Nikolovski_

I think you make a fair point about player strength. I hope we get more crazy mechanics in the future that provide additional challenges. Not sure if I want survivability to be the primary hurdle in missions going forwards though (especially with the ultra-ez survivability focused frames that exist now). More on that later. Although I think this is fair as well, I get the impression DE's newer mission design is trying to incorporate more operator interactions and failure conditions that don't have to do with personal survivability - such that going operator form just to avoid death means not contributing to the primary objective = failing the mission. That said, I imagine using Xaku, stealing enemy guns, then afking as operator would be pretty busted in some circumstances. I guess when I'm thinking of cheese, I'm not thinking about merely surviving, but doing something to further the objective while taking no personal risk or displaying any skill. Although rev and invis exist, I don't find the playstyles particularly fun/challenging so I tend to avoid. (more thoughts on this at the end) I agree. In fact, I think 90% DR is more than enough in most content, such that afk cheese is very much on the table, outside of content approaching level cap. However, at/near level cap, 90% DR is absolutely worthless due to enemy damage scaling. I don't think any sane person brings a health tanking build to level cap for this reason - adaptation + high armor + DR abilities + healing isn't enough because even with enemies doing 0.01% of their base damage, that number is higher than frames can get hp for, 1-shotting health before healing/lifesteal/etc can even be considered. Agree with first half, disagree with second. I think there can be mechanics that are "uniquely challenging" that are nonetheless unfun to play around. I'm sure we could imagine a game or mechanic that requires skill but is still a horrible experience. I guess we disagree about how cringe this particular mechanic is. If this feature was only in place for abilities that could plausibly provide mission-relevant benefits while frame is afk, I don't think I'd mind nearly as much. However, I think the number of abilities that fit this category is very small. I don't think it makes sense for a frame with roar active to get nuked since roar's buff to teammates isn't dependent on the caster being alive. If the tradeoff to using Equinox 4, Xaku 2, Banshee 1 was damage vulnerability, I wouldn't be as bothered. Curious how you would feel if the mechanic worked as follows: When going operator, if your warframe has an ability that provides some passive benefit such as free damage, cc, etc. (give Nekros 3 a break tho ), you are only allowed to be in operator form for a limited amount of time (similar to warframe transference in Duviri lone story / experience). The timer decreases faster if a larger number of enemies are currently targeting your frame, and this timer "recharges" over time, such that you'd need to be in warframe form the majority of the time if using one of these abilities. Alternatively, abilities are merely uncast when timer is out, which would prevent annoyances where you were using operator to traverse the map quickly and get pulled all the way back. In my opinion, this would be the best case scenario: prevents afk cheese at all levels of content, doesn't have weird instant nuke potential at high levels, and potentially allows "parking" to decrease the timer penalty. Additionally, all consistency weirdness would be resolved. The reason I'm advocating for the mechanic's removal is because I imagine deleting it would be an easy change, but adding an entirely separate mechanic that actually prevents afk cheese at low-mid level and doesn't feel like a bug at high level would take a lot more effort. Even if DE is beginning to search for ways to make more difficult content, I assumed they wouldn't put that many dev-hours into improving a mechanic that really isn't noticed until ~sp 1000+ most of the time. Personally, I dislike the "parking incentive", since even if I were to consider it skillful, I don't think it's a particularly fun thing to engage with. My warframe is in the fight, and can sustain via shield gate, recovery abilities, i-frames, etc. but is made of paper the moment I go operator form - so I need to run from the fight or find a weird hole to hide it in before doing my operator business. This feels pretty disruptive to the flow of combat and the crackhead pace of warframe that I've come to enjoy. Also - different hypothetical - if the operator design/buildcrafting had equal depth to warframes, operators had more engaging survival mechanics than "hold crouch for immortality", and operator death was as punishing as warframe death, would there be any need for warframe damage vulnerability in operator form? Obviously a huge diversion from the original suggestion, but curious where you're coming from regarding balance and difficulty. Broadly speaking, I think the 90% DR mechanic hurts a number of frames/builds that could otherwise work well in level cap void cascade, and fails to provide the player with skillful / interesting / enjoyable counterplay, so it does more harm than good. I'm not opposed to difficulty per se, but to mechanics which demand an arbitrary restriction on builds or an uninteresting playstyle in response. Ultimately, is there any anti-afk feature that you would accept / prefer to the current system that prevents me from needing to slow down my playstyle (via parking) or risk getting nuked through a frame I can't control and a damage source I can't see?

