In my opinion, Protea is a weird Warframe. I like her concept, because it's pretty well
established that I'm a fucking sucker for the engineer thematic.
I dislike her kit, because it feels a little bit underwhelming and because Protea is literally
living proof of how inconsistent DE can be. I love her playstyle, because with Vauban
I can sort of plan out how I want to play in a mission, since his kit does remarkably
well in defensive objectives such as Defense and Disruption, meaning that I could choose
to play Vauban either completely defensively or offensively, and I would do fine.
Protea on the other hand, kind of forces me to take a more proactive approach to gameplay,
and that's something I don't really get out of Vauban.
In a nutshell, I would say that although both Vauban and Protea are of the engineer theme,
Vauban is more about being methodical and defensive, whereas Protea is more about being
aggressive and "in your face." However, DE's insistence that Protea "doesn't
have a turret" is nonsensical, because that's what it is. It's not artillery. It's a turret.
In a nutshell, artillery is a gun that's so fucking big that it has to be fired from an
extreme distance because it can't be carried normally.
For example, Photon Strike is artillery. Conversely, a turret is any machine or weapon
system that is either human-operated or automated, but is capable of providing support in the
form of shooting the fuck out of anything that moves.
It doesn't matter if Blaze Artillery lasts 5 seconds or 0.5 seconds. It's a turret. Nosgoth
had a turret as well that lasted less than 6 seconds, but it was marketed as a turret
and not given an incorrect name such as "artillery." But anyway, as excited as I was and am to
play Protea, honestly I'm a little bit disappointed. Protea's not a bad Warframe, not at all.
Her Quest is really fun.
She just feels a little bit weak by Warframe standards, in my opinion.
Her passive is hands down top 10 in the entire game, and her first ability is surprisingly
strong for a first ability. That's where my impressions of her end.
Her turret ability is weak, and I honestly expect that DE buff it in the future. I'm
fully aware that DE is likely skeptical when it comes to buffing it, because in the worst
case scenario, they make Blaze Artillery so strong that it basically becomes the second
coming of the original Mesa Peacemaker. I would say that the simplest way to fix it
would be to let Blaze Artillery scale with enemy level, just like how Vauban's Photon
Strike and Flechette Orb do. If the purpose of Blaze Artillery is to be
a powerful but short-lived turret, it should feel like one. Right now literally all of
my Riven Mods outdamage it, even my Convectrix. Her dispenser is.. average. Again, it's not
bad, it's just that (at least personally) I never have an issue with ammo, so dispenser
just boils down to being a health and energy dispenser, which is kind of unnecessary if
you ask me because energy pizzas exist, and they're relatively cheap to craft.
As for Protea's time warp ability that was totally not stolen from League of Legends
or Overwatch, I don't see the point of it, personally speaking.
I always go into Operator Mode whenever I'm close to dying, that way I can simply reposition
and heal my Warframe in order to not get downed. Having a button that does that for you but
also deals damage is nice I guess, but aside from the fact that it refunds your Energy,
I don't see much point in using it. The only thing I can think of is that this ability
reinforces Protea's role as an aggressive "in your face" engineer, because activating
this ability would let her effectively spam her abilities and then rewind back to safety.
I can get that, but when Blaze Artillery itself is weak to begin with, running around and
spamming abilities doesn't feel very satisfying. Besides that, the Deadlock Protocol is a solid
Update and a fun Quest to do, but if we really want to call Protea as being "Vauban's niece",
then she needs to be buffed to at least deserve that title.
Thank you for watching.
