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Dev Workshop: Healing Defendable Targets


[DE]Rebecca

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I'm happy you took a broader look at this topic and listen to community feedback. 💜

That said, I believe you missed a few things worth considering.

 

1. Limbo's ability to send things into Rift, thus negating all damage and also offering healing with the augment.

I'd leave this as it is, just add the healing if it didn't work now. It is strong, but that's exactly what Limbo is supposed to do.

 

2. Non-static Defence Targets and NPCs, be it in Rescue, Defection but also in Hijack. They have several limitations worth taking a look at as well.

Healing NPCs in these missions is essential as their AI won't make them stay in protective areas frames like Frost create. With the change to damage you recently did, these NPCs die extremely quickly to hazards like fire created by Grineer Napalms and the corrosive sludge created by Infested. They can also get displaced and stuck thanks to enemy attacks. Since their AI doesn't avoid these hazards and they don't care about our attempts to protect them, healing them is the only way to prevent their death, thus giving us more options to heal them or have us be able to give them simple commands would help here a lot. I won't ask for AI improvement as I know that is a huge task, but it would be the best solution, so hopefully something worth looking into in the future.

Truth be told, I often have to Banish these NPCs with Limbo in order to be able to complete the mission.

 

3. Burst Heal and Heal over Time. 500 Health is nothing in higher level missions, be it by burst or regeneration. I would leave the amount healed by Magistar and others the same, but if you're worried it might get abused, give the Defence Target a 5 second period in which it cannot be healed by any Magistar and similar source again.

 

4. This brings me to the main point of this little essay.

There is no need to change the myriad of things we, the players, can do, while it is much easier and more efficient for you to change how the Defence Target reacts to what we do.

 

Defence Target NPCs

Let us affect NPCs in full, just like if it was another player. Let us impress the little guys.  😉

Their survivability is often very poor so even if we make them nigh unkillable and trivialise the mission so be it. They can often die in a split second ruining the mission as well. This is a simple yet effective way how to handle these missions and you don't have to bother with their wonky AI. Plus, this removes the frustration caused by "Why does my support Warframe [Trinity] can't heal this freaking NPC?!"

Directly unrelated but please take a look at shields these NPCs use and consider giving them Shield Gating like Corpus units have, to reduce the chance of them getting insta killed.

I'd love for our companions to have the same, but that's another topic.

 

Normal Defence Targets

Again, make them be affected by all defence and healing abilities (that make sense to do so, like Garuda's Blood Syphon doesn't make much sense here), but with 50% reduced effectiveness on healing, shield and overshield generating, max 50% damage reduction, and 5 second cooldown before it can get healed or made invincible in Limbo's Rift (Banish) again from the same source once the healing or invincibility period has ended (ideally, visible above the target with a client side icon others can't see to let them know when they can heal the target again).

I'm all in for removing Vazarin invincibility affecting Defence Targets though.

Example:

Trinity's Blessing restores max 50% of the target's Health with a 5 second cooldown before the target can be healed again and gives max 50% damage reduction. But, if the target already had Gara's Splinters on it, giving it another damage reduction, the total damage reduction stays capped at 50%.

This way, the target is well protected and healed, but there is still a chance it can be destroyed, so the challenge the missions should pose remains. If players seek to protect the target further, they have to use area denial abilities like Frost's Snow Globe.

 

I'm hoping this is something you can set on the Defence Target itself. Imagine a damage reduction and a cap but for healing, if that makes sense. If possible to do, this could simplify the changes for you and make them easy to understand for players as well, instead of browsing through the patch notes or wiki to find out how their ability works on Defence Targets now.

 

PS:

Whatever you decide to go with, please make sure you change all the in-game descriptions and other related texts so players don't get confused and easily know what the ability or item does now, without having to search on Wiki.

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Vazarin Protective Dash, brief invulnerability will be necessary for it's consideration in high level defense, else Zenurik would be a clear winner.

