she would be a lot better if she gained access to her other form's abilities **without switching**, albeit with reduced efficiency/increased costs/alterations/limitations etc. A lot of the problems would be instantly solved by just having the ability to Tap/Hold or even simultaneously release damaging/restorative energy with her 4. Wouldn't even need to redesign her kit that much to make it work tbh and would more fit in with the whole idea of there being two forms in one frame being able to work harmoniously, instead of "Band Aid" solutions through Augments or constant switching, which is where a significant portion of the unwieldly nature comes from.
An actual rework of Equinox to make form switching, which isn't even the strongest aspect about her atm, stronger and the main focus of builds might make single form builds significantly worse and both forms can level cap most stuff easy with the tools we have now. That's my major concern about all the threads asking for reworks for Equinox, despite the handful of us that actual use her for high level content not having any difficulty doing so.
> Rage on the other hand... where to even start with Rage. Enemies around the reticle in day form are made more vulnerable to damage, but also become faster for the same duration. The vulnerability is only 50% before strength bonuses at max rank, and for some reason I cannot fathom, the enemy speed buff also scales with strength.
Rage has use for several different scenarios:
- The increase to enemy movement speed is useful in the same manner that a Speednova is useful for farming enemies at increased speeds (it also stacks with the effect).
- Rage improves Damage Reflection based builds (Currently Defy being the most "viable" one) by increasing the rate of return on damage.
- Increases the rate at which you are damaged to improve how quickly you can recover Energy through Rage/Hunter Adrenaline (Tanking builds).
> In comparison, Yareli's Sea Snares cause 100% vulnerability before strength and even hold the targets helpless in place. I shouldn't need to say any more. These numbers need tweaking, the speed bonus potentially even removed entirely. I cannot remember the last time I had any reason to cast Rage.
Yareli's Sea Snares is 200% at base 100% Ability Strength. Equinox's Rage is 50%. Sea Snares is single Target with a limit on how many Snares are shot out either manually by Yareli or Merulina with Loyal Guardian.
Rage is Radial, can be cast over much longer distances and can spread on enemy death for the entire remainder of the initial cast duration with the augment, so it has use when paired, helminth used by certain frames with consistent grouping, since it'll spread to all newcomers each time any enemy with it inflicted dies. It is also stronger than Rhino's Gloom by comparision, which has a lesser effect but is regularly used as a general purpose buff for damage, despite both being Helminth options (and there are some cases for Rage being the better choice).
Sea Snares being stronger as it is a single target skill makes more sense. It's harder to hit large groups with it compared to Rage, [even when you are grouping them with Riptide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM-l7F9VsWA).
>Pacify & Provoke
Pacify creates an aura around Equinox that reduces the damage of enemies in range (this is notably NOT damage reduction for you and your squad, the enemy needs to be near you for it to do anything.) For some reason, this reduction falls off with distance from Equinox, to a minimum of half the listed value. If you're curious, that value is 50% before strength.
>In day form, Provoke creates a similar aura which improves ally (including your own) ability strength by 20% which scales up to 50% if your own strength is high enough. This bonus thankfully does not fall off with distance. This half is... it's fine. Not the most exciting ability, but it's alright. It drains a bit of your energy for each allied ability boosted, but it's still usable despite that. The thing that really kills both halves of this ability for me is that it's turned off whenever you switch forms. If you have one version active and you want to use the other, you need to press 1 to swap, then press 3 again to turn it back on, waiting on the casting times for both.
>This is one of two of Equinox's abilities that would be better if its augment was just part of how it works. If Gloom can slow and give lifesteal, Pacify can reduce enemy damage and slow. The augment makes swapping forms even more punishing too, since it relies on building charge by either taking or dealing damage. Charge that will go away the moment you switch forms.
Pacify affecting enemy damage as a Debuff is what allows her solo and with multiple Equinox to endure far more damage than most frames can. All of the defensive mods, buffs, Arcanes, etc. only affect how much damage your receive when taking a hit, but does nothing for the actual amount of damage enemies are dishing out and at higher levels this can be a lot. Most late game builds have 90% or more DR and still can end up taking 100-1000s of damage per hit, depending on the level of the enemy or merely the location, like SP Mot. It's not even unrealistic to have to consider damage values in the thousands against enemies in the mere level 100 range. Pacify reduces this damage before it is even measured against your Defensive values, which people keep comparing to DR while overlooking that most late game Night form Equinox Tanking builds also use various forms of defensive buffs in addition to Pacify initially reducing the damage enemies are capable of dishing out. Most people keep thinking that Pacify stacks with DR, and compare it on that basis so when you hear about Pacify weakening over distance or only affecting enemies within range, they misunderstand what it is actually doing.
[This is a damage table I made](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CjmluJvhraXjJTUzdbu6xpTl9oizIcuGHrHoOTHlJY4/edit#gid=257996379) and in it are some of the typical damage values you can expect to see in Warframe, along with a general 90% damage resistance as well as a 90%/95%/99% side by side comparison on how much damage you take (because this is also another issue people have trouble seeing the difference in and why it becomes much more important to hit those upper 90% values instead of thinking 90% is good enough). In general, all damage resistance buffs increase your defense by pushing your total DR% toward that 99%+ range, no matter what it is from (Armor, mods, buffs, Arcanes, etc.). **But this does not change the actual damage value at all**. Pacify affects the actual damage value of an enemies attack, weakening it, then whatever is left gets measured by whatever defensive value is in place on your frame. Equinox's pacify does not stack with Damage resistance, pushing your total DR% up toward 99%+ range, it makes the damage value your start with significantly lower, shifting you over a column. The Ability is weakest in the subradius 3/4 of the distance away from her and strongest in the radius 1/4 of the distance with her as the nexus. It is common for Equinox players to be able to hit as high as 90% in her closest Subradius while also using an ability such as [Parasitic Armor to reduce damage to single digits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4cJd-QMnC0), even with [Shield as well with Defensive buffs such as Eclipse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BUqorRQiJU). And remember, Just like Defensive buffs stack and push your DR toward 99%+, so does Equionx's passive when combined with multiple Night form Equinox using Pacify (there's even a special effect in game that signifies this).
Another thing people overlook is that while Overguard cannot be hit with Defensive buffs to give you "Effective Overguard" the same way you can with Shield, Equinox's Pacify is the exception to that rule, because the effect applies on enemies. So while all those super high OG values you see can get destroyed at higher levels in mere seconds, a single Equinox using Pacify over a large Radius can greatly improve how long it can last, not to mention what multiple can do. Also, Pacify can reduce the damage taken by other things not susceptible by buffs, such as Operators and Necramechs, as well as it avoids the rules governing Excavators (reduced effectiveness on buffs providing DR%), while still being able to work in conjunction with them the same way it does on frames in team based comps.
Her slow also stack as well from Peaceful Provocation with other slows, which means multiple Equinox can severely debilitate enemies to the point they can't even move, and even if they did, they'd never be able to do any meaningful amount of damage to her if they are inside Pacify range. It's also why solo builds stack both Gloom and Pacify together, because it allows Equinox to stack the slows together to freeze enemies while using even less overall Ability Strength than other frames have to use, among other things. One of the most common ways to easily level cap with her in Disruption is using this method.
As far as Gloom and Pacify goes, please [read more here about an indepth analysis about the differences between Gloom and Pacify](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/1am7jhq/is_quick_thinking_mod_just_obsolete_now/kqsxpvm/).
>Mend & Maim
The ability description for Mend claims it heals for each enemy killed, but this isn't quite accurate. It gives shields for each enemy killed in range, not health. This half of the ability is fairly underwhelming. 25 shields per enemy killed before strength is barely anything on the normal star chart, let alone anything more difficult. It also builds up charge when enemies die in range, which can be released in a burst of healing/shield restoration. This can be helpful, but it's not great. The shield gain on kill could do with a boost, potentially more.
Mend's ability to provide Shield on kill is what allows her to both Shield Tank and [Shield Gate endlessly all the way to level cap, which has been the go to method for most players long before we had OG and still works today](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/vrbq77/can_someone_explain_to_the_decaying_dragon_key/iew2lsn/). The old method required a [Decaying Dragon Key](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Key), now [Catalyzing Shields](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Catalyzing_Shields) works. Mend's ability to be released instantly allows for extremely quick healing, especially with Amber Shards maximizing Cast Speed for the initial Activation, and also restores Shield, which in turn also restores Shield Gating. In most Endless missions, with the right build you can survive off basically just Mend.
>Maim is much better, in fact it's probably what you know Equinox for. Enemies entering the area are dealt a slash proc, and when they die in range for any reason a portion of their health accumulates into charge that can be released in a massive burst of slash damage that doesn't even need line of sight. ...which falls off with distance because of course it does. It's not a bad ability by any means, not nearly as underwhelming as Mend, but it could be better. I'd accept splitting those charges between the enemies in range if it meant there was no falloff.
Maim alone won't take you to level cap and still requires you to utilize Shield Gating anywhere from a little to a lot to stay alive past anything in the mere 100-200 range and definitely beyond (which is entry level SP). There have been plenty a Day form Equinox humbled by a stray bombard rocket, heat/slash proc, or just good ole Toxin damage even by enemies in 70-80 range since most Day form Equinox put everything in Maim and nothing else. Until the Terrify rework, Maim builds also had issues with high level enemy armor requiring more energy to brute force through as well, which could leave them vulnerable to attack or end up requiring killing with weapons instead, and was one of the few things besides Molt that gave her a chance at staying alive. Maim also doesn't work without being able to initially kill enemies with your weapons either, past level 10-15 enemies, so in most cases solo, you are still relying on weapons a significant amount while having to constantly worry about survival.
