The Steel Path: Feedback Megathread!

[GrandLibra]

The rate at which Steel Essence drops is abysmal. Brozime after streaming for nearly 12 hours managed to accrue 23 of it. 14 of which came from planet completion rewards.
In my own experience, after around 4 or 5 hours, I only got 2 drops.

If we're meant to gather 85 of this stuff for the Operator Outfit, and then even more for all the evergreen rewards from the store, the effort simply is not worth it at the current rate.

Additionally, Bosses should have either reduced, or no Health/Armour/Shield enhancements. Just increased levels would make them tough enough, but the extra buffs make them boring bullet sponges beyond belief.

[-Loko-]

This has probably been said multiple times but I gotta say that Lua decoration looks simply like a bad placeholder. Derelict one is extremely cool, though.

Other than that, I'm slowly getting through the star chart and most of the time I'm having lots of fun. Emissary Assassination was the worst mission for me as of yet but I haven't really prepared for it, so there's a possibility that it's not that bad.

[Shyltar]

My first impressions after doing several missions (mostly solo) on earth, venus and the kuva fortress:

- Difficulty:

At first I must say I was a bit disappointed as it did not feel really hard. It seemed more like we have been playing easy/story mode until now and steel path was normal mode. After playing it a bit more (especially the kuva survival mission) I really enjoyed it though. It is a nice change that I actually gain something from using the different weapons in my loadout and that applying debuffs or cc to the targets matters. I think that new mod is healthy for the game as it should encourage players to learn about the game mechanics. I, at least, enjoyed that it made me see some flaws in some of my builds and that I have to think about some adjustments. I totally understand that some players don’t want to bother with optimisation but I think it is also important that they understand that maybe this game mod is not for them and they can still rush mission and one shot everything in normal mod if that’s what they enjoy.   

 

- Rewards:

I honestly don’t care much about most of the rewards associated with the steel path as I would probably have played it even without any reward at all. I am totally getting that operator armor though!

I see a lot of complains about the rewards but in my opinion the current rewards are ok-ish. Much better rewards would make steel path mandatory and, seeing some of the comments here, this game mod is definitely not for everyone. The only rewards I wish would get a buff are the relics. It would really be nice that normal mode vs steel path worked a bit like normal vs elite sanctuary and that steel path would reward radiant relics.

Concerning the steel essence drop chance, I saw a lot of complains and my own experience made me worried too at first but then I got a decent drop rate from Taveuni (10 essences in 35 min of kuva survival) so it seems ok to me.

[Kokomala]

Right now I've completed Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars and Lua. I did most of Earth solo before linking up with some friends who came online. Overall I'm having fun with it. I rarely go longer than 1hr endurance runs, but most of my frame/weapon setups have the synergy to tackle high level play, so they fit right at home.

Everything I've heard from people is that they are disappointed that this isn't some kind of endgame, but it's pretty much right where you said it would be. Downplaying rewards at the start is probably a good thing.

Main feedback as follows:

