An idea on how to make Warframe more difficult

[Poisonx3]

I believe it was mentioned in devstream #122 that the difficulty for "endgame" players is not all that hard. As one of those players I can agree with that. Now since warfarmes are basically main characters with crazy plot armor compared to any average unit in any location, and become basically impossible to kill when grouped and have the right party set up and builds, what if warframes were brought down a peg or two... or just all the way.

 

My idea:

A new mission type that has some special rules to stress on skill and teamwork by stripping away power and having to earn it back mid mission. 

No mods, or just unranked mods (to still allow for some variety but still heavily restricting the killing power of warframes and their weapons). A system could be added to automatically bring down the ranks of equipped mods so new ones do not need to be acquired just for this. On top of that you only start with your melee weapon. As you earn kills, or maybe finish objectives that show up, you earn the ability to use your secondary then primary. After missing an objective or not getting enough kills in time you will lose your primary then secondary. Similar to survival and sanctuary onslaught, the mission goes as long as you can while the enemies get harder, but instead of increasing the number of enemies and their level have only the levels rise so the enemies become actually stronger. This can of course be ignored but i believe that this may change up the tack ticks of how players play since Warframe is more of a hack and slash this will cause each individual enemy to be challenging on its own.

The idea is to "remind" tenno of their "roots" and show how far they have come but also prove that they are still masters of gun and blade.   

 

My original idea of the location of this the orokin tower seen from Cetus since it seemed like a cool place to go, but really it could be added like a new type of nightmare mission, or even one per planet and have a special set of rewards for them. Maybe its own area. It could be wedged in anywhere really.

A lot of this can change of course since it's just an idea but I think the basic part of it (striping away the power and making players earn some of it back) provides a good basis to make Warframe more difficult. 

 

Let me know if this should be posted somewhere different.

 

Edited February 4, 2019 by Poisonx3

[(PSN)OriginalEquinox]

So basically handicap players? Arbitration and Sanctuary already did that and failed.

What we need are enemies that aren't brain dead cannon fodder who run straight into our fire all day, take some time to give them more complex coding that allows them to react better to the world around them instead of watch the person next to them get cut in half by a invisible Warframe and just ignore it like they do now. Give them two AI if possible, one that acts as a individual unit and has priorities Ike self preservation, and the other a hivemind kind of thing that allows groups of enemies to work together and coordinate attacks and protect eachother.

I doubt this is a easy thing to do but I assure you if DE pulls it off it would benefit everyone 

[Poisonx3]

38 minutes ago, (PS4)Equinox21697 said:

So basically handicap players? Arbitration and Sanctuary already did that and failed.

What we need are enemies that aren't brain dead cannon fodder who run straight into our fire all day, take some time to give them more complex coding that allows them to react better to the world around them instead of watch the person next to them get cut in half by a invisible Warframe and just ignore it like they do now. Give them two AI if possible, one that acts as a individual unit and has priorities Ike self preservation, and the other a hivemind kind of thing that allows groups of enemies to work together and coordinate attacks and protect eachother.

I doubt this is a easy thing to do but I assure you if DE pulls it off it would benefit everyone 

Those failed because they don't actually handicap anything. Sanctuary has little noticeable affect so I'm not sure what it does other than reset my combo counter each wave but the problem with arbitrations is that all it does is add that one drone that kills everything for you when you kill it. At least my idea actually strips you down to base stats.

I'm not saying better AI shouldn't be added, it would definitely hep the difficulty some, but seeing how Warframe is basically about killing masses of enemies efficiently I'm not sure how much AI changes would actually change anything. Also I'm not sure if DE would really ever change the core of their AI after all this time because the problem I see with the ai right now is that everything (warframes, weapons, enemy movements) is all about killing big groups. Not smarter, tougher, spread out enemies, which is what they would need to do.

[Poisonx3]

13 minutes ago, (XB1)Cubic Clem said:

What you describe is "fake" difficulty and it's hated by the community..

Ya that did cross my mind. Maybe I'm the only one who likes it though, at least in other games so I thought it could work here in some way.

