Surprisingly good railjack experience

[32768]

Yesterday i played railjack and it was surprisingly good. I usually play with randoms and they do whatever they want, this time composition was the following:

1. Pilot (not me)

2. Artilleryman (me)

3-4. Two gunners

All on guns, we just ignored all repairs, etc, no one cared enough to go fix stuff. Suddenly railjack felt like a proper gunship with proper crew working as a single organism. I'm not sure if this is intended way to play railjack, but it was good.

Strictly IMO: all boring stuff like running around with fire extinguisher, making energy and shells should be off-loadable to AI or NPC (or people who do boring stuff should be rewarded very well).

There are couple of problems though, this worked very well on Earth but didn't work so well on Saturn. Problems: 1) not enough ammo for artillery; 2) artillery and battle avionics do not scale.

Pilot, artilleryman and gunmen all should be able to order ammo they need without walking to forge, making one shell at the time and then walking back. Allowing Cy to make ammo in forge when requested could be a good start. If a player can go to forge and press a button to make ammo, i assume a cephalon could do that too. Aimbots on side turrets could be great too, so railjack can be manned with only two people instead of four.

I had the same fully upgraded railjack, MK3 everything, fully upgraded mods in fully upgraded slots. Battle avionics and artillery just didn't work in further missions. I think it should be possible to scale battle avionics and artillery somehow, e.g. from average MK-factor. If everything in railjack is MK3 - just buff artillery until it works. Or since reactor can be upgraded, let us to install same mod several times and stack its buff. Whatever works really. For now it just doesn't work at all: i install missiles volley (or how it is called), it works on Earth, then it's getting worse on Saturn, then it stops working in Veil. I've also spent like 2k space endo on bad mod by they way, not quite fun.

Also, if i join railjack mission without crew, then, ideally, "teamwerk" objectives wouldn't generate. It's very annoying to run back and forth because there is no one outside to shoot once at generator or whatever. I understand everything about how it is designed for away and railjack teams to work together, it's just very annoying. Thank you for understanding.

I'm not mentioning straight bugs like artillery failing to hit because of dust particle between railjack and crewship, it is probably already reported by someone else, right?

I honestly don't think railjack is broken beyond repair, it's pretty cool experience when it works, it just need a lot of fixes. Good luck.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Honestly, if you're sitting on Artillery, you should also be the person doing the engineer task, 'cause at most you're gonna fire the gun 6 times over the course of the mission (assuming you have the max rank Zekti Forward Artillery avionic and a Rhino to buff the gun's damage).

1 Pilot, 2 gunners, 1 Eng/Float. Pretty nice to have number 4 out on an Amesha slowing up fighters, too.

[gluih]

I personally don't mind repairing and using the forge, as long as I'm actually busy. I think it makes sense, that you have to do that. It's also really what teamwork in railjack is about. That said, I think with these supportive roles, it is always difficult to give the players a way to show off their skill. Sometimes a bad support or engineer in this case is just as good as a really good one and in other cases it's just matter of it being noticeable. In railjack it is actually pretty difficult to actually screw up the engineering part, so if I was to do that on a regular basis, it would require some additional challenge.

When it comes to stuff not working in veil anymore, I don't think there is a straight forward fix, outside of the artillery cannon. Imo at least the crewships we have right now should be destroyed by being hit with the artillery, otherwise it's just easier to take the archwing cannon. Maybe crewships are supposed to be destroyed that way, but then we need other targets for the artillery. For stuff like particle ram and seeker volley, I don't just scaling them up is a good idea. Void hole actually works pretty well. You can group stuff up and then shoot it with the tycho seeker and everything just dies. There is also the tether thing to slow enemies down and I think it makes sense, that in higher levels you have to focus more on CC. Otherwise the turrets just become pretty useless. There is also this tactical avionic, that buffs turret damage for a short time, maybe that could affect battle avionics as well.

Overall I don't think you should be surprised when you are having fun in there. When you have a well equipped railjack, it's really only the bugs, that are a problem. Objectives are going to improve over time, so hopefully we don't have to kill 90 fighters and 6 crewships every time. I do hope they keep it team focused for the most part.

[32768]

42 minutes ago, gluih said:

I think it makes sense, that you have to do that. It's also really what teamwork in railjack is about. That said, I think with these supportive roles, it is always difficult to give the players a way to show off their skill. Sometimes a bad support or engineer in this case is just as good as a really good one and in other cases it's just matter of it being noticeable. In railjack it is actually pretty difficult to actually screw up the engineering part, so if I was to do that on a regular basis, it would require some additional challenge.

Well, usually i'm the one doing piloting, it just happened that someone else took pilot seat, side turrets were busy too, so i jumped into artillery and it worked out pretty good, rather fantastic i would say. We didn't even had to leave railjack until we had to kill the boss. Everyone were in their places doing their best, this was The Battleship. It really worked great when everyone was doing what they wanted to do.

Also when i play with randoms, ship is usually always broken. I can't be bothered with repairs, other people can't be bothered too, so we're finishing mission with like four ruptures and whoever want intrinsics fix them afterwards, or don't. I only upgraded railjack health because even when ship has 3-4 ruptures it still has like 2k health and still viable.

I generally don't feel like making people go and do stuff they don't want to do. It's a video game, not a job. Maybe a person came to Warframe to relax after the job, who knows. If i had to recruit "an engineer" in recruting chat specifically to do repairs instead of playing the game the way they want to play, this would make railjack less attractive for me personally in the first place.

[gluih]

5 minutes ago, 32768 said:

Well, usually i'm the one doing piloting, it just happened that someone else took pilot seat, side turrets were busy too, so i jumped into artillery and it worked out pretty good, rather fantastic i would say. We didn't even had to leave railjack until we had to kill the boss. Everyone were in their places doing their best, this was The Battleship. It really worked great when everyone was doing what they wanted to do.

Also when i play with randoms, ship is usually always broken. I can't be bothered with repairs, other people can't be bothered too, so we're finishing mission with like four ruptures and whoever want intrinsics fix them afterwards, or don't. I only upgraded railjack health because even when ship has 3-4 ruptures it still has like 2k health and still viable.

I generally don't feel like making people go and do stuff they don't want to do. It's a video game, not a job. Maybe a person came to Warframe to relax after the job, who knows. If i had to recruit "an engineer" in recruting chat specifically to do repairs instead of playing the game the way they want to play, this would make railjack less attractive for me personally in the first place.

I used to play a different mmo and when I started there I was mostly playing a healer. Mostly people don't enjoy playing healers, but at least at that time there was some skill to playing the role. You had to to be efficient with when and where you used your heals, so you didn't waste a cooldown when you needed it a few seconds later and you didn't want to waste all your mana. Warframe in general has nothing like that and the engineering has the same problem. You just go where you have to repair something and do it and the only time you really have to "hurry" is when you have a minute to prevent the mission failure.

I think there are enough people like me, who are fine with doing repairs in between other stuff, but I would really like more room to make decisions. Give me room to actually fail at that job.
1. You could make objectives, that depend on the engineer on the ship. Maybe have mobile defense, where the ground team has to defend while someone on the ship has to do a hacking mini-game to make the timer keep going.
2. Balancing different tasks can be really engaging, when there is enough to do. Right now there simply aren't enough things to balance.