@DE the nerf Warframe NEEDS, but players don't want!

[Teridax68]

12 hours ago, Exodess said:

The problem with Warframe is infinite scaling -- there are no ceilings to build under, and this is a BIG problem. The issue is most evident with infinite scaling on enemies, and thereby drives that same approach for players.

I can very much agree with this -- the game implements difficulty by incrementing the enemy's stats until they become impossible to properly fight against, and that just hasn't really worked out. While enemies could stand to last for more than a fraction of a second, it doesn't feel right when they turn into bullet sponges, as that ends up making combat more tedious than challenging (in fact, it doesn't make it challenging at all, as enemies tend to pose little real threat). Similarly, when enemies have their damage scale, due to how that damage is administered, i.e. through often random hits and misses (many enemy weapons are hitscan), all that means is that it becomes impossible to consistently play a squishy warframe, because they're at risk of getting randomly obliterated, and so players instead go for frames with massive health pools and/or 90%+ damage reduction steroids. Making enemies eventually stronger than us functionally doesn't provide healthy gameplay and is a major detriment to diversity of play, to say nothing of how little it sense it makes in a game that tries to sell us this power fantasy where we're supposed to be the most powerful thing in the room.

We can talk about limiting enemy scaling, and I'd agree that would improve matters significantly, but I think in an ideal environment enemies should probably not scale at all, and we should instead have all of our power balanced around a fixed, consistent benchmark. We wouldn't need frames to kill enemies through walls or become immortal in order for them to be able to deal with enemies, and in fact it might even be possible to achieve some finer degree of balancing, something that's never been possible so far due to how many different variable factors exist. Instead of implementing difficulty through enemy stat scaling, DE should also look to other ways, such as by having more complex enemy units, or tighter and more difficult mission conditions (e.g. less health on a defense objective, faster life support drain in survival, etc.).

Edited February 1, 2020 by Teridax68

[(PSN)UltraKardas]

7 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I can very much agree with this -- the game implements difficulty by incrementing the enemy's stats until they become impossible to properly fight against, and that just hasn't really worked out.

The disconnect here is that this only rings true where the missions can last forever. And when that difficulty is only applied to a select level of missions, saying it hasn't worked out isn't completely true.

And it's only a problem when you have multiple enemies at this level. Otherwise 98% of the games other content doesn't have infinite scaling. The star chart certainly doesn't. The raids and world bosses don't have this problem. 

And those examples suffer from being trivialized. If you change things to be percentage based, you get problems like destiny where it rarely feels you ever truly get stronger unless you get something so strong it gets nerfed into oblivion. 

You can cap the scaling of enemy armor, but that makes increasing difficulty past that point infinitely more complicated. What do you do from there to add a challenge? There's a hard limit to how many enemies you spawn, or conditions you can create without getting annoying. They already have units that reduce damage and warframe powers by 90%. You already have units that protect units around them from powers and damage. You already have units that become invulnerable and just become annoying. 

Infinite scaling isn't something that ever bother me, and I'm the type of person that does survival runs for fun. I've killed the two grineer bosses that glitched out to be level 9,999 with all the armor and health that came with it. I don't understand your issue with it, when a game has a challenge to always meet you. The only contender to an unstoppable force is an immovable object. When you are a bullet sponge yourself, you are inevitably going to come face to face with an opposing bullet sponge. (How many AI would consider you a bullet sponge after spending a galleon's worth of ammo after trying to kill you for the 3rd hour in a row?)

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

The disconnect here is that this only rings true where the missions can last forever. And when that difficulty is only applied to a select level of missions, saying it hasn't worked out isn't completely true.

And it's only a problem when you have multiple enemies at this level. Otherwise 98% of the games other content doesn't have infinite scaling. The star chart certainly doesn't. The raids and world bosses don't have this problem. 

But I'm not talking about infinite scaling, I'm talking about scaling in general. Railjack enemies don't scale infinitely, for example, but at higher levels are still notorious bullet sponges that deal too much damage to our Archwings. The point is that we inevitably reach a threshold with enemy scaling past which gameplay breaks down completely.

1 hour ago, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

And those examples suffer from being trivialized. If you change things to be percentage based, you get problems like destiny where it rarely feels you ever truly get stronger unless you get something so strong it gets nerfed into oblivion.

Okay, and the question of getting stronger is a separate one entirely, but what I'm pointing out as well is that enemies are trivial because their lower levels are also fundamentally out of sync with our own power, at least with the power we can reach. The fact that our abilities are frequently broken also means we can trivialize even high-level enemies too, in a manner that scaling doesn't really address all that well.

1 hour ago, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

You can cap the scaling of enemy armor, but that makes increasing difficulty past that point infinitely more complicated. What do you do from there to add a challenge? There's a hard limit to how many enemies you spawn, or conditions you can create without getting annoying. They already have units that reduce damage and warframe powers by 90%. You already have units that protect units around them from powers and damage. You already have units that become invulnerable and just become annoying. 

That is literally my point. Enemy scaling only goes so far, so we need to look for other ways of altering our difficulty. As said above, more difficult mission conditions, and modifiers to our missions to make them tougher, would likely work a lot better towards that purpose.