• Steel Path resource drop chance does not stack with the market resource drop chance. Why? Apart from lost revenue on your side, it makes me feel like I'm wasting my drop chance booster. I don't run with a mod chance booster, but I'm guessing that wouldn't stack either?
• You can bring frames that aren't max level, but affinity feels really low on any node that isn't grineer. I understand your desire to not give us an affinity booster, but you may wish to take a look at the affinity disparity between the factions. I forma'd and leveled my Nyx a few times as we we clearing planets as I hadn't quite prepared her in time for steel path. Non-grineer missions were abysmal in terms of affinity.
• Difficulty feels ok at this level of the star chart and clearing Lua. Archwing feels too easy. I think most people complain about AW because they don't take the effort to farm up the mods or gear it up. I'm seeing a bit more variety in frames being used which is a good thing.
• Solo interceptions are really good to play. Lots of enemies and you can't expect to yawn through the mission.
• Defense targets and extractors feel ok for the most part.
• Junction specters - pleasantly surprised by them.
• Teshin's voice lines - really good.
• Vay Hek on Oro, Earth - phase 1 really needs to be looked at. Takes forever on a weak spot that is barely open to shoot on a target that constantly twitches and moves around, not to mention scrambling your UI with magnetic procs (yes I know there is an arcane). It's ok at the regular star chart as it doesn't take much to bring it down. Please consider leaving the weak spot open for a longer period but cap the max damage it can take in a single opening (eg: no more than 1/4 of his health), as that will make the fight less tedios.
• Spy's - please consider including ciphers on hacking terminals onto the gear wheel cooldown. I literally mash ciphers all day unless its the sortie. If it were on a cooldown I'd have to consider where I would use it.
• Melee stance forma - strange reward. Outside of maybe 3 weapons, I can't see myself ever wanting this. There's simply not enough stance mods per weapon type.
• Steel Essence - not 100% around the drop rate as it feels a bit low, but I'll reserve judgement until I do longer endless missions. But getting a single drop from 4 syndicate death squads indicates it's pretty darn low. Unless they can't drop them and there was another unit that happened to die in the same spot.
• Teshin rewards - prices might be a little high, but need to see how the drop rate is in endless missions. I can appreciate keeping his rewards low to start with.
• Xoris nerf - as someone who didn't abuse this it hasn't really affected me, however consider giving exalted melee weapons their own version of the combo counter that increases based on how long you have it active. That said, warframe abilities that scale off melee mods should be looked at - acolyte/glad mods and 5 disposition rivens are abused with stat sticks.
• Endless missions - consider having the rotations in the same format as arbitrations (ABCCCCC...)

If I had to pick 3 of the above to list as what I would consider most important, I'd use the following:

• Resource/Mod drop chance boosters need to stack with Steel Path boosters
• Include Cyphers on the gear wheel cooldown
• Steel Essence drop rate might be too low.

[Zuhan]

The shop for the Steel Path seems rather dull. Sure we get some neat armor to make us look like Teshins children, some Kuva and a Stance Forma. Why not add some decorations in there to. I love my Kuria that I got for hunting all of them down and I would like more so I can donate them to my dojo so me and my clan mates can do a kind of scavenger hunt with it (Currently we use a popper floof). We do this every few weeks or so and the one that finds the floof first wins 500 plat from me. I think having those decorations you can only get once being added to the shop would be a good direction to go. Set it up like Simaris and his Warframe Blueprints. You have to have had it once in order to buy more.

[KIREEK]

So, my experience

Since the steel essence in part drops from eximus, the more you kill, the more chances you have at the resource, the issue is that you kill more in earth compared to pluto, so if you have to farm you're almost obligated to kill eximus that are well, easier to kill, meaning there is litle incentive to kill them on later areas.

Another problem is that eximus appear in spy missions when you are detected, meaning you have to do a clumsy entrance to trigger the enemies you want, the worse you are, the more steel essence you may get, this filosofy isn't great.

Other than that it's fine, earth interception is likely going to be a place to farm, my personal meta if you wish.

My only issue are mainly the players, who keep doing the same vulgar stuff everywhere, not much CC or killing, avoiding eximus like the plague, using the front door in rescues, not killing the eximus wardens, it doesn't matter if i'm paired with 1,2,3 players or even do several missions, players are just mundane, they don't really try much in any aspect.
This isn't DE's fault obviously, players are different from one another, it's just that i expected more from the community.

[bulletsearl]

What I hoped Steel Path to be is a better method of farming rare ressources for players who can tackle lvl100+ enemies
without the need of using cheesy meta gear.
This would attract all those intermediate players who actually still need tons of those rare ressources (argon/cells/tellur/endo/...)
but don't really enjoy spending hours in low/mid level endless missions. And endurance runners would still get their higher start level.

From this thread it does not look like I'm gonna find this once I'll find the time to try it out...

 

vor 12 Stunden schrieb -TheSerhokyan-:

Alright, so after the update hit me and my buddies gathered for the farming, however the Steel Essence is just way too hard to drop. It's near imposible to drop it.
We had 4 Resource Drop Chance Boosters, so every member had it.
Also we all used farming frames with their respective looting augment mods: Nekros, Hydroid, Khora

After finishing the Earth, we gained only 2 Steel Essences.