[Poisonx3]

5 minutes ago, (XB1)Cubic Clem said:

The thing is it's too late to introduce difficulty in this game, not with all this power we have.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a meta user so I actually have difficulty in this game..

So the only difficulty de can do is CC us to death (orb Vallis) nullify our abilities (nullifiers, Krampus, arbitration drones etc.) .. and it's not fun, at all..

And removing our mods? I don't like that, neither do others..

The only difficulty the user can make is to Nerf themselves, and step away from the meta, which brings mortality and damage falloff.. maybe try out different builds yourself etc. to spice up the game.. 

But don't expect to log in one day and get a game mode that is Uber "difficult".. probably not going to happen.. (which again, IDC, because I have difficulty in this game) 

I am starting to see that now, that it's to late to have actual difficulty. DE would need to rework basically the entire game to make it more difficult. At least the warframes are living up to being the super weapons they are.

[breakdafunk]

2 hours ago, Poisonx3 said:

No mods, or just unranked mods...

I did not collect my mods to not use them. That makes no sense. Why do people keep coming up with variations of this idea?

[Loza03]

I went through a Kuva Flood hive mission as an unranked, unmodded Trinity using no abilities. Literally any enemy could kill me in one hit.

Wasn't hard, just a little frustrating.

[Steel_Rook]

So... pretty much a Battle Royale framework, then? The Division Survival? I'm personally not really interested. You've hit on two of the aspects of difficulty design that I REALLY hate in video games - removing player abilities and an over-focus on DPS. Progression is a large part of Warframe, so a game mode which effectively strips my progression for the duration of it does not strike me as compelling. If I wanted that, I could unequip my own mods and jump into the game that way. Worse, an explicit focus on killing enemies quickly just boils the game down to an AoE DPS optimisation issue. It's the Diablo 3 Nephilem Rift problem, essentially. In my opinion, horde shooters are at their most boring when they boil down to "just kill all the things as fast as you can." Complex objectives, exploration and non-combat systems are, I feel, what sets the good ones apart from the bad ones.

Not to keep bringing up Payday 2 all the time, but that game nailed the objective-driven dynamic. Kills give you nothing, enemies respawn constantly faster than you can kill them (up to a cap), your goal is to do what you're there to do and get out before being overwhelmed. Between that, the game's scavenger hunt mechanics for extra loot and the bag-moving mechanic (similar to carrying items in Warframe, except a pile of 20 of them) end up creating a game where killing enemies is a means to an end, not the end itself. Any time I see a suggestion for new game modes in Warframe which come down to kill enemies as fast as possible while staying alive, I have to say something about it because those game modes get REALLY old REALLY fast.

[Teridax68]

I personally don't think it's "too late" to implement difficulty in Warframe. Rather, in order for Warframe to be truly challenging, it's going to have to pull back on some of the power it's given us in ways that may make some people complain, at least in the short term. Personally, I think there are three main obstacles to challenge in Warframe:

• There's too big a spread of numbers to balance around: I don't think the problem with our frames is that our numbers are too high, strictly speaking. Numbers are meaningless, and if the problem is that we're dealing a million times too much damage, then enemies should have a million times more health. Trouble is, we don't deal a million times too much damage all the time, because much of that power happens through mods, instead of being innate to the weapon. On top of this, damage doesn't always grow at the same rate: some weapons deal tens of times more damage than others even with full mods, which makes it impossible to balance around those at the same time (enemies that are okay against one would either get one-shot by one or feel super-spongy to the other). The same can be said for our health, as some frames can have hundreds, even thousands of times more eHP than others. It is impossible to balance enemies in this wildly fluctuating environment so that they can feel good to deal with on some given health and damage values, without being either trivial or unfair to deal with on other values, a problem made even worse by the fact that players of different levels can also visit different parts of the game at the same time, yet face the same enemies, which need to be balanced around even more of these divergent values.
• Too many of our powers are designed for spectacle, rather than for gameplay: simply put, many of our warframe abilities look cool, at least the first few times we use them, but aren't necessarily fun to use in the sense that they enhance or modify our gameplay. This affects older frames more than recent ones, but often there's this problem where the player can press this button for a big, radial effect, which can even travel through walls or kill enemies on its own, and cause all gameplay to stop right then and there. The result is that using our warframes often ends up making gameplay duller, rather than more interesting, by doing all the work for us, and rendering us largely passive in the process of playing against enemies using our abilities.
• Our Energy economy is broken, so that Energy constraints don't matter at high levels: Alone, this wouldn't be a problem, but coupled with the above, i.e. abilities that essentially solve the game for us, this means that we have unlimited access to abilities that eliminate pretty much all interaction with our enemies, thereby trivializing gameplay. This is why DE has resorted to so many mechanics that invalidate or deny our usage of abilities, because the moment we get to use our abilities even a little bit, our missions lose all element of challenge.

