Feedback on the recent looting change with Nekros/Hydroid etc.

[evilChair]

So what you're saying is that now a nekros/hydro/khora trio have to split turf with a #4 as backup on patrol?

[Ein0r]

It increases grind, it increases the time gating, it indirectly increases the cost of arcanes and other rewards where liberal use of consumable was common.  The removal of this interaction was either to achieve exactly that, so people buy more resource booster, so that somebody can make more money. Or just lazy programming. Instead of fixing that single mistake with the Silver Grove Specters, they got rid of everything in a big way. If I grind for Polymere now, I will get a lot less. Thus i will craft a lot less energy pizzas, and will just try to leech off of other player's energy pizzas because my resources have become a lot more precious after that change.

They added the Pilfer Mod for Hydroid, so people would switch away from Nekros. And to make Hydroid more interesting to play. Or at least more tolerable. People complained about Hydroid that his tentacles are super annoying, don't kill things and make the grabbed targets a lot harder to hit. His Barrage was unreliable damage, his puddle useless, and the wave useful in rare defense cases. Similar reasoning behind Khora. Cool frame, but you saw her less than Garuda or Baruuk. Great, her Strangledome offers a decent amount of protection, but shooting down those dangling enemies sure gets annoying after a while.

 

The Pilfer + Desecrate combo existed for years. DE knew about it. I can't possibly imagine a world where none of DE's employees missed that interaction. They probably also factored that interaction in when deciding for resource requirements to craft certain items/consumables/frames. Without that interaction, Vauban Prime might only cost 5k Oxium instead of 7k. Basic Toroids might give 1,5k or 2k standing when you trade them in. The Hema's cost might have been reduced to 3k Mutagen and 8k Plastids, if it were't for that specific interaction.

When it comes to rare resources like Neurodes, Cells, Tellurium etc, people rarely went for "Spare Part" farming because Pilfercrate parties existed. While monotone, they are still more fun than Spare Parts. Even though the Spare Parts method was a lot more efficient than a 1h Pilfercrate survival and it only ever came up in chats when DE introduced their own double drop events. It was a trashy method of farming those resources. And although this is just a minor argument, a Pilfercrate party didn't feel so S#&$ty and dirty and it allowed for communication between the party members.

I agree that the Silver Grove Specter farming with all of those layers of loot generation was too extreme and unnecessary. What do you need 40-60 copies of Growing Power for? Yes plat, but with the flood of Grove Mods,  from all the users that farmed that one Nightwave quest alone and without those layers of bonus loot, even that price dropped.

[Mez999]

4 minutes ago, evilChair said:

So what you're saying is that now a nekros/hydro/khora trio have to split turf with a #4 as backup on patrol?

What would now be more efficient is to have multiple Nekros in one farm. As a Nekros has a 54% chance to roll for extra loot, it means that the chance of that corpse providing extra loot is increased. So a team including 2/3 Nekros with some overlap on a tile set would be quite effective, in my opinion. Although equally finding a choke point and slapping tentacles everywhere with a team of Hydroids would also now work if they were spawning from multiple directions. 

[evilChair]

Just now, Mez999 said:

What would now be more efficient is to have multiple Nekros in one farm. As a Nekros has a 54% chance to roll for extra loot, it means that the chance of that corpse providing extra loot is increased. So a team including 2/3 Nekros with some overlap on a tile set would be quite effective, in my opinion. Although equally finding a choke point and slapping tentacles everywhere with a team of Hydroids would also now work if they were spawning from multiple directions. 

so basically farming now has to migrate from defence/survival to interception/survival, by descending efficiency.

[Mez999]

Just now, evilChair said:

so basically farming now has to migrate from defence/survival to interception/survival, by descending efficiency.

I suppose it would do, yes. Or running two excavators at the same time with two Nekros and two Frost split up into two-man parties. 

[Ein0r]

vor 2 Minuten schrieb evilChair:

so basically farming now has to migrate from defence/survival to interception/survival, by descending efficiency.