I'm sure there are a number of ways to increase difficulty that don't require the sort of inconsistency / annoyance / inconvenience of this one. Again, it's super weird that players would be incentivized to uncast abilities or run away from their objective in order to do operator actions. Especially true if your intention is to go operator for 3 seconds to cast some sort of debuff. I'm all for difficult content being in the game, but when I think of "difficulty" I imagine objectives and challenges that demand mastery over one's kit - the type of thing that looks impressive to a spectator. As it is currently, there's no difficulty increase for invis frames and abilities that "don't count": it doesn't even make sense to punish a player for leaving an ability up that provides no benefit to themself / operator. Also no challenge for people who can uncast. As for people who choose to hide their frame somewhere to do operator actions, I imagine this highly discourages quick operator actions since engaging with the system is far more obnoxious, and as far as "difficulty", I don't think parking your frame somewhere safe is the type of "skill expression" that most would consider difficult or impressive. I guess another way to think of it is that not all things that people "fail" at are difficult (at least insofar as we want "difficult content"): winning at roulette is something most will fail to do, but I hardly think it'd be reasonable to claim the winner has "succeeded at a difficult thing". I would much prefer difficulty mechanics were challenges that all players could deal with, and ideally - the "correct way" to address a challenge is still fun and engaging, not avoiding ability usage and parking the frame somewhere away from enemies.

In the hopes that devs read this: writing ultra concise version, then justifications, then potential fixes. Links at bottom. ~~~~####### Short Version #######~~~~ Please change or remove the following feature: "While controlling the Operator, the Warframe becomes invulnerable to damage. However, if the Warframe has an ability active, it will instead have a 90% Damage Reduction instead of being invulnerable" (wiki)1. https://imgur.com/a/VMCWBpQ Video Demonstration of mechanic Why? Player confusion. Inconsistent / confusing / unfair application. Not preventing any cheese that I assume the feature was originally intended to address. Little impact on low-mid level content. Massive and unjustified impact on high level content (especially void cascade). Extremely easy to fix. ~~~~####### Expanded Justifications #######~~~~ Player Confusion My friends and I enjoy doing "endgame" / level-cap content to limit-test our builds and farm shiny objects. Big fan of omnia fissures, sp circuit, deep archimedea. Despite the bugs, we enjoy running long sp void cascades. However, we kept getting this "weird bug" where our operators would randomly get 1 shot by nothing, and our warframes would have 2hp left. With perfect connection and rolling guard, you might survive this. We were shocked to discover that this was an intended feature - one that I argue should be removed or at least changed. I imagine this is the experience that 99% of players have engaging with this feature - they either assume their operator got 1-shot through shield gate and Emergence Savior2 by some unseen damage source, or that the game bugged. I struggled to find many others talking about this, but from what I did see, most people posting about this are under the impression that it's a bug, not a feature3,4. Inconsistent / Confusing / Unfair Application I still have no idea which abilities count for making your warframe vulnerable while in operator form. I know desecrate counts, grave spirit, and apparently limbo's kit3. When scrolling through the list of frames, it looks like most frames (60%+?) have some sort of duration-based ability tied directly to the frame (i.e. not like wisp motes) that is likely to remain up (i.e. not ash smoke) while in operator form. Many of these abilities can't be uncast, (roar, grave spirit, shooting gallery, etc.) thus allowing no input from the player to make their warframe untargetable while in operator form. Even if every ability in the game was able to be deactivated, would you really want players to manually disable every ability before going operator? This is antithetical to the fast in-out gameplay that I think DE wants us to have - at least based on design choices with Thrax, Kuva Guardians, debuff operator abilities, etc. Isn't Justified with "Cheese Prevention" I suspect most if not all of the abilities that a player could cast and then go immune in operator have no meaningful benefit for cheesing purposes. All modern "nuke" abilities I'm aware of have active cast requirements, and crouching in operator form for an extended time is wildly inefficient anywhere that it matters. Maybe there's some huge equinox cheese that lets you afk in operator doing level 20 content, but there are far better ways to address this if it's even a priority. Little Impact