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

[keikogi]

3 hours ago, GKP_light said:

Yes, anything hard can be overcome with those powerful warframe. 

But it is what i want, and it is why i want a hard mode : actually, we don't need anything to win easily any mission. We can run with an ignis and without a brain, kill everything, and finish the mission. In a hard mode, we would need to use the warframe, create strong team, ...

My point is you can´t have a hard mod because the core of the game. Even if the game relies on straigh up bullshiet like the air is contaminated all warframes take 50% maxhealth as damage/s the mission would be easy with a half decent comp. The only way the game can be hard is by stoping being the game , when every enemy is imune to skills and has mutiple damage caps , the game can start to try to be hard. If you don´t belive me just look at the recent boss encounter desing.

[keikogi]

2 hours ago, VoidArkhangel said:

Think about this:

The lore says that the warframes were the masterpiece of the orokin warmachines, we are designed to fight for the most advanced race that ever existed in maybe the entire galaxy, so even if we slept centuries if not milleniums, the other factions don't stand a chance against us and maybe it will take another millenium to be hand to hand with the other factions (excepting the sentients).

So as op said, devs have difficulties to create a new enemy cuz how a game where you play as The Legion of the Damned (Warhammer) can be difficult? nerfing the warframes goes against the canon, creating tanks of saturn 6 makes the game tedious so the only difficult we will ever have is either finding our creators (wich apparently only one survived) or puzzles. But that is if the enemy neither take a massive technological jump nor get the blessing of some comsical entity but, personally, I don't think that will happen.

I´m not saying that the game should be hard , I´m just stating that it can´t be hard. The hard mode wont change anything.

[DrivaMain]

The only way to overhaul the entirety of the game is to basically turn the game into something that we don’t recognize today. From a casual horde looter shooter into a tactical hardcore shooter like Destiny. Sure it will create Destiny like balance, but it will not be the same game we all know and love. 
 

Not to mention the players who demands compensation and threaten to quit due to the fact that their builds are no longer viable. There will always be winners and losers during balancing changes. DE should be extremely careful, because balancing the game where the player base are mostly casuals who don’t want challenge can get messy with the complaints of “It’s too hard, make it easier”.

What makes warframe unique than other games is you create your own way to play. 

I would say the only way to add somewhat of a challenge without turning the game into something else is to introduce more enemy types that has more than 1 way to takedown instead of just “Shoot it until it dies”. Nox is a good example of this, you can take them out with CO Hybrid Melee or you aim at the head to deal massive damage.

Regarding AoE meta, we need to rework the mission type that requires it to discourage using it while balancing it at the same time. Defense and ESO is the only mission type I know that demands it. My proposal :

ESO : 1. Efficiency drain rate reduced by half.

          2. Introduce a mini-boss that increases efficiency drain while present but killing it will grant a lot of efficiency percentage.

Defense : 1. Wave is now time based instead of amount of kill based. 1 Wave will last 50 seconds with 10 seconds downtime.

                2. When a wave starts there is a chance for 1 Demolisher to spawn, killing it will instantly end the wave.

For AoE. Only 1 simple change is needed. AoE effects no longer goes through walls. So you can’t just stay in 1 room camping spamming nuke abilities killing the enemies on the next room.

          

 

 

[Steel_Rook]

4 hours ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

This is nothing new.  People have been talking about how broken the damage system is in WF for years. One thing people fail to bring up in context with the huge damage numbers, is that the equally broken loot system is based on killing massive quantities of enemies - again and again.  The # of enemies spawned is a function of the expectation they will be slaughtered.  The life support on survivals, the drop rates of reactants, resources, etc - if you monkey with the math in a vacuum, I assure you it will suck even more.

