Teoarrk Posted July 23, 2020 Share Posted July 23, 2020 (edited) Welcome to the second edition of my thread. Thank you for 25.8K views! ----------->Latest post<------------- Previous thread Something else Contents: Pets 2.0 Part 1: Here Comes the Birds Part 2: Creating Gods Part 3: The Stuff of Legends Part 4: T.A.I.L.S Part 5: Quests and Consequences Bonus addition: Mood Collars and Food Bonus addition: Pet control system Trials. The Vault of Orryphus Part 1 - The people that inherited Mars Part 2 - The Trial and attunement quest Part 3 - (WIP) Hahn Abi Expeditions The Path of Vindication Deliverance of Marineris The Trial The Third Gravidus Dilemma Rail Synova Terminus Proxima Part 1 - Some background and attunement quest Part 2 - The Trial The Path of Judgement Trial Vendor Miniature trail events Man in the Wall incursions (at the bottom of the post) Ascended Liches (at the bottom of the post) Rewards for Miniature - Trial events The final part of the Syndicate revision system: the Syndicate war What does the Solar Rail War look like to you? - potential implementations of a War event. Armistice and finale A lot of art that I most likely won't be able to provide in more than basic sketches. What changes I would make to the elemental system The Technocyte Schism: Ire of the Saffron Emperor - Current series Part 1 - A Dilemma Unfolds Part 2 - Enemies of the same flesh Part 3 - Night Waves under Torn Skies Part 4 - The Cauldron Bubbles, a quest introducing Raven, the leader of the Exilus. Frame belongs to @keikogi. Part 5 - Iliad's Bane - The Depths of Menes Part 6 - The Lasting Sin of Kathman - A tie in quest for @keikogi's Warframe, Persphone. Part 7 - Five Blights, Five Nights Part 8 - Blades in the Dark - Prelude - The Solar Shutdown - Recap timeline Side ideas / one offs Transforming Rivens into a traditional RPG power up system. Lich Murmur Changes (part of the rework). A mainline update - The Omen of Eudoxus Warframe / Weapon trees for evolving Warframes and weapons beyond what they are now. Loka - a look into a period of time during The Fall where decadent despots brought us into the dark age we find ourselves in. Origin System, Revised. - Improving mission connection and adding random events. Other odds and ends that are more minor. Plains expansion Beyond the Eidolon-Moh - A boss heavy expedition module. Tranq upgrades Making bad/unpopular missions better Dojos as social hubs Relays as social hubs Slaystorm - Endless Exterminate Botany system (Skip to Horticulture) Overhaul to planetary resources, resource tiers. Sentinel Rework Plague Star Season 2 Ghoul Purge Season 2 Buried Depths Season 2: A tale of two businessmen Setting the scene: key Grineer, Corpus and Orokin infrastructure and installations Exilus Reinforcements Other great threads to browse/follow: Due to study / leisure balance, expect submission time to be slower. Special Thanks Spoiler @BulletBoi @nerfinator6 @Loza03 @(PS4)IIFrost_GhostII @Dreddeth @RevanGarcia @exturkconner @keikogi @(XBOX)Fluffywolf36 @Gaz_TTV @L1fewater @fo3nixz @FoxFX @cephalon_corgi @413X @Unus @(NSW)HoodieDeku @(NSW)Cosmiccakecat @Oorel @Aljhaqu @jasonidpy @Trinergy @Acala @GrayArchon @Xenogelion @MDRLOz For commenting, either with constructive critique or morale boosting praise. I will be giving each of you potatoes so check your inboxes. I would also like to mention u/yarl5000, u/FTC_Publik and u/ArseneArsenic. They have either inspired, or have had their words used directly in my posts. The final part of the Syndicate revision for instance would not exist if it weren't for this exchange. You also will get potatoes. Lastly, I would like to thank DE for making a wonderful fiction to imagine in. I may have a few disagreements with the current direction, but I am still writing in your fictional universe. Keep on going. Prove me wrong and win me back. Give me feedback! Thanks. T. Edited December 8, 2023 by Teoarrk Contents needed to be shuffled 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted July 23, 2020 Author Share Posted July 23, 2020 (edited) Part 6: The Syndicate War; The rails alight once more Every war has a series of sparks and some kindling. Let me present a timeline of events. NB: I will be using names and positions, both canon and of my own fiction which are laid out here. 4 weeks ago: In response to the sentient threat, Teshin convenes the Syndicate leaders. He suggests they learn from the Tenno and join forces, despite their differences in ideals. The leaders agree and the Origin accord is signed. Initial performance is poor however, as mixed cells are slow to adapt to differing strategies. The highest casualty rate is among Steel Meridian, who suffer casualties among 25% of all mixed missions. This leads to a skepticism of effective intelligence from non Steel Meridian informants in joint missions by Brak Takko, the Steel Meridian grand strategist. He goes on to insist on selecting deployments based on his syndicates intel over others. 3 weeks ago: After a week of cross deliberation between Paita and Zik No, Operation Origin Grease is planned and executed. Due to the after action report by operative Vernum Graz, Cressa Tal threatens to pull out of the accord and condemns the use of neurotoxin by New Lokan cells. Lower elements of Steel Meridian refuse to work with New Loka on the grounds of perceived xenophobia. Leaked recordings of some of Amaryn’s most incriminating speeches appear across the weave, leading to the New Loka leader releasing a public statement that announces a walking back of ‘past mistakes’, accompanied by Kavor initiates to the New-Lokan collective. Teshin calls for an inter-syndicate Lunaro tournament to strengthen ties. Steel Meridian does not have a representative team at the games and their turnout is subsequently the lowest. 16 days ago: A Cephalon Suda operative cell is attacked by a Warframe while on mission in Europa, who escape with only minor injuries. The after action report initially links the Warframe to a Red Veil Tenno operative, but footage obtained from the incident could not identify the Warframe as any in use by Tenno operatives across the system. Palladino approaches Jur Nivvas, the head of Cephalon Suda’s Tenno Operations wing in order to review the video for anomalies. This request is granted. Arbiters of Hexis cells report of Red Veil operatives stalking them during artifact extraction operations. The Trio of Vannina condemn the actions of the Syndicate in this matter. To assuage further allegations of espionage, Cantis, the Information chief of Red Veil discloses the last 3 months of operations performed by her spies. When asked about recent sightings that don’t match up to the manifest, she chooses not to comment. 10 days ago: An anonymous whistleblower within New Loka leaks that the smart neurotoxin, Domoixin used by their operatives has a much lower LD50 dosage for Grineer than humans to the weave. The news, along with the revelation that the weapon is not selective after release, causes immense pressure from the other Syndicates for its removal from all active cells. Ushwaran, the Purification general of the New Lokan collective releases a public statement that addresses the leaked information and the continued state of New Lokan cell tactics and weaponry, where he promises that all active cells will be retrained to use different methods of combat and be provided with more conventional weaponry. In line with this, a large order of firearms is commissioned from the Steel Meridian aligned Mars seperatist forgeworks. 8 days ago: A Steel Meridian Tenno cell launches an attack on an undercover Perrin Sequence freighter under false intelligence. The merchant crew is slaughtered. Ergo Glast condemns the attack as ‘The greatest act of terrorism in modern times’. The ship in question, The Thalmus is towed to a spaceport above the Jovian moon of Io for repairs and refitting. Silv Arc, the syndicates Holding Security Manager imposes a ‘no fly zone’ for any unaffiliated Tenno craft beyond the lunar capital of Gish Bar until the process is complete. All unaffiliated operatives already on the moon are instructed to finish their missions and leave. 7 days ago: The Apis Tholis incident occurs. This marks the first time that Tenno has bared arms against Tenno in recorded history. The Perrin Sequence pulls out of the Origin Accord immediately. The arrest and denied burial obligations of Can Tekin angers both Steel Meridian and the local Ionians, who show sympathies with the ideals of freedom the syndicate express due to their constant war for independence against the encroaching Corpus and Grineer forces. Steel Meridian issues an ultimatum: it will leave the accord unless Can Tekin is released immediately. 3 days ago: Can Tekin is released. His testimony of events leads to Steel Meridian pulling out of the Accord. The commission between the Mars separatists and New Loka is cancelled halfway into the order, straining ties between the two factions. The removal of Steel Meridian resources from joint operations exacerbates difficulties in the logistics of the mixed operations. New Loka pulls out of the accord, on strong insistence from Ergo Glast that ‘this is a sign of things to come.’ The Perrin Sequence distances itself from New Loka after it is discovered that Domoixin is once again being used by their operatives Trust starts to break down between Tenno loyal to different syndicate factions, indicated by various reports of missions cancelled across the system due to ‘philosophical differences’. 2 days ago: Teshin gathers the remaining accord members to discuss the future of the agreement. The meeting is dominated by the findings of Palladino, however, who attributes the strange sightings in weeks prior to the Man in the Wall. The other syndicates pull out of the accord by the end of the meeting, condemning the Red Veil leadership as superstition spreading frauds. The growing animosity between those syndicates out of the accord already, combined with a lack of shared intel leads to accidental friendly fire events, which grow to be open hostilities by the end of the day. Present: A general state of war has been officially declared between Syndicates. Only official diplomats, neutral agents and Lotus Path guardians are allowed to remain in the neutral ground of the relays. Solar rail sections have been captured by the various factions vying for control across the system. Rumours spread of darkened figures appearing in areas where the fighting is the thickest. Thousands have lost their lives. The Tenno and their allies are at war and the origin system burns. Teshin turns to you now, to balance the disharmony of the system, to shape it as you see fit. My pupil, the Origin system is in turmoil, a turmoil that I myself may have set into motion. In preparing your allies for the coming war, I sought to strengthen the bonds between them, to mold them into a single spear to skewer the Sentient threat. My spear lies in ruins; the bonds of friendship that once stood are shattered. Common cause has been discarded for petty hatred. Even your fellow pupils have replaced the sanctity of the Conclave for blood on the rails. Something else casts a long shadow over the system. While we set aside our gaze, an ancient power has encroached upon the system. A prophet of the Red Veil named this power The Man in the Wall, a void creature of immeasurable might. Remove it's vessels, destroy its servants. Beware its influence on your mind. Do not let it affect your judgement. I await your victory. Now that I have laid out the lore, I will go into how this will work in the next post. Edited July 23, 2020 by Teoarrk 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted July 24, 2020 Author Share Posted July 24, 2020 (edited) Syndicate Solar Rail conflict This could be a revitalisation of the PvP experience of Update 13.2.3 to 16, or something different. How different is up to the impression of the five different implementations I will list now. In any case, the base premise is that this will be a 2 month event, like Nightwave. Unlike Nightwave however, you can choose which Syndicate, or Syndicates you wish to support over the course of the event by participating, as was done before. Completing thresholds of this support can earn you Syndicate specific weapons. These will be new weapons that you will recognise from my other posts. Don't worry, you will be able to get the others later, but the event badge will be strictly for the Syndicate you supported first. It is my belief that this should be the lasting choice of the event, as event exclusive weapons are not too popular with collectors. Fights will occur over a 5 hour window, with a 2 hour gap in between. There will always be a fight that you can join to support the Syndicate of your choice and each can be found easily by a multi-colored bubble on the star chart, which will float around a node like the Lich sphere of influence system. For ease of access, it will also be possible to find them listed neatly in the invasions tab. Supporting either side could present itself with a random Syndicate award as battle pay, either from the menu already in game, or from this post too. There are also opportunities for Syndicates to mark you for fighting against them. An elite squad of syndicate Tenno spectres can teleport into your missions and catch you by surprise. This will be treated as a Gustrag 3 invasion. Fighting them will have a chance to drop Rare mods from either the conclave pool, Cetus, or the respective syndicate's exile set. Syndicate allies will be your npc allies in each implementation, looking and acting similar to the ones that fight alongside you during Syndicate dailies. They need not necessarily use the same weaponry as those missions however, either using Syndicate specific weaponry such as those already in the game, linked above, or the pool of weapons considered generic Tenno weapons. You need not necessarily fight for syndicates you have reputation with, but fighting for one will gain you reputation with that faction. Killing Syndicate allied Tenno (or their spectres) will grant you rare mods and the exile armor sets attributed to them. Implementation 1: No changes- PvP Sabotage/Defence So for people that didn't play during those times, here is a video going into it as well as the wiki page. Spoiler Naturally, there would need to be an update of the map for the current movement style, or even multiple maps could be made to mix up game play. Since there were less restrictions on PvP then and people at the time still had a great experience, the only thing that can't be used in these missions would be rivens and gear items. Additional changes could relate to situations where teams are imbalanced, either by introducing modifiers to damage and health, or increasing the number of npcs on the disadvantaged team to compensate. Since PvP in general is not in a great state right now in game, I would steer away from this unless a major change is made to how PvP matchmaking is handled. In another post in this thread, I may touch on changes there, but for now I will move on to the next implementation. Implementation 2: Stalker Mode This is slightly different. Unlike implementation 1, the defending team is replaced by a single player, who will enter the mission like The Stalker. They will be unable to use abilities, purely for the sake of balance. This player will be at maximum level from the start and therefore will require coordination to bring down. This defending player will have an equal number of lives as the attackers. A conflict long power up system will be available to players who choose to be 'the stalker', which will only affect them in 'stalker mode'. At the start, you will be little more than a maximum build player. By the end, you'll be like The Wolf - a force to be feared and respected. To stop this power up from being completed in the first 10 hours of launch, it can only be powered up by completing 3 successful defences at any unique contested rail owned by the same faction. Spoiler Stage 1: +25% ability resistance. Stage 2: +100% vitality/shields. Stage 3: +25% knockdown resistance. Stage 4: +25% damage resistance. Missions appear dark to attackers and they need to use flashlights. Minimaps scramble when you get close. Enemy players begin the mission at level 10. Stage 5: -50% recoil. Occlusion outline on players that you have aimed at for 4 seconds. Stage 6: +50% aim glide speed, -50% gravity. (see Tractor Beam) Stage 7: Stalker vision. Weak points on enemies are indicated. +25% status resistance. Enemy players start at level 20. Stage 8: +25% damage resistance. (50% total) Stage 9: +25% ability resistance. (50% total) Stage 10: Vessel of the Man in the Wall. A mission where you participate will change utterly. Lights will dim at your approach. You will appear as a figure in the centre of a pool of mist, a faint red glow flickering over you (to other players). Enemy players will see illusions of you appear around the map. They will hear 'Hey Kiddo'. Whispered into their ears. Fun stuff. Downing players will make a face akin to this fill their view, taunting them, making them unable to see all but what is in the corner of the screen. Enemy players are at full strength. It may require testing to determine whether these numbers would be balanced and even if additional features would need to be in place for either the stalker analogue or the hunted players. Given the launch of Stalker mode in the future, it might turn out that a skilled enough player will be just fine without additional buffs. It might be that certain weapons will not be usable in the game mode, or Warframes. That is to be seen. Games like Dead by Daylight are still trying to find a balance for the hunter vs hunted dynamic. Implementation 3: Gravidus Dilemma The OG invasion event, the one that made me really like this game and made me hopeful for its future development. Unlike the other two implementations before it, this one will be a strictly PvE experience. The maps will focus on a different approach to match. Since it doesn't need to focus on balance, a strict focus will be on giving advantages to the defenders. For instance, staggered cover, turret emplacements, traps, kill zones, areas with no cover and good sight lines and elevated positions. A perfect example of this is the entrance to the Kuva Fortress and continues on throughout the zone. If the ai properly utilised the defences in place, it would be near impossible to mount an assault without excessive use of force. Thankfully, we are super soldiers, so it's all well and good. Spectres of enemy Warframes will appear throughout the level. These will be chosen from a pool of players that have participated in the event. (early adopters only need to worry about syndicate agents) Since this would be much easier than the other implementations so far, I propose some challenges: The Arbitration rules of becoming downed apply. Warframe Spectres drop Resurgence Tokens on death. Killing too fast may cause the Man in the Wall to appear. When this happens, each player will be taken into a phased zone where they will have to fight reflections of themselves. If you don't win this battle in a given amount of time, you will instantly die. Equipped riven mods raise the level of the mission. Implementation 4: Sea of Thieves In this implementation, instead of fighting on the solar rails themselves, we will be fighting above them. Similar to Sea of Thieves, the focus will be on ship verses ship combat. This can be against ai crews, or other players. I am unsure of how flexible the architecture of Railjack is to the dynamics of PvP though, or how stable it would be. Regardless, each battle will be three rounds of testing your mettle with Cephalon Cy alongside a worthy crew. Implementation 5: Something different I used to play a lot of board games, so this is kinda an attempt at bringing a bit of that into the game, besides this, of course. For those of you that have played battleship and checkers in particular, this will be familiar, but not quite the same. I will call this one Khram Lek, or Little War. To start the game, join an ongoing conflict as an attacker or defender. An attacking host will be paired with a defending host. An 8x8 checker board will be laid out in front of you all. The players on each team will get a token, which they will place along the opposing edges of the board. The Defender goes first. During a turn, each player has to move their token and can move them one square in any direction. They can also choose to place a decoy token on any square of the board that is not occupied by a token. This decoy will only last one turn. The players on the opposite team do not know which token is real, as the board is obscured to them during their opponent's turn. The aim is destroy the enemy team's real tokens, or to get all of your real tokens to the other side of the board. Tokens can be destroyed when two real pieces occupy the same square (decoy tokens disappear when a real one enters their square). When this happens, all players become aware of where those two real tokens are on the board. Those two players will then be drawn into a duel. Regardless of loadout, both players will fight this duel as toy Dax and have similar limitations to the Teshin fight in The War Within. The victor keeps their token, the loser loses theirs. If a player's real token is destroyed, they can still place decoy tokens. It is important to note that there is another actor at play here. One token will move around the board, seemingly at random. It will always move during your opponent's turn. If a token is placed in the same square at this one, their entire team will be taken into a battle. You will hear someone breathing behind you. Oh, did I say battle? Spoiler Twin pools of light shine in the darkness far above. They blink. Eyes. Impossibly large eyes, baring down on us. A feeble torch down here sputters its dying breaths and all around, the sounds of nothing short of the stuff of nightmares. "Hold onto that light, kiddo." A voice booms. "Hold onto it and run. Entertain me." The voice breaks into laughter that sounds like the cracking of large rocks. A single slit of light shines far ahead. Liberation? Or a trick. There was only one way to find out. You will be running. Similar to the torches present in the Emissary Prelate boss battle, this thing will be your lifeline, so don't let it go out. Shades of syndicate leaders will appear in the darkness around you and will be the fuel to your fire. Hurry towards the light. After a minute, the light will go out and you all will have a wonderful twilight adventure. Not. Leave the safety of the torch and you will not have a good time. The Man in the Wall will whisper sweet nothings in your ear and cloud your vision with his terrible designs. You may even see duplicate names appear before you, a torch there for you to go back to. You venture deeper, unaware. Then you realise what you've done and you try to hurry back, but you've stayed in the darkness too long. Your screen will go black. The names will multiply even more, until you see a sea of them. That breathing from before will grow into a wry chuckle. "Good job kiddo. Welcome home." Parties that stick together and get to the exit won't have a problem, but for parties that lose one, or even the whole party will lose a player at random. Only the player will know that they've lost their token They won't be able to communicate with their team as such (unless they're using voice comms). What has happened is that their token now is also able to move about at random. It will follow the rules of players however, moving only up to 1 square at a time during a turn. The first turn, your team will know that something is up, but cannot directly see what has happened. Spoiler If programmed properly to mimic a 'human move'. Assuming that it takes .2 seconds for the average person to react to the fact that their turn has started, plus a random amount of 'think time' between 2 and 14 seconds. The turn after however, they will see that the enemy has gained a token and they have lost one. This token will however appear as an enemy token to both teams, so to the enemy team, the number of tokens on your team will remain unchanged. It's not entirely out of the question that your team may go for this extra enemy token by mistake. Oops. Not so eager to destroy all the enemies tokens now are you? ________________________________________________________ With this final one, I wanted to have a different take on PvP. Since we didn't get Komi, or the fairer and more balanced Go it would be best to do something different. I need to write a little post event stuff, which I will do next. Edited July 30, 2020 by Teoarrk Clarification 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RevanGarcia Posted July 29, 2020 Share Posted July 29, 2020 I love it when the community writes its own lore. I remember when The Sacrifice came out I wondered "Do the Syndicates know about Natah's betrayal?" which prompted me to write my own version of a Syndicate War (I called it the Shadow War because it happened behind the scenes of the Corpus-Grineer Cold War). I never had the chance to play in a Solar Rail conflict and this sounds like a really cool idea to revamp the Syndicates. Also, thank you so much much for the potato. I was so surprised when I saw it in my inbox, I couldn't take the grin off my face. