Fight the Powercreep!

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

So this is going to be something of a broad topic. To put things in extremely simple terms: Warframe suffers horribly from "powercreep". That is to say that as the game keeps developing and new content is added, older content becomes increasingly obsolete. Originally I thought this was an issue that could be slowly addressed and worked out over time on DE's side, but with the release of the new "Disruption" game mode this no longer seems to be the case.
With the introduction of Disruption, players are met with the task of defending special terminals from both mob enemies and a special unit type called a "Demolyst". These Demolysts are obscenely tanky and immune to several Warframe abilities. To make matters worse they will beeline to the terminals without pause, and will quickly destroy it should they reach the terminal. Essentially they are what is known as a "DPS Check", an enemy/problem that can only be defeated/solved with ungodly amounts of firepower. This kind of enemy design shows that DE is not only accepting "powercreep" but are actively incorporating it. Now of course simply making a buff enemy is not powercreep in itself, rather it is this in conjunction with other variables that make it so.

The weaponry of the Tenno are vast and varied. They have simple rifles like the Braton to guns that create miniature black holes on a whim. But all that glitters matters little if it cannot kill fast enough. The first weaponry the players start with (Braton, Lato, Skana, etc) are only viable until about Jupiter, afterwords players will be hard pressed to get something better. This is not powercreep in itself as starter weapons are expected to be underwhelming in most games. However even the "upgraded" versions of these weapons (Primes, Vandals, etc) only have so much use before they too are insufficient. Warframe has a strange unspoken rule that newer weapons will arbitrarily be better than the majority of older weapons. Just take the a look at the Soma: Once famed for being a DPS monster due to its formerly rare high Critical Chance; it is now a relic of lost glory due to so many newer weapons having high Critical Chances on top of high base damage. Overall Warframe has shied away from giving consistent  weapons with similar DPS but unique feels, towards simply giving stronger weapons with or without a neat gimmick upon each update. As a result players are less likely to use weaponry based on their personal preferences and more because it currently has the best DPS.

So here are the two key variables: Enemies keep getting stronger, and weapons keep getting stronger. When these two variables combine they create a spiral in which the game is constantly trying to "outdo itself" and creates a large amount of wasted material and potential. If it continues then the game runs the risk of collapsing under its own scaling curve. The only way to counter powercreep such as this is by "lowering the curve". Essentially the difference between a starting enemy and "endgame enemy" should not be an exceedingly large percentage. Likewise weaponry and their mods should be designed so their lethality is relatively close to one another.

Example for enemies: A level 1 Grineer Lancer has 100 units of health and 100 units of armor. A level 50 Lancer has 3,701.5 units of health and 553.75 units of armor. This is an extreme increase. However should a level 50 Lancer only have 500 units of health and 100 units of armor, then a larger number of weapons would be viable with proper mods.

Example for weapons: An unmodded Braton has an average DPS of 210. With a maxed Serration mod its DPS becomes 556.5. An unmodded Braton Prime's DPS is 335.3, while a Serration mod bumps it up to 888.5. The difference in the unmodded versions is 125.3, but the Serration widens the difference to 332. This type of modding creates an exponential curve, but if the Serration mod gave a much smaller boost then it could be swapped for another mod depending on one's preference. Overall some weapons are going to be better than others, but so long a their scaling curve is kept in check the margin of viability will greatly expand.

Thoughts?

[Gabbynaru]

Hek no, give me:

[FinOCE]

I think you meant to say the level 50 has 5000 units of health.*

Personally, I like how the game is currently. It means a level 50 enemy is significantly harder to kill than a level 1, as it should be. Mods are supposed to give a significant boost so that you can effectively kill the high level enemies. We don't want it to take, let's say one shot on a level 1, but 10 shots on a level 10, and 100 shots on a level 100. The super powerful mods are unlocked and maxed by people who are attacking enemies that require that power. Most god-tier builds use either very expensive mods like Maiming Strike or rivens, or fall off around level 100 or so.

