The Scaling Renaissance

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 1, 2019

Before anything else is said, Warframe is an excellent game. Its story, variety, and gameplay put most paid games to shame. It is something that game companies should strive to recreate. That said, it has a glaring flaw in regards to both scaling and challenge: Its damage numbers. For lack of better words, they are simply too high for their own good. This in turn creates a power vacuum that compounds on itself every time a new "endgame" is released.

For the basis of this argument, and all further arguments in relation, we need a base of reference for the math. This base shall be Excalibur; an all-rounder that's been around since the beginning. The control:

Excalibur: level 0 (level 30)
- Health: 100 (300)
- Shield: 100 (300)
- Armor: 225
- Total Effective Health: 275 (825) ^{[Shield + (nominal health x Dmg reduction)]}
  - *For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that enhancement mods are either limited or reserved for higher levels.

Here we see a simple pattern. From level 0 to 30, Excalibur's defenses essentially triple. Now we must beg the question: Do enemies do the same? We shall use the basic Grineer Lancer as reference:

Grineer Lancer: level 1 (level 30)
- Health: 100 (1,361.5)
- Armor: 100 (281.2)
- TEH: 133.33 (2,637.7)

As we can see, a level 0 Excalibur and a level 1 Lancer are not too different. They have the same base health, but Excalibur has the added advantage of better armor and shielding; roughly having double the TEH of the Lancer.. Jump to level 30, and the similarities lose all cohesion. The lancer has over 13 times more health now and almost triple the armor. His TEH is nearly 20 times the base amount; while Excalibur has only tripled.

Now we can throw in mods to see if this discrepancy can be evened out. Vitality and Redirection both add +440% more value to their respective stats, while Steel Fiber adds +110% armor. That said, these scale only with the base 0 health. Using this knowledge, lets see if Excalibur can catch up:

Modded Excalibur: level 0 (30)
- Health 540 (740)
- Shield 540 (740)
- Armor: 472.5
- TEH: 1,930.5 (2,645.5)

Surprisingly, Excalibur just inches ahead of the level 30 Lancer with full mods, albeit still out of cohesion. But now another problem arises: While Excalibur has hit its health cap, the Lancer has only begun to scale (at an EXPONENTIAL rate no less). This is the root of Warframe's sorrows. There is no consistency between the playable Warframes and the enemies they face. It's like they are from two totally different realities. If only they we on similar scales, then all other factors such as weapon scaling and enemy behavior could more effectively mesh together.

To better explain this hypothetical change, here is a Grineer Lancer using Excalibur's scaling mechanics:

Lancer: level 1 (level 30)
- Health: 100 (300)
- Armor: 100
- TEH: 133.33 (400)

Now we have coherency. The armor is higher than before, but the TEH is much more in line. Now there is a solid foundation for everything else to build up. Enemy units can be adjusted to follow this scale (adding or losing base stats in regard to rank/role). Weapons now have a viable reference to balance their numbers around. Warframe abilities now have a viable reference.

Should players desire a challenge, keep in mind linear scaling can be scary as well:

Lancer level 30 (50) (100)
- Health: 300 (500) (1000)
- Armor: 100
- TEH: 400 (667) (1,333)

Math is neat that way. You clean up the starting numbers, and then everything else falls neatly into place. Should DE accept this ideal, the woes of powercreep may be finally culled.

Thoughts?

EDIT: After careful consideration, it has been decided that armor values should remain largely static to each enemy type _{(Prior scaling data updated)}. This is largely due to the fact that excessive armor scaling is a major culprit in monopolizing build types (Corrosive/Slash builds). This creates a new point of discussion: Should enemies retain the same (or similar) linear health scaling, while retaining the static armor, or should the linear scale be steeper to compensate? Please note: While the armor values would be static, they would still be larger or smaller depending on the unit. A Butcher may only have a measly 50, but a Bombard may have a whopping 600.

Edited February 4, 2019 by (XB1)alchemPyro
New point of topic

Teridax68 · February 1, 2019

The math and intent are good, but I feel the analysis also goes about the problem backwards: enemies scale exponentially in effective health because our damage scales to ludicrous levels. Our weapons can be fully kitted out with mods whose damage increase scale multiplicatively off of each other: base damage mods multiply base damage, elemental damage mods multiply the resulting total damage, which is also multiplied by multishot, then multiplied by crit chance, then multiplied by crit damage, to say nothing of the damage increases brought about by status effects like Corrosive or Viral. If we want to equalize enemy effective health numbers with our own, and prevent them from scaling exponentially, we first need to deflate the exponential scaling on our own weapons. Example:

Remove base damage and multishot mods, both of which are mandatory and add no gameplay, only more power.
Rework elemental damage mods to convert existing damage to a certain element, rather than add damage.
Rework crit away from a random damage chance, and instead as a cover-all damage multiplier on headshots, finishers, and more generally damage against enemies that are unalerted or stunned in some form. Crit would become more situational, rather than a general damage increase.
Rework status chance in some form to operate less on permanent damage multipliers, and not add raw damage based purely off of the weapon's own damage. Would probably take some time, and could operate alongside an equalization of enemy health.

With this more solid foundation, enemies could be made to scale in a much more tame manner, as suggested in the OP, because weapon modding wouldn't cause weapons to deal over a hundred times their base damage. Additionally, though, if we're making enemies scale like warframes, armor should not scale with level: armor scaling is what causes armored enemies to scale quadratically, on top of their exponential stat scaling, which turns them into bullet sponges far quicker than any other type, and to my knowledge only one frame has their armor scale with level (Nidus, though his stat gains are unique all around). With this implemented, ideally enemies should not only avoid drastically differing in health from the player, but as a result should also allow self-damage mechanics to function a lot better: currently, Nyx suffers still because turning enemy damage against itself isn't actually that good, and more generally mechanics that turn enemies into minions, or reflect damage back at enemies, are usually awful, because enemies have orders of magnitude more health than they have damage. Reducing or eliminating this gap would allow those abilities and frames to become truly functional, without having to rely on band-aids like the ones Nyx received to have some sort of impact.

LightZodiac · February 1, 2019

38 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Example:

Remove base damage and multishot mods, both of which are mandatory and add no gameplay, only more power.

Rework elemental damage mods to convert existing damage to a certain element, rather than add damage.

Rework crit away from a random damage chance, and instead as a cover-all damage multiplier on headshots, finishers, and more generally damage against enemies that are unalerted or stunned in some form. Crit would become more situational, rather than a general damage increase.

Rework status chance in some form to operate less on permanent damage multipliers, and not add raw damage based purely off of the weapon's own damage. Would probably take some time, and could operate alongside an equalization of enemy health.

I'd say keep the base damage mods because if enemies EHP or TEH increases in linear fashion, then you pretty much want gun damage to increase in linear fashion as well. So you have base weapon which deals OK damage against lvl1 enemies, but you need to invest endo/credits into Serration to keep up as you face higher level enemies. Otherwise either beginner gets a gun which can annihilate everything with one bullet, and things just get harder for him, or we separate weapons into beginner, mid, late game in which case a lot of weapons are pretty much wasted.

Guns should be able to equip only one base damage mod, so you could equip Serration with .eg +200% damage or Heavy Caliber with .eg +250% damage -Accuracy, not both of them at the same time. (arbitrary numbers)

All other mods should not simply add to the raw damage of the weapon. 100% multishot would add double bullets, but cut the damage of individual bullet by half, so more consistency, greater proc/second, but same damage output. Elemental mods convert % of damage into elemental damage type, physical mods convert % of damage into damage type. And yeah rework the elemental damages and elemental resistances so that if certain status adds to the raw damage it does have a downside. Add a whole bunch of +/- mods such as +mag size / -reload speed, +fire rate / -accuracy... etc.

So the whole weapon modding becomes less of trying to squeeze as much damage from the gun and more about modding a weapon to personal preference.

Edited February 1, 2019 by LightZodiac

Teridax68 · February 1, 2019

14 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

I'd say keep the base damage mods because if enemies EHP or TEH increases in linear fashion, then you pretty much want gun damage to increase in linear fashion as well. So you have base weapon which deals OK damage against lvl1 enemies, but you need to invest endo/credits into Serration to keep up as you face higher level enemies. Otherwise either beginner gets a gun which can annihilate everything with one bullet, and things just get harder for him, or we separate weapons into beginner, mid, late game in which case a lot of weapons are pretty much wasted.

