Railjack Revisited (Part 1): Railjack Pacing Feedback Megathread

[DogsConkers]

• Spawning times of Enemies – the response time for spawning in a new bunch of ships when needed seems good however the trigger points for crew ships being fed into a mission seems a bit weird now. Not sure if it’s because all ships are being killed much faster now but the crew ships seem to appear in clumps. I’m ending up with all 6 floating around once all ships have been killed whereas before I think you needed to kill a railjack or 2 before more regular ships spawned in, I could be wrong. In any event it seems more of a 2-part exercise now where you kill off all the little ships real quick then go after the crew ships. Not so much fun IMO as it was more scary/chaotic having to deal with both crew ships and regular ships at once.
• Mission flow – Seems split/fragmented now rather than taking on a whole armada of different overlapping challenges (small ships/crew ships/boarders) for the reason above
• Traveling through Railjack missions – Too fast you can even do some viel missions in a few minutes, great for veterans farming but doesn’t synergise with the difficulty level of a new player working their way through the planets in warframes. I think when new players get to railjack they will have enough skill and equipment to find it easy
• Mission Navigation – fine
• Frequency of Breaches and Boarding Parties – It currently feels like what I expected Command to be. You can solo everything pretty easily now. Fix the odd breach remotely and deal with occasional boarders if a ramsled gets through which are easier to shoot down now. For a genuine team challenge we need something similar to the scarlet spear experience of having multiple teams of boarders rushing the ship after parking your railjack at the 5^th Murex. It was ‘all hands on deck’ to fight back the hoard, great fun. So yeah, more breaches and boarding parties please.

[SenorClipClop]

This is just a first impression, I gotta do more testing, but the changes to boost and speed are fairly good. Narrowing the speed gaps between Regular Speed, Boost Speed and Drift Speed means that going base speed feels a lot less meh. That said though, I find that piloting now feels like you're constantly out of boost when you need it. Perhaps if cost of just Dodge were lowered, or the boost recharge rate increased.

[TheLordOmega2]

The change to base speed is pretty enjoyable, but the boost really feels like it doesn't even exist. If you told me DE forgot to actually increase the speed while in boost and just used a few visual tricks to give off a small feeling of speed, i would believe you.

But i'm a gunner/boarder, my piloting skills aren't the best.

[Sohaya-]

Playing around, Railjack with literally every single speed avionic in existence and the new boost feels about the same as conic nozzle + ion burn and old boost.
The boost itself also runs out far too quickly and takes too long to recharge making most of movement being sluggish and just feels terrible overall

Proposal: either cut the time taken for the boost to recharge by at least half ( shorter strafes and more time moving around) and it would probably feel okay, or increase boost capacity/reduce boost drain by 75% (or at least give us avionics for that.)

And also increase boost multiplier to 1.5x. At the moment boost barely feels like a speed increase until you get to the dash at the end.

Other than that I don't really have much to add, other than RJ missions with objectives being an absolute slog due to aforementioned clunky movement. without those it's barely noticeable because of enemy spawn mechanics. Speaking of spawn mechanics, have the first wave of enemies spawn further away so the squad gets ready before engaging since it does mean teammates occasionally aren't loaded in yet.

Edited May 2, 2020 by Rose

[jarous]

15 hours ago, Refertu said:

cant agree more it is pointless in all possible ways. there is guys in my clan who started jack recently and they like the slow pace of Veil proxima.

and better gun for harder efforts. Man the last year was all about- let them concentrate on RJ. Now they don't want to play it.

And now this is it. 1st take your resources back. coz now it cheap as pizza. and pls don't bother to progress in that game coz we nerf all down so every newbie can play with ease. im missions that suppose to be for skilled players

unfair and unplayable

 

7 hours ago, Nehra96 said:

Update failed for 59th time!

 

13 minutes ago, Rose said:

Playing around, Railjack with literally every single speed avionic in existence and the new boost feels about the same as conic nozzle + ion burn and old boost.
The boost itself also runs out far too quickly and takes too long to recharge making most of movement being sluggish and just feels terrible overall

Proposal: either cut the time taken for the boost to recharge by at least half ( shorter strafes and more time moving around) and it would probably feel okay, or increase boost capacity/reduce boost drain by 75% (or at least give us avionics for that.)

