Dev Workshop: Healing Defendable Targets

[Graavarg]

16 hours ago, Vitalis_Inamorta said:

Neither is the same type of enemy with the same uniform and the same weapon doing the same differences in numbers at the same times, but that happens too.  Your logic was inapplicable from the start, therefore flawed and its outcome incorrect.

No, it is actually the other way around. The logical premise for endless missions is that the difficulty shall increase as the mission progresses. The mechanism for this is an ever increasing enemy level. Having defense objectives and/or warframe healing powers increase in the same way works against this basic premise and is thus illogical. Doesn't mean it doesn't add to the fun, but it isn't logical.

The only logic behind having such a scaling healing system is players wanting longer missions to become easier, but that is a completely different premise. The scaling in endless missions is there for two purposes, to stagger enemy difficulty for one set of rotational rewards (until the first set of the rotation has been completed) and to make the endless mission "non-endless" by forcing the players to leave or lose at some undetermined point when enemy scaling exceeds player capability.

[TheLexiConArtist]

34 minutes ago, Graavarg said:

No, it is actually the other way around. The logical premise for endless missions is that the difficulty shall increase as the mission progresses. The mechanism for this is an ever increasing enemy level. Having defense objectives and/or warframe healing powers increase in the same way works against this basic premise and is thus illogical. Doesn't mean it doesn't add to the fun, but it isn't logical.

The only logic behind having such a scaling healing system is players wanting longer missions to become easier, but that is a completely different premise. The scaling in endless missions is there for two purposes, to stagger enemy difficulty for one set of rotational rewards (until the first set of the rotation has been completed) and to make the endless mission "non-endless" by forcing the players to leave or lose at some undetermined point when enemy scaling exceeds player capability.

Let's assume first that we're talking about something that refreshes - Excavation, I hear, does this now. Let's also hypothesise that it is a 1:1 linear progression between the additional health of the objective and the additional damage gained by an enemy.

There's more than one enemy. An objective with health of (4000 + (100*level)) versus incoming damage threat of ((100 * level) * 10 units)  = one raises by 100 per level, one raises by 1000 per level. So, clearly, even a 1:1 gain is already not 'easier' at any point.

This means that percentage healing simply stays consistent with the target, difficulty still increases but linearly (Enemy output grows faster than health) instead of exponentially (enemy output grows faster than health AND healing is increasingly less potent by proportion).

The punishment for 'failure' grows as enemy threat increases. You take some stray bullets to the face, it's more dangerous by level. You let some sneaky melee lad through and they hit your objective, they can do so fewer times before you deal with them, as levels increase, if you don't want to lose the objective. Also, enemies are still hardier in and of themselves, adding another scalar for difficulty that remains independent of healing - they're more likely to live long enough to land that damage on the objective.

[Lone_Dude]

On 2020-04-04 at 2:05 AM, [DE]Rebecca said:

Sancti Magistar

Heals for damage dealt in an AoE

Heal for up to 500 over 5 seconds, can’t stack with other players. Going from a burst to Heal over Time. 

Going from burst to heal over time

You do realize that its a 100x nerf, right? You reduced its efficiency to 1% of what it was. Even worse, considering that it heals OVER TIME lmao

You already messed up this weapon by removing CC immunity on swings from it. You nerfed it even further via range reduction changes. You broke it even more with impact changes, making it so that it throws enemies AWAY from you. And now you reduce its utility down to 1% efficiency.

500 HP per 5 seconds? Do you people even know how much health objectives have? Do you know how much damage enemies deal? Or is it one of those "its a bug because we dont know how it works" situations? Do you realize that it was one of the unique weapons that truly had a purpose in your game aside from PRESS E TO KILL? Do you realize that it was one of those weapons that could utilize a heavy attack build without relying on SLASH? Do you realize that this weapon was extremely useful for those of us who play non-meta frames that you REFUSE to rework?

