Steel Path survival life support module drop

[Samhel]

So the problem: I kill more enemies in 2 minutes on a Steel Path survival mission than on a Normal survival in 10 minutes and yet the life suppport modules are the rarest drop i can see from enemies.

I don't know if this is caused because i'm playing it on solo mode (because everyone else just uses some overpowered abilities on public and i can't play with my weapons or frames) or because there's something wrong going on in the equation, but this definitely needs to be fixed. Without a khora/nekros/hydroid there's no way one can survive more than 5 or 10 minutes without using a life support capsule, keeping in mind that this person still kills more enemies than on any survival before in that 5 minutes.

[Magus_Tahir]

Even on normal if your Kills Per Second (KPS) are not high enough to push RNG in your favor you will end up using a Life Support Capsule. I have not encountered a Survival mission as of yet in the SP that we have not needed to use a LSC. The last one I did was Kelashin on Neptune and it was a Volt and a Saryn in the 5 minute window we used 2 LSC our total Life Support was around 80-90% until we let it drop to 50 then used a LSC. 

It does feel like they may be slower but since they attempted to add "challenge" the rate may have been slowed. I believe it may be intentional to use the LSC in the SP if that is the case. There was a Survival I did on Saturn however that was a full party and we didn't end up using any LSC. So who knows at this point.

[Traumtulpe]

1 hour ago, Samhel said:

Without a khora/nekros/hydroid there's no way one can survive more than 5 or 10 minutes without using a life support capsule, keeping in mind that this person still kills more enemies than on any survival before in that 5 minutes.

That is not true, you just need to kill faster. If you camp in a corner, with your Specters making you invincible, you will indeed run out of life support. However, running through the hallways in the direction of new spawns, while mowing everything down, will give you enough life support.

[taiiat]

without l00t Abilities, you're supposed to be using Life Support Towers periodically.
that's the point.

that's how it's supposed to work. that you consume some of the Life Support Towers over time. as long as your Kill rate is good you should always be at a net positive of Life Support Towers so that they build up over time, but it is still 100% normal to be using Life Support Towers.
there are times that you may have very low need for them with very high Kill rates (and/or exploiting how the drop Chance works - no, not that kind of exploit, there is another definition that has been used for far longer of exploit. i'm talking about the other form of exploit) however, but these situations are abnormal.

 

being able to go upwards of 10 minutes without using a Life Support Tower is actually very high performance, not very low.

[Wyrmius_Prime]

Enemy spawns are still room-dependent. I had no problems going 2 hours solo in Ani, Void, but struggled a bit with life support on a dark sector infested survival and corpus survival, even though individual infested and corpus enemies die faster due to 0 armor.

[60framespersecond]

Compared to normal mode, the drop chance for life support appears to be significantly reduced in Steel Path. I put some data points over at https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1207827-steel-path-survival-life-support-drop-chance. You probably need upwards of 150 KPM to be independent of the towers without using loot frames.

Edit: Slight correction/update. This might be related to the node, as I had no issues whatsoever on Ani with 130 KPM, but in the Derelict I struggled with the same KPM.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

Most of the issues with survival spawn rates and keeping LS up without using towers is down to player positioning vs DE's poor spawn mechanics and very poor enemy pathing, which has somehow gotten worse sometime in the last few months.  I've done solo survivals without farm frames that have lasted over an hour, only needing towers if I hit a bad position or moved around too much.  I can tell if I'm going to need a tower based entirely on what's happening with my minimap, via enemy radar and seeing what the tiles around me look like.

It used to be that you needed to pick a certain kind of tile to camp out, so that enemies would feed into that tile from adjacent tiles that were easy for the enemy to spawn in and move through.  If you had a room that was too big or too complicated for the pathing to figure out adjacent to your camp room, it would slow spawn down.  Now, enemies seem to get stuck in the room they spawn in about half the time, even if they spawn in an end tile, right in front of the door.  I've literally seen enemies just pile up right outside the doors to the room I'm camping.  They either broke it and don't care, or they stealth nerfed camp farming by tweaking the AI to not feed the player anymore.  Neither would surprise me in the slightest.

