The Scaling Renaissance

[Teridax68]

20 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

And yes, I'm aware that this doesn't entirely work in Warframe since there's no single stat to denote a player's power. There's no "level" nor "gear score" to consider, no "DPS" or "Toughness" metric to normalise by. Well, yet anyway - these CAN be introduced, as other people have suggested in the past. My argument, though, was more in the abstract - it's entirely possible to scale players vs. enemies in a controllable, predictable fashion and offer on-screen stat increases up to a point while the system still works just fine. As with many of its other aspects, Warframe's design makes this difficult for frankly no real benefit in return, and that's on DE for having given themselves extra work and painted themselves into a corner. Flat stat increases are core to their business model as a F2P, at least up to a point, so quite why they didn't come up with controllable and scalable metrics to deal with these increasing stats is a bit beyond me.

I understand we're not going to agree on this, but that's simply how I feel on the matter.

But that's the thing: I do agree with this. A multiplayer game that scales all players in a team to the same level, then scales enemies to that precise level, is a game that at least gives itself a means of properly balancing its contents to all of its players. If CoH has that system, that would perfectly explain how it could balance its difficulty. However, that is also a system that operates by flattening people's power: if progression is signalled by an increase in stats, but the game balances you by raising your allies' stats until they're at your level, then raising your enemies' stats until they're at your level, then you have effectively gained nothing. The increase in stats here is illusory, and if you were to apply this system to Warframe, it would make base damage and multishot mods all the more redundant. Thus, all roads in this respect lead to flattening the player's power in order to balance the game. I don't think power creep is a part of the game's business model, and overall I feel DE may even have reduced their income gains precisely because the only meaningful impact to power creep in their game has been the exclusion of all the weapons, and even the frames that got left behind, in favor of a much smaller pool of items, effectively reducing the range of products that sell well.

Edited February 8, 2019 by Teridax68

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

5 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Okay, but then how does this:

Contribute to this:

What you suggested about rebalancing weapons and abilities gets much closer to this, but then that also implies balancing all of those against some consistent baseline: which level would that be? What about effects that auto-scale? I can also sympathize with changing the way damage scales to makes Warframes get one-shot less, but scaling nonetheless implies frames inevitably get to that territory. The same can be said for weapons, whose damage will eventually fall off, as you mentioned. The question then becomes: what are you defining as "late-to-endgame levels"? How quickly should enemies or players die then?

That's a bit tricky to answer as Warframe doesn't have an absolute baseline. However it does have a relative baseline: All Warframes and weapons have a maximum level of 30 (minus one special exception). Because of this, we can approximate everything up until that point as early-to-mid game. Most players won't have maxed gear or very many potatoes at this point, so we can assume these stats (plus some incomplete mods) work as a good baseline. After level 30, things start to pick up. Major story quests and new mechanics are unlocked. Mot in the Void is the last "natural" unlocked node in the game, and it caps at about level 45. So we can assume that levels between 30 to 45 is mid-to-late game. Now we can factor in Sorties. Sorties start at level 50 and go all the way to 100. So we can consider these late-to-end game levels.

You could also factor in Cetus and Fortuna bounties: Tier 1 bounties are 5-15 and provide stuff only really useful for beginners. Tier 2 and 3 range from 10 to 40,and offer things most mid-game players would appreciate. Finally Tier 4 and 5 bounties offer the most valuable rewards, but range from 30 to 60; meaning only the well prepared can fight them. None of them are quite "endgame", but they do give a general idea of how DE sees the progression system.

But you did make me realize I forgot to add a goal point: Enemies (when under confusion) should be a viable threat to each other. At higher levels currently, it can take minutes for one Lancer to kill another, but only a couple seconds to kill a Warframe. The means to alleviate this comes around four-fold: Make enemy armor static. Make health scale linearly. Make damage also scale linearly, but at a slightly slower rate (needs fine tuning). And make Tenno weaponry also scale their damage slower to compensate the lower overall values.  By doing these things, it should create a theater where strategy and approach can play as good a role as simply DPS-ing rooms of enemies. Of course enemies at higher levels will still down Warframes at a faster level, but it should not be nearly as fast as they do now.

[Teridax68]

2 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

But you did make me realize I forgot to add a goal point: Enemies (when under confusion) should be a viable threat to each other. At higher levels currently, it can take minutes for one Lancer to kill another, but only a couple seconds to kill a Warframe. The means to alleviate this comes around four-fold: Make enemy armor static. Make health scale linearly. Make damage also scale linearly, but at a slightly slower rate (needs fine tuning). And make Tenno weaponry also scale their damage slower to compensate the lower overall values.  By doing these things, it should create a theater where strategy and approach can play as good a role as simply DPS-ing rooms of enemies. Of course enemies at higher levels will still down Warframes at a faster level, but it should not be nearly as fast as they do now.

This I think justifies changing enemy health values, rather than the rest. Stuff like balancing all weapons, abilities, etc. is conceptually simple, but obviously much easier said than done, which is why I don't think it makes sense to reject some proposals due to complexity while keeping others. I completely agree that turning enemies' damage against themselves should be made genuinely useful for once, and the only way to do that is to equalize enemy health and damage values relative to each other, which also means bringing our own health and damage values at that baseline. However, changing enemies exclusively wouldn't address this: if enemies have less health and damage, they'll simply be even weaker relative to the player. Thus, equalizing enemy health and damage could work, provided the baseline or scaling were increased to give players a challenge within acceptable level ranges.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

14 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This I think justifies changing enemy health values, rather than the rest. Stuff like balancing all weapons, abilities, etc. is conceptually simple, but obviously much easier said than done, which is why I don't think it makes sense to reject some proposals due to complexity while keeping others. I completely agree that turning enemies' damage against themselves should be made genuinely useful for once, and the only way to do that is to equalize enemy health and damage values relative to each other, which also means bringing our own health and damage values at that baseline. However, changing enemies exclusively wouldn't address this: if enemies have less health and damage, they'll simply be even weaker relative to the player. Thus, equalizing enemy health and damage could work, provided the baseline or scaling were increased to give players a challenge within acceptable level ranges.

Yeah this kinda comes around to my initial post about coherency. Having enemies scale their health at a similar rate to Warframes (~200% base increase per 30 levels) means that all mathematical values will share a similar baseline. At level 1 a Lancer has an EH(effective health) of ~133. Their Grakatas deal 11 base damage per hit. (Ignoring the finer calculations) It should take ~13 rounds from a fellow Lancer to kill them. Of course the damage against a Warframe will be much harder to calculate, but ultimately it would take much more than 13 rounds to down a level 1 Warframe. For the sake of debate, lets say it takes ~26 rounds.

