Why doesn't energy regenerate?

[quxier]

1 minute ago, Teridax68 said:

Because... ?

With smaller maps time "wasted" is not big. So while "could be better" it's not necessary. You don't feel it like you are wasting too much time. It's like "meh, 1 minute more doesn't matter".

 

3 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Uh, no, I'm proposing to change our sprint speed, which we only use while holding down the sprint button, to go much faster while sprinting, and only while sprinting. I am not proposing to change our base movement speed, which the speed at which we run during our normal movement, i.e. when not sprinting.

So I either walk with the speed of turtle or run fast like cheetah? No, thank you.

[Teridax68]

30 minutes ago, quxier said:

With smaller maps time "wasted" is not big. So while "could be better" it's not necessary. You don't feel it like you are wasting too much time. It's like "meh, 1 minute more doesn't matter".

But that's completely arbitrary, and still based on the reductive notion that the smaller the map, the better, which is clearly not the case. At this point, it's boiling down to personal preference rather than some objective discussion of game systems.

30 minutes ago, quxier said:

So I either walk with the speed of turtle or run fast like cheetah? No, thank you.

So... buff base movement speed by whichever amount you like and make sprinting faster? Or get rid of sprinting? At this point I'm not even sure what you're asking for, because for every proposal and its opposite you have produced a contrarian answer. What is your exact position on our movement and sprinting speed, and how would you like to personally see it changed?

[selig_fay]

And here is the speed? If you decide how to change gauss 1, then make it an exalted mod that simply makes shift work differently when it is active and the problem, whatever it may be, will be resolved, preserving the compromise.

But this topic is about energy, not about speed.

[quxier]

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

What is your exact position on our movement and sprinting speed, and how would you like to personally see it changed?

I'm more or less fine as it is now but if you want change:
You cannot simply remove walk or sprint (+ some buffs or de buffs) because, as fair I can see, walking speed is used when aiming. So, even I rarely use walking by itself (without aiming etc), walking should be in the game.

You may introduce 3rd state - aiming (or something). So you can change walking into sprint (+ some buffs) and sprint into "super speed".

Change rolling into dash. Or at least let us choice it instead of roll. Using Protea's roll animation would be nice as well. Like limbo "roll animation". And if the Limbo uses dash, let him move "a little" faster.

Allow us to shoot while "rolling". Imagine shooting while doing Protea's "roll". Wonderful.

Better collision detection when rolling (e.g. Protea's roll get should "roll" above things not get stuck on invisible walls).

You can buff current sprint speed like, 0.5 for each frame.

 

ps. feel free to copy-paste it to new thread... this discussion is like gold for dev 😉

[Teridax68]

11 minutes ago, quxier said:

I'm more or less fine as it is now but if you want change:
You cannot simply remove walk or sprint (+ some buffs or de buffs) because, as fair I can see, walking speed is used when aiming. So, even I rarely use walking by itself (without aiming etc), walking should be in the game.

Aiming already slows the player down, though, so you already have three speeds. From the looks of it you want to mostly rename our current speeds, and slightly buff sprinting? What would the renaming achieve?

[quxier]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

what would the renaming achieve?

So people wouldn't look for "why my walk is not a walk".

... or do you mean something else?

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

From the looks of it you want to mostly rename our current speeds, and slightly buff sprinting?

More or less yeah. New walk would be current sprint, and new sprint  would be "super fast sprint". + add to the new walk, let's say, 0.5 speed.

That's for running/walking stuffs.

[Steel_Rook]

In the interest of saving space, I may be responding a bit out-of-order. I hope that's OK.

 

19 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I mean, I did mention at the start of this conversation that I did some research into this and came up with relevant documentation, which I would be more than happy to show or link to in order to explain to you that it is in fact possible to have that kind of design, including for heals; it just requires not treating Warframe like some old-school MMO.

I would like to see that, actually. Keep in mind, though, that it might take me time to go through depending on the document's size. Additionally, I didn't mean to assert that balancing Warframe abilities purely on design is literally impossible, so much as I didn't see how it was possible based on what you'd shared. Clearly that's not how it came across, for which I apologise. If you have a long-form document that explains this, then that'll definitely help.

 

19 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Bearing in mind that Overwatch, The Division, Destiny, and CoH all vastly differ from Warframe in terms of pacing, mobility, and general balance, particularly given that those games have much more PvP, and Overwatch in particular is designed as a PvP game first and foremost.

I'm not sure what your contention is here. Yes, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft are old-school tab-targer MMOs where slower animations and longer cooldowns are rarely an issue, but the Division, Destiny and especially Overwatch are action games. In terms of pacing, I'd argue Overwatch is substantially faster than Warframe - not in terms of movement, granted, but certainly in terms of opportunity windows and especially TTK. Yes it's PvP which does alter design paradigms somewhat, but not to the extent of being inapplicable, I don't think. I'll talk about this a bit later, but knowing one's abilities and using them at the precise right time is the difference between willing and losing a match there. It's why most Overwatch abilities have such short durations. A Zarya bubble lasts 2 seconds on a 12-second cooldown. A D.Va Defence Matrix lasts 2 seconds max, with fairly slow recharge. The list goes on.

I'm not arguing that Warframe should be balanced for PvP. However, it seems reasonable to draw inspiration from the systems of fast-paced PvP games, given the pace of Warframe. To be honest, Warframe's current state of balance makes it quite a bit more sluggish than its systems suggests it should be, but that's too large of a balance discussion to tackle here. I guess what I'm saying is... Could you get into a bit more detail as to why you feel the likes of Destiny and Overwatch are inapplicable here? To me, they seem to be of very similar genre. I just can't see how the mere presence of PvP design disqualifies those games from the conversation. Personally, I feel Warframe could learn a lot from a PvE Overwatch, which does actually exist... Albeit exceedingly conditionally.