The method I use currently is still pretty much the same, but now I have to find 2-3 suitable tiles and run a path back and forth between them, or I have to find a very long hallway type tile and sit in the middle of it.  Leaving the middle of the tile puts me too close to the doors and the enemies will stop coming through and just stack up outside it.  Staying in that position concentrates spawn in the adjacent tiles (of which there will only be two options for the game to pick from.) and makes it so they feed me continually.  Deviating from that means LS will dip. 

The issue people are having with spawns in multiplayer missions is the fact that no one, not even people that have had the mechanics explained to them in detail, literally no one cares about how the spawn mechanics work in this game.  You can tell people that splitting up super far from each other breaks spawn concentration, and that constantly changing rooms, especially without fully clearing enemies from the room they're leaving, moves spawn around every single time they go through a doorway, and they'll just keep doing it anyway.  I've been in arbitrations with life support at <20% and no towers left, practically begging my squad to stop being idiots, group up and stay in a concentrated area because that's the only way the mode actually functions and they're all just running around chasing the red triangles to the far corners of the map wondering why life support is so low.  

Ignoring enemy spawns and not clearing your way from excavator to excavator is also the reason why cell carrier spawn breaks in excavation missions.  The reason why DE can't fix that is because they aren't looking at the core of how their spawn mechanics work.  They just bump up the number of cell carriers and call it a day and put on a pikachu face when it still doesn't work.  They know exactly why it doesn't work, and why life support drops don't work and several other issues like this are all functioning poorly for players:

They want us to play the game like a slow, methodical, tactical shooter and engage with every single enemy through the whole mission.  At every turn, multiple developers have espoused that "we finish missions too quickly" and "shouldn't be skipping half the mission" (which was one of Pablo's defenses for nerfing Wukong's Cloud Walker.) and it's very clear to anyone paying attention that they want us to play a certain way and enforce that play style every chance they get via game mechanics.  If you play these missions the way that they were "intended" to be played and not the way most of us actually want to play them, they all function pretty well.  You can go test this yourself.  These spawning and drop mechanics have been "broken" for years precisely because they are not broken to DE.

[Samhel]

Well, while everything does make sense that you mentioned, this feedback's point is that on Steel Path survival missions specifically the drop rate of life support modules by fallen enemies seems to be drastically reduced, and that i suspect it to be an unseen change in the drop table in steel path missions.

[mac10smg--Toa_of_Green]

47 minutes ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

They want us to play the game like a slow, methodical, tactical shooter and engage with every single enemy through the whole mission.  At every turn, multiple developers have espoused that "we finish missions too quickly" and "shouldn't be skipping half the mission" (which was one of Pablo's defenses for nerfing Wukong's Cloud Walker.) and it's very clear to anyone paying attention that they want us to play a certain way and enforce that play style every chance they get via game mechanics.  If you play these missions the way that they were "intended" to be played and not the way most of us actually want to play them, they all function pretty well.  You can go test this yourself.  These spawning and drop mechanics have been "broken" for years precisely because they are not broken to DE.

Well, I guess that’s why I ever rarely encounter spawn issues, because that’s almost always how I play.

And in those instances that I do, I’m usually in a hurry, so I do just speed through.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

10 minutes ago, Samhel said:

Well, while everything does make sense that you mentioned, this feedback's point is that on Steel Path survival missions specifically the drop rate of life support modules by fallen enemies seems to be drastically reduced, and that i suspect it to be an unseen change in the drop table in steel path missions.

I would assume reduced kill speed, but OP specifically mentioned higher kill counts than in normal survivals in the same time frame.

One thing I've noticed and been keeping tabs on, but haven't fully figured out yet mechanically is that when normal survivals get to higher levels, even if your kill speed doesn't slow down, life support drops can slow down dramatically on occasion.  A completely untested theory I have is that either Eximus units don't drop LS, or have a lower chance to.  That, or something screwy happens with the drop tables in longer missions, possibly due to enemy scaling.  Ran an arby a few days ago and someone in squad was running a drop chance booster and it absolutely rained Vitus on us for the first hour.  Then it just stopped.  It didn't look like just RNG where we had 5 minutes of solid rolls on the drop table and then it slowed down.  I'm talking like 30 essence before boosters in the first hour, like every third drone was dropping for an hour straight, then maybe 5 drops the next whole hour we were there.  The exact same thing happens with LS drops sometimes and I would not be shocked in the slightest if either a) it's intentional because DE hates endurance runners, or b) the drop tables break at a certain level because this game is held together with string and maple syrup.

