Outright Sinful eHP Gap and Bias Playstyle Content of 2018

[Xzorn]

*Video does not depict the entire point of this Topic. It's simply an example to one of many conditions.

 

There's always been a big eHp gap between "caster" type frames and "tanky" frames. It's gotten larger and larger over time but one thing somewhat kept this acceptable. Those so-called caster frames could accomplish feats beyond anything the tank frames could ever hope. In general at least. The trick was. They couldn't make a mistake. Not one.

Seems that pretty much all content released in 2018 follows an eHP / DPS theme. It doesn't accept CC at all let alone stealth or glass cannon Vs tanky.

CC and Stealth have been under constant pressure since the Void days. Nerfs, counter measures like Arc Traps, Nullifiers, Hyper enemy Alertness and with 2018. Kill Efficiency in ESO, Arbitration Drones and pretty much all of the Fortuna update. That's not to say you can't force a square peg into a circle but why? There's been topics on the value of CC frames in general and frankly it astounds me our damage output and survival has gotten to a point players discard the value of CC. "It slows down my kills" or similar and you know what, it's true.

"The New Direction of Warframe" rewards a technique where players just smash their stats against an enemy until it goes away.  Simple brute force out performs other strategies due to a blatant disrespect for frames that rely on controlling the battlefield or subterfuge in order to survive. Their kits and tactics are undermined by area denial, stealth tracking and immunity to the point it's becoming a chore to even bother playing these frames and in the end; You're not rewarded any differently. Yes, that special case situation I mentioned earlier doesn't exist unless you want to sit in a mission for hours and you're still not rewarded any differently than if you spent 20 minutes.

One or more things needs to happen:

• Stop this ability area denial and stealth tracking cheese which forces players into brute force techniques.
• Normalize eHP so that Stealth and Squishy frames can afford to make a mistake and therefor CC and Stealth can be brought into a reasonable performance.
• Fix the scaling in Arbitrations and endless missions in general. Introduce the Vallis Alert system to the rest of the game as a scaling multiplier with additional enemy abilities, mini bosses and effects. Give players quick access to real high level content where these glass cannon wonders once shined.

TLTR: DE, Please consider working on the foundation of the game itself. Scaling, eHP, enemy damage output, CC, Buffs, everything. It's gotten out of hand and it's obvious. These attempts at "difficulty" only serve to block out otherwise effective playstyles. This game needs a strong foundation to build on for future content.

[Chewarette]

It's not just a eHP problem. The problem with Fortuna (because it's here that it is the most noticeable) is that half of the units there are somehow immune to everything, for no reason.

Mag would be amazing against the Profit Taker, if Terrans units could actually be disarmed / stunned by her 3/4. They can't, and as she can't really tank anything, yeah she'll die quickly enough. Some mobs seem to even not care about her Bubble.

That's more a design philosophy problem. Caster Frames usually have some ways to survive without relying on HP/Armor/Heal and the likes. But as of today, this doesn't work (Terrans see through Stealth, can't be disarmed or stunned), so all that remains is... facetanking.

Edited January 17, 2019 by Chewarette

[kgabor]

We don't need squishy caster frames to be able to make a mistake through artificial crutches and more EHP,  that's bad design aswell.

Just make their abilities work and tone down the facetanking meta, normalizing EHP doesn't need to include any of the casters, they are the more balanced frames.

[Xzorn]

4 minutes ago, kgabor said:

We don't need squishy caster frames to be able to make a mistake through artificial crutches and more EHP,  that's bad design aswell.

Just make their abilities work and tone down the facetanking meta, normalizing EHP doesn't need to include any of the casters, they are the more balanced frames.

 

I don't have a problem with glass cannon one-shot wonder frames. I played Nyx / Loki for years. DE seems to.

They create content without regards to how it affects these frames.

Closing the gap between eHp was only one suggestion. Another was to simply stop doing this immunity gag reel content. Stop dropping Nullifiers on our heads, stop making enemies ignore critical survival effects for these frames and stop making enemies immune for no reason other than to present challenge.

[Elementalos]

This whole topic seems to presuppose that caster and stealth frames are at an inherent disadvantage compared to bruiser-y frames on the whole and I'm not sure I really buy that assertion. Of the five lowest armor frames in the game, Volt, Trinity and Banshee are all considered powerful frames and even the two that aren't (Nyx and Zephyr) are more considered weak as a result of the way their abilities interact with the game rather than because of their poor defense.

On the flip side, of the three frames that break 400 base armor only Nidus is considered particularly good and Valkyr and Atlas are generally perceived as poor choices by the community at large. Again, this determination pretty much comes down entirely to their abilities and what they provide for a team, not their inherent tankiness.

That's not to say Nidus wouldn't be nerfed if he lost a couple hundred points of armor or that Nyx wouldn't be better off if she had armor like Valkyr, but pretty much across the board "How good is this Warframe?" is a question of what their skills bring to the table. 

Meta defining frames are pretty much all over the place and so are the ones considered universally bad. 

