Dev Workshop: Railjack Revisited Information

[--RV--arm4geddon-117]

A friendly reminder that Gunnery 10 still sucks big time to the point of being detrimental.

 

[Vit0Corleone]

9 hours ago, vinc120 said:

So a extremely small sample of players for a extremely short period of time gets to test this out before it goes live? The chosen players are mostly completely random except for a select few and may not even care for or have tried Railjack prior? Seems like a very fair test for very accurate feedback...

 

9 hours ago, vinc120 said:

I don't usually post on the forums but I can't keep quiet after reading this. Here's some insights from someone who’s got 10/10/10/10 intrinsic and a fully decked ship with top avionics and mk3 components plus a decent amount of time spent doing Railjack missions. Some of the changes here just sound terrible. Why dumb down Railjack this much? I know that when you start out, it feels really weak and just makes you want to switch to your Amesha to kill everything but when it's fully upgraded, it feels very powerful and rewarding and it's a lot of fun while still not being a complete snooze-fest. I think that some of the suggested changes will just make Railjack less fun and overall worse in the long run. There is still a lot of improvements needed and the difficulty curve feels pretty off at the start (at least it did when I started at the beginning of Railjack), but this is not the answer.

 

Warframe partners: "Warframe is too easy, there's no reason to use the top notch gear we chase for. Why should I bother with xyz when I could just use random stuff and do the same"

Also Warframe partners: "Railjack is too hard, players shouldn't have to use top notch gear to efficiently clear content"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

By gutting difficulty on Railjack missions, DE is also removing the sense achievement and progression, moving closer to the casual game play that is common throughout the whole game.

Can't say I'm surprised. As it stands it seems that the vast majority of players play the game casually, and challenge just doesn't fit with that. And DE has to cater for the bulk of the players, not just those that are willing to put the time and investment to excel at the game. This is the same reason why real raids are never going to be a thing.

Watching some of the Warframe partners play testing PTS on stream has brought some hilarious moments.

Like a partner saying "Oh it feels much better now, our squad with a fully upgraded railjack finally can clear a Veil node in 10 minutes. We used to take 30 minutes".

Meanwhile, us Railjack "veterans" ( if there's such a thing ) complete hardest Veil node in less than 4 minutes, and less than 7 minutes solo.

To me .. and I assume some of us, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to experience Railjack as I did, challenging, actually making me work for it, use more than 2 brain cells to think about how to engage the missions and what are cool strategies to use, and coming out of it with the sense that I've accomplished something and earned my rewards in the process.

On a side note, I saw the PTS clan on stream and it had like 12 people playing out of a clan of about 500 "testers". Can't help but wonder how is this going to help anything with the "testing at scale" that the PTS was intended for.

 

[kulow]

love the changes, especialy the fix to broken aw-melee ❤️ (does titania still have this strange.. feet attraction ?)
what I'm missing in here is the increase for this one component, that does this electro-pulse thingy with 50m range. lets be honest.. for enemys to be hit in 50m range, they would have to hold on to your ship or something like that xD. we could see, that the 100m range, the aw-beneficial avionics had, were a joke. so a stat increase for this 50m pulse or enemys to fight it with would be nice 😃

by decreasing the spawn distance of enemys, will that mean we get to see some more aw- beneficial avionics in the future ? would love to build my railjack some more into a carrier, supporting fighters outside 😉 

*edit* and I hope, that if you guys plan on changing the intrinsics 10 skills, that you leave the "port to squad members"- skill untouched. best and most usefull skill in history of railjack!

btw.. are railjack- loadouts a thing worth discussing ?!

[(PSN)DocKuro]

A question about the retired avionics: you said that they will be removed from the inventory with a script, but will a cost be refunded, beyond the upgrade one? Should I sell all the will-be-retired ones before the script is run? 

 

Another thing, the limit of 1 hazard per type is ok with me, but maybe it could be scaled with the number of tenno in the squad? Like 1 per type per squad member, or 1 per type per tenno in the railjack. 

 

Thank you for your work 🙂

[Ikusias]

Honestly most of the changes go in a direction i really don't like.

- Railjack is getting oversimplified -

- Avionics were a mess, mainly because the UI is pretty but not lreadily readable and fundamental avionics had excessively low drop chances.

