Maybe it is time to rebalance things by put diminishing returns on mod stacking

[BDMblue]

I would just remove mana add cooldowns. Nothing complicated. Well would take time to go through every single ability and add one but meh worth it.

[Pizzarugi]

4 minutes ago, Aldain said:

Perhaps rather than scaling every mob it should scale up select "heavy" units in between the chaff.

Then again I've suggested this before in some threads and been ignored (at best) or insulted (more commonly) so what do I know.

Considering the nerf to enemy armor scaling, heavies don't really stand out as a particular threat anymore. Corpus are still weak, Infested are still weak, Grineer are finally (roughly) around their level.

At this point, DE would be better off making tons of varied mini-bosses for each faction that is designed to soak up damage, knock you around, and block mission progress until dealt with. Either that or make non-endless mission objectives behave similarly to mobile defense, where every so often you have to stop moving forward and hold position as swarms of enemies swarm you before you're allowed to continue.

Take Rescue for example. Instead of punching random prison cell consoles trying to find the right one where the hostage is in, they're always in one cell and opening it requires plugging Lotus into it and defending it while hordes of enemies try to stop you.

[(NSW)Jothki]

2 hours ago, Padre_Akais said:

Monsters scale in MHW based on the number of people in the group. Challenge remains intact for both Solo and Group modes

 

This gets at something valid. Many other games scale for multiple players by making enemies stronger. Warframe scales by adding more enemies but leaving them just as weak. That means that frames and weapons built for hitting individual targets will become less effective, while frames and weapons that deal damage over a large area will remain just as powerful.

[HeartPurity]

so the frames need to be nerfed now in the eyes of the salty people?? It is called investment, people take the effort to forma their frames multiple times to make them stronger & this game is PVE so I really dont get why some are still getting jealous. Look at that poor ember, now she is in the freezer. I am worried about Khora becoming the next victim as some jelly people getting jelly of her too. If my teammates are powerful, I am happy because I dont have to carry a bunch of dead potatoes on my shoulder. 

[OvisCaedo]

Well, let's look at the stats here.

Strength: Don't see any issue with stacking the hell out of it, actually. Many non-damage effects hit hard caps relatively early in to strength stacking, and damage scaling is just... damage scaling, fairly linearly at that. You also take significant hits to a lot of other stats to go so all-in on damage. Really not any issue here. Map-clearing powers aren't like that because of 300% power strength (which a lot of them don't even go for!), it's because of having a game breaking ability design to begin with.

Duration: Also fairly straightforward for the most part. Every point of duration adds the same amount of time. It's easier to stack up without making a big sacrifice other than the slots, but generally doesn't have very directly gamebreaking effects. Full room lockdowns or such are a problem, but I think almost every case of them you'd be able to do just fine by simply casting more often even with worse duration scaling. The energy economy is too utterly shattered in several places to prevent that.

Efficiency: This stat is just stupid! Escalating returns instead of diminishing really make this one stand out as having needed a hard cap. But there's also only two mods for improving it, to that hard cap. Stacking it is technically already headed off, I guess. It probably never should have worked the way it does to begin with, and should have actually been "efficiency" instead of "% cost reduction" to make it stack/scale in a less absurd manner, with different numbers on it.

Range: This is also... kind of another problem one. With AOE effects, this also turns into something that has technically escalating returns when it comes to actual area covered. A lot of ability designs can become pretty absurd when they start getting too big, which has led to DE being all over the place with abilities almost arbitrarily requiring line of sight or not. But quite a lot of them still don't, and I think everyone's pretty familiar with the results of what abilities affecting such massive areas are.

So, some of the stats are issues, I'd agree. Though I'd probably disagree on it being much by means of power creep for most players, since it's been like this since Corrupted mods were released extremely early into the game's life once it was out of closed beta. Those were, and still are, the biggest sources of being able to get an absurd amount of stats into potentially gamebreaking territory. Individually weaker mods added since like the Auger set or such have had very little impact in comparison, I think. (except maybe now for their interaction with shield gating but that's a separate thing).

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

Warframe modding in this game is when the modding system actually works. 

The issue is weapons modding with how Base Damage, Multishot, Elemental Damage and Crits are multiplicative which makes scaling something DE has a hard time balancing.

There isn't a reason not to stack all these multipliers together so a lot of builds look samey. There is little reason not to put Base Damage with Multi-shot save for things like the Ferrox.

