On "challenge" and "reductive combat"

[keikogi]

20 minutes ago, Kainosh said:

Cooldowns or Different energy system (no pickups, only regeneration)

I've once proposed a system where people could only regenerate over time or by killing enemies but no energy from skills or aoe weapons. The energy amount would be warframe stat. This system would fix the problems of warframs current system that both allows the players from profit energy from using an AOE skill or generate energy from tin air. But I got a bad reception.

26 minutes ago, Kainosh said:

• Ability stat nerfs.  Some have too much range, some provide too much invincibility...
• Different ammo economy (without any mutation mods and pizzas). Bramma arrows should be as valuable as BFG ammo....while "bullet hose" ammunition should be quite available. Each weapon needs its own "ammo consumption"
• Further balance and tweaks to Status procs and Crits to make them work VS bosses properly (Stacking cap maybe?)

The damage system in general needs fundamental changea to many mutipliers and too much scaling. A unmoded weapon like the acelera increases its DPS 100 timea after it is modded. It is silly. When you start to stack warframe buffs , debuff and status it gets quite silly to the point of an enemy has no invunerability mechanic people will find a way to one shot it. Monster Hunter increases the player DPS like 4 times from start to finish , this way the player progression is mostly skill and knowledge intead of bigger number.

 

 

[Kainosh]

9 hours ago, keikogi said:

I've once proposed a system where people could only regenerate over time or by killing enemies but no energy from skills or aoe weapons.

I saw many threads with similar suggestion.  All had totally different reactions... Some of them were quite pop btw.  You just....missed the "wave" i guess. It happens.

9 hours ago, keikogi said:

many mutipliers and too much scaling

I think DE just need to separate "low rank" and "high rank".   Just like MH does. 

Then multipliers will not matter...Coz "High rankers" will play in "high rank missions" and will be challenged with "high rank combat".  

 

But yeah....10x crit damage mult i have on several weapons is just...  Modding indeed does a bit too much. For both Weapons and Frames.

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, Avienas said:

Though i do enjoy a nice active discussion, the quote walls are getting too huge so lets try to condense things down on further discussion and snip the quotes when they are extremely blockie.

I've been doing my best to achieve that. I try to only quote pieces that I'm directly responding to, I try to edit out sentences in order to crop paragraphs down to just the core arguments and I try to summarise points in my own words when I feel a quote is getting too large. I've also been skipping a lot of stuff I want to comment on for the sake of brevity, and to keep these posts down to JUST an hour or so to write 🙂 If it's not working then I do apologise. I can always shoot for more brevity, but I still want to shotgun responses to as many people as I can manage in the one opportunity I get to post in a given day.

 

14 hours ago, (PS4)GEN-Son_17 said:

Only a few players claim the game began easy. Even less claim the eidolons, orbs, the Wolf and most bosses were not challenging. Of course, it's extremely easy to say this now when, A) years of experience has accumulated and, B) the absolute overloaded amount of YouTube tutorials, builds, spoilers and guides exist. This overabundance of assistance (years of xp + hand holding) changes the narrative and allows such a discussion to take place, where in this day of social media spoiled gaming, anyone can claim to be good.

One of the primary reasons I felt compelled to make this thread was precisely because I wanted to drive a line between "difficulty" and "challenge." People often complain that Warframe is "too easy" and ask for it to be "more challenging" as though these things are opposite of each other, but they really aren't. It's entirely possible for the game to be easy AND challenging at the same time. This is why I define "difficulty" as our ability or lack thereof to actually complete tasks in the game and "challenge" as the mechanical complexity we need to engage with in order to tackle challenges, whether we successfully complete them or not.

This isn't just semantics, either. When pushed for what they would see as "more challenging," a lot of people will describe a version of Warframe which is fundamentally more complex. Some might ask for better AI which requires us to be smarter about fighting it, some ask for more elaborate enemies that we have to outmanoeuvre or outsmart somehow rather than just out-damaging. And sure, there are a fair few people who just want enemies with bigger numbers where the big numbers of our own builds really make sense, but a lot of THOSE arguments often boil down to the likes of "why bring a sniper rifle when a single shot from an auto rifle will one-shot everything?"

I don't have comprehensive metrics to back this up, of course - I AM speaking on anecdotal impressions from conversations I've had and comments I've seen. However, my impression is that at least a plurality of people want a more complex combat experience which requires more active involvement from the player when they ask for "more challenge." Most of the time, this comes hand-in-hand with "higher difficulty" because most people intuitively believe that higher difficulty will naturally force us to play smarter, but my experience has been the exact opposite. The more difficult combat becomes in a video game, the more reductive the experience becomes simply because high difficulty predominantly serves to invalidate "cheap" tactics, builds and approaches. If the game doesn't offer smarter, more complex, more "skilled" alternatives, then it becomes reductive, with players funnelled into a stale and limited meta.

My impression of discussions regarding challenge (both here and on other games' own forums) is that people often have some intuitive idea of the difference between difficulty and complexity, but all too often use them interchangeably without realising that they're talking about two separate, almost entirely independent concepts. It's entirely possible to make a game brutally difficult without really being challenging, as well as to make a game challenging while also being fairly easy. These are two different tools used to modify two different aspects of the experience.

I would assert that a game really only benefits from high difficulty if it already offers a wealth of mechanical complexity. By its very nature, difficulty invalidates options. When used correctly, difficulty can invalidate the boring, repetitive, grindy options while pushing players into engaging with the game's complexity rather than trying to sidestep it. We can only have challenge when the core gameplay loop has complexity for us to engage with AND when game design sufficiently convinces us to actually engage with it. When used in moderation, difficulty can be a good tool to guide us in the right direction without railroading us too much, but difficulty alone does not challenging gameplay make. Well-designed combat is still required.

 

14 hours ago, Kainosh said:

Even if you take enemies straight from Doom eternal and put them in Warframe....nothing will change.

One cast of Shatter shield = no ranged damage. Then just nuke with Peacemakers. One Radial blind and every demon in sight is finishable... 

On the other hand - yes, this is true. While difficulty alone can't create challenge if the underlying system lacks any real complexity, a complete lack of difficulty makes complexity itself pointless. In almost every discussion on the subject of challenge, we invariably get to the point of "Who cares how complex enemies are when I can one-shot all of 'em with AoE weapons without even knowing they're there?" As an Inaros fanboy, I'd add the other side of this coin - "Who cares about telegraphed enemy attacks when I can just tank 'em all since they can't hurt me?" Without difficulty, players will naturally gravitate towards the simplest, dumbest, most boring way to play the game because that's our nature. We go with what's easiest and least taxing. Some amount of difficulty is still required in order to punish us for being lazy and force us away from at least the most straight-forward, most reductive playstyles.

Again I go back to The Division 2. Sometimes in that game, you can stand out in the open, tank damage and trade with the enemy. If all of us could do this all of the time, then we wouldn't be playing a cover shooter, so raw difficulty (enemy health and damage values) are generally scaled to the point where even really tanky players will be punished and punished hard for attempting this. There are exceptions (ballistic shields, say), but by and large the game will simply kill you if you try to trade. Enemies WILL outdamage you nearly every time, even with a team, even with lots of armour. Your only choice, then, is to take cover and try to NOT get shot the majority of the time. There's nothing complex about it. This is simple difficulty achieved via enemy levels and enemy stats with no real "challenge" inherent in it. Instead, challenge comes from then having to engage with the game's cover system, use the game's weapons and abilities wisely, use terrain to your advantage. When reductive facetanking fails, The Division 2 offers a wealth of complexity to fall back on in order to still play the game and win.

The catalyst for this thread actually came from a discussion with friends of mine specifically about The Division 2. I have a reputation for liking easy fights and disliking "challenge," which caused a lot of confusion with my friends because I kept insisting we play on Challenging, when they seemed to prefer Hard. My reasons for it were simple, though. Hard had insufficient difficulty to FORCE us into cover, so some of my friends would simply stay out of cover and trade damage with the enemy. I preferred Challenging for the simple fact that it forced us the play the game "the way it's meant to be played" rather than ignoring its complexity and YOLOing our way through what would otherwise have been cool, tactical combat which we were reducing to a really stupid, boring grind instead.

Difficulty and challenge (really, "difficulty" and "complexity" which together come to form "challenge") may be two different concepts, but both are needed for a fun and engaging experience. Challenge without difficulty is reductive because nobody bothers to be fancy. Difficulty without challenge is reductive because we're forced into simplistic solutions. Both in moderation, I think, lead to the most rewarding experience.

 

14 hours ago, Kainosh said:

Nothing will change without:

• Cooldowns or Different energy system (no pickups, only regeneration)
• Ability stat nerfs.  Some have too much range, some provide too much invincibility...
• Different ammo economy (without any mutation mods and pizzas). Bramma arrows should be as valuable as BFG ammo....while "bullet hose" ammunition should be quite available. Each weapon needs its own "ammo consumption"
• Further balance and tweaks to Status procs and Crits to make them work VS bosses properly (Stacking cap maybe?)

Without these changes it is pointless to add any cool enemies or expanding combat mechanics. 

14 hours ago, keikogi said:

The damage system in general needs fundamental changea to many mutipliers and too much scaling. A unmoded weapon like the acelera increases its DPS 100 timea after it is modded. It is silly. When you start to stack warframe buffs , debuff and status it gets quite silly to the point of an enemy has no invunerability mechanic people will find a way to one shot it. Monster Hunter increases the player DPS like 4 times from start to finish , this way the player progression is mostly skill and knowledge intead of bigger number.

I don't want to go into detail on specific suggestions, but my thoughts usually go along the same lines. In particular, I highly dislike Warframe's "Energy" system, and find it to be one of the game's major sources of reductive gameplay. At best it's an anti-fun mechanic which keeps us from using the cool toys we have at our disposal. At best it's a non-issue which simply requires a "meta" build pick to render entirely meaningless. And because DE don't seem to design with infinite energy and infinite ability spam, we end up breaking difficulty when we do it. I would dearly love for Energy to disappear from the game entirely, and be replaced with something else altogether. My vote would be a cooldown system or some kind of unique per-Warframe resource system like what Nidus, Ember, Baruuk and a few others have. Whatever ends up happening, though, our current implementation of a "generic MMO mana bar" just isn't conducive to fun combat.

And then there's buff stacking, in particular damage buff stacking. Right now, Warframe has so many sources of multiplicative buffs that the difference between an unmodded weapon and a fully-modded one is absurd. I would go one further and assert that damage buffs in general are almost always the kiss of death for any combat system with pretensions of depth, simply because they're almost always better than everything else that may be trying to compete with them. I'm fully convinced that player damage buff stacking needs to take a serious nerf and the scope of power on our weapons kept within a more reasonable range of their base values. But again, I don't want to get into specific detail.

In short, I feel we need another round of Warframe Revised in order to address some of these long-standing core systems. I know the current run of Warframe Revised didn't exactly sit well with everyone, but I personally enjoyed it greatly if just because it showed that Warframe is not "fixed." Warframe is not a lost cause. Things can change - even things so old and written in stone that you might consider them iconic. Warframe is the game it is today because DE weren't afraid to scrap large chunks of it and remake then brand new. I want to see more of that. I don't really think we can have much in the way of challenge without some seriously disruptive, seriously controversial major changes.