     Limiting avionic to a single variant removes much personalization, the only deciding factor with these changes will be the ship's reactor capacity.

     Considerd time, effort and annoyance suffered in farming those many mods that will be removed we deserve better than a fistful of dirac for our effort!

- Railjack base speed increase is a good thing... a pity that base speed x2 = slow as a glacier x2, also were the Heck is our ship inertia???

- Boost and Drift nerfs are counterproductive, you removed "stamina-like" mechanics from frames parcouring and now adopt them here?! You know better!

      What's there will be to do for the pilot except being a glorified taxi driver, considering also that pilots guns have lowered damage compared to side ones????

- Ship's main gun still feels like a joke, takes too long to aim and requires extra coordination between pilot and gunner.

- Command intrinsics are still "missing in action".

- Ship radar is crap, tactical needs an intrinsic for long range sensor sweeps: enemies, materials, points of interest etc.

- engineering could use a node for auto resource mining when near deposits, most space games resort to drones nstead of annoying players to death.

- When playing solo or when side turrets aren't manned, all guns should be slawed to the pilot's.

- Archwing intrinsics are "padding" out of place in the other trees and should be moved in their own progression.

- Railjack's got 6 degrees of freedom controls, why archwings don't??? we get 2 different flight control schemes in the same game mode for no reason.

      Also archwing pitch getting stuck at the zenit and nadir points of the craft horizon makes no sense when enemies have no limitations and makes dogfighting uselessly frustrating

- All projectile based guns suffer from stupidly low bullet speeds, that don't consider craft speed in calculations for their "actual" speed!

     If craft A is flying at speed X and shoots a gun with muzzle speed Y, the bullet will be traveling at speed Z=X+Y! This is basic phisics!

     Also wtf with damage falloff in space!?!?!?! velocitus got nerfed^2 by these oversights and it's a sniper railgun!

I don't pretend Descent levels of complexity but damn all these oversights clearly tell you guys don't have prior experience with space combat games...

- Enemies spawning closer to the ship by default: no way of bypassing them or disengaging thanks also to the nerf on boost speed and duration

    Also this doesn't solve enemy ships "getting lost" in some far corner of the map for reasons unknown!

[papry]

Il y a 4 heures, Vit0Corleone a dit :

Also Warframe partners: "Railjack is too hard, players shouldn't have to use top notch gear to efficiently clear content"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Please; Railjack isn't hard.

it's just Poorly balanced from the enemy health, to the progression system and ship ability.

This have a completely different feeling rom the rest of game.

So yeah I'm pretty much happy that they are rebalancing that dumpster fire.

[Vit0Corleone]

17 minutes ago, papry said:

Please; Railjack isn't hard.

It can be hard when you're starting, in the sense that you can't just go balls in.

You have to think how to engage the mission, how to approach the spawns and crew ships, how to prioritize your enemies and deal with hazards without running out of resources. Gaining experience doing those things also matters. 

I saw a streamer play testing the PTS. He went balls in with a bare bones default Railjack and zero avionics, barely got any damage and finished the mission in like 2 minutes. That's how much dumb down it's going to feel. Which, as I mentioned, is a good thing for the general casual player base that DE needs to appeal to.

Making enemies easier to deal with would be a good thing if there were more enemies to deal with and abilities for mass murdering them, but that's not going to happen. The "warframe" feeling isn't going to be there simply by decreasing TTK.

[(XBOX)TapelessDawn]

Please DE watch this I beg you. I agree with everything brozime has to say.

Also, dont kill voidhole *sad puppy noises* 😢 and make it so that the host is the only one who can use navigation pls

[Vit0Corleone]

Just now, (XB1)TapelessDawn said:

Also, dont kill voidhole *sad puppy noises* 😢

They didn't kill Void Hole.

However, they appear to have killed Munitions Vortex, which is (was) the best.

RIP Mv, it was fun while it lasted.

[(XBOX)TapelessDawn]

hace 3 minutos, Vit0Corleone dijo:

RIP Mv, it was fun while it lasted

Indeed 😢

[Hollow_Knight]

On 2020-04-24 at 10:18 PM, SpicyDinosaur said:

Most of these changes are... awful. I am going to lose mods if they are from the wrong house? Everything is made drastically easier? Can't we just have a challenge on some part of the game?