I like looking at big damage numbers, and I like how the system currently works. DE just needs to buff weapons, and nerf others to give it more balace. Of course, people won't use some weapons because the gun isn't fun, or there is a better version, or whatever, but that's just how it is.

[844448]

Depends on how you see the powercreep, since I can beat mesa in damage dealt using nezha and Stradavar. Most of the time the powercreep is caused by people that don't bother to actually invest in said weapon. Have you tried investing forma on braton? You can bring it to sortie level

[Teridax68]

Agreed, it's pretty obvious that Warframe has a power creep problem. However, I'd say there are actually two separate kinds of power creep in Warframe, which create distinct problems:

1. There's damage creep, where certain weapons deal far more damage than others, and where certain specific combinations of mods make those weapons severely more powerful than other combinations. This I think is actually the less-bad kind of power creep, because the solution here I think is just to equalize and flatten most of our damage. Rebalancing our weapons along similar lines of damage (which has been done before), reworking IPS and elemental damage mods to instead convert our damage to a certain type, rather than add any, and nerfing/removing the remaining base damage and crit mods could put us all at much less crazy damage levels, which would then allow DE to also readjust enemy levels and scaling so that they don't need crazy exponential increases in health (and damage) to not die instantly to us.
2. There's Energy creep, where Energy has become such an ineffective restriction to our ability usage that we can use abilities essentially on-demand with 100% uptime (and are balanced around it). This I think is by far the worse of the two kinds, not only because it's contributed to our damage creep (e.g. nuker frames nuking non-stop), but because there isn't really that clean a solution to it: Energy as a resource isn't actually all that fun, because it's not fun to run out and be unable to use any abilities at all, so simply nerfing our Energy economy and generation is unlikely to help, and the moment one suggests alternatives, that is also bound to require some other sacrifice that many players would complain about.

So on one hand, rebalancing our damage might not be so difficult to do, and I'm all for it, if only so that we can have a less ridiculous spread of raw damage across weapons and MR levels, and hopefully more build diversity too, but changing our ability usage is a much more prickly topic, even though it contributes just as much, if not more to the game's power creep problem: when we deal too much damage, the easy solution is to just crank up the stats on enemies, but when we can kill, disable, or ignore enemies with 100% uptime, it's difficult to create any sort of challenge, at least not without making ability-immune enemies. Finding out ways to let us use our abilities often, but without causing interaction problems with the game, is likely one of the difficult projects DE will have to set themselves, as currently there are so many ability- and now status-immune enemies that a huge portion of the game is ignoring some of its own core systems.

[(XBOX)Hyperion Rexx]

Hell no.  This game is a power fantasy so let us put together our op builds.  It takes a ton of time to rank up mods, forma, roll rivens and then test a build.  Take that away and what's left once you've done the star chart?  You want de to constantly swing the nerf hammer at everything that becomes meta?  You've just killed the game.  Players will leave in droves if the build they've maybe spent weeks putting together gets nerfed back to median level.

Every weapon can't be the same, you need powerful weapons and you need trash ones too.  

As for the demolyst being too tanky, woah, we have a tanky enemy.  So bring a good loadout.  No, you won't do much with your burston prime so bring a catchmoon - easy to build one, it's super powerful without a riven.  Or a good shotgun.  Hell I can kill it with my braton prime but then I did invest a lot of time putting 6 forma and rolling a decent riven for it.

You want to take on the toughest enemies take the best gear.  You want to chill and just bounce around the star chart take any loadout you want and you'll be fine.  That's how it should be.

[Hobie-wan]

I admit that I don't feel like reading a wall of text at the moment, but games that have things added to them over the years are just going to have power creep. Just like economies will always have inflation. Could it possibly be avoided with more planning? Maybe, but development would likely slow to a crawl to where the game would wither and die before it could be implemented.

[844448]

12 minutes ago, Hobie-wan said:

I admit that I don't feel like reading a wall of text at the moment, but games that have things added to them over the years are just going to have power creep. Just like economies will always have inflation. Could it possibly be avoided with more planning? Maybe, but development would likely slow to a crawl to where the game would wither and die before it could be implemented.

