New content / endgame - Higher tiers of missions, enemies and a new Star system

[toxicitzi]

Reason? Scaling The Same Missions to high levels won't cut it. Arbitration is just an endless mode for people who haven't had enough of Sorties yet, of which I can say that, I've had more than enough of my fill with the current state of Sorties and I think I much prefer the Simaris endless in that regard.

You can scale missions with the same enemies up to level 700, 800, it really won't make a difference, because it's the same basic enemy types with higher health, damage and armor. There's nothing challenging about them this time, if your weapon was already grossly killing their health bars over 1000x its values at level 60-80, it's more of the same and this sort of content should be restricted to just the Endless survival type missions, of which the game should not become the model for.

 

 

 

One reason why that should be the main focus into the future, is to hopefully steer correct the current direction of the game for 1-2 months farming a slightly new content such as Fortuna, which is more of an addition for a few planets that already exist blended into 1 place containing all of the levels that we've already more than covered well enough, with all the planets and mission varieties on the current Star system, plus 10-20% of it that could be called new and challenging content, which is cool that we have that, but that's still a very minuscule portion of higher tier challenges and leaves people hungry for more. It's too little, this is what I think people mean by sustainable content, because the content in Fortuna and Plains is completely superfluous and only adds optional layers of Stuff, to Collect, while otherwise providing very little in terms towards any progression.

There's a few remixes to both these places, which is cool, but that stopped at that and went back to scaling the first few couple of missions it created, kind of like Archwing before it.

 

 

For starters, we need to redefine the Tiers and this is extremely important towards how things will be balanced later on.

 

What makes current Tier 1 and what makes Tier 4? from what I've seen, it's the frequency in which harder enemies come, otherwise it's all the endless neverending scaling mechanic seen before. This to me seems poor for a couple of reasons

1. Enemies that scale in Tier 1 to Tier 4 proportions, don't scale up in rewards.
2. They all contain the same enemies, they just differ in the frequency in which the stronger enemies start showing up. This is never a good thing, especially with the scarcity in rewards.
3. Poor indicator of what the difference is in all Tiers.

This speaks of a serious problem of Warframe, DE, you have become too reliant on Enemy level Scaling. Here's an example.

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Codex/EnemyList/Grineer

if we even look at the wiki, there's at least 4, or 5 variants of the SAME Grineer Enemy types. Lancer, Butcher, Eviscerator, Seeker, Trooper, Heavy Gunner, Bombard, Napalm, Scorcher, etc. Giving them a different skin doesn't make their behavior and challenge they pose any different, they're all the same enemy types as seen as far back as Earth missions and even though we are so far away from Earth now, we're still seeing them and we're still seeing JUST THEM, with almost no new additions added to the table outside.

The others suffer from this too, but not as large to an extent as the Grineer faction does, except the Infested which suffer in the exact opposite way from the Grineer, in which they probably haven't had any updates in years now, or any new enemy types in any capacity.. Corpus on the other hand, seems like the only faction that has attempted to provide new, higher tier enemy types.

 

To start the suggestion, this  idea can't work if we don't have more enemies and we should have more enemies by now, it's unthinkable the game survived as long as it did with chargers, lancers, crewmen and all the sorts of enemies we've seen at the very beginning. That's like WoW surviving from slaughtering hundreds/thousands of Kobolds or Gnolls. At one point, you have to consider moving forward and adding more enemies, expanding the universe in the process, having the factions seem active towards the players and always evolving, adapting with the players.

 

For enemy types, new enemies to replace the cannon fodder in current Earth state.

Instead of lancers, we need something like them but slightly more and more better with each tier of difficulty increased, double goes for the Butchers, who are just there to be chopped in half almost all of the time. These kinds of enemies do not translate well into higher difficulty, that's why they exist for the lowest level missions, they're a beginner's training enemy types, these ones need to be upgraded into something equivalent, but adding a little certain something for a higher Tier/Grade of enemy, such as a Lancer with some slight more mobile, slight increases in power of weapons, slightly increases for armor, even different kinds of weapons if necessary, it shouldn't always be just automatic rifles.

