On "challenge" and "reductive combat"

[taiiat]

Quote

Why do we need both slide and dodge? Why do we need bot sprint and "not sprint?

While, yes, doing parkour manoeuvres offers a certain amount of dodge, it also severely degrades one's ability to return fire. You, the jumping player, become a lot harder to kill but you have a harder time killing the enemy in return.

all Mobility tools are uniquely useful and co-exist with one another to let you move faster and with more precision, it's up to the Player to know how to put them to use.
the only problems with Parkour is the breaking of Air Melee, which is dead as a Mobility Tool and is just dead period as the removal of that Acceleration made the attack incapable of hitting anything. and that it would be nice to be able to Double Jump and then Bullet Jump, separating these charges so that they can be used in either order rather than only Double Jump being operation agnostic.

that's a you problem, honey.

 

 

(you also should mentally separate optional features for going above and beyond to perform better from "useless tools because i can still complete my Mission without them if i feel like being lazy". but i know you're never going to do that so i'm going to leave it there)
RE: i only responded because of spreading misinformation about Parkour.

[Arcira]

Just want to remind that one of de´s "fixes" for murex raids where more enemies spawning. I can´t blame them though what option do you have when player can spam apocalyptical ultimates and endless cc 24/7? Either you drown them in an infinite amount of respawning enemies or make those immune to abilities. There is little room for AI or other gameplay improvement within the current system.

In terms of movement I see two distinct issues.

1.) Visualisation: a lot of enemy attacks are poorly (or not at all) signalized. And even when they are hit detection is just awful. However because of the nuking you can´t even notice this unless you do some experiments. Just an example infested units like charger can´t even hit you while you are litterally walking in cycles.

2.) Why bother: just play one of the "tank" warframes with like 10x time more ehp and you are fine.

Anyway unlike direct combat I think there is a lot of unused potential with mobility.

Edited April 22, 2020 by Arcira

[Steel_Rook]

18 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

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. 

Fair enough. This is a video game, there's always going to be a layer of artifice so pretending that real players are responding to my action isn't necessarily a bad thing. For instance, Survival missions could pull a random player's Warframe and have that thank me for distracting enemies and making their job easier. It doesn't matter that it's fake since it exists only for a bit of flavour. The reason I brought up Scarlet Spear is because DE spent a lot of time, money and effort creating a system which ended up being almost indistinguishable from this exact kind of flavour fluff. Now hopefully they'll make something more meaningful out of it in the future, but where it stands right now... They might as well not have bothered. When my experience would be entirely unchanged if a gameplay system were replaced with nothing but the game claiming a system exists, then that system has fundamental design issues.

One of my recurring criticisms for DE is that they invest very heavily into game systems that end up not mattering in the slightest, either because nobody ends up caring or - more commonly - because nobody knows about them. And I'm not saying "don't make complex systems" - far from it. If you ARE going to make complex systems, though - make sure they make a practical difference to me, make sure I know about it, and make sure I have some means of affecting them. Ultimately, video games are an interactive medium. Keeping us players in the loop and engaging with it ought to be a primary objective.

 

18 hours ago, UnderRevision said:

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.

Both of these sound good, yes. Having a boss go through a series of deadly attacks followed by a vulnerable stat is staple of boss design dating back to Arcades, if not earlier. The Division 2 actually has something similar to your other proposal. The Boston Dynamcs Sniper Hounds are VERY tanky and VERY deadly, but they do expose a weak point just before they fire - a red magazine that players can shoot while it's being loaded into the gun, stunning the hound for a while. Now granted, those are not BOSS class enemies, but this goes back to something I talked about before. Challenging players with more complex combat mechanics doesn't necessarily always make the game "harder." In fact, for players who know and exploit these mechanics, the game can become overall quite a bit easier.

I don't necessarily have a problem with letting players stun-lock a boss if they know how and can pull off the shots. Maybe not permanently, but to a point. I mean, you always have the option of making a boss flash red, go berserk and simply ignore weakpoint hits for a while if players stun it too much. Your standard MegaMan boss could do that 20 years ago 🙂 There are ways to limit the ways in which players can troll boss enemies, but I'm fine with letting players troll boss enemies at least to a point. That's part of feeling like you're outplaying the enemy, rather than just out DPS-ing them.

Being able to prevent a Thumper from rotating or jumping by shooting its main weapons would be a really nice addition to that encounter, even if it's not unlimited.

 

6 hours ago, keikogi said:

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.

Yeah, I suppose that's a fair point. That's not really a weak point so much as centre-mass. In that case, I do agree that some kind of breakable shielding needed to expose that weak point would be warranted, though I'd still make it breakable with standard weapons. Just as long as it's not a HOLE in the enemy's hitbox, that's still an improvement.

 

6 hours ago, keikogi said:

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.

The problem, though, is that current Sentient Battalyst/Conculyst designs are absolutely BRUTAL against low-level players. I've introduced quite a few new players to the game, and all of them have had severe issues dealing with Sentients in The Second Dream. I suppose meeting Sentients in Railjack and Scarlet Spear missions isn't AS much of an issue since those are generally high-level content where we're typically wielding weapons capable of blowing through even level 100 Sentients. Honestly, as long as players don't get grid-locked running The Second Dream, I guess I'm mostly OK with Operator requirements.

 

51 minutes ago, Arcira said:

1.) Visualisation: a lot of enemy attacks are poorly (or not at all) signalized. And even when they are hit detection is just awful. However because of the nuking you can´t even notice this unless you do some experiments. Just an example infested units like charger can´t even hit you while you are litterally walking in cycles.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I've been saying for most of this thread. Warframe already has a lot of fairly complex mechanics under the hood, but the game does such a terrible job of player feedback that most people either don't know these mechanics exist or have given up trying to spot them. The simplest example, perhaps, is dodging Bombard rockets. You very much can do that, they're really slow... But the game does a terrible job informing you that a Bombard is taking aim at you, that a Bombard has fired or showing you the missiles in flight. Maybe my eyesight is bad, but even when I'm looking directly at the things, I can barely spot them much less judge distance to impact. The majority of my interactions with Bombard missiles is getting nailed by them from behind as the first hint I have that I'm being fired upon. Or - if I'm playing Inros - getting nailed in the back 15-20 times before I start realising a Bombard is shooting me.

And that's just one Special enemy type. Napalms and Heavy Gunners suffer from the same issues. Most of the Corpus Specials have similar issues as well, though they are USUALLY a bit better-telegraphed. Nullifiers have a visible bubble with a drone attached to it, Shield Ospreys have a visible connection linking them to the people they're shielding which you can visually track back to the source Osprey, Mine Osprey mines are clearly visible... I think the worst of their lot is Sapping Ospreys because it's very easy to have one of those AoE pellets dropped on you without realising it, then dying because they deal actually a lot of damage and don't respect barriers.

