Wisp enjoyers, I need your help!

For context, I have 4000 hours logged in missions, and I primarily play crowd control/weapon support frames like Nyx, Limbo, Caliban, Frost, Banshee, and so on. That is to say, while I’m not a new player by any means, I think I may have some biases that prevent me from fully appreciating a frame vaunted as the “best support in the game”.

I’m not here to gainsay her power as a damage frame, as frankly anyone with a blind can run Xata and propel themselves into the upper echelons of damage potential, and Wisp comes with an invisibility kit to boot. I also think she has great quality of life as a solo frame due to her ability to disengage and control enemy aggression.

Instead, I think I’m missing something about her support toolkit. Here’s where I’m coming from:

  • Haste Mote looks nice on paper, but in my opinion fire rate is generally less valuable than reload speed, which is hard to get and mostly only available from fairly weak mods. Wisp also needs an eye-watering 300% strength just to replicate the effects of a single speed arcane.
  • Vitality mote is fine, but certain maps such as T4 void, Zariman, and Deimos Labs have enemies with severe alpha strikes, so I think health tanking is generally more situational and requires Eclipse or another DR on top to really work and be comfortable.
  • I think Breach Surge is becoming less useful as the strongest weapons have shifted to conal, punchthrough, and chaining weapons that rapidly kill enemies approaching from a single tile entry point. I believe it also has a fairly significant propagation delay between when it casts and when the effect radius reaches far targets? Correct me if I’m wrong, please!
  • @glilimith@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6•3 days ago

    A few things:

    • What wisp does for herself she also does for the group. Your teammate can afford to bring a frame that’s not survivable enough normally because of vitality mote, and with very little coordination from the group.
    • Because of the way reservoirs work, that strength requirement isn’t as much of a tradeoff as it seems. Wisp can afford to tank her efficiency into the ground and still function very very well in any mission where you can stay near your reservoirs.
    • You compare her to arcanes, but those are a very large farming investment to get to high levels, whereas she drops from a boss fight / relics. If you’re one of the players that already has everything the comparison is fair, but if you’re looking at a new thing to acquire the two are very different hurdles.

    Ultimately she’s probably rarely the best possible choice, but part of the reason that she’s considered “the best support in the game” is that she does so much with so little investment or effort (and that she was given that title before a bunch of older support frames got buffed to stand on par with her)