ZantenZan

Yeah, it's ironically the kind of build that performs worse and worse relative to teammates the less beefy and/or numerous the enemies are. I only tend to bring it into Steel Path missions with frequent mob spawns now, like Survival, because if the enemies are too squishy, or too thinly spread out, its utility drops off a cliff and I'm likely better off just bringing in my Thrall Pact/Mesmer Shield Revenant with a Torid or straight up just using Mesa for her 4. It's a bit of a knife's edge, no pun intended. I think I have the damage output built up enough to kill Steel Path enemies very quickly without armor stripping outside that one Aura mod. But my damage isn't SO high that I can one-shot most Steel Path armored mobs using a single light attack, which means I can more reliably spread damage to everybody else in the area. If the average armored mob takes me 2-3 hits to drop, and I hit maybe 3-4 of those mobs in a 20m radius, the shared damage output will be enough to nuke everything short of an Eximus. And if I'm actually whacking an Eximus instead, it might take me as much as 5 Light Attacks to drop them, by which time everything else is pretty much dead. Obviously this is only the case if Influence is active, but there's no cooldown to re-trigger Influence after its duration expires, it just comes down to the probability of both getting electric procs, and whether each proc will trigger the Arcane to activate. I will also activate on 'death blows,' even if it doesn't actually spread damage doing so. So I've been able to keep it running maybe 90% of the time I'm fighting, almost always when there are lots of mobs to hit, by bolstering my existing Electricity Proc chance with the Volt Trooper augment mod to Volt's Shock ability. It's admittedly almost counterintuitive, as I'm killing enemies more slowly so I can kill mobs more quickly. xD

I'm sure you've already looked over it, but just in case you haven't I would highly recommend trying Rauta specced for multishot, fire rate, magazine size, etc rather than damage in any build where the majority of your damage is going to come from Kullervo's melee anyway. I initially dismissed it, but I find it's one of the quickest ways to build combo count from nil to 12x, to say nothing of maintaining that combo count if even one of the shotgun pellets tags a distant enemy. I still used the Dexterity Arcanes to more easily maintain the combo, as I found it waaay too stressful without it, but the quick combo build-up would let me build to maximum damage output very quickly on the back of only a couple Steel Path enemies. Also found it very useful when I was relying more on the 'teleporting heavy attack' part of 1 a lot, as it would only take a couple of well-placed shots to restore the combo I'd spent on the heavy attack and keep my damage output at its peak. Yeah, agreed! Collective Curse is one of those things that can potentially be pretty bonkers on paper, but in execution the full payoff needs several things to go right each time. Curse, Curse, hit with 1, build combo, Curse, Curse, hit with 1, build combo, repeat. I got very accustomed to bullet jumping through a mob to get them between me and my teammates so I could aim for the guy furthest away from them, as trying to target anyone at the front of the pack usually meant my ability often landed a split second after a teammate already killed them. I've been able to mostly circumvent that now, as I still fling myself into the mob but now frantically swing my weapons the entire time, as is tradition! :P I've still got a Crit-focused build in the wings, because there are some things that it particularly excels at, like any enemy with a particularly strong immunity to Status Effects such as Juggernauts. Personally, I find that one of my favorite parts about Kullervo is that with a Primed Flow, emphasis on Ability Strength and Duration, and however many Violet Shards you can put together, you can make him a crazy high and reliable Crit build without actually having to specifically spec for Crit Chance or Crit Damage. Both because of how his 1 is Additive rather than Multiplicative, and because of how much the Violet Shards can boost Crit Damage. Could I get even higher by adding Crit mods? Absolutely! (I actually have a Riven installed that bumped the Crit Damage from its initial 10.5x to 13x, along with a base damage boost,) but I decided to focus all of my remaining modding on Status Chance and damage. So I can operate at a 550% Crit chance, (with Molt Augmented running full steam,) 13.1x Crit Damage multiplier, 185% Status Chance plus a max combo Weeping Wounds Status boost, using Volt's Shock with Shock Trooper modded to add a further 200+% Electricity damage and regularly trigger a 20m area of effect that soaks all mobs in the vicinity with the damage I'm inflicting on any one enemy because every single hit does Status Damage at super critical levels.