It will just revert back the old ways, where farming parties consisted of 2-3 Nekros and something else, mostly oberon.

[i.Faust]

I've always farmed using Nekros + other normal frames. The only time I get other farming frames is if my clanmates decide to farm efficiently.

So I guess this doesn't affect me much since I've been okay with just Nekros

[Creegz]

You can't really take away all of the grind but I can see why they took that function out. It makes a load of sense, something was stacking in a way that made the game less involved and didn't really make a ton of sense thinking of this as a "real world" environment.

[Lutesque]

LoL.... DE desperate to sell Resource Boosters...

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

9 minutes ago, Ein0r said:

The Pilfer + Desecrate combo existed for years. DE knew about it.

Sure, that combo with Hydroid existed for years and for all of those years Hydriod has been a P.O.S frame with a wonky, inconsistent power.  People used him without question, I used him with Nekros.  But it was never "good".  It just was a thing you could try to take advantage of.

Then Khora's augment came out, a camp farmers dream come true.  Strangle dome goes exactly where you put it and does exactly what you want it do do.  Unlike the tentacle swarm in a major way.

Boom.  Next update the power stacking is removed.  I have no doubts as to why (but I'm wearing a tin foil hat as I type this).

[evilChair]

1 minute ago, (PS4)Agent_CHAR said:

Boom.  Next update the power stacking is removed.  I have no doubts as to why (but I'm wearing a tin foil hat as I type this).

 

2 minutes ago, Lutesque said:

LoL.... DE desperate to sell Resource Boosters...

 

[Ein0r]

vor 1 Minute schrieb (PS4)Agent_CHAR:

Then Khora's augment came out, a camp farmers dream come true.  Strangle dome goes exactly where you put it and does exactly what you want it do do.  Unlike the tentacle swarm in a major way.

That's also the reason why Strangledome has only half the chance Pilfering Swarm grants. Fire and forget, and it will affect every target as long as your mates allow it to get into the Dome's range..

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

6 minutes ago, Ein0r said:

Fire and forget, and it will affect every target as long as your mates allow it to get into the Dome's range..

Which of course they'll do because you're camping and strategically placing the dome in the path of the enemies.  I've only used her augment once so far to farm toriods with a nekros buddy because I had a FREE resource drop chance booster from login from the sortie.  25 vega's (no double booster / smeeta involved) in about 10 minutes seemed pretty broken.

Edited May 24, 2019 by (PS4)Agent_CHAR
Fixed source of FREE booster

[Lutesque]

Next Update:

Eidolon Shards now Count Torwards and are limited by your Focus Cap.

Arch wings now run on fuel....

Charm only activates once per mission. 

Affinity sharing range reduced by 80%.

All sortie Rewards replaced with Endo

Kuva Survival towers are no longer affected by Warframe Abilities...

All bosses are immune to status effects and now use Object Health Bars (yes... The green ones)

Energy No Longee can be replenished by anything at all.... 

 

LoL... im telling you... this is Where Warframe is going...

[Ein0r]

Zitat

Which of course they'll do because you're camping and strategically placing the dome in the path of the enemies.  I've only used her augment once so far to farm toriods with a nekros buddy because I had a FREE resource drop chance booster from login from the sortie.  25 vega's (no double booster / smeeta involved) in about 10 minutes seemed pretty broken.

And now you will get maybe 5-10 toroids in 10 minutes, with a resource drop chance booster. And no it isn't broken, it is intended. You would lie to yourself when you believe DE didnt think about this when adding Toroids, or any resources for that matter. Especially because they are relatively hard to get. Or more like not fun to grind at all.

Edited May 24, 2019 by Ein0r

[Oreades]

 

49 minutes ago, (PS4)Agent_CHAR said:

Sure, that combo with Hydroid existed for years and for all of those years Hydriod has been a P.O.S frame with a wonky, inconsistent power.  People used him without question, I used him with Nekros.  But it was never "good".  It just was a thing you could try to take advantage of.

