(PC) Empyrean: Railjack General Feedback Megathread

[DagoDrakh]

3 minutes ago, LvJasper said:

as i said, watched some kid with 8 viewers get a free rail jack and key in the mail. had to do nothing to have it build for him. I don't mind building it. i've spent my share of money in the game i don't want free stuff but i don't think they should get free stuff just because they are a streamer, and yes not all streamers did. I watched a few people i know craft it piece by piece.

I see, normally the partnership states that you have to do regular content for WF or you lose that extra. DE probably being a bit sloppy kicking out those who did not play wf for a long period of time.

Edited December 17, 2019 by DagoDrakh

[HEYORI]

Crewships are the most annoying part of Railjack for me when it comes to gameplay. With Homing missiles that are fired from machine gun of sorts, this is worse than the old archiving. Volley of this bois will kill any archwing in matter of milliseconds from miles away even on Saturn. If doesn't somehow it will stagger your Archwing, and will finish you anyway. They are impossible to dodge, and also do area damage. So you are not safe even behind asteroids sometimes.  

Crewships also have no special visual indication, hard to spot in hectic fight.                

Edited December 17, 2019 by HEYORI

[LvJasper]

that's an excuse for DE to be lazy, they bring out new content when they still have boss fights that have been in the game for 1+ years that are still buggy as hell. but yall right, it's my bad for investing in a terrible company lesson is learned and the $1k+ i payed was a bad investment. Lesson is definately Learned =] wont be making any more deposits =]

[Kierran]

As a feedback that will get drown among the others, the sheer amount of materials required to repair or construct railjack parts it's astronomical.

Thousands upon thousands of materials just to get better guns to progress and hours/days wait time... or 50plat to skip it all, even the material cost. This makes me not want to play the mode at all.

[ecwp1981]

10 minutes ago, Kierran said:

As a feedback that will get drown among the others, the sheer amount of materials required to repair or construct railjack parts it's astronomical.

Thousands upon thousands of materials just to get better guns to progress and hours/days wait time... or 50plat to skip it all, even the material cost. This makes me not want to play the mode at all.

Just hop onto someone else's railjack and enjoy the ride 🙂 thats what I have been doing thus far 😄. You get to upgrade your intrinsics and become a valuable crew member as well.

Edited December 17, 2019 by ecwp1981

[Kierran]

1 minute ago, ecwp1981 said:

Just hop onto someone else's railjack and enjoy the ride 🙂 thats what I have been doing thus far 😄. You get to upgrade your intrinsics and become a valuable crew member as well.

That's what I've been doing to be honest, but it brings other downsides with. Most often you get matchmade to the end of the mission, just for the railjack then to go to dojo and disband.

[Gendalph]

tl;dr on Empyrean: has potential, doesn't have "the numbers" to back it up.

I've spent weekend playing Railjack missions. Good news? I see potential with the core gameplay. Bad news? Everything around it is bad. I will try my best not to rant about bugs here.

I feel like the way Railjack missions are balanced right now, they're antagonistic to everything the rest of the game is. My main two concerns are: Railjack is a slog with overtuned enemies and way too much RNG on top.

What do I like in Warframe and why I dislike other similar-ish games? It's dynamic, mowing through hordes of enemies as a space ninja. Other games are slow. I've tried Destiny 2 and I felt like I was in shackles, compared to Warframe. And Empyrean throws that out the window: you're slow, everything is a slog now, deal with it.

Other point people really enjoy about Warframe is steady progression instead of dependence on RNG: you put in the work and get same results as the next guy. And a huge chunk of community loves this part about the game. Rivens took some of that away, but we learned to deal with it. Liches still need some work in this regard (I, and a number of people I talked to, really want the ability to upgrade bad rolls in addition to replacing them with better rolls). What did Empyrean bring? All salvaged Shield Arrays, Engines and Reactors have RNG stats: https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Railjack#Components. And if that wasn't enough, they can be worse than baseline Sigma parts of the same tier. You have to get the part, get the good roll, and then grind for resources to actually use it. Doesn't this sound like a bit too much? It does to me.
Generally, you either grind for good rolls (Diablo, PoE, Desitny) and not resources, straight up drops or blueprints and resources, but not rolls (WoW and Lineage 2, maybe?). We get to grind for both. And what a grind it is.

