Warframe can´t have difficulty because it lost control over its basic systems

[keikogi]

Sound like I´m doomsayer but warframe definitively lost control over the basic numbers of the game, because of that the DEVs can´t design fight at all and everything breaks down.

 

 

Damage System

The players can achieve hilarious levels of damage , that the game cant naturally handle , even the HUD was not prepared for it, here it is ( the HUD was charged but causing a stack overflow was definitely not intended by the DEVs)

https://i.imgur.com/74wuarQ.mp4

Player Damage

This creates a lot of problems when designing enemies because enemies are designed around the time the player should ideally took to kill them. Since player damage is “infinity” we been getting wave after wave of invulnerable enemies or enemies with multiple health pools (4+ destructible weak spots and so on). The situation is so desperate for the DEVs that railjack grineer used to have “scaling damage protection” ( tl:dr the enemy thought that your shot did too much damage and the enemy got an appropriate amount of DR against that shot ).

Player durability 

Player durability is somewhere in between 500 hp to 1 million , of course the game cant decide how much damage a cheap shot should deal because if a grakata bullet does 500 damage it does not even tickle the 1 million hp guy and 1 shot the 500 hp guy. Shield gate does fix that but it’s kind of invalidate damage as whole, if your shield always blocks all the damage there is no diference between 500 damage and 1000000.

 

 

Resource economy (health , energy and ammo )

Trinity pretty much broke the health and energy economy of the game ever since the ev build was thing. The ammo economy at its very core, since a opticor shot does 1000 damage and cost 1 ammo and grakata shot does 23 damage and cost 1 ammo. So the game can´t even try to fight a war of attrition with the player because his resources are effectively unlimited (side not ammo restores break any hope of the resource economy ever function because the player can start the with 80 000 energy , 240 000 health and 88 000 rifle rounds worth of restores that are readily available at the start of the mission.

Edited May 9, 2020 by keikogi

[Azamagon]

Yeah, the core "numbers" of the game is indeed very messed up. The massive disparity betwen player/enemy and damage/durability is also the reason things like damage-reflection is never gonna work particularly well (unless using massively inflated numbers, but I digress).

My biggest question to all this is: Can this even be fixed?

Edited May 9, 2020 by Azamagon

[BlackCat500]

Well, unless you change the whole by now established identity of the game as a shooter for massive amounts of enemies and instead make it less enemies with more of a tactical focus with taking cover etc. for each enemy type again, I don't think it's so easily done. I think some difficulty is still possible though, despite all the numbers, but not for everyone.

[Amazerath]

The core of the problem is the spamming of warframe powers. We've all played games that allow you to do incredibly powerful things, but most of those games have very big restrictions on when, how or if you can do those things. Warframe was never really big on restrictions, but now it's got to the point where there are barely any restrictions at all. Anyone who played Scarlet Spear has seen this. The strongest factions in the game with the highest levels outside of endurance runs and they could barely touch us (let alone move, if Limbo was involved).

There needs to be a limiting factor to power usage that goes beyond just energy cost. You can't just let players spam damage and crowd control powers that nullify over 40 enemies per cast and have a really long duration. Same goes for buff and debuff powers, although those are less of a problem right now.

With Scarlet Spear and the New War, DE seems to be going down a path of giving all enemies (at least sentient ones) immunities and resitances to everything. And while that could indeed create some kind of challenge to the players, it will also feel incredibly boring once the novelty ends. We don't need bullet sponges, we need limitations. That way you can have a reasonable mix of weak and powerful enemies instead of having everything be either too weak or too powerful.

Unfortunately, I can see no way to do this that doesn't involve annoying things like power cooldowns or a big review of all the power related mods. Personally, I prefer the mod review route. Because it's an opportunity to lift the game as a whole and because it's easier to swallow nerfs when they come accompanied by buffs. For example, I think the corrupted mods definitely need to have bigger penalties or more restrictions. But I also think there are way too many bad augment mods that don't really offer us much in terms of new build options. If you mess around with the corrupted mods people will rightfully complain that you're ruining their builds. But if you improve the augment mods and make them more interesting and useful, the nerf on corrupted mods would have a smaller impact.

Either way, I think it's only a matter of time until DE is forced to deal with this. Even if they try to avoid it, the game will eventually move into a dead end and the only way to get out of there will be to deal with these issues. It's not a matter of if it can be fixed or not. It's a matter of how long is DE going to stall and how are they going to deal with this.