on Low-Mid Level Content 90% damage reduction is plenty for low-mid level content, even non-endless sp. To get a feel for where 90% DR is effective, think of places that Mesa's Shatter Shield, Trinity's link or blessing, Mirage's Eclipse allow you to tank all enemies with zero effort. This means that any attempt at cheese prevention can't even apply to content where ultra-passive nuking abilities function. Massive and Unjustified Impact on High Level Content The only time I've even noticed this "feature" is when doing high level content + approaching level cap. There, you die instantly without having a very active playstyle, either using shield gate + brief respite (or similar), warframe-specific survivability (Hildryn, Harrow, Rhino, Revenant), or invisibility (snoozefest). Thus, 90% DR is nothing against these enemies. They will 1-shot your shield, you will have a ~1.3 second shield gate window, then they will 1-shot your health, at which point your operator instantly dies, and you return to your frame with about a 0.1 second window to activate rolling guard or cast something to save yourself. If you're not the host, going operator and getting unlucky means a death sentence in about 2 seconds. Players are unable to (and shouldn't be expected to) uncast their abilities to avoid this instant death. In contexts where operator use is encouraged, (Thrax, Kuva Guardians, future game modes I bet) players do not have time to "hide" their warframe somewhere just for a quick operator action. Deaths in high-level content are often far more punishing than normal stuff - ideally those deaths reflect a genuine "skill issue", not "your frame had an ability up and one enemy decided to land their shots while you were doing operator stuff." If you want to add content where players are encouraged to use operator, especially in quick in-out gameplay, this feature - that most players think is a bug - will continue to cause problems. Due to AI behavior + enemy inaccuracy, whether enemies try to target the warframe / operator / teammate / companion / random objective, whether the player dies in 2 seconds of operator form is entirely out of their control, and whether they happened to be playing a frame with the misfortune of having an ability that counts under this system is not a mechanic I think players want in the back of their minds. In normal gameplay, this "feature" only happens occasionally while in operator form - maybe 1 out of 20 times at worst. This makes the occasions where you intended to use some operator action and instead get killed instantly wildly unpredictable, and not really something you can strategize around other than attempt to recover. Easy to Fix There's probably one line of code handling the logic for "if(warframe_ability_active): 90% DR; else: immune". If you are an intern reading this, change that line to "if(False) ...". Your boss will not notice, and endgame players will consider you a hero. This mechanic is outdated and can be safely removed. Unless your code is unbelievably spaghettified, absolutely no system in the game relies on this mechanic, easiest change in the world. If, for whatever reason, someone wishes to defend some aim of this feature, I have other solutions listed later. ~~~~####### If This Only Affects Endgame, Why Care? #######~~~~ Let Me Play With the Cool Toys Warframe players grind for many a shiny object. As you acquire more weapons, mods, frames, etc. the world of buildcrafting opens up a considerable degree. Many players - myself especially - greatly appreciate Warframe's buildcrafting depth and the variety of ways we can bully the enemies of the origin system. If you're like me, something that drew you in to warframe beyond an ultra-casual level was seeing YouTube videos demonstrating some ultra-niche setup that got massive red numbers using some weapon or frame that you (or overframe) had resigned to the trash heap. Endgame and/or level-cap content gives us an opportunity to limit-test these interesting build ideas, since it really doesn't take much to make average sp content feel trivial. Additionally, having insanely high level content gives players something to aspire towards as they collect each ingredient for some future build, and was certainly enough to keep my newer friends clearing the normal star chart. DE Wants to Build More Endgame Activities It seems like DE is exploring multiple ways to define what constitutes "difficult" content in Warframe: Zariman gives new modes with new failure conditions (flood, cascade) besides just letting the objective get 1-shot More attention paid to excavation hp and similar at higher levels of enemy scaling, a sort of endorsement of high-level content not seen previously Duviri sp circuit scaling to level cap pretty quickly + loadout restrictions as a difficulty modifier Deep Archimedea combining sortie-esq modifiers, loadout restrictions, and higher-level enemies than other non-endless content 60 eyes Murmer boss having insane damage and dispel on attacks Increased number of enemies with