Guns should be able to equip only one base damage mod, so you could equip Serration with .eg +200% damage or Heavy Caliber with .eg +250% damage -Accuracy, not both of them at the same time. (arbitrary numbers)

All other mods should not simply add to the raw damage of the weapon. 100% multishot would add double bullets, but cut the damage of individual bullet by half, so more consistency, greater proc/second, but same damage output. Elemental mods convert % of damage into elemental damage type, physical mods convert % of damage into damage type. And yeah rework the elemental damages and elemental resistances so that if certain status adds to the raw damage it does have a downside. Add a whole bunch of +/- mods such as +mag size / -reload speed, +fire rate / -accuracy... etc.

So the whole weapon modding becomes less of trying to squeeze as much damage from the gun and more about modding a weapon to personal preference.

I can agree with modding weapons for personal preference, but with this as well, I feel the issue can be phrased the opposite way: if gun damage doesn't increase by any major amount, why do we even need enemies to increase in health in the first place? The entire purpose of scaling enemies is to match up to, then exceed our own damage, yet if our modding changes to be about genuinely customizing our weapons, instead of simply piling on more and more damage, then that sort of scaling formula ceases to function, at least with the vast rifts in enemy health that we have now.

LightZodiac · February 1, 2019

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I can agree with modding weapons for personal preference, but with this as well, I feel the issue can be phrased the opposite way: if gun damage doesn't increase by any major amount, why do we even need enemies to increase in health in the first place? The entire purpose of scaling enemies is to match up to, then exceed our own damage, yet if our modding changes to be about genuinely customizing our weapons, instead of simply piling on more and more damage, then that sort of scaling formula ceases to function, at least with the vast rifts in enemy health that we have now.

Well I think that facing stronger and stronger enemies and leveling our gear to pew-pew those enemies is an integral part of the game, it's a "looter shooter" kind of a game, if I don't need to increase in "power" then there is really no reason to loot and farm stuff... I could just rush through the starchart.

But at the same time I also firmly believe that our enemies damage and ehp, as well as our own ehp weapon and abilities damage should scale in a more linear and less steep fashion.

More linear because when I started playing Warframe the game felt absolutely amazing, it took some time to gun down the enemies, and pretty much every weapon was viable to gunning/slashing/smashing/ them down. One moment I was running around with a rather large warhammer and a bow, in the next mission I was running around with some claw weapons and a grenade launcher. I could nuke all mobs around me with my abilities, yet I couldn't nuke those heavy units such as Nox/Bombard/Bursa. However when I reached the "endgame" the whole experience became much much worse. A lot of weapons are unviable at higher levels, other weapons clear whole rooms or kill Bombards in like a second, at the same time damaging abilities do not even tickle the said bombards... this happens because all values mentioned above scale at wildly different curves.
The only thing that kept me in this game was the fact that I artificially nerf myself in most of the game content, but even then I get matches with players who just nuke everything or completely cheeze the mission, so my gameplay turns into walk from start to A, then wait then extract.

Less steep because, well I have a Tiberon Prime with a riven which deals +100 times more damage then unmodded Tiberon and like +700 times as much damage as MK-1 Braton, and that's without any mod which would affect the performance negatively (no rate of fire mods, the gun behaves the same), if we build just for DPS my weapon will easily deal several times a s much damage as weapon from casual gamer who didn't spent a ton of time learning the game mechanics. But the things get worse because I will build my weapon to strip armor or go around it by .eg using Hunter Munitions, or I will play in a team with 4 Corrosive Projections which strip all armor and casual player may use an build which has to deal +1.000.000 damage against level100 Bombard.

The big problem this game has is making content which casual players do not find too hard, and min-maxers do not find to easy, and lowering the difference between them as weal as dealing with some really OP mechanics is a step in the right direction.

Teridax68 · February 1, 2019

I think there's a fundamental opposition between this:

33 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

Well I think that facing stronger and stronger enemies and leveling our gear to pew-pew those enemies is an integral part of the game, it's a "looter shooter" kind of a game, if I don't need to increase in "power" then there is really no reason to loot and farm stuff... I could just rush through the starchart.

And this:

33 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

But at the same time I also firmly believe that our enemies damage and ehp, as well as our own ehp weapon and abilities damage should scale in a more linear and less steep fashion.

More linear because when I started playing Warframe the game felt absolutely amazing, it took some time to gun down the enemies, and pretty much every weapon was viable to gunning/slashing/smashing/ them down. One moment I was running around with a rather large warhammer and a bow, in the next mission I was running around with some claw weapons and a grenade launcher. I could nuke all mobs around me with my abilities, yet I couldn't nuke those heavy units such as Nox/Bombard/Bursa. However when I reached the "endgame" the whole experience became much much worse. A lot of weapons are unviable at higher levels, other weapons clear whole rooms or kill Bombards in like a second, at the same time damaging abilities do not even tickle the said bombards... this happens because all values mentioned above scale at wildly different curves.
The only thing that kept me in this game was the fact that I artificially nerf myself in most of the game content, but even then I get matches with players who just nuke everything or completely cheeze the mission, so my gameplay turns into walk from start to A, then wait then extract.

Less steep because, well I have a Tiberon Prime with a riven which deals +100 times more damage then unmodded Tiberon and like +700 times as much damage as MK-1 Braton, and that's without any mod which would affect the performance negatively (no rate of fire mods, the gun behaves the same), if we build just for DPS my weapon will easily deal several times a s much damage as weapon from casual gamer who didn't spent a ton of time learning the game mechanics. But the things get worse because I will build my weapon to strip armor or go around it by .eg using Hunter Munitions, or I will play in a team with 4 Corrosive Projections which strip all armor and casual player may use an build which has to deal +1.000.000 damage against level100 Bombard.

The big problem this game has is making content which casual players do not find too hard, and min-maxers do not find to easy, and lowering the difference between them as weal as dealing with some really OP mechanics is a step in the right direction.

On one hand, there's this running notion that, because Warframe is a "looter shooter" game, it needs to make players more powerful over time, and thus enemies as well, yet this kind of scaling is precisely what causes the game's balance to go out of whack: weapons and frames that felt fun and balanced at the start of the game suddenly either turn into pea-shooters, or one-shot high-level enemies. Enemies that are themselves fun to fight at some level either become so ineffective they may as well not exist, or so overpowered that they become outright frustrating to deal with. It is not a stable foundation, which is why I think we need to move away from the current model of difficulty scaling, and onto some alternative.

For starters, I don't think progression in Warframe is actually about getting more powerful: sure, mods like Serration and Vitality give more power, but the player caps out on those mods very early on, way before they get to the end of the Star Chart, and in-between there are a whole lot of quests and things to do. Rather, I think progression in Warframe is about unlocking more options, i.e. getting weapons, mods and frames that offer new gameplay, rather than just power. Moreover, difficulty in the game should test the player on their mastery of the game's systems and mechanics, rather than just impose gear checks: if a mission is meant to be more difficult, it should probably test the player more on their ability to shoot, melee, use abilities intelligently, parkour, or evade damage, and not just ramp up enemy stats, which I think actually goes against the game's core themes (the player is meant to be the strongest thing in the room, so it breaks the fantasy to have standard enemies become more powerful than our warframes). In this respect, it may be better to scale the mission objective, i.e. making it more difficult to complete in some way or another (e.g. by making enemies cap towers quicker in Interception, increasing Life Support drain in Survival, etc.), rather than enemies. With this, enemies and players could be balanced along some stable point of reference, which would allow combat to be consistent and fun at all times.

Steel_Rook · February 1, 2019

12 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Total Effective Health: 275 (825) ^{[Shield + (nominal health x Dmg reduction)]}

Just out of curiosity, why would list that as the formula by which you calculate total effective health? Your numbers are correct, but that's not how you calculate effective health even remotely. If you wanted to set up mathematical ground rules, why not set up the actual functions you're using to derive cited values?

12 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

To better explain this hypothetical change, here is a Grineer Lancer using Excalibur's scaling mechanics:

What IS this hypothetical change, though? I don't see a thesis here, just a single stat tweak to one enemy at one level. What goals are you trying to achieve?

26 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

There's this running notion that, because Warframe is a "looter shooter" game, it needs to make players more powerful over time.

