The Steel Path: Feedback Megathread!

[Elkyn]

Ropalolyst encounter need a rework for solo player because 4 conculyst lvl 140 is a real pain in the ass and dealing with them and the boss at the same time is really annoying.

Why don't you make the encounter more flexible by matching the number of conculyst with the number of players?

[Flying_Scorpion]

I just finished MOT and I enjoyed the challenge of dealing with the insane damage from the enemies. It forced me to switch my Warframe and strategy. I think it would be fun to test out some builds with other people and see if it's possible to health tank on MOT. 

[(XBOX)toughdragon17]

Can you please increase thr drop chance of steel esance and or make it an end of mission reward its realy crapy that eximie are the only thinge that drops the esance and you have a 2% drop chsnce of geting it and thats only ONE ESANSE so you would need to kill 85 eximie for the full set of armor, 85 foe the ephamera, 34 for the misc items thats 204 eximie you half to kill but you only have a 2% chance to get 1 esance so its more like 408 to 1000 eximie to get enouphe for everything even if you complet the hole star chart which gives you 64 you would still need to kill around 140 eximie or more like 240 to 760 eximie to get enouphe for everything 

 

Vites esance is more better to farm than steel esance at least with arbitrations you get esance as end of mission rewards and have enemys that drop the esance all the time insted of halfing to go to a servival or defence and go for about an hour or two to even get a remote amount of esance 

[(XBOX)YoungGunn82]

Now that Teshin has Steal Path,  It is time.

1. Convert all PvP conclave mods to PvE for Steel Essence. 
 

2. Move all conclave weapon skins to Steal Path rewards. 
 

3. Allow Teshin to have a feature that costs Steal Essences, that when purchased our Primary Secondary and Melee slots can turn into a Slot 1,2,3. Where we can equip any 3 weapons freely. Archwing weapons would take up to 2 slots. 
 

Just a shower thought. 

[Metal_Madness]

This is one thing that really cheesed me off. I was on the Steel Path fighting the Jordas Golem. It took me a few minutes to kill the Juggernaut due to its higher level and then I went into archwing to fight the main boss. It was boring but easy. The golem can do almost no damage to you if you stay behind it but my archgun was slowly but surely whittling it down. The fight was a massive, boring slog, but I was going to win and hadn't used any revives in the mission.

Then I got the message, "Mission Failure Imminent". Because I had been fighting for something like 15 minutes (that golem has waaaay too much health on Steel Path given how little damage I was taking) but hadn't killed the boss I was booted. I had less than 20% of its health to go and if given five minutes I could have killed it.

This is incredibly dumb. I was going to kill the thing. My health was mostly full and its fire move couldn't drop my shields. All I needed to do was persevere. But no, since I didn't beat it in time I don't get the credit, which I find incredibly frustrating.

Simply put, I think the time limit should be extended for Steel Path missions or the ridiculous health pools should be nerfed so that I am not spending fifteen minutes shooting continuously at the boss's weak spot and still not get the kill. My archgun was fully modded up too, Larkspur with all damage increasing mods. I have a picture for documentation if necessary.

 

[Flying_Scorpion]

On 2020-07-13 at 8:52 PM, shieldb said:

[Snip] Finished all the nodes for Steel Path at this point... [/snip]

This is the post in this thread that I agree with the most.

• Quote

  For capture/spy/rescue/sabotage these were basically identical to the normal versions

  I agree. I just ran past the enemies and finished the missions like I normally would. I'm fine with this though, this is what I expected.

• Quote

  Solo interception feels really garbage with the increased spawn rate.

  I disagree. Maybe it's because I cheesed these missions with Khora. Khora strangledome made all interception missions easy. If you haven't tried it yet, I recommend it.

• Quote

  No changes on rotation based drops means if I'm looking for something off of "rotation C" I might as well just run the normal version for cases where I can do it faster/safer outside of Steel Path

  I agree. If the purpose of your play session is to obtain end-of-mission rewards, you're better off doing the normal mode missions. Not a big deal to me.

• Quote

  Some bosses feel pretty bad with the scaling

  I agree. For example the treasurers have way too much shields to take down in 90 seconds. If I want to get Granum Crowns, I'll need to play on normal mode.

• Quote

  Companions often feel incredibly squishy

  I agree. But I'm fine with this. Seems fair to me considering that the Steel Path is supposed to be challenging.

