Dev Workshop: Healing Defendable Targets

[Bashuul]

I like these changes! Obviously the numbers need more tweaking, since arbitration defense operatives have like 40kish hp 

 

Also, please let Garuda heal with Blood Siphon, Gameplay > Flavour. Otherwise you could make a argument for other things to not work since "flavour", as in why is anything able to heal a metal casket anyways lol. So please let her heal work too

[(PSN)General_May-Ham]

I have several thoughts about his.

First, its great that so many frames will get a buff when it comes to defense missions

Second, whatever the final numbers are going to be where they differ from the standard healing (ie trinity healing 500 over 5 seconds) they should scale along the enemy damage ramp up curve. So instead of 500 over 5 seconds it would be 100*( level scaling factor) over (modified by duration) seconds.

Perhaps power strength's influence should be capped for these values but consider allowing the duration to be the same as the uptime for allies so that casters know when to recast. That and/or let the health bar of the objective show what buffs and durations those buffs have in the UI

[Karonuva]

Please stop nerfing/changing things to only have flat values, the game has enemies and objectives that scale in level and health and that makes percentage based stats PARAMOUNT. The game does not end at lv20.

[(XBOX)Skippy575]

1 hour ago, FerdinantFreez said:

Thank you,
for killing off excavation long runs. Instead of fixing things that have been broken for years like rivens, kuva or scaling rewards. Your approach is swing the ban hammer as per usual.

The overall quality of the game has been going down since the Lich update. You ignore the majority of feedback and keep focusing on bringing in new features in a game that has no direction. Keep over promising things and ignoring your loyal player base and see how much revenue you loose this year. 

When Scott explained the reasoning for nerfing Itzal Blink he said that it was required to give us more options with archwing as Itzal had superior mobility making all other archwings inferior. When you nerfed catchmoon you explained it in a similar fashion stating that it was the most used secondary invalidating other ''in slot'' weapons. How can you not see that protective dash gives us the freedom to choose any frame and go to any mission to play and have fun and be fine. It gives us options.. back to 2015 frost bubble spam i guess, great design DE, solid logic.

Sad to see what is becoming of this game and how disconnected you as developers are from your core audience.

Except you're solely using one focus school. Now you don't need to. That's the options you mention in your post.

[Julian_Skies]

12 minutes ago, Rude_Zuud said:

Even if DE was to change the flat heal/time to a % base, that doesn't help the issues with the objectives eventually just getting 1-shot. If they don't want players feeling forced into cheesing every aspect of the game, maybe have the game not cheese the player into losing. Objectives simply don't have the survivability they need to handle the onslaught a warframe can handle, and they won't 50 times over if this worthless update comes out. What we need instead is a repeat of Disruption, honestly, with specialized enemies capable of actually dealing damage to, or outright destroying, defense points that the player HAS to deal with while being suppressed by the trash and infantry defending the specialist doing its thing. Railjack has something like this as well, with the saboteurs planting bombs around the railjack if they aren't taken care of (although they usually are taken out before that becomes an issue, but it's the idea that counts). DE could give nullifiers armor-ignoring weaponry that deals True damage or Grineer with a new guided rocket launcher using the new Arm Cannon weapon type that deals catastrophic levels of True damage that CAN NOT be ignored without significant risk of mission failure. Ordis could announce spotting particularly dangerous weaponry incoming and pointing a market at the target. They've already shown us how much base survivability they're willing to give to enemies with units like Bursas having both shields and alloy armor and Grineer Crewship Captains having extremely high level 1 armor.

There is nothing to fix about objectives getting 1-shot. If your objective is getting 1-shot you have literally overstayed your welcome in an endless mission.

It's what the design of endless-type missions in any game is about. At one point it's going to outscale you. Objective getting one-shot? Mission's finally outscaled you. 

[RaethFennec]

Ah, static values with no indication whether ability strength effects them. Even if it does, some of these values look completely unusable for any high-level missions. So we're back to "make it invulnerable or fail" and no new choices were created. Except, some of the viable damage reduction options and Vazarin just got devestated. So... I guess we're down to only having two useful non-Eidolon Focus trees, ever. RIP Vazarin. You will be remembered. Also, RIP the only useful thing Garuda could do. And the Sancti Magistar in general.

The idea behind these changes make sense, but as usual, the execution is exclusively what matters. This is a very tepid change for high level play and accomplishes the exact opposite of the suggested goal, which is to increase player options. When a point with tens or even hundreds of thousands of HP can die in just a few seconds, healing numbers in the 50's may as well not exist. So we continue to Snow Globe, Cataclysm, Strangledome and Bastille points like always, etc. What's the purpose of building for such weak, static healing values when I can just build for complete and total lockdown so it can never get hit in the first place? I'd never make that choice for a high-level mission. I could understand percent heals being applied over time, but making everything 50-100 HP/s is meaningless past the early star chart. Except maybe Wisp, who was already in a strong spot and so just got a small but noticeable bump.