Now if we have a level 30 (unmodded) Warframe and two level 30 Lancers, we should have similar numbers still. The Lancer's EH is now 400, so the Grakata's damage should now be 33 (Probably slightly less. Still would need fine tuning). Confusion hits, and it still took ~13 rounds of friendly fire. Likewise it still takes ~26 rounds to down the Warframe

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Right, fair enough. I suppose an easier question would be - as stated above - what kind of metrics do you intend to evaluate performance? Even ignoring catch-all categories like "DPS" and "Toughness," how do you measure the "right" amount of health and armour for an enemy? Do you envision some kind of "shots to kill" or "time to kill" metric? I find game balance to be a bit like 3D animation. While you CAN animate by rotating every bone individually down the chain, it's usually simpler to go with an Inverse Kinematics solution where you can position the foot or the arm and let the computer back-calculate the elbows, knees, hips and such. When playing a video game, players generally tend to experience the statistical metrics more than they experience the base stats regardless of what they use to inform themselves. We might gawk at dealing 100 000 damage intellectually, but intuitively we "like" the fact that that one-shot an enemy. Inversely, dealing 10 000 000 per hit doesn't feel like a lot of the enemy has 100 000 000 health, aka the Clicker Heroes problem. That's why I typically push for metrics first, balance those metrics second, figure out base stats last.

Incidentally, a TTK metric is good for both balancing enemies AND balancing guns, just as a random thought of the moment. It's what I'd seriously recommend going with if you don't already have anything planned.

Hopefully my above statement answers this as well. While getting the ratios correct is indeed more valuable than the actual numbers, its a bit tricky to not involve the numbers as Warframe already has a defined system. Overall the idea is to get close to a 1:1 ratio between a lvl 1 enemy's health-to-damage ratio and a level 30 enemy's health-to damage ratio. By doing so the health/damage values of Warframes can be treated closer to a plug-in factor, rather than something that has to be constantly catered to to create artificial difficulty.

[Teridax68]

22 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Yeah this kinda comes around to my initial post about coherency. Having enemies scale their health at a similar rate to Warframes (~200% base increase per 30 levels) means that all mathematical values will share a similar baseline. At level 1 a Lancer has an EH(effective health) of ~133. Their Grakatas deal 11 base damage per hit. (Ignoring the finer calculations) It should take ~13 rounds from a fellow Lancer to kill them. Of course the damage against a Warframe will be much harder to calculate, but ultimately it would take much more than 13 rounds to down a level 1 Warframe. For the sake of debate, lets say it takes ~26 rounds.

Now if we have a level 30 (unmodded) Warframe and two level 30 Lancers, we should have similar numbers still. The Lancer's EH is now 400, so the Grakata's damage should now be 33 (Probably slightly less. Still would need fine tuning). Confusion hits, and it still took ~13 rounds of friendly fire. Likewise it still takes ~26 rounds to down the Warframe

Alright, but now, where does that leave with damage mods? If we shift to this model and still keep our current multiplicative damage increases, we will be able to vaporize enemies even at level 1000. This is why I think there is a particular order in which these changes need to be done, and why reductions to our own scaling should apply first.

Edited February 9, 2019 by Teridax68

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-02-08 at 8:00 PM, Teridax68 said:

If CoH has that system, that would perfectly explain how it could balance its difficulty. However, that is also a system that operates by flattening people's power: if progression is signalled by an increase in stats, but the game balances you by raising your allies' stats until they're at your level, then raising your enemies' stats until they're at your level, then you have effectively gained nothing. The increase in stats here is illusory, and if you were to apply this system to Warframe, it would make base damage and multishot mods all the more redundant.

It's not illusionary, it's a learning curve and a gear check. You could get away with not slotting any enhancements in the 1-5 level range quite easily where enemies were scaled to be fought completely unprepared. You couldn't get away with it in the 30+ range, however, as your attacks would do piddling damage and your defences wouldn't work very well. The introduction of more and more powerful attacks also put a cascading drain on the player's Endurance reserves (essentially, energy) meaning the same level of performance would cost progressively more as it required a stronger build to sustain. This all tended to plateau at level 30, where players could start growing progressively more powerful again... To the point of utterly breaking the combat system in the 50+ game by forcing enemy to-hit chance down to 5% via defence buffs. That system absolutely had its issues, especially with the introduction of Inventions (Diablo style sets), but at least it did a good job transitioning players from an easy and care-free experience to an equally easy but player-driven experience later in the game.

I understand what you're saying here with damage enhancements becoming "redundant," i.e. a mandatory best-in-slot lock rather than a choice. City of Heroes had this exact issue to the point where a special "Enhancement Diversification" diminishing returns system had to be introduced to limit how many damage enhancements players could stack onto their powers. And that game absolutely WAS formulaic in terms of builds. Is it an attack? OK, so slot 1xAccuracy, 1xCost Reduction, 3xDamage, 1xRecharge Reduction. The only limiting factor was - like I said - ED and how many slots you actually had to play around, with the game offering 24 and a bit power picks but only 90-something slots the entire game. That experience is a large reason why I feel that damage buffs ought to be separated in their own entire system and not compete with other buffs.

 

4 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Hopefully my above statement answers this as well. While getting the ratios correct is indeed more valuable than the actual numbers, its a bit tricky to not involve the numbers as Warframe already has a defined system. Overall the idea is to get close to a 1:1 ratio between a lvl 1 enemy's health-to-damage ratio and a level 30 enemy's health-to damage ratio. By doing so the health/damage values of Warframes can be treated closer to a plug-in factor, rather than something that has to be constantly catered to to create artificial difficulty.

I'd argue that you're comparing the wrong things, though. You shouldn't be matching an enemy's health against their own damage because they're typically not designed to fight themselves. Occasionally they fight each other, but the balance of these fights is largely irrelevant. What you want to compare is an enemy's effective health vs. a Warframe's DPS, as well as a Warframe's effective health vs. an enemy's DPS. Even better, pick a desired TTK for both a Warframe and an Enemy, then scale individual enemies off of that. Yes, it's true that guns, critters and Warframes (and Operators, and Archwings, and...) are different, but you can evaluate those based on how much and in what direction they deviate from their "standard" values. Judging "shots to kill," for instance, is kind of pointless on its own unless you also consider rate of fire at the very least, reload time and AI behaviour as well preferably. To a player, it doesn't matter if they died in 1 shot or 10 shots if they got wiped out before they could react. Ideally, you want a model which abstracts away damage granularity so you don't have to worry about creating separate rules for snipers vs. SMGs and shotguns vs. everything else.