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted July 30, 2020 Author Share Posted July 30, 2020 (edited) @RevanGarcia Glad you like it. I appreciate you coming back for thread 2. Really like the idea of your concept as well. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Part 7: The Armistice and re-establishment of the Origin Accord On completion of the event, everyone will get their rewards. Teshin will send you a message. My Pupil, your labour has borne fruit. The recklessness that started this conflict is all but spent, it's disputes tempered in those left behind. It is a time of mourning on the rails, but also of rebirth. Six hands have been raised to ensure that this tragedy never passes from memory, that the sacrifice of those buried is repaid with humility. The Origin Accord is signed once again, bound by shared blood, so that the Syndicates can fight as one against all enemies. Rejoice, my pupil, for the Sentient threat will stand as nothing against our combined might. Attached will be a Spade weapon (or cosmetic), based on the Golden Bell Spade pictured on the right. Spoiler The inscription on the step of the spade blade reads ‘Never again’ in Orokin script. The icon on the aft blade (which may be hard to see here) is based on this Simurgh, a mythological bird from the epic of Shahnameh, holding two crossed arrows in its beak. Spoiler (PNG of the insignia. The script here is the Orokin for 'war') Spoiler The relevance of the creature is that it is, as the stories tell, capable of purifying the land and waters. It represents the union of earth and sky and is a mediator between them both. At the end of a civil war, such a symbolic creature of peace would be welcome. Profit Centre Alpha Spoiler New tileset - Corpus Freeports. Imagine them to be like Sevastopol station from the Alien movies and games. Awesome structures of metal floating above a planet, where an overarching power owns the station and every person trying to eke out a living gathers. If the surface stations are where the Corpus hoard and make use of most of their wealth of resources, this is where they trade them. Spoiler (Side note- Star citizen has some really great concept art) Vast hangars buzz with the activity of ships of every size and make. Dockhands and labourers toil under the weight of precious cargo of all kinds. The smell of fuel and the heat of business are your friends here, but little else. Drones lazily scan the area. The screeching of Corpus radios compete with cycling engines and the operation and handling of cargo pods and spaceship parts. beyond the hangar, the crowd roars. Spoiler The first thing that hits you is the number of people. Colonists of all creeds in constant motion up and down the street. The roar of the crowd and the keening voices of trades above them. Different striking and enticing aromas reach your nose. The spectacle of rare and valuable things from all across the system strikes your attention. Cooks, artifact hunters, weaponsmiths, inventors. Each trade and walk of life fights for a cursory glance and splash of credits. Corpus footmen are on constant patrol, keeping a close eye on those that are doing well for the day, their weapons as much a negotiation tool for the coming taxation as their voices. They do not care much for the nature of the good, so long as it pays. For those that can’t however ... there are always other ways of payment. This essentially will be to the Corpus what the Grineer dockyards are to the Grineer- a dear and important place that we should not be. The markets the Corpus operate are the lifeblood of most shareholders and as such will be fiercely guarded. Given that this is essentially a zone of control for the Corpus, what that means would be something like a standing police force. When unalerted, Mercatum (business) Corpus soldiers will patrol around, armed with the kind of weaponry we have come to expect from the new ship tileset, as well as proxies. Down below, drones and security lasers will be a barrier to entry. When, when the alert is raised, new enemies will join the fray. Corpus personnel will either appear from security stations, or from Coildrives. Among them Corpus variants of the Grineer Heavy Shield Lancer armed with the Angstrum, or rapid fire Detron could be used to mix up variety, or encourage a different approach to combat. Hyena proxies would roam the streets and the threat of an Ambulas appearing could be something in the back of the players mind. I posit a final enemy. When the Grineer Dockyard tileset was first introduced, the Prosecutors were a force to be reckoned with, as they could make enemies in a huge aoe around themselves immune to all forms of damage apart from the damage of their chosen element. Not having a properly coordinated squad with all 4 elemental damage types at the ready could put you and your squad in hot water. Was it challenging? Yes. It encouraged you to kite prosecutors away from their allies if you couldn't outright kill the prosecutor yourself. Was it fair? No. Pugs were at a clear disadvantage and god forbid you were a solo player that didn't have a coveted rainbow build of all 4 elements. You'd have a very hard time and have to quit out if you didn't have the right element for each incoming prosecutor before you completed your objective. So, what I suggest instead is a mini boss squadron. Spoiler I recently watched Jin Roh and can't recommend it enough. The Kerberos unit in the anime is relevant at this moment. Heavily armed and trained super cops. Lets go with the name Regnators. I believe appropriate models already exist in game (The Machinist). The only changes necessary would be to give them the binding grenades of the Index, varied weaponry and also a buff to their armour to give them more staying power. These are not the only things to take into account however. Like the Grineer dockyards, there will be a lot of neutral parties walking around-but this is not a place of simple loyalties. There will be 5 factions present on a Freeport. Corpus Merchant class - The owners and wealthiest merchants. Always hostile when attacked and 90% chance to become hostile to the player when alert is raised(or become friendly) Tucktarians - Colonists from Mars. Quick to take advantage of a situation. 75% chance to become hostile when attacked and 50% chance to become hostile to the player when alert is raised. Ostrons - Clades still trade across the sector. Do not fight back, nor become hostile when the alert is raised. Origin Drifters (for instance Maroo). - Most have contacts with Lotus Path guardians, if not been aided in some way by Tenno in the past. Have a 50% chance of becoming hostile when attacked and 25% chance to become hostile when the alert is raised. Grineer Merchants- Clones whose role in life is to barter that which cannot simply be stolen. Always hostile when attacked and will always become hostile to the player when alert is raised. So, how are we interacting with this? Accord Operations- a new weekly. Teshin is your contact here. When you wish to start the mission, you will need to determine who you are representing. You can choose to represent up to 3 different Syndicates at a time. Completing the mission for one faction will grant the minimum tier of reward, but also carries the minimum risk of an invasion by rogue Syndicate agents. 2 will raise this risk, but also reward tier and 3 will grant the maximum reward and maximum risk. These invasions will be composed of Syndicate agents with Tenno weaponry, or a lone Tenno Spectre. These guys will be much the same as the junction boss fights, pulling no punches. The mission will be as described in the short story Origin Grease, but with more twists and turns. You will have to get to different stores in the map to either save animals or other valuables, cut power to various sections of the station and also divert incoming traffic so that it can be intercepted by Syndicate raiding parties. Essentially, the Assault format. Tier 1 rewards - 2x Relics (Flawless), Ayatan Stars. 50,000 credits. Tier 2 rewards - Riven slivers, Ayatan Treasures, 100,000 credits. Tier 3 rewards - Relic 'fixers' - Many counterfeits of these devices exist, but this one will force a relic to have a guaranteed outcome. What this device does is that it allows to choose what a relic will produce on being opened. Other suggestions would be the Syndicate Warframe Mods, 150,000 credits and the Intrinsics I've written out below. Note- apart from these missions, Syndicates will no longer invade your missions. Railjack Syndicate Reinforcements Red Veil Homefield Advantage - 25 energy - All crew are invisible for 30 seconds. Evasive Counterattack -Passive- boosting to avoid damage boosts the damage of all weapons by 30% for 10 seconds. Stacks up to 3 times. New Loka- Spawning Pheromones -Passive- Clouds of Space Velella appear on the map. Travelling near them grants a small recharge of energy and reduces detect ability. Vacuum Tilling -50 Energy to activate, 5 per enemy 'tilled'- Enemies within 2000m of the Railjack have a chance to drop additional loot on death. Perrin Sequence Experimental shielding -75 energy- Triples shields for 60 seconds, but reduces speed by 25%. Right of Acquisition -Passive- Captured enemy Crew Ships remain undetected by enemies for 2 minutes. Steel Meridian Emergency Blow - 50 energy, 100 repair gel- Fixes all fires, repairs all breaches. Grants a temporary 50% health buff and armour buff on the Railjack and crew for 20 seconds. Dead Man’s Switch - 100 energy- All enemies within 2000 metres of the Railjack take 10000 damage after 5 seconds. Arbiters of Hexis Practiced Breach -Passive- Boarding a Crew Ship with the slingshot increases your damage and armour by 50% for 30 seconds. Efficient Skirmishing -Passive- Killing a Crew Ship with a dome charge instantly refills the boost meter. Cephalon Suda Signature Refraction Matrix -50 energy, toggle effect- Takes considerably longer for enemies to detect the Railjack. Homing weapons cannot lock on. Kalman Targetting Locus -Passive- Shooting a target with consecutive shots will increase the size of the guide reticle and lower the required accuracy of shots. (Think of this as a soft aim assist). Little things from the past I played Judgement this past week. I suppose it says something about me that one of the activities I liked most in it was the card game Koi-Koi. It is a traditional Japanese card game that uses Hanafuda cards, these little hand-painted cards that consist of flowers and nature in a traditional artistic lens. I thought that it would fit Warframe perfectly given that Tenno culture is supposed to be based in part on Japanese Culture. I don't think that it should be an outright gambling activity however, but just a comfortable bit of PvP for dojos, relays and ships that could tell us in part how the Tenno see the Origin System without it having to be shown to us outright through story or gameplay. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ And on that note, I'll end this one here. Next one will either be on Man in the Wall or Rivens, depends on how far I get with either one before next time. Edited September 13, 2020 by Teoarrk 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 7, 2020 Author Share Posted August 7, 2020 (edited) The Man in the Wall and you: How to stop the apocalypse Prenote: If you aren't familiar with the lore, I could very easily put the entire post in a spoiler tag and call it a day, so proceed at your own risk. The official comic Rell's first encounter. There is a lot that could be said about the Man in the Wall (MitW). For the sake of what is going to be discussed here, it might be better to focus on what he represents- The Devil. Not a traditional devil like the one of christian mythology, but something more in line with what the people of the Origin System might fear. For instance, his trademark Rap Tap Tap is in line with the christian belief that the devil knocks three times to mock the Holy Trinity. He surely wouldn’t be mocking an ancient belief system in the far future. In the Orokin times, the three religious institutions are the Saints, the Executors and the Emperors. The Saints, because of Cephalon Cy’s lines regarding them, but also an obscure taunt line from the old Tyl Regor boss fight in which he roughly states ‘We haven’t celebrated Halloween for a millennia’. The Executors are second, because they are honored in the same way as prophets, the penultimate level of governance before the Emperors themselves. To the average citizen, they would be seen as Jesus or Mohammed would be in life; a living messenger of the gods. Similar adages could be seen across the ancient and feudal world, where the kings would either be appointed by god, or be gods in their own right. In modern times, Saints and great leaders are still given that right. The Emperors however, are the highest pinnacle. They are neither seen, nor heard directly. They are worshipped outright, their Great Plan a divine tapestry by which the Orokin castes live their lives and the lower castes below them act, or be acted upon in kind. It is said they are able to predict the future, or do things beyond the comprehension of mortal men. So now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about how MitW manifests in the Chains of Harrow. Like Harrow, he uses chains to trap us in and torments us as the twisted spirit of Rell. Chains also plays into Rells phobia of touch here, being forced to chase us. His emotions are split into many parts and it is only through us that he is able to regain them. Autism comes in many forms, the spectrum being very diverse and covering a wide array of systemic, life long symptoms. I can’t speak on it as an expert, but I can tell clearly that Rell struggled to fit in, even more in a time where his condition was extremely rare. He may very well have spent his life as an outcast of the outcasts, being a Tenno shunned by Margulis. So for his own humanity as well as his emotional maturity to be stripped away, that would be an unbearable pain. The MitW affected the other Tenno too. In the Second Dream and the War Within, this either comes in hints of whispers that gnaw at their minds, or direct momentary possessions. Margulis treated it through a method that suggested that there were no other options: induced coma. This treatment suggests that the MitW influenced them directly while conscious, which means that ‘void exposure’, as she thought it was, was very powerful beyond the reach of The Void. It is hinted by The War Within that he gave us our powers, consequently saving us from our murderous parents. We owe him our lives and our newfound benevolence shows our lack of gratitude. After the Sacrifice, he taunted us for killing Ballas. He consequently lead us to the reformed Ballas in the chimera chamber aboard the Sentient ship. He may even be allowing us to sneak into the sentient ship when we observe Erra and Lotus talking. Therefore, from what he has given to us freely, it may be impossible to determine his power should we face him directly. However, an institution exists, as it has for a millennia to ensure that he is kept at bay. The Red Veil; The Church of the Atom for a new age Rell was shunned. He knew enough about The Void and he knew what he had seen, but he was a kid with a rare disease in an oppressive regime. Who knows how many years it took him to be taken seriously by anyone. What we do know is that he met either a team of female Archimedians, (or some lower Diluviats) did not accept Margulis’s theory of void exposure and wanted to produce a counter theory. They found- with Rell’s direct assistance the truth of The Void and what it could do to those that were trapped within it. The findings were so severe that they wanted to make sure that they were never forgotten. Whatever ways that Rell could muster to eliminate the MitW’s presence were recorded, first in direct procedure, then in liturgic ritual. An Archimedian arose to be Rell’s personal assistant, his public speaker and his Warframe crafter. Rell and Harrow became one being and the Red Veil was born. A realistic parallel opens up here. Nuclear waste is a hazard that will remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. The scientists in charge of the project pored over universal symbols for danger. They figured that if society fell or changed that symbols would lose their meaning, or the meaning would change. Ergo, one solution forward was a religious cult to retain the information of the symbols that were established. You can read more about it here. If you look at the syndicate leadership charts again, you will see that Sravus is the new leader of the Red Veil. It might seem crazy to think that a human could replace a Tenno, but my reasoning is thus: Given that the Red Veil is a cult based on scientific reasoning, it goes to reason that the devotees may be at least marginally scientifically literate and some gifted. There would be a ritual of succession, as no one is truly immortal and Rell seems too smart to not have a plan for his death. Rell may have needed to develop devices to help him determine where MitW might strike next. The Observation Nexus, as I have listed in previous posts is based on a real device. If it follows the design of the real device, it would not need void powers to be used. This might be a bit of a stretch, so bare with me. It also contains spoilers. Event Horizon has been listed as a movie which has been confirmed by the devs to be an inspiration for Warframe. In the movie, the Event Horizon is a ship that uses an experimental engine to create a Bose-Einstein bridge (a wormhole) to travel faster than light. After the first test of this engine above Neptune, it disappeared for seven years. In those seven years, it actually had been stuck in another dimension: hell. The important thing here is that it created a wormhole, which is a theoretical portal using a black hole. This is where the device in question comes in: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO for short. Spoiler How this device roughly works is that it sends a laser out to a point in space through the photodetector. It also keeps a copy of this initial beam in the right light storage arm. Gravity bends light, so therefore when the laser comes back it will be adjusted, depending on the mass of the object observed. The photodetector will receive the adjusted beam and store it in the left light storage arm. The two stored beams will be compared and the mass of the observed object can be determined. It is safe to assume that the MitW moving into realspace will cause a disturbance in spacetime, similar to a black hole, or his trademark ‘rap tap tap’, that can be determined by the Observation Nexus. Sravus and his assistants will then relay this information on to those beneath him. The Void-god lurks in the dark recesses So now we get to the gameplay section. This is a continuation of a previous post. Here I will talk about the Red Veil exorcism mission and the mini trial event. In the Red Veil mission, you would be dealing with a similar situation to The Thing. You would be dropped into a random mission, with only allies around. You will go around, gathering clues to who is the possessed by what they say, how they treat their belongings, or looking into their eyes. Spoiler (The most obvious sign of possession) You won’t be able to fight these possessed without killing the host. Therefore, you need to follow a purging ritual. Expect some freaky stuff to happen. You might suddenly be walking in a lake of blood, or be forced to look at the floor, or find yourself in another dimension altogether. How will you purge MitW? Well a theory I have is that there is some functionality to the Orokin fascination with gold. As a native metal, it will not react with most natural phenomena and unless force is applied to it, it will retain its shape for a long period of time. If we want to stretch what we know of Harrow, we could say that his chains, incense burner and whip are made out of silver, another native metal. Silver and Gold are often claimed to be pure metals and have healing and purifying properties among mystics. There may be something else to the science of the void at play in Orokin Towers, but the fact that Palladino was able to reach Rell through his golden Donda suggests that there is a significance there. The Temple of Rell is also encased in the traditional gold of Orokin tradition, with fire and blood being a constant motif, which I will segway into now. Fire is a fairly universal symbol of purification in religion, from Hinduism to Babylonia, Zoroastrianism, etc. It therefore makes sense that the Red Veil have such an emphasis in this. Maybe this lends itself to initiation, or even so far as the rituals required to exorcise MitW from a host. Finally, blood. If we look at the entrance to the Temple of Rell, it is full of blood. Maybe this is from initiates, temple visitors, or maybe from something else. Harrow flagellates himself to cast abilities. The Red Veil symbols in the Chains of Harrow are written in blood. It is safe to assume that the Red Veil consider blood ritual part of their mainstay religion. Each symbol is drawn as if cut from a knife. Unlike the warding symbols of Christianity, which focus on simple pictograms that can be drawn in a single stroke, they have many individual strokes to them. It could very well be that these have warding significance in it’s own right, presenting multiple layers that ward off the MitW from approaching. So lets us set up a set of steps. Step 1. You need to place a golden object that presents a steady non-chaotic movement. Spoiler Perfect, theres one. Step 2: Set fire at specific points on the floor. They will be provided to you. Step 3: Draw the given symbol on the floor. This will be given to you. Do all these steps in the pitch black, while under the wrath of an void god and the rhythmic chanting of acolytes of the Word in your ear: ‘Let the poison stars leave this vessel!’. Good luck. Now lets go onto the mini trial event. Chak-tak-tak, the Void-God cries! Chak-tak-tak! Our enemy dies! For people familiar with the Lovecraftian stories ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ among other works will know about the dealings of men with powers they don’t truly understand for the pursuit of power with outwardly monstrous consequences. I imagine that MitW can get similar devotion from desperate individuals and there are a lot of them in the Origin System right now. We saw with Arlo’s cult how many people flocked to get healed from a spontaneous and miraculous source. What if old void eyes promised something similar? Power? Wealth? Immortality? Spoiler Moving on. Similar to the Emissary Prelate missions, the cultists will be subsiding amongst the creatures they believe will deliver them; Void entities. These could be as simple as ghostly versions of existing models, or something a little more abstract. Spoiler The MitW is a void entity. The oro, the souls of the dead go into the void. Therefore it is fair game to assume that the MitW might make something horrific out of them. Above is a creature from the movie The Void (2016). The creature designs in the movie better fit what I have in mind for infested more than void entities myself, but the sheer terror that is evoked by how each creature moves and acts is something that is nothing short of refreshing. Surely a god from a chaotic realm like the Warframe void could make something like this or worse. Regardless of the caliber of monster, the cultists will be in a twilight realm. A temple to the Void God. You will be trying to stop them from summoning a portion of the Man in the Wall’s power into realspace. You will be running the gauntlet of arcades and tunnels to the central ritual chamber, fighting your way through barricades and Wards. Cultists may be overwhelmed by MitW’s power, taking new shapes and forms. They may become as powerful as us, or stronger. You will have to spot the transformation taking place or deal with a tough fight. Finally, you reach the central chamber. To stop the ritual you will need to reverse all the steps made and make sure that no one can use the site to do as these cultists have tried again. A fraction of the MitW’s power will fight you during the task, which you can do naught but evade. You will fight cultists that want to stop you, or creatures obeying their masters call. Be especially careful during the ritual; the wrong symbol, or a step out of place could get you killed. Don’t worry, there is a large margin of error. You will be warned that you are getting it wrong long before you get penalised for it. Finally, when the ritual is finished, the fraction of the MitW in realspace will be vulnerable. Expect a hard boss fight, similar in design to this, where the human like component of the MitW must be fought and destroyed, along with his familiars to expose something horrific and arcane.