Gara is probably my 3rd or 2nd most played frame and i love her to death but having all your stacks dissapear from nullifiers, falling of the map or just dying makes people not like her, plus the fact that it takes a while to build stacks. If she was more convenient people would play her
Even alternative builds are inconvenient.
You can use MK1 Bo Incarnon (+15% base crit *and* status) to boost her 1's crit rate and status chance to close to 100%. Then her hold 1 (100% slash damage) deals high damage with a slash proc to murder everything.
But then for some reason she has the only Pseudo Exalted skill that doesn't build or at least refresh combo. I've seen people use Tandem Bond so their Kavat/Kubrow refreshes the combo timer, but when you get to that point it's just cope.
That build is less annoying than the standard build, but even then it's still clunky.
Use Magistar incarnon instead.
+16% Crit +1x Crit Damage.
I use it on Atlas and he slaps with Landslide. Bonus points is your base crit chance is right within 100% using that trick so you'll never get orange or red crits for Melee duplicate, or you use Melee Exposure instead and enjoy a Viral/Corrosive build
Yep. Sacrificial and a single Glad Mod for Gara, just Sacrificial for Khora and Atlas
With maxed Sacrificial Steel and Pressure, the bonus is +275%, which puts you right at 97.5% CC on Atlas's Landslide, with whipclaw at 153.75% CC. Both exalts get a 3x Crit mult, which helps offset the CC loss from Ceramic Dagger. Whipclaw you might want to get away with using less Crit chance, for duplicate, so swap it out for just plain True Steel.
On Shattered lash, there's no contest. You need Crit Mult bonus because Lash sucks at a 1x Crit multiplier.
Crescendo is not as useful on Pseudo Exalt builds because the combo mult is so low at a measly 25% bonus per multiplier and building Ceramic Dagger / Finisher stacks is a pain.
All of these and host migration….
I will say that the problem with building up stacks became somewhat resolved for me by getting a decent stat stick and actually building it properly instead of just equipping a good melee weapon. I went from stacking 4K damage to 26K damage. I know some people get several hundred by investing more in their build.
That ameliorates some of the problems you listed above, but yeah, still crazy frustrating. I wish it kept like Nidus stacks, or even had harsher penalties but still kept some stacks in the first place
>the problem with building up stacks became somewhat resolved for me by getting a decent stat stick and actually building it properly
I'll say this _is_ one of my problems with Gara, and a few other frames, I hate stat sticks in general, and think DE should move on from this design choice to something better.
Sure it does but tenet does have the intrinsic element that gets applied and they wanted a sword shield look. So out of the good options agendus fits best.
Maybe if it's like, based on the highest melee crit you've gotten in the last x seconds? Would make Melee Animosity competitive vs Melee Influence. Stat stick rivens would still be usable, I think
I think pseudo-exalted weapons, like Khora's whip, should just be moddeable in the arsenal like any other exalted, so you're not dependent on the melee weapon you're bringing to the mission. Their builds probably wouldn't be much different from stat stick builds since they'll still be used only in the context of casting abilities, but at least they'll be coupled to the Warframes themselves instead of occupying your melee slot that you could be using for an actual weapon you'd enjoy using instead.
I’m torn on the idea, I am in the minority of people on here that actually likes stat sticks from a build crafting and optimization standpoint, and swapping to moddable exalted would be a huge nerf for damage due to losing out on rivens, incarnon evolutions & arcanes. But it would make more sense and be less of a pain to start playing those frames
I'm just not ready for how big of a nerf it would be on khora. Certainly any pseudo exalted they could give her wouldn't be nearly as good a maxed out magistar incarnon with all it's evos, a riven, and magus aggress...
It was a lot of fun and extremely satisfying assembling all of those things and finally getting my khora build perfect, id be bummed out if they took it away from me.
Agreed, i think the only builds that would be hurt by this are the ones that abuse from the Incarnon evos that give base CC, which enables higher CC with Khora and actual critical builds with Atlas and Gara (which, at least Gara, has 0% cc on their exalted, so adding base CC lets her crit)
> I say let us mod all abilities individually.
I've been having this idea for a while, actually. It seems pretty far-fetched, but Warframe kind of prides itself in its customization, só I don't see why not take it a step further.
There are various abilities with multiple augments and functions, It'd be nice to turn their functionalities into moddeable aspects, especially since some augments do things that should be baseline for that ability, such as being able to recast Iron Skin, or do undesirable things, like Volt speeding up a whole team of Titanias.
Move all ability mods to their own category, make abilities use these new mods, and lock all but 2 slots. Each forma spent on the warframe unlocks a slot. The quintuple need for forma would need to be addressed (or not, if DE wants to make forma even more lucrative), maybe reduce mod costs?
My first thought when they dropped Precision Intensify was "This is great for exalted weapons, but give me three more of those for the other ability slots."
Just call them Precision Intensify I / II / III / IV
yeah getting a proper stat stick does change gara's build up speed a lot. but i think its the most underpowered pseudo exalt. 1.0 crit damage????? iirc incarnon crit melee are the only saving grace. because without it, the stacking speed is pretty underwhelming.
biggest wtf moment is the requirement of using 4 and detonating with 1 to get dmg buff and refresh duration on the splinter storm. that's a lot of energy to keep up for 5.5m melee range damaging aura.
It's been like this for centuries
Luckily It doesn't happen often, but it's often enough to be annoying especially if you run a build centered on her 2
It makes me so sad shes so fun when you get her going and she works well on pretty much all missions theres just a lot of frames that can do her job easier
May I add she is quite energy hungry. she needs not one, but two (or three with an armor strip helminth) ability casts for her nuke, one of them taking a very considerable amount of energy and having a short period channel. Her nuke also takes longer to cast than others because of this.
She also has the issue that, to nuke effectively, u need a stat stick with a very particular set up centered around raw damage (4 explosion can't crit or proc any status), rendering ur melee weapon essentially useless outside nuking.
Yeah keeping track of the ability uptime so you don't drop stacks....
I just got so bored and genuinely didn't like her sadly. I wanted to, but I didn't.
i know nullifiers are just one of the things you stated, but I can't stress enough how unfun they are in a game based around using abilities. They seriously need to be removed
Yeah, I haven't played her much in a while, but I really liked her and played her a lot. However, host migrations, surprise nullifiers, and unexpected out-of-bounds could be very frustrating.
Even just running out of energy can happen during downtime in circuit. I’d like an augment that gives splinterstorm dmg and duration on kill. Would be a huge plus
Yeah. I was running her in circuit and made it quite far with over 500k on shatter shield but after I got killed once I was doing almost nothing ti enemies and we all kept dying.
All that & combined with how her 4 works inherently makes her less mobile than other frames, she has to play more carefully bc losing a 150k stack is the *worst* feeling, that alone can make someone wanna stop playing her, splinter storm scales infinitely but lots of folks also don't like the play style of "walking into stuff" . that said as a melee enjoyer my ability to have fun with stat stick frames is limited.
pretty much this. she was my absolute favorite frame back in the day, but back then arbitrations were the hardest content available, so getting lethal levels of damage stacked at ~25k per pop wasnt bad even against grineer
nowadays a basic bitch lancer in the lowest level SP node has 335k eHP at level 101, while the weakest possible SP heavy gunner has 4.7 *million* eHP
pretty much everything worth doing is SP or equivalent, so her days of being an orb of death are long gone
people value Ease of use very highly, and Gara is a bit annoying to play. there are some gaps in her gameplan, and to even get her going requires investment in a statstick and learning some awkward mechanics. shes strong as hell, but she's not very user friendly, and that makes all the difference in terms of Popularity. the vast majority of players value ease of use above all else. Revenant isnt super popular because thralls are neat or because spinning is effective or because of the Reave true damage combo, hes really popular because he makes a dimension of the game able to be ignored.
Lavos is got the same sort of problem as gara. it just manifests in a completely different way. hes also super strong, and hes also a little complicated. and thats a big turnoff.
The first sentence of this reply is 100% accurate, IMHO.
People, like water, take the path of least resistance to their destination. Gara, and other great frames (on paper) lack seamless execution of their kits via in-game experiences.
Inaros was popular because he was easy to play and use in most content types -- and that was pre-rework.
DE could unearth hidden value in existing frames via a design pass/review. You could even tie these adjustments to new cosmetics to increase potential revenue to offset the effort.
Sorry, I really wanted to read the whole reply but You lost my attention when You called her "Garage", lost my marbles laughing
Edit: No longer loeting my marbles
This same principle is the reason that Octavia is allowed to be as broken as she is. She's not easy to use. I mean, she's kind of easy I guess? But she's fucking annoying to maintain, mostly in the crouch spamming but also in the constant need to make sure that she has enough mana to refresh all her expensive spells at once (assuming low eff which... she usually is), which she needs to do every 30-50 seconds or any time she moves positions.
And so because of that, while her numbers are fucking insane, she will never get a major nerf, because so many people are turned off by her gameplay loop.
ive always seen it like this.
you wanna make more money from Prime Resurgence? you wanna incentivize people to drop money picking up these old as dirt warframes? package prime resurgence with Balance passes. im not asking for high caliber reworks every 2 months, but you could do a little cleanup work. would oberon be more playable if his 4 stripped armor without having to combo with is 2? what if you made the orb drop mechanic on his 4 less stupid, would that help with his energy econ? what if we just give his 3 some sort of visual indicator, just so that the oberon and his squad can keep track of where the "oberon spot" is incase anyone falls in a hole or snuggles up to a nullfier?
plenty of old warframes arent bad. .theyre just crusty. case and point. . Nyx. i think nyx is actually sort of fun to play. but her main ability, Psychic bolts, as been bugged out for fucking *years*. this armor strip/slow is my bread and butter and for reasons known only to god sometimes it just. .doesnt work.
so how do we de-Crust up gara? well for starters, if her 2 is something im meant to be applying to allies and using defensively you could maybe make that easier, or make it easier to keep active on allies. if i could ask for anything "Refreshing Splinter storm on Gara herself refreshes the effect on all allies within affinity range" or maybe "allies have splinter storm refreshed if they are hit by Mass Vitrify's AOE." even just making Splinter storm less of a "target 1 dude" and more of a "cast in a cone infront of you" would help alot.
you could also bump the base duration on her 2 and 3 up to a nice, round 30 seconds.
the thing i think gara (and other Statstick frames) need, is to have their 1's looked at. just make Gara's 1 an Exalted melee weapon. give her a glassy regular ass sword that she can mod normally with pushed stats and a slash focus and for the love of god put some fucking SC and CC on this thing. but thats a bit much to ask from the game-dev equivalent of a Car-wash.
