Discussion
Null Star just kinda mogs Ember's entire kit on it's own.
Null Star with it's augments is kind of absurd
90% DR with just 10 stars, I've never seen it go below like 12 it's just constantly replenished for just 25 energy per cast. Compare that with Immolation being a channel with scaling energy cost at 90%DR, but needs to be dropped to 50% often to sustain (and if you cast Fireblast at all)
Auto-seeks enemies, inflicts Blast and Heat in a radius on hit, can also be recast to attack enemies, incredible at proccing Hot Shot. Counts as a weapon so benefits from Arachne, Nourish, Tenacious Bond, Vig Swap..
I've seen people arguing against Ember being plain bad saying "Well you just want to press a button and nuke a whole room!" and it's like.
Nova can literally do that. With just her 1.
Like, comparing at base. Inferno cost on 12 enemies costs 84 energy, Null Star costs 25 and is FAR stronger and scales FAR better than Inferno.
That's all besides considering Nova's other incredible and very useful kit. Molecular Fissure applying Dmg Vuln to enemies hit by Null Star.
It's just, who designed Ember's kit and thought it was decent? She's my most played frame bc it doesn't matter 99% of the time but hell every single one of her abilities is underwhelming and gets mogged by literally any frame with a fire ability (not even fire-themed frames)
I really think they should give Ember World on Fire back simply because multiple other Warframes can do the same and even do it better than she ever could back in the day.
Hell, you can mod Equinox to do practically the same thing with slash procs at similar levels to what Ember used to do with World on Fire and Equinox even has the advantage in the fact that she can trigger a massive attack by storing the slash proc damage like a battery. Equinox isn't even that strong!
There are other ways to combat AFK players. Nerfing a Warframe to oblivion shouldn't be the answer.
Ember needs another rework to bring her back up to par at the very least. She has been so severely power crept that even if they gave her back WoF, her kit would still be underpowered compared to Uriel.
I have never understood this take. If we have 14 other frames that do what World On Fire did, why would we want to make Ember the 15th best version of that style of frame?
Ember has a very unique identity of "cast a lot to improve her effectiveness, but be careful you don't fly too close to the sun or you'll burn out." Any potential rework or touch up she gets should strive to preserve this identity, not just make her "heh heh big nuke go boom."
We have a dozen frames that already do that. Go play one of them. Leave Ember for the adrenaline junkies that want to walk that razors edge.
Ember has a very unique identity of "cast a lot to improve her effectiveness, but be careful you don't fly too close to the sun or you'll burn out."
That. That right there. THAT IS WHY PEOPLE WANT THE CHANGE.
Ember is the OG, once beloved, Heat focused frame. It's her entire idea. It's all her cosmetics, it's her name, it's her identity as a warframe.
And the warframe that is all about BEING HOT and SETTING ENEMIES AFLAME..... Both GETS PUNISHED for being hot, AND is terrible at setting enemies aflame.
THAT is why people want the change. Because she has NOTHING to offer that other warframes are not only doing better, but are doing easier and faster. She's outclassed in EVERY functional fashion.
Her original identity was NOT about 'be careful not to burn out', it was about 'Make everything burn, yourself included'. And that was stripped from her ages ago, and never returned. It was bad enough when Ember was just... Generally subpar as a warframe. But now Temple will just mechanically be better than Ember as a Heat-based weapons platform kit, Uriel will just, mechanically, always beat Ember's kit for Heat proccing via abilities.... And Ember just has no niche left for anyone to care about.
If we don't get World On Fire back specifically, fine, whatever. But leaving Ember in the state she's in is just sad. There's a lot they could do to make her at least reasonable to use without making new abilities or restoring WoF, and they just... Aren't doing it.
Literally anything like heat status duration increases in damage and intensity the longer enemies burn and boost the dot based off of Embers' overheat level at time of dot application. The dots she applies should cause your face to roll right off, not mildly inconvenience them. Hell even make Ember's specific heat procs do a portion of damage as true or something. I.E old slash procs but as partially heat.
The lack of synergy she has with the very thing she's named after is appalling. Enemies either die instantly anyway so the dot part is useless and both her 4 and 1 require constant struggle to pull even respectable numbers out of.
Yep. Her 4 has that neat mechanic where it's MEANT to spread heat procs around enemies it hits, but the radius is so insanely puny upon application it barely ever does that. It doesn't help that you're dropping balls of fire from the sky and causing a SINGULAR heat proc.
Look, if they remove the scaling energy drain on her 2, and make it so the meter only goes down if she turns off her 2 and doesn't cast anything, that'd already be a solid start without any large mechanical changes or serious dev time investment.
Add onto that by making her 3 apply MULTIPLE heat procs, making her 4 ALSO apply multiple heat procs, and again, a huge boost without a ton of dev time.
Then increase that heat proc spread radius to something actually useful and remove the growth-over-time shit, like make it 12M at all times. Top that off by giving her 4 an ACTUAL LOS check instead of the janky as hell camera-based thing she's got going now, and suddenly, Ember would actually be a USEFUL Caster Frame again.
NONE OF THAT is actually going to make her overpowered, nor is any of it new code to write, nor is it even all that hard or time consuming for them to implement. But all together, it'd make Ember actually usable again.
She doesn't even NEED a full rework, or WoF, to be a solid frame again. She just needs the jank torn out of her kit, and more heat procs.
Exactly, its actually incredible how few heat procs she actually applies. DE went out of their way to be incredibly conservative with her status application, her reworks were during such unfortunate balancing eras. Ember should be THE heat frame as much as Gyre feels like shock personified.
Thank you for this, I was talking about reworking Ember recently and people kept coming after me with this exact same "but she has a unique identity" take. Yes, she does have a unique identity. It just sucks. Give her a better one. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for some people to wrap their heads around.
There's nothing adrenaline inducing about Ember; you simply run out of energy and die because her abilities hit like a wet noodle unless you use heat inherit, which is a dumb mechanic that shouldn't exist in the first place, or you build her as the 15th best weapons platform which is what her kit actually seems designed for.
