It’s a claustrophobic mess of visual diarrhea, and the sheer volume of runs needed to obtain the ‘frame is insane.

I think they should halve the requirements or just give her to us for free - because at this point, I won’t even enjoy using her as the grind will have been too miserable.

I get what they were going for, but it did not come together properly.

Has happened multiple times for me and other people while playing as host

The premise is great. Follie hunts YOU, and YOU have to hide from HER while completing objectives. But you can shoot her to make her vanish, which defeats the point. The hordes of inked-up Infested also take away from this, and add to the clutter of a mission that feels like it should NOT be following the looter-shooter formula.

So, my changes. No ink hordes (save maybe for the face-grabbers) and Follie cannot be cast away with bullet fire. Put the focus back on you, the prey, and her, the hunter, who does not cease. 

Now, the map is quite cluttered. It’s an entire standard relay with overly ornate ink splots frozen in time everywhere. Some thing being stripped away from the original relay, such as the false front on the Suda room and possibly filling in the ditch around Teshin with ink, plus mangling some of the plant decorations to make them less circle-shaped and easy to confuse with resource balloons.

That is all.

The rewards are simply not worth the effort, and the prices for mods and blueprints are usurious. I'm more than half convinced this is to drive players to the platinum/cash purchase of the bundle. Not cool, DE. Not cool at all.  

Serration:

New Max - 190%

• Umbral Vitality: 

New Max - 110%h

2 Set Max - 145%

Full Set Base - 200%

• Primed Animal Instict :

Because this one is more loot related, instead of 10% give the ability to choose between reduced cooldown timer for air support charges by 50% OR add Scavenger.

• Galvanized :

Add 1 stack.

End of Mission Rewards :

For end of mission rewards give equal parts of Stela and Atramentum. Don't dilute the drop table. If you earn 55 Atramentum give 55 Stela.

Also change the Syndicate Medallion drop to a Universal Medallion drop.

Store Changes :

Add weekly rotation item similar to Teshin for Atramentum but make other relay/tenno related items... Orokin Catalyst Blueprint, Archon Shard, Universal Medallion x 3, Ducats x 100, Aya x 2, etc.

Add weekly Focus cache similar to the Baro Cache for 100 Atramentum... one of the following. One of any Eidolon Shard, 5 of any Tauron Strike Materials, Endo, etc...

These could be story related even... After the 5th letter the ability to buy the Cache unlocks. Add a few story lines about helping to teach the tenno to Aspirant Zorba.

1) Mission type: Rush. The design actively punishes you for slowing down, so you eventually... don't. No matter what lies ahead, you just mindlessly continue to push forward, because if you stop, things can only get worse. Especially after picking up the Ink, it is pure Hail Mary - either you successfully paint something, or you die, so you can fight again. (Because the Operator does not have the damage output to clean the path, there are usually no ways around, and waiting is straight out.) The most annoying obstacles are all things that can slow you down and which you can't affect. Just push forward, the traps are invulnerable anyway!

2) Playstyle: Berserker. My builds focused on durability, speed, and burst damage. Eventually, I ended up with speed-oriented Inaros (ton of health, arcane Persistance and Rage, Hunter Adrenaline, running speed mods.) Just spinning around, and once I found the ink, I blasted the accumulated creatures with Strun incarnon. Without activating the incarnon form, of course, as careless AoE blasts can kill you. Yes, every other round, something still managed to make me fight for my life - mainly sneakily deployed dual death orbs, or that damn book that hovers over your head (you know, the place you do not see and can't reasonably aim at.) bug: Inaros' fight for life prevents the mission from ending. You must revive/die first.

3) Mood: Annoyed. Both obvious and secret mission restrictions are eventually occupying your mind more than is healthy. No loot air support, prime Animal Instincts with surprisingly short sight, resource boosters not working. Those exceptions are annoying.

4) Longevity: I am not trying that thing again. I got my blueprints, and the rest of the mission rewards have a terrible effort/reward ratio. The droplet of kuva in the shop, or the shiny mod skins? Not worth it. (Mind that this is the opinion of someone with access to end-game gear, which might make my opinion on a random 500 standing token even more dismissive. However, at the same time, contrary to some starter Tenno, I can have a sturdy and fast Operator. Which is kinda a key feature to this game mode.)