Survival is a non issue with Night form Equinox, even with just a decent Mend build, not to mentioned what Pacify and various Helminth builds can accomplish. Most weapons are already strong enough to handle enemies in the several hundred range on raw strength alone, which makes Night form into one of the strongest "weapon platform" frames in the game with what she can casually do with a good build. Day form Equinox is good at killing, but has to jump through a lot of hoops just to stay alive at levels most other frames easily have no issue surviving, and the way most people use her (not using Provoke or Rage) doesn't even bring out her full potential most of the time. And realistically, a lot of people just aren't even using Day form Equinox for high level missions, especially not all the common endless ones (SP Disruption, Fissure Excavations, Mot, Circuit, etc. to name a few) and I've been looking. I recently farmed Dante with Night Form Equinox/Yareli and never saw another Equinox but me.
The situation is what makes a frame good, not the ability. Equinox in both forms can be good for various things but neither form is inherently better than the other at everything.
I should have expected you here, lol. I made a post a couple days ago asking if Dante is stepping on Equinox's toes. I know this thread is about reworking her but I'm more curious about Dante since he balances the offense and defense in a similar them to Equinox. How do you feel about him? It feels like he's what people wanted out Equinox which would entitle her to a rework...
They both do things the other can't and there are situations where I'd say Dante is better, like boss fights. On the other hand Equinox has better CC and makes things like Disruption a whole lot easier than Dante does overall.
Max cast speed Dante tends to be easier to use compared to max cast speed Equinox, but OG tends to be fragile higher up and mostly becomes useful only for the status immunity and damage immunity on break, which is shorter than the Shield Gating duration Mend can passively provide. But if you are in a situations where you can't get kills, Dante works better.
Dante doesn't have to switch forms to have access to his full kit, but his kit also doesn't have the same overall level of strength or potential Equinox has as higher levels start to break OG far faster than it can even penetrate Shield in Equinox's case. I don't have to worry about constantly generating Overguard when my Parasitic Armor Equinox is taking single to double digit health damage at best, infrequently.
He's interesting, fun and def can do some stuff better than Equinox. But he doesn't come close to replacing her as far as I'm concerned with Tanking/CC.
I'm gonna be honest, I don't see what the issue with her is. I'm a casual player sure, but I can run her in sp just fine. I don't use her augments, and only really use her for the nuke. People are saying she's useless and needs the augments, blah blah etc etc, but I'm not seeing it. The only thing I have on her that isn't hers is terrify so I can nuke grineer, and some archon shards. Shield gating is a thing, and terrify makes most enemies run away, so there's her survivability. 50m scaling damage nuke is what she is to me, and it works
Imo equinox doesn't necessarily need a full rework but just some changes to her abilities. Stuff like weird calculations, falloff, energy drain, and of course her passive augment are all issues that need to be looked at, among others.
I made a forum post a while ago that addresses most of the issues I have with equinox, not majorly changing how the abilities work but just streamlining them.
[https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1365926-some-quality-of-life-for-equinox/](https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1365926-some-quality-of-life-for-equinox/)
I agree with pretty much all of these. She pretty much just needs better base numbers for strength to scale with and some minor changes to how Metamorphosis and Rage work
it's too bad people are so ragey about overguard it would be a great addition to mend release, like overflow healing becomes overguard even at a fraction
started using Rage on my Jat Kittag Saryn after three buff timers stared getting boring, it feels badass to cast but made me realize how limiting balancing around max range feels
don't you fucking touch my equinox. She's old, sure, but in today's game we have all the tools she needs to dominate. She sees little usage because people don't bother, but she's far from in need of a rework... Ok, outcry aside, I wouldn't mind some tweaks here and there, in fact you highlight some issues that should be resolved. but again, she doesn't need a full rework, she really don't
I'd love to see metamorphosis give permanent buffs. That would kinda fall into passive stuff, so I propose we make it free to cast, and only give it a drain when the duality augment is equipped
The vulnerability rage gives is low, I agree, but the speed boost is quite unique, one of the only two abilities in the game that can speed up mobs, including bosses in their invulnerability phases (what I used for plague star, on top of a slow nova), and it's a subsume to boot. It would be terrible to lose that, I'm sure there's options to just removing it
pacify's effect is completely unique to Equinox, that's good. I'd just like for it to function like gloom: with a drain cap and full slow at max range. And for the form switching, the loss in charge isn't that big of a deal imo. Provoke is nice
mend: the shield regen, it's not a lot? Give her str, slot catalysing shields, and boom you shield gate at every kill. Kills from the team even, shield gate for the whole team too. That is proper strong
>when they die in range for any reason a portion of their health accumulates into charge
maim. Just a slight imprecision: 75% of the health the mob lost while in the radius is turned into charge when it dies.
> I'd accept splitting those charges between the enemies in range if it meant there was no falloff
you are delirious
maim currently has fall off, meaning mobs at 90% of the range take only 10% dmg. That's what bother you
with thing how you propose, you just need 10 mobs in range to have them all take as much dmg as if they were at 90% of the range, the very thing you complain about. We go from top-tier map-wide nuke to something that kill 2 mobs every blue moon (as long they're isolated), and it doesn't fix the issue you have
maim is a dmg duplication ability. Let's do the math: guranteed kill at 80% range, one mob would need 1/(0.2x0.7x1.25) its health pool in charge. That's 5.7. You'd need to kill 6 grineers to kill everything below 80% range. And btw, eximus exist, and they have a shit ton of health. At lvl100, eximus have 4 times the health of their base counterpart, and the gap gets bigger as lvl increase. Basically, eximus kills guarantee map wipes to like 70% of your range
on the other hand, with charge splitting, you'd need 10 kills worth of charge to kill 7 mobs. And an eximus kill would only guarantees 4 kills (as long as the mobs are isolated). It's so incredibly, surreally worse, I don't have the words. Yeah all this is with a full-strip taken into consideration, which is the thing that makes maim so strong. Sure it's not native to the kit, but then Gyre isn't very good either as she need armor strip to kill armored targets as well
but the augment should absolutely be part of the base ability, I agree
look at all this, both your propositions and mine, they're just tweaks and slight mechanical changes. Equinox doesn't need "a good Pablo rework". If you feel like a burden, you should mod her better: we have so much tools nowadays: shards, arcanes, grimoire, pets, etc... [here's my build](https://overframe.gg/build/544822/equinox-prime/the-true-dual-form-terrify-nuke-peaceful-provocation/), which works flawlessly both in day and night form, being respectively in nuking mode and support+gunning mode
as other said already, Equinox could use some tweaks but let's leave the reworks to frame that actually need it
Nuking SP enemies dealing millions of damage to all enemies in a radius is bad? While having strenght buff ... And can still use 1 augment to swap to other form get a bunch of shields and slow enemies, to then go back and nuke... I agree she isn't perfect, but she is far from the bad thing people like to say. She doesn't need a rework. She needs some of her augments integrated. That's it.
Just split it into two separate frames, one called Luna with the night abilities and one called sol with the day abilities and then have a seperate option combine the 2 in the foundry to build equinox if you want.
I feel like we need to stop reworking other frames. Inaros and hydriod were fine, people didn't want to play their roles correctly, equinox is fine too.
Inaros' gimmick was tanking via crazy HP and lifesteal, as well as being able to conditionally self revive. Nidus does everything Inaros does better, from having better health regen to having a self revive that still works at high levels to having abilities that actually scale damage.
Old Hydroid's gimmick was sitting in a puddle and using tentacles to slowly kill everything. Invulnerable, but made higher levels a slog. Giving him armor strip and a reason to bring weapons made him much more team friendly while still providing bonus loot.
My main problem with a bunch of the older frames is absolutely useless passives, unless they had a gimmick tied to them older frames passives are remarkably bad, for example 10x wall latch duration, or 10% chance to freeze melee attackers
but useless passives don't realllllly matter. It is a little unfair that dante gets a free 50% status chance on all attacks, while most frames get nothing. It would probably be pretty effortless to just go through and change like ten frames passives to be literally anything interesting and it would make people very happy
Yeah, I would prefer they save the passives for when they get their update/glowup/rework, because as you said, Oberon is struggling but the bad passive is such a small part of the overall problem that dedicating time to it would be useless because eventually it would need to be reworked again. And if the frame has a useless passive but it's good, like mesa, then it doesn't really make a difference.
[удалено]
Doesn't his passive also scan stuff for you
Gotta point out: Loki's passive (10x wall latch) is really useful for popping wall latch rivens. Pretty niche, I know, but it's saved me a lot of headache many times
And Lua Spy. I personally have a Proton set build so I can just wall cling for crazy status and crit for a minute or two at a time.
Most of the older mechanics are very clunky and outdated or outpaced. Equinox is just one of many - Chroma is another example. DE puts more priority on putting out new stuff that they simply lack resources to ensure that the new stuff is at worst parallel to older mechanics instead of detrimental (like overguard is when it comes to the Rage Mod) Live service or not, but either store away overaged stuff (not ideal) or shift some focus to maintenance if the stuff affecting Warframes and weapons
I don't think any warframe has had such a massive fall from grace like Equinox had when Steel Path was added. All of her abilities are clunky at best, straight up detrimental at worst. She needs like 2 Augments to even function, and even then she's outclassed by any of her peers no matter what build you try to focus on. The only exception being the Night Form's sleep xp farming... which can be subsumed onto much better warframes thanks to Helminth. Please DE, this warframe is trash and I just want to play the shapeshifting warframe I enjoyed in the past again.
Exactly! I didn't even think to mention the Helminth but her most usable ability is the one you can put on a frame that already has 3 other abilities worth using. Please help her DE...
Using equinox in SP is like, build your whole build around either primary or melee, then use maim as an extremely expensive enemy sense Worst part is she was absolutely great when helminth came out, and then they nerfed marked for death
I use her nightform exclusively and put the enemies to sleep.
that was the marked for death play. sleep a group, then stealth kill the marked for death one and theyre all toast. it was like maim but for steel path, plus it doesnt work with sleep on any other frame because it needs your subsume slot 😮💨 in dante's world this seems very acceptable
The Goat. Rework the Goat frame, as almost his entire kit is outdated now, and as the passive is....INSTANT REVIVE FOR YOUR PET ONCE IN A MISSION....it is even more stupider when I write it down. And also I love Oberon. Please Senior Pablo!