And also increase boost multiplier to 1.5x. At the moment boost barely feels like a speed increase until you get to the dash at the end.

Other than that I don't really have much to add, other than RJ missions with objectives being an absolute slog due to aforementioned clunky movement. without those it's barely noticeable because of enemy spawn mechanics. Speaking of spawn mechanics, have the first wave of enemies spawn further away so the squad gets ready before engaging since it does mean teammates occasionally aren't loaded in yet.

 

[mizeriq]

The ratio of fighters to crewship is way too low, it feels like you're mostly fighting crewships, with fighters as a tiny distraction.

Fighters should be the main course here, they are the fun new part of the mode and they should either be much greater in number relative to crewships and/or you should be able to dispatch crewships faster (less crewships per mission, much faster meltdown, faster forward artillery animations, faster forward artillery charge speed and more forward artillery charges available by default), while fighters taking longer (more fighters per mission and/or higher resilience, for example: enough hp so cryophon takes 2 non-crit hits to kill them, instead of being complete pushover with any railjack/archwing weapon).

This is about the veil, since I don't play lower level missions, but I guess it's not much different there, too.

Edited May 2, 2020 by mizeriq
suggested changes

[Sunai_Moonswing]

Spawn rates are good if you're running a full crew, if you're starting out a basic ship with no avionics, basic sigma gear and no intensics. It would be nice to have enemies spawn outside of their spotting range, which I believe is 4km away. The reasoning for that is to allow for a breather to patch the ship up. Especially for the crew ships, as they will put a starter, or even still upgrading ship into catastrophic failure. 

 

My personal ship on the other hand, these missions in the Veil feel like I'm an excited dog tearing through Christmas presents. Crew ships just get shot in the engines and left for later, once fighters are all gone. Usually, all ships are dealt with within 10 minutes, which is pretty fitting. The only drop in pacing is dealing with crew ships at the end. Mind you, this is only because I'm doing these missions alone. A single person either using the archwing slingshot, or main artillery would shorten the process greatly. 

For context, I'm running around using Zekti Apoc, Particle Ram and as much speed as I can. 

 

[Talinthis]

some locations are not visible with tactial fast  travel on the railjack due to the material list being in the way depending on where you are in the railjack. the display moves around with you so if you are in the pilot seat, you cant see the forge, and if you are at the forge, you cant see the pilot seat fast travel points. it affects pilot seat the worst since the mouseover can prevent you from being able to warp there. behold!

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[ElKayJae]

I think aiming at the pilot seat needs to be relooked. When you are aiming downsights to locate the target, the ship moves at the same time, since the ships turns slower than the aim cursor, there is alot of turning around and counter turning required to lock onto the target.It would be better that when aiming downsights, ship movement is locked so that you can properly aim at the enemies.

Edited May 3, 2020 by ElKayJae

[CoalitionOfGears]

Having tested RJ after this update, I'd say great job on improving the flow of missions. Increasing the ship's speed was crucial. So was reducing the number of avionics; that was a real mess before. The new vacuum is neat, too.

Now the bad/neutral stuff.

1. Veil missions are far too easy/too short now. A single Gian Point run takes me about three and a half minutes in a two-man squad and loading the map takes between 30 to ~80 seconds. That means that up to a third of the time that I get to spend on an actual mission, I waste running and jumping about impatiently on the ship. Please double the number of fighters and crewships per mission and/or make them a threat again, because...

2. At no point during a mission am I in any danger. Granted, my ship's all pimped up, but still I don't feel any pressure to try harder, or to focus, or anything... It's just another rinse & repeat Warframe action now.

I realise that this is a larger problem in this game, one that isn't really limited to RJ alone, but please do something about it. It just sucks that whatever game-mode you wish to play, you'll never once have to play at more than 10% of your ability once you're all geared/modded up (or unless you spend two or three hours in a traditional endless mission).