Then Khora's augment came out, a camp farmers dream come true.  Strangle dome goes exactly where you put it and does exactly what you want it do do.  Unlike the tentacle swarm in a major way.

Boom.  Next update the power stacking is removed.  I have no doubts as to why (but I'm wearing a tin foil hat as I type this).

And yet when they explained it away they mentioned some "exploit" involving Chesa Kubrow. 

If I was a betting man they'd probably been working in some sort of check into the entity that had been recording which frames abilities had been used to loot it previously so they couldn't be used a second time. For whatever reason the Kubrow broke that and or they just felt that the code was getting waaaay to bulky so they went with a drastically more Boolean approach. 

Tho personally I think they should have gone with three states instead of just two. 

Currently the game seems to record "Has it been bonus looted" in either

1. While it is alive (Ivara)
2. While it is dead (Literally everything else) 

Where it makes a lot more sense at least to me to consider Has it been bonus looted 

1. While it is alive (Ivara)
2. At the moment it dies (Where most loot augments operate)
3. While it is dead (Nekros)

Tho the only one that agressively stacks outside of possibly the Kubrow exploit was at the moment of death. That could be stacked up to like three? maybe four instances deep with an Atlas petrify, Hydroid Tendrals (something else) and each one would resolve individually. So you would have the potential to tripple dip loot before Nekros even came into play and then whatever the Chessa BS was.

Just change how the game resolves the bonus loot at the moment of death to either 

1. only consider the highest loot potential and resolve that.
2. stack the loot potentials and increase the loot quality after a certain percentage. Where you would still only get the singular bit of bonus loot at the time of death but it would have the potential for being of higher quality. So there is still a benefit to playing with other players with loot augments. 

 

Tho realistically speaking the only currently viable loot state is after death because NO ONE IS GOING TO LET IVARA SLOWCRAWL A RESOURCE FARM. It's just not going to happen, the only group that might have would be a group of Ivaras and they nerfed that ages ago. 

 

The current changes just end up making it feel like you're fighting your own team and Nekros seems poised to get hit extra hard. Because the Desecrate/Despoil combo with Health conversion is going to take a pretty big hit. People keep saying Nekros has a 52% chance to spawn extra loot but glaze over the fact that the majority of the time that "extra loot" is just a health orb. Which was great for Health Conversion, now tho all those corpses hit with other augments are going to be flagged as "already looted" which means less orbs for Health Conversion to work with.

Edited May 24, 2019 by Oreades

[TARINunit9]

1 hour ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

Nekros Desecrate no longer works with Hydroid or Khora. 

Basically, dead enemies can be looted once, period, no matter what combo of frames you have. Only Ivara can stack with Nekros/Chesa Kubrow/Hydroid/Khora, because she loots while they're alive. 

They justify it by the fact that you could multi-loot Silver Grove specters, and they decided to disable looting power stacking, rather than a narrow fix to the specters. 

1 hour ago, Ver1dian said:

Something very few ever did got removed and now everyone who will never do it because they're overstocked are blowing it out of proportion becasue others who will probably never do it no longer can.

1 hour ago, Ced23Ric said:

Saves me posting more, thanks.

Cognitive bias.

This idea that they "overreacted because it was only something people did on Silver Grove" isn't quite accurate; a Nekros + Hydroid build was also very common for Toroid farming. And I have a feeling Ivara isn't going to be able to pick up the slack

[Ham_Grenabe]

2 minutes ago, TARINunit9 said:

This idea that they "overreacted because it was only something people did on Silver Grove" isn't quite accurate; a Nekros + Hydroid build was also very common for Toroid farming. And I have a feeling Ivara isn't going to be able to pick up the slack

The Silver Grove looting exploit (their term) was their specific, stated reason for making this change. It's in the patch notes. 