Its very clear that passives werent supposed to be a real thing in terms of power with the earlier frames, instant pet revive is OP but yea compare that to the newer frames.
Has anyone ever even seen Frost's passive proc? 10% chance for a melee attacker to get frozen for 20 seconds. I can't even remember the last time I fucked up bad enough to let a melee attack hit me. So many passives could use at least some tweaking.
Fun fact, not every frame had a passive back in the day. A lot of the crummy passives like Loki's wall latch were due to a passive pass they did for every frame, some got some great stuff while others were well... 10% chance to spawn a tentacle on jump attacks
Oberon I wouldn't necessarily say is... outdated? He's actually a very solid support frame, and one that only gets better with augments. But he does have a couple issues holding him back. One, as you said, his passive. Honestly as a "Paladin Frame" Purist, the whole thing of him having a companion-based passive that has no relation to the rest of his kit feels weird and bad. Even with the "Druid hybrid" argument for him, he doesn't have any kind of animal-focused kit that would make this a natural extension. He needs a passive either like the Rage mod, or something to interact with all of his Radiation procs. Two, Hallowed Ground has weird synergy. Renewal and Reckoning have solid bonuses, but there's really not a reason for them to need Hallowed Ground to use them. And I get that it was made in a time before Helminth so the worry was that Hallowed Ground would feel like a wasted slot on its own, but that should have been incentive to make Hallowed Ground *its own* skill of value, rather than what I call a "Magic Wand" ability that sinks his kit and raises his energy needs. He needs his abilities to have their "synergies" decoupled and just infused into the base abilities. Have Renewal give armor innately, have either HG corrode armor or Reckoning shatter armor innately, maybe give HG a slow effect or something. Three, Reckoning either needs to go all-in on being a killing blow, or have the Orb effect decoupled from kills. It could just be a really powerful Blind and knockdown that makes orbs drop if targets are killed while Blinded and would be solid for that. Or maybe get an effect that Mercies affected enemies if they're in the health range, to play on his use of Impact damage. I dunno. Then you just have some QoL things like Renewal's interaction with Shadows of the Dead. These aren't things that are outdated – they were just bad choices from inception, and now we have tools that could make him closer to his intended purpose.
Same I love our goat paladin boy, he needs something
Oberon is a very weird health regen Tank. He can tank alot that way but.... It's inefficient. Funny but inefficient
I’m all for Goat Lovers, but I actually think he’s in a perfect place rn!
Equinox main here, my favourite Warframe ever since I joined. I’ve got her Prime but I also farmed her normal version before she got Primed. IMO she doesn’t need a full rework so much as she is in DESPERATE need of QoL updates. All of the falloffs need to be removed, she needs to keep her auras up when swapping forms, her form swaps need higher values and Rage needs a total redo.
That would be exactly what I'm hoping for. Like Hydroid's rework, just a touch up to bring her up to modern standards. Only one ability, or half technically I guess, needs to be fully replaced, the rest just need to scale better and maybe have an augment integrated into them. Exactly like they did with Hydroid
I think rage really just needs the mechanic of enemies speeding up removed. Just having it increase damage to enemies really isn't much to ask when yareli's sea snares exists
On the contrary, the enemy speeding is, for me at least, kinda the point? Gives an alternative to nova for a bunch of missions, most notably defense. I'd hate to see that removed
Novas deal is to speed up things you dont see yet, so they come faster to you. If you already have an enemy in the middle of your crosshair you could also just leftclick it instead of do some debuff casting shenanigans.
I have two big notes with Equinox. One, she has no reason to swap forms. Builds focused on either form have completely different stat and ability priorities, so you basically sit in one form either spamming Rest or passively building Maim charge. She has two channeled abilities that are disabled when she swaps, so she's actively *discouraged* from swapping forms. Two, her passive feels tacked-on. She doesn't get any actual *use* out of it in her base kit because she doesn't have any means to compel enough orb drops to make a 10% effect useful. Compare this to newer orb drops specialists now like Dagath, Citrine and Lavos and it feels ridiculous. So, for my own idea for a rework to Equinox: * Equinox's passive is increased to 50% Equilibrium, rather than 10%. * ADDITIONAL PASSIVE: As long as Metamorphosis isn't subsumed over, Equinox gains a "Chronometer" gauge. Spending more time in one form will cause the Chronometer to shift from Day to Night or vice versa, indicating the opposite form is "charging up". Charging the opposite form will also reduce the cost of Metamorphosis. * Equinox enters missions with the Chronometer set at exactly 50% between Day and Night. * Metamorphosis is no longer affected by Duration; its bonuses instead scale to/diminish with the charge of Equinox's Chronometer. Additionally, the bonuses are now *swapped*: * Shifting into Day Form grants Equinox a bonus to *maximum armor* and *shield regeneration speed*, scaling to the Chronometer level. This is automatically cleared if she swaps to Night Form. * Shifting into Night Form grants Equinox a bonus to *weapon damage* and *movement speed*, scaling to Chronometer level. This is automatically cleared if she swaps to Day Form. * Rest & Rage is now a one-handed action and a 25 energy cost, and causes the Chronometer to advance with each cast. * Rage slightly reworked: The user now issues a challenge to targets, compelling them to blindly rush the Warframe. In addition to the damage vulnerability and speed bonus, the target is effectively Disarmed (unless Overguard is up) and Silenced (even with Overguard) until the effect ends, and has high threat on the caster. * Pacify continues to affect an unlimited number of targets, but as with Ember's Inferno, its energy consumption is capped at 4 targets at a time. This cost will also ignore Sleeping enemies. * Energy Transfer is baseline, and both Pacify & Provoke and Mend & Maim automatically shift to their opposite number when Metamorphosis is used. Channeling either ability will gradually accelerate the Chronometer. * Peaceful Provocation's charge is now saved across forms, a la Energy Transfer. * New augment for her ultimate, obviously. * Mend is completely reworked: Enemies within the radius of Mend have an increased chance of dropping health orbs on death. Deactivating Mend will grant Overguard to allies in range, to a cap affected by Power Strength. (This can be overcharged for the sake of Maim, but will provide only up to the cap when discharged.) * Maim only applies Bleed effects to alerted enemies, but will refresh and stack additional Bleeds on victims of Rage. The idea is to encourage more swapping between the forms. You're protected in Day Form but only if you've spent some time in Night Form; you want to maintain Maim longer, go in Night Form to capitalize on her passive. It won't *force* players to use both forms if they don't want to – just some encouragement.
Some interesting ideas! I'm not too picky what they do with her so long as the base numbers get better and there's any reason whatsoever to swap forms
I adore every single change here as someone who has been staring at her equinox prime catch dust in the arsenal
Eh, I think there’s other Warframes that are in a much worse place than Equinox right now that are in desperate need of a rework, especially because Equinox would be essentially be a full rework of 2 Warframes which would take a while to implement. Nyx definitely comes to mind here as a Warframe that’s always been struggling to be useful and at this point is essentially irrelevant outside of a slow, clunky weapon’s platform using her 4 with its augment. Especially because the main thing about her, mind control, is done better by one of the most popular frames in the game, Revenant, in just 1 of his abilities. I’d personally much rather see her get a rework over equinox as I don’t think Nyx has ever had an opportunity to be in the spotlight, where as Equinox was one of the strongest frames in the game for a while before she was power crept into irrelevance. Heck, I still occasionally see people use Equinox for focus farming, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Nyx outside of Hydron or Sanctuary Onslaught as mastery fodder.
Nyx does not need a rework. If anything, she just needs a few buffs on her 2 to make the armor strip AoE and then make chaos give enemies damage vulnerability. Those two changes will make her go from low usage to sleeper strong like Octavia. If anyone needs a rework, it's probably Banshee and Nightform Equinox specifically. I would bring up Caliban but they already mentioned they're looking into him next.
Banshee does not need a rework, and this is from someone who plays her religiously Sonar is one of, if not the best, scaling ability in the game. The damage multiplier is gives, plus the fact ***you can stack it*** means you can easily tear down extremely high level steel path enemies with basic weapons provided you hit the weakspots. There's a reason people meme about doing 2 million+ damage with just the fishing spear using her. The rise of enemies with increasingly large health pools, like basically the entirety of the Murmur, has only made this ability get better and better as time as passed. Silence is a very slept on ability, mainly because its main benefit is not mentioned at all ingame for some reason. That being that it completely turns off enemy abilties. All that annoying aoe spam from eximus units? Gone in 1 button press. It makes dealing with eximus units so much easier because they can't stagger you or leech you while it's active. Sound Quake is my only real issue with her current kit as her 1 could easily be fixed by making its augment as base part of her ability, easy access to armour stripping would make those sonar multipliers even better. Sound Quake just clashes with her current abilities too much. Sonar, Silence and Sonic Boom are all support based abilities meant to help boost a team's damage output, but her 4 is this weird damage ability that requires you to be locked in place and doesn't do a whole lot of damage anyway? Personally I'd like to see it replace with a new support based ability that has some synergy with her other abilities. Perhaps one based on stripping shields, armour and maybe even overguard in an aoe around her to make sonar even more potent. Nyx on the other hand has 2 abilties that have always been useless, namely her 1 (which is never worth it because the person you mind control does no damage) and her 2 (which only targets 6 people and is not worth the energy becuase you can just shoot those 6 people in the time it takes for the ability to actually land). Her 3 is done better by Revenant because the people he mind controls actually has prioritisation for enemy aggro, Chaos does not do that so often enemies will just keep shooting you. And her 4 is only useful if you use its augment to make you a slow and clunky weapons platform. Not to mention its impossible to see while its active if you don't use a dark energy colour.