 

Two other things I want to talk about:

A) Meta vs Off-Meta

B) Intrinsic motivation vs Extrinsic motivation

 

A) Meta vs Off-Meta

One of the cool things about Warframe is that you can put together a really weird off-meta build and still get through almost all of the content. The Steel Path severely limits your options. To some people this is a bad thing. To me, it's a fair trade-off. I've used the analogy of a race car before. Playing Warframe and assembling super powerful end game builds (for example this Oberon Build I put together <--Youtube link) is like assembling a super fast race car...but then you have nowhere to drive it, and it just sits in your garage collecting dust. You can take it out for a drive, but it's very disappointing to never get the chance to put the pedal to the medal and see just how fast the car can actually go. Some of my favorite Warframe builds are absolute overkill for 99% of the game, and that's boring and un-fun. I want a place to utilize my uber builds, and I don't want to have to spend an hour in a survival mission to begin to feel the enemies tickle me. I want a place where the time I spent grinding and theorcrafting can shine. I want to be able to show off my power in an environment where it's noticeable. And the Steel Path delivers this. So I am thankful that the devs have added the Steel Path, and I hope they do more like this in the future.

B) Intrinsic motivation vs Extrinsic motivation

It's the journey, not the destination. Some of you guys are acting like a spoiled child complaining that they can't have the chocolate bar at the checkout at the grocery store. If you climb a mountain and there's a rare flower that grows at the top and you simply admire it's beauty and then go back down, imagine how you would feel when the next day someone comes down from the mountain and says "I forced myself to climb all the way up that stupid mountain and all I got was this lousy flower. This flower isn't worth the climb. They need to put an escalator on that thing." They missed the point.

It's not about the flower, it's about the experience.

I think the steel essence drop rate is fine. The rewards for the Steel Path are mostly cosmetic - you don't *have* to have them. They aren't game-changing from a mechanical standpoint. They are expensive on purpose. They are supposed to be rare. If you don't think they are worth the grind to get, then the answer is simple: don't. Don't grind for them, leave them for other players to enjoy. If DE lowers the bar by either reducing the prices or by increasing steel essence drop rate, then the items would lose their value because even more people would be able to easily get them. This is the same thing that happened during the first season of nightwave - the original nightwave challenges were harder and took more time, but whiney crybabies flooded the forums with complaints and DE (as they often do), caved in under the pressure and nerfed the difficulty, which in turn, made the rewards less prestigious and less valuable. This is the same thing that happened when Kuva liches were added to the game. Whiney crybabies complained on the forums about the lich breaking their Warframe's back and heaven forbid, they needed to use a revive. DE caved in and removed that mechanic. Meanwhile a silent portion of the playerbase had no issue with it and I can only speak for myself... I actually *liked* the challenge. I liked 1 hour Kuva survival mission without activating life support. I liked that DE was going in the direction of making enemies that could actually threaten the Warframe. But every time they do that, they get this backlash from whiney crybabies and every time they cave in and give the temper tantrum forum posters the chocolate bar, they strengthen the temper tantrum and disappoint players like me. I hope they hold the Steel Path reward prices where they are, because I want the Steel Path cosmetic items to carry at least some level of meaning and prestigious value to them. 

 

Suggestions:

• Better matchmaking
• A reason to use corrosive+[whatever] status effect over viral+heat. The enemies in the steel path have bonus armor, so you would think that maybe corrosive 80% armor strip would get a chance to shine right? Nope. Viral+heat procs are still beating corrosive+[whatever] procs. This is testament to how overpowered viral+heat is. Please do another balance pass on status effects, and/or please correct me if I'm wrong. It would be nice to know why DE hasn't touched viral+heat since the last balance pass on status effects several months ago. If you guys are busy with other things, that's understandable, but can you please at least acknowledge this? I bring this up because I care about build diversity and game balance.
• Would enemy hp that scales up based on the number of players in the mission be a good thing? What I notice in the steel path is that the more players there are in the mission, the faster we chew through the enemies and closer the squad comes to trivializing the content. On the one hand, it's good to be rewarded with an easier mission when you're teaming up with allies. But on other hand it can become a problem when you're competing with your team mates to get kills. The Steel Path enemy HP scaling swings the pendulum in the opposite direction, where enemies are sometimes too tanky for a solo player, but just right with one or two other people in the squad. Perhaps having enemy hp scale up with # of players in the squad could help balance this.

[OmegaVoid]

4 hours ago, Metal_Madness said:

My archgun was fully modded up too, Larkspur with all damage increasing mods.