 

20 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I specifically tackled a Trinity rework, for example, and made her Blessing a full heal with limitless range, no Energy cost, and no cooldown: rather than simply heal everyone to full all the time, the ability would specifically require a teammate to be very close to death in order to apply that effect. Thus, you'd have the ability ready whenever a life-saving moment were to come up, even if it were two in quick succession, but wouldn't be able to spam the thing to top everyone up. If the ability is meant to be situational, I'd thus rather design around the situation, rather than slap on a cooldown.

I'm using this quote more as a jumping off point than a direct reference, because there's a point here on which I feel we're talking past each other on. I get your aversion to cooldowns, but I'm not entirely clear on your reasoning for it, at least as described in the last few posts. Let me describe those reasons as I understand them, you let me know where I'm going wrong.

You seem to assert several things here:

• That cooldowns would prevent people from using their situational abilities when a situation presents itself due to said abilities being on cooldown at the time.
• That players would be encouraged to not use their abilities for fear of not having them when they're needed.
• That players would need to predict situations before they happen.

On the first and second point, I don't think we disagree. That would indeed happen. Our point of contention is that you don't want these things to happen whereas I do. I find those issues themselves to constitute compelling gameplay. Deciding when to use an ability and when to hold off under pressure is why I keep going back to Overwatch despite the game being made of PvP which I don't usually care for. You don't agree with this design, and I can respect that.

The third one, though, is the one which confuses me. You appear to disagree that players should need to anticipate the right situation to use an ability, yet your design for Blessing essentially demands that. You're creating an ability which requires a team-mate to be at extremely low health before the player is allowed to trigger it, but a player at that kind of low health doesn't offer a lot of time to react. In my exierience, the kind of content which is likely to put a player at death's door is likely to either insta-kill them or at least burst them down very quickly. A Trinity looking to play Healer, then, wouldn't be able to rely on player health bars, since the margin for error there is slim. She'd need to anticipate when players get themselves into trouble and "hove over" the heal button in order to hit it as soon as it's available.

To go back to Overwatch, for a second, this is more or less how Zarya bubbles work. Yes, sometimes you slap them on team-mates reactively when you see them being hooked or put to sleep or charged. Most of the time, however, you keep an eye on what your team-mates are doing and bubble your tank as they decides to push into the enemy team. Voice chat can help in this, as the tank can announce their intent, but all too often that's not an option. As such, you as Zarya need to watch what your team-mates are doing and anticipate their actions. I see this as not too dissimilar from a Trinity needing to spot a team-mate diving a Nox, or failing to spot a Bombard or otherwise getting themselves into trouble. I obviously may be missing context here that your document will fill in. It just seems like we're not that far removed in our positions, is all.

 

20 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I think it's quite clear at this point that we started from the same assessment, yet diverged completely in proposed solutions: the common ground we both seem to have is that we agree that warframe abilities typically only truly have gameplay when given some sort of downtime, but currently have no real downtime due to the state of the game's Energy economy. However, we are proposing to alter opposite factors in this: I'm proposing to change the design of abilities so that they have gameplay even without a significant downtime, whereas you are proposing to reimplement a downtime to warframe abilities in the form of cooldowns.

This is a good way of putting it, yes. I absolutely do want abilities to have downtime, but find Energy to be a poor way to implement that, for various reasons discussed. We both seem to have the goal of making abilities situational rather than "surrogate weapons," but we disagree on how this should manifest. If I'm reading you correctly, you want to remove ability cost altogether, giving players full access to all of their abilities at all times but discouraging the overuse of abilities through ability design and time efficiency. I want rather the opposite - to enforce substantial ability costs somewhere in the middle of their spread right now. That means much more accessible abilities to current low-level players without easy energy recovery tools, but substantially less accessible abilities to current high-level players with infinite energy. We agree on the problem, but propose diametrically opposite solutions.

And just as a parting thought - I want to reiterate that I don't assert what you propose to be impossible. If it can indeed be done, then I honestly wouldn't have a hard time picking it over my own proposal. It's not exactly what I want, but it's a damn sight better than what we have. My concern is how you handle uncooperative players who insist on playing a "caster class" despite Warframe really not being designed to support this. I presume your documentation covers this, but that was quite literally our primary source of friction, I think.

[headsoup]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

That means much more accessible abilities to current low-level players without easy energy recovery tools, but substantially less accessible abilities to current high-level players with infinite energy. We agree on the problem, but propose diametrically opposite solutions.

I had an experience today that I think demonstrates that making abilities less accessible (unless you mean it is still plentiful if built for?) at higher levels also has problems, in the Warframe context:

Using Nyx, I went to do a Requiem Relic.  I don't have any fantastic mods and they're not all fully upgraded, so generally I'm comfortable up to ~L50.  Requiem fissure was 60-70, so I knew this would be a challenge, but hey, why not... 

Frustration set in quickly and reminded me why I hate the energy system; I could take on a few enemies at a time ok, but being a fissure of course there were heaps of spawns (even for a spy mission).  What sucked was that when I used Psychic Bolts, I could take the heavy units down reasonably well... but they wore off quickly and of course I ran out of energy in a couple of casts.  I then just got overwhelmed because I also couldn't then cast Chaos (new fissure spawns didn't cop the earlier cast) or Absorb and got ded quick. I could have cast mind control on something instead, but then I have no energy to cast PB to strip armour and actually kill things.  I was left immensely frustrated that I had the tools to do the job, but couldn't apply them.  Fighting easier content masks the problem because abilities just aren't as necessary, but I'd prefer a decent challenge too.

