Too much inconsistency in Profit Taker fight

[Inkarius]

Trigger warning: if you are blindly accept whatever DE implements then please do not read text bellow.

 

I just had my very first Profit taker fight and I am shocked with the amount of inconsistency (and bugs).

So it all revolves around having Arch-Guns - oki, fine. As I remember, Arch-guns were introduced with Arch-wings which is cool. But in this particular mission we can not equip Arch-gun and fly with Arch-wing. I think this is broken design and deliberately altering what we know since we started playing game is extremely bad approach.

Frost's bubble - trough entire solar map we were using this bubble to shield ourselves or something that we defend. We were making builds around this ability, carefully pick colour of energy to help teammates to see trough easily. But in this fight this is useless as regular units fire trough as if there was no bubble! Not one but 3 bubbles. Bubble was not destroyed, profit taker was on other side of mountain peak and didn't hit me - it was regular corpus soldier. Why all the sudden this bubble lost it's primary function?

Levels - so using weapons which helps me to go trough Sorties easily but same weapons deal abysmally small damage to enemies in level range of 50-60. Why all the sudden this change? If the enemy is set to  be level 50 to 60 then it should be that difficulty to kill it, not magically elevated difficulty. I was under impression I was fighting something way beyond sortie level.

Everything points out that this is difficulty for the difficulty sake. Having something difficult is not a problem. Having inconsistent rules is a huge problem. I haven't tried but even Wiki states that Hystrix innate ability to switch element is useless there. Why changing all these things we are trained all this time? I understand - it is a boss fight and has to be difficult but to change functionality because of it is, I am sorry I have no other words - stupid and lame.

 

Consistency is a key. Without it - it is pointless. Difficulty for difficulty sake was never a good design.

[Fiftycentis]

21 minutes ago, Inkarius said:

Levels - so using weapons which helps me to go trough Sorties easily but same weapons deal abysmally small damage to enemies in level range of 50-60. Why all the sudden this change? If the enemy is set to  be level 50 to 60 then it should be that difficulty to kill it, not magically elevated difficulty. I was under impression I was fighting something way beyond sortie level.

yep, orb vallis corpus are way stronger than the normal counterparts

22 minutes ago, Inkarius said:

I haven't tried but even Wiki states that Hystrix innate ability to switch element is useless there.

i agree that this should work, it's already an unused weapon, at least it would get a nice spot, where it's still out performed by better weapon in an organized group but allows for better solo (which is something to consider, expecially on switch with how unstable orb vallis is, causing at least one people to crash on public matches)

24 minutes ago, Inkarius said:

So it all revolves around having Arch-Guns - oki, fine. As I remember, Arch-guns were introduced with Arch-wings which is cool. But in this particular mission we can not equip Arch-gun and fly with Arch-wing. I think this is broken design and deliberately altering what we know since we started playing game is extremely bad approach

I really see nothing wrong with this, unless you really want to use your archwing just to have the enemies knock you out of it in a millisecond. And it's altering the base of a game mode 90% of the community doesn't care of outside of events (fomorian and razorback, and even there, full of leeches in aw), so there's no big problem

[DiabolusUrsus]

46 minutes ago, Inkarius said:

Consistency is a key. Without it - it is pointless. Difficulty for difficulty sake was never a good design.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the rest of the OP, this is indisputably true and something DE really needs to take to heart.

If you constantly have to break your own rules to produce working content, something is wrong with your rules. As developers, you have full control over your rules. If a rule is broken, change it.

Nothing feels quite so bad and off-putting as having a badass set of tools at your disposal... Only to be forbidden from using those tools at what seems like every turn. For example, what good is having a status system if most significant enemies are simply immune to it? It always feels terrible to run into a boss that you simply can't damage in melee. Enemies which simply ignore Warframe powers just aren't fun. So on, and so forth.

Similarly, "level" is supposed to be a metric for relative power. Something that allows players to estimate the capabilities of enemies or allies. If level doesn't follow a consistent pattern, it becomes useless to the point of being actively misleading.