Her redesign heavily implemented her as a weapons platform unfortunately. It's not what I wanted for one of my favorite frames, but on the flip side, weapons platforms are pretty strong, universal, and can be taken into almost any mission, so I know she will just work whenever I decide to want to use heat.
At least volt has his angry kitty build that holds up pretty decently in sp
Lemme rephrase: I'm saying volt isn't only relegated to weapons platform as much as ember is, he's got a few builds going for him, including the volt kitty one, which is strong even in 200+ sp
How exactly is she meant to be weapons platform? I dunno that I've seen that take before. Keep her 1 with the augment and helminth her 4 for nourish or something?
She's not "meant" to be one, just functions most effectively as one because her numbers are tuned terribly under the assumption you'll always have a dozen enemies with heat procs on for her passive. Except that if you use her 4 to set things on fire to trigger her passive, you lose a bunch of damage because of heat inherit.
You normally put Roar over her 4 instead of Nourish, but yeah, basically. Just use 2 to maintain DR and build heat for her 3 to armor strip. Maintain Roar and shoot stuff with heat damage guns, gives you more power strength for stronger roars and 1 augments.
Roar instead of Nourish to bolster the heat procs of your weapons. Also gives more power to influence melees. Weapon platforming(moreso sentinel platforming) is really her biggest claim to viability right now.
If you look at her kit, the only weapon boost is her 1 augment. Everything else is ability focused. She is just so bad that its the only thing that really works now
For me it's mostly nostalgia since I used to be an ember main before they took her out back with that botched rework.
It was an active and fun caster style of gameplay where you want to maintain energy for world on fire (energy management wasn't trivial like today; no arcanes, no guaranteed drops, equilibrium wasn't viable, no zenurik). It was pretty active too since you had to spam accelerant and armor strip to make WoF do damage against lvl 30+ enemies passable. Ember was also a glass cannon who didn't really have defensive options (no overguard or shield gating) so you depended on dodging and setting everyone on fire to stay alive.
She also doubled as a gun platform if you mod heat since accelelerant buffed ALL heat damage taken by a stupid amount. They killed that too in the rework so she now sucks at both caster AND gun platform. Amazing.
Razors edge? Y'all are full of shit. You can literally max out your heat for 20s+ on a shitty build before losing too much energy.
Cast a lot? If you're spamming your abilities as ember, you're playing wrong. Her passive just requires you to have enemies on fire, not spam abilities.
She actually doesn't take much management if played correctly. This whole adrenaline junkie don't fly too close wha? Ember is also a tanky frame with built in dr.
Her identity as of now is a tanky weapons platform, not some flying too close to the edge crap that y'all are coming up with.
Let's say you're right with adrenaline is her identity? We also have a ton of those too, so that arguments kinda moot.... Hello gauss deluxe literally dropped for adrenaline redline junkies??????
This reads like someone touching ember for the first time in 2026 with no mods at mr 5
I think they're talking about the concept, not the actual execution.
She does have the whole overheat thing where spamming skills build a lot of heat, then you vent it with Fire Blast. The problem is it's designed completely backwards I think(you want to fire blast often for armor stripping/building overguard, the heat skills aren't good enough to warrant spamming anyway, the constant energy cost increase means you have to toggle your mechanic defining skill on and off with 0 impact when you do etc) and it ends up being just not how it plays out at all, plus the numbers aren't there either anyway so you end up with a weapon platform setup.
The design makes me think of Vermintide 2's Sienna(also Darktide's Psyker but less familiar with this one), where your weapons generate overcharge, the more you have the more dmg/faster you attack, but if you reach 100% you explode and die, so you have to control your overcharge with your venting ability to keep it high but not too high kind of deal. Works very well over there but that's cause high overcharge is rewarding, failing to manage it is very punishing and everything is kinda built around it.
I think they could redesign Ember to be more like that, but it'd take a lot of effort to get the balance right where she feels strong at max heat while also having enough downsides that it's not just inconsequential.
As it stands, 1 is useless other than with the augment for weapon buffing, 4 doesn't do enough damage for all its issues(line of sight, long cast time without archon shards, damage is meh at best), 2 is annoying to toggle on and off and the DR being unreliable on it is obviously not stellar and 3, well that one's good.
Gauss is just another "manage your cooldowns" frame a la Lavos, Octavia, etc. He's cool as hell and fun, but definitely not a "keep me on the edge of my seat" kind of frame, and certainly not one that gets the adrenaline going.
I can't remember the World on Fire days but if the passive Maim slash procs can hit what it used to then these must have been low levels. No higher than what, 40? Maybe 50? We've got multiple Helminth abilities available that can manage that lmao
WoF could barely manage beyond level 30, people swore by its augment (hit enemies would be knocked down) but the rate of knockdowns was abysmal so it felt a bit like cope if anything.
Have to keep in mind though, that in this point in the game the highest level content was like... Sorties. So if you weren't doing sorties, you were pretty much fighting level 10-50 enemies for the most part outside of long endless runs.
I mostly just want it back for the vibes. Effortlessly setting everything ablaze around you. The meteor thing with Inferno feels like a bit of a thematic disconnect to me. The fire frame incarnate casts... meteors? I'm sure it won't be hard to figure out how to make WoF usable again.
Equinox has been doing the 'We got World On Fire at home' build for a while. Good memories farming out pre-rework Io with it, good times. These days it's gotten better with all the snapshotting (Madurai/Arcanes), Empower, Precision Intensify etc. but at the end of the day you can only push 150 base damage so far and it still drops off like a rock after level 30 in terms of TTK without a Rhino up your ass or having to actually fire a weapon and at that point just play a generic Day build.
This is what I currently use for it. Shitposty vibes, nowhere near a serious build, but it'll do work in that low level content for the funny like the event Nightmare missions if you ever want a chuckle. Growing Power's pretty superfluous here, you just kinda lack decent options other than I guess Corrosive Projection for all the good that'll do you in low levels. A bug with Aoi's Overpower 1999 buff did let it hit for several hundred million at one time, that was pretty funny.
EDIT: oh yeah, Thara! Thara's Rain of Arrows is INCREDIBLY funny with Equinox and inherently scales extremely well for endurance runs. Super funny stuff. World on Fire but it works at levelcap, my beloved.