With decent energy supply regeneration (etc), I could have instead focused on picking targets with PB's and moving around a lot while converting an ancient healer or two and casting Absorb/Chaos if it got too sticky.  There are other issues here in terms of balance and skill design, but energy just adds a layer of pointless frustration.

Just an anecdote that probably oversimplifies things, but it feels apt to the issue.

[Birdframe_Prime]

On 2020-07-13 at 3:20 PM, headsoup said:

Sorry for the snark but I don't really appreciate people that come into threads with condescension to 'tell us how it is.'

I would like to try accepting an apology for snark, but without any kind of alert via quote or mention, if I hadn't come back to check how the other people were doing, I wouldn't have even known you tried. I won't presume bad intent there, but there's a definite inflection of it...

That said, condescension is literally the least concern. If you're taking the point of 'You're barking up the wrong tree' as condescending, then sure, you do you.

Moving on.

On 2020-07-13 at 3:20 PM, headsoup said:

Aside all that, do you think there are any issues with energy supply when early in the game?

To be honest with you, I've been watching a lot of the players that start up new games over the years, with the most recent being one of the content creators doing so with DE's permission to start a second account.

What I've observed is that they barely even notice. Energy orbs do drop enough for them to actually play the game, and the early level enemies are not difficult enough, damaging enough, or copious enough to actually threaten a player that has some reasonable experience with the game.

To those without that reasonable experience, I have mentored a whole lot of them through, the progress of them is surprising when there's a bit of a helping hand about. They don't know nearly enough about the game to worry about spam builds or even really rely on their Abilities at all in the early game. It's more towards the point where they reach MR5 and are looking at The Second Dream, having seen all these other Warframes, all the mods that they still have to grind, all these people proposing builds, all the things that a really long-term player can achieve, that's when they start looking into ways to get cheap and easy Energy.

Most I've dealt with see that the Syndicates offer the Large Energy Restores reasonably early and start working towards those, farming and building them, and using them conservatively to set up for missions. Others will look into investing in frames like Nezha, who has the access to Orb drops. And it's by far the fewest of the group that I've observed that luck into Zenurik as their choice of Focus School, and start working towards that Energising Dash.

Early game players don't even know about the builds they can go for, and while I'm happy to guide them towards interesting or more out-there builds, they aren't able to do them, so they just do what's best at the time.

There's not an Energy Drought in the early game that I've observed, but there is some RNG to it without the mods that make the most of what they have. As long as you help new players get hold of the mods they need, there's genuinely no issues in the early game that even require the kind of energy you or I would want or need to play with.

[GREF_TM]

18 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

And it's by far the fewest of the group that I've observed that luck into Zenurik as their choice of Focus School, and start working towards that Energising Dash.

Wait, zenurik is the less common way of getting energy amongst newer players (with access to focus) in your experience? Am i getting it right?

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, headsoup said:

Frustration set in quickly and reminded me why I hate the energy system; I could take on a few enemies at a time ok, but being a fissure of course there were heaps of spawns (even for a spy mission).  What sucked was that when I used Psychic Bolts, I could take the heavy units down reasonably well... but they wore off quickly and of course I ran out of energy in a couple of casts.  I then just got overwhelmed because I also couldn't then cast Chaos (new fissure spawns didn't cop the earlier cast) or Absorb and got ded quick. I could have cast mind control on something instead, but then I have no energy to cast PB to strip armour and actually kill things.  I was left immensely frustrated that I had the tools to do the job, but couldn't apply them.  Fighting easier content masks the problem because abilities just aren't as necessary, but I'd prefer a decent challenge too.

Well, that depends, to an extent. The problems you seem to have had are precisely the problems I have with the system. I would LOVE to use Nourish more often on Grendel, but doing so would lock me out of Feast and cause me to spit. This is one situation that cooldowns completely resolve. Each ability is on its own separate cooldown (its own resource, if you will). That means you can cast Psychic Bolts without worrying about locking yourself out of Chaos or Absorb, since abilities don't interfere with each other. This issue is easily my least favourite part of the Energy system which quickly leads me to just never use certain abilities.

On the other hand, cooldowns WOULD keep you from recasting abilities one after another. They would, for instance, keep you from casting Chaos multiple times in a row as new enemies spawn in. Psychic Bolts I can't speak to. That's one of those "surrogate weapon attack" abilities which likely need some sort of general redesign. That could work on the basis of building up multiple charges in cases where spam is needed, or just be put on a short cooldown. You ARE intended to be unable to cast abilities if you try to cast them too quickly at first available opportunity, but I'd lie if I said this would be simple. Some abilities might need longer durations, some shorter cooldowns, some other changes.

Long story short, though - I'm kind of in the same situation you are playing anyone who isn't Inaros (where I can afford to not cast abilities) or Trinity (thanks to Energy Vampire). I end up not using my abilities because I don't have enough energy and I don't want to run through 50 Restores per mission on the regular. There are ways around it, I know, but I keep thinking there can be a system which retains some form of meaningful limitation without being so onerous.

[selig_fay]

2 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

There's not an Energy Drought in the early game that I've observed, but there is some RNG to it without the mods that make the most of what they have. As long as you help new players get hold of the mods they need, there's genuinely no issues in the early game that even require the kind of energy you or I would want or need to play with.

I can say that you can say that about the whole game. There are missions where you get a lot more energy orbs than you can carry constantly. But there are missions where you get 1 energy orb every 2 minutes. Personally, I don't know what it depends on, but it certainly doesn't depend on the number of murders.

[Teridax68]

3 hours ago, quxier said:

So people wouldn't look for "why my walk is not a walk".

... or do you mean something else?

More or less yeah. New walk would be current sprint, and new sprint  would be "super fast sprint". + add to the new walk, let's say, 0.5 speed.