[keikogi]

37 minutes ago, Azamagon said:

Yeah, the core "numbers" of the game is indeed very messed up. The massive disparity betwen player/enemy and damage/durability is also the reason things like damage-reflection is never gonna work particularly well (unless using massively inflated numbers, but I digress).

My biggest question to all this is: Can this even be fixed?

Is it fixable , it is. Anyone with math degree and a good sense of game design could come up with better system. The problem is more would the game survive the outrage , people complaining that their weapon no longer deal 1kkkkkkk damage and one shots the mob but now it deal just 1 k damage and one shot the mob.

Damage 2.0 is the wrost mistake DE made because it created a lot pf extra mutipliers for the damage system and a lot of useless and redundant damage types. The wrost part is it did not Fix the original problem of lack of build diversity.

 

[keikogi]

1 hour ago, BlackCat500 said:

Well, unless you change the whole by now established identity of the game as a shooter for massive amounts of enemies and instead make it less enemies with more of a tactical focus with taking cover etc. for each enemy type again, I don't think it's so easily done. I think some difficulty is still possible though, despite all the numbers, but not for everyone.

Not really both doom and vanquish say Hi. Both games are quite hard and allow a great degree of mobility but they have control over the player damage output so the enemies have a chance to fight. Vanquish uses cover but the game does it's best to get you off it and rely on mobility and reaction time , Doom does not even have cover system to speak of off. 

 

Edited May 9, 2020 by keikogi

[keikogi]

41 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

The core of the problem is the spamming of warframe powers. We've all played games that allow you to do incredibly powerful things, but most of those games have very big restrictions on when, how or if you can do those things. Warframe was never really big on restrictions, but now it's got to the point where there are barely any restrictions at all. Anyone who played Scarlet Spear has seen this. The strongest factions in the game with the highest levels outside of endurance runs and they could barely touch us (let alone move, if Limbo was involved).

Quite aware of the brokenness of the warframe energy system allowing bullshiet to happen. I have an entire post about it , but since my point here was just to bring up the core imbalance of damage and resources I did not develop my point much here if you want to see my full opnion on energy 

 

46 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

There needs to be a limiting factor to power usage that goes beyond just energy cost. You can't just let players spam damage and crowd control powers that nullify over 40 enemies per cast and have a really long duration. Same goes for buff and debuff powers, although those are less of a problem right now.

Who the hell tought that a button the turns off the enemies of massive radius was a good idea with a 100% uptime. 

 

47 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

With Scarlet Spear and the New War, DE seems to be going down a path of giving all enemies (at least sentient ones) immunities and resitances to everything. And while that could indeed create some kind of challenge to the players, it will also feel incredibly boring once the novelty ends. We don't need bullet sponges, we need limitations. That way you can have a reasonable mix of weak and powerful enemies instead of having everything be either too weak or too powerful

DE has been quite desperate in creating difficult so the enemies just come with layers upon layers of bullS#&$ to fight our bullshiet. Damage caps , damage scaling damage protection , invunerability phases , armor reduction immunity , debuff imunty , inconsistent cc resistances and so on. 

50 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

Unfortunately, I can see no way to do this that doesn't involve annoying things like power cooldowns or a big review of all the power related mods. Personally, I prefer the mod review route. Because it's an opportunity to lift the game as a whole and because it's easier to swallow nerfs when they come accompanied by buffs. For example, I think the corrupted mods definitely need to have bigger penalties or more restrictions. But I also think there are way too many bad augment mods that don't really offer us much in terms of new build options. If you mess around with the corrupted mods people will rightfully complain that you're ruining their builds. But if you improve the augment mods and make them more interesting and useful, the nerf on corrupted mods would have a smaller impact.

Fleeting expertise is the worst culprit due to the exponecial nature of efficiency. But corrupted mods in general are remarbly powerfull and usually favor a build style based on effectively removing one of your skills for the sake of power , which kinda brings back some of the old mods as powers build style.

53 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

Either way, I think it's only a matter of time until DE is forced to deal with this. Even if they try to avoid it, the game will eventually move into a dead end and the only way to get out of there will be to deal with these issues. It's not a matter of if it can be fixed or not. It's a matter of how long is DE going to stall and how are they going to deal with this.

I have a faint hope of they addressing this because I can recall scot saying that they are looking at buff stacking either on the first at home stream or shy stream .

