DecadeX

There's another problem lurking underneath the problems you outlined that is the real cause of your problems. Many years ago, when recruiting chat was still a good way to get a squad for niche things, when there were many fewer Warframes, it was generally expected that a player would seek out a wide arsenal. It let players flex into different roles for the needs of different gamemodes and squads, and it made a player's account resilient against balance patches. You can't be screwed out of squads because your 1 frame or your 3 weapons got nerfed into the ground if you have every frame and every half decent weapon in the game. Over time, with more equipment in the game and with a few large content releases forcing DE to be more careful about how they used their time, DE decided they didn't want to balance around every frame. That gave us what I call the Inaros meta. It's almost literally every piece of content released between the Plains of Eidolon and Disruption. DE's core design philosophy focused on minimizing the impact of equipment choices on player strategy. It's why almost nothing not directly equipped to Operators can buff Operator damage, it's why Thermia Fractures and Demolishers project nullfier bubbles, and it's why Coolant Raknoids are immune to all Warframe powers. I call it the Inaros meta because his being a big sack of health made it so DE could not eliminate him as a strategy without compromising the core design philosophy or every frame in the game, including modern Revenant, would die instantly. That's a problem because that started about 7 years ago, which is most of the game's history, and all the players who started in that time learned a different lesson than the players before them. They learned to pick a few favorite frames and weapons, and ignore the rest, because when DE said they were making challenging content, those decisions wouldn't matter anyways. I am one of the old players who learned to build out an arsenal. Some players who like Archimedia and Circuit just like to play around with weird builds, but that's not really why they are the way they are. If you ever listen to DE talk about high level players, they often talk about players who have lots of gear and use it to trivialize every challenge. What has happened is enough player like me have stuck around and successfully failed to keep with the times, to the point that we've monopolized what it means to be an endgame player. That creates an issue where a lot of competent and capable players have been rocking with a few good frames and weapons they know how to use well, and then they load up SP Circuit or Archimedia and have none of them as options. DE has created a mid game design problem. Currently a player can take 1-3 frames and maybe 10 weapons and do literally everything in the game, and then they hit a brick wall when SP Circuit and Archimedia ask them to build out every single weapon and frame they can. For what it is worth, there are a couple ways to mitigate Archimedia. The personal modifiers (the equipment restrictions and the 4 modifiers beneath them) are not lying about being personal. Two players with 2 completely different kinds and number of selected modifiers and still queue together. That means one player can take no modifiers to carry another player and then they can swap places for a 2nd run. For people who cannot unlock or beat Elite, Normal is more flexible. You should be able to turn off 2 modifiers and still get all 3 rewards from Normal mode which is more flexible than Elite gets and is still more rewarding than 2 Netracells. The Vosfor reward for taking all modifiers on Elite is also bait and not worth it. An MR10 player has 20k daily standing. If they spend 20k Holdfasts standing on 2 copies of Molt Augmented they can get 44 Vosfor a day. That's 308 Vosfor in a week. An MR28 player can get 3 copies for 66 Vosfor and beat the 50 Vosfor reward in 1 day. That's just off standing. Steel Path Cascade for example is a much better Vosfor farm than that as is Acolyte farming in general. If you want to go all the way for the 50 Vosfor, doing it once can be worth it because there is a Sumdali reward the first time you do it, but unless your weekly gear roll is real good, it's not worth doing. Just drop the frame modifier or one of the others if you already have a good frame to choose. I do hope DE eventually smooths out the transition to being the kind of endgame player that Duviri and Archimedia ask of the community. They could do some content that unlocks after the Second Dream where several missions have to be performed in quick succession in very different locations, so a different Loadout has to be deployed to each mission for example. Something to start emphasizing the need for a wider arsenal earlier in the game without the RNG check, so players don't suddenly get stuck with unfamiliar options. It's still important to remember that Duviri and Archimedia aren't the way they are because of bad design or DE not knowing the playerbase. They come from a very old way of playing Warframe that the longest running, most capable players largely still adhere to. One where Vauban isn't good, but you should still be able to use him.

Can we get a look at the Nezha augment change as well. 50% base radius reduction is a 75% area reduction, and that's no small tweak.

I had forseen Dante getting a line of sight check, but I figured they would probably test it somewhere that wasn't a white room with a pillar and one Grineer. I regret the faith I had in DE. This is just lowest bidder work. Reb really predicted it with the line about 1 week of Dante fun on Devshorts. The weekend warriors who farmed him didn't even get to play him. The ones who bought him are finding out on their work breaks that they wasted their money. I know a lot of long time players who do not farm frames on release and never spend money on a frame. I myself don't spend money on the new gameplay additions because of things like Mesa Prime being incompatible with tennogen on release (I had money set aside and ended up spending it elsewhere before it was changed). I now am reminded of why that is.