[Elyi]

@Fiftycentis already replied to your questions but i'll add something
 

1 hour ago, Inkarius said:

Levels - so using weapons which helps me to go trough Sorties easily but same weapons deal abysmally small damage to enemies in level range of 50-60. Why all the sudden this change? If the enemy is set to  be level 50 to 60 then it should be that difficulty to kill it, not magically elevated difficulty. I was under impression I was fighting something way beyond sortie level.

Enemies in vallis not only are much tougher but you can't simply mod for one thing and expect it to work everywhere.

1 hour ago, Inkarius said:

Frost's bubble

I was not aware of this because i never use frost for this fight but I'll jump in the vallis real quick and test it  out, I'll edit this with my findings.
Edit: My results are the same as what @Fiftycentis described below this post, the bubble works fine with everything except the corpus fluctus units and the Missiles from the orb, however the missiles have an AoE damage as well as a hit damage, the bubble blocks the hit damage but the AoE damage hits through the bubble, this is not new the bubble has always behaved this way against bombards, the AoE can hit you inside the bubble even if the bubble blocks the initial hit of the projectile.

Edited April 12, 2019 by Ely.I

[Fiftycentis]

5 minutes ago, Ely.I said:

I was not aware of this because i never use frost for this fight but I'll jump in the vallis real quick and test it  out, I'll edit this with my findings.

For my experience on switch, there's no problem, at least running him on fractures.

But probably the corpus armed with fluctus are the problem, it's certainly nerfed from open space version, but it probably keeps the 300m or what's the number punchtrought

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Inkarius said:

Consistency is a key. Without it - it is pointless. Difficulty for difficulty sake was never a good design.

A lot of these are not so much "inconsistencies" as shoddy or bugged design. Frost's bubble is infamous for not protecting you from AoE for the most part, even in regular content. Moa stomps, Hellion fire and a bunch of other things can still hit you if you're within their AoE range. The Snowglobe will just detonate them early. The Profit-Taker and Terra Corpus in general pack a large amount of wide-radius AoE against which the Snowglobe generally doesn't work very well. The same is true of Atmospheric Archguns + Archwings. I'm pretty sure that bit of coding isn't intentional design, so much as an extension of the locks on the Archgun Launcher. You can't activate your Archgun Launcher in the air (for some stupid reason), meaning you can't call it from an Archwing and the Archwing itself disables a WHOLE host of functionality and gear meaning you can't call it after mounting. I suspect we'll see the ability to do so eventually, once DE get around to fixing it. Propbably around Railjack, is my suspicion.

Your point stands, however, and is one of the reasons why I generally dislike "World Boss" fights and the Terra Corpus in particular. Warframe's enemy design and balance is hardly the best around, but it still does have some broad design rules one can rely on. The Grenier are tough, heavily armoured and armed with fairly straightforward wapons - guns, grenades, rockets, fire. The Corpus are lightly armoured, pack shields and come with exotic weapons and control abilities. The Infested are predominantly melee ranged, pack a large number of fast-moving units and offer a host of nasty passive debuffs. The Terra Corpus have... Pretty much all of the above, in addition to generally higher stats and more aggressive stat scaling. It's a great example of "challenge through cheese." A faction purpose-designed to be not very tough isn't very tough? OK, give them all of the traits from all of the factions. That'll make them challenging!

I'm being facetious, of course, but I sincerely hope that Fortuna style enemy and encounter design is NOT a blueprint for the future. In order for factions to even matter, they need to have distinct strengths, weaknesses and defined behaviour. New units added to the game really need to act consistently with these factions both in terms of game balance and in terms of "feel." The Terra Corpus certainly doesn't "feel" like Corpus.

[Inkarius]

Thanks everybody for sharing their thoughts as I have shared mine. It is not only Frost's bubble that is the problem. I have experienced many inconsistencies with other frames - Limbo in particular. As for the bubble - a projectile hit me, not an AoE. But I guess that is irrelevant now. I just got used that no projectile can hit me in the bubble before bursting the bubble. I also learned to expect enemies in level range 50-60 to not be any serious threat to me while playing the game. I guess I was wrong and that is OK to be just some number which means nothing.

