Nerfing Enemy EHP did not make "High Level Enemies" more fair.

[Gawizard]

Hello. (Apologies if this is in the wrong subtopic) The recent status mainline rework that reduced enemy Effective Health Points did not make the game more lenient. Here's my reason why. I'll quote some information from the Wiki to back up some claims. My 3 main points are Enemy EHP, Enemy Damage and Enemy Accuracy, (These are the 3 main factors that determines if you'll have an easy or hard time defeating said enemy).

Enemy Effective Health Points

Enemy EHP being nerfed is a double edged sword honestly. On one hand, you can essentially dispatch most enemies with a weapon modded with a DoT and Viral and this scales up to the current Level Cap but this comes with the enemy gaining extremely high damage output per level the higher they scale (for example a hyekka master's fire bomb can reach over 50000 damage at lvl 400).

Enemy Health Scaling

Enemy Armour Scaling

 

Enemy Damage Scaling

Enemy damage scaling scales just like the old scaling for enemy health and armour. Total enemy DPS then scales on an exponent with factors such as their level, base damage and number of enemies. Having 1 level 100 lancer shoot at you probably only does 27 damage, but having several (5-10) do this with heavy gunners and bombards attacking you all at once means Total enemy dps tends to be really high, usually we ignore this since we'd just kill them and shrug off any dmg we do receive but the higher enemy level goes, the higher their damage scales.

Enemy Damage Scaling

Enemy Accuracy

Enemy Accuracy and in general, accuracy, is one of the more uncharted areas in Warframe. From my observation and experiences, enemy accuracy tend to scale with their level though they also generally follow a general Hit Probability based on distances between them and the player. From this, I've also seen that if I were to use mirage clones and play with fairly evasive maneuvers, Enemies at higher levels (above 120) would more consistently land hook shots or just regular shots on me. Blast also appears to reduce enemy accuracy but from testing this, the results are quite vague, a ballista from 20 meters away may miss me with 1 blast proc or land several shots in a row with 10 blast procs.

Conclusion

In general, Warframe's enemy design is not perfect and this is widely accepted. The more recent changes was a poor attempt at fixing a problem in warframe but it does carve better ideas for enemy balancing. Instead of making enemies literal glass cannons (glassmaker reference), start tinkering with their damage and accuracy stats, maybe this will make way more squishier frames more viable.

[taiiat]

that was a lot of words but... what was your point?
if your point was "Enemies need to do less Damage" - what exactly would be the point of Enemy Levels, then? their Level Number would become basically irrelevant.

[Gawizard]

1 minute ago, taiiat said:

that was a lot of words but... what was your point?
if your point was "Enemies need to do less Damage" - what exactly would be the point of Enemy Levels, then? their Level Number would become basically irrelevant.

Whats the difference between a lvl 300 enemy and a lvl 1000 enemy?
both can oneshot you if you're overwhelmed. the point of this post was not to "make the game easier", its to address that nerfing enemy EHP did not make high level enemies fair to play against. Sure its an improvement but we've moved from enemies vaporizing your hp while eating bullets from you to enemies vaporizing your shields then hp but you can vaporize theirs. In what way is that a fair game when enemies have a damage, accuracy and numbers advantage?

[DOOMPATRIOT]

hace 19 minutos, Gawizard dijo:

Whats the difference between a lvl 300 enemy and a lvl 1000 enemy?

Currently there isn't a big difference, both of them can be one shoted and both can one shot you if you are not careful, but you wanting the enemies to be nerfed even more is really funny, they already die real quick, what is the point of  an enemy if it doesn't represent some kind of threat, and if dmg or health isn't the answer, then what is It?

[Xaero]

I find the whole level scaling system stupid and boring. Difficulty should be increased with smarter ways than just making the same enemies one-shotting bullet-sponges, which can even be bypassed with proper tools. At the highest difficulty we should be overwhelmed with tricky-to-kill enemies, debuffing and nullifying units, tough mini-bosses, all of them at once.

[Marine027]

vor 4 Minuten schrieb DOOMPATRIOT:

Currently there isn't a big difference, both of them can be one shoted and both can one shot you if you are not careful, but you wanting the enemies to be nerfed even more is really funny, they already die real quick, what is the point of  an enemy if it doesn't represent some kind of threat, and if dmg or health isn't the answer, then what is It?

Sadly those that could be a treath besides damage like Scrumbas die to quickly before able to use any abilitys themself. Grineer Commanders as annyoing they can be are well designed as exampel i say, they not one shot you but stun you efficent for his allys, sadly those stop to exist in high level so.

