Limitations on Umbra Forma need to be lifted

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

It’s a special reward, not the new meta push.

[grindbert]

it is the meta push when it involves power creep. because the meta is the strongest possible. this ain't solo player dungeons and dragons.

some seem to have missed it although i mentioned it a million times now: this "special reward" thing is being circumvented by making multiple accounts already in order to compete for time. having players do that through arbitrary scarcity is moronic and should be just unified by an appropriate distribution.

are only roleplayers and fashionframers on these forums? where the competitive speedrunners and minmaxers at?

[Ogundiety]

40 minutes ago, grindbert said:

it is the meta push when it involves power creep. because the meta is the strongest possible. this ain't solo player dungeons and dragons.

some seem to have missed it although i mentioned it a million times now: this "special reward" thing is being circumvented by making multiple accounts already in order to compete for time. having players do that through arbitrary scarcity is moronic and should be just unified by an appropriate distribution.

are only roleplayers and fashionframers on these forums? where the competitive speedrunners and minmaxers at?

Umbra forma is not tradable.  As far as I am aware, you can never have more than 3 umbra on a single account (as of now).  

 

Personally I think that it should be purchasable on the market by new players, up to the amount not available in game (so anyone who has never gotten any could, right now, get 2, then would have to do the nightwave for the third), with when the old source gets rotated out there being a signifcant delay (month?  2 months? longer?) before someone could buy it.  Set the price arbitrarily high and strongly disincentivize it, but a method of acquisition is a good thing.

As for why, it's because these mods are powerful, and one of the few meaningful limited systems of power right now.  They are a very good carrot.  They are not in any way required for any content, they are not easy to acquire, and you have to think deeply about what to use them on.  Making them in any way grindable* would simply be equal to making them available on the market, and every good build would 'have' to have them.  That's not what DE wants, especially as the new war is going to have a strong sentient focus of some sort, so this power increase is regulated.    If they were to be unlimited, the big cost to using them (the huge drain) would be removed/negated, and it would be an across the board power increase, for content that doesn't require it- which is very bad for long term health of any game.  Why don't you just have a cheat code to enable <x> or kill <y> with a simple console command- because at that point you're not playing the game, and that is a sliding scale that any serious game designer has to be careful about touching.

 

For what it's worth, most truly min/maxed games where you can equip this and that and never die/kill everything effortlessly are the ones that fall off the map.  Dark Souls wouldn't be a hit if you could make one build that could litterally do everything with no danger (and no 'if you play well then'), because that sort of game is deathly boring.  Most speedruns in fact use arbitrary limits on power, either for laughs, jokes, or simply for difficulty spiking, on top of the actual timing.

 

Also you use the term 'power creep', and do you not understand that is a problem that most (all?) games try frantically to avoid having?  It is a terrible black mark on any game design, so it's a constant struggle to avoid new stuff obliterating the old stuff. It isn't something you want to have, and avoiding it is sort of the whole point, while trying to also have new and different things to do.

 

*Should mention for completion's sake that they could put in a timegated mechanism for umbra forma that is different from nightwave, in theory, but it would amount to pretty much the same thing, and you'd complain about that as well.

[grindbert]

by that logic if somebody rolls a god tier riven they should only be allowed to have 2 of those. it makes no sense.

i wasn't talking about riven trading but they have their competitive warframes with the umbra formas on those accounts. and they switch accounts when they want to play something else.

i'll say it again: what would people say if in any mmorpg people were only allowed to make one or two characters max lvl per year?

what if in wow you were only allowed to level one char from 110 to 120, what if in gw2 you would have to wait months in order to be able to get from 70 to 80?

this game is not dark souls. nothing EVER was difficult. it's not about IF you can do something but HOW FAST or HOW LONG. raids were easy, eidolons are easy, arbitrations are easy, everything is easy in this game. why do you think people make their own leaderboards for speed- and endurance runs? why do you think people compete with each other instead of with the game? there is no challenge in the content itself, there never has been, whoever finds warframe difficult must be severely physically impaired.

the challenge is the challenge that you make yourself and that others make for you. and that kind of competition requires a baseline. it's bad enough that rivens make that baseline wonky, it's even worse that the kuva weapons make it even more wonky, it shouldn't be that the lack of an upgrade that make up for 4-5% of a warframes strength makes it even more wonky. weapons are #*!%ed with rivens and kuva weapons. warframes are #*!%ed because of the introduction of umbra mods. with enough umbra forma it would at least fix this problem by acknowledging this new baseline instead of tiptoeing around the issue.

"no, it's not really powercreep because it is limited and you cannot ... blablabla" it is powercreep. this is the new baseline now. this trying to talk around it needs to stop. we have  a new numerical maximum, instead of trying to limit it, by introducing frustrating and timegated mechanics into the game they should just accept it, move on and balance accordingly.

