Arbitration Love And Hate

[Klavinmour]

So on one hand I love Arbitration, it's nice to have more "end game" content that can be a bit difficult and make you think about what you're bringing and how you're going to deal with it.

But there are a number of issues I'm having with them, so let's start.

First the Drones.
They are pretty cool, but there are definitely a few problems with them, ranging from not being affected by status, to becoming near impossible to kill sometimes due to Ancient Healers.
Which this is something that is quite the problem, they are small, they move fast and seem to be actively dodging your aim, having Ancient Healer's protection on top of this is beyond annoying, and without the ability to inflict status (particularly Radiation) there is no counter to this issue.

Then we have issues on each mission type.
Survival doesn't spawn enough enemies. If I play a normal Survival mission there can be more enemies swamping me than I even want to deal with, but that's never a problem in Arbitrations, on average there are groups of 3-4 enemies, which makes it significantly harder to keep air support up than it should be with the charges already giving 25% less.

Defence takes too long.
10 waves for a rotation is quite mind numbing.
Defence is generally the endless mission type that takes the longest outside of Arbitrations, so when it comes to making it take longer in Arbys it's too much.
Perhaps lowering a rotation to 7 waves would be more acceptable.
I don't understand why we can't give our secondary weapons to the operative, though that's a minor complaint.

Excavation has a similar problem to Survival.
Power Cell Carriers do not spawn enough, which makes filling an excavator a painful chore, which is quite unfortunate as it's one of the more fun Arbitration mission types!

I have no complaints for Interception however, so far they've been perfect!
No complaints for the last two missions types though as I avoid them like the plague.

 

Outside of the problems with the specific mission types, Arbitrations have been some fantastic content.
I love experimenting with the Warframe/Weapon bonuses, though some Warframes probably shouldn't show up on the rotations like Loki for example, he gets literally no benefit from Power Strength.

[Chaos.Blades]

Defense is brutal. It is long enough in normal gameplay. If they want to double something double the number of enemies per wave.

Survival again, if they want to make it more difficult to double the number of enemies. Most of the time I have spent in Arbitration Survival was me running around looking for something to kill. With the changes I feel like we are back to old Survival were you are limited to bringing Nekros or need to accept the fact that the game might not give you enough life support to make it to wave C

[peterc3]

11 hours ago, Klavinmour said:

ranging from not being affected by status

Then bring something that doesn't only work because of inflicting procs. Who would have thought they might not make Slash an easy win in Arbitrations?

[Klavinmour]

5 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Then bring something that doesn't only work because of inflicting procs. Who would have thought they might not make Slash an easy win in Arbitrations?

I'm more talking about Radiation Procs, to strip away their ability to protect and receive the Ancient Healer aura.
These drones have too many protections against being killed by us.
There is no need for them to be immune to status AND Warframe powers, one or the other.

[peterc3]

3 minutes ago, Klavinmour said:

These drones have too many protections against being killed by us.

It's like you have forgotten that things other than Status hoses and frame abilities exist.

[Klavinmour]

9 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

It's like you have forgotten that things other than Status hoses and frame abilities exist.

It's like you've forgotten that weapons have soft and hard drop off points due to how broken enemy scaling is, and if you're going to go any decent amount of time in Arbitrations you'll most definitely be going past the point where weapons are useless and wont be able to kill a Drone in less than a full clip, and that's without the Ancient Healer buff.

Meanwhile if we're able to inflict status on them, that opens up 1hour+ runs fine.

[peterc3]

1 minute ago, Klavinmour said:

It's like you've forgotten that weapons have soft and hard drop off points due to how broken enemy scaling is, and if you're going to go any decent amount of time in Arbitrations you'll most definitely be going past the point where weapons are useless and wont be able to kill a Drone in less than a full clip, and that's without the Ancient Healer buff.

Meanwhile if we're able to inflict status on them, that opens up 1hour+ runs fine.

It's like it is meant to be difficult to last an hour+ in a mode that rotates every hour and has drops DE considers relevant for the level they're at.

[Klavinmour]

3 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

It's like it is meant to be difficult to last an hour+ in a mode that rotates every hour and has drops DE considers relevant for the level they're at.

There's a significant difference between a challenge, and being difficult for the sake of being difficult.

If the Drones ignore Warframe powers, and are immune to status, then there is absolutely no justification for them being able to be effected by positive ally auras like Ancient Healers.
Especially when their movement patterns and size already limit you to AOE weapons in order to deal with them as quickly as possible.

My suggestion for changes is entirely fair, meanwhile you give no reasoning to keep them as they are.
Please either come forward with a proper debate, or don't comment.

[W3zeer]

@peterc3 he was obviously talking about the fact that ancient healers can extend their aura on the drones and you can neither break that aura with radiation or kill the healer first as you normally would. This seems indeed like an oversight especially considering they removed overlapping ancients auras a while back. Reading before defending helps sometimes.

[Zi-Sui]

The ancient healer + drone combo is problematic yes. I can deal with it for the first 30 minutes with my Pyrana but it has a pretty decent riven and only Primed Heated Charge maxed as an elemental mod, probably my best weapon. And it takes me more than a whole 12-chamber clip to kill a single ancient healer affected drone. That's how strong they are. And I don't think you can make use of primed expel/bane mods against drones so there's that.

The only weapon I can think of doing enough damage to oneshot ancient healer drone is a slow crit plague zaw maxed out and built for damage, not status.

Oh yeah and please make the arbitrations weapon buff work. Right now it's bugged.

Edited October 25, 2018 by BoarWarrior