1 hour ago, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Infinite scaling isn't something that ever bother me, and I'm the type of person that does survival runs for fun. I've killed the two grineer bosses that glitched out to be level 9,999 with all the armor and health that came with it. I don't understand your issue with it, when a game has a challenge to always meet you. The only contender to an unstoppable force is an immovable object. When you are a bullet sponge yourself, you are inevitably going to come face to face with an opposing bullet sponge. (How many AI would consider you a bullet sponge after spending a galleon's worth of ammo after trying to kill you for the 3rd hour in a row?)

Okay, and more power to you, but what I'm pointing out is that this is clearly not something everyone considers fun, or even most players. Most players don't enjoy dealing with hyper-bullet sponges, as the Wolf of Saturn Six showed in particular, and many players would like to pick frames that don't rely on cheese to be able to have a decent chance at surviving "challenging" content. The fact that the only thing these high levels push us to do is cheese the game also makes the very notion of "challenge" in relation to it eminently questionable. It's not a particularly amazing demonstration of skill to perma-stun an enemy, kill crowds of opponents before they can even see you, or build in such a way that it becomes practically impossible to die, yet ultimately that is what our greatest expressions of "skill" currently look like.

[CopperBezel]

Gah, ninja'd on part of this and didn't get a notification.

1 hour ago, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Infinite scaling isn't something that ever bother me, and I'm the type of person that does survival runs for fun. I've killed the two grineer bosses that glitched out to be level 9,999 with all the armor and health that came with it. I don't understand your issue with it, when a game has a challenge to always meet you. The only contender to an unstoppable force is an immovable object. When you are a bullet sponge yourself, you are inevitably going to come face to face with an opposing bullet sponge. (How many AI would consider you a bullet sponge after spending a galleon's worth of ammo after trying to kill you for the 3rd hour in a row?)

And meanwhile, the scaling does give us the classic RPG difficulty thermostat. How tough do I need to be for this area? Well, if I'm dying a lot, I probably need to be tougher, and had better go grind for something. It makes dedication an alternative to skill. Love it or hate it, that's a mechanism that makes having a broad audience and playerbase possible. 

But yeah, the "infinite" part of "infinite scaling" is of questionably direct relevance. New content in the game stops at level 110, with no benefit to pushing past this in arbies or other endless. Before liches, it really stopped at level 100; new high-level content follows that curve along as it gets tacked onto the end, just a little bit at a time, to keep up with our power creep. 

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

Making enemies eventually stronger than us functionally doesn't provide healthy gameplay and is a major detriment to diversity of play, to say nothing of how little it sense it makes in a game that tries to sell us this power fantasy where we're supposed to be the most powerful thing in the room.

I agree generally, but in terms of raw durability and possibly DPS, the things that enemies directly scale with, though, that is the nature of the power fantasy being sold and what the game's visually trying to tell us. The tagline is still about ninjas, not gods. So it makes sense that a Nox has a longer TTK than we do and that we have to compensate through abilities that may or may not be of the generic regenerative or damage-mitigating varieties. Certainly there are exceptions - we have Inaros right now as an alternative to thinking much about casting - but the median frame should certainly be the most powerful thing in the room, not necessarily the toughest.

And I do still think that this curve of enemy strength is exactly as thematically hazardous at the opposite end of the curve, when we're using our fully tooled up frames to fight level 20 enemies while farming something and these same enemy types can't consistently offer any kind of threat. They're both equally reminders of how artificial the scaling is and that we don't really have a sense of just how godlike we really expect our warframes to be. 

But I do agree - if we imagine the scenario like arbitrations where we're pushing into absurdly high levels of content, and ask, what's the thing that's going to make this mission become impossible if it goes on long enough, it should probably be the advance of external conditions rather than the strength of individual enemies. 

I will say that this is also part of why I don't dislike the effects of efficiency and range on the Warframe power curve by content level / MR / whatever proxy you want to use for a player's general level of kit despite, disliking the extent to which nukers make things too easy. Things that don't directly affect the toughness of enemy you can expect to fight, but do change how much map space you can command or how frequently you can toss out a costly casting combo, increase the level of situational, mechanical difficulty your frame can actually deal with. The extreme of this (the point at which this kind of scaling breaks) is sortie-3 excavations, where you have a defense target with fixed health that doesn't scale and a vast number of enemies pouring in for a chance to take it down in a few hits. It's not the enemy durability that matters, it's whether any of them get close enough to make a shot.

1 hour ago, keikogi said:

Warframe has what I would call survival scars. Warframe did not have the time to properly think out its damage , progression and enemy desing. Neither at had enought time to properly desing warframes and enemies. Warframe always had to move forward regardeless of was behind. 

How to fix this mess. The same way I fix every mess. One step at time.

First you adreess enemy desing creating strong enemy units that have both unique strengths and weaknesses. Make some medix unit capable of purging cc but has a sound cue and small delay on the purge. Make a unit the carries a hufe frontal shield that impedes aoe damage to come through , but allow the player to just kick down the shield with " gale kick " or jist jump up and kill the shield carrier or just flank the ahield carrier since a unite with frontal damage resistance should have limited turn rate.

Them you would go foward and try to change the damafe system. DE is slowly doing this one ( fire damage rework and possible armor scaling curve ajustment ). But I have feeling they are nkt willing to dive deep enought.  A bit of a side point but weapon switch speed is a big culprit in the lack of weapon diversity because your build can't have a situational weakness because realistically speaking you can switch weapons mid combat becaise in warframe switching weapons reduces your brust Dps. 