These two Essences are the fixed reward for clearing the planet. So actually, you had zero drops. OOF

[Yasha-7HS]

7 hours ago, Flying_Scorpion said:

Bottom line: If DE introduced the steel path and put a $20 price tag on it, I would have gladly paid $20 to gain access to it 

20 dollars to... Do the same thing you've always done without having to play an hour and a half to get to the enemy level desired and booster rewards that do not excuse the abysmal drop rates of most rare mods when they're under 1%, or in even more extreme cases under 0.05%, on an enemy that spawns rarely? 

20 dollars to skip slightly ahead in time for no rewards not gotten better anywhere else, and no change to the more boring enemies and bosses in the game that have little interaction.

Wow. 

Anyway, onto feedback: Steel Path Honors and its shop items are a mistake. How many ways are there to obtain Kuva? How many ways are there to get relics? You added stance forma, but no one reevaluated what stances are being used after melee 2.9, considering many of them have both terrible movement and terrible damage output without mentioning stances that have literally one combo under two different names. 

Steel Path's rewards offer only concurrency, but the way you've decided to add that concurrency has in-turn made it a possibility to be a mandatory mode as opposed to what you wanted it to be for standard players while also not addressing the lack of rewards for players hoping to have a more ramped start to endurance missions. 

The reason the term "Umbra Forma" comes up a lot in this thread as a suggestion for rewards is probably because it's been a little over two months since it was removed as even a possibility from sentient anomalies for a "security issue" while we haven't heard any news about its return in any way, shape, or form. The most logical place to have put it was the Steel Path's store to avoid the "security issue" of people being able to farm it from the multiple instances of the same ship re-spawning in endless Mulex, considering the phrase "(harder enemies, better rewards)!" 

While there has apparently been talk about changing the way Power and Status immunity works in this game, it didn't make it in time to be in Steel Path clearly. We've nerfed the Xoris to deal with the "restrictive" loadout of "Xoris or you're doing it wrong" how about opening up the conversation of Paracesis or you're doing it wrong when it comes to regular sentient enemies considering their inability to be affected by status at all, their adaptation of all Warframe powers without any decay or cap on that adaptation making it incredibly restrictive in terms of fighting them with regards to their level scaling without Paracesis, especially if you're not hosting that game as going in and out of operator while being a client takes more and more time the worse your ping is. There are less than a handful of ways to interact with Sentients. It's not interesting, and they're not our "greatest adversary." It's either you get rolled by being unprepared, or you entirely trivialize them with a Shattering Impact Paracesis as if they were nothing but training dummies. 

If you're tired of everyone testing things in the Simulacrum, why not give the players the ability to customize a mission level and scaling instead of just granting everything the same maximum the simulacrum has, because currently all I see is disappointment on two fronts:

1.) The casual players saying they won't even do Steel Path due to them not wanting to play against bullet sponges for no rewards except breaking even with the boosters, and boring tedium considering they'd have the replay the entire star chart just to get to the few nodes they wanted to play faster anyway.

2.) The more equipped player saying that it's too easy because the level scaling and the armor scaling were even reduced from what it was on the test server, which wasn't even that difficult to deal with in the first place at full Sortie modifiers. 

I expected only one thing from Steel Path, and that was the ability to have higher level enemies faster on any node. I didn't expect to be required to complete the entire star chart for a second time just to do that.

I'm going to be extremely disappointed if I complete this star chart and I don't even get Steel Path Arbitrations starting at levels 250. 

[(PSN)WetPollito]

I don’t think it’s/was a good way to implement a “hard mode” I can’t believe I have to complete all planets again!! I did 2 time!, it will be the 3!. I thought it could be added into nightmare mode or something new! It’s not fun play all the same mission again and again! And rewards sucks!, as a player with more than 6 years in this game and 2 account without CrossSave I ask you, do you what to boring me? I want to keep playing but!, cmon! Srry but I can’t find it fun!, 

[LSG501]

I've had a little time to sleep on this and while I still feel the same as I posted earlier, I did think of a way to improve rewards by adding umbra forma without over saturating them etc...

