Scarlet Spear Feedback/Criticisms/Suggestions - Missions, Enemies, Cheese, and more

[ADirtyMonk]

TLDR:

1. Limbo completely breaks the game mode because enemies have no counter to Cataclysm-Stasis
2. Melee is once again a NON VIABLE OPTION
3. Sentients are horribly designed
4. Op-link does not scale or heal. At all. I thought we just solved this issue with excavators?! Without cheese mechanics like limbo, late waves are instant fails while early on there is zero risk
5. There is zero meaningful variation to the missions. They are all exactly the same, every mission, with no meaningful randomness/variation and this is just asking for player burnout.
6. There is no Railljack to the Railjack mode. All the effort into maxing out the railjack and its just a glorified Uber. It's scaled horrible so you cant do anything but be an Uber past Murex 3 anyway.

Overview: So now that most of the game breaking bugs and reward issues have been fixed, SS is a decently fun mobile defense and a quick way to stock up on arcanes but riddled with issues everywhere. Some are issues inherent to the event, some have been festering for ages.

Instructions/Intro: this could have been made much clearer and an example video of how scoring works would have helped a lot as it is clunky to explain in words. I do not recall reading anywhere that you could leave a flotilla after you have scored points with it and still potentially get the bonus reward. That would have been nice to know before I wasted that hour and a half.

The first week: The event was released into live build in a ridiculously broken state. On DevStream this was stated to be because they did not have enough people to properly test new mission-sync mechanics and whatnot. I call BS. Many major games have dedicated test servers to iron out these problems. Why should the bulk of PC players waste their time as unwilling QA testers, especially when many also purchase plat? Star citizen uses this to great effect with their Evocati test group. They selectively pick and choose the players who are most prolific in leaving high quality feedback and then invite them into a special test server, sometimes for weeks on end to QA. I guarantee you there will be no shortage of willing volunteers, if only for the privilege of getting to see/leak exclusive in-progress content early.

Overall mission feedback:

1. I do like that the missions ramp to a certain point that is difficult for your average random squad that isnt cheesing yet have a defined end point. There is so much cheese in warframe right now there is no point of true endless. It just devolves into who can cheese and no-life harder.
2. Squad composition would matter if you want to go into deeper waves due to the tankiness of the Condrix and the squishiness of the Op-links. However it caught on pretty quick there is absolutely NOTHING enemies of any level can do to Cataclysm-stasis so the event has now devolved into becomes a boring AFK fest where nothing is happening except to wait for the timer to tick down.
3. There is zero variation to the missions. No modifiers, nothing to change things around a bit which makes running it over and over a chore and prone to player burnout.
4. Op-links do not scale in any way. There are too tanky in the beginning with no risk at all and too squishy towards the end. Combine this with the naturally ultra tanky-but also high damage sentient models and you get a swarm of lightning-bruisers which can instantly end missions and wipe squads...unless you cheese with cataclysm-stasis.
5. Squad reinforcement is pointless. Geared squads have no issues clearing the full missions. Also the price is way too high. I refuse to spend that large a chunk of my hard earned credits on an unknown squad that probably isnt even geared right for a single use, minimal benefit effect.

Suggestions for missions in general:

1. As a stopgap, throw in Demolysts. They have a nullifier pulse which disables Cataclysm and are tanky enough to get there. While the all or nothing interaction with cataclysm is less than ideal, it potentially solves limbo cheese, or at least forces Limbo to think about how much range they really want and/or invest extremely heavily into 2 or more DPS memebers.
   • Ideally change the way nullifiers fields and pulses interact with abilities, especially ability timers. Sure keep that null fields dont let abilities through. But entering a null field should not flat out negate buffs either. I would say while in a field, abilities tick down at 10-20x speed. Quantified abilities (like iron skin/negating swarm) lose 10-20% of charge every second. Getting caught in a nullifier pulse immediately knocks 15-20s off of any buff timers that are running. Quantified abilities (such as iron skin or Negation swarm) lose a flat 20% (ex. 100% -> 80%, 1000 max iron skin -> 800 iron skin -> 600 iron skin).
   • Introduce rare units that can spam throw "nullifier grenades". Corpus have isolator bursa (with its cheap instant nullifier nade which needs to be fixed) but Grineer and other factions need this as well. Its up to the players to kill the nade fast enough before it releases a large non damaging AOE pulse.
   • I realize this does nothing to solve the problem of Mesa, or Saryn, or energy pad spam, or Trinity spam, or Exodia contagion or other broken mechanics. Those interactions need to get fixed at some point too. Hopefully soon.
2. Introduce "HP gates" for objectives. For example. The oplink has 20,000 HP. Non-regenerating. Drop the HP by 50% and put a 15s gate at every 5% HP with a final gate for 30s at 2hp. Low level enemies now need to chew through 500 HP per tick which is a decent amount but doable, but now high level enemies both hard hitting and rapid fire need to hit the link at least 20 times to kill it and the link is guaranteed to survive for around 300 seconds (5minutes) of continuous fire which should be more than fair.
3. If you're going to do squad reinforcement, do it right.
   • A member of the squad that needs help PAYS some event currency to summon another player.
   • Let us EXCEED THE 4 PERSON CAP, up to 6 total players, with the caveat that only players with all rank 30 gear that are MR 20 or have an MR equal to or higher than the highest MR in the squad can join.
     • Example. a squad with highest MR 7 will allow anyone with MR 20 or over in. A squad with MR 25 highest will only allow MR 25 or higher in. Will this stop trolls? No. But the community has so few trolls in it overall the system should work well.