When the Dojos were first introduced, tiny little 2 person clans couldn't realistically build them alone and people got pissed that it was too difficult to research everything.  A month later, just when all the players who had commited time and effort to building them had pretty much reached completion, the crafting requirements got dragged way down.

It's hard to fault DE for this really, they need to make a game the majority of people want to play.  Based on the majority of people I've met playing Railjack, it's simply too complicated for most players.  People don't seem to understand what's going on, what's a priority or even just how to to do some stuff.

For my two cents though?  Railjack is tough, no arguments here, and requires you either put time and effort into crafting a good ship, or make friends with someone who has.  I can solo Veil with mine now, and thinking back to how hard it used to be that feels pretty good.  With a good crew we can do any mission in about 5 minutes.  However, I don't actually think Railjack needs to get easier, I think it needs to be worth it.  Like Archwing before it, it sort of sits alone in it's own little world where the only reason to do it is to get mods specific to it.  Scarlet Spear basically only used it as a Space Bus.

So if this is what we need to get more Railjack content?  Fine DE, but if you'd just included a goddamn tutorial I don't think we'd need this revision.

[Sahxta]

On 2020-04-25 at 12:08 AM, [DE]Rebecca said:

Munitions Vortex

Vortex is now attached to the front of your Railjack

Increased Vortex radius from 30 to 60

Increased radius from 150 to 200

 

This is really bad,it is the only skill that makes me want to play railjack,if this stays as it is in the PTS might as well not even touch railjack

[Ikusias]

50 minutes ago, Hollow_Knight said:

When the Dojos were first introduced, tiny little 2 person clans couldn't realistically build them alone and people got pissed that it was too difficult to research everything.  A month later, just when all the players who had commited time and effort to building them had pretty much reached completion, the crafting requirements got dragged way down.

It's hard to fault DE for this really, they need to make a game the majority of people want to play.  Based on the majority of people I've met playing Railjack, it's simply too complicated for most players.  People don't seem to understand what's going on, what's a priority or even just how to to do some stuff.

For my two cents though?  Railjack is tough, no arguments here, and requires you either put time and effort into crafting a good ship, or make friends with someone who has.  I can solo Veil with mine now, and thinking back to how hard it used to be that feels pretty good.  With a good crew we can do any mission in about 5 minutes.  However, I don't actually think Railjack needs to get easier, I think it needs to be worth it.  Like Archwing before it, it sort of sits alone in it's own little world where the only reason to do it is to get mods specific to it.  Scarlet Spear basically only used it as a Space Bus.

So if this is what we need to get more Railjack content?  Fine DE, but if you'd just included a goddamn tutorial I don't think we'd need this revision.

This really goes to the crux of the issues with railjack: no tutorial, no explanations, nothing

[Faerren]

I appreciate that they're recognizing that the content needs to be more accessible. A lot of the original implementation was disrespecting time spent (granted, the time gates to even touch a railjack seemed like a buffer to make the content last over the holidays, but...). This feels more like the direction of giving you the nice toy semi-outright and encouraging you to grind the accessories later on.

I'm still a bit concerned about the asterite. I have a mkIII reactor, shield, and engines, but have not made a single mkIII gun because of the asterite required and the choices I have to make. I could go farm primaries and parts for my warframe and try them out, but the time sink to get more asterite to "try something" just isn't there. It feels like the equivalent of every primary/secondary in the game requiring orokin cells. If they ALL needed it, I'd be way pickier about crafting anything... But they don't all need it so i can keep up with the grind for the ones that do, and craft others to see if i like the playstyle.

[Hollow_Knight]

1 hour ago, Ikusias said:

This really goes to the crux of the issues with railjack: no tutorial, no explanations, nothing

I submit that it isn't too hard to work out with a bit of patience and...

Oh... right, no I see where I went wrong there...

[(XBOX)Mr VibeCheck210]

Test servers should be made more often so content can be great. but thanks for the info 

[Paladinun]

Can someone explain to me the part where it says all the avionics are going to be removed? im currently building my rj so i dont understand that. is it worth it to farm good avionics now? or should i just wait for this?