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

I guess for a hard mode foe you could take the Ai from that one Grineer enemy unit in Beach Days..I cannot remember his name but he wrecked everyone. Just stick that guy's brain in mass produced Wolves of Saturn all gifted with a brammas, nullifier bubbles and Sentient elemental immunity.

Edited May 9, 2020 by (PS4)FriendSharkey

[MacIntoc]

No one to think that the problem is not the warframes or weapons but the missions ?

 

Edited May 9, 2020 by MacIntoc

[keikogi]

4 minutes ago, (PS4)FriendSharkey said:

I guess for a hard mode foe you could take the Ai from that one Grineer enemy unit in Beach Days..I cannot remember his name but he wrecked everyone. Just stick that guy's brain in mass produced Wolves of Saturn all gifted with a brammas, nullifier bubbles and Sentient elemental immunity.

Creating a hard enemy is easy just give him a kill comand gun ( literally just kill the player instead of doing damage like the lick backbreaking ) and allow him to have perfect acuracy. Creating a engaging combat system is way harder it requires good enemy desing and solid foundation on damage , resources and mobility.

[keikogi]

2 minutes ago, MacIntoc said:

No one to think that the problem is not the warframes or weapons but the missions ?

 

It is a problem too but you can't desing a good mission if the basics mechanics of the game don't work well.

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

23 minutes ago, keikogi said:

Creating a hard enemy is easy just give him a kill comand gun ( literally just kill the player instead of doing damage like the lick backbreaking ) and allow him to have perfect acuracy. Creating a engaging combat system is way harder it requires good enemy desing and solid foundation on damage , resources and mobility.

I don't think they can, so take what you've seen what they can do and combine it...As for your kill command I would't be opposed to a enemy that has the death nullifier bubble running around..only instead of small unit we saw in that Raathum event, it should be something that would make a Balrog ask...Mom?

Edited May 9, 2020 by (PS4)FriendSharkey

[Steel_Rook]

A bit of misinformation being thrown around here. When it comes to player damage, "the numbers" are not the issue. Neither are buffs and multipliers on their own. It's the way in which they stack together that causes issues. Right now, you have base damage mods which are multiplicative with elemental damage mods, which are multiplicative with critical hits, which are multiplicative with headshots, which are multiplicative with that weird cascading "critical headshot" thing when you go over 100% critical chance. The sum of all our buffs together isn't that large. The multiple of most of our buffs together, however, is and that's the problem.

Player skills, as well, aren't so much an issue in and of themselves. There ARE some exceptions (mostly Limbo, Mesa, Saryn and a few others), but the majority of our abilities are underpowered, rather than overpowered. If we're lucky, our attack abilities scale with enemy health so they actually get to do anything. If we're slightly less lucky, maybe they have a control component. But if all your ability does is "deal 150 damage" then you may as well not even bother. Not in the higher levels. We can take a 30-damage automatic weapon and slap on *200 combined damage buff and end up with something which routinely hits for 6000 damage per shot, and that's on the low side. We can't do the same with our abilities since our only source of ability damage is Ability Strength, which generally doesn't go much above 100% bonus. A basic Intensify is 30%, which adds a whopping 30% damage to most offensive abilities.

You'll note that the majority of the Warframes that deal decent damage with abilities do it in one of two ways. Either they use Exalted Weapons which can be slotted like normal weapons and benefit from the rampant multiplicative buff stacking issue, or else they scale off of enemies in some way - damage stored and redirected by the ability, damage done to the ability, damage scaling off enemy health, etc. In other words, a few exceptional abilities cause the perceived issues of "ability spam," while the vast majority of them don't really do an appreciable amount once you get past level 60 or so. And yes, large-scale AoE control abilities do remain effective at high levels since status resistance doesn't scale with enemy level, but our Warframes don't actually have access to all that many of those. Limbo's Cataclysm is one, granted, but I can't really think of many more like it off the top of my head. Atlas' Petrify, maybe Nys' Chaos.