For Jordas Golem you need good crit stats. Larkspur has low crit chance and very low crit multiplier.

Try something like Imperator Vandal or Velocitus. 😉

I agree about the timer though, it doesn't seem to serve a useful purpose.

[Damocles]

On 2020-07-09 at 7:35 PM, ES-Flinter said:

Double post time.^^

I agree on the corpus guy. They are really hard to kill (but until now i just meet one on venus and I had only a kuva karak and a level 24 Rhino).

But I have to disagree about the sentients. They are still easy to kill. 

Sentients are easy to kill with the right loadout... Except in my case, I had half the right loadout that killed 1 sentient, while the other 3 destroyed the mobile defense objective in 3 seconds. This was because 2 of them spawned near the defense target and 1 of them did the disco laser. Maybe unlucky, but... totally unfair

[Damocles]

On 2020-07-10 at 10:08 AM, Traumtulpe said:

Stop lying, a melee weapon with magnetic damage kills them very quickly. Not that you have to kill them in the first place though.

Magnetic doesnt work on them. My melee doesnt seem to work either, as peacemakers did better. Lastly, I have to kill them or wait 1 minute to finish the defense wave. We actually just idled there for 1 minute because we all agreed we cant kill the darn thing

[Sahansral]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb Flying_Scorpion:

B) Intrinsic motivation vs Extrinsic motivation

It's the journey, not the destination. Some of you guys are acting like a spoiled child complaining that they can't have the chocolate bar at the checkout at the grocery store. If you climb a mountain and there's a rare flower that grows at the top and you simply admire it's beauty and then go back down, imagine how you would feel when the next day someone comes down from the mountain and says "I forced myself to climb all the way up that stupid mountain and all I got was this lousy flower. This flower isn't worth the climb. They need to put an escalator on that thing." They missed the point.

It's not about the flower, it's about the experience.

Oh, come on. SP is neither some piece of art nor example of game design craftmanship. It's existing content with some multipliers slapped on it.
There's no hidden beauty to be discovered, no additional lore, world building etc. On the contrary, players are even more disconnected from the story aspect of the game, are even more pushed to exploit cheesy mechanics and restrict their weapon choices to a very narrow field of viable frames and weapons.

If you want to invoke a feeling of unique experience in your players, multiplying your existing content by 1.5 and praying for the best is not enough, I fear.

"Oh, you cleaned the barracks? Now, do it again - with a toothbrush!"
  

[Flying_Scorpion]

5 minutes ago, Sahansral said:

"Oh, you cleaned the barracks? Now, do it again - with a toothbrush!"

You don't have to play the Steel Path you know? No one's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do it. Just don't play it if you don't like it. Dude there's lots of video games to play man, don't be forcing yourself to do something that you don't like. You've got the whole internet to find something to do that you enjoy.

[Sahansral]

vor 17 Minuten schrieb Flying_Scorpion:

You don't have to play the Steel Path you know? No one's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do it. Just don't play it if you don't like it. Dude there's lots of video games to play man, don't be forcing yourself to do something that you don't like. You've got the whole internet to find something to do that you enjoy.

Well, I completed SP for mastery and got the ephemeras. Wasn't fun and I have no intention to revisit this soon to be forgotten part of the game, because much about SP was just lazy game design.
If you think anyhting from SP resembles a meaningful, touching player experience (you invoked this picture of a steep mountain and a rare,precious flower), perhaps you are the one who should  check out what's on the game market. I don't say that Warframe doesn't have these moments (Second dream, the War within), but Steel Path ... 🤣

[limernest]

Finished all nodes on SP. Can't say I really enjoyed it but here are my main feedback points:

1. Thanks to the ridiculous tankiness increase for all enemies, melee weapons are pretty much the only weapons that can deal any significant damage to SP enemies in a reasonable time. Primaries and secondaries might as well not exist, or simply be there for status application so that your CO modded melee can hit harder. The only time I felt a primary was actually useful was when I was killing Vay Hek, but even then I was using the Kuva Ogris for sheer splash damage. (because trying to shoot a flying bullet sponge that scoots around like mad with tiny, sporadically exposed weakpoints with a sniper is just annoying)

2. Against Corpus, toxin is king, while viral corrosive and slash take care of the rest of the factions fine. The other damage types might as well not exist.

