Endless Mission Feedback and Suggestions

[Violet_Xe]

Endless Mission Fix Suggestions

   So, endless missions are by far the best missions in Warframe hands down. There are a few bad eggs either being a hit or miss. But endless missions have lacked several things for quite awhile depending on which endless run were talking about. Core parts of Endless runs are there for one mission type, but for some reason DE forgets some golden rules they established with previous missions. These core parts would be the following. Speed to Reward Ratio, Rewarding Replayability, Fun Value, Difficulty and/or Challenge, and Scaling Effort.

 

Spoiler

 

1. Speed to Reward Ratio is key for content. usually this and rewards are the first things examined in missions to dictate whether this mission is worth their time or not. Speed to Reward can also be manipulated as in defense speed nova is used to pass missions faster increasing the Speed to Reward. If players were to choose between 2 fissures be it survival or excavation players would choose excavation because you get your rewards faster.
2. Rewards are strange because while many players simply say, "Just put in X Reward and take out Y", DE is faced with issues from such suggestions. While rewards are critical and the defining thing in what makes or breaks missions as important, you cannot make rewards too good nor can you change them too much becuase it makes a domino effect through the game. More on that later. Rewards can come in all sorts of ones and zeros. XP, Focus, Standing, Resources, Cureency, Cosmetics, Gear, Weapons, etc etc all count and can be used in different missions.
3. Fun Value. This is critical to a mission's success but is unreliable. You cannot ever make something fun for everyone because everyone is different. This doesn't mean it should be ignored though as fun can be aimed towards the general population of the game to produce good results and replayability. Recent feedback on disruption shows Fun Value is important to players but this will always flop when it's stand alone. Fun Value is the icing on the cake to make people want to play it again that much more.
4. Fair Difficulty is a more delicate balance than many players want to believe is easy to obtain. Unfortunately the scale of power we have is difficult to measure and gear content towards. As a developer, the difficulty of content must be hard enough to not feel like you're a god and nothing is interesting, yet not too unfair to ward players away from content you want played. Depending on the audience and location in your game you can take more liberties and be more unfair or lenient depending on if it's at the start of the game, or meant for long term players seeking deep challenge.
5. Desire to Improve is something that DE has nailed in the past, but for some reason cannot replicate. While Void Keys vs Relics is a valid argument, one undeniable fact was that the void keys had the best drive to push players to their limits and beyond. Enemies demanded you to be better for you to get more bang for your buck. To get the most value of your keys you had to be as good as you possibly could. the Desire to improve is something that NEEDS to be in all endless missions adn there are multiple ways to include this.

   All of the above are needed in an Endless Mission, and there is some idea that these changes are simple, but that's wrong. I would love if it were simple but DE is faced with a domino effect by altering rewards that are currently in place. For one, if X Endless Mission gets good rewards it may overshadow Y Endless Mission because it's hands out better rewards. Changes may also affect normal missions such as capture and exterminate which are also in desperate need on attention. Even asking for reward increases it an issue. By altering resource drops it in turn will revalue how difficult it is to obtain and craft certain weapons and research to where it becomes outrageously easy to get what you want. This means DE has to revisit how expensive dozens of blueprints are, or sweep another issue under the rug like they've been doing.
   That being said, I want to try to suggest changes to said missions to make them more fun, rewarding, and attractive to players depending on the way you play. This post will feature not only the mission themselves, but general additions and alterations to variations. I'll also be suggesting fixes to current game modes and new takes on that mission type. The following will be showing the positives of the missions, negatives of the missions, and fixes or ideas to support said mission/variation.