You punish off-meta playstyles again and again, only to then moan about players using DPS frames everywhere. You don't even understand how video games work lmao - you reduce Warframe down to a KPS calculator and then complain about Simulacrum. Why else would you even nerf playstyles that allow for a wider diversity and specific loadouts? What a #*!% up.

[_GoodLuck_]

On 2020-04-04 at 1:05 AM, [DE]Rebecca said:

Now that that we have reviewed it, we feel like healing these objectives can serve well as an alternative or a complement to the commonly used defensive abilities, such as Frost's Snow Globe, Gara's Mass Vitrify, Limbo's Cataclysm. 100% heals is not what we want to do, so we are instead trying to allow the effects but adjusted as to not trivialize the game modes.

It won't serve as an alternative. 500 over 5 sec? Really? Do you realize how much HP objectives have? It's a bad idea.

[Zendadaist]

So this reads as a buff to the first half of the starchart, then at best, an irrelevance to everything everywhere else. It's a nerf to powers which were previously able to do noticeable amounts of healing on static targets.

I get trying to balance things and reduce inconsistency, but it seems as though you put the balance point somewhere around Ceres. Beyond that, the occasional stray bullet from a random mob will out-damage all of this healing, making it a waste of effort.

Will defense targets get shield gating?

[selig_fay]

5 hours ago, nslay said:

Consider how ridiculous it would be if 4 Garas applied 4 Splinter Storm on a defense target (is that even possible)? That would be 99.99% DR (=1-(1-0.9)^4)... that's ludicrous! But 99.99% DR is still worse than Limbo's Cataclysm.

1 Gara applied Walls and got 100% DR for the object because the shots don't reach. Do you really think that players on Gara will worry about the DR object? Gara also has a CC aggression generator to safely recast Walls.

Here there is still nezha which gives a halo on 2K hp. But I'm not interested in the halo, but the invulnerability that the halo gives at the end of its action. In fact, this is healthgate for objects.

[umadgurl]

500 HP over 5 seconds is an effin april fools joke i hope. otherwise i have to say that you devs are utterly out of touch with reality of this game...

[(PSN)Galeforce43]

So does this in any way affect Mag's ability to heal defence objectives' shields? Both her 3 and 4 are effective means of restoring shields in moments and I worry there's a stealth nerf coming here as she's not mentioned.

[C0ney]

When you make a mistake and instead of taking responsibility for it you tell your players they are exploiting the game when they are simply playing the game the way you coded it with features you intentionally created to be used in said game. Then instead of apologizing and just fixing the issue, let it marinate for days and weeks and then rewrite the book on warframe defensive healing while still leaving players out in the cold and only able to play the game specifically the way you want it. I'm getting flashbacks of kindergarden play time when all the kids in class would fight over whatever game rules they would make up as they go along, and then teacher comes and takes the toys away and tells the bad kids to stand in the corner for X amount of time. This situation with scarlet spear and all the fallout from the community has escalated to the point where the game has all but completely dropped off the twitch stream stats, new content that was released in previous years that saw multiple thousands of streamers is now reduced to under 1k, compared to other games that have not had updates in years still getting well over 3k viewers. Combine that with sweeping stay at home orders across the globe and it's very apparent that players are just not interested as they once were to play and provide entertainment. Somebody at DE done goofed this time around and I'm hoping these issues get resolved soon so I can go back to playing the game I fell in love with years ago and have some friends still left around to play it with.

 

[MacIntoc]

6 hours ago, 0_The_F00l said:

You also missed the following:

Frosts Icy avalanche augment armor for Damage Mitigation.

It doesn't add armor. It's more like Iron Skin from Rhino.

I suggested to DE to see the wiki's page dedicated to sources of energy, health and shield to found those that apply to allies. I hope they see it.

[0_The_F00l]

41 minutes ago, MacIntoc said:

It doesn't add armor. It's more like Iron Skin from Rhino.