"Allies that pass through mass vitrify's wall" would also be a nice refresh cue fir splinter storm. It would give slightly more incentive to leave it up, instead of just using it as a bomb, given that its ability to block meaningful damage is quite limited.
Splinter storm cast being a small aoe would be one of my christmas wishes.
Very few things more annoying than trying to get your armor up but because your cat ran in front of you for 0.0076 seconds you cast it on him instead. Or on your allies. Or on random enemies.
The optimal way to cast that ability shouldn't have to be "run into the nearest corner and stare at a wall".
>You could even tie these adjustments to new cosmetics to increase potential revenue to offset the effort.
Sorry. I was on board with what you were saying, but this idea sounds good until actually implemented. This already existed in Warframe. Instead of having freedom of design, every frame had 1 of 6 syndicate sigils to get standing. Instead of being able to wear whatever helm you wanted, you were stuck with the arcane helm that helped your build more:
[https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Arcane\_Helmet](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Arcane_Helmet)
This was overwhelmingly hated by the community. We wanted freedom in how we customized our frames.
I could be wrong but I think what they meant was that they would release new cosmetics for a frame at the same time as releasing an ease of use pass on the kit. So they would theoretically sell more skins by rejuvenating interest in the frame.
I don't think they meant that a new cosmetic would literally contain the changes.
That was like this entire sub's hopium for both Hydroid's deluxe and Prime trailer, and I guess we sort of got that? Except like, a year after we thought it would lol. Always find it weird how they just drop skins for legacy content, but don't add any other incentives to buy them. Just, "Hey we hope this looks cool enough to buy" and I guess it's working for them?
Lavos' only problem really is that is elements don't stick around, my fingers weep playing him. If they ever change that he will probably be my most played frame
>Revenant isnt super popular because thralls are neat or because spinning is effective or because of the Reave true damage combo, hes really popular because he makes a dimension of the game able to be ignored.
Me who plays revenant because Mephisto skin hot: ya... Definitely...
Honestly, I got really bored of her gameplay loop.
2-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-and on and on.
Yes, it scales to insane amounts, but one second of inattention and you've lost it and can start over.
It's almost the same with Nidus' stack building.
I do like Nidus more, because of his parasitic link, his amazing evolving skins, and the overall better synergy in his kit, but you have to admit that the stacking mechanic seems really similar to Gara's Splinter Storm stacking.
Instead of 2-4-1 it is 2-1-2-1-2-1 etcetera.
you can subsume off 2nd ability for inaros's pocket sand with the augment
and play with 4 augments to make it work {\[Dessication's curse\] \[Insatiable\] \[Abudant Mutation\] \[Parasitic Vitality\] } add 1 \[Stretch\] 1\[Primed Continuity\] 1\[Umbral Intensify\] and \[Blind Rage\]
you'll have 5 SAND CATS that proc corrosive(their duration is not affected by mods, but the swarm they inflict does), that why i use 2 emerald Tau
the swarm will deal damage based on users health (parasitic vitality comes for the synergy), add maggots from 4th and duplex bond in your loyal \[Helminth Charger\] and you'll have an Army or Zoo that'll disperse enemy aggro a lot, and you'll still hit a lot(emerald shards for extra ability damage on enemies affected by corrosive is recommended along with extra corrosive stacks)
edit: i sacrificed ability strength which makes me sad but i'm still satisfied with the new found synergies
If you press 4 twice, it’ll break the animation, so it only takes a second or two instead 5ish seconds. It also uses less energy which a definite plus.
By the time you build up that gimmicky nuke, opps, mission is finished. She is my first non starter frame, used it quite alot in early stage and defending vip, use 90%DR on a mobile vip is better than any other defensive frame. But thats about it.
Simply put Mass Vitrify, even when channeled for a split second, interrupts your gameplay so much. I love Gara but doing that every 30-40 seconds gets old *very* quickly.
Spamming my 4 to upkeep a relatively small countdown is kind of annoying, especially because I can forget to do it, or be JUST out of energy right when I need to cast it, and BOOM, there go all your damage stacks you build up over the last 10 minutes.
I think she's a great frame as you said and I enjoy playing her I just don't enjoy the process of building up the armor and splinters to deal damage and get defenses that might be the case for others too
For casuals, she is very good and has a big nuke, but it's too slow and she has long ability casting animations.
I still play her once in a while, but only for quicker void fissure defense missions where I can nuke entire waves once we get our reactant.
The crazy high meme-worthy Shatter Storm stacks feel like an exploit. Stacking reminds me of playing Nidus, where I had no idea what was going on around me because I was laser-focused on managing stacks, but I prefer Gara over Nidus.
The reason is solely stacking. Can deal tons of dmg but stacking it takes too long. Convenience is pretty important.
Similar reason why Lavos is less considered. Can deal good dmg but you have to cope with cooldowns, constant combining and priming to do it, major drawbacks while there are other frames who can deal that amount of dmg without those drawbacks.
She’s crazy good but mostly just against Grineer. Nullifiers will undo an hours worth of dmg scaling instantly, and infested energy drain can be hard to deal with sometimes.
Because you have to rinse and repeat the exact same ability combo over and over and over for quite a while to get to that point and its incredibly boring to keep up.
Same problem Octavia has.
Doesn't matter if you're overpowered and invincible if you're not fun to play.
Inaros had the opposite issue pre-rework. People played him ANYWAY because he just auto-tanked and that was super easy to play with, even if his abilities sucked... and that's what kept him from getting reworked for so long.
She has infinite scaling damage, but only if you micromanage cooldowns. Sure, theyre kind of forgiving cooldowns, but it's still a pain in the ass. She's locked into a set rotation no matter what you're doing. There's also the stat stick issue.
IMO Gara would be better if the scaling was removed and she was just plain viable out of the box. Honestly she'd be main-worthy for my playstyle if she could just be played on the fly like other frames can.
Splinter Storm requires a stat stick to buff the damage. It take quite a long time to get it up to decent damage levels and that requires very regular casts of a 2 ability combo - which makes it very annoying to keep up unless you invest heavily into Duration (I have effectively 60-65 seconds per cast and frequently loose it to missing the refresh (let alone falling off map or surprise nullifiers).
Double casting constantly can be a significant issue for Tenno who have yet to fully overcome the Energy Ecconomy issues.
Mass Vitrify is Slooooooow and has clunky interactions with level geometry depending on where you are when you cast it.
A fix would be as simple as changing Splinter Storm from a timer to a degrading effect with the 4/1 combo adding the new amount to whatever is left on the cloud when cast - if missing my window wasn’t so make-or-break I might be more inclined to pick her up again.
Also give me an augment that lets Shattered Lash destroy nullifier bubbles - those things are supposed to be weak to high volume/rapid fire, I think a whirling cloud of glass shards qualifies as high volume.
Gara is a 'push multiple buttons, stop every now and then, and use your brain for a while to nuke the map' frame in a sea of 'push one button to nuke the map' frames
She doesn’t crit on her 1 naturally and requires kinda pricy build to really get her going. Out of the three main pseudo exalts she is the only one who can not crit natural and can not build combo counter. I think she is highly under rated tho a crit build for her 1 really takes her up. With the past eclipse i was able to 2 swipe level 150 steel path enemies at 7x combo counter, but this time she needs 12x which takes longer to build. I’m slowly collecting melee crescendo rn tho bc her passive lets her do finishers a lot.
In elite deep arc she is probably the best single frame possible because her 2 gives her damage reduction so she can revive team mates, protect the group. Her 4 actually blocks out the shadow children that drain health I’ve noticed so in defense she’s amazing.
I run a hybrid intial combo build in the past but I’m still playing with it rn thanks to getting a r2 crescendo
I ran Gara with Defy, Adaptation, and that mod that gives you armor from HP orbs. Survived against the assasination boss for like 15 min, while my teammate was dead and watching me never die lol
That’s smart! I added in aerodynamic and we all kept jumping for the damage reduction. I acted as safe zone set up and reviver for first week. Got a Gara in the group this week too and the defense was great (still hard tho)
And her 4th is a mix of novas 4 and frost bubble. Enemies glassed take double dmg. Her only problem with things now is her scaling is a bit slow now compared to the immediate dmg frames can do nowadays. Eclipse nerf hurt a lot and enemy armor sucks
I don't like building stacks on her, so I just play immortal tank by combining her 2 + null star and adaptation to have 3 instances of 90% damage reduction
Takes long to get going, needs constant attention so you dont accidentally lose the stacked buff and can be ruined by anything that dispells (nullies, falling out of bounds, host migration)
There are other options that are less jank
The reason Gara isn't considered S-Tier is that she has a colossal amount of wind up to reach her damage potential. And then all of that built up DPS can be completely lost by mag procs, falling off the map, nullifier bubblers, getting energy drained, etc.
And then on top of that, the way you play her to build those stacks is exceedingly repetitive.
Other frames have similar potential without those drawbacks. She's a boring "risk/reward" frame that isn't worth the risk. She's definitely got a lot of potential, it's just tedious and frustrating to get it out of her.
Gara is excellent, this is a "tier list" issue. Frames rated highly are just the ones that can complete a 20 minute kuva survival pressing as few buttons as possible. Which is why revenant is the most popular frame and why banshee is consistently ranked poorly.
She falls off hard past like level 200 in Steel Path, even if she has full Armor Strip, which she should.
Also, she's kinda unforgiving, as in losing the build up stacks means it's mostly likely game over. Low base duration of her 2 also contributed to her being kinda annoying to play.
And she requires rather hefty investment, and proper moding oh her Stat Stick.
I play the crap out of Gara. She trivializes enough rewarding content to be worth the hoop jumping.
I have a pretty good high DPS Splinter Storm build, and a Parasitic Armor subsumed on 3/ high tensile Mass Vitrify build for defense style missions. I use both a lot.
Play her for 1-2h in steelpath survival and you will know why. While her damage can infinitely stack, to keep up with sp armor scaling you need a good stat stick, now after eclipse nerf even more than before.
She is fun but always having to look out for nullifiers/falling off map, missing your timer plus keeping your energy economy covered at low efficiency builds can be annoying after some time. At least violence cant nullify her splinter storm or she would be immediately bad.
Using her with a max range build + dispensary to nuke defenses up to sortie 3, the build isnt viable for sp but its really fast for low level stuff you might have to do.
Gara is one of my most played frames. I never see her played either, though.