After all that , you would begin to adress harder and more paintfull topics such as moding , energy economy and warframe desing. The worse part about these is because you can't really make a big change on 1 without making big changes on ther other two as well.

Yeah, this looks like the way to do it to me. We need more dynamics at play in combat that can't be resolved by raw DPS. The extreme opposite of this is Onslaught, where enemies start to feel like affinity containers we just have to break very quickly and efficiently to keep up; gameplay that feels exactly unlike Onslaught does now, where enemies demand interaction and have lots of unique mechanics that interplay interestingly with abilities, really ought to be the goal.

And it's clear that your third phase is where the folks in this thread would start to have a lot of disagreement on what's reasonable and where the norm for Warframe ought to be, not least because how much the gameplay should work like a proper shooter vs. a magic beat-'em-up is definitely in contention here, and I completely agree that they're all really one question. 

 

Edited February 1, 2020 by CopperBezel

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

On 2020-01-26 at 10:41 AM, zephyr_infinity said:

fun is subjective, *you* might have more fun with changes like this but that's not necessarily true for everyone or even the majority. Any sort of change like this has to be very slowly rolled out and closely monitored to ensure it doesn't cause massive player drop off. The issue being that all of the games systems based around combat are precariously balanced on a knife tip altering any one to any great degree can send the whole game crashing down. Are Nuke frames really a problem? I don't really feel that they are, the games style and systems all push that play style and making things less efficient can make the game significantly less fun for large parts of the population.

Thats a very, very good point!!!

 

Except for nuking. I think nuking is fine its spam nuking that i h8.

Edited February 1, 2020 by (PS4)IIFrost_GhostII

[(PSN)UltraKardas]

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

for example, but at higher levels are still notorious bullet sponges that deal too much damage to our Archwings. 

That's just rail jack being busted honestly. The enemy ships don't go off the normal damage calculation, and aren't scaled for archwing. The damage is balanced around your rail jack. The status procs and elements are completely different and I'm pretty sure Railjack enemies and system will be overhauled. 

 

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But I'm not talking about infinite scaling, I'm talking about scaling in general. The point is that we inevitably reach a threshold with enemy scaling past which gameplay breaks down completely.

Agree to disagree. Cause Enemies is any non survival mission hardly scale. Until there is a mission node that stats players off with corrupted enemies at level 140+ the scaling is a non issue. 
It takes enemies to be level 90+ or above for me to not one shot most of them with my builds. 

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Okay, and the question of getting stronger is a separate one entirely, but what I'm pointing out as well is that enemies are trivial because their lower levels are also fundamentally out of sync with our own power, at least with the power we can reach. The fact that our abilities are frequently broken also means we can trivialize even high-level enemies too, in a manner that scaling doesn't really address all that well.

Except that it goes beyond just ability scaling. Weapon procs scale infinitely. Example A being how Viral scales infinitely. Corrosive and heat procs strip armor. Even some of the crit weapons are so ridiculous that until you hit level 140 level or corrupted heavy gunners that armor scaling doesn't matter. 

Even better still, certain warframe abilities scale infinitely. Octavia and Revenant come to mind. (Mallet does 2.5x the damage whatever enemies pump into it. This gets buffed by her ult. Their damage scales infinitely which makes Octavia skill infinitely) Friendly fire in the simulcrum will show you what kind of ridiculous numbers you can get by shooting your own mallet. 

If high level enemies can be trivialized, the hole point of scaling becomes a non issue. High armor functions as intended so high level enemies aren't one shotted and provide something of a challenge to overcome. 

 

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

That is literally my point. Enemy scaling only goes so far, so we need to look for other ways of altering our difficulty. As said above, more difficult mission conditions, and modifiers to our missions to make them tougher, would likely work a lot better towards that purpose.

Hence why arbitrations, kava flood, and the like came out. They start at high levels, with enemies offering everything from complete immunity to enemies that have to killed in special ways. 

Spawning more enemies will inevitably cause technical problems, while more enemies like maniacs or arbitration drones will just get on players nerves after awhile or have them switch to weapon based warframes -Chroma. 

Kuva Lichs were the newest attempt at difficulty with adding an rng factor to it, needing the condition that you kill them with the right mod order, but other then annoying players with forcing them to take down a shield generator or other gimmick, the other modifiers are more likely to annoy players then anything else. (Remember how eximus units were proposed to only take damage by shooting certain weak points? Remember how well that was received? 

For the time being, scaling makes the most sense both in concept and practice for enemy difficulty. Lower gear and more casual players might struggle, but its fully possible to kill any level enemy regardless of conditions other then complete and utter damage immunity. I still think DE should explore new ideas, but with the power afforded by rivens, corrupted mods, warframe powers and so on? The scaling can be ignored in any mission where you aren't required to kill things. (Spy, interception, rescue, mobile defense, etc) just through CC alone. 

 

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Okay, and more power to you, but what I'm pointing out is that this is clearly not something everyone considers fun, or even most players. Most players don't enjoy dealing with hyper-bullet sponges, as the Wolf of Saturn Six showed in particular, and many players would like to pick frames that don't rely on cheese to be able to have a decent chance at surviving "challenging" content.

