(NSW)Greybones

Hah! Not like players were building for balance anyways when they jump into Sorties with a Steel Path build; the options may be comparable with each other on their own merit for what they’re designed for, how they’re used and combined and then where they’re taken is a different matter. Wouldn’t mind seeing what kind of nerfs other mods might receive though. It’ll probably break some builds but then players’ll whine, then just make new ones to live in

Jesus, that’s a lot of Forma. Despite SP being an unbalanced mode of extreme specialisation with little variety of playstyle or options and the Randomiser runs against that by trying to enforce variety that works better in the standard game, there’ll usually be loaner builds present in a run that can work fine and plenty of times the Warframe can do the lifting with their abilities (the loaners seem like they’re built like a bunch of energy-sucking players will be using them too, most likely for the sake of newbies). I think you might be blowing it out of proportion; you can sink tons of Forma if you want (personally I’m not that interested), but loaners alone can net someone whatever rewards they’d want

Hmmm. A mod that enhances just a specific element and shifts damage weighting could be interesting; I’ve often wanted a near pure element damage output even beyond what we can do with the current elemental mods we have now, with targeted damage increase instead of the holistic Serration or Hornet strike mods

I reckon let the players who would rush do the thing they want to do. They’re trying to get done ASAP and all these slowdowns are not only annoying them, but I’m being impacted in comparitively minor ways that aren’t hugely problematic, but are still making it take longer to get something I’m mildly interested in. Purge the rushers like a particularly bad stomach bug, they don’t want to be here and the game is being negatively affected for trying to keep them around

🤔 These’ll also be good if I’m looking for the combined element but not necessarily the extra damage from the two elemental mods mixed together, like I just experienced where I wanted a combined element but to get it I’d be doing redundant amounts of damage while also consuming a mod slot. I’m getting more excited for the 13th!

Ooooh. Elements are a lot of fun to build around for their effects and roles against different enemy types, and I’d gladly consider some of those mods first when I start needing/wanting to slot damage mods since I’ll have even more slots to play around with

Just be aware that if you’re going to ask for a change on behalf of a room-clearing player who’s built themselves way beyond what the mission is designed or asks for specifically because it makes the game mode a breeze (and they could be doing higher-level missions but they opt not to), then that change is going to affect someone else who’s using alternative builds that align more with the content and actually fights. Some stuff like enemies coming in waves instead of rushing all at once helps prevent someone who’s actually fighting from getting completely overwhelmed, since if enemies start hanging around long enough then they start piling up

🤔 Sometimes I’ll randomise my whole loadout or just go with whatever or design my weapons to suit a role like sniper-and-pistol, and the content I’m doing and the way I’ve built my kit can shift the value of some pieces of it or emergent scenarios can organically arise that I’m not particularly building for but are still enjoyable to deal with the tools I brought, so there’s also the content being done and how fights can unexpectedly play out that can influence the feel. I guess fundamentally and not particularly tied to ever-shifting content or build, a few things I like doing is using Nova’s Wormhole to shoot some AoE weapons through and drop shots in weird locations or extend where I can shoot weapons like the Simulor or teleport enemies around, or I’ve sometimes done two-player dungeon dives with Wuclone as ranged and me as melee blocking and parrying enemies. I find Dragon Keys like Decaying and Bleeding can add some spice when trying to stealth through a mission as Excalibur with reduced health and shield (generally I equip them for 40-ish and below content even if I’m not stealthing). I’ve been leveling a bunch of stuff lately and status-built snipers with something like electricity can be fun. I like using Loki’s passive (possibly with Patagium, though I don’t often hang around in the one spot long enough to get the full time) to stick to the wall and snipe enemies and in general get a look at the lay of the land I got every combination of every piece of equipment and mod/arcane/whatever I’ve earned so far and every place to take it to, though I do have some equipment that I’ll gravitate towards like Mesa, Argonak, Lato or Lex/Prime, and a set of sparring weapons or daggers; no particular synergy considered (aside from things like Amalgam Argonak and daggers), but they can be fun to use together

If we’re talking going as far as possible, you might want to look up some Meta guides, as those’ll be designed for that purpose

Makes me miss the old pvp days with games like Quake or Unreal. Nothing too complicated, no supers to charge, no objectives to defend. Just some good old fashioned beating each other up until one side or the other wins