 

since rivens were released which #*!%ed up weapons completely at least all my warframes (which is all warframes) could be of a specific baseline standard. this is being #*!%ed now as well. guess the next thing is warframe rivens that we can only get once a year. because powercreep is fine as long as you have to choose which part of the game you'd like to be good at and which part you'd like to be S#&amp;&#036;.

 

once again another role player seems to not understand that NOTHING is required in this game. i can take down a hydrolist with mote amp, lvl 0 loadout without a single mod. it has been done, it's nothing new. there has never ever ever ever ever been ANY shred of content that required ANYTHING. this is not an argument, has never been, will never be.

the game survived rivens, a literal powercreep slot machine. it will survive slightly stronger baseline mods.

and seriously? cheat codes? what about rivens? what about primed mods? did you say the same when they were released? literal upgrades of existing mods? i can do content without mods, i guess i should call every mod a "cheat" now, you are delusional mate.

if they wanted to prevent power creep maybe they just should not have made the umbra mods stronger, how about that? same stats as intensity, vitality and fiber, no scaling, how about that? only the weird sentient part scales, that's it. they however CHOSE to make them stronger. the power creep is obviously intended.

 

right now people have to choose which of their warframes gets to be on the new standard and which is simply "trash" compared to umbra frames. they either get to do the 6x3 eidolon run as chroma OR they get to do something else as somebody else at peak effectiveness but not both. new players are completely shafted because they will never be able to reach the power level of people who already grabbed the forma and everybody except some role players which prefer color palettes over maxed mods (who mainly plague these forums) is mad because they can't _complete_ their warframes.

 

Edited November 16, 2019 by grindbert

[QuinnCarter]

On 2019-11-16 at 12:31 AM, grindbert said:

you must not have heard of primed mods and rivens yet.

Um, yes I have, the trick is to plan ahead and forma all the other mod slots so you have enough room to put the Umbra mod in.

Case in point

[Xzorn]

I haven't even used an Umbra Forma yet because in order to max them I'd need around 6-7 for various frames just to fit them.

This isn't counting non-Primes which is just a very bad idea to use them on since they're even more time gated than originally thought.

At any rate it seems worse than you think OP. If you're going to use Sacrificial Steel then you might as well use Sac Pressure as well since it's more DPS.

The buff to Sac Steel and nerf to CO made the set bonus exceed Primed Pressure Point. This is esp true if you have a Riven with +%Damage. Even if you're using a Blood Rush build the set bonus beats out Primed Pressure Point with no status active on CO. Obviously PPP would just get worse with status active. Oh and yes due to a now lack of melee multipliers using both Sac Steel and Blood Rush is better DPS than majority of options with Primed Fury being the main exception.

PPP + Primed Fury + Blood Rush + Berserk is generally the best DPS right now for most if not all weapons not looking to use Heavy Strikes.

EDIT: Oh and Umbra Forma are nothing more than a time gated carrot-on-a-stick method to get players to do crap they otherwise wouldn't.

Edited November 18, 2019 by Xzorn

[No1NParticular31]

On 2019-11-15 at 4:15 AM, Jutzo said:

It's meant to only be used on your best gear so it can even get better rewarding the player.

That's all well and good, except when DE keeps making "your best gear" a moving target with all the changes, nerfs, buffs, etc. Can you imagine if someone used an Umbral on a weapon 1 month ago that is now nerfed into the ground and now they get to wait for another Umbral Forma and pray the next time they use it it doesn't just get wasted again? I am NOT saying they need to make them common, but maybe a tad more common. OR As an alternative, when they make big changes like they did with this patch allow player a 1 time opportunity to extract and reuse their already used Umbral Forma. This is exactly why I have never bothered to even use mine, because the game just isn't stable enough to know what will even be worth using it on next month, much less further down the road.

Right now Sac Steel and Sac Pressure are great for Charged Attack weapon builds. What are you going to do if you used your Umbral Forma today to make this awesome new weapon and DE nerfs it next patch?

Edited November 18, 2019 by No1NParticular31

[Xzorn]

26 minutes ago, No1NParticular31 said:

That's all well and good, except when DE keeps making "your best gear" a moving target with all the changes, nerfs, buffs, etc. Can you imagine if someone used an Umbral on a weapon 1 month ago that is now nerfed into the ground and now they get to wait for another Umbral Forma and pray the next time they use it it doesn't just get wasted again?

 

They should have just not been stupid and made Umbra forma account bound with some process required to remove them.

Similar to how Arcanes and Arcane Distillers worked. IQ200 right there. 8th dimension advanced concept.

[Chaemyerelis]

You can fit the umbral mods easily in melee builds even with primed mods. As long as you forma like 6 slots.

I sure wont say no making umbral mods purchasable tho. 