Except that the Wolf of Saturn Six was the only assassin type boss that wasn't a complete and utter joke. Every version of the stalker dies nameless, I have so many Brakk parts that I could literally give out 7-8 complete sets, and Zanuka is just a meme. If wolf wasn't immune to warframe debuffs he wouldn't be a threat. He was made to be a challenge, hence he was invulnerable to everything that removes the challenge from the game. 

If you don't like that he was a bullet sponge? That has more to do with him not being effected by status effects, or stuff like Nova's slow that would trivialize him no matter how he scaled. You can toss me and a level 9,999 of him in an arena, and if I could use status effects and debuffs? I'd win every time. 

The "Challenging" content all revolves around enemies like Eidolons who are fully immune to warframe debuffs, or simply scale enough to be a challenge. Eidolons, Orb mothers and Wolf fall into both. Color me surprised that they seem to favor the same strategy to defeat. 
 

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

The fact that the only thing these high levels push us to do is cheese the game also makes the very notion of "challenge" in relation to it eminently questionable. It's not a particularly amazing demonstration of skill to perma-stun an enemy, kill crowds of opponents before they can even see you, or build in such a way that it becomes practically impossible to die, yet ultimately that is what our greatest expressions of "skill" currently look like.

I laugh at your notion of skill. You want skill? Go become the best Lunaro player or enter conclave with nothing but a kraken. 

This is a PvE game with so many different factors that detach themselves from the realm of skill. So many frames and abilities exist that can be used to dispatch enemies with your eyes closed, that the pursuing "skill" in this game is laughable. 

The closest they got to skill was when they introduced raids, that forced you to do things in a certain amount of time or otherwise straight killed you completely. 

It wasn't the enemies that made it hard, but the insta death mechanics that enemies would make difficult by adding pressure to the players. 
 

Edited February 1, 2020 by (PS4)UltraKardas

[CopperBezel]

I want to believe that whenever anyone is complaining about damage or armor scaling, they mean both the enemy side and the player side. I.e., armor scaling and player DPS scaling are one entity, because they are scaled against each other. The enemy levels we're expected to take on are normalized against what our gear is able to do. Nerfing enemy armor scaling would require nerfing player damage output. Personally, I'd make the first step just rejiggering enemy health scaling in general so that armor scales, if at all, linearly rather than exponentially, but health scales much more sharply than it does now specifically for armored units. All of that subject to change later if level scaling or damage output in general gets flattened somewhat.

Edited February 1, 2020 by CopperBezel

[selig_fay]

I may say something stupid, but what if DE nerf EHP all nuckers. I feel like nuckers should be very weak on defense. I feel that if a random hit kills them, their popularity will plummet.

[(PSN)UltraKardas]

26 minutes ago, zhellon said:

I may say something stupid, but what if DE nerf EHP all nuckers. I feel like nuckers should be very weak on defense. I feel that if a random hit kills them, their popularity will plummet.

and how does that make the game more fun exactly? Seems like you just want to make people mad and ruin a good amount of frames.

[CopperBezel]

Yeah, it's similar to self-damage on AoE weapons. Like, you can punish players for using the thing, which might reduce the prevalence, great, and when they're around they'll go down a lot and need a revive. But since it's random, it's not a skill challenge that the player in question has to master, and not only does it not actually reduce what that weapon or frame is capable of doing, it selectively has less effect the lower the content level. That last part would be true of nerfing nukers' raw damage, but at least that wouldn't have the other problems.

I think nukers just need to actually work like nukers. Like @(PS4)IIFrost_GhostII said, make it something you can't reasonably spam, has to be built up, has situational or other requirements, etc. like nukers in any other game context. Energy costs aren't enough to ensure that since one-off casting costs for ults are never more than four times a basic attack, but Ember-style meters and things can.

Edited February 1, 2020 by CopperBezel

[George_PPS]

Are you out of your mind? Or WHICH OTHER DEVELOPER ARE YOU WORKING FOR TO DESTROY WARFRAME? 

The proposed nerfs are logical ON PAPER like all nerfs but they will elicit a new round of extreme angry and force players to leave and never come back. Players work HARD to study and tweak and min-max their builds over many hours. If such ideas are actually implemented, you will see TONS of players leaving! 

Please stop these non-sense!

[selig_fay]

10 минут назад, (PS4)UltraKardas сказал:

and how does that make the game more fun exactly? Seems like you just want to make people mad and ruin a good amount of frames.

Kill before the enemy kills you. Nuckers will become more demanding in their ability to avoid damage. Supports like nezha for DR or Wisp for HP will become more popular for nuckers, which encourages team play more.

I am a simple person, I balance everything according to the Trinity system (tank, support, DPS). Saryn has a lot of DPS? So she must be bad at everything else.

[(PSN)UltraKardas]

Just now, zhellon said:

Kill before the enemy kills you. Nuckers will become more demanding in their ability to avoid damage. Supports like nezha for DR or Wisp for HP will become more popular for nuckers, which encourages team play more.

I am a simple person, I balance everything according to the Trinity system (tank, support, DPS). Saryn has a lot of DPS? So she must be bad at everything else.

I asked how it makes it more fun. Nukers already want a limbo so they can stay in the void and cast abilities. 

Your proposal isn't fun nor is it balance. Most frames fit into two roles of your "trinity system". it just doesn't work for warframe. 