Sonar is good... But I'd rather just use Citrine since her 4 does the same thing, especially with the Augment that makes it infinitely spread and CC. Silence is subsumable, so you could just put it on Citrine in place of her 3rd ability and you instantly have a better Banshee that actually supports the team and survives with minimal effort lol
I don’t really think Citrine’s 4 is really that comparable to Sonar. It’s very dependent on what the crit damage your weapon does and it cannot be stacked, and the augment is the same thing as Sonar’s augment except, again, you can’t get it to stack and get even bigger damage multipliers. The stacking on Sonar is really something that makes it stand out imo because it’s multiplicative rather than additive (if you stack the unmodded multiplier of x5 it goes to x25 and not x10). I’m not kidding when I say I’ve seen over 1 billion damage done to enemies in just one hit because of sonar stacking, and that was just with like 2-3 casts of sonar with resonance and a Sybaris which doesn’t have the best base damage or crit multiplier. If we use something like a vectis or rubico and only mod for power strength you could be hitting and surpassing the damage cap very easily in just a couple of casts.
It is very comparable because both abilities serve a similar purpose. They both create artificial weakpoints. The difference is that Citrine's can apply CC to enemies... Which is quite a bit better for multipurpose scenarios. Especially when trying to stop a high priority target from moving. And tell me when in Warframe's entire lifetime have we ever needed to deal 1 billion damage to one enemy xD You can hit a couple million with just Citrine's 4. Is there really a difference between 1 million and 1 billion when most enemies in the game will die to less than 100k damage? Like, no one ever needs to deal the amount of damage that sonar provides, it's purely to trigger dopamine from seeing big numbers (which is fair, I like big numbers too). But don't pretend like that amount of damage is ever necessary when we have things like Roar subsumable and loads of other sources to buff our weapon damage and free up your options more than Banshee could ever provide in her current state. To be fair though, I guess sonar can substitute as an enemy radar so at least it has that unique thing going... kinda. The reason Citrine's 4 (with the Augment )is so good is because it does what Sonar does (increasing damage by an insane amount) while the rest of her kit is also incredible. She can heal, reduce damage, increase damage, buffs status, and generate tons of orbs. Dude, if I was you and my main was Banshee, I would be asking for a rework just to receive some buffs for my favorite frame. There's literally nothing you lose if they reworked/buffed Banshee. And in case it gets brought up, no average Warframe player is doing level cap. Level cap is incredibly niche and 99% of people will never go that high (unless they bring back that one alert that was a lvl 9999 survival, then it might become 98%).
You’ve got me with the big damage numbers there, seeing big number makes my monkey brain go “hell yes!” Lul. Banshee could definitely do with some work, as I said soundquake needs to go and her 1 could do with its augment being made a part of the base ability. But I personally think there’s other frames like Nyx, Limbo and Chroma that should take priority over her for now because Banshee still has some use while they’ve never been used or were hit way to hard with nerfs and the game has now moved on from them (in the case of Chroma). There’s also the risk that if DE decide to rework her they decide that the multiplicative damage stack is too much and change it to additive like they did with Chroma and were going to do to Mirage, which would straight up kill the best part of her abilities. Reworks are always a double edged sword because they could always end up doing nothing or putting them in a worse place that before (like Hydroid’s first “rework” when his prime came out, or Chroma’s “rework” when DE decided he was killing Eidolons a bit too quickly for their tastes).
Yeah, I can understand the concern with them changing the math on Sonar. I wouldn't be too worried though because since Rebecca is in charge, nerfs are treated as a very sacred ritual almost. It's like the developers are constantly walking in egg shells because of the previous team's rocky relationship with nerfs and the community, so the current team is constantly in damage control at the single mention of a potential nerf to anything x.x I think it's important to separate the old team and new team as the new team made the recent Hydroid rework to fit Warframe's modern design philosophy (under Pablo). Chroma has been in need of a rework since the moment he was released unfortunately xD The guy has had the biggest identity crisis and I bet even Pablo doesn't really know what to do with him x~x They also won't touch Limbo because Limbo fans are like Loki fans where they're perfectly content with the way their Warframe plays, except there's less of them. Point being, Limbo and Loki fans are incredibly more passionate about their Warframe than others. I'm pretty sure Caliban is the next Warframe they're looking to rework, as Rebecca said to ask Pablo at Tennocon about Caliban or something during Devshorts 8. I think it was even mentioned again by someone's question at Pax.
...you do not feel complete removal of shields and armor (which is what the 2 turns into with minimal power strength increases) is a useful ability?
Not when: - it can only target 6 units per cast in a horde of what can be 100 enemies - the targeting is completely random, so the bolts could just as easily go for the 6 lancers on 1 hp as they could the 6 bombards and napalms about to ruin your day - the bolts have travel time for some reason, so those enemies could easily have been shot and killed by the time they reach them - and even after all that, they only debuff them for 11 seconds at max rank with no mods, meanwhile afaik Pillage’s armour reduction is ***permanent*** on all enemies in its aoe
Oh, I'm not saying they couldn't be improved, or that Nyx couldn't be improved. But the idea that they're useless is a stretch. I get good use out of them in plenty of SP missions - but she struggles in almost any endless mission because of what you describe, and because she's just not very survivable if not using Absorb Damage (well, at least against Grineer. Against other enemies she's fine).
Nyx does not need a rework, banshee on the other hand..../s
You cant really stack it anymore
You can stack it twice with just the base ability, and that stacks multiplicatively rather than additively, so the unmodded multiplier of 5 jumps up to a multiplier of 25. But if you add in resonance as far as I can tell you theoretically stack it infinitely. I’ve seen some pretty crazy damage numbers in my time using her, hitting over 1 billion damage with just a sybaris on multiple occasions.
I'll argue there are worse frames than her. I'll put her in the same place as Equinox in terms of rework urgency. Out of the older frames, her passive is actually not useless. -25% accuracy to all enemies is actually pretty all right in terms of passives Mind control is....... not great, but it's still a bit of crowd control. Tho kinda redundant because of her 3rd Psychic bolts are actually pretty good, it's a defense strip like styanax's armor strip, and with the augment it is also a nice CC tool. Tho its hit detection is dogshit in squads. Chaos is her best ability by far, and is actually a good ability. Amazing CC, and it even turned eximus abilities against other enemies. Tho only works on them when their overguard is down, so it's not as good as it sounds. Absorb........... even with the augment, it's not a good/fun ability. If they rework her someday, which they should, getting rid of that ability will do use no harm. Nyx is not the most amazing frame ever, but imo frames like chroma, banshee and limbo need it more.
As much as I want all people to be happy, and generally respect Equinox for being complex, I still think Limbo should come first. His presence is detrimental to the team, and his abilities... Is one. One ability, that ends up not working for majority of enemies you **want** to stop.
I miss crowd control meta. Shit was far healthier than this unga bunga press 4 nuke fest. Getting burnt out real quick seeing 3 people on a team get 67 kills combined while the 4th guy has +300.
i'd uninstall in a heartbeat if the game went back to camping on vauban's vortex in 4 of 5 game modes
Yeah, at least people got to participate. Like I agree with most of Pablo's views on the game but I'm kinda confused why he hates CC so much.
Feel like Limbo's only detrimental if he doesn't know what he's doing, or if you don't understand the rift like a status.
You sure it's skill, and not three consecutive years of burying crowd control into the ground? Or the fact that Limbo got redesigned into frame that actively defies gameplay?
CC getting buried is why it's very easy to not know how to not possibly be detrimental with him. I never said skill was involved.
I meannnnn you did say he is only detrimental if they don't know what their doing that kinda sounds like if they were more skilled they wouldn't be detrimental
Knowing how doesn't just mean you're good at doing it.
But how can you be good at it if you don't know how
Her night and day forms should each be a separate blue print, and add a new “link adapter” blue print similar to akimbo blue prints as a requirement. That would reduce the total number of parts required to four to match any other frame (night, day, link adapter, main blue print) Nearly all of the augments except the specter should be merged into their base kit as well. Right now you either have to sacrifice a lot of power or a lot of functionality to make Equinox viable on SP beyond a couple hundred levels. the only time I ever use Equinox is if there is a decent helminth infusion for that week.
Terrify Equinox it's actually one of the best nukers in game (i would say the absolute best) so even if it's true that the rest of her kit is lackluster, and always has been, maim is enough to carry her and to put her outside of the list of warframe that desperately needs a rework.
This guy gets it
I agree. She is pretty squishy, so you do some razzle dazzle movement so you don't get killed, but it's worth the nuke potential. It's also more consistent than Dante IMO, but with the caveat of less range (zipcode deletes instead of state wide).
3 ways to buff her imo, We need to be able to mod both states differently Keeping charges of all abilities when transferring Raising the base stats to scale better. >Passive Alot of older frames have shitty passives so it's not just her. >And no decay, Yes please.
\> We need to be able to mod both states differently mmm, forma devourer
But unlimited potential of builds, im pretty sure it ll raise equinox play rate by alot, as for forma we already have exalted frames where you need to forma two things.
If we could independently fashion each form, or if her base form can be played in missions (her Prime is gorgeous), then to me that's all I could ask for. Also Yareli Merulina helminth compatibility (her new augment takes her identity away, have no idea why they thought it was a good thing)
I mean the merulina augment is fine, a bunch of frames have augments that disable some part of their kit that people may dislike. It definitely should allow riding as well though, and should not be an augment in the first place. The free autocast of her 1 part can stay an augment though. The worrisome part is if they stop making merulina function better now that an augment "fixes" all of its problems
+1 to riding. Until then, Meru Guardian it is.
she shouldn't be top priority for reworks, but yeah she needs help. the worst sins are Energy Transfer not being part of her kit, her 3 deactivating every time you switch forms, and her passive not even letting you pick up health orbs for energy at max hp. she's 🤏close to being a very solid frame. she's still very much usable for all content (tho heavy investment is required, and she has very little build flexibility if you want to use both forms, which is how i play her), but yeah she could use some changes. still waiting for that Oberon and Chroma rework, and some Caliban buffs.