[grindbert]

On 2019-11-18 at 5:51 AM, QuinnCarter said:

Um, yes I have, the trick is to plan ahead and forma all the other mod slots so you have enough room to put the Umbra mod in.

Case in point

and right there you proved yourself wrong. 

that's one umbra mod. now put a second one on there ....

 

  

On 2019-11-18 at 8:22 AM, No1NParticular31 said:

Can you imagine if someone used an Umbral on a weapon 1 month ago that is now nerfed into the ground and now they get to wait for another Umbral Forma and pray the next time they use it it doesn't just get wasted again?

good point, after the nerf to wukongs stick i definitely wish i hadn't put an umbra forma on him. 

when i think i was planning on putting a second one on him .... the horrors ...

 

  

On 2019-11-18 at 10:30 AM, Chaemyerelis said:

You can fit the umbral mods easily in melee builds even with primed mods. As long as you forma like 6 slots.

I sure wont say no making umbral mods purchasable tho. 

you can't. you can use one. not two. not with the given primed mods and a riven. that point is fact and not up to discussion. look at the build Quinn posted above and tell me how he would replace primed pressure point with sacrifical pressure. he can't, there's 4 capacity missing with 6 polarised slots. if he replaced berserker with a 11 or 12 capacity mod it would even be 6 or 7.

Edited November 22, 2019 by grindbert

[Uhkretor]

... I'm confused about this particular thread...

 

Is the OP's problem the fact that all his/her available Forma aren't Umbral so he could simply slap them on every single equipment he/she collected during his OCHD (C = Completitionist, H = Hoarder) because he/she wants to use both Warframe and Melee sets on everything...?

... or it is simply because the OP wants to equip the Sacrificial Steel, but he/she's using the entire Sacrificial Steel in an attempt to prove QuinnCarter's screenshot wrong?

Edited November 22, 2019 by Uhkretor

[Nichivo]

I happen to agree that they are gated unnecessarily. However, I am not as interested to obtain them anymore. I still enjoy the game, but I find the recent changes have caused the game to feel less like the fast past smooth game I enjoyed. It's now slow, clunky, with less interesting build options, albeit more flashy. Kind of sad, but in it's attempt be something it's not, it's losing itself, and becoming a rather bland copy of something else. The game has devolved into spam one attack again.🥺

[FireSegment]

On 2019-11-15 at 4:17 PM, grindbert said:

so now that Sacrificial Steel has become a non choice over True steel

the exact reason it's still a choice for now is due to the very high capacity the sacrificial mod require. 

and Umbra Forma would just be raining in Duviri plain 2022, no big deal.

[JohnMorte]

umbra forma should be purchasable. time gating it is frankly absurd. DE could definitely cash in on the min-maxers wanting everything (I know im half in that boat personally) and just put in the market for like 120 plat or something.

[QuinnCarter]

7 hours ago, grindbert said:

and right there you proved yourself wrong. 

that's one umbra mod. now put a second one on there ....

 

I don't need to, the added 50% crit chance from Sacrificial Steel isn't worth the damage loss of not having Primed Pressure Point. There's no need for me to put an Umbra Forma in this build. Where did I prove myself wrong?

Edited November 22, 2019 by QuinnCarter

[grindbert]

while that might be true it's not up to you to decide for everybody what's worth and what isn't. modding should be everyones individual choice. no, it doesn't help that sac steel has become a non-choice now. and yet somebody might want the extra 50%, be it because they could theoretically drop blood rush or whatever. it should be their choice. now this choice got shifted from "do i want this mod or not" to "can i afford to spend this forma on this weapon". which is bad. it's demotivating, it's frustrating, it's the exact opposite of fun. 

if you're a masochist and enjoy being punished, good for you. i suggest you find another outlet than an mmo which is supposed to be fun and recreational tho.

PS: i got this cycles umbra forma today. it gave me no joy. i feel frustrated because i cannot decide where to put it on. i could finish up wukong but he's bad now so i guess i will have to live with an incomplete wukong forever, might actually delete him. could start chroma but i he needs 2 so i will be doing this in the awareness that this "great limited reward" will literally do #*!% all to my build until i get the second one in what .... 5 months? ember became a great umbra target after the rework and only needs one, as are volt, saryn, oberon, etc etc etc but those are not exactly meta for eidolon hunting ... the stress this decision creates will get me an ulcer one of those days ...

at this point i'd sell my kids to satan for more umbra forma. they are about as annoying and frustratingly stupid as this umbra system.

i have never experienced another game apart from warframe where receiving a reward feels bad.

 

PSS: since the last time i posted here i actually came up with a decent solution: release primed mods for all umbra mods that have their stats at set completion. i know, i know ... it's power creep again for frames that only use 2 and weapons that only use 1 but it would be only a slight buff and the scales would be balanced again. people could stop losing their youthful hairline over this (for me it's too late but maybe we can save a few others) and the sentinel-hunting roleplayers could enjoy their "rare and limited (time gated)" rewards.

