Overhaul for All Frames

[Noralen]

Just a theoretical Idea I had regarding something that I personally find is an irritating problem with the game.

Combat in this game gets kinda pointless after awhile, and the way that the game develops a meta that discourages playing in a style one wants to out of favor for choosing weapons and mods and warframes that are capable of clearing rooms quickly.

Don't get me wrong, the power tripping is cool and all, but it gets boring really quickly because there's no challenge, and when I actually want a challenge, my only real option is to solo the missions, which for some of them just becomes impossible because of how enemy hp and damage scales.

So I have a couple of ideas regarding a way that this could be rectified.

First and foremost, I think you should remove level based missions and instead scale mission and enemy difficulty to a players mastery rank, and have matchmaking prevent players of 2 or 3 ranks lower or higher from matching together.

Lower mastery ranked players would be able to play missions and face only basic troops and low threat targets, and require certain mastery ranks in order to pass through junctions and move forward to other areas. This would let new players learn how to play the game over time, encouraging them to target more dangerous foes and to work together to take down enemies.

In addition to this, All enemies could be given a base health value for specific units, 100-150 for lancers, corpus Crewmen, chargers, 200-300 for larger, heavier units, 50 or less for smaller, specialized units like the corpus flyers, mutalist moa's, grineer scorpions, etc.

Instead having enemy health scale to match mastery levels would prevent missions where enemies are literally nothing more than damage sponges, while also keeping the difficulties matched to the players.

Now for the most controversial suggestion: remove damage increase in mods.

Instead of having mods increase a weapons damage, I would suggest having all weapons with a baseline damage, and mods instead changing a percentage of that damage to a certain type, like heat or toxic.

this would be a pretty big nerf across the board and I know a lot of people are thinking i'm crazy for suggesting something that would force people to take more time to complete missions, but that's kind of my point.

Speedframe is stupid, it's absolutely stupid and it annoys me that this game has developed into this gameplay loop focused more on "clear the mission as fast as you can" rather than "Enjoy yourself and have fun"

Most of my time spent playing this game is less actually playing it, and more just running through from the beginning to the end, pressing a button here or there to nuke the room and move on. That's not engaging, that's an idle heroes type mobile game loop where you turn it on and leave to go do stuff for a day and then come back to see how far you've gotten. I don't know why anyone would see that as fun. I got super excited for railjack, but it's proving incredibly hard to actually put up with and stomach the grind simply because actually playing the game is boring.

Making combat more engaging is the best solution that I can think of for this, and the best way I can see to do that is to make it so that players spend more time actually engaging the enemies.

DE has already shown they want the game to be more engaging with the Vauban and Ember reworks. Ember used to be the worst offender of the mindlessness that gameplay was, you just hit her fourth ability and go through the mission till you've won. Boring as hell, no challenge, and for some missions you might as well have just had a seat while everything around you died.

They changed it so that playing those two warframes is a MUCH more involved process, where your skills could be showcased by your ability to manage your heat, or in vaubans case, using your abilities in conjunction.

As far as the warframes go though I do have a couple of other suggestions.

 

Spoiler

First off, as far as I know in the lore (confusing as it is) the warframes are supposed to be powered by the operator right? So why do we pick up energy from enemies?

My first suggestion is that all frames have a baseline energy, and generate energy over time. Mods that increase your energy should instead increase energy generation.

second suggestion, Energy Drain abilities could instead function by reducing the maximum energy you have, so if the baseline is 300, and you use an energy drain ability, you can only generate up to 200 or 250.

Energy pickups could give a decent boost to energy generation and therefore reduce the tedium of just waiting for your energy to fill up.

And my final suggestion, Void Defense. A new stat for both players and enemies that indicates the resistance enemies have to warframe (And lich or other such boss) abilities. Basic enemies like the lancers and chargers and crewmen will have 0 void defense, where as eximus enemies and others like that could have somewhere between 25-50% void defense.

With this, remove the bosses immunity to player abilities and instead give them a resistance that reduces the effectiveness of those abilities, allowing players to do things like say, have Rhino stomp to hold Vor in the air while Excalibur sword dash cuts him in half (Like in that old warframe cinematic)

In addition, another stat called Void Penetration specifically for characters, doesn't reduce the effectiveness of void defense, but rather increases damage done by weapons to enemies effected by abilities. Add to this a slight change to Armor so that it DOES NOT REDUCE MELEE DAMAGE, and that gives players two ways of dealing with particularly dangerous enemies, most of which usually have high armor and health.