   GENERAL ADDITIONS I THINK WOULD BENEFIT WARFRAME
   Leading the General Additions Is an elephant. This will be about scaling health with armor. To deal with armor scaling I find it very simply. Put a hard cap on how much armor enemies can have. Depending on the tier of mission, the cap for certain enemies will be higher or lower. As an example numbers aren't final, Endless T1 Heavy Gunners cannot pass 7.5K armor // Endless T2 heavy Gunners cannot pass 10K armor. Endless T3 Heavy Gunners cannot pass 12.5K. If more tiers are added in the future this can be increased or decreased to fit acordingly. This change fixes multiple things. For one, armor no longer scales to absurd levels but is still powerful enough where armor stripping has relevance. This also means newer players won't have to deal with such a powerful enemy if they decide to enter a low tier mission. Lastly enemies won't multiply in health to ludicrous levels but it's still much higher than corpus and infested with exceptions like elites being bursa and juggernauts.
   Adding a different type of survival for void trace farming would be appreciated as well. If the future of warframe will revolve around these nemesis and primes then we need more ways to obtain traces. As it stands we can open around 13-4 relics for 1 radiant relic. I don't want to have to spend relics to get what I want because I'm starting to lose track of what's what. Better UI would help but I'd like a survival similar to Kuva Survival. The best location for this would be Lua. By lore it logical because the moon is essentially a giant relic lotus ripped from the void leaving lingering tears in the fabric of time resulting in lua spy. If we have a reliable and consistent way to farm traces without spending relics we might not accidentally use stuff we need.
   Also please let warframes like chroma, mirage, and nezha to apply their defensive abilities to defense objectives. For some reason gara can do this without an augment, yet nezha cannot with an augment, unless it's an open world excavator.... logic. Doing this would open up more warframes for more mission types and that is what DE is going for right?

   I will now discuss the mission's endless rewards, each per mission, and talk about their positives, failures, and how they can be fixed if they can or should be. I will not be going super crazy with rewards, but i do want to add some sense of scaling, improvement to the missions, and make rewards more skill based taking inspiration from where DE has gotten things right.

   EXIMUS DROPS
   I was pleasantly surprised by this. I actually had a rework concept for a mission type involving eximus dropping mats specifically because they appear more. I'm surprised DE took this route and it got me extremely excited. In recent years, this has been the only thing to get public matches to go past 30-40 waves of defense or past 3000 cryotic. I have literally nothing bad to say about this besides it may take awhile to ramp up and this might give rise to eximus stronghold replaying abuse.
   If DE wants to continue down this path then adding 100% resource drop chance or 100% resource boost to eximus deaths, then players would want to go further in all endless missions baseline. Also IF, and this is a big if, IF DE mages to pull off railjack and it's a fun and rewarding system to play then adding 1 railjack resource per planet would greatly increase players running for long periods of time. Maybe not hours but it's something.

   ENDLESS VOID FISSURES
   So one thing I've always found irritating about void fissures is that relic opened bonus. If players are talking about fissures you'll never hear anyone talking about "oh yeah this bonus I've got for opening 20 relics gave me 100% affinity. Nobody will be trying to level affinity on these missions if they're even going 20 times making that affinity booster completely useless. They will only run that long if their warframe is maxed. Why run that for affinity or focus if eidolons and ESO exist?
   Players might consider running survivals more frequently if maybe it went up by 50% per relic opened, or increased 25% for 2 items at random. Maybe allow players to pick what boost they get. Instead of waiting 5 rounds for a relic and it being separate from boosters make it drop on the fourth relic opened and increase the boosters. Chances are that relic might not be something we care about.

   DEFENSE
   Despite what many people say I think Defense is in a fantastic spot in my opinion. it's fun value is there and has a certain influence on which warframes are taken as players will prefer khora, frost, limbo, etc etc. There's some thinking involved in which warframes are effective. Defense also has Relics on every rotation which means despite it's semi slow Speed to Reward ratio, your chances of getting relics is higher than survival. Courple that with itbeing a solid affinity and resource farmer due to condensed tiles and you get defense. DE also shakes up defense with moving operatives and evolving tiles. Even the newest updates help as DS Defense is seen as the best way to farm Diodes and Carbides. For these reasons I wont ask for any changes to the mission rewards at all but it can be improved indirectly.
   The biggest issue with defense is the monopoly some warframes have over the type. I did say it makes players think of which warframes to use but it sadly leans too much to that. Nova ais the sole proprietor of complete enemy speed. Nekros, Hydroid, and Khora are also commonplace in defense for loot harvesting augments or abilities. Also the fact that warframes like nezha and more cannot efficiently apply defensive abilities to objectives but Gara can represses their viability further. This also doesn't make sense because nezha can't put stuff on excavators normally, but in open world areas it works just fine. Inconsistency is irritating.
   Applying complete speed control to more warframe abilities would improve the variety of frames you can see on defense missions. So far i mostly see players run Hydroid, Khora, Nekros, and Nova in organized runs. DE said players feel forced to use these frames and while I agree it feels like that, so instead of nerfing, just add more to player control. Imagine Rift Surge slowing or speeding up enemies within the rift. Not only adding to build variety and his survivability, but gives both small and large void cataclysms a purpose in defense.