[Vit0Corleone]

Just now, Paladinun said:

Can someone explain to me the part where it says all the avionics are going to be removed? im currently building my rj so i dont understand that. is it worth it to farm good avionics now? or should i just wait for this?

Keep in mind that the proposed changes aren't necessarily final, but the way they have it working on testing is that the avionics that have several versions (Houses) go away and only one stays. For example, if you have a Vidar Bulkhead, a Lavan Bulkhead, a Zekti bulkhead, 2 of them go away and you keep only one that will have the same stats as the best one.

All the avionics will be removed from your Railjack loadout, they will revert to rank 0 and all the Dirac you used to upgrade them will be returned to you.

As for currently farming rare avionics, assuming they will go ahead with the proposed changes, it's worth it to farm rare battle avionics such as Void Hole etc, but not the ones that have multiple houses ( like the example of the Bulkhead above ), since you will end up with the best of the lot if you have one of any house.

[Paladinun]

5 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Keep in mind that the proposed changes aren't necessarily final, but the way they have it working on testing is that the avionics that have several versions (Houses) go away and only one stays. For example, if you have a Vidar Bulkhead, a Lavan Bulkhead, a Zekti bulkhead, 2 of them go away and you keep only one that will have the same stats as the best one.

All the avionics will be removed from your Railjack loadout, they will revert to rank 0 and all the Dirac you used to upgrade them will be returned to you.

As for currently farming rare avionics, assuming they will go ahead with the proposed changes, it's worth it to farm rare battle avionics such as Void Hole etc, but not the ones that have multiple houses ( like the example of the Bulkhead above ), since you will end up with the best of the lot if you have one of any house.

i have already bought particle ram cause my friend said its rly rly good so will i lose my particle ram?

[Vit0Corleone]

1 minute ago, Paladinun said:

i have already bought particle ram cause my friend said its rly rly good so will i lose my particle ram?

Particle Ram has no variations, so no changes there.

Just to be clear, no one is supposed to lose any avionics. They just get merged into a single house.

Say.. you have 10x Lavan Bulkhead, 5 Vidar Bulkhead, 2 Zekti Bulkhead.

You will end up with 10+5+2=17 "Bulkhead" all with the same stats (maxed to match the old best House version ).

Again, this assuming they will move forward with the proposed changes.

[Paladinun]

1 minute ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Particle Ram has no variations, so no changes there.

Just to be clear, no one is supposed to lose any avionics. They just get merged into a single house.

Say.. you have 10x Lavan Bulkhead, 5 Vidar Bulkhead, 2 Zekti Bulkhead.

You will end up with 10+5+2=17 "Bulkhead" all with the same stats (maxed to match the old best House version ).

Again, this assuming they will move forward with the proposed changes.

oh ok thank you!

[(PSN)FatMacBrbn]

I've been away, I don't know if this has been implemented yet.

But a change I want is for Rail Jack to be optional. I get there was all this hard work put into it, but honestly, it is a game genre I do not enjoy. I do not play flight simulation games and sticking one into Warframe will not change that. I downloaded this to be a space ninja, not a space pilot. Please allow access to the story and sentient tile set without Rail Jack. Make it available like any other tile set in the game from the space chart. It's great that the PTS is being implemented for people that are interested, but that won't bring back players who share my views.

[ReaverKane]

Some of these changes are welcome, others seem a bit kneejerk reaction to some comment or other, and some important things are missing:

1. Like someone said before, the Avionics change isn't very welcome. I mean the different manufacturers added some degree of adaptability to inferior reactors.
2. I welcome the speed increase, but question the nerfs to boost. Especially when several Intrinsics interact with it.
3. I don't understand the scale thing, but its good to know that Archwings are less likely to die out there.

I think that some other changes would be welcome, like someone said, there's a lot of Archwing Intrinsics mixed in the Railjack progressions, that could easily be used in a new Archwing Intrinsic category instead of just being there preventing us from reaching the stuff we actually need/want.

Railjack still suffers from lack of missions. Like the mission type that was shown in the demo where we could explore orokin ruins for parts. Maybe the rewards could be a mix of extremely rarely umbra forma, more commonly unvaulted relics, and ship components or armaments.
Escorts, payload deliveries, blockade runs, all those could be viable mission types, and god knows we could use some variability in the game mode.
Also maybe add some modifiers are extra conditions, like if we destroy a satellite or a console inside bases within x seconds we can prevent further reinforcements on missions where main objective is to kill commanders or sabotage bases, thus removing the need to kill 80 more fighters and crewships.


