Archwing Variety Fix (Itzal Nerf), K-Drive problems

[Aldain]

5 minutes ago, DreisterDino said:

I kinda forgot that part in my first post, but yes i agree that the grinding for standing and leveling the K-Drives ist just too much (also said that in another reply).

Oh right I forgot to mention that the Ventkids also shouldn't suffer from a daily cap imo, as they provide nothing other than K-Drive parts, mods and cosmetic blueprints (which items need to be farmed for anyway so the time to make them is the same), that way if a player wants to just sit back and farm Ventkid standing for a day to unlock all the things and be done with it they can.

Of all the syndicates Ventkids have the least reason to be under the daily cap because they offer no tangible rewards (unless K-Drive mods are tradable, but that's fixable by making them untradable) unlike Fortuna, Cetus etc.

Edited April 8, 2019 by Aldain

[Ham_Grenabe]

2 hours ago, Chewarette said:

We don't need to make them viable. They need to be like Syandanas, use them if you want to, or don't.

Remove the freaking mastery points from that abomination. KDrives are the only non-combat stuff which award MR points, that's as stupid as putting MR points behind Syandanas and Accessories.

As long as they exist, I won't even bother anymore with MR grinding, as I know I'm locked out of 24k (?) unreachable Mastery points.

 

2 hours ago, Elessara1 said:

Given that K-Drives are essentially cosmetic there should be no reason the devs should force people to use them.  It would be like forcing people to use syndanas and sugatras (to continue the comparison from above).  If few people like them and they aren't being used then DE should just consider it a failed experiment and move on.

 

I agree - I'm not trying to threadcrap, but I think the pursuit of "make K-Drives viable" is the wrong approach. K-Drives are like floofs (or, as mentioned, syandanas), or the Ludoplex - they're toys. Fun things to goof around on, but not something essential. And they should never have involved Mastery, a syndicate, or anything like that.

I get that the devs put a lot of time and heart into making K-Drives a thing, but I think in this case, they should think hard about just letting it go. Leave them where they are, and don't fiddle with other things to try to make K-Drives happen. 

Notably: the easiest way to make K-Drives happen is to disable Archwing use in the Orb Vallis. Problem solved. Other problems created, but you'll have people riding their k-drives.

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

I would be fine if they would just enable the mining tool's radar to work while riding around on one....

[Oreades]

Quote

K-Drive 2.0 - How to make players *want to* use them

ftfy ❤️

Srsly tho I think my biggest issue with K-Drives is the fact that I just don't have time for them. They are a really nifty distraction and when Fortuna launched the thing I loved the most was K-Drives. Because while they where a stupid fun distraction from the grind. After that wore off it was back to the grindmines and you need to handle those as efficiently as possible if you want to progress at a reasonable pace. 

I don't think making them their own grind (essentially turning them into ground AW 2.0) is going to fix the problem with K-Drives. Kdrives will never be better than AW for getting the job done because 98% of getting the job done in these giant open world sprawls is getting from Point A to point B as efficiently as possible so you can..... actually get the job done. K-Drives can never do that, especially in mountanous regions where flying over the mountain is now and always will be the most efficient path even if they nerf the Itzal into the ground in a vein attempt to grief us into using K-Drives.

I really don't think adding more complexity to K-Drives (while interesting) solves the fundamental problem with K-Drives.  They will just never be as efficient as Archwing as all K-Drives bring to the table is extending your mission time by 5-10min of meaningless travel time. 

[Lhudge]

What's the point of be able to shoot while in K-drive ? We don't give a damn, we're here so slide and trick. Idk.

[(NSW)Psyymann]

I just thought of something amazing. Imagine if there were some sort of train that we could chase around various landscape with the k drive.  Too fast for foot Chase too slow for archwing. Perfect speed to chase while on k drive. Unlock weapons while on k drive. Simple alt fire brings you into weapons mode. Take your shots. Alt fire back to trick mode. Continue chase.

[Venatorio]

If given a choice, I would never use K-drives at all.

 

as was said by another poster, they’re mastery fodder first, a failed experiment second. DE should scrap the syndicate, then move on. 