How about adding an umbra forma into the 'clearing the planet' rewards, so we get a single umbra forma plus the existing planet ornament and the glyph thing each time we clear a planet.  As that would be a one time reward that would give 18 umbra forma iirc... actually they could even go 50/50 with aura/umbra forma if they're concerned 18 is too many umbra forma (it's no imo). 

This would personally give me an incentive to do the all the planets while imo not over saturating how many umbra forma players can attain.

Teshin would still need other rewards to bulk out his offerings and ideally an improved drop rate of steel essence but those could be things like you find in nightwave and/or aura/stance forma.

[Deshiel]

I love steel path. Ofc I'm probably biased because I am MR29 with practical builds.

But could you please add a Steel Sortie too? With steel essence bundles in reward pool?  I need it.

[lukinu_u]

Can we actually replace the "+100 levels" a "+x level slider starting at 100" ?
Currently, +100 levels is not enough to encourage the use of new strategies because you pretty much kill everything fast enough with any loadout.

No additional rewards are required, maybe a small increase on the boosters to encourage increasing the level if you can handle it. A very low +0.1% increase for every level over 100 would be fine, so for example +300 levels would make the boosters +120%.

[(PSN)Wolfsherrscher]

To make Steel Path feel more interesting as a bonus completion - make it so that for every planet where you fully complete all nodes in Steel Path - a new vendor reward will be added for you at Tenshin's shop.

And if you complete every possible mission on Steel Path on all planets than you should get the ability to claim an Umbra forma blueprint at the vendor.

This way you are giving players a reason to do Steel Path and rewarding them as they progress.

People in the forums say they want umbra forma, I say give them the ability to claim it. - But only in a way that makes it feel fair. Full Steel path completion would feel fair to me for an Umbra Forma.

[SorinJr]

Add credit booster, quadruple credits in mission rewards

[RevanZim]

I have read this entire thread now and played a good amount of Steel Path myself. I believe the amount of tweaking needed to make The Steel Path fun is not actually that much. Kind of how Railjack just needed a bit of adjustment, I think it's the same here.

I suggest the simple fix of increasing Eximus spawn rate by A LOT. Maybe 50% to 70% of a sortie Eximus Stronghold. This would address several points of feedback so far:

1. Low Steel Essence drop rates. Increase the spawn rate of the enemy that drops them, easy fix.

2. Low Affinity/desire for higher focus farm rate in Steel Path. Eximus enemies have much higher baseline affinity scores, in a recent Eximus sortie I stayed for about 13 minutes just for fun and got about 80k focus just farming some Eximii, pretty much the same I'd get in ESO. Now Eximus rate would be lower than that in the Steel Path, but rewarding nonetheless.

3. "Low" difficulty. Essentially, for high end players, nothing really changed aside from enemies taking two hits to kill now. A long time ago Steve talked about adding mid-tier enemies with weak-points in between the extremes of "boss" and "fodder" to change up the pacing of just slashing through hordes a little bit. Noxes were one foray in that direction, as were the glass enemies with the current nightwave. I believe Eximus units are closer to that goal than perhaps believed, at least when they spawn in great numbers. An individual Eximus unit is still a pushover, but together their auras and elemental resistances can be very annoying and challenging in a slightly different way than warframe's core gameplay loop usually challenges players. And I think that's all the Steel Path really needs.

Aside from this, credits could be boosted, sure. The mod booster makes no sense at all since the entire point of this mode is to already have all the mods and use them to kill the better enemies. The resource booster is OK, but not enough incentive. It should also stack with normal resource boosters, which according to other people in this thread it doesn't currently?

 

Now one last thing that should be done is to allow ALL mission types to be included the Path. As someone else said: "If I'm on the Steel Path, I don't wanna leave it". This means Nightmare, Fissures, Sorties, Lich missions, etc.

The big concern with this move is that it could split the playerbase a lot. I mean, why would I run normal fissures if I get double void traces on the Steel Path?

