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

[UnderRevision]

They need to decide which direction they want to take K-Drives because right now they're at war with themselves.  If they're just meant to be good old fashioned fun then why do they take so long to level up?  Why does it take so long to earn the Vent Kids standing for what is essentially a joke vanity item?  Why do they have mastery associated with them if they're not meant to be a serious part of the game?  Right now it's the utility of a joke item with the grind of a useful tool which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.  I actually like the idea of K-Drives but right now they're in an awkward place where I feel like I should use them for mastery but they're just so impractical.  They feel like an obligation instead of a fun way to mess around.  Until these sorts of questions are answered I'm not sure K-Drives should really be referenced in the context of Archwing balance.

[XenMaster]

Buff the, speed of every vehicles

[LuckyCharm]

I think most of the archwing stuff needs a re-look at, but for me, my issue with kdrive is mainly down to terrain and the "tricks" you can do with the board.

If youre going to add board tricks and have massive areas, you need a whole lotta ramps and half pipes. Its just simple knowledge for anyone whos ever picked up any skating game. Just doing tricks straight off the ground or slight hill feels bad and barely gets you time to show off. 

Add to that the movement system. You simply dont have any way with the current kdrive system to gain a vertical arc motion, currently you simply jump off a ramp and then seem to start falling immediately, theres not that up and weightless moment at the apex like skating games afford you. This just makes all your tricks seem like theyre designed to be used suuuper quickly which means we just spam them with little thought or reason and they look baf because they activate and perform so fast. 

As people have said, kdrive is never going to be the better transportation choice over archwing (and currently not the best for combat), why not simply make it the better tool for having fun with 

[Cephalycion]

On 2019-04-11 at 7:59 AM, Sahysa said:

Given their power level, it's almost as if K-Drives were not suppose to interact with the combat game. I thought it was just a diversion but comparisons with Skywing regarding their utility as fast transit mechanisms continue to be entertained in live streams.  Why? They aren't just for fun?

Well said sir.

[D1sTrust]

13 hours ago, (PS4)FriendSharkey said:

If the Developers want the players to use the K-drive they need to enable the Mining Tool's radar while riding around on it...We do missions and bounties using the Archwings, we'll use K-Drives for resources and farming...if anything have it pick up animals or animal spore as markers for our radar as well and then you'd really have a reason to use it....

Good point imo.
I like the K-Drive, and often use it solo for the fun of it. But it should be a buff for resource farming rather than the hinderance it is right now.

[Steel_Rook]

Are DE seriously still trying to make K-Drives competitive with Archwings for travel? I've not seen the Live Streams, but that seems... Silly? Impossible? Is that an actual quote? Because in my mind, the proposed Itzal changes should have a lot more to do with balance between individual Archwings than balance between Archwings as a whole and K-Drives as a transportation source. Archwing balance is archaic and needs a fresh pass (I expect one with Railjack), but nothing done to them is ever going to make K-Drives competitive. Nor indeed will anything done to K-Drives.

I remain of the opinion that K-Drives ought to have a separate, different role which Archwings can't fill at all, such as being usable indoors or on non Free Roam maps. DE have a history of adding stuff without any real plan on why they're adding it or what it's going to be used for, and K-Drives are a perfect example of this. What are these things for, other than goofing around?

[TehGrief]

16 hours ago, (XB1)Erudite God said:

I find it kinda unsettling that Scott thinks that the Itzal is gamebreaking, as if nerfing the Itzal into uselessness will improve the game. 

Open worlds create a demand for fast transportation, and the Itzal is literally the only thing that meets that demand. 

Scott never said the Itzal was "Game breaking", he was specifically referencing how overpowered Blink is and how its intensity and application make the Itzal the only archwing worth currently pursuing.

Currently, with mods, you can:

• Reduce the cost of Blink to less than 12 energy per cast.
• Increase the distance traveled in a single cast to 640 meters.
• 0 second cooldown (can be spammed)

No other archwing can even come close to achieving this level of speed, even when using Hyperion Thrusters (which I have, personally, always felt was a fast enough form of travel). If you haven't used the Itzal, the ability Blink is 100% spammable as long as you have the energy to do so. Even in the case that they buffed the other archwings to have movement speed abilities, it is time to accept that the Itzal's current Blink ability is objectively too strong for open-world content; Blink is the ONLY thing that was proposed as needing a change. Nerfing Blink will not cause the Itzal to be "useless" as you have suggested - as long as it is done properly.