Not sure why they chose syndicate medallions as we can only pledge to a limited number of syndicates at a time, making a good portion of the rewarded medallions a complete waste. 

Universal medallions only offer 1k standing, so it doesn't seem like a balance breaking amount of standing, and would be a significantly better feeling reward. 

Please add a map icon once you are able to hear the ink. Not only when you get really close as it does now. I am not deaf / hard of hearing but this game gets very much harder if you are unable to hear, even just in one ear since you need to locate where a sound is coming from.

I keep getting stuck on things, my eyes hurt, and it feels like only ways the game is able to "defeat" me is by annoying and inconveniencing me. Luckily I just cashed out the shop and I can finish getting my event tokens from other missions.

If you want an example of good enemy design that makes people actually feel hunted, here, meet DRG's Unknown Horror: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepRockGalactic/comments/1qhseg1/the_horror/. The Unknown Horror is an invisible, unkillable enemy that can and will kill you in a game where getting killed is both something that actually can happen, it's something that will happen, and when it happens it will actually have an impact on the outcome of your mission. It's an actual threat to pay attention to and avoid, and when it shows up it's a big deal. Follie isn't.

I adored it. It felt delightful to not be able to simply nuke my problems away. To be actively rewarded for using movement tech to its fullest.

At no point did I find the game mode to be too punishing or unfun. It was a lovely change of pace. 

I realize it’s an unpopular opinion, but I ask you to hear me out and take a moment to have an open mind. 
 

First off, I walked into Follie’s Hunt with zero expectations and with an open mind. Rather than comparing it to the rest of the game, I took it as its own thing, and appreciated it for what it is, rather than being upset about what it isn’t. 
 

Second, the theme, setting, ambiance and everything is spot on. The dark, creepy, dreary and ominous ink and darkness really made for a wonderful experience for me. Not everyone’s thing, admittedly, but even as someone who’s not huge on the horror genre I found it quite pleasant. 
 

Third, (and here’s the big kicker, I know) the mechanics. I’ll start by saying no, it wasn’t and still isn’t perfect. But DE’s devs are human and are allowed to make mistakes. 
 

Not having my hand held every step of the way was great. Seeing all of these weird things happen with minimal explanation was a great experience of adapting to the unexpected. Suddenly appearing walls, death fields popping up, doors getting locked by goop. Even the facehuggers. I was in no way prepared for it and it was a lot of fun quickly trying to adapt to each new challenge amidst the chaos. Follie herself being immortal encouraged me to just run for change. 
 

At no point were any of these mechanics actually problematic for me. Annoying in some cases, sure, but everything was very readily handled and adapted to even when I went in blind and didn’t have half as many tools as I did on subsequent runs armed with information. At no point did I feel powerless to continue on my mission. Simply pressured to keep moving and adapting to the ever changing situation. 
 

Take a few minutes to think outside the box and approach the new challenges with new solutions. The tools are there and it’s not a “there’s only one way” situation. I chose one and found it pretty quickly, but my friends have used several other approaches quite successfully. 
 

All that said, a few disclaimers attached.

I’m MR35, with virtually everything at least mostly built. I have tools to solve almost any problems.

I went in my first run with a shield regen Hildryn, as I often do in new content. It’s a very safe and sturdy, albeit boring, build. Extremely hard to kill and not dependent on energy or anything else to stay up. This has undoubtedly greatly affected my experiences. 
 

On subsequent runs, I switched from Vazarin (which wasn’t helping me) to Unairu (with Cogron for antique modes). Unairu’s Poise makes a massive difference. The immunity to slow and knockdown granted to the operator is huge. That said, it was not necessary for me to get through. Even when I was using Vazarin I did fine, it was just less smooth. 
 

I have seen a lot of complaints about the inconsistency of void mode with Follie’s aura. My partner loses their energy and gets kicked out of void mode in seconds. I on the other hand watch my energy bar drop and then get refunded immediately, resulting in “normal” behavior. I realize that this also has skewed my opinions and I may likely have a different view with different experiences. 
 