My proposed solution is the following: I'm the guy that has the first reply in this thread so of course I still think Umbra Forma should be a reward in the shop, however some limitations should apply. I think Umbra Forma makes sense at a high cost (because of the increased Eximus rate I'm proposing) and with a one month time limit, so you can only buy one once a month. Why a limit this long? There is genuine concern over splitting the playerbase, and I think the Steel Path should not be the place where every single veteran player goes just to farm as much Umbra Forma as possible. The time limit would ensure that, especially if every mission type can be played in the Path (as it should). Players will eventually leave the Path and get on a cycle of getting back on the Path every month or so to get enough Steel Essence to get their Umbra Forma. This also means this Steel Essence farm should take much less time than a month, so players hop back into the regular player pool after they're done.

This would leave the Steel Path in a position of being something of a monthly "challenge" to take on, somewhat similar to the Maroo and Clem weekly alerts, except with a much more generous timer to account for the added difficulty (and to control the Umbra Forma economy of course).

The only other two places the Path can go at this point, at least that I can see, are:

1. another one-and-done island with no reason to come back to it

2. OR, if salient enough evergreen rewards are added to the Teshin shop or in-mission drops (think exceptionally high endo drops or similar), a permanent divider of the player base, because if the evergreens are high enough, people will think of the path as mandatory (as opposed to useless if the evergreens don't cross that threshold).

I don't like either of the two above options: one-and-done or mandatory. This is why I believe the solution of offering a highly desired reward like Umbra Forma, at a one month limit (with the farm to get the Steel Essence to purchase that one monthly unit taking much less than a month to grind) is the best solution going forward. It keeps the Steel Path relevant to high-level players, while not siphoning them off from the rest of the game or creating a toxic environment where the Steel Path is meta and mandatory to play to progress the fastest in the game. It would be a monthly "alert" to spice up the regular gameplay as you actually work, at least a bit, for your Umbra Forma instead of getting it simply handed to you by Nora.

And the higher Eximus spawn rate should ensure a different and challenging enough spice-up of the regular warframe gameplay loop to keep it fun when you jump in every month (or just farm enough Essence one month to simply claim your next Umbra Forma when the timer is up, your choice).

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk 😄

[Sasuga]

As someone who's a probably a ways off from the Steel Path yet:

Tougher, cool! But are they smarter?

[wtrmlnjuc]

2 minutes ago, Sasuga said:

As someone who's a probably a ways off from the Steel Path yet:

Tougher, cool! But are they smarter?

Absolutely not. They have the same patterns, pathfinding, and movement speed. Light & heavy unit distribution is about the same too. 

[Jarriaga]

Seems my initial post in this thread got removed.

DE, please add Umbra Forma slivers as rewards as well even if added to Teshin's store to slow down their acquisition.

Also, please increase the drop chance of Steel Essence. It's very low. Way too low considering I only got 2 from Eximus from Earth to Mercury. I got more via an inbox message when I completed a planet, but you will eventually run out of planets and won't be getting these E-mails.

[Sasuga]

5 minutes ago, wtrmlnjuc said:

Absolutely not. They have the same patterns, pathfinding, and movement speed. Light & heavy unit distribution is about the same too. 

Dang 😕

And thanks!

[Andvarja]

I'm pretty unhappy with the armor here. You guys made changes to armor scaling (and correspondingly to corrosive projection) a while back which let us have an actual choice in our auras, it was overall a good change! But now you've brought ridiculous armor scaling back for Steel Path. I feel like I'm stuck using Corrosive Projection again, but as a solo player one 18% CorrP doesn't really do all that much. It simultaneously feels not effective enough, and as though it's the only option because we need all we can get, so a utility aura is a mistake. It doesn't feel great.

The armor scaling changes expanded our options, we could still run CorrP for a little extra but it wasn't strictly necessary. The way armor is piled on in Steel Path just restricts them right back up. That's frustrating given the stated rationale for the change to how Xoris interacts with warframe abilities that scale off of statsticks (which is its own whole issue). Xoris actually opened up options in the current state of the game, but was claimed by DE to be closing them off. Then simultaneously to that, you reintroduce armor scaling problems that you'd already recently addressed, and quite well.