Just got into my first PvP match in ever; this one’s pretty good! I have to agree with OP, it’s pretty fun. A good mix of melee and range, and a nice bit of coordination with some randoms. Instead of being a thorn in my side as they hog the entertainment with their Multiplayer But Solo loadouts, the community is the entertainment! And some of them can actually fight back, which I wasn’t expecting. I’ll be jumping in for conclave standing every so often so long as there’s people playing Some of those arenas are pretty nice too. Good verticality, not too big or too small. Some little areas to panic in and open areas to jump around and perch points. Made me appreciate the movement system all the more for how we could get anywhere but it takes a bit more effort than just flying around

Why the desire for more range?

If it helps, the time-limited stuff can actually become a boon; if a thing lasts a week, you do it once and that’s it covered and it forces you to move onto something else. Nightwave has a catchup system where it’ll cycle things back in once you complete something, but many things it asks for will typically happen just while playing and keeping the game from getting stale by jumping around different content and using different builds and loadouts we can make with the modless gear and anything we can modify it with (personally I find the game is kind of at its worst when I was sticking to one build and a few bits of content all the time) Plus you don’t necessarily need redundant amounts of power by game design; we’re not forced into building Meta and the game actually doesn’t have a lot to do if we did, which turns the chase of the Meta into a personal goal that you don’t need to chase if you don’t want to. A lot of the game is about options and how we combine them for the content we’re doing, so you’re only missing out on alternative building options if you’ve already got what it takes to complete a node at least once in a fairly comfortable manner (which doesn’t necessarily mean insta-killing everything, mind you), and if you’re particularly exploratory you may get enough out of what you’ve currently got to the point that FOMO power is diminished and the game ends up dropping a lot of new options into your lap when you’re not even looking for it, furthering more combinations. Which would be good because some of these timers definitely seem like they’re aimed at retaining players who rush through everything and then complain that there’s nothing to do, and chasing that mentality puts them on a direct crash course with not only timers designed to stop or slow them down, but also incidental timers that aren’t meant to be a problem

Across most of the game players will typically be building to solo a whole multiplayer mission by building way beyond what the level of the mission requires; it’s one of the reasons I avoid Multiplayer as I’m not keen on being forced to stand around twiddling my thumbs. Your team should typically have it under control, you just need to jump in and not die. So no pressure to contribute further redundant amounts of power, since they’re built for way beyond what the requirements of Eidolons are for the designed four player experience

There’s a bit to unpack here, and a lot of questions raised. One that jumps out in particular is why do you need to do Eidolons so badly? Has someone been telling you that you need to grind efficiently and in order to do that you need certain components?

Then maybe you should have been on the same page when I said “Play”, yeah? Instead of doing some kind of “What are you talking about, we’re already playing” when you drop several examples that take place in the Arsenal and then one that was focused on farming, which typically entails standing around spamming abilities and AoE with barely any consideration for what’s going on if a player isn’t forced to put in the bare minimum of effort to run around like with Disruptors. Because that was more than a little surprising that we apparently weren’t on the same page I don’t think there’s much of an issue at all in the first place. Steel Path wasn’t introduced for players seeking balanced gameplay (which is already there in the non-SP game and they are ignoring it), it was a shortcut to high level enemies that the player can specifically minmax to hit harder and who would hit back harder; thus the modifiers of crunchy enemies and max spawnrates for one player. It’s DE throwing up their hands and going “You guys want to prove you can handle unfair odds, here’s your chance” It throws the rulebook that the game is following to this day out the window, and then you tack on a Randomiser and you get what we got now. And that combination forces players to engage because otherwise they’d just do the typical thing of shoehorning themselves into a few builds and loadouts that turn the gamemode into mush. It doesn’t do a great job, but it does enough, and it’s pushing back against players who would very much like to turn everything into mush even to their own detriment of variety of builds/loadouts/gameplay since they now live in those builds (unless something forces them out of those specific ways to kit themselves out) even though the journey of discovery is over. I think if anything, the issue is you thinking that sitting in a few highest-level unbalanced builds 24/7 and thus sitting in unbalanced Steel Path represents the epitome of what this game is, when the rest of the game is there and balanced around more than just that. Like I said, I’m just glad that it’s not the whole game, and I’ve gotten plenty of stuff just by jumping in and treating it like the unfair gamemode that it is and then hanging around the considered part of the game when I want to play some considered gameplay with all of my options

