Steel path - Idea that could be great (thoughts and suggestions)

[FallenDisco]

After armor scaling changes most of non meta weapons and warframes drastically jumped in performance giving us greater variety for weapons to choose from and use in missions which made us choose weapons not necessarily depending on performance but on utility and how fun weapons felt.
However in steel path moved 90% of weapons back to trash and pushed highly performing warframes and melees back up.

Another thing is the idea of steel path being just another grind island with extremely low drop rates for its currency. Just look at arbitrations. It's very well designed game mode, where you receive good rewards for simply playing it, and it's currency drops reasonably frequent.
Hard mode currently offers nothing more than increased enemy toughness and their spawn rate.

What it could be and what could make it a good endgame.
Starting off balance changes:
Slightly reduced enemy toughness to make more weapons viable in there allowing players more flexibility to play this game mode and benefit from all warframe abilities available in challenges awaiting in gameplay changes

Gameplay:
Increased spawn rate should also mean increased invasions.
For example any endless mission should have more frequent hunters attacks - grustag, Stalker, zanuka, corrupted Vor, grineer maniac (also buffing those guys with new behaviors wouldn't hurt imo).
Throw in some progressing events for example in survival life support delivery got suspended and you have to unlock a vault/complete a spy/sabotage reactor to bring delivery back. Per every 10 minutes planet bosses spawn, for example you play survival on earth, first you get vay hek, then that chill guy invades mission, if he's killed after another 10 minutes different grineer boss gets summoned. On corpus tilesets corpus bosses would spawn.
Spy and sabotage should get more challenging hazards (radiation hazard could be fun :P) as for spy after hacking any vault it could cause a 30% chance of triggering alarms for all consoles (reasonable increase in deleting data time should be applied). while alarms are triggered drastic increase in enemy spawn rate should also be applied. Maybe summoning some of those special enemies that are currently only available in some events or special tilesets could also be welcome. Like how about a warframe specter controlled by corpus? Imagine them unleashing valkyr to hunt you down for stealing their data.

You seek Rewards hunter?
Remove common drops from drop tables in every mission entirely, so rng stops giving us 2500 credits or 100 endo for killing 500 lv100 grineer scooms and lv75 vay hek

In conclusion
My thought of endgame in warframe is knowledge of game and its mechanics and applying that to gameplay to take the most of it. Making different mission types collide with each other allows players to use their knowledge they earned in regular star chart on regular missions to deal with all mission types at once with loadouts that can deal with all mission types at once. I realize such project could take a lot of time to make, but in my humble opinion the wait would totally be worth it finally.

[Tyreaus]

1 hour ago, FallenDisc said:

Slightly reduced enemy toughness to make more weapons viable in there allowing players more flexibility to play this game mode and benefit from all warframe abilities available in challenges awaiting in gameplay changes

I am iffy on this by itself. One big call for Steel Path was so players wouldn't have to wait for hours to get high level enemies in regular gameplay. (Granted, the extra armour and health and shields isn't necessarily that, it does a decent simulation...)

If we were to tweak enemy toughness, I might suggest making the starting less - or taking out the EHP modifiers - but ramp it up a lot faster. Something where getting through Rotation A isn't too bad, maybe equivalent to unmodified level 100s (i.e. what a level 100 would be without the bonus armour, health, and shields), but that very rapidly ramps up into 500, maybe even 1,000 through the second rotation A and rotations B and C. After all, that is a major reason behind Steel Path existing.

1 hour ago, FallenDisc said:

Increased spawn rate should also mean increased invasions.
For example any endless mission should have more frequent hunters attacks - grustag, Stalker, zanuka, corrupted Vor, grineer maniac (also buffing those guys with new behaviors wouldn't hurt imo).

I like this, especially if we were to combine the above idea of ramping up enemy scaling. New behaviours are probably "eh", but I can't imagine it would take an inordinate amount of time to put in a small script or code that allows those to spawn A: more frequently (I believe Syndicate kill-squads do) and B: repeatedly in a single mission.

1 hour ago, FallenDisc said:

Throw in some progressing events for example in survival life support delivery got suspended and you have to unlock a vault/complete a spy/sabotage reactor to bring delivery back. Per every 10 minutes planet bosses spawn, for example you play survival on earth, first you get vay hek, then that chill guy invades mission, if he's killed after another 10 minutes different grineer boss gets summoned. On corpus tilesets corpus bosses would spawn.
Spy and sabotage should get more challenging hazards (radiation hazard could be fun :P) as for spy after hacking any vault it could cause a 30% chance of triggering alarms for all consoles (reasonable increase in deleting data time should be applied). while alarms are triggered drastic increase in enemy spawn rate should also be applied. Maybe summoning some of those special enemies that are currently only available in some events or special tilesets could also be welcome. Like how about a warframe specter controlled by corpus? Imagine them unleashing valkyr to hunt you down for stealing their data.

For what Steel Path's mainly meant to be - that big level jump - I think this is probably a bit overkill. Could be good for a Steel Path+ mode of sorts - nothing about the UI seems to say it's limited to just current Steel Path.

I think there is potential for rooms in general to have unique hazards - maybe some tiles have electromagnetic hazards, some have radiation hazards, some bestow the increased armour / shields modifier - and those could be set behind teammate doors that could also indicate the upcoming hazard.

But I also don't think that would be a bad idea on regular missions, so I'm biased. 😛

Bit iffy on Spy triggering alarms for all consoles on hack. That sounds like it makes it impossible to run solo. If it were that getting detected started the countdown for all vaults, that'd make more sense and be decently fair. Otherwise, if I'm running solo, it sounds like I have a 30% chance to fail the mission despite succeeding, because I'll never get to the other vaults in time. (Unless I misunderstand the idea)

1 hour ago, FallenDisc said:

Remove common drops from drop tables in every mission entirely, so rng stops giving us 2500 credits or 100 endo for killing 500 lv100 grineer scooms and lv75 vay hek

Better rewards would not hurt. Likewise, doing the Sanctuary Onslaught / ESO mix-up of adding radiant relics could be worth it, too.

1 hour ago, FallenDisc said:

My thought of endgame in warframe is knowledge of game and its mechanics and applying that to gameplay to take the most of it. Making different mission types collide with each other allows players to use their knowledge they earned in regular star chart on regular missions to deal with all mission types at once with loadouts that can deal with all mission types at once. I realize such project could take a lot of time to make, but in my humble opinion the wait would totally be worth it finally.

Steel Path is not endgame. You're risking shooting your idea in the foot just by bringing that up.