   EXCAVATION
   When it comes to excavation it's honestly really fun and it's rewards are decent with it holding monopoly over cryotic farming. They also have a very fast Speed to Reward Ratio for experienced players so skill and team communication does assist alot if you're able to split your group into 2 for separate excavators. This makes missions like Hieracon and Cholistan somewhat useful to players. They're mobile and make players run around in a mobile defense fashion.
   Sadly, Excavations fall pray to the exact same thing Survivals did. This isn't too hard to believe since Cryotic Front was so long ago leaving the game type vulnerable to being outdated. Rewards from Excavations are similar to survivals where they cannot grant relics anywhere on their Rotation A, but unlike survivals Excavations don't have a void sector meaning you'll never have relics on Rotation A. This cuts into the game modes potential as rotation A only gives credits and endo which are easily obtained elsewhere in mass. Lastly the Excavators themselves are so fragile it makes it almost unbearably difficult to run without a warframe who can either negates damage on excavators or defensive globes. While defense objectives are the same way there's less pressure because those have much more HP than excavators.
   One change I would make is put relics or something of value to Rotation A, whatever they may be. Another change I would make is make the health of excavators scale with enemies when they are deployed. Making them tougher to destroy in general would be lovely. Lastly I'd like excavation variation. Perhaps an Excavation Defense concept? Simply let us have one giant excavator to protect which mines cryotic and items from the ground. The more excavators completed without destruction, the more cryotic is harvested from excavators rising by 10 each and stopping at 300 per excavator. This is also affected by resource booster meaning you can get 600 per instead of 400 per.

   SURVIVAL
   Survival is the classic love of veterans and appreciated by almost the entirety of the player base because it's mindless fun and brings back nostalgia from old warframe. Multiple survivals across the system can be used for resource harvesting and in general it's just a decent mission type.
   The issues with survival are all based around time. Often we will wait 1-2 hours for our enemies to power up like goku, except he doesn't ever let an enemy power up for 4 episodes straight. Players must also wait 5 full minutes for a reward which worked in the past but now we have endless missions that give rewards in 2:30s at best. This means survival is outdated and needs to be looked at. Another issue lies with a forced useless Rotation A  for normal missions and dark sectors containing nothing of value but credits and endo which we can get elsewhere easier. The last issue I have with survival is the lack of Tier 4 survivals with only Mot in the void, and Zabala at Eris. This means survivals are terrible for endurance because there's so little variety with them. Either infested or corrupted.
   Now survival has a lot of potential to improve but it would be too much for me to state in one post. So I'll redirect you to another of my threads where I flip survival on it's head and show how ripe survival is to mission variation. "MISSION VARIETY SURVIVAL". DE needs to make relics part of every rotation for survivals or they need to make the rotations similar to Arbitrations where they will roll AABBCCC- or AABCCC-.
   Kuva Survival however I want to suggest that it increase in kuva obtained by 5 for every successful defend. It's not too powerful and would be fairly balanced. If someone wants to spend 1-2 hours in that mission farming kuva then they should by all accounts be earning more kuva than siphons can provide. This makes even more sense to add now then before because siphons have a chance at giving requiem relics where survival does not.

   INTERCEPTION
   I've been somewhat out of the loop on Interceptions so I don't really have anything negative to say about them. However they have decent Speed Reward Ratio, and they are one of the few endless missions which encourage team play being harder to control all points as one player. As it stands it's not the best but passable as a mission type. Interceptions are among the few mission types which don't make players want to kill everything, rather you want to be in control which means it's the home of CC frames such as limbo, nova, and vauban.
   Interception would be one of the few mission types that I would prefer scaling rewards on due to it encouraging team play and doesn't value damage over everything opening up for CC more than other game modes. Scaling rewards every 4 rounds to where we get 2 rewards instead of 1 per rotation would be appreciated and would add value past going round 4. However this reward would cap off at 3 rewards a rotation meaning after 12 it won't scale further. This is to prevent players from getting 10 rewards per rotation as that would break the system. This way we do have scaling rewards, an incentive to not leave and to not waste time, yet at the same time putting a hard cap on how much scaling reward we can get. Interception could also do with some variation with more defense objectives or more terminals for mission variety like A B C D E F with 3 terminals each on harder interception missions to prevent camping.