On the flip side, look at hand grenades. We had people complaining about those things every couple of days here on the forums - pretty much every time someone just insta-dies from an invisible greande the sound of which got drowned out by the din of combat. Now that we have an in-universe waypoint to them, I haven't really seen anyone complain about those things. Why? Because they have a REALLY long fuse and so are REALLY easy to escape if you're paying attention. They don't hit any less hard, they don't blow up any quicker - nothing about them has changed, other than NOW we have actionable information with which to avoid them. And so we do.

While I don't expect to see waypoints to every single Bombard rocket, this is nevertheless the approach I want to see to Special enemies' highly-devastating attacks. Notify me that an attack is coming, notify me who or what it's aiming at, notify me about who's launching it, and let me figure out how to avoid it. Warframe already has all the mechanics needed to do this, yet we still have enemies blind-siding us with AoE from inside a thick crowd.

Edited April 22, 2020 by Steel_Rook

[keikogi]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The problem, though, is that current Sentient Battalyst/Conculyst designs are absolutely BRUTAL against low-level players. I've introduced quite a few new players to the game, and all of them have had severe issues dealing with Sentients in The Second Dream. I suppose meeting Sentients in Railjack and Scarlet Spear missions isn't AS much of an issue since those are generally high-level content where we're typically wielding weapons capable of blowing through even level 100 Sentients. Honestly, as long as players don't get grid-locked running The Second Dream, I guess I'm mostly OK with Operator requirements.

 

It´s more of a consequence of DE loosing control over damage and trying to create hard enemies. Even if batalist and company were designed to challenge players of years ago, that still a insane bar for new players now.The sentient design is the biggest victim of that , multiple hidden mechanics of soft and hard damage caps , status immunity and other layers upon layers off hidden durability. The Condrix is the best example of DE trying to balance damage without balancing damage but that's a bad idea. (See my old reference to the LVL1 defender rifle in Anthem and the backwards scaling of the game). See this post for reference , I´ve suspected something funky was going on but I was not the only one.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Yeah, I suppose that's a fair point. That's not really a weak point so much as centre-mass. In that case, I do agree that some kind of breakable shielding needed to expose that weak point would be warranted, though I'd still make it breakable with standard weapons. Just as long as it's not a HOLE in the enemy's hitbox, that's still an improvement.

Enemy design and weak spot is a interesting topic , sometimes weird decision make sense due to lore and world building reasons

My first example in resident evil 1 the tyrant has a exposed weakspot on center mass ( exposed second heart ) but I makes sense in universe ( the second heart is a transplant from an elephant ) and the first tyrant was pretty much a prototype , so a glaring design flaw makes sense. In later games the exposed heart is present but it is protected in a way or another with is a interesting way to show history progression thought gameplay.

A second amazing example of anti intuitive enemy design is dead space, in a lot of cases shooting the head makes the situation worse , you should shoot of limbs. The lore and visuals of the game were created to support this feature and it feels amazing to tear off an arm and fire it back with telekinesis.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Both of these sound good, yes. Having a boss go through a series of deadly attacks followed by a vulnerable stat is staple of boss design dating back to Arcades, if not earlier. The Division 2 actually has something similar to your other proposal. The Boston Dynamcs Sniper Hounds are VERY tanky and VERY deadly, but they do expose a weak point just before they fire - a red magazine that players can shoot while it's being loaded into the gun, stunning the hound for a while. Now granted, those are not BOSS class enemies, but this goes back to something I talked about before. Challenging players with more complex combat mechanics doesn't necessarily always make the game "harder." In fact, for players who know and exploit these mechanics, the game can become overall quite a bit easier.

Boss design rewarding high risk strategies is good think, I´ve been playing vanquish alot and that game does an amazing job at rewarding high risk strategies with proper timing there are some minibosses you can burst down if you play your cards right and dodge the counters effectively. To my surprise you can aim glide on that game even dough you can jump ordinarily.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

While I don't expect to see waypoints to every single Bombard rocket, this is nevertheless the approach I want to see to Special enemies' highly-devastating attacks. Notify me that an attack is coming, notify me who or what it's aiming at, notify me about who's launching it, and let me figure out how to avoid it. Warframe already has all the mechanics needed to do this, yet we still have enemies blind-siding us with AoE from inside a thick crowd.

Vanquish also does a good job on communicating strong attacks , they either have a small charge up and sound cue or they are melee attack. 

I really think DE could learn allot by playing and dissecting that game. It is short but it does offer a unique experience and it offer something surprisingly close to our space ninja offering.

Edited April 22, 2020 by keikogi

[Steel_Rook]

16 hours ago, keikogi said:

Even if batalist and company were designed to challenge players of years ago, that still a insane bar for new players now.

This is very true. Warframe has a VERY steep difficulty curve fairly early on in a player's time with the game, which levels of DRASTICALLY after a certain point. Part of it is knowledge of game mechanics, of course. I used to try fighting Grineer with Magnetic damage and wondering why my guns were suddenly not doing anything, way back when. Part of it, though, is just having "stuff." Right now, I've amassed enough stuff to brute-force my way through even level 100 Sentients mostly without the use of my Operator, but the level 30-ish Sentients who spawn during The Second Dream are still BRUTAL to new players who just unlocked the Junction required to start it. That's the problem of shifting status quo as a means of controlling power creep - you end up screwing newer players. Sentients are broadly "fine" in their own high-level or at least "late-story" content, but they have a tendency to show up outside of it, as well.

 

16 hours ago, keikogi said:

A second amazing example of anti intuitive enemy design is dead space, in a lot of cases shooting the head makes the situation worse , you should shoot of limbs. The lore and visuals of the game were created to support this feature and it feels amazing to tear off an arm and fire it back with telekinesis.

While Dead Space's approach is counter-intuitive from the perspective of "That's not how video games work!" I'd argue that's never actually an issue. For one thing, the game (and its marketing materials) made it abundantly clear that Necromorphs' weak points are their limbs. There are in-suit videos talking about it and signs in blood on the wall pointing that out (the famous "cut off their limbs"). Additionally, game mechanics themselves communicate this by either causing enemies to manifest new abilities if their head is destroyed or straight-up spawning them without heads, while the player is given a starter weapon with a long cutting arc and the ability to toggle between horizontal and vertical. While Dead Space's Necromorphs differ from your standard video game enemy du jour, the game's mechanics themselves communicate developer intent. In my experience, it doesn't take long for players' headspace to switch to "cutting off limbs," which itself is an intuitive way of fighting enemies who don't die. You can't kill them, so immobilise them and remove the threat this way.

Warframe has some of those same weird enemies, but rarely if ever do mechanics (or even art design) properly convey developer intent. Moas, in particular, seem almost purpose-designed to TRICK the player by presenting a conventional-looking enemy model but making "where we think the head is" into a STRONG point. Cue Darth Helmet "Fooled you!" The same goes for Sentients. Hey, see this glowing anus in the middle of his chest, centre mass? Psyche! You're not supposed to shoot there, that's actually a hole in their hitbox! Why? What possible benefit is there to tricking players like this? Because what that means is that either we simply don't know how an enemy works and brute-force it or we #*!% off to the Wiki doing homework and studying for the test. Educate your players so that they may actually KNOW what the mechanics are, in order to engage with them.