Something I might suggest, is 1s invulnerability, and let healing stack up ~2% at a time. If the whole party is dashing through it, then it's a concerted effort to do this, and gives a place for Vazarin.. but like with Aura, if only one person brings it, it's based on preference or a need to fill a niche in their kit.. putting it in about the right spot.

It's been long due that Vazarin's protective dash was toned down, but it should be kept adequate enough for scaling and clutch heals. 500 healing over time will NOT save a defense target from a lvl 80 enemy. Worth considering how far behind the meta this would fall if it can't still serve it's intended purpose, if not so dramatically.

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This pattern of only finding “problems” when an aspect of the game is under stress and scrutiny is distressing.  How many things will Scarlet Spear nerf before it costs more players than it sated in the long run?

 

While I'm happy to see more abilities being allowed to affect inanimate mission critical stationary objects, supposedly pacifying the diversity argument, the limits keep these abilities as impractical options because of what they are competing with.  I echo and support the POV that the Varazan nerf will do little more than reinforce the Meta of defensive abilities preventing all damage to POIs. Actually, only two tools actually lost power in this post, and that was Splinter Storm and Varazan. Varazan is not a WF power so its inclusion in this list is insensitive to its independence from other loadout choices.  Indeed I think our time would be better spent making focus schools more interesting to vary in regular gameplay but that's another thread. Varazan is still absurdly powerful with Void Aegis and its ability to crash heal npcs and PC allies.  

 

The real discussion we need to have here is what are acceptable grounds for failure. “FAILURE!” -Vey Hek  This is a game of PVE grind and failure causes players to reevaluate their choices, all of their choices, including ones that break the loop.

 

In Scarlet Spear, failure has a very real cost in terms of scarlet credits, disproportionately so.  Therefore I am only allowed to, by incentive, play frost and limbo. Not doing so disrespects my perceived entitlement, my time, and the time of anyone in my squad who might care about the mission outcome and difficulty. Yes, I care about their experience a non zero amount.

Let me be clear: the only thing this change does is force me to say out of my frame to hold the dome up while a Def Obj is receiving 100 hp/s.  This does not sound fun, but it is better than failing or being forced onto a meta defense solution. 

I don’t feel this is a good design but I’m about to make the argument for it.  I believe WF is a game of tool selection so the player can play the content either the way they want or at the difficulty they want.  There must always be tools that trivialize aspects of the game or it simply won’t be fun. The more tools that do this in more unique ways, the better in my opinion, but this may not be true for other players who don’t have such an absolute perspective on the matter.  I do not believe this is that hard for everyone to appreciate because the mission Sortie: MD Rad hazard or Rad enhancement shows you must adapt or fail. “Fire discipline” is not practical because our companions are so powerful now, they can drop the console before you can get a 4-letter word out.  Either the squad university takes steps to avoid LOS with the objective, disable their companions, or the encounter is “trivialized” by using abilities which make tenno IMMUNE to status or make the Obj UNABLE to take damage. And in any high level or endurance run, these are the only options and DE sees fit to remove the one that is not attached to a frame.  Probably deserves it, but there aren't enough frames/solutions to replace it. Disclaimer: I use Varazan on only my primary load out for this reason.

 

 

We also need to take the time to evaluate how these changes interact with the various game modes and I’m not confident DE has done that because of the lack of commentary.

Scarlet Spear: no in mission healing ever, period.  It's part of the design right?

MD: Doesn’t need healing because the Obj health resets several times mid mission.  See Radiation exception.

Def:  Def heals itself if well defended.  These changes have little effect and defense is not actually a game mode of defense, but of speed exterminating to keep hostiles off the Obj and to get though the waves at a par rate.  I don’t like defense.  

Defection:  Healing bypasses some of the difficulty in this game mode but because NPC derpiness is the true challenge, this is fine.