...how so? Nezha, granted, operates more on damage reduction than on outright damage absorption, but I've found absolute minimal evasive efforts enough to stretch that out just fine, even when running the mission by myself with all enemies aiming at me. I still wouldn't have to fight to stay alive against them, just keep moving. In a team match where there are three other teammates (and, for a Defense mission, a mission objective,) I'd barely even have to do that, just refresh the ability when it expires instead. Rhino does actually negate damage taken while Iron Skin is active, instead stripping that damage from his built-up Armor, and even if you aren't relying on some of the crazy '1 million armor' builds, timing your activations well and keeping energy costs under control keep him delightfully tanky in his own rights. Again, all without actually having to help in any way. Ivara isn't immortal while using Prowl, but if someone's invisible and keeping out of the fray what does that matter? She still needs to get hit to take damage (hit twice in a certain window to get past shieldgating,) and nobody would be aiming at her. I have an Ivara specced for Spy missions and with a quick Energy top-off beforehand I can apparently keep Prowl running continuously for over 15 minutes. Longer if I occasionally bounce into the fight to grab energy pickups. As far as 'AFKable' Warframes go, she'd likely be the best suited. Don't get me wrong, Revenant is super tanky in his own right, in part because his defense ability doesn't rely on damage numbers, meaning Mesmer Skin is just as effective against a level 1 enemy as it is against a level 500 enemy. (Ironically this makes it a pretty poor tank ability for low level missions.) Very rare things can bypass it completely (like Void explosions or a particular 'fog' effect the yellow Archon uses,) and anything that negates active abilities like certain bosses or falling off the map will turn it off entirely. More to the point, though, it only has a certain number of charges. You mentioned you bet most Revenants don't use Mesmer Shield, that mod that lets you give your teammates stacks, i.e. contributing a buff to the team. If so, then they also wouldn't get the +50% buff to its strength; so, relying solely on a modded Ability Strength of, say, 220%, we're looking at maybe 11-12 charges? It's a good bit of resilience, but hardly a 'set it and forget it' ability. His survivability does improve a lot when you use a combination of Mesmer Skin and turning Thralls to break up enemy aggro. But that reduction in enemy aggro is something the full team indirectly benefits from, because every enemy targeting a Thrall is one less enemy targeting you or a Defense objective. Again, you were asking how someone would feel running a mission with 2-3 Revenants. You know how I'd feel? Functionally immortal, even without shared Mesmer skin charges. Because between all the Thralls, and all the enemies targeting the Thralls, almost nobody would be trying to shoot me. :P

So, setting aside the obvious Nourish usage across the roster, there are a few Warframes I use particular Helminth abilities with. Xata's Whisper on my Revenant for Archon Hunts, instead of Reave; I find that squeezing the trigger on my Phenmor and aiming in the general direction of the boss' head is a LOT more effective when even my missed shots at least do some damage due to the Void status bubble. Volt's Shock on my Kullervo, instead of Collective Curse. More specifically, using the Shock Trooper augment. I wanted something to help beef up the frequency of my Electricity status procs to better use Melee Influence. Whenever I get Voltaic Strike, I'll likely retest and see if I can get away with using something else instead. Harrow's Condemn on my Saryn. Like its crowd control and shield recovery, and the shield recovery tends to come quicker than it does with Pillage. Speaking of, Hildryn's Pillage on Gyre, for both some extra survivability and of course the armor stripping. Nidus I think is the only one I can think of who I haven't really changed.