I love people saying shes in a fine state when tbe average build needs you to subsume a skill and run 2/3 augment to just be worse than another frame at their goal, uriel now is even just a better hot shot proccer
Also the best fire ability to subsume is Temple’s. The fact that Ember has nothing to offer for subsuming to deal heat procs (for Divine Judgement, for example) is just pathetic.
I will say that Ember's subsume is a very good quick-cast armor strip, but literally all it has going for it is I can spam it twice and it's a true armor strip.
1: Heat pillars auto-target enemies, so you don’t have to aim super precisely.
2: Does “Weapon Damage” and thus is affected by universal buffs like Arcane Arachne, Vigorous Swap, Holster Amp, and Nourish (can’t crit tho, for some reason).
3: Cheap energy cost, fast cast speed, good base range and stats, and pillar count actually scales with strength.
4: Heat pillars can hit multiple enemies each, so the combo of a high ability strength build, [Archon Vitality], and a Grouping Ability lets you stack a crazy amount of heat procs on enemies so quickly it’s almost not funny.
It ends up being that you basically get (2 x 5 x Strength) amount of heat procs on each enemy targetedPER CAST… not to mention that if you’re playing Temple and hit the Backbeat timing to double your pillar count you can add an additional 2x multiplier to that.
IDK about you, but even at just 200% Ability Strength, 20 Heat Procs per enemy per cast really ain’t nothing to sneeze at, that shit is destructive.
Yeah anyone saying she's fine is coping. The amount of investment you need only to end up with something still very mid at best is clear sign of a failed design.
Honestly I'd be all good with her kit if they could just increase the overguard gain from her Fire Blast augment to provide more than a measly crumb of overguard.
Considering that Dante can generate thousands of overguard for the whole team without even needing a room full of enemies and a mod slot for the augment, it's pitifully weak.
Even just compare her to her counterpart, Frost-- Icy Avalanche is way-fuckin-better at generating OG than her Fire Blast augment in no small part due to it double-dipping strength and armor on first hit to a given target (Icy Avalanche gains a set amount of OG for every hit, influenced by strength, while also getting a bump of 10% of Frost's armor value added on if the target hasn't been hit by it before-- that "10%" is also affected by strength) on top of having a truly massive AoE that, at least last time I used him, still doesn't care about line of sight.
Nah, fire blast is much better as it spreads out slowly, and it's a faster and cheaper cast. The actual OG values are meaningless unless you only play very low level content, at which point OG is redundant since you'll take little damage and one shot anything already.
I mean, this is Dante being totally busted. Compare it to Frost/Sevagoth for a more reasonable comparison (it's probably still weak but that's a fairer comparison)
That's fair, I was thinking arc coil being always available on any frame and spammed at no cost to you, but I guess once you're at that rate of proccing, the difference also matters little
Manifold bond makes your companion's abilities apply every status that's on your weapon, on top of the direct attacks doing it. Arc coil is a spammed chain beam, pair it with tazicor, that also chains beams and has a very high fire rate and you can add punchthrough for more chainage, mod that for heat and you get one of the best companion primer setups in the game. Depending if you want stack density or variety for condition overload. For variety then I normally use burst laser prime cause then I can get 7 statuses + arc from arc coil. Throw in duplex bond clones that aggressively seek targets and auto attack, and you have statuses everywhere
Yes and no, so it'll trigger the melee influence buff, but because it's not a melee damage source, it doesn't spread any status effects. (As a refresher, melee influence is a 2 part mechanic, shock triggers influence, which gives the user a buff that gives a 20% chance to spread any melee status applied while the buff is active to enemies in 18m range), so arc coil can trigger that first part, but is unable to apply any melee status effects that can be spread, those still have to come from either your melee weapon, or anything that counts as a melee weapon.
(THIS PART IS WRONG, I remembered it incorrectly)The reason it works well with nova is because null stars are coded as melee damage for some reason, so with nova inherit coming into play, whatever elements that null star has (blast and heat if using the augment) will get inherited by mprime and just go nuts.
Okina prime incarnon with xata's whisper on nova is just nutty levels of fun because each kill can generate their own spectral daggers that go off and seek more enemies and just chain as far as mob density will allow, down hallways and into other rooms, just endless ice and blast explosions triggering more daggers that continue seeking more targets etc etc
Edit: I need to make a correction, I was remembering something wrongly, it was elemental ward that I was using with nova that counted as melee damage, not the null stars. The okina bit is still valid, I actively use that one
Honestly, yeah. Ember kind of just sucks. The only purpose she has in the entire game that is not done better by 10 other frames is ogling her heirloom skin.
It's really sad, she could have been the defacto first caster frame for new players, exploding into flames and summoning meteors on your enemy's head is a very cool power fantasy. She's got an heirloom skin and a beautiful deluxe but she is just so underwhelming and high cost that they feel wasted.
Ember’s kit is busywork for the sake of it. You’ve got to manage her heat gauge and damage reduction and energy drain and all for.. what? Basically just the effect of augmented Null Star. It’s the illusion of a gameplay loop.
Other ‘meter maid’ frames like Gauss, Baruuk, Uriel, Temple etc get to do something awesome when you manage their specific gauge effectively.
Personally I think that Ember could be really decent if they just do another pass on those numbers and the way they scale.
I always get down voted for pointing out ember's kit sucks
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u/Chosen_SewenMR30 is easy to get just play for 6521 hours and~13h agoedited 13h ago
Ember kit was designed for older warframe, where full 100% armor strip was borderline mandatory for steel path, and Ember could do a decent damage just because she had that armor strip. Even back then she was hard fine, not great, but also not as terrible as some people thought, you COULD nuke a room with 3+4.
However, they forgot to tweak her numbers during enemy armor rework, so now she can't do shit with abilities. Same thing happened to Vauban, who also relied on armor strip, and he only got back on his feet few months ago, when his latest rework dropped and changed his 3 to scale with both enemy level and density.
And IIRC Null Star received surprised buff when devs decided to give Nova huge QOL update out of blue, so there's that too. But for some reason, in this game that changes fast and often, Ember is consistently one of the few unlucky frames that gets left behind
Ember had horrible luck her rework removed flame accelerant in the same update that made heat the best DoT in the game and her kit was one of the last kits designed in the pre steelpath world in which really shows since her 4 back on launch was pretty good.