3. Juno Corpus need a serious nerf. In general they have way too much health, shields and damage compared to other corpus factions. Compared to normal Elite Crewmen, Juno Elite Crewmen have way more health and shields, and carry freaking Supras loaded with explosive ammo. You know, the weapon that was previously wielded by the Tech, a rare heavy Corpus unit. Juno Elite Crewmen also spawn in swarms, so most missions involve you fending off a barrage of missiles from all directions. Ironically, the Juno Tech is much less of a threat than before since he carries the Exergis, which barely tickles at range.

4. The importance of cheese is really shown here. Missions that don't involve killing can be cheesed with invisibility or CC. See spy, capture, sabotage etc. On MD and interception having CC is practically required given the swarms of enemies that spawn. Operator mode also trivializes most content giving heals and infinite revives as needed. I'm seeing a lot of Khoras and Octavias suddenly. No surprise why.

6. Sentinels and pets go down almost instantly and might as well not exist. Just make them invincible if they're too stupid to avoid damage.

7. The Ropalolyst and Zealoid Prelate were absolutely terrible to fight. Ropa shield phase takes way too long and the level 140 sentients that spawn might as well be invincible.

8. SP is unrewarding. Regular resources apart from Kuva are useless for vets who have stockpiles. Steel Essence drop rate is terribly low and locked behind RNG of Eximus spawns. The only way to farm Steel Essence reliably is to do survivals that are at least an hour long, since that's when eximus spawns are maxed. SP was meant to be a "time skip" of sorts so what gives?

Playing SP has made me realise how much more fun and rewarding regular WF is. I don't know who this mode is for. Are there really people out there who want to put in more time and effort killing tankier versions of regular enemies for barely any more rewards? If so, more power to you then. I'm probably done with SP for good.

[Flying_Scorpion]

6 hours ago, Sahansral said:

Well, I completed SP for mastery and got the ephemeras.

Then just play through it once and leave it in the dust. The Mastery was just a draw to get people there in the first place. Kind of like the flower at the top of the mountain. Some people will just go look at it once and then never go back up that mountain again. Some of us like climbing the mountain, and the flower at the top is just the icing on the cake for us. Maybe I should be using cake as analogy instead of climbing a mountain.

 

Anyway, here's a good question: Is farming for affinity on the Steel Path worth it? I'll go test and report my findings now...

 

...okay finished testing. It's actually pretty close. I have to say kudos to DE for balancing this...whether it's intentional or not, the affinity/time ratio of Hydron on the Steel Path is comparatively close to running Hydron on Normal. At least under the circumstances of my testing. I think it's possible for the Steel Path to pull ahead of normal gameplay in terms of affinity/minute, but you'd probably need to run to 20 waves and definitely would need a way to reduce enemy armor. I'll post the video of the testing below:
 

 

[CortiWins]

So after a few planets in steel path, mostly solo, it's time for some feedback. For me, steel path drastically shows some of the imbalances that exist in warframe and how "cheesing" content is state of the art for any content.

Most mission types, like Exterminate, Capture, Sabotage, Rescue etc. just take a little longer and with a non-meta frame just take little more to win, which is actually a nice experience, while those are obviously easy to win by just taking a CO melee weapon and one of a few strong frames.

Missions with any kind of defense (without nullifiers) are a question of Limbo or not Limbo, as the enemy damage annihilates the defense target so fast, it's not fun. With limbo, for me its questionable whether "will me and the target die within the second recast animation?" is a challenge i have waited for, but as long as i only need to do the mission node once in my lifetime, its okay. Doing the fomorian hijack mission as a disarm-loki felt really exploitative, but it's fun in a way, like solving a puzzle. Some fights like Flydolon where pretty epic.

Then nullifiers. As the whole balancing of this game mode seems based around exploiting certain abilities, Nullifiers leave nothing to salvage imo, especially solo. As now steel path been out for some time, the number of players playing the nodes have gone down. On Venus a week ago i found 2 to 3 people for the average absolutely not fun interception mission, on Europa i struggle to find one. To be honest, why should anyone replay it? I wouldn't.

Steel Path probably works best for Survival where it skips some time, but then again, it still takes a long time for an increased amount of eximus units to spawn, and whats that about the trade chat bans for farming steel essences? So for endless its like a time-saving, time-wasting, long time grind that punishes players for doing the long time grind too long. I'm irritated. It seems pretty incoherent to me.

[Ruinous_Envoy_Zed]

Any  plans on adding Eidolon Lens BP for 10steel (or 15steel). I would easily assume most players tackling the Steel Path have completed most of the Focus Tress and the drop rate for those BP are kinda low already on the Paper Path.

