Exarke

Not being purposely obtuse. I agree Revenant is popular because he can survive easily and is simple. If Revenant is popular only for those reasons, then he should have a steady play rate since his release--he has always had those qualities. Your explanation does not account for Revenant's spike in popularity over the past two years. You make a good final point, and something I hadn't considered concerning alternate failure conditions. Those aren't the only mission types in the game. More importantly, it doesn't reduce any of the points I made in the initial post. If CC is ruining your fun, you can choose not to use it. --------------- I'm going back to focusing on what changes would be improvements. My current interpretation is CC is most problematic/powerful when it can remove an enemy before the enemy can threaten the player/objective. CC abilities can easily be built past enemy aggro radius, so maybe the change should force the players to get into the "range" of the Overguard units before it can affect them. There's a bunch of clarity problems with this solution, but I would still prefer this to CC being totally ineffective.

No one said anything about having trouble surviving. Why is it "CC immunity needs to be in the game"? Why not "Being able to see Invisible frames needs to be in the game"? Why not "Being able to ignore self-boosting defenses needs to be in the game"? Why not "Dealing damage through shield gating needs to be in the game"? CC is only one of many ways to increase your ability to stay alive--and there are many that leave you functionally invulnerable--so why is it targeted far more than the other methods? Does DE merely want enemies to have the ability to shoot at you, regardless of whether or not they can actually hit you at all? Revenant (combined prime and standard) was used 1.33% in 2020, 1.46% in 2021, 2.46% in 2022, and 5.69% in 2023. Revenant's use rate has quadrupled since 2020/2021, so why didn't the community gravitate toward his simple playstyle before 2022? He's not even particularly a difficult frame to farm for. You're going to need a better explanation for why he's suddenly become so popular.

Completely agree. We're having a discussion on this over in this thread too, and both of your suggestions have been brought up by others. It's fairly obvious (to me, to you, to many others) that complete CC immunity is a terrible design choice for multiple reasons, and yet here we are. Say it louder for the developers in the back

This is a really cool idea. They would definitely need different enemy models for each type, however. I very often can identify that an enemy is an Eximus but can't tell which type of Eximus it is. If they were that different (which would be an improvement for diversifying strategies and rewarding creative gameplay vs "kill it faster"), they would need to be more easily identified. Also the last sentence is beautifully written. -------- To Toasty and Grimlock, you seem to both want the same thing in that CC should affect Overguard units in some way. You seem to be disagreeing on how to make CC less effective. None of us are expecting DE to allow CC to have its full effect again, and so the bones we are asking them to throw to us look different. Toasty is suggesting to turn all CC into soft CC through a slow. Grimlock suggests making all CC have its full effect for reduced time. Either suggestion accomplishes what we're asking for, and I'd be pleased with either suggestion being implemented as an improvement over current game state.

This is an interesting proposition. What if CC simply removed a percentage of the Overguard bar, regardless of level/scaling? That would give reason to use CC on Overguard units even if they remained immune. Just turn CC into effective damage, and it's suddenly relevant again. Wait what if we just made all CC damage instead?? This is true; methods of reducing the effectiveness of being hit by a bullet fall off eventually (except for Mesmer skin), while making players less hittable never does. As you head toward level cap, classic tank methods eventually fall off. CC is one major way to avoid being a target, but invisibility and evasion fall under this category too. Keep pushing in this design direction, and you nearly necessitate a Mesmer Skin, Shield Gate refresher, or Squad invisibility frame as the levels continue to climb. There used to be many many more options for dealing with the hyper damage scaling at extreme levels, but most Warframes are now bullet-jumping ducks for level 1000+ Eximus. Although I don't think Warframe delineates as neatly into "classes" as other MMOs, I do think Warframe releases have trended toward "This frame can do everything relevant" for far too long. Every frame has damage. Every frame has a way to increase their damage further. Every frame has a self-buff for their defenses. At this point, classes in Warframe are either [has a movement ability] or [does not have a movement ability]. This is a large contributor of the lack of perceived diversity between Warframe releases: no new Warframe has meaningful limitations to their kit. Qorvex could have just been a tank, but nope he blasts rooms too, and buffs his own damage. Dante was supposed to be a support? By support you mean room clear DPS, right? As Syndrome from The Incredibles said, "And when everyone's super, no one will be."