Agreed, and I'd argue that's one of Warframe's greatest weaknesses. Too much of the game comes down to one of two things - either rush to the end so you can repeat a mission as often as possible or kill enemies as fast as possible. In short, Warframe has fallen into the two most prominent pitfalls of horde shooters. I'm of the opinion that less emphasis should be put on actually KILLING enemies who aren't in the player's way, and more emphasis put on interacting with more complex objectives. While I've not played all the horde shooters, Payday 2 is the only one to date which has actually managed to solve this issue, and the way they solved it was exactly what I described - "objectives." Most of the good heists in Payday 2 ALWAYS have you doing something, often multiple things at once. You need to find the Security room and hack the server, but you're also looking for additional loot and it would help if you could find some keycards, and you have this pile of hostages that you want to keep the cops off, etc. When you fight enemies in PD2, you're doing so because they're impeding you in some specific way. They keep breaking your drills, they keep stealing your bags, they keep freeing your hostages, they keep shooting you as you're cutting open lockboxes, etc.

Warframe's mission objectives are almost childishly reductive. At almost no point do you have anything more complex to do than a dirt-simple "get to a waypoint" or "kill a thing." There ARE a few mission types which deviate from that... But they also happen to almost never get played, ala Defection, Disruption, Infested Salvage, Spy, etc. Either you're getting to a place skipping everything on the way, or you're sitting in one spot killing everything in sight with no real sense of complexity even terrain interaction. I'd argue that's why people over-focus on the meta-game so much. When the game's objectives are THIS reductive and its reward system THIS focused on finishing missions quickly, it's no wonder nobody cares.

 

4 hours ago, (PS4)One_Angry_Goose said:

But nobody wants to give up any of that power because, yknow, we worked hard (or long) for it. To take that away would be to spit in our face. But, at the same time, the game can’t keep breaking itself and DE can’t keep slapping bandaids and a new polish of paint on it. 

At the risk of coming across as dismissive - I think people need to get over themselves on this point. I fully agree that the "power fantasy" aspect of Warframe is an important part of its overall appeal, but that doesn't mean we need damage numbers which break the UI and EHP/Sustain levels which let us AFK in the middle of high level enemies without noticing. It's entirely possible to retain the feeling of a power fantasy and the reality of carving a bloody path through legions of enemies too week to threaten us, delay us or get out of our way. That feeling isn't a matter of "numbers," but a matter of the balance thereof. I can have a weapon which deals 50 000 damage per shot and still feel weak in Warframe while a Plasma Sniper which deals 16 damage in XCOM 2 is a really powerful gun. It's entirely possible to rebalance damage stacking, compress damage variance and STILL retain comparable TTK to what we have now. Yes, that's going to hurt the extreme outliers on the top end, probably drastically buff the extreme outliers on the low end, but the vast majority of the population can transition to the new system with minimal practical disruption.

Yes, there are going to be hurt feelings, in the vein of "I've put 6000 hours in Warframe. I used to be special, and now I'm not." There are always going to be people who demand to be compensated when the Plebians get access to previously exclusive items or gameplay. I dare say that doesn't represent the average player, however, and I dare say that that's one of the least significant issues to do with a rebalance on the scale of what's being proposed. And besides - the min/maxers will still find ways to excel and ask for "more challenge." The point here is for the rest of the playerbase to have access to a decent median experience without HAVING to rigidly adhere to a specific meta. Because that's the case right now - a few Warframes have a few outlier builds which drastically limit variety and DE don't seem willing or able to fix it. Frost and Limbo reign supreme on defence s DE tried making Healer frames a viable alternative... Except they offered so little healing that nothing of substance changed.

If it meant wider build choice and fewer "mandatory mods" for everyone, then I would be all too happy to give up my literally unkillable Inaros.

[keikogi]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

My apologies. I didn't mean to attack you. I wasn't even trying to respond to you directly. There's a general trend of argument in Warframe that our "stats" are too high and we need to be nerfed, which often takes the form of suggesting reductions to health, armour, damage, etc.

I quite aware that are really bad problems in the way the numebers interact with each other , no the size off the number itself. For example armor sacling is uncessary because health scales and armor mutiplies health. Armor would be way better of as if enemeis had a diferent ammount of armor on diferent body parts so palying agaist amored enemeis would be about precission instead of raw damage out put or armor ingnoring damage types. I just wanted to hight light the consequences of the problem on the least ammount of words possible so i just used a gif of a consequence of the the math ( funny fact those are rookie numbers you could do way more damge comboing a chroma , rhino and ember ( at the time of that gif acelerant and 2 elemetnal damage augment ember was a thing ) . 