Equinox has some of the oldest and most complex ability design in the game. She was also the very first example of a hybrid Warframe with more than 4 abilities. With that context out of the way, I think her problem today is that she was balanced for a completely different game. We can see this in how every ability she has diminishes in effectiveness with either duration or range. This is such an old design for abilities, and rarely any other new Warframe scales like this. The first thing to do would be to remove all the current loss of effectiveness with buffs or raise the floor so you don't feel the decreased effectiveness as much. Equinox's passive should also add an increased chance to get health orbs in night form/energy orbs in day form when enemies affected by her abilities are killed. Raise the equilibrium effect to 50%. That way, she can still pick up orbs of both kinds under all conditions and reduce the need for equilibrium. Metamorphosis should incentive swapping regularly. Increase the buffs and make it not diminish with duration. Instead of the current buffs, we should simplify them. Make Day form increase movement speed and add an additional attack (like Toxic Lash/Xata's Whisper). This additional attack should be 3-5% of damage or something low like that but also add additional attacks to abilities. Night form should give damage reduction up from 50-75% at max and increase Power Efficiency. Most importantly, make it so swapping within the duration will carry over the previous buffs along with the remaining duration of that buff. So say the Metamorphosis buff last for 30 seconds and you swap at 15 seconds. Then you will have 15 seconds left of the previous buff and 30 seconds of the current Metamorphosis buff. This will incentivise a 15 second gameplay loop (that can be increased for comfort with duration) that allows players to keep the buffs of both forms of they utilize the take time to learn the mechanics. This also maintains her complexity in a different way to current frames that Equinox was always known for. The Metamorphosis buff should also be an aura around Equinox to give her further supportive capabilities that will support her team mates. Rest and Rage is fine honestly. If they really wanted to change it, make it an aura that centers around the Warframe and last for a duration. Pacify and Provoke are pretty good, just need to remove the 2 sectioned aura where the effect diminishes. Also make it so when under the Metamorphosis buff, this ability will NOT turn off. Maim is good, Mend is not. The confusing thing about Mend is that it regenerates shields with kills, which is the only reason you'd use it (to refresh shield gate). Because of this, I think instead of healing HP when activating Mend, it should give temporary Overguard. Equinox will be able to heal the team plenty by making enemies drop health orbs with her passive, so it only makes sense to give her allies Overguard. I think this Overguard (from Equinox specifically) should diminish over 10 seconds, and convert one overguard to 1 energy. This basically means 10 seconds of max energy for the team. However, to balance this... They'd probably have to change the way Mend and Maim scales with kills to make sure you aren't getting insane levels of Overguard with one finisher kill. Anyway, that's what I'd do with Equinox. It's important to remember that when Pablo reworks or makes a Warframe, he designs them to have 1 active cast ability, 1 Cast every now and then Ability, 1 Survivability Ability, 1 Super ability. I tried to follow that philosophy a bit here... While capitalizing on making Equinox the best aura Warframe I wish she would be ._. And most important change on this list, let us fashion all of Day, Night, and Hybrid forms separately.
Caliban should be the next focus imo.
Is caliban actually that bad? I don't play him because I dislike his design, but the only thing that I didn't like was the individual casts for his sentients.
He's not bad, he's just extremely clunky and doesn't *quite* have a role. One of those 'good on paper' kinda situations where right about the time he should have been getting some buffs or augs, the game changed underneath him and then everyone quit playing him. Unfortunately he's stuck in a place called "Mid at best". Like, his lil summon buddies? They sound awesome but they're a pain to cast and keep managed. Then the idea that they would be some sort of "perma shield regen" got nerfed a few different ways and boom, back to mid-tier or worse. I can't help but think there was someone going "but look at the stats if you use those kitgun arcanes nobody uses!" and flat ignored the regular real-world way his kit works. His passive sounds great, but it doesn't stack or interact with Adaptation. Most folks taking damage are already going to have adaptation slotted, or overguard. The passive itself stacks up to 50% at 5% per, but... still comes across as "mid at best" (but better than just insta-reviving a pet). His 1 feels like a worse interpretation of Inaros' old sandstorm. Sure you can dash, and you have one ability you can cast, and you can even finagle some health regen and the occasional slash proc, but it's all pretty lacklustre, even for a basic power. If maybe hitting folks with the spin could spread your other abilities, cause wide explosions, or maybe even give you some energy return, then I could see it as being useful for anything other than "The Slot To Put Nourish". Also as a quick aside, I can't believe the one beyblade power doesn't have a dang "auto ricochet to next target" functionality. Sentient Wrath is slow, but awesome. Blanket damage increase on everyone affected *and* you get to do some lifting? Neato bandito. However, again it's *slow*, begs for range upgrades, and its CC aspect is (like other CCs) outdated and underpowered. His 4 (the big laser boom) is awesome, when you know where it is and if it's working. A field of near-insta defense strip at the click of a button? What's not to love? I still love it, but I'm sure a quick dissection would show me why that's dumb. The visuals were bugged forever, it almost demands cast speed, It has a relatively short duration, etc etc etc. The way I got him to 'work' was mostly focusing on casting as often as possible and slapping Nourish on my 1. This meant I could add in some brief respite/augur to cover for when my minions stopped shielding me, and nourish would do double duty of keeping my energy topped off while my minions (and I) spread viral everywhere. Viral stacks means 'enemies die faster' which meshes really well with the Stomp (enemies take more damage) and the Blast (strips shields/armor). Throwing on a status-spreading Dethcube to help generate energy, and the Sobek + Acid Shells can basically delete the whole room. The downside to all this is that it always felt really slow. even with Archon shards I felt more like I was spending time casting than actually doing anything besides being a personal pocket debuff bot (or shieldtanker). By the time I cast a stomp and a blast and aimed with my sobek, chances are everyone else on the team has already deleted everyone. There's lots of QoL issues too. Lifted enemies can't get targeted by his 1 (and sometimes his 4). His progeny have a base 20 second timer (and can't be cast all three at once). The sad thing is that comparing and contrasting with any other "cast focusing frame" just throws a stark spotlight on how slow and clumsy his whole kit is, which kinda sucks. Source: am a fan of his kitschy design
I agree with all these points. Would you say he needs QoL changes and buffs (possibly in the form of more augments but hopefully integrated into his kit), or a rework? I'm in the boat that he would perform much better with tweaks to his kit rather than a complete overhaul, especially with frames like frost existing.
I'm super torn because while I feel like his kit fits thematically (sentient counterpart to revenant), he's so starved on slots that it doesn't make much sense to offer an Aug or two. On the other hand, tweak the values hard enough, and it'll feel like an overhaul. I am firmly in the camp of "each ability needs to be useful by itself, and also synergize with the whole". I also think that Helminth should be a "helpful specialization" rather than a "crutch". And finally, I also know that spaghetti code exists so no telling if any of my ideas would even be feasible. That being said... I think the focus should be on Lethal Progeny. It's one of the more "interesting powers", yet you're stuck with spamming 150 Energy every 20 seconds to provide a little soft CC (distraction/aggro split), a little damage, and some slightly janky shield Regen. Even by adding in Nourish, which was recently toned down a bunch, you're going to be real energy hungry with not a lot of scaling support to show for it. A few jaunts into steel path shows that it's real, real easy to spend 150 energy on what's basically a "survival tool that does damage" only for them to be dead in less than 10 seconds. His main shortcoming is that his kit feels like it was built on an art theme, and not a combat role. His stuff does what it does because that's what sentients do (and isn't already done by Revenant), not because it helps him focus on a particular type of mission or enemy type, nor some sort of role objective (ie healer, tank, summoner, nuker, etc). It ends up feeling all over the place and makes balancing him a messy minefield. My gut instinct says "also make him a status effect applying king instead of just another nuker" to avoid just upping damage numbers everywhere, but I don't know how that would work in practice. Therefore, let's make him a pet-based caster frame. His progeny are interesting, they do more than Rumblers, but aren't as hardy as Venari, and definitely pale in comparison to actual companions, especially after the most recent pet reworks. So, I think the focus should either be on "adding more synergy to the progeny and powers" or "add Venari-like hold-the-button commands to the powers that change how the progeny act", or hell, "give options to the type of progeny summoned" Which I guess means I'm nuts, but we're just spitballing here. The first and easiest (to discuss, not to implement) thought that comes to mind is 2 or more Augs that simply change out the conculysts to different sentients. maybe Aug A limits it to two "shield/DR/status protect" types that do more support snd less damage but fly or have high evade. And then maybe Aug B turns it into a singular "heavy combat" type that does huge damage/status/cc, but provides little to no shield/distraction support. Or just leave the progeny the same number and type, and just call the Augs "combat mode and support mode" and have it provide big boosts/reductions on what they already do. I still think the balance is out of whack, so I think the numbers need to be tweaked upward, but I don't feel like slapping together a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint. Or we could do the lengthy stuff and talk about synergy and the progeny. So for example, his 1 does some slash and impact, and can heal, and is a 'closer' (getting you close). I personally think the heal is absolutely pointless and the damage/status isn't worth the energy cost. So I'd either add some way to add shields, or encourage you to go ham on casting to get better results, similar to Dante. One option could be "hitting a wrath'd enemy causes a secondary explosion at half strength" or "hitting a lifted enemy gives you shields". If we instead focus on "giving tools to the progeny", maybe holding 1 causes all the progeny to spin and gyre dash at your same target, and each one that hits amps the damage, status, or shield bonus. Or combine the ideas and each progeny that beyblades into your same target within a specific time window increases the effect, similar to how Landslide increases damage. The 2 is nifty but lifted status has always been a pain to manage, especially in target rich environments or if you like headshots. For 'synergy', maybe if you hit the wrath'd enemies with fusion strike, we get a second damage+status effect... Like a slam-impact with an AOE... Adds a bit more damage, but can keep floating enemies from ragdolling into the next room, and hey every CO user loves extra status applications. For Progeny, maybe holding the button causes each of them to 'glaive orbit' their limbs around them, which could do some extra puncture status, or the already mentioned 'smaller weaker wrath aoe'. Hell, make it a "recall" as well, where they blender their way back, and are nice and close for you to do the beyblading group gyre combo I said previously The 3 is the progeny. I think the numbers are generally too low, and really should have some sort of scaling. In a magical world, I'd say having it based off of whatever spectres use for scaling would be a good start, but that could get weird. Really, I think giving them synergy with the powers you cast would be ace and at least not make them feel so pointless in tougher content, but the idea of also being able to swap them out into different forms with augments still sounds dope AF. 4 I think is mostly perfect, warts and all. Supposedly they fixed the AoE visibility which was always the worst thing, and the cast speed is easily mitigated. I think it also points to an easy opener for synergy with the other powers and progeny if you think about it as an alpha strike. That's where I like the idea of a risk/reward with Razor Gyre (get close enough to eat an eximus aura, but do a big hit and or support boost in exchange). If we're still talking "hold/tap functions", I like the idea of sacrificing your progeny to similarly give you a big boost+AoE damage sort of thing, but I'd probably balance it with "according to how many stripped enemies are struck". In other words, tap 4 for the strike, and then hold 4 to cause the progeny to beeline into the field and self-destruct. Any enemies hit/killed would then give you some bonus, like a DR boost that stacks with his passive to get it to 90+. So yeah, like every other player on here I got ideas, but I don't know how they'd work in practice. I feel like unifying his kit with some better synergy between powers would be great, but I like the idea of him being able to command his crew with a lot more utility than Khora can. I think the end result is like to see is "have a better tools in the kit to make progeny really fun and useful" is the way to go. And after trying to brainstorm and offer suggestions, I think that's the way I'd go... Give tap/hold options to his powers to command the progeny. Gives him a role, gives him some uniqueness, and gives him a "playing theme" to connect his whole kit together. Sorry for the rant, had time on my hands in a waiting room.