Also, finally, a comment that isn't related to Railjack itself, but in the past, and with these changes, we've seen DE improve "drop rates" or reduce costs of things in relation to Railjack. Maybe its time the same could be applied to outliers like Hema and Sibear which have such high resource costs in rarer resources (especially Hema) that it makes the weapon less used, and lets face it, none of those are worth their costs, i doubt we will ever see either of those excessively expensive weapons hit catchmoon level usage rates (and i'm saying this although my clan HAS completed the research of Hema, mostly by my own input, and i've mastered both weapons a while ago).

 

[(XBOX)toughdragon17]

For the revised they sead it would be easyer to get salvige and special things for end game rewards but all iv seen is the same amount of salvige and nothing new for end mission rewards 

The only thing thats new it seems is the RNG has been increased by a good amount and railjack is still a masive grind island and they still havent removed relics so there can be more chanses for other things i mean you can get relics in multiple other ways railjack dosent need relics 

 

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

I was going to say "All the changes except the Avionic houses retirement and the ship hazards cap look very nice", but while writing this I changed my mind. I'll start with those though.

The multiple brands of avionics, aside from the ones with high upgradability (es. Zekti Bulkhead), served a purpose, mainly giving a decent bonus to a single stat while having a lower base cost, and I thought that was a great way to allow min-maxing by focusing expensive avionics on your go-to stats and also being able to still fill out the rest of the "integrated" slots with cheaper ones. Now people will complain that a max rank reactor doesn't allow them to fill the entirety of the avionics grid with the highly upgradable ones, which probably wasn't even intended to begin with. So, instead of giving away another free rise in power and satisfy them (which would further lower the already massively reduced difficulty), it would be wise to keep them as they are. The only issue, at least to me, was that the various icons indicating different houses weren't flashed out enough (the small graphical changes on the borders are quite hard to notice when skimming through equipment), and that lead to confusion whenever trying to recognize the brands. A simple color coding (idk, red for Zekti, blue for Lavan, green for Vidar, yellow for base or unaffiliated like tactical and battle if I'm not mistaken) would solve the problem without overly simplifying the system. 

Speaking of difficulty and oversimplification: unless the hazard cap means that when there's a fire alert, the WHOLE ship is on fire, visually and statistically, the new system isn't going to cut it. It would look absolutely pathetic if a single small fire in a remote corner of the railjack suddenly dealt 100 damage per tick to the whole structure, and took 20 seconds and 50 revolite to fix. The current system is probably fine, there are already smart ways to avoid being riddled with statuses, and in my opinion dealing with them is a core part of the empyrean cooperative experience, that creates a sense of danger and urgency which can't be found anywhere else in the game. If a system that maintains those qualities is in the works, such as the aforementioned ship-wide catastrophes, I'm all for it.

...And keeping on with the trend of difficulty and oversimplification: I've watched some more footage on the changes, as I haven't experienced the changes for myself, but any sense of difficulty seems to have been dismantled, and that's extremely saddening, considering that Empyrean seemed, being a whole new environment that at least in ship to ship combat isn't rooted in warframe's overblown extremes of player health and damage, the only place where challenge could flourish. In the veil, fully kitted railjacks can literally stand in flashing enemy fire without a concern whatsoever. I get you should feel powerful, but that's definitely overboard, considering that it is supposed to be the hardest location on the starchart, and that, probably, corpus space won't go much higher in level since there is no way to progress the railjack's stats further without introducing new upgrade levels/resources. 

Think about it, DE. Currently, Railjack is a controlled environment, with few variables which could be tuned to set a challenging bar for difficulty. Don't waste the chance to finally give veteran players an ecosystem in which skill, and not gear alone, has a say in one's success. "Fun" doesn't imply "easy". That also doesn't mean that challenge equals very big enemy stats. Balance lies down in the middle, alongside mechanics that require your attention, on which, unless dumbed down, Empyrean has a very solid foundation in terms of ship managing. I beg your pardon if you've read my whole, chaotic mess of thought, and I hope I've been helpful.