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

It isn't SOLELY responsible, mind you, but it's a primary contributor. Address that, and most other issues will either click into place or mandate adjustments of their own to match the new status quo. This isn't a panacea which will solve all issues overnight, but it is an important first step to even ALLOW balance a chance to happen.

I often talk about this when I comenting on fan creations , it is more important that something is balanceable than something being balanced. Something being balanceable has more to do with it having the proper levers that allow devs to control it. Something like any mindless aoe skill will never be baanceable because it is just to good to deal AOE damage, if there is no set up involved or trade back it will either be useless because its damage is low or op because it wipes out everything. Something like 

Chaos Shield

Gains armor and 75% damage reduction against melee strike. Buff increase based on the amount of enemies killed within 7 meters of Warframe s while the buff is active. If the player reaches 100 damage reduction with this skill, at the end of the duration the souls gathered will be released in form of wraiths dealing damage to nearby enemies. 

It does a lot of things in fact more than the mindless aoe but it is balanceable because the buff is not all powerfull and the nuke component is slow and unreliable. 

 

[keikogi]

50 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

The only way to overhaul the entirety of the game is to basically turn the game into something that we don’t recognize today. From a casual horde looter shooter into a tactical hardcore shooter like Destiny. Sure it will create Destiny like balance, but it will not be the same game we all know and love. 

Saying for the 4th time Vanquish and doom say hi, Both are quite fast games, vanquish is probably faster pace than warframe. 

51 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Not to mention the players who demands compensation and threaten to quit due to the fact that their builds are no longer viable. There will always be winners and losers during balancing changes. DE should be extremely careful, because balancing the game where the player base are mostly casuals who don’t want challenge can get messy with the complaints of “It’s too hard, make it easier”.

Not talking about being hard or easy , I´m talking about it not being able to be hard. DE hard mod won´t do anything to create either chalenge or difucult. There is a far bigger problem about the game not being balanceable. 

55 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

I would say the only way to add somewhat of a challenge without turning the game into something else is to introduce more enemy types that has more than 1 way to takedown instead of just “Shoot it until it dies”. Nox is a good example of this, you can take them out with CO Hybrid Melee or you aim at the head to deal massive damage.

Regarding AoE meta, we need to rework the mission type that requires it to discourage using it while balancing it at the same time. Defense and ESO is the only mission type I know that demands it. My proposal :

The only way to make warframe hard is to just make it not warframe. Create cooldwons for skills that dont have cooldowns , having enemies that literally ignore the basic buff and debuff math ( damage scaling protection condrix and the original implemantation of the railjhack grineer) , alot of weird damage caps , list of skills imunities , Bubles that say no and so on. But at this point what is the point of creating dificult content if it does not even follow the usual rules of the game. 

[Tyreaus]

I see the reason Warframe can't have difficulty is because the progression is inverted.

Typical RPGs have a similar increase in power for players, where they level up their character and boost stats and find better weapons and unlock better skills. The difference is that, in a typical RPG, that progression works up to content, and tends to take a good while (partly due to the numbers, partly due to the variety of systems that all feed into progression). Players grind to get strong enough to take on the next dungeon, basically. The difficulty largely comes from their impatience: there's technically nothing stopping them from grinding to endgame levels and making content easy, but nobody wants to do that.

In Warframe, the player has that for a little bit, but their power gain spirals out of control very quickly. By my recollection, there's a bit of a push when dealing with the inner system planets. Somewhere around Saturn, however, it takes off. The player progresses through content at an almost exponential rate because they've maxed out base damage and they've figured out Forma and Catalysts and....well that's pretty much the entire starchart once you got those under your belt, even when working with a Braton Prime.

That's my view, based around how DE seems to want to do difficulty with level scaling like an RPG, but I think it's partly subjective. What's lacking depends on what kind of difficulty you'd even want and the progression tied to it. If you're wanting more complicated enemies, then better AI is a big thing that's lacking. If you're just wanting stronger enemies, AI doesn't matter. Or if you're wanting threats to the mission objective, then maybe missions need reworks. Or maybe you want something DOOM-like where damage modification either matters less, has many more conditions tied to it, or doesn't exist. Every avenue of "how to make Warframe difficult" has an accompanying street of "why Warframe isn't difficult".