[George_PPS]

52 minutes ago, zhellon said:

I may say something stupid, but what if DE nerf EHP all nuckers. I feel like nuckers should be very weak on defense. I feel that if a random hit kills them, their popularity will plummet.

And players who spent a lot of time and efforts to build these Warframes will be really mad and leave the game. 

[George_PPS]

On 2020-01-26 at 7:42 AM, EDM774 said:

Kill the power fantasy feel of a power fantasy game? Great logic 10/10
 

I came to play warframe to be an all powerful space ninja that wipes the floor with anything it sees. If you want balance and fair play go play conclave LMAO

DE has worked really hard to nerf the signature character of the game - power fantasy - over the last 20 months or so. That’s exactly why players left and caused the game to lose its appeal since late 2018.

DE should have and could have used the time to build new contents and new Quests and another great open-world like 2017 and 2018. Instead, Updates of the past 20 months were mostly about nerfs and fun-killing adjustments. This design mentality needs to stop.

I seriously start to believe that there is some game developer hiring people to join Warframe and asking all these d**n nerfs in the PvE game. 

[CopperBezel]

23 minutes ago, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Your proposal isn't fun nor is it balance. Most frames fit into two roles of your "trinity system". it just doesn't work for warframe. 

Particularly since it's just expected that all frames will be playable in solo context, which means that all "support" frames tend to have buffs that are good enough to be useful if they're themselves the only ones using them. Like, Wisp isn't the best frame you could possibly solo with, but she's certainly not punished for it. And in particular, healers are inherently tanks because that's just how Warframe abilities work.

[(PSN)UltraKardas]

15 minutes ago, George_PPS said:

DE has worked really hard to nerf the signature character of the game - power fantasy - over the last 20 months or so.

Except not. 

Kuva weapons that add to the power fantasy say hi. Rivens say hi. Amalgam mods say hi. The entire melee rework to make them better weapons say hello. 

[George_PPS]

1 minute ago, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Except not. 

Kuva weapons that add to the power fantasy say hi. Rivens say hi. Amalgam mods say hi. The entire melee rework to make them better weapons say hello. 

The max potential of Kuva weapons dont stand out. Rivens are constantly nerfed especially for those players loved and used the most The melee rework is half baked by nerfing the max range and also overall decreased damage for meta. It simply just isn’s fun as before. 

[Mu_Gera]

Most base values on damage abilities are not good enough to keep up with even high level infested, 1000 damage is like the bare minimum amount for some abilities to do actual damage to high level infested with current mods and practically only the very newly reworked frame and newer frames have abilities that can do that much damage. The only other way to make them decent would be to add the enemy level scaling that grendel and vauban have.

And you can test this by simulacrum, high level non grineer missions with no strength mods on, and the most obvious being the grendel part missions where the enemies aren't even high level.

[selig_fay]

28 минут назад, (PS4)UltraKardas сказал:

I asked how it makes it more fun. Nukers already want a limbo so they can stay in the void and cast abilities.

I don't know. I just suggested it.

The warframe has never been particularly complex and I don't understand why people want nerf stuff. It is better that the developers would have made a smarter AI (I'm playing warhammer vermintaite 2 now and there mobs have a very good AI). And on account of saryn, just make the spores spread only in the line of sight of the mob. Then mobs can simply be afraid of an infected mob. Same with mesa, mobs must have tactics against its ability, not just rush and die. Most of the CC abilities, like Bastille, can also be changed so that mobs are afraid to enter them and create some tactics. It's a lot of work, but it will make everything more fun.

[IIDMOII]

I sort of disagree. The game plays more like an arpg than strictly a shooter imo.

I think they should focus more on overwhelming the player with numbers rather than making individual enemies more spongey. 

When you're overwhelmed, you have to make decisions on the fly and things get intense as your squads organization falls apart. 

Very little decision making goes into killing sponges. You shoot or you don't.

I've never once been upset about balance when playing Diablo or path of exile and clearing the screen with a single ability. I don't see why it has to be any different here simply because it's a 3rd person perspective.

I do agree things are too easy but i hope they dont swing so hard it turns into hp bar hell. 

 

Edited February 1, 2020 by IIDMOII

[(PSN)UltraKardas]

37 minutes ago, George_PPS said:

The max potential of Kuva weapons dont stand out. Rivens are constantly nerfed especially for those players loved and used the most The melee rework is half baked by nerfing the max range and also overall decreased damage for meta. It simply just isn’s fun as before. 

Except like half the Kuva weapons are amazing. My kuva braak certainly does with the elemental bonus. 100% crit chance, and 91% status chance. Literally my favorite and probably strongest secondary weapon. 

You don't think Melee is as fun, but it's literally a straight upgrade with how blocking works, or how power attacks now work.

[CopperBezel]

Also a straight up upgrade to fun, considering the stance changes and the fact that you don't have to have 100 hits before your weapon starts dealing damage.

18 minutes ago, zhellon said:

I don't know. I just suggested it.

The warframe has never been particularly complex and I don't understand why people want nerf stuff. It is better that the developers would have made a smarter AI (I'm playing warhammer vermintaite 2 now and there mobs have a very good AI). And on account of saryn, just make the spores spread only in the line of sight of the mob. Then mobs can simply be afraid of an infected mob. Same with mesa, mobs must have tactics against its ability, not just rush and die. Most of the CC abilities, like Bastille, can also be changed so that mobs are afraid to enter them and create some tactics. It's a lot of work, but it will make everything more fun.

