Warframe's Biggest Problem: Its Flawed Game Design

[sappinmahsentry]

Over the course of the last 7 years, Warframe has evolved from a semi-tactical largely boring third person shooter to a game with many different mechanics, a beautiful parkour system, and melee and gunplay that flows very well together.

The problem is that it's not ever tested by the games. Well, outside of Jupiter Disruption and Fortuna, that is. And the main reason why is because of two things.

1. Enemy design (DE knows this one.)

2. Frame and weapon design (DE likely also knows this one, but....)

First, let's go over enemy design.

Warframe's enemy design is literally outdated. Which is why all of the newer nodes and gameplay pieces have far, far better enemy design than everything else. I believe that Deadlock Protocol might address this with the Corpus, so I'm mainly going to talk about Grineer right now (the same things will be applicable if not, though).
Walking Turrets
Those two words put together sums up the entirety of Warframe's gun toting enemies(I'm not touching infested. This entire post would be about infested if I did). Grineer are hitscan thiccums who do nothing but shoot and walk. Sometimes run. And this is true for almost every single grineer unit. The main standouts are Noxes and Manics, the latter of which are ridiculously squishy and rare. Which is kind of backwards for a rare enemy. So, here I'm proposing some ideas for enemy reworks.

1. The current heavy units become 'medium' units. To make them less annoying though now that they'd be more common, they'd have a 2.5x headshot multiplier instead of 2x. 

2. Introduce new enemies, buff some others. Make manic bombards appear on *every* grineer node past a certain level. Decrease the rarity of manics and increase their health pools a bit. We have massive parkour, I think we're past the point of Manics being possibly overpowered. Flesh out commanders, make them spawn with a group that follows them and make them able to target players based on their threat level (AKA, if they are leading in kills, they'd target that player). And also make them spawn more, too. This would also synergize with their switch teleport, as they'd be able to teleport you right into hell. Of course, I'm not expecting all of this right now. DE has more than enough on their plate as it is, and nobody wants them to burn themselves and put too much on their plates again. I'm just saying this is what I'd like to see in the future.

3. Nerf us.

We're Broken. Too overpowered. Our personal design is in need of a rebalance.

The main problem with many Warframes is that they have no risk, no opportunity cost, and no effort. Let's look at Saryn. You press buttons, things die. You put in no risk and no cost, energy is almost infinite in this game especially with efficiency mods and numerous pizzas. Look at Mesa. You press 4, wiggle your mouse while holding m1, everything dies. All the while you have 95% DR from bullets, how quaint. LOOK AT TRINITY. Look at Octavia, every single one of her abilities is literally broken. Every single one. You press 1, enemies die from their own bullets. You press 2, the ball does all the positioning work for you, enemies also follow it like idiot ducks, too. You press 3, well. Wow, what an overloaded ability. Multishot (!!!), invisibility (!!!!!!), and more! You press 4, and everything gets double the broken, all the while you deal more damage! Equinox is broken because other frames are broken, and also weapons. Frost presses 3 and wins defense missions. Gara... Is Gara. Look at every single hard CC frame in the game. If you're not solo or if you have one of the broken weapons, they're almost completely unstoppable unless you literally go to sleep at the keyboard. All of these frames deserve nerfs. not anything significant, just something to reel them in. Of course, abilities should be more powerful than your arsenal, but not for no cost. You could easily nerf many of these frames by:

Adding damage falloff to certain overbearing AoEs such as Saryn (please, I mean it makes sense spores and gases naturally get more and more dilute the further you're out come on)
Significantly increasing energy costs. (please)
Adding new mechanics that make it so that the abilities stay the exact same, but you need to work harder to use (or be able to use) them. Maybe increasing their power if said abilities become far more limited.

In my opinion, every frame should be around the Revenant to Wisp benchmark. And yes, that also means buffing up potentially weaker frames. God knows how clunky Titania is, even if I want to love her so much. But the design benchmark should be that every frame should either have to work for their power, that their power should be tied in some way to skill, or that their power should simply come with certain limits. 