If something isn't stronger than the best weapon = instantly judged as MR fodder

as usual

[Hobie-wan]

Just now, 844448 said:

If something isn't stronger than the best weapon = instantly judged as MR fodder

as usual

Yup.

[(XBOX)Hyperion Rexx]

9 minutes ago, Hobie-wan said:

Yup.

No, I don't agree at all.  I don't think that is borne out in game either.  Glaxion Vandal for example, definitely not the most op weapon.  Has it been well received?  Yes, without doubt. 

[Hobie-wan]

1 minute ago, (XB1)Hyperion Rexx said:

No, I don't agree at all.  I don't think that is borne out in game either.  Glaxion Vandal for example, definitely not the most op weapon.  Has it been well received?  Yes, without doubt. 

It is still better than the regular glaxion though. That's power creep.

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Glaxion_Vandal

[Loza03]

A good idea and intention, but you've missed the real point behind things being overpowered. It's not how powerful something is that matters, it's how often you can use it. Something can be insanely powerful, but if you can't use it, it's useless. Similarly, something can be weak, but if it's always good enough then the player has reasons to use it often. The problem arises when something is extremely powerful and broadly useable This is the case for all gameplay balancing, always has been, always will be.

 

In order to fix Warframe's balancing, we need more situations where powers aren't effective. And I don't mean that like Nullifiers, I mean that like Mario Spinies, or Doom Pinkies, or even Halo Elites. Each of these enemies has options to be able to fight back against the player's conventional tactics - Spinies are immune to jumps, Pinkies can resist front-facing assaults and punish them with their charges and Elites can manoeuvre to make aiming difficult or run out of the way of grenades. Similar things must be done for enemies.

I suggest going through the enemies and giving them certain interactions with certain powers - specific powers will work differently on these enemies, even if they work as they always have on others - which could be both positive and negative. For example - Volts' discharge is grounded by Moa's and Moa corpses, producing a small area where no organic enemy is affected by the attack - but Moa's take far more damage, two or three times as much (hence Moa corpses). It still works as well as ever against wide-spread enemies, since in such a situation Crewmen and such will often be far enough away from Moas to still be affected, but against tight-knit crowds, it's less potent, only wiping out Moa's leaving Organic foes intact - and critically, still shooting at you.

Similarly, some enemy archetypes could be resistant to certain power archetypes but more affected by another - for example, ground-based abilities and flying enemies. Why do Ospreys get stunned by Rhino's stomp? Why do they care about Hallowed Ground when they don't touch the ground. But similarly, without a good way to brace against the ground, why aren't they more affected by powers like Pull and Ripline, or why aren't they more affected by Reckoning considering how lightweight they need to be for flight? Such things would encourage creativity, and be used to engineer scenarios where we're not too powerful in organic ways, as opposed to now where it's like "Oh, hey, I see you can no longer use your powers. What a shame!"

[George_PPS]

Powercreep? Give me a break. We are supposed to be this powerful because this is WARFRAME and NOT any other slow killing games. 

If anyone prefers to have less power, you can always play with just 9 or 8 Mods for each and every one of your Warframes and only 7 or 6 Mods for your weapons. And no Rivens allowed in your weapons for all missions. As for some elemental damage types being too power? Don’t use them. Remove these of all elemental damages from all your weapons as well. 

Problem solved. 

Edited June 14, 2019 by George_PPS

[Xzorn]

I can't really agree with your analysis of Power Creep + Scaling and it's outcome.

Scaling is the natural counter to Power Creep.

If the game were designed properly using Exponential scaling players would always get just a bit further but be unable to ever reach the maximum value as Power Creep should be linear in nature. Both could function as Linear gains as well but the upkeep would be greater and the level range more broad.

Unfortunately DE doesn't balance anything and through stacking all our available tools scaling is not longer an issue. We can hit lvl 9,999 already using multiple tactics. Far as Power Creep Vs Scaling goes. The game is over already. This isn't a numbers thing. It's a design thing and a complete lack of effort in controlling it.

[Test-995]

Allow us to do fight for the powercreep, we have immense amount of powers yet it's not enough for me.