The 75% area nerf is the wildest part. This isn't even the first time DE has made this mistake that I can think of off the top of my head. Back when Vacuum was changed to be available on all sentinels they cut the radius of it in half then too and it resulted in the vacuum volume being reduced to an eighth. 1/4 area on Nezha's 4 is a dirtnap nerf. That mod is a novelty now not an actual tool in the kit. It's not the tweak the patch notes make it out to be. If the augment just came with a 50% modded range reduction that might be okay but no it had to be base.

Dante's ceiling isn't that high. I think your original comment ignores things like Styanax also giving a massive amount of energy to the whole squad and himself which means his overguard building doesn't cost him that much energy in the long run. Rhino has the original Roar which is one of if not the best Damage buff in the game. Frost has a full strip and CC attached to his Overguard ability. Kullervo really wants a good melee with a guaranteed slash heavy attack, but can rip apart things like SP disruption. The other Overguard frames have upsides that Dante does not. Dante's weapon also personally is kinda underwhelming. I like it better as a statstick with the tome mods than as a way of killing by itself. The bigger thing about Dante is he has a very high floor. He doesn't need a super specific or high investment build to perform well, and gets to do things like no line of sight nuking. It's not that he's the only frame that does that, but the other options like Gara for example need tools like Ceramic Dagger Incarnon and 3-5 forma builds with a specific Helminth ability to do it well and Dante can kinda just do it with basic mods and maybe a Molt Augmented at rank 30 with no forma invested. I don't think Dante needs a big nerf, but I could see him being annoying to be in a squad with particularly in the older defense maps which tend to be better for farming because of their small size. Some of the other issues people have with him like stopping Chroma from building up Vex Armor are more existing issues that Dante having team Overguard in his base kit has exposed. The two other frames that can give loads of Overguard to the whole team got that ability via augment mods which don't generate as much buzz. Dante is the new shiny and therefore more popular however so the Chroma players are just having an abnormally rough time with an issue that's existed for a while. Realistically Chroma's hated defensive team support since overshield generation became possible and the better that got and with the introduction of overguard and overguard support he got worse and worse.

The short answer is that Dante's ceiling isn't higher than normal. The long answer is that his floor is very high for the amount of execution that requires. Octavia and Saryn are great examples to compare to. At low levels Saryn wipes the map too quickly which makes her a royal pain in the butt to play. A good Saryn build in most regular starchart content, and I'd even include early SP content, is complete overkill. The game will not spawn strong enough enemies fast enough for her to maintain damage and that brings her powerlevel down. Octavia likewise is really high APM with the amount of crouch spam you have to do to maintain invis, and with overguard protecting some enemies from the taunt effect of her 1 and 2, she needs that invis. That's before we talk about build requirements on either of them. Dante by contrast works well on even very basic mods and can press 3 twice then 4 to wipe most maps without a line of sight check. You do not even need to hit the Dark Verses in most content. Gara is an example of a frame that can do similar mapwiping, but she has much stricter build requirements, wants an armor strip a lot more, and needs hard to get tools like Ceramic Dagger Incarnon to do it. Dante it's all in his 3 and 4. He's not actually overpowered at the high level, but because he works so well on low investment, he's liable to be really annoying and appear extraordinarily powerful to the average player that doesn't know how to mod particularly well.

I checked the wiki for the total mastery needed to achieve each Mastery Rank, and dropping the requirement to 25k makes it doable in one day for an MR18 player which reduces the MR grind needed to get it in a day by over 50%. They should absolutely drop the cost. Some people only have 1 day a week where they have time for games and it would make the extra shard way more obtainable for them.

When Dreamer's Bond was added it was added with a Madurai (that's one of the V looking polarities for the people who don't know the names), and there was a note that it would be changed to be universal with Dante Unbound. It did not get changed. I checked the update notes for 35.1.0 and it did say in the Dante Unbound update and not a hotfix afterwards. Update is big so I figure it probably slipped through the cracks, and somebody should let y'all know.

Oh I know they're easy for me, but so is everything else in the game. That is not the point. DE has been very clear about where most players are capable of and content like Netracells is hard for the average player. For the effort they're going through, Netracells should be better than they are. And if Netracells were not limited to 5 per week they would be way better even with existing droptables, but I can only do 5 a week. If they're going to lock me out of the farm and force it to drag on for weeks and months, and it should have rewards that make it worth coming back for all those weeks and months. Netracells don't have that right now. Barring the people who just get absurdly lucky, it's going to be a very long time before the people doing Netracells every week have any real advantage over the people sticking to just Archon Hunts and Kahl, and that is a problem. If DE wants to bill Netracells as an addtional shard source that's fine, but players should be able to log on after weekly reset and know they're getting a shard from it, not just hope that's the case.