If Multishot mods were buffed, but made mutually exclusive with Base Damage, then that might open up a single slot, though most players will probably add in the next multiplier like Faction Damage. 

 

[Rakosta_Kai]

24 minutes ago, Aldain said:

Perhaps rather than scaling every mob it should scale up select "heavy" units in between the chaff.

Then again I've suggested this before in some threads and been ignored (at best) or insulted (more commonly) so what do I know.

I'd say setup co-op scaling for all of them but have them scale to different degrees.

The Mesa or Saryn setup to pop lvl 130's like piñatas will still do that if they aren't.

Yes, it would mean that we would have to re-define what Endless modes look like for Co-OP, but there's no law saying that both versions can't exist at the same time and just change the core objective and drop tables between them.

Spoiler

 

Instead of the struggle to keep air... Let's say it's the struggle to provide a large enough distraction for the Tenno operative. And instead of scaling levels it alternately scales mob count and mob type every other 5 minutes with the Operative hitting paydirt at that location every 15 minutes. Hitting paydirt has the operative detected and signals the arrival of a Sub-Commanding Lich and their thralls. Defeat them and the Operative goes to a new area to start the process over with even higher difficulty.  The next 15 minutes signals that the mobs are just as tough but do more damage. Rinse and repeat.

The goal being to grind players off the map without making failure be a punishment and reward the heck out of the ones who stick it out.

 

People would be glad to have Mesas and Saryns in those missions and folks wouldn't be kvetching about how Trinity made it all too easy.  

The barrier to ideas like these has a lot to do with the nerf mentality,"Nerf their stuff but leave mine alone.". In my example's case, nothing gets nerfed though as folks would still have access to their current modes.

...It still won't gain traction though because of the nerf mentality.

10 minutes ago, (NSW)Jothki said:

This gets at something valid. Many other games scale for multiple players by making enemies stronger. Warframe scales by adding more enemies but leaving them just as weak. That means that frames and weapons built for hitting individual targets will become less effective, while frames and weapons that deal damage over a large area will remain just as powerful.

... And it's encouraged and rewarded.

[(XBOX)Demon Intellect]

On 2020-07-20 at 2:51 AM, Pizzarugi said:

It's not about competition, it's about the game not devolving into a walking simulator because one player wants to wave their e-peen around by 1shotting rooms of enemies.

I don't play the game to just go from start to extraction, but this is what I've been reduced to doing when someone joins a mission playing Saryn or Mesa or other frames that just have high damage, high range AoE abilities.

Also, it devalues other frames. Why bother playing a tank like Rhino or Revenant when you can just nuke the map? Why bother bringing Trinity to heal when Saryn can just make all threats disappear? Why bother playing a CC frame like Nyx when the best form of CC is making enemies vanish in a puff of affinity? I'd just be better off playing a nuke frame, mashing one ability, and moving towards extraction. The others are worthless. If they don't nuke, there's no reason you should play them.

This is your logic. Like, how does any non-nuke frame "compete" with a nuke frame without deliberately sabotaging them (ex. Putting Frost domes down in front of Mesa to block their LoS or playing max range Nyx with Chaos augment in a defense to keep enemies out of Saryn's ability range) or if they're new and don't know how to build the frame right?

Funny thing is that that wasnt the point the OP was trying to make at all because a decent power 130% powerstrength mesa can still nuke mobs fast and a 145% saryn can still spore enemies long before you see them. Kinda projected pretty hard with the nerf nuke frames thing 

[-Sandman]

On 2020-07-20 at 8:40 AM, (XB1)ECCHO SIERRA said:

This. Don't forget the part where OP begins with the supposition that his idea of "balance" will somehow be more fun for everybody else. 

This isn't said enough around here.

 

So many complex arguments about making the game more realistic or fun but it ends up really only being that person rationalizing their POV and what they want. 

 

What if the present state is someone else's idea of fun? What if some people just want to finish a mission as efficiently as possible and collect the reward? What if some people don't like to play the "kill" role at all and rather run around playing support/cc/buff instead?  

[Pizzarugi]

6 hours ago, (XB1)Demon Intellect said:

Funny thing is that that wasnt the point the OP was trying to make at all because a decent power 130% powerstrength mesa can still nuke mobs fast and a 145% saryn can still spore enemies long before you see them. Kinda projected pretty hard with the nerf nuke frames thing 

My point was arguing against the typical strawman people like to use to dismiss legitimate criticisms with broken nuke frames, as you'll notice I was arguing against someone else.