 

Now, I have a list of issues I managed to remember after a break from Warframe and good night's rest (I had much more to say on Sunday, believe me):

• Resource costs are exorbitant (I was told costs are being looked at, we all hope they get changed).
• Archwing weapon "re-balace" is bad: assuming that healing ability in the Veil is bugged, enemies in high Saturn and Veil turn into bullet sponges, making Skirmishes - the omnipresent mission objective - a massive slog. For me this damage balance is a throwback to my 2013 Warframe experience, which I played for a couple months and put on a shelf for years. Also, you should've probably included these in the patch notes: 
• You know what's also bad? Railjack weapons. On top of dealing pitiful damage where it matters, Zetki weapons have such massive heat generation, that they're pretty much unusable.
• And while we're at it, can we tone down the FX on projectiles and make all them reasonably fast? Or am I supposed to watch from the side how my projectiles miss targets?
• Enemies - and I mean ALL enemies - are overtuned. How do you feel about getting one-shot by a level 60 enemy? As Umbral Wukong. Or Amesha under all of her abilities. Fun, right?
• Archwing speed is a joke. Saturn enemies being faster than my Itzal? Really? Do I need Hyperion Thrusters for Saturn? I won't even talk about Veil.
• You know what sucks more than trying to catch up to enemies all the time? Travelling 15k meters on Archwing with Blink that has 3s cooldown. 25% cooldown reduction at rank 8 Tactical is a bandaid. Blink cooldown needs to be reduced significantly, probably halved, also front "dodge" needs to go, it only gets in the way of Blink.
• You know what sucks even more than that? Railjack being as slow as it is. I'll die of old age earlier than I'll get to where I need on my Railjack, unless I have decent Mk III Engines.
• Forcing people to use Forward Artillery or going inside Crewships to blow 'em up is asinine is not the best idea, IMO. I understand why it was added, but I still don't think it's a good design.
  I also assume that I often get bugs where my Forward Artillery doesn't deal damage (either at all or some arbitrarily low amount). Moreover, Forward Artillery being useless on high Saturn missions and in the Veil is bad as well. It takes a lot to use it, and it being completely useless where it matters? Unacceptable.
• Rewards. I don't need to elaborate on this one, just go check r/Warframe.
• Does every single pickup needs to show up in the corner as rare? It's annoying at best.
• RNG stats on parts. I have elaborated on this earlier, but something needs to change about this. This is just too much RNG.
• Drop rate for actually good Avionics. I've spent days trying to get the good Bulkhead. It wasn't fun. Maybe make them tradeable?

After playing this mode over weekend, I got burned out. I'm considering taking a break from Warframe after my active boosters run out this weekend. Leave it be for a month while the team goes on holidays and addresses most of my complaints. I really hope this is not left the way it is, and we won't get Archwing 2: Electric Boogaloo or Hema 2: It's Raining in the Derelict!

[Her_Lovely_Tentacles]

here are a few things I noticed that could be improved upon:

• while Railjack piloting has proper free rotation (similar to old experimental flight), the Gunnery turrets and archwing lack this. This is highly frustrating when you try to track a target and just can't turn any further, and instead you nead to rotate around a completely different axis instead. Please enable free rotation for Archwing and Gunnery Turrets!
• compounding on the still tiny archwing vacuum, if you use your archwing blink through an item, the item does not get picked up at all - which means you have got to double back again to get the drops, making it even more time consuming.
• Crewship damage is ridiculously high compared to Archwing survivability, and their projectiles cannot be properly shaken with the Archwing abilities that were specifically disgned to do just that.
• Please de-couple Warframe Auras and especcially Arcane Enhancments from Archwing. Please, just let us choose them seperately for Warframes and Archwings. Having to choose a non-optimal Warframe setup just to properly setup the Archwing is infuriating.

[Drago55577]

1 hour ago, LvJasper said:

this dude who's name i wont drop said "haven't played in years" MR 3 and signs in to a free rail jack and key? a job? LMAO i wouldn't consider streamer a job..... it's a hobby, just because you can make money doing it doesn't consider it a job.

 

I mean, it literally does. He entertains people for money. There's many other jobs that do this.

