Stealth Disruption or, Making Stealth (Frames) Matter

[MahouShoujoRainbow6]

I have a great love for stealth games. Thief 1 and 2 started it, and I've fed it with various stealth, semi-stealth and action-rpgs-that-you-can-technically-play-stealth-in games ever since.

Warframe isn't a stealth game. But it does have stealth frames and, arguably, stealth missions, and I think they could be a lot better. This is particularly relevant with Ivara Prime coming out, whose Prowl (with Infiltrate) is the most complete stealth in the game - and also the most monofocused, least general-use stealth in the game. This'd be an appropriate trade-off, if complete stealth were ever particularly useful.

So let's understand why it isn't useful, and make a mission type where it is.

Current Missions

Most missions require three things: the ability to kill enemies quickly, the ability to survive enemies in turn, and the mobility to get from one concentration of enemies to another, or just to race to extraction. Most of the rest of the mission types swap out some of the mobility for being able to prevent damage to some third party.

For the first, you're either using weapons or abilities. Abilities, in most mission types and levels, aren't important for upping single-target or weapon damage, but to increase how many enemies you can kill at once. Weapons, similarly, tend to be more valuable based on how convenient they make slaughtering enemies in job lots, because even at sortie levels, it's not a huge problem.

Stealth abilities, when they influence damage, are more about boosting the damage you can already do, as opposed to expanding how many enemies you can hit. Not super applicable. (And Ivara's Prowl limits your weapon choice with increased drain, so it has issues.)

They do help with survivability... to an extent. Invisibility, in particular, can prevent damage by preventing enemies from aiming at you - take a Loki, keep your 2 up, and so long as you don't get too close to an AoE effect, or one of your brightly coloured, fire-drawing teammates, and you can survive fairly well until something unlucky downs you. (Metronome can do more, but not with the Nocturne buff alone.)

When it comes to mobility or protection, most stealth abilities (again, aside from Metronome's other buffs), are fairly useless. Ivara's Cloak Arrow can protect a human target, but Ivara's Prowl massively impairs your mobility, and most targets aren't human.

(This isn't a thread for Ivara buffs, but with the current mission selection it's understandable why some want them.)

There is one, supposed, stealth mission type, though - surely stealth frames matter there? Well...

Spy Missions

There's two parts to every spy mission - the connective areas, and the vaults.

The connective areas only matter insofar as you have to cross them alive and, preferably, as fast as possible. You can trip every alarm, alert every enemy, and so long as they don't kill you, it's unimportant. They can even follow you into the vault without immediately tripping the countdown. Invisibility as damage avoidance is useful, but mobility is better, because it helps you get there faster too.

In the vaults, tripping the alarm sets off a countdown. If you clear the vault before the end of the count, all's good. If you don't, it fails, and possibly fails the mission with it. Stealth, of course, lets you get deeper into the vault without tripping the alarm. But why bother? Even in most vaults, tripping the alarm doesn't matter. Take a fast Warframe, possibly one who can ignore laser barriers, and even if you have to go Spoiler Mode to avoid dying when you're hacking the doors, you can make it in most vaults without using a cipher, and no penalty, and far faster than a stealthy approach would have done it.

Of course, you are risking failing the vault. When you do fail a spy vault, in the higher levels, that's it - mission failed, your teammates are taking deep breaths to avoid cussing you out in chat, everyone goes 'Leave Squad' and tries again.

One could try and emphasize stealth gameplay by making vaults longer or countdowns shorter. Enough that if you trip the alarm at the beginning, no matter how fast you go, you fail it. But that just makes failed runs more common, and failed spy runs are very annoying. A more complete overhaul is probably needed.

Taking Cues From Disruption (No, Not The Industry Buzzword)

Failing the objective is not failing the mission. Objectives are easier when tackled as a team, but the mission goes faster when multiple objectives are done at once. Rewards can scale with how well a round is done, not just whether it was done. And, unique to this theoretical new mission type, stealth is the measure of how well you complete an objective.

This is the mission structure I came up with using those principles.

1. You have four spy vaults spawn each round. This would probably be by having a number (4-8?) of excess spy vaults on the map, because I can't think of any easy-ish way to generate new-feeling vaults on a static map without building in the space, and while using Simaris style 'load a whole new map in' would let you trim down the space and change up the connective areas, it's also inelegant.

2. Each spy vault should have elements that can be disabled in other rooms to significantly reduce difficulty - these other rooms could be sabotage coolant cell rooms, with some additional guards. I don't know how easily one could implement such elements in the current vaults. Hopefully they could use the same base layout - a lot of the obstacles could be laser barriers, as few frames have the ability to avoid being detected by those, though you wouldn't want an Ivara to completely invalidate the sabotage mechanics, even if they have an edge.

3. The content in the vaults 'takes damage' with every alarm, making your round end reward worse and counting for less towards the minimum mission score needed to clear. This includes areas outside the sabotage and vault rooms, though such areas should be kept short and relatively sparsely populated so one can move from vault to vault with some measure of speed, even using a frame like, say, Ivara in Prowl.

4. An alarm within the vault does more damage, and starts the countdown as normal - if the vault is lost, you've lost 25% of your possible score. Some of the sabotage rooms might increase the timer. Once you clear a vault, you've 'locked in' 25% of the score for the round.

Example Play

So, you spawn in to the mission, say for a sortie. Much like an excavation mission, there's a counter of how much data you need to extract before you can leave. Let's say it's 200.

Round 1 starts. Half the counter fills up with grey - you can get 100 points, maximum, from this round. Two perfect rounds and you're out.

You clear the first vault undetected and one quarter of that grey half-circle turns white. Your score is now 25.

You trip an alarm trying to clear the second vault - each uncracked vault loses 5 points of value, and the countdown starts. Your 25 from the first vault stays - it's untouchable - but all remaining vaults are worth 20. The grey part of the circle shrinks a bit to reflect this. You clear the vault before the countdown ends, and collect your 20.

You're extra careful on the next vault, doing some of the sabotage rooms to make them easier, and take it clean too. You get another 20, and now you're at 65. The white part of the score counter is just past 90 degrees.

But you get impatient going to the last vault, and trip another alarm on the way. It's now worth only 15. You trip another alarm trying to clear it, and it's worth 10, and the countdown started. Again, the 65 you've already taken is yours, and takes no damage. But you fail the vault, and lose even those last 10 points. With no more grey left in the circle, the round ends. You get a reward, but its not as good as it could be, because you only got 65 out of 100 possible points. (If your score is too low, you get some insulting reward like 50 endo.)

Round 2 starts. The grey semi-circle doesn't quite reach all the way around - you need a third round even if you play this one perfect. Different vaults activate, with more guards in them. Rinse, repeat, until you can extract.

Variation and Conclusion

Multiple players can mean either doing all the vaults at once, or being able to get the sabotage rooms done for one vault much fast - or a combination of the two, with pairs of players.

One could argue that while this is less punishing that normal spy for failure, mimicking Disruption's clear condition isn't ideal. Maybe you don't like how Disruption forces extra rounds to extract if you fail one defense - isn't the reduced reward enough punishment? In that case, you can change the clear condition to 'rounds passed': set a minimum score to 'pass' a round, pass 1 or 2 rounds to extract. This way, people who want to just finish the mission for a sortie (or lich hunting, or fissures, or syndicate missions...) can play a bit fast and loose without necessarily locking themselves into multiple rounds. Sure their rewards are going to be worse, but that's not what they're here for.

Obviously the specifics of this idea aren't set, but I think more broadly applying Disruption-like principles would be a good thing for Warframe missions, and no Warframe mission type needs more good things than the stealth missions.