Stop holding Umbral forma hostage, and do something with Nightwave

[Tamatu]

Just now, BiancaRoughfin said:

Umbral Forma is suppose to be Rare so players have to better plan their builds and where they want to actually use them.

Personally i prefer it stayed that way. You can make great builds using 2 of them and no need for Umbral Formas.

Being rare is good, but consistency is key. As things have been going they are not consistent with it.

Also as it was mentioned above, we can't have such a thing be this rare when builds and metas can shift so drastically that the character you use them on might just be changed entirely. You can't plan a change ahead that even DE doesn't know will happen 3-4 months from now on.

3 minutes ago, BiancaRoughfin said:

Personally i prefer it stayed that way. You can make great builds using 2 of them and no need for Umbral Formas.

I really preferred it didn't. It's a large investment for something that can change over a short period of time.
 

The builds that will be using 2 at all times also benefit greatly from them: 8 or 16 more capacity means you can affort to leave a few slots unpolarized for a wonderfully flexible build.

[TheLexiConArtist]

1 hour ago, Vaeldious said:

Something along the lines of how Aura Forma are universal. Of course, Forma of any kind are the bread and butter of the free-to-play with time invested business model DE employs and is highly unlikely to change. 

Actually not so, it's a suggestion I've kicked around for years now. The basic premise is that you polarise the item, not the slots, giving you a 'bank' of available polarities that you can then use the polarity-rearranging menu we already have to mix and match. Let me go dredge up one of my old threads for you.

Unfortunately, Tinypic is defunct or just voided a bunch of older images or something, so my mockup isn't visible any more. I'm looking to see if I still have it somewhere, and if so, I'll re-host it for reference.

Essentially, by allowing the unlocked polarities to be independent of slots you achieve the following:

• No Forma is ever 'wasted' as you only increase the potential until you could fill every slot with any polarity. No longer need to undo previous work to keep up with balance changes or new releases.
• Adding more forma only increases flexibility as you can choose to not use any unlocked polarity, removing self-inflicted cross-polarity problems. 
• Each Forma is exactly as valuable as the Polarity system currently provides, meaning the business model does not change. (This was long before Aura Forma was introduced - we're not looking to uni-polarise, we only want normal polarities to be flexible)
• Players are encouraged to invest more Forma than before into any given item, since it will no longer lock them into inflexible builds, and the functional maximum is no longer having 8 (10) slots with one polarity each.

 

[TheLexiConArtist]

@Vaeldious Found it.

Quote

In this mockup we can see:

• This Warframe has two optional Aura slot polarities - Madurai and Naramon - with the polarity currently in use (Naramon) highlighted.
• This Warframe has one optional Exilus slot polarity - Naramon - which is not in use, allowing an Exilus mod of Madurai polarity to be used without penalty.
• This Warframe has a bank of polarity options for regular slots, still kept separate from 'special' mod slots:
  • One Madurai polarity - currently in use, allowing Primed Continuity to be reduced in drain.
  • One Naramon polarity - in use, for Constitution.
  • One Vazarin polarity - in use for Redirection.
  • One Zenurik polarity - not in use because the build in use has no Zenurik mods, retaining the 'unpolarised' slot for free normal-draining use by a mod of any other polarity.
  • Zero Unairu polarities - no Warframe mods are currently in the Unairu school, but this would be an option for future mod releases.
• (Ignoring the stars of the old Forma indication), this Ivara has had four Forma installed - unlocking, in addition to its native Naramon Aura and Regular slot polarity and native Vazarin Regular-slot polarity: the extra Aura polarity, the Exilus polarity, one (used) Madurai polarity, and one (unused) Zenurik polarity.

Since then we've had a bunch of UI tweaks, and the area I put the polarity bank now holds rankup stats, but there's still real-estate that could be leveraged.

It also accounted for Auras separately than normal slots to preserve the existing system - this would be less necessary now we have Aura Forma but could still be applied to keep the Exilus slot separated (unless and until we get a uni-polarity for that too).

Umbra polarity could be added in, with minimal intrusiveness. The design allows for aggressive storage optimisation to cut the result down to a maximum of 6 new bytes per item (using four bytes split into 4-bit nibbles for the banks stored in pairs, as no more values than 0-9 are required for each polarity, and 1 additional dedicated byte per 'special' slot).

So, minimal database load too. Really wish DE picked it up.

 

[dogbus]

3 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Found it.

Thats actually a really curious, and thought out take on the subject. 

Thanks for taking the time to share it.