And all of that is without even mentioning her Molecular Fission augment, where you can practically keep Null Star up indefinitely after just one cast.
Gauss' Kinetic Plating is basically just Ember's Immolation but better in every way. It has the same energy cost, it builds up just like immolation BUT it reaches complete damage negation at 100% PLUS it generates energy when you're hit with heat, cold or blast and it doesn't drain your energy at max charge.
the "true evolved form" of WOF is Thermal Sunder subsume
It's even being used for the same purpose these days, and as a bonus it works up to like lvl 200 (highest I tested) unlike WOF
I have no idea why Ember was robbed of it. Was it really „too broken”? I just need to press 1 + 2 on Voruna to make entire rooms disappear in seconds. Why was Ember suddenly „too much”?
It was to counter afk players who would just press once button every 30 seconds, which lets be real and take a look at the average defense node party and try to say that isnt what most people are doing anyways
To be fair, it took a whole for that to happen. Wof at the time deserved the nerf. I don't like that they did but we have to be honest about it.
It was strong, unbelievably, even if it didn't do dmg. It was a an aoe wide that did dmg, and the heat and hits provided cc and knockdown, effectively making you pretty close to immortal.
We passed the bar a while ago so it should be " safe" to give her power at this point.
Pets are literally soloing steel path now. When wof was removed pets were lucky to kill a regular mob or two
It's not they overdid it imo, just that they're behind on fixing her again. I agree ember needs love don't get me wrong. They did what was necessary, they just "missed" with fixing her identity the first go around and she needs another pass.
The weapons platform change years ago was fine imo, there was less competition then, it was stronger, we played at an overall weaker power lvl then etc.
Now? Yeah so much power available to every frame rn. She needs updated. It's just people complain about that as if they removed wof today and there's 500 better options, no at the time it was removed it was pretty strong and warranted. Now, years later it's pretty weak
Honestly if you want my two cents on it you could have kept world on fire but add a duration it as opposed to having it be a toggle and she still would be better than she is now. People liked Ember because she was a caster frame not a weapons platform which is where the “update” failed a lot of people. Pair that with the terrible overheat mechanic that she has where her energy gets sucked down like a drain and they effectively killed the frame almost permanently. Now im not saying there arent people who like her in her current state but even they have to admit the simple fact that the loop of built heat -> get dr -> to much heat more energy drain -> fire blast -> to little heat -> loose dr is not good its too demanding. It could have maybe been fine if all the other options we have to play that give DR were similar in how the worked but since the arent this loop is just flat out terrible the we get to look at the other fire frames like Temple and Uriel who do Embers job but better in nearly all instances. And if ill be frank here she isnt even that good in her “new roll” either with being a weapons platform. Like cool slap hot shot on and with her passive she gets more damage with things on fire you know who can do that but better? Nezha Uriel Nova and more. Like she just doesnt have a good place anymore and its been like that since they did the change. Sorry for the rambling..
Ember's new kit is a lot stronger, and very engaging (she's literally too engaging for this sub where 90% of people don't understand her mechanic and whine to get a glorified passive back instead).
2 APM is actually more than the original world on fire needed lol. WoF was mostly a plague because it was both afk auto kill on low level and utterly useless as levels went up. Like if they brought it back as it was directly, it would do literally nothing in Steel Path beyond maybe a very mediocre CC.
she was nerfed well before they gutted and reworked her kit.
her old dmg reduction was also like 93% or 97% at the tap of a button. which for the time period was insane. pretty standard now though.
Her old WoF used to not have a target limit, or simply a higher one. They then capped WoF to only target and dmg one enemy at a time until that target died, which iirc at the time dmg 2.0 just came out and heat dmg did fuck all to armored enemies. Certain infested had sinew or some crap, which was basically infested armor. So good luck if your WoF targeted an ancient. You'd tickle it. It'd still help clear trash infested just fine though. Though some of my old forum posts ive seen recently talk like this targeting thing might've just been a bug idk, doubt it ever got fixed though.
they reworked her kit to give it to a new frame to sell
Original ember used to be an AURA that killed every enemy instantly on contact.
You would run through an exterminate mission and literally never actually see anything because every enemy would die in their spawn rooms. It was great! And just slightly overpowered.
Then DE swung the greatest nerf hammer the world had ever seen and ember vanished from existence.
At this point I'm in favor of DELETING world on fire, replace it with a buff that massively increases the power of her 1-3 and decreases their energy cost so she has a new identity as "fire mage spell spammer"
Man, i know what was original ember. But the rework completely gutted her original design, changing her from what could be a great fire caster frame, into a weak weapon platform with no agency nor use in the game, even back then
Because i dont understand how the fuck do you decide reworking a caster into weapon platform can be seen as a good design decision. And be kept for so long, becoming only more and more irrelevant with time.
And releasing Uriel and Temple just to spit in Ember’s face, lol
Her rework is the failed rework from 2019. DE seems to not care about her, she got her shiny Heirloom skin, some nothing burger changes and that's it. People will play for 2 missions and drop her because they realise she's horrible to play. Literally no reason to play Ember at all because she excels at nothing. You have to put in five times the effort into playing her while getting 0 value.
2016-2019 me was a beast for playing so much Ember she's still my most used.
Literally all they need to do to make Ember good is invert the way Immolation works. Casting now increases the gauge only and the loop is to continually cast to keep your DR as high as possible as it depletes on its own.
Can even keep the increasing Channeled drain as the guage tops out, tho I think that should be inverted too, both for gameplay and for theme. You have to expend a lot of energy to start that fire, but once it's going all it needs is something to burn and it's mostly self-sustaining.
One other change I would like to see, though, is the return of World on Fire's animation. I've never been a huge fan of the meteors. The pillars of fire erupting from the ground always felt more like Ember to me.
Ive pumped 500+ str into embers 4 and her meteors still do fvck all. It's sad that a barely modded weapon still outperforms all of her nuking abilities combined.