Personally haven't gone deep into the Steel Path - but I'd like to purchase a Eidolon Lens at some point.

[Flying_Scorpion]

1 hour ago, Grand_Effekt said:

Any  plans on adding Eidolon Lens BP for 10steel (or 15steel). I would easily assume most players tackling the Steel Path have completed most of the Focus Tress and the drop rate for those BP are kinda low already on the Paper Path.

Personally haven't gone deep into the Steel Path - but I'd like to purchase a Eidolon Lens at some point.

That's a really good idea. I'm so bored and tired of running Bounties in Cetus. if I could just buy Eidolon lens blueprints from the Steel Path, I'd rather do that. It's one of those evergreen things (until you max out all of the focus schools.)

 

Also, adding ayatans to the steel essence store would be nice too. I know a lot of people say "UGH, I have absolute ZERO use for more endo" okay fine. Put it in the store and if they don't like it, they can just skip over it. There are many other players, like myself, who can do the steel path but would like to get more endo. Endo was actually the main reason why I liked Arbitrations (when they were first released), but now the drop pool for arbitrations has been watered down with mods and arcanes, but I just want that endo. I know you can buy a Zambuka from the Arbitration store, but it costs a lot for that price, it would probably be more time efficient for me to just farm platinum and buy ayatans from other players on the market. Time efficiency is in my opinion, the best reward for doing challenging content - just like what you guys did with Operation: Scarlet Spear. Also offering a variety of paths that lead to the same thing is also good.

[(XBOX)CI shadow2397]

That game is a good challenge to the normal star chart but the steel essence needs to change. Everything costs at least 10 or more and even though you get 36 to complete the star chart after that you have to suffer through either eidolons or use smeeta Kavat with every drop booster possible in order to get steel essence 

[Glaive-012]

@[DE]Bear I find the Steel Essence drop rate of 2% too low. I've done half an hour survival runs as I killed multiple Eximii, but I only received up to 2 essence. Are there considerations to increasing the drop rate for this currency, or is there a trick I'm missing?

[y0urd0g]

I enjoy Steel path, but I have a few suggestions.

Maybe have a steel path relic mission where its incredibly difficult but at the end of it, you get whats inside all four relics. Instead of having to pick only one. Like what if it was like arbitration where it had 10 minuet/round increments.

Another Idea I had is, steel sorties, like the normal sorties but maybe only once a week, and you got something like 5x rewards from it. or whatever, maybe a chunk of steel essences

Lastly, I really think conclave rewards should be attainable for steel essences, not many people care about conclave anymore and it would be a cool way to bring those rewards into the PvE side of the game. Not to mention its pretty difficult for us non pvpers to get into it, because the people who DO play conclave a lot, are just too good for us to compete, so a lot of those rewards are essentially unattainable.

[Flying_Scorpion]

4 minutes ago, y0urd0g said:

so a lot of those rewards are essentially unattainable

Pretty sure you can get game changing rewards via the nightwave credit store. Correct me if I'm wrong, but all the stuff exclusive to conclave is just cosmetic right?

[FaridRLz]

So we should call this hardmode (star chart: reboot kind of cheesier) is already dead? I mean, by now I had to complete almost 80% nodes alone and I'm just up to Jupiter by now, because no one in their 5 senses would play such an underwhelming reboot of all the same missions with truly no real reward. Dax armour? Done. Crania ephemera? Done. Trio ephemera? jaja lol. And what else? not even the kuva farming on Steel essence is even worth

[(NSW)StoneGhost]

I didnt think that simply cranking up the difficulty would make the game more fun, but holy crap it did. I just did my first mission in the Steel Path and I haven't had that much fun in a long time.

The rewards are a little weak, but I'll still engage just for the fun factor. Recommend adding Umbral Forma to the mix with a high price tag for people like me who are turned off by Nightwave's chore formula. 

[(XBOX)Adams Eden]

Xbox Tenno, was playing last night, it looked like the defense target on Excavation and arch wing mobile defense health/shields are not right we’re only 3 to 6 thousand compared to defense targets being over 100k

[Root-Drummer]

Hey. Could u pls have a look to give Derelict a public matchmaking option? I am in a very small clan and also dont play 24/7 and still a bit away from Derelict Steel Path, but seeing how i hardly manage to get full groups for the other nodes i dont really look forward to Derelict recruiting.