 

It also seems to presuppose that facetanking damage is a normal strategy in harder content and I'm not sure that's really true either. The meta places a lot of value on frames that can keep their allies from tanking damage at all. Frames like Frost, Limbo and Gara are considered valuable to teams not because of their own inherent tankiness, but because of their ability to prevent the rest of the team from even having to worry about taking damage through their defensive countermeasures.

In fact one common complaint on other parts of the board is that higher difficulty missions hit a point where tankiness and damage reduction just stop mattering entirely because enemies have so much killing power.

[Xzorn]

7 minutes ago, Elementalos said:

This whole topic seems to presuppose that caster and stealth frames are at an inherent disadvantage compared to bruiser-y frames on the whole and I'm not sure I really buy that assertion. Of the five lowest armor frames in the game, Volt, Trinity and Banshee are all considered powerful frames and even the two that aren't (Nyx and Zephyr) are more considered weak as a result of the way their abilities interact with the game rather than because of their poor defense.

 

I mentioned 2018 content twice.

I'm not sure how else to specify what I'm talking about though I'm sure if trends continue it will also encompass 2019 content. I'm aware of how useful frames can or cannot be. I push them to the limits and create group comps that break every mold of community created "meta" concepts.

Thing is, none of that applies to 2018 content. You will die of old age before Arbitrations scales to a level worthy of group cooperation and synergy. ESO cares for nothing more than your kill rate and Fortuna completely ignores that some frames even exist in the game.

 

11 minutes ago, Elementalos said:

In fact one common complaint on other parts of the board is that higher difficulty missions hit a point where tankiness and damage reduction just stop mattering entirely because enemies have so much killing power.

 

This is a common misconception. You can make a group comp able to survive damage from level cap enemies.

Just using Trinity + Gara and an Ancient Healer will give Trinity 18,800,000 eHP and that's a 100% Abating Link build, not Tank and without Adaptation.

[PrincessKiryou]

Okay, this is epic.

[Loza03]

I don't agree with the idea that enemies should go on having no resistance to hard CC but agree with most of the rest, including most of the enemy immunities.

Starting with what I disagree with: A few enemies being able to ignore hard CC effects is healthy for the game because it prevents cheese - Limbo can easily do what you displayed in the video to a whole area by throwing down a cataclysm and stasis. Not so much in OV because Hyenas, Raknoids and Jackals will give him a rude reminder. I wouldn't mind more enemies that display similar properties, or even equivalent properties for AoE nuking abilities. Though even then, this should be consistent to these mini-boss like enemies. 

And now for what I do agree with.

Regular enemies being able to ignore core survivability like invisibility (with, again, maybe the exception of Raknoids. They ARE bosses) is a no-go. For example: Limbo's core survivability isn't stasis, it's the rift. Enemies shouldn't (and mercifully don't) ignore the rift unless you're dumb about letting them in. The same should apply to other frames.

I agree the Nully-drones are far too common. They didn't use to be, but of late they've been absolutely swarming. And unlike their regular counterparts (which I've gone on record several times saying I quite like), they automatically can bubble two or more and are tough to hit, immediately eliminating what it is I like about Nullifiers - the fact they have strong counterplay.

The EHP levels we've reached and the enemy scaling to counter it is uncontrollable - it needs to be brought down. Scaling needs fixing and the tank power creep needs to be addressed simultaneously. Casters don't need to be able to tank, but getting oneshot by a grunt from out of nowhere isn't fun.

I agree that CC has become less prevalent, though I've only been around a year so I can't identify it as readily. But it is clearly more focused for older Mission types - it shines in missions like Interception where players have divided attention. But even then, it's been phased out in mission types like defence.

[Steel_Rook]

6 hours ago, Chewarette said:

It's not just a eHP problem. The problem with Fortuna (because it's here that it is the most noticeable) is that half of the units there are somehow immune to everything, for no reason.

The Terra Corpus design really feels like a developer completely out of ideas for "challenge," so they just start breaking their own rules. Boss enemies as normal enemies, lots of status-resistant enemies, lots of health, armour and shields and mobility and so on. To me, that's a tacit admission that the only way for the game to provide "challenge" is to lean hard on the cheese. The Orb Heist is just the best example of this, where "tactics" come down to bringing a crap ton of EHP and 15 damage types, then the event sorts itself out. When game balance leans so heavily onto high enemy stats to counter cascading player multipliers, it has the effect of squeezing out everything bar the most optimal builds.

I remember back in I think 2005, when the MMO City of Heroes instituted the infamous "boss buff." Tankers and Scrapper players were easily soloing the supposedly team-only "boss" class enemy, so Cryptic Studios implemented the infamous Boss Buff. That... Essentially didn't affect Tankers or Scrappers, who faced only mildly more difficulty. However, it completely invalidated the ability to solo bosses for Blasters, Controllers and Defenders, who were already struggling with that in the first place. That particular change didn't last long before the inevitable revert hit, with an admission that... Maybe players CAN be allowed to solo in an MMO. It was the early 2000s, we were still in the EverQuest mentality.