Excavation: Even with the health buff, excavators need direct support because of their exposed position on map and incentive to go to high level.  This is probably the mode most directly affected by these changes.  

Hijack: this game mode is the most trivialized by healing.  But with lack of an endless mode, there was never difficulty here to begin with.  

 

Rescue, VIP Defense:  Do these changes reflect interactions with NPC allies in any way?

Arbitration:  I don't play enough arb to comment but I know this hurts them. 

 

Feedback:  

These trivial sustaining heal numbers are trivial.  It's nice these abilities have gained utility but to be realistic, they are either unnecessary or insufficient.  With the exception of Renew and Vitality Mote (because those scale with frame power str and don’t need to be refreshed), these new interactions are not interesting especially compared with current tools and provide a thin security blanket to be shattered by the first high threat target the tenno fails to instantly dispatch.  While appreciated, they must all scale somehow including scaling down! 100hp/s is too much for low level missions. 1-2% hp/s or something.  

 

50% damage reduction is difficult to detect on the player during game play.  How much less so on a detached def target which is immobile. Doubling remaining health is nice but will not influence my decision making when meta defence options are available.  Let's do 75%.

 

Varazan should have lost its ability to heal Def Obj.  It was kind of silly! Varazan should have only retained its very temporary invulnerability. This keeps the ability unique while retaining the consequence of a damaged Def target because it cannot heal on its own or quickly.  Maybe even make it stasis the Obj health so it cannot be healed until the invulnerability ends. That would be interesting. It’s much more fun as an “oh sh!t” button since its current state as a cure all is broken.  

 

Overall these are good changes because it adds more utility where there was none before for an arbitrary reason: Trinity was OP in the very distant past.  More consideration and baking is needed.

 

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Well, you nearly erased vazarin from the game. Only few weirdow will be using it after this update. I mean, protective dash is the ONLY reason people even used this school on arbitrations and etc. And you just murdered it. This is not supposed to happen.

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Ok, it's "subject to change".

So, don't forget to let defence frames to defend. There is 2 of em. Gara and Trinity. You nerf Gara in 5 times. It was alternative to Frost and Limbo. Not a popular actually.

50% is useless. Nobody will pick it as a defender. Do whatever you want, but do not kill option which doesn't brake the game. Frost is still exist. Even Limbo not deleted... yet. Real consistancy here is let Trinity do the same. That is all.

Untill some treshhold (and this is pretty near 90%) there is no matter, can Ember protect something, or not. Nobody never will came with her as a reasonable option to do this.

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6 hours ago, Brawlatron said:

Vazarin Nerf

Oh dear, this is the big one... When it was first revealed a review was being done on Defense healing, my thoughts immediately turned to a review and subsequent nerf to Protective Dash, though I'd by lying if I said there wasn't good reason for it. I'll start by saying I am in favor of removing its ability to make targets invincible; having merely to Void Dash into the target every 5 seconds to make it completely immune is absolutely overpowered. That said... The healing effect change is a colossal nerf; using the Hydron pod with 47,630 Health as an example again, and using the 500 health over 5 seconds cap (aka 100 HP/s), it would go from healing this objective for 5,715 health per second to 100... 57 times less. And worse yet, this would remove what I would argue is the only use case of running any Focus School other than Zenurik in general play. I would propose instead allowing Protective Dash to heal objectives for 15%-20% of their max HP per second (this is the exception to the 5% cap on abilities I mentioned earlier), and more importantly, launching a review of all Focus Schools for balancing.

Let me be absolutely clear with that last point: I am not just calling for a massive nerf to Zenurik. While it is highly likely Zenurik needs to be toned down and perhaps some of its abilities given to other schools (giving Inner Might to Naramon comes to mind), I would argue that by doing only that, using Focus at all outside of hyper-specific examples such as Eidolons would be next to irrelevant, especially with the massive grind that comes with accessing the Focus abilities in the first place. I believe ALL Focus Schools outside of Zenurik are in dire need of buffs, and given the recent Warframe: Revised update already helped fix long-standing issues with the game, now would be a perfect time to do it.