I think, while damage is pretty common among difficulty options, the underlying issue with all of them is that Warframe's playerbase, by and large, doesn't seem it would like the changes needed to get difficulty. The most common example is player damage. Nobody likes nerfs, after all. But what has been cited in the past is "annoying enemies in Orb Vallis" and "nullifiers" and "enemies are too tanky". Those aren't without merit, don't get me wrong, I agree with the sentiments at times. But it's hard to look at the game and think "hey, maybe we should make enemies harder to kill" when the playerbase seems to reply with "no" before you've even started touching code.

Edited May 10, 2020 by Tyreaus

[DrivaMain]

5 minutes ago, keikogi said:

Not talking about being hard or easy , I´m talking about it not being able to be hard. DE hard mod won´t do anything to create either chalenge or difucult. There is a far bigger problem about the game not being balanceable. 

DE can add challenge. But how they are supposed to do that when the player base instantly whines when challenge is added? I can list a few examples

1. Eidolons and Profit Taker having semi bullet hell attacks, Players whine “It’s too hard”.

2. Orb Vallis enemies on launch actually poses a threat. Players whines “it’s too hard”. DE nerfed them shortly afterwards.

 

 

[SpringRocker]

7 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

DE can add challenge. But how they are supposed to do that when the player base instantly whines when challenge is added? I can list a few examples

1. Eidolons and Profit Taker having semi bullet hell attacks, Players whine “It’s too hard”.

2. Orb Vallis enemies on launch actually poses a threat. Players whines “it’s too hard”. DE nerfed them shortly afterwards.

 

 

Let's not forget how the last "Hard Mode Challenge" were Arbitrations.

People complained so much on it that it was basically gutted. Not only made to be easier, but some enemy interactions were removed ("too hard"), revive mechanic added, and overall just made easier... Then they complained that there weren't enough rewards (originally weren't supposed to be any), so they made it just like every other game mode...

It's to the point where if someone can't play the game one-handed while watching Twitch without fear of losing then it's too hard (some still complain even at that point). I don't know why the concept of "Deadly Space Ninja" translates into "Farmville in Space" for people.

[DrivaMain]

4 minutes ago, SpringRocker said:

People complained so much on it that it was basically gutted. Not only made to be easier, but some enemy interactions were removed ("too hard"), revive mechanic added, and overall just made easier... Then they complained that there weren't enough rewards (originally weren't supposed to be any), so they made it just like every other game mode...

 

I am mostly neutral towards Arbitration changes. The revive mechanic help F Tier squishy frames like Nyx and Banshee where their CC abilities are nullified by the drones to push longer. But allowing them to revive indefinitely seems a bit too much, I would rather they cap revives to 4 per round and +2 from arcanes.

What I don’t like however...  is the drop table dilution. I want to farm Endo, but I keep getting Vitus bundles, Arcanes, and mods I am not interested in or have no market value if I have bad luck (looking at you Combat Discipline). 
 

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

18 hours ago, MacIntoc said:

Not so easy. Why would you want to build a new weapon that has no better stats than the ones you have?

Lmao look you cant have both (constant better weapons and no power creep) so like you gotta pick. Tier weapons, or making every weapon have the "Capability" to be put on equal playing ground. Those are literally the only 2 ways to stop power creep and have variety, unless you have reason to believe otherwise. 

And what youre suggesting keeps power creep in the game, which is boring imo. What makes people get one weapon that doesnt have much better stats over other you ask? People have preferences. The way a gun kills, the effects it gives off, the look of it, the way it shoots, etc determines peoples choice when it comes to weapons, when Absurd weapon damage deviation no longer exist.

This inturn opens up more time for DE to work on good stories, cosmetics, new enemies, or whatever else other than power creep, which i find far more entertaining than constant power creeping weapons.

 

Edited May 11, 2020 by (PS4)IIFrost_GhostII

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

On 2020-05-10 at 6:54 AM, (PS4)IndianChiefJeff said:

The question is, which weapons are we focusing on to make high-tier? The arsenal is huge, but it's not without its fair share of bad weapons. You don't see players bringing Stug to a sortie, and that in itself is a problem that has existed for quite some time. We have weapons that under-perform to such a high degree, when do we round these weapons off? Where should the limits be set? Should certain weapons be nerfed for the sake of balance? There are a lot of ways to go about balancing the arsenal, but it hasn't been done effectively.