Edited December 3, 2019 by grindbert

[(XBOX)Shodian]

22 minutes ago, grindbert said:

. the stress this decision will get me an ulcer one of those days ...

at this point i'd sell my kids to satan for more umbra forma.

Holy crap dude, it's just a game. You need to take a step back and really look at this. It's not the end of the world. My build are fine and can take out all the kuva liches without the use of an Umbra Forma.

[grindbert]

fine is not good enough. the maximum numerical value is my baseline.

anybody can take out anything without any mod. it's not about that. it's about taking a weapon or warframe to it's maximum potential. i imagine somebody who is fine with "fine" wouldn't understand.

[(PSN)RazorPhoenix970]

You're a min-maxer, min-maxing isn't meant to be easy. If Umbral Mod combos are the key to maximum potential then it follows that they should either be extremely hard to acquire or severely limited. DE chose the latter option. There is no content that exists in the game that requires heavy min-maxing on all gear anyway

29 minutes ago, grindbert said:

anybody can take out anything without any mod.

Tone down that hyperbole, try taking out a level 100 charger with no mods whatsoever

 

30 minutes ago, grindbert said:

it's about taking a weapon or warframe to it's maximum potential.

For what purpose, your mere satisfaction?

[grindbert]

yes. for my mere satisfaction. exactly what a game should be. if i'd want to be more dissatisfied with existing i'd spend more time at my office job.

you younglings tend to forget that games are supposed to be entertainment, not a mirror to the hardships of life.

and minmaxing already has a cost. it costs forma that need to be crafted or bought (let's be honest, nobody crafts forma, we all just buy the 3 pack over and over again), it needs time to level up and it needs hours and hours of testing and comparing results. this is the price one should have to pay for excellence, not an arbitrary 4 month time gate. getting the plat for the perfect riven is faster.

 

and yes, been there, done that. stuff gets boring, sometimes the boys go out for a ride naked. so far i have not encountered any content that cannot be done without mods. including lvl 100+ enemies.

Edited December 3, 2019 by grindbert

[ciTiger]

We should have access to more umbra forma indeed, not too much but the current rate is too slow.

[Ender140]

New war is coming and I feel like we should be getting umbra forma along with the ship

[JHarlequin]

 You already do a million damage with one attack.  Will doing 1.3 million really make a major change for you.  You do not need these umbra forma for your plan.  You want these umbra forma.

 That said, the umbra forma being spread out and limited to just the nightwave is one of the disappointments of nightwave.  It would be nice to really have a way to work for them rather than to just wait for them.  Perhaps for now some extremely ridiculous method to get them.  Perhaps a 250 vitus essence purchase, or start adding d cycle rotations to some of the tougher endless missions that only start happening after four regular rotations.  (abcc abcc abcc abcc abcd...)

[Duality52]

On 2019-11-15 at 6:23 AM, Voltage said:

Blood Rush is better in every single scenario,

The only area where Blood Rush does not exceed in is involving builds around Heavy Attacks. Since the buffs to the Crit Chance mods, Heavy Attacks became quite interesting, with some weapons like the Fragor Prime being well known to not just to make a comeback, but as a main candidate of Heavy Attacks too.

Off topic, but special mention to Killing Blow that is one of the few things that helps making Heavy Attacks also viable, along with Amalgam Organ Shatter.

Edited December 6, 2019 by Duality52

[Birdframe_Prime]

On 2019-11-16 at 9:05 AM, grindbert said:

where the competitive speedrunners and minmaxers at?

As somebody that was one? Not using Umbral mods is where they are.

This game has mechanics that scale above and beyond the basic functions of Effective Health, Ability Strength and so on.

A team of four, depending on the task, actually does better without Umbral builds on the frames. What Loki needs Strength? A speed Nova actively doesn’t want it. Does an Octavia or a Nekros have any real benefit to more than neutral Strength when building for long runs? Nope.

Same with many weapons that don’t benefit at all from the Sacrificial mods.

Speed runners in Warframe particularly don’t use them because ability efficiency and unique animation functions are more important. The only three that really benefit from Strength for speed runs are Rhino, Oberon and Chroma and only in the context of Eidolon hunts to kill large health pools quickly.

These mods have their place, true, but stop thinking that they’re all-important tools for min-maxing or endgame content. Several frames work better if you entirely forego survivability in that sense and have mechanical survivability from either abilities or mods that don’t directly affect health. Depending on the content of course.

Umbral Forma is not, and will never be, the normal kind of Forma. It is designed to be doled out in drips and designed to limit your choice.

When that is the goal, the exact designed intent, then your arguments to make it more available because you don’t enjoy limitations will entirely fall flat.