Please address the armor scaling, and if looking for a quick and easy adjustment increase their movespeed a little or something. Give us something to react to rather than just bullet sponges.

Rewards do seem a bit off, too.  I do a level 103 mission for an unrefined Lith relic and 2k credits?  I understand that early on you might want to be a bit conservative with the reward structure, so I'm hopeful that this is something you guys are looking at for review. Even the very first level of refinement on relics would differentiate the rewards a bit from just slamming out a level 3 mission.


As for what I do like as is, the junction specters actually feel pretty good right now, possibly they could even stand to be just a little tougher. Since they're basically minibosses, I don't mind a little bit of sponginess on them specifically, lets me engage with their mechanics.

[MephiticMetaphile]

Absolutely terrible.

DE has been trying to get players to use other weapons for a long while now and they've not just shot themselves in the foot with this update, but both feet and legs. If you want to get Steel Path missions done with any decent speed then you're forced into using the boring meta weapons that you see time and time again.

[Mover-NeRo]

Steel essence drop is too low. Like i cleaned 1,5 planets and did 30 min Survival and did not get any Essence (not counting the 2 for clearing planet).

Why are the drop rates so low? Its not like we can buy anything special for them. Low Riven sliver drops are fine.

[Surrebral]

6 hours ago, Monolake said:

How are people still bring up AI when its been beaten to death even by DEvelopers : AI is irrelevant unless you disable player abilities, since you can just stun and nuke the entire room

Perhaps then the problem is being able to stun/nuke the entire room. Not disable abilities, just change the ones that only take 1 button to clear a tile.

If that were to change, then maybe we could get better AI that could react faster, flank, and dodge some of our attacks. I would really like to see the AI use squad based tactics that play off of the individual strengths of the units to make the whole team more difficult to fight.

Also having them be aware of one another in a fight would be a nice change. Try to surround us more and not just charge at us in a conga line.

[Karasokami]

I just tried the Zealoid Prelate Bossfight with my friend, and damn, he ist bullet spoongy. We exited the fight, becasue it wopuld have taken at least 1-2 hours. I know this is hard mode, but thats much time. And even though I did not try it, I can imagine the Jordas Golem and Infested Alad V are the same. Vay hek on the other hand I could easily do solo. So maybe a little bit more Bossfight balancing would be nice.

 

 

[IzzyTH-I51]

33 minutes ago, RevanZim said:

I have read this entire thread now and played a good amount of Steel Path myself. I believe the amount of tweaking needed to make The Steel Path fun is not actually that much. Kind of how Railjack just needed a bit of adjustment, I think it's the same here.

I suggest the simple fix of increasing Eximus spawn rate by A LOT. Maybe 50% to 70% of a sortie Eximus Stronghold. This would address several points of feedback so far:

1. Low Steel Essence drop rates. Increase the spawn rate of the enemy that drops them, easy fix.

2. Low Affinity/desire for higher focus farm rate in Steel Path. Eximus enemies have much higher baseline affinity scores, in a recent Eximus sortie I stayed for about 13 minutes just for fun and got about 80k focus just farming some Eximii, pretty much the same I'd get in ESO. Now Eximus rate would be lower than that in the Steel Path, but rewarding nonetheless.

3. "Low" difficulty. Essentially, for high end players, nothing really changed aside from enemies taking two hits to kill now. A long time ago Steve talked about adding mid-tier enemies with weak-points in between the extremes of "boss" and "fodder" to change up the pacing of just slashing through hordes a little bit. Noxes were one foray in that direction, as were the glass enemies with the current nightwave. I believe Eximus units are closer to that goal than perhaps believed, at least when they spawn in great numbers. An individual Eximus unit is still a pushover, but together their auras and elemental resistances can be very annoying and challenging in a slightly different way than warframe's core gameplay loop usually challenges players. And I think that's all the Steel Path really needs.

Aside from this, credits could be boosted, sure. The mod booster makes no sense at all since the entire point of this mode is to already have all the mods and use them to kill the better enemies. The resource booster is OK, but not enough incentive. It should also stack with normal resource boosters, which according to other people in this thread it doesn't currently?