More than that - the change in the most recent hotfix, where you get enormous amounts of experience for fixing your ship, would suggest that it is your intention to reward sucking at the game. 'So, you haven't evaded a single missile, got raided by Ramsleds 20 times and didn't even bother to upgrade stuff before taking on a mission in the most high-level region of the game-mode? Cool, here's your reward. Until next time, then.' It sucks to have to suck in order to have a ship/skillset that doesn't. Imho, you should reward playing to the best of your ability (not getting damaged, shooting down fighters fast enough, etc.). Plus, by moves like this you invite gaming the leveling system.

 

Some info for comparison - I only once got to fix something onboard my ship after this update. It happened when the ship was standing (floating?) still under fire and no-one was piloting it for over a minute.

 

3. Intrinsics and gear. I'm of two minds here... On the one hand, I think it's great that you've made RJ more accessible with the double Intrinsics gain and increased gear drop-rate. The Valence system works here better than it does with Liches, imo.

On the other, well... let me put it this way. I hadn't really played RJ before March (or was it February?), as I'd expected the grind would at some point be reduced after RJ's release in November. And, long story short, it was, and so I joined. I got my ship, and suffered through the still-awful-at-the-time grind of exp and items. And now you're telling me that I could've just waited 6 months instead of 4 and spent a literal fraction of that time getting all this stuff?

Meh. I'm all for accessibility, really, but I genuinely hate that retro-actively inflating people's time is now a trend. It's exactly the same as it was with Exodias and now rare Arcanes in Scarlet Spear. This past year or two I've been reluctantly approaching any new content and always giving it some time to settle in the game for good, so that I wouldn't feel that I'd wasted my time again in the end (and not got compensated for it at all afterwards), but it seems I got fooled again.

 

 

TL;DR

Still, gameplay-wise, I think the changes are for the better. Piloting feels smoother and more wholesome (and just more fun in general); it's just the enemies that are too easy and the missions that are too short compared to the time I spend warping in.

 

As far as technical requests go, please allow me to disable run-on-toggle for RJ. It's great for Warframes or Archwings, but very confusing when piloting a ship.

Also please do something about wreckage cap... I now get ~10-15 parts for 20 minutes of playing. Deciding what to scrap and what to keep just so you can continue playing is a surprisingly time-consuming chore I get to do every time I feel like pew-pewing in space again.

 

edit:

I realise that some of the things that I brought up perhaps fit better with the thread on RJ balance, but I see them as a hindrance to the pacing/flow of RJ as an over-all experience, not just "this thing should hit harder" or "that thing is too difficult to obtain".

Edited May 3, 2020 by CoalitionOfGears
clarification on argumentation

[Toonya]

About Mission flow and Traveling through Railjack missions...
A lot of missions have Point of Interest and this part is the most boring, cause players explore all bases very fast and they cannot find there something interesting... I think - just increase spawn chance of Rare Crates with 2000 Kuva (and may be something other) on these missions and players almost on every rank will be interested to explore base for these Crates. But please, remove strings with [nothing] from droptable, what seems still there cause you removed Umbra Forma and Rush Repair Drone.
And please don't set chance of spawn on 0.1-5% - it's not worth to explore every Point, 5-10% is better.

[Brynslustafir]

Railjack is still in desperate need of a comprehensive IN-GAME tutorial. I really shouldn't have to go on a Wikidve for every single thing.

I'm starting to understand why people complain about the new player experience.

Edited May 3, 2020 by Brynslustafir

[razorstrike]

Speed boosts needs to be increased. Waiting for it to recharge makes the gameplay too slow.

[captainHalide]

The Railjack's boost recharge speed now feels really, really long for how little benefit it provides. Please consider increasing the rate at which it refills, or offer some avionic or intrinsic to increase it in some way.  

Boosts also feel fairly weak, save for the skip-jump that pilots unlock at rank 5.  Maybe a 75% reduction was overzealous, and a 60% of 50% would be better?  

[FrostyNovaPrime]

The mission pacing was fine before, but now it's even better and more aligned with normal star chart missions which is really good! Boosting does feel like it got the short end of the stick as you cannot get the full benefit of drifting.

 

On the flip side, once the mission objective(s) are over there's a good 5-10 minutes of complete (and rather awkward) silence as you navigate the map to look for loot asteroids.

