Streamlining defence with troll abilities.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

When playing defence the next wave doesn't start until every enemy is dead.

I've noticed a trolling trend: players using certain abilities to draw that out as long as possible. Abilities like Inaros's sand spectre, Nyx's mind control or Garuda's healing spike.

The trolling goal appears to be to stall while any abilities, focus, combo counters etc all drain out.

However, this can happen by accident too - I'm pretty sure everyone has had one of those missions where you can hear an enemy near one of the spawn rooms, but they're trapped in the wall and unkillable.

It would be easy to fix: once there are fewer than 3 enemies spawned in a wave a 10s timer starts for the next wave. If all the enemies either take no damage for 15s or are under abilities then the next wave happens too.

[Etzu]

Nidus Link could also produce this result.

[Teridax68]

I think part of the problem here is simply that enemies turned to the player's side still count as enemies, which is silly and shouldn't happen. Even if you had an entire "troll" team who all turned enemies into their minions, it would not be game-breaking if the next wave would start if only those enemies were left, especially since those kinds of frames are meant to be good in defensive missions anyway. DE patched the game a while back to stop hacked Bursas from counting as enemies, so I see no real reason why the same shouldn't apply to mind-controlled enemies as a whole.

As a side note, I'd also be interested in seeing a rework to Defense that made completion time-based, rather than wave-based, so that players would be faced with a heavy and constant inflow of enemies, rather than a slow trickle of units that has become so exasperating by today's standards that it's not uncommon for players to bring in a Speeva, just to make missions go that much faster. That may be a matter for another discussion, though.

Edited January 2, 2019 by Teridax68

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

12 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I think part of the problem here is simply that enemies turned to the player's side still count as enemies, which is silly and shouldn't happen

It's because they can turn back into enemies - so an Inaros can spend 5 mins slowly consuming a Nox, but if they stop at any point that Nox gets back up and becomes an enemy again.

Even temporarily incapacitated enemies should count as dead for waves.

Also, that one cat thing trapped under the stairs in Hydron shouldn't count either.

[Teridax68]

50 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

It's because they can turn back into enemies - so an Inaros can spend 5 mins slowly consuming a Nox, but if they stop at any point that Nox gets back up and becomes an enemy again.

Even temporarily incapacitated enemies should count as dead for waves.

Also, that one cat thing trapped under the stairs in Hydron shouldn't count either.

Exactly -- it doesn't matter if one, two, or even five enemies end up left over from the previous wave, past a certain point it's ridiculous to halt the mission until literally every enemy is killed. Interception has a countdown timer after enough enemies are killed at the end of each wave, so there's no reason why Defense shouldn't have that, and the slowdown and unreliability generated by such a rigid constraint is what's made the mode less desirable for farming than many other endless missions (especially when enemies get stuck in the level geometry, which isn't that rare).

[Mach25]

I really liked someone's idea of setting a time limit on the defence objective while having waves of enemies rush the player until time runs out - that is more realistic and would be far more engaging while simultaneously dealing with the issue stated in the original post.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

On 2019-01-03 at 6:09 PM, Mach25 said:

I really liked someone's idea of setting a time limit on the defence objective while having waves of enemies rush the player until time runs out

I do to, but it would make speed Nova into the affinity queen and slow Nova into pure troll.

I think that's a different mode though, like wave defence vs rush defence - it'll have a whole different personality that ends up.much more like sanctuary onslaught's kill enemies in a time limit dynamic.