Sentient feedback: Sentient enemies have 3 levels of tankiness:

1. Squishy
2. Oh my god why is it so tanky
3. Oh my god why is it INVINCIBLE until you kill MULTIPLE TINY weak spots hidden by GIANT INVINCIBLE ARMS while it FLIES ERRATICALLY and FLAILS AROUND and INSTANTLY REGENERATES ALL ITS WEAK POINTS AT ONCE ON A REGULAR BASIS

This enemy mix is really un-fun to play against when every three enemies is a status-immune hyper-tank. This is my Exergis with top tier riven:   it dumps 2x 140k damage shots every two seconds (including reload) from a warframe with no buffs. It takes over 10 shots to kill some sentients in the later waves at point blank and that is MESSED UP.

As for individual enemy feedback:

• The Brachiolysts. What even is the point of this enemy other than to be a new sentient model? It's squishy, its not aggressive, its damage is poor, its not a buff unit, its drops arent anything special. Sure theres more than other variants but not enough to be meaningful fodder. It doesnt seem to follow traditional Sentient adaptation mechanics either.
• The Aerolyst is without a doubt the most terrible enemy DE has designed in recent memory. It combines every single horrible miniboss enemy mechanic and turns it up to 11. Its invincible. You cant use explosives on it, it seems to ignore beam type weapons, its hard to shoot weak spots because its giant invincible flailing arms blocks shots, you cannot effectively melee it because its flying meaning you get two hits in at best. You cant force it to drop to the ground because if you stun it GOES TO SLEEP IN THE GODDAM AIR. It doesnt do noticable damage, it doesnt buff other enemies. Its only purpose is to SIT THERE AND HALT MISSION PROGRESS UNTIL YOU AWKWARDLY KILL IT.
• Battalysts. This is an old issue. They would be manageable if it werent for the disco laser which spins fast and does TREMENDOUS damage. By Condrix 14 or 15 its an instant room wide AOE squad wipe unless you have a hyper tank. Or are cheesing with Limbo. There is only ONE small safe spot and that is directly under it. There is little warning it is using that attack. No significant visual or audio cue and the enemy is relatively not attention grabbing. You're off in the corner beating on some grineer and then you're dead and then you see the small disco ball with tiny lasers and go "thats bullsh-".
• Our Operators, you know, the void powered demon which channel unfathomable energies that also happen to be utterly toxic to sentients does BARELY ANY DAMAGE to them past the first 5 to 10 minutes of a mission. The resistance wipe is nice but it doesnt last and with all the Limbo spam going on, works rather inconsistently.

Suggestions for Sentient enemies

• The entire faction needs to lose the status immunity. Keep the damage reduction and copy the lich mechanics that significantly limit the status stacks. Something like -2 max stacks for each element it is currently resisting.
• Brachiolysts need to be made slightly tankier. Give them a mid-damage slow tracking continuous beam or something.
• Aerolyst: complete rework. Make this guy a mini-ropapolololyst. Reduce number of weak spots to 2 or 3. Make them much larger and move them to the upper backs or the arms. Make them an actual threat. Give them the ultra high damage Ropalolyst pulse laser attack with the sniper style aim-indicators.
• Battalysts: The disco laser move needs a complete rework. Reduce the number of lasers to 4 or 5 at most. Make them and the orb MUCH Larger. I want to see a big energy pulse and noise 2 or 3 times before the ability fires. Keep the damage but reduce the speed significantly. It should be no more than base warframe walk speed (not sprint) so players have time to get out of the way.
• Operators: at some point operators need a full rework but for now can we get an innate 30 or 50x void damage multiplier against sentients? I want to see that void power.

