Nightmare Mode, The General Problems And An Idea To Add Variety And Fix Them.

[Volvadin]

Nightmare mode was introduced in U9 and while it adds a new challenge, along with new rewards, in truth it is broken. Let me discuss in general why nightmare mode is broken.

 

First, let us discuss about its rewards, the popular Dual mods.

 

Since their introduction they have been a powerful and, in a way, rather easy to acquire (Blaze non-withstanding). During my time farming for nightmare mods I’ve noticed several things that in my opinion seem wrong:

 

• Every nightmare mod can be rewarded anywhere, therefore eliminating any real need to unlock nightmare missions beyond Venus. This also greatly eliminates any real challenge the nightmare missions give baring some of the combinations of modifiers, mainly energy drain.
• The loot table for nightmare mods is crowded. Some of these mods are extremely hard to get because of the size of the table and their rarity (again, blaze comes to mind). This table is only going to get bigger and bigger as more updates and events come up without a way to filter them into separate missions.

 

In short, I have a proposal to help adjust and improve nightmare mod in general. The general idea of the new nightmare mod system is this:

 

• Each planet has 3 Nightmare mods dedicated towards it. They would be themed by the area you would fight in. (Venus would have ice based, Phobos would have its 3 mods from the event, etc)
• Each of the mods has a different drop rate based on the usefulness of the mod. Between the 3 mods, the drop rates would be 60/30/10%. (Before you complain about the low % for the highest grade mod, read the next proposal below)

 

With these changes it would bring greater incentive to complete all missions in a given area, and therefore increase the amount of playability.

 

 

Now, while that fixes the problem with the mods. We still have one problem with nightmare mode itself. A major problem I find is that people often just restart the mission if the modifiers are too harsh without even trying the mission, especially in higher level missions.

 

 

My next proposal would be a fix for this problem.

 

• Modifiers (renamed to “Risks”) are displayed to the person when the mission starts.
• For each risk present, the loot table changes % wise based on the amount of Risks and the challenge they bring. This “Risk bonus” is shown below the displayed modifiers. The % is additive as well, so it’s a direct and easy to understand number on how much better you can get
• Leaving a nightmare mission within the first 3 min places a penalty to loot chance for the next nightmare run. This penalty leaves the person after 15 min or after a single mission.

 

So for example, say you got the modifiers “Energy Drain”, “Stronger Enemies” and “Low Gravity”. Energy drain is a rather dangerous risk, so that would be worth a lot. Stronger enemies would give a fair number as well. Low gravity is almost harmless, so it would not be worth much to the risk bonus.

 

We will use this as the formula for the Risk bonus:

 

(Energy Drain = +10%. Stronger Enemies = +5%.  Low Gravity = +1%. 3 Risks present = +1% per)

 

Finally, this would appear on the right side of the screen for the first 5 seconds of the level. (Excuse the poor ASCII art)

 

     -----------------------------

 /

|   Active Risks

| - Energy Drain

| - Stronger Enemies

| - Low Gravity

| Risk Bonus – 19%

\

  -----------------------------

 

 

With this, it would modify the loot table at the end for nightmare mods from 60/30/10% to 44/39.5/19.5%.

 

So what do people think of this idea for nightmare mode? What do the public think? What does DE think? Constructive input would be wonderful from any source.

[Volvadin]

Not a single comment in almost a week? Please, any sort of feedback would be great.

[Thanatoasty]

Loot tables are going to increase as time goes on, this is just based on the expanding pool that are available to us. Other than that, your idea sounds very nice, I'm gonna bump it. (also, stealthing nightmare mode should also carry more rewards...if we could stealthly take out everyone on a highly alerted base and get to extraction without being seen, I feel that we should get more rewards for that...)