I would also suggest that enemies effected by CC should have increased weakness to melee weapons, in particular because of the Lifted Status that Melee 3.0 has just brought in.


My whole reasoning behind this combat overhaul springs from a question regarding the Melee 3.0 changes. The changes are nice and the intuitive nature of the combat is cool, but whats the point? How often do players actually go into melee where such a complex and interesting combat system would even matter? As I said, most missions are just run through and nuke all the enemies with super over powered weapons.

what incentive is there to have a melee system, or a hybrid melee system, if most of the time the enemies are dead before using such skillfull sword skills would matter?

Who cares if you can block 100% of damage coming from a direction, if you can just insta kill everything and not even worry about that damage?

As always, I welcome constructive responses, suggestions, and ideas.

[--Blame--]

your idea of mastery is bad, considering that more than one participant may be on the mission

The issue of damage had been commented on taking mods like 'serration' from the game, and I am even in favor of this change. The problem is that some DE genius (I don't want to mention the name) has unceremoniously launched a "primed" mod for damage, and I believe that idea has been downhill since that event.

about the speedframe, well, then you expressed yourself badly. Speed is cool and gauss is living proof of that, but some warframes really need to be reworked. Actually the warframe as a whole needs a rework. Because of that, I don't think the game will have cohesion and unity until they release a "warframe 2". (lots of gaps between quests that make the newbie be lost on game, lack of voice actin, immersion, unique character animation, lots of unused conclave and lunaro mechanics, some bad and poor UI resources on some places, etc.)

The problem with your whole point of view is that this is your view of how you want the game, and each player has a unique and unique view as well.

In my case for example, I think BAD have taken inert from Archwing, because I like the immersion (and I believe the entire Warframe gamer base has never played a game like Elite Dangerous, and because it has no ability with space games, complains too much. )

And I also think Warframe should be something more Cyberpunk, something more hi-tech, space and voice acting, and less "void energy, kuva" and all those aspects that make the game look like a witchcraft game of the future.

But it is my opinion, and my opinion is something egocentric. So there is no point in making suggestions that go against what the player is attached to. It is necessary to give suggestions that improve the gameplay without misreading the game's differential of its competitors (which unfortunately is void, kuva, etc)

Edited November 27, 2019 by --Blame--

[Hypernaut1]

11 minutes ago, --Blame-- said:

your idea of mastery is bad, considering that more than one participant may be on the mission

The issue of damage had been commented on taking mods like 'serration' from the game, and I am even in favor of this change. The problem is that some DE genius (I don't want to mention the name) has unceremoniously launched a "primed" mod for damage, and I believe that idea has been downhill since that event.

about the speedframe, well, then you expressed yourself badly. Speed is cool and gauss is living proof of that, but some warframes really need to be reworked. Actually the warframe as a whole needs a rework. Because of that, I don't think the game will have cohesion and unity until they release a "warframe 2". (lots of gaps between quests that make the newbie be lost on game, lack of voice actin, immersion, unique character animation, lots of unused conclave and lunaro mechanics, some bad and poor UI resources on some places, etc.)

The problem with your whole point of view is that this is your view of how you want the game, and each player has a unique and unique view as well.

In my case for example, I think BAD have taken inert from Archwing, because I like the immersion (and I believe the entire Warframe gamer base has never played a game like Elite Dangerous, and because it has no ability with space games, complains too much. )

And I also think Warframe should be something more Cyberpunk, something more hi-tech, space and voice acting, and less "void energy, kuva" and all those aspects that make the game look like a witchcraft game of the future.

But it is my opinion, and my opinion is something egocentric. So there is no point in making suggestions that go against what the player is attached to. It is necessary to give suggestions that improve the gameplay without misreading the game's differential of its competitors (which unfortunately is void, kuva, etc)

i do kind of miss the more sci-fi feel over the magic fantasy class feel the game has now. We went from a frame that made enemies spontaneously combust into flames at random, into a mage that spawns magic meteors from the sky, even indoors. 

[--Blame--]

Just now, Hypernaut1 said:

i do kind of miss the more sci-fi feel over the magic fantasy class feel the game has now. We went from a frame that made enemies spontaneously combust into flames at random, into a mage that spawns magic meteors from the sky, even indoors. 