But there are two things that struck me the most: first one being:

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

but I sincerely hope that Fortuna style enemy and encounter design is NOT a blueprint for the future

and the second one is the speech of Chriss Willson from Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) at GDC. He said: it doesn't matter if feature is not ready, they are excited so you just ship it and later if it is not a major thing it is pushed by something else that is more important. And meanwhile I have found this post from reddit which is 3 months old. So players were giving feedback back then. It is a known issue. I was naive to think my feedback will be of any worth. It was redesign of plains of Eidalon and the New War and this thing will stay broken like this for a very long time because it is as Chriss said: it is pushed by something else that is more important. Times have changes and I don't believe anymore that a bug/glitch like 'coptering' will be turned into a feature. I just hope this boss fight will not be mandatory for next two upcoming frames. The mentioned reddit post is down here - forum editor shows it in it's entirety.

 

[(NSW)Belaptir]

It's not just the profit taker fight, it's everything related to fortuna that looks boring unless you have a very defined set of frames (and even weapons). I've made a post in reddit about this now that I've played Fortuna content for a while and got downvoted to hell.

Problem is that DE can't seem to find a way of adding difficult to the game without it being a brute force challenge (brute force because you either need a very damage resistant frame or a very high damage dealing weapon). The profit taker fight is something that only a few select frames can do. But not only, the enemies are inmune to an incredible amount of skills (and in arbitrary ways that don't make sense in the lore of the game). Some can even see invisible frames! For what I've noticed, several enemies can shoot through the rift (and are immune to its effects), they can also shoot through frost snowglobe and even through walls. Most of the crowd control skills are practically useless in fortuna since they affect a select number of enemies, not all of them. This ends up with the belief that "the best CC is death".

This basically limits your options to a very small amount of privileged warframes that can take on every mission there. What's the point on bringing a limbo if none of his skills work? Or frost of his signature move, the snowglobe, doesn't protect from fire? Why would you try a stealthy approach if there are enemies that can see invisible frames?

One of the things I like from warframe is the variety of content that allows for so many different gameplay styles, but if to do the latest content, I must rely on a frame that I don't like because that's the only way of doing it, what's the point on even trying it?

[Elyi]

9 hours ago, (NSW)Belaptir said:

It's not just the profit taker fight, it's everything related to fortuna that looks boring unless you have a very defined set of frames (and even weapons). I've made a post in reddit about this now that I've played Fortuna content for a while and got downvoted to hell.

Problem is that DE can't seem to find a way of adding difficult to the game without it being a brute force challenge (brute force because you either need a very damage resistant frame or a very high damage dealing weapon). The profit taker fight is something that only a few select frames can do. But not only, the enemies are inmune to an incredible amount of skills (and in arbitrary ways that don't make sense in the lore of the game). Some can even see invisible frames! For what I've noticed, several enemies can shoot through the rift (and are immune to its effects), they can also shoot through frost snowglobe and even through walls. Most of the crowd control skills are practically useless in fortuna since they affect a select number of enemies, not all of them. This ends up with the belief that "the best CC is death".

This basically limits your options to a very small amount of privileged warframes that can take on every mission there. What's the point on bringing a limbo if none of his skills work? Or frost of his signature move, the snowglobe, doesn't protect from fire? Why would you try a stealthy approach if there are enemies that can see invisible frames?

One of the things I like from warframe is the variety of content that allows for so many different gameplay styles, but if to do the latest content, I must rely on a frame that I don't like because that's the only way of doing it, what's the point on even trying it?

You can't simply expect all frames to work everywhere, some excel in certain areas more than others, some excel in all areas. Personally I love profit taker, is a fight that keeps you on your toes, lots of things to do and be aware of, it was also a lot of fun to work towards the necessary gear to efficiently do it. Also you don't need a frame that's tanky or excels in damage you can do with multiple frames even squishy ones, just be aware some are just better than others depending on what you seek. 

Not sure what you mean with fortuna being good for only a set of frames, so far you can play any frame in fortuna bounties and be fine, Profit taker has a good variety of arsenal you can take much more than eidolons, and Exploiter is basically "anything works" the fight.