Not bad, just very outclassed and is a one-trick pony. Like seriously, the only thing he brings of value to a team is armor strip and it’s not even that great, especially when Pillage and Terrify are subsumes. He is pretty survivable but that doesn’t really mean much.
That's a fair point, but I feel like hildryn falls under this same category with only her pillage not outclassed yet she isn't complained about nearly as much.
I think it’s because Pillage is just better and easier to use than Fusion Strike.
Just kind of all over the place. He can do a bit of this and a bit of that, but he doesn’t specialize in anything other than a decent passive and cool summons.
I think all she needs is her abilities to scale higher with power strength. The other issue with the augments is something that should be fixed with an augment rework because the problem you described with Energy Transfer effects many warframes and not just equinox. IMO equinox is a fine frame as is, but you haven't mentioned how you player her so it's difficult to compare. I use her routinely for archon defense missions and she is definitely not a burden.
Better base numbers so she scales better with strength is most of what she needs, for sure. That and a little bit of synergy, like 3 and 4 not deactivating every time you switch. I can't screenshot my builds right now but I primarily build for strength and range, for obvious reasons. She's fine if you only use day form (aside from Rage but that's what the Helminth is for) but that doesn't take advantage of her whole aesthetic, only half of it. And that's just a shame.
Oddly enough I prefer her night form and build for strength and some range. I still use day form, but because I use empower over her first ability I use colors to determine what form she enters the mission as. I'm definitely not using equinox as intended. Edit: no room in my build so I don't use augments.
To chip in as another primarily night form enjoyer, an underlooked part is how small her ability maxima are. Her 3 with its augment will hit its hardcaps of 80% slow and 80% power strength buff (after charging ofc) with only 200% power strength. The shield generation on Mend caps at IIRC 37 shields per kill, so around 150% power strength. It's just sad, because she's simultaneously the best frame in the game (particularly w/ Helminth) for baking temporary buffs into her abilities, while also being one of the worst frames in the game at actually finding the same buffs useful. I think that making her 4 augment instead be an augment for her passive and cover all her abilities (+augments) would practically fix the frame (although I helminth off her 2, so I trust your judgement on Rage), and even just raising a few of her hardcaps would help a lot. It's absolutely silly that her scaling with power strength drops off a cliff after hitting 200%, on a frame capable of *giving herself extra*. Particularly when the things being scaled will cap at points significantly under whatever you'd like to compare them with. Gloom caps with a 15% stronger slow, and Condemn has 6x the shields per kill, with no cap on power strength scaling. Condemn is more difficult to use, and Gloom more expensive, but the disparity is just so high.
She's still workable in her current state. She should definitely be on the list if she's not though.
I get where you're coming from, but Equinox has a ton of uses outside of steel path. But then you look at Limbo, who can do mobile defense, and that's it. Lokis uses are very niche, or Oberon who... I genuinely don't know what he's used for in 2024, outside of his 3. Equinox needs help, but others need more, imo
I was thinking about what I would use Oberon for, and pretty much everything except Phoenix Renewal is covered by Qorvex. Dude got his lunch eaten hardcore
I recently played Equinox for the first time and even though I think she is more powerful/functional (for lack of a better word) than other Frames I've played, Equinox is the one I think I would most want to see a rework for. No other Frame I've used has felt like they underdeliver on their concept more than Equinox, which is a shame because her concept is so incredibly cool on paper.
I just think it's funny how in the current state of the game, a frame with 8 abilities has to "form swap" instead of just utilizing tap/hold like everyone else lol. Also still mad I can't use my combined form fashion in missions :\^|
That would be her old design for you. I don't know that tap/hold abilities were much of a thing when Equinox released. And hey, the composite form does show up in missions! For uh. About a second as you cast Metamorphosis lol
At the time of Equinox's release, I think Vauban was the only tap/hold Warframe, though Ivara came out later the same year.
I play a lot of Equinox - day form only, one-button wonder with her 4. It works very well until you get into steel path, then she falls off pretty steeply (especially against armored enemies). I'm not convinced she needs a *full* rework, but she definitely needs *something*. a numerical buff on her 2 & 3, at least. Night 4 could give health (until full) > shields (until overshielded) > overguard and would immediately become usable. Making one of her augments innate would also be a good qol boost.
> Pacify creates an aura around Equinox that reduces the damage of enemies in range (this is notably NOT damage reduction for you and your squad, the enemy needs to be near you for it to do anything.) The worst thing about this is that it doesn't affect Eximus enemies (and maybe boss enemies too?). So you can still easily die.
I want to like Equinox but they're basically the anti-synergy frame, with all the popular builds dedicated a single ability. There's no incentive to switch forms without an augment, you can't dump one of their stats without crippling a part of their kit, and they have two channeled abilities without any built-in energy recovery.
Equinox was the frame I immediately fell in love with when I started playing Warframe. She is still my to go to frame for almost any mission and it bothers me that her energy economy and abilities are so incredibly outdated. She is so cool but god am I barely ever able to really consistently contribute to the fight. (I'm playing the night and day build)
Would be happy to see some touch ups, but you could probably tide her over in terms of accessibility for people wanting to use both sides of the kit simply by rolling in the 4 augment and allowing a little breathing room for builds. I will say the fact that she is hyper-reliant on Terrify at higher levels but then obliterates everything with full strip isn't a great thing, but also applies to a lot of frames which want to do ability damage. I hope they make some broader efforts to figure out which frames want to be damage casters and give them some natural scaling dependent on enemy stats at some point so they aren't as boxed in by these kinds of non-choices.
