Archwing Feedback and Ideas

[Sarulas]

With the latest devstream, DE discussed their intention to bring multiple improvements, buffs, and nerfs to various archwing systems now that railjack is out. This is obviously very necessary, given the current Amesha/Cygnas meta that's developed over the past few weeks. Seeing how controversial archwing has been with the community since it's inception, I wanted to start a consolidated feeback thread here so hopefully our ideas can be seen and considered by DE after the holidays. I personally have a lot of ideas myself that I'll post down below, please critique them and add your own!

[MysticDragonMage]

whatever archwing changes or buffs are coming, i hope the end result does not make railjacks irrelevant.

if all archwings had or eventually scaled to the same damage potential as most railjack guns plus survivalbility, then the best course of action would be to leave the railjack far from the battle and just use archwing for the entire mission. this would save a ton of resources and no one would be restricted by cooperation. it just makes sense to do so.

this mode is all about the railjack and cooperation. if anyone just wants to play archwing only, then they should have asked for more content for the original archiwing missions or just play those archwing missions as they are.

if archwings eventually do receive buffs that make them as effective as any pilot or gunner, i think there should be a few restrictions to prevent most people from playing archwing through entire railjack missions without repairing or caring for the ship.

My Suggestion:

archiwng should get a new ability that increases their stats and improves their abilities for a short period of time. this ability must be charged and can only be charged while the player stays within the railjack. the ability can only be activated when it is at 100% charge and if the ability is still active when a player returns, there will be a reduced charge time.

this will prevent what i have predicted before. players eager to use an archwing during entire railjack missions will eventually come back to the railjack and cooperate with their team while their archwing is charging. it would also give other players an equal chance to use their own fully charged archwings. it would also prevent archwings themselves from becoming extremely unbalanced during regular archwing missions.

Edited December 22, 2019 by MysticDragonMage

[CopperBezel]

Forcing players to play game modes they don't want to doesn't actually result in them playing those modes. They just stop playing altogether. I don't think your idea would really force anything on players, but that needs saying.

This thread isn't exactly unique - I'm going to link some other recent or active archwing discussions that could be useful context here. Archwing movement feedback thread, archwing movement discussion thread, archwing rebalance feedback thread, my modular archwing discussion thread. I also made a document hashing out the kind of thing I'd like to see from modular archwing myself, with some input from a player who's better at numbers.

I've been playing exclusively as a jumper. I have no interest in pushing buttons and putting out fires, and only teleport back to the ship when there's a catastrophic failure warning or someone on the ship pings for help, and then I deal with the problem and jump back out to defend the railjack or work on mission objectives as needed. I'm very glad that there are people who enjoy flying the big ship and baking sealing foam. It's not something I'd have any interest in doing, but I'm glad that they exist and I can play in missions with them.

The idea of having a crew is to work as a unit and coordinate while doing different things. One of those things is archwing. Right now, two on the ship and two in space is a very good balance for making the railjack not die while getting the mission done with a full squad. And unlike the old archwing mission modes, Archwing 2.0 is actually really fun, even if it's a pity there's only one archwing and two guns.

Regardless of any future archwing buffs, the railjack is struggling for relevance right now, because it has a unique liability (if it dies, we all lose) but no unique battlefield role, so it's entirely possible to leave it hiding in a rock and do the mission without it. It does not need to have better guns and survivability than archwings to have a role, and with the right upgrades, it does already have much higher DPS and crowd clearing ability. One fairly straightforward thing that it could provide but doesn't is actually archwing support - like a passive regen of archwing health and energy in a very small radius, to help us jumpers see it see it as a home base instead of a defense target. Another is giving it a bunker-busting capability, so that some objectives just require it to be there and can't be completed without it in the way that crewships require archwings.

[Sarulas]

Alright, my personal vision for archwings in railjack contains some pretty extensive additions, so I'll do my best to keep it organized. Please forgive any weird formatting, I am using mobile.

--Archwing General Changes--

-Lock on

In the same way that railjack cannons can lock on to targets, I believe archwings should be able to do the same. This would allow for lead indicators to help compensate for the slower projectile speed of archguns, easier tracking of individual targets, and easier deployment of certain abilities archwings posess. Additionally, the reticle for targeting could include indicators for the range of the target, useful for this next proposal.

-Blink

Blink being changed to be a passive for all archwings is a fantastic change in my opinion, and could see some upgrades in functionality now that it is universal. My proposal uses this feature to fix a common complaint about archwing mode in railjack- archmelee. I'd like to suggest that, when within blinking range of an enemy fighter that is currently locked on and within your crosshairs, executing a blink would teleport you directly to that ship. I'm imagining a frame standing/grabbing onto the hull of the enemy fighter while an animation of using your archmeele to attack plays. The player could get several slashes in before being shaken off by the pilot. In an ideal world, if the fighter was killed by the attack, a special finisher would play. This would remove the need for tracking attacks (the currently broken ones) used on normal archwing missions in favor of a more visceral, flashy animation that could deal significant damage at the cost of a relatively shorter range without having to compensate for the extreme speeds of enemy fighters. 