I suggested to DE to see the wiki's page dedicated to sources of energy, health and shield to found those that apply to allies. I hope they see it.

Thats what i meant , but yeah i understand how it could look like that now that i see the sentence for itself.

Will edit the original.

thanks.

[HolySeraphin]

4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Let's assume first that we're talking about something that refreshes - Excavation, I hear, does this now. Let's also hypothesise that it is a 1:1 linear progression between the additional health of the objective and the additional damage gained by an enemy.

There's more than one enemy. An objective with health of (4000 + (100*level)) versus incoming damage threat of ((100 * level) * 10 units)  = one raises by 100 per level, one raises by 1000 per level. So, clearly, even a 1:1 gain is already not 'easier' at any point.

This means that percentage healing simply stays consistent with the target, difficulty still increases but linearly (Enemy output grows faster than health) instead of exponentially (enemy output grows faster than health AND healing is increasingly less potent by proportion).

The punishment for 'failure' grows as enemy threat increases. You take some stray bullets to the face, it's more dangerous by level. You let some sneaky melee lad through and they hit your objective, they can do so fewer times before you deal with them, as levels increase, if you don't want to lose the objective. Also, enemies are still hardier in and of themselves, adding another scalar for difficulty that remains independent of healing - they're more likely to live long enough to land that damage on the objective.

Don't you realize that due to damage scalling the only relevant damage reduction would be 90% or 100% at this point? And that healing would need to be so high (20% per second or more) to prevent you usual grineer squad from destroying that lvl40 defense pod? Yes, the defense objective does NOT scale as the rounds go. In fact, it would be more challenging to do 60 waves of lvl1 defense than going to Sedna.

What this means is that if enemies are already killing the pod in 5 seconds, the healing  would have to be absurd. It would either need to be based on enemy level, which I doubt is applicable since it is cast on the defense target, or the defense target's health, but because it doesn't scale the number would have to be too high, which would trivialize low level farming, and DE would nerf it because you would put little effort to avoid losing.

[ShirakawaNaoya]

It is sad that Vazarin got hit. Always used it as a clutch save. Vazarin actually is fine as is.

[Dark_Chroma_Prime]

What about Chromas EW with fire? It's also able to heal

[Vitalis_Inamorta]

15 hours ago, HolySeraphin said:

Also, the problem with healing is that it MUST NOT surpass enemy damage output at lvl 30-40 otherwise we have mostly an AFK farm, which DE clearly wants to prevent

Outhealing enemy damage output at lvl 30-40 would be something like 400-4k HP/second depending on the enemy and how many of them.  That's the problem.

In addition, Vazarin for one already doesn't heal any def targets unless they've taken no damage for 5-8 seconds.

[JollyCookie1988]

If vazarin cant make teammates immune after this update goes through, I am quitting the game.

 

[Vitalis_Inamorta]

6 hours ago, Graavarg said:

No, it is actually the other way around. The logical premise for endless missions is that the difficulty shall increase as the mission progresses. The mechanism for this is an ever increasing enemy level. Having defense objectives and/or warframe healing powers increase in the same way works against this basic premise and is thus illogical.

By that logic any warframe with abilities based on % of absolute values are illogical.  Look at them all.  Easier to name the warframe without an absolute %based ability than the ones with one or several.  No, that ship has sailed.  Besides, enemies will still oneshot your operator or frame with AoE if you're near the defense target trying to heal it eventually.

By a third piece, these changes would make most healing abilities perceptibly irrelevant at the mid point of the star chart, let alone endless missions that start at higher levels like Abs or Sorties or events.

By a fourth piece, the max health of the defense target doesn't change once the mission has started, so enemies still scale past it even if it's getting %max healed, so you have no logical standing in any regard.

[nslay]

4 hours ago, zhellon said:

1 Gara applied Walls and got 100% DR for the object because the shots don't reach. Do you really think that players on Gara will worry about the DR object? Gara also has a CC aggression generator to safely recast Walls.