[keikogi]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't want to go into detail on specific suggestions, but my thoughts usually go along the same lines. In particular, I highly dislike Warframe's "Energy" system, and find it to be one of the game's major sources of reductive gameplay. At best it's an anti-fun mechanic which keeps us from using the cool toys we have at our disposal. At best it's a non-issue which simply requires a "meta" build pick to render entirely meaningless. And because DE don't seem to design with infinite energy and infinite ability spam, we end up breaking difficulty when we do it. I would dearly love for Energy to disappear from the game entirely, and be replaced with something else altogether. My vote would be a cooldown system or some kind of unique per-Warframe resource system like what Nidus, Ember, Baruuk and a few others have. Whatever ends up happening, though, our current implementation of a "generic MMO mana bar" just isn't conducive to fun combat.

The problem is not energy as concept is the way it was implemented. Energy in warframe has a unsatisfying and overly strict energy system that was design to punish the player. The core of warframe energy system is shoot enemies until RNG Jesus decides that you won 25 energy. That´s 25 energy is worth somewhere in between 12,5 energy (blind rage ) and 100 energy (fleeting expertise ). Also if memory serves me well energy drops become more scarce the longer the game goes. The player cannot plan around the system because the game hides the core information of what is the expected energy wield of each enemy so he cant plan around ( no wonder energy syphon was so popular and zenurik is so popular right now ). After you add all the bell and wisely added over the game history the system becomes inexistent energy restores pretty much mean the end of energy concerns, zenurik warps the system to wait around until you have energy and arcane energize just increases the expected wield of each energy orb by so much that you might as well not have a energy system at this point ( also efficiency is compounding all energy gains , zerukik gets you like 25 energy per5 seconds but at maximum efficiency at is effectively 100).

edit: don't even get me started on the energy drain mechanics that were originally introduced as way to save energy because duration skill often did not need their full duration ( Nix meditation) so paying for used second was a buff. But after a knee jerk neck because using exalted blade with 100 % uptime was too much for the game the energy drain prevents regeneration with makes duration skill way superior to drain one even if you waste half of the duration.

At the end of the day it creates terrible gameplay at both ends of the spectrum new players can´t gather energy and veterans have 0 energy concerns. Also it does not create at gameplay loop out of it´s complexity ( arcane energize ask you to do what you would do anyways and zenurik ask you to perform a pointless dance to get a passive ) nor it creates any meaningful interaction between player and enemy. If you want to view my full review of the system here it is

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

n short, I feel we need another round of Warframe Revised in order to address some of these long-standing core systems. I know the current run of Warframe Revised didn't exactly sit well with everyone, but I personally enjoyed it greatly if just because it showed that Warframe is not "fixed." Warframe is not a lost cause. Things can change - even things so old and written in stone that you might consider them iconic. Warframe is the game it is today because DE weren't afraid to scrap large chunks of it and remake then brand new. I want to see more of that. I don't really think we can have much in the way of challenge without some seriously disruptive, seriously controversial major changes.

 

The damage problem is the one that I find the hardest to address because I don´t know if warframe would survive a damage compression ( reducing the distance between the damage floor and the damage ceiling ), the community would riot way harder then a rework of the energy system or even warframe nerfs across the board. People like the brag about their builds causing the HUD to break (doing so much damage that the HUD can´t handle it, the number overflows the variable type used for the HUD ). I can´t even imagine the S#&$storm created by a damage compression even it is better for the game and healthier for the gameplay.  Even the most commom form of warframe content is simply how to get this weapon to do BIG DAMAGE.

Edited April 11, 2020 by keikogi

[UnderRevision]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

In almost every discussion on the subject of challenge, we invariably get to the point of "Who cares how complex enemies are when I can one-shot all of 'em with AoE weapons without even knowing they're there?" As an Inaros fanboy, I'd add the other side of this coin - "Who cares about telegraphed enemy attacks when I can just tank 'em all since they can't hurt me?" Without difficulty, players will naturally gravitate towards the simplest, dumbest, most boring way to play the game because that's our nature.

I'm not sure if this would work, but the thought this provokes from me is if we should give enemies counterplay options.  If they could resist ranged damage or strip our armor, for example, would that encourage more diverse play?  I find I can't personally answer this because I'm not really at the point where I can evaporate any enemy without fail or face-tank any and all damage, so I don't have the required perspective.

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

I'm not sure if this would work, but the thought this provokes from me is if we should give enemies counterplay options.  If they could resist ranged damage or strip our armor, for example, would that encourage more diverse play?  I find I can't personally answer this because I'm not really at the point where I can evaporate any enemy without fail or face-tank any and all damage, so I don't have the required perspective.

Possibly, but probably not - not on its own anyway. Like difficulty, ability nullification is a means limit players' options. That's only a good thing if the combat system offers enough underlying complexity for players to fall back on when their abilities are nullified, and I'm not really convinced that Warframe has that. As I said - just buffing enemies or nerfing players (even conditionally) isn't going to make Warframe more challenging. On the contrary, would make combat even more reductive, since it would invalidate even more currently viable options and push us into even more cheese as we try to kill these kinds of ability nullification enemies before they're able to nullify us.

You'll note from my terminology that all of this neatly applies to Nullifiers and to an extent Arbitration Drones. Here's the thing, though - as much as people hate Nullifiers, they come with quite a bit of complexity inherent in their design. No, we can't kill them with abilities and their bubbles block most of our gunfire, but their mechanics give us quite a few ways to engage with nullifiers even though we can't attack them directly. We can use rapid-fire weapons to burst their bubble, we can snipe the little drone thing, we can even use melee to attack the bubble from outside (with enough melee range, anyway) or even just say "Screw it!" dive in the bubble and kill them from inside. Which approach you take heavily depends on what kit you brought and the overall situation. In the case of Nullifiers, I would argue that there is enough gameplay complexity to fall back on when just spamming skills or shotgun shells at them doesn't work.

If you're going to design more enemies like them, however, you're going to need to come up with at least that much complexity FIRST, before you start invalidating players' tools. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with making some enemies immune to some of our abilities nor letting some enemies temporarily take away some of our toys. However, it needs to be handled with care and must always come with additional complexity to make up for the abilities we've lost. Ultimately, difficulty borne out of hobbling us never going to be very popular. People want to use their toys AND still feel challenged, not feel challenged only by giving up their toys.

 

18 hours ago, keikogi said:

The damage problem is the one that I find the hardest to address because I don´t know if warframe would survive a damage compression ( reducing the distance between the damage floor and the damage ceiling ), the community would riot way harder then a rework of the energy system or even warframe nerfs across the board. People like the brag about their builds causing the HUD to break (doing so much damage that the HUD can´t handle it, the number overflows the variable type used for the HUD ). I can´t even imagine the S#&$storm created by a damage compression even it is better for the game and healthier for the gameplay.  Even the most commom form of warframe content is simply how to get this weapon to do BIG DAMAGE.

I'm confident that Warframe can survive a round of "damage compression" (now that's a really clever term that I'm going to be using 🙂). While, yes, a reduction in the damage numbers on-screen is going to freak people out and we'll get a lot of histrionics, I think common sense will ultimately triumph. As I said before, a lot of the game's min/maxing currently doesn't really change how we play the game, but rather whether playing the game "feels good." That feeling is less a function of how big the number pop-ups are and more a function of how quickly we can kill enemies. If I went from dealing 300K per headshot with my Opticor down to doing just 3000 damage per headshot that might feel weird for a while. However, if enemies still go down in one headshot then I'm going to get over it pretty quickly because the game still "feels good" to play. It's a Spartan Laser. It should be killing people in one shot whether it deals 3000 or 3 000 000 000 damage.

I'm kind of with DE on their dislike of the Simulacrum, to be honest. I tend to find that action games do better when they DON'T give people damage pop-ups over enemies' heads. Players tend to over-focus on the numbers and largely ignore the "feel" of individual weapons and their overall performance in favour of just having big integers on-screen. I remember having endless arguments with people on the Payday 2 forums about Rifles being better than LMGs because they're more accurate so you can deal more damage in headshots... Maybe, but a large volume of fire with generally higher rates of fire give you better kill potential overall even if the individual numbers are smaller. Or take The Division 2. My current build is absolute bottom tier for damage, doing just barely over 80K damage per shot with my Stoner but still managing to keep up with snipers dealing 4-8 million damage per critical headshot because I can just keep the guns firing all of the time.

As long as whatever damage compression change we get comes with a corresponding change to enemy durability, then I think people will get over themselves. They'll scream, they'll shout, they'll ragequit forever and make breathy "the rise and fall of Warframe" videos on YouTube. But they'll eventually be back, reshuffle their builds around and find the game is just as much fun to play, if not a lot more so. Yes, some people play Warframe as a thought experiment trying to see how high they can make the numbers in the same way some people speed-run games through endless bugs and glitches. I'd argue that the majority of Warframe players are here for the core gameplay experience, however. Opening up more options, making more weapons viable and lowering the barrier of entry to "a decent build" would - I think - be healthy for the game in the long run, even if it takes a massive disruption and many hurt feelings to achieve that.

Change is never easy, but "change" is the primary selling point behind the whole Live Service model. We keep coming back to these games BECAUSE they keep changing, evolving and expanding. The moment they stop changing is the moment they die, far as I'm concerned.

[keikogi]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm confident that Warframe can survive a round of "damage compression" (now that's a really clever term that I'm going to be using 🙂). While, yes, a reduction in the damage numbers on-screen is going to freak people out and we'll get a lot of histrionics, I think common sense will ultimately triumph.

After seeing the sucess of this post on reddit I hopefull a change like this could happen without killing the game, a lot of the community is already frustrated with the “reductive gameplay “ the meme format just makes easier to appeal. Here it is

 

 

Also it feels like people are finally realizing that too much power kind of make fights meaninless , I feel like the comunity is feeling like this 

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

If I went from dealing 300K per headshot with my Opticor down to doing just 3000 damage per headshot that might feel weird for a while. However, if enemies still go down in one headshot then I'm going to get over it pretty quickly because the game still "feels good" to play. It's a Spartan Laser. It should be killing people in one shot whether it deals 3000 or 3 000 000 000 damage.

As I like to say a one shot is a one shot. 

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm kind of with DE on their dislike of the Simulacrum, to be honest. I tend to find that action games do better when they DON'T give people damage pop-ups over enemies' heads. Players tend to over-focus on the numbers and largely ignore the "feel" of individual weapons and their overall performance in favour of just having big integers on-screen.

The Simulacrum is more of symptom them the disease, is like saying someone has fever dump the into ice. For example if you gave people a target dummy on darksouls series people would not give the faintest of #*!%s about it. The Wolf of Saturn six exist , bomabards exist , Kyta Raknoid exist , the think is the most important think in this game is dealing allot of damage fast. If the difference between a average build and riven most optimized build was 2 times instead of 20 people would care more about playing instead of building.

