Idea for Augmentations. (Maybe)

[Twilii]

So its been reverberated throughout the community, something about making augments either tied into the abilities or making additional slots on warframes like arcanes. This is an interesting thought but it would require to much work with how much work has been done on the UI for such a minor improvement to the game. (At least in my opinion) Time would be better spent on mods 2.1 as I'll call it.

Lets talk mods 2.1:

In essence the idea I'm going to pitch here would be a multi-year endeavor and honestly should be tested on small scale by community contributors before the concept goes for full development, but lets take a walk on the wild side; shall we? 

First take on the issues with Warframe as a whole is decisions on how to interestingly mod warframes, at this point for me it's a little stale, add power strength / range / duration / efficiency / durability where needed. There isn't really anything but simple mildly reconfigurable cookie cutter setups for most warframes. (Umbral Forma have amplified this issue) Honestly augments how no reasonable adaption to a build for general use, but only to be used in niche circumstances or in some cases if the augment does add something to a specific part of a kit that makes it more fluid: IE: Rhino with Ironclade Charge. There was an argument to be made over Firequake CC Ember, but that's been removed from existence unintentionally. 

Now complaining aside, how could we address some of these issues? Lets start with throwing the book out the window and looking back at the papyrus that Warframe used to be, not to show my beta colors but once upon a time I had to put mods that were my abilities onto warframes. Lets entertain that a bit. Instead of just making a system for just augments, why not just combine that idea with the old system of abilities were mods, take a dash of that new focus tree thing and give it a swirl.

EXAMPLE:

Ember:

Ability set for ability 1: Fireball, Fire Missile, Flame shock, Mark of the Flame

Ability set for ability 2: Accelerant, Flashpoint, Cauterizing Flame

Ability set for ability 3: Ring of Fire, Flame Burst, Warding Flame

Ability set for ultimate abilities: Birth of the Phoenix, Armageddon, World on Fire (Keeping it classic.) 

Use a semblance of the focus systems UI elements to create a tree of these different abilities to rank them up or add little perks to them / the main functionality of selecting abilities.

Wooh, that was a doosy, took me just 5 minutes to come up with names for different abilities for selection, let alone the actual work it would take to do this for 20+ unique ability sets. But, this is a great start of an idea to a whole new playground for both developers to go wild and content galore for us to tinker and create whole new builds / play styles. Now for implementations I do have a few thoughts on introduction of this idea also, start simple; release a rework of lets say 'Ember' that has the beta functionality of this idea baked into it as a unique warframe (not a replacement of the original), let community contributors take it for a spin, release it as selective beta placement after for a larger data sample, and if its liked them just rework all existing Embers. Just pick one or pick an order after and then instead of entirely new ideas, you are just recycling old content into SHINY new content for us tinkers to play with. Much of which makes infinitely expandable idea to build off addition abilities or tweaks to kits / builds from a development stand point.

But, BALANCE?!?!? This is a pve game, the pvp is another topic for another time. But in regards to pve, damn the balance in the name of new content, sometimes throwing a brick at a window is a great way to get a larger view. After all this is just an idea to make the game more expansive and interesting, maybe too much you say? New players would be driven away? There is another post I have already done on that topic I do say. There aren't never too many tool-tips, they are like tic-tacs.

Contribute for even more fun! Add ideas for abilities sets for your favorite warframes down below, there is never too many ideas in the name of content!

Probably won't add onto this post, as I get consumed in my work, and will forget about this thread in 24 hours.

[LunaSelenis]

I don't know what to think about this. This confuses me?

Are you saying to have slots for abilities again but every ability has 3 different versions of it or are you saying that you simply select 1 of 3 Versions of an Ability which are the same first Ability but Augmented? I.. i don't understand?

[Teridax68]

I think it would help to give examples of what those different abilities would do, just to paint a better picture of the system being proposed. Looking at it, though, while there is certainly an appeal to wanting to explore each frame's theme more deeply, and while I agree that modding could be far more interesting, I also feel designing entirely different alternate abilities for each frame runs the risk of being a combinatorial nightmare, in terms of managing synergies and balancing across all of these potential mixes. Thus, while I would like modding to be based more on bespoke customization and less on generic options, and would like to see radical changes to our modding system to accommodate that, I feel it would still be better to apply mods to the same sets of abilities each time (and perhaps then mod abilities so heavily as to turn them into variants), rather than come up with multiple abilities for each slot.

[peterc3]

8 hours ago, Twilii said:

why not just combine that idea with the old system of abilities were mods, take a dash of that new focus tree thing and give it a swirl.

This would require 90% of the work that would otherwise go into a new frame. There isn't and likely never will be a cap on how many frames they make, so this is just torching potential abilities for new frames.

[(XBOX)GodMasterTP]

A suggestion: rework your post.

All jokes aside, your post looks kinda controversial: first you said that adding new slots for augments would take a lot of work...then later you suggest a damn new system that includes 3 skills choices for every skill slot we have WTF.  

So, try to communicate better.