So yeah, I don’t think it’s a bad game mode at all. Unpolished, sure, but not at all bad. Simply different. 

As for real criticism, I can say that the Atramentum drops being global is huge, and the gold sparks now finding canvases was a good change. 
 

The lighting changes I didn’t like, but that’s personal preference. Highlighting the balloons more was a great thing. 
 

Making Follie killable made the game mode a joke, though. Her aura’s damage didn’t really need nerfing, either. You’re supposed to run, not tank the hits. As I’ve seen some others say, giving her strong Damage Attenuation would be a fair compromise in my opinion, though I’m still in favor of the immortal Follie. We all know by now that if it’s not immortal, it’s simply dead. DA does mitigate that, but still. If a boss doesn’t have invulnerability phases it generally just melts. Follie has proven no exception here. 
 

And of course, fix the bugs. Bugs make anything less fun. This is no exception. 
 

At the end of the day, Follie’s Hunt has been demonized unfairly, IMO, and it pains me to see so much disdain and shade thrown at DE all for making a single unpopular game mode. They’re human and are allowed to make mistakes like the rest of us. Give them a break. They’ve made countless hours of amazing content. Not everything is going to pan out flawlessly every time. That doesn’t make them bad devs, it makes them human like the rest of us. 

QoL Issues

These are issues that I think should be addressed regardless of what other changes are made

• Cephalon Suda's room should always have the "weave" portion visible so that we can tell what's in the room at first glance
• Loot radar should properly affect the balloons and operation medalions from the event instead of being limited to 20-25m 
• Minimap should only show you the floor you are on, viewing both floors simply makes it harder to read
• Paint should be more visible, oftentimes it's hard to tell whether a plate has paint or not even if it's in direct line of sight
• Make Drip, Drip, Drip walls affect both the minimap and the waypoints 

As for some more personal nitpicks/recommendations:

• Have a counter bellow the minimap showing how many balloons/medalions have been picked up, that way it's easier to tell if you have gotten everything or not
• Replace the medalions from Maxim Medalions to Genius Datum to make them easier to spot without relying on the minimap
• Increase the automatic marking range for paint/canvases by 5-10m both in the minimap and the persistent waypoint

MANDATORY Gameplay Changes

These are things that simply make the game mode annoying to play, regardless of whether you are a new player struggling to kill enemies or an lr6 that can nuke rooms instantly

• Remove slowdowns from Sticky Ink, Follie's book attack and the yellow lingering puddles that one of the enemies can create (the Zealot I believe)
  • Due to the tight halls movement is already limited, additional slowdowns just make the game more annoying
• Damaging auras from Polyopia Follie clones should not stack
• When playing with a squad there should be a limit on how many Polyopia Follies can target the same player
  • What's the point on scaling the amount spawned if they are all gonna jump the same player randomly?
  • If the point is for players to stick together then why increase the number of paint required for each canvas? such a strategy would simply make squad play take objectively longer than solo regardless of the player's skills
• Allow each player to pick up 2 (or maybe even more) paints at once, with the 2nd paint granting some sort of debuff (such as less max health/energy)
  • This would improve the flow of each run whenever you find more paint on your way to the canvas, having to run back to the same/similar location makes the mode feel repetitive
• When a player dies while carrying paint they drop it on their death location so that it can be picked up again, dropped paint despawns after 15s
  • Death is already a punishment, why punish the players further by instantly deleting paint?

Altering the Hunt

I understand DE's intentions with Follie's Hunt being a more methodical mode where how fast you kill enemies isn't the primary objective, however as we've seen a big part of the community doesn't like this, so how about we use something that has not been used since the introduction of Sanctuary Onslaught? Have an easier "normal" version and a harder "elite" version, featuring some gameplay changes beyond simply increasing enemy levels. Both normal and elite variants have a Steel Path version

Normal Mode:

• You can pick up paint with your warframe without being forced into the operator
• Operator retains void sling while carrying paint
• Zealot enemies do not spawn
• Drip, Drip, Drip walls can be damaged and temporarily destroyed
• Ink Mires are larger and only 1 spawns per a door at a time
• Draining Effigies no longer drain operator energy
• Sticky Ink does not trigger
• Same rewards as current version