That’s all part of the picture, but there’s a game with actual gameplay outside of the Arsenal screen that I’m guessing you’ve never explored except as a vague notion of what you want to avoid. Everything we’ve earned, including whatever Shards, Arcanes, Incarnons, or anything we’d get from the game or Steel Path can also be used in the non-SP part of the game with greater variety of combinations and better balance across its various tiers of levels and working from the modless baseline, resulting in gameplay that involves third-person magic space ninja gameplay depending on how you combine your loadout and mission you take the result to. I’m not sure why I need to spell out “Gameplay involving moving and aiming and shooting like what a third person shooter would have” like it’s a novel concept, I was pretty certain “Play” would carry enough of the gist on its own within context of this game, but the Randomiser in SP helps break up some of the most desired means of minimal effort reward gathering, which some players praise because it forces them outside of their comfort zone

Steel Path is never going to be balanced as long as those modifiers are in play, and it’s never going to be the place for this game’s greatest strength of build/loadout/any combination variety as long as it starts at high level even if the modifiers were reigned in. It’s a mode designed to get squashed through build refinement, and then the RNG introduces any sort of difficulty only because it breaks up the optimal loadouts that someone would normally use to trivialise the mode. It’d not meant to be particularly considered in design, it just needs to break your build until you find out how to make it stop, and the Randomiser actually goes against that idea but it forces players to actually play, warped as the experience will always be because Steel Path itself is warped

SP in general is a not a well-designed mode; it’s a mode that slaps on a bunch of modifiers and cranks the spawnrates and serves the purpose of giving a chance to test and refine builds until the mode is mush, but it’s not the place to go for either variety or balance, and repeat use of a build after it’s been optimised as much as is necessary to squash SP is of questionable value (it’s mainly the journey and experimentation and exploration that was important anyways) Throw in the Randomiser which directly contrasts with the specialisation requirements that SP is about, and SP Circuit is trying to mash two worlds, variety and specialisation, together. And it only sort of works with the Decrees as the glue. I think treating SP Circuit like a different game makes sense, since it kind of isn’t even following the rules even without the introduction of Decrees because SP itself throws the book out the window from the getgo

It kind of sounds like it may have been an unintentional thing; I get that they’re used in a similar way, but they’re parts of Void Angels as opposed to things literally called medallions. If anything is meant to encourage engaging with the syndicates but the objective can be done without engaging with the syndicates, that can kind of defeat the purpose

Yes plz. I love fighting through the cramped interiors with some close quarters stuff like abilities or shotguns or melee, where enemies can sometimes clog up the pathways and leave themselves open with no gathering needed to some high-impact localised effects. By dint of being forced into such close quarters for not just the player but also the enemy, enemies are forced into melee striking more often and open themselves to whatever ramifications that can have. Feels good to have distinctive-feeling different locations where different kits can get a chance to shine in different ways I think it’s also fair to slow players down who would otherwise try and bulletjump their way through levels like they wish that there was the extraction point right next to the infiltration point. It’s kind of funny to imagine players crashing into things like they’re a newly-born foal who’s wobbling all over the place with barely any sense of control, while controlled sprinting or jogging gets its chance to shine and stops us from just bulletjumping deep into the dangerzone and get shot up from every direction with no situational awareness before we get a chance to actually scope out the lay of the land

That’s good to know. I honestly wasn’t expecting my mechanical knowledge of how things work to broaden because of you; I thought you’d just die

Huh. They kept chasing me so aggressively and the area I was in was so small I figured there must be an alternative option, which the game is usually pretty good about in general

I was recently doing a Kahl mission and had angered some Deacons who were going to make some trouble if I didn’t somehow get them to stop chasing me. Having forgotten that it was a thing, I tried chucking a the stunner because it kind of made sense to at least attempt it. How did you normally deal with problem Deacons who would chase?

I’m glad it exists in the form it’s taken because it does for most players something they could never bring themselves to do, which is forcing them to play at least a warped version of the game instead of giving them the option to turn it off. It doesn’t do anything for builds so it’s only a matter of time before every option is so thoroughly optimised that we’re back to square one, but at least it’s tricking players into doing something approximating play, temporary as it may be, and I’m just glad the whole game does not live in the mode