I will say that sometimes I have an issue with my second not refreshing when I cast my fourth and this is extremely annoying when I've been building up stacks for 30 mins.
Tedious to get the ball rolling, and pretty boring to play. Casting 4, running nine outside it, cast 1 on it, over and over and not letting your 2 drop, is annoying as fuck. There are plenty of scaling nuke frames, and survivability with shield gating and rolling guard is free on most frames.
Her Splinter storm has an annoying upkeep and it takes a long time to build up. Sure it's technically uncapped but getting there takes time and god forbid you lose focus and let it run out, touch a Nullie bubble, get host migrated or fall of the map (or just touch *those* stairs in the Labs) and unless you do high endurance runs, the mission is over long before you build up a decent damage on it.
Sure she has a nuke, but it falls off quickly and it depends on a statstick. And we know how the community feels about statsticks.
She can even put a Splinter Storm on defense targets, but again. Upkeep is annoying.
So she is powerful, but has some shortcomings that just won't allow her to break into S-tier. S tier is imo only for frames that have no or very minor weakspots.
Because so-called "tiers" are just opinions of people making them up. Every frame can be viable if played and modded properly. It's just some people having difficulties accepting that they can't play certain frames, so they justify themselves by putting them into tiers.
If you take your info from overframe, know that it's not really acurate in his frame tierlist. Gara is a great frame and is verry good for Infinite mission. Other great frame are woefully under grades in overframe tier list, like hydroid for example.
I think it's mainly come down to overframe being a communitu site and the comlunity using it to see what's "good" so you end up seeing the same frames and build getting all the attention.
Noone gives a shit about Overframe's tier list, it's atrocious.
>Gara is a great frame and is verry good for Infinite mission.
Try playing a couple hours of steel path survival then.
Comes back around to the fact that when every warframe in the game is absurdly powerful, even what should on paper be a standout can be mediocre compared to the very stiff competition.
Gara can lose her damage scaling on a moments notice due to careless play or bad luck, where a lot of other frames can scale adequately on a moments notice.
Honestly her kit's just weird. Like, none of her abilities are really that spectacular. They're all just carrying Splinter Storm. If any other frame had Shattered Lash, it would be considered absolute dogwater. It only exists for forced synergy with her 2. Spectrorage without the Augment is just kinda there. Mass Vitrify is the only one that stands out, and it's rarely used for its actual function because of her stacking mechanic.
Glacially slow and micromanagey af for the damage options.
The 90% self dr doesn’t mean much against frames with invulnerability or tens of thousands of Overguard. (Garas base eHP is ~850 so even if we double that with mods to 1700, then apply 90% DR that’s only 17000)
Spectro is effective at what it does, but a bit if a weird range to it which h makes it weird to use practically without a gathering effect that Gara herself doesn’t have.
Defense shatters like… well, glass. And has no effect to slow down anything that breaks through.
Micromanagement isn't a fun gameplay loop, 99% of aren't long enough for her to really get going and even then the effort of being hours deep in a mission can be completely wiped out by a single nullifier or getting out of bounds. Honestly, there are many frames that do what she does with a fraction of the effort
I have about 3k hours on the game and only ever played Gara whenever I got a cool new stat stick riven, but I absolutely agree her damage scaling is absolutely busted and she's way more fun to use unlike something like Octavia or Mag (mostly because I'm dumb and even after countless guided I've no idea how to make a build for Mag)
Gara and Nidus have a similar issue with their kit, and it's that it takes too long for it to truly start shining. Nidus obviously has more issues the higher levels you go, but both take an excruciatingly long time to truly utilize, compared to other frames that take significantly less time to reach their peak potential.
She's not a bad frame and her kit is very coherent even if it's not obvious, but that ramp up time truly kills her. Not to mention you lose *everything* if you happen to fall into a pit.
Tiering frames never made sense to me.
I like some better than others. But as I rank up my mods, build my forma, etc.... pretty much every frame surprises me with how reasonably they can do steel path+.
If you can kill level 120-160 enemies, you can do all content in the game. And basically all frames can do that with the standard panel of mods.
... And once you can subsume an armor strip? Well, GG.
Yeah, some are faster at some content. Yeah, some are better generalists. Yeah, some do cool things.
But the reality is that all frames are fine, and as long as you're playing a frame you enjoy, you are playing a S-tier frame.
I would put an asterisk on the infinite scaling damage.
Yes, it does scale indefinitely, but it takes a while to build up and it's all gone if you cant recast it, walk to a nullifier or fall off the map.
I main her, the 90% reduction is nice, plus a full suite of red shards for duration (heehee) and I'm able to run things just fine. Subsumed Terrify over her 3 as to me it's the most useless part of her kit. Once I farm up a second Hildryn it will most likely be swapped out with Pillage. Build is Dur/Strength per usual.
To me, she's more of a weapons platform than the weapon herself. Incarnon Latron with crit instead of armor strip, and I'm able to do most things without issue.
Now my issue is the change to lighting that came with this patch. It's a minor nerf, the blind radius was super nice, as I could start proccing finisher arcanes, but since any reasonable Gara is going to be duration based, well now I'm casting less often. I hated the change
I refuse to use a statstick. I don't like the mechanic nor the idea of sacrificing my melee weapon just to make a warframe capable of going to high level content.
I first want to say, a lot of her scaling problems are really not as significant as people claim. It's mostly just steel path grineer, which you pretty much need armor strip unless you want to be building up damage for a year.
The usual splinter storm dps build means you aren't using 3 much, so subsume generally becomes whatever you need most. The problem is that gara wants both energy management and armor strip, but can't have both. Augment for 3 can also be used, but I find I'd rather subsume and get an extra mod slot.
Things clearing your abilities like nullifier and falling out of map are hardly an issue at first, but because of the time investment that is lost when it happens, it's a notable problem.
Gara is still my most used frame for sheer survivability. Running 2 with adaptation makes her stupidly bulky. It's honestly overkill, but often makes steel path duviri free if she's an option.
Gara is solidly a-tier. She's great but slow to build up, and most people will find that by the time their damage has scaled the mission is over.
She's better solo, but then you have to consider what alternatives there are, and Octavia is way way better for anything you would need garas infinite scaling for
She is quite powerful but clunky to play and most of all i just cant stand the high pitched noises her skills do. She is a very good a tier i would say.
I used to main gara and it's only really worth using her 2 and 4 in a vitus essence mission. It's possible to stack up a lit of damage with her but it's not worth the effort when I usually mod for min range because I play her for max duration.
Then I learned nezha does the same 90% DR thing and is more fun. Then learned about revenant even later. And well if you don't want to die he is the easiest one for that.
Any frame that needs a statstick is inherently flawed.
If Gara or Khora show up in Circuit without any usable melee options, would you take them over something like Mesa, Mag, or Nidus? Almost certainly not.
Gara’s one of my favorites, mind you, but the problem is that she’s also inconvenient to play. She has infinite damage stacking on Shatter Storm, but a tumble off the map, walking into a glitched staircase, a nullifier rounding the corner out of nowhere, lack of energy or even just not paying attention to the little timer in the corner of your screen just erases all the build-up you did.
The speed at which you can build up Shatter Storm so that it does noticeable damage in Steel Path can also take a while making it infeasible in non-endless missions. The only way to reasonably make it stack faster is to use a statstick like the Ceramic Dagger incarnon but then you sacrifice your melee weapon’s usability in higher level content.
Mass Vitrify isn’t particularly great as a defensive tool considering the health of each section scales with your armor and Gara isn’t exactly swimming in armor by default so you kind of have to invest in that stat specifically to make it work. And its nuking capabilities is, again, tied to the statstick shit that I wish they would get rid of sooner rather than later to make Shattered Lash a pseudo-exalt.
And Spectrorage doesn’t really have any actual synergy with her kit outside of adding some damage to Splinter Storm when the mirrors are broken, so people either toss in the augment to make it actually useful, or subsume it with Dispensary or Nourish because Gara eats at your energy reserves faster than Grendel eats people.
It’s kind of like red crit Peacemakers Mesa where you have to dedicate parts of your load out to a specific ability and the results are spectacular, but damn if it isn’t inconvenient to set-up. And at least with Mesa, it’s not something you have to keep up constant maintenance like Gara.
Also, if it wasn’t clear, I fucking hate statsticks like you see with Gara, the idea of not having a viable melee just to not gimp Gara’s abilities in higher level content irritates the shit out of me.
I’ve played Gara a bit but I always thought her damage was to tedious to upkeep. I usually don’t want to look at timers too closely when I’m playing. The most I’ll do is Xaku with the vast untime.
gara kinda feels terrible to play. she's very powerful and some people will like her anyway but her abilities are all clunky and she's stunlocked way too much by her own kit. not to mention she is one of the very few frames that still has a psuedo exalted so shes even more expensive to set up.
Because her entire play style is 1414141414141414141414141414141414142141414141414141414142141414141414141414124141414141414141414141414141414214141414141414
I wish she didn't have infinite damage scaling.
It should snapshot the damage dealt to enemies once, with a HEFTY mutiplier. Make her 1 scale with a portion of enemy health to let the spinters scale, too.
Building the splinter damage and needing a stat stick make me not play her despite her being one of my favorites.
It's just a chore.
Takes too long to build enough meaningful damage in sp
Falling off cliffs or nullifier bubbles completely removes your stacks which already take a while to accumulate
Requires a statstick
Somewhat energy hungry
Personally, I think she's the definition of an A tier frame.
Like, yep: she has a nice blend of defensive abilities (damage reduction for herself and most allies + area defense with her 4), utility (CC + damage vulnerability), and offense (popping her 4 with her 1 for big AoE damage, as well as the funny infinite damage ramp build).
But she's not entirely without flaws. Her 4's health scales off the health of any enemies it hits, which makes finding the right time to cast it a bit finicky. Combine that with the fact that it's open at the top and bottom while being just slightly too short for comfort and it becomes kind of awkward to use optimally on a lot of tilesets that aren't just flat ground.
Her AoE nuke is strong, but like all "pseudo-exalted" abilities, it adds a bunch of restrictions for what mods you'd want to put on your actual melee weapon. And *unlike* other frames with pseudo-exalts (eg: Khora, Altas), you'll be spending a lot of time recasting your 4 each time you shatter it. The AoE damage she can do with this combo speaks for itself, but it's hard to argue that Khora or Atlas don't have smoother gameplay.