And mind you, I too am bothered by ability spam - not because it's "overpowered" or "broken," but simply because it's bad design. Ability controls are not convenient for repeated use and it's pretty clear that most abilities aren't intended to be spammed, either. A LOT of buff abilities won't even let you retrigger them before they expire - such as Rhino's Iron Skin. A lot of summon abilities have limits on entities summoned. A lot of buffs that can be spammed (Titania's Blessing, for instance) don't actually stack, but just refresh duration. The list goes on. Personally, I feel we'd benefit from scrapping Energy altogether as a concept and moving to either a full-cooldown system, or a Cooldown system with unique per-Warframe resources, ala Barook's Restraint or Nidus' Mutation or Inaros' Scarab Armour, etc. For the few abilities which clearly ARE intended to be spammed (Atlas' Landslide, Ember's Fireball, etc.), those can be turned into either Exalted weapons or left as a potential weapon choice ala Garuda's claws. Give every Warframe their own Exalted weapon, maybe give it some Archgun-style recharging ammo and that covers most of the exceptions.

Basically, Warframe's buff stacking for weapons is severely out of whack, which is what necessitates these absurdly powerful enemies. Make all damage buffs additive (yes, even Critical damage and headshots and such), slash enemy health, shields and armour across the board to match, push weapon damage in general closer to ability damage, then move abilities over to cooldowns, internal resources and exalted weapons. Essentially, compress player damage and enemy EHP until the difference between the lowest and highest damage we can do is sane and until abilities fall somewhere in the middle. And yes, I know that's not simple, but it IS doable. Players will complain about seeing "lower numbers," but I believe most will get over it as long as TTK remains roughly the same.

[MacIntoc]

4 minutes ago, keikogi said:

It is a problem too but you can't desing a good mission if the basics mechanics of the game don't work well.

Basics mechanics of the game work much better than the poor mission design let think :)

That's just the missions can't rely anymore on only killing enemies as fast as possible or defending an objective. Warframes are too good on this.

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

4 hours ago, keikogi said:

Sound like I´m doomsayer but warframe definitively lost control over the basic numbers of the game, because of that the DEVs can´t design fight at all and everything breaks down.

 

 

Damage System

The players can achieve hilarious levels of damage , that the game cant naturally handle , even the HUD was not prepared for it, here it is ( the HUD was charged but causing a stack overflow was definitely not intended by the DEVs)

https://i.imgur.com/74wuarQ.mp4

Player Damage

This creates a lot of problems when designing enemies because enemies are designed around the time the player should ideally took to kill them. Since player damage is “infinity” we been getting wave after wave of invulnerable enemies or enemies with multiple health pools (4+ destructible weak spots and so on). The situation is so desperate for the DEVs that railjack grineer used to have “scaling damage protection” ( tl:dr the enemy thought that your shot did too much damage and the enemy got an appropriate amount of DR against that shot ).

Player durability 

Player durability is somewhere in between 500 hp to 1 million , of course the game cant decide how much damage a cheap shot should deal because if a grakata bullet does 500 damage it does not even tickle the 1 million hp guy and 1 shot the 500 hp guy. Shield gate does fix that but it’s kind of invalidate damage as whole, if your shield always blocks all the damage there is no diference between 500 damage and 1000000.

 

 

Resource economy (health , energy and ammo )

Trinity pretty much broke the health and energy economy of the game ever since the ev build was thing. The ammo economy at its very core, since a opticor shot does 1000 damage and cost 1 ammo and grakata shot does 23 damage and cost 1 ammo. So the game can´t even try to fight a war of attrition with the player because his resources are effectively unlimited (side not ammo restores break any hope of the resource economy ever function because the player can start the with 80 000 energy , 240 000 health and 88 000 rifle rounds worth of restores that are readily available at the start of the mission.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes

 

The only way i can see this being fixed is if DE centers a group of weapons to perform around the same damage potential of our highest damage dealing weapons, and then solely balances new enemies around our new high teir labled weapons.

Balance is important, ive felt DE lost it long ago. 

Edited May 9, 2020 by (PS4)IIFrost_GhostII

[keikogi]

3 hours ago, (PS4)FriendSharkey said:

I don't think they can, so take what you've seen what they can do and combine it...As for your kill command I would't be opposed to a enemy that has the death nullifier bubble running around..only instead of small unit we saw in that Raathum event, it should be something that would make a Balrog ask...Mom?

Edited 1 hour ago by (PS4)FriendSharkey

They did worse as far as gameplay is concerned , liches originally insta killed you if you failed a guessing game and you could not get rid of them in any other maner, an enemy that kill you with its first shot at least could be dealt with be preemptive cc or nuking through walls.