That's not inherent in the game's theme as a looter-shooter, but rather its genre as an offshoot RPG. Not only is stat progression a traditional aspect of those, it's also used to alter players' relationship with their enemies. Generally speaking, low-level characters are scaled much more favourably against their enemies because they're typically not using any powerful enhancements - high-rank mods, high-level Warframes, powerful gear items, etc. As players progress in level and fight stronger enemies, scaling progressively shifts towards enemies so as to offset the increase in player power from levelling up and earning better "stuff," as well as to up the difficulty overall. The issue with Warframe is how far that scaling goes, not its presence altogether.

While, yes, you can offer purely sideways progression, that's not going to keep players grinding a F2P title long-term, in my experience. It'll keep SOME, chiefly those with a collector mentality, but it has next to no impact on someone like myself who enjoys routine. Put it like that - ever since I got my Inaros, I've had absolutely no desire to try any other Warframes. And while I HAVE experimented with some of them, I do this mostly for MR fodder before going back to what I actually like. Neither Garuda nor Baruk have held any weight for me because I already have the Warframe I like.

If memory serves, we covered some of that elsewhere on the forums already 🙂 so I'll leave it at that. I'm in general agreement that narrowing the performance gap between more pedestrian builds and hyper-optimised builds is necessary to avoid needing enemy armour to scale into absurdity, just up to a point.

Xzorn · February 1, 2019

For starters Excal Umbra has around 30k Frontal eHP before Adaptation. He also has Blind.

Enemies don't have these features and this is why CC is important to the game in terms of scaling. Especially specialized CC frames. You also aren't considering the buff stacking that takes place in Warframe. That same Excal Umbra playing with Trinity and Gara standing next to an Ancient Healer suddenly has 12,000,000 eHP with instant healing. Lets throw a Banshee as our 4th group mate with Excal's Blind in effect and he's now doing +960,000% Damage. Gara could throw in on that too but why bother.

Enemies scaling exponentially was intended to counter these layering group buff effects in small gains but inevitable loss to combat Power Creep but they've failed to do so. If anything enemies don't scale harsh enough to force a group into cooperating and putting thought into their group compositions. You can solve either problem with CC or layering buffs and hit the level cap of 9,999. The entire scaling scheme has been reduced to a simple factor of Time the player is willing to invest.

The only way to challenge a Solo player and a pre-made Group within the same game is a total Damage system rework which involves damage types, scaling, buff stacking, status types, armor, interaction with armor, enemy weak points, enemy damage, ect, ect. A total Core system revamp. Nothing else will work.

Teridax68 · February 1, 2019

39 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

That's not inherent in the game's theme as a looter-shooter, but rather its genre as an offshoot RPG. Not only is stat progression a traditional aspect of those, it's also used to alter players' relationship with their enemies. Generally speaking, low-level characters are scaled much more favourably against their enemies because they're typically not using any powerful enhancements - high-rank mods, high-level Warframes, powerful gear items, etc. As players progress in level and fight stronger enemies, scaling progressively shifts towards enemies so as to offset the increase in player power from levelling up and earning better "stuff," as well as to up the difficulty overall. The issue with Warframe is how far that scaling goes, not its presence altogether.

See, that's where I think there's something interesting to be had, but it's being masked by power progression: you are right that players start out generalized, and then move onto more specialized builds as they choose where to put their power gains, relative to enemies' largely generic increases in stats. That I think is what's at the core of many RPGs, more so even than power progression. Vertical power, in this respect, I feel is accessory to this, as well as a relic from an era of older RPGs, including pen-and-paper RPGs, where incrementing some number was obviously far simpler to do than introducing an entirely new mechanic each time. In this respect, while I dislike increases in vertical power, I think it is absolutely essential to any game with customization to let the player specialize, and give themselves defined strengths and weaknesses.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is the real progression to essentially any game with power increases: in multiplayer games like Warframe, World of Warcraft, or Dota, but also singleplayer games like Skyrim, Half-Life, Doom, when the player progresses, they may gain some power, but that power generally comes from an increase in the game's complexity: when the game gives the player a new ability, an extra weapon, etc., they are giving the player a new tool that they are then expected to learn and master, and enemies themselves tend to become tougher and more complex to match this. Effectively, power progression in this context exists to ease the player into the full game experience, when the full game experience would likely be way too complex for a new player to handle. Power progression is also frequently illusory, because in games that can control their difficulty to match the player, particularly in singleplayer games, increases in the player's power are countered by increases to the enemy's power, thereby preventing the game from becoming easier over time (and usually making them progressively harder instead).

In the case where a game doesn't match its difficulty to the player, though, that's when problems happen, and that typically happens in multiplayer games, where difficulty is based on the environment, rather than the players: in a game that has to accommodate newbies as well as veterans, who can be miles apart in terms of sheer power, and also does difficulty via enemy levels, the game is bound to have low- and high-level zones, some of which will be either trivial to one group, or inaccessible to the other. Past that point, when the means of increasing difficulty is too simplistic (e.g. just by increasing enemy durability and damage), the game's balance becomes even more unstable, because past a certain point enemies become so imbalanced relative to the player that the game ceases to function properly, which is why players in Warframe eventually get one-shot at random and have to resort to cheese methods to kill spongy enemies. Even in singleplayer games, like TES IV: Oblivion, the game can break if its difficulty isn't perfectly adapted to the player. With this in mind, for Warframe to function, and let players specialize adequately, it's going to have to either scale difficulty according to each individual player, rather than per level or per team (if players still increase in power), or shift to a flat power system where everyone can be balanced along the same, consistent reference.

Quote

While, yes, you can offer purely sideways progression, that's not going to keep players grinding a F2P title long-term, in my experience. It'll keep SOME, chiefly those with a collector mentality, but it has next to no impact on someone like myself who enjoys routine. Put it like that - ever since I got my Inaros, I've had absolutely no desire to try any other Warframes. And while I HAVE experimented with some of them, I do this mostly for MR fodder before going back to what I actually like. Neither Garuda nor Baruk have held any weight for me because I already have the Warframe I like.

If memory serves, we covered some of that elsewhere on the forums already 🙂 so I'll leave it at that. I'm in general agreement that narrowing the performance gap between more pedestrian builds and hyper-optimised builds is necessary to avoid needing enemy armour to scale into absurdity, just up to a point.

Indeed, we covered this in other discussions, and I feel ultimately it boils down to personal experiences and opinions. I consider myself a collector, and I'd say Warframe is, in fact, a game primarily designed for collectors, but I also agree that it cannot rely on appeals to completionism alone to retain players. Whether those modes of player retention involve vertical power progression I think is another question entirely, but there certainly is merit to having a game that players can commit to and enjoy, without being forced to engage with gameplay they do not like, especially now that the game has expanded significantly in gameplay variety, to the point where some part of it is bound to interest some players and not others.

Edited February 1, 2019 by Teridax68

LightZodiac · February 1, 2019

22 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I think there's a fundamental opposition between this:

And this:

On one hand, there's this running notion that, because Warframe is a "looter shooter" game, it needs to make players more powerful over time, and thus enemies as well, yet this kind of scaling is precisely what causes the game's balance to go out of whack: weapons and frames that felt fun and balanced at the start of the game suddenly either turn into pea-shooters, or one-shot high-level enemies. Enemies that are themselves fun to fight at some level either become so ineffective they may as well not exist, or so overpowered that they become outright frustrating to deal with. It is not a stable foundation, which is why I think we need to move away from the current model of difficulty scaling, and onto some alternative.

For starters, I don't think progression in Warframe is actually about getting more powerful: sure, mods like Serration and Vitality give more power, but the player caps out on those mods very early on, way before they get to the end of the Star Chart, and in-between there are a whole lot of quests and things to do. Rather, I think progression in Warframe is about unlocking more options, i.e. getting weapons, mods and frames that offer new gameplay, rather than just power. Moreover, difficulty in the game should test the player on their mastery of the game's systems and mechanics, rather than just impose gear checks: if a mission is meant to be more difficult, it should probably test the player more on their ability to shoot, melee, use abilities intelligently, parkour, or evade damage, and not just ramp up enemy stats, which I think actually goes against the game's core themes (the player is meant to be the strongest thing in the room, so it breaks the fantasy to have standard enemies become more powerful than our warframes). In this respect, it may be better to scale the mission objective, i.e. making it more difficult to complete in some way or another (e.g. by making enemies cap towers quicker in Interception, increasing Life Support drain in Survival, etc.), rather than enemies. With this, enemies and players could be balanced along some stable point of reference, which would allow combat to be consistent and fun at all times.