Limbo rift being broken is a different matter altogether, DE has acknowledged it and fixed some enemies going through it already, either way there's no point of bringing limbo to a profit taker fight as his arsenal doesn't really bring anything useful, limbo is a defense oriented frame, you don't really bring him to boss fights to count on his skills unless you need a clutch, you mostly relay on your weapons. Snowglobe is not broken and working as intended, it WILL protect you from majority of attacks except AoE attacks and the fluctus unit (because fluctus goes through everything even when the player uses it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNjkoN4hOfE

You still have variety and options at your disposition, be clever about them dont give up.

 

[Inkarius]

3 hours ago, Ely.I said:

You can't simply expect all frames to work everywhere, some excel in certain areas more than others, some excel in all areas.

We don't but you are missing the point here. What we are expecting is to have abilities that work consistently all the time. It is frustrating and regardless of what it has no excuse to alter frame abilities in certain areas just for the sake of it. It is lazy work and as it seems - it will never be fixed. Railjack is upcoming and they will keep this and that is what is utterly flawed with this.

 

3 hours ago, Ely.I said:

Personally I love profit taker, is a fight that keeps you on your toes,

Well that is your opinion but again you are missing the point. It is not about a boss fight that this post I wrote about it is about inconsistencies during this particular boss fight. With this fight I have noticed that Frost's bubble doesn't work, what is next? Will I suddenly discover that Iron Skin doesn't work? Suddenly Miasma doesn't work? I expect skills to work as they always did - that is the point. A lot of boss fights keeps us on our toes and that is OK. Skills not working as we got used to is not OK.

 

3 hours ago, Ely.I said:

Not sure what you mean with fortuna being good for only a set of frames, so far you can play any frame in fortuna bounties and be fine, Profit taker has a good variety of arsenal you can take much more than eidolons, and Exploiter is basically "anything works" the fight.

You are wrong again - you can't bring Frost not because Frost is bad but because his abilities suddenly don't work as they should. If abilities work as expected, if enemy range represent what is expected then this wouldn't be an issue. Exploiter is a sort of a well made fight - has phases and all but they nerfed that too for Nova. So her ability doesn't work as intended there. Again inconsistency. And why? For the difficulty sake. Also, Limbo can't freeze time for coolant spiders so there is that too. But at least Exploiter Orb fight feels like 50-ish level fight. Profit taker fight doesn't. They can at their very least alter the text to more appropriate levels.

Warframes are built to be powerful, why taking away these powers all the sudden?

3 hours ago, Ely.I said:

Limbo rift being broken is a different matter altogether, DE has acknowledged it and fixed some enemies going through it already, either way there's no point of bringing limbo to a profit taker fight as his arsenal doesn't really bring anything useful, limbo is a defense oriented frame, you don't really bring him to boss fights to count on his skills unless you need a clutch, you mostly relay on your weapons

Wrong again - I can do a lot with Limbo when his abilities work as intended, but when they don't everything falls apart. That is why I can take Limbo only in those simple missions where I know his abilities will work, otherwise useless frame.

3 hours ago, Ely.I said:

Snowglobe is not broken and working as intended, it WILL protect you from majority of attacks except AoE attacks and the fluctus unit (because fluctus goes through everything even when the player uses it)

Wrong again and I repeat again: I was shot by a projectile, not once but multiple times and I am well aware it was a projectile and not an AoE attack. I know how to play Frost I know his weaknesses.

This just brings me to the conclusion you will dismiss the point no matter what and the point is: I am vouching for a more quality in delivery which we are not having and we won't have in the future. It will benefit everyone. What is wrong with that? What hurts your gameplay when abilities of other warframes work as intended? What hurts you so much when I point out "this is not right?". What is such problem to alter text on the bounty saying "this is way beyond 50-60 level"? Because it is. Regular enemies in that range should fall easily to my gunfire as anywhere else on the starchart but no they were bullet sponges just there. That is not right. Why is that OK? How it is OK? If it is OK then they can remove levels on enemies and let us go blind.

And all of the bugs... These bugs are there to stay because there is always more important instead of these old things to fix. That is just the cycle of these games I guess.

Look we all love the game, but when something is not right it should be criticized to be fixed. That is exactly what I am trying to point out.