Unlike Limbo's Cataclysm, Gara's walls are easily broken by enemies past Condrix #12. Gara can also only cast a single Spectorage when enemies can enter the OpLink area from several directions. Spectorage also doesn't work well unless the enemies are near/inside of it (so if you Spectorage an OpLink, far away enemies will ignore it and still shoot the OpLink). Here's another fun fact, Gara's Walls take several seconds to solidify. Even though visually they look like walls when she casts them, enemies can shoot through them and hit the defense objective while they form.

By the way, I'm a Gara player and I worry about the walls breaking and I apply Splinter Storm to every single OpLink every single time. Even at Condrix < #12, bugs allow Grineer to walk through the walls (e.g. if they're on a structure, I've seen them roll through the wall and into walled area).

Both Frost and Gara have HP attached to their "100% DR" defense abilities (Gara's is divided among segments of the wall making individual segments easy to break). To compensate, Frost is given CC and Gara is given Splinter Storm castable on defense objectives (which will be nerfed to 50% effectiveness).

[MrShawnStone]

It's a real shame that most, if not all, of these are nerfs in one way in another. It does kinda reinforce the idea that DE is quick to blanket nerf something that makes the game playable, especially at higher levels, rather than taking that little bit longer to buff the stuff that is left at the wayside.

Some of these being relatively low values for healing in Warframe. In another game, such as WoW or Final Fantasy 14, they would be okay, but that's because those games are built around those numbers.
Warframe, on the other hand, has some really ridiculous numbers across the board, from our weapons and abilities, to the enemies weapons and health.
500 health is nothing to the defensive targets, and that sort of healing would disappear the second an enemy so much as sneezes on it.

Please really take into consideration where players are using these abilites and such, such as what map and the level of enemy.
I know this can be difficult for something like endless mission types, where the node can say that the map is a low level to begin with, yet increase in difficulty the longer they stay in those missions, but maybe then have a look at how long they're staying in there for.

And about some of these making the game playable, well, at higher levels, sometimes defending something can be a joke/don't even bother if you didn't bring a particular frame or focus school.
And focus... it's not the best. It really needs another look, because only a few nodes are even worth it. There is even an entire school that's left at the wayside (Unairu).

Look, I just want to stop these knee jerk reaction mega nerfs with little band-aid fixes that are the amount of slapping 1 over freshly seperated limb.
This is very similar to what happened to Ember before her rework. DE nerfed the one thing that still kept her being used (World on Fire) and it took a while before her rework, but until she did recieve it, no one used her.
I feel like what''s happened here is that DE has given us the tools as they already came, told us how to use them and then when we used them as told, they've pulled a surprised pikachu face and told us that's not the way to use them.

Please. please. PLEASE have another look into this, look hard as to why and how the players are using these abilities, and also really have a look into if the values are going to be worth it because enemy damage scaling can be and is a joke that sometimes even the best of healing can't heal damage so high that it will kill the objective in one shot.

[mikakor]

10 hours ago, nslay said:

It's admirable that they are exploring defense ability interactions with defense targets for all the frames. But without more careful consideration of these numbers, the future of defense is Limbo. Heck, Limbo is already currently better than all of these other frames without 50% DR defense objective caps. No?

i rather think that because Limbo is... well, Limbo, people will still use any other frame=... when they can. because Limbo, the rift, banish, cataclysm... maybe it will be used most of the time, but i am pretty sure that if people can avoid using Limbo, they will.

[---RNGesus---]

On 2020-04-04 at 3:05 AM, [DE]Rebecca said:

NUMBERS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE, the purpose of this post is to communicate our intentions.

I have never laughed so much in my life before

[Ulvra]

Generally sounds like a good change. Sad that vazarin is getting such a significant nerf, but still the best school even if the heal only works fully on players, it's however a game changer to have all healing and protection abilities suddenly take effect, making for a whole other level of choices being opened up and that's delightful news. Currently the need to bring a wall of ice, rift or whatever is way too limiting on team compositions, even if they themselves can be fun. The best fun however is the fun you're not forced into.