That's for running/walking stuffs.

I'm pointing out that calling something by any other name won't change the thing in question. Functionally, you're just asking to increase sprinting speed by some tiny amount, which raises the question as to why sprinting should exist if it's only going to be marginally faster than our regular movement.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I would like to see that, actually.

Sweet! Sent you the link.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm not sure what your contention is here. Yes, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft are old-school tab-targer MMOs where slower animations and longer cooldowns are rarely an issue, but the Division, Destiny and especially Overwatch are action games. In terms of pacing, I'd argue Overwatch is substantially faster than Warframe - not in terms of movement, granted, but certainly in terms of opportunity windows and especially TTK. Yes it's PvP which does alter design paradigms somewhat, but not to the extent of being inapplicable, I don't think. I'll talk about this a bit later, but knowing one's abilities and using them at the precise right time is the difference between willing and losing a match there. It's why most Overwatch abilities have such short durations. A Zarya bubble lasts 2 seconds on a 12-second cooldown. A D.Va Defence Matrix lasts 2 seconds max, with fairly slow recharge. The list goes on.

I don't think TTK against opponents is quicker in Overwatch at all, given that killing crowds of enemies in fractions of a second is the norm in Warframe. Movement is also key here, because unlike those games, Warframe encourages the player to constantly be on the move and to basically speedrun the game. Meanwhile, CoH or WoW will have the player play much more defensively and manage their cooldowns by design, even in content that does encourage speedrunning. Even so, downtime isn't something that is liked in those games, which is why they offer tons of abilities to cast so that one is never waiting around for any one cooldown (and when that was the case, as with on-release Demon Hunters in WoW, players complained heavily). Meanwhile, Warframe gives us four active abilities, which puts us in a dilemma: if we make abilities exceptionally strong to justify their cooldowns, weapons aren't going to compensate adequately for the feeling of downtime, and if we don't, why have cooldowns at all?

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm not arguing that Warframe should be balanced for PvP. However, it seems reasonable to draw inspiration from the systems of fast-paced PvP games, given the pace of Warframe.

I disagree completely. PvP means taking into account agency on both sides of the equation, whereas Warframe gets away with a lot precisely because it only needs to factor in just one. Cooldowns exist in PvP games to give human opponents a window of agency to capitalize upon an opponent using a significant ability, whereas opponents in Warframe aren't going to complain if they have no such windows of opportunity. That doesn't mean PvE games should not challenge the player at all, they just don't need to do so in the same manner as PvP games.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

On the first and second point, I don't think we disagree. That would indeed happen. Our point of contention is that you don't want these things to happen whereas I do. I find those issues themselves to constitute compelling gameplay. Deciding when to use an ability and when to hold off under pressure is why I keep going back to Overwatch despite the game being made of PvP which I don't usually care for. You don't agree with this design, and I can respect that.

But that's where I think we're talking past each other, because I'm actually agreeing with you here: I think it is valuable gameplay to decide to hold off on using an ability under the right circumstances, I just don't think cooldowns are a good way of achieving that in Warframe, because "the right circumstances" can happen completely unpredictably, at a pace that does not match our cooldowns. The point to cooldowns is typically to discourage players from using them in suboptimal situations, but in a game like Warframe it is likely to end up simply punishing players for playing correctly, and merely being unlucky enough to find themselves in a situation where an ability on cooldown could've really helped once again.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The third one, though, is the one which confuses me. You appear to disagree that players should need to anticipate the right situation to use an ability, yet your design for Blessing essentially demands that. You're creating an ability which requires a team-mate to be at extremely low health before the player is allowed to trigger it, but a player at that kind of low health doesn't offer a lot of time to react. In my exierience, the kind of content which is likely to put a player at death's door is likely to either insta-kill them or at least burst them down very quickly. A Trinity looking to play Healer, then, wouldn't be able to rely on player health bars, since the margin for error there is slim. She'd need to anticipate when players get themselves into trouble and "hove over" the heal button in order to hit it as soon as it's available.

And as a Trinity player, I can tell you that that gameplay does in fact happen: watching over one's allies and saving them from death if they get too close is in fact the gameplay I want to encourage, and it happens often enough that a Trinity player who plays into that will be able to perform many life-saving Blessings, without Energy or cooldowns required to make those high moments appear. With enough experience, it is in fact possible to anticipate when a teammate is about to go down, so cooldowns aren't needed. If the state of the game is such that a player can go from full or high health to 0 without any possible window of reaction in-between, that is a problem with the state of the game's damage, separate from the state of healing, which is reactive by nature.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

To go back to Overwatch, for a second, this is more or less how Zarya bubbles work. Yes, sometimes you slap them on team-mates reactively when you see them being hooked or put to sleep or charged. Most of the time, however, you keep an eye on what your team-mates are doing and bubble your tank as they decides to push into the enemy team.

I think there's confusion here between reactive and proactive protection, which is an entirely separate topic of discussion by itself. TL;DR though is that both are valid and commonly used in many games (e.g. shields vs. heals in any Blizzard game or the like), and the only reason why healing is not considered useful in Warframe unless it's always-on is because the state of damage in the game is itself broken, and doesn't always allow for sufficient reaction, which is also why DE has picked up the habit of giving virtually every new frame a 90% damage reduction steroid or the like.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

This is a good way of putting it, yes. I absolutely do want abilities to have downtime, but find Energy to be a poor way to implement that, for various reasons discussed. We both seem to have the goal of making abilities situational rather than "surrogate weapons," but we disagree on how this should manifest. If I'm reading you correctly, you want to remove ability cost altogether, giving players full access to all of their abilities at all times but discouraging the overuse of abilities through ability design and time efficiency. I want rather the opposite - to enforce substantial ability costs somewhere in the middle of their spread right now. That means much more accessible abilities to current low-level players without easy energy recovery tools, but substantially less accessible abilities to current high-level players with infinite energy. We agree on the problem, but propose diametrically opposite solutions.