 

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 hours ago, Inkarius said:

Warframes are built to be powerful, why taking away these powers all the sudden?

THIS.

For everyone who just parrots "power fantasy, power fantasy:"

Nothing destroys a power fantasy quite so quickly as having that power arbitrarily shut off to balance it without "nerfing" it. I would rather have a slightly less absurd power that ALWAYS WORKS than a power that a random enemy mook has the technology to completely disable.

Take Kuva Guardians, for example. Absolutely no hope of damaging them without Operator mode. So why the heck didn't the Grineer squash the Tenno early at the beginning? We would have been utterly helpless and impotent before finishing TWW.

2 hours ago, Inkarius said:

Look we all love the game, but when something is not right it should be criticized to be fixed. That is exactly what I am trying to point out.

PREACH.

[Fiftycentis]

On 2019-04-13 at 12:38 AM, (NSW)Belaptir said:

and even through walls.

Well, that's because some of them are armed with a 200+m punchtrought weapon, called fluctus, unless you are sure it was something else hitting you

But i too hate enemies targeting me while invisible, i can accept some missles, like heat searching so hiding to the eyes don't work with them, but  i had many experience, mostly on the plains, with dargyn don't giving a s* that i'm invisible, and same for some other things like thumper or sometimes even normal enemies following and shooting at an invisible me.

[Miledude]

Since this is a topic about inconsistency let me drop this right here 

 

[(PSN)BenHeisennberg]

"Please make a trivial boss even more trivial k thx"

Basically what I'm reading here.

[Teridax68]

2 hours ago, (PS4)BenHeisennberg said:

"Please make a trivial boss even more trivial k thx"

Basically what I'm reading here.

Then you may perhaps benefit from reading lessons, because so far the main subject of discussion has been the problem of inconsistency tied to fighting Profit-Taker, inconsistency that has become increasingly prevalent in a game that has been trying to give us difficulty, but in ways that go against the game's core systems and mechanics. I think many of us would in fact want a genuinely challenging fight (which as you mentioned, isn't currently the case), but one that is consistent with our usage of weapons, powers, and so on: currently, by your own admission, we have a fight that is trivial for some players to complete, but to make matters worse, that trivial fight is also needlessly frustrating, because it breaks a lot of interactions. Thus, if you really are in favor of more challenging fights, why not advocate for more consistency to our combat, so that we can build genuinely solid encounters on top of actual functional systems?

Edited April 22, 2019 by Teridax68

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

I don't think the fight is fundamentally broken , but it does have a couple easily solvable issues.

1 - One of the three spawn point is over rivers, which sucks as there's the annoying mechanic where all abilities get dispelled when stepping into water. Remove that spawn.

2 - The shield cycling mechanic should have independent per player cycling. Changing the element for everyone sucks and makes the fight longer that it should be.

3 - There's too many enemies spawning around the orbs, and they scale too high and hit too hard and are just annoying. This forces players to use tank frames, as they are already busy looking at the orb to see which element and shooting it with the right gun, and they don't have much time to clear adds and alarm poles. They still do alot of knockdown aoes, plus some obligatory magnetic procs to steal all your needed energy when you need it... Plus you can get in situations where other smaller orbs join the fight.

4 - Archguns take ages to get equipped, plus the cooldown mechanic kinda sucks. Having to hunt for somewhat rare and hard to spot enemies with fluctus sucks, and the fact I often kill myself intentionally just to have my archwing ready when I actually need it says that it needs to work better. Why not just drop archwing recharge modules from the pylons and remove most of the adds. We don't need a gazillion corpuses , just make the orb stronger and let us focus on damaging it.

5 - There might be too many phases. Feels like having slightly longer phases with less equipping and reequiping the archgun would only make it feel better.

6 - The fight doesn't use operators or any interesting team synergies, it's just shoot the thing with guns with multiple elements... Hurts build diversity and tactics.

Edited April 23, 2019 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[(PSN)BenHeisennberg]

2 minutes ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

they scale too high

Agreed on a couple points, but here would like to point out:

Beacons make a sound when deployed and are easily seen on the minimap.  Anyone with some situational awareness can keep the alert level low.