It hasnt been done effectively, infact i dont think its been done at all (though i havent checked)

So its time they really started finding that average damage potential for weapons.

And yes, im aware that this takes work. But it doesnt take more work than railjack. Especially since the main focus would be the high tier weapons.

On 2020-05-10 at 6:54 AM, (PS4)IndianChiefJeff said:

Variety shouldn't be limited, that's why power creep has been an issue for so long. So much goes to waste because you have gear that radically outperforms everything else.

I think you took what i said out of context. As i dont see how this applies to what i said.

Of course variety shouldnt be limited, which is why i didnt say that it should.

I said variety for high tier weapons will (or "may". Depending on DEs capabilities) be limited temporarily. Until DE creates more variety in the high tier class.

 

And having a few weak weapons in the game for the heck of it adds variety. Would i use them? Probably not, but they could make for interesting challeneges. I use to do plat giveaways yearly, and one of my challenges involve mod and high damage potential weapon restriction. The challenge i made was only possible and fun with weaker weapons.

On 2020-05-10 at 6:54 AM, (PS4)IndianChiefJeff said:

New endgame content is bound to have a meta that trivializes it all, ESO has it, and Eidolon hunting has it. What a meta does is inherently restrict one's freedom to explore alternative solutions & methods of play in the content we encounter

Something that prove your statement about "meta restriction" to be false is the Rubico Prime and Lanka when eidolon hunting. One can say rubico is meta, but lanka is an Alternative solution. Also check out chroma verses ivara for 1shotting eidolon limbs.

To create more alternative solutions, make more high tier or high damage potential weapons. For instance my lanka outputs near 150k damage per second, give me an assualt rifle that does half or 1/4 of that damage, and low and behold you have variety (freedom of choice you speak of) because the deviation in the amount of damage dealt is no longer Absurd making it a decent alternative choice for taking down an eidolon. Especially if the eidolons limbs dont have an absurd amount of health.

 

As for what "new endgame content" does, while it is true that it will always have a greater risk of accidentally producing meta over the non endgame content, it still offers something that is loved by many gamers which is slight doses of moderate mind engagement and buckets of gratification which can get 100s of thousands of people addicted to a game (with some mild supporting evidence). 

Edited May 11, 2020 by (PS4)IIFrost_GhostII

[keikogi]

10 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

because the progression is inverted.

Typical RPGs have a similar increase in power for players, where they level up their character and boost stats and find better weapons and unlock better skills. The difference is that, in a typical RPG, that progression works up to content, and tends to take a good while (partly due to the numbers, partly due to the variety of systems that all feed into progression). Players grind to get strong enough to take on the next dungeon, basically. The difficulty largely comes from their impatience: there's technically nothing stopping them from grinding to endgame levels and making content easy, but nobody wants to do that.

In Warframe, the player has that for a little bit, but their power gain spirals out of control very quickly. By my recollection, there's a bit of a push when dealing with the inner system planets. Somewhere around Saturn, however, it takes off. The player progresses through content at an almost exponential rate because they've maxed out base damage and they've figured out Forma and Catalysts and....well that's pretty much the entire starchart once you got those under your belt, even when working with a Braton Prime.

Yep , it breaks quite fast because the scaling is not linear kt is exponential Due to countless compounding mutipliers.

10 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

think, while damage is pretty common among difficulty options, the underlying issue with all of them is that Warframe's playerbase, by and large, doesn't seem it would like the changes needed to get difficulty. The most common example is player damage. Nobody likes nerfs, after all. But what has been cited in

There is a quite larger problem about the time to kill. Player dps is out of whack , remenber the Wolf , some players were syaing they literally run out of ammo before bringing him down and others just said that they killed him with 2 slides attack. Since the people tjat complain about high TTK are the one with non ultra opmized set ups. The problem is the diference between an ultra opmized build TTK and and normal build TTK is 20 times. So you can't desing a fight that will take between 5 seconds and 1 minute depending on the player gear to finish and expect both parties to be happy. If warframe had a normal damage curve where the diference between an ultra opmized set up and the normal one is like 50% to 200% more damage DE would be able to desing enconters properly. 