I never even considered that angle! In my case I usually just found that once I had some thralls set up around the objective- usually Enthralled one enemy per direction, let them spread the effect amongst themselves in as complete a circle as possible- the amount of attention on the Defense objective dropped so hard I'd just have to Madurai-buffed Void Blast the occasional Eximus mob who somehow made it through the in-fighting to assault the objective itself, while clearing out what I could with whatever weapons I had available. I have a few other Warframes that could single-handedly clear the mission faster- Gyre with Pillage, Baruuk with some aggressive Desert Wind off-the-map yeeting, a slow-build Saryn with spammed Condemn for shields and crowd control, Kullervo with damn near any melee weapon- but these usually come with a trade-off where the objective itself is more vulnerable to direct attack, they rely a lot more on heavy Energy usage, and/or they are themselves more vulnerable to getting killed. Baruuk's 1 gives great survivability, for example, buuuut since its effect doesn't work while I'm attacking, it doesn't help much at if I'm using him to scatter mobs. In essence, there are some other Warframes I could clear SP Defense with, some even faster, but with Revenant my Objective was usually damaged the least, even if the mission lasted longer. And considering Defense is the only Circuit mission you can 'fail' for any reason other than running out of Revives, a low-stress defense run is always much appreciated.

Since you asked this outright, gotta point out that I've run Steel Path Circuit Defense, solo, with a Revenant and barely anything in terms of decent dps other than my Operator's amp due to RNG pain, and it's by far always my easiest Defense run for SP Circuit. Maybe this works differently for Public, it's usually too much of a cluster**** to tell, but the Thralls are actually very good at drawing aggro away from Defense targets, Excavators, etc. So, yeah, I'd be perfectly cool running with 3 Revenants. All the better, really, because it'd let me focus 110% on mob clearing. I'm failing to understand how you might have trouble with a Defense mission when you're with 2 or 3 Warframes that can, with just 1 targeting his abilities properly, virtually nullify the threat to the actual Defense objective until the mobs get mopped up. As for killing mobs, yeah, Revenant alone doesn't offer much DPS for Steel Path or level 200-250 mobs, very true. But not every Warframe has to single-handedly nuke a small country whilst armed with nothing but a whiffle bat. And the power scaling in the game is so vast, that you can have a build perfectly capable of killing Steel Path Defense mobs, and still get completely overshadowed because you end up running with a player using a crazy high DPS build that mega nukes everything within a 20m radius. It sounds like part of your complaints stem from the idea of players themselves not doing much, which... is not exclusive to Revenant. :P I've seen players in all kinds of Warframes, with all kinds of weapons, just kind of keeping out of the way or only killing 2 or 3 enemies in a SP or Netracell run. Hell, in regular Circuit I've had randoms find a corner to hide in because they were too lazy to play the game and wanted to be carried, and those usually weren't using Revenants either. Someone being lazy in a Revenant could still be lazy in a Rhino, a Nezha, an Ivara with high efficiency and Prowl. And, frankly, buffs just aren't that valuable when you're running with a public squad and thus have no real coordination on who brings what. If you ARE complaining because you use a crazy high, mission carrying DPS build, then... what do you expect? I run a crazy high DPS build for Steel Path Survivals, Defense missions that don't randomise my gear, anything with a lot of tough mobs. It's always a pleasant surprise when someone keeps up or outpaces me for kills, (my build has downsides, like being melee-focused,) but I'm certainly not going to hold any comparative underperformance against my teammates. I literally made the build to excel at carrying Steel Path missions if necessary. My teammates could frequently be people who could absolutely have killed mobs, but would have needed 4 seconds to kill three mooks as opposed to my 1.5 seconds to kill fifteen.

I, for one, welcome the opportunity to min/max mod the crap out of the fish. I will not rest until I have the softest, least accurate, and most skin-moisturizing fish-slaps any player has ever encountered!