Earth missions: 

1. Where is the mission variation?
   • Why in the world are Condrix drops not random? They are always in the same locations, in the exact same drop pattern and that gets boring as hell.
     • Why in the world was Plains of Eidolon not repurposed for this? PoE (and Fortuna for that matter) seems like the PERFECT arenas for a mass sentient invasion with potential for randomized drop points and multiple drops. 
   • Why is there only ever one at once? Why not drop two or three or even four at a time and let high level ultra optimized squads go nuts? 
2. Why do we have all the time in the world to get to a Condrix and beat on it? Arent these intel gathering sentient carriers? Add in some interception mechanics like a cumulative progress bar or the "liberate grineer camp" style control gauge and if the gauge fills, then the mission ends.
   • This way its harder for a random squad to just cheese with CC spam or Limbo spam because they HAVE to have a squadmate that can DPS down the Condrix and sentients.
3. Why are non gunblade-non exodia contagion melee once again a non viable option? AGAIN. Just, why. Why waste all that effort on melee 3.0 and then make it non-viable versus weak point bosses, AGAIN?!
   • The weak point is higher than most frames can bullet jump.
   • The orb hitbox is located so far in the invincible shell that most melee hits are completely ineffective.
   • There is nowhere to stand in front of the orb, we just slip off before getting a single hit in.
   • There is no proper air melee combo system so we cannot remain in place midair to hit a floating target.
     • I've managed to glitch inside the orb once with operator dash and the melee damage was NICE, but not Exodia contagion cheese levels of nice.

Suggestions for Earth Missions

• Add variation please
• Add some sort of platform for melee players to stand on so we can reach the weak spot. At some point, proper aerial combos and juggling need to be added, not just the impotent and cost inefficient "Lifted status"

Space mission: 

1. There is zero need for any railjack combat. Its used purely as a transport vehicle between Murex. Just grab the satellite and sprint like hell to the next Murex and park INSIDE of it and the dumb as balls AI will suicide themselves on the Murex geometry.
   • Sure the odd boarding pod sneaks through but thats still not railjack combat.
   • Furthermore the fact that I can just dump the railjack with a boarding party on it and run into the Murex and be completely fine is a horrible design choice. 
2. The fact that Railjack is currently scaled to lv 45 enemies and I am seeing Lv 100+ enemy ships that my tricked out mk3 everything crit railjack can barely tickle is a horrible design choice.
3. The satellite disabling Railjack front guns while transporting the satellite is a horrible design choice.
4. The inability to dump the satellite to fight is a horrible design choice.
5. The fact that the satellite is completely invincible once you dump it in space is a horrible design choice. 
6. The complete and utter uselessness of the Artillery gunner position is a horrible design choice.
7. The fact that the mission degenerates into a mobile defense his a horrible design choice.
8. The fact that the only way to feasibly do Murex 4 and 5 without risking an instant-wipe is by abusing Limbo is a horrible design choice.
9. Again there is zero meaningful variation

Suggestion for Space Missions

• Fix Railjack. 
  • But seriously...
• Make it so space enemies do not scale beyond Veil Proxima levels (lv 45 enemies max).
• Satellite is NOT invincible after placement and must be defended until the Murex is dead. (This also solves the problem of a solo or duo players just camping the murex until it dies
  • OR each time the satellite takes damage, upload is halted by 5 seconds (non stacking with 10s cooldown)
  • OR introduce interception type mechanics where upload stops when enemies are near
• Put a kill field linked to a crystal within the murex "cage-body" that does ramping 20% hp damage every second so players cant just #*!% off and hide in it
• Put make it so that crystal has to be artilleried so players can archwing in before it respawns in 20s
• Decrease the kill code required from 9 to 5. 
• Make it so that placing two oplinks hits the 100% transmission speed cap. This way the average setup becomes 2 players on railjack defending satellite, 2 players inside defending oplink. If the two oplinks die, well you have up to two more. Of course top tier railjacks or geared players may only need one player on the railjack or on the ground or vice versa but at least there's now railjack in.... railjack.

Rewards: I do like the mix of weapons and decorations. Thus far, the common and uncommon arcane prices seem fair for the effort put in compared to eidolon farming. I have not yet finished crafting the weapons so I can only theorycraft from stats. I've no real concerns about the Ceti-Lacera. Right now all melee weapons are more or less viable. Lacera was good to begin with and this is a straight upgrade into hybrid melee territory. The Basmu seems. Ok? It looks like a less potent Acceltra with a straight up impotent bootlegged kuva nukor glued onto it. Rather underwhemling stats for an event weapon. I doubt the life-steal gimmick would make up for the damage loss although perhaps hyper tanks would enjoy it. I would like to see the primary fire damage multiplied by at least 1.5x, maybe even 2x given it leans status. The secondary fire needs to at the very exceed the base stats of the Kuva nukor due to the tiny magazine size.