 

[Scar.brother.help.me]

On 2020-05-09 at 7:48 PM, keikogi said:

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. 

 

Talking about Vanquish - I wish Warframe had these SLIDES

[Scar.brother.help.me]

Talking about the topic - I wish weapons, powers and mods were re-ballanced (melee 3.0 is not perfect but the best I've experienced so far and glad it happened, now almost every melee weapon is strong, has similar range and some diversity in builds, though crit is king), especially corrupted mods, but no nerfing, only boosting everything to the level of meta, then leave the current content as is and make the new one with enemies who can challenge more or less that new flat power level of Tenno.

[keikogi]

59 minutes ago, Scar.brother.help.me said:

Talking about Vanquish - I wish Warframe had these SLIDES

The Chad slide boost vs the virgins slide attack. You can also aim glide on the game , discovered this out of muscle memory of aim glide.

49 minutes ago, Scar.brother.help.me said:

Talking about the topic - I wish weapons, powers and mods were re-ballanced (melee 3.0 is not perfect but the best I've experienced so far and glad it happened, now almost every melee weapon is strong, has similar range and some diversity in builds, though crit is king), especially corrupted mods, but no nerfing, only boosting everything to the level of meta, then leave the current content as is and make the new one with enemies who can challenge more or less that new flat power level of Tenno.

The real problem is warframe ks not a balanceable game. There are issues on the core damage mechanics and scaling. For example guns can get a 100 times mutiplier on their dps out of mods while skills only can get a 3 times mutiplier on their damage. This makes guns mechanically better at dealing damage than skills. Damage skills in general are useless because they can't keep up with guns. To combat that skill are either getting external scaling with enemies killed or enemy level scaling damage , but that also creates thr problem of what is the point of scaling enemies if you damage scales with than. 

Another example is high ROF weapons are inherently better than lower roof weapons due to shield gating and status mechanics. ( I know damage procs exist but the hightbROF guns can use than at the same proficiency than low ROF guns ).Since status effect only scale out of number of procs and not the base damage behind the proc , it does not matter if a there was 1000 damage behind a corrosive proc or 25, because of that shooting 40 bullets dealing 25 damage is on mechanical level better than shooting 1 bullet dealing 1000. That's on top of statuz procing after damage calculations screwing even further low ROF weapons. Not to mention the natural disadvantage of low ROF weapons wasting more damage ( low ROF weapons waste more dps overkilling enemies ).

There Also fundamental problems in warframe desing that pretty much kill any chance of an worthy opponent unless that opponent pretty much ignores warframe skills. I like to bring up limbo because you can't win a fight against limbo if you are affected by his skills. There is no way to win against a limbo inside the rift using stasis. 

 

Edited May 11, 2020 by keikogi

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

1. Eidolons and Profit Taker having semi bullet hell attacks, Players whine “It’s too hard”.

A note on this.

Eidolons don't really have "bullet hell" attacks. They have "functionally unavoidable" attacks. That, in fact, is my primary criticism of those encounters. Yes, each individual attack they have is in theory avoidable, but the encounters are designed such that you're basically always taking damage from something. The Hydrolyst especially seems to draw near-constant shouts "What the hell is killing me?!?" from my friends on voice any time we attempt it. If the design of Eidolons actually allowed for a smart player to use positioning and avoid damage that would be one thing, but I simply don't see that as being realistic. You turtle in Operator Void Mode where damage doesn't touch you, or you bring immortal Warframes.

The Profit-Take is a different story, in that I RELALLY like its "expanding walls" attack. That right there is pretty much how I would like bosses to be designed. The same goes for most of its other attacks, as well. They're telegraphed reasonably well and have quite a bit of lead-up. The problem with the Profit-Taker fight isn't the Profit-Taker - it's everything else. Unlike with Eidolons, we're not fighting just the boss, but rather eleventy billion high-level critters on top of that. And because the Terra Corpus seem to have knockbacks on damn near every enemy, it devolves into the same nonsense chaos of Eidolons anyway. You're constantly taking attrition damage from all the "adds" so you either turtle in Void Mode or bring an immortal frame. Or you don't, and I have to keep reviving you, which has been my experience playing those.