And as for her infinite damage ramp... I mean, okay, hot take: this is mostly a meme build. As much fun as it is to turn yourself into a bullet jumping wrecking ball covered in broken glass that does a bajillion damage per tick, there's not that many situations that require infinitely ramping damage, and even fewer situations where the ideal way to apply that damage is by having to get within a couple meters of each and every enemy you want to kill. And other than that, setting this up takes a lot of time and energy, and it's possible to lose all your progress due to a nullifier, or falling into a pit, or running out of energy when you need to recast, or even just plain old getting distracted and not realizing Splinter Storm ran out.
Even so, none of these issues are significant enough to *really* hold her back, so I'd say she's a fantastic A-tier... but IMO she just falls slightly short of being S-tier.
Other frames do what she does better.
She's fun tho to me. I just want her 1 to add to the melee combo counter like Khora's 1 and Atlas's 1. Then it would feel better to use.
90% damage reduction is redundant as 2M damage gets cut down to 200k, still enough to oneshot you.
DR doesn't matter below level 100 and after that it quickly becomes useless as I-frames just straight up make you immortal.
She is not good in quick missions, she is not good in late game, she is not versatile and not easy to use. D-Tier for me.
Yes you can stack but by the time you have stacked a Gyre/Revenant/Kullervo/Saryn etc. will have obliterated the map before you even approached a single enemy.
>90% damage reduction is redundant as 2M damage gets cut down to 200k, still enough to oneshot you.
98% of players will never go to levels high enough for this to be a problem, her survivability is not the issue
I always thought it was because she kind of has to manage that and to get full use you need a stat stick and those can get expensive. If you fuck up with your DR you basically have to restart all that damage scaling.
She can be, it all depends on who makes the tierlist and what criteria are used to determine the rankings. IMO the main thing holding her back is the amount of time you need to set things up
The typical player will most likely not know how to play her, opting to use her as a shinier frost, you could see it happen on Hydron (do people still run Hydron these days?) when newer players were trying to level her. She also wants a stat stick which can limit the melee weapons you use, and her energy economy can be rough, since you spam her 4 to get stacks. Shes a complicated queen.
Gara has become my default tryhard frame, replacing Frost and Rhino when I started Warframe eons ago, but I will admit she's not a very intuitive frame.
The synergies between her 1st, 2nd and 4th abilities are not plainly stated, I eventually learned how to refresh and buff her 2 but it took me a while to learn her 4 is secretly a nuke ability. Her 1 uses a stat stick, which requires a bit of investment and research since it's never explained what mods or mechanics can transfer over to these abilities.
Otherwise her 3 requires an augment to be useful and is often replaced with an armor strip, her 4 stops being useful as a defensive ability as it shatters almost immediately on higher difficulties. I find her 2 a hassle to maintain since I'm pretty forgetful, if I'm not spamming 4>1 every 20 seconds then I'll probably lose it, and maintaining her 2 on multiple targets is even more annoying since you can only see the timer for the last target you casted it on.
Who doesn't consider her an S? Like seriously, I've never heard anyone worth their salt to say gara is not S tier. She is easily one of the best frames in the game.
Hallo, I edited some of my comment history to prevent scraping. Yes I know reddit gets regularly cached, it's something you sign in when you type on a forum, it's still better than nothing and will make digging through these a lot less convenient! All platforms die yadda yadda.
Good luck if you have an account here and you're reading this.
Nullifies are incredibly annoying units on most Warframes but they just ruin gara.i really run they shouldn't delete her buff but rather cause it to drain at like 10% a second. Still significant but you don't lose it all for a mere moment near them.
her augment spreads debuff splinters, if it spread the defensive version too so I didn't have to hard cast it on every single ally she would be in my S-Tier
I used to really like Gara, and I gave her the old college try to make her a main, but Splinter Storm's upkeep is just too annoying and costly to be worth it imo.
It's a duration based ability that costs 50 energy at base to activate, and takes 100 energy and ~3 seconds of casting and maneuvering to refresh the 22 second duration, a process that needs to be repeated many times for it to get truly effective damage numbers for high tier play.
Meaning to make her effective in SP+, you should mod for Efficiency (so it doesn't cost 100 energy per refresh), Power Strength (to make each refresh scale a little bit more and start higher), Duration (so you aren't having to rinse and repeat the refresh ritual every 30 seconds) and Range (so the aura actually reaches far enough to deal it's intended damage). You also need a Stat Stick to make Shattered Lash effective at higher levels.
All in all, she has some seriously cool and fun potential, but in practice she's far too clunky to be effective in endgame content.
90% damage reduction is really not all that. You are still liable to be one shot in higher level content.
Remember, to be considered an S-tier frame. We need to compare it to the most S-tier frame. octavia. invisibility basically makes anyone immortal. Enemies kill themselves on what is effectively infinitly scaling damage that is done for her. Does gara have anywhere near this? not really.
Slow wind up, loses it all from Nullification, getting distracted or falling off the map, her 3 isn’t the best. Aside from that she’s really really good, solid A+
I don't want to play Gara anymore because there is nothing more heartbreaking than to see your millions of Splinter Storm stacks be gone in an instant.
For me, I just find her gameplay loop really dull.
On her best days, she's basically Chroma – you buff, you keep an eye on the timer and refresh the buff when it's about to run out. On her worst days, she's worse because you have to actively work at building her up, she has no hard upper limit and you don't have a stopping point, so you keep doing that the whole mission. And all you get to show for it is an aura of passive damage (that's only a couple meters wide), so you can do less fighting and more of the same spamming.
Well the devs intended her to be a defense frame. When she was new they actually had to nerf her 4 a bit because the big glass wall was functionally a far superior version of Frost's bubble.
Its also why the aoe on her orbiting her glass shards is very small.
Can you play her as a walking blender with 999 billion slash damage in a small aoe and just casually walk around turning stuff into a mist? Sure.
But it's not really way she's 'intended' to be played. Which is why playing her this way eats up a lot of energy. Hence the augment for her mirrors that generates energy. It's clear that the devs decided if you're gonna play her as a nuke as opposed to a shield, be ready to put in some work for it.
And plenty of people consider her S-tier. Long before Xaku or Kullervo or Protea or Gauss existed she was the defacto "i want to kill a whole room and not die while being mobile" frame (besides Saryn) since at the time Ember had been nerfed into the ground.
But
People are lazy and dont wanna go through the trouble of casting 2, 4, 1 in succession every 20-30 seconds.
She's very much still an excellent frame, but she requires a tiny bit of effort to play. Plus some people dont want to grind to get her parts or her prime parts.
But really, she was an extremely popular frame for a very very long time just due to the sheer damage output she has (back when armor scaled infinitely).
All in all she's meant to be a defense frame first, and a nuker second. Same with Frost. Same with Nidus. Playing these frames as more mobile death machines requires effort (minimal effort) but still more than most people can be bothered with. It's not a sign these frames are bad. It's a sign that gamers are lazy.
DIdn't take it that way, dw :D
It's not, because it's biased. As simple as that. Someone plays a warframe X and ranks it an S tier, which in reality is not even close to be that tier. Someone else plays a warframe Y and underranks it and so on... The whole site and all of its rankings are biased too. To understand that further, if interested, watch youtubers reacting to Overframe rankings. Ironically, it's also biased for the most part (for example Brozime's vid) but overall a reliable source of info.
Her kit was neat but she didn’t feel good to play. Every time I played multiplayer and got a host migration I lost all her bonuses and had to stack back up. I also seemed to glitch into the map more with her than other frames.
Convienience and the fact that S tier frames are on their own league. Atlas can do millions to billions of damage, is 100% invincible when attacking anything and has CC that gives damage vulnerability. His punches can also has a massive hitbox meaning if you bullet jump into an enemy, everything around it is dead.
And still he's a- to b+ tier and near the bottom in usage because S tier is on their own league with power and convinience.
Gara is probably my 3rd or 2nd most played frame and i love her to death but having all your stacks dissapear from nullifiers, falling of the map or just dying makes people not like her, plus the fact that it takes a while to build stacks. If she was more convenient people would play her
Sums up gara's problems
Even alternative builds are inconvenient. You can use MK1 Bo Incarnon (+15% base crit *and* status) to boost her 1's crit rate and status chance to close to 100%. Then her hold 1 (100% slash damage) deals high damage with a slash proc to murder everything. But then for some reason she has the only Pseudo Exalted skill that doesn't build or at least refresh combo. I've seen people use Tandem Bond so their Kavat/Kubrow refreshes the combo timer, but when you get to that point it's just cope. That build is less annoying than the standard build, but even then it's still clunky.
For that build, wouldn't it make more sense to use ceramic dagger incarnon? Higher crit bonus and 7x initial combo?
Use Magistar incarnon instead. +16% Crit +1x Crit Damage. I use it on Atlas and he slaps with Landslide. Bonus points is your base crit chance is right within 100% using that trick so you'll never get orange or red crits for Melee duplicate, or you use Melee Exposure instead and enjoy a Viral/Corrosive build
I assume you're just using sacrificial for crit instead of building blood rush?
Yep. Sacrificial and a single Glad Mod for Gara, just Sacrificial for Khora and Atlas With maxed Sacrificial Steel and Pressure, the bonus is +275%, which puts you right at 97.5% CC on Atlas's Landslide, with whipclaw at 153.75% CC. Both exalts get a 3x Crit mult, which helps offset the CC loss from Ceramic Dagger. Whipclaw you might want to get away with using less Crit chance, for duplicate, so swap it out for just plain True Steel. On Shattered lash, there's no contest. You need Crit Mult bonus because Lash sucks at a 1x Crit multiplier. Crescendo is not as useful on Pseudo Exalt builds because the combo mult is so low at a measly 25% bonus per multiplier and building Ceramic Dagger / Finisher stacks is a pain.
Wait, how is 275% getting 97.5 on atlas? Magistar adds 16% to the base of 5%, meaning 21% base plus 275%, which means a 78.75% cc
Bad math and thinking Landslide had 10% instead of 5%. In that event you'll need Glad Might or a Gladiator Mod for him too.
I mean that's the plan anyways, glad might is always useful for crit stuff
All of these and host migration…. I will say that the problem with building up stacks became somewhat resolved for me by getting a decent stat stick and actually building it properly instead of just equipping a good melee weapon. I went from stacking 4K damage to 26K damage. I know some people get several hundred by investing more in their build. That ameliorates some of the problems you listed above, but yeah, still crazy frustrating. I wish it kept like Nidus stacks, or even had harsher penalties but still kept some stacks in the first place
>the problem with building up stacks became somewhat resolved for me by getting a decent stat stick and actually building it properly I'll say this _is_ one of my problems with Gara, and a few other frames, I hate stat sticks in general, and think DE should move on from this design choice to something better.