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trm9ZKxXtFI. Spoils of the Banished You can only run the mini trial event once per day. For performing these mini trial events, you will get a Amala token, or two for completing every task within a certain amount of time or without a single person downing. These can be traded into either the Observation Nexus/ Void Locus or Temple of Rell with Sravus. I will tabulate the rewards for ease of reading. Naturally this might be a little high investment for the rewards and a small pool to choose from, but it's only a preliminary list. Reward Effect Cost Rift Temerity (Rank 0) Taking damage gives you a 3/6/9/12/15/18% chance of increasing your speed by 5/7.5/10/12.5/15/17.5% and you gain a barrier that will absorb the next 100/200/300/400/500/600 damage for 3/4/5/6/7/8 seconds. 1 Rift Geniality (Rank 0) Staying in the affinity range of another player for 15/14/13/12/11/10 seconds makes a health orb drop at your feet. 1 Rift Serendipity (Rank 0) There is a 2/3/4/5/6/7% chance that you will gain double loot for 30 seconds after you empty your primary weapon’s magazine. This can only occur once every 180/165/150/135/120/105 seconds. 2 Rift Amensalism (Rank 0) There is a 5/10/15/20/25/30% chance that when you take damage that would down you that your health and shields are restored to full, but you take a stack of transference static. 2 Amala Syandana Cosmetic 10 Edited August 10, 2020 by Teoarrk Proper use of italics. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 8, 2020 Author Share Posted August 8, 2020 (edited) Rivens: Addiction or healthy addition? This is a divisive topic, because the riven system has its supporters and detractors. I am among the latter. To discuss why it is a problem, we should go into why so much power and RNG is thrown into one mod. Section One: You must be this modded to ride Puns aside, Warframe does not have a unique problem. You have a very wide selection of power ups and limited space for all of them. 8 normal and two special slots on a Warframe, 8 and a special slot on a primary or Secondary and 8 normal and 2 special ones on a melee. This will give you a similar level of customization to other games in the MMO-lite genre. Lets introduce a couple of examples. Borderlands 2 has a talent system to specialise your class, alongside 4 slots for weapons, a slot for a shield, a subclass specialty slot, an artifact slot and a grenade slot. Payday 2 also has a talent system, along with weapon attachments, perk decks and other nick knacks. In a more traditional MMO like WoW, your character has 19 total equipment slots, of which you may not even use every one at all times when fully 'geared', or never have the opportunity to use all of them, unless you are playing specific classes. Atop of this, you also have talents to unlock additional stats and abilities. Spoiler More often then not, these pieces of gear will only allow minimal customization, such as sockets or enchanting. These bonuses may be minor stat bonuses up to some very powerful temporary bonuses. But this is not all the power one can acquire for their character. To get more, a player can also get more buffs. Spoiler These can be from other players, yourself, potions, food and others. They are important since they can offset not having the 'best in slot' gear. Best in slot gear is something that can last for at most for 5 months, give or take a month or two per WoW expansion. The desired talents of each Vault Hunter class may change little between expansions, but this is offset by increased expansion into other subclasses and an increased pool of desired legendary equipment for each type of weapon, with different gimmicks to boot. On the other hand, Payday 2 has evolved immensely over the years, to the point where almost every person at maximum infamy (The game's prestige system) will have a different build for any activity. Weapon diversity on the other hand can be limited to how much DLC the player has bought, with some of the most unique items behind paywalls. Part One: humble beginnings Some of our best in slot mods have remained so since the mod system was introduced, such as Serration, Pressure Point, Point Blank and Hornet Strike alongside multishot mods. In the early days of mods (Mods 1.0) for Warframe, the pool was limited and so was the capacity to have a full build. Mods were levelled up by sacrificing duplicates, or fusion via cores. You often saw players recommend taking mods that were not taken to their full mod capacity to squeeze in another that complemented the build. It wasn't a perfect system, but it was worked out well enough. You could get powerful, but you were only so powerful. It was a very different game back then though, too. It was common to see people running around with Serration and some armor piercing on their fully mastered weapons. The Paris and Boltor were considered viable meta weapons because enemies' health did not scale, only their armour, shields and damage and these two ignored armour. Missions were less enemy rich and there was a higher focus on single target damage. Part Two: Primes - Limits begin to be removed. The introduction of Frost Prime was controversial at the time. He had innate polarity slots, making him directly superior to Frost. There also furor to the introduction of the Prime Access system, but thats not the focus here. The big thing is that more complete builds could be created for Frost before a player bought an Orokin Reactor for him. You could fit on all his powers fully ranked alongside a more complete build. It became more common to see more complete builds, up until Update 8. What happened in update 8? Part Three:Forma Forma introduced a balancing factor for those that wanted more power, but didn't want to be limited to using primed equipment. Indeed, with enough of a platinum investment, it allowed players to be able to equip as many mods as they wanted. As people got more familiar with the system, people started to get into modding habits. The first meta revolved around rainbow builds, where all elements were added to a weapon as it was enough for a weapon to just do flat, consistent damage. Part Four: Corrupted Mods Corrupted mods were interesting. They were hard to obtain and behind multiple layers of grind. You had to sacrifice Orokin Tower keys to create Derelict keys and another to create a dragon key. They were powerful, but with a downside for each. The builds on weapons that people used changed with their introduction, but until the introduction of damage 2.0 and the elemental combinations that came with it did the rainbow builds fall out of favour. The biggest changes were for Warframe builds however. The mods were a lot more powerful than those already in the pool and provided a toolkit for much more specialised builds. Part Five: Dual status mods Dual status mods were introduced over the course of events. The effects of the statuses were powerful and so sacrificing some damage for additional chances to proc an effect was worth it. Tenno reinforcements brought weapons into the game that had high innate crit and status chances, which could benefit more and more from the mods in the game than those already in the pool. DE added weapons that were more and more powerful to pique interest and give players more power, at the expense of weapons that were left behind for greener pastures. Between this point and the next, the number of mod slots that began to be taken up consistently by the same mods across weapons increased to the point where there was only the wiggle room in one or two slots. It was clear that it would take more than one or two slots to allow some of the oldest weapons to catch up. Part Six:The War Within Rivens are introduced, much in the same state that they are today, but limited to a few weapon types. From a developer standpoint, the system was designed to: Make old weapons viable. Not affect Warframes and powers (source) What we got instead could be best summed up by this quote by Cephalon Samodeus: https://imgur.com/a/hvUsPms Directly from the wiki , there are 40,756 different attribute combinations for Pistol, Shotgun and Rifle Rivens. This is before considering the randomization of the percentages themselves, positive or negative. Therefore, each unveiled riven mod is almost unique. That makes the lows some of the lowest and the highs as high as an 100,000 platinum value item, which where I live is over 4000 big ones. For a direct comparison with Steam, the maximum price that an item can be bought from the Steam marketplace is 1800 big ones. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Section 2: the consequences of in-game power for real money https://imgur.com/a/oB3ZKa7 - These are the services accessible today. When I first made this query, to see how optimised Warframe.com was for such a search, it was 7th on the search results page. I think that it's telling that even after purging the most popular second hand platinum services, more still remain active. There most definitely is a demand. People don't want to spend 4000 big ones to buy 100,000 platinum when they can get it for much less. In response, DE deducted suspicious platinum from every account. Hundreds, if not thousands of accounts were locked, even those that were not directly involved in suspicious plat purchasing, but just interacted with those who did. This is an ongoing problem which would exist even without Riven Mods as long as players can trade with other players, but the amounts involved in Riven trades increase the chance that people will exploit the second hand platinum market. A player is much more likely to legitimately buy 75 platinum for a Prime set than 5000 for a riven across the trading player base at large and I would have a hard time believing otherwise. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Section 3: What to do about it u/FTC_Publik suggested in my link at the start of the post to have a riven choice to reduce the RNG. I would take it a step further, to remove the RNG entirely. Many people said in the thread that Rivens are a constant content loop for them. I wish to consider them with what I am going to suggest. Lets take some elements of what exists currently- an all in one boost to a weapon, weapon disposition, the link to Samodeus. Now lets change the formula. A new Riven for a new age You acquire veiled riven mods as you do now. Instead of being many specific types, one veiled riven can be applied to any applicable weapon. They are unveiled by completing a mission as they are now. The newly unveiled Riven will be for the weapon they will be equipped to. The first change is that they will not have random stats, but instead will be blank and cost 0 mod capacity. To unlock the first stat, you must go to Samodeus's Sanctum. Since he is already modelled in game, this could be as simple as a purple tinted plane in weave space. If it were something that I had a say in though, it would be something based on M.C.Escher. Spoiler The dialogue written for him suggests a certain level of arrogance and that he may be slightly unhinged. This is not to say that Escher himself had such traits, but his bold designs defy physical possibility and nothing but a mad architect would build them. Each Riven mod is part of Samodeus, which means like Ordis, he has been discarding parts of himself and Ordis isn't considered the most sane individual. Anyway, you go to Samodeus's Sanctum. He will task you with performing a task similar to the Mastery rank 25 test, with a modifier to the number of enemies you need to kill relative to the inverse disposition of the weapon. For instance, a 0.5 disposition weapon will have a much higher requirement for unlocking the first stat than a 1.55 disposition weapon. You will be unable to use the weapon in question during this task. When this is completed successfully, the player can then choose an attribute to add to the mod. The current list is as follows: Spoiler The 31 positive attributes are: Effect Prefix/Core Suffix Additional Combo Count Chance* Laci Nus Ammo Maximum Ampi Bin Damage vs. Corpus Manti Tron Damage vs. Grineer Argi Con Damage vs. Infested Pura Ada Cold Damage† Geli Do Combo Duration* Tempi Nem Critical Chance Crita Cron Critical Chance on Slide Attack* Pleci Nent Critical Damage Acri Tis Base Damage / Melee Damage Visi Ata Electric Damage† Vexi Tio Heat Damage† Igni Pha Finisher Damage* Exi Cta Fire Rate / Attack Speed* Croni Dra Flight Speed Conci Nak Initial Combo* Para Um Impact Damage Magna Ton Magazine Capacity Arma Tin Melee Combo Efficiency* Forti Us Multishot Sati Can Toxin Damage† Toxi Tox Punch Through† Lexi Nok Puncture Damage Insi Cak Reload Speed Feva Tak Range* Locti Tor Slash Damage Sci Sus Status Chance Hexa Dex Status Duration Deci Des Recoil Zeti Mag Zoom Hera Lis *Melee/Zaw-exclusive attributes †Positive values only To the list, I would add conversion of physical damage types from one to another, something that is only approached in Conclave as well as Headshot Combo, Slam Damage, Aim Glide Duration and Accuracy. The chosen attribute will be given 1 of 10 pips, which can be levelled up via spent Kuva. The mod capacity cost of this Riven will increase to 8 on application of this attribute and rise gradually to 18 as pips are raised in any given attribute.The amount of Kuva necessary to level up from one pip to the next will increase from pip to pip, just like the mod system. Lets say the base is 25 Kuva from pip one to pip two. It will double each time, so to maximise one attribute's pips it will cost 12,800 Kuva. Say you want to unlock a different attribute. You will be tasked with another Riven challenge. Complete it and you will choose a second attribute. You will only be able to get two attributes without a penalty, as is currently the case. Now you want a third. Another Riven challenge to complete. You complete it and the rules are now different: you choose a positive and negative attribute to add to the mod. When you level up the positive attribute, the negative will increase with it. You will be allowed up to 5 positive attributes, with 3 negatives. How large the percentage increase of power will be per attribute per pip will entirely depend on the disposition. This will be a standardized percentage for each weapon at each disposition. A further consideration is to make each stat require a certain special Ayatan of certain color. Red could be for direct damage effects, green could be for conditional damage effects, purple for utility effects and silver for bane / damage conversion effects. These stars could drop from bosses around the sector. How to monetize it Since this is still a mod system and these are custom mods, the riven slots system will not be removed. Atop of this, given that the mods no longer are slot machines, DE would be able to add Kuva and veiled Riven mods back to the marketplace without controversy. Additionally, with RNG removed from the mods they will also fall in line with the kinds of prices that almost all other trade-able items in game. The direct comparisons that comes to mind as I say this is maxed out prime mods, or some of the more desired corrupted mods. The price fluctuates for both, but they will be much more affordable than they currently are. It is a big assumption I am making here naturally, but a lower barrier to entry could open trading of them up to more players legitimately. Riven mods and exalted weapons Riven mods currently affect exalted weapons. Given that I am advising a general increase of power for Riven mods, this interaction would end, as it should at current. Whilst it is good to see some older weapons being used, to have a weapon simply be used as a stat-stick is not their intended purpose. Brozime has gone on record saying that a Riven is not necessary for an Exalted Weapon to be very powerful, but Rivens can boost Exalted Weapons to extreme heights, far past what the Xoris exploit alone could achieve. This interaction is a balancing nightmare and not very many people gain to benefit from DE having difficulty determining player power. It has lead, among other things to some of the questionable decisions in enemy and boss mechanic design that we have seen: damage gating and damage sponging. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Section Four: Slot contenders Lets end with a discussion of steps DE are taking to open up power to unused weapons beyond Riven mods: Amalgams and Mod Sets and then wrap up with my final thoughts for opening up yet more slots. Amalgams: A ray of hope The Amalgam mods introduced with Operation: Buried Depths demonstrates that DE are willing to consolidate two best in slots into one, with a slight reduction in power. It has not been expanded upon beyond the Jovian Accord however. Side grades for meta mods across multiple different weapons, or from Warframe to weapon is in my opinion healthy game design to spice up the meta, especially when beyond elemental combinations there is very little else that can be changed about a build that is meta worthy. If more weapons are given their own Amalgam mod treatment and the treatment is handled well, it will draw more people to play something different than meta. Where I would like them to hit next is Amalgam elemental combination mods, or Amalgam crit chance and crit damage mods, things that we rely on consistently and are in almost every build. This would put them in open conflict with Riven mods for that build clincher and I believe they should be. Rivens should not be the king of the 8th normal slot. With any luck and enough expansion of the Amalgam system or the other system in this section, there will be more diversity in builds than ever before and each mod will have equal weight in determining what makes or breaks a build. Mod Sets: More please Introduced with PoE, these mods provide bonuses for equipping multiple mods from the set across your entire build. Similar to WoW, these are anything from 'nice to have' to very attractive. Unlike WoW, some of them are better placed on a Sentinel/Moa weapon to boost your damage output in lieu of another meta mod. I believe that they are a good thing to devote time and effort to making more of them. Going back to the best in slot adage, it often is the case in MMOs for this to be best in slot for a key number of slots, the buffs outranking non set gear that is otherwise just as powerful as individual pieces of a given set. It gets people coming back week after week just to get that last piece, doing that same dungeon or raid again and again just to get the top piece of gear. [DE]Rebecca has said in the past that evergreen rewards are something that DE as a whole have aimed to give to players that will keep them playing the same loops over and over. I would say that if provided in the right way, be it reputation, Ducats, or otherwise mod sets could be that thing. Final Thoughts Warframe is something I've been with for a long time. I've seen it grow into something much bigger than it was in 2013. It is my belief that for the mod system to progress, it should cast aside, integrate, or replace some of the more boring effects like flat damage increases. Melee 3.0 has buffed all melee weapons to the point that they deal much more damage than would be gained through Primed Pressure Point and yet it is still in the game. This was a missed opportunity. Flat crit mods are useful no matter what build. Multishot, especially on shotguns is a pure damage increase. If these became parts of our weapons as standard, we wouldn't lose as much as we would gain. There would be space for more mod set bonuses and something more experimental. At least, thats what my optimism says. My pessimism says that it would just give way to a new meta where people would just tack on as many mods as possible to get maximum elemental damage for bigger badder status effects. "If given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game." is a quote by Soren Johnson that I think applies here. Therefore, it is important for DE to not be complacent. They should not be afraid to challenge their players, by changing mods, or taking them away. How the game is in 2 years could be a entirely different beast from what it is now. I hope in part that it is. If anyone gets through this mammoth rant, let me know your thoughts. Edited January 4, 2022 by Teoarrk Riven sockets. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 10, 2020 Author Share Posted August 10, 2020 (edited) Neopets Part 1: Meet the Birds Bit of a shorter one this time. I have decided that since I didn't really get to finish my pets post in the last thread before it locked, I should cover each part in its own separate post with more polish and less stream of consciousness. Lets start with Condrocs. Why Condrocs? Spoiler I am a proud bird owner and would like to be able to extend that into Warframe. On top of that, Condroc is a portmanteau of Condor and Roc, the first being among the largest birds in the western hemisphere and the latter being a giant flying mythological creature from One Thousand and One Nights. I took one look at that name and thought I'd like to fight alongside one of those things one day. I think that it is only fair that since we have had dogs and cats as fighting animals for quite a while that we expand into birds, especially since we have the space for them in open worlds. On top of this, falconry has been a sport and art practiced by almost all cultures worldwide since ancient times. The Orokin adopted many aspects of ancient cultures, mainly from ancient Persia, China and India. It would be remiss of them to not have considered falconry amongst all the other arts that have been included in the game already. Spoiler Sawgaws and Mergoo are on my radar too, just not given them much thought at present. As described by the Condroc section of this post, there are 6 different breeds. Since I cannot draw a bird for toffee, it might be better to present a selection of images that will better describe each breed. But first we must talk about core stats. Each bird will have: Defenses: 130(250) Health, 50(250) Shields, 50(100) armor, 5(10) evasion. Damage: 30(75) Puncture damage, 30(75) Slash damage, 0(10) Impact damage -total I/P/S of 60(160) damage. Now, onto the different breeds. Oughab A brave and powerful breed, they will often lead the charge on any would be foe, tearing and pecking at anything that would dare hurt its master. This is literally the Farsi word for eagle (oghab) with a u added. I thought the name sounded fittingly different from English that it only needed slight variation to be applicable to the current vocabulary of the game. Since Aquila is a fairly broad genus, I consider these as representatives of this bird. example 1 example 2 example 3 example 4 Stocky, powerful wings. Not the largest, but capable predators. Special abilities: Protective Assault The Condroc swoops at your attacker, dealing 160 damage to all enemies in its path. Cooldown of 10 seconds. Swooping Pass Stagger all enemies in a straight line, taunting them. Gain 20 evasion for 5 seconds. Cooldown of 10 seconds. Laashkhor More lightweight and agile than other Condroc breeds, this breed has been designed for reconnaissance and hit and run subterfuge. This breed has been given the Ostron name ‘Oog Pek’ for their penchant for going for the eyes. Farsi again, meaning Buzzard, but with an extra a. Taking the Common buzzard here would be cheating alone, especially since the beak of this bird is not all too imposing. Perhaps a vulture's beak or a Northern Loon would fit better for the description. Special abilities: Eye Gouge Deals 320 damage and permanently lowers the accuracy of the target by 10. Feigned Descent Distract enemies in a 25m area, reducing your detection range by 10m for 30 seconds. NB: If it is unclear how this works, see Noise Arrow. Kushir A breed designed originally for sport, the larger talons and raised plumage easily distinguish this breed from any other. It’s piercing cries prelude a flurry of well placed talon rakes. This name is just plucked from my head. It has nothing to do with the hebrew Kushi, or the Japanese city of Kushiro. I imagine this as an amalgamation between a Woo-Hoo, a Bearded vulture and a Secretary bird. Maybe a strange combination, but It stands to reason that if you can give a dog a horn you can combine three very different species. Special abilities: 1000 Strikes Deal successive hits against multiple enemies, chipping away at enemy armor and applying a bleed status proc. Keening Cry Stuns enemies for 5 seconds. Melee attacks deal 150% more damage for the duration. Phunteneb (Originally Funtneb) A breed designed to mimic the sea eagles of ancient Earth, it can knock down foes with a beat of its powerful wings before going in for the kill. A name that I pulled out of my head. I changed it slightly because it sounds better to have all the syllables drawn out. As the flavour text suggests, these will be big birds. Birds like Stellar's sea eagle. However, since these birds are not even among the top ten largest flighted birds, it could bulk up by having some attributes of the Great white Pelican and the Andean Condor. Special abilities: Belligerent Assault Taunt all enemies in a 15m area. Deal 160 damage to all of them. Toppling Gust Deal 160 impact damage and knock over all enemies in a cone. They take additional damage if they hit a wall in the process. Ghoshan (Originally Ghoshag) Members of this breed have wingtips strong and as sharp as any blade. They will dance around a foe, taking every opportunity to cut them to ribbons. The naming of this breed is based on the Goshawk, so it was pronounced ghu-os-hag. I realise that this was a pretty bad oversight and so the name is now changed. However, since the idea of a bird with bladed wingtips sounds like something out of Pokemon, it might be better to look at birds with straight, or slightly curved wings, like the Frigate bird. Other influences could be Swallows and Kestrels. It might be a bit harder to picture this one, but essentially the latter two birds are capable of very fast maneuvers, but the Frigate bird has that nice sharp wing outline that I have in mind. Special abilities: Hunt’s End Deals 160 finisher damage. If you are undetected, this attack will instantly kill the enemy. Pinion Dance Deal 160 damage to 5 enemies, leaving them open to finishers from the Parazon. Xioxib Victims of the Plague Star, these birds have become twisted fusions of flesh, sinew and toxic spores. Keep separate from other Condrocs to avoid infection. Pronouncing this as Shock-zib. Had this in my head the whole time I was brainstorming about this breed. For those unfamiliar with Magic the Gathering, especially for a card and associated mechanic that came out a decade ago, the green goo in the image isn't just for show. This bird is a carrier for a deadly (and frankly quite overpowering) disease. I thought it necessary to have an Infested Condroc variant since Helminth Chargers are already in game and it seems fairly unlikely that none of the wildlife of PoE would become infected by the technocyte virus. Special abilities: Potent Offal Deal 300 toxin damage over 5 seconds to all enemies in a cone. If this damage kills an enemy, it explodes for 75+10% of their total health as viral damage. Spore Haze Deal 40 gas damage to all enemies within 10m for 10 seconds. Their accuracy is reduced by 10. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Part Two will come soon and cover the Beast improvement system. Edited September 17, 2020 by Teoarrk A little more bulk to that justification paragraph. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keikogi Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 At this point might as well have birds two. 9 minutes ago, Teoarrk said: otent Offal Deal 300 toxin damage over 5 seconds to all enemies in a cone. If this damage kills an enemy, it explodes for 75+10% of their total health as viral damage. 300 damage is unlikely to ever land the killing blow , better to have the die while afflicted condition. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 10, 2020 Author Share Posted August 10, 2020 (edited) 4 minutes ago, keikogi said: At this point might as well have birds two. 300 damage is unlikely to ever land the killing blow , better to have the die while afflicted condition. This is before buffs are applied. I assure you that there is a method to my madness here 😉 Edited August 10, 2020 by Teoarrk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 17, 2020 Author Share Posted August 17, 2020 (edited) Neopets part 2: Creating Gods This post is about upgrades to the breeding system. The current functionality is fine for creating a one off pet, but given the changes that I will put forward in this post and the next one, it will make sense why. All I want to say for now is that I have it in mind for pets to be a large time sink and for them to really matter in game play too. Temperament The first and most minor change is that the Temperament animations given to Moa pets should be extended to organic pets too. For now, I would motion for Proud, Fierce, Curious Passive, Playful and Timid. Proud - Head up high, with a privileged swagger. Will hold firm when petted and grow irritable when petted for too long. Will not play with beach balls, but will swat them away if they bump into them. Fierce - Will growl at anything it considers intimidating in the Orbiter. Will be initially be apprehensive when petted, but will soften up. Will chase beach balls. Curious - Will go to other parts of the ship often and will inspect any new decorations you place. Will react well to being petted. Will stalk beach balls. Passive - Finds a good spot to sit down and just sits. Will accept being petted. Beach balls will not be interesting. Playful - You will be chased around the ship. Will beg to be petted and happily accept pets. Will try to move beach balls to you. Timid - Rarely spotted member of the ship. Will be reluctant to be petted. Touching a beach ball will make them run away. Lineage A more major change here. The aim of this system is to make imprint based breeding have more going for it than just having a higher chance of getting that rare coat pattern, color combination or getting a chosen breed. A new incubator upgrade will be available from the Tenno Research Lab: The Antecedent Incubator Upgrade Segment. What this does is allow you to group one to two pets into one 'family', regardless of gender. Assigned pets will take up one incubation slot rather than two. This will make the two an imprint pair and establish them as a family unit. They will form a family tree, similar to the Sims. Spoiler It will have a more important function than just nostalgia however. It will allow you to monitor the breeds of animals in generations before and make important decisions during incubation. When you make an offspring from this family, the parents will be consumed. This is a big upgrade in cost for producing a new pet, but it also comes with a greater reward. You will be able to select key identifying features from the parents to emphasize or suppress, such as build, height, coat/plumage pattern and breed. There will be perks to certain incubation decisions. Keeping to one breed for successive generations will give you a 'Thoroughbred Bloodline' Perk, which will double the base effectiveness of their abilities. Choosing to have successive generations follow every breed available will give your pet the 'Mixed Lineage' Perk, which will allow them to obtain an additional breed ability from a different breed. Some perks may last forever, while others may exist conditionally, such as the Thoroughbred Bloodline and Mixed Lineage perks already mentioned. Others still may be in effect for one generation. Note: Imprints can still be made and used in proxy for an animal. A single pet in an imprint pair will produce a clone offspring. Here is an initial list of Perks: Spoiler Awakened Antecedent: +100% health and +100% damage. Descendants of pets that have completed the Shinrei tree will gain this perk.* Born Warrior: +2 melee attack range and +15% armor. Descendants of pets that have completed the Jange tree will gain this perk.* Inherited Intelligence: +50% ability casting speed and +25% power strength-link. Descendants of pets that have completed the Chensi tree will gain this perk.* Innate Instincts: +25% loot pickup range and +5% sprint speed while in Kindred range. Descendants of pets that have completed the Pravasi tree will gain this perk.* Mixed Lineage: Additional Breed ability from a different breed. Thoroughbred Bloodline: Doubles the base effectiveness of breed abilities. Kuva Crazy: Will enter a frenzied state when Kuva is acquired, gaining +10% attack speed and taking +10% less damage for 10 seconds. Lich Stalker: Deals 15% more damage to Lich and Thrall Enemies. Amalgam's Bane: Deals 15% more damage to Zanuka and Amalgam Enemies. Tau-Foe Imprint: Deals 25% more damage to Sentient Enemies. Avarice Hunter: Deals 25% more damage to Corpus Enemies. Clone Adversary: Deals 25% more damage to Grineer Enemies. Plague Ender: Deals 25% more damage to Infested Enemies. Null-Sentry Muddler: Deals 25% more damage to Corrupted Enemies. Nemesis's Fate: Takes 10% less damage from bosses and deals 10% more damage to them. Double Muscle: -25% attack windup speed and +25% melee damage. Exceptional Bone Density: +50% armor. Indistinct Profile: +10 evasion. Defiant Blood: When this pet takes lethal damage, it will become temporarily invulnerable, continuing to fight for 20 seconds. Orokin-Era Gene Reemergence: The Maximum Loyalty of this pet is increased to 150. While in Kindred range, you will be immune to damage for 25% longer when your shields are depleted. Dax Complement-Memory: Attacks from this pet have a 25% chance to disarm enemies. Diamond in the Rough: Rare fur/plumage patterns will be guaranteed in offspring. Can only be obtained from Shelter animals. * Continuity Markings: This pet will have continuity scars. Can only be obtained by absorbing life in the incubator.* *Will be talked about later. Feat system Another major change. Modding will be removed from all pets. Breed abilities will be unlocked and improved through levelling up your pets in a similar manner to Warframes. All the mods that previously existed will be obtained and upgraded in a similar manner to the Borderlands Badass system. For those that aren't aware of the system, it rewards players for completing challenges, which can be as basic as 'kill x enemies with x type of weapon', up to unique interactions tied to centerpieces of boss fights, or parts of the world. These unlock additional stats for your character that boost them in marginal, but useful ways. At present, pets exist in a sort of bubble of being nice to own, but very few are useful beyond being mastery fodder, something that is only exacerbated now that they cannot reach their full potential- there simply is not enough mod capacity for this to be possible. These are the current mods that are widely available to companions (specific mods are excluded). Naturally, the next step is to take these and attribute them to certain actions. Rather than just killing, a lot of the basic stat boosting mods could be replaced by feats that reward regular, but varied tasks. I will be using their names for clarity. The system will be named Maharata, the Punjabi word for expertise. Spoiler Maul - Reach increasing damage thresholds with a pet equipped. Bite - Reach increasing thresholds of headshot/ heavy attack kills with a pet equipped. Link Health - Reach increasing healing thresholds with a pet equipped. Link Armour - Stay for certain minute totals in Survival missions (across missions) with a pet equipped. Link Shields - Take increasing amounts of damage with a pet equipped. Loyal Companion - Revive your pet an increasing number of times. Hastened Deflection - Parry an increasing number of times. For the other mods, certain special 'achievements' will be required. Medi-Pet Kit - Heal your pet for 1000% it's total health in one mission. Animal Instinct - Hunt 3 fish without missing a throw, then kill an enemy without being detected. (5 fish and 3 enemies to prime it) Pack Leader - Finish 5 coop missions scoring top damage (10 for prime). Shelter - Heal a teammate that is reviving a fallen teammate. Hunter Recovery - Perform a perfect conservation Hunter Synergy - Perform 10 consecutive headshots without missing with a shotgun. New addition thanks to the guys on Mr.WarframeGuy's server - Trial n' Terror- Pet damage is buffed by your melee weapon damage and gains all elemental types- Complete 1 Trial mission without taking a single casualty. This is not a complete list, but rather just to give you an idea of what to expect. More to come. Next post will focus on pet Talent trees. There is art this time. Edited February 6, 2021 by Teoarrk rogue bullet point Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 17, 2020 Author Share Posted August 17, 2020 (edited) Neopets Part 3: The stuff of legends There is a common bugbear in gaming that this post will tackle: the useless AI ally. They get stuck, or they don't attack, or they constantly die. There is a lot of utility that some pets bring to the table at present, don't get me wrong. The Smeeta Kavat in particular is very useful for Kuva farming, but even then it is only the 5th most used companion and you have to go down to rank 10 to get another pet, the Helminth Charger. This chart might be slightly outdated, but it is unlikely to be significantly different now as there has been little done to improve pets utility. Spoiler Sentinels have much of the same functionality and up until 2 years ago were the only source of loot vacuum. They do not need to worry about AI path-finding, have multiple lives and do not require maintenance. Therefore, for pets to become competitive, they need to be just a convenient. Bred for Excellence The first step is that once you unlock the Maharata on one pet, it will be unlocked on all pets. This will give basic durability and viability in most content that isn't high level. The next step is a sort of talent tree system, whose names I hinted at earlier. Animals in a family tree will inherit talents from their ancestors, so that after enough generations you will get all the talent trees completed and your pet will be massively powerful. Some key features first though. Kindred Range Kindred range is similar to Affinity range for other players, except this is a personal bubble where you and your pet gain bonuses. I will set this to initially be 40 metres. In this range, pets will gain xp for your kills, actions and everything else. Focused Learning Nightwave's success shows that people will go out of their way to perform specific tasks if it rewards them. The requirements for advancing on this talent tree system will be less varied, but still require you to do different things to level up the first three different trees. You will gain points for the talent trees as your animal levels. Once you reach level 30 and want more points, you have a difficult choice to make: either continue down the family tree, or consume an unfertilised egg or set of DNA in a form of 'pet continuity' to reset to level 0 and continue levelling and gaining points. Either option will mean downtime in the incubator. Note: pets that are already Level 30 will be given 30 free points to spend on the first three trees. Forma on your pets will be removed, but you will gain an additional 15 points to spend on the first three trees per Forma applied. Similar to the Focus Tree system, leveling up an ability will have a greater cost the higher you raise it, but in this case, levelling up abilities further from the initial skill will cost more too. Levelling up the base skill will cost 1/2/3/4/5 ... levels to complete, one further along the branch 2/4/6/8.., further along 3/6/9/12... and in the rare case of three along the branch 4/8/12/16... . This means that it will take a while to complete, but given that pets are a secondary interest to most people already, it will be something to do on the back burner for a while. The three initial divisions. Jange - Farsi for Warrior. To level up in this tree, take your pet to Exterminate, Survival, Defense, Assassinate and Assault missions. Chensi - Chinese for Muse. To level up in this tree, take your pet to Sabotage, Disruption, Interception, Defection and Hijack missions. Pravasi - Gujarati for Traveller. To level up in this tree, take your pet to Capture, Rescue, Mobile Defence, Infested Salvage, Spy and Excavation missions. All trees can also be levelled up by doing open world content. This final tree will be unlocked after completing the other three trees and a subsequent quest. Shinrei - Japanese for Divine Spirit. Progression in this tree can be made by performing any activity that grants affinity. Beasts without equal The old saying of 'If you aren't smart, then you'd better be tough' applies to the AI of Warframe very well and at present, pets don't fit that bill in general. The aim of these trees is to fix that and make them a force to be reckoned with in a 5 minute mission, or a 5 hour mission. Without further ado, the trees. I will credit the artists that made the artwork underneath each image. Jange Spoiler Artwork by Jack Mosher. Chensi Spoiler Artwork by Zéh Kolmeia Pravasi Spoiler Artwork by 121642 Shinrei This tree will be locked behind a quest. When a pet gets one point in this tree, it will no longer require DNA stabilisers. Spoiler Artwork by Laranj4 Edited September 3, 2020 by Teoarrk One of the best skills in the Pravasi Tree was easy to get to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 18, 2020 Author Share Posted August 18, 2020 (edited) Neopets part 4: the Tenno Animal Interests and Livelihood Society All across the sector, a common theme that we come across is that if it isn't the little man getting the short end of the stick, it's the animals. The Howl of the Kubrow has us meddling with a Grineer Kubrow poaching scheme. We as players are encouraged to kill Kubrow and destroy their nests for new eggs and rare mods. The open world critters are hunted for pelts, feathers, or meat. An achievement has us killing quite a few Plains of Eidolon animals and acknowledging them as pests. It seems that only The Biz and his Er liason Master Teasonai care about animals well being and maybe to a lesser extent New Loka, but they seem more focused on plants. Enter the Tenno Animal Interests and Livelihood Society (TAILS), here to tell the Grineer to stop stealing puppies and to tell the Corpus that Sunny Pobbers are not a spreadable.They are eco-terrorists, shelter owners, conservationists and more. Where did you think all those wonky looking cats and dogs were really going when you pressed the 'Consign' button? They have a base of operations near Mercury, in a Tenno Tower that serves as animal sanctuary and preservation area both and is known as Svalbard's Tower. Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the largest store of seeds in the world, containing over 4.5 million varieties of seeds and also one of the safest due to its position deep in permafrost. Read more about it here. The Tenno's main bastion is at Mercury, so therefore they don't really have much of an option to locate elsewhere unless they want to put themselves at risk of being raided. This Tower could be similar to a small Clan Dojo, filled with aquarium rooms, semi open enclosures for rare and endangered animals, petting zoo, pet cafe and just enough of a hint that you're only seeing the visitor areas of the tower. Una and the Lion The founder of this organization goes by the name Una. This is a direct reference to a character of the same name in The Faerie Queene, a 16th century English epic poem by Edmund Spencer. Among many other things that happen in the epic is that Una travels the land taming beasts and monsters. The Una that we find in Warframe will be more focused on recovering beasts and bringing monsters to heel. At rest, she will be very much like the painting Apollon by Briton Rivière; a natural lover of animals and that is where her true passion lies. The Origin Sector will have hardened her however, a simple 'save the animals' naivete tempered by the acts of barbarity she has seen done in the name of entertainment. I need not go into detail here and I kept it very brief in Origin Grease, but sufficed to say, it is with bitter resentment that she says the name Corpus, or Grineer. She will give a weekly mission, either to break up a Grineer poaching ring on Earth, or secure livestock aboard a Corpus Freighter. Consider the former a specialised mobile defence, with the horde buildup mechanics from the Emissary survival mission that was run during the final stages of Nightwave Season 2 and the latter a multiple target capture mission with keys from Disruption thrown in for good measure. If there is interest I will flesh both of these out. The big thing here is that this will change how Consignment works. When you press the Consign button now, your pet is no longer in your inventory, but you can still recover it with help from support for a few months afterward. What I envision changing here then is that when you press the consign button and manually type CONSIGN to confirm, your pet enters the pool of available pets that can be adopted in Svalbard Tower. When your pet is adopted, you get a notification that your unwanted bundle of joy found someone that loved them more, you monster. Where do you adopt pets? In the Pet Cafe. Spoiler For those of you not in the know, Pet Cafes are cafes where you can have a bite to eat with animals roaming about that are up for adoption. They require open collaboration with local shelters and when run well, allow many animals that would otherwise sit in a shelter for an unbearable amount of time to get to a loving home. This Pet Cafe will be called Hek-in' Chonks, or Forma-liac Floofs, or something else that is very corny and a play on something Warframe related. The head clerk will be a TAILS member by the name of Telio Simhah. Now you might ask what we might be eating here, since we don't need food. We don't need to necessarily eat, but it could be a social area for board games, Ludoplex and to watch Lunaro tournaments. Regardless of activity, the idea is to create a more natural, homely feel to the place than the sterile, utilitarian look of an animal shelter. Animals that are up for adoption will be updated in real time and be unique for each player, similar to how a Dojo Dry Dock only displays your personal Railjack. Whats in it for me? Consigning a pet frees up a stasis slot, which is fine and dandy, but it is little incentive for the more pragmatically minded players to trek over to this place and pick up a new one. Well, for starters pets that are adopted have the unique gene perk 'Diamond in the Rough', which can give you some of the rarer and more sought after coat patterns. Additionally, pets from this place will have a higher loyalty cap for a week, which means more damage. They could also have unique markings, such as branding numbers, battle scars and unique coats for those that are interested in making that optimum cosplay companion. You will also get tokens for adopting pets. These come in the form of TAILS tokens. Adopt one, get one token. Adopt 2, 2, Adopt 6 or more, you get a bonus of +2. Tails Tokens will also come from the Weekly, of which you will get 5. You can get the following items for your Tokens. Token cost Item 1 Sigil - ”Thank you!” over a messy paw print 5 Sigil - ”Fan-Kavat-tastic!” over a Kavat head 10 Sigil - ”Saviour of the Fleefle!” Over a horde of pets 20 Badge - TAILS logo 25 Baltu Collar-Pets wearing this collar build Loyalty 50% faster and lose it 50% slower. 