To me, a "Standard" Warframe would be a theoretical one with 100 health, 100 shields, 100 energy and 0 armour when "unranked." Pick a TTK against that Warframe, then we can work backwards to figure out enemy damage, rate of fire, accuracy and so forth. Because right now, the game feels like it was balanced "by the seat of our pants." Throw in some numbers for Warframes, throw in some numbers for Grenier, let some players loose on it and see what happens. I see no "intended" balance proposition in the first place, and that's not a good thing for a developer to do. Ideally, a developer should be in control of the ecosystem, not just reacting to it ad-hoc.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

53 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'd argue that you're comparing the wrong things, though. You shouldn't be matching an enemy's health against their own damage because they're typically not designed to fight themselves. Occasionally they fight each other, but the balance of these fights is largely irrelevant. What you want to compare is an enemy's effective health vs. a Warframe's DPS, as well as a Warframe's effective health vs. an enemy's DPS. Even better, pick a desired TTK for both a Warframe and an Enemy, then scale individual enemies off of that. Yes, it's true that guns, critters and Warframes (and Operators, and Archwings, and...) are different, but you can evaluate those based on how much and in what direction they deviate from their "standard" values. Judging "shots to kill," for instance, is kind of pointless on its own unless you also consider rate of fire at the very least, reload time and AI behaviour as well preferably. To a player, it doesn't matter if they died in 1 shot or 10 shots if they got wiped out before they could react. Ideally, you want a model which abstracts away damage granularity so you don't have to worry about creating separate rules for snipers vs. SMGs and shotguns vs. everything else.

To me, a "Standard" Warframe would be a theoretical one with 100 health, 100 shields, 100 energy and 0 armour when "unranked." Pick a TTK against that Warframe, then we can work backwards to figure out enemy damage, rate of fire, accuracy and so forth. Because right now, the game feels like it was balanced "by the seat of our pants." Throw in some numbers for Warframes, throw in some numbers for Grenier, let some players loose on it and see what happens. I see no "intended" balance proposition in the first place, and that's not a good thing for a developer to do. Ideally, a developer should be in control of the ecosystem, not just reacting to it ad-hoc.

I'd actually argue the opposite. Enemy vs enemy scenarios play a fairly large aspect in Warframe's design. Several Warframes (Nyx, Revenant, and Oberon) heavily rely on EvE for their own utility value. Also Invasions and Crossfire directly rely on the principle that Corpus, Grineer, and Infested are all trying to kill each other. Not to mention the value of a Radiation weapon's proc is almost purely to get nearby enemies to help DPS the target.

Again, this is largely a proposal at the rate of baby steps. It merely lays the groundwork so DE can adjust values without adding "artificial" difficulty.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

4 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Alright, but now, where does that leave with damage mods? If we shift to this model and still keep our current multiplicative damage increases, we will be able to vaporize enemies even at level 1000. This is why I think there is a particular order in which these changes need to be done, and why reductions to our own scaling should apply first.

One thing leads to another. The outright removal/rendition of Warframe's core damage system has several obstacles. Ideally we'd start small, lowering the multiplicative damage values of some mods/abilities. In Warframe's current state, the issue of damage numbers relies less on proper match-ups and more on simply getting them as high as possible (hence the heavy use of Bleed/Corrosive to ignore/lower enemy defenses).

Here's an extremely simplified example: Say we have a rifle with 100 "Damage Per Second" at base. Put on a maxed Serration mod (+165%) and now the rifle has 265 DPS. Put on two maxed elemental mods (+90 base damage each) and now you have 742 DPS. Add on 75% crit chance and 4X crit damage (~3X averaged) and your DPS is now ~2,226. This has yet to even factor in multishot, weakness/resistance, and status effects.

This is what constantly puts DE in a bind. "How are you suppose to create a challenge when your damage system is designed to obliterate everything?" The answer: Change the damage system.

Now lets change just one number: The rifle's DPS is still 100, but now the Serration is capped at +100%. Now the rifle has 200 DPS. Add in the two elemental mods and get 360 DPS. Same crit values give you ~1,080 DPS. That's less than half. Same weapon, stats and all, but one number changes everything.

Once again: Math is a beautiful thing. Get your setup right and everything else falls cleanly into place. And that's what this is all about: Setup.

DE, for all their quirks, has an excellent development team. You point out a core problem and they will move mountains to fix it. If they decide to adopt this model and role with it, it will be all of a week before things get largely cleaned up. Its really quite amazing how much love and care they put into this game.

[Teridax68]

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

It's not illusionary, it's a learning curve and a gear check. You could get away with not slotting any enhancements in the 1-5 level range quite easily where enemies were scaled to be fought completely unprepared. You couldn't get away with it in the 30+ range, however, as your attacks would do piddling damage and your defences wouldn't work very well. The introduction of more and more powerful attacks also put a cascading drain on the player's Endurance reserves (essentially, energy) meaning the same level of performance would cost progressively more as it required a stronger build to sustain. This all tended to plateau at level 30, where players could start growing progressively more powerful again... To the point of utterly breaking the combat system in the 50+ game by forcing enemy to-hit chance down to 5% via defence buffs. That system absolutely had its issues, especially with the introduction of Inventions (Diablo style sets), but at least it did a good job transitioning players from an easy and care-free experience to an equally easy but player-driven experience later in the game.

Okay... but then the game did not, in fact, balance its difficulty against the player, because apparently the difficulty adjustment covered only stats and not abilities. We are therefore back at square one, same as Warframe, where players and the game are often not in sync with each other. Moreover, none of this contradicts the fact that the stats component to progression is illusory: if you're gaining stats but having those same stats squished when it comes to entering proper content, you may as well not have gained those stats at all. Those stats bring no tangible benefit, because even if you didn't have them enemies would have just leveled down to match you.

Quote

I understand what you're saying here with damage enhancements becoming "redundant," i.e. a mandatory best-in-slot lock rather than a choice. City of Heroes had this exact issue to the point where a special "Enhancement Diversification" diminishing returns system had to be introduced to limit how many damage enhancements players could stack onto their powers. And that game absolutely WAS formulaic in terms of builds. Is it an attack? OK, so slot 1xAccuracy, 1xCost Reduction, 3xDamage, 1xRecharge Reduction. The only limiting factor was - like I said - ED and how many slots you actually had to play around, with the game offering 24 and a bit power picks but only 90-something slots the entire game. That experience is a large reason why I feel that damage buffs ought to be separated in their own entire system and not compete with other buffs.

Sure, damage buffs can go wherever, but none of this really justifies why those damage buffs need to stay, or at least which benefit exists that outweighs all of the downsides associated with handling these damage increases. Why is it so important to keep these increases when they only make challenge in the game more difficult to implement?