Why we not have invsible enemys as example  that hold you in place, having you to watch out for footsteps or noises, maybe blink up shortly like maniacs but a sneaky variant getting close if you stand still to long, making you use a quick time event or so or button mash to free yourself, like the Kuva Lich grip, something this lacks a method to free yourself as gameplay mechanic and not just smash yout squishy frame that forces you to use tankier frames on them.

[Gawizard]

There's nothing threatening with warframe's current enemies. The general consensus for survival through any gamemode is go invis, apply heavy crowd control or face tank the damage. Frames that cannot do those are basically considered bad and its not their fault. sure they need re-tweaking but most DE just tend to make a warframe that can do 1 out of 3 things i've listed above. As for adjusting enemy accuracy and damage output, I suggested some change, because the current system is still heavily weight against the player.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

Make Revenant even more redundant? Sure why not.

[Gawizard]

4 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

Make Revenant even more redundant? Sure why not.

I guess this also insinuates that some frames need to be rebalanced? 🤷‍♂️

[taiiat]

1 hour ago, Gawizard said:

Whats the difference between a lvl 300 enemy and a lvl 1000 enemy?

the differences in Enemy Levels is (well, mostly was) EHP Scaling, and Damage Scaling. 

making Enemies do neither, would mean Enemies don't scale in anything. so what does their Level Number do, then.

[Gawizard]

So which would be a more reactive element within 2 differently leveled enemies, 2 different enemies that can 1 shot you but one is just lvl 1000 while the other is lvl 300 with relatively similar EHP or 2 enemies which the lvl 300 enemy and the level 1000 enemy does the same damage but have a greater EHP difference? All having enemies with high scaling dmg but low scaling hp does is categorize frames into frames that can survive past lvl 200 and frames that struggle at lvl 200. 

Imagine this scenario, theres a gun that one shots every enemy, what sense would it make to create a gun that does more damage than that first gun?
thats the current state of warframe enemies and their level scaling.

Edited May 21, 2020 by Gawizard

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Gawizard said:

Whats the difference between a lvl 300 enemy and a lvl 1000 enemy?

The enemy health, armour, shield and accuracy scaling changes weren't really addressed at enemies of those levels. The game itself isn't really balanced around enemies much over level 100, so you're in somewhat uncharted territory there. The need to look at enemy scaling only really gained enough urgency to act on it with the release of Kuva Liches and Railjack, which routinely feature enemies up to level 110. Previous to this, it seemed like enemy stats were considered "balanced" up to about level 60-ish, and "unbalanced but who cares" over that level. Once standard content pushed people into the 80-100 range regularly is when that level range too had to the balanced. I've seen no reason to suggest that an attempt has even been made to balance enemies level 300, let alone 1000.

[Gawizard]

18 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

The enemy health, armour, shield and accuracy scaling changes weren't really addressed at enemies of those levels. The game itself isn't really balanced around enemies much over level 100. 

This is Wrong, look at the charts my friend, the difference at the 80-120 level range compared to the old scaling is about 20-30% less ehp (being VERY generous)

i really dont know how you derived that from the charts if you did look at them.

Edited May 21, 2020 by Gawizard

[Steel_Rook]

8 minutes ago, Gawizard said:

This is Wrong, look at the charts my friend, the difference at the 80-120 level range compared to the old scaling is about 20-30% less ehp.

Yes, there is a difference. Enemy EHP and damage were changed at high levels. That doesn't mean the game is balanced around those levels. These are two separate things. Enemy EHP and damage is a function. The new function DE came up with was designed to fix enemies level 75-100, while also reducing scaling past 75 in general, this is true. However, it didn't make "high levels" more fair, as you point out. Because it wasn't intended to. There's a world of difference between "a change" and "balance."

To put it another way: Yes, the EHP of level 1000 enemies changed. That doesn't mean that fighting level 1000 enemies improved, or that the change in question was intended to even address that.

Edited May 21, 2020 by Steel_Rook

[Gawizard]

There is a world of difference between a change and a balance. although it may not seem like it, DE does know that players hitting lvl 150-300 is quite common for anyone that likes playing warframe's endless mode. enemies from the old scaling and the new scaling have very similar EHP values at lvl 80 - 120 (general level enemies where the general community play at) as compared to lvl 150-300. at level 150-300, enemies of the old scaling have the EHP of enemies at lvl 3000-9999 with this new scaling. It would be very stupid on behalf of DE to change code that affects a large spectrum of enemies to only address enemies at a specific range.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

2 hours ago, Gawizard said:

I guess this also insinuates that some frames need to be rebalanced? 🤷‍♂️

If by that you mean rework Revenant completely then Im all for it.

