Steel Path: Some Suggestions

[KuraiWolf2014]

Steel Path is a bit tedious and not very rewarding. This is supposed to be a sort-of "hard mode" that gives better rewards at a greater challenge. But currently, it doesn't. Now, I am not going to get into the rewards here, this post is just dedicated to the gameplay side of things.

 

1. Change the drop boosts for an affinity boost and a new mechanic

 

2. The new mechanic should be a "momentum" feature. It works like this: Have a multiplier similar to the combo counter that goes away after a few seconds. Increase that multiplier by getting kills (excluding CC/Nuke ability kills). The higher your multiplier, the higher your chances of getting rare drops from all enemies (that includes steel essence from eximus units) up to a reasonable cap.

 

3. Remove the armor buff and replace it with either a damage buff or, better yet, a rotating modifier. Like, every few hours the modifier changes, and it will apply to all Steel Path missions. Have some of the same modifiers that sorties have plus some new ones. Like some can be similar to skulls from Halo, like Iron making all enemies higher tiered (elite units and eximi for example), or cloud/fog forcefully disabling all enemy radar (not the whole minimap, just enemy tracking) and also maybe add a thick fog to the map for reduced visibility.

 

This is all just to make Steel Path less of a slog to play through and can be supplemented with improved rewards.

[Yuri_Doujinshi]

Steel path isn't supposed to reward you outside of mastery and more affinity from higher level enemies. All Steel Path is supposed to be is a way to challenge yourself if you feel like it. If it was given actually meaningful rewards such as an affinity booster, people would feel obligated to play it, thus generating resentment from the people who can't handle the mode or don't like fighting high level enemies (which is most of the playerbase). DE's intention with this mode is to give people who enjoy fighting extremely high level enemies an easier way to do that; I would bet that the only reason it was given rewards at all was to avoid the "MUH CONTENT DROUGHT" portion of the community's complaints that they weren't getting anything useful from a content update.

For me, I will be playing through all of the Steel Path missions for mastery and the armor set, then likely never touching it again until I need to level archwing things on Salacia. Archwing is still stupidly easy on Steel Path, so getting the bonus spawns and affinity will make leveling archwing gear significantly easier.