noneuklid
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Posts posted by noneuklid
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I love Warframe to death, and have put in more hours on it than most other games I have. However, I find myself being driven to a plateau simply because I can't afford to put forth the dough just to collect the several weapons I've built in the foundry entirely with credits.
I love Warframe too, so I gave them some of my money.
That being said, I frequently find myself without sufficient time to play. I would cheerfully buy some of your credits with some of my platinum -- especially given the terrible rates on the credit bundles in the market relative to the amount of credits required by other in-game systems (why does it cost substantially more platinum to buy enough credits for a Sentinel BP than it does to buy a fully-furnished Sentinel?).
Perhaps such a thing will exist someday.
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I would be OK with Warframe voices if they never spoke; only sang. In a language beyond words, full of their terrible joy in the face of death, their earnest melancholy in contemplation, their laughing wail to mourn their enemies' demise. The songs of the Tenno would be beyond era, the robotic voices of an autotuned Sinatra as interpreted by harpsichord. The orchestras of the Tenno are conducted by sword and begin and end in utter silence but with a vivacious audience participation section in the middle.
And the beat is kept upon Ammo Drums.
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What?! Paying to beta test content? Before anyone else gets to see it, and while it's still in a state where changes can be made so my feedback might actually be relevant?
...Yeah, okay, actually that sounds pretty much alright.
Also, yes. Council design process is the crappiest democro-oligarchy ever, but the Council chat channel makes up for it.
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I don't understand why you're so resistant to Nekros being a Necromancer, Ember being a Fire Mage, etc. If you really want to keep digging into the comparison, the minigun is the equivalent of the actual equipped weapon of the Fire Mage in the fantasy context - a crossbow or wand, for example.
Or a sword, right?
If you booted up a new fantasy game, picked the Fire Mage and all it could do was melee skills would you be saying "Well, it's a different fantasy universe from the other ones with Fire Mages in it - so I suppose I'll just let it slide."
Or... not a sword? So crossbows and miniguns are both okay, but...
So... let's say I did pick up a fantasy game and it didn't have a Fire Mage. Instead, it had a Fire Swordsman. He only had melee attacks, and they did fire-themed things, like burning enemies or starting fires. And you said that he was that game's Fire Mage, and for the sake of argument I agreed, since it's a pretty reasonable cognate. And then... you would say that he should have Fireball? I guess? Since that "better fits" what a fire mage is, even though the game itself never actually said it had fire mages.
I'd say I find this confusing, but it'd be disingenuous. The position is incoherent. I gave you a way to syncretize the Nekros with your Platonic necromancer back in my first post. If it makes you feel better, use that.
If you want a skill that does little AoE explosions around the bodies of enemies... then wait for a Frame that does that. Nekros is a complete package; attack, control, sustain and defense. Throwing away his sustain for "worse sustain" and mucking with his direct offense seems like a needless change, especially since the only reason I can find for it from you is that he 'doesn't feel like a fire mage' in a game about ninja swordsmen. In space. With guns.
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I do think Overheat also feels out of place for a fire mage
Totally agree. Also out of place for a fire mage : minigun.
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So I'm still kind of attached to my top post, because I'd like to see a stealthy Warframe that works like that. On the other hand, I really like a lot of this thread.
I think the question I have for most commenters here is: If Banshee isn't a Stealth/Assassin frame, what is she? Most people seem to agree that her control and support abilities (Sonic Boom & Sonar) are great. How could that be extended to make her a) have a coherent theme and b) not suck? Like, should she lean towards more control, more harasser, or more support-y?
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Your post is neither amusing nor funny. Troll elsewhere, thanks.
WoW is that way -------v
Yeah - I forgot to mention that. I meant Nyx as a Shadow Priest. Trinity would probably be more of your typical benevolent Cleric.Fixed your arrow.
You appear to be ridiculing me, but some of what you say is actually on point - energy is essentially mana (hell, I call it mana when I'm playing with friends), caster Frames do generally have lower armour and the Orokin do have things in common with Elves - more still with the Dwemer from TES, mind you.Everything was "on point" except that Nekros is a medium-armor (50) Frame rather than a light-armor (10) -- or "cloth" armor -- Frame, and obviously he and his minions can use guns. All of the other things are exactly how he currently plays, but changed cosmetically to reflect a fantasy game rather than a sci-fi one.