See, I do think my own system would be accessible to newer players as well, because having no limitations to casting means you'd get to use abilities as much as you'd like, and experience all the joy of a new toy right out of the box, without restrictions. Eventually, you'd learn to use them optimally, but that's not really important for someone starting out; they want to do the shiny stuff and don't really care about why they're being held back. I also do feel my system has room for substantial costs, tradeoffs, and longer-term considerations, via appropriate mechanics on relevant abilities, whereas I don't think the reverse can be said for what you're suggesting if everything needs to have a substantial cost by default.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

And just as a parting thought - I want to reiterate that I don't assert what you propose to be impossible. If it can indeed be done, then I honestly wouldn't have a hard time picking it over my own proposal. It's not exactly what I want, but it's a damn sight better than what we have. My concern is how you handle uncooperative players who insist on playing a "caster class" despite Warframe really not being designed to support this. I presume your documentation covers this, but that was quite literally our primary source of friction, I think.

I mean, the answer to that would likely be quite simple: if the player for whichever arbitrary reason wants to completely ignore weapon usage and spam abilities, they're simply not going to do very well. Some warframes may be more conducive to a "caster" playstyle, but ultimately no problem in the game would be solvable just by mindlessly spamming some effect, because each effect would be redesigned from the ground up to not encourage that.

Just to give a concrete example: in my proposed rework for Excalibur, I've kept Slash Dash, and made it a dash to an enemy that inflicts damage over time... except the damage over time scales based on the distance travelled. Theoretically, you could give an enemy a literal death by a thousand cuts from point-blank range ability spam... but in the time you were to do that, you'd likely have killed that enemy several times over through the use of a melee weapon, or even by going out a certain distance, and dashing back to them. Thus, the less interesting playstyle of spamming the ability as one's primary source of damage would be disincentivized, and players would find themselves naturally driven towards something more interesting, such as dashing from a distance and following up with melee strikes.

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, GREF_TM said:

Wait, zenurik is the less common way of getting energy amongst newer players (with access to focus) in your experience? Am i getting it right?

Among new players, yes.

Why? Because new players don't farm the way older players do, and explore Focus a lot more slowly. It's there, but so are a dozen other things they want to do, like collecting more Warframes, Weapons, this new Kuva stuff, and even trying to finish the Star Chart so they can take on things like Arbitrations.

Basically, the problems expressed in this thread are only problems from the perspectives of us, the longer-standing players, looking at the system after having exhausted it.

[quxier]

18 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

4 hours ago, quxier said:

 

I'm pointing out that calling something by any other name won't change the thing in question. Functionally, you're just asking to increase sprinting speed by some tiny amount, which raises the question as to why sprinting should exist if it's only going to be marginally faster than our regular movement.

No, I suggested changing "walk" name if we changed "walk" speed to something much faster.

[Teridax68]

5 hours ago, quxier said:

No, I suggested changing "walk" name if we changed "walk" speed to something much faster.

Which, as said already, does not functionally change what our speeds would do by itself. I don't think increasing our sprint speed to such a weak extent that it wouldn't even represent a 50% boost compared to our base movement speed really warrants a change in nomenclature either.

[quxier]

9 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Which, as said already, does not functionally change what our speeds would do by itself. I don't think increasing our sprint speed to such a weak extent that it wouldn't even represent a 50% boost compared to our base movement speed really warrants a change in nomenclature either.

Current stats:
Walk = 1.0

Sprint  = 3.0

Suggestion (just number, you can pick better):

Walk = 4.5

Sprint = 30.0

[Teridax68]

29 minutes ago, quxier said:

Current stats:
Walk = 1.0

Sprint  = 3.0

Actually, it's far worse than that. A sprint speed of 1.0 only represents a ~22% speed increase over our regular movement. If one were to increase speed by 0.5, even on Gauss, who has the highest base sprint multiplier of 1.4, that wouldn't allow our sprint to reach triple our base speed.

29 minutes ago, quxier said:

Suggestion (just number, you can pick better):

Walk = 4.5

Sprint = 30.0

That's actually far more ambitious than I'd ever hoped for! The most I was thinking about was to increase our base movement speed by about 50-100%, and then potentially make sprinting or the like multiply that by a factor of two or three (which would make it about 4x-6x our current movement speed). Testing would almost certainly be the only real way of determining which values would be best, but the end result should ideally be a speed that matches our rate of movement via parkour and the size of tilesets, so that we get to go fast without bumping too often into things when using regular movement and sprinting properly.

[Steel_Rook]

Still going through your document, so I'll only address points I don't think will be covered in it, as agreed.

 

16 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't think TTK against opponents is quicker in Overwatch at all, given that killing crowds of enemies in fractions of a second is the norm in Warframe.

Originally, I was referring to TTK against players rather than NPCs. However, I've slept on it and realised that even this specification doesn't work. My time playing Inaros has warped my perception a bit. Depending on Warframe choice, build and enemy level... Yeah, we can and do get one-shot, often by things we didn't even know were on the map. So fair point - I stand corrected.

 

17 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But that's where I think we're talking past each other, because I'm actually agreeing with you here: I think it is valuable gameplay to decide to hold off on using an ability under the right circumstances, I just don't think cooldowns are a good way of achieving that in Warframe, because "the right circumstances" can happen completely unpredictably, at a pace that does not match our cooldowns. The point to cooldowns is typically to discourage players from using them in suboptimal situations, but in a game like Warframe it is likely to end up simply punishing players for playing correctly, and merely being unlucky enough to find themselves in a situation where an ability on cooldown could've really helped once again.

