Ship Sabotage Missions Favor Meltdown Too Much

[Pizzarugi]

I'm not lying when I say this: I've only had two missions in sabotage where the reactor was destroyed by something other than meltdown. The first time was when I was playing with a friend and I stuffed a coolant cell into the reactor, the second time was me putting the fuel cell into a coolant system on my own in a public setting. Everyone else hardly bothers to try removing the coolant cells, opting instead to blast the coolant systems containing them, reinserting the fuel cell into the reactor, and causing a meltdown. There's no risk or danger to it anymore. You've got several lengthy minutes to open the blast door and leave before anything bad can happen.

I think we need to add more incentives to encourage players to try other sabotage methods.

My first idea is to reverse the nerfs to the risks caused by ship meltdown. There was a time early on in the sabotage rework where sections of the playable area heated up quickly as soon as the meltdown started, spreading to adjacent rooms until the map was saturated with fire which started a countdown to escape or incur a mission failure. Let's bring that back, even buff it to make it occur faster. It could also require you hack two consoles to get the blast door up. This is the easiest sabotage state that is quick and easy to perform, it should come with more severe consequences that would encourage players to rethink their strategy in missions like Kuva Siphons/Floods.

My next idea is to speed up the freezing sabotage, or bring back the blast door step for magnetic sabotage. I'm not blind to the reason why the meltdown strategy is often picked. It's the fastest of the three to complete. However, when you compare freezing sabotage to magnetic, magnetic wins out for speed. It take a lot less time to create magnetic anomalies before mission is complete and you can extract. Magnetic sabotage doesn't even have a fail state. If an enemy hacks the console, it just pauses the progress which you can resume by hacking again. Meanwhile if the enemy destroy the fuel system during the the freezing sabotage, which takes longer to complete than magnetic, you fail.

Edited November 17, 2019 by Pizzarugi

[Genitive]

I like your ideas. I think another good way would be to put different rewards for different methods.

[LSG501]

People take the 'fastest' or 'easiest' option... IF DE wants us to take other options they need to make it so they take less time, it really is that simple. 

The meltdown one is quite simply the fastest and easiest one to deal with, fire damage doesn't really do much to warframes and is pretty easy to avoid, it doesn't slow us down like cold and it doesn't wipe out our energy or pull us in like magnetic. 

Edited November 17, 2019 by LSG501

[Lokidus_Prime]

I agree with this!  I also would like to see the burning/freezing rooms come back in addition to having a stricter time limit on completing the mission once the reactor has been sabotaged.  Right now, it feels like you can just take a leisurely stroll and figuratively stop to smell every flower whilst the ship's reactor is supposed to be in meltdown.  There needs to be a much greater sense of urgency to get out of a ship that's had its reactor sabotaged - especially if its basically going to blow up.

[(XBOX)ShadowBlood89]

players will pick the easyier option when given the choice as

meltdown destruction of the reactor offers the least amount of resistance. but the pay off for this quick option makes it so you cant search for the caches with ease.

freezing destruction of the reactor takes of time where you have to guard 4 coolant pipes with the area having patchs of ice that slow you down but cant still look for caches with some ease.

magnetzing destruction is 2nd easyiest as you deffend the terminal you just hatched an causes low gravity effect an magnetic bubbles to appear around making it annoying to try an find caches as these bubbles can pull you in to them an hit you with magnetic procs.

The idea was to offer players a variety of ways to do the mission an be opted to pick what kind of strain they have after they destroyed the reactor as you have a 2% chance at nitain an 0.5% for a xiphos ship part.
The way this is fine for the mission part while it is noted that players do want the reward from caches to be better