In my opinion, Blink could be fixed in one of two ways:

• Provide a set of "charges" for Blink that are depleted as the ability is cast. The charges would have a cool-down tied to them, after not using the ability for a short delay, the charges would reset and be available for use.
• Provide a strict cool-down between casts of Blink, even if it is just 1 second between each cast.

And yes, while the Open Worlds can be greatly improved by using fast transportation, you have to ask yourself "When does something move too fast?" - the answer is the Itzal's Blink ability.

As to the other archwings, replacing one of the less-useful abilities from their kits with an ability that either augments speed or provides a different type of travel would be acceptable balancing. 

 

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Are DE seriously still trying to make K-Drives competitive with Archwings for travel?

I remain of the opinion that K-Drives ought to have a separate, different role which Archwings can't fill at all, such as being usable indoors or on non Free Roam maps.

What are these things for, other than goofing around?

Obviously the K-drives could never compete in regards to speed alone. The concept of K-drives, while also adding an alternate form of transportation, was for an alternate enjoyable gameplay alternative - FUN! (hard to imagine a game being fun... I know, I know...)

You have to keep in mind that, from a linear prospective, the starting K-drive can be obtained long before you could even build an Itzal archwing/and archwing launcher segment when starting the game. 

You're absolutely right when it comes to them filling two separate roles. Archwings are a vehicle that get you from point 'A' to point 'B', K-drives allow you to perform cool tricks and gain standing with a faction to continue to upgrade and change your K-drive playstyle - who doesn't like a little bit of nostalgia (we all liked to 'sk8' and occasionally 'shred some gnar' at one point)? 

[Otaiken]

I genuinely like K-Drives. Even if the trip takes objectively longer than with an archwing, sometimes it feels shorter just because you have to think a little while you travel. I have to think about the enviroment and can throw some tricks in. I understand though that this is not the case for everyone. Efficiency wins in the end.

The problems are that:

1) In pugs people will always rush and hence K-Driving gets you left behind. I think this is a shame because a squad of players racing around doing tricks could be fun. That never happens though.

2) K-Drives lack any sort of utility. I can travel through the world but while I'm on the board I lack the means to interact with anything in the world.

It might have been a mistake by DE to remove consumable charges from AW deployer. They were very cheap if a bit annoying. If charges were still a thing K-Drives would be much more popular imho.

DE also hinted at weather affecting AW. I'm not saying that AW should be made entirely unusable at random intervals but some enviromental effects would be nice. It would also make using AW slightly more fun. As I meantioned it's more fun to have to think at least a little bit about where you're going than just holding forward and sprint. As a side note holding 3 different buttons to achieve top speed is rather tedious.

K-Drives can hardly ever compete with AW in speed. They would have to be so fast they'd be unusable. But DE could add a lot of utility to them through mods. I want a vacuum and enemy radar for boards. And if you're not gonna allow me to shoot then add a mod that automatically destroys containers/spores/etc. in a large radius. Add tools that help with mining, hunting and fishing.

The typical problem of air travel over open world areas is that you can't engage with the world. But as it currently stands you can't really much engage with the world from a K-Drive either. So we might as well take the extra speed.

[(PSN)Nozomi244]

So what if k-drives are not as fast as archwing? Not all melee weapon types have covert lethality so should we only use frames with blinds and daggers because it the best possible dmg? The only time you need archwing speed is during bounty objectives. There are multiple things in the vallis people do outside of those too. As for the itzal, the blink is nice, but an odonata or amesha "sprint" will still get you to your objective very fast. Just because its not instant does not make it bad.

[Ketec]

On top of the complexity of a k-drive - they are stuck behind a ridiculous pipe grinding. I have yet to progress in the rep and only have the vanilla drive.

K-drives get stuck,  you can fall off, got unnecessary combo complexity, low speed, lack of bullet jump etc.

Nerfing something to fix a problem is not a solution.
It's like fighting starvation by starving yourself.
 

Edited April 12, 2019 by Ketec

[Elessara1]

On 2019-04-09 at 2:38 PM, Ohforf3 said:

Nobody is talking about forcing people to use K-Drives.  They are talking about adding functions to give people a reason to want to use them.