 

More feedback - Falloff on weapons is far too high. The hitscan weapons feel nearly useless due to how close their falloff is.

[Colyeses]

12 minutes ago, Gendalph said:

Zetki weapons have such massive heat generation, that they're pretty much unusable.

I disagree with that. Especially if you have Polar Coils installed and leveled to 3 or something, it's very manageable as long as you pace yourself. That said, there's a bigger issue, IMO, which is that Apoc blows all other options completely out of the water.

Pulsar almost keeps up with it, trading a bit of damage for super high accuracy and hitscan, making it more reliable and easy to use, however, the Carcinnox, Cryophon and Photor are all completely negligible and a direct and very severe downgrade. Carcinnox does no damage but has a high firerate, Cryophon does no damage and has a low firerate and enormous heat generation, and the photor just does no damage. 

Worst part is probably that the Apoc and Carcinnox are the only ones with effective range 500-1000, with all others being 400-800. And I'm pretty sure the Cryophon can only hit targets that are 100m away. 

Basically, there's a few options for guns, and only the Apoc is good.

[Toran]

In contrast to my expectations, Railjack is the most fun I had in years in Warframe. The mode emphasizes teamplay more than any other part of the game, something I experienced the last time as noob, six years ago.

Railjack has some issues that need to be addressed though:

Loot-pickup in Space: make it instant. You don't want to look for loot during a raging battle and you sure don't comb the area for floating glowies for minutes after the battle. Alternative: quadruple the pickup range.

Loot pick-up by Away-Crew: share the loot with your team outside backing you up! Dont let them miss on the loot inside a target structure! Fix that ASAP

Target indicator for Archwings, please:  in later sectors they're neglectable, but for beginners Archwings are a valuable support form. I'm ok with the loss of hitscan, but at least give us leading target indicators for Archwings (without mods or whatever)!

Different target marks for ships, please: different symbols for different sized ships would be very helpful, especially in non-verbal PUGs. It would be awesome, if you could mark targets too (with G as usual)

Endless range for main objectives, please: the maps are huge and sometimes in the heat of the battle you withdraw outside of the next objective's marking range. Kinda annoying when you don't know where to go next

Veil Sector Healing Globes: currently only the host can see those stupid things and the most effective way to kill them is using an Imperator Archgun? Also, the healing effect seems to work far over the depicted range. Please remove this crap aslong it's not visible for the whole crew!

Lost-in-Limbus-Slingshot - worst bug yet: if a crew ship explodes while you still slingshot-travel to it, you will be lost in a black Limbus. Unable to move, you can't kill yourself, beam back or unstuck or do anything but chat. You can only wait for the rest of the team to finish the mission and return to the dry dock where you can restart the game. This is especially annoying as host.

Funny Archwing Beam after crew ship explosion: if your teleporting back from a crew ship times with its explosion, you'll end up with your archwing in Railjack but holding your ground gun! Especially funny: you just can glide out and shred anything with your devastating primary (so much stronger than ANY ship weapon 😂 )

[Skyrage]

I just need a clarification but: does the Railjack level up as well? And if so, why is the "level" of it not displayed? I mean, I get the level up sound every now and then when playing and when I check up on the ship afterwards I see that the avionics capacity has increased by the number of times that I leveled up.

[Inquisitor_Melhody]

Just two words: one about the “RAMMING” part… I just don’t see it working at all. Is there really a RAMMING feature to start? I mean, I play WH40K Battlefleet Armada Gothic I & II, and ramming feels powerful, especially if your ship as a front spear made for ramming and dealing huge damages. In Assassin’s Creed sea battles, you can ram the enemies (and also have made-to-ram front prow), and sometime completely destroy them, cutting their boat in two parts. You feel the power of the impact, even more if you were at full speed, and you have sometimes a kill cam that shows the destruction. Here… nothing. I never feel anything when ramming small and medium ships. It looks like I just pass through small dust dots floating in space.

Second word: the scale of the Railjack is really too small. When you are outside with your Archwing, you can see the cockpit that is as large as yourself, whereas you can put 5 Players inside when piloting. I also found this concept art that looks pretty accurate and show how high a Railjack could be :

Once again, when outside, the Railjack looks small. Some might say “so the Orbiter is and the interior never matches the skin you have”, which is true, except you never fly around the Orbiter and can enter/exit/enter/… during a battle. As the areas where we have Railjack missions now look far too big, making us hardly fly through it during battles but mainly to collect everything once the mission is over, and even if I think they tested a 1:1 scale, I really wonder why DE made it so small.