 

What i want? Fast travel. Make it so that those camps you clear STAY CLEARED. So that I can just fast travel 1k meters instead of NEEDING to use my archwing at all.

 

Regarding how “hyped” people were at tennocon: this is a very small subset of warframe players. They’d be hyped at anything new, let’s be honest. K-drives are garbage. They’re not fun to the majority of the playerbase. I don’t want to play a Tony Hawk game. I want to play Warframe.

[SneakyErvin]

None of it would get me to use them for bounties. I dont want to stand on a board and fight, especially if it removes the powers of my frame. I dont want to traverse on a board because it is limited both vertically and horizontally compared to an archwing.

They are imo nothing but a failed experiment, leave them as is for the people that wanna fiddle with the skater minigame. If I want a good skateboard videogame experience I'll just play one of the Tony Hawk games, even the first one ever released for PS1 is still lightyears better than our K-Drive experience.

[Hypernaut1]

I'm surprised they allowed AW in orb valis. They could've easily come up with a valid reason for the restriction.

I agree with  the posters that day K-drives are just a toy. They don't need to make us use them. 

I use mine occasionally for fun. Leave it at that. You don't always have to satisfy the meta efficiency crowd. 

[AxalEquinox]

I think they really shouldn't have abilities, and also lore-wise, it wouldn't make sense. 

[mpmaloney]

What if there was some sort of tunnel system that you could only enter on a K-drive to travel faster than via archwing? It would be a 20 - 30 second mini course with some jumps and rails, and would spit you out of a tunnel entrance / exit nearest to the objective. I think that beats flying in a straight line, and if its faster then people will use it. Plus I think it fits well with the vent kids theme.

[(PSN)AllOrNothinDays]

For me it also had to use the maps. I actually used them a little bit on plains because I didn't have to deal with rocky terrain/falling off/having to go around hurdles that would make me take more time.

[Ham_Grenabe]

53 minutes ago, mpmaloney said:

What if there was some sort of tunnel system that you could only enter on a K-drive to travel faster than via archwing? It would be a 20 - 30 second mini course with some jumps and rails, and would spit you out of a tunnel entrance / exit nearest to the objective. I think that beats flying in a straight line, and if its faster then people will use it. Plus I think it fits well with the vent kids theme.

If the tunnel system had no solid flooring - e.g., was coolant or water or whatever - then K-Drives would be a cool thing to explore. I mean, you could probably archwing into it, but K-Drives would be optimal for a tight tunnel system without stable footing. You'd need a more deliberate dismount though, to hop onto islands or whatever.

I wouldn't object to it, but I think we're all struggling to find the question that K-Drives are the answer to, when it's probabl better to say "hey, they can be fun from time to time, and that's enough." 

Edited April 8, 2019 by Ham_Grenabe

[(PSN)Dishinshoryuken]

Possible changes for K-Drives-

-Give them Fast Travel to areas that you drop a Loc-Pin on once you hit a certain velocity. The Loc-Pins would have a # to indicate which the order for Fast Travel would be OR you can pull up a radial dial to pick which number you want to go to. This would make them faster.

-Make them once you master them as a K-Drive riding vehicle, they can be used as a weapon. LoL.....but seriously, once your board is mastered, it can be used as a weapon such as grinding into a crowd to send them flying OR send the K-Drive slamming into a open world area to detonate on the big enemies such as Eidilons, Spiders, and whatever else you send our way. You can choose to have them become a travel board weapon , melee weapon, or gun weapon. Gives a reason to have more than one board aseach would be one of the 3 types of weapon boards you could have.

-Make the Open Worlds have areas that are only accessed by using K-Drives such as Magnetic Storms or Ice Storms or Fire Storms that Archwings and regular travel will not allow you to get to.  The K-Drives get special shields that allow you to travel to these places and there is no Fast Travel once you Loc-Pin (if that idea was used). This would lead to a quest of some sort as well as finding some long lost crashed ship(s) that created their own colony's.

Got other ideas....but no more time.

 

 

[-Schnitzel-]

if we could have the ability of running over enemies (think GTA but a k-drive), that'd make me want to use k-drives more.