Point being, this sort of balance is a dead-end street. Once you let damage resistance run away from you to the point that some players have hundreds of times the EHP of others, no balance is possible. The level of damage and cheap bullS#&$ necessary to actually kill an Inaros or a Rhino or a properly-built Nidus would be enough to damn near insta-kill a Volt or an Ash. That, in turn, pushes those guys into never taking damage by just instakilling all of the enemies... So then the enemies themselves start having to be made tankier and resistent to control effects, and we find ourselves in a game balance deadlock. We find ourselves fighting the Terra Corpus.

I'm not saying nerfs or buffs or anything is necessary. However, I'm saying that if Orb Vallis is what it takes to provide "challenge," that's indicative of fundamental flaws elsewhere in the system.

[Xzorn]

12 hours ago, Loza03 said:

I don't agree with the idea that enemies should go on having no resistance to hard CC but agree with most of the rest, including most of the enemy immunities.

Starting with what I disagree with: A few enemies being able to ignore hard CC effects is healthy for the game because it prevents cheese - Limbo can easily do what you displayed in the video to a whole area by throwing down a cataclysm and stasis. Not so much in OV because Hyenas, Raknoids and Jackals will give him a rude reminder. I wouldn't mind more enemies that display similar properties, or even equivalent properties for AoE nuking abilities. Though even then, this should be consistent to these mini-boss like enemies.

 

I agree but it's a minefield condition. The relationship between eHP, hard CC / Spell avoidance and enemy damage is so fragile that simply introducing one counter can be crippling. Each addition needs to be cross referenced between multiple enemies who will also be joining in fights to insure the counter is fair and can be overcome by the player.

I mentioned Arc Traps because they were one of the first counters against Stealth play. They would spawn on walls, ceilings, behind doors and everywhere in between and were one-shoting stealth players. Now of course they only spawn on the ground, are DoT effects and hardly act like a trap really. A very different spectrum on one object introduced to counter something because of how it was done.

The concept of bringing eHP closer together among frames along with enemy damage, CC potency ect, all plays together to allow more creative freedom without checking every possible outcome in an ever increasing library of conditions. The addition of Rolling Guard helped the squishy guys a lot. Before that mod Limbo was limited to a true %chance of failure against Nullifiers. You could mitigate that chance as the player but it was still a chance of death regardless of your actions which is something we really need to avoid.

 

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm not saying nerfs or buffs or anything is necessary. However, I'm saying that if Orb Vallis is what it takes to provide "challenge," that's indicative of fundamental flaws elsewhere in the system.

 

I'm right there with this theory. It's why I've preached Damage 3.0 so much in the past. DE said they were going to try "Enemies 2.0" instead but if this is enemies 2.0 it's not working. What we got with Damage 2.0 was enemy scaling, armor scaling, weak points, interaction of damage modifiers on armor and other changes in addition to just status effects and damage types. It was a huge change to the core of the game and I think the flaws of Damage 2.0 continue to plague the game from it's foundation through every content addition that gets stacked on top of it.

I actually played P1999 for 5 months a while back. The Raiding did not age well but the group aspect is still pretty strong. Not the leveling but delving deep into those parts of dungeons or the Planes where few players go and every player is taxed in their abilities to work together and pay attention else everyone dies. I feel it's something this game could take a tip from. Not in general but in certain parts. Everyone fights each other in Warframe which gets calls for nerfs instead of please for certain frame types to join.

EDIT: Come to think of it one of the reasons Raiding in that game didn't age well was majority of enemies in Raid zones were Immune to pretty much everything. Forcing players who otherwise had valued utility and CC into being batteries and buffers for Tank and DPS output. The Raids were pretty much players slamming their stats against a problem till it went away. Oddly familiar to recent Enemy design strategies.

Edited January 17, 2019 by Xzorn

[(XBOX)ZenithLord 42]

The most recent trend in enemy design and difficulty has been alarming, not to mention overtly silly, to say the least. The only way to counter a system that allows players to min/max to the extreme with specific gear is to set limits on how far a stat can be taken. (From a developer standpoint.) 

Power Efficiency comes to mind in how to effectively cap a stat and still make it viable. Stat limitations are also a way to provide better enemy encounters by allowing enemies to relate better to player damage output. It can also allow for damage numbers that scale both linearly and exponentially to work together instead of remaining diametrically opposed in regards to enemy encounters.

Enemy armor numbers actually making sense being one such example of a single exponential curve that only creates a rift in relationship to the player. Where as one level 30 Bombard is a threat, a level 100 Bombard is a completely different enemy. 

Forcing players to use gear that provides the maximum amount of numbers to bludgeon said enemies, instead of providing engaging gameplay, reflects poorly on the game and all parties involved. 

[Arcira]

I think it would be less of a problem if abilities scale better especially in case of damage and cc. Currently damage from abilities is either op or useless because it´s solely affected by power strength which increases the base damage by ~2-3 (maybe a bit more if you really want to max powerstrength and use Natural Talent for some reason).