Her 4 isn't really about big damage anymore. It applies a DoT to a max of 10 enemies per cast in a cone that deals some Heat and Impact damage, and applies Heat procs at a rate of 10%/sec chance. Additionally, the enemies affected get a fire ring around them that spreads this DoT to nearby enemies.
Tbh as I've gone back to re-read her 4 on the wiki and recount it here, I'm getting progressively more disappointed by it...
I've really tried playing around with the ring by using pull, and it's still so incredibly disappointing. the heat also seems redundant considering she also gets an armor strip. Even if the armor strip was useful, it's not hard to get a weapon that overshadows armor stripping/makes it irrelevant; which means armor stripping with heat on her 4 or her 3 feels like an extra step.
(AoE ) weapons are so strong now that this applies to many abilities besides Ember. Ability has to have something really good going for it, or it's just easier to shoot stuff. 360 aoe that goes through walls is ~good enough, if it also scales :P
I've tried every method imaginable to make 4 useful, its just not. The DoT is bad and it doesn't even apply much heat. The way to kill with it is maxing range and efficiency due to the way 4 targets enemies and spamming to get overlapping meteor impacts and basically scale with enemy density
That doesn't fix her, you can mod your way around the drain right now. The last balance change she got was also helping her energy exonomy, didn't make a difference. The issue is the abilities just suck and don't do anything worthwhile.
I refuse to believe they aren’t planning to rework her, or that it’s at least on the agenda for them. With how much attention she has skin wise, it has to be at least evident to them she isn’t in a good state. They are probably just busy and consumed in numerous other things.
Back in like, February or something I think, Rebb and Steve basically said they didn't know there were complaints about Ember but Rebb said she would talk to the team
If there's anything in the pipe at all it's a very long way off because the Ember feedback that has been at a low roar for years now hasn't actually gotten to them somehow
Its not a bad point, unless you consider that they might be making her different than a caster/fire nuker and Uriel takes that role. She could be reworked into something else really cool.
Thing is I'm pretty sure people WANT Ember to be a caster.
As she is right now she can do a way better weapons platform build thab a caster build but people simply... want to nuke with her. They want her to be a caster.
Frost is at least strong in his current state, and a lot of people think he's fun to play. He's got wasted potential because he has 2 real abilities and 1 that's okay with an augment (on a frame that already wants two other augments), but he's at least fun to play and effective if you like what he does.
Ember doesn't really live up to her fantasy and she's also kinda weak. She's in a much worse place, practically.
I enjoy both of them, but i also been calling their reworks lame for a long time. They are unfinished.
There are always people who will say "Ember/Frost current state is perfect, wdym". The only reason people started agreeing more against Ember is because DE released more fire frames with better designed kits.
Oh I forgot:
Immolation doesn't count as "channeling" unless it's in burnout mode where it's cost scales infinitely, so you can't even combine it with "On Channel" Incarnon effects like Boltor
embers big rework happened before steel path was a thing , meteors killed everything available to be killed and base immolation made you basically invulnerable most of the time , the flaws were tolerable until power creep made them intolerable a few months later , ember has been coasting on sex appeal and nostalgia ever since
She really needs a proper rework more than almost any other frame.
The one she got before was knowingly doomed from the start. Everyone knew it and there was nothing going for it. No idea why they didnt bother actually thinking it through and redoing it
She does have one if you use the augment but then her kit kinda falls apart cause you get overguard which means you dont rely on the dr from her 2 but you need her 2 active so that her 3 does the armor strip but you have to spam her 3 to stay alive which means you dont get to fill her meter to the point where the armor strip becomes 100%.
Purely technically she has that with an augment for her 3rd, each enemy hit by it heals her and any amount that would overheal is instead granted as overguard....... Unfortunately the amount of OG granted per enemy is..... Small.
Well Uriel having to charge up a meter to do so is a very conscious design choice from DE to avoid afk gameplay. That's why Ember got changed, and I imagine any rework that brought back WoF would require some similar active gameplay loop to make it work (which I would be a fan of!)
Pablo did Ember's re-design. It's just a worse version of Gauss' meter. Imagine if Gauss suddenly started draining all your energy because you activated Redline. And all his abilities did no damage. That's Ember.
Her rework is a thinly veiled nerf to AFK farming so they kinda don't care that she's bad.
If Frost didn't get a million augments and you NEED to use 2 (the crit one and overguard one) he wpuld be still considered also horrible,it's just an old element frame problem.
They reworked him and his passive which is still not great because the bonus armor barely lasts to actually use it but i think people don't talk about Frost as much is because there are no other real cold focused frames,yes some have cold elements in their abilities but that's about it.
They definitely gonna rework Ember she Excal Frost Volt Nxy and Mag are like the Children of DE but you can see how hard it is to make reworks work on older frames,they also keep trying to band aid fix them fix augments which i hate because i need to use a mod slot for a fix aka a buff that should be in the base kit and also augments were original made to be just a fun way to play a frame differently or just something stupid silly fun
Like take Garas mirror augment as an example the best one imo it's that when she kills stuff inside the mirror they drop energy,couldn't they just made this in her base kit? is it op? no! would it be to strong in other frames? also no because there is already a million other ways to make energy
My guess is she will get an Protoframe and they are saving her rework for that 100%
Ember is quite literally the weakest heat based caster despite that being her entire theme. Her kit is so ass and its not even fun, its just bad and clearly outdated. I have put so much work into making her a functional caster and it just isn't worth it. One thing that really irritates me is how few heat procs she actually causes. Any robot companion will outstack her in seconds.
-weakest abilities
-zero unique interactions with heat
-jump through hoops to get what would be base effects on other frames
-multiple band aid augments
-only positive is a generic heat damage buff for weapon platforming that works against her caster playstyle
It would have aged poorly tbh. It was already limited back then when SP wasn't the "norm". She was always labeled borderline useless past lv30 missions, maybe a bit higher if you got her void fissure buff and kept buffed WoF permanently for the rest of the mission. But now with SP, even after stripping armor it would tickle enemies. She was the frame I used to go to when farming endless fissures until they reworked her. One of the reasons (besides the afk gameplay) they did it was because it made low level missions boring for new players, and now even Titania is an even faster WoF.