You may've missed the point of the jape.
He is a necromancer in this universe (or as close as you can get to one). Making him feel "more like a Necromancer" means, explicitly, making him feel more like a fantasy-genre character (in this case, the Diablo 2 character class). You make the point early on that Soul Punch could be re-themed with fire, or ice, or whatever to fit another character; you can do the same thing with any functionality. Soul Tag on an Ember? Well, she blasts her enemies with specially-developed TCV that burns her victims alive even as it controls their bodies (does that sound like a stretch? Well, I'm on the edge of my seat to hear how Overheat grants damage reduction). Corpse Explosion? Could just as easily be literal explosives Vauban seeds his dead enemies with.
Theme and functionality have practically nothing to do with one another. If you don't like Nekros' abilities because you don't think they work, fine -- lead with that. If you don't like his abilities because they aren't the same as the DII fantasy necromancer (or a WoW Shadow Priest)... tough cookies.
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How to make Necros Feel More Like A Necromancer
1. Remove Necros' energy bar; replace with mana bar.
2. Change all references from TCV to "magic," Forma to "orichalcum," and Orokin to "elvish."
3. Limit weapons to Orthos, Bo, and Amphis (staff-class only). No guns.
4. Heavy armor is out of theme. Remove Warframe; replace with cloth armor.
5. Replace abilities with a soul-drain blast, a "ghost summon" that haunts and terrifies enemies, a way to get health from dead enemies, and Mass Raise Dead that spawns skeletons and zombies (melee only).
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I have an important question for the Buff-heads and Anti-nerfers in this thread: What, exactly, is your standard for balancing weapons?
It's hard to be perfectly specific because there are some qualifiers to do with type -- like, is the weapon burst damage or sustained dps? Is it single-target, multi-target, or AoE?
So forgiving the vague terms, I'd like a weapon to perform "adequately" within the bracket in which it's obtained and "tolerably" within the one above that. I would divide the current game into three brackets -- first tier, which is the first five or so planets and T1 Void missions; second tier, which is T2 Void and most of the other planets, and third tier, which is 'endgame' missions (most of Pluto and Eris, a few missions elsewhere, some Alerts, T3 Void, etc).
I'd ideally bracket the entire non-credits, non-clan and non-dropped blueprint region as "T2." For-credits complete weapons would be T1, and weapons whose blueprints cannot be acquired from the market are T3 (with a few exceptions, like Cronus). But the range in power of that second tier varies wildly, as does that of what I would think of as T3.
The problem I have with the wildly varying power of T2 (as I call it) is that there's very little difference in effort required to obtain the weapon... I don't really care that much about the difference between, say, 2 morphics and 6. So new, more powerful weapons at the same difficulty to obtain feel an awful lot like power creep.
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Not sure if it used to be good at damage, but that's not a current strength. Its current strengths are CC and, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceoeD8fV9ag'>well...
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My point stands.
With enough caveats to fill a EULA. Even the powers you disqualified, you noted could have the desired effect if optimally functional/recast/etc.
I'm not saying that Sonic Boom is useless; far from it. I agree completely that it's a very practical utility power. But... is that really what the Banshee is about? (see MXultra's post.) There are plenty of other frames I would much rather use to do 15-ft-range crowd control with, even at the cost of some energy or a slightly less optimal blast shape. Jedi Push : The Warframe doesn't really seem to fit her tagline ('ranged stealth'), nor is it greatly synergistic with her other abilities.
The abilities I proposed are all about giving Banshee and her player proactive control of the field, rather than reactive. I don't think Defense missions are the greatest showing for a ranged stealth frame, but if you really do need to buy yourself ~3 seconds control around a pod for 25 energy, her ult will do it. But since she has more selective control over her range of engagement (she can disable enemies with Subsonic Pulse before closing in) and more flexibility in how she disrupts enemies, a lot of situations that really needed that "quick escape" from Sonic Boom simply won't exist in the first place.
And since the power will have changed so much, a Sonic Boom-like power could make a reappearance in a more-suited frame; perhaps a telekineticist or wind-themed one, with a better power synergy. Let Banshee be sneaky and selective.
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Sonic Boom is super-useful, what else other than pull can get 5 fusion moas off of a cryo instantly?