Yeah, I was initially swapping out Storm of Ukko for awhile, the reason I changed my mind was because I realized that while that ability didn't offer much coverage without Range buffs, it did have some fringe use for maintaining a melee combo meter. I already use Primary and Secondary Dexterity Arcanes to buff my combo duration, but if I was running a mission that relied on changing locations- Mobile Defense, for example- dropping it in the midst of a crowd while in transit would give me some extra breathing room. Granted, emphasis on fringe usage, because I could also squeeze off a hastily aimed shot with Rauta to refresh the counter as well. If I'm in a narrow-corridor kinda map, it can be useful to plonk it down at a doorway to deal with some mobs while I focus elsewhere. With Collective Curse, it wasn't just that my build lessened the range, but also that I was using a maxed Melee Influence arcane on my Dual Ichor Incarnon with a pretty reliable trigger rate. So I would regularly start dishing out all Status Effect damage from my melee strikes to all enemies within a 20-meter radius, omnidirectionally. A one-hit KO to ten enemies actually got in the way of that, because as far as I could tell Collective Curse only shares damage across ten enemies, rather than sharing status procs. It also wouldn't trigger Dual Ichor Incarnon's damaging fields on mobs killed by the Curse's damage sharing. Even though I could dish out much higher total damage numbers using a Crit-focused Collective Curse build, a lot of that damage would be ridiculous amounts of overkill to the tune of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. My current build- which, between my Shards, my Warframe and my weapon relies both on high Status and high Crit- doesn't pump out the same amount of raw damage, but I find it burns through mobs much, much quicker.

I don't really think buffing Revenant's other aspects (be it damage dealing or buffing) without nerfing his survivability is really in the cards, though. He's already very popular due to that survivability, if you also made him a Warframe that could dish out a lot of damage, or buffs that increase damage, by virtue of his abilities alone it would essentially land him in Nourish territory, i.e. 'Why NOT Just Use Him For Everything?' And any attempt to 'balance' him by taking away from his survivability while adding to his DPS or buffing would just stick him in the same role a number of other Warframes already occupy. I actually find Revenant can be quite useful as a weapons platform because his Mesmer skin not only offers invulnerability but also nullifies any sort of knockdown effects that might throw off aiming a precision weapon. I don't use him for much anymore; mostly just Steel Path Circuit Solo if he pops up, because he's one of the few that can reliably get me through a Steel Path Circuit Defense mission by myself while using trash weapons. But when I want to run a quick Archon hunt, solo or public, I grab Revenant, stick Phenmor on him, and off I go. To be fair, I also use his Mesmer Skin augment, so I can contribute in the form of compensating for my Public squad's potential squishiness by giving them damage-nullifying buffs. But even if I wasn't, Revenant lets me use my main contributor to the mission, Phenmor, a LOT more aggressively because I can just stand there and pump heavy automatic fire directly into the Archon's head without having to worry about being jostled or killed. To say nothing for how the stun effect Mesmer skin inflicts on enemies makes getting those initial headshots to get my Incarnon form active soooo much quicker. I can see where you're coming from, to a degree, but speaking as someone who's run a lot of Public Squads for high-level content, I find I'm less concerned with a player who can't meaningfully contribute, and more with a player who gets downed every ninety seconds and needs a perpetual life preserver yeeted at them. Especially on something like a Netracell or an Archon hunt, where that player dying translates to them failing the mission, creating a virtual obligation that I go out of my way to try and revive them on multiple occasions. If I had to pick between receiving buffs, but giving regular revives, and receiving no buffs but mostly being able to focus on clearing mobs, I'm probably going with Option B. And, again, I don't think Revenant would see a buff to make his shortcomings better without also having things balanced by making his strongest points worse.

Do we even know yet the extent of the nerf? What I dug up suggested they're not removing any of the ability's effects, but rather lowering the numbers to some degree. Because it does absolutely make sense that Nourish would be the most commonly used ability, it not only offers a very strong damage boost with a desirable Viral proc for even more damage potential, but there's also the way it can sometimes singlehandedly eliminates energy economy for a ton of builds. Singlehandedly is the operative word here, because I've been able to run builds that regularly use abilities, have only 80-90% Ability Efficiency and have no passive energy regen mods by beefing up Ability Strength and triggering Nourish. The only times I've used a different ability have been to benefit very specific builds, like Volt's Shock or Hildryn's Pillage. I do agree a lot of the other Helminth abilities need to be reworked to make them, well, even kind of versatile. But beefing every ability up to Nourish's current level? ...how would that even happen, short of just making them all copies of Nourish? How do you match a Corrosive/Viral build PLUS functionally unlimited energy across 50+ other abilities while still making them seem somewhat different? In theory (generally not in practise unfortunately,) there isn't really supposed to be a 'One Size Fits All' and Nourish comes closer to that than anything else. Like, would the preference here be that they keep the energy economy as is but remove the Viral proc, or allow only one of the effects to run at a time? Or is this literally 'I want maximum damage AND unlimited energy' kind of thinking?