YESSSSS!!!

but also i have to admit that i kinda like the new gameplay of ember

Edited November 27, 2019 by --Blame--

[--Blame--]

I'll give anyone who is reading an idea and wants to change some aspect of the game radically

create a proposal mockup video and make it go viral so that DE can't ignore it. Just as DE couldn't ignore Excalibur Umbra :))

[(PSN)Ozymandias-13-]

5 hours ago, Noralen said:

that are capable of clearing rooms quickly

A big issue that Warframe has is that they keep making room clearing weapons and abilities the same strength as single target ones. Of course that would make anything not AoE obsolete.

They need to rework their formula on those kinds of weapons and abilities. I don't know if it is better to have them scale down damage for each additional target affected, or with damage falloff from the center (target) point or what. But to be able to do the same or better damage in an area instead single target is a clear upgrade. 

Of course there could be specific exemptions to this mechanic on certain abilities as appropriate. Maim has to build up damage through manual kill effort already, so it wouldn't necessarily make sense to add the damage falloff on top of it (as an example).

As fun as this game is, scaling is it's biggest flaw...which then leads to overcompensating with disproportionately powerful buffs...then very unbalanced mechanics and content being introduced to counteract that instead of fixing the scaling from the start. It's a painful cycle to play through over these years.

[Hypernaut1]

8 hours ago, --Blame-- said:

YESSSSS!!!

but also i have to admit that i kinda like the new gameplay of ember

They could maintain the gameplay, but keep her as a sci-fi like fire starter. I'm just not digging the magic meteors from the sky. , It could've still been spontaneous combustion. IMO it would've been cooler

Edited November 27, 2019 by Hypernaut1

[(PSN)CommanderC2121]

11 hours ago, --Blame-- said:

In my case for example, I think BAD have taken inert from Archwing, because I like the immersion (and I believe the entire Warframe gamer base has never played a game like Elite Dangerous, and because it has no ability with space games, complains too much).

As someone who also plays E:D, my wish for railjack is to have a 6DoF control scheme like the experimental archwing. I doubt it will happen due to the outcry of most players but by god would i love it

[Noralen]

12 hours ago, --Blame-- said:

your idea of mastery is bad, considering that more than one participant may be on the mission
 

The idea is to have matchmaking set up so that your only ever paired with people in the same mastery ranking as you.

Also this isn't just my idea for warframe, this is something me and my clan have been discussing for months now to try and find a feasible way of making the game more engaging while keeping the learning curve for new players low enough, and letting old players have more fun than just run and press win button.

And Also when I mean speedframe I don't mean frames that move fast, they have their niche and things they do that's cool, the problem is that missions end too god damn quickly for most players to actually enjoy playing the game. It feels like playing Diablo where you just press repeatedly to make everything on the screen die.

Look at the melee combat changes they've made, whats the point of making such a complex system when there's no incentive to use it? I have yet to be in a mission that didn't force you to use only melee, where having the melee combos was necessary or even relevant. Why would I do any of that when I could just kill everything with catchmoon or miasma?

Edited November 27, 2019 by Noralen

[(PSN)CommanderC2121]

4 minutes ago, Noralen said:

The idea is to have matchmaking set up so that your only ever paired with people in the same mastery ranking as you.
 

If you have a mr27 and a mr2 queue together as friends, are the enemies balanced around the mr2 or the mr27? 

[Noralen]

Just now, (PS4)CommanderC2121 said:

If you have a mr27 and a mr2 queue together as friends, are the enemies balanced around the mr2 or the mr27? 

I would say the MR27, just to discourage the MR2 from partying queing up with the mr27

But I'm also the sort of person who would rather new players play the game and learn how to play and match up to the higher ranking, rather than let the higher ranked players do all the work for them.

In my opinion, when you let someone else do it for you, you pretty much ensure you'll never learn how to properly play the game.

[Colyeses]

13 hours ago, Noralen said:

-snip for brevity-

The gameplay you are looking for is called Destiny 2.

On a more serious note, though, overhauling the entire core of the gameplay identity for this game has way too many hooks to snag on. The suggested format of mastery rank based progression has a few issues. For one, if your weapons increase in damage but your enemies scale up alongside it, that's a problem that I like to call 'reflective scaling'. You deal 50 damage per attack against a 100 HP enemy, you level up, you now deal 100 damage per attack against a 200 HP enemy. Literally nothing changes. 