There is no fundamental opposition between those two if you assume linear scaling.

Currently Warframe starts as a game in which you both increase in "power" and you also gain options (more frames, weapons...) and that part is just great. But then since the way things scale it actually cut's the options (a lot of frames, abilities, weapons become unviable... unless you roll some really good riven) and it pretty much becomes all about power. If you don't believe me start looking at players loadouts in higher level missions... it's basically just a couple of frames/weapons in like 90% of the cases.

Just take a look at frame abilities, they have strenght, range, efficiency, duration. If you want to increase just the strength of the ability, well first you have to level the frame from 0 to 30lvl, now if you want to further increase the strenght of the ability there are Umbral Intensify or Intensify, Augur Secrets, Power Drift those will grant you an increase of 66% to 105% for build with all 3 Umbral mods... that's the flat increase in power.

Now if you want to further increase the ability strength you have to use conditional mods such as Energy Conversion, Growing power... so you get more ability strenght but you have to fulfill the condition to do so.

And if you want even more ability strength you have to use +/- mods such as +55% ability strength -27.5 Ability Duration and +99% ability strength -55% Ability Efficiency.

This part is in my opinion great, you have both a flat linear increase in ability strenght/range/efficiency/duration but not by much. And then you also have options to... make a well rounded build, or make a certain min-max build or anything in between. Like I could build a frame with +300% ability strength, but it's going to be a really power hungry build with low durability.

However if we take a look at weapon builds... well we can pretty much stuff all 8 slots with mods which increase DPS, since they basically multiply each other we get a S#&$ton of DPS.

And finally the enemies. Since the armor and HP basically multiply all enemies with armor have their EHP scale at exponential rate, so our damaging abilities which scale linearly become poo, and gradually most of the weapons which can't strip or go around the armor become poo too, but weapons which can strip or go around armor absolutely massacre enemies well beyond lvl100.

There is offcourse a magical solution to the problem, equip the Corrosive Projections, and have 3-4 of them strip most of the enemy EHP away, but that won't happen because Steel Charge = more mod capacity.

Now let's assume enemies have flat armor values which do not increase with their level, and let's assume that weapon modding is more like abilities modding... flat increase in DPS (not by much) and then you pretty much have an option to go for well rounded build or... some super DPS build which has 3 bullets in the magazine. (there is a ton of tweaking to be done but I'm trying to make it simple)

Players increase in power with time, and they also increase in options... you can use a ton of different frames, weapons, build in the "endgame".

Teridax68 · February 1, 2019

3 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

There is no fundamental opposition between those two if you assume linear scaling.

Currently Warframe starts as a game in which you both increase in "power" and you also gain options (more frames, weapons...) and that part is just great. But then since the way things scale it actually cut's the options (a lot of frames, abilities, weapons become unviable... unless you roll some really good riven) and it pretty much becomes all about power. If you don't believe me start looking at players loadouts in higher level missions... it's basically just a couple of frames/weapons in like 90% of the cases.

But that isn't a question of power, it's a question of different warframes doing different things that are favored in a certain meta: Chroma is favored in a meta where there are many high-end mission types that throw lots of damage at the player and also require bosses to be taken down with potent single-target damage. Before PoE, he was largely considered a mediocre frame, and even then, it was only after Profit-Taker that he truly became one of the most meta frames around. He's not the most powerful frame around, he's simply one of the best fits for the current metagame, just as Loki used to be the best a few years back.

3 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

Just take a look at frame abilities, they have strenght, range, efficiency, duration. If you want to increase just the strength of the ability, well first you have to level the frame from 0 to 30lvl, now if you want to further increase the strenght of the ability there are Umbral Intensify or Intensify, Augur Secrets, Power Drift those will grant you an increase of 66% to 105% for build with all 3 Umbral mods... that's the flat increase in power.

Now if you want to further increase the ability strength you have to use conditional mods such as Energy Conversion, Growing power... so you get more ability strenght but you have to fulfill the condition to do so.

And if you want even more ability strength you have to use +/- mods such as +55% ability strength -27.5 Ability Duration and +99% ability strength -55% Ability Efficiency.

This part is in my opinion great, you have both a flat linear increase in ability strenght/range/efficiency/duration but not by much. And then you also have options to... make a well rounded build, or make a certain min-max build or anything in between. Like I could build a frame with +300% ability strength, but it's going to be a really power hungry build with low durability.

Sure, and that's what I got to in my above reply: progression is great when it lets the player specialize, and gives the player choice on how to customize, what strengths and weaknesses to pick, etc., but that in itself is different from increasing in power, which on its own has the net effect of making game content easier, often too easy in Warframe's case.

3 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

However if we take a look at weapon builds... well we can pretty much stuff all 8 slots with mods which increase DPS, since they basically multiply each other we get a S#&$ton of DPS.

And finally the enemies. Since the armor and HP basically multiply all enemies with armor have their EHP scale at exponential rate, so our damaging abilities which scale linearly become poo, and gradually most of the weapons which can't strip or go around the armor become poo too, but weapons which can strip or go around armor absolutely massacre enemies well beyond lvl100.

There is offcourse a magical solution to the problem, equip the Corrosive Projections, and have 3-4 of them strip most of the enemy EHP away, but that won't happen because Steel Charge = more mod capacity.

Now let's assume enemies have flat armor values which do not increase with their level, and let's assume that weapon modding is more like abilities modding... flat increase in DPS (not by much) and then you pretty much have an option to go for well rounded build or... some super DPS build which has 3 bullets in the magazine. (there is a ton of tweaking to be done but I'm trying to make it simple)

Players increase in power with time, and they also increase in options... you can use a ton of different frames, weapons, build in the "endgame".

I'm with you on increasing in options, but why increase power? Why not just take the baseline, well-rounded frame or weapon, and then specialize it via tradeoffs? Again, this is where the opposition comes in, because the game cannot remain well-balanced at all times in an environment where players and enemies scale in power independently of each other, and where enemies scale infinitely, whether it be linearly or exponentially. At points, players will be much stronger than enemies, which trivializes gameplay, and at others, enemies will become too strong to be fun to play against. Unless you are proposing to have each enemy scale to each individual player, independently from other players, this problem will continue to exist in a world of power increases.

LightZodiac · February 1, 2019

43 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

The only way to challenge a Solo player and a pre-made Group within the same game is a total Damage system rework which involves damage types, scaling, buff stacking, status types, armor, interaction with armor, enemy weak points, enemy damage, ect, ect. A total Core system revamp. Nothing else will work.

Yes, currently there is no bandaid, there is no "if we change this one little thing" the game suddenly works and has interesting gameplay on all levels.

If we just take enemy armor scaling away now all weapons work, damaging abilities work in higher levels too but since Arca Plasmor now clears whole rooms in 3rd sortie why use anything but AoE weapons, and if it's a single target like a boss, well it's going to nuke it too.

As for the buff stacking, it's currently possible to reach +2 000 000 000 damage, if buff stacking stays in it's current form the only way to make a boss which min-maxers can't kill in 1 shot is to have it +2 000 000 000 HP. So min-maxers will kill it in 2 shots, while casuals will have to take a day off and bring lot's of ammo restores.

A total core system revamp.

Xzorn · February 1, 2019

10 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

As for the buff stacking, it's currently possible to reach +2 000 000 000 damage, if buff stacking stays in it's current form the only way to make a boss which min-maxers can't kill in 1 shot is to have it +2 000 000 000 HP. So min-maxers will kill it in 2 shots, while casuals will have to take a day off and bring lot's of ammo restores.

A total core system revamp.

And so DE resorts to cheese damage gates and immunity. A tactic which forces meta play methods and generally isn't fun for anyone I imagine.

Right now you can't take half the frame roster to Eidolon fights and even less to Profit-taker. Before, frames were less effective in various missions. Like Ash on a Defense mission but you could make it work to an extent now this design desperation is killing the best thing about Warframe which is allowing us to approach problems in different ways.

The "Tool Box" is being taken away from us for the sake of trying to keep a broken system alive.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 1, 2019

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Just out of curiosity, why would list that as the formula by which you calculate total effective health? Your numbers are correct, but that's not how you calculate effective health even remotely. If you wanted to set up mathematical ground rules, why not set up the actual functions you're using to derive cited values?