[KeLaRo]

Agree with using Just melee weapons, and some ability, maybe a concept play map like lunaro, for nice racing pvp or pve, a warframe.kart vision

 

 

[(XBOX)RPColten]

You can't make players use K-Drive. From a core design point of view, it's entirely inferior to Archwing. Short of giving them rocket boosters and letting them fly alongside Amesha, the players who actively don't use K-Drive still won't use K-Drive. Let it remain as a nice little option for the players who enjoy it, and don't force unnecessary abilities and weapon interactions with it.

What K-Drive should receive is a doubling-down on the cruising and free-styling design. Add a bit of increased speed when cruising along roads and paths, maybe an increased speed boost when going down hills and slopes, vapor-trail effects to customize, so on. 

9 hours ago, DreisterDino said:

• let us use our weapons on our K-Drives
• give each K-Drive 4 abilities to bring them on par with Archwings

This is in direct contrast to the original design intent with K-Drives, where they were meant to be a traversal tool with no combat intention, and the boards themselves to have no statistical or functional difference so as to prevent players from feeling obligated to use certain designs for the stats.

[MJ12]

22 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I feel like there are two separate issues at hand here:

1. Archwings are useless in nearly the entirety of the game, and even in levels like the Plains of Eidolon or Orb Vallis, are incapable of fulfilling any purpose other than traversal.
2. Archwings, and Itzal in particular, are good for traversing the Plains of Eidolon and Orb Vallis, possibly even too good.

So, on one hand, it's not really fair to just nerf the sh*t out of Itzal, because the absolute last thing Archwing as a mode needs is to have its last remaining use stomped into oblivion. On the other, it's kind of necessary if we want to solve all of the issues relating to traversal around these big maps, because currently Itzal is the only valid choice, to say nothing of how completely irrelevant K-Drives are due to their inferior speed. It's thus perhaps not a great idea to just nerf Itzal, but then there will still have to be some point where traversal will need to be equalized somewhat if we don't want one option to dominate over all the others (because currently Itzal is far quicker than even frames perfectly suited for long-distance traversal, such as a Tail Wind Zephyr). With this in mind, I feel there are some more conclusions to draw from this:

1. Simply nerfing Itzal isn't the answer; Itzal is a barely functional, heavily exploit-y Archwing to begin with and could use some love, even/especially if that comes with changes to its mobility.
2. More generally, purely focusing on nerfing Archwing in large levels is short-sighted and harmful; if we're going to change Archwing, we should also try to make it more generally useful and integrate it better, e.g. by perhaps not having us get near-instantly shot out of the air the moment we try to use Archwing in combat.
3. We should be looking comprehensively at movement in these open levels and perhaps look to buff other options, and not just nerf (though that shouldn't be entirely out of the question either). K-Drives could use a boost (or a faster boost), and perhaps there could even be warframes who could use buffs to their traversal in the Plains or Vallis.

I think for numbers 1 and 2, Railjack could likely help, as it looks like it'll give Archwing much more presence. However, for the time being, we really could use changes to enemies so that they don't automatically knock us out of Archwing when we try to fight from the air: there could be this awesome element of aerial combat, which would add a tactical layer to Archwing, but currently DE knee-jerked way too hard on this, and outfitted every enemy on the Plains and Vallis with homing anti-air missiles that can instantly kill us in Archwing, knock us out of Archwing, or both. Perhaps it's time to relax on those controls, particularly if there are going to be nerfs to our Archwing-based traversal, as otherwise the mode will become irrelevant to the entire game once more.

I'm not sure this is true. Amesha is ludicrously powerful and if the open-world zones didn't knock you out of Archwing every minute or so, Amesha would be a perfectly adequate replacement for Trinity, allowing some kind of interesting hybrid team comps for Eidolons or Orbs (e.g. off-healers who use Amesha when the primary is overwhelmed). Hell, even Elytron can do some pretty hilarious damage if you can get enough of a group around in mid-level Plains/Orb. Its damage drops off pretty hard as levels go up, but I wouldn't call that useless, just gimmicky.