5 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

One thing leads to another. The outright removal/rendition of Warframe's core damage system has several obstacles. Ideally we'd start small, lowering the multiplicative damage values of some mods/abilities. In Warframe's current state, the issue of damage numbers relies less on proper match-ups and more on simply getting them as high as possible (hence the heavy use of Bleed/Corrosive to ignore/lower enemy defenses).

Here's an extremely simplified example: Say we have a rifle with 100 "Damage Per Second" at base. Put on a maxed Serration mod (+165%) and now the rifle has 265 DPS. Put on two maxed elemental mods (+90 base damage each) and now you have 742 DPS. Add on 75% crit chance and 4X crit damage (~3X averaged) and your DPS is now ~2,226. This has yet to even factor in multishot, weakness/resistance, and status effects.

This is what constantly puts DE in a bind. "How are you suppose to create a challenge when your damage system is designed to obliterate everything?" The answer: Change the damage system.

Now lets change just one number: The rifle's DPS is still 100, but now the Serration is capped at +100%. Now the rifle has 200 DPS. Add in the two elemental mods and get 360 DPS. Same crit values give you ~1,080 DPS. That's less than half. Same weapon, stats and all, but one number changes everything.

Once again: Math is a beautiful thing. Get your setup right and everything else falls cleanly into place. And that's what this is all about: Setup.

Literally all of this is stuff I laid out already in my first reply to this thread: for sure, order matters, which is precisely why reductions to our own damage need to come before nerfs to enemies. The fact of the matter is that enemies are not challenging right now, not even with exponential scaling, and so because our damage is out of wack. It therefore makes no sense from a priority perspective to nerf enemy scaling in that particular environment, as enemies are not difficult to begin with. Math is indeed a beautiful thing, but here it demonstrably gets in the way of good balancing and good gameplay. Meanwhile, logic is also a beautiful thing, and it is logical in view of the game's current state to amend player scaling first, and enemy scaling second (if that much sooner).

5 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

DE, for all their quirks, has an excellent development team. You point out a core problem and they will move mountains to fix it. If they decide to adopt this model and role with it, it will be all of a week before things get largely cleaned up. Its really quite amazing how much love and care they put into this game.

DE for sure has a stellar development team, and they absolutely love and care for their game, but the rest of what you said here is simply not true. DE leaves problems unaddressed for months, and when they work on something, it does not take a week to get things ready, as Melee 3.0 can attest to. This isn't to fault DE; rather, it is simply not physically possible to address all of the game's core problems in a week, nor is it reasonable to expect to.

Edited February 10, 2019 by Teridax68

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

11 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Literally all of this is stuff I laid out already in my first reply to this thread: for sure, order matters, which is precisely why reductions to our own damage need to come before nerfs to enemies. The fact of the matter is that enemies are not challenging right now, not even with exponential scaling, and so because our damage is out of wack. It therefore makes no sense from a priority perspective to nerf enemy scaling in that particular environment, as enemies are not difficult to begin with. Math is indeed a beautiful thing, but here it demonstrably gets in the way of good balancing and good gameplay. Meanwhile, logic is also a beautiful thing, and it is logical in view of the game's current state to amend player scaling first, and enemy scaling second (if that much sooner).

Ah, I see your logic now. Our disagreement stems less from an order-of-events and more from the fundamental divide within the community. While the more laid-back  players find the game having an unpleasant difficulty curve, the more aggressive players view the scaling as overall lackluster. So I will simply say this: You are half right.

Warframe's scaling mechanics do in fact allow even the toughest encounters to become trivial, but at a cost. To maintain effective DPS and survivability, the number of effective weapons and Warframes dwindle into a select few "meta" choices. Warframes that may be fun to play may be overall useless at later levels. Likewise relatively bland Warframes are still commonly used simply because their raw numbers keep them viable. This whole debate is still going on regarding Fortuna's enemies and their disproportionately high values. Personally I'd treat this issue by simply adding softcaps to damage values, but really though this is a problem for a different discussion.

My two cents is that its overall better to have enemies start out as "too easy" rather than "too difficult". When its easier at first then there is a better control group. It allows us to see how everything performs relative to each other; see if anything still under-performs despite everything else being at or above par. However if everything is too tough at first, then its hard to get a good grasp on what needs fixed. Do we buff the players, or nerf the enemies? Likewise you're more likely to turn off a larger percentage of the player base, further skewing the feedback. Overall its better to have an interim of "too easy" than to have an interim of "too hard".

11 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

DE for sure has a stellar development team, and they absolutely love and care for their game, but the rest of what you said here is simply not true. DE leaves problems unaddressed for months, and when they work on something, it does not take a week to get things ready, as Melee 3.0 can attest to. This isn't to fault DE; rather, it is simply not physically possible to address all of the game's core problems in a week, nor is it reasonable to expect to.

Not exactly what I meant there. DE is indeed a bit slow in developing things from scratch, but they really shine in "post-introduction patchwork". Every time a major update comes out, its typically less than 2 weeks before 90% of the related bugs are fixed. If they did implement this new scaling design, it'd likely be a couple months before it was introduced. However once its launched, it'd be only a couple weeks before everything is adjusted to a comfortable level based on feedback.

[Teridax68]

12 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Ah, I see your logic now. Our disagreement stems less from an order-of-events and more from the fundamental divide within the community. While the more laid-back  players find the game having an unpleasant difficulty curve, the more aggressive players view the scaling as overall lackluster. So I will simply say this: You are half right.

No, I really am disagreeing from an order-of-events angle here. The game having a rough new player experience is not incompatible with it having no real late-game difficulty, and in fact both are related to the way the game does scaling. Nerfing enemy scaling will affect high-level players the most, and make the game even easier, which is not what the game needs at this stage.

12 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Warframe's scaling mechanics do in fact allow even the toughest encounters to become trivial, but at a cost. To maintain effective DPS and survivability, the number of effective weapons and Warframes dwindle into a select few "meta" choices. Warframes that may be fun to play may be overall useless at later levels. Likewise relatively bland Warframes are still commonly used simply because their raw numbers keep them viable. This whole debate is still going on regarding Fortuna's enemies and their disproportionately high values. Personally I'd treat this issue by simply adding softcaps to damage values, but really though this is a problem for a different discussion.

Sure, but this is not simply a problem of scaling, it's also a problem of the game throwing too many enemies at the player in its current endgame, one of many enemies nullifying abilities or being immune to them, and so on. Nerfing scaling may make more frames endgame viable, but only because it would be making every frame so much stronger, including the ones that are already far too strong.