I know that was my point. Orange and Red crits are more rewarding than Duplicate.

I disagree. In general, if a melee weapon has good enough crit to consistently do a regular crit, Blood Rush will push them to consistent orange or red crits, and the reward for that is more powerful than double damage assuming those weapons don't also have a lower than normal Crit Damage Multiplier. Every other part of your reply I agree with. There are a lot of issues in the game right now, but I wanted to speak on the one that stood out to me not just cause it was brought up on the Devstream, but also on other official communication platforms, and it was addressed in a way that implies DE might not realize what the real problem has been.

After Netracell changes being mentioned as a Devstream thing in the devshort this week, I was hoping to hear the playerbases's complaints about Cells addressed, hopefully with a coming change to Netracells themselves. I was disappointed to find out the "fix" is a different gamemode entirely. As it stands the Netracell droptables are really bad. 33.72% of the time you get the same arcanes dropped by the Fragmented bosses and the books. They are extremely easy to farm, especially in an Assassinate or Exterminate bounty with a book side objective, and that's not considering using standing to buy them. Another 20% of the droptable is the Melee Aracane Adapter which isn't awful, but can be bought for 50k standing or a measly 20 platinum otherwise. Even the 2 legendary arcane rewards exclusive to Netracells are mediocre at best. Outside of playing with them for their own sake, Crescendo is useful on exactly Ash, and he does not need more than 1 copy to achieve the full effect, and Duplicate currently has no relevant usecase. It would not be an exaggeration to say that all of the arcane rewards are Vosfor fodder given the ease with which the low tier arcanes are maxed and lack of power of the 2 legendaries. Given the low plat price of the adapter, Vosfor is arguably the better reward. That's a 64.96% chance of the reward from a Netracell run being Vosfor at best, and I can farm that better elsewhere. Judged by powerlevel, Netracells are also the hardest or second hardest piece of non-Steel Path content in the game in contention with only Archon Hunts. By the time the new gamemode releases they will be no lower than 3rd place by that metric. They should be worth it on their own. Addtionally they are billed as an additional Archon Shard source at a time when new systems ask players to spend more shards, but I'm having to win coinflips to get shards at all let alone the specific shards both fusion and the new tau creation systems demand. The new mode might help with that problem, but nobody said anything about shards on stream. We only heard that the legendary arcanes will be a guaranteed drop when the 2 of those we have are not even that good. I want to be excited for the new gamemode. Pablo obviously is and I've like a lot of his work that's had his name on it over the years, but this feels like I'm getting that in exchange for not getting fixes to the existing game, and I don't like that.

I would prefer it be made a toggle or tap/hold. I think it's unreliability is maybe a bit overblown. The videos I've seen where somebody suggests Eclipse as a Helminth or a reason to use Mirage come with a note that the relevant buff is basically always available (one specific video called out that it's basically impossible to not have the damage increase during Profit Taker for example). That being said, y'all have better tools for determining how true that is and I'd rather have the QoL of 100% reliability than it's current high powerlevel. Do what you need to do.