[TheOneWhoKnoxx]

The Fix to Middle gameplay option for the pilot guns on the railjack makes the movement of the ship very sluggish and jittery. When you try to whip your guns around the reticle isn't smooth at all and doesn't have anywhere near the snapiness of the non fixed guns.

Personally I play on a gamepad so I don't know how it feels to play without the "fix to middle" pilot guns on a mouse. I can only assume that the Fix to Middle option was added for controller because without it the reticle always snaps back to the middle unless you apply constant pressure. This makes it very hard to aim (you can get decent at it if you practice). The Fix to Middle option is the solution to this problem as it ensures no snap back to the middle but currently when I turn it on it feels like I'm piloting my railjack underwater.

I have no idea if this is the "correct" megathread to be posting this feedback but as slow as the aiming and ship movement becomes when I toggle on Fix to Middle it does legitimately mess with the pacing. 

If the point of the revisit is to make railjack feel better, faster, and more empowering Fix to Middle needs a pass in the "make the movement faster and more fluid" direction.

[Antris]

Hi,

So about RJ Speed, while its definitely slower, while playing Gian Point I felt the flow was pretty good in general, maneuver in normal speed, boost and drift to approach CS or take a bit of distance from fighters. In the Saturn asteroin mission, even with Cruising Speed everything felt slightly too far for RJ speeds, mission objectives and spawn.

There is something I noticed while looking at engines, Engines are not added to the base speed and only count after the Avionics, so it becomes a flat stat. My RJ with maxed Vidar Engines 60 m/s 0.2B, Conic Nozzle and Ion Burn has 368 m/s and 2.0 boost, switching to sigma default engines it has 308 m/s and 1.8 boost!

That component and avionic interaciton is something that also happens with Shields and Flux, I would like for those to be multiplied by the Avionics instead of being added after it. Maybe its a bug? I don't think it was like that before.

Also a Bug: RJ having a base speed of 270 on Default Sigma Engines, when adding Conic Nozzle +25,6% speed on maxed grid, only has 308 m/s instead of 339,12 m/s. Just noticed while was writing this and trying to figure out how much of a increase counting the engines would increase the speed.

Please look into the multipliers, engines, shields and flux. Mainly Engines and Shields.

The boost costs feel alright to me, but another request, a separate Sprint Toggle for RJ! It's clunky with sprint toggle on, while warframes kinda need it, going back and forth on the options is annoying, to the point I'm nearly used to handle the RJ with it ON, but still keeps eating boost and overshooting things sometimes.

As for Hazards, Fire still feel like campfires on maxed bulkhead RJ, while on a Shield based one (not that viable lol) its quite deadly. Didn't care much for Breaches or Electrics, maybe because of my Zetki shield.

Here is my suggestion, make the fire grow! You know how when one destroys a Crewship core, how there is fire everywhere inside? Like that. Make it do % health damage instead of flat, so it's consistent, maybe ignore armor as its inside if it doesn't already? And grow from the campfire to the Crewship fire levels gradually. Have be in the same room start doing stacking fire damage to everyone inside after a certain point, that keeps increasing. One main fire source. Or everywhere but with low revo cost and without the that filling bar on most of it, just on the main fire.Grow to the point that Cy forces a retreat countdown like in a critical breach.

Same for the other options, have breachs leak atmosphere, maybe grow larger. Cryo hazards could slowdown the ship and seal more doors maybe stop some things from working, Electrical ones as well, affect shields to the point of turning them off if they grow too large and have electric arcs running in the ship after some time and some consoles become electrified etc.

Gradually, ofc.

Overall, it was an improvement. Some drop rates are really too low; Needs more modes there are many suggestions on the forums; Projectile speeds need increases across the game not just on RJ and that turret velocity mod is a band-aid in the current state not unlike the entirety of the Augments system for warframes.

For geared RJ and warframes, the missions are a bit easier, but the major difference is for not as geared RJs, its alright. Because of a bug placed me on a default RJ instead of mine when the Host left, I ended doing an earth mission on it, it was doable despite being mid level earth prox.