 

From the patch notes:

**Added info: When we added the Nightwave challenge for the Silver Grove, we encouraged a return to content that normally would have been fine. A small handful of players found an exploit and as we looked into things, we thought we fixed the issue with the new Chesa behavior that could lead to problems. We didn't. We decided to cut a bit deeper. Ivara's looting ability is now the only one that stacks with other looting because it works while alive. If a target is dead, a successful loot now happens once, no matter the source. However, multiple can attempt to loot the same body. Yes... this is different from how it previously behaved, but this is the new intended behavior.

Edited May 24, 2019 by Ham_Grenabe

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

5 minutes ago, Ein0r said:

And now you will get maybe 5-10 toroids in 10 minutes, with a resource drop chance booster.

I can't speak for anyone else but I find that to be a reasonable amount of time/effort put into getting what I need.  Which is generally enough toriods to build an amp part.  If I can get 5 in the time it takes to scale the enemies to the point I want to leave I'm happy. 

Pulling the cat out is always an option too but often I'm too lazy to deal with the hassle of switching pets... has that mechanic changed yet on PC?  I thought they said they were making pets more like sentinels as far as load outs go.

[LSG501]

42 minutes ago, Ein0r said:

The Pilfer + Desecrate combo existed for years. DE knew about it. I can't possibly imagine a world where none of DE's employees missed that interaction.

Considering I'm 99.9999999% certain I saw DE's Glen using this combination in one of his streams I'd say they knew about the interaction, well those that actually play the game outside of the internal testing setup lol

[Ham_Grenabe]

Pilfer + Desecrate was an intended interaction until this update, as a result of exploiting the combo in the Silver Grove Nightwave bounty (according to DE's own notes).

The notes are actually reasonably frank about that part - they say this is the "new intended behavior." (emphasis added)

Edited May 24, 2019 by Ham_Grenabe

[LSG501]

1 minute ago, Ham_Grenabe said:

Pilfer + Desecrate was an intended interaction until this update, as a result of exploiting the combo in the Silver Grove Nightwave bounty (according to DE's own notes).

The notes are actually reasonably frank about the change - they even say this is the "new intended behavior." (emphasis added)

Yeah but it's arguably the usual DE sledgehammer approach when a 'better' fix would have been to just stop the the exploit (debatable in all honesty, as everything was working as designed...) in silver grove

[Kothophed]

Welcome back to getting harangued by your squad if you bring anything but Nekros to a loot mission.  Because that was fun.  Inter-frame synergy, variable squad comp, multiple playstyles in a mission type, who wants those?

[Ein0r]

vor 5 Minuten schrieb Ham_Grenabe:

Pilfer + Desecrate was an intended interaction until this update, as a result of exploiting the combo in the Silver Grove Nightwave bounty (according to DE's own notes).

The notes are actually reasonably frank about the change - they even say this is the "new intended behavior." (emphasis added)

Just because I give a specific reason doesn't mean that this is the truth. And they only gave this added infos after some youtubers mentioned this in their videos, to prevent it from blowing out of proportions. And the "new intended behaviour" is just a phrase they can use for the sake of the argument that "this is our game and we can do whatever we want with it." In the end it is still just a cop-out.

If I have a tree in my  garden and the shade it provides has a negative impact on the rest of the flowers, I could prune its branches, or remove the tree if the former is too difficult. But I dont have to remove the entire garden because of that.

And in the end the only statement I will give is: "Fixed an issue with shade interaction between flowers and the tree" 

Edited May 24, 2019 by Ein0r

[SneakyErvin]

4 minutes ago, LSG501 said:

Yeah but it's arguably the usual DE sledgehammer approach when a 'better' fix would have been to just stop the the exploit (debatable in all honesty, as everything was working as designed...) in silver grove

And that is the core meaning of exploit, you take advantage of a design working a specific way, but not positively the intended way. There might have been no good way to fix just the silver grove, so a system wide change was easier and better. A specific SG change might have resulted in no extra looting at all in there.