In other words, I think the problem is that Archwing is implemented in open-world zones badly. Archwing is only useful for travel thanks to every random enemy having an instant death zone that knocks you right out of Archwing if you ever dare to seriously try to fight them instead of dropping a missile on them and running away. To add insult to injury, the missiles that knock you out of Archwing are hard to see and incredibly maneuverable, and Archwings handle like mud now that DE decided that they need to have inertia to be more realistic. Therefore, because fighting in Archwing is made nearly impossible, people use Itzal and only Itzal because it's the only Archwing with powers that relate to the only thing Archwing is good for in Plains and Orb Vallis-moving around.

Remove the Archwing disabler missiles from enemies and give them actual anti-air artillery instead (bursting flak missiles, homing plasma bolts, whatever) that deals damage instead of kicking you out of Archwing, and I suspect with literally no other changes, people might use non-Itzal Archwings more. It won't fix everything, but this is a first, necessary step.

[Teridax68]

1 minute ago, MJ12 said:

I'm not sure this is true. Amesha is ludicrously powerful and if the open-world zones didn't knock you out of Archwing every minute or so, Amesha would be a perfectly adequate replacement for Trinity, allowing some kind of interesting hybrid team comps for Eidolons or Orbs (e.g. off-healers who use Amesha when the primary is overwhelmed). Hell, even Elytron can do some pretty hilarious damage if you can get enough of a group around in mid-level Plains/Orb. Its damage drops off pretty hard as levels go up, but I wouldn't call that useless, just gimmicky.

Okay, but just in that sentence, you gave two very good reasons for why Archwings simply aren't used in combat right now in open zones: it's far too easy to get knocked out of Archwing, so why even bother, and Archwings specifically made for damage fall off relative to warframes and their weaponry. Both are issues that need fixing if we want Archwing to see proper use in combat outside of Archwing-only missions.

1 minute ago, MJ12 said:

In other words, I think the problem is that Archwing is implemented in open-world zones badly. Archwing is only useful for travel thanks to every random enemy having an instant death zone that knocks you right out of Archwing if you ever dare to seriously try to fight them instead of dropping a missile on them and running away. To add insult to injury, the missiles that knock you out of Archwing are hard to see and incredibly maneuverable, and Archwings handle like mud now that DE decided that they need to have inertia to be more realistic. Therefore, because fighting in Archwing is made nearly impossible, people use Itzal and only Itzal because it's the only Archwing with powers that relate to the only thing Archwing is good for in Plains and Orb Vallis-moving around.

Remove the Archwing disabler missiles from enemies and give them actual anti-air artillery instead (bursting flak missiles, homing plasma bolts, whatever) that deals damage instead of kicking you out of Archwing, and I suspect with literally no other changes, people might use non-Itzal Archwings more. It won't fix everything, but this is a first, necessary step.

I don't think we disagree all that much, because implementation is one of the main problems I find with Archwing in open zones, as noted by point 2 in my post. There is no real reason for enemies to disable our Archwing so easily, but even if they didn't, there remains the issue of Archwing and our regular warframes/weapons not really being balanced around the same reference point. Bar Amesha, Archwings are super-squishy relative to most our frames, particularly as they don't have their own versions of OP mods like Adaptation to exploit. This is something that would likely need addressing in order for AW to work better in higher-level bounties, in addition to changes to their damage scaling as well. As it stands, even if we were allowed to fight in Archwing mode, our warframes can typically do so much more on the ground that even then there is a competition problem, which is why I think the problem goes even beyond implementation.

[MJ12]

2 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't think we disagree all that much, because implementation is one of the main problems I find with Archwing in open zones, as noted by point 2 in my post. There is no real reason for enemies to disable our Archwing so easily, but even if they didn't, there remains the issue of Archwing and our regular warframes/weapons not really being balanced around the same reference point. Bar Amesha, Archwings are super-squishy relative to most our frames, particularly as they don't have their own versions of OP mods like Adaptation to exploit. This is something that would likely need addressing in order for AW to work better in higher-level bounties, in addition to changes to their damage scaling as well. As it stands, even if we were allowed to fight in Archwing mode, our warframes can typically do so much more on the ground that even then there is a competition problem, which is why I think the problem goes even beyond implementation.

