Making Steel Path Worthwhile

[SweetAnubis]

So here's my thought on Steel path....

1. A hard mode is great! But some variety other than bullet sponge would be nice. Perhaps enemies that go immune to weapon categories to give tenno a reason to use different weapons (kinda like how stalker is immune to powers).

2. Worthwhile rewards without completely breaking the loot tree. Make certain Highly wanted items purchasable once from the steel path store. Umbral forma, event mods, arcanes, etc. Also for fully completing steel path map let them pick one of the items as a reward. This will give players who dont mind a grind for the currency a chance to get that one thing they normally don't have time for or happen to miss out on due to real life etc. Making it one time purchase per item will still keep the source content of such items relevant.

3. Keep map unlocked. Having to unlock the whole map again just to access one mission you want to play in hard mode kinda defeats the purpose. say someone just wants to farm in hard mode on hydron to make it a little more challenging/entertaining. well then they have to play through the entire map again to do that. Thats rediculous and also completely defeats the argument towards "better rewards being unnecessary cause its only intended to be a hard mode for people who want a challenge"

[Corvid]

For the first point, I have made a suggestion already:

Feel free to pop by and show your support!

[Wyrmius_Prime]

5 minutes ago, SweetAnubis said:

1. A hard mode is great! But some variety other than bullet sponge would be nice. Perhaps enemies that go immune to weapon categories to give tenno a reason to use different weapons (kinda like how stalker is immune to powers).

They are only sponges if the only thing you are using those said weapons without any buffs at all. You actually gotta use your brain and suddenly they aren't sponges at all and die in a few hits.

[Traumtulpe]

5 minutes ago, SweetAnubis said:

Worthwhile rewards [...] Umbral forma, event mods, arcanes, etc.

Technically there is already one such reward: Kuva. However, you will get very nearly zero Kuva from just playing the Steel Path. The biggest issue is that "playing" the Steel Path rewards nothing, you need to do specific farms.

If you do some targeted farming, with a specific group setup, a Smeeta and a booster (and some luck), you can make it rain Steel Essence. So adding anything particularly noteworthy to the rewards would diminish it's value immensely.

Steel Path would be fine if you could even just get Forma blueprints from playing the missions normally. Or, as I suggested elsewhere, shards that can be used on an item to give it experience - so you could play somewhat interesting Steel Path missions with your good gear, while leveling a new weapon at the same time - instead of having a dead slot in your loadout while playing some pathetically easy XP farm.

[SweetAnubis]

8 minutes ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

They are only sponges if the only thing you are using those said weapons without any buffs at all. You actually gotta use your brain and suddenly they aren't sponges at all and die in a few hits.

ya kinda my point..... its either super easy for people or super hard simply based on what mods they have equipped. my point i was getting at is some actual variety that wouldnt require a whole reworking of enemy AI that would still add some difficulty requiring some thinking or changes in combat style. After all how many players have just that one primary or melee weapon they use to insta wipe everything but dont really have much of a back up planned out or just use a mass insta wipe frame like saryn or ember. This would require players to use other things than their usual and require a slight bit of thought other than mindlessly wiping with same old thing over and over.

[SweetAnubis]

1 minute ago, Traumtulpe said:

 

If you do some targeted farming, with a specific group setup, a Smeeta and a booster (and some luck), you can make it rain Steel Essence. So adding anything particularly noteworthy to the rewards would diminish it's value immensely.

 

thats why i said one time purchase, to keep value from diminishing to hard. Many players want more than one of an item or want to farm an item to sell right? so if theres only one available this way it'd prevent that method of farming and make it only there for people who cant make the events or farm heavily enough during a limited time.

[0_The_F00l]

Any reward that adds reasonable power will create FOMO in players that dont have the competence/gear for that mode.

DE will then NERF the node to cater to said crybabies.

 

I would rather all the star chart missions (kuva , fissure , syndicate, sortie,lich etc.) be available from the steel chart with same modifiers.

[JackHargreav]

Just play it for fun.

[Dreadwire]

I had fun trying out my new build in steel path tho.

Steel path open up a lot of build. So many to consider. So many to test. It's like i started warframe from the beginning again.

Forgot the last time i had that kind of fun

54 minutes ago, JackHargreav said:

Just play it for fun.

Yup yup 

[844448]

3 hours ago, SweetAnubis said:

1. A hard mode is great! But some variety other than bullet sponge would be nice. Perhaps enemies that go immune to weapon categories to give tenno a reason to use different weapons (kinda like how stalker is immune to powers).

I kill steel path grineer with Lato and no riven equipped.

You can't explain that

[(NSW)Kirbys-Epic-Yarn]

8 minutes ago, 844448 said:

I kill steel path grineer with Lato and no riven equipped.

You can't explain that

You don’t need Rivens when you can just have the normal mod.

[844448]

Just now, (NSW)JJA209 said:

You don’t need Rivens when you can just have the normal mod.

Killing grineer in steel path with Lato? Are you sure about that?

[(NSW)Kirbys-Epic-Yarn]

1 minute ago, 844448 said:

Killing grineer in steel path with Lato? Are you sure about that?

I think. Tho steel path hasn’t been updated to the switch just yet tho.

[Wyrmius_Prime]

1 hour ago, 844448 said:

Killing grineer in steel path with Lato? Are you sure about that?

I apologize for not having a 5 forma regular Lato, and also for cheating by oneshotting that eximus squad with Hildryn's 1. Would I recommed using a Lato? No. Can it kill enemies? Yes, it absolutely can. That build could have been improved with Hydraulic crosshair or a cold 60/60 tbh, that heat mod was kinda useless. Arcane Precision would have at least doubled my damage output, but unfortunately I don't have it.