I'm not opposed to this, and it makes sense thematically. They're already damage resistant due to having massively increased effective health bars, so making them CC resistant makes sense too. This does, however, present a problem for CC abilities that cannot be recast while active. On the other hand, this would increase demand on energy economy for CC-based defenses by needing to cast more often. Self-buff based defenses are far more static and uninteractive when it comes to energy demands. I personally thought Rhino Stomp's former interaction was particularly interesting, having a very high slow but not ragdolling Eximus. I doubt it's feasible to do something like that to all CC abilities, but I appreciated it for what it was. Diminishing duration would make sense (and if DE insisted on sentient-like adaptive resistance over time, I would be unhappy but understand). You could then reduce effectiveness for everything including debuffs and damage abilities. If they have 50% duration on CC abilities, why not also have 50% damage from damage abilities? You've touched on another issue with Overguard enemies: that their health bars are ~95% Overguard and once it's removed they're already basically dead. Having a state of "removed Overguard" has very little impact on the game because it is frequently downright difficult to deal the right amount of damage to remove Overguard without also killing the target. This is additionally problematic for frames who need to cast their abilities on an enemy, but can't cast it on Overguarded units--it happens very frequently where I cannot cast Lantern on an Eximus unit at all because they die to the slash proc that has just removed their Overguard before the cast time for the ability finishes. It's similar to the "Void damage weakness" in that while it technically exists, it is functionally useless due to errors in design and balance... but not to the same extent. Quintuple their normal health bars or more, and halve their Overguard health bar. Make post-Overguard interaction something meaningful instead of an afterthought at best.