This is true, but I think the first step to making Archwings other than Itzal useful would be to at least stop actively trying to make them useless.

Yes, even if you fixed Grineer/Corpus AA to simply deal damage rather than instantly knock you out of Archwing, you would have to deal with much more limited powers and lower survivability. But at least you'd only be underpowered if you tried to rain death from above, instead of simultaneously being underpowered and frustrated. I can handle underpowered kit-Warframe has enough scaling that you can find ways to play around with it, and it'll never be meta or be optimal but nuking thirty Grineer with an Elytron is still amusing once in a while. I can't handle underpowered kit that also tries to actively punish you for using it.

[Teridax68]

3 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

This is true, but I think the first step to making Archwings other than Itzal useful would be to at least stop actively trying to make them useless.

Yes, even if you fixed Grineer/Corpus AA to simply deal damage rather than instantly knock you out of Archwing, you would have to deal with much more limited powers and lower survivability. But at least you'd only be underpowered if you tried to rain death from above, instead of simultaneously being underpowered and frustrated. I can handle underpowered kit-Warframe has enough scaling that you can find ways to play around with it, and it'll never be meta or be optimal but nuking thirty Grineer with an Elytron is still amusing once in a while. I can't handle underpowered kit that also tries to actively punish you for using it.

I can agree with this; the first step to giving Archwing more presence would be to remove all of the anti-air weaponry designed to instantly knock us out of the sky the moment we attempt to fight in Archwing. However, as you also acknowledge, that in itself would likely not be enough, and Archwing may still not see much use in combat after that it there also isn't follow-up work done to rebalance them.

[moodster]

K-drive was not intended to be a fast travel button... It was intended to be a fun addition to the game... relax people. This isn't really about k-drives no matter how much you want it to be. Personally, I could NOT care any less about the speed of k-drives... because I understand their place in the game.

The only thing I would want changed about k-drive is:

1. Ability to shoot weapons while on k-drive, making it a useful part of the fast paced POE/vallis combat. 
2. enable companion/sentinel mods while on k-drive... AHEM animal instinct. 
3. ability to fish from k-drive.... wouldn't it be cool to sit down on your k-drive, dangling your toes in the water and fish from the middle of the lake?

As far as the anti-air, yes it's annoying... but you can just aim glide and push your archwing button again so you never touch the ground. also, dodge roll to avoid rockets. AAAND you weren't really intended to be doing poe/vallis with just your archwing anyway. 

Anyone saying Itzal or any archwing is ONLY useful for fast travel clearly doesn't know how to use archwings... Many bounties I never leave my archwing... Amesha can heal in a large radius, Elytron can nuke in a large range, Itzal will always be the meta POE/vallis archwing regardless of blink being changed or not. Itzal was practically designed as the perfect POE/Vallis archwing, and here is why:

1. teleport - dodge attacks, fast travel
2. INVISIBILITY! and arguably most important... an INSTANT STOP! button
3. BIG loot vacuum and mild CC

You can fast travel while full speed boosting and instantly stop on a dime at your destination while immediately going into stealth then snipe the dropships while vacuuming up all the ground troops and their energy and loot. No other current archwing would EVER compete with this even if they all had blink.

Perhaps the tank archwings could be made immune to the anti-air that knocks you out of archwing... That would be a good QOL change for the tank-wings i guess, but it will make you more likely to take damage and die... I would not give that to itzal or odonata. As far as archwing survivability... I have zero problems surviving in the highest level bounty with my DEMODDED itzal... I remove all mods except efficiency, energy, and range so I have bigger starting energy pool for more blinks... 

Edited April 9, 2019 by moodster

[Tatchi_Mi]

man how can you even think about that instead of taking some of the most fun thing in the game why just not buff every thing else do you really think we will use the other if you nerf it !!!! for me i will just stop use archwing at this point

 

[WhiteMarker]

Oh look... another one...

[ismellpestilence]

Someone tell me what has been nerfed about Itzal ?