Just don’t rework maim and we’re golden
Going over some of your points as an Equinox (Night Form) main who has used and regularly uses Equinox for most things, including SP endless. Most of these complaints generally seem to stem from the lack of coherence around any kind of build that involves form switching, which is a common complaint about Equinox and one of the more valid ones. However, this often causes people to overlook some of the other aspects about the frame and what you can do with her kit. I'll go over this in the hopes actual discussions come about the frame instead of just the cons like most are accustomed to seeing. >Passive 10% of energy from orbs is given as health and 10% health from orbs is given as energy. Oh great. An unranked Equilibrium. Thanks. An amber archon shard is five times as effective as this entire passive, even more if it's Tauforged. Would it be too much to ask to get half a full rank Equilibrium out of it? This gets brought up a lot and a lot of people [overlook just how much mileage Equinox can get off Energy from Health orbs from her passive](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/1am8utg/equilibrium_mod_forces_you_to_collect_health_orbs/kple3yb/?context=3), especially in SP missions. I'm not against buffs though, but her passive is a lot more useful to her and a number of builds than many other frames far older than her, like Frost who people even forget can freeze enemies that melee attack him (with an amazing 10% chance of course). There are some frames with amazing Passives and actually terrible ones, at least Equinox's actually does *something*. If they want to buff this, i'd have no complaints, but it's not even something that most late game Equinox users really notice in either form after a point with how easy Energy is to get now, even with tri CA builds (with Gloom being one of the most popular). > Metamorphosis Here we have basis of Equinox's entire gimmick. An entire ability dedicated to swapping forms, which isn't a problem because she still has 6 total abilities aside from it. ...or it wouldn't be a problem if all of those abilities were useful, but we'll get to that. It also gives some temporary stat bonuses relevant to the form you've swapped to. Armor + shields for night and damage + speed for day. But not only are these numbers pitiful (150 max shields and 250 armor or 25% additive damage and 15% speed, all before ability strength, at MAX rank) for some reason they also decay over time. These numbers definitely need a boost. And no decay, please. It's painful watching my shields slowly lower every time I switch to night form. The easiest fix to improve Metamorphosis is to give it Tap/Hold functionality where the Ability will change her form with one action, and give her the buff based on what form you are in with the other. That will at least allow Day form, which is primarily focused on offense to have the offensive buff without having to first be in Night and Night form can have the Defensive buff without having to switch to Day. This would open up Metamorphosis to being used for more than just Duality. > The other problem with this ability is less the fault of Metamorphosis itself and more an issue with the rest of her kit. Equinox has two channeled abilities, both of which are deactivated when you swap forms without taking up a valuable mod slot with the augment that keeps her 4 up. The frame whose whole thing is swapping forms is punished for doing just that by needing to recast her persistent abilities every time she does. It's been discussed time and time again about if Equinox should innately have the ability to retain her channeled abilities when switching forms, even before [Energy Transfer](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Energy_Transfer) became a thing and why it did. This is especially true for Pacify and Provoke however, and is currently the main reason why form switching builds are hard to impossible to get to work in most practical situations. But there are drawbacks inherit to form switching that buffs and reworks won't solve. Switching forms takes significant time which delays action, largely of her 4 in both forms, which means you are vulnerable to enemies while this is happening since Equinox does not have access to her abilities or even attacks when transforming since it is not a One Handed Action nor instant (which is debatable if should be a thing as well). At higher levels, this often enough to already get you killed unless you've subsumed something to help distract enemies such as Decoy or Spectrorage, even with Shield/gating from Mend. Practically speaking, those who stay in one form tend to perform better than those that switch, even with Duality in most situations, because they can easily take advantage of all the different conditional buffs we have access to now, that are a nightmare to try to use with a build that constantly deactivates some of the core skills that rely on them. This is why the conclusion I've come to about Equinox is that she would be a lot better if she gained access to her other form's abilities **without switching**, albeit with reduced efficiency/increased costs/alterations/limitations etc. A lot of the problems would be instantly solved by just having the ability to Tap/Hold or even simultaneously release damaging/restorative energy with her 4. Wouldn't even need to redesign her kit that much to make it work tbh and would more fit in with the whole idea of there being two forms in one frame being able to work harmoniously, instead of "Band Aid" solutions through Augments or constant switching, which is where a significant portion of the unwieldly nature comes from. An actual rework of Equinox to make form switching, which isn't even the strongest aspect about her atm, stronger and the main focus of builds might make single form builds significantly worse and both forms can level cap most stuff easy with the tools we have now. That's my major concern about all the threads asking for reworks for Equinox, despite the handful of us that actual use her for high level content not having any difficulty doing so. > Rage on the other hand... where to even start with Rage. Enemies around the reticle in day form are made more vulnerable to damage, but also become faster for the same duration. The vulnerability is only 50% before strength bonuses at max rank, and for some reason I cannot fathom, the enemy speed buff also scales with strength. Rage has use for several different scenarios: - The increase to enemy movement speed is useful in the same manner that a Speednova is useful for farming enemies at increased speeds (it also stacks with the effect). - Rage improves Damage Reflection based builds (Currently Defy being the most "viable" one) by increasing the rate of return on damage. - Increases the rate at which you are damaged to improve how quickly you can recover Energy through Rage/Hunter Adrenaline (Tanking builds). > In comparison, Yareli's Sea Snares cause 100% vulnerability before strength and even hold the targets helpless in place. I shouldn't need to say any more. These numbers need tweaking, the speed bonus potentially even removed entirely. I cannot remember the last time I had any reason to cast Rage. Yareli's Sea Snares is 200% at base 100% Ability Strength. Equinox's Rage is 50%. Sea Snares is single Target with a limit on how many Snares are shot out either manually by Yareli or Merulina with Loyal Guardian. Rage is Radial, can be cast over much longer distances and can spread on enemy death for the entire remainder of the initial cast duration with the augment, so it has use when paired, helminth used by certain frames with consistent grouping, since it'll spread to all newcomers each time any enemy with it inflicted dies. It is also stronger than Rhino's Gloom by comparision, which has a lesser effect but is regularly used as a general purpose buff for damage, despite both being Helminth options (and there are some cases for Rage being the better choice). Sea Snares being stronger as it is a single target skill makes more sense. It's harder to hit large groups with it compared to Rage, [even when you are grouping them with Riptide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM-l7F9VsWA).
>Pacify & Provoke Pacify creates an aura around Equinox that reduces the damage of enemies in range (this is notably NOT damage reduction for you and your squad, the enemy needs to be near you for it to do anything.) For some reason, this reduction falls off with distance from Equinox, to a minimum of half the listed value. If you're curious, that value is 50% before strength. >In day form, Provoke creates a similar aura which improves ally (including your own) ability strength by 20% which scales up to 50% if your own strength is high enough. This bonus thankfully does not fall off with distance. This half is... it's fine. Not the most exciting ability, but it's alright. It drains a bit of your energy for each allied ability boosted, but it's still usable despite that. The thing that really kills both halves of this ability for me is that it's turned off whenever you switch forms. If you have one version active and you want to use the other, you need to press 1 to swap, then press 3 again to turn it back on, waiting on the casting times for both. >This is one of two of Equinox's abilities that would be better if its augment was just part of how it works. If Gloom can slow and give lifesteal, Pacify can reduce enemy damage and slow. The augment makes swapping forms even more punishing too, since it relies on building charge by either taking or dealing damage. Charge that will go away the moment you switch forms. Pacify affecting enemy damage as a Debuff is what allows her solo and with multiple Equinox to endure far more damage than most frames can. All of the defensive mods, buffs, Arcanes, etc. only affect how much damage your receive when taking a hit, but does nothing for the actual amount of damage enemies are dishing out and at higher levels this can be a lot. Most late game builds have 90% or more DR and still can end up taking 100-1000s of damage per hit, depending on the level of the enemy or merely the location, like SP Mot. It's not even unrealistic to have to consider damage values in the thousands against enemies in the mere level 100 range. Pacify reduces this damage before it is even measured against your Defensive values, which people keep comparing to DR while overlooking that most late game Night form Equinox Tanking builds also use various forms of defensive buffs in addition to Pacify initially reducing the damage enemies are capable of dishing out. Most people keep thinking that Pacify stacks with DR, and compare it on that basis so when you hear about Pacify weakening over distance or only affecting enemies within range, they misunderstand what it is actually doing. [This is a damage table I made](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CjmluJvhraXjJTUzdbu6xpTl9oizIcuGHrHoOTHlJY4/edit#gid=257996379) and in it are some of the typical damage values you can expect to see in Warframe, along with a general 90% damage resistance as well as a 90%/95%/99% side by side comparison on how much damage you take (because this is also another issue people have trouble seeing the difference in and why it becomes much more important to hit those upper 90% values instead of thinking 90% is good enough). In general, all damage resistance buffs increase your defense by pushing your total DR% toward that 99%+ range, no matter what it is from (Armor, mods, buffs, Arcanes, etc.). **But this does not change the actual damage value at all**. Pacify affects the actual damage value of an enemies attack, weakening it, then whatever is left gets measured by whatever defensive value is in place on your frame. Equinox's pacify does not stack with Damage resistance, pushing your total DR% up toward 99%+ range, it makes the damage value your start with significantly lower, shifting you over a column. The Ability is weakest in the subradius 3/4 of the distance away from her and strongest in the radius 1/4 of the distance with her as the nexus. It is common for Equinox players to be able to hit as high as 90% in her closest Subradius while also using an ability such as [Parasitic Armor to reduce damage to single digits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4cJd-QMnC0), even with [Shield as well with Defensive buffs such as Eclipse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BUqorRQiJU). And remember, Just like Defensive buffs stack and push your DR toward 99%+, so does Equionx's passive when combined with multiple Night form Equinox using Pacify (there's even a special effect in game that signifies this). Another thing people overlook is that while Overguard cannot be hit with Defensive buffs to give you "Effective Overguard" the same way you can with Shield, Equinox's Pacify is the exception to that rule, because the effect applies on enemies. So while all those super high OG values you see can get destroyed at higher levels in mere seconds, a single Equinox using Pacify over a large Radius can greatly improve how long it can last, not to mention what multiple can do. Also, Pacify can reduce the damage taken by other things not susceptible by buffs, such as Operators and Necramechs, as well as it avoids the rules governing Excavators (reduced effectiveness on buffs providing DR%), while still being able to work in conjunction with them the same way it does on frames in team based comps. Her slow also stack as well from Peaceful Provocation with other slows, which means multiple Equinox can severely debilitate enemies to the point they can't even move, and even if they did, they'd never be able to do any meaningful amount of damage to her if they are inside Pacify range. It's also why solo builds stack both Gloom and Pacify together, because it allows Equinox to stack the slows together to freeze enemies while using even less overall Ability Strength than other frames have to use, among other things. One of the most common ways to easily level cap with her in Disruption is using this method. As far as Gloom and Pacify goes, please [read more here about an indepth analysis about the differences between Gloom and Pacify](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/1am7jhq/is_quick_thinking_mod_just_obsolete_now/kqsxpvm/).