OK, this could be a source of confusion here, I think. Do you consider Warframe to be too fast-paced and/or chaotic to properly anticipate ideal opportunities for ability use? This isn't criticism, but a genuine question. Ideologically, I'm fine with making players "feel bad" for not being able to use an ability in a perfect situation due to having thrown it away at an inopportune time earlier. That's part of the experience I'm after. However, this only works if these mistakes feel like they're our fault - I jumped the gun, I dumped my bit AoE hold on three guys, then 15 more guys came rushing in, I should have known better. If, however, the game doesn't really give us the tools to judge this, then these mistakes stop feeling like our fault and start feeling like we're being screwed. For instance, I could never tell when would be "a good time" to use an AoE hold if enemies are constantly swarming me in large numbers. Every moment feels identical to every other. If I throw out a hold and get swarmed from behind anyway, it feels less like I made a mistake and more like the game never really gave me a shot. Cooldowns, then would feel like a penalty for something players can't control.

Just to be clear, is that along the lines of what you're arguing? Because I can see that. Warframe has a history of terrible player feedback, from dying to Bombards who spawn behind me and make no noise to losing all my energy to Leeches I never had a chance of spotting to losing my buffs to a Comba bubble from off-screen that gave me no indication. Making abilities situational and punishing players for using them in the wrong situations is predicated on players having some means to tell which is which. It sounds like you're arguing that the game's overall design precludes this?

 

17 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I mean, the answer to that would likely be quite simple: if the player for whichever arbitrary reason wants to completely ignore weapon usage and spam abilities, they're simply not going to do very well. Some warframes may be more conducive to a "caster" playstyle, but ultimately no problem in the game would be solvable just by mindlessly spamming some effect, because each effect would be redesigned from the ground up to not encourage that.

I know that's addressed in your document, but I just wanted to say - if you can pull that off, then that would be "good enough" for what I'm after. Even if it's not the one I proposed, any design which gives players easy access to their own abilities while discouraging spam to the point of abilities replacing guns gets my seal of approval. Warframe works best when players use all or at least most tools at our disposal.

[Teridax68]

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

OK, this could be a source of confusion here, I think. Do you consider Warframe to be too fast-paced and/or chaotic to properly anticipate ideal opportunities for ability use? This isn't criticism, but a genuine question. Ideologically, I'm fine with making players "feel bad" for not being able to use an ability in a perfect situation due to having thrown it away at an inopportune time earlier. That's part of the experience I'm after. However, this only works if these mistakes feel like they're our fault - I jumped the gun, I dumped my bit AoE hold on three guys, then 15 more guys came rushing in, I should have known better. If, however, the game doesn't really give us the tools to judge this, then these mistakes stop feeling like our fault and start feeling like we're being screwed. For instance, I could never tell when would be "a good time" to use an AoE hold if enemies are constantly swarming me in large numbers. Every moment feels identical to every other. If I throw out a hold and get swarmed from behind anyway, it feels less like I made a mistake and more like the game never really gave me a shot. Cooldowns, then would feel like a penalty for something players can't control.

Short answer is yes, and you actually gave a pretty good example for it too: in Warframe, there is no real means of telling when enemies are going to rush in 15 at a time through the same choke point, or dribble through from various corners of the map. There's no real way of anticipating whether the game will choose to spawn a couple of paltry Drahk Masters or a bunch of much tougher Nox units in quick succession, as both are heavy units, so holding off on that DPS boost ability may be all for nought. It is just as possible for an "ideal" situation to not occur for an exceedingly long span of time as it is for that situation to occur multiple times in a row, which means players would likely get punished for no predictable reason if they were to hold off or blow their cooldowns then. Cooldowns typically presume some more regular pacing which Warframe simply doesn't have, and to some extent that's actually one of the game's qualities: while the game could certainly stand to be a lot more refined, there's value in an exceptionally high variance of possible situations, because it makes the game that much less predictable. Given that Warframe is a game we're expected to play for a very long time, i.e. literal thousands of hours, lack of predictability in at least this respect is quite likely a good thing.

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Just to be clear, is that along the lines of what you're arguing? Because I can see that. Warframe has a history of terrible player feedback, from dying to Bombards who spawn behind me and make no noise to losing all my energy to Leeches I never had a chance of spotting to losing my buffs to a Comba bubble from off-screen that gave me no indication. Making abilities situational and punishing players for using them in the wrong situations is predicated on players having some means to tell which is which. It sounds like you're arguing that the game's overall design precludes this?

Yup! It's not all good, as per the situations you mentioned, but it's also not entirely bad either. Even in a perfectly balanced and polished game, I think it would still work to its advantage for it to have a degree of unpredictability in that manner. This doesn't mean we should prevent the game from telegraphing certain scenarios entirely (Assassins can be quite fun in that respect, and more enemies could stand to telegraph their powers more), but it does mean that it would probably work to the game's longevity and freshness if players were expected to respond more organically to situations at hand, rather than expect certain occasions to arise at the metronomic pace of a cooldown. Because of this, I think the more adapted ability design would be one that wouldn't be contingent upon a waiting time, so much as matching the right mechanic to the occasion that presents itself.

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I know that's addressed in your document, but I just wanted to say - if you can pull that off, then that would be "good enough" for what I'm after. Even if it's not the one I proposed, any design which gives players easy access to their own abilities while discouraging spam to the point of abilities replacing guns gets my seal of approval. Warframe works best when players use all or at least most tools at our disposal.