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

49 minutes ago, -Sandman said:

This isn't said enough around here.

 

So many complex arguments about making the game more realistic or fun but really it ends up really only being that person rationalizing their POV and what they want. 

 

What if the present state is someone else's idea of fun? What if some people just want to finish a mission as efficiently as possible and collect the reward? What if some people don't like to play the "kill" role at all and rather run around playing support/cc/buff instead?  

I hope you dont mind if I borrow this point in the future. 

[(XBOX)Demon Intellect]

1 hour ago, Pizzarugi said:

My point was arguing against the typical strawman people like to use to dismiss legitimate criticisms with broken nuke frames, as you'll notice I was arguing against someone else.

Well that's kinda the good thing about the steel path. CC frames are actually viable as are utility frames.

[Pizzarugi]

32 minutes ago, (XB1)Demon Intellect said:

Well that's kinda the good thing about the steel path. CC frames are actually viable as are utility frames.

How many people are going to stick to Steel Path after they've completed all of the mission nodes? Steel Essence is rare, plus some activities aren't given the Steel Path treatment like Void Fissures, Syndicate missions, Kuva Siphons, I might be missing others.

There's not enough incentive to stick to it when you can just go back to Arbitration and get more or less the same rewards more easily.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

2 hours ago, -Sandman said:

This isn't said enough around here.

 

So many complex arguments about making the game more realistic or fun but it ends up really only being that person rationalizing their POV and what they want. 

 

What if the present state is someone else's idea of fun? What if some people just want to finish a mission as efficiently as possible and collect the reward? What if some people don't like to play the "kill" role at all and rather run around playing support/cc/buff instead?  

Thanks for being a voice of reason.

If I know I'm gonna be building some crazy AOE loadout that might affect someone else, I go solo or go to recruit chat. They can do the same. 

I've seen people in recruit chat literally asking for a nuke for Hydron. 

We're can both currently exist in the same sphere.

[Tyreaus]

23 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Warframe modding in this game is when the modding system actually works. 

The issue is weapons modding with how Base Damage, Multishot, Elemental Damage and Crits are multiplicative which makes scaling something DE has a hard time balancing.

There isn't a reason not to stack all these multipliers together so a lot of builds look samey. There is little reason not to put Base Damage with Multi-shot save for things like the Ferrox.

If Multishot mods were buffed, but made mutually exclusive with Base Damage, then that might open up a single slot, though most players will probably add in the next multiplier like Faction Damage. 

 

Largely agree with this. If there are issues with how Warframes mod up, such as the issue of "mod for x ability and ignore everything else" or of some ability being ridiculously powerful, the issue is more often in the Warframe's design. Altering how mods stack isn't going to put Loki up there with Saryn.

Regarding weapon damage: I think one simple, but certainly not gentle, fix would be to make all damage mods additive on the same level (maybe barring faction mods). In other words, all damage mods would work off the weapon's base unmodded damage, not the base damage multiplied by base damage mods.

I don't know if there's necessarily a good fix for multishot, but I've always felt splitting multishot in some way - e.g. having one that applies crit chance to every pellet but splits status chance across the pellets (like shotguns) and another that applies status chance to every pellet but splits crit chance across the pellets - could help. It'd mean you can trade crit chance for better status; status chance for better crit; or take both but lower ammo economy (in the form of fire rate mods). If those are made mutually exclusive, could work...

[(XBOX)Demon Intellect]

11 hours ago, Pizzarugi said:

How many people are going to stick to Steel Path after they've completed all of the mission nodes? Steel Essence is rare, plus some activities aren't given the Steel Path treatment like Void Fissures, Syndicate missions, Kuva Siphons, I might be missing others.

There's not enough incentive to stick to it when you can just go back to Arbitration and get more or less the same rewards more easily.

That skull ephemera will keep playing for a while.

[844448]

On 2020-07-20 at 12:55 PM, Prexades said:

Yes, I guess a lot of people will be angry about it, but one of the main complaints is power creep and the stacking of specific mods is the main source of creep. Saryns with multiple range mods that cover most of the visible area and there are more examples.