You can do this with any warframe capable of stripping a bunch of armor. Debuffers are higher tier dps frames in Steel Path than actual dps frames are. Banshee for example is absolute god tier assuming you have mastered shield gating and using Rolling Guard.

 

[Morthal]

15 hours ago, SweetAnubis said:

A hard mode is great! But some variety other than bullet sponge would be nice.

I'm putting 3 shots from Tysis into an enemy and one shotting them with melee, if the Tysis doesn't accidentally kill them first >_< Too many crappy guns, useless MR fodder primary weapons with laughable base dmg values...meanwhile melee disables challenge like a nully bubble ends Rhino's existence.

Either weapons are to weak or too strong, I don't expect balance though--that's being unrealistic considering the sheer amount of redundancy in our arsenal.

[Oreades]

Worthwhile is subjective

Mechanically the difference in the enemies is IMO worthwhile. 

Where DE hecced up was with the RNG currency, establishing a goal and then throwing mission after mission at you where you make literally no progress towards it because RNG. 

Steel Essence Simulator 

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Got One!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did you make it or decide that it wasn't worth clicking until you got one? Cause most people are going to get 2-3 in and say hecc that noise. That is the system they have established and as it stands I personally don't want to engage because I'm just going to be sitting mission after mission with the realization that no steel essence are dropping slowly grating away at the back of my mind...... 

[VanFanel1980mx]

Fix the experience gain in Sponge Path, add the sortie/nightmare modifiers on the objective for non-elimination centric missions (ie, ciphers disabled, high alert in rescue, etc.)

[Hypernaut1]

16 hours ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

They are only sponges if the only thing you are using those said weapons without any buffs at all. You actually gotta use your brain and suddenly they aren't sponges at all and die in a few hits.

This is true. I hd to chek i was still playing Steel path after optimizing a build and melting through enemies. 

[Wyrmius_Prime]

7 hours ago, Oreades said:

Did you make it or decide that it wasn't worth clicking until you got one? Cause most people are going to get 2-3 in and say hecc that noise. That is the system they have established and as it stands I personally don't want to engage because I'm just going to be sitting mission after mission with the realization that no steel essence are dropping slowly grating away at the back of my mind...... 

You don't have to do mission after mission when you can just do an endurance run. Solo runs can also be paused. You can buy out the entire store with a single resource booster in 3 hours. You need to maximize eximus spawns, and after 2 hours there generally aren't any other enemies but eximus units. Ani in Void is a really easy node to do a run solo, there aren't any problems with spawns or enemies dropping air support. It's really damn easy honestly.

[Kaotyke]

We need MR29 Weapons.

So we can point them at people and say that they MUST do this or their scrubs.

Or we might shoot them with it. We need to find a way to re-apply Rad Proc on a command.

[(NSW)Kirbys-Epic-Yarn]

14 minutes ago, Kaotyke said:

We need MR29 Weapons.

So we can point them at people and say that they MUST do this or their scrubs.

Or we might shoot them with it. We need to find a way to re-apply Rad Proc on a command.

Lol no and yes that would be toxic af but also kind of a cool treat to the people that did make it that far. Maybe for the MR 30 test at least for one locked gun. Just one not multiple.

[Kaotyke]

1 minute ago, (NSW)JJA209 said:

Lol no and yes that would be toxic af but also kind of a cool treat to the people that did make it that far. Maybe for the MR 30 test at least for one locked gun. Just one not multiple.

gimme mah powah criips. Need tu rub in feceis of scrub abut huuu wuusum me iz.

[Oreades]

2 hours ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

You don't have to do mission after mission when you can just do an endurance run. Solo runs can also be paused. You can buy out the entire store with a single resource booster in 3 hours. You need to maximize eximus spawns, and after 2 hours there generally aren't any other enemies but eximus units. Ani in Void is a really easy node to do a run solo, there aren't any problems with spawns or enemies dropping air support. It's really damn easy honestly.

Hmmmmm I seem to recall at least a fair part of the driving force for this was people shrieking about having to stay in endless missions for hours before they became challenging and they wanted a way to be able to just have some challenge from the start. 

What has changed? 

Now the missions start out at a higher level which isn't particularly challenging particularly for the people who where already breezing through lvl 800-2000 enemies. Instead you have to sit around for hours before the currency starts to drop in any meaningful amount. So instead of playing just playing the game and having fun, you need to play one particular mission subset (survival) for a protracted period. Great for the people who where already playing Survival for protracted periods of time pre Steel Path, not so great for everyone else. 

I certainly can't speak for everyone but I find protracted endless missions boring AF

The RNG currency IMHO was the worst way they could have handled this and what do they have now? On one hand you have people burned out due to the lack of progression towards the rewards dangled infront of them VS people who where going to grind endless missions regardless of Steel Paths existence who now have more Steel Credits than they know what to do with and enough Riven Slivers to last them until DE pulls the plug on the Warframe Servers (Read: years worth). 

[(PSN)Kakurine2]

The rewards can be cosmetics. But they have to actually be good. Theres a bunch of neat codmetics that coulf be added over time.

[Morthal]

On 2020-07-26 at 7:16 AM, JackHargreav said:

Just play it for fun.

The issue with this and people like me is that, it's no different than normal difficulty. Literally 0 difference now after they changed the elements to ez mode. How do you have fun doing the same missions thousands of times over while getting nothing exciting in return? I really was hoping that Taveuni would have at least given more Kuva per siphon, especially after removing the diversity of warframes able to use on that tile.