You're absolutely right - Sentients are absurdly complex in terms of mechanics, to a point that even I didn't know about after playing the game for over two years. So many of these mechanics are impossible to deduce from fighting them. Just today looking at Void Damage interactions with Sentient health types did I learn that it's supposed to stagger them. I never noticed! I'm also told that Void Damage is supposed to be deadly to Sentients, but it appears to have no damage bonuses against them, at least none that I can find, or notice in practice. Instead, standard guns seem to have more bonuses due to Sentients using Ferrite armour across the entire faction. They have a bunch of damage caps that I'm still not sure how they work, plus who knows what other mechanics I've either misread or entirely missed. What's the point of making an enemy THIS complicated if it's going to feel just random in actual practice?

 

16 hours ago, keikogi said:

Boss design rewarding high risk strategies is good think, I´ve been playing vanquish alot and that game does an amazing job at rewarding high risk strategies with proper timing there are some minibosses you can burst down if you play your cards right and dodge the counters effectively. To my surprise you can aim glide on that game even dough you can jump ordinarily.

What's odd is that DE have already done this exact approach once before. Almost every Spy Vault has a VERY fast route directly to its console, but that path typically requires a lot of tricky jumps and dodging lasers or scanners or other high-risk things. Take Vault C on Jupiter. You have a fire path and an ice path which are both tricky but still let you just kill everyone with a silent weapon or sneak past them with a stealth ability, if you feel like walking the long way around. OOOR you can go into a vent, drop down a couple of levels and go directly to the vault through the pulse laser room. Of course, the tradeoff is you need dodge said pulsing lasers, moving from cover to cover as they recharge. Then there's the Grineer Galleon Vault where the console is protected by scanner fields. You can run all over the place turning them off, or you can jump in, time the fields and hack the console with a Cipher directly. One of the Uranus Spy Vaults similarly allows you to swim about 50 miles around pipes and flooded chambers... Or dodge a few scanner bars and walk directly into the console chamber.

Granted, the same level of risk isn't easy to create in combat just given our level of power creep, but "high risk high reward" tactics are still very much something DE can and have done. Doing this for boss fights shouldn't be outside their wheelhouse. Being able to interrupt bosses with proper cheeky shots while they're charging up a big attack that we're going to eat if we fail is inherently exciting, especially if we also have the option of just hiding around a corner to sit that same attack out. Hell, I'd argue that JUST giving bosses intermittent high damage alone would be a major step up from their current "all of the damage all of the time" design. I don't know if you've fought an Eidolon recently, but pay attention to the density of their attacks next time you do. By the end of the fight, players are CONSTANTLY taking damage from CONSTANT attacks which stack on top of each other and spam you with damage over and over and over again. The only real way to approach those is to either have an unkillable Warframe or turtle in Operator Void Mode.

Individual Eidolon attacks are well-designed. Eidolon raises a leg, get ready to jump over its foot stomp. Eidolon slams the ground, get distance and stand between the damage waves. Eidolon summons lightning from the sky? Keep moving until all the lightning strikes are done. However, Eidolons also have "passive" attacks - energy projectiles just spawning from nothing near the Eidolon and homing in on player, over and over again. The Hydrolyst is the worst about it, since it's CONSTANTLY spamming AoE lighting on the ground, killing lures, murdering pets and just slapping everyone with near-constant attrition damage. It's not unbeatable - far from it. But there's no "clever" way to beat it. There's nowhere you can stand, nothing you can avoid, nothing you can shoot to make the damage stop or otherwise keep yourself safe. You cheese through it with EHP, DPS and healing, employing absolutely no kind of sophisticated tactic because none are available to use. At least, I don't know of any, and I've fought a fair few of those and also read their Wiki articles. There doesn't seem to BE a smart way to fight Eidolons, and that makes the encounter kind of... Boring, honestly. It has brief moments of excitement when shooting its joints, but that's about it. The rest of it is magdumping into a house and out-sustaining constant incoming DPS.

Honestly, the same goes for the Profit-Taker. Sure, the element-switching mechanic is interesting and the Profit-Taker itself DOES have proper telegraphed boss mechanics rather than an Eidolon's constant chip damage... But then DE threw in about 50 Corpus on the field alongside the Orb at all times, meaning you're still eating constant chip damage AND STAGGERS anyway, drastically undermining the boss' design. I think the only one of the raid bosses so far that I actually like is the Exploiter Orb, simply because it doesn't come with constant unavoidable damage attached to it. I know not everybody likes the Exploiter mechanics - it IS a gimmic boss - but it's still something different from just unloading my guns into tanky enemies until further notice. Obviously, not every enemy needs to be or even should be this complicated and fiddly to fight. Certainly not Common and Uncommon enemies we meed in large numbers in our missions. However, I wouldn't be opposed to a boss of this calibre showing up more often. I definitely prefer the Exploiter over something like Wolf...

[keikogi]

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

While Dead Space's approach is counter-intuitive from the perspective of "That's not how video games work!" I'd argue that's never actually an issue. For one thing, the game (and its marketing materials) made it abundantly clear that Necromorphs' weak points are their limbs. There are in-suit videos talking about it and signs in blood on the wall pointing that out (the famous "cut off their limbs"). Additionally, game mechanics themselves communicate this by either causing enemies to manifest new abilities if their head is destroyed or straight-up spawning them without heads, while the player is given a starter weapon with a long cutting arc and the ability to toggle between horizontal and vertical. While Dead Space's Necromorphs differ from your standard video game enemy du jour, the game's mechanics themselves communicate developer intent. In my experience, it doesn't take long for players' headspace to switch to "cutting off limbs," which itself is an intuitive way of fighting enemies who don't die. You can't kill them, so immobilise them and remove the threat this way.

Pretty much what I was trying to convey but with a more detailed explanation. Even if you got baited into a headshot play style ( my friend gave me his hard copy and told me it was like resident evil ). The visual desing ( the joints of the slasher the first enemy you find into the game ) are fairly oversized and your weapon is called cutter. After the first bad headshot experience you are probably going to try either a environmental kill or try revenge for your limbs lost on the last encounter. I was just stressing the weak spot desing depeng on both lore and enemy visual desing. 

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Hey, see this glowing anus in the middle of his chest, centre mass? Psyche! You're not supposed to shoot there, that's actually a hole

Wann hear some bullS#&$ ? Corpus were headshot immune in warframe ancient times but people complained so much that DE changed.

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

What's the point of making an enemy THIS complicated if it's going to feel just random in actual practice?

