Feedback for Wolf Tactical Alert

[ADirtyMonk]

General: Giving players a guaranteed way to farm the WoSS for his drops is a very nice send off for him at the end of Nightwave Series 1. Crashing the sledge market was a nice bonus so the people who do not want to/cannot farm wolf can pick up the unique weapon for cheap. The Wolf is not nearly as difficult now that players can prepare for him beforehand. The Adds do significant damage which is good since Warframe has never really had a significant Add phhase in a boss fight before but the thermia bomb attacks are overtuned and horrible to have to deal with using a squishier warframe. By far the easiest way to deal with the mission is to take a hyper tank and absorb everything while using a boring pure crit weapon.

One Time Rewards: On one hand, I like what we got for the one time rewards. On the other, I do wish Tier 1 and 2 Wolf Hunts rewarded Wolf credits of varying amounts instead. Let the players choose what rewards to get from Nora. It would fit better with the theme of these alerts being Nightwave related event missions. Stratos emblem is nice but doesnt mean much. I never see anyone use it and even if they did how are we supposed to tell how much Strata the player has accumulated without consulting the wiki? It would be nice if getting a certain amount of strata gave an icon in the Profile page or a unique glyph or ephemera. Or if the emblem itself was re-designed to be animated 3D like the Quantum and Ki'teer badges.

The Fight (Wolf Hunt Tier 2): 

The WoSS

• The good: The fight is a stomp now that players can actually prepare gear for his fight instead of trying to make unoptimized gear work. This is no surprise as even before this third nerf if one player in the squad had an anti-wolf weapon a lv70 wolf was going down in <1min. I do think DE got the tankiness down as close as they could to a reasonable level while keeping the boss accessible to almost everyone given that the only condition to access it is Nightwave 5. I've run exclusively pub missions. For the squads with majority >MR20 the fight lasts under 20 seconds as expected. For squads with majority between MR10-20 the fight can last 30s-1min which isnt bad either. Most importantly Wolf isnt invulnerable, doesnt use tiny weak points, or many other methods to artificially prolong the fight and I do appreciate that.
• The bad: I dont really like the use of the old Ruk tileset for the fight. The wolf likes to move a lot. A lot of the time his charge moves wind up with him hugging the very edge of the pit (which resets all of your abilities if you fall in) and the lack of platforms means theres not much room to space out the thermia bombs either. A lot of his moves are not very well telegraphed. His tornado move is especially bad. The wind up is very fast. There's no way to tell what direction the wolf is going to charge in and once you are caught in the pull there is no way to break out, no way to mod to counter the pull (even with maxed primed sure footed). I wouldnt mind if the wolf hit harder but all of his attacks got a 1-3 second windup before they cast. I do not like that the wolf has complete immunity to status when he really should take reduced status effects (ex. 1 corrosive proc now only strips 2% of armor instead of 25%). Warframe has always been very bipolar with status effects and arbitrarily invalidating an entire build tree feels very bad. Wolf was a missed opportunity to incorporate Operators into the fight. Given that the wolf is part sentient, he should have had the adaptive resistance mechanic that all sentient have instead of an arbitrary flat damage reduction.

Saturn Six Fugitives

• The good: They were a very good attempt at a significant add phase to the boss fight. The bombs do more than enough damage to dumpster non hyper tank warframes if the numbers of SSF are allowed to build up so they actually had some impact to the fight. The burn DoT hits decently hard but is not overtuned I do wish they lasted much longer to push players towards using healers to counter the DoT or more DPS frames to end the fight faster, or more CC frames to counter the Adds. The fight is noticeably less chaotic if half of the the squad is CCing/killing the adds while the other half handles Wolf.
• The bad: the thermia bombs suffer from the same issue as almost every single enemy explosive attack does. No visible windup, an easily missed casting animation, a tiny projectile. There is no way to tell who is getting aimed at or how large the impact area is. I've had to stop using my umbral-adaptation volt because every so often I would instantly explode with no warning after 5 or 6 SSF randomly decided to lob thermia bombs at me at me. I do not mind that the grenades hit very hard. If anything they could hit harder so that even hyper-tank frames have something to fear (as of now I'm just eating all the hits with an umbral eternal war valkyr). What is unacceptable is that players are not given any time to react whatsoever. There should be a very clear tell/visual/sound warning that the SSF are going to throw their bomb. Simultaneously there needs to be a red impact ring that appears where the bomb will land so players can react and get out of the hit zone. A 2-3 second cast time is reasonable to allow players to move out of the damage zone or expend a revive.