12 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

My two cents is that its overall better to have enemies start out as "too easy" rather than "too difficult". When its easier at first then there is a better control group. It allows us to see how everything performs relative to each other; see if anything still under-performs despite everything else being at or above par. However if everything is too tough at first, then its hard to get a good grasp on what needs fixed. Do we buff the players, or nerf the enemies? Likewise you're more likely to turn off a larger percentage of the player base, further skewing the feedback. Overall its better to have an interim of "too easy" than to have an interim of "too hard".

If you want slower starting scaling, then reduce the scaling of enemies across the Star Chart. You don't even have to introduce a new model. Right now, enemies only start out too difficult for newcomers, and if you are experiencing difficulty once enemies start to scale, then the scaling system is doing its job. If that much is not acceptable, then we can go back to what I said and move towards scrapping enemy-based scaling altogether, but in the meantime players get way too strong for their own good, and that is what is fundamentally skewing balance.

12 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Not exactly what I meant there. DE is indeed a bit slow in developing things from scratch, but they really shine in "post-introduction patchwork". Every time a major update comes out, its typically less than 2 weeks before 90% of the related bugs are fixed. If they did implement this new scaling design, it'd likely be a couple months before it was introduced. However once its launched, it'd be only a couple weeks before everything is adjusted to a comfortable level based on feedback.

The same can be said of literally any company that implements Day 1 patches or hotfixes. It is not an uncommon process these days to release a feature half-done and then spend the next few weeks applying fixes, and Warframe's larger updates are notorious for having bugs and balance issues. Phrasing things this way also makes what you said completely irrelevant to the subject matter, as whether or not DE cleans up quickly after their releases says nothing then about how fast they can implement the changes themselves.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

No, I really am disagreeing from an order-of-events angle here. The game having a rough new player experience is not incompatible with it having no real late-game difficulty, and in fact both are related to the way the game does scaling. Nerfing enemy scaling will affect high-level players the most, and make the game even easier, which is not what the game needs at this stage.

Sure, but this is not simply a problem of scaling, it's also a problem of the game throwing too many enemies at the player in its current endgame, one of many enemies nullifying abilities or being immune to them, and so on. Nerfing scaling may make more frames endgame viable, but only because it would be making every frame so much stronger, including the ones that are already far too strong.

If you want slower starting scaling, then reduce the scaling of enemies across the Star Chart. You don't even have to introduce a new model. Right now, enemies only start out too difficult for newcomers, and if you are experiencing difficulty once enemies start to scale, then the scaling system is doing its job. If that much is not acceptable, then we can go back to what I said and move towards scrapping enemy-based scaling altogether, but in the meantime players get way too strong for their own good, and that is what is fundamentally skewing balance.

Okay, let's be clear on something. These are all good arguments, but they do not directly contribute to the original topic. What you are trying to define with your arguments is "endgame". While the original topic does have a play in endgame, it is not the main focus. The focus of this thread is to discuss creating and maintaining fluidity from early game to late game. There are tons of ways to create and enhance endgame. Adding new enemy type/ranks, imposing player softcaps, making enemies all-round smarter, etc. None of these are a direct concern right now.

The focus here is to ensure that progressing from level 1 to level 60 is overall a smooth experience. Enemies shouldn't be spontaneous bullet sponges. Properly modded players shouldn't be suddenly squishy. Tactical approaches like using Radiation should be consistently viable. As of now that simply isn't the case. Grineer jump in defensive values at a moment's notice. Only the most durable Warframes maintain late game value. Only extreme DPS strategies matter. Warframe goes from a game of infinite possibilities to one of niche "meta" as a player progresses.

Many things must be done before problems like "endgame" can be solved. That said if we can get the base math right, it will be infinitely easier.

[Teridax68]

3 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Okay, let's be clear on something. These are all good arguments, but they do not directly contribute to the original topic. What you are trying to define with your arguments is "endgame". While the original topic does have a play in endgame, it is not the main focus. The focus of this thread is to discuss creating and maintaining fluidity from early game to late game. There are tons of ways to create and enhance endgame. Adding new enemy type/ranks, imposing player softcaps, making enemies all-round smarter, etc. None of these are a direct concern right now.

The focus here is to ensure that progressing from level 1 to level 60 is overall a smooth experience. Enemies shouldn't be spontaneous bullet sponges. Properly modded players shouldn't be suddenly squishy. Tactical approaches like using Radiation should be consistently viable. As of now that simply isn't the case. Grineer jump in defensive values at a moment's notice. Only the most durable Warframes maintain late game value. Only extreme DPS strategies matter. Warframe goes from a game of infinite possibilities to one of niche "meta" as a player progresses.

Many things must be done before problems like "endgame" can be solved. That said if we can get the base math right, it will be infinitely easier.

If all you wanted was to make scaling from early to late game smooth, the simplest solution would be to just squish enemy level ranges across the Star Chart. No need to reinvent the entire scaling system. Moreover, your topic directly addresses the topic of endgame, as noted in the very first paragraph of the OP:

On 2019-02-01 at 1:11 AM, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

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.

So you are simply changing the goalposts here in the face of criticism, as has happened before when the previous reasoning for lowering enemy scaling was to make enemy self-damage more meaningful. The fact remains that your proposal to reduce enemy scaling is not a good fit for the game's current situation, and would only become more appropriate in a state of the game where other systemic changes were implemented prior. As it stands, the direct consequence to nerfing enemy scaling is that, all else held equal, the game would become even more trivially easy for most players, and if the fix were to adjust the speed at which enemies scaled, that same fix could be adjusted to the current environment to address the problem of early-to-mid scaling. Again, this is why I think there is a crucial ordering to follow here, because otherwise the proposal in your OP simply does not make sense in the game's current state.

Edited February 11, 2019 by Teridax68

[(PSN)Spider_Enigma]

People r under the assumption that players don't have a gear score, but they do

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

So you are simply changing the goalposts here in the face of criticism, as has happened before when the previous reasoning for lowering enemy scaling was to make enemy self-damage more meaningful. The fact remains that your proposal to reduce enemy scaling is not a good fit for the game's current situation, and would only become more appropriate in a state of the game where other systemic changes were implemented prior. As it stands, the direct consequence to nerfing enemy scaling is that, all else held equal, the game would become even more trivially easy for most players, and if the fix were to adjust the speed at which enemies scaled, that same fix could be adjusted to the current environment to address the problem of early-to-mid scaling. Again, this is why I think there is a crucial ordering to follow here, because otherwise the proposal in your OP simply does not make sense in the game's current state.

No, I said there is a power vacuum every time a new endgame is released. If I was shooting purely to fix up endgame, I'd just throw out a few suggestions and call it a thread; or perhaps add my two cents onto the dozens of other threads complaining about the lack of proper endgame. The goal here is not to directly change one thing, but to indirectly change many things. So long as enemies scale on an exponential curve it will be nearly impossible to properly gauge difficulty in any setting. When a new player comes to Warframe, they are taught that type matching is priority for damage, and that there are multiple ways to approach each mission. As the game progresses, these things become more and more obscure; eventually devolving into a sheer DPS check. DE tries to mix things up and provide a challenge, but in the end all they are doing is further narrowing the list of viable Warframes/weapons.