Then there's the consideration of damage mods being removed from the game and the consequence this has for weapon play in general. Sure, everything deals less damage. But it's also one factor of a weapon's overall output that's eliminated or diminished. If you're not slashing crits alongside it, won't that create an oppressive crit-heavy meta? What about multi-target weapons like the Lenz or Tonkor?

And what do you do with Primes? Weapons that function similarly like the Penta and Tonkor, or the Dread and Paris? What happens to Primes, Vandals, Wraiths? Kuva weapons? Something is going to be better than something else, and without damage mods and a much narrower spectrum of balance, what do you balance for? Do you balance for the prime variants and thus make thing to hard on the non-primes, or do you balance for the non-primes and end up making things a cakewalk for the primes? Do you do away with primes altogether due to this balance conundrum and if so, what do you do about the ones already in the game? 

14 hours ago, Noralen said:

Speedframe is stupid, it's absolutely stupid and it annoys me that this game has developed into this gameplay loop focused more on "clear the mission as fast as you can" rather than "Enjoy yourself and have fun"

See, I think this is the core of a player problem. I am playing this game and having fun because I use frames I like with builds I appreciate and weapons I enjoy. I don't follow some kind of super build and though I will occasionally speedrun missions, I am mostly focusing on finding enjoyment in the game in what it offers. Breaking things can be a lot of fun too. I play mostly custom runs on Slay the Spire for example because I find it, on average, more fun to be completely broken OP by lucking into the right combo of relics and cards and that's much easier on Custom runs. HEX was a card game I loved for its tendency to encourage utterly broken decks in the PvE mode. 

I'm not saying what you're suggesting is bad. A more Destiny-like balance dynamic could help Warframe. But it would also make Warframe step into Destiny's shadow and go into direct competition. Currently, the two are completely different takes on a similar genre. Destiny got its identity and Warframe got its own. But that is the important part. Warframe got its own identity.

A rework to this degree would mean a total overhaul of the game's entire identity, and that can shock and scare off a lot of players, not to mention that the entire dev team would have to completely rework their mindset to fix in this new design, and then there's still -zero- guarantee that this will fix any issues. For example, even if the balance was reworked to cater for it, a Guardian could not complete a Warframe defense mission because there's no cover and the downtime on rifts and Titan barriers is too long. It has to be kept in mind that Destiny built their game from the ground up with the different dynamic in mind, so their level design is also incorporated into their difficulty design. 

Overall, it's just too much hassle for a problem that, isn't even clearly definable and may end up just being a player issue of compulsively choosing the fastest, least engaging method of content consumption.

[--Blame--]

8 hours ago, Noralen said:

The idea is to have matchmaking set up so that your only ever paired with people in the same mastery ranking as you.
 

This create other problem, ping limit for join, also some regions dont have that much Warframe players. Dont forget, not everybody plays Warframe from NA servers.

I understand your intention is to protect and make Warframe a better game than it already is, because after all, we like the game, but you'll notice that it's hard to get a genuine idea that everyone agrees on topics that are complicated.

Just yesterday I complained about the resource interface you have in the Forge, and I received several negatives in Reddit, because there is simply the resource interface in Inventory.

Edited November 28, 2019 by --Blame--

[Noralen]

On 2019-11-27 at 1:45 PM, Colyeses said:

Overall, it's just too much hassle for a problem that, isn't even clearly definable and may end up just being a player issue of compulsively choosing the fastest, least engaging method of content consumption.

There are a great many problems with the core dynamics of Warframe, problems that have been identified and acknolwedged by the devs, and they've been working to fix them in a number of ways (Again I direct you to the melee updates and most recently warframe reworks).

The devs have been pushing to make warframe more engaging and interactive and less like a simple "press button to win" game. It's not a player issue, and while the playerbase can be blamed for a lot of things, this isn't one of them.

As an aside, it's quite obvious that you rarely play in pug games from the content of your post, because in pick up games, you don't get to enjoy yourself the way your suggesting, because other players WILL pick the fastest and least engaging method, simply because they want to get through the grind faster.