On the other side you have weapons that deal more than 100 times the base damage fully modded due to properties like firerate, crit and riven in general. I know it´s quite a challange to create a balanced state if you have a more or less fixed difficulty level. But who says there can´t be lv100 or 200 profit-taker and kuva endurance runs ... endgame someone?

CC on the other hand lacks said scaling in my opinion. The current version work always no matter what. enemy level and strength don´t matter. Instead there are equally absolute counter like nullification or straight up immunity.

Spoiler

Things I´d like to see:

1.) Separating abilities from the warframe modding system. Essentilly abilities would be treated like weapons with there own modslots and capacity. I migth have state this here and there but whatever this would be a nice addition to the game because there could be new ability and augment next to weapon releases.

2.) More ability realed mods

3.) Scaling cc resistance for enemies and other things like increased resistance against the same kind of cc, thresholds, ..

4.) CC with scaling like strength, duration, threshold reduction, stack efficience, ...

5.) No absolute numbers like 100% or 0% but also %damage (corrosive, viral). A good example for the first one is the way armor works. It´s expressed by % damage reduction but you can never achieve 100%. The second one is a bit more complicated and I don´t want to go into deals here but if someone knows what status-strength and -threshold means it´s quite self-explaining.

6.) Overhaul to weapon dps especially to multishot and critical chance/multiplier.

 

Edited January 18, 2019 by Arcira

[Teridax68]

20 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The Terra Corpus design really feels like a developer completely out of ideas for "challenge," so they just start breaking their own rules. Boss enemies as normal enemies, lots of status-resistant enemies, lots of health, armour and shields and mobility and so on. To me, that's a tacit admission that the only way for the game to provide "challenge" is to lean hard on the cheese. The Orb Heist is just the best example of this, where "tactics" come down to bringing a crap ton of EHP and 15 damage types, then the event sorts itself out. When game balance leans so heavily onto high enemy stats to counter cascading player multipliers, it has the effect of squeezing out everything bar the most optimal builds.

I very much agree with this. Generally, the best enemies are enemies that reward the player for mastering the game's mechanics and gaining a deeper understanding of its rules. In some cases, an enemy might "break" the rules, usually a boss, but if that enemy is well-designed, it will deliberately subvert a rule in the game precisely so that the player can understand that rule's consequences, and demonstrate how well they understand the game by adapting accordingly. Warframe does the exact opposite so far, especially with the Vallis, where enemies "break the rules" mostly by just ignoring things players typically do to win, for no clear reason: aside from enemies having pretty much every armor and shield type under the sun, some enemies can track stealth, others ignore stuff like Mesa's Shatter Shield or Limbo's Rift (which may just be poor coding), and some enemies are immune to abilities for no particular reason (e.g. Kyta Raknoids). Add to this the excessive levels of enemy damage and crowd control, and the result is a confusing, frustrating mess that "challenges" the player by just making them die at random to stuff they have no real way of understanding, and forcing them to play a tanky frame with lots of damage.

If the game has to break its own rules just to challenge the player, particularly in this manner, then its rules simply do not allow for the player to be challenged, or are otherwise just not being respected overall. This, to me, is reason to not only overhaul enemies, so that they don't need to constantly deny the player agency in order to challenge them, but also to overhaul the way players scale and are currently balanced, so that there aren't players who are literally hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than each other (I don't even really see a reason for any player to be more powerful than any other, so much as just more experienced and knowledgeable as they play the game and unlock more customization options).

[ArcKnight9202]

After doing a round of ESO(I got a booster) for Focus, I was reminded of what a failure this mode is. A solo player like myself can be literally just as effective as an entire party so long as I am using the correct warframe. The mode's utter insistence on non-stop killing rather than anything resembling intellectual nuance is the real turnoff.

You have things in the game like Inaros. Don't get me wrong, I love my sandy mummy. But he can tank so much damage, buff his armor, heal people, and crowd control very effectively with his pocket sand and devour, it's hard to believe this is a real thing.

They had an opportunity with the larger orbs to put an impetus on smaller key targets requiring accuracy and/or timing instead of yet-another big HP sponge target(something akin to Kela's spinning target things). Unsurprisingly, it's Chroma to the rescue for the most blatantly obvious reasons. You would imagine a CC frame would be useful there but for many reasons outlined above, most players just don't bother.

I love the game, but it needs work, haha.

[BlachWolf]

On 2019-01-17 at 7:45 AM, Xzorn said:

Normalize eHP so that Stealth and Squishy frames can afford to make a mistake and therefor CC and Stealth can be brought into a reasonable performance. 

Well I can bring the other side, most caster frames do a lot more AoE dmg then tank frames. We dont need anothe Mesa who can tank and deal huge amounts of AoE dmg. There has to be a balancing point. Also stealth is by far better then tankiness, if you die as a loki or ash then I cant really help you, if you really dont wish to die you could always use {rolling guard}.

On 2019-01-17 at 7:45 AM, Xzorn said:

Fix the scaling in Arbitrations and endless missions in general. Introduce the Vallis Alert system to the rest of the game as a scaling multiplier with additional enemy abilities, mini bosses and effects. Give players quick access to real high level content where these glass cannon wonders once shined. 