status caps (not my favorite mechanic) and unstrippable armored necramechs (also not my fav, we'll see after armor changes) These different approaches to difficulty have a variety of reactions from the community, (not going to weigh in too much here) but the general aim is to find enjoyable but difficult content, and to encourage players to make the most of their loadouts + the mechanics the game has to offer. It also seems like the choice to leave shield gating as-is (which I like tbh) and increase access to survivability options (team-wide overguard w/ Styanax and Dante) means a shift away from survivability being the #1 challenge in warframe, but rather a challenge players need to keep in mind while doing some other objective - similar to energy management or damage strategy. For these reasons, I think this feature will become an increasingly important issue as DE adds more challenging content and powerful enemies. ~~~~####### Potential Solutions #######~~~~ Remove Mechanic Outright with no Replacement (preferred) Based on its disproportionate impact on endgame content and the decreasing (if any) availability of afk nuking abilities, I can't see any reason for this feature - or anything like it - existing in the current state of the game. I would advocate for its complete removal. Abilities Deactivated When Swapping to Operator (bad for QOL) I wouldn't like this change since it's a negative quality of life most of the time, but if DE really thinks there's some afk cheese issue, this would prevent random rng deaths. I would prefer this change over changing every ability in the game to be deactivatable, and a similar sentiment was suggested here5. However, this would still force players to figure out which abilities risk them getting instantly nuked in operator form without warning, or would punish quick operator usage with needless recasts. Abilities Lose Duration or Deactivate if Immune Warframe Targeted by Enemies (okay I guess) Better than the previous fix, since recasts aren't guaranteed, and any afk cheese is prevented by an enemy shooting the afk frame. This would still be annoying to the player, since you'd need to see if your important abilities were deactivated when transferring back to frame. ~~~~####### Conclusion #######~~~~ Please remove all warframe vulnerability while in operator form. This mechanic serves no purpose in any content, and is a total rng instant death at the highest-level content, with no counterplay besides restricting your frames to only include abilities where this mechanic is absent. This only hurts the game, and will become a larger problem if DE continues to add high-level content. More players don't know about this problem because they don't yet engage with high level activities or because they assume it's a bug. Thanks for reading <3 1. https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Operator Transference Section, paragraph 3 (as of April 2024) 2. https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Emergence_Savior 3. https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1313909-warframe-killed-while-in-operator-mode/ 4. https://steamcommunity.com/app/230410/discussions/2/1629665087690680267/ 5. https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1103362-tranference-and-active-warframe-abilities/

I'm slightly concerned about this too, although I hope we can put our faith in the lord Pablo. I guess we'll have to wait and see. The dominance of armor strip + the power of viral+slash could be shaken up a bit. Also, may no longer be absolutely mandatory to use 2 green shards when corro stripping. I didn't like the armor scaling on disruption necramechs, so maybe we'll have more ways of dealing with this. In general, seems like a positive change for all of the content that most players engage with, but I'm more interested in what this means for ultra-sweatlord level cap content. One of my favorite aspects of warframe is the buildcrafting variety, and having more frames that aren't automatically bad without some form of armor strip would help with this (too many frames where I run pillage or terrify and can't really switch it up unless I go the corro primer + emerald shards route). Also, the slash DoT is 0.35 x 6 sec of the initial dmg to enemy, whereas elemental procs are 0.5 x 6 sec. Elemental dmg might see an indirect buff from this change if bleed proc's armor ignore becomes less impactful. Good imo for allowing more build styles. I'm sure a lot of us sweaty players have been abusing anti-crit incarnons + xata's for a while now, and with that patched and these changes, we might have some interesting problems to solve regarding optimal weapon dps. The simplification of faction damage bonuses may increase the usage of faction-dependent DoT statuses, especially if slash's impact is diminished. I love the idea of reviving some status-heavy elemental weapons to bully various factions, so I'm hoping that this is the case. Maybe these indirect effects alone will prevent enemies from becoming boring bullet sponges.