So putting aside grossly unwieldy spreads in numbers on both damage and durability, the central problem with the game's challenge is our abilities: we get essentially unrestricted access to abilities that are often sufficient to eliminate all difficulty in the game, and so often with little to no gameplay involved other than the press of a button. Perhaps these spectacular effects made more sense at a time when we could use them much less, and therefore had to make a real decision, but currently we could not be farther from that situation. Either we get access to abilities that let us sit back and enjoy the show, without really participating, or we get unlimited access to our abilities, but we can't have both, and it's this tradeoff, and inherent loss from the current situation, that I think would elicit the most knee-jerk reactions from players.

Personally, I think the way forward should be to eliminate our Energy constraints altogether, but instead redesign our older abilities to be balanced around unlimited usage, so that they always have gameplay even when spammed. Already, most recently-released frames operate more or less on this principle, with abilities that innately feature gameplay, and often render the frame practically independent from Energy restrictions. So long as our abilities only enhance our gameplay, instead of solving it for us and eliminating it, the game will be able to challenge us, otherwise the only way for the game to challenge us would be for the game to continue preventing us from using our abilities properly.

[Femuru]

instead of handicapping players why not just make actual stronger, smarter, and better mechanic enemies? personally i think we enemies at a good enough lvl wit a fair amount of defense stats to prevent insta nukes, somewhat smarter ai so they dont stare/run around to only ignore you while yur shooting them, and alot of new enemy types wit some mechanics that just make killing enemies abit more innovation. possibly stealth enemies that can detect stealth frames, heavy shield lancer that could block abilities from certain direction wit bullets, support units like maybe a moa wit a volt shield but cant shoot, maybe a mini juggernaut like how they made zanuka into a regular enemy type in fortuna, or maybe even mobility units that can cling to walls that require good reaction/aim to take down. i honestly think that instead of dumbing things down id rather they bring creative ideas to offer a challenge instead and wit the way warframe is set up i think that there are probly countless ideas wen it comes to making enemy units or how they can improve systems like maybe adding in a take cover system.

[BaronKreight]

Heres whats needed to be done to  increase difficulty (and they are not going to do all of this)

- stop the power creep

- rework all so called old and outdated 'dps' frames like saryn, mesa, etc.

- completely rework trinity shes broken asf and doesnt have a place in this game

- rework energy economy. Possibly remove energy orbs, rework zenurik, rework consumables

- rework weapon mods, remove goto mods like serration etc

- rework focus system and operator interactivity

- a lot of other reworks - outdated mission design, outdated frames, shields being less useful

If they can do all of this and more maybe the game will become more challenging to play at higher levels.

 

 

[Heidelgard]

 

11 hours ago, (PS4)Equinox21697 said:

So basically handicap players? Arbitration and Sanctuary already did that and failed.

What we need are enemies that aren't brain dead cannon fodder who run straight into our fire all day, take some time to give them more complex coding that allows them to react better to the world around them instead of watch the person next to them get cut in half by a invisible Warframe and just ignore it like they do now. Give them two AI if possible, one that acts as a individual unit and has priorities Ike self preservation, and the other a hivemind kind of thing that allows groups of enemies to work together and coordinate attacks and protect eachother.