If its increasing difficulty then I'm on board, this game needs some other form of difficulty than levels and debuffs.

On 2019-01-17 at 7:45 AM, Xzorn said:

CC and Stealth have been under constant pressure since the Void days. Nerfs, counter measures like Arc Traps, Nullifiers, Hyper enemy Alertness and with 2018. Kill Efficiency in ESO, Arbitration Drones and pretty much all of the Fortuna update. That's not to say you can't force a square peg into a circle but why? There's been topics on the value of CC frames in general and frankly it astounds me our damage output and survival has gotten to a point players discard the value of CC. "It slows down my kills" or similar and you know what, it's true.

It really comes down to your team comoposition, all frames that can go invisible are one of the best scaling ones out there (Ash, Ivara, Octavia especially, Loki though he's dying slowly). But yeah on the CC side i fully agree with you, CC alone is something no one now days wants, this is also the reason why frames like vauban are basically dying.

[BlachWolf]

On 2019-01-17 at 8:19 AM, Xzorn said:

Closing the gap between eHp was only one suggestion. Another was to simply stop doing this immunity gag reel content. Stop dropping Nullifiers on our heads, stop making enemies ignore critical survival effects for these frames and stop making enemies immune for no reason other than to present challenge.

Agree to you to an extend, normal units shouldnt be able to ignore CC and nullis should be reworked, but this game needs one thing and thats something challenging in a smart way, though as you said not in a form of debuffs immunities and levels.

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, Xzorn said:

I agree but it's a minefield condition. The relationship between eHP, hard CC / Spell avoidance and enemy damage is so fragile that simply introducing one counter can be crippling. Each addition needs to be cross referenced between multiple enemies who will also be joining in fights to insure the counter is fair and can be overcome by the player.

I'd argue the problem is with how EHP scales. The actual Warframe armour stat is done in a fairly clever way, where each point of armour adds a bonus 1/300th of your total health. Linear relationship, fairly predictable although it does over-reward a large health pool. The problem is two-fold. First of all, the system isn't balanced terribly well. The reason Inaros keeps being brought up is that his high health and high armour give him a lot of EHP to start with AND he has a lot of native healing on top of that. If Warframes like Atlas or Valkyr had any meaningful way to compete with that, then he wouldn't stand out as much. However, even with moderate slotting Atlas still has a substantially lower EHP even with full Rubble Armour AND substantially weaker, more expensive self-healing. And that's just an example. And then you have all of the "gimmicks" the game offers to survivability. The most recent Adaptation mod can boost one's EHP by a factor of 10 almost regardless of the Warframe, not to mention stuff like Arcane Guardian.

Because the game's given me something like 15 * 75% off discounts in about 150 days, I've been experimenting with items I couldn't get otherwise. An Inaros with very basic slotting (i.e. Vitality + Steel Fibre + Vigor) along with Adaptation and Arcane Guaridan is just unkillable. Unless I end up dealing damage to myself, the basic healing I get from Medi-Ray can out-heal just about any amount of incoming fire. And if it doesn't, I also have Devour and Scarab Swarm and Dessication + execution to fall back on. Inaros himself isn't "too tough," but stacked on top of all of these other overpowered tools, the result is far in excess of what the game actually has to offer. I'm not even using Umbral mods or Primed Vigor or any of the other sources of health or armour, and I'm still looking at an EHP of 267 520 most of the time. What kind of damage, exactly, does the game have to throw at me to even make a dent at that? And assuming it does throw that kind of damage at me, what the hell does a Mag or a Nova or a Volt do? You'd need to be doing 10s of thousands of damage per second to blast through that much health and damage resistance, which is multiple times the combined health pool of some warframes, not to mention poor Rhino's iron skin.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Inaros. But it's a little silly to consider that a character with 500 base hit points can at some point tank over a quarter of a million points of damage not even using an optimal build. That's an order of magnitude of 500 times the effective health, so how do you balance against that? How do you balance against 90% damage resistance after 90% damage resistance after 5000 health and not completely invalidate either every other Warframe or that amount of mitigation? And I'm not saying Inaros is the only one. Atlas can reach some staggering levels too, even if they're lower than Inaros, as can Rhino and Chroma under specific circumstances. They're all VASTLY tanky when done right, and far more so than the vast majority of Warframes, to the point that it's impossible to have enemies who simultaneously threaten a well-played Atlas and don't also one-shot a Limbo or a Loki the moment they step wrong.

I'm generally a fan of game design drafted after benchmarks. Pick an idea scenario of how long a "tank" should survive, how fast they should kill, how many enemies they should be able to engage with, etc. Then just work from there to pick base stats, and stick to them. What defines "a lot of EHP" is how much damage enemies are actually doing, and what defines "a lot of damage" is what can effectively damage "a lot of EHP." That's just a simplified example to illustrate that you want standards for enemies by which you set standards for players and you don't let the game run too far away from those standards. Warframe seems to be doing this backwards, with developers picking base stats and then figuring out what that means through testing or simulation. Oh, sure, let's throw in a mod that gives 90% damage resistance to armour and shields to virtually everybody. It'll work out fine! Does anyone here even know what kind of DPS enemies are throwing at us at any particular time? How much EHP would I need to survive for 30 seconds without healing? How much effective healing would I need to offset that? We know their health and armour so we know what benchmarks to build our weapons for, but is the reverse even considered anywehre? Or are we building for "as much EHP as possible, let God sort it out?"