There are few games I know where you can enter/exit your ship that is really 1:1 scaled (No Man’s Sky and the amazing feeling in VR when walking on one of your frigates in orbit, Star Citizen but I don’t play this one yet, Elite Dangerous if I remember right… and what they show of Beyond Good and Evil 2), that would be nice if Railjack could also be 1:1 scaled.

[Drago55577]

44 minutes ago, Inquisitor_Melhody said:

Just two words: one about the “RAMMING” part… I just don’t see it working at all. Is there really a RAMMING feature to start? I mean, I play WH40K Battlefleet Armada Gothic I & II, and ramming feels powerful, especially if your ship as a front spear made for ramming and dealing huge damages. In Assassin’s Creed sea battles, you can ram the enemies (and also have made-to-ram front prow), and sometime completely destroy them, cutting their boat in two parts. You feel the power of the impact, even more if you were at full speed, and you have sometimes a kill cam that shows the destruction. Here… nothing. I never feel anything when ramming small and medium ships. It looks like I just pass through small dust dots floating in space.

Second word: the scale of the Railjack is really too small. When you are outside with your Archwing, you can see the cockpit that is as large as yourself, whereas you can put 5 Players inside when piloting. I also found this concept art that looks pretty accurate and show how high a Railjack could be :

Yeah. Not a huge issue but it'd be really nice if they scaled everything up. Really want to feel the epic scale of space vessels when you're flying around with your Archwing, but instead it's like you're a giant. The speed of Archwings could just be increased to counteract everything being scaled up.

Oh yeah, as for ramming. I really think ramming should be an inherent feature of hitting anything, with damage scaling based on the mass (or some other collision factor) of the object, with the ramming intrinsic being changed to something like 25% increased ramming damage, or something. Add some shake when you ram fighters and some cool noises when you hit crew ships and it'd be a lot better. Even ramming crew ships doesn't really do anything, you just sort of stop. It doesn't feel or sound like you hit another massive ship. 

[MSEP1]

Copy pasting from something I shared on Reddit: 

Yes [I really like Railjack as a game mode]. It’s the only thing I’ve done in Warframe since its launch. It’s super fun and I think the team did a great job on the core systems. [combat, flight, repairing, gunning, slingshots, main cannon, entering exiting, raising bases and hijacking ships].

However:

1. Right now isn’t a great time to play it since clan research for the mk2-3 parts isn’t finished yet. Those parts act as RNG protection (good), but they aren’t accessible which makes it hard to upgrade your ship if you only get bad or no wreckage drops. By end of this week, this won’t be an issue. I’m glad the sigma parts are relatively cheap, because they give a nice progression independent on drops.

2. Bugs. Invisible forge timers, infinite loading screen between missions, fighters not spawning, wreckage repair costs not loading, getting stuck, weapons having the wrong models, etc. A lot of these should be resolved in the coming month.

3. Wreckage is so gosh darn expensive. It already has a 12 hour timer (no problem there). The resource cost needs to be toned down just a bit. 

4. The forge is weird. Why can’t I queue up 4 tasks from the same forge? Why can’t I see which forge is busy from a distance? Why do I need to refine materials? Why did my teammate just refine the 10 cubics and pustrels I was about to use to make ravioli to patch the ship? Why isn’t there a master control panel?

5. More mission variety would be nice (on earth at least. Haven’t gotten past mid Saturn yet). There are three of the exact same mission in a row. I think the middle should be changed a little to add variety.

6. The avionics UI is weird. When I’m scrapping avionics, why can’t I see their drain? Why can’t I upgrade avionics that aren’t in the grid? 

7. Avionics drop rates and railjack vacuum range need to be looked at. I’ve played probably 10-ish hours of content and haven only gotten 1 battle avionic and a few tactical avionics. It’s disappointing to not even be able to equip my ship with basic abilities not because of reactor limitations but because the mod drops probably drifted into oblivion.

8. Why aren’t we allowed to buy starter/weak battle/tactical avionics from the clan console? Simple ones that are outclassed by the mission drops.