In what follows, I will explain why the CC immunity of Overguard units is flattening ability diversity of Warframes and how this contributes to both an increased perception of "boring" Warframe releases that all function and play similarly and a meta which is becoming overcentralized on pseudo-tank. I will propose changes that would improve the player experience against the current CC-immune Overguard units and help even the playing field between outdated kits and ones that excel within the emerging meta. Ultimately, I urge DE to reconsider the CC immunity for Overguard units. There are three fundamental coexisting objectives in Warframe: 1) Kill the thing 2) Keep the thing alive and 3) Go to the place. Warframe abilities usually* operate by letting the player do at least one of these objectives more effectively. (*There is an additional fourth objective which is nonessential for mission success which is "Grab the loot" and a select few abilities/augments focus on assisting with this.) When considering the second objective, to keep the thing alive, we may first think of something like a defense target or extractor, but in every mission the most important thing to keep alive is the player. There are a plethora of methods to keep yourself alive in Warframe, and the methods can be divided into larger groups in various ways. One simple method of delineation is abilities that keep you alive (1) by making each bullet that hits the player mean less (often through tank stats) or (2) by making the enemies hit the player less. You could also consider dividing them by (1) defensive/passive (aka self-buffing) methods or (2) offensive/aggressive (aka debuffing/CC) methods. These two methods of classification are similar but not identical. For instance, CC reduces the total bullets being shot, but invisibility does too, and evasion and accuracy reduction diminish the number of effective bullets. Enter Overguard a few years ago, which invalidated the majority of CC options. At the time, the game had already been moving to a damage-centric meta for several years. Overguard turned this up to 11. Frames released or reworked since then are universally very tanky with overwhelming damage. (And this is the apparent "problem" with Caliban: that he has neither.) Interesting CC abilities used to be commonplace, be it Bastille, Lantern, Petrify, Silence, or Desiccation (the list goes on). But when your CC abilities have a caveat of not working against some enemies, you stop designing them. Referring back to the earlier discussion, you have now minimized a massive space for Warframe ability design which has a huge amount of potential diversity within it. Shatter Shield/Scarab Shell/Vitality Mote/Mesmer Skin/Iron Skin? They all feel the same - they're shooting me, but it doesn't matter. CC increases the amount of player-initiated interaction possible with enemies; Self-buffing reduces the amount of interaction, and that's why Octavia is so boring to play. I'm sure somewhere at DE, there's a developer whose argument is "Eximus are the most important enemies because CC doesn't work on them, therefore CC immunity of Overguard is working as intended." Overguard enemies are the most important primarily because of their special abilities. CC immunity does contribute, but it's artificial difficulty at its worst--both for the players and the game designers--since it negates a large portion of Warframe's meaningful interactions, skill expressions, and established "rules" for the sake of making something "harder". But let's say that Overguard isn't changing. Then DE needs to rework the way it appears in game. First, Overguard needs to appear on special units only. This means there should be no Eximus unit that can also be non-Eximus and vice versa. As Warframe is a horde shooter, there is simply too much information on screen to quickly parse which of the 7 butchers is an Eximus. And you must quickly parse, since they are CC immune. Therefore, Overguard units should be distinguishable by their shapes and movements as well as their colors. Second, Overguard units should appear differently on the minimap from standard units. Since enemies spawn from all sides, needing to turn around to decipher new information regarding Eximus adds additional reaction time, which can be mitigated through an improved minimap. Third, there will also be a need to rework a huge amount of Warframe's tiles so that cover is more quickly accessible at all points in the tile (to say nothing of how playing with cover can impact game modes that are spawn dependent like Survival). Fourth, rebalance Overguard's "weakness" of Void damage so that it actually matters--or completely remove it, because right now it's not doing anything. These changes would bring Overguard into a far better state. Of course, my ulterior motive for listing these is primarily to illustrate that it would far simpler to revert the CC immunity. Honestly? It was still fine--not great--when most CC abilities didn't work because there were still options, even if limited (and it didn't overcentralize the meta on whether the frame is "tanky" or not--as if Revenant Prime wasn't already the most used Warframe in 2023). Breach Surge and Ice Wave were among my most used Helminth options for this reason. I am certain it negatively affected new player experience with frames that depend on CC to survive - Limbo, Banshee, etc., since they wouldn't have access to Helminth. Unfortunately, there is no longer design space for frames whose survivability is entirely dependent on CC. Now, my skill expression is, "Did I push Shatter Shield 40 seconds after the last time I pushed Shatter Shield?" How engaging. In conclusion, the CC immunity provided by enemy Overguard has effectively destroyed a large swath of Warframe's previously usable design space. With the destruction of this design space, other spaces are being used more frequently to compensate. Thus, damage-based abilities have become ubiquitous. Additionally, Warframes are now dependent on some kind of self-buff-based damage-avoidance to be playable, and this makes the experience of being shot at by enemies vary minimally between Warframes; the major goal of staying alive in Warframe is maintained passively, which has effectively automated and trivialized roughly 1/3 of a Warframe mission's major playing objectives. If DE is insistent on maintaining this design choice, there are major changes which should be implemented as quickly as possible due to the physical limitations of human faculties combined with the nature of their game. However, due to its design & interaction limiting qualities and its status as artificial difficulty, I entreat and beseech DE to reconsider Overguard's full CC immunity.