The issue is that at some point with something like 300% range or 300% power strength some game mechanics will break. That will always happen unless the creep is reigned in somewhat. That happened to other games as well with Eve Online stacking damage mods until battleships could instantly melt anything (long ago), or with nano (speed) mods stacking to the point where the hit and damage calculations went bonkers and the ships became practically immune to damage. The solution to stacking damage or speed mods was always to put in diminishing returns. I am not saying there should be no benefit for exampe in putting Stretch + Overextended together but the percentages should be lowered by a fair amount and the benefit for adding a third range mod for example should be further reduced. Same with damage or duration.

Might as well going full risk and reward by eliminating stacking like my thread

 

[lowgrav]

so just to sum it up you want diminishing returns on mods like power strength? .... don't we already have that i saw the wiki when i was doing a build for my frame 200% power was 30% for the ability the wiki section had a fancy slider so i could check how much strength i would need for what i wanted and according to the wiki i needed 8000% to get to 75% thats riduculus then i found out ability strength % is like armor lvl the higher the power you want the more you are gona need to just click it over the 1 and i wouldn't be surprised if range and duration have the same mechanic but we wont get to that limit to see

also if you didnt know a solo player can get power strength up to 464% most dont go that high as whats the point if the cast is supper expensive the range is terrible and the duration is not as high as it could be on a final note the problem with trying to balance things with this idea is most play missions with randoms so teamplay is hard as some dont want it (when you go to recruting chat to help somebody do they just start the mission when you join the squad or do you spend 10 min planing what everyone brings /does? as far as i know the planing thing is a terry thing and we remember the 8 player squad missions that forced team co-operation its gone now)

game is if you cant trust randoms do it yourself hence why people crank the nuke frames up so high

[Drachnyn]

The more viable mods we have for warframes the more build tinkering is a thing. If you cut down on that you'll get a very boring modding system. 

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

19 hours ago, -Sandman said:

What if the present state is someone else's idea of fun? What if some people just want to finish a mission as efficiently as possible and collect the reward? What if some people don't like to play the "kill" role at all and rather run around playing support/cc/buff instead?  

It's fine if that's their idea of fun, but, in a game in which the entire goal is grinding items, what's the point of having options if a single, small subset of game styles, i.e. AoE nuking, is the most effective at mostly everything in the game by a large margin? The existence of "other roles" is wishful thinking at best, the only two instances in which I legitimately saw people organizing in roles were scarlet spear and eidolons. That leaves out a pretty hefty chunk of the game, to put it lightly. Generally, there's no need for support when most nuke frames can sustain themselves health-wise with no problems and when energy economy is non-existent, there's no need for CC since enemies are already CCed by death, and there is no need for buffing when enemies die in the blink of an eye anyways. In a game in which the main focus is matchmade missions, telling someone to avoid playing public if they want to go with a non-nuking playstyle and not play hallway simulator is a clear sign of underlaying issues with the game systems.

DE and the community should strive for a game in which each of the tools at the player's disposal is useful and needed in its own way, so that players in a group can specialize and cooperate, instead of always, exclusively min-maxing for AoE nuking potential and competing with each other for kills.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

21 hours ago, Pizzarugi said:

How many people are going to stick to Steel Path after they've completed all of the mission nodes? Steel Essence is rare, plus some activities aren't given the Steel Path treatment like Void Fissures, Syndicate missions, Kuva Siphons, I might be missing others.

There's not enough incentive to stick to it when you can just go back to Arbitration and get more or less the same rewards more easily.

I will.

People like you keep using the essence drop rate excuse like you don't understand that you're not supposed rush content....

Did you really expect 2,000 steel essence after 1 play through of a games content that just dropped?

Why would anyone intentionally make content that can be finished in 3 hours? 

Just like with everything else in the game, you play a little of this and a little of that, because it adds up in the future.

If you play the game passively instead of rushing, you (in theory) actually enjoy the content. Then in a month or something you're like "....why do I have so many steel essence..."

 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

3 hours ago, (XB1)ShonFr0st said:

It's fine if that's their idea of fun, but, in a game in which the entire goal is grinding items, what's the point of having options if a single, small subset of game styles, i.e. AoE nuking, is the most effective at mostly everything in the game by a large margin? The existence of "other roles" is wishful thinking at best, the only two instances in which I legitimately saw people organizing in roles were scarlet spear and eidolons. That leaves out a pretty hefty chunk of the game, to put it lightly. Generally, there's no need for support when most nuke frames can sustain themselves health-wise with no problems and when energy economy is non-existent, there's no need for CC since enemies are already CCed by death, and there is no need for buffing when enemies die in the blink of an eye anyways. In a game in which the main focus is matchmade missions, telling someone to avoid playing public if they want to go with a non-nuking playstyle and not play hallway simulator is a clear sign of underlaying issues with the game systems.