I would have much liked the option to purchase forma, potatoes, slots, and perhaps even railjack weapons or skins. It would be a very good opportunity to allow non-railjack players to catch up on gear.

Story/Charactera/Voice lines: 

• Overall is decent. But again there is too little dialogue variation. Little duck saying calling Ruk a "pillok" got boring after the first three times and I hear it MULTIPLE TIMES A MISSION. Please please PLEASE play Hades by Supergiant games. That is a game that does dialogue variation right.
• STOP TURNING ALL PROMINENT GRINEER INTO ONE DIMENSIONAL BUFFONS
  • Vay Hek was funny. I'll give you that. Then Kela became an over the top boistrous TV Star. Now Ruk is being retconned into an uncompromising xenophobic racist zerg rushing idiot? Ruk was one of the most honorable grineer in Gravidus Dilemma.   Anyone who fought for the Grineer IS Grineer and is to be respected. Ruk called out Vay Hek on his use of the Grustrag 3 because they killed his soldiers. He was written as a Grineer who valued his troops and now half of his dialogue is "Kill Tenno, Kill Sentient!" "Throw yourself mindlessly at the enemy!", would it kill your writers to have some Grineer characters with even a bit of depth to them?

 

Welp there goes about 4 hours of my life writing this. If you got this far thanks for reading and I hope you're all staying safe in these strange times.

[Yasha-7HS]

Spoiler

1 minute ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Op-link does not scale or heal. At all. I thought we just solved this issue with excavators?! Without cheese mechanics like limbo, late waves are instant fails while early on there is zero risk

They don't need to scale because they hardly take damage, and they can be healed. A single person with Sancti Magistar easily solos the entire ground segment. 

4 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Introduce "HP gates" for objectives. For example. The oplink has 20,000 HP. Non-regenerating. Drop the HP by 50% and put a 15s gate at every 5% HP with a final gate for 30s at 2hp. Low level enemies now need to chew through 500 HP per tick which is a decent amount but doable, but now high level enemies both hard hitting and rapid fire need to hit the link at least 20 times to kill it and the link is guaranteed to survive for around 300 seconds (5minutes) of continuous fire which should be more than fair.

This sounds like the most entirely boring mechanic for defense of any type, where defense missions already sorely lack challenge. Now, you barely even have to watch the objective and just abuse gating mechanics again like we do with Railjack, what is the point of that? Unless by Non-regenerating meaning you can't heal it either anymore, which would still not matter. 15 second gate, every 5%? So, you get 20 free lives on the oplink for a mission that takes 17 rounds and only has one threat, even with the addition of demolysts who are notoriously CC'd until death through many means. 

10 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Oh my god why is it INVINCIBLE until you kill MULTIPLE TINY weak spots hidden by GIANT INVINCIBLE ARMS while it FLIES ERRATICALLY and FLAILS AROUND and INSTANTLY REGENERATES ALL ITS WEAK POINTS AT ONCE ON A REGULAR BASIS

The Aerolyst is a joke with a plethora of amps and weapons. A Klamora Prism destroys all of its weakpoints, while stunlocking it in place, and dealing damage to the body itself. Lega Prism, Shwaak, just about any AoE. 

 

15 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

This is my Exergis with top tier riven: 

Do you understand how sentients work? They reduce damage by 95% of the maximum damage at the time in descending order, and also have multiple health gates to prevent being killed in one shot. Which is why we have operators and the Paracesis which resets the former mechanic to restore the damage you're capable of doing. You're trying to circumvent the main mechanic of our greatest adversaries by brute force. 

24 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

The Brachiolysts. What even is the point of this enemy other than to be a new sentient model? It's squishy, its not aggressive, its damage is poor, its not a buff unit, its drops arent anything special. Sure theres more than other variants but not enough to be meaningful fodder. It doesnt seem to follow traditional Sentient adaptation mechanics either.

For the same reason you're currently complaining about the rest of the sentients, so that the entire Condrix gate model isn't fighting heavy armor, high damage minibosses for it to be more possible for those weaker than a properly kitted player.