I agree completely that Recompense not targeting bosses is a huge pain in the butt, especially because the ability already has a built-in limitation when too few enemies are in range, i.e. the time it takes from the daggers to leave Kullervo to the time any remaining return rather aggressively to him. Spamming Recompense isn't a problem when you have thick enough mobs to land all the daggers, but if there's just one or two aggressive ones I've had what Overguard I get blasted away almost immediately, at which point the remaining daggers stab me in the unguarded kidneys. Ironically my build's survivability and strength literally improve the more mobs I have to deal with. Now, I don't mind this in and of itself- it honestly makes Steel Path Mot runs really fun because I feel like I'm on a knife's edge half the time- but if you can't target certain enemies in the game at all, that leaves him pretty screwed. I've mostly stopped trying to use Wrathful Advance for its teleport lately, (feels too finicky) and only use it for its teleporting heavy attack when launching the first strike against something like a Steel Path Rogue Voidrig or similarly meaty foe. Otherwise I just aim more towards the ground so I do a quick 'hop' and gain the Critical Chance buff on a high Ability Duration. Even the Heavy Attack component is hit or miss sometimes, as I'll get 'Enemy Obscured' error messages when targeting enemies directly in front of me on flat ground, which is part of why I've mostly stopped using that part. (Thank God we can reverse the tap/hold button effect for specific Warframes.) I did like using Collective Curse before I replaced it with something else, but I found that as you said the targeting can be a bit finicky. Being able to hold the button to see the cone of effect's coverage or highlight enemies in range would be a nice feature so we can make little adjustments to our positioning before letting it fly. When I used it, I got around the problem by running a high Efficiency build and spamming it three times in slightly different directions. :P That being said, I've been using him nowadays for a Dual Ichor Incarnon build and I loooove it. :D

Just two filters could be too simple to address it, was speaking more to the spirit of it than anything, i.e. what mindsets should be separated in this case. After all, there's also the matter of high-damage players who might want to avoid getting matched up with inadequately kitted players for things like Netracells or Archon hunts, and maybe there's some matchmaking option to help at least reduce that risk. I personally don't mind carrying someone through a Netracell, Archon hunt, etc, but the ones who may not even bring enough survivability to stay alive tend to make it a notably more stressful experience for me. :P Making a matchmaking system too complicated risks having too many partitioned 'cells,' and I think that Recruiting chat is still a valid route if someone wants to put together something super specific, like a Khora or Hydroid wanting to set up a limited kill box item farm and avoid map nukers. You're absolutely right, such a game mode could end up landing with all the enthusiasm and engagement of, well, a bunch of other game modes that have already been released, meaning worst case scenario we have one more to add to the pile. At the very least it would presumably need less design work and special assets/coding than something like Railjack, which literally implemented a 'Matchmake With Any Mission On Planet' button to try and help address faltering population levels and STILL ends up with empty planets. End of the day, if it's released alongside regular Star Map and nobody wants to do it, then... I guess that's that, then? At least it's there, and doesn't limit options for those sticking to regular Star Map. Still, maybe an optional 'Low Key Mode' would draw some interest, even if just for a sense of early game nostalgia. Maybe not. I will say, as much as I adore running Steel Path now, I do get why it seems to be the red headed stepchild for some people; even when someone puts together a build that can arguably play Steel Path, it can still feel like a bit of a spongey slog unless/until you put together something that can cut through them as quickly as a standard kit cuts through standard mobs. My first weapon for Steel Path was a Kuva Nukor, and initially I didn't have things like Cascadia Flare and such slapped onto it, so killing armored mooks was a big ol' game of 'Hold The Laser Pointer Of Doom On Them.' It was functional, it definitely wasn't fun. Now I have a build that can tear through Steel Path, but with the added edge of danger that comes from being just a little too squishy and needing to close to melee range. I'm actually having more fun with Steel Path Survival than I've had with Survival itself in ages. A lot of people might not like it, but I'd personally be really irritated if Steel Path was somehow taken away, or my Kullervo Dual Ichor Incarnon status nuker for that matter. :P Like chocolate and peanut butter.