What IS this hypothetical change, though? I don't see a thesis here, just a single stat tweak to one enemy at one level. What goals are you trying to achieve

🙂

Well the formula I put was just a compressed version of it. The full version is [Shield + (Health X ((armor +300)/300)))]. It looks too messy like this, so I just summed the armor formula bit to "DMG reduction".

As for my thesis, I am simply stating that all health based entities should abide by the same damage numbers. Tenno have very little health relative to their enemies, but their weapons deal massive amounts of damage to compensate. Enemies have exceptional amounts of health, but their weapons do relatively little damage. If the basic scaling system was adjusted so Tenno and NPCs have comparable health values/scaling, then everything else can fall neatly into place. Weapons will have smaller/closer damage numbers (thereby reducing the powercreep). Warframe abilities with fixed/non-scaling damage values (like Radial Javelin) will remain effective longer. And overall DE will have the groundwork setup to create genuine challenge, instead of simply making enemies high-powered bullet sponges.

Really its one step towards the massive scaling changes DE already promised they'd work on. Likely they are already considering something like this.

Teridax68 · February 1, 2019

16 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

And so DE resorts to cheese damage gates and immunity. A tactic which forces meta play methods and generally isn't fun for anyone I imagine.

This I think is the biggest argument against our current mode of scaling: as players, we have grown so powerful that enemy scaling alone cannot adequately balance the game around us. As a result, in order to remediate this broken system, DE have tried to add a whole bunch of hard-counter mechanics, plus artificial difficulty methods such as hard CC against the player, undodgeable damage, etc., to try to make the game more challenging for veterans.

Ultimately, not only are these mechanics ineffective at making the game truly more challenging (players are still too strong to truly care about even those effects), they have only served to make gameplay often less fun at higher levels, by reducing our gameplay down to a few basic moves and strategies. It's not fun to be denied ability usage due to ability nullification, ability immunity, or Energy drains, nor is it fun to lose control of one's frame, especially when there's so much crowd control going on in places that one can get stunlocked to death (in a PvE game, no less, which is staggering, sometimes literally). It's not fun to essentially have to operate in an environment saturated with massive, unavoidable damage to the player, nor is it even all that fun for combat to express itself purely in combat against either hordes of enemies, combat against a single enemy with lots of different invulnerability phases and zones, or both.

Because the current endgame relies on all of these effects, the net result is that the only truly viable endgame frames are hyper-tanky frames who either have massive radial damage or massive single-target damage (or, in Inaros's case, who are simply incapable of dying). It's one of the reasons why Warframe feels so small in its endgame content, when it has literally hundreds of times more stuff to offer to the player. We just need all that other content to be connected properly, and for the game's combat systems to be changed so that Warframe doesn't have to constantly paper over broken mechanics with other broken mechanics.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 1, 2019

5 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

The math and intent are good, but I feel the analysis also goes about the problem backwards: enemies scale exponentially in effective health because our damage scales to ludicrous levels. Our weapons can be fully kitted out with mods whose damage increase scale multiplicatively off of each other: base damage mods multiply base damage, elemental damage mods multiply the resulting total damage, which is also multiplied by multishot, then multiplied by crit chance, then multiplied by crit damage, to say nothing of the damage increases brought about by status effects like Corrosive or Viral. If we want to equalize enemy effective health numbers with our own, and prevent them from scaling exponentially, we first need to deflate the exponential scaling on our own weapons. Example:

Remove base damage and multishot mods, both of which are mandatory and add no gameplay, only more power.

Rework elemental damage mods to convert existing damage to a certain element, rather than add damage.

Rework crit away from a random damage chance, and instead as a cover-all damage multiplier on headshots, finishers, and more generally damage against enemies that are unalerted or stunned in some form. Crit would become more situational, rather than a general damage increase.

Rework status chance in some form to operate less on permanent damage multipliers, and not add raw damage based purely off of the weapon's own damage. Would probably take some time, and could operate alongside an equalization of enemy health.

With this more solid foundation, enemies could be made to scale in a much more tame manner, as suggested in the OP, because weapon modding wouldn't cause weapons to deal over a hundred times their base damage. Additionally, though, if we're making enemies scale like warframes, armor should not scale with level: armor scaling is what causes armored enemies to scale quadratically, on top of their exponential stat scaling, which turns them into bullet sponges far quicker than any other type, and to my knowledge only one frame has their armor scale with level (Nidus, though his stat gains are unique all around). With this implemented, ideally enemies should not only avoid drastically differing in health from the player, but as a result should also allow self-damage mechanics to function a lot better: currently, Nyx suffers still because turning enemy damage against itself isn't actually that good, and more generally mechanics that turn enemies into minions, or reflect damage back at enemies, are usually awful, because enemies have orders of magnitude more health than they have damage. Reducing or eliminating this gap would allow those abilities and frames to become truly functional, without having to rely on band-aids like the ones Nyx received to have some sort of impact.

To be fair, the modding of weapons is its own beast. This topic aims less toward fixing everything in one fell swoop, and more towards adjusting the base numbers to something more manageable. Its rather tricky to say exactly how to adjust weapon mechanics when "weapon X" and "weapon Y" have a DPS difference of 1,000 before mods.

As for armor scaling: I believe it should still exist, just to a much smaller degree. My numbers are rather crude (as they follow the Lancer's level 1 armor values to scale), but the idea is still the same. Higher level enemies should have "better" armor due to being (hypothetically) more valuable soldiers. It shouldn't be like comparing paper armor to tank plating, but at the very least some difference is in order.

LightZodiac · February 1, 2019

9 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But that isn't a question of power, it's a question of different warframes doing different things that are favored in a certain meta: Chroma is favored in a meta where there are many high-end mission types that throw lots of damage at the player and also require bosses to be taken down with potent single-target damage. Before PoE, he was largely considered a mediocre frame, and even then, it was only after Profit-Taker that he truly became one of the most meta frames around. He's not the most powerful frame around, he's simply one of the best fits for the current metagame, just as Loki used to be the best a few years back.

Well there will always be frames which are better at certain kinds of missions. Like... I'm not going to use Frost in extermination mission, I am going to use him in some kind of defensive mission, then again there are Frost, Khora, Gara which are all good for defensive missions and there is no strong meta for one frame. Well there is Limbo which is able to cheese through any non-Corpus defensive mission but he is balanced by the fact that other players leave the match as soon as they see max range cataclysm (not a perfectly balanced system, but it works).

As for Chroma... I would rework him to be less capable as DPS (more capable with his 1,4 and at actually buffing the team) heck I would rework the whole buff and stacking of buffs. Buffs should be a meta for boss fights but they shouldn't be so powerful that they are able to simply blow anything into oblivion. The thing that comes to my mind is that bosses should take less damaged from buffed damage, but also they should not be immune to other abilities but be less influenced by them... eg instead of bosses on starchart being slowed down by 75% by Nova, and Eidolons, Orbs completely ignoring Nova slowdown ability (so in one case Nova can cheese them in other case Nova doesn't really bring anything useful to the fight) have all bosses influenced by Nova slowdown but less then 75%... let's say 25% (arbitrary number) and now multiple frames are viable for boss fights... no frame can really cheese through them. If Nova can slow down Eidolon for 25% well maybe she's not the best, most meta frame for the hunt but she is useful. (again this is a simplification, I don't want to go through all abilities of all frames)

19 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Sure, and that's what I got to in my above reply: progression is great when it lets the player specialize, and gives the player choice on how to customize, what strengths and weaknesses to pick, etc., but that in itself is different from increasing in power, which on its own has the net effect of making game content easier, often too easy in Warframe's case.

I'm with you on increasing in options, but why increase power? Why not just take the baseline, well-rounded frame or weapon, and then specialize it via tradeoffs? Again, this is where the opposition comes in, because the game cannot remain well-balanced at all times in an environment where players and enemies scale in power independently of each other, and where enemies scale infinitely, whether it be linearly or exponentially. At points, players will be much stronger than enemies, which trivializes gameplay, and at others, enemies will become too strong to be fun to play against. Unless you are proposing to have each enemy scale to each individual player, independently from other players, this problem will continue to exist in a world of power increases.

Because a lot of playerbase (myself included) like the increase in power too. If you take that away you are alienating a lot of players. And I don't want to alienate a lot of players.