That said, this looks great for start chart newbies, who always can use a little extra love. I'm all for letting them feel strong and useful any way they choose.

[LeonardBlyx]

I like the general idea.

I don't like flat numbers part.

 

[EquestrianWyvern]

Seeing as they aren't mentioned, any word on how Truth, Justice, and Purity will be impacted.

[flaicher]

Do the same changes affect mobile defence targets, such as Sortie and Arbitration Defence targets not to forget Rescue targets?

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

9 minutes ago, (XB1)Skippy575 said:

Except you're solely using one focus school. Now you don't need to. That's the options you mention in your post.

When everything thing is S#&$, nothing will be

[Zahnny]

What about abilities that help protect or reduce damage taken?

Such as Nezha's Warding Halo augment.

Nvm, ignore me. Somehow I missed the second set of table contents.

[ldegroodt115]

1 hour ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Oberon - Renew

125 burst heal

50 health per sec

It's 40/hp second I thought? Unless you're planning to give him a buff.

If you want healing to be a viable alternative to defensive abilities the changes need further review. The latter can put up with high leveled enemy damage, but the healing changes are gonna fizzle out as useful at a much, much lower level. Glad that this is getting a look taken at but low percentages + keeping the HoT like other people are saying sounds way better.

Vazarin change is oof but anyone could see that nerf coming. With the myriad of options we have to heal Warframes, I never saw people running for that, only its unique ability to heal defense targets. We already get 90% DR/invuln in operator mode anyway. Not to be dramatic but this sounds like it is going to kill its niche.

Maybe it's time you take another look at focus schools. Cut out the worthless nodes, the nodes that add energy drain/penalize you for upgrading, or let us pick and choose without prerequisites. Give each tree something really good to compete with Zenurik's double whammy of energy regen and the melee efficiency (always wondered, why isn't this in the melee tree?). A lot of effort is put into maxing them out, please bring everything else up to par.

[Redrum_Wraith]

Just to add a voice to the chorus, can we have a percentage of max hp healed over time rather than flat values that will fall off sharply in higher level content such as arbitrations?

[Zahnny]

There is something I see missing from the table.

Osprey Specters since they help with shields and are often paired with Ancient specters.

[TheGrimCorsair]

A better fix is to just block all healing on defense targets.

They're more than durable enough as it is.

[Vit0Corleone]

This "Heal for 500 over 5 seconds, can’t stack" would make much more sense if it was "Heal for X% over 5 seconds".

As it is proposed it won't scale.

Also, I hope you are aware that the changes to Vazarin are going to essentially kill the only efficient use that focus school has.

On a side note: Why so fixed on changing things that work, instead of actually focusing on the damn multitude of bugs the game has that cause so much frustration.. I honestly don't get it. If you have the time to work on all this, you certainly could dedicate some effort into prioritizing bugs. Fix what's supposed to work and doesn't, instead of breaking what does work please ..

[NightmareT12]

I also think some of these that heal static values should be changed to %HP. Other than that I see this as something pretty good, given the current state?

[AuroraSonicBoom]

Still not used to seeing you review contentious issues that pop up so quickly. I didn't care either way before, but it will improve the gameplay options. Nice one.

[TavisNamara]

After further consideration... As many others are suggesting, please consider percentile and scaling options instead of the flat numbers all over these charts. The flat numbers only cause more problems for high-level play instead of balancing.

[Feltal]

Vazarin change is bad.

[Rude_Zuud]

30 minutes ago, Julian_Skies said:

There is nothing to fix about objectives getting 1-shot. If your objective is getting 1-shot you have literally overstayed your welcome in an endless mission.

It's what the design of endless-type missions in any game is about. At one point it's going to outscale you. Objective getting one-shot? Mission's finally outscaled you. 

Missed the point entirely. Of course an endless mission is going to scale, but if the scaling means the objective dies to a stray trash bullet then it's not a challenge that I lost to. I didn't fail to scale, the objective just died for no good reason. The proposal I made was to give a good reason for failure: Either the point gets scratched to death, which this pitiful healing proposed by Rebecca and the Tenno around us, along with existing globe/shield frames, would help prevent, or the point is hit by a demolition crew and just pops like a balloon because our damage couldn't support killing it before it did its job, like how it is in disruption.

[(PSN)sister-hawk]

Yeah I appreciate that you are moving in the right direction by expanding healing abilities rather than removing them, but the change to Vazarin is very excessive. At the very least it should be healing a percentage. Any flat number is probably going to be way over powered in lower levels and absolutely useless in higher levels. Also I think completely taking away the invulnerability is too harsh. Vazarin isn’t just another frame you can swap to. To get protective dash, you are locked into that entire focus school, and it’s the only one with healing. Effective healing is the only reason to use Vazarin. It is often the only option for solo players who want to use something other than a meta frame.