 

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

If the game has to break its own rules just to challenge the player, particularly in this manner, then its rules simply do not allow for the player to be challenged, or are otherwise just not being respected overall. This, to me, is reason to not only overhaul enemies, so that they don't need to constantly deny the player agency in order to challenge them, but also to overhaul the way players scale and are currently balanced, so that there aren't players who are literally hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than each other (I don't even really see a reason for any player to be more powerful than any other, so much as just more experienced and knowledgeable as they play the game and unlock more customization options).

A game breaking its own rules is typically indicative of developers who've backed themselves into a corner and can't really challenge the players without moving the goal posts. Stuff like Eidolon fights, Orb Heists and the whole of the Terra Corpus tell me that the current iteration of the game simply lacks the mechanics necessary to challenge players to the degree DE wanted to, so they had to resort to removing tools from the player's toolbox. Best case scenario, this invalidates some people's builds and entire playstyles. Worst case scenario is the above, plus the changes still fail to actually challenge the high-end players they were aiming to challenge anyway. I cited 250K+ EHP on my Inaros above. Well guess what that does to the Terra Corpus? DE made a lot of them immune to my Dessication and Scarab Swarm and hit hard enough to blast through my basic 15K+ EHP, so I sourced one extra mod and one extra Arcane... And we're back to square one. I'm still facetanking most of what they have to throw at me, I'm still resisting their status effects, and I might have to Devour a person here or there instead of using my other abilities.

I wanted to be smart, I really did. I tried bringing a Magnetic weapon to Orb Vallis, but it didn't work. The Alloy Armoured Proxies heavily resist Magnetic. I tried bringing a Rhino to hopefully tank the status effects, but his Iron Skin got burned out too fast. In the end, I gave up, bushed my Inaros to unkillable levels, brought a Radiation-built ultra-high-damage Opticore and entirely ignored whatever design the Terra Corpus might have had. And the dumb thing is that if the game hadn't let me do that, I'd have probably walked away from Fortuna entirely. Because there is no good way, no smart way, no "proper" way to fight these guys. Not like there is for the Grenier, the Infested or the regular Corpus. At least, I haven't been able to find any way that gives me a tangible advantage. At that point, why bother trying to be clever? Why not just break the system and ignore its balance entirely?

[Xzorn]

12 hours ago, Arcira said:

I think it would be less of a problem if abilities scale better especially in case of damage and cc. Currently damage from abilities is either op or useless because it´s solely affected by power strength which increases the base damage by ~2-3 (maybe a bit more if you really want to max powerstrength and use Natural Talent for some reason).

On the other side you have weapons that deal more than 100 times the base damage fully modded due to properties like firerate, crit and riven in general. I know it´s quite a challange to create a balanced state if you have a more or less fixed difficulty level. But who says there can´t be lv100 or 200 profit-taker and kuva endurance runs ... endgame someone?

CC on the other hand lacks said scaling in my opinion. The current version work always no matter what. enemy level and strength don´t matter. Instead there are equally absolute counter like nullification or straight up immunity.

 

There is logic in what I think you're trying to say and sorry if I get this wrong but basically anything that scales forever undermines the entire purpose of having a level based system for enemies to combat?

I've been outspoken about single layer damage concepts that scale forever. CC / Spell Avoidance has similar qualities, even being single layer but the risks also increase rather quickly till one mistake means death. Until recently Warframe has kept CC / Spell Avoidance in check by putting the player in conditions that must be overcome. Conditions which compound with level and the number of enemies thereby further increasing the chance of failure but when enemies ignore these effects completely or are designed in a manor that's unfair it only serves to choke these tactics from the game entirely.

Far as both damage and mitigation; we can hit the level cap of 9,999 but it generally requires multi-layer means with abilities, specters and other players. Oh and way more time than most players are willing to put in these days so I don't feel under current conditions there's a reason to ignore their own rules to create challenge and cheat CC / Spell Avoidance when there cannot be any difficult in a well designed group anyways.

I understand why the Devs don't want to do a core mechanics ie Damage 3.0 rework. It's a mess and will take time but what they're doing now isn't working either.

[Xzorn]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

-snip-

 

Armor in itself has a good design in that it's flawed. Damage types like Puncture or Toxic heavily negate armor and produce greater amount of damage to a frame that cannot be fully ignored. This is essentially how proper telegraphed attacks to players can be made though it's not utilized in this manner sadly. It's mostly just a random occurrence, esp with Bleed procs. The stacking of mitigation sources is where things quickly get out of control.

You can take that same Inaros, add a Trinity, a Gara and an Ancient Healer and you're now in the millions for eHP. What challenges that?