37 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

The Aerolyst is without a doubt the most terrible enemy DE has designed in recent memory. It combines every single horrible miniboss enemy mechanic and turns it up to 11. Its invincible. You cant use explosives on it, it seems to ignore beam type weapons, its hard to shoot weak spots because its giant invincible flailing arms blocks shots, you cannot effectively melee it because its flying meaning you get two hits in at best. You cant force it to drop to the ground because if you stun it GOES TO SLEEP IN THE GODDAM AIR. It doesnt do noticable damage, it doesnt buff other enemies. Its only purpose is to SIT THERE AND HALT MISSION PROGRESS UNTIL YOU AWKWARDLY KILL IT.

Again, a joke, and it's killed at just about the same speed here at 26 as it does at 110 since destroying the weakpoints deals a significant amount of damage to the Aerolyst itself.

Spoiler

 

 

41 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Battalysts. This is an old issue. They would be manageable if it werent for the disco laser which spins fast and does TREMENDOUS damage. By Condrix 14 or 15 its an instant room wide AOE squad wipe unless you have a hyper tank.

Or, you go any amount of distance above it in this map that has nothing but rock cliffs and high ground everywhere. You can even stand on or behind the Condrix, these enemies only spawn once and they're the enemies you should be focusing, the Grineer are garbage fodder that can be ignored even if they got into the 200s. 

 

45 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Why are non gunblade-non exodia contagion melee once again a non viable option? AGAIN. Just, why. Why waste all that effort on melee 3.0 and then make it non-viable versus weak point bosses, AGAIN?!

• The weak point is higher than most frames can bullet jump.
• The orb hitbox is located so far in the invincible shell that most melee hits are completely ineffective.
• There is nowhere to stand in front of the orb, we just slip off before getting a single hit in.
• There is no proper air melee combo system so we cannot remain in place midair to hit a floating target.
  • I've managed to glitch inside the orb once with operator dash and the melee damage was NICE, but not Exodia contagion cheese levels of nice.

 

If this is what you meant by melee not being viable, then there's no chance I can agree you should be able to just melee everything in the game with no effort. It's the dominant strategy in just about the entire rest of the game where melee is an option. Not every single thing in the game should be melee viable. 

 

 

[Leusipher]

I'm surprised this made it past the concept stage. The ground is just endless defense missions and space is endless excavator. Only change is if your in space you have to wait on the ground to give you "power cells". I was already bored after a couple hours. 

[Kydilla]

Actually the Limbo stasis is not helping against the Battalyst disco. Nothing except hiding under it is helping. It one shots you with 3 Umbra mods + Adaption while being in stasis. I am okay with insta-kill mechanics in a fight. The ways to avoid it is to get under it. But as you wrote we would need some indication for that. Every MMO boss dungeon/trial boss mechanic works like that.

Addition to the Murex satelite: The crewships can one shot it while you are transporting it. The only way around that is using the Particle Ram Avionics. Which prevents the damage to the satellite completely. Mechanic removed by Avionics.

I can put down the Aerolyst very easily with a fast firing weapon like the Rattleguts Kitgun.

[OmegaVoid]

10 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Limbo completely breaks the game mode because enemies have no counter to Cataclysm-Stasis

Agreed. Limbo trivialises any mission where all you need do is defend stuff.

If the OpLinks were to cease to function while in the Rift or something, it would make it a lot more interesting. Limbo would still be a viable choice to hold a choke-point in his own little Cataclysm, but he wouldn't be able to god-mode the whole mission.

(There is a Sentient attack which can kill him even in the Rift, but it's a big floating glowing ball that's only encountered on the Murex. It can result in OpLinks getting trashed, mostly when the squad doesn't bother killing the Sentients 'cos they think they don't need to.)

13 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Op-link does not scale or heal. At all. I thought we just solved this issue with excavators?! Without cheese mechanics like limbo, late waves are instant fails while early on there is zero risk

I did the Murex Raid solo with Nova. Was on my fifth Murex when I lost my OpLink. And I have not teh great skillz.

Considering it's a co-op focused game, and this is supposed to be a bit challenging, I think it's fine.

As for the Ground Assault, I think I was at about ten Condrix solo with Grendel.

Succesfully defending for 17 Scans requires some powerful Abilities... but since Warfames have powerful Abilities that seems appropriate, no?

13 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Sentients are horribly designed

I don't agree with this.

13 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

The Brachiolysts. What even is the point of this enemy?

One thing I've noted; on the mini-map they look the same as the more important and dangerous Sentients. That means the player needs to pay more attention than usual to the 3d environment, especially in the Murex Raid. 

Three enemies over one side of the mini-map may be three Brachiolysts you didn't need to worry about. The one enemy over the other side could be the Battalyst you should be prioritising.

