Weekly Warframe: Koumei

We've done it! All the currently released frames are covered! I didn't really plan for what to actually do at this point... I'm open to suggestions! My current ideas are: I continue the threads only when a new frame or Prime releases (would probably need a new name as they definitely won't be weekly anymore) or I make a poll with some select warframes on every new thread and let the community vote on what frame they want to revisit next week. But enough about this, this is Koumei's thread after all!

I feel like this warframe is very polarizing. Depending whether you enjoy the chaos or randomness or prefer a more reliable and consistent playstyle, you'll either love her or hate her. I'm definitely the latter. Her 1st ability looks really cool with the thread spun up across the level geometry, but in gameplay is objectively useless. Not only will you struggle to get enemies to walk through the damned things on anything but the most cramped tilesets, because of how they are placed a lot of enemies will just walk right under the threads completely ignoring the ability. Each thread also only inflicts a single stack of whatever stats they rolled, absolutely useless. This is your subsume slot. Her 2nd ability takes the Duviri Decree mechanic and removes the two things that made it good - the passive 10% dmg and HP buff each decree gives and the ability to select from multiple ones. 90% of Decrees you get are going to be absolutely worthless to you, and good luck actually getting the challenges themselves done in a squad with a single competent damage frame. Rolled a Decree challenge you can't complete? Enjoy your 150s wait time! Her 3rd is a Revenant's 2 except entirely random. Depending on how the RNG gods feel, you can be an unkillable juggernaut or a paper mache frame that dies when an enemy looks at her. This is Xaku's 4 all over again, I don't like leaving my survivability up to chance. Her 4 is her best ability, but yet again you are entirely on the whims of RNG on whether you roll good statuses or not. Roll all 6? Congrats, you have an AoE nuke capable of dispatching lvl 200 Steel Path enemies with ease. Rolled anything but that? It's a cone-shaped Rhino's Stomp except the enemies move in an annoying matter making them more difficult to shoot. There is one good thing I can say about Koumei! She's available very early and thanks to that, teaches all new players a very valuable lesson - when you gamble, you never win.

So I'm definetaly on the 'love her' side of the Koumei polarization, Actually switched to her as my main after literal years of Valkyr (though partly due to Valkyr now being intollerably buggy) I agree her 1 is a bit crap, It has such a huge range that I thought you could almost have your own domain where a huge radius is covered in threads but the thread limit just kills it to the point that it barely works at base range. Definetaly my helminth slot, usually for Xata's whisper which I admit is the most boring pick but her 4s not reliable enough to nuke with sickening pulse.

Really enjoy her overall though, her 2 is fun less for the power boost and more for just spicing up missions with interesting side objectives, though in endurance you can really get crazy powerful when decrees start stacking up. Her 3 is poorly explained in that whatever effect was rolled persists for the entire cooldown period rather than you getting nothing for 3 seconds (effectively like mesmer skin). Her 4 is basically just her 1 but useful, its good but not super interesting imo, useful for element based challenges though.

Overall, I find Koumei fairly fun to play, a lot of her kit seems to be focused around priming for CO style mods.

Her 1 can have some issues with where the threads are placed, enemies are able to walk around them if the ability isn't cast in a location which funnels them to the player, or they may stand still and just fire at the player from a distance.

Her 2 is a fun ability, somewhat useless in short missions and completing challenges can be hindered by your team. Challenges seem to be weighted mostly towards airborn kills, wall latches or kills at certain ranges, I'd like to see the other challenges like headshot kills/elemental kills more often. Her 1, 4 and passive all helped with covering any elements you were missing. There are some less useful decrees in there that can be earned/possibly detrimental depending on your weapon loadout. Being able to remove Decree after it's been earned would be helpful. It would be nice if some of the decree bonuses could scale with warframe duration like armor on finisher kill for x-seconds being extended.

Her 3 is a little questionable for her survival, it only works 50% of the time and has a 3s cooldown. She does have more base health and armor than most other warframes, so it might be worth investing into health and armor depending on what level the content is that you're playing. The ability seems like it might be useful subsumed onto something with a large hp pool and easy access to healing like Wisp if you aren't interested in shield gating.

Her 4 has really good range and hits anything in line of sight. The CC lasts for a reasonably long amount of time and holds enemies still enough that you aren't struggling to get headshot kills if that was one of your Omikuji challenges unlike some other ragdoll cc abilities.