I doubt this is a easy thing to do but I assure you if DE pulls it off it would benefit everyone 

I believe this is the top priority, and the term that you have used, "brain dead cannon fodder", is simply perfect to describe the current AI.

This kind of AI we have now, could remain unchanged for low level enemies, it's perfect for someone new to the game, but later on higher difficulty levels, the enemies need to be upgraded, and not just with higher statistics, but also advanced combat AI, less dumbness.

Edited February 4, 2019 by Heidelgard
Typo

[Poisonx3]

Ok, after sleeping on this, and looking at the replies, I had a thought: Would DE really be up to changing the game in such a big way? And will Warframe ever be difficult, or will we just stay at our superhero level of strength and keep the game at more of a chill level of game play rather than a challenge, and require the players to make it a challenge on themselves if they want a challenge?

It seems that most suggestions regarding the topic of difficulty end up talking about reworking most of the game and adding new ways for the AI to think. Would DE actually change the game so drastically, with the risk of breaking the many things they have added over the years? It seems like they might as well just make a new game but use the same assets in order to gain actual difficulty in the average game play.  

[Arcira]

5 hours ago, BaronKreight said:

Heres whats needed to be done to  increase difficulty (and they are not going to do all of this)

- stop the power creep

Agreed especially adding things like Adaptation

5 hours ago, BaronKreight said:

- rework all so called old and outdated 'dps' frames like saryn, mesa, etc.

- completely rework trinity shes broken asf and doesnt have a place in this game

That´s a very difficult point. Generally I agree nonetheless taking away all the effort some people put into there stuff is unfair as well. They shouldn´t have been implemented this way in the first place and now they are a balance nightmare. Mesa or Exalted weapons are a special case in my opinion though.

5 hours ago, BaronKreight said:

- rework energy economy. Possibly remove energy orbs, rework zenurik, rework consumables

I think they should replace the current version with operator energy and add small cooldowns for abilities.

5 hours ago, BaronKreight said:

- rework weapon mods, remove goto mods like serration etc

Here I disagree. They are the progression system in this game. If anything the lack of equivalent mods for ability damage causes a problem. The way Exalted weapons work should be the way all abilities scale. Gunplay in general is the most balanced aspect the game offers (far from good though) followed by melee and far far behind abilities.

5 hours ago, BaronKreight said:

- rework focus system and operator interactivity

The question is what can they add to the gamplay. I already dislike that some things can only be done by operators like damaging Eidolon shields or the need to use transference in order to trigger passive focus effects at the start of a mission. Than again I´d like to see warframe ability scaling trough the focus tree instead of mods.

In general I´d add:

1.) Status system

- again scaling: a panic proc from lv1 fireball should never be as effective against high level as low level enemies. After all your damage is different as well. Status chance should be changed into scaling status strength with thresholds.

- procs like corrosion/viral or % damage in general should never exist because they nullify the purpose of scaling.

2.) Armor scaling: or to be more precise the fact it´s limited to one faction. Base hp scaling is enought in my opinion.

 

Edited February 4, 2019 by Arcira

[Femuru]

41 minutes ago, Poisonx3 said:

Ok, after sleeping on this, and looking at the replies, I had a thought: Would DE really be up to changing the game in such a big way? And will Warframe ever be difficult, or will we just stay at our superhero level of strength and keep the game at more of a chill level of game play rather than a challenge, and require the players to make it a challenge on themselves if they want a challenge?

It seems that most suggestions regarding the topic of difficulty end up talking about reworking most of the game and adding new ways for the AI to think. Would DE actually change the game so drastically, with the risk of breaking the many things they have added over the years? It seems like they might as well just make a new game but use the same assets in order to gain actual difficulty in the average game play.  

i mean they have before which is how warframe went from a low tier game that everyone thought was gonna fail into something wit a good amount of popularity and imo id say the game is already kinda broken anyway its more like asking are we gonna get something really good or something else for us to face palm at lol

[--END--Rikutatis]

Only AI changes is not enough for the reasons Teridax68 described. There's no point in making the enemies super smart with advanced tactics and strategies if you can press one button to CC the whole map then press another button to one-shot nuke the whole map. 