9. Why aren’t battle avionics equippable in all three slots? Some only go in slot 1 for example.

10. Why isn’t loot from crew ship interiors and points of interest shared with the entire crew? This is dumb.

11. Why doesn’t the slingshot have the 360 aim like turrets?

12. Why are enemies (crew) scaled so strangely?

13. Why don’t corrosive procs work on some enemies (crew)?

14. Why can’t I see what the RJ damage conversion is for archguns?

15. Why can’t I independently color the railjack name?

16. Why isn’t there an independent extract option? (Other than aborting. I know about that)

17. Why isn’t there a voting/notification for which mission we are moving to next?

18. Why isn’t there an indication of current dome charges, munitions, and crafting materials in the tactical screen?

19. Why isn’t loot from fighters automatically gathered? I understand environmental loot, but fighters can get downed from miles away and their loot has physics so it just floats away.

20. Why Are mission rewards (credits, non railjack materials) so pitifully low?

21. Why are avionics upgrades and house differences so subtle and weird? Where do different avionics variations even drop?

That’s a lot of issues, but they don’t stop me from loving this update. They just kind of annoy me and hold the update back from greatness. I look forward to seeing how this mode will evolve and progress overtime. With some polishing, it could be one of the best things to happen in this game.

[Shy0]

space combat is too messy and enemies are overpowered. when you have a 360-degree arena and swarms of enemies that can one-hit kill you plus are bullet sponges at higher levels, it forces us to use certain archwing builds just to survive and complete missions. cyngas + amesha, anyone/everyone? let's not even mention archmelee now.

also, who thought it was a good idea to put said overpowered enemies in a 360-degree space, make them really fast and then make all our weapons projectile-based and not hitscan? once again, this forces us to use a certain archwing (because we have only four to choose from and the other three can't survive or do enough damage or cc anything while the amesha at least gives us some survivability and enemy slow). though i guess none of this will matter when you hit rank 10 gunnery for the auto-aim intrinsic..

speaking of builds, there is very little room for combat customising our railjacks. as it is now, everyone will eventually end up using the same optimal mods/avionics and playing the same optimal way. why not have the equivalent of corrupted mods so we can try different playstyles? some people might enjoy a slow-moving but heavily-armoured ship that can tank and dish out short-range damage, while others might like to provide long-range healing or artillery for the archwings in the squad, or have a really fast but squishy, high damage ramming ship for hit-and-run attacks. then you could even have multiple railjacks in a mission with each performing a certain role, like a proper squad-based space sim.

don't get me wrong, the current implementation of shootery board-and-sabotage combat is nice, but the whole thing is coming across as more grind to get a ship that can survive more grind to grind more to survive more grind etc. rather than "now THIS is some amazing spaceship battle." staying out with cyngas + amesha is the better way to kill enemies since we still have to board things and kill stuff with our warframes. the railjack is essentially a controllable defence target that needs babysitting while we run/fly around completing objectives. you didn't need the whole new space thing to do that, you could have just done that with our existing solar system map.

this whole thing is becoming like the kuva liches: great idea, great potential, great ambition but very superficial and unsatisfying implementation. i appreciate that DE might like to branch out a bit after so many years but the current standard of the last two content drops is making me worry that they've lost their touch or are aiming too high.

p.s. how did the grineer make such OP space tech and still not have energy weapons, you know, the ones we keep doing low-level sabotage missions to destroy their mining equipment to stop them from developing? (but they somehow still managed to make giant space lasers on their balor fomorians..) maybe if we had spent some effort stopping them from getting into space instead? hmm, lotus?

[MirageKnight]

Scrapping Avionics at the moment is kind of risky: It's too easy to select and trash Avionics that you might want to keep, thus wasting time and effort in collecting and ranking them up, largely due to lack of important info. The "Scrap" menu needs better thumbnails / previews of Avionics, so that you can tell what stats it has, how many ranks it has, and if it's been ranked up or not.

Although not terribly important, allowing Avionics to be traded would be a nice touch.

Weapon blueprints could probably use an indicator as to where those weapons are meant to be slotted, so that players don't build more than what they need to.