This is all the consequence of trying to create a hard enemy on game where the developer lost control of damage and debuffs. The list of power immunity and resistance just feels like the sentients just say no to everything the DEVs could remember ( revenant can entrall them , so the forgot it seema the more likely explanation )

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Granted, the same level of risk isn't easy to create in combat just given our level of power creep, but "high risk high reward" tactics are still very much something DE can and have done. Doing thi

Good point.

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

passive" attacks - energy projectiles just spawning from nothing near the Eidolon and homing in on player, over and over again. The Hydrolyst is the worst about it, since it's CONSTANTLY spamming AoE lighting on the ground, killing lures, murdering pets and just slapping everyone with near-constant attrition damage. It's not unbeatable - far from it. But there's no "clever" way to beat it. There's nowhere you can stand, nothing you can avoid, nothing you can shoot to make the damage stop or otherwise keep yourself safe. You cheese through it with EHP, DPS and healing, employing absolutely no kind of sophisticated tactic because none are available to use. At least, I don't know of any, and I've fought a fair few of those and also read their Wiki articles. There doesn't seem to BE a smart way to fight Eidolons, and that makes the encounter kind of... Boring, honestly. It has brief moments of excitement when sho

The first time I fought the hydrolist I was just like what is all this aoe spaming non sense. Seriously the hidrolist shots out so much random aoe around him that you just give up dodging non sense.

Also the time race makes the dps racr even worse than usual 

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Honestly, the same goes for the Profit-Taker. Sure, the element-switching mechanic is interesting and the Profit-Taker itself DOES have proper telegraphed boss mechanics rather than an Eidolon's constant chip damage... But

True the ammound of adds on that fight os unbearable

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

everybody likes the Exploiter mechanics - it IS a gimmic boss

At this point I think just having gimmick bosses is better than bullet sponges. Because it's more about execution than dps. The exploited with is flaw at leas allows for some skill expression by allowinf players to speed up the overheating window and the HP is resonable even for a unbuffed weapon.

[UnderRevision]

4 hours ago, keikogi said:

At this point I think just having gimmick bosses is better than bullet sponges. Because it's more about execution than dps.

I think there's a fair amount of truth in that.  The Exploiter is certainly one of my favorite bosses.  She was also well designed enough that I both needed and was able to figure it out largely on my own.  Enough to win, anyway.  The exact details of how the overheating was working weren't clear until I looked them up, but I was able to beat her regardless.  She does suffer from a little too much RNG and would benefit from a little more structure.  There are few things more annoying than being out of thermia fissures and having to just sit there and wait for her to decide to open more.  Sometimes she just doesn't for a good five minutes or so.  Or gets herself stuck on the cliffs and breaks her AI.  But in terms of the ideal run, she's a lot more entertaining to deal with than a wall of health or marginally beefed up normal enemy like the Sargent.  Less geared players can still make worthwhile contributions with the thermia, and over-geared players can't evaporate her with their first shot.

[Steel_Rook]

Yeah, the Exploiter HAS issues. Her overheat mechanic is not well-explained, leading to players thinking the encounter is a lot harder than it is. Thermia cannisters don't "add" heat, but rather speed up her inherent overheat. You're always making progress even if she's constantly getting cooled. A longer overheat bar would help there, since minor changes in heat would be easier to notice. I'd add that the cannister-throwing mechanics are also quite terrible, with awkward aiming that doesn't work if you have your melee weapon out and always pulls out your pistol after a throw.

Like you, however, I feel that she's a fun boss despite all these issues. The Exploiter has enough mechanical complexity and activity variety to keep me on my toes, keep me moving around and give me something to keep track of. I tend to prefer the overworld segment myself as it's more open and less scripted, but the indirect nature of obtaining cannisters, filling them with Thermia and throwing them at the Exploiter does still make for a varied experience. Hell, it even allows for some emergent team roles. The few times I've done this with friends, we usually had "a sniper" perched atop a high rock somewhere playing Overwatch, popping Coolant Raknoids before they can reach the Exploiter while the rest of us run around flinging orange juice at her.

I don't expect all bosses to be as complicated as the Exploiter, of course, but having something on the level of the complexity of her exterior fight would not go amiss for more of the game's bosses.

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

This thread is too good to allow it to go unnoticed, so here's my take, hopefully sparking some more conversations and bringing attention to it. 

Unfortunately, the main problem with the game is that even if cool interactions are added such as specific ways to deal with enemies and telegraphed attacks that need to be dodged, most of those mechanics would be balanced around middle-of-the-pack Warframes in terms of damage and survivability, so they could ultimately be just ignored with powerful, braindead frames (looking at you, Inaros, Mesa). The only ways to solve it are either A) totally rebalancing the roster, putting serious limitations on buff stacking, damage abilities, damage reduction, and straight health values (it's pretty dumb that Inaros can get 8k hp with stupid regen without abilities, only gear, and thus being completely untouchable by energy constraints or nullifiers), which would take ages and cause the biggest uproar this community has ever seen, or B) Have enemies with damage gates and firepower that scales with % of EHP of the enemy hit, which would, still, require ages, ask for a giant reshaping of the game's code, and could be very fiddly and unbalanced. 

[Steel_Rook]

51 minutes ago, (XB1)ShonFr0st said:

Unfortunately, the main problem with the game is that even if cool interactions are added such as specific ways to deal with enemies and telegraphed attacks that need to be dodged, most of those mechanics would be balanced around middle-of-the-pack Warframes in terms of damage and survivability, so they could ultimately be just ignored with powerful, braindead frames (looking at you, Inaros, Mesa).

This is true, and I say that as an "Inaros main," if it weren't obvious 🙂 General game balance absolutely DOES need to be tweaked in order for the mechanical challenge we're describing here to really be meaningful. After all, nobody will bother with mechanical complexity if they can just off-handedly ignore entire game systems, like Inaros can all but entirely ignore "damage" as a concept. And yes, the kind of large-scale rebalance needed to achieve this would likely cheese a lot of people off for the same reason Riven Disposition changes usually do - "Why you nerf my stuff!" I do think there's an extra factor to consider here, though, and that's the concept of "fallbacks." The reasons I tend to criticise DE's attempts to create difficulty in Warframe thus far is because all that accomplishes is to render some of our tools non-viable. The problem is that once you take away our absurd DPS and our absurd EHP, we have very little else to fall back on. Warframe overwhelmingly lacks the mechanical complexity needed for us to make up that lack of stats with "skill," exactly BECAUSE so much of the game is designed to be won or lost in the Arsenal and boils down to a straight damage trade in actual practice.