There's ways to increase the challenge in Warframe without redesigning the whole game, but a lot of people won't like that. It involves significantly increasing the enemy level that we fight against in "endgame/veteran" content. Lvl 60 at ESO and Arbitrations is just pitiful when we know for a fact our weapon builds can still obliterate lvl 200-300 easily. It's just that people are really against bullet sponge enemies and getting one shot (but honestly getting one shot is just them not wanting to adapt and change their current squishy builds used to face lvl 60s). But for a game with the mechanics that Warframe has, that's pretty much the easiest route to take. Lots of other games use that kind of inflated numbers difficulty and it works fine for them, like Diablo, Borderlands, and Anthem seems to be going that way as well. 

But other than that, I agree with Teridax68. The energy economy is completely broken and really needs to be looked on. But DE won't do that cause the community will just riot if they can't afk spam powers anymore. More recent operator gameplay has also greatly trivialized the game with brain dead invul rezzes, magus elevate, etc. 

[Loza03]

 

On ‎2019‎-‎02‎-‎04 at 2:37 PM, Teridax68 said:

There's too big a spread of numbers to balance around: I don't think the problem with our frames is that our numbers are too high, strictly speaking. Numbers are meaningless, and if the problem is that we're dealing a million times too much damage, then enemies should have a million times more health. Trouble is, we don't deal a million times too much damage all the time, because much of that power happens through mods, instead of being innate to the weapon. On top of this, damage doesn't always grow at the same rate: some weapons deal tens of times more damage than others even with full mods, which makes it impossible to balance around those at the same time (enemies that are okay against one would either get one-shot by one or feel super-spongy to the other). The same can be said for our health, as some frames can have hundreds, even thousands of times more eHP than others. It is impossible to balance enemies in this wildly fluctuating environment so that they can feel good to deal with on some given health and damage values, without being either trivial or unfair to deal with on other values, a problem made even worse by the fact that players of different levels can also visit different parts of the game at the same time, yet face the same enemies, which need to be balanced around even more of these divergent values. 

There's also the other side of the coin - the same enemies are found at level 15 as level 150.

This makes it impossible to have enemies that can take these damage numbers or even just implement better enemies, because doing so leads to the start of the game being messed up. Scaling is needed to fix this which leads to huge divergence in power level of enemies as well - necessitating this huge divergence in power level for players. There's huge power variance on both sides and both sides are  using different mechanics to make that variance.

On ‎2019‎-‎02‎-‎04 at 2:37 PM, Teridax68 said:

Too many of our powers are designed for spectacle, rather than for gameplay: simply put, many of our warframe abilities look cool, at least the first few times we use them, but aren't necessarily fun to use in the sense that they enhance or modify our gameplay. This affects older frames more than recent ones, but often there's this problem where the player can press this button for a big, radial effect, which can even travel through walls or kill enemies on its own, and cause all gameplay to stop right then and there. The result is that using our warframes often ends up making gameplay duller, rather than more interesting, by doing all the work for us, and rendering us largely passive in the process of playing against enemies using our abilities.

Agreed.  Fortunately, OV actually seems to have a solution, at least for CC. Mini-bosses, which aren't affected by hard CC, can force players who use it as a 'no gameplay button' to have to sacrifice aspects of the build that enables it to be capable of fighting back, in turn limiting the ability to use it.

It's a first-order-optimal strategy, and it takes a surprisingly small push to get players to experiment more. For example, a couple people complained Limbo was useless on Orb Vallis at first (when he's actually pretty useful) due to Raknoids, Hyenas, Jackals and Nullifier drones countering the typical 'sit in a bubble' FOO strategy he's unfortunately known for.