I mean, generally speaking, when players feel pushed to engage in some strategy that isn't fun, it's worth looking at what's incentivizing them to do so. For example, players looking to farm in Survival missions huddle in a small room and camp until the end of the mission because that's the way to maximize enemy spawns, even if it's a terribly boring way of playing. Similarly, if players are driven to spam the same ability over and over, it's typically a sign that the ability incentivizes spam: Mesa's Peacemaker, for example, is superior to any weapon, so there is virtually never a combat situation where the answer for Mesa is anything but "use Peacemaker" when the ability's available (and plentiful Energy means it's virtually always available). In cases like those, I think it ought to come down to removing the incentive to spam at the level of the ability itself -- to design it in such a way that there are situations where it's not optimal to use, and make the player engage in gameplay when using it. This is design that can work with or without cooldowns -- which means that if it can work without cooldowns, I'd rather do so for Warframe.

[keikogi]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

use Peacemaker" when the ability's available (and plentiful Energy means it's virtually always available). In cases like those, I think it ought to come down to removing the incentive to spam at the level of the ability itself -- to design it in such a way that there are situations where it's not optimal to use, and make the player engage in gameplay when using it. This is design that can work with or without cooldowns -- which means that if it can work without cooldowns, I'd rather do so for Warframe.

I'm more of fan concepts kind of guy than balance discussion kind off guy but hear me out. A lot of ability types can't be designed without any cost in mind ( energy , cool down or any unique resource ). For example all damage skills have to pass the following test: 

If have this ability would I ever use a gun ? 

If have a gun would I ever use this ability ?

There are solutions that won't involve cooldows but they involve resource generation by another name. For example equinox day form requires enemies to die to charge up, with is effectively just resource cost.

The only way it not inherently good to cast a skill is if there is a downside to it. Be it a massive casting time ( opportunity cost ) , debuff ( vulnerability) or cost ( cool down or resource). It is never wrong to cc enemies , it is never wrong to buff yourself and it is never wrong to do damage. Warframe was originally designed around a cost system ( and is a high cost system , that's why there are abities that shut down game play because they originally had a small uptime ) but due to an OP stat ( efficiency ) and the slow march of power creep the system felt apart ( it was not that good to begin with , because there is no gameplay loop assosicated with it).  

As far as fixing this mess, is either give ability cooldowns or kill energy and give all warframe some kind of unique resource they need to gather ( it can be energy but it would be necessary to kill all energy related mods and abilities that give allies energy ) and just give each warframe unique ways to gather energies be it kill with guns , kills with melee , some skill could refund energy on hit ( lkke nidus 1 ), existing , being on combat and so on.

Edit: forgot about the last way to prevent spam is just make something situational enought where It can't be spammed but warframe only have 4 skill having multiple situational skill can feel like you don't even have skills at all.

[selig_fay]

22 minutes ago, keikogi said:

give all warframe some kind of unique resource they need to gather

This may work, but it requires a re-frame of all frames, which is hard. I remember someone offering to pay razorfly for abilities. I liked the idea.

22 minutes ago, keikogi said:

some skill could refund energy on hit ( lkke nidus 1 ), existing , being on combat and so on.

Nidus is not a good example. This strengthens spam and cuts you off from team play.

[keikogi]

4 minutes ago, selig_fay said:

Nidus is not a good example. This strengthens spam and cuts you off from team play.

Just offered him as the most well know example of refund mechanics. Personally I would apply this kind of effect to a set up skill ( like titania 1 argument ) or payoff skill.

 

[Teridax68]

39 minutes ago, keikogi said:

I'm more of fan concepts kind of guy than balance discussion kind off guy but hear me out. A lot of ability types can't be designed without any cost in mind ( energy , cool down or any unique resource ). For example all damage skills have to pass the following test: 

If have this ability would I ever use a gun ? 

If have a gun would I ever use this ability ?

As mentioned above, I did some separate work on this to figure out how to make it work, and it can in fact work, given the right design. You're actually partially right: in the case of many abilities, they're basically just weapons given ability form, so might as well make them weapons. However, not all damage-dealing effects work like weapons, and not all weapons need be focused on damage either.

Just to give an example, in this doc I mentioned above, I reworked Ash and changed his Bladestorm to allow him to kill enemies he sees at the press of a button (and it would be a guaranteed kill, too). Pretty strong, right? Catch is, the ability to do so only activates on each enemy after a delay, based on how close the enemy is to Ash, whether or not they're unalerted, and so on. The ability would be great for stalking enemies and taking them down stealthily, plus picking off troublesome lingering opponents in the middle of heavy combat, but terrible for directly engaging an enemy in combat that needs to be dealt with right this second. Thus, such an ability could coexist with weapons just fine.

Quote

The only way it not inherently good to cast a skill is if there is a downside to it. Be it a massive casting time ( opportunity cost ) , debuff ( vulnerability) or cost ( cool down or resource). It is never wrong to cc enemies , it is never wrong to buff yourself and it is never wrong to do damage. Warframe was originally designed around a cost system ( and is a high cost system , that's why there are abities that shut down game play because they originally had a small uptime ) but due to an OP stat ( efficiency ) and the slow march of power creep the system felt apart ( it was not that good to begin with , because there is no gameplay loop assosicated with it).  

It may never be wrong to CC enemies, but it may be wrong to CC the wrong enemies, e.g. stunning some weak unit as opposed to the heavy unit or the like. I agree that Warframe is designed with costs in mind and doesn't respect that, but I think you're making the leap by assuming that costs and cooldowns are the only way of balancing abilities, even as you list several more examples.

Quote

As far as fixing this mess, is either give ability cooldowns or kill energy and give all warframe some kind of unique resource they need to gather ( it can be energy but it would be necessary to kill all energy related mods and abilities that give allies energy ) and just give each warframe unique ways to gather energies be it kill with guns , kills with melee , some skill could refund energy on hit ( lkke nidus 1 ), existing , being on combat and so on.