However, this also works in reverse. As you add more skill check fallbacks to the game - more ways for us the be clever and circumvent enemy DPS, enemy EHP, enemy abilities - the more difficulty players will generally be willing to tolerate. My standby example for this is the knockback system. I've said this in other threads so apologies for the repetition, but: I used to absolutely DESPISE knockback, to the point where I refused to play anything without knockback immunity - anything besides Inaros, Rhino, Atlas, etc. Now, after Warframe Revised, the knockback system has chanced. I have a skill check to essentially negate a knockback and - failing that - another slightly lower skill check to quickly recover from it. Not just that, but I also now have a choice. I just got pulled by a Scorpion. Do I roll-recover towards her and melee her, do I roll away from her and shoot, do I roll to the side and try to get behind an object, etc. It's not MUCH of a choice, but it is a choice. Almost overnight, I got over my issues with Knockback simply because I now have a fallback to mitigate it.

I mean, don't get me wrong - I still hate Terra Corpus knockback spam. That hasn't changed. But stuff like Scorpion hooks, ancient stretchy arms, random shield bashes? Yeah, I don't mind those so much, because I can deal with them. The more tools I have to recover from knockback, the more knockback I'm willing to tolerate before I start complaining about it. The same goes, I feel, with general difficulty. The more tools we have to "troll" tanky enemies, the tankier those enemies can be made before people start complaining about it. The more tools we have to reflect, negate or avoid massive damage, the more damage enemies can do to us relative to our EHP before people start complaining. JUST adding mechanical challenge to Warframe wouldn't work since we're powerful enough to essentially negate most combat systems... But adding mechanical challenge opens the door ALSO adding more difficulty, or at the very least to ALSO pushing through balance changes which would otherwise cause a riot - say like a change to multiplicative damage buff stacking. People push back against difficulty when it is reductive, when it robs us of the tools we like using without really offering any other, more complex tools to fall back on. Adding those tools AS you're increasing difficulty, however, could work a lot better.

And just as a parting thought because it occurred to me earlier today - the Nox. You know how people complain about "tanky enemies?" Well, the Nox is by FAR the game's tankiest, most bullet-spongey enemy, featuring a lot of health, a lot of armour AND a 75% damage resistance on top of it all. But you don't see a lot of people complaining about Noxes, do you? The reason for that is simple - the Nox is only this tanky IF you try to brute-force your way through his armour. Most people don't, however, because the Nox's character design makes his weak point very obvious - glass visor over exposed head. And if you shoot him in the head, he's no different from any other Grineer. Kind of squishy, even, especially now with the armour scaling changes. Right there, you have an example of how Warframe can support a RIDICULOUSLY tanky enemy unit without generating an outcry like Wolf did. And again, the reason is simple - people have a mechanically more complex fallback (slightly more so), so they use that instead of complaining about it on the forums. Now granted, the overall design is a bit unimaginative since it still comes down to "shoot it in the head," but it's a step in the right direction.

Long story short - Warframe can support REALLY tanky enemies who deal a lot of damage and apply a lot of control... And people won't really complain about it as long as said enemies give us some way to avoid or negate their attacks (roll to shed the Nox's toxic globs) and avoid or negate their tankiness (break the glass, shoot it in the head). I'd argue we need more enemies like this.

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

The same goes, I feel, with general difficulty. The more tools we have to "troll" tanky enemies, the tankier those enemies can be made before people start complaining about it. The more tools we have to reflect, negate or avoid massive damage, the more damage enemies can do to us relative to our EHP before people start complaining.

Wholeheartedly agree with your post in general, but this in particular. Adding skill checks to the game would be a great starting platform to raise the bar with difficulty, and I honestly think that since the sentients are the faction we'll focus on with the new war, they could be the perfect candidates for DE to hit us with some improved enemy design. The brachiolyst and Aerolyst are decent starts, but miss their mark on some key aspects... I love how the first one has both a telegraphed melee attack (the air to ground slam) and clearly recognizable projectile attacks, however it's not nearly as dangerous as it could be, considering how easy it is to avoid both.  The Aerolyst should have the Nox treatment: high damage reduction, not invulnerable. Each canister destroyed lowers the dr. Again, I extremely like the telegraphed orb attack that bursts into projectiles that can be interrupted by breaking the orb before it fires. Again, it could be much more damaging than it is, but still it's a fun mechanic. 

To be fair, on one side I'm quite hopeful, especially for Deadlock protocol. DE seems to understand some of these concepts in enemy design: Terra units, despite the hated knockdown (that, to be honest, puts some welcomed pressure on you, but is still damaged by very short windups and lack of sound cues from the units that apply them), are in my opinion some of the best designed enemies in the game. Sentra turrets promote movement, and their magnetic proc poses some actual threat. Scrambuses can be disabled by shooting off their helmet (yeah by then they are probably already dead, but I shall give some credit), Hyenas are actually dangerous up close along with raknoids: the big green one in particular has a nice set of abilities, with area denial and evasion, that for once actually made me switch to magnetic for the first time in 1.5k hours of play to more easily deal with the over shield. There's potential, and I very much hope that eventually DE comes around to freshen the infested and particularly the greener, that apart from the aforementioned Nox have basically no interesting enemies. 

 

[Steel_Rook]

54 minutes ago, (XB1)ShonFr0st said:

Wholeheartedly agree with your post in general, but this in particular. Adding skill checks to the game would be a great starting platform to raise the bar with difficulty, and I honestly think that since the sentients are the faction we'll focus on with the new war, they could be the perfect candidates for DE to hit us with some improved enemy design.

Sentients are an odd example... If you look through their Wiki articles, they're MASSIVELY complex, far more so than most of the game's other enemies. The problem is that almost none of that is communicated to players through proper feedback, so most people don't even know about it. Did you know that Sentients have damage caps per shot? I didn't. Did you know that they can pick up each other's shot off arms? Hell, I didn't know you COULD shoot off their arms until recently. How would I? Sentients highlight the dangers of complex enemy design, and that's proper player feedback. It's all well and good that you need to break Alad V's shield which breaks Zanuka's shield, but how was I supposed to figure this out on my own short of blindly stumbling into it? Or, as was the case, just reading about it on the Wiki. This should have been depicted on-screen during the fight, not left to my imagination.

Games with complex enemies face the challenge of communicating mechanical information through enemy visual design. I use The Division as an example, because that game's art design uses a few very basic cues. Actually, it uses one cue - anything red explodes, shoot it. All of the enemy's weak points, be they grenade bags or ammo pouches or gas tanks or magazines, all of those are red and nothing else anywhere on the characters is. If you see some weird shape somewhere on an enemy's body that's coloured red, chances are it'll explode or do something nasty to the enemy, so shoot it! That game also has a very distinct hit indicator and hit confirmation sound for weak point hits, far more so than for headshots, so you always know that you're doing SOMETHING.