A bit of side note I find it shamefull that the mods that affect the weapon handeling ( switch speed , reload speed , magazine size , projectile speed ) can´t make the cut on a good build.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

As long as whatever damage compression change we get comes with a corresponding change to enemy durability, then I think people will get over themselves. They'll scream, they'll shout, they'll ragequit forever and make breathy "the rise and fall of Warframe" videos on YouTube. But they'll eventually be back, reshuffle their builds around and find the game is just as much fun to play, if not a lot more so. Yes, some people play Warframe as a thought experiment trying to see how high they can make the numbers in the same way some people speed-run games through endless bugs and glitches. I'd argue that the majority of Warframe players are here for the core gameplay experience, however. Opening up more options, making more weapons viable and lowering the barrier of entry to "a decent build" would - I think - be healthy for the game in the long run, even if it takes a massive disruption and many hurt feelings to achieve that.

Spoke like a prophet. 

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Change is never easy, but "change" is the primary selling point behind the whole Live Service model. We keep coming back to these games BECAUSE they keep changing, evolving and expanding. The moment they stop changing is the moment they die, far as I'm concerned.

I´ve played warframe on and off for years. The change is the biggest reason to come back to see how the game is now.

Edited April 12, 2020 by keikogi

[UnderRevision]

16 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Possibly, but probably not - not on its own anyway. Like difficulty, ability nullification is a means limit players' options. That's only a good thing if the combat system offers enough underlying complexity for players to fall back on when their abilities are nullified, and I'm not really convinced that Warframe has that. As I said - just buffing enemies or nerfing players (even conditionally) isn't going to make Warframe more challenging. On the contrary, would make combat even more reductive, since it would invalidate even more currently viable options and push us into even more cheese as we try to kill these kinds of ability nullification enemies before they're able to nullify us.

Hm, I see your point.  Looking back as someone who joined the game after they were added, I've followed a sort of progression on my reaction when I see nullifiers .  At first I took them in stride because I was still figuring out how to bullet jump reliably and thus had bigger fish to fry.  Later I found them irritating because they shut down the abilities I was finally getting used to relying on.  Then, much like you said, I realized I had options for how to fight them and I went back to taking them in stride and dealing them them as needed.  Now they only irritate me when the map becomes 80% nullifier crewmen, partially because I can't see what's going on at that point.  Pretty sure I don't know how to design an enemy that would strike that kind of balance.

14 hours ago, keikogi said:

A bit of side note I find it shamefull that the mods that affect the weapon handeling ( switch speed , reload speed , magazine size , projectile speed ) can´t make the cut on a good build.

I agree there.  On the one hand, I like how distinctive a lot of weapons can feel.  On the other, there have been quite a few weapons where I've really wished I could mod for stuff like that and not feel like I'm crippling my ability to actually kill things with it.  In theory, the weapon exilus slots should help with that but I play casually enough that that just feels like more effort than it's worth when I still might not like the weapon afterward.  Also, I've got to agree with Steel_Rook that "damage compression" is a really good term and I might have to use it.

[Steel_Rook]

22 hours ago, keikogi said:

The Simulacrum is more of symptom them the disease, is like saying someone has fever dump the into ice. For example if you gave people a target dummy on darksouls series people would not give the faintest of #*!%s about it. The Wolf of Saturn six exist , bomabards exist , Kyta Raknoid exist , the think is the most important think in this game is dealing allot of damage fast. If the difference between a average build and riven most optimized build was 2 times instead of 20 people would care more about playing instead of building.

This is true, though we're talking about a couple of different things here, though. I'm not opposed to games giving me complete stats and testing grounds so that I may make informed decisions. Far from it. I more brought this up because a lot people tend to be irresponsible with this information, prioritising high values for raw stats which don't always translate to high performance. I had this exact issue with The Division 2 just the other day trying to figure out which LMG would give me the best performance based purely on damage per shot, rate of fire and magazine size. I ended up having to put together this spreadsheet of my own just to get a good idea of their over-time stats. Don't worry about the actual info in there, it's not relevant to Warframe. It's just to illustrate that JUST getting high damage numbers per shot isn't always the same as dealing a lot of damage.

The reason this matter is because any kind of damage compression is going to drop damage numbers substantially and create the appearance of massive systemic nerfs. People are almost certainly going to go to the Simulacrum, get much smaller numbers and proclaim doom and gloom, context be damned. Hell, and that's if we're lucky. A great many will read the patch notes and proclaim doom and gloom there. That's not a "maybe," it's going to happen because it always happens whenever MMOs make changes like these. Even if TTK remains the same, even if weapon power relative to enemy health remains the same, even if the over-time stats change in players' favour - as long as the Simulacrum shows us smaller numbers, it's a "nerf." That's I'd argue the primary challenge that damage compression would need to overcome - one of perception more so than one of game design or balance.

What you're describing is the other side of that coin - enemy tankiness. This is the result of what I like to call a "sliding status quo." Players get stronger via power creep, enemy stats and levels are increased to match, players get more power creep, repeat. While the relative strength of player vs. enemy remains fairly stable and indeed slowly shifts in the player's favour, the builds required to achieve that grow more powerful and thus more exclusive. While status quo "feels" the same, it slowly slides up, increasing in requirements and systematically eliminating options. Yes, as it stands right now we can blow through even the game's tankiest enemies, but the COST of doing so is formulaic, specialised builds overloaded with damage to the exclusion of everything else.

In Warframe, you're almost never encouraged to mod for accuracy or stability or magazine size or reload, let alone pointless stuff like ammo capacity. You mod for ammo pick-up sometimes, but that's more to address Warframe's shoddy Byzantine ammo pick-up system. You can mod for weapon switch speed and a bunch of other interesting stats. But you don't - none of us really do. Because status quo keeps sliding up, we keep needing more and more (and more and more) damage to break even against the higher-level enemies who show up in increasingly high-level "regular content." There's no room to build for fun stuff when you need to invest everything you have in damage, criticial damage, elemental damage and more damage via multishot, and also more damage via armour-ignoring slash effects if we can. Building for damage always trumps everything else, especially in combat systems against tanky enemies.

I understand the need to choose between "more damage" and "other things" in an RPG system, but that's really not a meaningful choice in Warframe. The general "handling" stats of all of our guns are fine by default. Very few weapons are inaccurate enough to bother modding for accuracy, very few weapons have meaningful enough recoil to bother modding for stability, etc. At best, it might be worth slapping on a Magazine or Reload mod if it also comes with 60% elemental damage. Gunplay mechanics is actually something I should have brought up in the OP. Warframe has the potential for pretty interesting gunplay, but never really does anything with that. You have the occasional weapon like the Tenora, which shoots faster and more accurately the longer you hold down the trigger, but most weapons have no real gunplay to them. You point, you shoot and hope that your mouse tracing is good enough, to the point that the game often feels like a Virtua Cop experience. Gunplay in this game is itself heavily reductive. There exists mechanical complexity within some weapons. Our solution as players is to just not use those weapons. Ain't nobody got time for that. Just pick a weapon that shoots straight and is stable, then pile on all of the damage on it. Why bother with a quirky weapon, instead?

 

8 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

Hm, I see your point.  Looking back as someone who joined the game after they were added, I've followed a sort of progression on my reaction when I see nullifiers .  At first I took them in stride because I was still figuring out how to bullet jump reliably and thus had bigger fish to fry.  Later I found them irritating because they shut down the abilities I was finally getting used to relying on.  Then, much like you said, I realized I had options for how to fight them and I went back to taking them in stride and dealing them them as needed. 

This mirrors my own experience, as well. The thing with Nullifiers is that - for all the complaining people do about them here on the forums - they still offer a fair bit of underlying complexity that players can fall back on when the abilities they normally rely on aren't effective. Yes, when too many Nullifiers spawn then that complexity becomes impractical, but this is something I already addressed: Complex enemies SHOULD NOT be spawning in large numbers. The more complex an enemy is, the less frequently you want players fighting them and the fewer of them at a time you want to spawn. If an enemy requires my full attention to fight, the last thing I want is having to fight four of them every 15-20 seconds. That's actually one of my primary concerns with the Infested. Ancient Healers are a GREAT idea for an enemy and a really good way to create a priority target... Up until the game starts maintaining four of them scattered around the room, making enemies damn near unkillable through walls and behind obstacles.

You can have hordes and you can have complex enemies, but you can't have hordes of complex enemies. Yes, shooting simple, dumb, weak enemies all day gets dull fast, but so does having to play what amounts to minigames with every sodding enemy you meet all day, as well. A balance is needed, and I feel that L4D nailed that balance over a decade ago. Its trick was simple - provide hordes of simple cannon fodder enemies who are individually not even worth considering and exist only to distract and stumble the player, then pepper in a small number of more complex, more dangerous Special enemies that the player has to look out for WHILE being distracted by the Commons. It works out well because it allows the game to still play like a hectic cover shooter while still not getting boring because the game always has curveballs to throw at you. Granted, L4D's approach to Specials is annoying because it's very heavily centred on the "four player co-op" gimmick it pioneered. Guaranteed death grabs like that aren't a good fit for Warframe. However, Special enemies with complex mechanics, lots of health and dangerous or disruptive gimmicks could still work.

As it stands, Nullifiers feel "cheap" because they're a departure from standard enemy design in Warframe. That is to say, they're not just a bag of HP that you shoot in the head while trying to not get shot yourself, like pretty much everything else is. I feel that the playerbase might be more accepting of this design if it were more wide-spread throughout the game, though. DE seem to want to make some weapons good against some enemies and worse against others by fiddling with health types. Special enemies, by contrast, are a good way of varying weapon viability not based on "stats" but simply based on how each individual weapon works. Weak, rapid-fire weapons are particularly good against Nullifiers simply because they're better at popping their bubbles without having to aim. Inversely, sniper weapons are better against a Nox because they have an easier time hitting his weak point and typically doing a lot of damage. Special enemies with actual special mechanics open the door to stuff like this, and more.

I don't think DE will ever go back and redesign all of their legacy enemies (partly because they don't seem to think there's anything wrong with them). They can, at the very least, design more interesting enemies moving forward, however. What concerns me is they're not actually going that. Yes, the Aerolyst is a step in the right direction, but look at how many patches it took before we could beat it into their heads that WE NEED A GRACE PERIOD! They seemed to think that giving that enemy almost instant regen on the cannisters added to its "challenge" when all it did was make it more tedious. And that's one enemy. The last major new enemy I can think of was that "one long arm" Infested creature they added with Arlo, and that's... Just a bag of HP with a melee attack, near as I can tell. Hell, the special enemies who turn into cocoons when killed were more interesting, and NONE of those entered general rotation.

Basically, I feel that a mix of predominantly weak and simple enemies with only occasional tough and complex enemies would offer the best kind of combat variety. We'd get our fix of mindless slaughter, interspersed with moments of intensity as the "real enemies" show up on the field. And if you want to up the difficulty, you can always make Common enemies more numerous, tougher or more dangerous to put more pressure on us and better distract us from the Specials. That's not how Warframe is built, obviously, but it's still possible.