K-drives are a good idea but poorly implemented, if they put a little effort into fixing the issues they would be used more.  For one thing turning down the difficulty of Vox Solarus quest so newbies getting to Venus can do it and changing the recipe for the T1 board to not require the second highest gem would help greatly.  By the time you can get a K-Drive you most likely have an archwing which is better in pretty much every way.

The original title for this thread was "How to make people use K-drives".

Synonyms for "make":  force, require, coerce, impel, oblige 

The OP has since changed their thread title.

[Elessara1]

On 2019-04-10 at 9:54 PM, nslay said:

No, it's not a nerf. A new world specially designed to give k-drives an equivalence or advantage does not change Archwing's superiority in Plains of Eidolon or Orb Vallis. And it doesn't even have to be an environmental hazard or obstacles in the air, all you have to do is make the world mostly flat with few obstacles and k-drives become more equivalent to Archwing.

People are not complaining about k-drives not being fun. They are already fun. This is a red herring that has nothing to do with any complaint in all threads about this topic. DE specifically stated (I didn't say it!) that they were considering nerfing Itzal to make k-drives suck less. K-drives suck because they're inefficient for all the reasons I stated and especially compared to Itzal (actually even other Archwings suck compared to Itzal)! If DE wanted to really make K-drives better (which means more efficient, because nobody is talking about the already-fun k-drive), is to make an environment where they are equivalent or advantageous to Archwings. Even if you give k-drives abilities like Archwing, save for blink, it still remains worse (less efficient, nobody is talking about fun) than Archwing.

Why should DE go out of their way to specifically design a new world just for K-drives?  

I find K-drives neither fun nor not-fun.  They are just there.  I wouldn't miss them if they went away - not that I'm advocating for their removal (I'm not).  I just see no need for DE to create an environment where people are forced - I'm sorry, encouraged (since some people take issue with the word "force") to use K-drives for faster travel.  K-drives are just a gimmicky way to travel faster on the ground and as far as I can tell that's really all they were meant to be, especially given that each piece of each board does exactly the same thing as all of the others.  I honestly think they made a mistake giving them mastery at all and they definitely didn't need their own syndicate.

K-drives will never be able to let me do one of the things I actually enjoy the most when I'm in the Plains/Vallis:  flying way up high just to look around.

Also, I honestly don't like Itzal all that much.  I prefer Amesha ... but that's probably because I've played healers in most of the MMOs I've been in.

[nslay]

48 minutes ago, Elessara1 said:

Why should DE go out of their way to specifically design a new world just for K-drives?  

Because they think nerfing Itzal will make K-drives suck less when K-drives inherently suck because of the nature of the current open worlds. There is no simple way to make K-drives better, equivalent, viable, etc... compared to Archwings if we're talking about Plains of Eidolon or Orb Vallis. Hence, they had better make an open world... with... I don't know, lots of tunnels or dangerous lightning or poisonous gas clouds, or heck, even a nice flat Cephalon datascape or some kind of desert where k-drives would be efficient. That's if they really want players to find k-drives useful...

48 minutes ago, Elessara1 said:

I find K-drives neither fun nor not-fun.  They are just there.  I wouldn't miss them if they went away - not that I'm advocating for their removal (I'm not).  I just see no need for DE to create an environment where people are forced - I'm sorry, encouraged (since some people take issue with the word "force") to use K-drives for faster travel.  K-drives are just a gimmicky way to travel faster on the ground and as far as I can tell that's really all they were meant to be, especially given that each piece of each board does exactly the same thing as all of the others.  I honestly think they made a mistake giving them mastery at all and they definitely didn't need their own syndicate.

Preaching to the choir!

48 minutes ago, Elessara1 said:

K-drives will never be able to let me do one of the things I actually enjoy the most when I'm in the Plains/Vallis:  flying way up high just to look around. 

Also, I honestly don't like Itzal all that much.  I prefer Amesha ... but that's probably because I've played healers in most of the MMOs I've been in.

OK.

[M3rc13]

This game lol-OMG some players are getting around faster....and? It's not like there is some PVP advantage or DE has to pay out players for getting to objectives faster. Making it take longer to get to the often 2000M to the next pointless objective is clearly a win. 