I can't say whether that was the intention of their existence, but I approve of the effect.

13 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Battalysts. [...] There is little warning it is using that attack. No significant visual or audio cue

Battalysts curl up into a ball before deploying their parasol of lasers. Some of the telegraphs in Warframe are a bit shorter than I'd like, but this isn't one of them.

If you see that happening and you're too far away to get underneath it in your 'frame, you can use your Operator in Void Mode to get under it safely.

A player using their eyes can identify this threat and nip it in the bud. For example, if Frost uses Freeze on a Battalyst before its animation is completed, the lasers won't deploy.

(If you're in Grendel, you can suck the damn thing into your belly even after it's deployed its attack and the lasers disappear with it! Then trot off to a quiet corner to spit it out and hack it up. 😄)

14 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

The Aerolyst [...] Its only purpose is to SIT THERE AND HALT MISSION PROGRESS UNTIL YOU AWKWARDLY KILL IT.

I've seen Aerolysts go down very quickly, to all sorts of squads. Magus lockdown or Slowva or really good aim or an Ignis Wraith... there's ways and means.

I've also seen them take a long time to get rid of.

Get them scanned, and one can go to the Simulacrum in the downtime between Murex waves to try out different weapons and 'frame Abilities to find out what works best for them.

Scarlet Spear is a four-week-long event. The Aerolyst is presumably supposed to be tricky to deal with when we first encounter it. Then we learn how to deal with them, then we trash them a bit faster each time, and before long we wonder why we ever thought they were a problem at all.

And it feels satisfying when we trash them quickly because they are annoying at first.

14 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

Operators: at some point operators need a full rework but for now can we get an innate 30 or 50x void damage multiplier against sentients? I want to see that void power.

Really not. If the answer to Sentients is simply "get your Operator out and smush them", how is that interesting?

The necessity to use both Operator and Warframe to take down high-level Sentients adds a nice extra layer to the combat.

14 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

There is no Railljack to the Railjack mode.

Yay! 😃

More seriously, I suppose this hinges on how many RJs are genuinely ready for serious combat. If that's a very low percentage, then it's for the better that we don't need it.

13 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

throw in Demolysts

Yes! I like this idea.

[Schokoscheise]

Mostly agree with the OP, another thing they might add in order to make the Murex feel like a raid, is increasing its size and making it kind of a labyrinth where you can only enter the next room if you defeat the enemies in that room. This would make us actually fight the sentients and in order to compensate for the higher tim investment per Murex the number of Murex per mission could be reduced. In the end, such a mechanic might even help out in other mission types, but I feel like it fits very well with these Murex raids, because I want them to feel like a raid and not just a rush to the oplink site.

[ADirtyMonk]

On 2020-03-30 at 4:29 AM, Kydilla said:

Actually the Limbo stasis is not helping against the Battalyst disco. 

Addition to the Murex satelite: The crewships can one shot it while you are transporting it. The only way around that is using the Particle Ram Avionics. Which prevents the damage to the satellite completely. Mechanic removed by Avionics.

I find this to be very inconsistent. Sometimes you can freeze the battalyst before it uses the move but if the disco ball comes out the ability will 100% fire regardless of what you do and that's pretty bad.

I did not know about the crewship satellite instant kill problem since I always run Particle Ram. Good to know and looks like I'm keeping it on at all times now.

[Guest]

Ground is horrendously inferior in comparison to space.

I can easily get 3-5 space missions in, during a murex wave.

While a ground mission, doesn't allow the player to rank up enough, before all murex are chased away.

Space is a smooth rush from murex to murex.
Which can be done in about 15 minutes.
And it rewards way better.

Ground missions take at least 3 times longer.
And it is extremely hard, to get a 3 star badge there.
Especially, if everyone chooses space - because it is superior.
And you're left with no party members at all.

I started my last ground op, the moment a new wave began.
After having 2 people, nope out, merely because they didn't do enough damage.
I mean, seriously. Just stay, and help with the Oplink.
I don't mind being a carry.
But yeah, it leaves you with no more partners left.

For this one time, where I'm constantly on public, I am forced to solo.
Because there are no candidates.

Before you can even gather 5000 points, the space team has allready chased 100 ships away.
Unless you're a pre-formed team, all set up to go.
Ground mode is excrutiatingly hostile towards players.
Leaving almost nobody, to join in anymore.

If I go into space, my ship fills immediately.

Also the Aerolyst, bugs out in limbo.
You cannot shoot it's glass vials, while it is inside.
This forces a limbo, to deactive their cataclysm.
Just so you can take down an aerolyst.