Also, Flickering Ram for non-pilots, still wayy to many latency issues and lots of bugs. Some times while doing Gian, there were no enemies and Cy was quiet with the navigation being accessible even though we just arrived. Please keep looking on high latency environments, in regards to world wide play, 500 ms etc. 🙂

[DKPXR]

1. I'm still don't like the limitation of the booster. Why do you think people like parkour 2.0? For sure it is because the removal of the stamina bar.

2. I want one click to max the avionics.

3. I really hate the auto rush after drifting, I really really hate it

[Toonya]

Speed Boost consumed when we just stand and press the button [Sprint] (for Railjack), would be more fair to consume when we press [Sprint] + [W/A/S/D]. Just a small thing to avoid random and inefficient Speed Boost losses...

Edited May 4, 2020 by Toonya

[---Swaggi---]

Plz that need to be fixed asap 🙂 thx

[temz]

Regarding the launch that occurs as one comes out of boost. It would really help with maneuveraility if it launched you in the direction that you are currently moving based on the direction keys. Having it being locked forward can be really frustrating at times. Having a way to cancel it or make it so that directions like strafing sideways or moving backwords cancel it automatically could also be helpful. 

[Dr.OCD]

The whole point of this update is to make the RJ fun and I feel although the increase to the base speed is good, the nerf to the boost is too much.  Make the boost last at least 10 secs or if you decide to keep the high drain, then at least let it recover just as fast.  It was really fun piloting the RJ before the patch and the boost was pretty much perfect.  Now because of the high boost drain and slow recovery, it just doesn't feel as snappy or as fun even when using a maxed out Vidar Mk3 engine along with both speed and boost avionics - please adjust to make it feel good again:)

Thanks

[TheBlackAce21]

Agreed on the boost changes, ya'll went too far there. How it was before was better. I like the rest of the changes but tbh I really enjoyed RJ since it came out anyway and I think people *@##$ too much. My biggest problem with RJ has mostly been about content. We have a big mean ass ship now....and we are doing.....what with it? The missions give rewards of parts for the ship and more guns and while I don't have every avionic collected, I have maxed it out now. With the removal of umbral forma from the loot  table (this was a HUGE mistake imo, shoulda just taken the crates out of the event instead of taking the forma out of the crates) there now feels like very little point to even running the RJ missions at all =\

When this was revealed there looked to be a lot of integration with ground missions and instead we got a limited event that showed off that premise and while it was pretty fun and had its fair share of rewards. Idk...I feel like you guys have 6 pieces of a puzzle that you simply haven't put together yet. The picture might be beautiful if it was all put together but as it is now, it just feels half assed.

As a disclaimer, I don't say any of this to spit on your accomplishments or attack anyone, I just see a bunch of stuff that would be cool if it went together more. Open world game play, spaceships, hell I'd like to be in a place one day where going on a mission is flying to a place in our RJ, taking out a bunch of crewships and fighters to then deploy to the ground and run a defense or something. Maybe that's where we are headed? I hope so, because I would like more reason to play with RJ.

[Firetempest]

A giant map and none of it used for fighting. After the initial attack, it's all just clumped right there. Not like there is a point to race to a invincible objective that can attack you while still fending off fighters you need to kill anyway. Tell you can spare a body to board the objective. It's just easier to blow up the whole navy. Then just meandering around particle ramming the hidden bits of titanium on your way to the objectives.

Some of the astroids should be Squadron bases. To spread out 'the ship game'. Or make the maps half the size.

[Ikusias]

1 hour ago, Firetempest said:

A giant map and none of it used for fighting. After the initial attack, it's all just clumped right there. Not like there is a point to race to a invincible objective that can attack you while still fending off fighters you need to kill anyway. Tell you can spare a body to board the objective. It's just easier to blow up the whole navy. Then just meandering around particle ramming the hidden bits of titanium on your way to the objectives.

Some of the astroids should be Squadron bases. To spread out 'the ship game'. Or make the maps half the size.

This is currently the main insult in railjack's game loop:

dozens of fighters, some crewships and then nothing at all - completing all objectives despawns all remaining enemies - had a creship I was finishing off, 7 out of 6 i needed to conclude the mission, disappear under my frame denying me exp and drops

Railjack missions have maps proportionally equivalent to the planetary landscapes: Cetus & Fortuna - and are depressingly empty