The grind isn't a problem for me, i don't mind how long it takes for me to get certain resources, my problem is that while trying to get those resources I'm basically just sitting around waiting, unable to do anything, because the enemies are all dead every few seconds by other players literally just pressing one button and getting everything killed.

I'm not suggesting that Warframe become Destiny 3, I'm hoping that warframe grows to have more complex and engaging combat, where players abilities interact with each other, rather than just overlapping and blasting everything in an area.

[ScytodiDaedalus]

The problem with the changes you propose in regards of DMG, enemy health scaling, modded damage, MR Matchmaking and the lot, while it'd be interesting(?) to revamp the game, I believe DE doesn't have the time to OVEERHAUL the entire game, knowing how they update the game, it'd mostly kick the game low in the vulnerables and it'd take months of rebalancing, not like the game is currently very well balanced, but it's the best it could be, except in the case enemies are getting higher HP pools and innate DR.

On 2019-11-27 at 12:32 AM, Noralen said:

That's not engaging, that's an idle heroes type mobile game loop where you turn it on and leave to go do stuff for a day and then come back to see how far you've gotten.

Comparing this to an Idle game? pretty low. On this game you can actually play and OFFLINE progress is 99.9% non-existent.

On 2019-11-27 at 12:32 AM, Noralen said:

DE has already shown they want the game to be more engaging with the Vauban and Ember reworks. Ember used to be the worst offender of the mindlessness that gameplay was, you just hit her fourth ability and go through the mission till you've won. Boring as hell, no challenge, and for some missions you might as well have just had a seat while everything around you died.

They changed it so that playing those two warframes is a MUCH more involved process, where your skills could be showcased by your ability to manage your heat, or in vaubans case, using your abilities in conjunction.

It seems to me you haven't played Ember since or before the rework. Let me tell you something, it's gone from pressing 4 once and pressing 2 a bunch of times to pressing 4 often.

On 2019-11-27 at 12:32 AM, Noralen said:

My first suggestion is that all frames have a baseline energy, and generate energy over time. Mods that increase your energy should instead increase energy generation.

Now this is something I'd like to see in the game, don't know what you mean baseline energy, but it'd be cool if Warframes regen'd energy on their own, albeit slightly. Mods that increase energy regen or max energy capacity should exist, no idea why you remove max energy mods in your suggestion.

It'd be nice if you had titled your post "Game Overhaul" or "Overhaul for Warframe" since you try to change the game itself, not just Warframes.

And one last thing, there's a point on which playing too much of a game will eventually get the players bored, either temporarily or permanently, that's the nature of it, it's not like you're supposed to play the thing 24/7 and forever remain entertained. Hopefully, Railjack will bring a whole lot of fun and a better way ALL missions could work in general, more things to do, farm, grind and enjoy.

[Noralen]

Here's another idea then.

What if instead of scaling all enemies up with level, you have a set limit at which certain enemy types can scale. Like for example the base line units. Grineer Lancers, Butchers, those shield guys. What if the highest they could get was like level 20.

They still spawn on all missions, but now they're hardly ever a threat even on the highest missions, and as a result they're little more than cannon fodder or a distract so the bigger units can have at you.

I still want to have the immunity to warframe abilities replaced with a resistance, because I can't imagine it feels nice to anyone to have targets that just cannot be affected by abilities. Providing a resistance to warframe abilities that scales with level (keeping in mind the limit to which some enemies cannot scale past) would also reduce the ability to just nuke entire rooms.

You could still nuke rooms, clearing out all the weaklings, leaving only the tougher enemies that actually take some engagement to fight properly.

Also

3 hours ago, ScytodiDaedalus said:

Now this is something I'd like to see in the game, don't know what you mean baseline energy, but it'd be cool if Warframes regen'd energy on their own, albeit slightly. Mods that increase energy regen or max energy capacity should exist, no idea why you remove max energy mods in your suggestion.

By baseline energy I meant like all frames have 100 energy at rank 1, and 300 energy at rank 3. And the main reason for removing max energy mods is because i'd like for energy regen to be percentage based rather than number based, so that you regen like, 20% energy per second, increasing with mods to nearly 50% or something. I don't know for sure, that's something i'm open to discussing.

As it stands, Max energy mods, plus existing energy regen aura mods, kind of implement something like this already. But I feel like it should be integrated into the warframes themselves, rather than something you have to mod for.