• In space, you can ignore them. Just have one stick around, and you're fine.
• On the ground, you are forced to take it out, or the next batch won't exit the condrix.
  Which can take aggravatingly long, with it's erratic movement.
  Throw in a grineer party, that is also now unaffected, and you're golden.

Furthermore, there is the tripple stage of a condrix spewing out sentients.
It's invulnerability moments, cause arbitrary wait times.
Especially when it takes a moment to realize, it's troops are dead.

And the biggest joke of it all.
Is that space teams, need the ground team.
The ones that are stuck with the grind, and poor rewards.

Seeing like only 480 points at around wave 8, is teeth-grinding.

The comparisson kind of speaks for itself.

[Bergelmir0991]

I just played a ground mission with one of the guys having memorised the exact spawing point of every condrix. So placing the Oplinks, let the gread trivializer of all things defence do his thing and than rush to the next point. This speed running was so annoying!

Limbo needs a rework or he will forever make everything defence a nobrain afk show.

[fabi-fly]

On 2020-03-29 at 9:21 PM, ShichiseitenYasha said:

It doesnt do noticable damage, it doesnt buff other enemies. Its only purpose is to SIT THERE AND HALT MISSION PROGRESS UNTIL YOU AWKWARDLY KILL IT.

The aerolyst can heal other sentients, just test it in simulacrum

Edited March 31, 2020 by fabien21920

[TheLexiConArtist]

DE: "We've made this mission 'solo friendly'"

Also DE: "Just kidding, we're punishing solo players with a 75% speed reduction / 400% defend time extension, which they implicitly can't be versatile to compensate so a defense frame and/or cheese is mandatory"

Also Also DE: "HA HA NO actually we've also made the giant eyeball soft-cap DPS from any single source, so the only way to scale damage fully is to have multiple sources firing on it at once, your attempts at stacking power all onto your solo self are going to be neutered."

 

OP: "Force multiplayer, outright bypass everything that lets a solo player actually complete the missions already artificially stacked against them"

[ADirtyMonk]

On 2020-04-01 at 1:11 AM, TheLexiConArtist said:

DE: "We've made this mission 'solo friendly'"

Also DE: "Just kidding, we're punishing solo players with a 75% speed reduction / 400% defend time extension, which they implicitly can't be versatile to compensate so a defense frame and/or cheese is mandatory"

Also Also DE: "HA HA NO actually we've also made the giant eyeball soft-cap DPS from any single source, so the only way to scale damage fully is to have multiple sources firing on it at once, your attempts at stacking power all onto your solo self are going to be neutered."

 

OP: "Force multiplayer, outright bypass everything that lets a solo player actually complete the missions already artificially stacked against them"

It sounds like you're complaining that my changes dont allow a solo player to easily run the entirety of a mission scaled around a 4 player squad because the only way this was possible was to AFK with a broken ability for 45 minutes. 

Sorry you're salty you wont be able to 100% solo what is essentially an 8 man soft-raid but I for one would actually like to play the event instead of shooting at frozen fish in a shrinking barrel all day.

Edited April 2, 2020 by ADirtyMonk

[TheLexiConArtist]

31 minutes ago, ADirtyMonk said:

It sounds like you're complaining that my changes dont allow a solo player to easily run the entirety of a mission scaled around a 4 player squad because the only way this was possible was to AFK with a broken ability for 45 minutes. 

Sorry you're salty you wont be able to 100% solo what is essentially an 8 man soft-raid but I for one would actually like to play the event instead of shooting at frozen fish in a shrinking barrel all day.

DE stated the ground missions are solo friendly. They're literally not even that, but some of your suggestions want to make them even more crippling, along with 100% killing the 'not directly balanced for but plausible to solo' Space missions. Solo is a valid playstyle, and unless it forces you to bring a squad like Raids did, then it should be reasonably possible to accomplish, even if cheesier strategies still available to squads are a necessity to do so.

 

 

For the record, I was intending to be more critical of DE's current design flaws that make these necessities what they are - which you said yourself, referencing Murex 4-5 and Limbo being tantamount obligatory - than of what you brought to suggest.

But it's better to have something possible through cheese despite bad design than just barricade entry. It's already hard enough getting a Flotilla off the starting blocks - and whoever goes for that first Murex kill, if they didn't bring a premade, is probably stuck in solo for the rest of the mission even if their squad is open, because joining is locked.

_{And Demolysts are pretty horrible enemies. Possibly worse than basic Nullifiers themselves.}

Edited April 2, 2020 by TheLexiConArtist

[FurianStorm]

Here are my 2 cents of feedback.
Note: I don't comment on the bugs since yeah I can imagine making something new without bugs is as good as impossible and an event is a good way to find out where those bugs are and then later iron them out)
So this will only about the mechanics.