[keikogi]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

This is true, though we're talking about a couple of different things here, though. I'm not opposed to games giving me complete stats and testing grounds so that I may make informed decisions. Far from it. I more brought this up because a lot people tend to be irresponsible with this information, prioritising high values for raw stats which don't always translate to high performance. I had this exact issue with The Division 2 just the other day trying to figure out which LMG would give me the best performance based purely on damage per shot, rate of fire and magazine size. I ended up having to put together this spreadsheet of my own just to get a good idea of their over-time stats. Don't worry about the actual info in there, it's not relevant to Warframe. It's just to illustrate that JUST getting high damage numbers per shot isn't always the same as dealing a lot of damage.

I´m aware that the true measures of weapon is time to kill (TTK) on the content you are running. People look to much at dps and don´t realize that of million damage he just did , only 800 k were necessary and the guy using a smg killed 2 enemies on the time he killed one.

Even on the golden age of the tigris prime I never tought it wsd that good because it had low kills per seconds.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

The reason this matter is because any kind of damage compression is going to drop damage numbers substantially and create the appearance of massive systemic nerfs. People are almost certainly going to go to the Simulacrum, get much smaller numbers and proclaim doom and gloom, context be damned. Hell, and that's if we're lucky. A great many will read the patch notes and proclaim doom and gloom there. That's not a "maybe," it's going to happen because it always happens whenever MMOs make changes like these. Even if TTK remains the same, even if weapon power relative to enemy health remains the same, even if the over-time stats change in players' favour - as long as the Simulacrum shows us smaller numbers, it's a "nerf." That's I'd argue the primary challenge that damage compression would need to overcome - one of perception more so than one of game design or balance.

I think you can somewhat side step this buy keeping the highest number the same , just increase the minimum one( not sure if possible new players would be somewhat confused if their weapon did 3 k damage per shot while their HP is like 100, also a bit of a side note the asymmetry between warframe stats and enemy stats is also a surprisingly big problem for warframe design , all enemy control or self damage mechanics have a nasty tendency of falling flat).

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

What you're describing is the other side of that coin - enemy tankiness. This is the result of what I like to call a "sliding status quo." Players get stronger via power creep, enemy stats and levels are increased to match, players get more power creep, repeat. While the relative strength of player vs. enemy remains fairly stable and indeed slowly shifts in the player's favour, the builds required to achieve that grow more powerful and thus more exclusive. While status quo "feels" the same, it slowly slides up, increasing in requirements and systematically eliminating options. Yes, as it stands right now we can blow through even the game's tankiest enemies, but the COST of doing so is formulaic, specialised builds overloaded with damage to the exclusion of everything else.

It also creates the side problem off bigger barrier of entry. 

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I understand the need to choose between "more damage" and "other things" in an RPG system, but that's really not a meaningful choice in Warframe. The general "handling" stats of all of our guns are fine by default. Very few weapons are inaccurate enough to bother modding for accuracy, very few weapons have meaningful enough recoil to bother modding for stability, etc. At best, it might be worth slapping on a Magazine or Reload mod if it also comes with 60% elemental damage. Gunplay mechanics is actually something I should have brought up in the OP. Warframe has the potential for pretty interesting gunplay, but never really does anything with that. You have the occasional weapon like the Tenora, which shoots faster and more accurately the longer you hold down the trigger, but most weapons have no real gunplay to them. You point, you shoot and hope that your mouse tracing is good enough, to the point that the game often feels like a Virtua Cop experience. Gunplay in this game is itself heavily reductive. There exists mechanical complexity within some weapons. Our solution as players is to just not use those weapons. Ain't nobody got time for that. Just pick a weapon that shoots straight and is stable, then pile on all of the damage on it. Why bother with a quirky weapon, instead?

Feel sad for the basmu, quite a interesting desing but it just can´t keep up with my generic shooting rifle of choice ( kuva hind ). There are a lot of really interesting weapons in warframe the problem is more often they don´t deal enought damage. The mutalist quanta has a interesting gimmic but cant deal enougt damage even using it. The quanta has a intersitng alt fire but it got power creeped into oblivion , the weapons with drawbacks don´t deal enought damage to compensate for these drawnbacks and so on. 

Side note: the basmu will probably find a weird crit build using arcane avenger and cats but I dislike using those. 

More damage is just to good to pass the freedom of the modding system is exactly what causes us to Always choose more damage. DE even created the exilus slot for people not choose more damage but alot of people just slap vigilante suplies there to get a bit more damage.

[Steel_Rook]

23 hours ago, keikogi said:

I´m aware that the true measures of weapon is time to kill (TTK) on the content you are running. People look to much at dps and don´t realize that of million damage he just did , only 800 k were necessary and the guy using a smg killed 2 enemies on the time he killed one.

So much this, yes. People will go for these absurd overpowered cannons that overkill enemies 10 times over just because they have high stats. And incidentally, the post-mission summary reinforces this. It seems to count "damage dealt," not the damage enemies actually took. If you bring a high-damage Vectis, for instance, you can be overkilling enemies by tens if not hundreds of thousands of damage and score 95% damage done at the end screen with a fraction of the actual kills. I'd rather have an Overwatch-style readout of actual damage dealt as an absolute value, of damage absorbed (so including damage ignored by Iron Skin and dodged by Elude and absorbed by Armour), of damage healed, etc. Not to keep harping on it, but The Division 2 has a much better readout with actual accurate stats and even a "real critical hit percentage" and "real critical damage" percentage.

A little information is often worse than no information at all. It causes people to feel they're informed while being still just as uninformed. Rather than hating the Simulacrum for being the only place people go to get their stats, give us better metrics to draw on from regular play, and I guarantee fewer people will go there. Not NONE, but fewer.

 

23 hours ago, keikogi said:

a bit of a side note the asymmetry between warframe stats and enemy stats is also a surprisingly big problem for warframe design , all enemy control or self damage mechanics have a nasty tendency of falling flat.

Agreed, though that's down to level scaling. DE made what I feel was the wrong decision of trying to scale enemies by level infinitely, then forgot why they did it and started pushing content into those higher levels. We wouldn't need to worry about enemies with 50 000 health and 8000 armour if we weren't routinely fighting level 100+ enemies these days, but we are. With that said, I don't think it's a good idea to try and achieve damage compression from the bottom up. World of Tanks tried this on their Sandbox server, and the result was utter madness simply because most of their systems weren't designed for numbers like that. Now, that's also a PvP game with different concerns, but still. I'd rather compress numbers down and - necessarily - take another stab at enemy scaling. Honestly, scaling by itself isn't BAD any more, not after the Warframe Revised changes. However, it would necessarily have to change if damage numbers drop drastically, as well.

 

23 hours ago, keikogi said:

It also creates the side problem off bigger barrier of entry. 

That's a very good point. The higher that Status Quo slides, the higher the barrier of entry becomes to "the core gameplay experience" and the more it alienates newer players. I still remember the UTTER HORRORSHOW this game was for me as a new player some two years ago. It's easy to forget just HOW hostile Warframe is to new players jumping into it cold.

 

23 hours ago, keikogi said:

Feel sad for the basmu, quite a interesting desing but it just can´t keep up with my generic shooting rifle of choice ( kuva hind ). There are a lot of really interesting weapons in warframe the problem is more often they don´t deal enought damage.

I feel bad for it, as well. It has a fairly unique mechanic, with near-instant ammo regeneration but a slow reload if you run it dry. I feel that weapon could work even without the "heal on reload" mechanic. Just having a "reload penalty" if you overheat the weapon (something all Railjack weapons already have) is enough to give it a unique feel. Even for the brief amount of time I played with it, I still had fun trying to feather my trigger so I could use as much of the magazine as possible without getting slapped with a reload. But the Bamsu, like so many other funky weapons, just doesn't do enough damage to compete with far simpler, far less interesting rifles.

[keikogi]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

A little information is often worse than no information at all. It causes people to feel they're informed while being still just as uninformed. Rather than hating the Simulacrum for being the only place people go to get their stats, give us better metrics to draw on from regular play, and I guarantee fewer people will go there. Not NONE, but fewer.

I would prefer to have a more information like if you click the character and the menu shows kills per skill and weapon. Also the actual damage death so people would not what works. Also it should show the total buff uptime and total healing done. But a low ammount of info is terrible precisely because it does fool people more than guide them.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Agreed, though that's down to level scaling. DE made what I feel was the wrong decision of trying to scale enemies by level infinitely, then forgot why they did it and started pushing content into those higher levels. We wouldn't need to worry about enemies with 50 000 health and 8000 armour if we weren't routinely fighting level 100+ enemies these days, but we are. With that said, I don't think it's a good idea to try and achieve damage compression from the bottom up. World of Tanks tried this on their Sandbox server, and the result was utter madness simply because most of their systems weren't designed for numbers like that. Now, that's also a PvP game with different concerns, but still. I'd rather compress numbers down and - necessarily - take another stab at enemy scaling. Honestly, scaling by itself isn't BAD any more, not after the Warframe Revised changes. However, it would necessarily have to change if damage numbers drop drastically, as well.

Breaking the player level x enemy level balance was a bad idea. Warframes never increased their rank from 30 but we did get more powerful system on top of each other and buff to warframes. I remember the time where a 10 k iron skin was a big deal. Now we can reach 100 k. Also I have a big problem with warframe hiding the player durability it is #*!%ing silly that trinity reaches like 200 k EHP with instant heals and infinity energy and a lot of people dismiss her because she has 1 k health and almost no armor. Seems like DE is trying to create a sense of danger because the HP number is small. Don´t even get me started with the nature of shield gating as it is right now (it seems to provide a small window of invulnerability )ill be the bane of warframe future because we will never get its damage system revised. Player will abuse invulnerability mechanics (rolling guard and shields ) and forget about the durability. Also having modding for shields still a bad idea.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

That's a very good point. The higher that Status Quo slides, the higher the barrier of entry becomes to "the core gameplay experience" and the more it alienates newer players. I still remember the UTTER HORRORSHOW this game was for me as a new player some two years ago. It's easy to forget just HOW hostile Warframe is to new players jumping into it cold.

Feels like new players play a diferente game. The energy system is completly diferent for example. Also the game does not properly segway the player into the history. For example if the new player played old events instead of the pointless side quests for each planet he is in, we would get more engagment. Seriosly new players are probably confused why Regor is so pissed at the tenno or why valkir prime is a strange concept and so on.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I feel bad for it, as well. It has a fairly unique mechanic, with near-instant ammo regeneration but a slow reload if you run it dry. I feel that weapon could work even without the "heal on reload" mechanic. Just having a "reload penalty" if you overheat the weapon (something all Railjack weapons already have) is enough to give it a unique feel

I like the unique game of probably I should stop at 1 ammo or maybe I should fire everything. I wish DE keeps making the sentient weapons weird. We can have a corpus standard energy gun with a more standard overheating mechanic. 

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

. Even for the brief amount of time I played with it, I still had fun trying to feather my trigger so I could use as much of the magazine as possible without getting slapped with a reload. But the Bamsu, like so many other funky weapons, just doesn't do enough damage to compete with far simpler, far less interesting rifles.