I'm sure some people will complain about more complex boss encounters simply because there will always be people who complain about literally anything. However, if Eidolons and Profit-Taker fights were designed like actual mechanically-complex boss fights with the ability to dodge out of the way of most of their attacks, I dare say a lot fewer people would complain about them. Instead, DE went with the "put players in a blender" reductive approach. And as with any other reductive design, how players responded is by attempting to min/max their way to entirely subverting the whole system and not even engaging with its complexity.

[DrivaMain]

2 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

A note on this.

Eidolons don't really have "bullet hell" attacks. They have "functionally unavoidable" attacks. That, in fact, is my primary criticism of those encounters. Yes, each individual attack they have is in theory avoidable, but the encounters are designed such that you're basically always taking damage from something. The Hydrolyst especially seems to draw near-constant shouts "What the hell is killing me?!?" from my friends on voice any time we attempt it. If the design of Eidolons actually allowed for a smart player to use positioning and avoid damage that would be one thing, but I simply don't see that as being realistic. You turtle in Operator Void Mode where damage doesn't touch you, or you bring immortal Warframes.

The Profit-Take is a different story, in that I RELALLY like its "expanding walls" attack. That right there is pretty much how I would like bosses to be designed. The same goes for most of its other attacks, as well. They're telegraphed reasonably well and have quite a bit of lead-up. The problem with the Profit-Taker fight isn't the Profit-Taker - it's everything else. Unlike with Eidolons, we're not fighting just the boss, but rather eleventy billion high-level critters on top of that. And because the Terra Corpus seem to have knockbacks on damn near every enemy, it devolves into the same nonsense chaos of Eidolons anyway. You're constantly taking attrition damage from all the "adds" so you either turtle in Void Mode or bring an immortal frame. Or you don't, and I have to keep reviving you, which has been my experience playing those.

I'm sure some people will complain about more complex boss encounters simply because there will always be people who complain about literally anything. However, if Eidolons and Profit-Taker fights were designed like actual mechanically-complex boss fights with the ability to dodge out of the way of most of their attacks, I dare say a lot fewer people would complain about them. Instead, DE went with the "put players in a blender" reductive approach. And as with any other reductive design, how players responded is by attempting to min/max their way to entirely subverting the whole system and not even engaging with its complexity.

It seems that these world boss encounters extremely encourages using Operator Void Mode on design by the looks of it, because some of the attacks are homing so people actually uses Void Mode as a cover. A reminder we’re fighting the boss in an open landscape where there is no building, tree, rock formation, etc to take cover from. 
 

DE can rework Eidolons to be less of a gear check or must use min maxed crit builds or tank frame if they let Warframe abilities and status to work on them. Thankfully, DE is considering it. For Profit Taker, they can just outright remove the mobs or reduce the amount they spawn in the fight or replace them with raknoids because we’re fighting a robot spider mother. Letting the “children” to protect the mother seems to be fitting for the fight and most of their attacks are telegraphed, giving more time and room to dodge.

[Steel_Rook]

3 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

DE can rework Eidolons to be less of a gear check or must use min maxed crit builds or tank frame if they let Warframe abilities and status to work on them. Thankfully, DE is considering it. For Profit Taker, they can just outright remove the mobs or reduce the amount they spawn in the fight or replace them with raknoids because we’re fighting a robot spider mother. Letting the “children” to protect the mother seems to be fitting for the fight and most of their attacks are telegraphed, giving more time and room to dodge.

I'd love to see that, especially for the Profit-Taker. The actual boss design for that one is fine on its own, and would be cool to fight if not for the Adds. The only real issue would be recovering your Archgun ammo, which could just be done by either spawning Ammo Stations in Corpus bases like we do on the Plains, or just have the Profit-Taker drop some whenever its shields fail.

[Zectico]

The "big numbers" problem isn't unique to Warframe, and is actually shared by nearly all equipment-based grindathons.