The flaw in design and the bite size concept so far is that we're not taking advantage of scaling to combat Power Creep we've endured over the years and the scaling is wonky to say the least. More eHP more Damage but also more time to get to a point where the differences matter. As I mentioned in my OP; there's a wonderful spot in the game where these Glass Cannon wonders can shine bright but no one wants to sit in a mission for 2 hour Solo or even longer in groups and rightfully so. If DE is intent on restricting our access to higher levels then something needs to be done because these frames that don't rely on eHP but are otherwise very powerful don't have a place in the content of 2018.

 

6 hours ago, BlachWolf said:

Well I can bring the other side, most caster frames do a lot more AoE dmg then tank frames. We dont need anothe Mesa who can tank and deal huge amounts of AoE dmg. There has to be a balancing point. Also stealth is by far better then tankiness, if you die as a loki or ash then I cant really help you, if you really dont wish to die you could always use {rolling guard}.

 

I don't have a problem surviving as a squishy frame in content created before 2018. The point of the comparison is these frames are being neglected by outright cheating the core rule book of the game and when they make so many exception to the rule type enemies then they push these tactics out of the game and create meta conditions.

My "About Me" section will show Volt lvl 300 MOT, Octavia lvl 1,300 MOT videos both Solo.

These squishy frames are strong in their own right. Just not anything made in 2018 and very possibly in the future. I've mentioned in other topics that "caster" frames can generally accomplish feats beyond something a tank can hope to do on their own in exchange they cannot make a mistake.... but where? Where is this a worthwhile exchange?

[Arcira]

3 hours ago, Xzorn said:

There is logic in what I think you're trying to say and sorry if I get this wrong but basically anything that scales forever undermines the entire purpose of having a level based system for enemies to combat?

It´s quite difficult to discribe but I´ll try my best.

Warframes difficulty is devided into level based and "fixed" currently. In the Past there was nothing like nullifier only enemies that become more and more difficult the longer you run a mission. Now if we take eidolon runs as an example there is only one difficulty but in contrast a wide variety on player with different efficient gear. Like I said weapons damage can be more than 100 but also only 50 times higher depending on your progression (rivens for example). So what player percive as difficult or easy is quite dependend on the re progression and there gear. Some player kill Profit-taker in like 1min and demand more challange while others are challanged already.

What I want to say is there should be different difficulty levels similar to the endurace runs people did back in void times. Some did 40 wave some 100 depending on there efficiency and progression. There was one problem though. CC doesn´t scale so essentially there isn´t any limitaion in how far you can go with a good setup.

Because of that we got nullification effects. But they don´t reduce the cc they neutralize it. Weapon damage has it´s problems with scaling and balance but there is nothing that negates there purpose and this should be the case for abilites as well. Nonetheless damage and health becomes less and less effective against higher level enemies the same thing need to be applied to cc. And that´s why cc-thresholds and -strength should be implemented. It´s different to immunities because casting a cc on an enemy is nerver wasted istead you just need several instances of a spell to proc the effect just as you need more and more damage to kill scaling enemies.

In summary: I´m fine with endless scaling ehp and damage as long as cc and abilities affect all enemies and scale as well. This would create challange and more sense of progression. Some things should be adjusted though. Almost 1.000.000 (not kidding) ehp on a certain warframe migth be a little bit over the top currently. And of cause armor scaling and the resulting ridiculous efficiency of corrosive damage/corrosive projection.

3 hours ago, Xzorn said:

CC / Spell Avoidance has similar qualities, even being single layer but the risks also increase rather quickly till one mistake means death. Until recently Warframe has kept CC / Spell Avoidance in check by putting the player in conditions that must be overcome. Conditions which compound with level and the number of enemies thereby further increasing the chance of failure but when enemies ignore these effects completely or are designed in a manor that's unfair it only serves to choke these tactics from the game entirely.

If Spell Avoidance means something like a scaling % chance to ignore the effect of cc this would work too, but I´m not a big fan of rng in general. I prefer predictable solutions.

3 hours ago, Xzorn said:

Far as both damage and mitigation; we can hit the level cap of 9,999 but it generally requires multi-layer means with abilities, specters and other players. Oh and way more time than most players are willing to put in these days so I don't feel under current conditions there's a reason to ignore their own rules to create challenge and cheat CC / Spell Avoidance when there cannot be any difficult in a well designed group anyways.

And that´s why I think ability scaling should be more present. This is only possible because you have access to "absolute abilities". I think DE is a bit affraid of bringing back endurance runs and scaling rewards just because of this. Aside from cc there should be a look at other aspects of the game as well like invisibility for example. Although I´m not sure how this one should get addressed.

Edited January 19, 2019 by Arcira

[Xzorn]

2 hours ago, Arcira said:

-snip-

 

Yea CC / Spell Avoidance is very binary. 1 you live; 0 you die.