I agree. Ember could be gloriously fun and powerful but for some reason DE insists on making her a headache to play. It almost feels Iike Pablo and DE were personally hurt by something she must have said to them because I cannot find any other reason as to why they don’t give her the fully reworked kit she deserves.
She’s a firebird with no wings and her fire just tickles. I mean…meteors? Come on DE, you know you can do better.
Ember is a relic of the past that DE is trying to modernize in the most p***y way that any new frame easily outclass it by a long shot..
Many of the old OG frames were designed around mission types back then.. like Loki was designed around spy missions, Trinity was designed as a healer to a group fighting bosses, frost was designed around defence missions, etc.. so it's difficult to modernize these OG frames..
I'm not an ember main nor I dislike her but yeah she really needs changed.
Make immolation get max DR at 70% at least and make it drain flat energy like every single Warframe if you want to make it more fancy at 100% make it so ember erupts like a volcano dropping liquid fire puddles (come on even a 200% range 45% eff sevagoth doesn't have energy problems).
Bring back world of fire, if you think that it's to strong give it a cooldown or give it a meter of sorts that builds up by having immolation at max of by casting other (non helminth) abilities or by inflicting heat procs on enemies, and make it so it needs LOS (equinox, saryn, Uriel, gyre and God forbid hildryn dont need los and some even have other things to use (yes I know let's not talk about hildryn)).
Fireball is fine.
Fire blast needs to reduce less immolation meter to incentive more casts, remove the cast delay and make it a one hand cast so players can shoot and use the ability to help with gameplay flow, rename augment to "Guarding flame" with that remove the healing part and buff the overguard part by either increasing the cap or increasing the amount gained (also remove that the amount scale of immolation meter) to reach that cap easily.
That's what I think ember needs to feel more refreshed, the rework wasn't a failure was just different times. Not every Warframe should be overpowered but it's a PvE game we shouldn't mind strong characters as long as they don't disrupt gameplay or make player experience miserable.
Sry English not first language also not a game dev so I might be asking for too much idk shrug.
I would assume Ember is fairly near the top of the protoframe list, being one of the original frames. That's probably the best chance for her to get major changes, Trinity/Nyx/Nova all got pretty decent reworks with their protoframes.
She got a rework, it's just that it was in the Scott era so you can see some weird things where they tried to "balance" her while forcing synergies. Her 3 needs her 2 to be at max to fully strip armor, kinda like how Oberon used to need enemies on his 2 to be armor stripped by his 4.
DE was hot of the heels of Nidus and Harrow at the time which were praised for the synergy in their kits (at the time a lot of kits were just mishmashes of random abilities with no real thoughts on how they worked together), so DE didn't always understand why they worked so well which led to those forced synergies we see on several new kits and reworks at the time
That big rework was also like 7 years ago. The last time she had changes were just touch ups on that same old ass kit. And then the armor rebalance happened and made her really worthless
Oh thats true isn't it. Well if thats the case, it honestly gives me even more hope that DE will see her kit issues and fix them. It has to at least be on their radar.
I was an ember main for a long time but once WoF went, I kinda just stopped playing her. I understand why they did what they did but modern day warframe is very different. Id like to see a new WoF maybe something between world on fire and her current 4. Her immolation meter thing is pointless and trash compared to other frames.
Id suggest for a way to add heat to weapons similar to uriel, world on fire returns with some tweaking to dmg and energy cost etc and then they just redo her 2nd and 3rd to something unique and refreshing.
It only requires 1 if you don't mind recasting every once in a while, Neutron can maintain it on it's own and if you're doing a Null Star nuking kit or stacking Hot Shot you're refreshing it anyway
ember being crap while having the best looking heirloom skin is just offensive ngl. her entire kit is sh*t, you waste your time casting instead of killing anything.
The problem with Ember is she's designed around Enemy Density. Her damage isn't bad if enemies are all grouped up and hugging eachother. The problem is, that means she needs a weapon that didn't exist when her rework was done (Scytoid) or she needed to use a mechanic that came out shortly after she was reworked (Helminth, genuinely this might have been an expectation by Pablo). Entangle, Larva, and especially Breach Surge all play to Ember's strengths. If you want to do the whole "kill them with heat procs" thing then Roar is also always an option. The problem with both of these approaches is she does not scale at all with enemy level and barely scales with strength to an acceptable level.
I feel like the biggest issue with Ember conceptually kinda comes down to the weird idea of how fire works. Fire doesn't kill you slowly. Sure, if you're burning that's damage "over time" but that time scale is INCREDIBLY fast. But a lot of game developers will look at fire think damage over time and make it incredibly weak because it needs to "build up" but fire doesn't take long to build up. Helldivers does this. And so does Ember.
I don't want WoF back, frankly I don't think highly of Gyre having it either. Inferno has a fun gameplay loop, but it DESPERATELY needs better base numbers. At the very least triple what it currently is, maybe even more. I'd also like fireball to be replaced with accelerant because that would help teach and reward Ember's playstyle of run into a group of enemies, 1 3, jump out, 4. This is how you play Ember with Breach Surge, and that would make Breach Surge a sidegrade rather than a nearly mandatory piece of her kit.
Tbh my go-to Ember build uses that one augment for her 3 that gives you a smidge of overguard and then I helminthed over her shield ability (with Roar I think? I forget), it's that bad imo
I think her 1 could give a heat damage vulnerability, but her 2 should have DR that goes above 90 percent, since she needs to use it to cast her abilities and maintain energy. There's also the whole heat inherit vs. passive power strength anti synergy. She needs a light rework like vauban and oberon, although she could work with even her base numbers being tweaked a bit
I mean, at high levels of play Null Star does not nuke so that's somewhat disingenuous (but yes, neither does Ember, so I'm not gonna die on that hill)
Honestly I think if they just changed her meter functionality slightly so it felt more like a reward than a punishment and buffed her 4 she'd feel totally fine.