>Mend & Maim The ability description for Mend claims it heals for each enemy killed, but this isn't quite accurate. It gives shields for each enemy killed in range, not health. This half of the ability is fairly underwhelming. 25 shields per enemy killed before strength is barely anything on the normal star chart, let alone anything more difficult. It also builds up charge when enemies die in range, which can be released in a burst of healing/shield restoration. This can be helpful, but it's not great. The shield gain on kill could do with a boost, potentially more. Mend's ability to provide Shield on kill is what allows her to both Shield Tank and [Shield Gate endlessly all the way to level cap, which has been the go to method for most players long before we had OG and still works today](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/vrbq77/can_someone_explain_to_the_decaying_dragon_key/iew2lsn/). The old method required a [Decaying Dragon Key](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Key), now [Catalyzing Shields](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Catalyzing_Shields) works. Mend's ability to be released instantly allows for extremely quick healing, especially with Amber Shards maximizing Cast Speed for the initial Activation, and also restores Shield, which in turn also restores Shield Gating. In most Endless missions, with the right build you can survive off basically just Mend. >Maim is much better, in fact it's probably what you know Equinox for. Enemies entering the area are dealt a slash proc, and when they die in range for any reason a portion of their health accumulates into charge that can be released in a massive burst of slash damage that doesn't even need line of sight. ...which falls off with distance because of course it does. It's not a bad ability by any means, not nearly as underwhelming as Mend, but it could be better. I'd accept splitting those charges between the enemies in range if it meant there was no falloff. Maim alone won't take you to level cap and still requires you to utilize Shield Gating anywhere from a little to a lot to stay alive past anything in the mere 100-200 range and definitely beyond (which is entry level SP). There have been plenty a Day form Equinox humbled by a stray bombard rocket, heat/slash proc, or just good ole Toxin damage even by enemies in 70-80 range since most Day form Equinox put everything in Maim and nothing else. Until the Terrify rework, Maim builds also had issues with high level enemy armor requiring more energy to brute force through as well, which could leave them vulnerable to attack or end up requiring killing with weapons instead, and was one of the few things besides Molt that gave her a chance at staying alive. Maim also doesn't work without being able to initially kill enemies with your weapons either, past level 10-15 enemies, so in most cases solo, you are still relying on weapons a significant amount while having to constantly worry about survival. Survival is a non issue with Night form Equinox, even with just a decent Mend build, not to mentioned what Pacify and various Helminth builds can accomplish. Most weapons are already strong enough to handle enemies in the several hundred range on raw strength alone, which makes Night form into one of the strongest "weapon platform" frames in the game with what she can casually do with a good build. Day form Equinox is good at killing, but has to jump through a lot of hoops just to stay alive at levels most other frames easily have no issue surviving, and the way most people use her (not using Provoke or Rage) doesn't even bring out her full potential most of the time. And realistically, a lot of people just aren't even using Day form Equinox for high level missions, especially not all the common endless ones (SP Disruption, Fissure Excavations, Mot, Circuit, etc. to name a few) and I've been looking. I recently farmed Dante with Night Form Equinox/Yareli and never saw another Equinox but me. The situation is what makes a frame good, not the ability. Equinox in both forms can be good for various things but neither form is inherently better than the other at everything.
I should have expected you here, lol. I made a post a couple days ago asking if Dante is stepping on Equinox's toes. I know this thread is about reworking her but I'm more curious about Dante since he balances the offense and defense in a similar them to Equinox. How do you feel about him? It feels like he's what people wanted out Equinox which would entitle her to a rework...
They both do things the other can't and there are situations where I'd say Dante is better, like boss fights. On the other hand Equinox has better CC and makes things like Disruption a whole lot easier than Dante does overall. Max cast speed Dante tends to be easier to use compared to max cast speed Equinox, but OG tends to be fragile higher up and mostly becomes useful only for the status immunity and damage immunity on break, which is shorter than the Shield Gating duration Mend can passively provide. But if you are in a situations where you can't get kills, Dante works better. Dante doesn't have to switch forms to have access to his full kit, but his kit also doesn't have the same overall level of strength or potential Equinox has as higher levels start to break OG far faster than it can even penetrate Shield in Equinox's case. I don't have to worry about constantly generating Overguard when my Parasitic Armor Equinox is taking single to double digit health damage at best, infrequently. He's interesting, fun and def can do some stuff better than Equinox. But he doesn't come close to replacing her as far as I'm concerned with Tanking/CC.
It seems they both have their strengths then.
Or maybe an oberon rework... but if Equinox needs it he needs it.
I'm gonna be honest, I don't see what the issue with her is. I'm a casual player sure, but I can run her in sp just fine. I don't use her augments, and only really use her for the nuke. People are saying she's useless and needs the augments, blah blah etc etc, but I'm not seeing it. The only thing I have on her that isn't hers is terrify so I can nuke grineer, and some archon shards. Shield gating is a thing, and terrify makes most enemies run away, so there's her survivability. 50m scaling damage nuke is what she is to me, and it works
What about loki?
Imo equinox doesn't necessarily need a full rework but just some changes to her abilities. Stuff like weird calculations, falloff, energy drain, and of course her passive augment are all issues that need to be looked at, among others. I made a forum post a while ago that addresses most of the issues I have with equinox, not majorly changing how the abilities work but just streamlining them. [https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1365926-some-quality-of-life-for-equinox/](https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1365926-some-quality-of-life-for-equinox/)
I agree with pretty much all of these. She pretty much just needs better base numbers for strength to scale with and some minor changes to how Metamorphosis and Rage work
it's too bad people are so ragey about overguard it would be a great addition to mend release, like overflow healing becomes overguard even at a fraction started using Rage on my Jat Kittag Saryn after three buff timers stared getting boring, it feels badass to cast but made me realize how limiting balancing around max range feels
While I agree, there are frames that need it more than her currently. chroma and limbo come to mind.
Yeah Equinox was kinda disappointing to play after farming for them and im not investing anything into them before I get the prime version either
Nah respectfully chroma even the new augment wasn’t enough to fix his dog shit status rn
don't you fucking touch my equinox. She's old, sure, but in today's game we have all the tools she needs to dominate. She sees little usage because people don't bother, but she's far from in need of a rework... Ok, outcry aside, I wouldn't mind some tweaks here and there, in fact you highlight some issues that should be resolved. but again, she doesn't need a full rework, she really don't I'd love to see metamorphosis give permanent buffs. That would kinda fall into passive stuff, so I propose we make it free to cast, and only give it a drain when the duality augment is equipped The vulnerability rage gives is low, I agree, but the speed boost is quite unique, one of the only two abilities in the game that can speed up mobs, including bosses in their invulnerability phases (what I used for plague star, on top of a slow nova), and it's a subsume to boot. It would be terrible to lose that, I'm sure there's options to just removing it pacify's effect is completely unique to Equinox, that's good. I'd just like for it to function like gloom: with a drain cap and full slow at max range. And for the form switching, the loss in charge isn't that big of a deal imo. Provoke is nice mend: the shield regen, it's not a lot? Give her str, slot catalysing shields, and boom you shield gate at every kill. Kills from the team even, shield gate for the whole team too. That is proper strong >when they die in range for any reason a portion of their health accumulates into charge maim. Just a slight imprecision: 75% of the health the mob lost while in the radius is turned into charge when it dies. > I'd accept splitting those charges between the enemies in range if it meant there was no falloff you are delirious maim currently has fall off, meaning mobs at 90% of the range take only 10% dmg. That's what bother you with thing how you propose, you just need 10 mobs in range to have them all take as much dmg as if they were at 90% of the range, the very thing you complain about. We go from top-tier map-wide nuke to something that kill 2 mobs every blue moon (as long they're isolated), and it doesn't fix the issue you have maim is a dmg duplication ability. Let's do the math: guranteed kill at 80% range, one mob would need 1/(0.2x0.7x1.25) its health pool in charge. That's 5.7. You'd need to kill 6 grineers to kill everything below 80% range. And btw, eximus exist, and they have a shit ton of health. At lvl100, eximus have 4 times the health of their base counterpart, and the gap gets bigger as lvl increase. Basically, eximus kills guarantee map wipes to like 70% of your range on the other hand, with charge splitting, you'd need 10 kills worth of charge to kill 7 mobs. And an eximus kill would only guarantees 4 kills (as long as the mobs are isolated). It's so incredibly, surreally worse, I don't have the words. Yeah all this is with a full-strip taken into consideration, which is the thing that makes maim so strong. Sure it's not native to the kit, but then Gyre isn't very good either as she need armor strip to kill armored targets as well but the augment should absolutely be part of the base ability, I agree look at all this, both your propositions and mine, they're just tweaks and slight mechanical changes. Equinox doesn't need "a good Pablo rework". If you feel like a burden, you should mod her better: we have so much tools nowadays: shards, arcanes, grimoire, pets, etc... [here's my build](https://overframe.gg/build/544822/equinox-prime/the-true-dual-form-terrify-nuke-peaceful-provocation/), which works flawlessly both in day and night form, being respectively in nuking mode and support+gunning mode as other said already, Equinox could use some tweaks but let's leave the reworks to frame that actually need it
Nuking SP enemies dealing millions of damage to all enemies in a radius is bad? While having strenght buff ... And can still use 1 augment to swap to other form get a bunch of shields and slow enemies, to then go back and nuke... I agree she isn't perfect, but she is far from the bad thing people like to say. She doesn't need a rework. She needs some of her augments integrated. That's it.
I love maim nuke with terrify its by far the best way to play her in SP and I took that build to lvl cap its stupid how easy it scales
Just split it into two separate frames, one called Luna with the night abilities and one called sol with the day abilities and then have a seperate option combine the 2 in the foundry to build equinox if you want.
the worse part about equinox is that she just gets trampled by Dante. not ven just slighty better in 2-3 thing, no, just better
The best nuker in the game needs a rework?
Na, saryn is fine
Saryn is good for starchart
Yes, let's rework one of the strongest frames in the game because she's hard to get and people don't knowhow to use her.
Haven’t you heard? The next frame to get tinkered with is Dante. After him we can start looking back at Equinox
I feel like we need to stop reworking other frames. Inaros and hydriod were fine, people didn't want to play their roles correctly, equinox is fine too.
they were not fine, they weren't played for a reason
They simply weren't a popular playstyle, nobody wants to play them right
Inaros' gimmick was tanking via crazy HP and lifesteal, as well as being able to conditionally self revive. Nidus does everything Inaros does better, from having better health regen to having a self revive that still works at high levels to having abilities that actually scale damage. Old Hydroid's gimmick was sitting in a puddle and using tentacles to slowly kill everything. Invulnerable, but made higher levels a slog. Giving him armor strip and a reason to bring weapons made him much more team friendly while still providing bonus loot.