   DISRUPTION
   Disruption is unquestionably one of the most exciting modes DE has launched in ages. It's Speed to Reward is skill based making it the best option for organized teams who know their stuff. It's randomness also makes it the most replayable all of endless missions and can keep players on their toes. Lua is the sole location for lua lens and somatic fibers making it permanently viable and the universal medallions seal the deal. But it gets better because Disruption's skill based system makes it the only mission type capable of skipping Rotation A. It certainly has it's place.
   Despite all that, on launch the rewards deflated the entire premise of disruption. This has since been changed but 2 missions stick out for me to this day. Jupiter Ganymede drops hexenon which is annoying because it's an easy resource to farm. This underutilized resource has no place in diluting drop tables for disruption and only serves to irritate players. The Kuva Fortress also flops compared to survival. The reason why is because players not only get kuva from K-Survival, but normal rotation rewards. Demo units also have issues related to enemy scaling. Corpus demo nullifiers I can get behind because thematically it works. But why are grineer and infested equipped with this ability? Grineer Demo have Shields, Armor, alot of CC Immunity, sometimes flat damage resistance, and ability nullification.
   As said before, remove the hexenon of Jupiter's disruption. This is the equivalent of 50 plastids from a rotation which sounds terrible to anyone. The Kuva Fortress should also be changed to have the highest chance for Universal medallions at maybe 8-10% and Lua should be stripped of medallions. This makes the fortress a more reliable medallion farm giving it purpose and separating it from the survival while freeing up drop chance for lua lens on the moon. Lua's disruption already has exclusive rewards in lenses, don't give it medallions too. Also please change it so terminals respawn right after completion rather than a new wave. Making rewards come every 4 terminals that respawn instantly instead of 4 set terminals per wave makes it feel smoother and might increase the speed at which rewards can be obtained making players feel even better.

   INFESTED SALVAGE
   Believe it or not, this mission does in fact have positives. For one, the rotations are quite quick. Even with 1 terminal degraded you can complete a rotation in around 3 minutes. This means it's much faster *if you're lucky* than survival for relic farming. It's also got a much better rotation A than survival.
   IS sadly is restricted to 1 sector making it easily forgotten. Most of my clan forgot it existence before I brought it up for feedback on this topic. The mission also doesn't feel very fun or interactive. Worse, it's difficult to navigate due to it being an infested ship tile with infested spore and mist, lighting and UI issues/bugs, and 3 giant everblue bubbles blocking vision. Playing with friends makes it just that much more hectic. Moving on, If terminals are destroyed one wave they slow down progress and there's no way to recover except restarting which hurts people who do endless runs and cuts into Speed to Reward Ratio. Nidus is also legendarily infamous for being impossible to farm for some players followed by the rest of Rot C which carries the worst rewards of all endless missions. Any other Tier 3 endless has better rewards yet they're the same difficulty. Rewards continue to disappoint because while you complete it faster the relics have a below average drop rate of 10% making this less reliable than any other endless for relics.
   I honestly like the mechanic concept... but I'd much rather just have this mission type removed from the game. I don't find it fun and it's rewards would make sense elsewhere. The infested salvage mechanic however can be utilized to further make Eris feel unique and different. The mission is needless but the mechanic is unique so use it. Specifically this mechanic would be amazing if blended into a Defection revamp. This is honestly coming from a person who wants what's best for warframe and removing it would be for the best. Nidus can be moved to the infested lab. I do feel like this mission could be improved but it's better off being... salvaged... for it's mechanic and applied elsewhere for divesification. Open the dark sector for another more useful mission.