It certainly could, and if we're looking at tactics and enemies as ways to make gameplay more engaging, this is a pretty sensible one to work with. Even something as simple as Nezha's Firewalker, the effectiveness depends on the idea that enemies will walk straight into the fire - but it'd be a lot more interesting in a situation where, say, Corpus mooks would stand back and it'd be a complete barrier to them, while robotics would just walk right through and take the heat proc.

You wouldn't want a situation where abilities just become garbage because enemies will simply avoid them in ways that don't slow them down, but let's be real here, if we want to play into the power fantasy, letting enemies flee in terror is not working against that goal. And I love this idea for Saryn.

[selig_fay]

36 минут назад, CopperBezel сказал:

You wouldn't want a situation where abilities just become garbage because enemies will simply avoid them in ways that don't slow them down, but let's be real here, if we want to play into the power fantasy, letting enemies flee in terror is not working against that goal. And I love this idea for Saryn.

There can be a lot of options. For example, an opponent who is under the influence of the ability can take a grenade or rush to the warframe for a suicidal explosion. But DE can create a random and mob will run to its allies, thus dooming them. I'm not saying that mobs should act wisely 100% of the time. But, if they do this from time to time, it can create some difficult situations for players.

Also, infected mobs have good mechanics. The ancient destroyer reduces the effectiveness of abilities, but does not destroy them completely, as do the nullifiers (who are frankly bad enemies). Also, ancient healers are excellent at resisting Saryn, as they give DR to allies and heal from damage that was inflicted on allies. Mobs are endless, it is not necessary that they necessarily have the opportunity to get rid of abilities, but for their short life they must do a lot of dirt.

The problem can also be solved with black holes on the walls. Just spawn zones where mobs can appear with animation that they get out of the ventilation for example. These zones are really very scary, because you can send a whole wave of 20 mobs through them, so you will not be safe in any case.For example, to place such zones where players like to stand on Mesa and this may well solve the problem of convergence.

And I love the idea of random bosses appearing. Nuckers are designed to suppress crowds, but their abilities are useless against bosses. I'm not saying they should be like the first wolf to be killed in 30 minutes. Even if the players could be distracted by it for 2 seconds. What's important here is that the players are distracted.

I really don't really know how to counteract Limbo, for example, but there is already a problem about balance. It may be worth removing the possibility that damage by abilities ignores the rift. If some mobs stop entering the rift, the defense mission may be delayed. Yes, it's a nerf, but I think players won't mind it, because mobs can also do damage on Limbo by ignoring the rift, so there's a good side to it, too.

But this is a lot of work, so I don't think it will appear.

 

[Teridax68]

On 2020-02-01 at 1:54 PM, CopperBezel said:

I agree generally, but in terms of raw durability and possibly DPS, the things that enemies directly scale with, though, that is the nature of the power fantasy being sold and what the game's visually trying to tell us. The tagline is still about ninjas, not gods. So it makes sense that a Nox has a longer TTK than we do and that we have to compensate through abilities that may or may not be of the generic regenerative or damage-mitigating varieties. Certainly there are exceptions - we have Inaros right now as an alternative to thinking much about casting - but the median frame should certainly be the most powerful thing in the room, not necessarily the toughest.

I personally don't really think the "ninja" tagline was ever all that applicable, not in a game that gave us Rhino as one of its first frames. Everything about our lore says that we're not just elite trained warriors, but also just overall superhumanly strong and durable... which is fine, and I don't think has to mean we're not ninjas either (I for one would like to see stealth gameplay become a lot more viable). It just means that it's probably not great if our one-of-a-kind warframes get outperformed by some mass-produced clone or robot.

On 2020-02-01 at 1:54 PM, CopperBezel said:

And I do still think that this curve of enemy strength is exactly as thematically hazardous at the opposite end of the curve, when we're using our fully tooled up frames to fight level 20 enemies while farming something and these same enemy types can't consistently offer any kind of threat. They're both equally reminders of how artificial the scaling is and that we don't really have a sense of just how godlike we really expect our warframes to be.

That's the thing, I don't think making enemies individually weak automatically translates to the game itself always having to be easy: perhaps one enemy against a Tenno would be a pushover, but a whole squad of them at a time would be more challenging. Perhaps we're strong enough to cut through enemies like butter, but the challenge of our mission is to do so under a strict time limit that we may not be able to make. Perhaps killing enemies isn't even so much the issue, as it is raising the alarms and risking an objective if even a single weak enemy detects us. There are many ways of implementing difficulty, whether it be in or out of combat, without having to force enemies to each become stronger than us, and overall I do think the pace of the game should be such that we should never spend too much time killing anyone who isn't a boss or miniboss.

On 2020-02-01 at 1:54 PM, CopperBezel said:

But I do agree - if we imagine the scenario like arbitrations where we're pushing into absurdly high levels of content, and ask, what's the thing that's going to make this mission become impossible if it goes on long enough, it should probably be the advance of external conditions rather than the strength of individual enemies.