I can already see my frustration when the eidolon lures keep getting nuked during my solo hunts because Vazarin’s heals get hit too heavily.

[(XBOX)WolfKingLeo]

why the big nerf on vazarin? That's just too much of it.

 this is just a dumb change to make it a lot weaker

Welp ill just change into Zenurik

[AnhurShu]

I'm changing this to make a more general statement after I thought about this topic for a while. I understand the desire to give us more choice but that is a crazy rabbit-hole to go down. It certainly isn't just Defense-type missions that favor one strategy or another or a specific few frames. Spy, for example, favors the few stealth frames inherently. In fact, I thought that was kind of the point, having a diverse set of mission types that each favor a few frames (so that you aren't using just one or two for everything). 

I would personally say that the bigger issues are the more general issues and the one more general issue I would like to bring up that really should be looked at is survivability. Survivability is a real issue with many frames (especially older frames) making high-level missions very difficult to impossible for some frames no matter what the mission type is. Even with the recent changes to damage there is a certain point in the game where enemies will just decimate squishier frames.

I'd say maybe it's time to do a sweeping rework of all of the current Warframes rather than just one or two at a time and with all of those who should be involved working together. Doing reworks one at a time always seem to be either too conservative, where the changes are so tame that they do nothing to really encourage people to play them (Ember, Atlas), or still don't fit the meta, where the changes might be interesting but don't really fill any role in the game (Vauban), or they are too good, where the rework is amazing but because it outclasses the other frames it gets nerfed because that's easier, which just ticks the players off (Wukong).

  

[TheLexiConArtist]

2 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

We have been heads down several days on discussions - and ultimately what we want is more ‘Healing’ abilities to work to allow for more strategies to emerge in various mission types. We want there to be lots of options instead of one ‘perfect’ option. The decision to not allow heals to work on these defensive targets is an old one, and it arose from Trinity's Blessing. The fact that it was a 100% heal meant that it trivialized any Defense mission. Since then we have been blocking heal on most abilities (not super consistently) without reflecting back on the original design decision.

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.

Here are the next steps:

Warframe Abilities / other items that provide healing will work on Defendable Objects in 3 ways:
 

1. Fine as is
2. Needs a cap
3. Change “Burst Heal” into “Heal Over Time”
   

It's impossible to do a real sweeping, consistent change on this due to it being linked to other tools in the respective Warframes' kits, but many of these are going too far.

Remember that the viable strategy is already "The only winning move is not to play" - that is, to blockade any damage from hitting the targets, because they sit at one static level of tank while enemies scale up, enormously, against them. Healing is weak at any value when enemies are permitted to overwhelm the user for a lack of complementary control effects (either naturally, or through diminishing returns and enemy ignorance - looking at Strangledome versus those Sentients).

 

Vazarin's Protective Dash was a perfect tool to approximate the effect of those total-blockade defender frames that allowed a player to not still be pigeonholed when they didn't want to play one of those few frames, or needed to bring something else as well as compensating a defense - like wanting a strong DPS for fighting those Condrix and ludicrously-scaled Sentients, but being stuck with an obligatory perfect-defense frame because the OpLinks don't have the tank to survive any incoming damage by the latter waves. It's all or nothing.

Protective Dash had its own challenge to use with the invulnerability. Its percentage health restoration lets it scale consistently with the target, not get completely outstripped based on the level range you're working with - and when that inevitably does get outscaled in endurance runs, you have to manage a targeted dash every 5 seconds, in an alternate form to upkeep what Limbo could do by simply pressing one button, maybe two if you're feeling spicy. Since you'll not want to abandon your loadout and fight purely as operator, this becomes an intricate dance - Fighting, transference, aim, crouch, jump, transference, back to fighting - in a tight loop of timing. It was actually skilful and engaging to weave that proper protection in with actually.. clearing the enemies you have to clear. Protective Dash should stay exactly as is so it can function as the Non Defender Frame's fallback option. Three frames out of more than 40 is not a good spread of viability when it comes to this.

 

Cutting the effectiveness of damage reduction to 50% is nothing. Please, look at how you massacred my girl designed an unreliable 'defensive' ability for Ember in her latest rework; she can't go as far as she should be able to on paper (and as other high-DR ability frames can, hi Mesa), because you force her into reducing her protections all the time. Look at Trinity, who often needs the two layers of 75% reduction to keep up her survivability in open combat. 200% effective health is eaten in an instant. 1000% is a solid buffer - and would let some of the 'lesser heal' effects actually have a chance to keep up.

 

I'm not necessarily saying let Trinity full-heal and fully DR with Blessing, but that's one pure support frame who happens to have strong tools in both facets. Most of the other sources you identified have a very definite "A or B" relationship - and you know by now, squads are always overpowered when players can optimally layer the right effects. You need to make the right choices for the frames in their own right.