Radial Blind, Freeze, Avalanche, Crush, Sound Quake, Terrify, Decoy, Radial Disarm, Chaos, Absorb, Iron Skin, Stomp, Molt, Vortex, and possibly Soul Punch, Antimatter Drop, Rhino Charge, Miasma, Shock, and Bounce.
Sonar with maxed Stretch goes pretty far already. Subsonic pulse seems to be counter productive if it's meant to replace Sonic Boom...
Sonar with maxed Stretch would go further with this. Subsonic Pulse and White Noise together replace Sonic Boom and Silence together; they keep the combined functionality, but in a way that puts a bit more control in the Banshee's hands.
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Sound Quake is unsalvageable in its current design; its sweet spot is far too narrow. (Buffing either the radius of the stun or the raw damage to the point that justifies being rooted and vulnerable for 8 seconds probably puts it into 'way OP' territory. It's a bad design.)
Sonic Boom could be buffed into a functional control and damage power, but it will always be kind of a less-useful Pull (again, unless it's buffed straight to OP, like Pull pretty much was). Either way, it's pretty boring.
I couldn't tell you if Silence could be buffed into usefulness because I can't imagine what it's intended to do... at least, that simply "being invisible" doesn't do better.
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'cuz it deals damage and we need more |/ Warframe mods.
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Before I get started, there's one change the Banshee needs above all else. With it, the changes I'm going to suggest to her abilities are obvious and self-directing; without it, those changes are pointless.
She needs better sounds.
I'm serious. Give the sonic mistress great sound effects, and she'll be fun to play. If she's not fun, first and foremost, everything else is just a different arrangement of muck.
Of course, I have http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvRV8LYk6j4"'>a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDlif8Km4S4'>few http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE0JqjuhaQI'>suggestions.
Now that that's out of the way...
Sonic Boom- Subsonic Pulse. This is a directed pulse of sound that stuns its target for a short while and deafens them for longer (permanently for regular enemies). If the target is hit with another Subsonic Pulse while still stunned, the energy diffracts, dealing large damage to them and releasing a wave of energy that stuns and damages nearby targets.
- Sonar. As now, except 30/37/43/50m radius.
Silence- White Noise. Activating this ability continuously drains energy from the Banshee until deactivated (at a rate of 3/2.5/2.0/1.5 energy per second. Deactivate by 'activating' again). Enemies who are within the radius can neither hear nor make noise, and have significantly reduced accuracy due to the disorientation.
Sound Quake- Superior Soundwave. (OH KAY, FINE. If that's no good, "Bananach's Song.") Another continuous-drain ability, at 20/17.5/15/12.5 energy per second. Activating this ability slows the Banshee's movement speed significantly, but the waves of sound she emits act as a sort of barrier, halving the damage she takes. Also she's immune to stuns and knockdowns for some reason. While the ability is active, nearby enemies are greatly disoriented. Their movement and reload speeds are severely reduced, and they have a high chance to be stunned on each tick. Being exposed to the Banshee's song saps the life and power of enemies; each tick deals 20/50/80/120 plus 0.5% of their max health to enemies, and reduces max shields by 10/20/30/40.
The disorientation and shield reduction last for up to 5/6/7/8 seconds after the Banshee deactivates the ability, based on how long the enemy was exposed to the effect (10% of that duration per tick exposed).
The Banshee cannot attack with primary or secondary weapons while this ability is active, but can use melee weapons and Subsonic Pulse; their Sentinel also continues to function as normal.
I feel like these changes keep the spirit of the Banshee's original abilities, but greatly improve her utility. I will say that I'm on the fence about White Noise -- I kind of blended my ideas for Silence between that and Subsonic Pulse, but my alternative idea was a castable AoE Silence (target it on an area rather than emit from self).
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So I've played Trinity, Mag (pre-Pull changes), and Volt, and loved all of them. I thought Sonar looked pretty cool, so I farmed Banshee parts and built her.
I'm pretty underwhelmed. I really want to like her, but Sonic Boom feels like a weak "Pull," Silence is... not working? Or just not particularly useful in the current play paradigm, or both. And Sound Quake is just awful; 8-second root for underwhelming damage and total exposure to anything outside the radius? No thanks. Making it cast-and-forget for the duration would smooth it out a lot, but it still wouldn't make it interesting.
I like the effect of Sonar, but I'd like it a lot more for twice the baseline radius and half the cost. The thing is, it's a great power for dealing with 'spongey' enemies (disproportionately high health to their overall threat), and wonderful for bosses, but against anything else it's slightly less useful than just having a direct-damage power.