[Miledude]

2 hours ago, (PS4)BenHeisennberg said:

"Please make a trivial boss even more trivial k thx"

Basically what I'm reading here.

the point is make the boss encounters more intersting for a fight whitout dispense frame as a hole, makeing him empty shell just for movement, so makeing boss there is not so trivial as you say can be challenge and even force you to use all abilities that you can do to beat him, otherwise you just forget about the build and put everyting into defence and bring the guns...

[TheGreenFellow]

Just another symptom of the core problem, namely the lack of balance, stemming first from the modding power spiking we're given - which has the knock-on dominoe effect of the damage system, status/damage types, armor scaling and enemy scaling being totally out of control, boss design revolving purely around invulnerability phases and artificial B.S. damage reduction because there's no other way to deal with the insane amount of power spiking we get thanks to mods....

[Aldain]

1 hour ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

The fight doesn't use operators

Technically it does use Operators to cycle the shield's current resistance, but that's it.

[Argenex]

Here are the reasons I will never do the fight again, unless I have to for the specific toroids;

1. Sometimes spawn inbetween rivers and lake, which means constantly being knocked into the water, and losing all of your abilities, because as we have all learned, WATER IS THE KRYPTONITE OF WARFRAMES. OHH NO WATER!!! AAAGGH! 
2. Maximum Alert in under a minute due to non-stop NPC Spam. With all the knockdown, knockback, interruption, and other BS that profit-taker spews, I don't need 500 enemies up in my face while I'm trying to JUST VISUALLY SEE what stupid element it's shields are on currently, out of 20.
   • Corpus currently field 6 to 7 different warframe disabler / weapon invunerable enemies on the ground there... which is frankly stupid.
   • Raknoids that spend 60 to 70% of their battle-life invunerable, while being in your face or spamming massive AOE disabling / magnetic procs
3. The Archgun constantly breaks when reloading, the model itself vanishes, you can't switch to another weapon, you can't fire, you're stuck there with 0/2099 ammo, and can't do anything, the only way to "fix" it is to pop into your Archwing, removing all buffs and abilites, and pop back out, oh guess what, you just also reset your Archgun cooldown, which is stupid, since you have to have it to destroy the legs.
4. Ultimatly the fight isn't fun, in any sense of the word; the sheer amount of spam, spew, and spoogle all over the screen makes it frustrating to even figure out what is going on, let alone trying to accomplish the simple goal of "pew pew shields IF you have the right element, oh wait switch weapon, Oh wait it switched again, Oh dang noone has that element, well wait 15 sec... ah dang I'm dead again because my toe touched some water and my buffs poofed. Oh Now I've revived and 4 Raknoids are stomping my warframe into the mud, good lord I wish I could see through them." <-- I might as well watch a Michael Bay Transformer Battle, or better yet, I think I'll sit here and crinkle aluminum in front of my face.
5. While the shield having 1 out of 20 possible weaknesses isn't the core of the problem, due to the above problems, it just makes the fight even worse. Pick 6, use those, otherwise this statement is true: "Since the corpus can effectively ignore warframes do to all of the enemies they field that can ignore weapons & warframes, why haven't the corpus simply dominated the whole system? All they need is some shields that rotate weakness and some bursa bubbles."

Anyway, the fight isn't fun, warframe is suffering hard enough as it is lacking fun, here is probably one of the worst culprits in my opinion. When you sit down to design something, try thinking about fun first and keeping that as a goal.

[RistN]

On 2019-04-12 at 8:22 PM, Inkarius said:

Frost's bubble - trough entire solar map we were using this bubble to shield ourselves or something that we defend. We were making builds around this ability, carefully pick colour of energy to help teammates to see trough easily. But in this fight this is useless as regular units fire trough as if there was no bubble! Not one but 3 bubbles. Bubble was not destroyed, profit taker was on other side of mountain peak and didn't hit me - it was regular corpus soldier. Why all the sudden this bubble lost it's primary function?

I  think the problem  with Globe is that it doesn't  block AoE dmg and there is like 70% of Corpus open world units that either have aoe weapons  or just teleport/jump into globe making it somewhat  useless. Also I  think that aoe of these units have more than double range which reaches far into globe.