Elite Mode:

• You can only carry paint with your operator
• Void sling distance is reduced by half instead of being disabled
  • A compromise between the annoyance of fully lacking void sling and unnerfed void sling invalidating the little threat that enemies have
• Zealot enemies spawn
• Eximus enemies spawn that are guaranteed to create a trailing waypoint to guide you to a canvas/paint on death
• Dropped paint despawns after 5s instead of 15s
• Modifiers are enhanced:
  • Gigantism: Enemies also gain a +50% movement speed, +100% max health, +25 base armour and +50% damage. Follie only gains the movement speed
    • Enemies are currently a non issue and gigantism is basically a meme modifier, this is a way to fix both of these issues
  • Polyopia: Additional clones will randomly patrol the main concourse room (where canvas A spawns) and the syndicate hall, these clones will travel along a set path and will not actively chase players
  • Splattering Touch: Enemies will only lose 50% of their max hp instead of dying, each enemy has a 15s personal cooldown on triggering explosions
  • Sticky Ink: Reduced movement only lasts 2s instead of 4s
    • Technically a nerf to the current version but consider the above change where sticky ink does nor trigger on the normal mode
  • Drip, Drip, Drip: Walls cannot be destroyed, touching a wall will summon Follie
  • Draining Effigies: Can also drain operator energy at the same rate they currently do, when destroyed they explode similarly to splattering touch
  • Ink Balloons: Additional roaming balloons
  • Ink Mires: 2 Mires spawn per door similarly to now, every 3s they are active they will proc gas to all players in the blocked room
  • Deimos Tendril Drones: No changes
• Increase the guaranteed attramentum on mission completion by x3 (+30 star chart, +50 steel path)
• Increase endo amount by 2x
• REMOVE CREDITS FROM THE DROP TABLES
• Combine Bountiful Seed, Executive Quittance, Honored Mark into 1 pack and Defender Insignia, Intriguing Datum, Lawful Medallion into another pack, both packs having 5% drop chance
  • These 2 changes leave a 27.02% gap in the drop table, either equally split it among everything else or put in some evergreen rewards like kuva or universal medalion

The problem, in a nutshell, was that it was fun to play once or twice, kind of okay the next four or five times, and incredibly boring after that. There were only three maps, and there was no variation in gameplay, or any kind of story or lore. In short, it was ideal for an expo, where many people would play one or two rounds and then give up their role to someone else, and absolutely terrible for any kind of sustained play.

(There was also a gimmick where the game was supposed to shut down after something like a billion Flock were killed, but since no one played it they got nowhere near this before having to shut down the server keeping track. The FAQ on the Steam page is an interesting read for a more in-depth post-mortem. It's also not relevant here, because DE isn't that dumb.)

Follie's Hunt has, I think, a similar problem. It's really interesting to play the first few times, until you get used to the map and hear all the voiceover lines, at which point no matter how easy or hard you find it, it's mainly just a lot of walking back and forth with occasional surprise energy drains that you can do nothing whatsoever to counter. Ivara, Oxylus, and Ignis Wraith trivialize farming Atramentum, at least, but it doesn't really do much about the slog, or the frustration of having Follie suddenly teleport on top of you.

I also suspect, based on how quickly it was implemented, that there were two camps in the design of this level, one of which wanted Follie to be unkillable, and the other of which wanted her to work like she does now, but the underlying problem is not whether Follie is killable or not. It's that there's no way to avoid her. A good horror game - hell, a good anything game - will give the player multiple means to counter the main threat. In Death Stranding you can avoid the BTs, hold your breath to sneak through them, or kill/dispatch them in a variety of ways. There's also a built-in warning system so that you don't accidentally stumble face-first into them. Prey, while more action-y, likewise lets you sneak past or kill the monsters, and gives you multiple cues that they're there as long as you pay enough attention (music, visual distortion, I think there's an HUD component but it's been a while). Even Warframe uses the same design philosophy for the Eximus units, hence the change to Arctic Eximus so that the effects on the player are clearly signposted and avoidable. The Vampiric Liminus have a visible aura around them, etc, etc.