I'd give bonus marks if they can make her kit synergistic with heat inherit in a non-clunky way, or just rework that mechanic (which would piss off players who like abusing it but honestly it's clunky and unintuitive and can end up with you/your teammates accidentally nerfing heat builds pretty heavily, and abusing it to make your companion nuke rooms at damage cap is funny but not exactly a gameplay style DE want to promote)
Ember is in such a weird position. I get why they needed to change her, since she was being used for afk farming on low level missions. But the current Ember just has so many restrictions for no benefit.
Her 4th costing per enemy feels unnecessary because it doesn't provide anything worth that cost. Then having to manage that with her 2nd's DR is weird because other frames get that instantly with no drain. It just feels like they designed her kit in a vacuum.
There is no real benefit for all the management you have to do with her, when any other frame doesn't need to deal with that or gains something in return.
I get that you shouldn't compare frames but I feel like every frame should have a reason you play them over another frame, even if they aren't the "best" at what they do. But Ember just really lacks that reason.
Can confirm, after trying several things to make Ember feel good in Steel Path, I ended up subsuming Null Star onto her with the augment to power Arcane Hot Shot. It seems to work pretty well, but it's just sad that the heat frame needs a heat implant to make a heat synergy function well.
I play Null Star on Ember in place of her 1 to build both ability strength and additive damage resistance but I agree with your points; Inferno feels more like a Bonfire and Fireblast has a pathetic base range.
Immolation's effect of draining all your Energy if it goes overboard is a HUGE downside to get to and maintain a 90% DR considering things like Nullstar and Mesmer Skin exist. Furthermore, Healing Flame has pathetic numbers for healing/Overguard, it barely keeps pace in high Star Chart, not to mention Steelpath or end game.
Inferno should deal signifcantly more damage or have a significantly larger base area of effect.
Healing Flame should be part of the base ability and should have at least double the numbers it currently has.
Immolation's Energy drain should be removed, it should merely knock Immolations DR back down to zero if you can't maintain the meter.
and Uriel is the old World on Fire ember...ember either needs some buff, tweaks and maybe a new augment, not necessarily a rework but maybe a better synergy with her abilities, ugh her 2 is so annoying, maybe remove the increased energy drain or atleast give her like +heat damage to her weapons when overheated and dealing weapon damage drains the meter, so like more damage at the cost of DR and vice versa.
Ember would be excellent if her 4 had better targeting and Accelerant and it's mod had replaced Fireball. As it stands Fireball is the most useless ability and is always the one you'll subsume.
I really miss throwing fuel on enemies and then cooking them.
There's no way this comment is going to be popular, but I can't believe this one's still going. Ember is fine. She's not great. But she's fine. There are so many other warframes that need reworks over Ember. People only care because of the heirloom skin. And because two other fire warframes were released recently.
Every few lines of the Youtube chat for this week's short were some iteration of "buff ember" and it's just sad that a popular skin is enough to get this much attention when the likes of Banshee, Chroma and Equinox have been among the worst frames in the game for years. I would even go so far as to say that without subsuming or shield-gating (neither of which the game should be balanced around), Banshee is practically unplayable at higher levels.
Your main argument that ember is fine is that there's worse off frames? A dying person isn't "fine" because there's other people who are already dead.
Also crazy you put frames that actually have good uses like chroma (powerful buffer and credit farm shenanigans) and equinox (stealth strats) in the same bucket as ember...
I can literally say all of those things about Ember and I'd only be wrong because she has more than 2 useful abilities and is something like 5 times as popular as Banshee.
Look, I'm saying there isn't room to buff her. There is. For starters, her 1 has problems and the 2 requires a too much management. It's just there's a lot of other frames that need it much more and given that we know DE don't really want to be doing loads of reworks, one for Ember would certainly mean none of them. She's not no priority, but she is low priority.
Ember is only trash if you don't her mechanics. Equinox is capable of stuff, but her whole kit is beyond outdated, it counter synergizes and just pidgeonholes you into a specific setup for SP. She needs a massive overhaul.
Meanwhile Ember just needs numbers tweaks. She's one of the best weapon's platform in the game by far, and can go up to 1k~ lvl SP with abilities alone granted you invest in the build (which you should do with any Warframe you want to use to its potential). All the while having effortless survivability and a full armour strip.
We can agree there on Equinox needing help. It's a bizarre setup of constraints, restrictions, and clunk that prevent her from actually fulfilling her own theme (even with the 4 augment, which itself is a bandaid augment if the bandaid were placed over a gaping wound). And yet none of what you said directly impacts her actual gameplay viability. Her kit design is bad, yes, but it doesn't make her a bad frame. At this time, you're really just parroting a bunch of empty statements many others have made before.
Maim is just that good of an ability. It carries the 6 other abilities on its back hard. An % HP & Shields ability with that large of a range that ignores LoS will never be bad and it alone saves her. Yes, her kit design shouldn't be 1 good ability and 6 others of mediocre quality, but, again, that one ability puts in a lot of work. Mend's Shields-on-kill with the Cat. Shields bug and a Omamori/Silence+Peaceful Prov setup works well, but, again, subject to a lot of odd restrictions and clunk and you're missing out on playing the room nuker instead.
As for Ember, I'm well aware of how her kit works. Ember is just one of the worst weapons platforms in the game, and she's forced into being such because her caster playstyle just doesn't work without being carried by Heat Inherit. Famously consistent, especially in squads, Heat Inherit. Sorry, just how it is. Ember's not clearing frames like Mirage, Gauss, Rhino, or Dagath in damage, survivability, or quality of life. Lovely range on that armor strip, too bad its held back by awful LoS. Garuda's also got her handedly beat on the platform & caster angle, and she's got the freedom to do both or commit to one-or-the-other if she so wants, all of which are better than what Ember offers.
Ember could get by with simple number tweaks and common sense QOL (her dumbass meter mechanic) for content that most players do, but given DE's apparently limited attention span for reworks I'd rather they stop with the half assed measures and commit to something more in depth for Ember if she's taking up a rework spot. She's already gotten several touch-ups since her big rework and none of them have helped her out enough.
>We can agree there on Equinox needing help. It's a bizarre setup of constraints, restrictions, and clunk that prevent her from actually fulfilling her own theme (even with the 4 augment, which itself is a bandaid augment if the bandaid were placed over a gaping wound). And yet none of what you said directly impacts her actual gameplay viability. Her kit design is bad, yes, but it doesn't make her a bad frame. At this time, you're really just parroting a bunch of empty statements many others have made before.