I want to grind something that will make me more powerful, with which I can pew-pew more stronger enemies, which drop something which makes me more powerful, with which I can pew-pew stronger enemies. I want to build those formas then forma my gun and frame 6 times. I want to have a gun which is stronger then a gun which some casual player put together without grinding some end game mod I grinded BUT!

It doesn't have to be 20 times as powerful as casual players gun, it doesn't have to be 5 times a s powerful, or twice as powerful... maybe it's like 10-20% better? I'l take that... can I grind to make it another 1-2% better? I'l take that too! can devs make content which I and the casual player can enjoy? With 10-20% difference in "power" sure no problem! Maybe me and my meta team will bring that boss 50% faster then a group of casuals? If you ask me that's great! I'd rather fight a boss with "proper" game mechanics and kill him "only" 50% faster then one shot one enemy boss, then have to put up with some clunky game mechanics which needlessly prolongs the fight with another enemy boss.

Now maybe a group of casuals come with Iron Skin Rhinos, don't use their Roar and end up fighting the boss 4x times as long as my meta group... and this is pretty much their own fault.

Now everything on the starchart at lower levels is squishy to me! Well some players want just that, some players (myself included) don't.There is really no reason to please just one group of players. Have players chose between having squishy enemies on the starchart or some kind of balancing which either buffs the enemies or nerfs us to keep it challenging if you will. This would essentially split the playerbase into two, but since both groups are having fun I don't see a problem with that... it's better to have them split into two groups and both groups having fun, then have one group gradually leave the game.

Now some player are all about "muh power fantasy, muh big numbers" and honestly I don't care about their tantrum, even if they are a majority of the playerbase it's only because players who reach the endgame and don't like this dull game mechanics gradually leave the game.

LightZodiac · February 1, 2019

1 hour ago, Xzorn said:

And so DE resorts to cheese damage gates and immunity. A tactic which forces meta play methods and generally isn't fun for anyone I imagine.

Right now you can't take half the frame roster to Eidolon fights and even less to Profit-taker. Before, frames were less effective in various missions. Like Ash on a Defense mission but you could make it work to an extent now this design desperation is killing the best thing about Warframe which is allowing us to approach problems in different ways.

The "Tool Box" is being taken away from us for the sake of trying to keep a broken system alive.

Eidolons are a great case of a boss fight which is not really fun to anyone.

Do you have a mote amp and 0 Teralyst hunts? Great just hop right into Tridolon hunt! You guys didn't equip Corrosive Auras? Well congrats now the boss has 5x the EHP value! Can your frame heal lures, buff operator damage, buff damage? No? Well you just brought nothing to the table!
It can! Whoops EMP just drained all your energy I hope you brought some energy pads with you 😃
You want better amps, and some nullifier arcanes? Well you have to hunt eidolons to get them hah! 😄

At the same time meta players are squeezing 5-6 hunts into one night which are basically, collecting lures, placing shields, pressing 4, charging VS and one shooting limbs and eidolons... and they pretty much have to since it takes like 200 hunts to collect one set of arcanes.

Since I played a lot of eidolon pub's and I carried so many players in their first hunt, I can comfortably say that most casuals try it once and never again. At the same time for meta players this "boss fight" is basically farming.

Profiter Orb does lower the difference with some clunky mechanics, and it's somewhat successful at doing that... I didn't really saw people recruit for them, pub's are OK, no toxicity. But at the same time that boss fight really feels underwhelming, and once again we basically have to farm a boss.

Teridax68 · February 1, 2019

15 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

Well there will always be frames which are better at certain kinds of missions. Like... I'm not going to use Frost in extermination mission, I am going to use him in some kind of defensive mission, then again there are Frost, Khora, Gara which are all good for defensive missions and there is no strong meta for one frame. Well there is Limbo which is able to cheese through any non-Corpus defensive mission but he is balanced by the fact that other players leave the match as soon as they see max range cataclysm (not a perfectly balanced system, but it works).

Of course different frames excel at different mission types, my point is that virtually all missions labeled "endgame" content right now all favor a very specific type of warframe, namely warframes that are very survivable and deal lots of radial damage. Thus, our current metagame isn't simply defined by raw power, but by which frames are best-adapted to the most popular missions.

15 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

As for Chroma... I would rework him to be less capable as DPS (more capable with his 1,4 and at actually buffing the team) heck I would rework the whole buff and stacking of buffs. Buffs should be a meta for boss fights but they shouldn't be so powerful that they are able to simply blow anything into oblivion. The thing that comes to my mind is that bosses should take less damaged from buffed damage, but also they should not be immune to other abilities but be less influenced by them... eg instead of bosses on starchart being slowed down by 75% by Nova, and Eidolons, Orbs completely ignoring Nova slowdown ability (so in one case Nova can cheese them in other case Nova doesn't really bring anything useful to the fight) have all bosses influenced by Nova slowdown but less then 75%... let's say 25% (arbitrary number) and now multiple frames are viable for boss fights... no frame can really cheese through them. If Nova can slow down Eidolon for 25% well maybe she's not the best, most meta frame for the hunt but she is useful. (again this is a simplification, I don't want to go through all abilities of all frames)

This is a perfectly valid direction to take Chroma. Personally, I'd prefer to keep his damage, and focus him around taking damage in order to deal damage, and make a tradeoff between one or the other, but either direction depends on the players in favor of it.

15 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

Because a lot of playerbase (myself included) like the increase in power too. If you take that away you are alienating a lot of players. And I don't want to alienate a lot of players.

A lot of players also like being able to one-shot crowds of level 100 enemies, and are bound to complain if/when that gets removed. At the end of the day, it comes down to a pretty utilitarian decision: if flattening power and balancing the game properly alienates some players, or even a lot of players, that is okay, if the end result is that it brings in and retains more players, especially core players who are well beyond the point where they can increase their power.

15 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

I want to grind something that will make me more powerful, with which I can pew-pew more stronger enemies, which drop something which makes me more powerful, with which I can pew-pew stronger enemies. I want to build those formas then forma my gun and frame 6 times. I want to have a gun which is stronger then a gun which some casual player put together without grinding some end game mod I grinded BUT!

It doesn't have to be 20 times as powerful as casual players gun, it doesn't have to be 5 times a s powerful, or twice as powerful... maybe it's like 10-20% better? I'l take that... can I grind to make it another 1-2% better? I'l take that too! can devs make content which I and the casual player can enjoy? With 10-20% difference in "power" sure no problem! Maybe me and my meta team will bring that boss 50% faster then a group of casuals? If you ask me that's great! I'd rather fight a boss with "proper" game mechanics and kill him "only" 50% faster then one shot one enemy boss, then have to put up with some clunky game mechanics which needlessly prolongs the fight with another enemy boss.

What about the players who want significant increases in power? Wouldn't they get alienated if they were nerfed to the point where all their gains only provided marginal increases in power? If such a model only interests a much smaller number of players, as the rest do not find the power progression satisfying, why even have it in the first place?

15 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

Now everything on the starchart at lower levels is squishy to me! Well some players want just that, some players (myself included) don't.There is really no reason to please just one group of players. Have players chose between having squishy enemies on the starchart or some kind of balancing which either buffs the enemies or nerfs us to keep it challenging if you will. This would essentially split the playerbase into two, but since both groups are having fun I don't see a problem with that... it's better to have them split into two groups and both groups having fun, then have one group gradually leave the game.

Playerbase fragmentation is a serious problem that causes games to feel much smaller than they truly are, and often causes players to leak out as they feel the game is running out of players, even when it isn't. It's a major reason why classic MMOs experience significant declines in players, along with any PvP shooter with power differences between players, because instead of having one game with one big playerbase, each player ends up being matched with a much smaller pool, and experiencing more waiting times. Also, I don't really like that the answer here to parts of the game being made trivially easy is just "too bad": sure, the game shouldn't just please one group of players, but that raises a double standard when immediately above you advocated keeping vertical power progression in the game specifically to please a very particular subset of players.

15 minutes ago, LightZodiac said:

Now some player are all about "muh power fantasy, muh big numbers" and honestly I don't care about their tantrum, even if they are a majority of the playerbase it's only because players who reach the endgame and don't like this dull game mechanics gradually leave the game.

I can agree with this, but then this is also why I don't really think we should be implementing an entire vertical progression system just to provide the rather basic dopamine drip that comes from seeing numbers go up. Where do we draw the line between numbers going up, and big numbers going up? Why do we draw the distinction there, instead of asking ourselves why numbers should be going up in the first place? This is where the discussion becomes a lot muddier, because the question of how much numbers should go up is bound to be very subjective, and prone to significant variance from player to player.