The only way to fix the numerous gameplay issues is to approach it indirectly.

[Teridax68]

4 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

No, I said there is a power vacuum every time a new endgame is released. If I was shooting purely to fix up endgame, I'd just throw out a few suggestions and call it a thread; or perhaps add my two cents onto the dozens of other threads complaining about the lack of proper endgame. The goal here is not to directly change one thing, but to indirectly change many things. So long as enemies scale on an exponential curve it will be nearly impossible to properly gauge difficulty in any setting. When a new player comes to Warframe, they are taught that type matching is priority for damage, and that there are multiple ways to approach each mission. As the game progresses, these things become more and more obscure; eventually devolving into a sheer DPS check. DE tries to mix things up and provide a challenge, but in the end all they are doing is further narrowing the list of viable Warframes/weapons.

The only way to fix the numerous gameplay issues is to approach it indirectly.

But it's towards the late-game that everything boils down to DPS checks. These are not problems the player runs into when going through the Star Chart for the first time. You are effectively trying to tackle an endgame problem. Moreover, how exactly does your proposal solve this? How would changes to enemy scaling prevent the meta from being a DPS check?

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-02-10 at 5:51 AM, Teridax68 said:

Moreover, none of this contradicts the fact that the stats component to progression is illusory: if you're gaining stats but having those same stats squished when it comes to entering proper content, you may as well not have gained those stats at all. Those stats bring no tangible benefit, because even if you didn't have them enemies would have just leveled down to match you.

We're retreading the same ground at this point. Let me try for a one-sentence thesis and hopefully we can leave it at that. You don't have to agree with me, as long as we're both clear about what's being proposed: Scaling player stats vs. enemy stats via stat upgrades is a useful tool to ensure a game is easy for new players without requiring a proper build, but progressively grows harder and requires players to learn, earn and progress in order to maintain status quo.

 

On 2019-02-09 at 11:19 PM, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

I'd actually argue the opposite. Enemy vs enemy scenarios play a fairly large aspect in Warframe's design. Several Warframes (Nyx, Revenant, and Oberon) heavily rely on EvE for their own utility value. Also Invasions and Crossfire directly rely on the principle that Corpus, Grineer, and Infested are all trying to kill each other. Not to mention the value of a Radiation weapon's proc is almost purely to get nearby enemies to help DPS the target.

All of those are exceptions to the game's general balance, however. Enemy vs. Enemy balance is almost entirely irrelevant for Crossfire because the result of the AI fights doesn't matter - the player is expected to kill or avoid all of them anyway. It's slightly less irrelevant but still largely so for Invasions, where the faction you're defending is deliberately spawned several levels below the faction you're opposing, specifically to ensure that "your faction" consistently loses and thus needs your help. Games have been doing these kinds of loaded fights for years, as far back as City of Heroes' return of the 5th Column set +2 to their opposing Council enemies to give them the impression of being stronger despite using most of the same units. Warframe mind control abilities are relevant, but also come with substantial "cheats" especially in the case of Nyx whose mind control target gains bonus stats. It's the same trick Payday 2 used to make Jokered Cops able to substantially exceed their non-Jokered counterparts so they could serve as meaningful pets.

And again - I'm not saying Enemy vs. Enemy balance should be deliberately broken, but rather that it's not and should not be the core of the game's balance proposition. By a wide margin, the majority of combat takes place between Players and NPCs, thus that's where the majority of the consideration needs to go for any mathematical model you're proposing. What the majority of players experience playing the game normally is a very reductive version of the game's stats and typically boils down to how quickly and easily they can kill enemies and how long they can afford to take damage before having to worry about it. That's why DPS and Effective Health reign supreme in most MMOs and most RPGs. Buffs, debuffs, control abilities and so forth serve - to a large extent - to modulate those basic stats. Hell, some games have embraced this and just listed a DPS stat and a Toughness stat right in your inventory. Both Diablo 3 and The Division do this. And while, yes, those numbers are not entirely representative of the complexities of battle, they're still the cornerstone around everything else revolves.

I don't mean to be overly critical here, but I do feel compelled to caution you on your approach to forging a competing mathematical model. Don't just tweak stats and cross your fingers. Start with a goal which can be expressed analytically (i.e. via an equation) then work from there. I'd argue that most of this game's balance issues stem from precisely the kind of approach to balance I'm criticising here, where a developer decided it would be "cool" to add damage resistance which scales up to 90% and threw that into a "rare" mod without really considering what role that was supposed to serve or what effect it would have on the overall balance of player power. Considering the issue of scaling enemy toughness is not the actual scaling but rather how fast it runs out-of-scope of our Warframe's guns, I'd argue that Player vs. Enemy is the most important consideration here.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But it's towards the late-game that everything boils down to DPS checks. These are not problems the player runs into when going through the Star Chart for the first time. You are effectively trying to tackle an endgame problem. Moreover, how exactly does your proposal solve this? How would changes to enemy scaling prevent the meta from being a DPS check?

I guess I should point out one key context here: Warframe's trouble regarding endgame is that it doesn't have an endgame. For a game to have endgame there has to be an "end". Warframe's plot is still developing and new content is always being added. You can argue things like Elite Onslaught and Arbitrations count as endgame, but ultimately the gameplay is almost identical to every other part of the game: Kill fast. Don't get killed.

Ideal endgame material is something that makes you change how play fundamentally. One good example is (oddly) Pokemon: Throughout the main game the player has to only worry about two things: making sure their Pokemon are leveled up, and have proper type match ups. Even when fighting the Elite Four (the final or near-final challenge of the game) these rules still applied, and even made them a cakewalk with enough prep. Really its not much different from Warframe's current design. HOWEVER the newer games introduced a sort of "Battle Frontier" where your Pokemon were auto-leveled to a specific level bracket, and the game itself would actively adapt the random opponents to beat your preferred Pokemon. So now not only did they take away your ability to overpower your opponents, they also took the prospect of type-advantage and actively use it against you; they also prevented you from using legendary Pokemon, so not to have a natural stat advantage. This design flips the game on its head and makes the player think of how to play the game differently.

Another good design of endgame was (please don't kill me) Destiny 1's Raids. After beating the main game and getting a high enough level, you could group up to challenge a Raid. These raids relied less on DPS and more on puzzle solving. DPS was still important, but there was enough breathing room to where you could fail a DPS check and still beat the Raid on the same round (So long as nobody dies). Even when there were "do-or-die" DPS checks, the actual DPS required was easily doable. What was the true make-or-break for these raids was team synergy and coordination, something that Warframe never actually demands from players.