As far as your proposal I don’t mind death touch enemies as long as they have a sound cue and are slower than the player

3 hours ago, MacIntoc said:

Basics mechanics of the game work much better than the poor mission design let think 🙂

That's just the missions can't rely anymore on only killing enemies as fast as possible or defending an objective. Warframes are too good on this.

As far as mission design is concerned, quite a lot of games are just an extermination mission from back to back. Doom, God of War 1 to 3, devil may cry, Vanquish , Dark Souls , Boderlands and so on. Even DE itself (scot speaking about the rail jack rework ) told us that if the extermination mission does not work the core gameplay loop has problems and there is not much point into adding layers of complexity over it because the core is compromised.

2 hours ago, (PS4)IIFrost_GhostII said:

Yes, yes, yes, and yes

 

The only way i can see this being fixed is if DE centers a group of weapons to perform around the same damage potential of our highest damage dealing weapons, and then solely balances new enemies around our new high teir labled weapons.

Balance is important, ive felt DE lost it long ago. 

Having a proper damage curve is the first think you need to balance the gameplay of game , the devs need to have an idea of the time a player takes to kill something and the time they can afford to take damage. Both curves are out of control in warframe and gameplay is breaking down because of it. I think shield gating (on the long run ) is one of the worst additions to the game because damage numbers no longer matter. I also think it is a sign that DE gave up on balancing enemy damage output so they just gave us a shield gate with a invulnerability window instead.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

A bit of misinformation being thrown around here. When it comes to player damage, "the numbers" are not the issue. Neither are buffs and multipliers on their own. It's the way in which they stack together that causes issues. Right now, you have base damage mods which are multiplicative with elemental damage mods, which are multiplicative with critical hits, which are multiplicative with headshots, which are multiplicative with that weird cascading "critical headshot" thing when you go over 100% critical chance. The sum of all our buffs together isn't that large. The multiple of most of our buffs together, however, is and that's the problem.

Im not here to explain why something is broken. I just saw a lot of post about the new hard mode and saw people discussing enemy level and mission design and thought to myself aren´t we forgetting something more basic here. So, I just decided to make s really short post highlighting some core issues of the game. I did not intent to discuss the multiple layers of multipliers of the game , I just highlighted that if the HUD of the game can´t display the damage the player dealt because it caused a stack overflow the Devs clearly lost control over player damage output long ago. Same applies combat resource economy health, energy and ammo. I´ve already discussed with you both energy and ammo with you I just decided to not go in depth about these topics here because I’m here just to point to an some underlying issues not go in depth about how to fix them.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Player skills, as well, aren't so much an issue in and of themselves. There ARE some exceptions (mostly Limbo, Mesa, Saryn and a few others), but the majority of our abilities are underpowered, rather than overpowered. If we're lucky, our attack abilities scale with enemy health so they actually get to do anything. If we're slightly less lucky, maybe they have a control component. But if all your ability does is "deal 150 damage" then you may as well not even bother. Not in the higher levels. We can take a 30-damage automatic weapon and slap on *200 combined damage buff and end up with something which routinely hits for 6000 damage per shot, and that's on the low side. We can't do the same with our abilities since our only source of ability damage is Ability Strength, which generally doesn't go much above 100% bonus. A basic Intensify is 30%, which adds a whopping 30% damage to most offensive abilities.

I’m quite aware most warframe skills are quite bad in fact most of them are sacrificed on the altar of corrupted mods.  The problem is since there are no cooldowns there is no reason to waste energy on them, so people don’t even notice how bad some skills are. I still remember quite shallow video about ember talking that her 1 was not worth the energy cost, the energy cost of lifting your finger to cast it.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Basically, Warframe's buff stacking for weapons is severely out of whack, which is what necessitates these absurdly powerful enemies. Make all damage buffs additive (yes, even Critical damage and headshots and such), slash enemy health, shields and armour across the board to match, push weapon damage in general closer to ability damage, then move abilities over to cooldowns, internal resources and exalted weapons. Essentially, compress player damage and enemy EHP until the difference between the lowest and highest damage we can do is sane and until abilities fall somewhere in the middle. And yes, I know that's not simple, but it IS doable. Players will complain about seeing "lower numbers," but I believe most will get over it as long as TTK remains roughly the same.

It´s kind of my point DE has to get control over its basic math behind the game because everything is falling apart due to a mess of couponing multipliers and weird enemy mechanics meant to deal with the couponing multipliers.