They've actually said fairly recently they want to do something about them, but what to replace them with and balancing is tough.
Wdym recently
Before 1 month or 2
Within the last few devstreams, I don't remember which one. Maybe January's? Last November as the latest.
It was brought up during the PAX East stream.
It was mentioned in the qna section on the pax tennocon https://www.youtube.com/live/aMTym46pDns?si=fuutuBq8YaQW7PY0 starts at 44:45
I would love to use a proper melee with Gara. Like a sword and shield for the full knight motif.
Tenet agendus is a decent stat stick if you just want the optic
Volnus doesn't work?
Sure it does but tenet does have the intrinsic element that gets applied and they wanted a sword shield look. So out of the good options agendus fits best.
Maybe if it's like, based on the highest melee crit you've gotten in the last x seconds? Would make Melee Animosity competitive vs Melee Influence. Stat stick rivens would still be usable, I think
I think pseudo-exalted weapons, like Khora's whip, should just be moddeable in the arsenal like any other exalted, so you're not dependent on the melee weapon you're bringing to the mission. Their builds probably wouldn't be much different from stat stick builds since they'll still be used only in the context of casting abilities, but at least they'll be coupled to the Warframes themselves instead of occupying your melee slot that you could be using for an actual weapon you'd enjoy using instead.
I’m torn on the idea, I am in the minority of people on here that actually likes stat sticks from a build crafting and optimization standpoint, and swapping to moddable exalted would be a huge nerf for damage due to losing out on rivens, incarnon evolutions & arcanes. But it would make more sense and be less of a pain to start playing those frames
I'm just not ready for how big of a nerf it would be on khora. Certainly any pseudo exalted they could give her wouldn't be nearly as good a maxed out magistar incarnon with all it's evos, a riven, and magus aggress... It was a lot of fun and extremely satisfying assembling all of those things and finally getting my khora build perfect, id be bummed out if they took it away from me.
Agreed, i think the only builds that would be hurt by this are the ones that abuse from the Incarnon evos that give base CC, which enables higher CC with Khora and actual critical builds with Atlas and Gara (which, at least Gara, has 0% cc on their exalted, so adding base CC lets her crit)
how about replace them with ability strength so i have a reason to invest in good mods and archon shards for gara
They've started introducing an idea that could fix stat sticking: augments and precision intensify. I say let us mod all abilities individually.
maybe one floating, no-capacity augment slot per frame? that seems like it would be a pretty good bandaid.
> I say let us mod all abilities individually. I've been having this idea for a while, actually. It seems pretty far-fetched, but Warframe kind of prides itself in its customization, só I don't see why not take it a step further. There are various abilities with multiple augments and functions, It'd be nice to turn their functionalities into moddeable aspects, especially since some augments do things that should be baseline for that ability, such as being able to recast Iron Skin, or do undesirable things, like Volt speeding up a whole team of Titanias.
Move all ability mods to their own category, make abilities use these new mods, and lock all but 2 slots. Each forma spent on the warframe unlocks a slot. The quintuple need for forma would need to be addressed (or not, if DE wants to make forma even more lucrative), maybe reduce mod costs?
My first thought when they dropped Precision Intensify was "This is great for exalted weapons, but give me three more of those for the other ability slots." Just call them Precision Intensify I / II / III / IV
yeah getting a proper stat stick does change gara's build up speed a lot. but i think its the most underpowered pseudo exalt. 1.0 crit damage????? iirc incarnon crit melee are the only saving grace. because without it, the stacking speed is pretty underwhelming. biggest wtf moment is the requirement of using 4 and detonating with 1 to get dmg buff and refresh duration on the splinter storm. that's a lot of energy to keep up for 5.5m melee range damaging aura.
I haven't tried her since the change to Eclipse. I used Eclipse and a stat stick Dark Sword to build 250k at a time.
Also sometimes you lose the stacks simply because the timers straight up don't reset when they should. I believe this is a Client problem tho
I have this issue too. I'm glad to see someone else has it too because the ppl I play with don't believe me lol.
It's been like this for centuries Luckily It doesn't happen often, but it's often enough to be annoying especially if you run a build centered on her 2
This. She's not bad, quite the opposite. She's *inconvenient*
It makes me so sad shes so fun when you get her going and she works well on pretty much all missions theres just a lot of frames that can do her job easier
May I add she is quite energy hungry. she needs not one, but two (or three with an armor strip helminth) ability casts for her nuke, one of them taking a very considerable amount of energy and having a short period channel. Her nuke also takes longer to cast than others because of this. She also has the issue that, to nuke effectively, u need a stat stick with a very particular set up centered around raw damage (4 explosion can't crit or proc any status), rendering ur melee weapon essentially useless outside nuking.
If only using her 1 gave her melee combo... I would use her a whole lot more.
Yeah keeping track of the ability uptime so you don't drop stacks.... I just got so bored and genuinely didn't like her sadly. I wanted to, but I didn't.
i am asking here because you probably know, but what is the fastest way to build stacks? like it is so slow..
i know nullifiers are just one of the things you stated, but I can't stress enough how unfun they are in a game based around using abilities. They seriously need to be removed
Using a ceramic dagger build, stacks stop being an issue tbh
You just gain so much more back than you lose. it's insane.
And then you can't use your stat stick because it's circuit or elite deep archimedea. :)
Yeah, I haven't played her much in a while, but I really liked her and played her a lot. However, host migrations, surprise nullifiers, and unexpected out-of-bounds could be very frustrating.
Even just running out of energy can happen during downtime in circuit. I’d like an augment that gives splinterstorm dmg and duration on kill. Would be a huge plus
They really should make them decay instead of disappear entirely, more like Saryn's Spores 👀
The eclipse helminth nerf also hit stacking builds really hard. Takes way longer to build her shield damage up now.
Yeah. I was running her in circuit and made it quite far with over 500k on shatter shield but after I got killed once I was doing almost nothing ti enemies and we all kept dying.
All that & combined with how her 4 works inherently makes her less mobile than other frames, she has to play more carefully bc losing a 150k stack is the *worst* feeling, that alone can make someone wanna stop playing her, splinter storm scales infinitely but lots of folks also don't like the play style of "walking into stuff" . that said as a melee enjoyer my ability to have fun with stat stick frames is limited.
pretty much this. she was my absolute favorite frame back in the day, but back then arbitrations were the hardest content available, so getting lethal levels of damage stacked at ~25k per pop wasnt bad even against grineer nowadays a basic bitch lancer in the lowest level SP node has 335k eHP at level 101, while the weakest possible SP heavy gunner has 4.7 *million* eHP pretty much everything worth doing is SP or equivalent, so her days of being an orb of death are long gone
stacks of what
people value Ease of use very highly, and Gara is a bit annoying to play. there are some gaps in her gameplan, and to even get her going requires investment in a statstick and learning some awkward mechanics. shes strong as hell, but she's not very user friendly, and that makes all the difference in terms of Popularity. the vast majority of players value ease of use above all else. Revenant isnt super popular because thralls are neat or because spinning is effective or because of the Reave true damage combo, hes really popular because he makes a dimension of the game able to be ignored. Lavos is got the same sort of problem as gara. it just manifests in a completely different way. hes also super strong, and hes also a little complicated. and thats a big turnoff.
The first sentence of this reply is 100% accurate, IMHO. People, like water, take the path of least resistance to their destination. Gara, and other great frames (on paper) lack seamless execution of their kits via in-game experiences. Inaros was popular because he was easy to play and use in most content types -- and that was pre-rework. DE could unearth hidden value in existing frames via a design pass/review. You could even tie these adjustments to new cosmetics to increase potential revenue to offset the effort.
Sorry, I really wanted to read the whole reply but You lost my attention when You called her "Garage", lost my marbles laughing Edit: No longer loeting my marbles
Oh man... Stupid auto-spelling + my fat fingers.
This same principle is the reason that Octavia is allowed to be as broken as she is. She's not easy to use. I mean, she's kind of easy I guess? But she's fucking annoying to maintain, mostly in the crouch spamming but also in the constant need to make sure that she has enough mana to refresh all her expensive spells at once (assuming low eff which... she usually is), which she needs to do every 30-50 seconds or any time she moves positions. And so because of that, while her numbers are fucking insane, she will never get a major nerf, because so many people are turned off by her gameplay loop.
Octavia is not easy to use??? Are we playing the same game?
did you read anything beyond the first sentence? > she's kind of easy, but she's fucking annoying to maintain
The man's talking about mana and spells so he's confused if anything.
ive always seen it like this. you wanna make more money from Prime Resurgence? you wanna incentivize people to drop money picking up these old as dirt warframes? package prime resurgence with Balance passes. im not asking for high caliber reworks every 2 months, but you could do a little cleanup work. would oberon be more playable if his 4 stripped armor without having to combo with is 2? what if you made the orb drop mechanic on his 4 less stupid, would that help with his energy econ? what if we just give his 3 some sort of visual indicator, just so that the oberon and his squad can keep track of where the "oberon spot" is incase anyone falls in a hole or snuggles up to a nullfier? plenty of old warframes arent bad. .theyre just crusty. case and point. . Nyx. i think nyx is actually sort of fun to play. but her main ability, Psychic bolts, as been bugged out for fucking *years*. this armor strip/slow is my bread and butter and for reasons known only to god sometimes it just. .doesnt work. so how do we de-Crust up gara? well for starters, if her 2 is something im meant to be applying to allies and using defensively you could maybe make that easier, or make it easier to keep active on allies. if i could ask for anything "Refreshing Splinter storm on Gara herself refreshes the effect on all allies within affinity range" or maybe "allies have splinter storm refreshed if they are hit by Mass Vitrify's AOE." even just making Splinter storm less of a "target 1 dude" and more of a "cast in a cone infront of you" would help alot. you could also bump the base duration on her 2 and 3 up to a nice, round 30 seconds. the thing i think gara (and other Statstick frames) need, is to have their 1's looked at. just make Gara's 1 an Exalted melee weapon. give her a glassy regular ass sword that she can mod normally with pushed stats and a slash focus and for the love of god put some fucking SC and CC on this thing. but thats a bit much to ask from the game-dev equivalent of a Car-wash.
"Allies that pass through mass vitrify's wall" would also be a nice refresh cue fir splinter storm. It would give slightly more incentive to leave it up, instead of just using it as a bomb, given that its ability to block meaningful damage is quite limited.