Warframe... Actually has this. Again, the Nox will be our example. Let's say you look at the Nox. Let's say you haven't played XCOM 2 and don't realise that you're basically fighting an Andromedon, so you don't immediately think to shoot it in the glass. If you even accidentally shoot the glass, however, the game plays a "glass breaking" sound which is unique to that unit and that specific weak point. By that point, you HAVE to piece together that "that glass is his weak point, I should shoot it." That's if his visual design, having a large thin-walled glass visor wasn't clear indication enough. Now flip this around and let's look at a Moa. That's an enemy design I've never seen. I should shoot it in the head. Nope! That's not a head, it's a turret and takes reduced damage. Where, then? The crotch. Or actually, not even - the fanny pack behind. Why? No idea, but that's their weakest point. OK, but what about the ones which deploy an Osprey. That IS their fanny pack until they deploy it. Where do I shoot them then? The design of the average Moa does NOTHING to guide the player to where we should be shooting.

I'm not saying "just make all the weak points red," obviously. However, I AM saying "please design your enemies to highlight their weak points." Where the #*!% is the head of a Charger? Is it the human head hanging beneath it? I don't think so, since they don't seem to take headshot damage there. No, they have a whole other face where their chest would be, and I THINK that's where I'm supposed to shoot them? But what at all about their design tells me this? While I know it's not realistic, enemy design should highlight enemy mechanics and vulnerabilities. Warframe itself has done this in the past already, but only sporadically and only for SOME enemies. I still don't know where to shoot the Ambulas, I still don't know where to shoot Lephantis, I had to read an article to figure out how to fight an Eidolon, etc. At the very least, the game ought to establish some kind of consistent colour scheme or iconography per faction, such that I can see a brand new enemy and instantly tell "that's its head, that's a weak point, that's a weak point."

And this doesn't even get to the subject of telegraphing attacks in a way that we can see they're coming out the corner of our eye, which is a whole other subject. This too DE have done with the Terra Corpus mortar Moa, but almost literally nothing else. Almost no enemies highlight the area where their attacks will land before launching said attack, meaning we rarely get any kind of warning unless we're staring at that particular enemy. And that's assuming we even CAN stare at a particular enemy, and it doesn't just blend into the crowd.

If Warframe is to have more complex combat (and I want it to), it REALLY needs to do a lot more for player feedback.

[Antris]

While I kind of agree with many points you made, I've made many similar points myself, like how the movement is quite key in warframe, I feel that DE themselves are kind of aware of the kinds of crowds that play this game.

I was thinking about what was written in the main post and many of the following ones, but you see, we DO have complexity in warframe and DE seems to be trying to introduce more challenge, and we also have simplicity! Like Nullifiers, they are an enemy type that adds complexity into the game by deactivating our powers, there are different ways to deal with them as well, one can use high firerate weapons to pop the bubble or try use precision by shooting the drone, alternatively just jump into the bubble and deal with the nullifier directly. However it is a commonly despised enemy, and one of the ways to deal with such enemies, or rather not deal with them is the adoption of Inaros as a common meta warframe.

Inaros isn't as tanky as some of the other warframes that use their powers to deny or absorb damage, but the simplicity of his method of tanking made him a common choice. Inaros doesn't care about Nullifiers, Scramblers, Damage or even CC. He does have skills that do something, but the meta on him is just being a durable platform.

Returning to the topic of challenge, implementation is hard, look at the comments on profit taker wiki page, yet we have people like Nash Prime on yt who can make a decent show of it even if the flaws still appear. I hold the opinion that Profit Taker was a decent try at introducing challenge, yet I don't quite like the fight myself because certain aspects of the implementation, like how sensitivity to latency makes the fight so unpredictable, like how the huge number of super dangerous adds with plenty of CC skills themselves are also unpredictable, how the "Archgun deploy isn't ready" phrase can be so annoyingly constant needing to rely on spawns and identifying an enemy who's silhouette is similar to the others to progress on the phases by getting a drop from it that can reset the CD, how its a gear check and somewhat needs to be one, how when using archwing to reach the pylons, touching the ground starts a stagger animation we have to wait and feels clunky. In practice, the fight ends being quite restrictive, and the best way to do it power through the content with the likes of Inaros or Chroma, probably because this is a looter game, we get rewards by killing enemies. 

Profit Taker requires us to stop, look at the damage type vulnerability, think about the weapons we prepared for the fight, try to manage the adds, dodge incoming CC and somewhat telegraphed attacks. Its definitely an Improvement of DE's previous attempt, the Eidolon farm. It's not gated by time, drops a token that can be exchanged for rewards instead of having to fight RNG, so the meta squad is a definitely more lax but still not enough that we saw a variety of frames, but the prevalence of immunity to warframe powers, unavoidable and often unpredictable damage skew the player's choices to either frames that can take it and don't rely skills that have external effects like chroma, Inaros instead of Volt, Mag or even Mesa because her deflection skill is vulnerable to explosions, or its a steep gear check for Arcanes, Mods, Rivens and quite a bit of preparation and skill, that can promote elitist behavior etc.

There is enemy tiers/types with Butchers, Lancers, Hellions, Scorchs, Heavy Gunners, Napalms, Bombards and finally Nox among others, yet some implementations still need improvement like mentioned here. Introducing something stronger the Nox that is already a mini boss by itself would possibly harm certain types of play styles, and narrow our options. 

I'm looking forward to the reworked Jackal Boss fight. It's going to be a good a show of how much DE has improved the implementations. Current Jackal has attacks that try to be telegraphed, but are not well done either by technological limitation or inexperience, both most likely. So the updated fight is going to be a good comparison to Liches, Ropalolyst, Exploiter, Profit Taker, Eidolons, Kela De Thaym etc and what to expect in the future. All those fights have problems with telegraphed attacks, timings, clarity and readable animations, in different ways but similar. Breaking easily under latency, host/client, exclusions of parts of the gameplay like powers, status, scalings and how restrictive they can be amid the clunky ness.

It looked quite good on that peek. Something I feel that could be interesting to link in this discussion is these 2 videos: "Genndy Tartakovsky | Reading the Action" and "How Samurai Jack Mastered The Art of “Nothing”".

For warframe and enemy animations of many kinds could be improved in terms of readability, even mercy kills can feel a bit too "blurry" though perhaps that could be a bit intentional?

The Second Dream is a quest that IMO is amazing on the presentation of certain scenes, in a similar line. 

How does that translate to challenge? Things that we can get a good read on can more easily present challenge while better avoiding frustration.

Jupiter tileset rework was a good step forward, the Sentient tileset also introduced good things, while also taking a step back by having tiles that feel like huge empty rooms that skew things towards certain parts of the movement system.

Warframe Revised and Railjack Revisited, along with the healing objectives changes are good directions as mentioned.

More of those, with the intent of improving the warframes, the enemies, tiding up the animations and readability, and even integrating augments to the frames, integration and polish. Warframes being able use movement offensively while enemies take cover is alright, projectiles weapons would be nice for them and for us instead of hitscan, but we need faster projectiles as well, that feel good to use and methods to get a good read on things, too many particles or use of bloom can be a bit blinding, too little can be a bit dull, good timings as well are important.