Drop Table:

• The WoSS' drop table is reasonable for this fight since players can effectively run it as much as they want very quickly. This drop table is NOT acceptable for random encounter WoSS. If the WoSS is to become a low frequency encounter after Series 1, I strongly recommend the removal of the common mod drops in his current table in exchange for Nightwave Series 1 unique drops (All the unique mods, cosmetics, glyphs, etc). This way people not present for Nightwave 1 still have a shot at the unique rewards and it wont feel as bad to do a potentially long fight.

Edited May 11, 2019 by ADirtyMonk

[MaxCrazybread]

Do think the event should grant participants nightwave rep? I mean the whole nightwave is based around the wolf, but yet defeating him somehow doesn't give players any rep whatsoever. Maybe this is only something that desperate tenno like myself, who still haven't reached rank 30 wants, but this is the perfect event for those missed out earlier challenges to grind for rep and reach rank 30 before the new season. I just want the umbral forma man... Any thoughts?

[UnderRevision]

I agree overall with a lot of this (though I found the firebombs to be a bit more hazardous than the OP seemed to).  I would like to add that I wish there was more variety with the fugitives.  The firebombs would be more tolerable if they didn't ALL spam them all the time.  There was a missed opportunity to give them a mix of looted Grineer and Corpus weapons to make them a more interesting mixed-bag of a faction and less a never ending rain of surprisingly potent Molotov cocktails.  Seriously, when do we get those as throwing weapons?  There's a throwing knife weapon concept in there that I wouldn't mind using.

For the fight itself, maybe it would have been better to use that giant hangar that I only ever see in the "destroy the mining equipment" sabotage missions in the Grineer Asteroid Base tileset.  There'd be more room to move around and do his swirling lunges there.  Heck, could have added a lore blurb about the reason we're going there is because he's steered the asteroid to smash into someplace.  Would make it feel a little less contrived that we're suddenly able to pin down a location for the guy who has been going just about everywhere in the system so freely.

[ADirtyMonk]

13 hours ago, MaxCrazybread said:

Do think the event should grant participants nightwave rep? I mean the whole nightwave is based around the wolf, but yet defeating him somehow doesn't give players any rep whatsoever. Maybe this is only something that desperate tenno like myself, who still haven't reached rank 30 wants, but this is the perfect event for those missed out earlier challenges to grind for rep and reach rank 30 before the new season. I just want the umbral forma man... Any thoughts?

I'm conflicted about this. One one hand. It would make sense to get a bit of rep for dealing with Wolf himself since you do if you deal with his goon squad. On the other, players had literally 2.5 months to do the event with significant amounts of leeway in skipping daily challenges on top of the rep doubler affecting Goon spawns during the Exploiter event. If someone started that late in the race it makes sense they shouldnt be able to finish.

9 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

I agree overall with a lot of this (though I found the firebombs to be a bit more hazardous than the OP seemed to).  I would like to add that I wish there was more variety with the fugitives.  The firebombs would be more tolerable if they didn't ALL spam them all the time.  There was a missed opportunity to give them a mix of looted Grineer and Corpus weapons to make them a more interesting mixed-bag of a faction and less a never ending rain of surprisingly potent Molotov cocktails.  Seriously, when do we get those as throwing weapons?  There's a throwing knife weapon concept in there that I wouldn't mind using.