I haven't seen a lot of calls for "buff the Banshee," and I'm thinking that this is maybe because she's just not that popular or interesting to play... but the alternative is that I'm totally short-selling her and there's a great combo I'm just not seeing.
So before I start my crusade to fix her, help me out -- what am I not getting about the Banshee?
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Pretty sure it's sanskrit/hindi, like most of the rest of the stuff in this game about space japanese spy-assassins often modeled after proto-european deities.
Google says possibly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakini'>this, but possibly, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnW-awi7z5o'>this.
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Yes, Blade Storm takes forever to finish, but I think the POINT of this is just some emergency Invuln time. While not useful in defence, because it kills too slowly, it still works as a decent way of keeping yourself alive in a state of 0 cover until your shields regen.
Mmm... I don't know. I feel like Smoke Bomb serves that purpose pretty well. Of course, I guess you could say something similar about Teleport already doing this job... but I think it could be kept distinct by keeping the limits on this version of the ult (like, can only teleport while attacking, so no stealth-porting) and possibly by buffing Teleport (or at least cutting its energy cost to 15).
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Blame the exploit, not the exploiter.
Exploit : If I just walk into stores with a gun, people give me money that I don't have to work for. It encourages me just to hold people up rather than work for a living.
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That has been the mantra for every update..every addition, every change, nerf, buff and game mode.
It gets old.
As stale as I'm sure it is to you, it's still true. Based on what I've seen, I feel like one of two things are what's going on:
- DE is playing an aggressive catch-up game to learn how to operate a PvE MOG after having made predominately deathmatch and single-player games for decades without engaging in massive staffing changes they probably couldn't afford right now anyway.
- DE is a bunch of stubborn crusty old nerds dead-set on ignoring years of data on MOG design and operation, rushing for a too-late cash grab in a market that's already fractured.
Every time I've seen Steve talk it sounds a great deal like the former, but there's not that much separating the two; maybe I've been deceived. Either way, I advocate taking a break if you're feeling frustrated and burnt-out on Warframe. If it's the former, there will be an sharp curve downwards in the rate of change of game mechanics after 'official' launch, which afaik is sometime next year, and you'll find if not a perfectly polished pearl, at least a pleasantly textured stress ball. If it's the latter, well, official launch will be delayed several times, it'll be lackluster and buggy and the game will quietly suffocate in the market, and you won't have wasted money on it.
- DE is playing an aggressive catch-up game to learn how to operate a PvE MOG after having made predominately deathmatch and single-player games for decades without engaging in massive staffing changes they probably couldn't afford right now anyway.
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Thanks, guys. I think you're right about the tl;dr. Kind of ironic, really. Busy right now -- will try to summarize later.
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I know it's a weird title, but hear me out. U10 is getting under some folks' skin. I know that personally, I'm not a fan of the Stamina changes -- I didn't like rushing but I did like doing lots of stupid pointless jumping and slashing, and that's a lot tougher now.
But keep in mind, one, the developers admitted to being under a lot of stress to get this out the door and two, this is a learning process for them. I don't use the "it's a BETA!" excuse for much -- DE's got my money, which means that I have at least some quality-control expectations (this isn't HuffPost). But... well, it's a beta. They've told us big changes are what they're doing right now.
So -- give feedback. They need it. Tell them what you like and absolutely tell them what you don't like. But there are two kinds of particularly useless feedback you can give someone:
- Hyperbole : They're doing big changes and the tendency is to exaggerate. A large difficulty increase becomes "this is literally unplayable." A difficulty drop becomes, "I can run this mission 20 times faster than I used to." If you're going to give qualitative feedback, try and mark it as such: "I feel very frustrated, and I can't solo this/my friends and I can't complete these missions." If you can give quantiative feedback, try and be as specific as possible. You don't have to be a dataminer, or absolutely certain, but something like: "I remember this mission used to take me about ten minutes, and I just timed myself doing it in less than two. I was able to bypass the enemy spawns much more easily and the tile changes made it possible to skip several sections that used to slow me down a lot."
DE has tools that tell them these things, actually -- things like failure rate on missions, time-till-completion, etc. So if they get feedback, they're checking out how often and how much their recent changes affect these numbers. Like some kind of capitalist ninja Santa Claus. But giving the feedback helps direct them to subjective problem areas and paint a more complete picture than the data alone.