   DEFECTION
   Defection is a great concept *in theory* and it's speed to reward ratio is on par with survivals at 4-5 min of work for 1 rotation, or quicker if you're in multiplayer. Defection has decent world building too being the first mission introducing you to grineer defectors if you haven't joined a syndicate yet. The mission is also different from other missions focusing more on protection instead of killing making control frames viable. Unlike interceptions however Defection uses allied AI which can be healed and protected with supports bringing them up in viability making this mission a ciritical spot DE needs to focus on if they want supports to rise in viability. AI pathing has also been improved in both tile sets as of update 25.3 and 25.7 to assist the mission so, maybe, expect less glitched AI. Also due to them being dark sectors they should always be more rewarding than common survivals.
   Now, what's bad about Defection. This mission doesn't fall short in many aspects but the few problems it has make the entire thing crumble. The pathing of our lovely defector friends is notoriously terrible, although admittedly DE has made strides to improve this after 1-2 years. This change flew under the radar and I can't really test this myself in depth but during my first mission going to 16 extracted squads I had 2 defectors get caught on life support capsules. Defectors also lack the stats to survive against powerful enemies, nor can they be sped up to increase how fast rewards can be gained. Also players spreading out alters spawns occasionally leading to droughts of power cells leading to defector dying like they caught black death. We already have delicate targets to protect, we don't need the game systems to ruin it for us because of enemy spawns.
   To begin, I'd like to apply the salvage mechanic. Players will suffer some debuff which stacks over time when exposed to heavy concentrations of infested spores. Power in life support capsules will create a massive bubble where players will not suffer this debuff but they will slowly shrink over time. Players can also use the life support capsules, press x on it, to recover health and armor at the expense of some of the tower's power. Around key tiles where defectors rally there should be power cell generators, atleast 2 or no more than 3 which produce power cells at a set rate countering enemy spawn issues. As players progress through the mission they unlock more and more defectors increasing squads rescued per minute which results in more rewards. After 14 squads are rescued B will now have B1 and B2 where 2 terminals can be activated to bring 2 squads of defectors. At 21 C1 and C2 will activate. Rotation B will replace rotation A if no defectors are downed allowing players to bypass the useless rotation A. Defectors also have a 50% chance to drop 1 synthula when extracting offering an alternative to crafting. Every squad of defectors which is extracted will raise Defector levels by 1 to prevent them from being too fragile. AI and Defectors should also be reworked to gain benefits from warframes like volt and zephyr with their AoE speed buffs.

Spoiler

SYNTHULA

   Oh my favorite. Ok so widely considered useless and it is actually useless I want to give a rework to these too since they are meant to be part of defection. Simply taking the synthula on the mission with it in your gear and using that synthula near a tower will apply the effects of that synthula on that tower for 15 minutes. The synthula's effects will be applied to any defector being healed by the tower and these effects linger for 15s. Stims cost 5 Synthula to craft now.

   On the this end I'd like to revise some effects of synthula.
-Calcafin stim will increase damage resistance of Defectors for 15s and Tenno for 20s no longer slows movement.
-Adrenal stim will increase speed of Defectors for 15s and tenno for 20s no longer increases damage taken.
-Refract stim will turn Defectes and Tenno invisible while inside of Tower bubble
-Clotra stim will give regeneration to Defectors for 15s and Tenno for 20s if healed by tower.
-Infirm stim will cleanse status and give status immunity to Defectors for 15s and Tenno for 20s if healed by tower.
-Hostis stim will provide extra fire rate and reload speed to Defectors for 15s and Tenno for 20s if healed by tower.
-Stamen stim will reduce energy consumed to heal Defectors and tenno.
-Pherliac stim will increase enemy spawn rates but causes enemies to deal 3X more damage to kavor

   By making it a tower buff that lasts for all kavor it should become much more useful. You can add risk reward with optional difficulty using pherliac stim or go for endurance with normal stims. Either way it's up to you.

   ESO
   I will leave out my opinions on this as there are quite a few things wrong with it and I myself don't have much experience because I tend to avoid it, not even on purpose either. I won't speak on areas I don't have much personal experience or information in. Besides, gathering long term data of ESO would be difficult without a squad made for that and none of my friends are up for more data gathering so i'm out of luck here.

Spoiler

   A note for DE, you've made a grinding game. You say that warframe is the game you can boot up for 5 minutes and have fun then log off but that's not how the entire community acts. It;'s fine if you want to do that but you NEED to strike a balance between long hardcore runners and casual players. You need 2 different reward systems in the game for both audiences becuase the game warfame is cannot not have hardcore runners.
   One would be skill based rewards, disruption. These missions reward players the same rewards every time based off skill letting them get the best rewards. This can be further improved upon by adding more rotation tiers over time but it's a fantastic idea which works for people who don't want to play endless missions for a long time.
   The second would be scaling reward with limitation, or bang for buck. Both of these styles work for the hardcore gamers as they both push players to their limits to get the most out of it. Restarting wouldn't be worth it after running past 40-60 min. Simply put reward players that can fight super high end content with what they rightfully deserve.