Update 13

[Seox]

Hello, Tenno.

 

 

Here are my thoughts on update 13:

 

Melee 2.0

 

To start, melee 2.0 feels substantially smoother and flows much better than the old system. I'm really impressed by how well the transitions between attacks work and how much more elegant channeling is compared to heavy attacks. On the flip side, the stance fiasco and the relative rarity of stances completely kills my excitement right now.

 

I've been playing for hours today to farm these mods and haven't gotten a single one. The one card that I did get was for dual daggers, which are about the only melee weapon type I don't care for. While it'd certainly be interesting to have a few stance mods exist as rare drops to give us something to aspire to, it seems odd to me that essentially every stance mod is a rare drop. I know that eventually the supply in the market will increase, but it's still frustrating to see a system where beginners will be dealing with a watered down form of melee and unlucky players who don't want to fork over the plat are unlikely to be able to experience a system that is essentially assumed for the playerbase at large.

 

More importantly, the one stance mod that I did get concerns me. While parrying has certainly improved and opens up more options for melee, I find that I am essentially still just spamming E to kill enemies and that the different combos don't really differ enough to warrant using one over the other. I understand that I've only used one stance card, so please take that with a grain of salt. Assuming this problem is true for other stances, I'm not really sure what the best way to fix this would be. It seems like the only way to do anything about it would be to separate melee combos by their utility/AoE/etc, but sinking talon just has two frontal combos that both contain minor lunges.

 

Hydroid/Vay Hek

 

Or rather, accessing the two. Some players have expressed concern that accessing the new boss is again locked behind a timewall that is made substantially easier in teams. While many players play regularly in groups, there is still a sizable portion of the warframe community that is unable to group with players due to connection issues or does not want to group and should not be forced to do so. It seems to be a fairly inelegant solution to me that content is blocked off this way. I understand the reasons for making players work their way to new content, but it seems that this could be done in a way that is based on the individual and not how many friends he brought with him.

 

Dojo Research - New Items

 

It seems that essentially all of the new gear (minus hydroid) is dojo-research only. As others have noted before, continuing to push in this direction will continue to alienate players who cannot or do not wish to join clans, and this also means that newer players and newer clans don't have as much to look forward to per-update. It seems that there could be an item or two per several dojo items that are available in the market so that players aren't immediately locked out of access to new content. 

 

At the same time, DE has discussed their desire to "lock off" access to some of these weapons to avoid overwhelming beginners in the market, so this one isn't so clear cut. At any rate, I was certainly disappointed when I logged in and saw that I wouldn't be enjoying any of these weapons any time soon, either.

 

Lex Prime

 

There's nothing here that I can say that hasn't been said before - I just got out of a 40m T3 defense with nothing, and one of my teammates had completed about 20 so far.

 

Void drop rates. 

 

In Conclusion

 

I logged in excited to try out U13, but found that I was using melee 1.0 without stance mods that I couldn't get without substantial work and substantial luck. I tried to use the new weapons, but found that those were out of reach due to additional dojo research as well. I tried to check out Vay Hek so that I could get Hydroid, but it looks like I'll want to wait for friends to get home so that I can get through it at a far more reasonable pace. I wanted to get Lex Prime, but that's again at the mercy of RNG.

 

Before someone says that I'm lazy and entitled, I understand and value putting work into things. My main issues are with blocking off core mechanics of Melee 2.0 with RNG. When you call someone lazy for saying things like this, you imply that if they'd only work at it hard enough, they'd be able to get what they wanted. My complaint is that with RNG, you have no guarantees with respect to that. It took me 300 hours of gameplay to get a flow mod, and there will be people who are unable to experience large parts of melee's mechanics because the decision was made to RNGwall it.

 

TL;DR this update REALLY pushed the bar as far as RNG/Grind. I have never felt that warframe was overly grindy/reliant on luck, but this was the update that did it for me and I'm really disappointed. The amazing stuff is there, we just need to take heed and see if we can't polish it to bring it to the top.

 

Thanks for all the hard work, DE!

 

[Temperance000]

In sum, well said.  I admit that I don't share all of your frustrations, but I definitely see the legitimacy of your concerns.  In particular, the low stance mod drop rate is bothersome; I've also gotten one so far, this time for axes...another melee category that I really don't care for.  I also have some general questions of my own:

 

1) The Dojo Observatory.  I'm a member of a Ghost clan, trying to build it at the end of a new Hall, with nothing visibly obstructing it, but I cannot find the observatory in the build menu.  Our capacity is somewhere around 109, energy availability at least 29.  Is one of these the problem?

 

2)The Codex.  I noticed a large number of new pictures, and was initially excited, but when I looked a little closer, it seemed that these were blacked-out  duplicates of enemies I had already scanned, ie. the Corpus Shock Moa.  I'm fairly certain that these are not new enemy types; are these for leader class enemies, or is it simply a bug caused by the update?

 

3)Melee 2.0.  I really love it so far, but as mentioned above, the stance mod drops are a bit of an issue.  I've also run into situations on Phobos where the parry animation did not play, but the action was still performed.  Also, I do miss charge attacks just a bit, especially with quick melee, though having seen all the work that went into reworking charge damage mods for the channel system, I can see how returning them to the game would be more than slightly problematic.