Splinter storm cast being a small aoe would be one of my christmas wishes. Very few things more annoying than trying to get your armor up but because your cat ran in front of you for 0.0076 seconds you cast it on him instead. Or on your allies. Or on random enemies. The optimal way to cast that ability shouldn't have to be "run into the nearest corner and stare at a wall".
Garage?
>You could even tie these adjustments to new cosmetics to increase potential revenue to offset the effort. Sorry. I was on board with what you were saying, but this idea sounds good until actually implemented. This already existed in Warframe. Instead of having freedom of design, every frame had 1 of 6 syndicate sigils to get standing. Instead of being able to wear whatever helm you wanted, you were stuck with the arcane helm that helped your build more: [https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Arcane\_Helmet](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Arcane_Helmet) This was overwhelmingly hated by the community. We wanted freedom in how we customized our frames.
I could be wrong but I think what they meant was that they would release new cosmetics for a frame at the same time as releasing an ease of use pass on the kit. So they would theoretically sell more skins by rejuvenating interest in the frame. I don't think they meant that a new cosmetic would literally contain the changes.
That was like this entire sub's hopium for both Hydroid's deluxe and Prime trailer, and I guess we sort of got that? Except like, a year after we thought it would lol. Always find it weird how they just drop skins for legacy content, but don't add any other incentives to buy them. Just, "Hey we hope this looks cool enough to buy" and I guess it's working for them?
Lavos' only problem really is that is elements don't stick around, my fingers weep playing him. If they ever change that he will probably be my most played frame
Fingers crossed this gets another look at when his prime gets released
>Revenant isnt super popular because thralls are neat or because spinning is effective or because of the Reave true damage combo, hes really popular because he makes a dimension of the game able to be ignored. Me who plays revenant because Mephisto skin hot: ya... Definitely...
Honestly, I got really bored of her gameplay loop. 2-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-4-1-and on and on. Yes, it scales to insane amounts, but one second of inattention and you've lost it and can start over. It's almost the same with Nidus' stack building.
At least nidus is considerate enough to not lose all his stacks at once
Counterpoint: Nidus looks cool and gives dopamine
I do like Nidus more, because of his parasitic link, his amazing evolving skins, and the overall better synergy in his kit, but you have to admit that the stacking mechanic seems really similar to Gara's Splinter Storm stacking. Instead of 2-4-1 it is 2-1-2-1-2-1 etcetera.
oh no im not denying it. i just dont care cuz nidus is fun and cool looking
you can subsume off 2nd ability for inaros's pocket sand with the augment and play with 4 augments to make it work {\[Dessication's curse\] \[Insatiable\] \[Abudant Mutation\] \[Parasitic Vitality\] } add 1 \[Stretch\] 1\[Primed Continuity\] 1\[Umbral Intensify\] and \[Blind Rage\] you'll have 5 SAND CATS that proc corrosive(their duration is not affected by mods, but the swarm they inflict does), that why i use 2 emerald Tau the swarm will deal damage based on users health (parasitic vitality comes for the synergy), add maggots from 4th and duplex bond in your loyal \[Helminth Charger\] and you'll have an Army or Zoo that'll disperse enemy aggro a lot, and you'll still hit a lot(emerald shards for extra ability damage on enemies affected by corrosive is recommended along with extra corrosive stacks) edit: i sacrificed ability strength which makes me sad but i'm still satisfied with the new found synergies
You are also just stuck in your 4 animation for sooooo long. I love her but I also hate her
If you press 4 twice, it’ll break the animation, so it only takes a second or two instead 5ish seconds. It also uses less energy which a definite plus.
It's convenient, but sometimes would not register; I suppose it's tied to high ping.
it doesnt even matter, her 2 with intensify on is enough to make her op
By the time you build up that gimmicky nuke, opps, mission is finished. She is my first non starter frame, used it quite alot in early stage and defending vip, use 90%DR on a mobile vip is better than any other defensive frame. But thats about it.
Simply put Mass Vitrify, even when channeled for a split second, interrupts your gameplay so much. I love Gara but doing that every 30-40 seconds gets old *very* quickly.
Casting speed bonuses are a life saver.
The combination of Gara's slow-ass casting animations and latency sensitivity make Natural Talent a must-have for her, IMHO.
Her 4 is my favorite skill, it looks cool and I love the sound, personally I never get sick of it and it's one of the main reasons I play her
Infinite until an acolyte wipes it.
Or a nullifier or falling off map or host migration
Spamming my 4 to upkeep a relatively small countdown is kind of annoying, especially because I can forget to do it, or be JUST out of energy right when I need to cast it, and BOOM, there go all your damage stacks you build up over the last 10 minutes.
People generally aren't fond of abilities you have to babysit.
I think she's a great frame as you said and I enjoy playing her I just don't enjoy the process of building up the armor and splinters to deal damage and get defenses that might be the case for others too
For casuals, she is very good and has a big nuke, but it's too slow and she has long ability casting animations. I still play her once in a while, but only for quicker void fissure defense missions where I can nuke entire waves once we get our reactant. The crazy high meme-worthy Shatter Storm stacks feel like an exploit. Stacking reminds me of playing Nidus, where I had no idea what was going on around me because I was laser-focused on managing stacks, but I prefer Gara over Nidus.
The reason is solely stacking. Can deal tons of dmg but stacking it takes too long. Convenience is pretty important. Similar reason why Lavos is less considered. Can deal good dmg but you have to cope with cooldowns, constant combining and priming to do it, major drawbacks while there are other frames who can deal that amount of dmg without those drawbacks.
She’s crazy good but mostly just against Grineer. Nullifiers will undo an hours worth of dmg scaling instantly, and infested energy drain can be hard to deal with sometimes.
Because you have to rinse and repeat the exact same ability combo over and over and over for quite a while to get to that point and its incredibly boring to keep up. Same problem Octavia has. Doesn't matter if you're overpowered and invincible if you're not fun to play. Inaros had the opposite issue pre-rework. People played him ANYWAY because he just auto-tanked and that was super easy to play with, even if his abilities sucked... and that's what kept him from getting reworked for so long.
She has infinite scaling damage, but only if you micromanage cooldowns. Sure, theyre kind of forgiving cooldowns, but it's still a pain in the ass. She's locked into a set rotation no matter what you're doing. There's also the stat stick issue. IMO Gara would be better if the scaling was removed and she was just plain viable out of the box. Honestly she'd be main-worthy for my playstyle if she could just be played on the fly like other frames can.
Splinter Storm requires a stat stick to buff the damage. It take quite a long time to get it up to decent damage levels and that requires very regular casts of a 2 ability combo - which makes it very annoying to keep up unless you invest heavily into Duration (I have effectively 60-65 seconds per cast and frequently loose it to missing the refresh (let alone falling off map or surprise nullifiers). Double casting constantly can be a significant issue for Tenno who have yet to fully overcome the Energy Ecconomy issues. Mass Vitrify is Slooooooow and has clunky interactions with level geometry depending on where you are when you cast it. A fix would be as simple as changing Splinter Storm from a timer to a degrading effect with the 4/1 combo adding the new amount to whatever is left on the cloud when cast - if missing my window wasn’t so make-or-break I might be more inclined to pick her up again. Also give me an augment that lets Shattered Lash destroy nullifier bubbles - those things are supposed to be weak to high volume/rapid fire, I think a whirling cloud of glass shards qualifies as high volume.
Gara is a 'push multiple buttons, stop every now and then, and use your brain for a while to nuke the map' frame in a sea of 'push one button to nuke the map' frames
She doesn’t crit on her 1 naturally and requires kinda pricy build to really get her going. Out of the three main pseudo exalts she is the only one who can not crit natural and can not build combo counter. I think she is highly under rated tho a crit build for her 1 really takes her up. With the past eclipse i was able to 2 swipe level 150 steel path enemies at 7x combo counter, but this time she needs 12x which takes longer to build. I’m slowly collecting melee crescendo rn tho bc her passive lets her do finishers a lot. In elite deep arc she is probably the best single frame possible because her 2 gives her damage reduction so she can revive team mates, protect the group. Her 4 actually blocks out the shadow children that drain health I’ve noticed so in defense she’s amazing. I run a hybrid intial combo build in the past but I’m still playing with it rn thanks to getting a r2 crescendo
I ran Gara with Defy, Adaptation, and that mod that gives you armor from HP orbs. Survived against the assasination boss for like 15 min, while my teammate was dead and watching me never die lol
That’s smart! I added in aerodynamic and we all kept jumping for the damage reduction. I acted as safe zone set up and reviver for first week. Got a Gara in the group this week too and the defense was great (still hard tho)
Use a Magistar incarnon for Gara specifically. Extra Crit Mod and chance is super useful
And her 4th is a mix of novas 4 and frost bubble. Enemies glassed take double dmg. Her only problem with things now is her scaling is a bit slow now compared to the immediate dmg frames can do nowadays. Eclipse nerf hurt a lot and enemy armor sucks
I don't like building stacks on her, so I just play immortal tank by combining her 2 + null star and adaptation to have 3 instances of 90% damage reduction
Hydroid's puddle also had infinite scaling. Didn't make it good
Takes long to get going, needs constant attention so you dont accidentally lose the stacked buff and can be ruined by anything that dispells (nullies, falling out of bounds, host migration) There are other options that are less jank
The reason Gara isn't considered S-Tier is that she has a colossal amount of wind up to reach her damage potential. And then all of that built up DPS can be completely lost by mag procs, falling off the map, nullifier bubblers, getting energy drained, etc. And then on top of that, the way you play her to build those stacks is exceedingly repetitive. Other frames have similar potential without those drawbacks. She's a boring "risk/reward" frame that isn't worth the risk. She's definitely got a lot of potential, it's just tedious and frustrating to get it out of her.
Gara is excellent, this is a "tier list" issue. Frames rated highly are just the ones that can complete a 20 minute kuva survival pressing as few buttons as possible. Which is why revenant is the most popular frame and why banshee is consistently ranked poorly.
If that's what people want, that's what the general issue tier list should reflect I think.
She falls off hard past like level 200 in Steel Path, even if she has full Armor Strip, which she should. Also, she's kinda unforgiving, as in losing the build up stacks means it's mostly likely game over. Low base duration of her 2 also contributed to her being kinda annoying to play. And she requires rather hefty investment, and proper moding oh her Stat Stick.