To this end, I can confidently say this: To try and create an endgame solely with enemy scaling will never work. So really to denounce a change in scaling using its influence on the non-existent endgame only makes for a poor argument. So long as scaling exists, be it linear or exponential, players will find a way to abuse this system and trivialize the game as a whole.

[Teridax68]

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

We're retreading the same ground at this point. Let me try for a one-sentence thesis and hopefully we can leave it at that. You don't have to agree with me, as long as we're both clear about what's being proposed: Scaling player stats vs. enemy stats via stat upgrades is a useful tool to ensure a game is easy for new players without requiring a proper build, but progressively grows harder and requires players to learn, earn and progress in order to maintain status quo.

Sure, but the issue here isn't one of misunderstanding, it's one of disagreement, with Warframe as the counterexample to your thesis. Gear-checking the player, especially during the early game, creates artificial lurches in difficulty, particularly when gaining this power is also random (e.g. based on obtaining certain mods), and leads to the player feeling like they're not progressing even after having learned the proper mechanics. Stats are not what alter gameplay, and the only proper way to introduce a difficulty curve is to introduce the player with new challenges that test them on the mechanics they're meant to have learned at that stage.

5 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

I guess I should point out one key context here: Warframe's trouble regarding endgame is that it doesn't have an endgame. For a game to have endgame there has to be an "end". Warframe's plot is still developing and new content is always being added. You can argue things like Elite Onslaught and Arbitrations count as endgame, but ultimately the gameplay is almost identical to every other part of the game: Kill fast. Don't get killed.

Semantics about whether not Warframe has a "real" endgame aside, the fact remains that the current highest level of content, i.e. ESO, Arbitrations, Profit-Taker, etc. is distinctly different from a new or even mid-level player's experience. In those particular modes, which also happen to feature a lot of horde mode combat, damage is indeed everything, but before then many more frames are viable in many more situations, and in some cases the player may even feel weak when they end up being understatted. Gameplay in ESO is not going to be the same as a new player's first Exterminate run, so I absolutely do not think it makes any sense whatsoever to equate all parts of the game.

5 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Ideal endgame material is something that makes you change how play fundamentally. One good example is (oddly) Pokemon: Throughout the main game the player has to only worry about two things: making sure their Pokemon are leveled up, and have proper type match ups. Even when fighting the Elite Four (the final or near-final challenge of the game) these rules still applied, and even made them a cakewalk with enough prep. Really its not much different from Warframe's current design. HOWEVER the newer games introduced a sort of "Battle Frontier" where your Pokemon were auto-leveled to a specific level bracket, and the game itself would actively adapt the random opponents to beat your preferred Pokemon. So now not only did they take away your ability to overpower your opponents, they also took the prospect of type-advantage and actively use it against you; they also prevented you from using legendary Pokemon, so not to have a natural stat advantage. This design flips the game on its head and makes the player think of how to play the game differently.

Another good design of endgame was (please don't kill me) Destiny 1's Raids. After beating the main game and getting a high enough level, you could group up to challenge a Raid. These raids relied less on DPS and more on puzzle solving. DPS was still important, but there was enough breathing room to where you could fail a DPS check and still beat the Raid on the same round (So long as nobody dies). Even when there were "do-or-die" DPS checks, the actual DPS required was easily doable. What was the true make-or-break for these raids was team synergy and coordination, something that Warframe never actually demands from players.

Okay, but how does nerfing enemy scaling before addressing player power lead to this? Would it not just make the game even easier and less skill-testing? If you want to test the player on their mastery of the game, why not actually address all of our godmode/easymode crutches in the first place?

5 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

To this end, I can confidently say this: To try and create an endgame solely with enemy scaling will never work. So really to denounce a change in scaling using its influence on the non-existent endgame only makes for a poor argument. So long as scaling exists, be it linear or exponential, players will find a way to abuse this system and trivialize the game as a whole.

This argument makes no sense. Indeed, to use scaling as the sole means of raising difficulty is artificial and doomed to fail, that has been my position from the start. However, it is ridiculous to deny that raising enemy stats makes gameplay more difficult, and conversely that when enemy stats are too low, the game becomes too easy. What you are proposing is to nerf the scaling of enemies, and thereby make them even quicker to kill and less damaging when they're already easy to beat, while opposing any prior change to our own excessive scaling. It is therefore obvious that, all else held equal, your proposal incurs the net effect of trivializing the game's already easy difficulty at higher levels. To pretend that one can have a perfectly challenging game regardless of any sort of balance work is itself a poor argument, and for all your talk of how the game should be challenging, you have so far only endorsed changes that would make the game easier, and opposed those that aimed to introduce genuine challenge.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

-snip-

Look: The goal here is not to directly affect endgame in any meaningful way. The goal is to counteract the "funneling" that Warframe's game progression imposes upon itself. You can make any argument you want about the endgame, but ultimately that is beyond the scope of this thread. When and how DE makes their endgame is their own deciding, but everything leading up to that endgame shouldn't scale so dramatically as to eliminate the usefulness of half the Warframes and weapons by level 60.

[Teridax68]

4 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Look: The goal here is not to directly affect endgame in any meaningful way. The goal is to counteract the "funneling" that Warframe's game progression imposes upon itself. You can make any argument you want about the endgame, but ultimately that is beyond the scope of this thread. When and how DE makes their endgame is their own deciding, but everything leading up to that endgame shouldn't scale so dramatically as to eliminate the usefulness of half the Warframes and weapons by level 60.

You are proposing to redo, and in the process severely nerf enemy scaling: whether you like it or not, your proposal would affect the endgame, and in fact it would affect the endgame more than any other part of the game. Our opinions of endgame are irrelevant to this fact. If you take issue with weapons and frames being invalidated by enemy scaling, it's understandable to want to find a solution, but your solution simply lowers the bar for everything, including weapons and frames that are already too strong. This is why I do not think your approach is the most efficient for the goal you're stating here, because when you make every enemy weaker just for the unviable frames to have a chance, the frames that are already too good at damaging enemies or surviving them now will become even more capable of disintegrating masses of enemies, and even more immortal. The same can be said for weapons: ultimately, you would still have the problem of some frames and weapons being much more desirable over others, except this time it's in an environment where enemies are will be, in most cases, complete pushovers, including in designated endgame content.