On ‎2019‎-‎02‎-‎04 at 2:37 PM, Teridax68 said:

Our Energy economy is broken, so that Energy constraints don't matter at high levels: Alone, this wouldn't be a problem, but coupled with the above, i.e. abilities that essentially solve the game for us, this means that we have unlimited access to abilities that eliminate pretty much all interaction with our enemies, thereby trivializing gameplay. This is why DE has resorted to so many mechanics that invalidate or deny our usage of abilities, because the moment we get to use our abilities even a little bit, our missions lose all element of challenge.

Sounds about right.

 

Personally, my solution would be to address enemies before we address players. Fixing scaling, implementing better AI elements and enemies designed explicitly to counter power use would bring the baseline up, and should sting less than directly nerfing existing builds.  Once that was done, outliers could then receive special attention. The enemy systems are desperately in need of address, and are just as important as the systems of the player. They ARE half of every fight after all.

[Teridax68]

47 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

 

There's also the other side of the coin - the same enemies are found at level 15 as level 150.

This makes it impossible to have enemies that can take these damage numbers or even just implement better enemies, because doing so leads to the start of the game being messed up. Scaling is needed to fix this which leads to huge divergence in power level of enemies as well - necessitating this huge divergence in power level for players. There's huge power variance on both sides and both sides are  using different mechanics to make that variance.

I very much agree with this. In an ideal world, the beginner quests should be filled with simple, easy enemies and then graduate onto more complex opponents as the player explores the Star Chart, and technically the game does this, but it doesn't do it very well. Elite Lancers or Crewmen are basically the exact same as the basic versions, only with more stats and different damage resistances, so there's no real increase in difficulty, and enemies that appear based on level don't really follow any real curve for complexity (Nullifiers appear fairly early on, for example). Beyond that, the stream of new enemies caps out pretty early, such that fighting enemies at level 50 or 150 is differentiated only in stats (which don't even ramp up that fast). In general, I think enemy diversity is not handled all that well, as most enemies are pretty samey, even across factions, which limits the diversity that can be injected into combat, as well as any sort of difficulty or complexity curve.

47 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Agreed.  Fortunately, OV actually seems to have a solution, at least for CC. Mini-bosses, which aren't affected by hard CC, can force players who use it as a 'no gameplay button' to have to sacrifice aspects of the build that enables it to be capable of fighting back, in turn limiting the ability to use it.

It's a first-order-optimal strategy, and it takes a surprisingly small push to get players to experiment more. For example, a couple people complained Limbo was useless on Orb Vallis at first (when he's actually pretty useful) due to Raknoids, Hyenas, Jackals and Nullifier drones countering the typical 'sit in a bubble' FOO strategy he's unfortunately known for.

This is true, though immunity to CC alone tends to not be great, because CC isn't the only problem. Orb Vallis isn't really good for CC-heavy frames like Nyx or Vauban, but is incredibly easy to navigate for a frame like Chroma, whose power comes from immense damage and durability steroids. In general, negating a specific effect tends to affect some frames disproportionately over others, and while some general rules could probably be of some benefit (boss or miniboss-type enemies should be either immune to CC, or resistant to CC in a way that severely reduces its duration), I don't think they can or should serve as a substitute to balancing broken frames.

47 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Sounds about right.

 

Personally, my solution would be to address enemies before we address players. Fixing scaling, implementing better AI elements and enemies designed explicitly to counter power use would bring the baseline up, and should sting less than directly nerfing existing builds.  Once that was done, outliers could then receive special attention. The enemy systems are desperately in need of address, and are just as important as the systems of the player. They ARE half of every fight after all.

If enemies can survive long enough to be able to demonstrate their more advanced AI, I'll gladly have that happen first, but that I think is a necessary condition: the most advanced and fun AI in the world isn't going to mean anything if it's attached to enemies who die too quickly to showcase it. As for countering our powers, I'd rather not, as ultimately that lowers agency, but if that allows for challenge to emerge in the short term, and is set to be removed in the long term, that could be acceptable, provided real change is effected upon our broken frames.