If drop tables do break at a certain level it would make sense that there's something wrong with SP survival right at the start of the mission.

[Traumtulpe]

5 hours ago, Samhel said:

Without a khora/nekros/hydroid there's no way one can survive more than 5 or 10 minutes without using a life support capsule

Oh look, some life support dropped:

I also got 15 Steel Essence in case anyone wanted to know.

[taiiat]

On 2020-07-19 at 2:55 PM, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

but OP specifically mentioned higher kill counts than in normal survivals in the same time frame.

one should not be all that surprised if say, there are twice as many Enemies Spawning, that you'd get roughly half as many Life Support Drops per Enemy.

[Lutesque]

On 2020-07-19 at 5:53 PM, Traumtulpe said:

That is not true, you just need to kill faster. If you camp in a corner, with your Specters making you invincible, you will indeed run out of life support. However, running through the hallways in the direction of new spawns, while mowing everything down, will give you enough life support.

This isnt true either... Basing the Game completely around RNG is just stupid. Maybe hes killing plenty fast but the RNG is just being S#&amp;&#036;ty again.

On 2020-07-19 at 10:31 PM, Traumtulpe said:

Oh look, some life support dropped:

I also got 15 Steel Essence in case anyone wanted to know.

Lucky...

 

[Bademeister44]

Am 19.7.2020 um 17:53 schrieb Traumtulpe:

That is not true, you just need to kill faster. If you camp in a corner, with your Specters making you invincible, you will indeed run out of life support. However, running through the hallways in the direction of new spawns, while mowing everything down, will give you enough life support.

with solo survival an enemy radar always helps, even when you camp.

When camping, the space is also important.

I didn't notice that less life support capsule dropping in steel path

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

On 2020-07-24 at 1:56 AM, taiiat said:

one should not be all that surprised if say, there are twice as many Enemies Spawning, that you'd get roughly half as many Life Support Drops per Enemy.

Maybe that's how you're conditioned to see things, but that sounds like a bunch of BS to me.  If the enemies are harder and there are twice as many of them, the drop rate should stay the same as the normal mode at the very least.

 

  

On 2020-07-24 at 3:52 AM, Lutesque said:

This isnt true either... Basing the Game completely around RNG is just stupid. Maybe hes killing plenty fast but the RNG is just being S#&amp;&#036;ty again.

Lucky...

 

While I agree on principal that basing everything on RNG is stupid, you're saying he got lucky.  Well, then he got lucky for an hour straight, because the life support is up there almost at max and he's 64 minutes in.  It's already been mentioned in this thread several times that your map position and kill speed are the most important factors in keeping life support up via kills rather than towers.

[prodi1600]

I think its related to kill count, you need to find a method to kill more enemies than you usually do that does help with spamming life support modules.

[taiiat]

5 hours ago, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

If the enemies are harder and there are twice as many of them, the drop rate should stay the same as the normal mode at the very least.

it is supposed to be a 'hard mode', after all. don't have much of an opinion on that.

though i could say that playing any Survival Mission for __ length makes Enemies have more Health, but Survival doesn't get easier to maintain the longer you're there just because Enemies are theoretically harder to Kill - that's a part of the Gamemode that Enemies will take longer to die and that will impact how long one can stay.

[fr4gb4ll]

the droprate for lf in a survival mission is ok if you just want to do the 5min and opening the node on the map, but it sure is a problem if you want to go beyond and being alone in the steel path mission... this is kind of sad imo and also narrows the choice of frames for it down to a selected few - but maybe that was what DE intended.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

Now that SP is on console, I can actually do more than speculate, and something is definitely wrong with life support drops in SP survival.  Comparing 5 minute runs, as well as comparing experience in running solo survivals, the drop rate in SP is much lower for life support.  

