Warframe of Mind: Reacting to everything unveiled in the Iceblade of Narin

What the report says


 
 
 
 
 
 Man alive, I feel rotten about this. Seriously, just awful. MOP’s Chris, whom I consider a friend and also just an excellent dude in his own right, gets to step forward and take his new day-to-day role running the site more seriously, coincides with the week when I have to say “hey, can I ruin my usual column schedule and get something into you way, way too late?” It’s to his credit that he went along with it. I would have kicked me in the shins.But, of course, I had to do things this way because we only just got to find out all of the details about Warframe’s next update, Iceblade of Narin.

And could I avoid talking about the update? Of course not. We’ve got a lot going on here! And as you might expect, I’m going to start by focusing in on… the Banshee rework, not any of the story implications or anything else. Yes, that’s what stood out to me first. I have never claimed to be consistent.Honestly, I was curious what tactic the Banshee rework would use from the beginning, just because she’s got a kind of inherently problematic kit in some ways. It’s not that everything she has is bad, it’s that the good parts don’t balance out the bad.

Which means that I feel like the two biggest changes – her passive and Sonar – are probably enough to help push her upward in viability while keeping her inherent properties intact.Seriously, making good use of Puncture traits and the existing spread of weak point-based mechanics mean that Banshee is likely to hit some appreciable crit numbers with the right kinds of weapons without redesigning her too heavily. The changes to her blast attack and her quake are welcome changes too, although I suspect it won’t be enough to change how her 4 is generally seen as the best slot to subsume something else.

Key details

I think it’s a bit of a conservative rework, but I also think it’s a good move to give her more playability and strength without radically redesigning her kit, and adding some armor strip/steal helps a bit with survival and offense as well.These reworks are always difficult to land perfectly, since you want to keep the frame recognizable while also giving some good abilities along the way. I’m looking forward to playing around with it.Narin herself, meanwhile, looks like she’s going to be an interesting sort of offensive support. It wasn’t mentioned (that I saw) if her second ability that sucks up Cold effects will apply overguard to her or to the rest of her squad as well; either makes sense, but the former especially makes her much more of a forward scout and enhancer sort.

She seems well-suited to tune for a sort of offensive boost role with her status effects and cold ammo along the way, let’s say that.This is not exactly a new concept in Warframe, but I’m happy to see it getting embraced a bit more and developed in more detail, and Narin looks like a fun variant on the concept. Also a relatively simple frame to understand, which is definitely nice after Sirius and Orion were… well, let’s just say they were not that.It’s also easy enough to understand why the new six-person missions are being started with pre-made groups, even though I have already seen much wailing and gnashing of teeth on this matter.

And to be clear, I don’t think it’s without merit. People are mad because being able to queue up and go is a major component of this game; finding out you can’t do that here is a pretty big deal and does not send the best message. That having been said, adding two more people is a major force multiplier because of how the game works, so I also don’t exactly blame developers for saying “let’s test this out before throwing the doors open.”At the same time… like, I feel like it’s going to be hard to get a whole lot of data on this one just because Warframe is not a game with a robust in-game means of finding other people.

More from the announcement

Folks who already have abundant lists of friends can get a group together for this, but if it’s going to be super-hardcore, there just isn’t a massive groundswell. There also just isn’t as much demand.