"We hear your feedback. Zenurik is being removed from the game."

I'm not saying that's what will happen. Just that I absolutely would believe it would based on previous incidents.

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10 hours ago, Sintag said:

So, I get that removing invuln on defense objectives is a point that Vazarin did need stripped away, as it made Defense downright trivial.

But why not drop the healing to 5% over 5s (or 500/5s, whichever's higher) on Defense Targets instead of just 500 over 5s?  I understand it needed a nerf, but this is going a bit too far in the other extreme.

(Though I also understand that these numbers ARE subject to change, so)

I agree with this. This is an entire focus tree that I have to choose over the rest of the focus trees, and they're deciding to make it 100hp per second? Have they ever thought of how damage scales up, making this a throwaway focus tree at higher levels?

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11 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Titania - Passive 4 Heal Per Second for 20 Seconds,

We have protection targets of 40K hp which are destroyed in 10 seconds at the mob level of 200, which is normal for arbitrages. How do you propose to heal with this? OK, with 50% DR it will be 8 protection per second, but it is very small.

To understand the absurdity of the situation, 4 hps is required to restore 300 hp of the warframe in 75 seconds, which is literally nothing against level 60 opponents. I'm not saying that you play the game and I know that you do much cooler calculations in linear algebra, but why can't you do such simple calculations at the school level?

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10 hours ago, RolloDex said:

Ah yes, further increasing the fact that Zenurik is the only viable focus tree. 500 flat healing is hot garbage where it matters. Echoing the thoughts of many others on the thread, keep a degree of percentage-based healing on Protective Dash to incentivize its usage. I'd love to see numbers comparing the actual usage of Vazarin, especially compared to Zenurik. With this change, I'd bet the number of Vazarin users is going to go down even more.

Oh man, now that you mention it, since more people are and will be using Zenurik, it could mean another blanket nerf for the focus trees. Oh what fun!

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10 hours ago, Voltage said:

 

These changes will reinforce the meta from back in Tower Void where you have a Frost (Prime) abusing the invulnerability phase on Snowglobe and spamming said Snowglobe for hours straight to keep static defense objects alive. I hope you consider this outcome and see how unhealthy it is to indirectly encourage this gameplay on higher end defensive missions.

So Gara. 

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While on this topic, what about Magus Repair?

I'm a bit worried to mention it, in case it gets nerfed.

It would be very nice if Magus Repair could also heal Defence Targets, although at a reasonably reduced rate, so it doesn't get too abused, especially since it's accessible to everyone.

Another thing comes to mind.

How about enabling Magus Repair to heal our Companions? They sure could use it, especially Sentinels.

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Just for clarification what exactly does can´t stack mean? Is it limited to the same ability or the same effect (e.g. Venari and Protective Dash)

Adjusting ability to reasonable values is good but instead of stacking limitation I´d suggest to add a healing cap of x% of maximum hp per second. I think this would be easier to balance and doesn´t limit players loadout choice so much.

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This change has a fixed amount of all healing and a similar design, so you can imagine that you have not scrutinized much.
Healing methods should be more diverse. (Example: Scaling, increase the amount of healing due to damage)

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Garuda:

Can you Please let Garuda's Blood Alter heal.

Or at very least... clarify the "Flavor" that sets her healing apart from other frames? 

At the moment, basically every other type of heal, even from notorious dps or tank frames, are able to heal. But she cant?

Her heal requires the presence of an enemy, and I would argue that that alone should make it viable for healing. Since it is low range, low duration, and more difficult to set up near a defence target. Unlike a Trinity blessing, a Nidus Ravenous, or especially something like a Wisp Vitality mote. Which can have infinite duration and be placed at Any time.

By all means... tone down the healing. Make it a 50hp/s heal, or something. But don't leave her out when basic everyone else has been included

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