New difficulty scaling in railjack

[gluih]

Right now enemies in railjack missions seem much stronger than in the rest of the game. This is true for the fighters in space and the enemies on the ground. It can take quite long to kill them and they deal a lot more damage than in the rest of the game.

I would like to draw your attention to 2 situations, where the scaling actually feels appropriate.

1. Using vidar cryophon mkIII, it takes ~3 shots or 1 crit to kill a close range fighter in the veil. This is with a lavan hyperstrike (+76% damage) and ~50% damge bonus on the weapon itself. The crit chance is ~40%.
There is some variation here. Some nodes might have higher level enemies, where you are going to deal less damage. There is room to add additional avionics for more crit and damage. This doesn't include temporary buffs. You can argue when the fall off should start and how much max range the weapons should have.
But in general this feels like a good benchmark to me, that the rest of the railjack cannons and archwing weapons could be balanced around alongside the enemy scaling.

2. I've been using wukong a lot in railjack missions. Having between 1.6k and 1.9k health with ~800-900 armor + temporary buffs from arcane guardian and sometimes defy + adaptation means, that I can barely finish hacking the console in a crewship when there are a lot of enemies around, without the passive activating. Most of the time I'm not actually using defy.
There are also a lot of other factors to keep in mind here. Wukong has more healing than he really needs. His base stats are very high, so most frames won't feel the same. It depends on how much time you have. In general warframe is very hectic and that favors tanky frames. I'm not really using any CC there. I don't think CC should be a big factor here.
In general, I think a good goal would be to have the most tanky warframe not have more than twice the effective hp of the least tanky warframe. Otherwise you are quickly running into a situation, where some frames can just ignore everything around them, while others are getting one-shot constantly. There could be some exceptions. Ivara and Loki are invisible almost all of the time anyway, so they don't need that high hp. Rhino with his iron skin is in a very interesting situation, but he seems fine in most higher level content and still has to recast occasionally in lower levels as well. You might also have some short term buffs (~20 seconds after putting in mods), that make frames more tanky.

 

Of course a lot of the numbers aren't that great.
Enemies on the ground are way too tanky, so I pretty much only use melee and very specific weapons with riven mods. And before someone starts complaining about riven RNG, they aren't for meta weapons. There are a ton of underused weapons with great disposition out there. You can just get a bunch of rivens and once you have one for a weapon, that you like, you roll it a few times until you have ok stats and make a build with it. Sooner or later you are going to get some insane crit stats with not too bad downsides. But still, the only good way to kill most of the railjack enemies is to use your melee weapons, because those are way too powerful compared to the rest of your arsenal. For a benchmark I would again look at how shotguns, snipers and bows deal with endgame enemies and adjust other weapons, so they are on a similar power level. Stronger enemies like heavy gunners and bombards shouldn't take more than 2-3 shots (depending on the specific weapon). No non-boss enemy should survive a tigris prime to the face. And of course, if we were to actually get the enemies scaled in that way, a lot the weapons would probably need adjustments or still feel too weak.
Most warframes die too quickly.
Archwings take too much damage. I think it should be dangerous to leave the railjack, but archwings should also heal while they are not being used. It might not be archwings taking too much damage in general and just be the crewships, which are going to be changed.
The forward artillery doesn't deal enough damage to crewships and even when it does, you have to be careful not to hit the engines. When you compare the effort it takes to destroy a crewship by boarding it vs. using the artillery, boarding is the much better option. This could be addressed by adding more enemy types in the future, but it seems like crewships should just take 1 shot from the artillery. Even if there were avionics, that could buff the artillery enough, it would barely be worth it.
The healing fields are just super annoying.
The projectile speed in space is too low for most weapons.
The railjack should be more effective at destroying fighters. We can argue about this one, but we might actually be in a good situation here.

 

I'm curious to know what other players think about this topic. What do you think the game is like at the moment and where would you like it to be? Which benchmarks can you come up with, that could help someone form a good opinion?

[(NSW)aradar]

im just curious if the grineer are this strong in space why haven't they taken over the entire galaxy already they seem damn unstoppable in space💩😭😭💩

[UUDDLRLRBA_START]

On 2020-01-02 at 3:23 AM, gluih said:

Right now enemies in railjack missions seem much stronger than in the rest of the game. This is true for the fighters in space and the enemies on the ground. It can take quite long to kill them and they deal a lot more damage than in the rest of the game.

The forward artillery doesn't deal enough damage to crewships and even when it does, you have to be careful not to hit the engines. When you compare the effort it takes to destroy a crewship by boarding it vs. using the artillery, boarding is the much better option. This could be addressed by adding more enemy types in the future, but it seems like crewships should just take 1 shot from the artillery. Even if there were avionics, that could buff the artillery enough, it would barely be worth it.

I'm curious to know what other players think about this topic. What do you think the game is like at the moment and where would you like it to be? Which benchmarks can you come up with, that could help someone form a good opinion?

I de-equipped the Forward Artillery avionic (I only have the one with 4 Ranks) to make room for a speed Avionic, and with a Carcinnox stripping the armor off of a Crewship, I can one-shot a Veil Proxima crewship without a problem. I just aim for the nose of the ship.

[gluih]

8 hours ago, UUDDLRLRBA_START said:

I de-equipped the Forward Artillery avionic (I only have the one with 4 Ranks) to make room for a speed Avionic, and with a Carcinnox stripping the armor off of a Crewship, I can one-shot a Veil Proxima crewship without a problem. I just aim for the nose of the ship.

Since the latest patch it should even be easier to hit a crewship properly.

I do wonder what actually affects how much damage you deal. Is it just status chance? Do you have to be close? Does destroying the engines on a crewship do anything other than making the immobile?
Flying behind a crewship, destroying the engines and the blowing them up usually works fine, but by that time you could probably also board them and blow them up that way. And when you are using the slingshot you have the advantage, that you can take care of a crewship while your railjack is pretty far away.

How effective the artillery is, also depends on how your team is working together. It is going to be very different in solo mode, public missions and playing with a squad, that is properly communicating.

[UUDDLRLRBA_START]

On 2020-02-10 at 5:00 AM, gluih said:

Since the latest patch it should even be easier to hit a crewship properly.

I do wonder what actually affects how much damage you deal. Is it just status chance? Do you have to be close? Does destroying the engines on a crewship do anything other than making the immobile?
Flying behind a crewship, destroying the engines and the blowing them up usually works fine, but by that time you could probably also board them and blow them up that way. And when you are using the slingshot you have the advantage, that you can take care of a crewship while your railjack is pretty far away.

How effective the artillery is, also depends on how your team is working together. It is going to be very different in solo mode, public missions and playing with a squad, that is properly communicating.

After I disable the Crewship, I just maneuver close enough that the cockpit is literally touching the Crewship — I'm guessing there is falloff in damage, but at ranges of 50 m or less, I doubt there is much falloff.

Without any Forward Artillery avionic, I've managed to achieve 40k-50K damage (red crit) on a crewship that's been Carcinnox-hosed.at a 50 m range. More than enough to kill it.