I think the best way of implementing some sort of filter would be, for lack of better terms, an 'Efficiency vs. Experience' option, with one obviously signifying a desire to just get through the matchmade content as quickly as humanly possible, and the other specifically advocating for a slower roll. I even think that Efficiency should be the default setting, and that someone should have to toggle Experience, rather than vice versa, just to sidestep the more overpowering players who ironically might just load in a mission without taking the time to fiddle with matchmaking preferences, i.e. the only nukes who end up in a slow-roll match would likely be deliberately griefing, and might be a more clear-cut thing to report. Because part of what makes chunks of this a grey area for me is that, as a free to play game, Warframe obviously relies on some pretty grindy game mechanics in order to accumulate certain resources, blueprints, etc, etc. I got into Eidolon hunts back when they were a fresh mechanic, for example, and of course they were a really nifty, different game mode... but not only did you have to play that game mode loads and loads of times in order to progress early Amp building and other Quills benefits, it was also a game mode that was only available during the night cycle. It would literally end prematurely if the sun came up! So, more and more, the emphasis was around trying to squeeze out as many Eidolon runs in a single night cycle as one possibly could, racing a clock. Because if you wanted your Amp, or to unlock your Waybound Nodes, you were gonna have to run a bunch of these one way or another, especially if you couldn't grind Focus through combat as effectively as I can now. Some content offers bounty payouts for RNG loot and faction experience, with rarity rolls and all. Zariman and Entrati Laboratory tilesets now have hidden pickups to find, meaning some squad members might decide to take things slow and poke around for all the shinies, while others just want to get through so they can roll the Exterminate bounty reward another five times before bed. Even Relic Exterminate and Capture missions create a sense of artificial scarcity, because they are objectively the quickest modes to crack a relic when going full throttle, meaning you can crack more relics/get more void traces in a given period of time, but they're only sporadically available to play compared to a larger number of objectively slower mission modes. I think there's a number of cases where 'slower run' would translate to 'much longer grind' for a given objective, which is why there should be something in place to help partition those who are more focused on a given destination rather than the journey itself. Right now, everyone's kind of getting thrown together hodgepodge, one side of the fence upset that their experience is being ruined, and the other side of the fence upset that their time is being wasted. Which I would imagine is why this thread has been going on for 18 pages now. :P