I think this is where Corpus and Grineer showed some promise, Corpus did with one enemy that never got revisited or followed upon ever since being added, Comba/Scrambus. These are definitely a higher tier above the usual Corpus enemies and they're not just a higher in size Crewman, like the Corpus Techs. For Grineer, the Reavers and Ghouls are definitely something new, same goes for Maniacs before them. These are the kinds of enemies we could use more of and maybe buff a little bit to stand out as a potential threat, give Tiers more flavor and a sense of identity, as opposed to just repeating and reusing the same enemies over and over again. I would even say that the Uranus missions did a fair job at attempting that, although much like the same things said before, they are the same enemy, they just have more varied buffs I suppose, but that's a basic idea of where to start and take things more forward from there, instead of just stopping at adding a little bit of armor and calling it a day.

As for Tier missions, my suggestion there is with using the enemies that are designed for higher tiers/grades, make them part of a respective tier, or introduce them during the endless missions sooner to replace the cannon fodder basic Earth-like enemies.

1. Tier 1 wouldn't have to ramp up towards Tier 4. If people can handle Tier 4 they should be doing those instead.
2. Each Tier would be representative of a certain group of enemy types, as well as have a gradual difficulty curve as a conceptual mode that makes sense and is easier to follow.
3. Giving Enemies More of an identity in the game and players something to tinker about in terms of the game's difficulty, by ranking them deserving of certain tier ranks.
4. As a bonus, squad spawns. Maybe for a little flavor, add squads of enemies that work together as a group as a sort of special event in long missions, for either extra objectives, or just Lotus informing us about a powerful squad heading our way? To make things more exciting for higher tier missions like these.

 

for any potential problems with this suggestion, if this means the enemies mentioned are too strong to be the ones replacing, that's why I mentioned upgrades in tiers towards Lancers/Butchers, as these enemy types I see as simply too primitive to scale well in difficulty and yes, things should escalate in a reasonable fashion, nobody would know what to do if we had 10 Combas appearing all at the same time, or in too quick a succession.

 

As for the new Star system, basically the same as what we have now, except for there being new locations, new lore, new places that the Grineer and Corpus exploit, or Infested attack, etc. etc. I know I'm not saying much here, but this is basically something to use from the idea mentioned above and be added from it, because people could use more progression and the game also could do with more reasons to add new enemy types gradually and naturally into the game. I think as far as the current Star system goes, we've exhausted it completely.

Likewise with this, a few new mission types would certainly not hurt, if this idea should carry out. We really need to move forward from the Exterminate, Mobile Defense, Defense, Spy, Survival, Sabotage palette of generic type missions and see some real missions. These worked fine for when the game came out and I have no doubt they'll be reused again and again, but how about remixing some of them, or maybe creating some scenario ideas out of them, like the one for Ambulas Reborn? Which from what I can tell, looks like a combination of an Assassination type mission, combined with a mobile defense, combined with hacking and escorting. Maybe these kinds of and, please excuse the poor terminology here, Super missions, could be a mesh of objectives meant for squads/clans, as well as this concept being introduced early on in a new Star system?

 

I'll end it here and conclude with what the intent of my suggestion here is. It isn't just to simply swap things as they are, but to steer correct this non-ending reusability that has gone on for years now..  The game needs new stuff, but not just any random throwaway new stuff, it needs new things that will STICK and not just go by the riverside. That's why I'm suggesting not simply new stuff, but new stuff that has a reason to exist and a hole to fill in the game currently.

If the game keeps going the same way that it is now, with adding Cool, Flashy things, which I'm not saying they are without merit, I can see why people would enjoy it, the game stands to hurt more and more because of the constant lack in players feeling like they need to do anything after a certain point, which really not the kind of state that MMOs should find themselves in.. There should be more priority towards moving things forward and not adding more stuff for new players, because all that new stuff will eventually become bloated, as well as harder to maintain with open world clashing the ordinary go in do the thing mission types. They're not a bad addition, but should they become more, something more has to be done there too the same way something has to be done here, even with that concept it feels like the surface has only barely been scratched so far, or to put it in very simple terms, Moving away from working the old mission types in the game doesn't solve the bigger problem Warframe is currently facing, it's just ignoring it.

 

anyway, that's all I have for now. I've checked the game how it is right now compared to when I stopped last year and this is what I think should probably be the aim moving forward. Fun stuff is cool, but we need something more and sustainable, content that is focused on the long term. I will edit and correct in the future if anyone has more information and if this thread should go forward.