What are your critiques of Caliban? He has a lot of desirable properties in my opinion, like a persistent full defense removal field and a damage vuln + CC ability.
I tried to dust off my Sevagoth yesterday since I got him forever ago, and he's still very bad imo.
I found no reason to use his Shadow form at all despite being an avid Desert Storm user. I'm comparing him to Baruuk because both are melee focused 4th ability and both are locked behind a meter. The Shadow form is too limiting in too many ways:
Sevagoth needs to fill the meter almost to the brim to use his 4 while Baruuk can use it anytime as long as the Restrain dropped, even just a little.
Shadow form cannot refill Death Well while Baruuk can lower his Restrain anytime as long as he casts his other abilities.
Shadow form cannot use guns. Baruuk can just swap to whatever weapon depending on the situation anytime.
Shadow form cannot interact with mission objectives.
Last Gasp is superior in every way than using Shadow form. 5 souls vs 3 kills, even down to 1 when it's Eximus while Shadow form cannot deal with any heavy unit in any meaningful way.
(cont.) Shadow form can only use an altered version of his 2 in downed form, meaning any button you press would just send you mindlessly zooming forward which is quite difficult to control and very confusing given how we usually use and interact with the Shadow form.
Shadow form's abilities cost energy and ignore Arcane Energize on Sevagoth, that means if I want to use Shadow form for a prolonged time, I'll have to consider Arcane Energize on him instead of other melee focused arcanes.
No skin, no augment, no bitches?
(This is a complete subjective opinion) Too much casting time between switching to Shadow form and back. I was trying to do something like a 4, 1, 4 combo, and it took too long to be useful. This is a wasted opportunity in my opinion, he could be extremely fun if he could function like Nidalee or Elise in League of Legends.
Let's just hope DE will fix him in some meaningful capacity when his prime comes out...
Strips all the enemies armor, has the entire party and defense objectives take 0% damage, while applying a continous Gloom level slow to the enemies and popping out periodic energy orbs?
The funny thing about "Gara does Frost's job" is it unironically requires people to be bad at playing either frame. Frost's snowglobe is not his best ability (though nice when needed) and Gara's wall as a wall (and not a syngery bind with her 2) is probably her worst
Gara is similar but doesn't do the same job.
She's a hybrid between Limbo and Frost in the regard that she offers damage reduction to both static and mobile targets while they give damage immunity to either static targets (Snow Globe) or mobile targets (Banish). The main difference is that Gara provides up to 50% DR to objects, whereas Snow Globe blocks everything.
In high level content, objects like Excavators don't have enough HP to survive even a few hits from the enemies even with Gara's DR and healing but Snow Globe can keep them alive by blocking the damage completely. There is Mass Vitrify, of course, but in order for it to work properly and have enough health, Gara has to hit multiple enemies while casting it. This means the enemies have to be close enough to her and hence to her defence target, which puts it at risk of getting destroyed before they get glassed.
Frost doesn't have this risk factor which is why he's better at defending.
man caliban is just hard carried by his 4 , its the only standout ability he got , his 3 is used begrudgingly , his 2 is redundant since armor strip is just so much bigger of an impact on damage that its never needed and his 1 is just a helminth slot with 0 redeeming features