I have 40% more kills in the same time frame, but can only keep life support in the high 60's by the end of a 5 minute run instead of reliably keeping it at max, and that's WITH Nekros.  Like OP said, it's not kill speed.  And the spawn rate is set so high that you don't even need to take positioning and spawn mechanics into account as much as you normally do.  Just straight running through enemies faster than normal, but life support was very slowly going down over 5 minutes with the drop rate for modules not keeping up with decay.

I am unaware of any other game modes being tweaked like this, if this is intentional, and I don't see the point and think that it should definitely be fixed.

[PollexMessier]

The drops are down to an abysmal level on steel path for sure. Without a loot frame, killing enemies as fast as the game allows them to spawn still doesn't seem like enough to keep life support up.

and needing to travel 100-200 meters to get a life support periodically REALLY throws things off because of the max spawn rate. Enemies in survival seem to have a really high despawn distance and you hit the spawn cap near instantly. Meaning you have the entire spawn cap of enemies trailing leagues behind you as you rush off to get life support, wasting a load of time. A loot frame is practically mandatory here.

It's unacceptably bad.

[Traumtulpe]

23 hours ago, PollexMessier said:

Without a loot frame, killing enemies as fast as the game allows them to spawn still doesn't seem like enough to keep life support up. [...] It's unacceptably bad.

This is still wrong 7 months later. Your problem is you: You are killing too slow to keep the life support up, yet you expect to be able to disregard the life support towers provided to you.

Look, there are people playing Warframe that want at least a couple missions worth doing that aren't super baby mode. For these people, the Steel Path is already too easy. Yet you demand it be made even easier still? How about you play some missions on, I don't know, Saturn? Non Steel Path of course, should be more to your liking.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

Killing ennemies ain't really hard ( melee with viral+slash+blood rush+berzerker+ condition overload + cedo...), but the survival module drop is really random. Sometimes they just doesn't drop.

I'm ok with a teamplay, but we should need more loot frame than just khora and nekros (hydroid in steel path is a joke), and the loot kubrow ain't efficient as it's only one corpse every 6s IIRC

[(PSN)sister-hawk]

I ran into this problem the other day when I went solo into Saturn survival to do the nightwave challenge. It is true that I was killing individual enemies a little slower compared to the normal version of this mission, although “longer” than 0.02 seconds doesn’t mean much. But I was still doing fine. And yet I just could not keep the life support going, even with the significantly higher spawn rate. The drop rate on capsules was abysmal.

[(PSN)sister-hawk]

21 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

This is still wrong 7 months later. Your problem is you: You are killing too slow to keep the life support up, yet you expect to be able to disregard the life support towers provided to you.

Look, there are people playing Warframe that want at least a couple missions worth doing that aren't super baby mode. For these people, the Steel Path is already too easy. Yet you demand it be made even easier still? How about you play some missions on, I don't know, Saturn? Non Steel Path of course, should be more to your liking.

You don’t have to clown this hard my guy.

It’s already been stated multiple times in this thread that there are several variables that seem to influence enemy spawns in survival, many of which are either out of the player’s control, or not something people should be expected to dissect and memorize. It’s not always a matter of just playing better.

I’ve seen this kind of attitude countless times across countless threads across the web for longer than I care to remember, and every person that has it makes the same critical mistake: you assume that when feedback of this nature is given, the motivation must be that the feedback giver just wants the game to be easier. I don’t think anyone in this thread realistically wants the game to baby them. That sort of remark is uncalled for.

What I want is for the game to function as expected. Maybe it’s true that the drop rate of capsules is lower in steel path. And maybe it’s true if you want to play steel path survival solo without being utterly reliant on towers (not just disregarding them) that you need a hardcore meta setup. No one is really arguing that that is not true.

But if I’m fully kitted out with gear that in any other area of the game would be considered of an “endgame” level, I would expect to be ok in sp survival. I don’t think I should have to go another step further and abide by a strict meta room-clear setup just to make the game function correctly.

People can express that opinion without wanting the game to practically play itself for them.

And you can disagree with their opinion. But the condescending attitude is not needed or helpful.

[(XBOX)J3GJ]

LMFAO, this thread is hilarious