There was a time when I was on board with this: Energy as a resource is too broad and doesn't have a well-defined gameplay mechanism, so might as well give frames their own individual resource that catered to the way they were meant to be played, and fuelled certain more power-, rather than gameplay-oriented abilities. However, over time I realized even that much could be refined, because typically frames only need that sort of "fuel" for one or two abilities. Often, that much could be replaced with a health cost, something certain frames already do (e.g. Chroma taking damage for his buffs, Harrow and Garuda hurting themselves for more power, etc.), or simply implemented more organically as a mechanic inherent to the ability or kit. selig_fay's example of sacrificing Razorflies for abilities is apt, as some of the kit reworks I had feature frames sacrificing their minions in exchange for power (notably, Nekros for a corpse explosion-like Desecrate). I would thus argue that if one really wants to give warframes access to direct power, there is usually a way of balancing that that injects gameplay into it without having to go into something too gamey like a resource bar.

[headsoup]

23 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

What I've observed is that they barely even notice. Energy orbs do drop enough for them to actually play the game, and the early level enemies are not difficult enough, damaging enough, or copious enough to actually threaten a player that has some reasonable experience with the game.

Most I've dealt with see that the Syndicates offer the Large Energy Restores reasonably early and start working towards those, farming and building them, and using them conservatively to set up for missions.

There's not an Energy Drought in the early game that I've observed, but there is some RNG to it without the mods that make the most of what they have. As long as you help new players get hold of the mods they need, there's genuinely no issues in the early game that even require the kind of energy you or I would want or need to play with.

Yes sorry forgot the @ callout, I don't believe any intent was hostile so no harm done.

I feel you contradict yourself here but you do highlight an important point...  Early players who have help from experienced players will not likely experience quite the same issues.  I am still a fairly new player and I definitely have frequently noticed the lack of energy.  What I noticed when energy wasn't much of a problem was that the content was easy and so I just wasn't using abilities (thankfully ranged/melee is fun and engaging already, or I wouldn't have gotten past the energy issue).  Early on the enemies are pretty easy regardless of knowledge/skill.

I had no idea syndicates offer Energy Restores for a long time and if you told me when I started that I had to actually work towards that as a tool to enable my abilities, I would have shaken my head at what is clearly a bad experience/incentive.  I don't think Energy Restores as 'pots' like in other ARPG's works for Warframe, or at least not in the current game's design.  You say there's no energy drought but then talk to the crutches needed to provide sufficient energy (with help from others to discover them).  It just sounds like very clunky design to even have to guide players to energy enabling functions.

 

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Short answer is yes, and you actually gave a pretty good example for it too: in Warframe, there is no real means of telling when enemies are going to rush in 15 at a time through the same choke point, or dribble through from various corners of the map. There's no real way of anticipating whether the game will choose to spawn a couple of paltry Drahk Masters or a bunch of much tougher Nox units in quick succession, as both are heavy units, so holding off on that DPS boost ability may be all for nought. It is just as possible for an "ideal" situation to not occur for an exceedingly long span of time as it is for that situation to occur multiple times in a row, which means players would likely get punished for no predictable reason if they were to hold off or blow their cooldowns then. Cooldowns typically presume some more regular pacing which Warframe simply doesn't have, and to some extent that's actually one of the game's qualities: while the game could certainly stand to be a lot more refined, there's value in an exceptionally high variance of possible situations, because it makes the game that much less predictable. Given that Warframe is a game we're expected to play for a very long time, i.e. literal thousands of hours, lack of predictability in at least this respect is quite likely a good thing.

Fissures are a good example.  Sometimes enemies constantly spawned, other times barely enough reactant to open the relic (I just completed an Interception which took till the 3rd round and I had to leave 1-2 relays un-captured the whole time to get enough reactant!). 

This appears to be the broader Warframe issue (and yet to an extent a benefit), the unpredictability in so many things: energy, enemy spawns, enemy balance, drops, Excavation fuel carrier spawns (!), pacing, ability balance, weapon balance, etc... there's a lot of factors, but energy has an impact on the ability to cope with the others and to me is the worst kind of unpredictability, because unpredictable enemy spawns (and balance) can create interesting moments.  Luckily the core gameplay/grind is just a lot of fun.

 

2 hours ago, keikogi said:

As far as fixing this mess, is either give ability cooldowns or kill energy and give all warframe some kind of unique resource they need to gather ( it can be energy but it would be necessary to kill all energy related mods and abilities that give allies energy ) and just give each warframe unique ways to gather energies be it kill with guns , kills with melee , some skill could refund energy on hit ( lkke nidus 1 ), existing , being on combat and so on.

That kind of sounds like Path of Exile's mana system.  You have a few flasks, but the only way to refill them is to kill enemies.  They also provide additional buffs etc which to me is complexity that takes away from the core utility of replenishing mana, but it works reasonably well as an active system.  The issue I see with having to gather resources is in difficult content.  If you need to kill to replenish, it fails when you need it most: against tougher enemies or a boss, so there needs to be a mechanic to cover those situations (aside all bosses having minions or supply crates).

 

I like the sound of the redesigns being discussed here, some very interesting mechanics I'd certainly enjoy exploring.  I think one mechanic that can work without energy and reduce spam for quite a few abilities is reducing effectiveness on reapplication.  For instance, using Nyx's Psychic Bolts will strip all armour/shield on the first hit, but if the enemy lives and regains armour/shield, the second cast only removes 33%, then 10% repeating.  Same for, say, Inaros' Desiccation: first cast blinds for 8s, then 3, then 1 repeating.  It doesn't matter how many times you cast if the effectiveness drops to being only marginally useful.  This can also be used for things like Khora's Whipclaw, though the damage would degrade more gradually.