Barring armor & damage, how would you add difficulty to Warframe?

[TheGuyver]

I would add shameless self promotion 

 

There's a lot of mechanics they could add and bake into existing and new enemies to make the game more difficult, but at the end of the day, we're walking war crimes against the origin systems inhabitants. They need something to, even temporarily, put us in check and keep us on our feet. 

[P._I._Staker]

11 hours ago, taiiat said:

Terrain that matches the Game Mechanics. numerous, numerous, numerous times i've said that Destiny and Warframe have the opposite Terrain that fits them, quite ironically. Warframe has complex super precise Player Movement with lots of flexible tools, yet mostly presents box hallways to just walk A to B through. Destiny is a traditional First Person Shooter plus Jetpacks, and yet has Floating Islands, multiple Gravity fields, transporting through time and space, infinite Voids of magical energy.... you name it.
these games are literally backwards.

 

THIS.

more complex parkour friendly maps to build on your parkour skills, since all they do a lot of the time is just let you travel faster.

remember that tall buildings section before the end of red war? I've always wanted mirrors edge in space.

remember half life? and their barnacles? we could add some of those in infested missions, to force you to dodge, and make them only shootable after they grab someone. just make them really obvious.

we already have laser systems, add more explosions to those.

MORE PARKOUR.

 

Negating cc -- ADD BUFFS if you do it correctly!!!

to make cc less of an annoyance, I feel like a lot of it should be way more telegraphed, and given limitations. cos right now with horde spam, you can get lasso'd in a chain. so we choose to put on mods that just plain remove that hassle. but I feel like if it were made extremely clear when something is coming, I'd just prefer to press roll to negate the knockdown, or whatever it is. and we could add small random buffs (with a duration before you can retrigger) to reward well timed dodges and frame it as warframe adapting itself to more possible dangers.   bonus if you make sure rolling guard isn't affected.

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remember the no touching floor thing someone mentioned?  (loki should get an alt buff on that one), you can add to that by having things like only being able to deal damage while you're in midair for certain bossfights.

and if they just can't put smarter ai decision making in, more varied units. even now some are only being used to certain mission types but could be dumped in other sections for variety without breaking lore. Hell, throw in more things that look like they're more of the environment but are not, e.g. rock golems that only activate if you shoot the pillar they're disguising as. but like, not sentient mimics, those are just annoying.

[TARINunit9]

14 hours ago, wtrmlnjuc said:

Suppose everyone settled on a damage & health/armour/shields solution, no arguments. What other values, factors, modes, AI behaviours, etc. would you add or change to test players? How would you hone player skill? Unless it’s very specific, try to stay away from discussing gear checks.

A complete rework of the game engine from the bottom up. Anything less and you just get terrible tedious Band-Aids

You need to both limit our ability to spam AoE attacks like the Tonkor or Maim Equinox, and make enemies more complicated than "spawn in a circle around the player, shoot at the player with infinite ammo and no friendly fire until one side is dead".

Counterintuitively, the best approach with the enemies' new AI, where they act as a mental challenge and not just a blob of hitpoints for the player to shoot, would also result in a net decrease in enemy DPS because they spend more time trying to outmaneuver the player instead outshoot the player. See also Half Life 1, and what Half Life 2 was trying to be. Which I think is fine, as long as the maneuvering is more interesting

[(XBOX)ONI Prowess]

numbers, just more enemies.

and the concept of support units is fine to an extent, ancients and arbitration drones. units that protect other units until they are dealt with. adding units that deal a constant aoe damage over a wide area (like embers old world on fire effect) that force is to deal with them would be interesting. one need only look at path of exile or diablo to figure out how to deal with players that nuke everything. 

however things like nullifiers are no good, as they directly inhibit warframes compared to ancients or arbi drones.

even eximus units draining energy unfairly targets caster frames compared to tanks, one of the reasons inaros is used so much is he does not care about energy, and his 4 that grants CC immunity with a mod uses hp as its resource. he is not the best frame, he just ignores BS mechanics.  

[taiiat]

7 hours ago, Reaper76OTP said:

to make cc less of an annoyance, I feel like a lot of it should be way more telegraphed, and given limitations. cos right now with horde spam, you can get lasso'd in a chain. so we choose to put on mods that just plain remove that hassle. but I feel like if it were made extremely clear when something is coming, I'd just prefer to press roll to negate the knockdown, or whatever it is. and we could add small random buffs (with a duration before you can retrigger) to reward well timed dodges and frame it as warframe adapting itself to more possible dangers.   bonus if you make sure rolling guard isn't affected.

i would certainly prefer to intentionally avoid being CC'd rather than the game running around the basis of punishing the Player for not being immune to CC to begin with.
doesn't make for something fun and engaging, it's you're either immune to it, or the game is going to laugh at you sometimes as it cheats.

Enemies don't need to cheat in order to keep Players on their toes.

5 hours ago, (XB1)ONI Prowess said:

one need only look at path of exile or diablo to figure out how to deal with players that nuke everything. 

though to be fair, in Diablo-esque games generally when things are 'high Difficulty', the Player just gets deleted in the blink of an eye without being totally sure what Killed them. while just a moment previously they seemed to be an untouchable deity.
that's not quite what should be ideal, if you ask me.

but to be abundantly clear, i also absolutely do not want to go engagement bankrupt like traditional MMO's where generally you get boxes and circles painted on the ground and you just spend the entire game playing simon says of "don't walk here". that's the extreme opposite where you focus on telegraphing so much that there's no playing the game left, you're just playing simon says.