DE and the community should strive for a game in which each of the tools at the player's disposal is useful and needed in its own way, so that players in a group can specialize and cooperate, instead of always, exclusively min-maxing for AoE nuking potential and competing with each other for kills.

Are you playing with every single person in the game? How do know what everyone is running? Are you just using anecdotal evidence because you've just been clicking on nodes with public on this whole time? 

[Pizzarugi]

2 hours ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

People like you keep using the essence drop rate excuse like you don't understand that you're not supposed rush content....

Press-4-to-win frame mains would disagree strongly with this. The whole point they're trivializing the game by mashing 4 is so they can rush missions as quickly as possible for the rewards.

2 hours ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

Did you really expect 2,000 steel essence after 1 play through of a games content that just dropped?

Steel essence has a 5% chance to drop from eximus enemies, that means 1 in 20 will drop a Steel Essence. If you check the wiki and search the comments in the Steel Essence page, someone showed a screenshot of them earning 350 in a single endless mission, time spent unknown, after having killed 54k enemies.

I'm pretty sure this took several hours to obtain. And the person who achieved this said they got a 2 week trade ban for their effort.

Barring cosmetics and the occasional stance forma (you're silly if you spend the essence on relic packs when Syndicate standing is easier), the main use of this will be to buy Kuva. If you took all of that essence and used it for Kuva, that's about 230000 Kuva total after maybe 8 hours.

If you're some madman who wants to craft god-roll rivens to sell for huge platinum profits, this might be worth doing. For anyone else? What's the point? What's the incentive?

1 hour ago, (PS4)Madurai-Prime said:

Are you playing with every single person in the game? How do know what everyone is running? Are you just using anecdotal evidence because you've just been clicking on nodes with public on this whole time? 

Is it necessary?

It's true that nuke frames invalidate the existence of everything else that isn't one. Energy economy is a joke and might as well not exist at this point, so support frames that help provide energy are unneeded. CC frames are redundant when everything is dead (veterans will remember a time when they were the meta). Tank frames are pointless if the things they're trying to aggro are all wiped out.

[Takamori]

Its an ARPG so I'd guess most of the playerbase wants to do the usual in a ARPG that is farming stuff so they either achieve more Power, different ways to kill stuff and Style too look gorgeous while looking for stuff.So power creep is part of the game you are playing.

The base farming is the bread and butter for this game, I arrive from work tired,I have the option to pop some relaxing music in spotify and shut down my brain while seeking a mod. What I miss though is have the BIG GOAL where we can say for example in Path of Exile, they have The Shaper, The Elder, Aul, Sirus and so on. This is the place where will test if you managed to do a good build

So instead of asking to "balance" this aspect, what hardcore players should ask for is more HC content. Steel Path is a first step but they could use what in the Path of Exile has, like end game boss, have an actual really difficult boss where you can either solo or do group for it so they can use their min max and feel challenged at the same time. At the same time DE should communicate that such content is meant to be challenging.

[Pizzarugi]

4 minutes ago, Takamori said:

Its an ARPG so I'd guess most of the playerbase wants to do the usual in a ARPG that is farming stuff so they either achieve more Power, different ways to kill stuff and Style too look gorgeous while looking for stuff.So power creep is part of the game you are playing.

The base farming is the bread and butter for this game, I arrive from work tired,I have the option to pop some relaxing music in spotify and shut down my brain while seeking a mod. What I miss though is have the BIG GOAL where we can say for example in Path of Exile, they have The Shaper, The Elder, Aul, Sirus and so on. This is the place where will test if you managed to do a good build

So instead of asking to "balance" this aspect, what hardcore players should ask for is more HC content. Steel Path is a first step but they could use what in the Path of Exile has, like end game boss, have an actual really difficult boss where you can either solo or do group for it so they can use their min max and feel challenged at the same time. At the same time DE should communicate that such content is meant to be challenging.

Wasn't that kind of what Kuva Liches were supposed to be? 😛