Edited May 9, 2020 by keikogi

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

1 minute ago, keikogi said:

I think shield gating (on the long run ) is one of the worst additions to the game because damage numbers no longer matter. I also think it is a sign that DE gave up on balancing enemy damage output so they just gave us a shield gate with a invulnerability window instead

Sorta, having a tanky warframe though still gives the player additional time to sit in the middle of gunfire from certain enemies without having to jump around and go crazy.

Perfect for drawing agro

[keikogi]

9 minutes ago, (PS4)IIFrost_GhostII said:

Sorta, having a tanky warframe though still gives the player additional time to sit in the middle of gunfire from certain enemies without having to jump around and go crazy.

Perfect for drawing agro

I´m not saying eveary player should have the same EHP and recovery but we should have some kind of balance. The tank shoud be more durable than a caster but he should not be 1000 times more durable. 

[Amazerath]

@keikogi

I don't think it was anyone's specific idea to give us unrestricted lockdown tools. It's something that happened progressively as the game matured and DE didn't really try to stop or adjust it. I'm sure they had their reasons but like I said before they can only avoid this for so long. The game or the community will eventually require them to act.

As far as enemies go, that is another big discussion. Because while I agree that the majority of their attempts have been bad, there's maybe one or two examples of enemies that have resistance mechanics I actually like. But even though I like these enemies and support their mechanics, they don't offer solutions to the spamming problem. They're just slightly better at handling damage coming from our weapons.

I mentioned the corrupted mods mostly as one possible starting point. But I think it's clear that the difficulty problem isn't something they can fix by acting on just one front. If they do that it's not going to be effective and it's also going to send the wrong message. Just as the problem came about in a progressive way, the solution also needs to be progressive.

Lastly, I wouldn't worry too much about what Scott or Steve said in any particular moment. There are people inside DE who absolutely want the game to be more balanced and probably also want these bigger changes to happen. But balancing a game must feel scary to developers since it isn't something that's guaranteed to please the majority. I hope the overall positive reactions to recent balance changes has shown them that this is probably not as scary as they think it is.

[Amazerath]

2 hours ago, MacIntoc said:

No one to think that the problem is not the warframes or weapons but the missions ?

The only way to create challenge through missions with things the way they currently are is to make missions with heavy restrictions. For example, a mission where all your mods are only leveled half way. Or a mission where you can only equip four mods. Or something like Elite Onslaught where your power will literally get blocked if you use it too much.

That is possible, yes. But it's basically the same as using duct tape to piece together something that's broken. It's a temporary fix, not a solution that will allow the game to grow and improve in the long run.

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

11 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

The only way to create challenge through missions with things the way they currently are is to make missions with heavy restrictions. For example, a mission where all your mods are only leveled half way. Or a mission where you can only equip four mods. Or something like Elite Onslaught where your power will literally get blocked if you use it too much.

That is possible, yes. But it's basically the same as using duct tape to piece together something that's broken. It's a temporary fix, not a solution that will allow the game to grow and improve in the long run.

But this just creates bullet sponge

Which is terrible. No 1 wants to repeatedly shoot a spot on 1 enemy for hours. 

 

Much rather have invincibility + weakpoints on enemy than this. Its more mind engaging, and the constant reward u get from it makes it less stressful

 

De could mix up access to those weakpoints which can make an enemy more tanky, but at the same time feel less repetitive.

Edited May 9, 2020 by (PS4)IIFrost_GhostII

[Amazerath]

@(PS4)IIFrost_GhostII

Not necessarily, but I wasn't presenting it as a solution to the difficulty problem. I was just pointing out that while it is possible to create challenge without touching warframes and weapons, it only works as a temporary fix. It's not ideal.

It would be interesting to explore these options later for specific game modes. Maybe even use them on Sorties, Nightmare Mode or Arbitrations. But that's another topic entirely.

[Zeranov]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Basically, Warframe's buff stacking for weapons is severely out of whack, which is what necessitates these absurdly powerful enemies. Make all damage buffs additive (yes, even Critical damage and headshots and such), slash enemy health, shields and armour across the board to match, push weapon damage in general closer to ability damage, then move abilities over to cooldowns, internal resources and exalted weapons. Essentially, compress player damage and enemy EHP until the difference between the lowest and highest damage we can do is sane and until abilities fall somewhere in the middle. And yes, I know that's not simple, but it IS doable. Players will complain about seeing "lower numbers," but I believe most will get over it as long as TTK remains roughly the same.