[UnderRevision]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

And just as a parting thought because it occurred to me earlier today - the Nox. You know how people complain about "tanky enemies?" Well, the Nox is by FAR the game's tankiest, most bullet-spongey enemy, featuring a lot of health, a lot of armour AND a 75% damage resistance on top of it all. But you don't see a lot of people complaining about Noxes, do you? The reason for that is simple - the Nox is only this tanky IF you try to brute-force your way through his armour.

Funny thing is, this also makes it good at standing up to Mesa, at least to a point.  My own Mesa can eventually chew through a Nox, but it takes a long time and reduces my aiming angle to its smallest size in a matter of moments.  It's actually advantageous to turn off Peacemaker and attack with my normal weapons that I can actually aim at the weakpoint.  It's a very short list of enemies that can have that impact on my playstyle.  I actually stop and think twice when I hear one of them coming.  Plus, the way their threat level escalates when the glass is broken is great.

3 hours ago, (XB1)ShonFr0st said:

The Aerolyst should have the Nox treatment: high damage reduction, not invulnerable. Each canister destroyed lowers the dr. Again, I extremely like the telegraphed orb attack that bursts into projectiles that can be interrupted by breaking the orb before it fires. Again, it could be much more damaging than it is, but still it's a fun mechanic.

The issue I have with the Aerolyst is that it is completely immobilized when the canisters break, rendering it harmless and an easy target.  Which would be fine if it was more dangerous, but right now it's not packing enough of a wallop (at least at enemy levels that I can play at) to make the stun feel like it's earned.  Take, for contrast, the Exploiter.  She is stunned when she's overheated, but it takes long enough to get her there that it feels like a milestone in the fight.  With the right weapons, an Aerolyst's canisters can be taken out almost immediately, turning it helpless and ready to be obliterated before it can do anything.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Antris said:

Like Nullifiers, they are an enemy type that adds complexity into the game by deactivating our powers, there are different ways to deal with them as well, one can use high firerate weapons to pop the bubble or try use precision by shooting the drone, alternatively just jump into the bubble and deal with the nullifier directly. However it is a commonly despised enemy, and one of the ways to deal with such enemies, or rather not deal with them is the adoption of Inaros as a common meta warframe.

See, I personally rather like Nullifiers. Yeah, I know people tend to hate them, but to me they're an example of good design. Nullfiers and anything else in their bubble are immune to abilities, but in this case we DO have a fallback for when our abilities don't work - our guns. Outside of a few specific Warframes, "our guns" are generally substantially more powerful than our abilities, and Nullifier bubbles are rather susceptible to that. As you mention, one can pop the bubble itself via rapid fire or snipe the drone, Nullifier bubbles are visually VERY distinct and easily seen from a distance, Nullifiers themselves generally move slowly and are easily spotted ahead of time. The only thing they lack is a unique voice package so you know one might be creeping up behind you even if you aren't looking. You can never miss a Nox on the map, even if you haven't seen them - those yells always announce their presence.

Now, Nullifiers aren't perfect. Their tendency to "cleanse" Warframe buffs upon contact is irritating, because it's possible to lose a LOT of Iron Skin or Scarab Armour or a fairly tough Snowglobe in a split second if you don't see the Nullifier early enough. Not all Warframes work this way, though. Inaros loses ALL of his Scarab Armour, but Nidus loses stacks of mutation over time. Rhino loses ALL of his Iron skin, but Saryn's infection DPS drains over time. Frost's Snowglobe bursts on contact, but Atlas' Rumblers lose health over time. The list goes on. I suspect people would be more accepting of Nullifiers if they sapped our abilities over time (even if very quickly) rather than instantly voiding them on contact, since it leaves a bit of margin for error.

As an "Inaros Main," though, I have to say - I wouldn't be caught dead jumping into a Nullifier bubble. That instantly deletes my Scarab Armour, which will then cost me 3000 HP to recover, on top of standing still for 10 seconds. It also voids my status protection, since Negation Swarm needs Scarab Armour to work. It actually gives me shivers whenever I see a team-mate playing Mag or Valkyr or some such dive into melee with them... That's a bit off-topic, but I just felt compelled to add a bit of context.

To make a long story short: I feel that Nullifiers need some tweaks, but they are a good design for a gimmick enemy that takes a bit of attention to fight correctly. I vastly prefer their design over that of the various Scrambus and Combas. There are like, three types of each and I can never remember which is which, which does what and those gigantic nullification fields spread WAY too far and WAY too fast to really react to. At least in my experience, anyway. I'd much rather fight Nullifiers over them, even the melee Nullifiers on Jupiter.

 

1 hour ago, Antris said:

Profit Taker requires us to stop, look at the damage type vulnerability, think about the weapons we prepared for the fight, try to manage the adds, dodge incoming CC and somewhat telegraphed attacks. Its definitely an Improvement of DE's previous attempt, the Eidolon farm. It's not gated by time, drops a token that can be exchanged for rewards instead of having to fight RNG, so the meta squad is a definitely more lax but still not enough that we saw a variety of frames, but the prevalence of immunity to warframe powers, unavoidable and often unpredictable damage skew the player's choices to either frames that can take it and don't rely skills that have external effects like chroma, Inaros instead of Volt, Mag or even Mesa because her deflection skill is vulnerable to explosions, or its a steep gear check for Arcanes, Mods, Rivens and quite a bit of preparation and skill, that can promote elitist behavior etc.

While the Profit-Taker is certainly better than fighting Eidolons, it has a lot of the same issues. It goes well beyond a "gimmick" fight and well into a "scripted" fight, it relies very heavily on high-specialised builds (i.e. you win or lose in the Arsenal, not on the battlefield) and it still bathes players in constant unavoidable attrition damage by just spawning a lot of Terra Corpus forces. My personal example for a good gimmick boss fight is actually the Exploiter Orb. Stage One of it I can take or leave. It's very scripted and contrived, with fixed steps and a lot of time spent waiting for the Exploiter to go through its dialogue, but the exterior fight is fun. It's a fairly simple concept - shoot Coolant Raknoids before they cool the Exploiter, pick up their cannisters, toss them into fissures, throw them at the Exploiter, keep boosting its passive heat generation until it overheats. They're certainly more complex mechanics than fighting, say, the Sergeant or the Jackal... But they're not that complex overall. Rather than scripted boss fights like Kayla or the Ambulas, the majority of the fight works on the same basic combat mechanics as the rest of the game, with the added gimmick of throwing cannisters. That's the sort of boss design I'd personally prefer.

That's not to say the Profit-Taker is AWFUL!!! I can think of a few changes to make it less reliant on specific builds and less prone to people getting in each other's way by switching damage resistances on each other. For instance, let the Profit-Take build up to 300% damage resistance split between all the damage types it's taking, increasing resistance to the damage it takes from every shot at the expense of dropping resistance to everything else. Think of it as a resistance budget. This way, players will be naturally inclined to swap damage types as resistances build up without having this silly "rotation," and it also gives you a reason to just shoot her with ALL the damage types to keep individual resistances low. Or if you have to stick with the rotation, have some way to easily tell if people have a specific damage type, so I don't end up swapping away from Electric even though a pubbie had a LOT of Electric damage. That sort of thing. Running the Profit-Taker with pubbies for me is a constant game of "Does anyone have Toxic damage?" and "Why did you switch it? I had puncture damage!" The exploiter, by contrast, doesn't really LET us get in each other's way like this.