Crew Ship Homing missiles will kill almost every Archwing - even with fully ranked health and shield mods - within two hits. They are also almost impossible to evade or shake off, even with Archwing countermeasures. This makes for punishing and frustrating gameplay. Scale down the damage please and make countermeasures more effective? On a side note, Amesha should not be the only viable Archwing in Railjack missions.

Having to almost constantly run around putting out fires in a combat situation gets a bit tiring after a short while. Could you reduce the instances of that happening just a little? We're here mostly to fight, not do damage control.

[AltheusV]

Can we please do away with the concept of refining materials?

It doesn't add anything enjoyable to the game, just means that you have to hit a button every now and then or lose some resources.

I only found out about this from a forum post, this is also not good. If you aren't going to remove refining, please give us a warning that we aren't receiving minerals we harvest.

[AltheusV]

Can we please have crew ships marked with a different target indicator to make them stand out from the fighters?

[ecwp1981]

1 hour ago, Shy0 said:

p.s. how did the grineer make such OP space tech and still not have energy weapons, you know, the ones we keep doing low-level sabotage missions to destroy their mining equipment to stop them from developing? (but they somehow still managed to make giant space lasers on their balor fomorians..) maybe if we had spent some effort stopping them from getting into space instead? hmm, lotus?

well i think there are more grineers than tennos so they might produce stuff faster than we can destroy?? 😉

[nogi187]

as mentioned before, crewships must get a bold marker that always points to their position, no matter where the player is aiming. they instakill any archwing oblivious to their position and most of the time they easily kill you, even if you know where they are. just use the same marker as the railjack has, but in red. this would make the railjack experience so much smoother and less frustrating.

the other real problem so far is that my client sometimes crashes while picking up loot in space (ship parts most of the time). but thats probably harder to fix (sent in 2 crash reports).

otherwise the new game mode is really cool and fun. this could turn into something crazy good if the transition between space and planets could somehow be implemented. the more inspiration you take from games like elite dangerous the better ! don't always try to reinvent the wheel. ;P

on a side node, it would have been perfectly fine with the railjack using mods and space endo etc. instead of soooo many new words. man you really need to study an encyclopedia to understand warframe mechanics while this could be so much less complicated.

anway gj on the update and keep it going. ;D

[Vasala]

Please make all loot that drops in bases in Railjack mission shared with the whole squad just had a player immediately rush the base commander after I asked for it to be left for after the rest of the mission so everyone could get the blueprint if it drops. He killed the commander and immediately left squad and then of course no one could enter the base to see what if anything dropped.

Edited December 17, 2019 by Vasala
fixing typo

[Inquisitor_Melhody]

About the scale, I tested it here is what two players see:

And now inside:

The other player is displayed at 52m. 

[ChangelingRain]

All of the Railjack resources being rare, and thus having a popup, can make it hard to see what your Heat is when you're using one of the Gunner positions since the Gunner's Heat gauge is for some reason in a different position than the Pilot's Heat gauge, and can and will be covered by the resource popup.

This is somewhat annoying, and probably needs adjusting.

[Serafim_94]

The fun stuff:

Our host couldn't interact with things in his warframe. When he went into operator, and I went slingshoting into enemy crewship, his warframe went there with me and, supposedly, got left there once the ship exploded. Host wasn't able to get out of operator mode once that happened.

Your archgun can bug out. Once on foot, instead of your primary weapon you'll use the archgun - not the one you have in archwing mode, but the one you equipped as heavy weapon. However, that archgun will not react to archgun deployer, and will regenerate ammo like "space" archgun does. Bug persists until the end of mission.

Once you go from space into interior, you can bug out and remain in your archwing while inside. You'll get glued to the floor, but otherwise can move around and cast archwing powers. Bug persists until the end of mission, and it's NOT the same as following:

If you manage to recall out of creship JUST as it explodes, you will find yourself on your jack, but in atmospheric archwing mode. Unlike previous bug, you can freely fly around the interior. As is the case with atmospheric archwing, you have access to your primary and secondary, and melee takes you out of it. If you go out of the ship like that, you REMAIN in atmospheric archwing mode, with access to your normal weaponry. Sniper rifle users - enjoy while it lasts. Meleeing in that state while in open space will take you out of archwing and hang you there in the void. If you recall out of that state, you proceed as normal.

Edited December 17, 2019 by Serafim_94