I like both missions in general. Meaning both the space and the ground.
We now have squad link, yet to me it doesn't feel like I am actualy in an 8 player squad.
It just feels like a normal 4 player party.
I mean both mission are done with an uplink but does it actualy feel like you're  in a squad?
Well only if you a space mission and no killcodes get uploaded.
To me it would make you feel like you are in a squad if you are littarly depending on each other.
- make a squad chat -> like groupchat but all 8 players can type in it.
- make the mission realy depending on eachother. Maybe have ground kill a condrix and after that a shield or whatever in space drops and the space group can advance.
  (I guess players will then against having to wait but who knows it might actualy work)
- Scoring system is bugged/flawed or whatever. just give people the points for things vanquised. And make the point even between missions.
  (ground gets a lot less point even though it takes longer to do 17 waves compared to 5 waves in space.
- Uplink gets destroyed super fast. past wave 10 on ground or wave 2/3 in space. (especialy with the new limbo nerf)
  (even other warframe abilitys like frost bubble gets one shotter at higher levels even with the stacking of globes since before you can stack its already shot to pieces/no more energy)

Things this event does well.

Not favoring solo players. I mean it's supposed to be squad based. Solo is not a squad. (I ll propably will get some hate over that comment)
the missions themselves feel indeed new
It gives players who aren't the best at everything to get a chanche to get arcanes. ( I mean I realy suck at eidolon. well mostly at terralyst. that's where I always kick the bucket)
It gives indeed the threat of the sentients. (also how many are there? weren't we supposed to have killed them to near extinction or am I missinterpetating the lore?)
It gives us more story, build up to even more story.
Gives the player complaining about wanting higher lvl contect some higher level content. (propably still not what they had in mind im guessing)
 

Things that I dont understand about this event.
Werent we supposed to be super specialist in killing sentients? To me it feels like I am fighting for survival instead of the other way around.
Why nerf warframe abilties to cover up a flaw in the mechanic? (change the mechanic instead of nerfing other stuff.) If you would change the mechanic you've shown you learned from your mistakes and will come out stronger in the end.
Why isn't there a squad chat. (group chat for all 8 people)
Why bring an extra grind in an already grindy event. (release of a new prime frame + Prime Weapons) 

 

Anyway sorry for the long post, my bad grammer, my stupid rambling. (been a long day at work (mental healthcare) and it's already late here)

[OmegaVoid]

On 2020-04-04 at 12:10 AM, FurianStorm said:

Why nerf warframe abilties to cover up a flaw in the mechanic?

Because Limbo was OP to begin with?

It didn't matter so much when he was just used to AFK cheese Excav and Mobile Defence missions... but it was no less true.

On 2020-04-04 at 12:10 AM, FurianStorm said:

Why bring an extra grind in an already grindy event. (release of a new prime frame + Prime Weapons) 

So when you're tired of one grind, you can switch to another grind! 😃

Also, the Primes will still be around to farm for a long time after the event has finished, so there's no pressure from DE's side to take take time off Scarlet Spear; it's up to each player to decide their own priorities. I've farmed Titania Prime, I did a couple of radshares for Pangolin Prime parts which didn't pay off, and went back to Scarlet Spear. I'll come back to that and the Corinth later.

On 2020-04-04 at 12:10 AM, FurianStorm said:

It gives indeed the threat of the sentients. (also how many are there? weren't we supposed to have killed them to near extinction or am I missinterpetating the lore?)

The Sentients didn't all come back to the Origin System; some -- probably most -- of them are still in the Tau System... meaning there's no canon-based limit on how many reinforcements they could have sent here.

On 2020-04-04 at 12:10 AM, FurianStorm said:

Werent we supposed to be super specialist in killing sentients? To me it feels like I am fighting for survival instead of the other way around.

Lore-wise, a Warframe was more than a match for one Sentient, but facing sufficient numbers they could still get trashed.

The regular Orokin troops must have been dropping to them like flies however; the Orokin were so desperate for manpower that they resorted to militarising their Grineer drudges, despite having serious reservations about their potential effectiveness and reliablity.

Plus, during the Old War, the Tenno were trained by Teshin Dax (and probably others), but since we came out of cryosleep with amnesia, the contemporary Tenno are probably not quite the force they once were.

By its nature, gameplay =/= lore anyway... but your experience probably squares better with the lore than you might think. 🙂

Edited April 5, 2020 by OmegaVoid
kan nott spel.