A simple improvement to Defense

[Teridax68]

Let's make this short and sweet; Defense has the following notable problems:

• Defense is slow and often boring: Defense is, in theory, balanced around each wave taking a minute, but because enemy spawns are so spaced-out, the mode often takes longer than an equivalent rotation of Survival or Interception. The resulting slow trickle of enemies also has them often fail to generate any real challenge per wave.
• Defense needs nuke frames to run smoothly: Because progression to the next wave requires killing all of the current wave's enemies, this causes the end of most waves to turn into a protracted game of hide-and-seek, where the player tries to figure out which piece of geometry the last few units got caught on. As such, kill frames are heavily favored, whereas crowd control-based frames suffer in spite of their defensive tools, because they can only stall enemies, and stalling is undesirable in almost all cases.

With this in mind, I think these problems could be solved with one basic change: instead of splitting Defense into waves, spawn enemies continuously and score players on time spent defending. As with Survival, the rotations should likely occur every 5 minutes, and with this the initial spawn room could instead be turned into an extraction room, which would unlock after the first rotation (as with Survival again). This would help the above for the following reasons:

• Defense would be balanced at the exact same speed as Survival, making comparisons between the two easier for the purposes of stuff like Arbitrations.
• There would be no lull in the flow of enemies, so no time wasted in picking off stragglers.
• CC frames would legitimately have a place (even if kill frames would generate more Affinity), because stalling the inflow of enemies would be a viable way of progressing through to the next rotation.

Thoughts?

Edited May 8, 2019 by Teridax68

[Monlex]

I do not see any downsides but clear upsides, great idea!

[Gamma745]

The only "downside" I can see from this is that Sortie defense could be borderline AFK-able with Limbo or Ivara, but maybe that's a stretch.

I like this idea as well.

[Teridax68]

4 hours ago, Gamma745 said:

The only "downside" I can see from this is that Sortie defense could be borderline AFK-able with Limbo or Ivara, but maybe that's a stretch.

I like this idea as well.

This is indeed a real problem, though I'd argue it's also one that exists with the current method of Defense as well: right now, even though a Limbo or Ivara may have to kill enemies to progress to the next wave, they can nonetheless render the objective invincible/invisible, with virtually nothing the enemy can do about it. In this respect, I think the problem is simply that some warframe abilities have balance or design problems that allow players to godmode the game without much effort, and that's something only changes to those abilities will fix.

[Gamma745]

22 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

This is indeed a real problem, though I'd argue it's also one that exists with the current method of Defense as well: right now, even though a Limbo or Ivara may have to kill enemies to progress to the next wave, they can nonetheless render the objective invincible/invisible, with virtually nothing the enemy can do about it. In this respect, I think the problem is simply that some warframe abilities have balance or design problems that allow players to godmode the game without much effort, and that's something only changes to those abilities will fix.

To be fair, the two I mentioned only works for the Sortie version. Ivara can't cloak the normal defense cryopod and if the enemy walks into Limbo's Cataclysm (which they do) they can shoot it no problem. Even then, they still need to maintain it or it's game over. Like I said, it's kinda a stretch.

[Teridax68]

9 minutes ago, Gamma745 said:

To be fair, the two I mentioned only works for the Sortie version. Ivara can't cloak the normal defense cryopod and if the enemy walks into Limbo's Cataclysm (which they do) they can shoot it no problem. Even then, they still need to maintain it or it's game over. Like I said, it's kinda a stretch.

Limbo also has Stasis, though, which when combined with Cataclysm means the enemy can do literally nothing to anything that is inside the area. The only counter to either is Nullifier bubbles, which aren't difficult to shoot down when those are the only enemies worth focusing.

[Gamma745]

4 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Limbo also has Stasis, though, which when combined with Cataclysm means the enemy can do literally nothing to anything that is inside the area. The only counter to either is Nullifier bubbles, which aren't difficult to shoot down when those are the only enemies worth focusing.

Yeah, that is another side of the problem. And if I remember correctly, the Stasis limit is quite high as well.

[Teridax68]

10 minutes ago, Gamma745 said:

Yeah, that is another side of the problem. And if I remember correctly, the Stasis limit is quite high as well.

Indeed, and the limit only applies to projectiles, rather than enemies. Popping Cataclysm + Stasis means Limbo can hold enemies there indefinitely without them being able to even fire their weapons in the first place, which combined with his Energy regeneration in the Rift, efficiency + duration mods, and Zenurik, means he can just repeatedly cast 4 + 2 for unlimited invulnerability on the objective. Because this applies to the current mode of Defense just as well, changing the mode wouldn't really introduce a new exploit in this respect.

[Gamma745]

16 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Indeed, and the limit only applies to projectiles, rather than enemies. Popping Cataclysm + Stasis means Limbo can hold enemies there indefinitely without them being able to even fire their weapons in the first place, which combined with his Energy regeneration in the Rift, efficiency + duration mods, and Zenurik, means he can just repeatedly cast 4 + 2 for unlimited invulnerability on the objective. Because this applies to the current mode of Defense just as well, changing the mode wouldn't really introduce a new exploit in this respect.

Yeah, but isn't that technically half the intention? So CC have it's own niche use here? It does what it supposed to be doing, stall or stop the enemy long enough for you to do other thing. You also choose to let go a large amount of affinity and resource, like you said in the OP.

[Teridax68]

5 hours ago, Gamma745 said:

Yeah, but isn't that technically half the intention? So CC have it's own niche use here? It does what it supposed to be doing, stall or stop the enemy long enough for you to do other thing. You also choose to let go a large amount of affinity and resource, like you said in the OP.

This can be its whole topic of conversation in itself, but I think there is a crucial difference between being able to crowd control or stall enemies, and being to do so indefinitely: if you can hold enemies for a certain amount of time, that's absolutely fine, but if you can reactivate your CC as soon as it expires, and effectively prevent enemies from ever taking any action, then you've removed all interaction with enemies, save for the part where you still need to kill them. In the case of Limbo, being able to stall indefinitely with 4 + 2 means Defense inevitably becomes a matter of making sure those abilities stay up 24/7, regardless of level, and for the time being the rest boils down to clicking on the static bags of health until the mission progresses to the next stage.

Edited May 10, 2019 by Teridax68