Our weapons, too, suffer from power issues. AoE weapons, such as the Kuva Bramma, kill single target just as efficiently as multitarget, which entirely defeats the point of choosing single target vs AoE. AoE weapons, simply put, should come with quite a bit less single target DPS, but a whole lot more multitarget DPS. Or, if they're going to be super powerful, they should be limited (very low ammo capacity and pickup). You know, like rocket launchers are in every other game. We could have both, that would be ideal.

Again, I'm not expecting any of these changes right now. DE is working on enough as is, and them putting too much on their plate led to the half-baked recent launches. I just love this game and I can't stop talking and thinking about it when I start to.

I think that DE shouldn't be afraid to nerf overpowered frames and weapons, people should try more to adapt instead of react. DE should, however, make sure not to overnerf. In sum, the point of these ideas is not to invalidate, but to simply balance. These powerful options would still exist and still give a glorious power trip, but they would allow other players to join in on the fun instead of only one player nuking the entire map. After all, if it's not fun, why bother?

Edited June 9, 2020 by sappinmahsentry

[Magnulast]

Kuva Bramma has a dev workshop.

[taiiat]

you don't need to increase weaknesses of Enemies, EHP was already nerfed so much that Enemies simply don't get high Health anymore.

you are correct in noticing that more complex Enemies do exist, the game just doesn't use them almost ever.
don't add more Manics though, they're poorly designed. you either cheese through their mechanics to Kill them faster than you're supposed to, or you're just standing around waiting to be allowed to Kill the Enemy. it's not an interesting Enemy to fight.

 

 

Saryn 2015 was objectively better designed than what we have now as a whole(though thesedays i want Toxic Lash to keep with having a Gun buff since Melee was gutted so much), and that's all there is to say about that.

overall for Abilities, don't intentionally make Abilities that are about AFKFarming. which is the majority of old Abilities, as well as the vast majority of Abilities made in the past year or two.
the game creates its own problems for the most part.

Revanant isn't a good example of an ideal Warframe i don't think... Mesmer Skin is the only reason why Revenant is relevant, ever. the clones he creates are a resource for him sure, but you just.... have no need or use for them. not because of numbers, but because we just don't need the things that these offer. similarly, Dance Macabre is in the boat of generic AoE blast Abilities. there's like, one Mission in the entire game that Killing a lot of Enemies is even relevant, outside of that we just don't actually care about that.
and Wisp for that matter finds herself with having a flashy Ability Weapon that's just irrelevant mechanically not because of Damage, an Ability that helps spread around extra Damage but that's also then irrelevant because it's just Damage, a Mobility Ability that almost nobody is or does ever actually use anyways. leaving just some puddles of decent convenient buffs.
what exactly is so shiningly good about these Warframes? heh.

don't just leave everything as is with numbers being reduced - so many Abilities are borderline useless at a fundamental level since all they do is apply AoE Damage and not much past that. that just isn't a good Ability in the first place.

[George_PPS]

The first part is reasonable. I wish DE could focus on game design and enemies instead of nerfing us -the easy and lazy way that get many players angry and leave the game every time there are some major nerfs.

 

[Amadurim]

Most of the time, it's better to buff rather than nerf. Like, rather than nerfing Saryn, it's better to just gives heavy units ability resistance. So, it's more of clear trash mobs ability.

In Payday 2, there's this heavy unit called Bulldozer with helm, faceplate, full-body armor and LMG which definitely high threat enemy. But, he's slow, easily cc-ed and a skill allow players to deal headshot multiplier on bodyshots (which i remind you, bulldozers have really high headshot multiplier) makes killing Bulldozers really easy, like 1 seconds on the highest difficulty.
So, they got buffed, they're fast, can run, can't be cc-ed, and rather than nerfing that whole skill, it only deal small amount of headshot multiplier on bulldozers only. The same build that can takeout bulldozers in 1 seconds need significantly more time.

Then, they add new variants of them, one is a medic dozer than can prevent death and restore hp to full to anyone near him with a cooldown. The other is a minigun carrying dozer, capable of dealing highest amount of dps to you, but they're super slow, slower than prebuff bulldozer.

6 hours ago, sappinmahsentry said:

Significantly increasing energy costs. (please)

No, that's just limiting build diversities and giving more reason to use Zenurik.