[MysticDragonMage]

increased difficulty is not so easily achieved no a days with simply harder mission types. we are smart. we find exploits, and these exploits become the only way to play these missions.

personally, my idea of a more difficult warframe is one with more ways to fail a mission.

ciphers, for example, have made hacking far to easy and made missions like rescue and spy easier as a result. these missions would easily become more difficult if ciphers simply did not exist.

another example, there should be an enemy type invulnerable to energy-based attacks that specifically targets objectives that need to be defended.

it would also be nice if some of the more unique enemies, such prosecutors or maniacs, were updated to be more of a noticeable threat.

Edited February 5, 2019 by MysticDragonMage

[(PSN)Ozymandias-13-]

I'm not sure DE wants the game to be difficult. 

They gave us Nightmare mods, then made it worse with Corrupt mods, then threw challenge out the window by giving us Rivens. We were already powerful enough for everything in the game before Rivens existed. I won't even use Rivens and I still do fine in all content with 95% of the frames.

They give some semblance of challenge with Elite Sanctuary Onslaught, which caters to the most offensively powerful weapons and frames, but not until they gave us one of the most powerful Frame reworks ever seen (before balancing it back a bit). They tried to balance it a bit by limiting abilities in Arbitrations except the Drones do all the damage for you when they die and all you have to do is just bring wide-area weapons with punch through.

I forget where I'm going with this... Oh right! This game is insanely unbalanced between Warframes and their opponents, on both sides. Either enemies scale to a point where they one-shot us and we can't scratch them, or we use the standard broken meta builds that became common due to broken enemy scaling and all content is a breeze. Then they continue to further balance around that instead of working backwards to simplify numbers again. Lol It's a painful cycle. I still love this game though...

Edited February 6, 2019 by (PS4)Riko_113

[torint_man]

Personally, I think there really isn't a need for a massive upheaval of the gameplay loop, as any upheavals that I see entail taking away from the main appeal of Warframe's gameplay loop, being super mobile and having relatively unfettered access to abilities, the thing that distinguishes frames from one another. The main difficulty of the game should be in the arsenal menu. The game is currently very good at this, as an emphasis on efficiency and a large variety of modes has lead to a large variety of arsenals being used. As such, the game should continue to emphasize this by making the new modes being non linear (Is that the right word?). The PT orb fight is very much linear, as all it entails is blowing through its phases, and the different phases don't really emphasize variety. It's just 3 phases of attack the boss, and 2 phases of run to the waypoints. The only other aspect to it is all the adds, which aren't worth bothering with so long as you destroy the reinforcement pillars. You are only rewarded for not dying and dealing damage (which every boss should do anyway), which chroma does to the greatest effect.

How could a hypothetical boss be "non linear"? Hypothetically, a new boss could entail doing another continuous objective on top of killing the boss. An example of this is the lures in the tridolon. You have to acquire them, charge them, and protect them. A hypothetical example would be, lets say you have the exploiter orb, and its vulnerability is created by something you have to charge, protect, and interact with. This something could provide more options the better you protect and interact with it, and as such, make killing the boss faster. This would give frames other than chroma actual value, and make the puzzle of which frame is most optimal non trivial as you would need more than just survivability and damage.

Another way would be some sortie/arbitration equivalent where random frames are restricted. Half the frames would be unavailable for the hour/day it's available, so if you over rely on a specific frame for a specific mode, you might not be able to use that frame for it. As such, players with large warframe arsenals with investment in all of them would be rewarded, and players would have to think about things like what frame is 3rd of 4th best at a specific mode, and what equipment goes with it. This would also give the players that only use one or two frames the kick in the arse they need to use and invest in more than that.