For the fight itself, maybe it would have been better to use that giant hangar that I only ever see in the "destroy the mining equipment" sabotage missions in the Grineer Asteroid Base tileset.  There'd be more room to move around and do his swirling lunges there.  Heck, could have added a lore blurb about the reason we're going there is because he's steered the asteroid to smash into someplace.  Would make it feel a little less contrived that we're suddenly able to pin down a location for the guy who has been going just about everywhere in the system so freely.

You make some good suggestions about the enemies. My guess is with the crunch of Jovian Concord (and whatever else DE is working on) there wasnt enough time to generate that many custom enemies that we will probably see only very rarely after this Nightwave.

I agree that there are so many more weapons in warframe than enemies are seen using it would be nice to see more of them in action in the hands of enemies

Regarding frequency of firebomb spam. I think it is ok for hard hitting attacks to be very frequent if players were given ample warning. No stamina bar means a ton of leeway to keep players moving and dodging big hits which is something DE really fails to take advantage of for boss fights. For example: 

That giant hanger would have been a perfect arena for the fight. Plenty of room to move around to avoid attacks and spread out the thermia bomb AOE with decent verticality for people who want to stay out of the mess and use longer ranged weapons.

Edited May 11, 2019 by ADirtyMonk

[(PSN)iPoisonedFlint]

I’m going to be completely honest with you here. Some of your suggestions in the original post are good, as for the alert itself, it’s extremely boring and way too easy. Groups are speed running this alert in under 45 seconds. There needs to be more of a challenge.

[UnderRevision]

2 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Regarding frequency of firebomb spam. I think it is ok for hard hitting attacks to be very frequent if players were given ample warning. No stamina bar means a ton of leeway to keep players moving and dodging big hits which is something DE really fails to take advantage of for boss fights.

Were the boss fight in a big open room (like the aforementioned hangar) I'd be onboard with that.  It's more the spam of fire in the tight corridors leading up to the boss that's irritating.  There's often not a lot of room to work with to avoid incoming fire.  It's not insurmountable by any means but it would have been nice if, for example, the enemies leading up to the boss were a variant with less spam while the ones in the boss arena were free to go nuts with them.  But, like you said, with all the new enemies in the Jovian Concord, their enemy design/development team was probably quite busy.  Looking forward to seeing the fruits of their labor firsthand.

[(PSN)Entropy512]

On 2019-05-10 at 7:59 PM, ADirtyMonk said:

General: Giving players a guaranteed way to farm the WoSS for his drops is a very nice send off for him at the end of Nightwave Series 1. Crashing the sledge market was a nice bonus so the people who do not want to/cannot farm wolf can pick up the unique weapon for cheap. The Wolf is not nearly as difficult now that players can prepare for him beforehand. The Adds do significant damage which is good since Warframe has never really had a significant Add phhase in a boss fight before but the thermia bomb attacks are overtuned and horrible to have to deal with using a squishier warframe. By far the easiest way to deal with the mission is to take a hyper tank and absorb everything while using a boring pure crit weapon.

One Time Rewards: On one hand, I like what we got for the one time rewards. On the other, I do wish Tier 1 and 2 Wolf Hunts rewarded Wolf credits of varying amounts instead. Let the players choose what rewards to get from Nora. It would fit better with the theme of these alerts being Nightwave related event missions. Stratos emblem is nice but doesnt mean much. I never see anyone use it and even if they did how are we supposed to tell how much Strata the player has accumulated without consulting the wiki? It would be nice if getting a certain amount of strata gave an icon in the Profile page or a unique glyph or ephemera. Or if the emblem itself was re-designed to be animated 3D like the Quantum and Ki'teer badges.