The only thing that brings me up short on matchmaking filters is even setting aside obvious potential for griefing, I find people can rarely agree on what a common ground would even be. Like, the power scaling in this game is pretty vast, and there are more ways to hog kills in something like Exterminate than just nuking. I could equip a well-modded Arca Plasmor, rapid-fire rifle with high dps, etc, set up some parkour-speed enhancing Warframe with high survivability, and still probably run circles around anyone who brought a short-range shotgun, melee, or a slow-winding bow to the mission. I wouldn't fit the criteria of being a nuke, per say, and by extension be a lot more modest than a Saryn map-clearer, but still end up making someone feel like they had a failure to launch. Person A might decide that such a build is within the spirit of the game, fair play, etc. Person B might get frustrated cause I keep killing their targets before they can fire their bow, even if I'm largely doing what they're doing, just pushing myself a lot faster to do it. (Speaking here as someone whose top-rated weapon is still Dread, by the way, even though I mostly had to stop using it in order to tackle Steel Path and Netracells. The wind up stress is real. ;_; ) A mode with pre-built modsets for the equipment you own (something DE have already implemented for Duviri, mind you,) would not only close loopholes, but also make it easier to enforce strengths and weaknesses of specific weapons and weapon types. Again, not something I'd want to see enforced on the main game, because I also enjoying seeing how hard I can break Steel Path Survival with my Kullervo and Dual Ichor Incarnon combination. But having somewhere to go for a different sort of challenge, where nobody has access to certain 'quality of life' improvements that we can take for granted, would also be a nice option to have. And I think with the setup that DE already undertook putting builds together for Duviri Circuit equipment, it likely wouldn't need as much set-up as a lot of other options would. To be honest, my guesstimation was mostly based on how long an Archon fight took me running what I used to consider my best damage-dealing weapon, (a Rubico Prime with Riven that I used for Eidolon hunting,) versus using a Phenmor with the kind of standard mods you would expect and Xata's Whisper for added aim assist. The former obviously hit hard, but given I was running it solo (because I didn't want to drag a team down, as the DPS was veeeery much a matter of aim,) it took me about a half hour or so of frantically jumping around and landing headshots while the boss healed regularly. :P The Phenmor just melted the boss and the fight took all of five minutes, most of which was spent doing that in-between bit with the double-locked gate. Former arguably made for a more exciting fight, but the latter is realistically the route I'd take on a weekly basis to nab my shard so I can spend the rest of my time Grendel-balling around a mission trying to see how many enemies I can run over. The irony is that guesstimating what an average run would look like would be virtually impossible to figure out on Public Squad, given half the squad would obliterate the boss, and the other half might be armed with whiffle bats. The power scaling in this game is vast, and the questlines the game needs completed in order to access these endgame modes require a lot less 'oomph' than the modes themselves might require, meaning you have players who had no real difficulty finishing The New War or Whispers in the Walls, but are by no means kitted out to contribute to a Netracell, Steel Path or Archon hunt yet. (Speaking here as someone who was in exactly that position back in December. :P I literally cheesed Netracells in Operator mode using environmental kills, it took me ages.)

I do think that some of the things DE have done in terms of alternate game modes like Grendel's blueprint missions and the Duviri Circuit 'default mod sets' might be interesting to examine in the context of creating a new alternative layer to Star Map, alongside Steel Path, maybe unlocked at the same time. Basically retooling the enemy level caps to whatever might feel like an appropriate challenge depending on whether they disable everything ala Grendel missions, or just set up pre-made builds for every weapon and Warframe in the game... and probably disable Operator mode as well, because a well-kitted Operator can also get one pretty far in terms of staving off death. Setting aside nuking itself, there are admittedly a lot of things that we take for granted nowadays, whether it's survivability buffs, virtually limitless energy regeneration, etc, and a game mode that strips some of those advantages and puts everyone on a modest playing field would be a neat concept. 'Alternative game mode' would be the operative word, though, as at this point I think DE has spent too much time releasing new Arcanes, Warframes, mod sets, and other means of power boosting to just start dragging the entire playerbase in a completely different direction by nerfing the main game to oblivion. (And seriously, the last thing I would ever want is for a Relic cracking Exterminate mission to take three times longer so someone can smell the roses, rose-smelling is what we have Survival for. :P ) Even if they decided to 'just remove the nuke builds,' the most effective meta builds are just that, the most effective. Even after those, there are a bunch of other builds that can obliterate a small country without necessarily being considered 'top tier,' because the difference in power scaling is vast. Trying to actually pull that power scaling all the way back without functionally gutting the game from top to bottom would be a massive undertaking, and even if someone could walk that tightrope successfully, I'm not sure DE would manage to pull it off. Every time a new build gets put together that single-handedly deletes an Archon boss, or turns Dual Ichor Incarnon into a map-clearing Diet Saryn, my first thought is usually; '...yeah, DE probably didn't see that coming.' There are just so many threads all intertwined and tangled up, pulling on any one of them tends to unravel five or six other areas. Having a single pre-curated build that leaves little to no wiggle room to figure out tricks, though? Much easier to pull off and tweak where necessary if someone does find a loophole. And confining it to a separate mode still leaves player choice on the table, by giving those who want to specifically avoid running missions with overpowering players a place to go instead. Even extend it so it can serve as an alternative way to run, say, an Archon hunt, giving players have the option of avoiding a team where three of the four participants are packing Phenmors and the boss is about to get Sonny Corleoned. Sure, the fight would take waaaaaay longer that way, but presumably that's what these people would be signing up for.