Grendel missions highlight the problems with the game.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

Running all 3 missions, different squads from recruit for each.  People, including me are going down left and right, half the time just getting 1-2 shot due to how ridiculous Corpus damage is, even at level 50.  The enemies were an enormous pain to kill, the lack of mods basically turning them into bullet sponges that can kill you in seconds.  It didn't feel like some epic, desperate battle.  It felt like an absolute chore, because it's the same enemies, on the same tilesets except now the team is getting eaten alive like we're a bunch of noobs because you did one of the only two things you know how to do when creating a challenge.  You turned off game mechanics.  Removing game mechanics and enemy number buffs, that's the only challenge ever presented in this game.  It's never better AI (hah.) or some use of warframe agility, or any other mechanics; just nullifiers and armor/damage scaling.

The main problem that it highlighted is that base energy economy is complete trash.  It feels genuinely awful to play and barely be able to use any abilities, getting shot up while you're praying for an energy orb.  Not having zenurik, pads, energize, or hunter adrenaline means you're basically playing a generic third person where you can very occasionally cast abilities.  People are going to argue "team comp" and "bring trin/harrow" and honestly that just means they redid eidolons with it's cookie cutter squad comp meta.  This wasn't an interesting concept like Dog Days was (before we had to run it in the ground by farming it 600 times.) because there the enemy was on a level playing field.  

This honestly felt like a feedback test run to see how the playerbase would respond to going back to a slower, methodical tactical shooter where the enemies are harder to kill and have more weight in an encounter than the current ones do.  If you didn't still have horde mode spawn mechanics, and all the horrible challenge bandaid enemies like nullifiers, it would probably be fine.  But trying to fight a horde of enemies without horde mode killing power is just frustrating, not fun.

[NekroArts]

45 minutes ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

The main problem that it highlighted is that base energy economy is complete trash.

Honestly, it's more of that "starve" restriction was not meant to be played at that level. At lower levels not only are enemy's health and damage low, but they also don't have any of the highly-dangerous enemies (Bursas, Nullifiers, Sniper). The base energy economy is fine at the lower levels because there's not a lot a threat, it's only in the higher levels; it doesn't feel like a problem, but more of the two were not compatible with each other.

A perfect example of level design and game-play mechanics not suppose to be together is when we had that Lephantis Melee-Only Sortie. Yeah, you can make a list of what is possible to use (Warframe and weapons), but once you take a step back and compare that to other list of weapon-restriction modifiers it is very small of what you can use.

[Moomabo]

To be honest I really miss the old slower warframe.

[(PSN)Quantaminum]

I kinda enjoyed the missions.

For the first time, I wasn't an unkillable one-man army with unlimited energy.

Whether you like it or not, bringing trin/harrow does help with energy. Augments and Arcanes that recover energy can help as well.

I don't know how you and your team played, but the teams I were in didn't get downed as constantly as you mentioned. Most of the time, I was actually using melee to kill enemies.

 

My only complaint about Grendel's missions is the duration. After a while, I just got so bored that the challenge was trying to stay awake.

[GPrime96]

2 hours ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

The main problem that it highlighted is that base energy economy is complete trash.  It feels genuinely awful to play and barely be able to use any abilities, getting shot up while you're praying for an energy orb.  Not having zenurik, pads, energize, or hunter adrenaline means you're basically playing a generic third person where you can very occasionally cast abilities.  

The only problem Solo got and makes you want to bring Broken Scepter or Frames that can get Energy back like Garuda or Octavia. Pretty dumb design for difficulty. 

[(PSN)Maunstre]

Been playing these missions solo and the experience is absolutely miserable. Doable, but miserable. Doesn't help that aiming on console provides just that much more difficulty by virtue of thumb-sticks not being mice. "Play with a squad" is supposed to be the goal, but as some others have pointed out on other threads or on Reddit, once people are done with these missions, they don't want to do them again, not even to help someone else just Get-It-Over-With. Energy economy is terrible as you mentioned, and it's just a slog. It's not "hard", it's like vanilla Arbies - it's a test of patience, not an actual challenge. It's not engaging, it's boring. Would you like to spend 40 minutes moving from excavation point to excavation point, not bothering to kill enemies because they are huddled up so closely on a claustrophobic tile under Nullifier bubbles you will be unable to take out any of them? No? Well too bad. What makes it all the more frustrating is that the ultimate reward does not match the "hardship" - I sincerely doubt Grendel is worth this level of grind. If DE is trying to teach us something about... starvation or being "hungry" for something we've lost or whatever, this is probably the worst way they could have done it.

DE could have done something unique with these missions to go in line with the Leverian codex or otherwise with Grendel's theme of hunger and punishing the gluttonous, which you could argue the mod-restriction does, but for all three missions? It stinks of "well whatever" design. Something involving life-steal would have been interesting or appropriate. If mods need to be taken away, you have to make a choice, you can only keep one type of mod, or the type of mods you're permitted to use are predetermined with set mod drain (like Monster Hunter's Arena or something) but you're "Starved" for mod space - choose wisely! Something actually strategic would have been more engaging and made the grind of these missions more bearable. Grendel got reinforcements by way of Gauss in his myth, we should be able to call in help too with gear or specters, but only so many times or something. Build a mission around an interesting premise of limitation, don't just slap a bog-standard mission together with a miserable restriction that feels awful to play - it's the least interesting thing you could have done!