I play this game since it's release on Steam 7 years ago and by that time it was just like that. Hell, I even remember going out of ammo with my Boltor against old Vey Hek and his Hek or running away from a hoard of Infested because they were really dangerous.

The player was very restricted in those days and that made the game a whole lot more tactical. Good positioning was tricky, Headshots against Grineer were essential and standing still against Infested was a death sentence.

I guess the first moment of power creep was the introduction of Forma which gave us a practically endless amount of mod capacity. After that corrupted and nightmare mods granted certain Warframe abilites almost unlimited power or range or efficiency. Damage 2.0 introduced the fancy multipliers you mentioned, Parcour 2.0 gave us godlike mobility and Melee 2.0 created a system where melee weapons could easily deal insane amounts of damage. Over the years those systems gained more and more powerful mods and Warframe abilites to support them resulting in the situation we have today. Oh and Riven mods became a thing, too.

Still I like all those newer systems. They offer the player a lot more choice and the gameplay feels more fluid. DE gave the control of the game flow to the players. Almost like sandbox games do this. If this was by design or mistake I do not know, but this is indeed unique among all the games I played. Of cource there is not much choice when aiming for the most powerful loadout, but this is a problem common to all games with customization and Warframe is dealing with it quite nicely by creating multiple game modes and everyone has a different meta.

The things you mentioned done right will probably fix most of Warframe's power creep and game flow issues, but it wouldn't be the same game afterwards. I guess it would return to its more tactical roots and play like a high mobility Destiny with deeper customization.

Hmm... I guess DEs knows this too and after 7 years they are now in a situation were the broken wackyness of the game's mechanics is a defining trait which makes their product kinda unique among all looter shooters. There is a strange joy in fighting impossible odds which are created in some endgame missions on the one side and overtuning your own arsenal in ways unthinkable in other games on the other so you can overkill the strongest enemies to the Void and back times -2 147 483 646.

And it's not like DE is totally helpless regarding the borked situation. Despite designing against potentially omnipotent players they still keep coming up with interesting game modes and encounters like the Sentients, the Teralyst, the Exploiter or the Liches. After all the current design direction somehow kept me playing for years and the game itself growing.

So... long story short. Warframe has some mighty design flaws and I totally agree with your points, but I'm afraid the game after the normalizations wouldn't feel like Warframe anymore.

[keikogi]

2 hours ago, Zeranov said:

Hek and his Hek or running away from a hoard of Infested because they were really dangerous

Remenber actually having to run back and shoot the infested.

2 hours ago, Zeranov said:

Still I like all those newer systems. They offer the player a lot more choice and the gameplay feels more fluid. DE gave the control of the game flow to the players. Almost like sandbox games do this. If this was by design or mistake I do not know, but this is indeed unique among all the games I played. Of cource there is not much choice when aiming for the most powerful loadout, but this is a problem common to all games with customization and Warframe is dealing with it quite nicely by creating multiple game modes and everyone has a different meta.

Seems more by accident because the core of some system are quite restritive. Even if veterans have unlimited energy thr core desing of energy is get 1 energy orb to.cast your 1 and 4 to cast your 4. In that system you can count on your fingers the amount of skills you cast on a single game. Same applies for mobility if you remember the first teaser for mobility 2.0 , the overly complex cinematic Moviment system DE originally had in mind was pretty much " boed out od the stage " and DE went back to drawing board with zoren conferring in mind.

2 hours ago, Zeranov said:

Liches

Gonna stop you here. Liches had 1 really bad desing issue that show the cracks , DE wanted to create a enemy capable of challenging the player and the only way the achieve it was to give the enemy insta kill if the player failed a mandatory guessing game.

2 hours ago, Zeranov said:

So... long story short. Warframe has some mighty design flaws and I totally agree with your points, but I'm afraid the game after the normalizations wouldn't feel like Warframe anymore.

Sometimes I fear we have so many bandages stacked on top of each other that the bandages are part of the body by this point and removing than would be incredible paintfull. For example the core of the energy system is player kill enemy and enemy drops energy if rngesus wills it. But people do their best to not rely on energy orbs or force than to drop.

[GKP_light]

it is not a problem : have very high damage need some setting.

it is different than run with an ignis with all dying instantly.

we can kill ennemis with 10^10 hp, but it is harder than kill an ennemie with 100 hp.