The riven system was meannt to fix that but it was doomed from the start. Base stats are mutiplied by normal mods so even a 800% status chance won´t fix a weapon with 3% status chance. Riven mods shoud increse a weapon base stats , this way you could fix them.  The Strong weapons would be dealt the same way they are dealth it now , S#&$ty stats

 

[keikogi]

@Steel_Rook man I´ve played a bit of Vanquish and now I´m truly convinced about the points brought up on this thread. The DPS race reducing removing options off interaction with the enemy. The lack of control of ammo economy making weapons ridiculous overpowered or under powered ( kuva Brama having as good as a ammo economy as it has while I can´t fire the Dex Furis for 10 s, it kind like running the bfg 9n pistol ammo). The mobility options are not quite tuned for combat ( this one you can only really notice when you play a game where they are, on Vanquish you can fire while you “run” (slide think ) and the recovery of the dodge roll is incredible small ( you can fire as soon as the San reaches the ground, you can even trigger bullet time to get a even better result or just line up your shot ).The resource economy being broken making the combat one dimensional (if I could slide and bullet time 24/7 I would and the game would be incredible boring ). Also at last we don´t really react to enemies( because we don´t need to nor there is point to it). For example in Vanquish there is a enemy that charges up a laser that does tons of damage , if you pot the charge up you can destroy that enemy by firing at the reactor while the laser is charging. Meanwhile in warframe you can destroy the aerolist genki dama attack but there is no point in doing so, the aerolist does not loose one of the canisters so you would be better of just shooting a pixel while he was charging and dodging at the last second or jsut face taking it because of shield gating. 

[PabloX732]

I made a post before reading this, now I feel bad, you passed the point across better than me.

[Steel_Rook]

7 hours ago, keikogi said:

Meanwhile in warframe you can destroy the aerolist genki dama attack but there is no point in doing so, the aerolist does not loose one of the canisters so you would be better of just shooting a pixel while he was charging and dodging at the last second or jsut face taking it because of shield gating. 

"Aerolyst Genki Dama" 🙂 I had quite a chuckle at that - kind of disappointed I never made that connection.

I actually kind of like that attack, though. While - yes - it doesn't help kill the thing, it is nevertheless a way to deny the Aerolyst his offence, at least temporarily. That does add a slight bit of extra complexity to fighting those things, and I do appreciate the added interaction. However, it is as you say - there's no real point. I don't know what that attack is supposed to do (I play Inaros, no idea if it does damage or not), but there seems to be no meaningful effect from shutting it down. It's a bit like how you can shoot the Gantulyst's yellow balls, but nobody ever does. Why bother shooting enemy attacks when you can just tank them, especially when you're in a rush to kill that thing since it's holding up the clock. Once again, complexity exists but the game does a fairly poor job of convincing us to interact with it, causing for a reductive encounter.

With that said, though - I like the Aerolysts. Yes, they're fairly complex and fiddly and slow to fight, but they're Minibosses. It's how they SHOULD be. And unlike other minibosses, the game doesn't actually spam you with them. Not only do you never fight multiple of the things, you don't really fight even one of them all that often. They're a rare enemy who blocks your progression and forces you into a complex encounter, exactly like I would expect Specials and Minibosses to do. Especially now that DE seem to have actually fixed his combat mechanics (i.e. stagger and cooldown on destroying his cannisters before he can regrow them), this really does feel like a proper enemy.

Warframe is in a really odd place right now. It HAS complexity in combat - rather a lot of it, if DE cared to actually use their own systems. However, players very rarely care to engage with this complexity, choosing instead to just brute-force their way through complex encounters because it's faster and easier. Players also often don't realise that they're engaging with complex systems because Warframe is UTTERLY TERRIBLE at communicating any kind of important information to the player. You're supposed to sort of GUESS that the Aerolyst's suicide belt of cannisters is his weak point with no real explanation nor really the kind of visual design which suggests it. In short, Warframe squanders its own complexity by letting us circumvent it and by failing to train us in any of it. What complexity we do end up using is based on how things work in other video games, or on stuff we've read on the Wiki.

But to make a long story short - yes, I would love it if shooting the Aerolyst's Genki Damage cause it to explode in his hands and stun him for a few seconds 🙂

[UnderRevision]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Warframe is in a really odd place right now. It HAS complexity in combat - rather a lot of it, if DE cared to actually use their own systems. However, players very rarely care to engage with this complexity, choosing instead to just brute-force their way through complex encounters because it's faster and easier. Players also often don't realise that they're engaging with complex systems because Warframe is UTTERLY TERRIBLE at communicating any kind of important information to the player.

I have very much relied on brute force to get as far as I have.  It's not an exaggeration to say that I've spent a lot of my time with Warframe relying on Valkyr's Hysteria and Mesa's Peacemaker to get me through higher level enemies.  Faced with the choice of digging through wiki articles and youtube videos to figure out how to build things properly and then to acquire and level all the mods and apply all the forma and grind all the arcanes, or pressing four and turning into a blender of psychotic rage... I picked the blender.  The problem with this is that, eventually, I ran into things that can't be brute forced effectively in that manner.  For example, pressing four proved utterly ineffective against enemies like Profit Taker and the Teralyst.  Now I'm in the position of being several hundred hours in and having to try to learn all the things that I should have been picking up gradually over time while I played, except now I'm doing it all at once.  The learning curve turned from shallow slope to brick wall and I never saw it coming.  Warframe let me get away with not understanding anything for so long that being forced to in order to keep making progress almost feels like I've picked up a different game.

[keikogi]

13 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

I have very much relied on brute force to get as far as I have.  It's not an exaggeration to say that I've spent a lot of my time with Warframe relying on Valkyr's Hysteria and Mesa's Peacemaker to get me through higher level enemies.  Faced with the choice of digging through wiki articles and youtube videos to figure out how to build things properly and then to acquire and level all the mods and apply all the forma and grind all the arcanes, or pressing four and turning into a blender of psychotic rage... I picked the blender.  The problem with this is that, eventually, I ran into things that can't be brute forced effectively in that manner.  For example, pressing four proved utterly ineffective against enemies like Profit Taker and the Teralyst.  Now I'm in the position of being several hundred hours in and having to try to learn all the things that I should have been picking up gradually over time while I played, except now I'm doing it all at once.  The learning curve turned from shallow slope to brick wall and I never saw it coming.  Warframe let me get away with not understanding anything for so long that being forced to in order to keep making progress almost feels like I've picked up a different game.

The best example of skills is Rhino making sure new players don't know anything about enemy CC or status effects.

The lack of proper learning curve does hurt a lot.

16 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

But to make a long story short - yes, I would love it if shooting the Aerolyst's Genki Damage cause it to explode in his hands and stun him for a few seconds 🙂

The sentient faction desing is almost great. Like DE is going in the right direction with them but they fall flat because of details. For example the sentient shield dude should be able to block frontal damage, but as far as my peace makers are concerned he can't ( aide note units with directional damage resistance need a limited turn rate ). Also as per a general rule DR does not rewards the player from engaging with thr enemies mechanics 

Also they have some odd resistences, for example I'm pretty sure sentients have multiple health gate or damage caps with heavily devalues low ROF weapons ( I don't mind health gate is long as it is used for mini boss units but grunts should not have it ). They are immune to status instead of eventually adapting to them. This a bit on the tenno side but weapon switch speed combined with host based switching makea their resistance gimmick way more annoying tha it needs to be. Also a side note once again health types and armor doble dipping kinda ruin the gimmick because if you use corrosive against a sentient adaped 50% to corrosive , it is still better than swapping to something that does blast. 

Edit: it would be funny if thr aerolist genki dama got extra energy from nearby sentient units ( you could we the energy flow from nearby sentient cores ) and grewn. Also I feel like the attack should purge buffs or silence because it build up so much for a weak attack.

Edited April 20, 2020 by keikogi

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

Now I'm in the position of being several hundred hours in and having to try to learn all the things that I should have been picking up gradually over time while I played, except now I'm doing it all at once.  The learning curve turned from shallow slope to brick wall and I never saw it coming.  Warframe let me get away with not understanding anything for so long that being forced to in order to keep making progress almost feels like I've picked up a different game.

I had a similar experience playing Atlas (whom I bought with money early on), since there's very little you can't One-Punch-Man your way through with him. For instance, I couldn't figure out how Alad V's boss fight worked, so I One-Punch-Manned Zanuka through its supposedly unbreakable shield, then shot Alad - not at all how you're supposed to do it. When Sentients showed up during The Second Dream, I One-Punch-Manned my way through them with little difficulty. The same with the Rumbler boss during Sands of Inaros. It wasn't until my S#&$ build for Atlas started falling apart against level 40+ Corpus firing nothing but Puncture that I had to look for other options, having to learn the game all over again at a high level. And even then, my solution was first to grab Rhino, then to grab Inaros and simply disregard enemy damage entirely.

Warframe's current state of not just balance but lack of overarching design philosophy gives us a plethora of ways to completely break the game and disregard entire game systems, to the point where some of us are straight-up never exposed to them in the first place. Whatever else we might learn as new players, what the game really teaches us is to never try and be clever, never try and learn how to play. For every problem, there exists a reductive solution which entirely negates any amount of complexity and reduces gameplay down to a watch-checking exercise. Defence missions too hard? Take Frost. Survival missions too hard? Take Nekros. Dying too much? Take Inaros. Don't like knockdown? Take Rhino. Don't like enemies in your game? Take Saryn. Everything is a gear check. If you're having trouble, check YouTube or check Google or ask on the forums and find one of the builds which passes that gear check and sucks all the complexity out of the game. My own gear check of choice is Inaros, simply because he allows me to explore and experiment at my leisure without having to deal with the pressure of being killed. Worse come to worst, I can sand people and execute them a few times if my weapons aren't having any bite.

I get that Warframe is supposed to be a power fantasy. I don't think it was intended as one, but that's where it sits now. However, even a power fantasy still needs some amount of complexity to keep the player awake, otherwise its appeal doesn't last. I don't have an issue with being overpowered, carving a bloody path through enemies who have no chance of hurting, resisting or outrunning me MOST of the time, sure, but not ALL of the time. I do want the occasional speed bump, I do want the occasional monkey wrench thrown in the works, I do want the occasional difficulty spike which wakes me up and requires some amount of actual involvement. That's why I like the L4D / Payday / Vermintide design. Cleaving through hordes of cannon fodder enemies has enough catharsis to create the sense of a power trip, but Specials offer enough of a complexity challenge that I still occasionally feel like I outsmarted or outplayed a meaningful enemy rather than just brute-forcing my way through everything.

To go a bit metaphorical... When a tough enemy shows up, I like to think there's a middle ground between "Oh, S#&$!" and "What now..." For me, that middle ground is hearing the enemy's taunt about killing me and thinking "I would love to see you try!"