150 TAILS poster 50* Menagerie blueprint * Can only be bought by Clan Architects. TAILS tokens are a currency that can be submitted to a Clan Vault. Value is determined by Clan size. The Menagerie is something simple enough in practice. A place where your clan can have spectres of their pets run around in a large forested environment and a place for your pets to rest while you attend to Dojo duties. If an Orokin version is wanted, then something that comes to mind is the visuals of The Fountain (2006). Spoiler I envision many such spheres of life existing in a Galileo Thermometer arrangement, floating lazily up and down a large cylindrical chamber. Next part will cover two quests I have in mind and that will end this section. Edited September 3, 2020 by Teoarrk weird coloration of text. Let me know if any more goes on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 20, 2020 Author Share Posted August 20, 2020 (edited) Neopets Finale: Quests and Consequences Two quests are in this post; one to unlock Condrocs and the other to unlock the Shinrei tree. Enjoy. Quest One: Talons in the Skies Quest Giver: Master Teasonai Quest requirements: Menagerie in Dojo, Own a Kubrow/Kavat, Mask of the Revenant (MotR) and own a Tranq rifle. Teasonai will ask you to investigate the recent disappearance of a large part of the Condroc Population on the plains. He suspects poaching from Tusk forces. Your task is to first search for Condroc nesting sites, then collect 20 Condroc eggs and capture 2 Condrocs of each subspecies through conservation. Onkko will contact you as you capture the last Condroc to speak to him. When you get to the Quill HQ, he will tell you that the Unum has seen something unusual on the Plains. Something that should not be. A Condroc of great size, flying with the grace of flesh, but with the shimmering finish of metal. An Eidolon. The sentient's broken mind has attempted something new: imitation. You must wait until nightfall to continue. At night, you must hunt the beast. For this task, Onkko will provide you with a choice of an Amp-Spear, an Amp-Bow or an Amp-Sling. You can only choose one and later unlock others through a post quest activity. It will be much like a typical Eidolon, with weak points and an over-shield. However, firstly it is a giant bird and secondly it will respond more fluidly to be attacked. It will be airborne for parts of the fight, which is where the slightly longer range of the hybrid Amp Weapons come into play. It will use its physical bulk and a range of energy abilities to attack, just like its peers. When it dies, Onkko messages us, telling us that he has detected a sentient energy spike from an unusual place - deep below. The Unum is afraid of the portents of such a signal- has the Sentient awoken? You then travel deep into the earth, to the cave that takes you to the base of the fallen Orokin buildings. The Sentient ghost seen in MotR is seen scanning the base of the tower. When it sees you, it disappears into a cloud of blue light. Onkko suggests you try to examine the point that the spectre was scanning, but find nothing unusual about the Orthobaster (The white building material that most Orokin Structures are made from) at all. Given the lack of evidence, Onkko suggests that you return to him to consider your next move. You report back to Onkko. Onkko suggests that the replication and the unusual shape of the Eidolon suggests that the tower might contain some data about the original Condrocs of the plains. He suggests that you search for Sigor Savah. He doesn't know where the scientist went himself, but suggests Ergo Glast, or Little Duck as leads. Going to Little Duck will send you to Maroo, who will send you to Darvo, who will ask you why you are asking for the location of a scientist from a weapons dealer; so naturally the fastest option is asking Ergo. Ergo will explain briefly that Sigor approached him for assistance in conducting a taxonomic survey of Orokin plankton on Uranus, which he obliged. He gave Savah a small vessel and crew to undertake the task, but that was a few months ago. We will have to go to him. Ergo gives us a frequency and a code word for contacting him. (This will utilise the scanner's expanded functionality as detailed in my previous thread). When we contact the ship using the Orbiter's Scanner, we are only able to get its current coordinates, but not get in contact with Sigor Savah. We go down to investigate the ship in a similar manner to The Glassmaker Investigation minigame. It turns out that due to Sigor Savah's profile as an accomplished scientist, a wanted accomplished scientist made Tyl Regor became very interested in his efforts on Uranus. Gathering the clues Tampered experiments - 16 species collated. Temperature critically unsuitable for life. Rare specimens no longer suitable for Vivisection scan. Grineer Myrmidon mask - Out of place aboard a Corpus research vessel. Dent suggests signs of a struggle. Final Log - Orbit Hour 534 of Ergo-Savah Research of Uranus's Micro-Fauna. Something is affecting the Skimmer nets. All readings are fine, but further investigation is necessary. Perhaps we captured the interest of a Lanx. - Lanus Krum A broken distress beacon - Grineer Raid! Calling for immediate assistance! Flickers on the screen. The machinery is punctured by three large holes. Discarded Grineer data pad - Theres a Corpus vessel on the surface. following the shadow of Cordelia. They do not have proper clearance from myself to conduct business here, nor do they answer hails. They have some kind of scientific apparatus too. Interesting. They must have a person of interest aboard, that could be very valuable to all of us. Kill the ones you have to, but this interesting one must not be harmed. Take them to the Barodome. -Tyl Regor. We will come to a conclusion. He is in a maximum security prison, similar to Saturn Six called the Barodome. Spoiler Note: No, this will not involve Void-Trader Baro, as Baro here refers to Barometer- a device used to measure air pressure. Given the underwater base that Tyl Regor has devised for himself under the waves of Neptune, one of the immediate concerns for him is firstly to ensure that the base does not get crushed under the weight of all that water, but also that the air pressure remains at an Earth, or near Earth atmospheric pressure so that he and his subordinates do not suffer from many wonderful illnesses related to high or low atmospheric pressure. A prison that can subdue prisoners through Hypoxia, or Barotrauma then is a dastardly and awful prison indeed. Read more about adverse effects of high and low air pressure here. Sigor Savah has been captured. Breaking him out of prison is out next step. For this, there is plenty of source material already in game for how it could work. The initial introduction to the Kuva Fortress comes to mind, with the directional scanning lasers, as do the Spy vaults of Uranus. Regardless, we rescue him and during the escape, we talk about the situation on the Plains. The scientist accepts your request for assistance and agrees to head to the plains once more, eager to meet old faces and take on this new mystery. You take him back to the cave, to the same point the sentient was scanning. Sigor scans the Orthobaster, seeing at first nothing. Then, he takes a different approach. The Orthbaster itself is not interesting, but beneath is an interesting secret: taking a sonic mapping of the foundations reveals living tissue underneath. Worse, this tissue is Kuva rich and may contain some data about species from the area. Within the archive, Sigor is able to determine what the Sentient Soul scanned to create the giant beast. Ancient Condrocs are described as predatory and kept by Orokin administrators as a symbol of rank due to their imposing stature, long feathers and grim temperament to anything they considered annoying. The discovery is temporarily stalled by Vomvalysts, which you have to destroy. Sigor Savah suggests that if the sentient had been able to access and process this information, there will be more Eidolon Replicants. It might be good to have a pet that could spot these things from above. His student's good counsel in collecting eggs will make it easier to bring these ancient Condrocs back. The data of the tissue cannot be removed and it will be fruitless to destroy it- the Sentient soul has already uncovered the information it needed. We will have to safeguard it, so more discoveries may be made. You head back to Cetus. Sigor has called in some favours. To one side of the market, the worn down scrap has been cleared. The sterile, steel finish of the prefabbed Corpus structure stands in harsh contrast to the rest of Cetus and a crowd have gathered round. Sigor proclaims to the crowd that he has had renewed interest in the Eidolon-Moh and will be staying a while longer. Quest end. Rewards - Long range Amp weapon. You can create Condrocs in your Ioncubator and receive an egg to make your first one The Eidolon Replicants will also be unlocked - a collection of boss battles to liven up the Eidolon Moh. Alongside them, an extension to the Quills repertoire of Eidolon hunting devices. This will be covered in more detail in the next post. Quest Two - The Second Siege of the Unum Quest Giver: Quill Onkko Primary Quest Requirements: MotR, Talons in the Skies and have a pet that has completed the first three talent trees. When you have completed the requirements, Onkko will message you. The Unum sensed a system-wide pulse of Sentient energy. The Pylons have held, but the Sentient Ghost creature you described has been spotted by Quill tertiaries. Something primitive and cunning has awoken from its tomb beneath the Eidolon-Moh, a basic intelligence more malign than the Eidolons that roam it nightly. It appears the Replicants were the first step of a plan. Your assistance would be greatly appreciated Tenno. -Quill Onkko Primary You go to Onkko. He tasks you with visiting various points of interest above and below the plains with a Dowsing rod crafted with Breath of Eidolon and little signets of gold. Spoiler When equipped, the canister on the end of the rod will bob this way and that, but point straight at an active Eidolon. For the sake of making it easy to see, the sort of dias that I have drawn as a close up will be a HUD element and change color, or flash. This will be an important indicator that combat is about to start. All places of interest will have active Eidolon activity. Above ground, sections of the buried Sentient will glow as in life and in the caves, the Sentient Ghost will disappear, leaving us with a harrowing discovery: the Sentient Ghost has figured out how to couple Vomvalysts together. Two experiments will exist: Eidolon Atomosalysts and Eidolon Desmilysts. Eidolon Atomosalysts: These will be little more that Vomvalysts clustered together in the shape of a Carbon atom. They will hover towards you slowly, to get into attack range. They will have a magnetic burst attack, similar to one pulse of the Energy Spike of Eidolons, but at a smaller scale and with lower damage numbers. When their health depletes, their energy form will split into many regular Vomvalysts. Eidolon Desmilysts: These will be little more than 5 Vomvalysts stacked, similar to studio lighting. They will be arranged so that their faces are aligned to a single point. Instead of the usual withering bolts of Vomvalysts, the combined firepower of the Vomvalysts will be similar to a beam laser of the Eidolon Teralyst. Onkko will have much to consider when he sees both of these new creations. If the Sentient Ghost can do this, what else is it capable of? He will instruct you to come back to Cetus to strategize. There is very little that Onkko himself can ideally suggest; if the Sentient has awoken, then there is little more that the Quills can do than slow down the creature's advance to Cetus. The Unum suggests that you and your chosen pet head to the isle at the very tip of Cetus at nightfall (it will be marked). When the time is right, you head to the marked place. A glowing shape in the water approaches, a monstrous thing. But there is no fear here, only a sense of wonder. Mer-Sah has appeared. His luminescent white scales break the water's surface for only a moment, but you swear in that moment you can feel his gaze. As he disappears back into the depths of the Persian Sea, a single object washes up on the shore. It stands out on the mud and as you begin to inspect it, your pet swipes it from your hands, gobbling it up. The change is sudden. Their eyes will begin to glow with a subtle light. Onkko will appear at the edge of the pier, asking if the ritual is done. Looking at your pet, he will get his answer. He will ask you to go back to the Plains, wearing the Mask of the Lost One. It will allow you to see as your pet sees. Returning to the Plains at night, with the mask equipped will allow you to see many developments. The Sentient Ghost is reconstructing it's body little by little. Great phantasmal shapes will loom over the Plains, the twisted shapes of Sentient flesh arranging and rearranging itself with a sinister eccentricity. But even beyond this, a light will shine brighter, almost white it is so strong. You will venture into the depths of Mount Nang, finding an old mystery once again. The Arcane Machine from Stolen Dreams sits at the base of a Sentient Vertebrae. It speaks in that same harrowing screech. I WAS SO CLOSE, MY VENGEANCE ALMOST COMPLETE. I WOULD REKINDLE US ANEW, MAKE OUR SUFFERING COME TO AN END. OUR WOMBS WOULD SWELL ONCE AGAIN, OUR CHILDREN WOULD SING ONCE MORE. INSTEAD, YOUR KIND DESTROYED ME, DOOMED US TO OUR BARREN EXISTENCE. YOUR KIND ARE NO BETTER THAN THE MASTERS YOU ONCE SERVED. Vomvalysts, Atomosalysts and Desmilysts will blink into existence. You will have to defend yourself. Once you destroy all of them the message will continue. MY BRAIN WAS DESTROYED, TRAPPING MY ORO DEEP WITHIN MY MINDLESS FLESH. YOU FREED ME, IN YOUR AVARICE FOR A NEW PUPPET TO CARRY OUT YOUR BLOODY DESIGNS. I SHOULD SHOW MY GRATITUDE. The ground will shake. Out from the ground will appear Sentient Matilysts. Mati, Greek for eye. These will fire continuous beams of light at you. It will be up to your quick wits to destroy them. When you defeat them, the Arcane machine will speak again. HOW MANY YEARS HAS IT BEEN, AS A FURTIVE PRISONER? HOW MANY WOUNDS HAVE BEEN CUT, SPLINTERS SHATTERED? I WILL REPAY EACH IN KIND TO THOSE QUILLS. I WILL TEAR OUT THAT WITCH FROM HER TOWER AND GORGE MYSELF ON THE MARROW WITHIN. THANK YOU FOR BRINGING ME A MORSEL OF HER KUVA. The walls of the cave will give way to Sentient flesh. From above, what appears to be many eyes look down at you and just as many indistinct limbs appear from the ground. They grab and trap your limbs, your pet suffering the same fate. A cocoon of Sentient metal forms around you and you can vaguely hear the sound of drills and other harsher devices whirring up. Suddenly, an explosion sounds above. The cave shakes again. There is a serpentine hiss and your cocoon and bonds unravel, revealing a blinding light. From it, the indistinct blur of a human walks into view. The Sentient is stronger than I thought. Hurry, before the Phrondisomb fades. Says Onkko. He has come to rescue you. You leave the cave, only to hear the sounds of Eidolon roars and the sounds of men and women shouting. The Plains are a warzone. The Quills, try as they might are fighting against awakening sections of the Sentient. As physical sections of the Sentient are felled, their Energy Form rises once more. There are nowhere near enough lures to contain the shambling forms. You bolster the lines, taking lures to the skirmishes that are marked and helping to bring down the Sentient's shields with your Amp where necessary. As the last of the creatures fall, a vengeful scream roils across the Plains. Onkko will send you away, on a good job done. NB: the night will extend as long as is necessary for the fight to be done, but will not affect the regular day night cycle. Eidolon Hunting will otherwise be disabled. Onkko tells us that for this to end, we will need to trap the Sentient Ghost and destroy it. He has an idea that the Shrine of the Eidolon in Gara Toht Lake can be used as a trap. There are still bindings from the warden Revenant there, that could hold it in place long enough to bring it to heel. When you return to the Plains during the day, you will see that the Quills have extended the wards on the island of Gara Toht Lake to the surrounding banks. At night, you will be able to actively search for it again, using your chosen pet and the Mask of the Lost One. You will find it circling The Seethe, but will not be able to hurt it, merely run from it. You coax it back to Gara Toht Lake, trapping it in place the moment the moment that it enters. It will now be vulnerable to Amp fire. This will be an easy encounter, culminating in the Sentient Ghost disappearing in a flash of blue light. It's a trap. The ground begins to shake. From the rises and the mountains emerge Eidolons of various shapes and sizes. They will rush towards the Gate of Cetus. The Quills leap into action, but the Eidolons are not interested in fighting, merely rushing towards the gate with wild abandon. Then will erupt a sound, everywhere at once and yet nowhere. The sound of a great bell rings out and the Eidolons freeze. The bell rings again and the Eidolons start to stumble back. A great Sentient Scyllalyst will emerge from the ground, darting towards the gate. The bell rings again and the Sentient is suspended in place as if held by a great hand. The bell rings again and as it tolls, the Scyllalyst is flung into the lake. It writhes about, getting up to strike again. It darts for the gate again, only to strike against a barrier created by the wards. It is then that it recognises you. You will have to be fight it. This will be a much harder fight, the Scyllalyst using a mixture of some of the harder abilities used by Eidolons, such as the falling comet airborne AoE and it will also create great waves of Eidolon energy. Eventually the Scyllalyst falls into the lake, defeated. The bell rings again. A golden pillar of light appears above you. The light travels slowly to the sea, where a silver white glow parallels it. The bell tolls one final time and the both lights fade. Onkko will commend us on our victory. Quest end. Rewards - Dowsing Rods - A tracking tool for the Eidolon Hunter that doesn't want to use a Shinrei pet. Onkko-Other Services- Entrust Temple Kuva- Will allow a pet to unlock the Shinrei talent tree. Unum-Sight- Allows Eidolon hunters with Shinrei Pets to automatically know the location of the Eidolon when entering the Plains and also locate special Eidolon caches hidden in the plains. Don't worry, these will be large, glowing chunks of Eidolon flesh, not a tiny little beeping canister. Edited May 19, 2021 by Teoarrk Formatting Quest One's reward text. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 22, 2020 Author Share Posted August 22, 2020 (edited) 'Ere be monsters- Plains Expansion The Plains of Eidolon is at least in part modelled on the area surrounding the Heleh Protected Area, in Bushehr Province, Iran. The area is one of many places in the country designated important for the purposes of wildlife conservation. It may very well be that the Unum Tower was placed here directly because it remained one of the few places where life continued to exist in the far future. It is well protected from wildfires with incoming humidity from the Persian Gulf and with its back to the Zagros Mountains, it enjoys plenty of rain. With its position on the coastline and varied terrain, many species can survive here. I only bring this up as it shows that there is much that can be done with this area. There are mountains to the east, plains to the north, delta and wetlands to the south and the Islands Kharg and Kharko to the west. The only problem is that all of these things are beyond the pylon barrier that traps the Eidolons in. There are visible parts of the greater Sentient that lie on the island Kharg and hints of it to the east too, visible from the cave network. Ergo, some of the Quill's efforts could be based elsewhere. If we take a leap of faith and say that these distant parts of the Sentient could become active, then the Eidolon Replicants could be a threat to other areas as well. Enter Replicant Hunts. The Eidolon-Moh never runs out of surprises. First the Grineer attacks and now metal birds fly in the skies. I am a hunter for my people, the best one around here. I have no experience with the Eidolons, but now they ask me to instruct others how to hunt these Eidolon-beasts? Ai-yo. -Master Teasonai. Think Monster Hunter or Shadow of the Colossus here, with a Warframe twist. These creatures will be less aimless than Eidolons on the plains, but mindless of their true nature all the same. Where the Eidolons are mindless wanderers, these creatures will be living beasts of stone and metal, similar to the robotic creatures of Horizon: Zero Dawn. They will tower over the wildlife they imitate, existing as a freakish mockery of the animals they mirror. Incredibly deadly and capable a great destruction, if not put in check. The motivator for us to hunt them could be that they pose a risk to the pylons around the plains, or to Quill and Cetus interests in the surrounding areas. There is evidence that they may have a caravan leading to Europe, for instance. Different regions could take on different Replicants. In the mountains, Replicant goats, birds and leopards could roam, the plains to the north could house horses and cattle. To the south, frogs and insects. Towards Kharg, sharks and other sea life. The gameplay loop will be similar and different to Eidolon hunts now. Since these hunts will be outside the pylons, the hunts will be accessed by instance. When you get to the location however, the loop will be much the same find, take down the shield, shoot the vulnerables, capture or kill. The next thing to bring up is the gear the mode will bring to the table for players in Operator Mode. Ever wanted to change your Amp during a hunt? Just like fishing, it can be done on the fly. Other than that, other useful items for hunting could be added, like stun bombs, flares, bait, trapping domes to keep the Replicant in an area, or lures to help capture the beast. So what are we doing this for? Spoiler Unlocking primary zaws. Whereas kitguns focus on more sci-fi weaponry, these weapons will be crude, ugly even. But they get the job done. Larger Amps: slings, bows and spears. These weapons will be able to compete more consistently with Warframe weapons in raw damage, but be limited to primitive projectile weapon types. Cosmetics that reflect the nature of what we're doing. Heavy emphasis on the use of ceramics, sentient flesh and Breath of Eidolon. This is something that they might already be working on if this Artstation profile is anything to go by. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Little Extras Theres not much more I could suggest for the Plains. It is not perfect, but it is in a much better state than it was at release. Forecasts are Murkray, try again later When Plains of Eidolon was teased, one of the features that was hinted at, but never released was a more dedicated fishing tournament addition to the game. To this I suggest two different versions: The casual version of this would be having a gear item that allowed you to set a timer and count how many fish each player in your squad caught in that time. A more advanced version could come from Hai Luk herself as a daily, or weekly event. Each fish has a set weight limit. In this event, you could find fish that were either a different color, or have a greater range of weights, where the top end is effectively removed. The task then, would be to catch either a rare coloration of a given fish, or a fish over a certain weight. Another addition could be for you to come across 'fishing bosses'. Final Fantasy XV is not praised for its story, but its fishing system was fun and intuitive and had some truly memorable bosses. Spear fishing might make such an encounter seem a silly prospect, but since we can stun fish with the shock spears, there is now a layer of direct interaction we can have with fish beyond simply spearing them. In return, we could have a fish that tried to push us into the water, dodged around our spear tosses and was generally a nuisance. Much ado about Nyth-in Would like a treasure hunt mini-game for mining. You have to look for certain gems to fit a piece of jewelry for Suumbaat to sell. You would bounce from designated area to designated area on the plains, looking for mining nodes on a piece of rock that is colored to match the gems you require. Along the way, you will have to fend off Grineer Prospektors and Surveyors. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Thats a wrap. Next post will briefly cover changes to elemental damage. Edited August 22, 2020 by Teoarrk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 29, 2020 Author Share Posted August 29, 2020 I took a break to enjoy HoD. New post will come soon-ish. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted August 29, 2020 Author Share Posted August 29, 2020 (edited) Elemental damage changes will be next, just a couple of thoughts from playing last night, with regards to conservation. These all are upgrades to the Tranq rifle. I will put my comments on why I think these are useful upgrades in brackets. Track and Tag: Useful upgrades Brush-trail Visualiser - This would basically streamline the tracking process by giving you a light trail to follow, similar to the light up trails in the tumor bounty. (Some of the trails in the new update are hard to see, especially when they are purple on purple, or a meek purple on orange.) Scatological Analyser - The start of animal trails will have floating visual icons in the environment above them and have symbols that relate to the trail's species. (The only way to find some of the trails is due to Helios scanning them. They do not stand out from the rest of the visual clutter on the floor of Deimos.) Universal Sedative - Allows Tranq rifle to be used on enemies. (A lot of enemy harassment occurs during conservation, so having an option that allows you continue what you were doing without swapping out would be useful.) Improved Compression Cylinder - Projectile speed is increased and arc is flattened, allowing for greater accuracy at long range. (The new open world area can sometimes reward using the Archwing for tranq shots, so this would benefit that approach.) Chromatophore Mesh Net - When a Conservation target is within 60 m, the user of the rifle will become invisible for 5 seconds. (It can sometimes be hard to spot a Conservation target when it is getting close, so this would give you some breathing room.) Aerosol-release Sedative - Allows you to Tranq animals without having to rely on the darts piercing their hide. (Only way I see the Tranq rifle competing with Ivara's Sleep Arrow for some targets.) Fauna Vitals Locator - Shows you the direction of animals in the heads up display when aiming with your Tranq rifle. Conservation animals will be highlighted with a square target. (It can be very infuriating hearing a 'beep' from the Tranq rifle and having no indication where that beep is coming from. A visual aid would be welcome). A visual representation of my wishes was produced by the Reddit user u/sdric ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Till next time. Edited September 10, 2020 by Teoarrk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 7, 2020 Author Share Posted September 7, 2020 (edited) Elements of Wrath: Damage Rework Here we are, the damage rework. Initially this was going to be a simple type up, but since time has passed, it might be better to give a more fleshed out take on the entire thing. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Know your materials: what are we hitting? Right now, there are 13 different types of (to use the Warcraft 3 term) enemy armor: Cloned Flesh - Grineer Lancers Flesh - Corpus Footmen, Warframe Spectres Infested - Chargers, runners Infested Flesh - Crawlers, Explosive runners Fossilized - Ancients Infested SInew - Jordas Golem Object - Arc traps Alloy Armor - Elite Lancers, Warframe Spectres Ferrite Armor - Lancers, Troopers, all Grineer Archwing enemies. Shield - All regular Corpus enemies. Proto Shield - Corpus bosses. Machinery - Rollers, Regulators, Latchers. Robotic - Corpus Proxies, including Robotic Bosses. I don't think that there is any more that this list can be reduced and to be frank I wouldn't want to. These defined armor types are varied enough to give each faction a different set of weaknesses and strength. It has enough to it that there is a skill to be learned in optimizing damage and people can create convenient charts like this to help people out. Spoiler However, for all this work and created diversity, most builds focus only on a very narrow spread of damage types. Why is that? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Fire and forget: why a few damage types dominate For this section, let us discuss the different damage types. I will be working with the Wiki definitions. First, lets look at physical damage. Impact: (Status effect: Stagger) - Causes target to flinch and staggers movement for 1 second. For 6 seconds, adds a +10% chance for a Parazon finisher if the enemy is below 5% HP. Stacks up to a maximum of 10 stacks for a +100% parazon finisher chance. Each stack has its own duration. Puncture: (Status effect: Weakened) - Reduces any damage dealt by the target by 30% for 6 seconds. Subsequent Puncture Status effects add +5% weakening, leading to up to 75% reduced damage dealt at 10 stacks. Each stack has its own duration. Slash: (Status effect: Bleed) - Deals 210% base True damage over 6 seconds after a 1 second delay. Stacks are not limited. Each stack has its own duration. From the physical (IPS) damage types, we see a key distinction between Slash and the other components of physical damage, in that it is purely offensive ability and that when it applies a status, it ignores armor and that it stacks indefinitely, as long as the player continues to apply damage. Puncture ignores a percentage of enemy armor, but it's status effect is rarely noticeable. The time to kill in Warframe is so short that an enemy dealing slightly less damage only makes a difference over time, assuming that the player has no way of healing themselves and has very bad defences. In the modern game, this is very rarely the case. Impact also has a similar situation. It makes it only slightly more likely for an enemy to be susceptible to a Parazon Finisher at a health percentage where they would more often die to sustained fire than live long enough for you to close distance and use your hidden blade on them. So how would I change them? DE's approach on making each of these effects do different things is interesting, but not necessarily useful. Single target crowd control (CC) is not a viable way of handling enemies in the current Warframe environment. It might have been in an earlier version of the game maybe, when spawning rates were much lower and enemies on screen numbered 5/6/7 per person, rather than the 12-18 that we experience today, but now every status effect should deal damage in one form or another and indeed the most commonly used ones do so. Therefore, to bring the other physical status effects up to par, I must qualify a change to how armor works in the game. Rather than taking the current combined health and armor approach, split armor from health into its own separate health bar, like this example from Mass Effect 2: Spoiler The importance of this change is twofold: to give Impact and Puncture a better offensive role and to make Slash less of an auto include for everything. Good? Good. * *mechanical enemies health will count most of their health as armor and thus their defences will reflect this. Impact: Deals increased damage to enemies with armor, as well as shields. Damage will spread evenly between armor and health. (The end of the heavy plate armor era in European warfare is marked by a shift from short swords as a backup weapon to that of maces, clubs and flails. The greatsword, made famous as a sort of cleaving weapon often had a mace-like pommel. This was to counteract improvements in armor-smithing techniques, from chain mail, to armor plates interlaced to full plate with few weak points, thick enough to deflect the points of swords and spears. Therefore, the best way to counteract this was crushing armor with overpowering centripetal force. A heavy weight attached at a distance to the wielders hand increases the force of their strike and coupled with the large surface area of a ball, or block of iron is more likely to overpower the yield strength of a thin metal plate.) Status: Haemorrhage- Staggers enemies for one second. Deals 80% base true damage and makes afflicted enemies take 50% more damage from all sources for 6 seconds. Each stack has its own duration. Puncture: Deals equal damage to enemies with armor as those without. Shots will deal damage almost directly to health and deal little armor damage. Reduced damage to shields. (Anti-tank shells focus most often on defeating armor through a single point of contact. Where the spear or the sword could not pierce a heavily armed opponent, an anti-tank shell makes up for this with increased force of impact through increased velocity. Indeed, there are many aspects to the design of an anti-tank shell, but this is the main focus here.) Status: Gouge - Enemies will suffer 5% of enemy health as true damage. Each stack has its own duration. Slash: Deals full damage to unarmoured enemies and reduced damage to shields and armor. ( Samurai in particular are often depicted as duelists, fighting head to toe in lacquered leather armor with katanas in hand under blossoming cherry trees. This romanticism is far from truth. Katanas were for less of a better term, a weapon of subjugation, for which acts of barbarity were par for the course, their most commonly stated purpose to slaughter unarmored and rebelious peasants.) Status: Bleed - Deals 210% base true damage over 6 seconds after a 1 second delay. Stacks are not limited. Each stack has its own duration. (Slash is fine as it is, but I believe each other damage types need to be brought up to the level of Slash.) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Next up, basic elemental damage. Cold: (Status effect: Freeze) - Reduces Movement Speed, Fire Rate, and Attack Speed by 25% for 6 seconds. Subsequent Cold Status Effects deal +5% slow, leading to up to 70% (capped) at 10 stacks. Each stack has its own duration. Electricity: (Status effect: Chain Lightning) - Enemy: Deals 50% base Electricity damage to enemies within 3 meters of the target and stuns them for 3 seconds. Stacks are not limited. Each stack has its own duration. Player: Deals 50% base Electricity damage to allies within 3 meters of the target. Heat: (Status effect: Ignite) - Enemy: Deals 350% base Heat damage over 6 seconds, after 1 second, while causing the target to panic for 4 seconds and stripping up to 50% Armor. Stacks are not limited. Additional stacks refresh the status duration. Player: Deals 350% base Heat damage over 6 seconds and strips up to 50% armor. Toxin: (Status effect: Poison) - Deals 450% base Toxin damage over 6 seconds after a 1 second delay. Stacks are not limited. Each stack has its own duration. Outside of Warframe abilities, it is unlikely for a player to interact with the first two elements due to the few advantages of using them outside of CC and as already discussed, that is not optimal. So, lets work on that. Cold: Deals Equal damage to Armor as Flesh. ( Make it cold enough and even metal will become as brittle as flesh under cold conditions.) Status: Crystallization - Reduces Movement Speed, Fire Rate, and Attack Speed by 50% for 6 seconds. Subsequent Cold Status Effects deal +5% slow, leading to up to 100% (capped). For each stack, the enemy takes 10% more physical and explosive damage. When fully crystallized, the enemy has a 25% chance to suddenly die. (Players can only be slowed to 70% and therefore cannot be instantly killed). (Sudden death is a very large change, but stacks do not apply fast enough for this to be as efficient as other methods of killing.) Electricity: Has the current positives and negatives. ( I think this is one of the best balanced elements at present.) Status: Chain Lightning - Enemy: Deals 150% base Electricity damage to enemies within 3 meters of the target and stuns them for 3 seconds. Stacks are not limited. Each stack has its own duration. Player: Deals 50% base Electricity damage to allies within 3 meters of the target. (This grants this element the same amount of damage as Toxin, which deals damage without stripping armor.) Heat: Naturally, since armor will be another health bar in this new system, Heat Damage's status effect will change from momentarily reduces armor to dealing 300% Heat damage to health that bypasses armor and 50% damage to armor. Toxin: Toxin will still surpass shields, but have to deal with armor before damaging health. I think that this will be fine and keep it in place as a dedicated Corpus footmen killer. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Now, the mixed elements. These are not made equal. Blast: (Status effect: Inaccuracy) - Reduces accuracy by 30% for 6 seconds. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and a 75% accuracy loss. Each stack has its own duration. Corrosive: (Status effect: Corrosion) - Reduces current Armor by 26% for 8 seconds. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and 80% reduced armor. Each stack has its own duration. Gas: (Status effect: Gas Cloud) - Creates a 3 meter radius effect which deals 450% base Gas damage over 6 seconds to targets inside. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and a 6 meter radius. Each stack has its own duration. The effect stays for its duration even if the affected enemy dies. Magnetic: (Status effect: Disrupt) - Enemy: Any instance of damage dealt to target's Shields will deal +100% additional damage for 6 seconds. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and +325% additional damage. Each stack has its own duration. Enemies under this effect also cannot regenerate shields naturally. Player: Reduces maximum and current Shields by 75%, and drains 50 Energy per second and scrambles the interface for 4 seconds. Radiation: (Status effect: Confusion) - Enemy: Attacks any closest enemy with +100% bonus damage to allies and will be attacked in return for 12 seconds. Also applies +100% damage dealt to allied units. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and +550% damage against allied units. Each stack has its own duration. Kuva Lich: Increases damage received from other units. Stacks for a maximum of 4 stacks and +250% damage received. Does not make the Lich attack his allied units. Player: Reduces firing Accuracy, able to damage and be damaged by allies for 4 seconds. Viral: (Status effect: Virus) - Any instance of damage dealt to target's Health will deal +100% additional damage for 6 seconds. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and +325% additional damage. Each stack has its own duration. Magnetic, Gas and Blast are for the most part the losers of the current system. Magnetic has always been unremarkable and Blast, while much less infuriating then the ragdolling it used to provide, has an unremarkable effect that I didn't even notice when it procced. Gas is in a more refined niche than it used to be, but the anemic status effect is illogical. Lets tackle this then. Blast: Blast damage will deal increased damage to shields, machinery and fossilized enemies. Against armor, it will deal damage in an 80/20 split. Status: Shrapnel - Deals 150% Impact, Slash, Heat and Puncture damage to the target and enemies within 3 metres. (I think that all of these effects should be evident to those that have seen the effects of explosions, but for those not familiar with war films, or the real thing, explosions create blast waves of force, which knock you down. the payload of the explosion will fling pieces of metal everywhere at high speed, let alone the ignition setting things on fire if they are not ripped apart.) Corrosive: Corrosive damage will deal increased damage to armor, flesh and machinery, but reduced damage to shields. (Introduce a corrosive enough material to anything and you will find that you can make a puddle.) Status: Corrosion - Deals 110% base true damage over 6 seconds after a 1 second delay. Stacks are not limited. Each stack has its own duration. (Increased versatility compared to Slash warrants a lower damage percentage.) Gas: Gas damage deals increased damage to infested. (I think that this is fine as is.) Status: Asphyxiation Cloud - Creates a 3 meter radius effect which deals 150% true damage over 6 seconds to targets inside. There is a 25% chance for enemies to attack any closest enemy with +100% bonus damage to allies and will be attacked in return for 12 seconds. Also applies +100% damage dealt to allied units. Each stack has its own duration. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks, 550% damage against allied units and a 6 meter radius. Each stack has its own duration. The effect stays for its duration even if the affected enemy dies. Note: reduced effectiveness of status against robotic units. Kuva Lich: Increases damage received from other units. Stacks for a maximum of 4 stacks and +250% damage received. Does not make the Lich attack his allied units. Player: Reduces firing Accuracy, able to damage and be damaged by allies for 4 seconds. (Gas should be a universal killer. The fact that it is banned as a weapon of war should be felt in a time when our weapons have been refined to such a degree as they are in Warframe.) Magnetic: Deals great damage to robotics, shields and ignores a portion of armored enemies' health. (High Tesla fields are very detrimental to computers, can bend energy fields and you if you take a sharp object anywhere near them.) Status: Magnetism: Enemy: Any instance of damage dealt to target's Shields will deal +100% additional damage for 6 seconds. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and +325% additional damage. Enemies within 5m of the original target have a chance to be pulled into the afflicted target. Each stack has its own duration. Enemies under this effect also cannot regenerate shields naturally. Each stack will also increase the likelihood of disarming the enemy. An instance of this effect will also deal 5% true damage to enemies with armor. Player: Reduces maximum and current Shields by 75%, and drains 50 Energy per second and scrambles the interface for 4 seconds. Radiation: As current. (This one seems healthy as it is currently.) Status: Vaporization - Deals 150% Heat, Blast, Corrosive or Blast damage for 6 seconds. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks and 325% damage. Each stack has its own duration. Viral: Deals increased damage to flesh, but deals reduced damage to infested and armored enemies. Status: Outbreak - Creates a 3 meter radius effect which deals +150% toxin and gas damage over 6 seconds to targets inside. Stacks for a maximum of 10 stacks, 6 metres and +325% additional damage. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I am starting to get busy again and so updates will become more infrequent. At the moment, I am writing something completely different. A short story that I am unwilling to share details of at the moment. So until then, enjoy the post and have a good one. Edited October 21, 2020 by Teoarrk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 7, 2020 Author Share Posted September 7, 2020 Hmm, changing gears for next time. This is from a Devstream several years ago. I think that the smaller numbers will be even worse now. Mayhap I will cover (briefly) Conclave, Rush, Pursuit and Hijack. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 9, 2020 Author Share Posted September 9, 2020 (edited) Why we fight, but not over there- the unpopular missions. We have a few missions that just aren't popular in Warframe. Why is that? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Conclave The entirety of the Conclave entered Warframe under a divided community support. Many people back then and today still do not believe that PvP belongs in the game. The Solar Rail Conflict and the Dojo Duelling rooms were fun distractions, but for some revealed underlying problems with how the game simply was not designed for PvP. Even back then, players, including me wanted PvP to be released as a permanent game mode if and only if specialised PvP Warframes and weapons were released to make PvP mostly balanced. What we got instead was kind've there but still not balanced in the overall sense. Initially however, it still had one of the biggest problems that Warframe has a whole: no dedicated servers. The host had an overall advantage over everyone else. The game mode as a whole eventually got dedicated servers (but not fast enough for bad memories to be made), but something else came out that made getting into Conclave just as unappealing: Movement 2.0. The skill ceiling and a lack of players to provide balanced matchmaking dissuaded most players from playing the game mode more than once. The mods that made you powerful in the game are rare and difficult to acquire outside purchasing, or slogging through mostly empty lobbies, except at peak time. When Lunaro was released in 2016, it was met with lukewarm support at best. It has only become less popular over time, with some die-hard fans continuing to play it every now and then (like me!). What positives does it have at present? Early starchart access to late planet resources. Most fleshed out PvP experience in game. Sport. potential for expansion. Archwing Archwing is a weird beast. A space game mode in Warframe, released in 2014 and then not touched with more than bugfixes from the release of The Jordas Verdict in late 2015 till Plains of Eidolon in 2017, then given new weapons in 2018 with Fortuna and relegated to a sideshow with Railjack. Some of the hardest to farm mods in Warframe, but a fresh take on the tight corridors of old Warframe. Was it worth the hype? In concept, yes. In terms of playability? No. It was a buggy nightmare on release, then lacked the kind of content incentive to really get you into it on release beyond farming the same resources you had been planet-side, or mods with the aforementioned low, low droprates. The release of The Jordas Verdict and Jordas Precept breathed a little bit of fresh life into an otherwise just-because game-mode, but only for the few people that were into Trials on one hand and those who were already into it on the other. Trials in particular had their own niche, which wasn't very large in the overall playerbase. When Archwing physics were updated, it made some of the encounters break. By break, I mean the Jordas Golem would derpily fly into the bounds of his arena during the fight, then fly off into oblivion when he died. The pursuit target would glitch into asteroids and terrain. Both of these bugs are still present in the game. Rush is rush. Don't bother with it unless you are a masochist. Its best rewards are in tier 2 and the drop table is bloated with relics. When trails were removed, the most common player interaction with Archwing became little more than the fastest way to get from point a to point b in the open world. Itzal became the most popular simply because it had a vacuum and the ability to travel instantly across the map. Now that Railjack has been released, Archwings are getting use again. Only a few weapons from the Archwing arsenal are being utilised and Amesha is the meta pick there. Archwing melee is never used, except to troll outside of Archwing nodes. What positives does it have at present? Fast travel workhorse of open world. Unique missions. The most powerful star-chart and open world weapons are unlocked through it. Some interesting abilities attached to it. Adds additional support niche to Railjack. potential for expansion. Defection Defection is so obscure that it still doesn't have a codex entry and short of people getting the final part of Harrow, it exists as a filler node on several planets that is barely, if ever touched. The reason for this is simple: it is a high coordination requirement game mode that touts the same kind of rewards you can get in a few other places, except you work more for it and have to deal with a very strict loss condition. For these reasons, it serves as little more than a reminder of an event that happened a while ago and a test of your friends, or recruit chat denizens. What positives does it have at present? Can become genuinely challenging by squad 18 Requires genuine teamwork Potential expansion for Corpus defectors in future. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comments, changes and fixes Conclave Since only a few people are interested in direct combatitive PvP, but many content creators are interested in Lunaro, one idea that comes to mind is a fleshing out of the sports side of Conclave. The test for Mastery Rank 20 introduces a hoop based time trial to Archwings. We currently have, with Fortuna and Deimos k-drive circuits and leaderboards. What if Archwing and K-drive racing were added to the Conclave? I have not seen a more competitive environment in Warframe than k-drive time trails for a long time. If Archwing had a similar content wrinkle, the same thing would be true for sure. Now that all Archwings can blink, I think that there is a more even playing field for such a thing to occur. However, a universal rule for all of these: add clan and personal leaderboards. Add trophies, pins and sigils. Include a dedicated spectator camera. Tournaments and leagues have existed in Team Fortress 2 with less, but with these additions they could definitely thrive. To further cement their place in the community, consideration could be made for making a Lunaro room for the Dojo and Archwing and k-drive obstacle courses. Archery and Kunai tournaments could be a casual past time and give people incentive and space to really hone their skills with these weapons for combat. If you want to have semi-combative PvP, how about a content race? Two teams of players go through a dungeon and have to reach the end faster than the other. To make it interesting, each player is limited to have a max MR of 20. Not the MR of player, but the combined mastery requirement of the weapons and Warframe they are using. A competitive, kill rather than timer version of sanctuary onslaught could also be added. Go could readily be added to the game, given that the code of the simplified Komi already has been. The only other thing I would change in general is to revert deathmatch PvP to be closer to movement system 1. The floaty combat of movement system 2 gives it a Tribes: Ascend feel, but with a lot of the kinds of hip fire ballistic weaponry that Tribes avoided to keep the combat highly skill dependant. Edit: In order to keep up with the times, I will add to this list. Necramechs are a wonderful addition for PvE and play very similarly to Dreadnoughts in Space Marine. Naturally, the next step is to add additional tiers to Annihilation and Team Annihilation. In Necramech Domination, each player will be looking for a ruined Necramech, of which one will spawn on the map. Getting into it allows you to dominate the battlefield, racking up kill after kill. The other players will have to coordinate to take you down. The player that does will get a massive bonus to their kill count. In Necramech Scramble, each player will be in a Necramech and the mode will be a demolition derby of free for all explosions and angry corn cobs. In Necramech Supremacy, both teams will start with one player as a Tenno (no amp, no focus schools, just void dash and void blast) sort of like VIP in Halo. The teams will have to escort their Tenno to a ruined Necramech, which the Tenno gets to control. The team that brings the enemy Tenno's health to zero first wins. In Necramech Wars,both teams will be in Necramechs, sure to be a lot of fun. Finally, in Necramech Purge, the PvEvP section of the game will be full of players heading through a dungeon in angry corn cobs. Edit 2: Since I am sure some people would like the challenge, a form of Guitar hero PvP would be cool - Shawzin Showdown. The song would be chosen at random. In the case of a stalemate score, both players would be awarded the same number of points. So, to recap, the total list of Conclave game modes would be the following list: Annihilation -Necramech Domination - Necramech Scramble Team Annihilation - Necramech Supremacy - Necramech Wars Cephalon Capture Lunaro Archwing race K-Drive race Dungeon Tempo - Necramech Purge Sanctuary Slalom Shawzin Showdown Go Archery Kunai Darts Finally, for Conclave to become relevant, it needs to be given space at Tennocon in some way. Archwing The mission types in Archwing are relative to the period of Warframes development back then. With the release of Railjack, we see a glimpse of what Archwing could have been- mixed aerial and ground combat, to tie it more thoroughly into the rest of the game. It also shows that if given enough time and development of their tools, DE could have better used the scale that a space environment brings to the table. This is no better felt than in the claustrophobic, winding tunnels of the Corpus Archwing missions, the static, 'arbitrary' placements of interceptions, the tell, but not show Grineer mining platforms that we fight over. The list goes on. If these missions are not going to be subsumed into Railjack in the future, they need to be reworked into a 'Railjack-lite' system. This means missions with ground and aerial sections, set pieces and better rewards. This includes finally introducing a corrupted vault to Deimos for Archwing content and potentially Amalgam mods to make the less popular arch-guns actually useful. On a technical side, improvements should be made to how easy it is to control an Archwing. They are not the 'bull in the china shop' they once were, but it is still a skill you have to learn rather than something you can pick up elsewhere and apply here. How arch-melee is utilised in future can be fixed in one or two ways. Aim-glide slams with arch-melee makes you charge at an enemy like a jousting knight and rewards learning how and when to hit an enemy during such a maneuver. The lock on and magnetic attachment of arch-melee is increased to 100m so enemies cannot simply be just out of range. Archwings are being given modular parts in the near future. Therefore judging and improving current archwings is moot. Defection When this revs up, this is the closest thing to trials you can get in the current game. High stakes, high coordination, teamwork orientated action. But no one plays it. Theres a simple answer to this: no (meaningful) rewards. If even a poster were added for this thing, or for you to be able to acquire the armor set from the Kavor Defection event were on the table after a substantial amount of rescues, people would be interested in this game-mode again. It would also help if there was a place for defection groups to meet up, given how hard it is to find groups for it even in recruit chat. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Till next time. Edited January 3, 2021 by Teoarrk Battling guitars go brrt. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 10, 2020 Author Share Posted September 10, 2020 (edited) On 2020-08-18 at 1:52 PM, Teoarrk said: The Menagerie is something simple enough in practice. A place where your clan can have spectres of their pets run around in a large forested environment and a place for your pets to rest while you attend to Dojo duties. Menagerie Addendum: Mood Food and Rings A comment by u/Ajreil has sparked my interest in expanding this beyond a simple room for pets, but to instead have a practical purpose. DNA stabilizers should no longer be the only thing we can feed our pets. Imagine if we could feed them different foods to provide buffs. Imagine if the collars we put on them were more than cosmetic (prime collar does not count, its ability was effectively patched out). Kindred range at present is a good way of encouraging you to be near your pet, but they very often wander off, or get stuck, so regardless they still will remain a liability at best and a way of passively herding you to arbitrary locations at worst. Edit: in further conversation, this is going to be split into two. One side will be food buffs, the other collars. If any of you have played Black and White, you will remember the leash system for your avatar, that was further expanded upon in the second game. This attributed general behaviours to your avatar and gave it direct attack orders, or ordered it to do things in a certain area. Given that there already are many hotkeys in the game already, I will limit this control to collars. Ajreil's list is as follows: Cautious: Avoids combat if possible, and is willing to run away from its master to stay safe. Aggressive: Activity seeks out enemies, willing to go up to 50 meters away from its master. Curious: Prone to wandering off and exploring. Small chance to uncover hidden rooms or open caches. Loyal: Stays by its owners side at all times, only engaging with enemies that attack its master. I would modify it to fit in with the Pet focus trees I have created. These will be various collars. Cautious: Avoids combat and becomes temporarily invisible when enemies approach for 4s. Aggressive: Will engage enemies just beyond Kindred range. Greedy: Rare resources will be marked on your map and dropped loot will be 50% more luminous. Wanderer: Will discover adjacent tiles and move up to double Kindred distance away from you to perform non-combative tasks. Territorial: Will stay within 10m of you, only attacking enemies that attack you. Defensive: Will only perform abilities and attacks when attacked. These could be further expanded. Regardless, these collars will be up for research from the menagerie, as personal research in a similar vein to Railjack. The collars will require robust open world materials, such as minerals and other more ductile materials, like Nistlepods and Pustiles. The food system could follow a similar vein to Final Fantasy 15. In that game, eating campside recipes gave you anything as simple as a simple health boost, to making you a critical damage god. I suggest that a similar system be implemented for pets on the grounds that it is nice to have, not essential, but ties OW directly to performance of your pets across the entire game. Food will be made using open world fishing, with some touches of materials from other sources. Lucky - When at 45% or lower health, +25% additional crit chance. Verbose - +25% impact damage Caustic - +25% toxin damage Inspired - Each 5th attack will deal double damage. Ultimately, this is just a spitball, just like everything else in this thread. I might expand on the Menagerie more at another date. Edited September 11, 2020 by Teoarrk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 13, 2020 Author Share Posted September 13, 2020 (edited) This post was made as a response to @(XB1)DarknessZeref's call to expand upon the socialability of Warframe. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dojo Social Activities The Dojo is a social space and therefore it will always be a secondary activity to combat missions. So the question then is what could be done to provide more of an incentive for players to spend more time spent in a social space? It's very simple (in theory). Create a place with easy access to most necessary activities in a game. World of Warcraft has great examples of this in their capital cities. At launch, the game had 6 capital cities, 3 for Alliance and 3 for Horde. All had access to craft training, auction houses, npc vendors, flight paths (the game's fast travel system) and other things. Why then did Alliance players choose Ironforge and Horde choose Orgrimmar? It is simple. They sit at the centre of their respective continents and provide (relatively) fast access to all areas of their continent. This centralization also extends to their layout. Both cities feature wide open plazas around which the auction house and bank sits (where players spend most of their in game downtime). These wide open areas also allow players to see each other, which is important especially for new players. They get to see how powerful they can be if they put enough time into the game and get better at their class. They also have easy access to a duelling area, so that players can watch PvP outside the gates of the cities. There is also the visual and audio element to both of these cities: Ironforge Orgrimmar It is enough to say that they inspire confidence, a sense of wonder and have a lot going on in terms of activities to do and things to explore. What can be done to replicate this further in Warframe? Most clans, especially big clans are social spaces that architects and artists spend a lot of time curating. Some of the most impressive sculptures I have seen in any game are right here in Warframe and they are made by the players. At present however, they still are a detached activity, an opt in experience, even if you are in a clan. What do I mean by this? You see, beyond having an additional social node on the starchart, it changes little to how you interact with content. A list of active friends can be just as engaging as being in a clan, the only difference being that there are few additional clan-wide goals to reach. I have already posited a few additions to tie Syndicates to Clans in the form of special rooms or, a Clan specific mission in the form of Lyvrus's Grand Excavations. These could help push a clan further towards certain goals and activities. The Menagerie that I reintroduced in this thread and improving reputation with the T.A.I.L.S organization in general could be an interesting side goal for clans to work towards. Getting flying pets is not for everyone, but being able to buff your pet through food, or having different collars for them to wear to change their behaviour are also goals people would be at least a little interested in. But at the base level, we have a fundamental level of separation between our Dojos and our individual selves and that is simply due to the fact that they are a node. For some, a node filled with people that you might know, or get to know over years during your free time. For most clans however, it is an empty place for trading and unlocking weapons and warframes for free rather than a plat purchase on the marketplace. Empty hall upon hall before you, the whistle of the haunting Dojo music at your back. For each Moon Clan, there are thousands of Ghost Clans. The guy that you match with in Warframe.market whose Dojo is a box room with a treasury and a trading hub? Thats the average clan. So, now we get to the crux of this post. The easier steps Step 1. When you join a clan and use the Dojo key for the first time, the Dojo then becomes the place where you login and has the same capabilities as the ship. Being thrust into a communal area opens up a player to more natural social interaction, because you'll be spending more time in company with others. Of the activities missing, there would need to be some additional assets made, or simply duplicated from the orbiter. Navigation (Observatory) Arsenal (Observatory) Radio Scanner - Longwave interceptor - Imagine a short radio tower. Marketplace - Commerce Locus - Think of Darvo's shop. Codex - Origin Atlas - Think of this as the Codex as you know it, but your clanmates can also see holograms of what you're looking at. Mods - Mod Repositry - An Orokin relic that looks more magical than technology. Think of the Vaults. Foundry - Clan Foundry - Imagine if the Foundry in the Orbiter had a much larger brother. Relic Interface - Seeker's Hoard - Think of this as a floating, shimmering golden Orokin Orb whose surface peeled back at your approach to reveal relics beneath its surface. Incubation - Tenno Vivoforge - Think of the classic creature in a tank kind of affair. Focus/Transference room - Tenno Transference Hub - A nod to the entrance to the Necralisk would be fitting for this. Helminth - (This one will be talked about later. I think it is a bit more complicated). Syndicates - (This one will be talked about in the next part) Conclave - Conclave Mustering Portal - If you're all in the Dojo Together, makes sense that you can queue up together. Railjack (Dry Dock) How would you access your ship? Well, a room that I have wanted to be added for a long time would be part of the expansion to the dojo - a Clan hangar. The hangar of Relays surely would be a good shoe in for a new asset; they still hold up. If it were up to me however, the hangar would also have an area added to it purely for Archwings, sort of like an Archwing rack. Accessing a mission would play an animation of your ship undocking from the hangar. Replace the barracks rooms with upgrades to the hangar, like upgrades to the foundry, incubator, or more currently relevant, the Helminth. Edit: After a talk with a fellow concepter @413X who came up with the idea, the barracks could be readded as an inter dojo spawn room. Given the system load on login, this is the best way of allowing players with lower end systems to use the dojo as their spawn. The rack of cryopods in the barracks could also have an animation for logging in and logging out (with adaptaions for players that have passed The Second Dream and The War Within) So, now we have a centralised hub, access to the ship. What new things will you throw at me? Well, the first change I would make is how the Clan Vault works. Clan members can donate relics and primed parts to the vault. A clan Warlord can then delegate these to clan members. Each member can be gifted up to 5 items a week from the Clan Warlord. Now that the foundry is communal, the Clan Vault can also be utilised for more than funding rooms and decorations. Say you join a clan at MR.2 and you want to get ahold of Paris Prime, but you aren't at Saturn yet. You can submit a request for help to fund the missing Nano Spores. The Clan Warlord can then accept your request and send you the nano spores. This works for anything that has a blueprint and required parts you don't have. Note: Items in the forge that received items from a request cannot be cancelled. This is simply so players cannot request 5 top of the line prime parts for builds, cancel them and then leave. Edit: There could be an honor/ give back system tied to this. Once again credit to @413X for this addition. At MR 0-10, there would be no need to give back items, but beyond that, there would be an option for a warlord to ask a player to replenish the resources/items that they had borrowed. Secondly, each of the labs will now have NPCs. Theres nothing quite as engaging as a character that we can associate with each activity, a level of interaction beyond you and an access panel. People remember Hai Luk, Konzu, Suumbaat, Hok, Teasonai, Nakak and Onkko and can build relationships with them, but it is much more difficult to build a relationship with an access panel beyond cursing it for asking for a few thousand more mutagen samples or a few hundred thousand more credits. Maru Ulghan - Infestation Lab Prefect. Personality: uppity, coy. An Infestation researcher for hire, she is willing to part with the goods, for the right price. Ashran Imaris - Tenno Lab Prefect. Personality: dogmatic, passive. Former Arbiters of Hexis seeker, but rejected the path after the Syndicate war cost him his cell. Varln - Chemical Lab Prefect. Personality: funny, shy. One of the first Kavor Defectors and a Grineer Scientist to boot. Ekki Djang - Orokin Lab Prefect. Personality: cold, hard. Maroo cut him out a few years ago for uncovering the find of the century and keeping the profits all to himself. Geeza - Energy Lab Prefect. Personality: sarcastic, dry. A Solaris United spy that is willing to sell Corpus weapon blueprints to the Tenno in exchange for 'donations'. Thirdly, short of rewriting the music of the Dojo, allow the Clan Warlord to choose the music playing in the Dojo from their personal Somachord collection. As an additional incentive, add drums of war to the list of available songs so that people that are new to the game can hear it for drum kit shenanigans. The intermediate steps Anything beyond this I would consider harder and more labor intensive. From my own creations, the Perrin Terminal and the Hydroponics Centre may be the simplest to add. One requires adding a 'farming' system to the game, the other can just be a list of procedurally generated company names tied to different industries with a watered down economic model. Operating the Theremin Hall would be based on a modified, full three octave version of the Mandachord, which in itself may not be hard, but given that it has not been further expanded upon with Octavia it is hard to say, although with the release of the Shawzin with multiple different scales it may be that this is just a style choice. The Balance Hall would rely on creating zones where different activities would be enabled. However, for the Observation Nexus and the War Room, entire new mission types need to be added. I have covered at length what the Observation room will be used for, but the War Room is an entirely different beast. Trials and their future in Warframe depends entirely on the ambition of DE and the voices of the community. I will cover the raids I want to go over once I have more than the footnotes of an idea and one that can hold up for more than a few minutes against the modern Warframe player. That being said, if DE ever consider Trials again, it is most likely going to be an activity where clans do more of it than people in recruit chat (depending on difficulty). For this reason, these two could easily fall into the hard category. Sticking with Syndicates, I left them out of easy steps. Now why would that be? Beyond the previous two paragraphs, it is because I want to do something controversial here. I have written previously about bases for each Syndicate. If I simply add remote access to their full offerings menu in the Dojo, it will make the time and effort of creating the bases amount to 5 minutes of exploration of the average player and then somewhere that players may go once in a blue moon to take nice Captura photos and / or interact with the Syndicate. The difficulty then is convincing people that this is a necessary step. It is somewhat similar to Riven Mods- once the genie is out of the bottle putting it back in is much more difficult. I did include Conclave in the easy steps, but part of it that can exist on it's own as a clan social activity- adding a Lunaro Room to the Dojo. Lunaro is a sport that I think most of the playerbase is missing out on not playing. It's like Rocket League mixed with ōllamalitzli and in that way it sure earns my respect for even approaching a crossover like that. The control scheme is different from regular play, but a lot more skill dependant then it first lets on. It is good for improving coordination, is good for team building and creating camaraderie and is actually quite fun. Next would be the Helminth. I think that the Helminth is a system that could afford to be incorporated into the Dojo in some way, shape or form. If we take what we have in the Orbiter, then make a larger, more freakish version of it for a clan environment complete with new metamorphoses and rewards to match at higher levels and you have yourself a resource sink that will make even the most established Warframe player chip in their millions of nano spores. The final piece of this section is adding a Cephalon to the Dojo. In a laughable attempt to draw such a thing a couple of years ago, I wished to add an 'Orokin Vault' to the Dojo, complete with a gilded winding staircase and a giant statue of Vauban standing guard. The keeper of this domain was the hilariously named Pecunimus (The latin for money is Pecuniam) who would heckle at you with all the spite of a financial clerk with more air than business acumen, but lets run the idea through a wider lens. Ordis (Ordo, latin for order), our caretaker is in the ship will not be coming with us, but another Cephalon will be with us in the Dojo. Following the metric of simpler Cephalons, I posit Ratis (Ratio, latin for reason) as the Dojo caretaker. He could be haughty, but a crowd pleaser. Since he is tied to a structure, rather than a ship it is much more believable to think of him to be more mute. He could be elated to see you, but not say much more than need be. The hard steps Now we move onto things that may be faux pas of Warframe - things that may even get those die hard readers that have gotten this far to look away. Let us count together children: Revamp the trade system Add an auction house Give us regional command ops / colony and faction leaders. Add more rewarding lore breadcrumbs 1. The trade system is in a much better spot in terms of ease of use - during the actual trade. However, getting to a trade outside of Warframe.Market or a similar site is a frustrating experience. Most people don't want to trade just one thing, but rather an entire list of various odds and ends, but mostly rivens. Filters will not get rid of everything you don't want, so instead I posit that we can set up linkable trade lists for more than 2 or 3 unique items. Where Dojos come into this is that for most people this is where they trade. So therefore, Dojos could have trade boards so that players can display what they want to sell or buy for members of the clan. Passive trading is a necessity in a worldwide game, as different timezones and free hours are more of a factor than one that only is in one timezone. These could be boards that simply list these demands, as I think @Yaldabaoth_ was going for, or be a place where one party can accept and complete the trade, even if the other is not playing at the moment. Of course, have a consent window so that players can't just 'accidentally' list them. Daily trades for both players will be depleted on completion of said trade. 2. Passions are very high when talking about such matters. However, it is much easier to find items on a competently coded auction house than in a fast moving trade chat. Both systems have worked side by side in other MMOs and Warframe has a lot more to gain than lose. Daily trades will be deducted the moment you put up items on the auction house. The buyer will lose daily trades on buying an item in the auction house. This could also be a deployable Dojo module and be a new role for Maroo in her Bazaar. But given that Maroo is right at the front of her bazaar, it will not give people much visual space to stand when they want to trade. Maybe a new character could stand at the spot of the blue rune at the back of the bazaar, or it could even be a Cephalon named Pecunimus. Yes, I'm sticking with the name. The auction house at the bazaar could be called the 'Ecunomopolis'. 3. Regional command ops would be great to add. Whenever they take over for Fleshy/ Purple Lotus it makes the game seem more alive in a more worldbuilding sense. It could be as simple as having another person's voice reading the same script as the Lotus, to minor lore drops through mission dialogue. What if, pray chance, some of the bosses even gave us backhanded instruction, similar to Alad V in the Disruption game mode. On another note, it would be nice for Capture and rescue targets to have small procedurally written bios to let us know who they are and why they are deserving of our attention. 4. Olemedi, Sigor Savah, Er-Phyrah, Ordan Karris and characters out there that add more to the game than just another objective marker. They are purely for window dressing and can make you feel invested in the story. However, these short stories are very infrequent. Whether there is a strict vetting process, or there is no place to put them I do not know, only that it is a terrible shame that there are not more. They can get friend and clan groups to form just to find them and are good talking points for game media not related directly to gameplay. Bonus: Community Easter Eggs. Enigmas like the Acolytes get the entire community working together. Now that they are being reworked, attention should be paid towards making sure that in their place something comes forward equally as challenging and just as alluring. Hidden vaults coming out of the ground? The infamous 'Guardian' troll finally being added? Grineer Informers? There is much that could be said here. Bonus 2: Credit for @Yaldabaoth_ for this one. Create a room that allows clans in an alliance to visit each other. Think of it as an instance airlock, like the gate of Cetus. I'd go with the name Door of Friendship, to refer to our coveted and ever present friendship doors. Many clans in an alliance consider the company of other clans in their Alliance on Discord, or in Alliance Chat. Maybe they will group up with them on missions from time to time, but visiting other Dojos in the Alliance? Thats not as common, or as easy as it should be. To go alongside this, there should also be a Dojo Alliance key, since it is no longer your clan that you are visiting. Bonus 3: Credit to @blazinvire for this one. Lets start off with a visual. Spoiler In all this talk, I could not have thought of this. In a way, it is an elegant solution to a problem DE faced years ago when Moon Clans dominated the events, such as the legendary Warbros. When a clan reaches capacity, it can cause upset for friends that want to join, but can't. Blazinvire suggested a sort of consultant, or mercenary system. It works like this: you want to join a clan, but not leave your old one? The Clan recruiters hire you on as a mercenary. You are added to the clan members social tab of each clan member and they appear in your 'mercenary contacts tab'. The reason why this is so important is that it allows DE to give a way for solo Ghost clans to merge without having to necessarily destroy the hard work put in by the people that treat the clan business as a solo venture. Unfortunately, that include me (on PC). I left my old clan because it was dying and I'm simply not on enough to be as active as a good clan warlord should be, so I don't recruit. However, the implementation of this system would allow me to reach out to other small clans and build up a social network without having to throw away months of decoration and spent resources. On a less personal level, it also gives DE a pragmatic solution to the ever present problem of content balancing for one person and four people, let alone their relative strengths and weaknesses. In a system where the social network net is wider, there are less people that are out of options if a task is simply too difficult alone, because they will have more people that they can contact. Bonus 4: Dog Days super soaker room. Dog days is a lot of fun, would be great to have access to it all year round in a limited capacity. Bonus 5: Visitor pass. When being invited to a dojo for trading, you come across masterpieces. You finish up your trade and the host leaves, kicking you out. But what if you could stay for an extended period of time afterward? 