Pretty much, though in both cases I think there's also something to be said about pushing the limit until content just becomes so intense that one eventually loses the nerve to go on, as opposed to going past that limit and having combat break completely. I think it could be tremendously fun if Warframe were able to exert some fine enough control over its difficulty such that the player would be pushed in a situation where any mistake could mean failure, but would still be able to keep going on if they play excellently. What we have now, by contrast, is a state of affairs where failure often occurs just because enemies end up randomly dealing more damage than our entire health pool, or become so durable that killing them in time to replenish Life Support or the like becomes impossible, even with top-tier gear. There's this critical difference between content being too difficult to keep playing and content being impossible to play properly, which the game's never done the best job of making.

On 2020-02-01 at 1:54 PM, CopperBezel said:

I will say that this is also part of why I don't dislike the effects of efficiency and range on the Warframe power curve by content level / MR / whatever proxy you want to use for a player's general level of kit despite, disliking the extent to which nukers make things too easy. Things that don't directly affect the toughness of enemy you can expect to fight, but do change how much map space you can command or how frequently you can toss out a costly casting combo, increase the level of situational, mechanical difficulty your frame can actually deal with. The extreme of this (the point at which this kind of scaling breaks) is sortie-3 excavations, where you have a defense target with fixed health that doesn't scale and a vast number of enemies pouring in for a chance to take it down in a few hits. It's not the enemy durability that matters, it's whether any of them get close enough to make a shot.

That is true, but then the issue with that those stats don't just make content easier to run, they often do so by eliminating interaction with enemies entirely. Our map size doesn't scale with our warframe stats, for example, so if one can alter the range of a hard CC effect to span multiple rooms, for example, the end result each time is that we get to stop enemies before they even get to see us. Similarly, our abilities were originally meant to be balanced around some kind of meaningful cost that meant we couldn't use them with 100% uptime, but thanks to evolutions in the Energy economy, which Efficiency mods contributed significantly towards, 100% uptime is pretty much the norm, which also means 100% uptime on effects that grant some sort of immunity to enemies entirely, e.g. invisibility, invulnerability, and so on. When left unchallenged, these effects tend to make content trivial regardless of enemy stats, which is also why enemies over time have had ability resistance, status resistance/immunity, ability nullification, etc. added to their kits, to a great detriment in our agency. This is also one of the reasons why I'd like to tackle our ability stats, because I'd rather have a game in which we couldn't kill enemies we're sometimes not even aware of, but also didn't have our ability to move and act constrained, not even by enemy hard CC, which I also consider to be a cheap form of artificial difficulty.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

That's just rail jack being busted honestly. The enemy ships don't go off the normal damage calculation, and aren't scaled for archwing. The damage is balanced around your rail jack. The status procs and elements are completely different and I'm pretty sure Railjack enemies and system will be overhauled. 

But it's not just Railjack being busted, though, because similar problems have occurred with every form of content balanced around high-level players, e.g. elite Fortuna units. Regardless of the new damage type system, enemies in Railjack have far too much EHP, and many deal far too much damage, because high EHP and damage were both meant to be the mode's means of implementing difficulty. It didn't work, and just made the mode more tedious.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Agree to disagree. Cause Enemies is any non survival mission hardly scale. Until there is a mission node that stats players off with corrupted enemies at level 140+ the scaling is a non issue. 
It takes enemies to be level 90+ or above for me to not one shot most of them with my builds. 

Okay, so first off, "agree to disagree" makes strictly no sense in this context. Whether or not gameplay ceases to function according to its intended design past a certain configuration of numbers is a question of fact, not opinion, and it is not even a fact we are disagreeing with, as you too are pointing out that scaling does become an issue. To be clear, I am not saying that scaling is an issue in our regular Star Chart, because levels 1-50 are indeed trivial to any well-equipped player, and the same can be said for most Sorties as well (unless you bring in a squishy frame or don't use the right elemental mods, in which case you will run into the issues mentioned above). However, when it does come to enemies exceeding those level thresholds you mentioned, or enemy units being implemented in such a way that their levels make no sense, e.g. Elite Terra or Railjack units, whose low level numbers mask ridiculously inflated stats, it is clear that there's a problem with making difficulty increase through scaling. In fact, low enemy levels demonstrate the issue as well, because below a certain level threshold enemies may as well not exist at all, as they deal no meaningful damage and are one-shot by most weapons.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Except that it goes beyond just ability scaling. Weapon procs scale infinitely. Example A being how Viral scales infinitely. Corrosive and heat procs strip armor. Even some of the crit weapons are so ridiculous that until you hit level 140 level or corrupted heavy gunners that armor scaling doesn't matter.

Even better still, certain warframe abilities scale infinitely. Octavia and Revenant come to mind. (Mallet does 2.5x the damage whatever enemies pump into it. This gets buffed by her ult. Their damage scales infinitely which makes Octavia skill infinitely) Friendly fire in the simulcrum will show you what kind of ridiculous numbers you can get by shooting your own mallet. 

If high level enemies can be trivialized, the hole point of scaling becomes a non issue. High armor functions as intended so high level enemies aren't one shotted and provide something of a challenge to overcome. 

Okay sure, but we were given this anti-scaling scaling precisely because it's how players wanted to combat enemy scaling. Vauban has his damage abilities scale, for example, because otherwise they cease to function against high-level enemies, much like any ability nuke that doesn't have its own scaling mechanism. It's effectively an arms race where enemies scale against players as a means of trying to provide difficulty, but then players have means of mitigating or eliminating that scaling altogether, which begs the question: what is the point of scaling at all?