Edited April 13, 2019 by M3rc13

[Caffeinian]

I think it is very short sighted for DE to nerf the Iztal.  Iztal is not the problem.  The other dev guy on the stream said it best.  The problem is I don't have time to fly around for 20 freaking minutes looking for something in the open world with 1 exit point.  The Iztal is chosen because I enjoy the game but I have a life and other things to do (i.e work, family, kids etc.)!  Blink is extremely useful.  You get to enjoy the game and finish missions in a reasonable amount of time.  Warframe has enough grind without having to travel in slower modes of transportation. 

Other games have went down the nerf this nerf that path and it led to most everyone leaving the game....because the dev team removed what made the game exciting and FUN TO PLAY. 

I don't want to surf around on a K-drive all day or fly around on another archwing unless it has blink or is fast enough to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.  Heck.....give every archwing and k-drive blink or FIX the open world exit point issue.  I sure hope the powers that be at DE doesn't start listening to dev team members that think nerfing is the answer to everything.  Something needing a nerf usually means there is a bigger problem at hand and developers want to take the easy way out.  DE please don't penalize players because the dev admittedly was unable to finish the dev work they had planned to do for open worlds in the first place. 

Edited April 13, 2019 by Caffeinian
removed improper wording

[Caffeinian]

On 2019-04-11 at 2:52 PM, vomder said:

It's all about time efficiency for players. They are going to choose what gets things done the quickest. Unless you are have unlimited free time, screwing around with K-Drives in humongous open world levels is really pointless.

ABSOLUTELY!!! I don't have time to fly around all day.  Blink makes the game FUN!! Warframe has enough grind already without having to mess around in slower modes of transportation.  Also, I enjoy Eidolon hunts and getting multiple tricaps.  Nerfing Iztal blink is very short sighted.

[Ohforf3]

14 hours ago, Elessara1 said:

The original title for this thread was "How to make people use K-drives".

Synonyms for "make":  force, require, coerce, impel, oblige 

The OP has since changed their thread title.

OP didn't change the title, it was merged with several similar threads.  And if you had read the OP's post you would have noticed nothing suggested would have forced people to use K-drives.  They suggested things to make K-drives more appealing so people would want to use them.

[(PSN)Revak29]

Can we please just make all archwing boosts work like blink and change the itzal's 1 so we can call it a day?

[Gawizard]

Honestly on delivery, K-Drives were just a way to make transportation look fancy. To buff them would be changing how they were originally intented to be, which would mean a full rework.
again i agree with OP

NO NERF ITZAL
BUFF K DRIVE

[blaze32]

Hey everyone, as you all have probably heard DE could be reducing the Itzal's blink ability.  I was trying to think of other things they could do to make the other archwings more useful, and I was thinking about the mod called Hyperion Thrusters, it starts at 10 capacity and goes up to 20. I was thinking what if they changed this mod to start at 6 capacity instead and (similar to Rush scaling) start at +5% and go up to +30% at R5, costing only 11 capacity instead?  If it cost less then it would be more likely used, AND it would give a little more flight speed at max than it does currently at +30% vs the +27.5% it does currently... This would open it up to be a more common or easier to fit mod in archwing builds helping other archwings be chosen more often in Itzal's stead. What does everyone else think?

The Current Mod:

My proposed Mod:

Edited April 13, 2019 by blaze32
restructuring pictures

[PhoenixFury]

I don't want to be cynical, but something tells me the mod costs 20 points because it's convenient.

[(XBOX)BULLS 0N PAR4DE]

Nope.  It's fine as is. Just make a dash polarity and bamm back to 10. 

 Stop being lazy or hate the fact it takes a lot of time and resources to Max this out.

[blaze32]

As an MR 23 with 2k hours in the game endo and forma aren't really a problem tbh. But, in devstream 126 DE (58mins in) DE said that an Itzal nerf is incoming because nothing is as fast.  I was trying to offer an alternative to bring the other archwings up for usability in open world maps. 😇

[peterc3]

Halve the cost, sure. This would probably be with a decrease in effectiveness, not increase. Suggesting both a decrease in cost and an increase in effectiveness? An ice cube has a better shot in an expedition to an active volcano.

[blaze32]

@PeterC3 I understand what you are saying but with the issue of travel time for open world addressed in devstream 126, I was thinking of an easy first step towards reducing that travel time, another would just be to increase base flight speed of all archwings?