The Fight (Wolf Hunt Tier 2): 

The WoSS

• The good: The fight is a stomp now that players can actually prepare gear for his fight instead of trying to make unoptimized gear work. This is no surprise as even before this third nerf if one player in the squad had an anti-wolf weapon a lv70 wolf was going down in <1min. I do think DE got the tankiness down as close as they could to a reasonable level while keeping the boss accessible to almost everyone given that the only condition to access it is Nightwave 5. I've run exclusively pub missions. For the squads with majority >MR20 the fight lasts under 20 seconds as expected. For squads with majority between MR10-20 the fight can last 30s-1min which isnt bad either. Most importantly Wolf isnt invulnerable, doesnt use tiny weak points, or many other methods to artificially prolong the fight and I do appreciate that.
• The bad: I dont really like the use of the old Ruk tileset for the fight. The wolf likes to move a lot. A lot of the time his charge moves wind up with him hugging the very edge of the pit (which resets all of your abilities if you fall in) and the lack of platforms means theres not much room to space out the thermia bombs either. A lot of his moves are not very well telegraphed. His tornado move is especially bad. The wind up is very fast. There's no way to tell what direction the wolf is going to charge in and once you are caught in the pull there is no way to break out, no way to mod to counter the pull (even with maxed primed sure footed). I wouldnt mind if the wolf hit harder but all of his attacks got a 1-3 second windup before they cast. I do not like that the wolf has complete immunity to status when he really should take reduced status effects (ex. 1 corrosive proc now only strips 2% of armor instead of 25%). Warframe has always been very bipolar with status effects and arbitrarily invalidating an entire build tree feels very bad. Wolf was a missed opportunity to incorporate Operators into the fight. Given that the wolf is part sentient, he should have had the adaptive resistance mechanic that all sentient have instead of an arbitrary flat damage reduction.

Saturn Six Fugitives

• The bad: the thermia bombs suffer from the same issue as almost every single enemy explosive attack does. No visible windup, an easily missed casting animation, a tiny projectile. There is no way to tell who is getting aimed at or how large the impact area is. I've had to stop using my umbral-adaptation volt because every so often I would instantly explode with no warning after 5 or 6 SSF randomly decided to lob thermia bombs at me at me. I do not mind that the grenades hit very hard. If anything they could hit harder so that even hyper-tank frames have something to fear (as of now I'm just eating all the hits with an umbral eternal war valkyr). What is unacceptable is that players are not given any time to react whatsoever. There should be a very clear tell/visual/sound warning that the SSF are going to throw their bomb. Simultaneously there needs to be a red impact ring that appears where the bomb will land so players can react and get out of the hit zone. A 2-3 second cast time is reasonable to allow players to move out of the damage zone or expend a revive.

 

The fact that the thermia bombs can one-shot many frames is annoying.

If the mechanic were somehow altered such that you would be in big trouble if you ignored them, it would be fine - but one bomb will kill a Loki in seconds.

(Why Loki?  Because if he can get a radial disarm off in time - the bombs are taken out of the equation and the fight becomes easy.

Also - while "random spawn" wolf was extremely tanky and highly resistant to any sort of Warframe abilities, it seems like the tactical alert variant can be armor-stripped by a Mag - either that or my kavat got lucky.

I've only seen the Wolf take more than 30 seconds or so in tier 2, because somehow the entire squad was repeatedly dying despite there being no Molotovs (due to high range radial disarm spam)

[(PSN)HellianKarmas]

Le 11/05/2019 à 00:12, MaxCrazybread a dit :

Do think the event should grant participants nightwave rep? I mean the whole nightwave is based around the wolf, but yet defeating him somehow doesn't give players any rep whatsoever. Maybe this is only something that desperate tenno like myself, who still haven't reached rank 30 wants, but this is the perfect event for those missed out earlier challenges to grind for rep and reach rank 30 before the new season. I just want the umbral forma man... Any thoughts?

This. I farm for the mask and weapon for a couple hour. But that is it. For all the trouble we dont even get rep. Wich didnt make sense. Same as to why the faction who hunt are only dropping BP instead of rep for your own factions.