[Loza03]

23 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I very much agree with this. In an ideal world, the beginner quests should be filled with simple, easy enemies and then graduate onto more complex opponents as the player explores the Star Chart, and technically the game does this, but it doesn't do it very well. Elite Lancers or Crewmen are basically the exact same as the basic versions, only with more stats and different damage resistances, so there's no real increase in difficulty, and enemies that appear based on level don't really follow any real curve for complexity (Nullifiers appear fairly early on, for example). Beyond that, the stream of new enemies caps out pretty early, such that fighting enemies at level 50 or 150 is differentiated only in stats (which don't even ramp up that fast). In general, I think enemy diversity is not handled all that well, as most enemies are pretty samey, even across factions, which limits the diversity that can be injected into combat, as well as any sort of difficulty or complexity curve.

Seems we're on agreement here.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This is true, though immunity to CC alone tends to not be great, because CC isn't the only problem. Orb Vallis isn't really good for CC-heavy frames like Nyx or Vauban, but is incredibly easy to navigate for a frame like Chroma, whose power comes from immense damage and durability steroids. In general, negating a specific effect tends to affect some frames disproportionately over others, and while some general rules could probably be of some benefit (boss or miniboss-type enemies should be either immune to CC, or resistant to CC in a way that severely reduces its duration), I don't think they can or should serve as a substitute to balancing broken frames.

True enough, and it's not a one-size fits-all solution. It's not a substitute, but it certainly makes fewer frames broken, and helps make sure fewer are broken in the future. 

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

If enemies can survive long enough to be able to demonstrate their more advanced AI, I'll gladly have that happen first, but that I think is a necessary condition: the most advanced and fun AI in the world isn't going to mean anything if it's attached to enemies who die too quickly to showcase it. As for countering our powers, I'd rather not, as ultimately that lowers agency, but if that allows for challenge to emerge in the short term, and is set to be removed in the long term, that could be acceptable, provided real change is effected upon our broken frames.

It's a bit of a catch 22 isn't it?

Fixing player balance is needed to make balancing enemies easer, which is needed to make balancing players easier.  It's possible, but it's not going to be easy or pleasant at first and it comes down to opinion on which gut-punch will be better to take for the sake of the other side.

 

Also, when I said countering powers I meant in the more general term. Like the whole 'minibosses being able to resist hard CC' thing. Exceptions to the rule that prevent any one rule being a one-size-fits-all solution like what's so common right now. Or, rather, 'Several sizes fit all'.

[(PSN)Ozymandias-13-]

10 hours ago, Loza03 said:

t's a bit of a catch 22 isn't it?

Fixing player balance is needed to make balancing enemies easer, which is needed to make balancing players easier.  It's possible, but it's not going to be easy or pleasant at first and it comes down to opinion on which gut-punch will be better to take for the sake of the other side.

I thought about this for a while last night. This kind of change would probably have to come together in one update that overhauls gameplay. I would expect overwhelmingly positive and negative reactions from players (but the forums react like that for even the most minor things) but I think it would be overall better for DE and their players.

We need a full rebalance, but I won't hold my breath until I see a dev workshop or something. Too many things disappear into the wind around here. I didn't even see IPS changes on the docket for this year when they showed the 2019 release goals.

[Loza03]

4 hours ago, (PS4)Riko_113 said:

I thought about this for a while last night. This kind of change would probably have to come together in one update that overhauls gameplay. I would expect overwhelmingly positive and negative reactions from players (but the forums react like that for even the most minor things) but I think it would be overall better for DE and their players.

We need a full rebalance, but I won't hold my breath until I see a dev workshop or something. Too many things disappear into the wind around here. I didn't even see IPS changes on the docket for this year when they showed the 2019 release goals.

Agreement. There is some good news though.

Steve has said on twitter that he's planning on implementing some changes to damage into Railjack as a test run. So it'll only apply to the 'jacks at first, and if it goes down well it should wind up implemented on the rest of the game. 

The reason the original IPS changes went away was because of near-unilateral dislike, especially by those very invested in the game. People pointed out that it didn't really help and tended to make the players weaker whilst not addressing the main issues of Armour scaling, meaning we'd have fewer options to deal with that.

If damage does get reworked across the whole game, that can be taken as an opportunity to rebalance everything, to bring power creep back in line. That might be able to be the first step, provided DE can follow through and make enemies better from there.