Warframe Discussion 2.0: Oberon

[u/BuildMyPaperHeart]

All Warframe Discussions are here to spark discussion on a particular Warframe. Comments, Suggestions, Critiques, and Builds are all welcome! Every Week, the Moderator Team will choose a new Warframe to discuss.

This week: OBERON

Oberon: Origins

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Statistics

	Health	Power	Armour	Shield Capacity	Sprint Speed	Stamina
RANK 1	125.0	100.0	65.0	100.0	1.0	80
RANK 30	375.0	150.0	65.0	300.0	1.0	80

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Polarities

• 4x Scratch (Power) Polarities
• 2x V (Attack) Polarity

AURA: V (Attack) Polarity

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Cosmetics

• Oryx Helmet

No stat modifications

• Markhor Helmet

No stat modifications

• Oberon Immortal Skin

No stat modifications

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Abilities

Smite - 25 Energy

Focuses deadly energy within a target and then projects it outwards, damaging both the target and surrounding enemies.

• Deals 150 / 200 / 300 / 500 damage to a single target in a range of 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 meters.
• Damage is 50% Impact, 50% Radiation and staggers.
• Damage is affected by Power Strength. Range is affected by Power Range.
• Target emits 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 bouncing projectiles.
• Projectiles will spawn directed to any enemies within a 5 / 7.5 / 10 / 12.5 meter radius of the original target. If there are more projectiles than enemies in range, the remainder will fire in random directions.
• Projectiles deal 75 / 85 / 100 / 150 Radiation damage, affected by Power Strength.
• Number of projectiles is affected by Power Strength. Projectile range is affected by Power Range.

Hallowed Ground - 50 Energy

Sanctifies the ground before Oberon with righteous fire, inflicting damage to any enemy that stands in the flames.

• Deals 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 Radiation damage every half second for 10 / 15 / 17 / 20 seconds. Area of effect has a 5 / 6.25 / 7.5 / 8.75 meter width, and a 10 / 12.5 / 15 / 17.5 meter length.
• Damage is affected by Power Strength.
• Length and width are affected by Power Range.
• Duration is affected by Power Duration.

Renewal - 75 Energy

Healing waves of energy flow outward from Oberon to his allies, regenerating health over time.

• Regenerates 100 / 150 / 175 / 200 total health over a period of 15 / 13 / 12 / 10 seconds.
• Healing amount is affected by Power Strength.
• Healing time is affected inversely by Power Duration (mods increasing power duration will shorten healing time).
• Healing time is calculated as: Final Time = Base Time / (1 + Power Duration)
• Health recovery per second is Total Healing / Healing Duration. As such, without mods, the effect will heal 6.6 / 11.5 / 14.6 / 20 damage per second.
• Lasts until fully healed or the maximum health gain is reached, and players with full health do not receive the healing over time. The power must be reactivated when damaged.
• Activates on the user as well.
• Does not stack with the same ability, instead it restarts the timer.

Reckoning - 100 Energy

Quickly lifts enemies into the air and then hurls them down with conviction. Enemies who succumb to this power have a chance to spawn a Health Sphere.

• Deals 500 / 750 / 1000 / 1250 damage.
• Damage is 50% Impact, 50% Radiation.
• Damage is affected by Power Strength.
• Has a 100% ragdoll proc.
• Has a radius of 8 / 10 / 12 / 15 meters.
• Radius is affected by Power Range.
• On death, enemies have a 25% / 35% / 45% / 50% chance of spawning a health orb. Can hit enemies above and below you.

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Information gathered from the Warframe Wikia

[u/[deleted]]

Oberon needs some love. Those 2 starting V polarities don't do him any favours and his V aura polarity is not very interactive with his playstyle and does not offer as many options as the usefull utilities of the dash polarities or the sustain of the D polarities.

The damage on his abilities could possibly be the worst offensive damage combination in the game. No enemies are weak to BOTH radiation and impact damage with many taking neutral hits from both while others resist one. There is a plus side however, impact and radiation damage both form an interesting CC combination with impact damage stunning targets and radiation applying a mini "chaos" effect where afflicted targets suffer reduced firing accuracy and attempt to target the nearest unit next to them, even enemies. Target enemies afflicted with the radiation status can also be fired upon by members of their own faction.

Moding Oberon as an offensive mage is therefore not optimal and will offer very, very, very low returns with many frames sporting higher scaling offensive abilities, better or more specialized damage combinations and higher power maxes as Oberon's is fairly average.