 

1 hour ago, keikogi said:

The sentient faction desing is almost great. Like DE is going in the right direction with them but they fall flat because of details. For example the sentient shield dude should be able to block frontal damage, but as far as my peace makers are concerned he can't ( aide note units with directional damage resistance need a limited turn rate ). Also as per a general rule DR does not rewards the player from engaging with thr enemies mechanics 

Completely agreed. Sentients have the potential for fun gameplay, but their designs heavily work against that. Just now I went to the Wiki entry for the Battalyst to look for the name of the disco ball of death attack ("Prism," it turns out) but stuck around reading about all the other mechanics Sentients had that I never knew about. Apparently, Sentients can "link" together, sharing damage and adaptation received. They're supposed to adapt to Warframe abilities (not just Limbo), they're supposed to be able to retrieve and reattach their own arms, or even borrow detached arms from other Sentients. They're supposed to drop some kind of core (I assume different from the loot drop) which explodes after a while, but both Tenno and Sentients can pick it up for a full heal, and that's just on a surface-level reading. Battalysts and Conculysts are designed like bosses, with a whole suite of mechanics that the game never communicates to players and that players never really care about. Hell, I'm actually slightly dubious as to whether all of these mechanics even work, because I've never seen some of them.

Having complex Special/Miniboss enemies is a good thing. It's a reliable way of adding extra challenge to combat. However, the player has to KNOW about this complexity and furthermore have a reason to CARE about it. At this point, I would file Warframe in the same category as Payday 2, as a game which utterly fails to educate its players or even provide basic player feedback. If I'm supposed to be able to blow a Sentient's arms off, do something to communicate this. Colour them differently or give me some kind of visual effect when shooting them. If Sentients can link together, draw an obvious beam of energy between them. Where is a Sentient's head - the place where I can score critical headshots? There have a glowing gen in the middle of their chest, but that's not a headshot spot. In fact, that's not even part of the Sentient - it's a hole in their hitbox where you don't even deal damage. Why? Highlighting weak points with contrasting colours or other visual effects is basic game design. It's why Resident Evil bosses always have these giant yellow eyes everywhere - so you know where to shoot them. Not in Warframe, apparently. This game wouldn't need tutorials and enemy mechanics breakdowns to such an extreme extent if it did even a modicum of effort to communicate through visual design and use the intuition we already have.

Again, I have to go back to The Division 2. Like Mirror's Edge, The Division uses colour to denote explosive or destructible items. Say a new enemy pops up whom I've never seen, but he has a red pouch on his backpack. The game up to this point has taught me that anything red explodes. I don't need to know how this enemy works, I don't need to have a tutorial or a log entry, I don't even need to know what the red thing is - bag, tank, box, whatever. It's a red thing on an enemy, I shoot the red thing on an enemy, it does something bad to them. Sometimes I don't even know what it does. A Black Tusk Tank, for instance, has a red box on his backpack. I shoot it, he stumbles, but nothing seems to happen. I had to read a Wiki entry to realise that this was a heal pack which repaired his armour. Even not knowing this, though, I would still always shoot their "red thing" because I knew it did SOMETHING. The same goes for objects in the environment. OK, that's a red thing. Looks like a jug. I don't know what it is or what it does, but two enemies are near it so I'm going to shoot it. Oh, it was a plastic jug of DC-62, a toxic liquid which which drains their health. I didn't know exactly what it was or what it did, but I knew enough to use it anyway. I knew it would explode and do something nasty to people near it because it was red. Now, that single-mindedness does sometimes backfire on me as I shoot at red luggage bags or milk crates, but I'd argue that's on the developers for making those the same shade of red as propane tanks and oil drums 🙂

Now let's go back to Warframe. Look at a Moa and tell me - where do you think its weak point is? Intuitively, I would shoot it in "the head," which in the case of a Moa means I'd be shooting it in the gun. Wrong - the gun takes only 50% damage. That's not a weak point. OK, then were IS the Moa's head? Well, it's actually at its crotch. See, if you examine one up-close, you can tell that there's a head-like thing there. Oh, OK, so shoot it in the crotch, then? Well, no. Because, you see, it has this large fanny pack. That's actually its weak point where it takes triple damage. Ah, OK, I get it. So I have this high-critc weapon, so I shoot it in the fanny pack, right? Actually, then you shoot it in the head. Even though the fanny pack is a significant weak point, it doesn't count as a headshot so it won't trigger the "critical headshot" buff. Oh, FFS... You know what? Screw it. I'll just shoot it "anywhere" and just bring a bigger gun. Or you know what you could have done instead? Give the Moa's head some kind of bright LED, colour its fanny pack some bright hue (like RED) and have BOTH items count as a headshot. Players will instinctively shoot at the light, but might shoot at the pack if they catch the Moa from behind.

It's all examples of reductive combat. Warframe's enemies have all of this complexity, they're doing all this work to try and be smart, try and be unpredictable and threatening. And yet, because NONE OF IT is communicated to us, we neither know nor care. We just bring the biggest guns we have and fire at whatever we can hit, then complain about enemies being just dumb bullet sponges. Again, combat is a not a contest between player and developer, but a covenant. Developers aren't trying to KILL us, they're trying to entertain us by giving us interesting and unique mechanics. In return, we aren't to BEAT them, but rather use the tools they've given us to extract entertainment. As such, AI enemies NEED to be clear and open with us about what they're doing, why they're doing it and how they work. DE seem to design enemies to try and swerve the player, almost like they're deliberately confusing us. Aha! A Sentient's head isn't where you THOUGHT it was! Why, though? Why not show me how everything is supposed to work, then let me figure out how to beat it on my own? Why hide mechanics from me? Because as an average, run-of-the-mill player, I'm not going to spend time trouble-shooting your combat system. I'm going to assume that what I see is what I get and just bring more damage next time. You don't want me just bringing a bigger gun, though. You clearly want me engaging with the complexity, so HELP me engage with the complexity. Clue me in, keep me informed, show me what's happening and I'll play along.

This is getting overlong, so I'll drop one final example and end it there. Payday 2 has a system for moving tied-up hostages from one place to another. A player interacts with a hostage, that hostage gets up and walks to follow the player, but will sometimes just drop back down. At no point does the game make it clear WHAT is causing this to happen, so often it feels entirely random. I managed to talk a mod-maker to redesign this system. Turns out hostages were intimidated by noise made by the players, which to me makes no sense. He changed hostage behaviour to "resist" the player based on noise made by the cops and based on the physical presence of cops near the hostage. More than that, the hostage's outline as they moved would fade more and more the closer they were to dropping down. A player noticing this could yell at them, resetting this and causing them to keep walking. This mod turned what used to be a frustrating, seemingly random system into actual gameplay. It gave me agency over keeping hostages following me (by clearing areas and yelling at them) and it gave me clear feedback on how close they were to failing. A few superficially simple tweaks included me in the game's mechanics and made them actually fun. Warframe needs a similar way of communicating its own mechanics so that we can actually take part in the game, rather than blindly stumbling our way through it.

[UnderRevision]

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Defence missions too hard? Take Frost. Survival missions too hard? Take Nekros. Dying too much? Take Inaros. Don't like knockdown? Take Rhino. Don't like enemies in your game? Take Saryn.

The question this evokes from me is: where is the line between "This frame has a role/niche where it's a good choice" and "This frame has a role/niche where it is overpowered"?  Because if using a defensive frame like Frost doesn't make a defense mission easier, then what's the point of having a defensive frame?  And I realize that I don't have a clue how to answer those questions.  I assume this is the point where it becomes a numbers game, deciding how much damage an ability should negate vs how much energy it should cost vs how quickly it should be cast vs a thousand other factors.  Or is it a conceptual level issue?  Is the way to balance it by making the defensive frame only viable when paired with an offensive frame because they sacrifice the ability to do enough damage for the ability to protect the target?  How is that then balanced against the universally available weapons that are theoretically capable of leveling a small city in the hands of sufficiently geared player?  To call this a challenge to solve would be a massive understatement, I think.

Side note, I actually have barely played Frost, Rhino, Inaros, or Saryn.  No idea how to use them properly at all.  I die constantly as Rhino and Inaros, and I can't even clear a single room with Saryn's abilities.  The gap in frame effectiveness when handled by a player like me and a player who has a clue is insanely huge.

[keikogi]

On 2020-04-20 at 10:56 AM, Steel_Rook said:

Defence missions too hard? Take Frost. Survival missions too hard? Take Nekros. Dying too much? Take Inaros. Don't like knockdown? Take Rhino. Don't like enemies in your game? Take Saryn. Everything is a gear check. If you're having trouble, check YouTube or check Google or ask on the forums and find one of the builds which passes that gear check and sucks all the complexity out of the game.

Btw you can you the pokemon trainer solution to defense missions and just choose ancient healer and that segways me into Scarlet spear. I never feel like a failed a mission due to lack of skill , I Always feel like Ive failed because I did not have X. For example I failed the mission 2 time:

first time a lost the satélite , did I loose because I can´t dodge ? No, I just did not have rank 5 on piloting so I literally could not perform the raijack fast moving thing. I got it later and the driving section went smoothly 

Second time I lost because limbo left and I forgot to equip my ancient healer spcters, later on I went on mission with 2 people afk and no defense frane but the mission went smoothly because I had enought pokeballs.

I never feel  like the game is telling me this when I die 

I just feel like I did not have the thing.

On 2020-04-20 at 10:56 AM, Steel_Rook said:

Cleaving through hordes of cannon fodder enemies has enough catharsis to create the sense of a power trip, but Specials offer enough of a complexity challenge that I still occasionally feel like I outsmarted or outplayed a meaningful enemy rather than just brute-forcing my way through everything.

The ocosional enemy that can ( not necessaraly will ) whoop your ass is amazing because the victory feeks even sweeter

On 2020-04-20 at 10:56 AM, Steel_Rook said:

Where is a Sentient's head - the place where I can score critical headshots? There have a glowing gen in the middle of their chest, but that's not a headshot spot. In fact, that's not even part of the Sentient - it's a hole in their hitbox where you don't even deal damage. Why? Highlighting weak points with contrasting colours or other visual effects is basic game design.

It could be converted into a good mechanic , have it covered on by a visible indestructuble shield. Void damage cab easily break this shield. Direct shoots agaist the core deal S#&$loads of damage and sentientes can´t adapt their core.

Edited April 21, 2020 by keikogi

[Steel_Rook]

15 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

The question this evokes from me is: where is the line between "This frame has a role/niche where it's a good choice" and "This frame has a role/niche where it is overpowered"?  Because if using a defensive frame like Frost doesn't make a defense mission easier, then what's the point of having a defensive frame?  And I realize that I don't have a clue how to answer those questions.

Well, the issue is one of degrees. Some Warframes aren't just "better" at certain mission types, but better to such an extent as to remove complexity from the mission. Frost and Limbo do this to Defensive missions in a big way right now, because they make the objective effectively unkillable. Due to how those missions are designed (and I'd argue they're designed badly), the primary source of failure in them is enemies shooting the defence objective from range before players can kill them. Being able to place a physical barrier which enemy ranged damage cannot penetrate around the objective removes that layer of complexity - effectively removing the defence objective from the mission and turning it into a Survival mission without a Life Support meter. Or you can look at it the other way around - NOT bringing a Frost or a Limbo introduces a major failure state to the mission which - unless players are otherwise vastly overpowered or generally working pretty hard - usually limits performance drasitcally.