I don't think it's impossible to do a story skip. I do have a couple of concerns though. For background I am LR3 and I mostly play on public, my account is from Update 1, but I've only played consistently for about 7 years, and my best friend does regularly play with me but she has been playing for almost as long as I have, and she is the only person I have to play with so no 4 person pre-mades for us unless we scrounge around discord or recruiting chat for help. My first concern is I believe that giant grind you, somewhat fairly, call a weakness might be load-bearing with regards to the public player experience. When I load into a Zariman mission today, even if my teammates might not have ideal builds and gear, the gear they do have did have to get them to the Zariman. That means they've probably done basic stuff like install mods, they've cleared a whole lot of nodes for experience with different objective types, and they've been given the opportunity to hit walls and learn how to get over them. That journey also presents an opportunity for myself or other pub players to notice them struggling and help them out some. It means that I can load into a Narmer bounty or Zariman mission, and have some confidence that my squadmates will be somewhat capable. Even if I gotta babysit, I'll be babysitting an 11 year old instead of a 3 year old. If players are skipping to Whispers, and all you've done is give them the quest rewards and a basic collection of mods and endo, I will be able to expect loading into pub Whispers missions to find Excal Umbras with just the partially ranked Umbral mods and a full loadout of unmodded weapons, unless they brought the Skiajati in which case it'll have just the two Sacrificials. That's assuming they even equipped those things. A story skip creates a risk that all the consequences of the systems new players struggle with coming crashing down not just on DE's bottomline or those new players, but also the entire pub playerbase. I can't even really farm Aeolak and Hespar right now in spite of being some of my only missing Mastery just cause everybody on those nodes is there for the voidplumes. I'm not sure I want to deal with similar issues in Whispers, and also have to worry about whether my teammates figured out how to put Serration on their Nataruk. On stream, Reb mentioned playing a game with story skips, and she may not have been talking about FFXIV, but it is a game we both play, and one of the concerns with loading into the dungeons from early in the EW expansion story is you might get players who've done story and job skips up to EW. You end up having to teach them on the fly how to play their job. Because of how FFXIV works they're probably in decent gear, and you just need to tell them to turn on Tank Stance or whatever so it's not a disaster. If they are in bad gear, you can change gear in dungeons as long as you're out of combat, and the game enforces a minimum equipment level to mitigate that risk. Even still skips are still controversial especially for new players to be using in that game. I can't have a player mod their weapons mid mission in Warframe. All the problems FFXIV players have with skips could be replicated 10-fold in Warframe. For my second concern, we'll assume you fix that prior issue. We'll assume you give people leveled mods instead of just mods+endo and the quest gear they get comes pre built with reactors/catalysts and a good set of already leveled mods installed. What position does that leave those players in? The Nataruk builds very well even on 0 forma it'll probably hold them over in the primary slot. The Skiajati, Broken War, and Broken Scepter do not work as well and melee in general is in the worst shape it has been since before Shadow Debt. I guess a heavy attack Skiajati is probably competent because Nikanas get guaranteed Slash but how are you teaching those players to do that. There's also no secondary weapon rewards in the main story aside from I assume the new book but a skip to Whispers wouldn't get them a modded book. That doesn't even speak to the quality of the upcoming weapon. Lastly how are those players going to handle getting new gear? How is somebody who's used to playing mostly endgame content going to adjust to having to build their weapons up there from scratch. For me that's something I do automatically and my high MR helps me do that. Somebody who has just the MR from quest rewards going from fully modded Nataruk to unmodded anything is taking a huge power dip that they might not be ready for and that's not even considering when they have to actually sit there and put mods in their gear for the first time. To return to the FFXIV example. The gear in that game is not nearly as complex. A casual or new player can look at the item level stat and assume bigger is better, and 99% of the time they'll be right. They don't have to worry about any modifications to their gear either because Materia is complete overkill for story content. They don't even have to worry about the actual gameplay relevant stats on the gear. In Warframe you cannot obtain a complete weapon for cash. Even if you buy Prime Access, the weapons and frames you get from them come out of the box underpowered. You still have to level them, you still have to mod them, and you still have to forma them to fit all the mods in. The reality is you don't finish climbing the Warframe wall, you just learn to do it quickly and efficiently, and if you do it enough your Mastery Rank goes up, and that can make it easier. I still remember when my MR got high enough into the 20s that I started to gain more mod capacity than I lost when I formaed for a high capacity mod. It completely changed my experience. I also had over 1k hours already by then. Given I was either the max possible MR or close to it when that happened, so players probably won't take as long as me to get there if they want to, but it's not trivial. You probably can't sell that in the skip. My last concern comes from the idea that a skip could help somebody play with me. The grinds that I have not finished are for like all the Incarnons from SP Circuit, and really out of the way pieces of Mastery like the aforementioned Aeolak and Hespar, and the Ambassador. A skip would either be ludicrously expensive or it would be the only way to play Warframe if it caught a player up to me. As Pablo said on stream you don't even do Co-op quests anymore, so even if we narrow the scope of catching up to just story content, that friend I buy the skip for isn't playing with me, they are playing by themself while I'm in a discord call with them. The upside is that means a skip is very unlikely to be p2w. I just don't believe you're putting in a skip that pushes players past any amount of grind, but that also begs the question why add a skip in the first place. There's a real risk that a player who buys a skip is going to quickly realize they have to go back and do all of the stuff they skipped. I don't think spending money on a skip or having a friend spend or trade for a skip, only to be confronted by the fact that the skip also has an unlisted cost is a good experience. A former friend of mine swapped from Xbox to PC. He had decent wealth to rely on so he bought plat to trade his way up to the same powerlevel he had on Xbox. He burnt out farming resources for every little thing that got added to the game. I was just slapping the craft button in the foundry because all that time I had spent grinding for the things he'd bought had gotten me the resources for free. Warframe is a game that very uniquely rewards players for having already played the game above everything else. A skip has a horrific opportunity cost. It could propel you into a group of players with radically different needs from your own and completely isolate you. You'd be full power Umbra grinding normal path Earth survival with the MR0s for Rubedo while your MR15 friend has already gone to bed because they don't need Rubedo, and it's not reasonable for them to go with you to every resource grind.