Follie has no signposts and one (1) countermeasure. The visible aura doesn't matter when she can teleport directly to your location, seemingly regardless of whether you're visible or not. There is no way to prevent her from teleporting, and all you can do is dump damage into her to buy yourself a brief reprieve. There's no strategy in that, and it's not fun to suddenly die with no warning because the monster is effectively cheating.

Worse, there is no way you can ameliorate this. If you're bad at Spy missions, for example, you can grind yourself an Ivara and an Infiltrate mod, boost her energy, and Spy becomes trivial. If you're bad at finding the mimics in Prey, there are powers you can purchase that will make that easier or a non-issue (iirc). If you're bad at sneaking past BTs, with enough hematic grenades you can get rid of them. With Follie, there's nothing you can do. There's nothing to get better at. There is no skill, mechanic, or item that will prevent her from showing up at your exact location. That's what's frustrating about her.

What they didn't fix is the reward table. 52% of it is bloat: 3k Endo, 10k Credits, Syndicate medallions. The last one is especially offensive because, for most players, half the time you get a medallion you get one for a Syndicate you're enemies with - and even I with my four-Syndicate juggling get junk a third of the time. Then of the remaining 48%, half (Enkaus BP and parts) become useless once you get them once and the rest (Follie's BP and parts) become useless once you get them twice. That's to say that once you got the Enkaus and two copies of Follie you have no reason to run the game mode at all.

Which, considering how dull and uninteresting it is, is actually an upside.

This is the game mode with the worst on-launch gameplay I've seen since Defection, and post-hotfix it's a less interesting Infested Salvage with even worse droptables (Infested Salvage at least has a ~53% to net you a Relic in Rotations A and B).

If Follie's Hunt would've been a course I'd have gotten in a restaurant, I'd return it to the kitchen. It's this bad.

I know that y'all in DE don't remove game modes - aside from Raid and Trials you never did that - so I don't expect you to remove it like some other posters in this forum suggested, but I do expect y'all to learn from this flop. 

I like to grind but for my baby tenno this is egregious 

As A veteran I feel shame for my baby tenno who want to enjoy these things but in its current state its hardly recommendable. 

We hope you address the mission soon, we are all waiting to see..

My experience from a first run: Downloaded the update and queued in straight away to a visually confusing, mechanically annoying, and frustratingly restrictive hot mess. Then I saw the rewards table and estimated the grind...

I like horror, I like Warframe, I like the mission concept, I don't like actually playing it though:

Everything looks the same.

Movement is gimped.

The operator is gimped.

The visuals become even more confusing as time goes on.

Big grey bubbles kill you, small grey bubbles do...?

Follie is too hard to see, and too hard to not hear.

Etc, etc.

Update: I found a style that works for me: play solo to reduce the completion requirements, enemy aura at max, stay in operator mode, roll, roll, roll. 🤣

Final update: After playing a few times more, then again after the hot fix today, it's fine IMO. Follie's retreat is a bit overtuned maybe, i'd prefer to have attacks reduce the kill bubble for a second to give me time to react and adjust, maybe with a lockout timer of a few more seconds to stop her from being stunlocked, but the graphical changes and auto-collect on balloons doubled my acquisition rate. 8/10 on the fixes DE. Thank you.

Are they bugged? It looks like I'm going to ultimately be forced to fork out the 1200 "pity" cost instead...

The first pain point I've seen is point B, it can be crammed back in the very back of the relay entrance and players don't know to look for the golden bowl thing to see if it's spawned in that room or not. OR B can be in the syndicate hallways and it can lock itself off so you have to go through the atrium and all the way down the syndicate hallway to deliver paint to it because of a wall spawn. These are both things you can mitigate with experience, but again they make the first impression of the game mode worse.

Second is paint spawns, there are times where there is basically no paint on the upper floor when there are always two canvases up there, that's a huge pain point even for more experienced groups where all of the paint has collected downstairs because syndicate rooms have closed off. Newer players don't know where paint can spawn and having to hoof it THAT FAR as an operator slowly rolling your way to the canvas with paint, that is a really bad first experience with the game mode.