I agree that 100% counters are a bit rigid but that's also where eHP comes into play as being problematic for reducing their effectiveness by some means. Diminishing Returns. Natural Resistance, ect. To reel in CC and Spell Avoidance in general while avoiding absolute counter effects I feel we would have no choice but the bring frame eHP closer together. Casters taking 3 hits to tanks taking 300 hits isn't even close to what we have now and that itself seems extreme. Loki with 3k eHP or less and Trinity with 188k.

By Spell Avoidance I'm mostly bunching up all tactics that aren't CC / Stealth but can avoid or negate damage. Volt's Shield is an example. It 100% protects players regardless of damage done to it. It's full proof protection long as the player doesn't make a mistake. It goes forever, much like CC and Invisibility do.

There are still Endurance runners in the game. We're a dying breed but there's still a community. The ever increasing time investment is what's slowly killing the endless mission community. Maybe this difficulty slider they spoke of in the Devstream will address that. They also thankfully acknowledged there's isn't a one step solution to creating difficult for players with such a variety of play styles, frames and weapons. The simplest hope I have is just giving us quicker access to parts of the game these things are utilized.

They probably won't be able to stop player cheese tactics but as a community we can at least give +0 brownie points when we see it. No one gave any credit to Naramon - Shadowstep runs nor should they but the problem with properly rewarding players is still persistent due to this and that's what drives a lot of players.

[(PSN)Onder6099]

F2P is, imho, general WF problem. You must permanently monitor the video market and in game datamines to attract players as much as possible. What I see in these days it’s: Solo player with Tank and high Dps trying to get everything in split second absolutely ignoring fact that, while he is able to do the content Solo, for me, after I made a squad, the content is absolutely trivial. 

[Andele3025]

On 2019-01-17 at 7:54 AM, Chewarette said:

It's not just a eHP problem. The problem with Fortuna (because it's here that it is the most noticeable) is that half of the units there are somehow immune to everything, for no reason.

This.
EHP differences tend to be varied based on how effective the frame kit is to stop the enemy from being to kill you in the first place (on most frames at least, ember - due to effective range, mirage - due to reliance on shadows for 2 blind and technically saryn, mag and khora due to just needing to cast their medium animation cc or kill skill before the enemy can attack). But if your kit doesnt work for no real reason (or behaves intentionally stupid and out of line for one enemy or type of enemies), its cheap. Hell Nully bubbles (which i still think should disable and not remove the effects of powers while you are in them (or degrade them fast for some things like it already does) are at least visually distinct, damage hitbox for them is bigger than the null field and even got the annoyingly buggy to hit drone for those that can bother instead of just slashing or shooting at it for half a second longer.

[ArcKnight9202]

They could have tackled endless scaling in more creative ways rather than just let it go and have the players sort it out.

An idea I had(though it isn't without its own flaws), is that players can stay in a mission as long as they like, but as enemies scale up, they start resisting more damage and CC effects would have diminishing effects. These could be set to different break points so the enemies could start to feel more threatening while the CC still works very effectively. At least until that starts to drop off as well.

How they could handle the invisibility, I don't know. Maybe make those Grineer dogs more common and have them actively hunt down invisible Tenno? Corpus heat sensor Osprey? There are many creative things they could do.

Just leaving it as a set-it and forget-it approach with such basic enemy scaling doesn't really reward anyone. It's so boring, too. This is why I think the arbitrations are such failures.

As far as tackling the EHP scaling issues: I always thought mods/whatever should have multiplicative as well as additive properties based on whatever value the warframe is sporting. For example: Steel Fiber offers 100% armor or +100 armor if it's below 100 already(random numbers for simplicity). This way all mods are at least somewhat beneficial to everyone. Requiring very rare arcanes just to boost the armor on squishy frames is just ridiculous. They obviously have to find a way to handle the outrageous stacking, too.

Oh, I also want to add just how not-fun certain sortie modifiers are. Toxic or Corrosive, being the most egregious, are so deadly to warframes that it's like being shot with the Golden Gun repeatedly. All warframes have armor and this gives Corrosive an exorbitant damage bonus on extremely low-armor frames. This, ironically, makes having armor a hindrance! What is that?! Toxic just goes right past shields, too. Hmm, I wonder what the best way to deal with these situations is.......?

[Steel_Rook]

Someone mentioned a "difficulty slider." I feel that would solve a lot of issues in this game, and not just "challenge" related. Personally, my issue is that - with my current gear - I'm restricted to only a few planets and tilesets I can play with without the game becoming absolutely trivial. I'm almost never going to bother going back to Earth or Mars or Ceres, despite (some of) those having absolutely magnificent tilesets and enemy selection. Worse, I can't even do the majority of the Alerts because only one of them is going to be 30+. Now imagine if I could push a slider and set that 5-10 alert on Mars up to 40-45. I'd run that in a heartbeat AND add a tremendous amount of variety to the enemies and locations I come up against. Yes, I'm sure people might want to push that to 100-150 and all the more power to them. I can't stand the way the game's mechanics utterly break down at that level, but hey - to each his own.

And who knows. Maybe if people had a way to face bizarrely high-level enemies on demand, the complaints that the game is too easy which typically push new development into "absolute cheese" territory might subside a little. Who know.