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Hence why arbitrations, kava flood, and the like came out. They start at high levels, with enemies offering everything from complete immunity to enemies that have to killed in special ways. 

And that didn't work, because our core means of fighting enemies are still broken. It doesn't matter how many abilities our enemies resist, because one can always pick Inaros and a Tigris Prime and wipe the floor, and when we can't, there is nothing one can do except leave the mission or die. None of those modes have offered a sustainable level of difficulty or endgame, which is why DE are still looking for a means of delivering us a challenge.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Spawning more enemies will inevitably cause technical problems, while more enemies like maniacs or arbitration drones will just get on players nerves after awhile or have them switch to weapon based warframes -Chroma. 

Agreed, which is why ratcheting up enemy numbers or implementing more ability nullification I don't think are sustainable ways of implementing difficulty.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Kuva Lichs were the newest attempt at difficulty with adding an rng factor to it, needing the condition that you kill them with the right mod order, but other then annoying players with forcing them to take down a shield generator or other gimmick, the other modifiers are more likely to annoy players then anything else. (Remember how eximus units were proposed to only take damage by shooting certain weak points? Remember how well that was received? 

I do, which is why I don't think those are good methods of implementing difficulty either. I'm not quite sure why you're throwing out these examples of difficulty that didn't work out, given that a) I've never actually promoted those effects as a method of implementing challenge in Warframe, b) that doesn't excuse difficulty via enemy stats from never having worked out, and c) the methods of implementing that I did propose you have so far not contested at all.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

For the time being, scaling makes the most sense both in concept and practice for enemy difficulty. Lower gear and more casual players might struggle, but its fully possible to kill any level enemy regardless of conditions other then complete and utter damage immunity. I still think DE should explore new ideas, but with the power afforded by rivens, corrupted mods, warframe powers and so on? The scaling can be ignored in any mission where you aren't required to kill things. (Spy, interception, rescue, mobile defense, etc) just through CC alone. 

You literally just described why enemy scaling doesn't work as a proper means of implementing difficulty in Warframe, though. If the only possible outcomes from a difficulty system is that there is no difficulty, or gameplay breaks down, then the difficulty system clearly isn't doing its job.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

Except that the Wolf of Saturn Six was the only assassin type boss that wasn't a complete and utter joke. Every version of the stalker dies nameless, I have so many Brakk parts that I could literally give out 7-8 complete sets, and Zanuka is just a meme. If wolf wasn't immune to warframe debuffs he wouldn't be a threat. He was made to be a challenge, hence he was invulnerable to everything that removes the challenge from the game. 

And this proves my point: if the only way to make a powerful enemy not a complete pushover is to make them notoriously unpleasant to fight against, then perhaps we should stop using scaling as a means of implementing challenge. In this particular case, for sure the Wolf didn't die immediately, but ultimately fighting him wasn't difficult either, because he posed no real threat and actually countered skillful ways of fighting him (his dash sucks us into him, for example, even when jumping away to dodge it). The Wolf is a tedious fight, not a difficult one, and unfortunately a lot of players seem to confuse the two for Warframe.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

If you don't like that he was a bullet sponge? That has more to do with him not being effected by status effects, or stuff like Nova's slow that would trivialize him no matter how he scaled. You can toss me and a level 9,999 of him in an arena, and if I could use status effects and debuffs? I'd win every time. 

But I don't particularly care about whether or not the Wolf is affected by status or crowd control, outside of the fact that it invalidated a huge number of builds and made things particularly awkward when he randomly spawned and one had the wrong frame and/or weapons. Status and the like are ultimately a means to an end, and the core problem remains that he's a bullet sponge, which most players did not consider fun to deal with.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

The "Challenging" content all revolves around enemies like Eidolons who are fully immune to warframe debuffs, or simply scale enough to be a challenge. Eidolons, Orb mothers and Wolf fall into both. Color me surprised that they seem to favor the same strategy to defeat. 

Well no, scaling isn't a part of this, because Eidolons and the like are at a fixed level. The reason why we have so much ability/status immunity/nullification is precisely because enemy scaling otherwise takes far too long to start becoming relevant, and when it does it breaks the game in the other direction. Those effects also exist because, if left to our own devices, we can perma-stun rooms at a time and kill crowds of enemies through walls, often without even knowing of their prior existence. Multiple systems are broken here, namely enemy scaling, and our own ability usage, hence why those systems need reworks.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

I laugh at your notion of skill. You want skill? Go become the best Lunaro player or enter conclave with nothing but a kraken. 

This is a PvE game with so many different factors that detach themselves from the realm of skill. So many frames and abilities exist that can be used to dispatch enemies with your eyes closed, that the pursuing "skill" in this game is laughable.

You are literally just restating my point. Again. Ultimately, challenge is a test of skill, and you are the one implying Warframe has some meaningful degree of challenge, not me, as I am in fact contesting your notion of challenge completely.

On 2020-02-01 at 4:24 PM, (PS4)UltraKardas said:

The closest they got to skill was when they introduced raids, that forced you to do things in a certain amount of time or otherwise straight killed you completely. 

Which was itself not considered skilful, just book-keeping. This isn't to say that skill expression is forever impossible in Warframe, it just means that the systems DE have put in place to implement challenge have largely failed, enemy scaling being among them.