No, no, that's not right. We double down on Overguard. Why should Limbo's Stasis not work as his sole source of defense but Octavia's invisibility does? Overguard enemies should be able to see invisible Warframes. And they should ignore damage mitigation abilities too, so they should do full damage to Mesa during Shatter Shield. And increasing your Health/Armor/Shields is effectively the same as damage mitigation, so they should bypass those too. Oh, and clearly they should also bypass player Overguard since that comes from an ability that provides defensive utility. It's not that CC is "useless" or "bad" even, it's more accurate to say that a frame needs self-buffing defensive capabilities to be good. And if you look at frames that have been released or reworked in the last ~5 years you'll see that holds true. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Caliban except that he doesn't and can't make himself tanky. This design flaw is a real shame, because we'll never have much use for frames like Vauban, Frost, and Banshee until they get unfortunately reworked and invariably get invisibility or limited invulnerability or something similar added to their kit. Just like Ember did. Just like Hydroid did. The removal of the last bastions of effective CC against Overguard was a horrible game design decision. They've removed a huge swath of meaningful interactions that players used to have in game from powerful enemies, and they're limiting their design space. How to design a Warframe, since at least 2020. Ability 1: Nuke. Most important ability. Ability 2: Self-damage mitigation. Ability 3: Debuff or Self-buff for even more damage! Ability 4 - pick one: a) CC ability b) movement ability c) energy econ ability. It's tired and predictable.

Why aren't more people talking about this? This is an absolute unmitigated catastrophe for everything Warframe.

The question is whether the Overguard units are or are not affected by Divine Spears. Right now the answer seems to be Yes, but also No. This is bad. I would rather Divine Spears not affect Overguard enemies at all than the way it currently stands. It further matters for a Nezha gameplay perspective because of the way Blazing Chakram (is supposed to) propagate(s) through impaled enemies. Nezha is not at the top of the list for me either, but DE has made it clear that when they're looking at augments for frames, they'll also look at the frame overall too. (E.g., Loki's Decoy actually getting some straight buffs that it's needed for 4ish years, and Yareli getting some animation tinkering too, both for Dante.) That's why to bring this up now. It also affects the upcoming augment usability on Overguard units. The top of the list should be reverting Banshee's stun on Silence not working on Overguard units and fixing the associated Thrax bug. The buff Nezha needs more than anything regardless of what I have said before is to fix the inconsistency on Blazing Chakram's propagating through Divine Spear targets. It's supposed to chain to different targets on Divine Spears, but it doesn't chain to all of them, even in the Simulacrum. He's needed that for a while. Ironically, the upcoming augment functions similarly to how the Blazing Chakram/Divine Spears interaction should work. Good to know, should to change it to a root on large enemies too :)

This happens to any individual spear that affects an Overguard unit. At the time, I was in the Simulacrum with only Eximus units, so Divine Spears as an ability was ending prematurely and not doing the slam end. With a mix of enemies, you will have individual spears on non-overguard enemies last the entire duration, but the individual spears on Overguard enemies will be temporary until the enemies move, despawning the individual spear prematurely. (I did just test this to verify.) It makes sense to me from what I know of how Overguard usually works: typically, Overguard enemies still take damage associated with abilities, but do not take their CC effects. So Divine Spears damages them, but doesn't ragdoll them. However, since Overguard enemies are free to move, once they move (and that includes little body-twitch movements from the small testing I was doing, not necessarily walking/pacing) the affiliated-yet-static divine spear despawns, since it's no longer holding anything in place. So make Divine Spears hold them in place instead, so they're still affected by the spear, but still dangerous. Also there's a list of CC abilities that work with Overguard on the wiki, so they are documented (at least as well as many other odd Warframe nuances). Also see the next short section after the following link. I see no problem with some abilities still working on Overguard (if none did, it'd be terrible for game balance). I did stumble across your megathread on this just now. https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Overguard#Crowd_Control_That_Overguard_Will_Not_Ignore

When Divine Spears hits Overguard enemies right now, they deal their damage and pass through the enemies... and then the Overguard enemies move soon thereafter and the spears despawn. It would be better if Divine Spears functioned like Fracturing Crush on Overguard enemies and rooted them in place (but without the armor strip of course). Since the enemies moving is what causes the spear to despawn, it's a random amount of time the enemy is affected by the spear, which makes for an inconsistent and poor gaming experience for the player. It would still leave Nezha vulnerable to fire from the Overguard units, since it is not a true disable, which means Overguard units retain priority targeting. Additionally, this would also be a second instance of the otherwise unused CC from Fracturing Crush, giving Nezha a relatively unique interaction. Big wins all around.