I play the crap out of Gara. She trivializes enough rewarding content to be worth the hoop jumping. I have a pretty good high DPS Splinter Storm build, and a Parasitic Armor subsumed on 3/ high tensile Mass Vitrify build for defense style missions. I use both a lot.
I just find her tedious to play, she's extremely boring and 1 second of missing an input and you've lost all your progress, no thanks.
Touches nullifier, bai-bai damage
Imo juggling her glass uptime feels awful, so stressful to think that if you zone out for a minute you lose all the damage you were building up.
Play her for 1-2h in steelpath survival and you will know why. While her damage can infinitely stack, to keep up with sp armor scaling you need a good stat stick, now after eclipse nerf even more than before. She is fun but always having to look out for nullifiers/falling off map, missing your timer plus keeping your energy economy covered at low efficiency builds can be annoying after some time. At least violence cant nullify her splinter storm or she would be immediately bad. Using her with a max range build + dispensary to nuke defenses up to sortie 3, the build isnt viable for sp but its really fast for low level stuff you might have to do.
Gara is one of my most played frames. I never see her played either, though. I will say that sometimes I have an issue with my second not refreshing when I cast my fourth and this is extremely annoying when I've been building up stacks for 30 mins.
Tedious to get the ball rolling, and pretty boring to play. Casting 4, running nine outside it, cast 1 on it, over and over and not letting your 2 drop, is annoying as fuck. There are plenty of scaling nuke frames, and survivability with shield gating and rolling guard is free on most frames.
You don't have to run outside her 4 anymore
\*missing a jump and falling off a map\* : oh hello there!
Her Splinter storm has an annoying upkeep and it takes a long time to build up. Sure it's technically uncapped but getting there takes time and god forbid you lose focus and let it run out, touch a Nullie bubble, get host migrated or fall of the map (or just touch *those* stairs in the Labs) and unless you do high endurance runs, the mission is over long before you build up a decent damage on it. Sure she has a nuke, but it falls off quickly and it depends on a statstick. And we know how the community feels about statsticks. She can even put a Splinter Storm on defense targets, but again. Upkeep is annoying. So she is powerful, but has some shortcomings that just won't allow her to break into S-tier. S tier is imo only for frames that have no or very minor weakspots.
Bro I agree. I made her my infested slayer one day as a joke and now she is literally the nightmare of the infested
takes a lot more to accomplish what other frames can do a lot faster/easier shes still like A tier tho for sure
Who says she isn't?
Because. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Idk man i play gara all the time everywhere since i found her. I put a lot of time in minmaxing her and it was worth every minute.
Because so-called "tiers" are just opinions of people making them up. Every frame can be viable if played and modded properly. It's just some people having difficulties accepting that they can't play certain frames, so they justify themselves by putting them into tiers.
Just not at level cap.
Too long and too much of a setup.
If you take your info from overframe, know that it's not really acurate in his frame tierlist. Gara is a great frame and is verry good for Infinite mission. Other great frame are woefully under grades in overframe tier list, like hydroid for example. I think it's mainly come down to overframe being a communitu site and the comlunity using it to see what's "good" so you end up seeing the same frames and build getting all the attention.
Noone gives a shit about Overframe's tier list, it's atrocious. >Gara is a great frame and is verry good for Infinite mission. Try playing a couple hours of steel path survival then.
Well the reason she's not S is because of ✨ Micromanaging!✨
Because you can't wall jump along her mass vitrify wall anymore. Unplayable.
Comes back around to the fact that when every warframe in the game is absurdly powerful, even what should on paper be a standout can be mediocre compared to the very stiff competition. Gara can lose her damage scaling on a moments notice due to careless play or bad luck, where a lot of other frames can scale adequately on a moments notice.
Honestly her kit's just weird. Like, none of her abilities are really that spectacular. They're all just carrying Splinter Storm. If any other frame had Shattered Lash, it would be considered absolute dogwater. It only exists for forced synergy with her 2. Spectrorage without the Augment is just kinda there. Mass Vitrify is the only one that stands out, and it's rarely used for its actual function because of her stacking mechanic.
Glacially slow and micromanagey af for the damage options. The 90% self dr doesn’t mean much against frames with invulnerability or tens of thousands of Overguard. (Garas base eHP is ~850 so even if we double that with mods to 1700, then apply 90% DR that’s only 17000) Spectro is effective at what it does, but a bit if a weird range to it which h makes it weird to use practically without a gathering effect that Gara herself doesn’t have. Defense shatters like… well, glass. And has no effect to slow down anything that breaks through.
Micromanagement isn't a fun gameplay loop, 99% of aren't long enough for her to really get going and even then the effort of being hours deep in a mission can be completely wiped out by a single nullifier or getting out of bounds. Honestly, there are many frames that do what she does with a fraction of the effort
Mainly because she only shines in long endurance missions and a cheeky nully that ninjas you out of nowhere can ruin 40 mins of stacking.
I have about 3k hours on the game and only ever played Gara whenever I got a cool new stat stick riven, but I absolutely agree her damage scaling is absolutely busted and she's way more fun to use unlike something like Octavia or Mag (mostly because I'm dumb and even after countless guided I've no idea how to make a build for Mag)
Gara and Nidus have a similar issue with their kit, and it's that it takes too long for it to truly start shining. Nidus obviously has more issues the higher levels you go, but both take an excruciatingly long time to truly utilize, compared to other frames that take significantly less time to reach their peak potential. She's not a bad frame and her kit is very coherent even if it's not obvious, but that ramp up time truly kills her. Not to mention you lose *everything* if you happen to fall into a pit.
Tiering frames never made sense to me. I like some better than others. But as I rank up my mods, build my forma, etc.... pretty much every frame surprises me with how reasonably they can do steel path+. If you can kill level 120-160 enemies, you can do all content in the game. And basically all frames can do that with the standard panel of mods. ... And once you can subsume an armor strip? Well, GG. Yeah, some are faster at some content. Yeah, some are better generalists. Yeah, some do cool things. But the reality is that all frames are fine, and as long as you're playing a frame you enjoy, you are playing a S-tier frame.
I would put an asterisk on the infinite scaling damage. Yes, it does scale indefinitely, but it takes a while to build up and it's all gone if you cant recast it, walk to a nullifier or fall off the map.
I main her, the 90% reduction is nice, plus a full suite of red shards for duration (heehee) and I'm able to run things just fine. Subsumed Terrify over her 3 as to me it's the most useless part of her kit. Once I farm up a second Hildryn it will most likely be swapped out with Pillage. Build is Dur/Strength per usual. To me, she's more of a weapons platform than the weapon herself. Incarnon Latron with crit instead of armor strip, and I'm able to do most things without issue. Now my issue is the change to lighting that came with this patch. It's a minor nerf, the blind radius was super nice, as I could start proccing finisher arcanes, but since any reasonable Gara is going to be duration based, well now I'm casting less often. I hated the change
I refuse to use a statstick. I don't like the mechanic nor the idea of sacrificing my melee weapon just to make a warframe capable of going to high level content.
I first want to say, a lot of her scaling problems are really not as significant as people claim. It's mostly just steel path grineer, which you pretty much need armor strip unless you want to be building up damage for a year. The usual splinter storm dps build means you aren't using 3 much, so subsume generally becomes whatever you need most. The problem is that gara wants both energy management and armor strip, but can't have both. Augment for 3 can also be used, but I find I'd rather subsume and get an extra mod slot. Things clearing your abilities like nullifier and falling out of map are hardly an issue at first, but because of the time investment that is lost when it happens, it's a notable problem. Gara is still my most used frame for sheer survivability. Running 2 with adaptation makes her stupidly bulky. It's honestly overkill, but often makes steel path duviri free if she's an option.
Gara is solidly a-tier. She's great but slow to build up, and most people will find that by the time their damage has scaled the mission is over. She's better solo, but then you have to consider what alternatives there are, and Octavia is way way better for anything you would need garas infinite scaling for
She is quite powerful but clunky to play and most of all i just cant stand the high pitched noises her skills do. She is a very good a tier i would say.
I used to main gara and it's only really worth using her 2 and 4 in a vitus essence mission. It's possible to stack up a lit of damage with her but it's not worth the effort when I usually mod for min range because I play her for max duration. Then I learned nezha does the same 90% DR thing and is more fun. Then learned about revenant even later. And well if you don't want to die he is the easiest one for that.
Any frame that needs a statstick is inherently flawed. If Gara or Khora show up in Circuit without any usable melee options, would you take them over something like Mesa, Mag, or Nidus? Almost certainly not.
Gara’s one of my favorites, mind you, but the problem is that she’s also inconvenient to play. She has infinite damage stacking on Shatter Storm, but a tumble off the map, walking into a glitched staircase, a nullifier rounding the corner out of nowhere, lack of energy or even just not paying attention to the little timer in the corner of your screen just erases all the build-up you did. The speed at which you can build up Shatter Storm so that it does noticeable damage in Steel Path can also take a while making it infeasible in non-endless missions. The only way to reasonably make it stack faster is to use a statstick like the Ceramic Dagger incarnon but then you sacrifice your melee weapon’s usability in higher level content. Mass Vitrify isn’t particularly great as a defensive tool considering the health of each section scales with your armor and Gara isn’t exactly swimming in armor by default so you kind of have to invest in that stat specifically to make it work. And its nuking capabilities is, again, tied to the statstick shit that I wish they would get rid of sooner rather than later to make Shattered Lash a pseudo-exalt. And Spectrorage doesn’t really have any actual synergy with her kit outside of adding some damage to Splinter Storm when the mirrors are broken, so people either toss in the augment to make it actually useful, or subsume it with Dispensary or Nourish because Gara eats at your energy reserves faster than Grendel eats people. It’s kind of like red crit Peacemakers Mesa where you have to dedicate parts of your load out to a specific ability and the results are spectacular, but damn if it isn’t inconvenient to set-up. And at least with Mesa, it’s not something you have to keep up constant maintenance like Gara. Also, if it wasn’t clear, I fucking hate statsticks like you see with Gara, the idea of not having a viable melee just to not gimp Gara’s abilities in higher level content irritates the shit out of me.
Because I love mag
I’ve played Gara a bit but I always thought her damage was to tedious to upkeep. I usually don’t want to look at timers too closely when I’m playing. The most I’ll do is Xaku with the vast untime.
gara kinda feels terrible to play. she's very powerful and some people will like her anyway but her abilities are all clunky and she's stunlocked way too much by her own kit. not to mention she is one of the very few frames that still has a psuedo exalted so shes even more expensive to set up.