 

2 hours ago, Antris said:

There is enemy tiers/types with Butchers, Lancers, Hellions, Scorchs, Heavy Gunners, Napalms, Bombards and finally Nox among others, yet some implementations still need improvement like mentioned here. Introducing something stronger the Nox that is already a mini boss by itself would possibly harm certain types of play styles, and narrow our options. 

Oh, certainly - not all enemies in Warframe are created equal. The problem is that there's no clean delineation between enemies who are supposed to be "cannon fodder" and so fundamentally not complex or powerful and enemies who are meant to be "special" and so both powerful and tough. There's a sort of continuous gradient, with enemies mostly differencing in the amount of EHP they have an the amount of damage they do. The reason I want a clean delineation between Common and Special enemies is so that Commons can be made simple to fight (no mechanics, no gimmicks, no duels, just shoot them in the head) while Special enemies can be made a lot rarer, a lot harder to kill but also a lot more complex in how you fight them. I want things like, say... Bombards charging up their rocket salvos with an obvious audiovisual indicator, their rockets flashing as they fly and us being able to shoot them out of the air. Napalms marking an area like a mortar Moa, then charging up a shot to set it on fire. Heavy Gunners needing to "lock onto" people before they can unload their Gorgons, with a Ballista style laser beam indicating this and having to regain lock if the player breaks line of sight.

Similarly, I'd like killing them to be a bit more complex. Maybe let us shoot the rockets on the Bombard, causing extreme damage to him. Maybe give the Napalm a gas tank we can shoot to set him and his buddies on fire when it bursts, reducing him to a knife. Maybe let us shoot the Gorgon on the Heavy Gunner, forcing her to reload and let us do that multiple times. When I talk about weak points, I mean more than just "shoot the enemy here for more damage." I'm referring to "shoot the enemy here to troll them and their team-mates." And just to be clear - yes, I am borrowing some of this from The Division. But this ability to turn enemies' abilities around on them is one of the few things that still makes me feel genuinely ecstatic. Hearing a Black Tusk Drone lady yell "Deploying drones!" is a mix of fear since those things are nasty... And excitement, because it means she's giving me what amounts to an insta-kill on her if I can pop the drones fast enough. The same goes for shooting the drug packs on Hyena rushers, releasing the drugs and stunning not just the rusher but everyone around them.

I know Warframe isn't The Division, but I still feel that our "Specials" can similarly have weak points we can shoot to rob them of their guns, set their buddies on fire, blind everyone, force them to reload or "troll" them in all manner of ways. Even something as simple as shooting heavy enemies in the legs to stumble them would be appreciated. Hell, that's most of what I do against Shield Lancers as it is 🙂 Again, I feel that giving us more complex enemies with weaknesses and gimmicks of their own allows for those enemies to be a LOT stronger than what we have now, specifically because we'll have other option to fight them than just out-DPSing them. Again - Noxes are already an enemy like this. You don't fight them by out-DPSing them. You fight them by exploiting their weak point. The same goes for Bursas, the same goes for Nullifiers, etc. If more enemies had those kinds of weak points, more enemies could be that tough.

 

1 hour ago, UnderRevision said:

Funny thing is, this also makes it good at standing up to Mesa, at least to a point.  My own Mesa can eventually chew through a Nox, but it takes a long time and reduces my aiming angle to its smallest size in a matter of moments.  It's actually advantageous to turn off Peacemaker and attack with my normal weapons that I can actually aim at the weakpoint.  It's a very short list of enemies that can have that impact on my playstyle.  I actually stop and think twice when I hear one of them coming.  Plus, the way their threat level escalates when the glass is broken is great.

And that's what I was referring to, yes. Playing Inaros, there are few things I can't hit with Dessication and execute for a one-shot kill. I can't do that to Noxes because even with True damage... They just have a lot of EHP. I need to execute them 10-15 times at the higher levels. It's just not practical. I can also slice through most other Grineer with my Paracessis (thanks, Blood Rush) but I can't do that to Noxes. They have too much health. I mean... I CAN do both of these things. Throw in overpowered enough weapons (which I personally don't have) and I'm sure you can burst through anything. However, I don't need to do that because I can just shoot them in the head. A few decent shots from a Corinth Prime, a burst from a Tenora, a headshot from a Euphone Prime and they go down. Especially now with generally reduced Grineer armour and packing Radiation or Viral damage. I'm sure that's the case for most people, in that I doubt many try to burst down a Nox without shooting him in the head. Yet I've legitimately never seen a complaint about Noxes on this forum. Not about them being too tough, not about them being unfair, nothing. People seem to pick up on the weak point, fight them as intended and move on with their lives - exactly like you have.

That's why I believe we can use more of these enemies. That's why I believe that if you give people a fair, approachable, intuitive way to "troll" otherwise absurdly tanky enemies, they'll simply do that rather than come to the forums to complain about how hard enemies are to kill. Some might, sure, but by and large I feel that players are adaptable enough to exploit enemy weaknesses as long as they have the means and information to do so.

 

1 hour ago, UnderRevision said:

The issue I have with the Aerolyst is that it is completely immobilized when the canisters break, rendering it harmless and an easy target.  Which would be fine if it was more dangerous, but right now it's not packing enough of a wallop (at least at enemy levels that I can play at) to make the stun feel like it's earned. 

The Aerolyst is a weird one, in that I think DE designed him badly initially and then over-corrected in the face of overwhelmingly negative response. The issue with the Aerolyst wasn't us being unable to stop him from moving, but rather that there was next to no time available to damage such a fast-moving target before the cannisters regrew. I argued that the cannisters simply needed to either be permanently destroyed or just take a long time to regrow. DE went the unnecessary extra step of also immobilising him. I'm personally not complaining because... Eh, I kind of like having the ability to heavily troll enemies like that 🙂 But even without the stun, just the longer regen cooldown on the cannisters alone would have been enough.

In general, though, I feel the Aerolyst too is a decent example of a complex enemy, implementation issues aside. I'd have personally made him stupid-tough rather than invulnerable, and made every cannister drop his damage resistance (see: Balor Fomorian encounter), since that would give people a choice. Try to burst down the Aerolyst or spend some time killing the cannisters first and THEN deal damage to the Aerolyst. Do you kill ALL the cannisters or do you kill most of them and just deal with the remaining damage resistance. By going with a binary invulnerability state, DE made him a lot more "scripted" than he needed to be, and thus less interesting than that design had the potential for.