Third is operator walk speed, most people learn to roll everywhere or sprint everywhere, but this is a really big problem with the game mode, the majority of Warframe's gameplay is defined by the bullet jump, people who play long enough to get to this game mode probably expect Warframe's movement mechanics to be part of the game. So creating a game mode that just invalidates that to where you're cutscene walking everywhere and rolling in operator form, that stays with this game mode even once you've learned how to play it. A lot of players have learned to tolerate this, but it sticks out in a bad way compared to the rest of Warframe.

Fourth is the drop table, this has been beaten to death, but the drop table is abysmal. I understand that you don't want to make the primary way to farm syndicate medallions Follie's hunt, an unpopular game mode being the optimal and infinite way to bank up syndicate rep would seriously hurt this game, players would simply optimize spamming this mission for infinite relics and that would suck for everybody. If it were me and it was decided this mission should be a source of medallions I would set things up so that you can buy like a "medallion pack" such and such times a day/week with the currency from the mission and replace the medallions in the drop table with void relics or something.

If you want to keep the discovery of canvases as a thing I would set things up so that canvases are automatically marked on the map depending on progress on previous canvases, if they haven't been discovered already, this would prevent players from getting stuck on their first couple tries and make things more about optimization of the mission rather than frustration for not finding the last canvas. Paint IMO should periodically cycle to new spawn points if a player hasn't visited that room in a while, like 30-45 seconds, that way things even out more and players don't get stuck with no paint on the second floor at all.

I don't know what to do about operator walk speed. Maybe put a cooldown on void dashing while holding paint or something? That could bring some more interest to moving around trying to find the places to use your void dash to go faster, it would speed up the game mode and add something back gameplay-wise in rather than just map memorization and rolling everywhere.

The thing that hurts the medallions most is that for any player that gets those, 50% of them are useless unless you're doing extra work going for four syndicates. There are basically things in this drop table that for a normal player are 100% useless, literally incapable of being used by that player in almost any capacity. They might have some edge cases like if you're desperate for more rep and are willing to brave a 5% drop chance, but even then that's a fairly contrived situation.

To put it plainly: this mode manages to be worse than Defection. I honestly didn’t think anything would ever surpass Defection, but here we are. Not one, not two, but every single design choice in this mode feels additively frustrating. If this mission was designed as a psy-op, it’s spot on.

Why it feels unplayable:

1. The Tileset: Easily one of the worst possible choices for this type of mission. Even as an MR33 who kinda knows the game, I sometimes don't know the way in Relais, and the randomly spawning walls don’t exactly help.
2. Why are there Enemies?: Even on Steel Path you can completely ignore ALL enemies. What is the point of them even being there?
3. Operator: The Operator is already incredibly clunky so naturally the solution was to make it even worse. Being slowed by Follie + being slowed in Void Mode + having no Void Sling turns this into Slow Motion Simulator 2026. You just sit there, pressing W, questioning your life decisions mid-mission.
4. Gameplay?: There is nothing quite like the thrill of running around like a maniac searching for paint and delivering it, over and over again. Exactly 0% of the time in this mission am I doing anything remotely fun.
5. The Reward Economy: Receiving under 100 Atramemtum on Steel Path when the blueprint alone costs 1,200 is ridiculous. Furthermore, adding Syndicate Medallions to the drop table makes no sense. What am I supposed to do with them, sell them for credits?

The result is what might be the worst game mode in Warframe. This needs a complete rework. And no, just making the loot global won't magically make it fun. At this point, it either needs a massive overhaul or it needs to be replaced with something remotely human-playable.

A group of people who all immediately scatter and start delivering ink will complete the map and get all the loot in like 3-4 minutes. It's incredibly fast. A group who doesn't will take like 12m, and by the end of it it will a miserable slog as one person is slowly completing things while all the modifiers stack up, more Follies are around, etc.

I don't know if people are leeching, trying to find all the loot first (pointless, loot radar and high explosives clear the map without difficulty), or just don't understand the mode, but this is actually tolerable with a good squad and utterly miserable with a bad one. A lot of content can be carried by one person with a broken loadout, but this can't. And it makes the differences in random squads stark.