Suggestions for something at least somewhat more interesting:

Survival: survive for twenty minutes, air is your "starving" resource, manage it. Enemies give guaranteed air, but enemy count / spawn rate is limited and slows as the mission goes on - don't kill them all at once or else you'll fail. You get no life-support towers. Secondary only, no operators.

Defense: a defense target with no survival instinct loses health constantly, the only way to protect it is to kill waves of foes to "feed" it (life-steal) while it throws itself into battle to its own detriment. Melee only, no operators. 15 waves.

Excavation: ??? I have no clue honestly, this one is just unfun to play under the limitations we're given. Give the player a choice between survival mods, ability mods, weapon mods, or companion mods (or just "boosted" stat sets). Mod / stat sets are predetermined and the sets not chosen are relegated to some shared base-line, like with Dog Days where you had 100 shield and 100 health regardless of what you brought to mess face with. ie: you pick abilities over survivability and weapons - your health / shields are reduced to 200/200 and you're given some kind of default peashooter like Lato + MK1 Kunai, but your abilities are buffed across the board to something like 200% with baseline efficiency. No operators.

IDK, maybe these are terrible suggestions, but the missions as they are are just un-engaging and unfun experiences and I have no desire to repeat them at any point once I'm finally through with defense.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

On 2019-11-21 at 7:17 PM, (PS4)Maunstre said:

Survival: survive for twenty minutes, air is your "starving" resource, manage it. Enemies give guaranteed air, but enemy count / spawn rate is limited and slows as the mission goes on - don't kill them all at once or else you'll fail. You get no life-support towers. Secondary only, no operators.

Defense: a defense target with no survival instinct loses health constantly, the only way to protect it is to kill waves of foes to "feed" it (life-steal) while it throws itself into battle to its own detriment. Melee only, no operators. 15 waves.

Excavation: ??? I have no clue honestly, this one is just unfun to play under the limitations we're given. Give the player a choice between survival mods, ability mods, weapon mods, or companion mods (or just "boosted" stat sets). Mod / stat sets are predetermined and the sets not chosen are relegated to some shared base-line, like with Dog Days where you had 100 shield and 100 health regardless of what you brought to mess face with. ie: you pick abilities over survivability and weapons - your health / shields are reduced to 200/200 and you're given some kind of default peashooter like Lato + MK1 Kunai, but your abilities are buffed across the board to something like 200% with baseline efficiency. No operators.

IDK, maybe these are terrible suggestions, but the missions as they are are just un-engaging and unfun experiences and I have no desire to repeat them at any point once I'm finally through with defense.

Sounds more interesting than what we got, which was star chart missions where you couldn't actually play with any of the things that make the game fun.  Warframe without abilities is just a generic third person shooter with a good movement system.  Take away the movement and the abilities and you're left with a game that would have died years ago, if it ever got off the ground to begin with.  

 

On 2019-11-21 at 2:07 AM, (PS4)Quantaminum said:

Whether you like it or not, bringing trin/harrow does help with energy. Augments and Arcanes that recover energy can help as well.

Oh look. 

On 2019-11-20 at 11:07 PM, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

People are going to argue "team comp" and "bring trin/harrow" and honestly that just means they redid eidolons with it's cookie cutter squad comp meta.

And as someone else already pointed out, good luck getting that team comp a few months from now when no one wants to redo this BS.  Oh, and I had my energize equipped.  Either my RNG is SUPER trash, or they don't work on console because it didn't proc a single time in all 3 missions.

 

[GPrime96]

20 minutes ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

 Oh, and I had my energize equipped.  Either my RNG is SUPER trash, or they don't work on console because it didn't proc a single time in all 3 missions.

Sounds intended.

[(XBOX)Salty Ginger]

Completed the missions with a full sqaud with no problem. All depends on the players skill base. 

[Argenex]

2 Trinities, spam EV & Blessing.

1 Wisp.

1 Mirage / Revenant / Hydroid / CC Area-Killing Warframe.

Did all 3 with that. No problems.

I saw this more as a "Oh, we just need energy for our warframes" problem.

Also the ignis wraith melts everything, especially on mirage.

And amprex stun locks all the enemies.

So weapons that add more CC is good as well.

[(PSN)RazorPhoenix970]

On 2019-11-24 at 4:59 PM, Argenex said:

2 Trinities, spam EV & Blessing.

1 Wisp.

1 Mirage / Revenant / Hydroid / CC Area-Killing Warframe.

Did all 3 with that. No problems.

You can replace Trinity with Hildryn, if team mates are competent Wisp should be enough for health sustain

On 2019-11-22 at 2:17 AM, (PS4)Maunstre said:

a defense target with no survival instinct

Just a regular defense operative then

 

On 2019-11-22 at 2:17 AM, (PS4)Maunstre said:

once people are done with these missions, they don't want to do them again

Sadly this is all too true, I'm never touching them again. I enjoyed them but once was enough

 

On 2019-11-24 at 1:27 AM, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

Take away the movement and the abilities and you're left with a game that would have died years ago, if it ever got off the ground to begin with.

In my view taking away things like mods ONCE IN A WHILE is fine, like a reminder of what power we actually have with the systems at our disposal