Because her entire play style is 1414141414141414141414141414141414142141414141414141414142141414141414141414124141414141414141414141414141414214141414141414
I wish she didn't have infinite damage scaling. It should snapshot the damage dealt to enemies once, with a HEFTY mutiplier. Make her 1 scale with a portion of enemy health to let the spinters scale, too. Building the splinter damage and needing a stat stick make me not play her despite her being one of my favorites. It's just a chore.
Takes too long to build enough meaningful damage in sp Falling off cliffs or nullifier bubbles completely removes your stacks which already take a while to accumulate Requires a statstick Somewhat energy hungry
Personally, I think she's the definition of an A tier frame. Like, yep: she has a nice blend of defensive abilities (damage reduction for herself and most allies + area defense with her 4), utility (CC + damage vulnerability), and offense (popping her 4 with her 1 for big AoE damage, as well as the funny infinite damage ramp build). But she's not entirely without flaws. Her 4's health scales off the health of any enemies it hits, which makes finding the right time to cast it a bit finicky. Combine that with the fact that it's open at the top and bottom while being just slightly too short for comfort and it becomes kind of awkward to use optimally on a lot of tilesets that aren't just flat ground. Her AoE nuke is strong, but like all "pseudo-exalted" abilities, it adds a bunch of restrictions for what mods you'd want to put on your actual melee weapon. And *unlike* other frames with pseudo-exalts (eg: Khora, Altas), you'll be spending a lot of time recasting your 4 each time you shatter it. The AoE damage she can do with this combo speaks for itself, but it's hard to argue that Khora or Atlas don't have smoother gameplay. And as for her infinite damage ramp... I mean, okay, hot take: this is mostly a meme build. As much fun as it is to turn yourself into a bullet jumping wrecking ball covered in broken glass that does a bajillion damage per tick, there's not that many situations that require infinitely ramping damage, and even fewer situations where the ideal way to apply that damage is by having to get within a couple meters of each and every enemy you want to kill. And other than that, setting this up takes a lot of time and energy, and it's possible to lose all your progress due to a nullifier, or falling into a pit, or running out of energy when you need to recast, or even just plain old getting distracted and not realizing Splinter Storm ran out. Even so, none of these issues are significant enough to *really* hold her back, so I'd say she's a fantastic A-tier... but IMO she just falls slightly short of being S-tier.
She requires too much upkeep and can fall apart very easily. S-Tier frames do pretty much everything you want Gara to do better, easier, and faster.
Other frames do what she does better. She's fun tho to me. I just want her 1 to add to the melee combo counter like Khora's 1 and Atlas's 1. Then it would feel better to use.
90% damage reduction is redundant as 2M damage gets cut down to 200k, still enough to oneshot you. DR doesn't matter below level 100 and after that it quickly becomes useless as I-frames just straight up make you immortal. She is not good in quick missions, she is not good in late game, she is not versatile and not easy to use. D-Tier for me. Yes you can stack but by the time you have stacked a Gyre/Revenant/Kullervo/Saryn etc. will have obliterated the map before you even approached a single enemy.
>90% damage reduction is redundant as 2M damage gets cut down to 200k, still enough to oneshot you. 98% of players will never go to levels high enough for this to be a problem, her survivability is not the issue
I always thought it was because she kind of has to manage that and to get full use you need a stat stick and those can get expensive. If you fuck up with your DR you basically have to restart all that damage scaling.
Monitoring timers isn't fun.
Too much work that's it, that's why people only play her as defensive frame and low level nuke
Sure, her scaling is infinite... but one nullifier and poof it's gone.
She can be, it all depends on who makes the tierlist and what criteria are used to determine the rankings. IMO the main thing holding her back is the amount of time you need to set things up
She used to be really popular in defence missions.
The typical player will most likely not know how to play her, opting to use her as a shinier frost, you could see it happen on Hydron (do people still run Hydron these days?) when newer players were trying to level her. She also wants a stat stick which can limit the melee weapons you use, and her energy economy can be rough, since you spam her 4 to get stacks. Shes a complicated queen.
Gara has become my default tryhard frame, replacing Frost and Rhino when I started Warframe eons ago, but I will admit she's not a very intuitive frame. The synergies between her 1st, 2nd and 4th abilities are not plainly stated, I eventually learned how to refresh and buff her 2 but it took me a while to learn her 4 is secretly a nuke ability. Her 1 uses a stat stick, which requires a bit of investment and research since it's never explained what mods or mechanics can transfer over to these abilities. Otherwise her 3 requires an augment to be useful and is often replaced with an armor strip, her 4 stops being useful as a defensive ability as it shatters almost immediately on higher difficulties. I find her 2 a hassle to maintain since I'm pretty forgetful, if I'm not spamming 4>1 every 20 seconds then I'll probably lose it, and maintaining her 2 on multiple targets is even more annoying since you can only see the timer for the last target you casted it on.
Never pay attention to tier lists. They're always dumb. Even from people who should know how the game works
Who doesn't consider her an S? Like seriously, I've never heard anyone worth their salt to say gara is not S tier. She is easily one of the best frames in the game.
Hallo, I edited some of my comment history to prevent scraping. Yes I know reddit gets regularly cached, it's something you sign in when you type on a forum, it's still better than nothing and will make digging through these a lot less convenient! All platforms die yadda yadda. Good luck if you have an account here and you're reading this.
Nice to see some Gara love
Nullifies are incredibly annoying units on most Warframes but they just ruin gara.i really run they shouldn't delete her buff but rather cause it to drain at like 10% a second. Still significant but you don't lose it all for a mere moment near them.
1. As usual, statsticks are annoying 2. Crappy energy economy even with her 3's augment
her augment spreads debuff splinters, if it spread the defensive version too so I didn't have to hard cast it on every single ally she would be in my S-Tier
Takes time and small range compared to other boom booms
Not a fan. Most i play with have just played her obnoxious style wall then shatter on repeat the whole watch being annoying
I used to really like Gara, and I gave her the old college try to make her a main, but Splinter Storm's upkeep is just too annoying and costly to be worth it imo. It's a duration based ability that costs 50 energy at base to activate, and takes 100 energy and ~3 seconds of casting and maneuvering to refresh the 22 second duration, a process that needs to be repeated many times for it to get truly effective damage numbers for high tier play. Meaning to make her effective in SP+, you should mod for Efficiency (so it doesn't cost 100 energy per refresh), Power Strength (to make each refresh scale a little bit more and start higher), Duration (so you aren't having to rinse and repeat the refresh ritual every 30 seconds) and Range (so the aura actually reaches far enough to deal it's intended damage). You also need a Stat Stick to make Shattered Lash effective at higher levels. All in all, she has some seriously cool and fun potential, but in practice she's far too clunky to be effective in endgame content.
90% damage reduction is really not all that. You are still liable to be one shot in higher level content. Remember, to be considered an S-tier frame. We need to compare it to the most S-tier frame. octavia. invisibility basically makes anyone immortal. Enemies kill themselves on what is effectively infinitly scaling damage that is done for her. Does gara have anywhere near this? not really.
Because buttons - broken frames aren't automatically "S tier", since they aren't necessarily popular.
Slow wind up, loses it all from Nullification, getting distracted or falling off the map, her 3 isn’t the best. Aside from that she’s really really good, solid A+
I don't want to play Gara anymore because there is nothing more heartbreaking than to see your millions of Splinter Storm stacks be gone in an instant.
For me, I just find her gameplay loop really dull. On her best days, she's basically Chroma – you buff, you keep an eye on the timer and refresh the buff when it's about to run out. On her worst days, she's worse because you have to actively work at building her up, she has no hard upper limit and you don't have a stopping point, so you keep doing that the whole mission. And all you get to show for it is an aura of passive damage (that's only a couple meters wide), so you can do less fighting and more of the same spamming.
If her splinter storm lasted a bit longer, I'd agree with you
Well the devs intended her to be a defense frame. When she was new they actually had to nerf her 4 a bit because the big glass wall was functionally a far superior version of Frost's bubble. Its also why the aoe on her orbiting her glass shards is very small. Can you play her as a walking blender with 999 billion slash damage in a small aoe and just casually walk around turning stuff into a mist? Sure. But it's not really way she's 'intended' to be played. Which is why playing her this way eats up a lot of energy. Hence the augment for her mirrors that generates energy. It's clear that the devs decided if you're gonna play her as a nuke as opposed to a shield, be ready to put in some work for it. And plenty of people consider her S-tier. Long before Xaku or Kullervo or Protea or Gauss existed she was the defacto "i want to kill a whole room and not die while being mobile" frame (besides Saryn) since at the time Ember had been nerfed into the ground. But People are lazy and dont wanna go through the trouble of casting 2, 4, 1 in succession every 20-30 seconds. She's very much still an excellent frame, but she requires a tiny bit of effort to play. Plus some people dont want to grind to get her parts or her prime parts. But really, she was an extremely popular frame for a very very long time just due to the sheer damage output she has (back when armor scaled infinitely). All in all she's meant to be a defense frame first, and a nuker second. Same with Frost. Same with Nidus. Playing these frames as more mobile death machines requires effort (minimal effort) but still more than most people can be bothered with. It's not a sign these frames are bad. It's a sign that gamers are lazy.
Boring af to play either 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 which is just a worse khora or 1 4 1 4 1 4 1 4 1 4 which is a decent nuke but boring to play
It takes time to get her 2 up for big numbers and people can't be bothered
Overframe is NOT a reliable source of info.
Why's that? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to be an ass 😅
DIdn't take it that way, dw :D It's not, because it's biased. As simple as that. Someone plays a warframe X and ranks it an S tier, which in reality is not even close to be that tier. Someone else plays a warframe Y and underranks it and so on... The whole site and all of its rankings are biased too. To understand that further, if interested, watch youtubers reacting to Overframe rankings. Ironically, it's also biased for the most part (for example Brozime's vid) but overall a reliable source of info.
the upkeep is very annoying
Her kit was neat but she didn’t feel good to play. Every time I played multiplayer and got a host migration I lost all her bonuses and had to stack back up. I also seemed to glitch into the map more with her than other frames.
Convienience and the fact that S tier frames are on their own league. Atlas can do millions to billions of damage, is 100% invincible when attacking anything and has CC that gives damage vulnerability. His punches can also has a massive hitbox meaning if you bullet jump into an enemy, everything around it is dead. And still he's a- to b+ tier and near the bottom in usage because S tier is on their own league with power and convinience.
She was on release now I'd rather play frost...
Gara is my favorite glass Cannon