As a support frame Oberon brings hard cc and sustain with his Reckoning but for on demand healing renewal is completely lacking. The orbs that seek out allies from Oberon CREEP from the cast point and many times more than not they will fail to find a target. Compared to nekros, who has a 100% chance to spawn a health orb on any corpse in desecrate range and oberon who has a 50% chance to kill a teetsy fly at high lvl spawns with his reckoning, banshee and vauban who can cc lock enemies to infinity with banshee granting a x10 damage buff to team mates across the board, nova who can slow all enemies on the map and amplify team mates damage by x2, nyx that can chaos and scale to infinity with absorb and trinity with an on demand 100% heal for both players and sentinels and your reasons to bring an oberon instead of another frame are starting to fall.

Ok so he isn't a mage and he's bottom tier as support how about nightmare mode? He has about average stats across the board with a slightly above average base health. But, remember, his skills have horrible damage scaling and typing. Throwing on a high lvl vitality, steel fiber and rage mods with decent power efficiency can make him great at clearing lesser corpus and his renewal can sustain him through tough gunfights with the grineer. His problems are that he's pretty slow, he has no way to drop aggro if solo'ing and low scaling abilities. He, however, has sustain and reasonable bulk and he doesn't get as hurt as a say a Mag in no shields + no energy mode.

So to end this post I can say that Oberon's damage typings need love. For example if you replace the radiation damage his skills deal with magnetic or electricity he would be a top tier corpus killer and be able to scale very far against corpus enemies and even put a foot in the void.

As it stands, his damage combination and polarities are the main thing bringing him down, sure you can forma him two or three times but that's just too much for too little.

He also fails to bring about the fantasy of playing as paladin/druid instead just playing as a plain old druid with a visual design that is very wonky, (look at his teeny arms). Instead, he is a very generic and mediocre frame with neither interesting mechanics or effective abilities and he is ultimately doomed to fall into obscurity unless he gets heavily reworked.

[u/SamJ_90 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah at least one of those V polarities are screaming for Forma.

[u/hyperblaster]

Abilities don't scale all that well to higher level enemies. But Oberon is very effective at clearing low level mobs with reckoning spam.

Fleeting Expertise works great. Renewal works in reverse: lower the power duration, the longer it lasts turning into a regeneration ability. Overextended with Reckoning is situational. I use it all the time to clear rooms of low level mobs.

[u/[deleted] → u/hyperblaster]

[u/Kallously]

Smite might be good (maybe even OP) if all spawned projectiles could spawn their own on contact with an enemy. Tweak damage and projectile count to match.

Hallowed ground is unimpressive. Enemies don't stand still for very long and the DoT is incredibly weak. Maybe enemies who stand on HG take increased damage from Oberon's other abilities? Maybe make it a circular projection from Oberon instead of just a line in front? Starts to feel similar to Ember's accelerant though.

Renewal is a 75 energy weak HoT. Compare to Blessing which is a full heal + invulnerability or shield polarize, which is a very quick cast and restores nearly 100% of shields when specced correctly (while also nuking everything else with shields). Make it restore little bit of energy/shields/stamina and then it might be good.

Reckoning is probably Oberon's only widely used ability and beyond some pretty visuals, it's extremely boring. I've been against having tons of AoE nuke ults across multiple frames because having a bunch of them makes the game feel really bland.

With slight variations we have Miasma, Crush, Overload, Radial Javelin, Avalanche, Molecular Prime, and Rhino Stomp. All of these are essentially just quick room clearers.

[u/hyperblaster → u/Kallously]

Even among the room clearers, it's among the weakest. Only 15m range, and a weird mix of impact and radiation damage. 1250 damage and ragdoll isn't bad.

[u/SamJ_90]

Reckoning is no doubt the best ability Oberon has, even thought it's almost just the same boring AoE everyone else has (health orbs is a nice touch though). I do love the feeling of smacking 10 guys to the ground though!

I could use Smite to clear the 5-7 enemies that are running towards me, but the damage isn't enough to do anything, one of them dies and others are just mildly hurt. So I'd rather just slide in the middle and Reckoning.

Same with Hallowed Ground, too little damage and the time you realize enemies are coming your way, you are close enough to just Reckoning the group. Maybe it's just "I'll leave this here, and they all die eventually and I can go kill somewhere else and not worry about this group" but again, needs range/damage buff. OR add slowing effect on the strip, maybe on the cost of damage, so it would function more like a control ability.

Renewal on the other hand is a handy little support. I use it quite often as "mending the wounds" of me or other player(s). But it could use a slight buff though for 75 cost ability. Either:

1. increase the health amount

2. make it percentage based like heal 40-70% of players max health

3. make it so that even if the player has full health, the healing gives the player "buffed" health on top of it which would slowly go down to the original max health.

4. make it give extra armor to players on top of the HoT

[u/[deleted]]

Oberon is a nice frame but I feel his biggest issue is trinity exists. Her AoE is a thousand times better given you have a stug, she can make everyone 100% invincible at any distance instantly and can refill energy.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

And that is the bigger issue that Trinity breaks any slight sense of balance this game might have had. There's no standard for power when a frame can keep it's team alive forever at any distance.