[Steel_Rook]

I'm obviously not arguing that the change was accidental. The ultimate goal was, after all, to decrease the speed of enemy stat scaling, where before it cascaded. Rather, I assert that the change was aimed at the level 75-100 range, with its effect on post-100 balance being considered largely less relevant. I understand that there is a subset of the community who prefer to fight extremely high-level enemies, but my impression from DE's statements and behaviour is that the game isn't really balanced around providing a fair or balanced experience for those people. A great number of game systems completely fail when high-level enemies are involved. You bright up one-shots, which is true. I tend to cite damage-dealing Warframe abilities, which rapidly lose their effectiveness as enemy level goes up.

The way most games treat extreme difficulty settings is to largely ignore them, and let the players who enjoy those challenges figure it out. That usually means exploiting poor balance and restricting one's self to a small subset of particularly powerful items, etc. Ideally, all aspects of the game would offer robust systems and extensive build diversity if they're balanced well. I don't think post-100 gameplay is balanced well, and I don't think there really is much of a push to balance it any better. So your original argument is correct. The scaling changes didn't make "high level enemies" any more fair. I don't think it was intended to.

 

3 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

If by that you mean rework Revenant completely then Im all for it.

I know this is off-topic, but what IS it with people's obsession with reworking Revenant? What's wrong with him? I thought he was one of the better-designed Warframes, myself.

Edited May 21, 2020 by Steel_Rook

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

10 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

 

I know this is off-topic, but what IS it with people's obsession with reworking Revenant? What's wrong with him? I thought he was one of the better-designed Warframes, myself.

He has a vampire theme shoved into him despite it not making any sense in his lore. His ability design is atrocious. The anchor to all his synergies can be killed, his other abilities stumble over each other, he was clearly never designed with those synergies in mind. Basic run down.

Passive: AHAHAHA

Enthrall: will literally be killed before you ever get to use them.

Mesmer: 100% is redundant at the levels we normally face, it prevents certain mods and arcanes from being effective, hinders Danse Macabres scaling mechanic. And the charges mechanic sucks.

Reave: needs enthrall to do anything of significance. On its own it’s just a very limited self heal which is completely redundant if your tank ability prevents you from taking damage. Makes about as much sense as giving Rhino a self heal.

Danse: good ability. The fact that it was added so late into his development, actually fits the Eidolon theme, and completely overshadows his other abilities makes you question why the hell they even bothered making him a vampire as he’s clearly worse off for it.

Edited May 21, 2020 by (XB1)GearsMatrix301

[Aldain]

4 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I know this is off-topic, but what IS it with people's obsession with reworking Revenant? What's wrong with him? I thought he was one of the better-designed Warframes, myself.

Gears is most of the rework Revanent crowd, but I do agree with Revenant having some practicality issues.

One major issue is that Enthralling mostly suffers from things dying faster than you can Enthrall them, due to the current damage dynamics favoring obliterating the entire tileset with extreme prejudice, nothing really lasts long enough to justify it.

His 2 is often praised, but honestly in most content, especially post shield-gate it doesn't really do much unless you're doing obtusely high level content, also it suffers from the weakness of nullifiers like most other ability based defense options.

His 3 is fairly slow and relies on Enthrall to be effective, while percentage based damage is a plus, the setup time to use it is outperformed by most other frames that can chunk things, and percentage based damage only really helps at comically high levels.

His 4 is boring, but solid, the adaptive damage nature of it helps (hell it is amazing in the Void) but otherwise is just another radial DPS ability.

He suffers from a kit that doesn't exactly click with modern Warframe, though that is more the fault of modern Warframe being more focused on ignoring gameplay as much as possible.

[Steel_Rook]

3 minutes ago, Aldain said:

He suffers from a kit that doesn't exactly click with modern Warframe, though that is more the fault of modern Warframe being more focused on ignoring gameplay as much as possible.

I guess that might be why I'm not noticing the issues. I tend to play either solo or with more "moderate" team-mates, so we rarely have issues of wiping enemies out too fast, especially in Lich missions (typically Rank 5 Lich). I don't know. To me it just seemed like Revenant was pretty hard to kill, had some decent utility and an Ult which actually does things. I guess that might suffer in a "DPS frames stealing my kills" situation, but most Warframes suffer from that. I'm a "tank main" sort of players, so I tend to stick to the likes of Inaros, Atlas, Valkyr, Hyldrin, etc. Room-clearing abilities seem to affect them about as much as they affect Revenant.