LightZodiac · February 1, 2019

15 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Of course different frames excel at different mission types, my point is that virtually all missions labeled "endgame" content right now all favor a very specific type of warframe, namely warframes that are very survivable and deal lots of radial damage. Thus, our current metagame isn't simply defined by raw power, but by which frames are best-adapted to the most popular missions.

So basically Inaros with spin2win melee weapon. Which is incidentally something I see a lot off. =D

20 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

This is a perfectly valid direction to take Chroma. Personally, I'd prefer to keep his damage, and focus him around taking damage in order to deal damage, and make a tradeoff between one or the other, but either direction depends on the players in favor of it.

I'd take away from his damage buff, muahahaha. But I would also change it from acting as a +dmg% mod to just a +dmg buff... so Chroma players do not have to make specific builds for Chroma. I'd give him more range, def lower the ability cost. i would change his 1 from being a really energy hungry weapon that deals poo damage into exhaled weapon which deals base damage element based on his energy color, and his 4 would use that same exalted weapon. Maybe the damage buff which depends on % of remaining health would work nice.

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

A lot of players also like being able to one-shot crowds of level 100 enemies, and are bound to complain if/when that gets removed. At the end of the day, it comes down to a pretty utilitarian decision: if flattening power and balancing the game properly alienates some players, or even a lot of players, that is okay, if the end result is that it brings in and retains more players, especially core players who are well beyond the point where they can increase their power.

What about the players who want significant increases in power? Wouldn't they get alienated if they were nerfed to the point where all their gains only provided marginal increases in power? If such a model only interests a much smaller number of players, as the rest do not find the power progression satisfying, why even have it in the first place?

Well Warframe has about 38 million registered players which is waaaaaaaaaay higher then it's active community, and I might be wrong but from the looks of it Veterans are a minority of the community. Since this game exists for 5 years I'd say that this game has a rather large problem with retaining players, both new players and veterans alike. So I myself am giving a suggestion for game rework which in my opinion would satisfy a large % of all players and would result in greater retention of the players... I might be wrong, I do not run a successful game developer company.

However I did ran a successful IPTV company, and when I wanted to increase the retention of my customers (which was horrible at the time) I didn't ask my existing customers on their opinion, I asked the ones which left I implemented changes that would suit them better and my customer retention went through the roof. So with all my suggestions flying around the best thing would be to ask the leaving players (both new ones and veterans) about their opinion on improving the game.

36 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Playerbase fragmentation is a serious problem that causes games to feel much smaller than they truly are, and often causes players to leak out as they feel the game is running out of players, even when it isn't. It's a major reason why classic MMOs experience significant declines in players, along with any PvP shooter with power differences between players, because instead of having one game with one big playerbase, each player ends up being matched with a much smaller pool, and experiencing more waiting times. Also, I don't really like that the answer here to parts of the game being made trivially easy is just "too bad": sure, the game shouldn't just please one group of players, but that raises a double standard when immediately above you advocated keeping vertical power progression in the game specifically to please a very particular subset of players.

I can agree with this, but then this is also why I don't really think we should be implementing an entire vertical progression system just to provide the rather basic dopamine drip that comes from seeing numbers go up. Where do we draw the line between numbers going up, and big numbers going up? Why do we draw the distinction there, instead of asking ourselves why numbers should be going up in the first place? This is where the discussion becomes a lot muddier, because the question of how much numbers should go up is bound to be very subjective, and prone to significant variance from player to player.

Well even a more linear vertical progression is not going to happen in a million years. Players would throw a rather large tantrum and DE is afraid of large tantrums.

A chance to push no vertical progress is actually equal to the chance of having no vertical progress... both are 0.

Xzorn · February 1, 2019

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

-snip-

I agree 100%

We can't simply change one thing. You see topics on armor scaling or enemy damage but these are all parts of a very complex puzzle that I've tried to make some attempts to solve and it's not easy. Not at all. It's so intertwined with so much content stacked on top of it at his point it would be a huge undertaking. Just a mess.

1 hour ago, LightZodiac said:

-snip-

The main reason I find Profit-taker superior to Eidolons is that we can use frames for majority of the fight. The Operator plays a background roll instead of a primary roll but that's about where the improvements stop. Profit-Taker is a very eHP / DPS weighted fight and punishes any other tactics.

DE continues with it's arbitrary immune enemies along with impossible to avoid Stagger Storms and Bounce Trains making lulz tanking the fight the best method. Going beefcake mode has always been an approach but not strictly the only viable one that's put in place with Profit-Taker. Chroma for example has always been a good boss killer since he was released but he wasn't a staple boss killer. Ever seen what Mag or Nova do to Sergent Ruk? Nova on Lephantis or CC frames like Nyx / Loki on Ambulas.

DE withdrew from Damage 3.0 and said they were going to try "Enemies 2.0" and if this is their attempts. I don't think it's working.

LightZodiac · February 2, 2019

5 hours ago, Xzorn said:

The main reason I find Profit-taker superior to Eidolons is that we can use frames for majority of the fight. The Operator plays a background roll instead of a primary roll but that's about where the improvements stop. Profit-Taker is a very eHP / DPS weighted fight and punishes any other tactics.

DE continues with it's arbitrary immune enemies along with impossible to avoid Stagger Storms and Bounce Trains making lulz tanking the fight the best method. Going beefcake mode has always been an approach but not strictly the only viable one that's put in place with Profit-Taker. Chroma for example has always been a good boss killer since he was released but he wasn't a staple boss killer. Ever seen what Mag or Nova do to Sergent Ruk? Nova on Lephantis or CC frames like Nyx / Loki on Ambulas.

DE withdrew from Damage 3.0 and said they were going to try "Enemies 2.0" and if this is their attempts. I don't think it's working.

I find Profit-taker superior simply because the difference between meta composition and non-meta composition is not that great. I still don't consider it a good boss fight though.

It's not just Nova, Zenurik Temporal Blast will also slow down "starchart" bosses by 80% for 15 seconds, and it works on Acolytes too. So you don't even have to bring a Nova, just bring Chroma, slow down the boss using operator then blast the boss out of existence. Most "starchart" bosses are a joke even in sorties. I usually don't cheese them because I like a longer boss fight, but several days ago I used Temporal Blast and Chroma to end Jackal sortie in less then 2 minutes, the fight itself took less then 10 second.

The thing I really like about Fortuna enemies is their increased mobility, it's really cool to have those MOA's jump around any hyenas running around, I'd like more of those hyenas in other corpus missions too, and that raknoid with shields and overshields is also cool (only enemy in game where magnetic is the best element to use?) also more "heavy enemies".

But they spam so much knockback attacks, there is like zero consistency in what abilities work on them... like if I cast Nidus larva it will suck most of the enemies in, it will stick to Hyena but it won't suck it in, so I basically have to wait for duration to end to cast it again... I could go on and on the thing is they simply use so many frustrating mechanics that I would rather play conservations for standing then another Fortuna bounty.

Steel_Rook · February 3, 2019

On 2019-02-01 at 6:21 PM, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Well the formula I put was just a compressed version of it. The full version is [Shield + (Health X ((armor +300)/300)))]. It looks too messy like this, so I just summed the armor formula bit to "DMG reduction".

That's not "sheilds + health*resistance," though, but rather "shields + health/(1 - resistance)." I get that you were going for simplicity, but you ended up with something that looks enough like a real formula that it's a bit confusing how you're using it. I actually had a lengthy post explaining effective health before I realised your numbers were actually correct (and, by extension, that you already understood the subject). If you're taking recommendations, I'd swapping the formula with at least the latter one I quoted, just for clarity's sake.

On 2019-02-01 at 6:39 PM, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

As for armor scaling: I believe it should still exist, just to a much smaller degree. My numbers are rather crude (as they follow the Lancer's level 1 armor values to scale), but the idea is still the same. Higher level enemies should have "better" armor due to being (hypothetically) more valuable soldiers. It shouldn't be like comparing paper armor to tank plating, but at the very least some difference is in order.