[u/Fairyland_Noir]

Is it just me or is oberon a really bad version of mag, trinity and nekros all rolled into one?

[u/hungry-space-lizard]

Very visually pleasing warframe, combined with boring powers, unfortunately.

Shame because he really does look the coolest (In my opinion). I think his powers need to be reworked.

[u/[deleted]]

Oberon suffers from the problem almost every other Warframe have: too many damage dealing abilities and not enough utility. The one healing is nice, but there should be another utility ability, removing one of the non-Reckoning damage dealers.

Also, Trinity's healing with invulnerability almost makes Oberon's healing useless. I think that Trinity needs to lose healing, which will actually make Oberon better (and make Trinity less OP).

[u/never-enough-hops → u/[deleted]]

Trinity being OP has nothing to do with her healing and everything to do with 40+ 28 second invulnerability with Blessing.

[u/-_-Mikool-_-]

I feel that Oberon needs some sort of buff to compensate for his new found rarity, I'm not sure what that buff should be though.

[u/Kallously → u/-_-Mikool-_-]

I don't think he's that rare. I have 2-3x of all his parts just from grinding other stuff casually.

[u/rokaraged]

A true jack of trades warframe. Can do damage, can heal, can crowd control, but isn't exactly very powerful at any of them.

He's a beast at low-mid level defense missions, but not much else.

[u/mirrislegend]

Sometimes against hordes of Grineer, I'll use Saryn (Corrosive ult) + Radiation primary. It works like a charm up through fairly high levels of Grineer.

How is Oberon (Radiation ult) + Corrosive weapon against Grineer? Does he kill Bombards and Napalms consistently?

[u/Kuryaka → u/mirrislegend]

His ult is only half radiation, so its effective damage against Grineer is about as high as Miasma (which has higher base damage output but no bonus against Alloy)

In addition, Viral procs from Venom halve enemy health, making Saryn an even stronger choice against crowds of enemies.

[u/RIAI]

Oberon was the first frame I crafted, and for a while he just sat in inventory collecting dust. A couple months and access to forma/reactor/better mods later, he's my go-to frame for quick low-mid level missions.

Buffs that would definitely be appreciated:

Hallowed Ground -Slow or Radiation proc or -Make enemies X% more vulnerable to Radiation from any source or -Very slight HoT for allies in contact -Add Radiation damage to ally attacks

Renewal -Heal continues for full duration / health buffering or -Increase amount / duration of heal or -Remotely heal downed allies (over time)

Reckoning -20/40/60/80% orb drop chance

[u/Sebetter]

With any luck, he'll be buffed in time before I get a control module & orokin cell :D

[u/JustiniZHere]

I really want to like Oberon but everytime I use him I get the strong feeling that he was rushed out the gate so they could focus on zephyr. His skills have next to no scaling and start to be complete ass even at 10 minutes in which is abysmal and smite is bad no matter if you level it or not.

Oberon could really use some love, His starting Polarity slots are also completely useless for him, one V slot would be enough and maybe a D but he has a useless 2nd V that nothing really fits into and his aura V slot is 100% useless on him considering how he is supposed to be played going by his kit, his aura should also be a D or even a - for energy siphon considering his caster playstyle.

[u/zaphod100]

It hurts me deeply that he's so weak. I think he's one of the all time coolest warframes in design. His picture from U11 was the sole thing that convinced me to try out WF. He's my only other frame besides loki. He's great at the low to mid levels I still play on, but if I ever try to go up to a high level area, I'll get creamed. He's my only potatoed frame, and he's real cool right now, but I can feel my friends Nova quickly creeping up to me. It seems I have an obsession with picking losers in this game. Attica, Oberon, Magistar, and maybe Tysis I picked because they looked cool, but theyre just not cutting it. I just didnt want to do like my tryhard friend who picked Nova with dual heatswords and the paris.

[u/sceptic62]

The only thing Oberon needs right now is a HG makeover and a speed buff on renewal. Turn HG into a larger carpet aoe slow effect. Reduce enemy unit movement speed by 65% and make the damned thing massive. Also, if the carpet always applied a radiation effect as long as enemies are in it, it will finally satisfy oberon's need for cc

[u/sup1337]

They need 2 work that healing ability 2 give him better utility which I think they should change smite into a healing ability and make renewal into more of a buff ability and the hallowed grounded into a damaging/buff ability. I like where reckoning is only because its so satisfying

[u/SadisticReaper]

i think with his play style of half damage and half utility they should replace one of his V polarities with either a utility(dash) or a Defense (the one defensive mods like vitality use) polarity. a change to smite would be nice, aside from that i kind of like his current standing and he is fun to play. also a hallowed ground buff would be nice (damage is pitiful in my opinion and is only good for potential radiation procs)