The core problem is player freedom. While more options allows players to find what's fun for them, these options will inevitably lead to optimization for maximum grind. While this works fine for single player games, it becomes a major issue in multiplayer ones. Those who choose to optimize will often find themselves qued with others who simply want to have fun, leading to frustration on both sides.

Warframe's solution to this seems to have been a vast number of game modes, as if hoping that eventually everyone will have something they enjoy. The result however is that we have dozens of unfinished systems that have no replay value.

[DOOMPATRIOT]

Man, I can't believe someone got out of the way to do this here, I really like this.

Gotta agree with the feedback given, DE has oficially broken their game, I think DE didn't cared anymore about dmg when they introduced rivens and survivability was hilariously more easy to accomplish with the massive nerf to enemies and shield gating, but gotta admit that at least they tried to fix the balance in the game, but not nerfing the dmg overall someone can do kinda trows that idea out of the window...

Sadly we all know what will be DE's stance on this: they will simply ignore it and hope for the best...

[Nichivo]

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

 

False!

Every time anything remotely challenging is introduced to the game. Some content creators, and others, start crying too hard, until it gets nerfed into the dirt.

It's been this way for a while. It's why you get about 3-6 months of fun(after some of the bug fixes) before the content is made trivial. Then those same people who are afraid of effort in warframe, will get what they want from said game mode, and stop playing that game mode. Which is usually followed by a no challenge in warframe, or content drought video, because views more important than the game.

You can't honestly say you have never noticed this happening can you? I have to say I really don't think DE, or the game are the problem when it comes to difficult content.

By the way if this offends anyone. Sorry!  I refuse to candy coat a rat turd, and try to pass it off as Ferrero Rocher.

[Amazerath]

15 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

I see the reason Warframe can't have difficulty is because the progression is inverted.

[...]

I think, while damage is pretty common among difficulty options, the underlying issue with all of them is that Warframe's playerbase, by and large, doesn't seem it would like the changes needed to get difficulty. The most common example is player damage. Nobody likes nerfs, after all. But what has been cited in the past is "annoying enemies in Orb Vallis" and "nullifiers" and "enemies are too tanky". Those aren't without merit, don't get me wrong, I agree with the sentiments at times. But it's hard to look at the game and think "hey, maybe we should make enemies harder to kill" when the playerbase seems to reply with "no" before you've even started touching code.

I agree that the progression is inverted and I also agree that there is no single way to look at difficulty and balance. I think the struggle is to choose the path that offers the most to the players (and to the game) without taking too much time and resources. But that's why the discussions are important. And that's also why it is a process, not just a single magic update DE drops one day and says "there you go, we've done it".

That being said, when it comes to how the community responds to something, it depends a lot on how the idea is presented as well as credibility. And DE unfortunately is not very good at communicating and not very trustworthy when it comes to adding challenge or balancing things. So sometimes when DE shows up with an idea, you think about all the many ways in which it can go bad and how it can potentially take years for them to make it right again. Because it many cases that's how long we had to wait.

[keikogi]

26 minutes ago, Amazerath said:

That being said, when it comes to how the community responds to something, it depends a lot on how the idea is presented as well as credibility. And DE unfortunately is not very good at communicating and not very trustworthy when it comes to adding challenge or balancing things. So sometimes when DE shows up with an idea, you think about all the many ways in which it can go bad and how it can potentially take years for them to make it right again. Because it many cases that's how long we had to wait.

DE track record of either fix on the next hotfix or fix it maybe two or three years from now really hurts any prospects of the game ever being balanced. Also, the monkey paw nature of DE changes when they do hear the community pretty much cements an environment that does not allow for long term health changes. Combine that with the track record of looking like the only answer to riots or youtuberr , you pretty much got a power keg community.

Edited May 11, 2020 by keikogi

[Monolake]

Yeah its a lost case, this mess is unfixable and I dont envy the developers (possible player durability is 'infinity' too)

But the worst part is not even the total lack of numerical balance, its the lack of gameplay behind it because there are abilities that just 1-button delete gameplay entirely or let the game play itself without player interaction - those are the biggest flaws. Warframe largely degraded from an action game into an idle farming one, and its not fun no matter the rewards (as the recent event showcased)

Edited May 12, 2020 by Monolake