I'd actually suggest the exact opposite - keep armour static and specific to the individual critter and scale health only, instead. This avoids the silliness of 95%+ damage resistance and ensures that all weapons remain viable without stripping or circumventing armour. My personal recommendation would be to go with 25%-50% damage resistance (so 100 - 300 armour) for most Grenier, with bosses and VERY rare enemies maybe going up as high as 75% damage resistance (900 armour) but no higher. Even 50% damage resistance is well worth picking the right kind of damage (Puncture, Radiation, etc.) and still worth stripping (Corrosive) without completely negating non-True, non-Slash damage and mandating Corrosive Projection.

Right now, the way Grenier armour scales creates a pretty silly binary state. A Bombard with 7860 armour has over 96% damage resistance, which means a weapon would need to deal over 20 times his hit points in order to kill him. Even Radiation damage is severely reduced by his armour, albeit to a lesser extent. Buuut... The same Bombard hit with True damage like that of an Execution or with the armour-ignoring damage of a Slash proc all of a sudden has effectivenly 1/20th of his hit points and melts like cotton candy. So either you brought the one status effect which can cut straight through the Bombard's armour and he's effectively meaningless, or you didn't and he's damn near unkillable. Even if I were to accept a Bombard with over a million's worth of effective health, the difference between "the right tools" and "everything else" shouldn't be of a magnitude of tens of times.

You want a Bombard that's a massive bag of HP? Fine, make him a massive bag of HP. Give him 500K hit points over 600 armour. Same effective health, except most builds get to have a much more meaningful chance of actually hurting him. "The right" builds, though, all of a sudden have a much harder target because you've gone from ~40K health now, to the 500K health I'm proposing. And if it seems like I'm proposing a ridiculous bag of hit points, that's only because that's what we already have. All I'm doing here is closing a few of the loop holes and presenting you with a Bombard "as intended," which IS a ridiculous bag of hit points to absorb some of the ridiculous amounts of damage players can do when built "right."

On 2019-02-01 at 5:07 PM, Teridax68 said:

Past that point, when the means of increasing difficulty is too simplistic (e.g. just by increasing enemy durability and damage), the game's balance becomes even more unstable, because past a certain point enemies become so imbalanced relative to the player that the game ceases to function properly, which is why players in Warframe eventually get one-shot at random and have to resort to cheese methods to kill spongy enemies.

Warframe is a good example of what happens when you ignore your own mathematical models' recommended value ranges. You can plug a lot of values into a formula and it'll "work" (from the perspective of not throwing an ArithmeticException), but the results you get may be substantially out-of-bounds of what you're expecting. I've brought up Status in the past, because it's a great example of what happens when you use heavily skewed function. Because the function for back-calculating status chance per pellet from the general "Status Chance" in the inventory is radical, its behaviour "degrades" progressively the closer you get to 100%, which is why 100% status means 100% status per pellet but 99% status might mean 20-30% status per pellet. The same goes for damage resistance, by the way, which is a rational function with an even more pronounced skew. The effective health gained per percentage point of resistance grows progressively the closer you get to 100% damage resistance, and those last few percent towards the 96% damage resistance on a level 100 Bombard are the most consequential.

Any time you have a non-linear function, you have to be extremely careful with the values you allow players, enemies and items to feed into it. Unless your goal is to turn a continuous gradient into a binary choice of "max value or GTFO," restrict parameters to sections where the function's growth isn't too extreme. Even if you're working with a linear function, make sure its steepness and height above the abscissa aren't too out-of-scale with whatever other functions it's intended to feed off of or counteract. For instance, the armour -> effective health function in Warframe is linear (and I applaud the developers for that), but it can still break just as easily as the rational armour -> resistance function if you slap on thousands upon thousands of points of armour. The whole reason I propose 100-300 armour for enemies is because values are fairly controlled in that range. They don't run away into infinity towards the end and the return isn't too severe.

Pick your mathematical models carefully, keep your parameters within conservative ranges, don't use multiplicative modifiers if you can help it, don't let additive buffs vary by too much. Keep your systems neat, your values under control and you'll have a system that you can meaningfully impact via small-scale changes. Digital Extremes have violated practically all of these rules, which is why we have these heavily skewed models with parameters running right up the very edge of calculability, with a whole bunch of multiplicative buffs which spiral even initially conservative base values into utter absurdity. At the risk of being too blunt: Warframe isn't "badly balanced." Rather, it has some of the sloppiest, least responsible systems design I've run across. This game lets players do things with the numbers which... Well, cause the game to cease functioning properly, like you said.

Xzorn · February 3, 2019

56 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

-snip-

In spite of the complexities of the Damage system and perhaps the happy accident that it managed to be so robust I did come to one rather simple improvement to the current system that wouldn't cause much trouble and improve the performance of a lot weapons.. Static Weak-point armor values.

Many of the best armor stripping weapons are AoE like Pox, Torrid, Zarr, ect. The weapons that tend to suffer are the ones that generally demand more attention to aiming and so the concept of exponential scaling body armor but static head armor seems functional and it's a bit of a tribute in a need for good aim from Damage 1.0.

Ideally it would be a fairly small change with a rather drastic impact on non-AoE weapons putting some power back in single-target DPS. Corrosive status would affect the body armor value until the point in which the body value is equal or lower than the head value at which point they drop at an equal rate so 100% strip is still 100% strip.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 3, 2019

16 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'd actually suggest the exact opposite - keep armour static and specific to the individual critter and scale health only, instead. This avoids the silliness of 95%+ damage resistance and ensures that all weapons remain viable without stripping or circumventing armour. My personal recommendation would be to go with 25%-50% damage resistance (so 100 - 300 armour) for most Grenier, with bosses and VERY rare enemies maybe going up as high as 75% damage resistance (900 armour) but no higher. Even 50% damage resistance is well worth picking the right kind of damage (Puncture, Radiation, etc.) and still worth stripping (Corrosive) without completely negating non-True, non-Slash damage and mandating Corrosive Projection.

Right now, the way Grenier armour scales creates a pretty silly binary state. A Bombard with 7860 armour has over 96% damage resistance, which means a weapon would need to deal over 20 times his hit points in order to kill him. Even Radiation damage is severely reduced by his armour, albeit to a lesser extent. Buuut... The same Bombard hit with True damage like that of an Execution or with the armour-ignoring damage of a Slash proc all of a sudden has effectivenly 1/20th of his hit points and melts like cotton candy. So either you brought the one status effect which can cut straight through the Bombard's armour and he's effectively meaningless, or you didn't and he's damn near unkillable. Even if I were to accept a Bombard with over a million's worth of effective health, the difference between "the right tools" and "everything else" shouldn't be of a magnitude of tens of times.

You want a Bombard that's a massive bag of HP? Fine, make him a massive bag of HP. Give him 500K hit points over 600 armour. Same effective health, except most builds get to have a much more meaningful chance of actually hurting him. "The right" builds, though, all of a sudden have a much harder target because you've gone from ~40K health now, to the 500K health I'm proposing. And if it seems like I'm proposing a ridiculous bag of hit points, that's only because that's what we already have. All I'm doing here is closing a few of the loop holes and presenting you with a Bombard "as intended," which IS a ridiculous bag of hit points to absorb some of the ridiculous amounts of damage players can do when built "right."

Hmm... Perhaps a sort of compromise would be ideal? As you said, constantly stacking on armor would create (or recreate) the conundrum of this game's reliance on corrosive/slash. Using "real life" as an example (please don't throw the 'but this is sci-fi' shtick at me), protective ballistic armors do actually "scale" to a degree. Steel plate armor became defunct as they provided little ballistic protection relative to their weight and cost of production. Flak vests used through most of the 20th century provided slightly better protection and where much lighter, but did little against direct fire. Present day ballistic armor can handle smaller caliber rounds and slow larger rounds a fair degree, but are far from perfect. What I'm basically saying is that all armor is challenging a "weight vs protection" conundrum.

The Grineer are frail, relying on mechanical augments to keep their rotting bodies combat ready. Odds are they can't handle very much weight, even with augments. Seeing as how their armor is almost definitely metal-based, that puts their overall protective capabilities into question. Overall it makes sense that lesser units have little armor, while heavily augmented units like Bombards and Gunners get higher armor ratings.

Of course I am still adamant about keeping the linear scale. The exponential scale is currently what largely contributes to the damage inconsistencies that make many Warframes and weapons obsolete at later levels. With a linear scale, abilities, weapons, and health can remain coparable between both Warframes and enemies.

The Scaling Renaissance

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