-Maneuvers

Currently, the left, right, and backwards roll maneuvers on archwings are very laggy, don't allow actions during them, and aren't incredibly useful. I'd suggest that archguns should be useable during them and the recovery period afterward is shortened considerably. They should also be able to avoid incoming projectiles if timed right and used in the right direction. If necessary, a small delay could be enforced to prevent them from being spammed, but I'd like to see them be more useful for maneuverability. Additionally, I'd like to see some of the railjack piloting options be translated to archwing to provide more fluid movement options to this mode.

-UI

The last of my universal changes has to do with the UI-- there are many things that are not communicated well to the player. I would add a different targeting reticle (meaning the red diamonds around enemies) to enemy fighters that are currently attacking your archwing as opposed to the railjack. This gives the ability for the pilot to prioritize these targets as well as decide when and how to use evasive actions to avoid them and loose their aggro. I would also add a way to see the directions that locked on projectiles are coming from and their distance so the player can better decide how to use their defensive archwing abilities and/or the direction and timing of a manual dodge. 

-Trade-offs 

To compensate for the power archwings have, they need to be reliant on the railjack so they do not overtake them as the meta way to play. I would remove ways for archwings to regain energy while on their own and tie health and energy regeneration to the ship itself. Additionally, I would add in normal ammo mechanics to archguns and require additional ammo to be gained from the ship as well. Players would have to periodically revisit the ship and allow for a charging time based off of the percentage of materials used before having the full combat abilities of their archwings available again. If a player dies in archwing, they are automatically revived on the ship and have to undergo the full duration of this timer.

-Intresniscs

A separate intrensics tree could be used for archwing to gradually add the new abilities discussed here. The lock on reticle, energy/ammo recharge time, extra maneuvers, the added blink functionality, and more could all be included in this tree. 

More ideas will be posted here soon. Please give me your feedback if any of these sound interesting to you
 

Tl;dr: please let us blink at enemy fighters to physically have our frame grab onto them and hit them with big ass swords DE it would be really cool and perfect with how archwings are designed 

 

Edited December 22, 2019 by Sarulas

[CopperBezel]

I like the current backflip because it's adorable and I could watch my Nova do it all day, but that's not very good gameplay justification. I have to agree that lateral and backward roll could use some attention. As folks have said elsewhere, making lateral roll functional as the old Star Fox standard barrel roll to dash sideways with some DR while maintaining full forward momentum seems like a gimme.

Archmelee targeting is weird, and as best I can tell, it's just bugged for some players. For me, it'll happily move at blink speed if it unexpectedly targets an enemy that's further away than the one I meant to hit in the old archwing missions, and I haven't had any problem sticking to enemy fighters in Railjack just by hitting the melee button repeatedly. I don't see my warframe grabbing onto the hull and hacking, of course, I see the enemy fighter's engine clipping and glitching across my entire screen, but the gameplay result is the same for me. 

As I said in my previous post, I agree that the railjack needs to be the base station for archwings, but what you're suggesting is far too severe. There's already no way to regenerate energy in archwing outside of Kinetic Diversion and Amesha's 4, I.e. taking damage, without dropping a pad, while health is a little ephemeral given that it's linked to the warframe's health and can be restored in any number of ways once out of archwing, which could mean being on the railjack, but could also mean being on an enemy crewship and Life Striking a guy. Because there aren't health or energy orbs in Railjack, or they're rare enough that I've never noticed them in the many hours I've been playing it, a little bubble of energy and health regen around the railjack would go a long way in selling it as home base, so I think we're on the same page there. But I don't see that as a reason to lose Kinetic Diversion, considering that just like Rage / Hunter Adrenaline for warframes, it's often the only way to survive long enough to escape the situation that's causing the health damage it's converting. The innate archwing energy regen can go or stay; it's not really useful or relevant, and the ability to go back to the railjack for a recharge would make it even less useful and somehow even more annoying.  

I don't want to see ammo and ammo economy as a mechanic for archwing - I don't think it would make anything more interesting. Maybe when there are more than two viable guns, it would make sense to decide between a gun that does slightly less damage and one that's going to require more frequent trips back to the railjack. Projectile velocities and making guns other than the Cyngas and Imperator Vandal usable really need to get looked at first.

---

For me, as I've said in the other linked threads, I just really want to see the modulars and any potential reworks of Itzal and Elytron learn from what makes Amesha work in terms of her power set. There's no way that a nerf to Amesha will change that usage percentage - Itzal and Elytron just have nothing to offer, and an Amesha with any two of her abilities removed at random would still be more viable than either. Itzal at least has the right idea, being built around crowd control and survivability, even if very ineffectively. Elytron is everything that could be wrong with an ability set in one place, with no survivability, combined with three abilities that amount to shooting an identical-looking direct-damage missile with a slightly different explosion, but still manage to be slow, clunky, and awkward to control.

Any future archwing needs some degree of DR or healing in its power set for the same reason almost every viable warframe does, and there are plenty of warframe abilities that would easily translate into space for debuff, CC, and support. In that document about my hopes for the modulars, all the abilities are just adjustments of things like Renewal, Will-'o-Wisp, Spores, Shooting Gallery, Ensnare, Cataclysm - you know, there's fifty frames in this game and just about every one of them has an ability that would be a viable asset to an archwing in Railjack with a little more range. Nobody has to be Elytron.

Edited December 22, 2019 by CopperBezel