Lua Defence is a great example of this. The first five waves have you defending an item in the middle of essentially a bowl, where ostensibly every enemy on the map can shoot at it pretty much from the moment they spawn, usually from long distance and from a large number of different directions. Killing them is an option, of course, but killing them faster than they can kill the objective requires the kind of map-clearing AoE which removes combat itself from the game altogether and is reductive in its own way. That kind of room-clearing gear-check is a lot more expensive, though, vs. just having a Frost and just placing a Snow Globe every so often. Just having Frost is an easy gear check to clear, since the Prime version of him doesn't even make all that much of a difference.

Frost and Limbo fundamentally undermine pretty much every "defensive" mission in the game to the point of removing its primary mission design component. That doesn't mean that Frost and Limbo need to be nerfed, though. Rather, I'd argue that mission designs which are this easily broken are themselves the issue and THEY need tweaks and redesigns. Consider Disruption. While a "defence" style mission at heart, Disruption objectives do not very strongly benefit from Frost, Limbo or Garaa. They don't fail by being shot at from range, they fail when a Demolyst enemy is allowed reach them and self-destruct. A Snow Globe, a Glass Wall, a Cataclysm - those help somewhat, sure. However, what helps far more than that is players listening to the beeping and roaming the map trying to intercept the Demolyst early. Sure, high DPS is still required to kill them, but this is an example of how defence can be handled in a way which doesn't require building a wall around an objective.

Having some Warframes be better at certain missions is fine, as long as they don't utterly trivialise those missions and so become required for those missions. Right now, you COULD run Scarlet Spear without a Limbo and get to maybe 5-6 Condrix just fighting the Grineer. However, if you want to get to 17 Condrix - which is where the decent rewards are - you NEED a Limbo on the team, or at the very least a Frost who knows what he's doing. DE talked about allowing us to heal defence objectives in a recent workshop which would open up a lot more Warframes (not all, but more) to these kinds of missions... But they haven't done that, or hadn't last I checked.

The problem with Warframe right now is that it's almost entirely binary. Do you meet the gear check? If so, then probably AFK your way through the mission. If not, then don't even bother. There's very rarely any middle ground between boring watch-cecking exercises and unfair damn-near insurmountable odds. Very little in the game is "competitive," to borrow a term. Very little either has odds of failure or requires active participation on the part of the player. The majority of the game is either impossible or trivial based on what you brought. When combat is won or lost almost entirely in the Arsenal and on the Wiki, then you're looking for probably the worst case scenario implementation of RPG mechanics. This is, at the end of the day, an action game. We should be winning or losing based on our actions first and foremost, not exclusively based on our builds.

 

20 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

Side note, I actually have barely played Frost, Rhino, Inaros, or Saryn.  No idea how to use them properly at all.  I die constantly as Rhino and Inaros, and I can't even clear a single room with Saryn's abilities.  The gap in frame effectiveness when handled by a player like me and a player who has a clue is insanely huge.

There's really not much complexity to playing Inaros. He's the ultimate gear check. Have Inaros, have Adaptation, have Arcane Guardian and Arcane Grace. That's it. It hardly matters what you actually do at that point, you are not going to die. And yes, I know that's a high-level, expensive build (cost me a pretty penny back in the day), but nothing about surviving as Inaros comes down to your actions as a player. Rhino is a bit more involved, but he still comes down to gimmick builds which spike your armour for a few seconds when casting Iron Skin. Honestly, Iron Skin is to me the worst kind of min-maxing, because the build gymnastics involved in getting that mythical 100K value for it are almost entirely abstract. Frost CAN be a fun Warframe to play, but his Snowglobe almost always relegates him to a shield bot who sits on the objective and recasts one ability while everyone else kills stuff. All of it is various flavours of reductive design. These CAN be fun Warframes, but their most efficient use is for removing complexity from certain mission types in the most passive way available.

Remember that joke image macro? "Here's a new Ephemera, available only to Rhino mains!" and it shows a Rhino with 20 or so Index tokens circling around them? Yeah, that's what I mean. Due to its design, "challenges" in Warframe are passed by a gear check, not by actual player involvement - at least more often than not.

 

16 hours ago, keikogi said:

Btw you can you the pokemon trainer solution to defense missions and just choose ancient healer and that segways me into Scarlet spear. I never feel like a failed a mission due to lack of skill , I Always feel like Ive failed because I did not have X.

Yes, and this is a nice conclusion to my thoughts from above. When "challenge" comes down to a gear check, players win or lose based on what they brought, not based on what they did. If you win, it's not because you did well so much as because you brought the right Warframe. If you lose, it's rarely because you made a mistake but rather because nobody on your team had the right Warframe. Or item, or Specter, or whatever other aspect of their build. There's gameplay complexity inherent in those missions, but nobody ever engages with it. Why would we, when we can just bring X and make that mission entirely trivial?

 

16 hours ago, keikogi said:

It could be converted into a good mechanic , have it covered on by a visible indestructuble shield. Void damage cab easily break this shield. Direct shoots agaist the core deal S#&$loads of damage and sentientes can´t adapt their core.

I would avoid putting in Void Damage only mechanics into Sentients. They do show up for people who haven't done The War Within, plus a brand new Operator sucks so much ass that they're basically unusable. Having some weakness to Void damage is fine, but a straight-up requirement becomes a bit gimmicky. In fact, that's my primary criticism towards Eidolons - the lot of them. Their fights aren't really that complex or difficult, but they NEED upgraded Operators with upgraded Amps for no reason other than because the mechanics mandate it. The Profit-Taker - as much as I hate that fight - does this far better. Operators help in switching damage adaptations, but they aren't out-and-out required.

Besides, I think the solution here could be simpler. Just move their "headshot" hitbox into their glowing core, and make that little stump passing for their head now simply part of their body. Don't get me wrong - I'm not opposed to breaking parts on the enemy to reveal weak points and such. In fact, you could still have an armour piece over their core which takes extra Void damage. My point was that Battalyst/Conculyst visual design draws the player's focus onto the glowing bit in the middle of their chests. It looks like a guide for players about where to shoot, so it should be their "head," or at the very least a weak point. Right now, it's not even a hit.

As I said - enemy visual design should clearly communicate enemy mechanics. Misleading the players and hiding mechanics from them don't add to the challenge of combat. They just make combat feel less intuitive and introduce a layer of research, neither of which actually helps. Creating enemies with weak points and mechanics that players can intuitively understand and exploit without having to Alt-Tab to the Wiki every time should be the goal, and DE have predominantly failed at that goal. They seem to consider figuring out the enemy as part of its challenge, and that is entirely wrong-headed. Look at how coy they were when they introduced Tusk Thumpers, like players having to figure out their basic mechanics was what made them difficult.

As a general rule of thumb, players in an action game should only ever find themselves fighting the enemies. They should never be fighting the controls, the design or otherwise fighting the "the game." Like I said, the player-developer relationship is a symbiotic one. It's in developers' best interest to arm us with all the tools necessary to tackle their content. Keeping us in the dark and having us guess almost always ends up causing us to guess wrong, blame the game and give up. It's been eight years now. DE should know better.

[UnderRevision]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Consider Disruption. While a "defence" style mission at heart, Disruption objectives do not very strongly benefit from Frost, Limbo or Garaa. They don't fail by being shot at from range, they fail when a Demolyst enemy is allowed reach them and self-destruct.

Funny thing, I hate defense missions.  Hate them.  Really like Disruption though.  The way they encourage mobility, the way that the combat is focused on finding those Demolysts, the way those Demolysts have just enough variety for me to have to vary my tactics a little bit.  Some of them I can just shoot, others are too tough and require that I try to slow them down so that I have time to chew through their health.  I actually use CC abilities in Disruption missions, which is something I hardly ever do in the rest of the game.  And then there's the flexibility of choosing the risk vs reward of activating more than one conduit at a time as a solo player.  I'm not sure how to bring those sorts of positives to defense missions.  The first thing that comes to mind is having variable secondary objectives that give the enemies an alternate means to destroy the defense target that you can't Globe or Cataclysm your way out of.  Most defense tiles are large and intricate enough to tuck things away into corners where a Mesa wouldn't have line of sight from the defense target without moving, but the only way to work around Cataclysm is to make things ignore it, which is less than ideal.

I only recently leveled my basic Limbo up to thirty and haven't tried to use him in Scarlet Spear yet.  Five to six Condryx is pretty much exactly what I can do using my Mesa, arguably my most effective frame in terms of damage output.  I suffer from not having the most effective weapons and so get outscaled by enemies in terms of damage output vs their defense pretty quickly.  Come to think of it, I haven't really tried higher level stuff since the armor re-balance with my weapons.  I've just gotten so used to relying on abilities that it's habit by this point.  I should reevaluate where my arsenal stands.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

There's really not much complexity to playing Inaros. He's the ultimate gear check. Have Inaros, have Adaptation, have Arcane Guardian and Arcane Grace. That's it. It hardly matters what you actually do at that point, you are not going to die.

Getting that gear is no small feat for someone who doesn't trade.  That's another problem with gear checks: the ones who get punished most by them are the ones who play the game without buying their gear.  Theoretically, I could have bought platinum and traded for all of that stuff right out of the gate and been invincible from day one.  Now I find myself in a position where I don't want to get that gear assembled because I want to be able to die if I'm being careless.

 

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

As a general rule of thumb, players in an action game should only ever find themselves fighting the enemies. They should never be fighting the controls, the design or otherwise fighting the "the game."

That reminds me of what I'd call one of the golden rules of game design.  "If a mechanic in your game could be effectively replicated by having someone burst into the room and slap the player's hands away from the controls for a few seconds, don't put it in the game."  Take, for example, the classic "frozen" status effect.  A freeze I can button-mash my way out of faster is infinitely less frustrating than one that is just a timer counting down to when I am allowed to continue playing the game.  Warframe mostly dodges this particular thing by letting us recover from staggers and knock-backs to a degree, but then the issue becomes how much those things can be spammed. 

I definitely agree on the Sentient designs.  Games have spent decades teaching everyone that we should always shoot the glowing bits.  It's as universal as red barrels being explosive or glinting objects being important.  One has to be very, very careful when subverting that sort of embedded design language.  Thumpers were actually not too bad in that regard, in my opinion, precisely because they followed those rules.  The plates glint like breakable objects and the joints underneath have glowy bits on them.  Both of these things communicate, in previously established design language, exactly where the player should shoot.  Sometimes I wish they'd stop spinning so I could hit their freaking back legs, but I guess that's encouraging the use of frames with CC abilities.

[Steel_Rook]

31 minutes ago, UnderRevision said:

Funny thing, I hate defense missions.  Hate them.  Really like Disruption though.  The way they encourage mobility, the way that the combat is focused on finding those Demolysts, the way those Demolysts have just enough variety for me to have to vary my tactics a little bit.  Some of them I can just shoot, others are too tough and require that I try to slow them down so that I have time to chew through their health.  I actually use CC abilities in Disruption missions, which is something I hardly ever do in the rest of the game.  And then there's the flexibility of choosing the risk vs reward of activating more than one conduit at a time as a solo player.