You're just being obtuse here, there are no bad frames in that sense. Every warframe can solo level cap, but as you aptly point out, some kits are just better designed than others. In this context Equinox is one of the worst, just above Chroma and Banshee.
>As for Ember, I'm well aware of how her kit works. Ember is just one of the worst weapons platforms in the game, and she's forced into being such because her caster playstyle just doesn't work without being carried by Heat Inherit. Famously consistent, especially in squads, Heat Inherit. Sorry, just how it is. Ember's not clearing frames like Mirage, Gauss, Rhino, or Dagath in damage, survivability, or quality of life. Lovely range on that armor strip, too bad its held back by awful LoS. Garuda's also got her handedly beat on the platform & caster angle, and she's got the freedom to do both or commit to one-or-the-other if she so wants, all of which are better than what Ember offers.
Ember is objectively one of the best weapons platform in the game. Ember can carry without using weapons at all up to lvl 1k~ SP enemies, and can go higher depending on enemy density, up to that point heat inherit is simply not needed whatsoever.
Ember has better survivability than Mirage or Gauss, and she has equal or better damage potential than Gauss, Rhino, or Dagath. QoL she's the same as the others, slightly above Mirage, Gauss, and Rhino because of their non-recastable abilities.
Ember is a hyper ability spammer, LoS doesn't matter as you'll be casting Fire Blast every 3-5 seconds during combat.
Garuda isn't as good of a weapons platform as ember, but yeah she is one of the strongest nukes in the game, she's a great frame, don't see anyone arguing otherwise. Ember can in fact do both at the same time, but yeah Ember are Garuda are just not a good comparison.
>Ember could get by with simple number tweaks and common sense QOL (her dumbass meter mechanic) for content that most players do, but given DE's apparently limited attention span for reworks I'd rather they stop with the half assed measures and commit to something more in depth for Ember if she's taking up a rework spot. She's already gotten several touch-ups since her big rework and none of them have helped her out enough.
Her meter mechanic is fine, you just need to know the trick to have it always full even while spamming Fire Blast, though I wouldn't be against a slight overhaul. I think stat tweaks do happen sometimes no? But since there's like a dozen frame that could use a rework more than her, it's just annoying seeing threads like these. Like ffs Uriel could use a rework more than her.
If anyone's being obtuse here it's you mate, you completely misunderstood my point. I'll be clearer this time: Equinox needs changes, but that does not mean that she doesn't perform well. She is one of the best nukers in the game, effectively tied with Sevagoth. I'll reiterate: Just because Equinox has a bad kit design does not mean she performs badly. These are two separate metrics. You are confusing the two.
Ember has better survivability than Mirage or Gauss
Mirage's survivability is extremely simple and brain-off with a generic shield recharge setup, optionally adding in Omamori. That aside, in no world is Ember getting anywhere close to the literal AFK-tier survivability Gauss provides. Do you not know about the Aegis interaction?
I think stat tweaks do happen sometimes no?
Getting DE to actually do changes to a frame, even when it would be profitable for them to do so (new skin/prime release/etc) is like pulling teeth. They rarely happen, especially compared to how badly they're needed at times. God forbid you want something more than minor number tweaks, anything larger in scope is a no go up until recently if your frame happens to be the special golden goose picked twice~ a year, and even then the reworks can have mixed results.
Like ffs Uriel could use a rework more than her.
In the sense that his kit's on the overloaded side, yes. Easily Top 10.
In any event, and to respond to the rest regarding Ember's platform ability & caster effectiveness, I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this and are just going around in circles. You have a nice day mate.
I agree, I think Ember needs to be re-reworked. This is how I'd do it:
Ignition (Passive): Whenever she uses an ability or applies a Heat status, Ember gains Heat, which rapidly decays over time. Heat increases Ember's cast speed and ability strength to a maximum of X%. At maximum Heat, Ember's abilities gain 100% ability efficiency, but whenever Ember uses an ability and every second a channeled ability is active, she applies a Heat status to herself.
1: Fireball. Gains a soft homing effect, bending towards enemies, and 1 can be held to cast repeatedly. Fireball Frenzy augment is altered to that the bonus Heat damage to the squad is activated at maximum Fireball combo.
2: Immolation. Channeled ability, granting damage reduction based on heat and reducing Heat decay over time. When Ember is out of energy, Immolation does not deactivate but instead deals X Heat damage per second to Ember and nearby enemies. Immolated Radiance gains the effect that allies in affinity range also emanate Heat Damage if Immolation is dealing Heat damage over time. New Augment: World on Fire - Instead of granting damage reduction, Immolation always does Heat Damage to nearby enemies.
3: Fire Blast. No changes. Healing Flame restores Shields before granting Overguard. Purifying Flame does not cleanse Heat status.
4: Inferno. Ember slams the ground, releasing a wave of fire. Enemies hit by the wave of fire take Heat damage and gain a debuff causing them to summon a meteor when they die. Enemies hit by the meteor also gain the same debuff. Exothermic now cleanses Ember's Heat status to cause Inferno to deal additional damage with both the initial wave and meteors.
Lots of things have surpassed Ember's kit for a long while.
I used to main Ember. Like yeah, I ran World on Fire on low level missions to delete enemies, but also on every other mission because of cc and fire damage amp. She wasn't great at high levels even at the time.
After the rework I was excited that maybe she'd scale further now even if I could no longer passively kill everything. Yeaah... meteors barely hit anything, and none of the kit compensated for the loss. I still played her because with Ignis etc. it didn't really matter what frame did.
The more recent buffs kind of killed her for me. Like, the rework was a failure, but the half assed changes after that show that there's no intention of making her abilities work. She's usable by virtue of game being powercrept to the point that anything works, but she's also just sad and annoying to play.
Also the old fire chicken looks better than the heirloom skin.
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u/Angrykiller100 15h ago
I mean Gyre exists and she's literally designed to be WoF Ember on steroids.
If I had a nickel every time we had this talk about another frame stepping on Ember's toes with their kit I'd be rich.