[Nyatalia]

Please reconsider removing the invulnerability off of protective dash and just halve it or make it 3 seconds maybe just put a cooldown for defense targets, or atleast make it so that npcs like defectors and operatives don't inherit the changes mentioned in this post; because those have some big ai and pathing problems whether it is taking longer paths to get to their objective (sometimes they even go on to other objectives just to go back to their original one) for defectors or just standing there in front of the enemy doing nothing for operatives and the numbers you are providing here won't do much to help on those situations, and let's be honest by making some of these changes you are just nerfing options and pushing the player base to use the obvious better option which would be just nuking everything which will lead to more people complaining about nuke frames and never having fun because there's nothing to kill and support frames being useless.

[Orokin]

14 hours ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

You don't need Limbo either if you can use Volt/Ember/Saryn/Equinox/Oberon/whatever frame that has AoE damage skill to nuke enemies into oblivion

You are not going to be instantly nuking level 180 armored enemies with those frames.

 

14 hours ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

He's one of some frames that will inevitably run into energy issues. With Primed Flow at max, and Efficiency mods stacked without hurting range or power, you only get one cast of Cataclysm+Stasis without picking any energy orbs

Limbo is probably the most energy efficient frame there is because of his passive energy generation. Idk why you would be running max strength on limbo, other than rift torrent. But on normal mobile defense/defense you should be running min range, so rift torrent would be useless. Even if you run rift torrent, you don't need max strength for any content in the game.

 

14 hours ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

If they wanna balance Limbo, then let ALL frames get the same treatment. Don't just banish Limbo in his sad corners

Limbo needs new abilities, I don't think just nerfing him is the solution. Limbo is not the only frame that need balancing

 

14 hours ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

THERE'S LITERALLY NEVER BEEN ANY RESTRICTIONS OF WHAT WARFRAME OR FOCUS TREE YOU BROUGHT IN ANY MISSIONS, if you forget it. 'Oh this update will make me able to use frames other than the meta frames'! WHO SAID YOU NEED META FRAMES TO DO ANY MISSIONS?

iF thE gAmE iS tOO eAsY, JuSt rUn wItHouT moDs 4Head. Remember how loved the Grendel missions were? That is not an argument. The game should be balanced, it should not be on the player to make the content interesting. A huge part of the game is optimization. Leveling up your mods. Using optimal team compositions. You take that away, the game loses its flavor (which is one of the biggest problem in warframe right now because the balance is so out of wack and optimization is currently not necessary
 

14 hours ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

Do they even remember how the things that they created in the past would interact in things they would create in the future? Do they, even base their future creations atop things they've done in the past?

From my understanding, they completely didn't

No they do not. They are making very slow progress to balance though, but they have a very long way to go. They nerfed covert lethality, magus lockdown, even healing/giving DR to defense objectives soon. These are steps in the right direction but there are so many frames that trivialize content, including Limbo that should be changed. 

 

14 hours ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

players shouldn't be punished because an oversight the developer does. Players are players, they could only do so much with tools provided to them. If you provided a spade to a person and tells him to dig, would you be mad for him if he uses that shovel not only to dig, but also fry eggs and chop trees? You should be complimenting them to find new uses that you haven't figured yourself, and now you can tell them not only to dig, but fry eggs and chop trees with one tool without needing to give him an axe or frying pan!

 

Yes, that is the main fun of the game for me, finding cool strategies with our given tools. But doing that right now is not fun, because (insert OP warframe) can just do it 10x more effectively. Content has to be balanced.

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

This event is living proof that DE is not doing good at designing events and new missions and have to either completely remove or neuter the core aspect of the game, SPACE MAGIC.

Design the game with the abilities in mind so that there can actually be some challenge and so that half the methods aren't completely obsolete.

Don't think I'll be playing this event on console lol.