Completely agreed, yes. I tend to not run a lot of Defection missions since I do predominantly Lich stuff and high-level Disruption is BRUTAL, but I do actually enjoy lower-level Disruption for pretty much the same reasons. Disruption missions are almost entirely objective-based, with combat serving mostly to impede and distract. Oftentimes, I'll either run away from enemies or try to nuke them not to KILL them, but rather to get them to shut up so I can listen to the beep 🙂 As I've played more Disruption, I started realising that the Demolyst beep is much louder if the door to a tile they're coming from is open. So, rather than sitting at the objective and waiting for the ceiling to fall, it's better to jump between all the tile exits, open the door to the adjacent tile and THEN listen. If I'm lucky, enemies will be coming into the room and open the door for me, saving me a bit of a trip.

Disruption also benefits from the "speedrunning" playstyle people seem to have adopted. Killing enemies is almost never the objective. Once you have the keys, your goal is to get to a Conduit, then find the Demolyst, then get to it and kill it. Yes, you're salmon-flopping your way past all of the enemies, but that's by design. Your main objective keeps you on the move constantly and usually on a short timer, so exploration is naturally disincentivised. You're not here to dungeon-crawl, you're here on a mission. And unlike your average Capture mission, you have more than one place to go to, as well. It's honestly a really well-thought-out mission which leverages the game's "horde shooter" nature correctly by tasking players to push their way through hordes rather than camp and fight them. It leverages the game's movement system well by tasking players to get to places quickly, but still requires players to hang around specific areas for a while doing things. It's a mission type which fits the game it's in 🙂

Defence, by contrast, heavily clashes with Warframe as a game. It encourages people to throw on a Snow Globe or a Cataclysm on the objective, then wander off in search of something to keep themselves occupied. How I think Defence could be improved is by using the Jupiter Sabotage mechanics. Rather than protecting an item from being shot, you're protected several consoles from getting hacked, for example. An enemy has to physically walk up to that console, at which point an alarm sounds, lights start flashing on the console and its map waypoint is pinged. Players have, say, 10 seconds to shoot the enemy off the console, or else a "purge" starts, draining a meter at a set speed. Players have to kill the enemy and hack the console to stop it. This meter NEVER recovers, and only when it drops to 0 does the player lose. You could even have the consoles scale with team size - number of players +1. And sure, you could probably still cheese it somehow - maybe have Vauban mine all of the consoles, maybe have a bunch of Khorras run around slapping SNM chain domes on consoles, etc. It's not a perfect solution, but at least it would keep people on the move a little bit and call for slightly more creative uses of abilities than "bubble the one thing."

 

44 minutes ago, UnderRevision said:

Getting that gear is no small feat for someone who doesn't trade.  That's another problem with gear checks: the ones who get punished most by them are the ones who play the game without buying their gear.  Theoretically, I could have bought platinum and traded for all of that stuff right out of the gate and been invincible from day one.  Now I find myself in a position where I don't want to get that gear assembled because I want to be able to die if I'm being careless.

Oh, it's DEFINITELY Pay2Win, no question there. I paid 1700 Plat for my Rank 3 Arcane Geace, I think around 400-500 Plat for my Arcane Guardian and recently ~400 Plat for an Arcane Aegis. Sure, I could have earned those through A HARD GRIND, but I chose to buy power, instead - because it was on sale. So you're right, having what I listed in itself isn't easy or simple - but it is expensive. But that in itself is an issue, though. P2W or not, the difference between even just a high-level build and a low-level build is absolutely hilariously absurd. There's no way that I can think of to balance enemy damage for players with a couple thousand EHP and players with 30K EHP with Adaptation and about a dozen ways to heal large chunks at a time. Having an Arcane-built Inaros or a 100K Iron Skin Rhino can break the combat system in ways which are absolutely impossible to balance for. That's the problem with Power Creep. It's not just that "players" become stronger as the status quo slides ever upwards, but also that the cost of entry for new players (be it in time or money) just to GET to a point where they feel powerful goes up constantly as well.

Earlier in the thread, we talked about "damage compression" - bringing low- and high-damage thresholds closer together so that enemy health can be made a bit saner. I'd argue the same is true of Warframes, as well. We need a bit of EHP compression as well, so that the high points there aren't SO irrationally higher than the low point that a middle point in enemy damage can exist. You know - enough damage that all of us have to at least acknowledge we're being shot without pushing it so high as to instantly delete anyone who ISN'T Inaros. Pushing enemy stats to try and combat high-end performance is always self-destructive. It rarely actually matters to high-end performers, but it effectively excludes low-end performers from the game as an indirect result.

 

51 minutes ago, UnderRevision said:

That reminds me of what I'd call one of the golden rules of game design.  "If a mechanic in your game could be effectively replicated by having someone burst into the room and slap the player's hands away from the controls for a few seconds, don't put it in the game."

My thoughts are along the same line, but slightly different. I'd argue that "If the player doesn't know about a mechanic and has no good way of tracking it, that mechanic might as well not even exist." What if I told you that Grineer Lancers have a hunger meter. Every 15 minutes, they will walk up to a locker, open it and eat food from it. I'm obviously making that up, but IF it existed - would you ever have seen it? Does a Grineer Lancer in any given mission even EXIST for 15 minutes between spawning in and being killed? Remember that they spawn only in tiles you're actually in as you approach them. Warframe could model this, but it would be entirely pointless and nobody would ever know.

Similarly, "If a mechanic is indistinguishable from a placebo, it might as well not even exist." Scarlet Spear tells us that our work on the ground is generating codes for teams in space who need them RIGHT NOW! It even shows us the faces and names of people who received our codes thanking us. What if I told you that none of it is real, that the game randomly picks a player in the game and simulates that player receiving a code, while generating codes for Space Teams in real time on a random delay. I'm obviously making that up, but do you have any means of testing this for yourself? Would you know either way from just playing the game? I mean, there's nothing stopping DE from returning Scarlet Spear without the Squad Link and just faking the whole thing at some point in the future.

This is why player feedback matters. It's important for the game to keep players constantly appraised of game mechanics, and it's important for game mechanics to actually matter such that players can affect and exploit them for their own ends. I don't know if DE's enemy designers fully realise this. I criticise Tusk Thumpers not so much for their own design (it's fine, though an enemy with directional weak points SHOULD NOT rotate this fast) as I do for the patch notes trying to play coy with the mechanics. This idea that Warframe is Dark Souls and players have to guess the developer's programming implementation as part of the "challenge" of a given enemy is entirely wrong-headed, even if the enemy in question is otherwise well-designed.

And incidentally on the subject of Thumpers - you can cheese them. Every 25% of their health, the leg you shot to cross this threshold will break and become undamageable. This means that you can do 24% damage to one of their front legs, shoot one of the back legs a few times and break that. Repeat and break the other back leg. This allows you to do the bulk of the damage to their front legs and entirely circumvent their "directional" design, with a few minor exceptions. If Thumpers are going to jump around and spin around so much that it makes fighting them solo a pain in the ass, then I feel justified in cheesing flaws in their implementation.

[UnderRevision]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'd argue that "If the player doesn't know about a mechanic and has no good way of tracking it, that mechanic might as well not even exist."

I like that.  Definitely an issue Warframe has.  There's just so much going on in this game and almost nothing telling the players about any of it.  I'd say that placebo mechanics can have a place as set-dressing but should be treated like such.  For example, if they took the idea of randomly grabbing player models and used them to fill out the specters in the Index, that'd be fine because there's no actual gameplay impact.  If that was how Scarlet Spear worked, it'd be less fine since it'd beg the question of "why is this hoop even here, then?".

On the subject of Thumpers, they could have the fast rotation if they gave us a way to counter it.  Something like shooting and disabling all the weapons putting it into a stunned state for long enough to have a fair shot at one of the legs while it repairs itself.  Of course, that leads to the prospect of having them stunlockable.  Maybe some sort of cooldown on that.  The classic approach would be the hit-hit-rest combo.  It does some attacks, ending with something big that "overheats" it.  Hit the weakpoint that exposes for a guaranteed stun and then go for a leg.  Wash, rinse, repeat with ever escalating threat between overheats.  It's formulaic and would be too much for rank-and-file enemies, but it does the job for a mini-boss.  Plus, they could make using that stun optional by not gating damage on the legs behind it, rather making it an option for those who aren't playing a frame with the required CC.

We're probably going to disagree on the subject of coy patch notes as a matter of personal preference.  I'd be irritated if I was reading the notes for bug fixes and the like and ran across an explanation of exactly how to kill the new enemy they just added.  I like to at least try to figure them out blind on my first few tries before I go to external sources.  Part of why I dislike Profit Taker is that it's such a gear check that I thought I was missing something in the mechanics of the fight, so I looked it all up and kind of spoiled it for myself.  If they put it in the notes and spoiler-tagged it I'd be cool with it though.  I just don't want to accidentally find that sort of information before I want it.

[keikogi]

15 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

would avoid putting in Void Damage only mechanics into Sentients. They do show up for people who haven't done The War Within, plus a brand new Operator sucks so much ass that they're basically unusable. Having some weakness to Void damage is fine, but a straight-up requirement becomes a bit gimmicky. In fact, that's my primary criticism towards Eidolons - the lot of them. Their fights aren't really that complex or difficult, but they NEED upgraded Operators with upgraded Amps for no reason other than because the mechanics mandate it. The Profit-Taker - as much as I hate that fight - does this far better. Operators help in switching damage adaptations, but they aren't out-and-out required

Boy making it a requirement just a quick way to dispatch non mini boss or boss sentient. As far as void only mechanics they should be quite common agaist sentient , but they should not be tied to the amount of damage done so they are fair for weak operators. It is part of the lore x gameplay conection. There is a lot of bad desing in face value that becomes good because of world building. For example , ridiculous difficult spikes are terrible desing, but if literally every single npc on the game told you that this region is remarkably hostile , well it is part of the world building. Same goes for sentients literally every single moment someone says that the void is their weakness. As per new players finding them the common unit should be kilable with just a bit of weapon switching.

16 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Besides, I think the solution here could be simpler. Just move their "headshot" hitbox into their glowing core, and make that little stump passing for their head now simply part of their body. Don't get me wrong

Making center mass a easy weakspots is bad for a supposedly hard faction is bad because center mass is the easiest place to hit. I have a problem with their desing right now because of bad communication , but if player shot it and saw zeros and it had any kind of visual shields it would be really easy to guess that he is using the wrong damage. Shoot protected glowy bit is also one of the most common tropes.

As a bit of a side note operator desing is atrocious because it is terrible in communicating their lore and stading out from warframe. If I were to desing them first change.

Tap 5 to equip your amp into the warframe. Warframe are meant to help the tenno to channel the void so here is a quick option. 

Hold 5 summon yourself to the fight , operator have 4 skill and they are very powerfull but have huge cooldows ( the 4 should go as far as 5 minutes ). The amp while used directly by the operators should be ridiculous powerfull but handle like a fire man hose. Void dash stay as is.