 

Now one last thing that should be done is to allow ALL mission types to be included the Path. As someone else said: "If I'm on the Steel Path, I don't wanna leave it". This means Nightmare, Fissures, Sorties, Lich missions, etc.

The big concern with this move is that it could split the playerbase a lot. I mean, why would I run normal fissures if I get double void traces on the Steel Path?

My proposed solution is the following: I'm the guy that has the first reply in this thread so of course I still think Umbra Forma should be a reward in the shop, however some limitations should apply. I think Umbra Forma makes sense at a high cost (because of the increased Eximus rate I'm proposing) and with a one month time limit, so you can only buy one once a month. Why a limit this long? There is genuine concern over splitting the playerbase, and I think the Steel Path should not be the place where every single veteran player goes just to farm as much Umbra Forma as possible. The time limit would ensure that, especially if every mission type can be played in the Path (as it should). Players will eventually leave the Path and get on a cycle of getting back on the Path every month or so to get enough Steel Essence to get their Umbra Forma. This also means this Steel Essence farm should take much less time than a month, so players hop back into the regular player pool after they're done.

This would leave the Steel Path in a position of being something of a monthly "challenge" to take on, somewhat similar to the Maroo and Clem weekly alerts, except with a much more generous timer to account for the added difficulty (and to control the Umbra Forma economy of course).

The only other two places the Path can go at this point, at least that I can see, are:

1. another one-and-done island with no reason to come back to it

2. OR, if salient enough evergreen rewards are added to the Teshin shop or in-mission drops (think exceptionally high endo drops or similar), a permanent divider of the player base, because if the evergreens are high enough, people will think of the path as mandatory (as opposed to useless if the evergreens don't cross that threshold).

I don't like either of the two above options: one-and-done or mandatory. This is why I believe the solution of offering a highly desired reward like Umbra Forma, at a one month limit (with the farm to get the Steel Essence to purchase that one monthly unit taking much less than a month to grind) is the best solution going forward. It keeps the Steel Path relevant to high-level players, while not siphoning them off from the rest of the game or creating a toxic environment where the Steel Path is meta and mandatory to play to progress the fastest in the game. It would be a monthly "alert" to spice up the regular gameplay as you actually work, at least a bit, for your Umbra Forma instead of getting it simply handed to you by Nora.

And the higher Eximus spawn rate should ensure a different and challenging enough spice-up of the regular warframe gameplay loop to keep it fun when you jump in every month (or just farm enough Essence one month to simply claim your next Umbra Forma when the timer is up, your choice).

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk 😄

 

reminds me of when nightwave first came out, i had an idea for nitain, compared to the alert system you get nitain much slower now, but you can bulk buy at the end of a season and never get nitain again... essentially my idea was add 4 nitain as an additional reward with standing from the daily challenges, to try and match the old time to collect.

 

with nightwave being the only way to get umbra forma, we could say nightwave is only for umbra froma, just, for this thought. doing challenges is equal to getting essence and time to collect is equal to completing nightwave at 100% speed.

so if i remember correctly, it took me one week to make 4 levels at 100% speed, and lets say umbra is a level 30 reward, thats uhh... math... about one and a half months, and lets also say for the thought that each 1k standing is one essence, thats... 300? that does sound absurd enough to me, I'd imagine essence drop rates or much better at like, mot, with a nekros, hydroid, khora combo.

 

so if we match getting an umbra to nightwave, just with this thought, it would be locked behind 300 essence and a 1.5 month cooldown, which sounds just about right for me, it'd be a fully crafted forma though, like nightwave's. there's probably some other balance that could be easily thought of if we made it a blueprint, but we'd probably still want it comparably absurd.

 

certainly DE could think of something with a similar utility and lack of theoretical use though, that would still have people breathing life in and out of steel path... and if I'm noticing correctly, steel path doesn't give increased affinity for killing 100+ enemies? like, in this current state it really is just mastery?

but it seems like the general consensus so far is that rewards are lacking, and some of the best idea's have been umbra forma or cosmetics, so I'd imagine at some point they'll do something along the lines of this mega thread where it seems the majority of us seem to be very close to the same page.