- Flat statements : "I hate Update 10." "The Nekros is awful." Whether it's a one-sentence post or a page-long text brick, feedback without a "why" is pretty useless. Even if you think the reason is perfectly self-explanatory, give one anyway. Otherwise it's just a bit of contextless negative data floating through the inter-ether.
There are two things that aren't necessary, but that will probably help a lot:
- Be nice. Your feedback will be heard even if you aren't, but the process of change will be a lot smoother if it is.
- Be concise. Busy developers can read concise statements. Busy community managers can read text-walls, and eventually summarize points out of them in conjunction with other, similar posts. One of these things is faster than the other.
So keep on giving constructive feedback, positive or negative. But I promise, follow these optimization guidelines, and your razor-edged throwing stars of text will have a 600% increase in effective DPS.
- Hyperbole : They're doing big changes and the tendency is to exaggerate. A large difficulty increase becomes "this is literally unplayable." A difficulty drop becomes, "I can run this mission 20 times faster than I used to." If you're going to give qualitative feedback, try and mark it as such: "I feel very frustrated, and I can't solo this/my friends and I can't complete these missions." If you can give quantiative feedback, try and be as specific as possible. You don't have to be a dataminer, or absolutely certain, but something like: "I remember this mission used to take me about ten minutes, and I just timed myself doing it in less than two. I was able to bypass the enemy spawns much more easily and the tile changes made it possible to skip several sections that used to slow me down a lot."
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In a simple game like Spelunky, you are repeatedly playing the same game, generally. But what makes it interesting is that no matter how good you become, and how familiar you are with challenges, you are always alert.
I am slowly growing the heretical opinion that progression mechanics are bad.
They serve a purpose, certainly. It's hard for me to imagine what else could serve that purpose and even harder to articulate. I've seen a place that games can get to where you are virtually 'gardening' your world, rather than playing it... but I'm diverging here from my point, which is:
Progression can actually suck the fun out of a game.
When you're doing a game about awesome backflips because they're awesome, it doesn't matter how many you do, or how often; you do them as often as you like, just because. So everyone loves backflipping, so the developers put in a "backflip count." It doesn't do anything except track your backflips.
But eventually someone gets a bit bored and says, "Well, why not make this do something? Why not make it so that after you've mastered basic backflips by doing 100 of them, you get a new type of even more awesome backflip you can do?"
So the developers put in Backflip 2, which you unlock at 100 backflips... and even though they haven't taken anything away, the general consensus becomes that the game doesn't "really" start until you've gotten to 100 Backflips.
But having achieved that first goal, people look to the game to set more of them. Whereas in the past the players took pride for executing stylish backflips or improbable ones, the backflip counter only cares about how many backflips you've done. So someone figures out the quickest-executing backflip, the easiest backflip to repeat over and over, and that becomes 'the backflip.' Doing any other kind of backflip is less optimal to unlocking the 'really fun' backflips.
Of course since there's always another tier of backflipping ahead, all that players really care about is the fastest Backflip 2 they can execute. And eventually, they complain that the new, highest-tier backflips are too different (too easy, too hard, too awkward, too simple) from the lower-tier backflips...
Progression undoubtedly keeps people playing. But it also keeps them from having fun, because they're always delaying the behaviors that would allow them to enjoy the game until they've "finished" the progression. And if they ever do finish it, the realization that they in fact have not been having fun the entire time they were playing the game comes down like a ton of bricks.
I, personally, am having fun with Warframe, and part of that is intentionally deprioritizing the progression mechanics. I love the fact that the developers are making bold, sometimes foolish decisions with it, and I hope that they never learn to lean too heavily on sequential end-gaming. We need more flOw.
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MK : If you have a tool that identifies who dropped what on the battlefield, I'll help.
If you don't, I'm not sure how to do this accurately.
Hmm.
How Rewards Kill Good Gameplay
in General
Posted · Edited by noneuklid
Agreed, OP. The more emphasis on progressing the game has, the less actual fun it is. I want to try different melee weapons out because I want to see their awesome attack chains, not because I'm looking for something to replace dual ether/orthos/whatever with. And I'd rather run a mission eight times and lose seven, than wait for an hour for enough good-enough people to be ready to run it once so I don't risk 'wasting my time.'