 

Overall, after all the angst that accompanied this update's launch fiasco and the minor anxiety attack when it appeared to be delayed again, I can safely say "Thank you, DE for all your hard work."  That said, there are a few things that need to be addressed, but I'm sure you'll be tending to those as feedback continues to come from the community.

 

Best regards,

Temperance000

[Seox]

After obtaining Tranquil Cleave, I certainly feel that melee 2.0's combo system isn't what it could be.

 

Of the three or four combos, three of them are forward lunges with short range. While I could certainly see the utility behind a lunge, there's such a long windup that I could just as easily run up to the enemy and spam E (melee 1.0) to kill them in the same time frame, especially given the relatively short range on the lunge. 

 

Heck, I can't even come up with a scenario in which a long wind-up followed by a lunge would be useful. Bosses would shrug that off easily, so you'd be better doing things to maximize DPS against them (like spamming E). Killing crowds of enemies works better with horizontal strikes (spamming E), not attacks that force you to move forwards. Lunges almost seem to be built with "slamming through enemy lines" in mind, but this is dangerous because doing so would put your back to the enemy, meaning you can't parry incoming attacks with a melee based build. I can't think of a scenario where you'd want to push through enemies and just keep running that would warrant three of a weapon's four combos being built around the concept.

 

Further still, few of the combos seem to offer different mechanics. I'm not noticing particularly greater speed, damage, knockdown, knockback, or stun. So much could be done with the way combos effect the game. Imagine a combo that doesn't do much damage but knocks opponents back fairly routinely - you charge in, knock a heavy against the wall, mince the lancers nearby, then take the heavy on in 1v1. Instead, the best thing to do seems to be to run up and spam E while holding channeling for max DPS. It concerns me that despite the heavy revamp, melee 2.0 still feels watered down and one-dimensional when it could be really expansive and vast. 

 

Lastly, if that wasn't enough, several of these combos require pauses and holds that reduce your number of hits per second and give you more opportunities to mess up, getting in less hits. The hit counter already expires very rapidly, and by trying to use combos that don't really seem to offer any real flexibility, you often sacrifice your ability to maintain the combo counter, which is where the real damage comes from. It almost seems like this system was built from the ground up to fall back into the EEEEEEEE of old melee 1.0 (minus the charge attacks, at least.)

 

I had really hoped that combos would have been diverse and interesting and really encouraged new play styles, and the aesthetic aspect of it is really cool, but eventually I get bored with that and just keep spamming E. I need a reason to use these combos besides the aesthetics. If anyone has anything to show me that I may not be seeing, please enlighten me - I'd love to be able to appreciate the depth of the system if there's something that I'm missing.

 

EDIT: Most enemies aren't even able to take a combo and still stand - further reason to quickly triple tap E and be done with it. I almost want to see a system where we're given four or five individual attacks per weapon (vertical, lunge, slam, etc) and we can chain them together to create combos as we like, giving you the flexibility to take on large enemies or weak ones the way you want to. You could even give certain one-two punch combos traits that play off each other (lunge after slam bleeds more often, etc). Combos against trash mobs doesn't "fit" warframe.

Edited April 10, 2014 by Seox

[Vargras]

If I have any gripes with Melee 2.0, it's that some of the stances are virtually identical to pre-patch attacks. Reaping Spiral, for instance, has the very same attack animations that all scythes had, and it's like that for every single combo except one. The one new set of animations is tied to a combo that's too difficult to pull off compared to how valuable it really is.

[Shashu]

Its exactly what u said, i expected more in this update but its just a remade animation on all weapons for E spam with an extra 1-2 combos that tends to be anoying and unflowable in combat or just useless that u just stick to E spam which pretty much what we been doing past year. Plus for ppl who got alot of rank 30 weapons already and not much to do on it anymore... its like...meh.. wat now, a few combos wont do much.

 

I wanted something like Soul Caliber...  the amount of different combos u can do and each one can flow nicely into each other, rather limiting to E they could added R for a different attack type to open more combo's for a start. But sadly this update is abit of a let down and wont last for a week, i can see why drops are hard to get becus if it was easy... ud have all the stances in 1 day and get bored faster. 

 

Only possitive side is u can unequip weapons. 

[Seox]

Its exactly what u said, i expected more in this update but its just a remade animation on all weapons for E spam with an extra 1-2 combos that tends to be anoying and unflowable in combat or just useless that u just stick to E spam which pretty much what we been doing past year. Plus for ppl who got alot of rank 30 weapons already and not much to do on it anymore... its like...meh.. wat now, a few combos wont do much.

 

I wanted something like Soul Caliber...  the amount of different combos u can do and each one can flow nicely into each other, rather limiting to E they could added R for a different attack type to open more combo's for a start. But sadly this update is abit of a let down and wont last for a week, i can see why drops are hard to get becus if it was easy... ud have all the stances in 1 day and get bored faster. 

 

Only possitive side is u can unequip weapons. 

 

I agree - it seems that the only sort of combo system that would mesh with warframe's low time to kill would be one where we have several different types of attacks that we can blend into our own combos. At the least, the tried and true "light light light heavy" combo system (like vindictus or dynasty warriors) would at least afford us some flexibility in how we handle combos. In addition, there needs to be something to diversify the actual attacks and give us a reason to use some of them, or people are just going to use the best one.