The problem here isn't simply that enemies scale up too strongly for some frames to be viable, but that there is far too large a spread of power between certain weapons and frames, such that some of them are hundreds of times more powerful than the rest. In the case of weapons, this mostly comes from numbers that need to be tuned, but in the case of frames, it's because some frames can do essentially everything one wants from them right now, and with little effort, whereas others struggle to be functional at what they're supposed to excel at. This can only be fixed by targeted balance and design work, but at the very least, reducing our own scaling first, and then balancing enemies along this more stable baseline, would open up a world where weapons suddenly don't deal hundreds of times more DPS than each other, and thus would be much more likely to all be viable.

Edited February 12, 2019 by Teridax68

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

10 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

You are proposing to redo, and in the process severely nerf enemy scaling: whether you like it or not, your proposal would affect the endgame, and in fact it would affect the endgame more than any other part of the game. Our opinions of endgame are irrelevant to this fact. If you take issue with weapons and frames being invalidated by enemy scaling, it's understandable to want to find a solution, but your solution simply lowers the bar for everything, including weapons and frames that are already too strong. This is why I do not think your approach is the most efficient for the goal you're stating here, because when you make every enemy weaker just for the unviable frames to have a chance, the frames that are already too good at damaging enemies or surviving them now will become even more capable of disintegrating masses of enemies, and even more immortal. The same can be said for weapons: ultimately, you would still have the problem of some frames and weapons being much more desirable over others, except this time it's in an environment where enemies are will be, in most cases, complete pushovers, including in designated endgame content.

The problem here isn't simply that enemies scale up too strongly for some frames to be viable, but that there is far too large a spread of power between certain weapons and frames, such that some of them are hundreds of times more powerful than the rest. In the case of weapons, this mostly comes from numbers that need to be tuned, but in the case of frames, it's because some frames can do essentially everything one wants from them right now, and with little effort, whereas others struggle to be functional at what they're supposed to excel at. This can only be fixed by targeted balance and design work, but at the very least, reducing our own scaling first, and then balancing enemies along this more stable baseline, would open up a world where weapons suddenly don't deal hundreds of times more DPS than each other, and thus would be much more likely to all be viable.

We're both saying the same thing, but you're missing the fine details. Yes enemies would get a health/damage reduction, but would would player weapons/abilities Its like a catch-22: Enemies scale immensely because player weapons scale immensely. Player weapons scale immensely because enemies do as well.

If enemies get a linear scale, and weapons get a scaling nerf (likely by simply reducing the mod bonuses), then it becomes a close-to-net-zero. The added benefit is that Warframes overall get better survivabilty, and damage-typing becomes more valuable than simply stacking slash/corrosive procs. As for all other arguments, that is up to DE. They can do whatever they want to bump up late-to-end game. So long as the math is coherent, we can worry less about Warframes becoming obsolete and weapons being homogenized.

[Teridax68]

3 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

We're both saying the same thing, but you're missing the fine details. Yes enemies would get a health/damage reduction, but would would player weapons/abilities Its like a catch-22: Enemies scale immensely because player weapons scale immensely. Player weapons scale immensely because enemies do as well.

Hold on there. I have been the one saying this, not you. My very first post states exactly what you are saying here, and proposed a set of nerfs to our own scaling, but at that point you had opposed the idea. As it stands, I have been insisting on nerfing player scaling first and enemy scaling second, precisely because it is player scaling that is at the source of our issues, whereas the enemy scaling formula is irrelevant in the short term, as enemy level ranges can easily be adjusted. I am not the one missing the fine details here.

3 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

If enemies get a linear scale, and weapons get a scaling nerf (likely by simply reducing the mod bonuses), then it becomes a close-to-net-zero. The added benefit is that Warframes overall get better survivabilty, and damage-typing becomes more valuable than simply stacking slash/corrosive procs. As for all other arguments, that is up to DE. They can do whatever they want to bump up late-to-end game. So long as the math is coherent, we can worry less about Warframes becoming obsolete and weapons being homogenized.

Okay, but then we're back at square one in this discussion: your ideas are nice and all, but we first need to nerf our player scaling, as I suggested with concrete examples in my very first reply here. Nerfing enemy scaling is, in this respect, secondary to the issue at hand, and is something that should follow, not precede, nerfs to our own scaling.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

45 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Hold on there. I have been the one saying this, not you. My very first post states exactly what you are saying here, and proposed a set of nerfs to our own scaling, but at that point you had opposed the idea. As it stands, I have been insisting on nerfing player scaling first and enemy scaling second, precisely because it is player scaling that is at the source of our issues, whereas the enemy scaling formula is irrelevant in the short term, as enemy level ranges can easily be adjusted. I am not the one missing the fine details here.

Okay, but then we're back at square one in this discussion: your ideas are nice and all, but we first need to nerf our player scaling, as I suggested with concrete examples in my very first reply here. Nerfing enemy scaling is, in this respect, secondary to the issue at hand, and is something that should follow, not precede, nerfs to our own scaling.

I proposed a simple numerical nerf. What you proposed was a complete overhaul of several mods and fundamental designs. That is drastically different in how it effects gameplay and how readily DE could implement it. The problem with both ideas however is that it would create an even more severe gap where all but the absolute best weapons turn into pea-shooters against an exponentially scaling enemy. Well meaning though it may be, to nerf players first will create a period of near-unplayability. That is why they have to be done at the exact same time.

[Teridax68]

13 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

I proposed a simple numerical nerf. What you proposed was a complete overhaul of several mods and fundamental designs. That is drastically different in how it effects gameplay and how readily DE could implement it. The problem with both ideas however is that it would create an even more severe gap where all but the absolute best weapons turn into pea-shooters against an exponentially scaling enemy. Well meaning though it may be, to nerf players first will create a period of near-unplayability. That is why they have to be done at the exact same time.

But there is no reason to implement your change at this stage yet. Your proposal makes it harder for enemies to scale when they're already weak against us, and is redundant in the face of simple level range adjustments that could be made even now. Meanwhile, the changes I am proposing, while drastic, are by no means an overhaul of the game's fundamental design, yet would cleanly address many current problems with our scaling. Removing Serration or Split Chamber from the game may affect the meta, but would not in fact change the game's core design, as the entire game is not designed around multishot. Similarly, changing elemental damage mods from addition to conversion would similarly not require an overhaul of the whole game. Reworking crit and status may take more time for sure, but that is precisely why I proposed addressing those later, and first going for quick wins on other damage mods. If my change makes players weaker (and it will for sure), the simple solution is to reduce enemy level ranges. Once more, enemies scale exponentially for a reason right now, and even with their ridiculous stats, they are complete pushovers. We need to address the problem at the source, or we will not be able to address the problem at all. Done wrong, the situation may even worsen, which is why ordering here is crucial, even if that means implementing tougher changes first.

Edited February 13, 2019 by Teridax68