30 minutes of access to a dojo would be a great way for ikeaframe players to get their art seen by curious players. Credit to @cephalon_corgifor helping flesh out the idea. Bonus 6: Have a Warlord that hasn't been on for a year? Vote for a new one! With the number of player features in this concept that require an active Warlord, being unable to interact with these features because the Warlord of your clan hasn't been on for quite some time is an issue. As discussed with @413X, this would be an option accessed via the clan overlay. The default time for replacing an inactive Warlord could be 1 year, adjusted by the Warlord himself. The Officers could be the ones to initiate the vote and officers (and players with lower roles, if granted permission) could then vote on the new Warlord. The old Warlord would be demoted, rather than kicked. This could perhaps be extended to have an in game way of handling toxic and or abusive warlords, but I leave the extent up to any feedback this gets. Edit. Bonus 7: Been playing Monster Hunter over the weekend. There should be a bulletin board which shows active missions players in the clan are on. If the objective of that mission is still active, a player could quick join a mission if there is an available slot. This is already possible via the friend menu, but it is not easily accessible. It also will give players a place to gather in a clan to join missions, making natural group formation possible if no current missions are available. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I haven't decided what the next post will be on yet. Stay tuned, but for now have a good one, wherever you are. Edited February 7, 2022 by Teoarrk New idea! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 15, 2020 Author Share Posted September 15, 2020 (edited) Sit, Stand, Kill: a simple system for controlling pets I read the upcoming features for Warframe included a pet command system. So I decided that I'd try to quickly figure out how to work it. Of all the actions that we currently perform, way pointing is the best place to expand for such a thing. Why? Because it has been expanded successfully in other games. Take for instance League of Legends. You can simply ping a map location, or hold down the ping button and this dialogue wheel pops up. Lets take this and adapt it for Warframe. G key tap (default) - mark a resource, position or enemy (as normal) G key hold - a dialogue wheel pops up. The four options would be Stay Here, Follow Me, Attack anything in this area/Attack this enemy, Stay away from this area. It does not have to end there. Our Warframes / Tenno could fling a toy towards that location. dogs have proven time and again the effectiveness of a good toy to get them to new places. Kavats seem to be 'doggish' cats and are willing to play football if you kick the ball to them. Birds are no better. Since marking a location is already a default keybinding for controllers, DE would not have to deal with the headache of finding another contextual shortcut. Tell me what you think. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Have a good one. Next post will take a bit more time. I am thinking about concepting changes to make relays social hubs too. Then after that, maybe talk about empowered liches as a second mini trial event and after that ... not sure. Till then. Edited September 16, 2020 by Teoarrk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 20, 2020 Author Share Posted September 20, 2020 (edited) Relays- How to make them into social spaces. Relays are an interesting misfire for a central social hub, one that has been avoided by every hub DE has made since (except one). Why is this? Content access overlap Few unique experiences/opportunities No 'skills/trades/professions'. Fast travel. No direct social interactions with the overarching faction - the Lotus Path Guardians. Content access overlap Syndicates - after your first encounter with each syndicate leader and obtaining your reputation mark, you never need go to them again (aside from submitting marks, accessing quests, speedrunning the repeatable boss and Arbitration). The fact that you do not need to go to the Syndicate leader in person to rank up with the Syndicate reduces the significance of the milestone, making it not much more of an achievement than say building a weapon in terms of required input, even though grinding reputation may take many more days of grind. Conclave - the winding path of the conclave could have served as a good mustering point for players to gather to play conclave, but with the introduction of the Conclave Terminals in the ship, players do not need to gather in one place to see who wants to play, only to rank up with the Syndicate and purchase rewards. Sanctuary Onslaught/ Elite Sanctuary Onslaught - Given that this mode is tied to Simaris, there are quite a few other reasons to visit him, but for the sake of this game mode the only thing you cannot access from the ship is the leaderboard. Few unique experiences / opportunities 5 quests are available from the relay. They are all unique, multi stage events. Some are better than others. One Fortnightly vendor on one relay that intermittently delivers completely new items. Most returning items cannot be acquired anywhere else, except trade. Simaris has a 'training dummy' room, a place to practice MR tests, unique items, mods and weapons, daily mission and has lore snippets locked behind synthesis Darvo has a weekly mission and offers older marketplace weapons at reduced cost in limited supply. Steel Path unlock for veterans, otherwise limited vendor. Most rewards are given on the ship. Arbitration unlock for players that complete the starchart. Relays are attacked every month/2 months depending on the quality of invasion rewards. No skills/trades/professions The reason I bring this up is that as an RPG element, professions encourage prolongued stays in a spot. For instance, consider how much time the average player spends going back and forth to an open world hub from the foundry to process the materials necessary to make a kitgun/amp/zaw. Imagine if they could craft those materials in the open world hub as well. An additional avenue of player identity could be found in adding non-combat professions, which at present are missing from the relays. Fast Travel This is maybe a little more subjective, but fast travel in a relatively small hub like the relays suggest how much space is wasted. They have a boon of course, reducing travel time, but what does it say about an environment that people do not want to take the 1 minute journey from the hanger to i.e. Simaris? Nothing good. No overarching faction interaction In the past, the Guides of the Lotus program gave the relays a direct 'faction' for players to interact with and ask help from. Since the program has been scrapped, it has significantly reduced the player interaction with a faction that directly represents what DE wanted out of the relays: a place to gather and help each other out. I am fully aware of why it had to be scrapped, but with nothing to directly replace it the relays are more barren. With the Strata relay restoration, Solarians and Ostrons have been added to the relays as additional NPCs. They however are there only to add to the environment, with no direct player interaction. All of these issues together make relays into a place of limited use. How many people that have read up until now visited a relay during every play session in the last 7 months? I don't think it will be that many. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Relay social rework Central hubs matter. They are a staple of any RPG, MMO or not. They are where quests are dispensed, where special events happen, where tradesmen teach others their craft, where interesting people tell tales and have mystical things from the past, or far away. Returning faces from the trials and tribulations of the game make themselves known. The main leader of the player faction appears and has a direct relationship with the player, or players. They have a unique feel and grandeur. DE has three successful ones in the forms of Cetus, Fortuna and the Necralisk. They have the means and the ability to create meaningful hubs. So if anything, what follows will be pointers on how to make relays 'more important' in future. Layout and theme Something simple separates the open world hubs from the Relay - an open layout. What I mean by this is that players aren't hidden from other players. Consider the following images. Spoiler What do you see in these images? Functional open spaces, a mixture of commercial and recreational, art and function combined to create an interesting and 'practical' environment. Do either of the cityscapes in World of Warcraft make the best possible use of space? No, but that is not the point. They combine function with character. Here are maps of both of these cities. Spoiler Here is a similar map of the relay: Spoiler Why the relays don't work where these digital cities did could be tied to many of the other reasons I have already listed, but one thing that this comparison can immediately draw to mind is that while the key cities of World of Warcraft focused on scale and open, doorless designs, Warframe's key points are often tucked away in their own special rooms - like a hotel. It is in its own way suggesting a sense of privacy is required for what you're doing, while playing a game that is, among other things about making friends. Every item in a main city need not be perfectly placed, but it should be easy to see other players. The designers of the relays have created this great sense of scale in the hangar of each relay, but then a narrow city greets them after. Why should that be? Why not emphasize that sense of scale that the hangar affords them? The Tenno are the defacto heirs to the Orokin through sheer power and might alone and the relays are a symbol of our collective strength. The cultures that the Tenno are inspired by are a mixture of Tang Era China, Shinto Buddism and a little touch of Tokugawa-Era Japan. If learning about these cultures has taught me anything, it is that they do not build small in triumph and victory. Therefore, each relay should be more open plan. Consider the design of Fortuna for instance. It embodies a lot of positive design decisions and yet, this is an industrial area and the Solarians that inhabit it are as close to slaves as can be. The relays are supposed to represent the combined efforts of the Tenno and their allies and yet each one is smaller than (as we have learned with Deck 12) a common Corpus industrial and housing complex for their workers. It doesn't feel right for our grandeur to be lessened so, especially when the Relays are the main bases we're supposed to gather in. Since the relays were made at a time when the game was younger and the scope of the game was smaller, it might be good for them to be expanded alongside the scope of the game. How about a new layout altogether, along the lines of this? This could be one of a number of new unique Relay Layouts. Spoiler Going from area to area, I'll try to describe the key features of each. Port - the port area has been expanded to allow Railjacks to dock at the relays. This will allow Railjack to recruit players from local chat and access special upgrades from the dockmaster, for the right price. The little point to the left of the image is where Baro's yacht will dock, allowing him to make an even grander entrance every fortnight. He will be present in the port. Lotus Path Guardians will patrol around the port and members from various open world factions or other lesser ones will have items for offer in a barter arrangement, or for ducats. Main Concourse - Players will find all the amenities of the ship here (expect personal quarters and the helminth system). There will also be profession trainers, a Koi Pond and a place to play Komi and Koi Koi. The proud statue of Lotus (as she was) will stand at the entrance to this district. Teshin will be present here atop a pyramid that resembles his current rise, but adapted to be approachable from any angle. If a player chooses to make the relay their login point, this is also the area where they will spawn. Sanctuary - The old Sanctuary you know and love. This area has no problems at present, other than being out of the way despite being one of the highest traffic areas. Nora Night - Think of this as a kind of a mix between live performance / Nightwave area. Here you can listen to music from Nora's pool and songs from Tenno Tunes. You can also see what the new Nightwave is all about, preview some of the items on offer and trade in creds from previous seasons to new creds. Vendor/Darvo area - Armor sellers, helmet sellers, weapons and Warframes. Darvo will be a returning face here, but new ones will be present as well. Mission Ops - Lotus Path Guardian mission center. Here you will find Arbitration and Lotus Path Guardian missions. Unique experiences and opportunities Among other things, one of the important things in any hub are social ambassadors. What are social ambassadors? In essence, they are representations of a given activity. In an MMO, space is an expensive commodity, so it is important to give people easy relation between an activity and an NPCs design, or props near them. The first two open worlds did this directly, the latter through an introductory quest. Relays do this too at present - the Syndicate rooms tell you what they're about, as does Teshin, Simaris and Darvo. However, since the Syndicate rooms serve as a replicate of a single console in the orbiter, the value of these are lost. Since I have moved Syndicates to their own bases, instead I will add something else in it's place - The Lotus Path Guardians. Lotus Path Guardians The first big changes is the Lotus Path Guardians. This will be a faction of Tenno that are security and the main force on the Relay. They will be armed with Corinths and other heavy weapons and have a unique blue, brown and red color scheme on their skinsuit. Their symbol will be a version of the Lotus insignia, with greater ranks of standing displaying different declarations under the sigil. Rank 1 - For the Lotus! Spoiler Rank 2 - For the Colonies! Spoiler Rank 3 - Defender of the Path Spoiler Rank 4 - Protector of the Future Spoiler Rank 5 - Origin System's Avenger Spoiler Their leader will be Thalia Mirv, the closest thing to a Grand Admiral the Tenno have. A Mercury native, she joined the Tenno as a way to save the Caloris colony from further harassment by Grineer raiding parties. She rose up the ranks of the Tenno allied navy, moving up the ranks at great speed due to her tactical acumen. When the Relays were created across the system, it is she that suggested that the relays would be a safe place for all factions of those allied to the Tenno. Now that the Accord has been signed, she has turned to those same factions as dependable allies across the space lanes. Thalia is a militant pragmatist. She is not one for dogma, for anything other than what is required. This doesn't make her cold, but rather to the point and driven as such. The missions she will provide will focus on either Archwing or Railjack combat. She will also provide a series of training exercises for Railjack, so that players can get used to the different roles in a stakes free environment. Cheng Ucletso will be her right hand man. He grew up in an colony around Makemake, before Corpus assaulted the colony. Too much of the infrastructure was damaged as a result and with no possibility of deciphering the ancient Orokin technology, the young Cheng and his family became drifters. They soon settled on Ganymede, only for 'The Great Merge' to occur, with Corpus once again threatening their lives. His father joined the Median resistance and when Cheng was old enough, so did he, but he found he made a better teacher of war than raw fighter himself. He found his skills gained him as many friends as enemies, eventually leading him closer and closer to the Mercury. After the first battle for Caloris, Cheng was recognised for the capability of those under his tutelage and the phenomenal efforts taken to ensure that the colony suffered minimal casualties. Thalia Mirv was quick to pick him as chief of staff. Cheng is a soft spoken, salt of the earth kind of guy. He is no pushover though and will quickly settle disputes if needed. Instead of missions, he instead will list players that have deployed an assistance beacon. If you are able to complete the mission with the player, you will get reputation for the faction. Joon Holas will be the head spymaster and the communications expert. A former Corpus Profit agent, he defected when ordered to arrest a Solarian orphan for brain shelving. His life was spared when his devolotomy device (a small explosive lodged deep into the frontal cortex) did not detonate. He got himself off world before his former comrades got wise to his changing loyalties. He was able to convince Tenno authorities that he had information on a whole slew of Corpus plans, a bluff that paid off when handed a scanner and given a couple of minutes to decipher the encryption on a Corpus transmission that laid down the invasion of Orcus. He instantly became a valuable asset to the Lotus Path Guardians and the most talkative of the communications corps. Joon is bashful know it all with just enough smarts and luck to pull it off. His missions will be based on attacking convoys, warships, haulers and VIP corvettes in deep space. Expect anything from Archwing and Railjack missions, down to Spy and Chain- Capture missions. There should be more characters here, but these are the three that are the most important. Professions All the professions will be governed by the Lotus Path Guardians, but may not be tied to their reputation directly. Archaeology will be a profession tied to recovering ancient items - some of these will be Orokin, but some of the rarest items will predate them, such as the ancient aliens referenced in the jazzy new shoulders from Glassmaker, or us. The value of this is that players can have additional decorations for their ship, armor pieces or pet toys. Melding will be like making a kitgun - except more expensive in raw materials. For this system, you sacrifice two non-Kuva firearms and pick weapon type, fire speed and damage percentages. Weapons with a riven dispo below 1.1 cannot be used for the system. The value of this is namely to crunch two weapons that you don't like into something you are more likely to use and to remove meh weapons from your inventory in a meaningful way. Gundressing - Think of this as the 'Sheen' and 'Trophy' systems from TF2. Sheen is simple cosmetic effect, like a sparkle or a smoking effect, whereas trophies add props to the model, in a similar way to our Sugatras. The vaule of this is to make weapons more unique, without applying a weapon skin. Tagging - When I saw the K-Drive scrawls, I was interested in personalizing these even further. What about making it possible to create your own scrawl, to truly make your board your own? The system could open up with additional symbols as the reputation increases. I don't think that it would be necessarily bad to give players such freedoms given that no one else will ever see the scrawl. Artifice - The old arcane helmets sit in a weird spot of not being strong enough to be more useful than the most used arcanes, but also not entirely useless (but mostly as a status symbol for older players). Essentially, this profession would be about creating arcanes, or removing them from helmets, only to make them stronger (under the right circumstances). Martial Arts - People have wanted to go full Bruce Lee on enemies for the longest time. This profession will be all about unlocking different disciplines of unarmed fighting and growing stronger over time. This would be a good opportunity to give Ostron monks and Quills a bit of combative characterization. Vendors Rather than a console, take a leaf out of Cetus's book - have different vendors sell different things. All the vendors will have deals of the day and promote recent items added to their shop. Hux Tolando - Warframe vendor. Behind him will be some of the pods that we protect during defence missions, with the three starter frames within them. Ilya Bix - Armorsmith. Various mannekins with different armor sets will be behind him. Cephalon Ixial - Gear seller. Various gear items will be displayed around her weave - matrix. Fiona Ilaic - Skins, palette and Alternative Helmet Seller, She represents Visvam Helmonics, the leading Warframe beautificators™. Holograms of various skins and helmets will be on display in her shop. Kashr Jharvas - Seller of odds and ends. Anything from DNA stabilizers to noggles. Darvo - Sells weapons. Will also promote Twitch. Amas Tekelu - Gunsmith. Will sell weapon skins and unique weapon mods from a pool only found in his store (these won't cost platinum). Rashida Lybaras - Platinum and Prime Access vendor. Klue - Ship vendor. Sells skins for landing craft, Railjacks and Archwings. Dockmaster Auxan - Sells unique parts for the Railjack in the form of blueprints and fully built parts. Quests Quests are something that DE should consider more intelligently. It is not sustainable to make a myriad of quests with long, elaborate cutscenes. These should be the exception. The writers have shown some of their most memorable moments in simple exchange of dialogue between two characters. For this reason, Man Of A Few Words, Sands Of Inaros and The New Strange, should be accompanied by other quests that better flesh out the struggles and relationships between members of the Relay, without breaking the animators fingers. Rather than writing out several quests, I instead will give brief blurbs of each quest to let your imagination run wild. Bad Portents - A new set of Arcane codices have been uncovered by the Corpus. Coincidentally, the Corpus fleet has amassed over Triton - what did they discover? The Show Must Go On - Visvam Helmonics has had a series of setbacks due to their couriers disappearing on the job. Find out where they went. Under Lock And Key - A series of Orokin Gateways have been uncovered on Earth. What do they hold? Anything good? The Ones We Fight For - In order to further demonstrate his control over Saturn, Sargas Ruk has begun to lead assaults into colonies on Titan and Dione. Put a stop to this. A Father's Love - It has been many years since I've seen my daughter on Neptune - could you deliver this message to her? She lives in the Pharos Colony ... This is just to begin with. A set of short stories told in quest form to really get you invested in the characters. To add to this, Simaris could do with a new set of personal synthesis targets. What these are what they could be doesn't really matter, only that they serve as a good window into either the past or the present. More short form lore drops are always welcome. Invasions A wider, more open layout makes for a more interesting experience during combat. What if you fought inside the Relay for some invasions, similar to the finale of the Strata Relay event? A similar strategy has been employed by other MMOs, as you cannot use that city as usual until you deal with the event. It also would be a good opportunity to include Railjack into the mix, and add NPC ally ships for space combat invasions. Reasons to come back I'd like to think that the previous section has fleshed out this quite well. To list them: A place to call home for players that do not have a clan, but want to have a base with other players. A faction with unique missions. Professions. Simaris's new scans. Special things you can't get anywhere else. Open combat in a Tenno owned environment during invasions. Bonus additions Assistance Beacons - Consider this the SOS flare of Warframe. In a rough spot? Need some help? Then fire off an SOS flare. Your mission will appear on Cheng's board and a player will be on their way. Even if you have a full squad, or you have set your game to solo, you can gain an additional player to assist you until the end of the mission (or next completion interval in endless). Only one Assistance Beacon can be deployed per mission, so only one player need use them at a time. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ That about does it. I've been working on this for a couple days and to be honest if I go too far in, no one will read it. Next one will be about the Empowered Liches, with a hint of an overall rework (in a better format this time). Till then, have a nice day. Edited January 21, 2021 by Teoarrk Making the post neater (but also a bit easier to read, hopefully) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teoarrk Posted September 20, 2020 Author Share Posted September 20, 2020 Quick note - I most likely won't be able to post for a fortnight unless my schedule changes. The Whispers upon the Wall of Lohk post will have to wait until the first, or second week of October. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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