[Aldain]

2 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Room-clearing abilities seem to affect them about as much as they affect Revenant.

They effect Rev a bit more because of how central Thralls are to his toolkit.

Reave recharges Mesmer by hitting thralls, but thralls die to a stiff breeze is most situations, he has similar issues to Nyx, the utility he brings can be negated by allies actions (Chaos doesn't do much if every enemy dies too quickly for example).

While playing solo/with friends can alleviate that problem, it doesn't quite clear up the core issue of him being a frame who suffers negative synergy with any kind of powerful AoE.

But in the interest of not derailing the thread I'll end my discussion here, sorry for the tangent folks.

[Orakan]

Edited May 21, 2020 by Orakan

[OmegaVoid]

2 hours ago, Gawizard said:

There's nothing threatening with warframe's current enemies. The general consensus for survival through any gamemode is go invis, apply heavy crowd control or face tank the damage

Of those three options, only "face tank the damage" implies the enemies do not represent a threat... and it's not a large proportion of Warframes can face tank at even level 100 (unless you give up useful Mods and Arcanes for the sake of tanking alone).

3 hours ago, Gawizard said:

Frames that cannot do those are basically considered bad and its not their fault.

True. It's the fault of commentators who vigorously propagate opinions of how good a 'frame is based on its performance in Mot four hours after most players would have got bored of the mission.

1 hour ago, Gawizard said:

lvl 80 - 120 (general level enemies where the general community play at)

Hence those are the levels the devs concentrate on. Level 100s are definitely easier to kill now -- though I probably only notice 'cos I've been shooting them with things like Paracyst and Argonak. 😆

1 hour ago, Gawizard said:

DE does know that players hitting lvl 150-300 is quite common for anyone that likes playing warframe's endless mode.

And that's a small proportion of the community. Scarlet Spear went up to something close to level 200, and that's the highest level enemies I've ever encountered.

You're right in saying that enemy damage and eHP are out-of-step at über-levels, though your conclusion that damage should be put on some kind of s-curve too is open to debate: I've seen a lot of comments from endurance-runners expressing the opinion that armour needed to be addressed, but enemy Health scaling should have stayed how it was.

[Tyreaus]

5 hours ago, Gawizard said:

enemy accuracy tend to scale with their level

At least according to Update 27.2:

Quote

We are decoupling enemy accuracy from level to reduce the overall ‘Aimbot’ like behaviours you face at higher levels. 

So if that is the case that accuracy is still scaling with level, it's likely unintended.

Also, trying to make squishier frames more viable (though shield gating has gone a ways in helping that) probably means looking at player EHP more than enemy damage, TBH. The prevalence of healing and small EHP pools sort of means that there's a very sharp turn-around from "able to face-tank" to "getting one-shot". For example, I can pretty much full-heal with Daikyu Target Acquired, a nikana, and one crit on an enemy. The point at which that kind of setup is threatened is the point at which I take more damage than I can heal over a given instance of time. Ideally, you'd want that instance of time to be quite long but finite, so that the player is threatened—their healing won't keep them alive forever—but their time-to-death gives them enough space to work in and find a solution to survive. But because I pretty much full-heal instantly, that turning point is when the enemy damage one-shots my health pool.

So in the progression of levels, there's just about no space between "perfectly fine, totally unthreatened" to "instantly dead". As long as that's the case, you're going to be really hard-pressed to find fair enemies (at least that aren't a total cakewalk). In a lot of cases, they scale over to "unfair" with almost a snap of the fingers. It's like balancing on a knife's edge.

_{(There's variances of course, like if I used Inaros I wouldn't heal instantly and so would have a healthy amount of "oh no" time, but for a good number of frames I use that setup on, that's about how it ends up. Also, that doesn't get into variances with modding, which can boost or cut down a player's EHP quite a bit. It's a lot of variables through which to hit a sweet spot.)}

[Kaizal]

On 2020-05-21 at 9:49 AM, DOOMPATRIOT said:

Currently there isn't a big difference, both of them can be one shoted and both can one shot you if you are not careful, but you wanting the enemies to be nerfed even more is really funny, they already die real quick, what is the point of  an enemy if it doesn't represent some kind of threat, and if dmg or health isn't the answer, then what is It?

Actually good enemy desing, which DE has consistenly fail to do.