Should DE take Steel Path into consideration for Game balancing ?

[White_Matter]

As in nerf/buff frames/weapons depending on their performance on steel path ? Should that be the gold standart ? 

Because the more I play steelpath, the gap between the power of certain weapons/frames become more and more apparent.

With that said, I rarely find squads when unlocking Steel path, so I admit that it isn't a perfect indicator of usefullness. A full squad would clean regardless of what frames/weapons they have, most likely.

[AConfusedBird]

i think that, since steel path is a "super cranked up" version of game content, using it as the primary metric would be a bad idea. everything would be adjusted to become totally OP everywhere else.

[Aldain]

NO.

Enough with the trying to balance around asinine multipliers, it is not working and is only causing more and more problems.

NOTHING will ever be enough if we keep going down the road of stacking more and more multipliers on everything under the sun.

[Nesodos]

Short answer: No.

 

Long answer: No, but every frame should at least be viable against level ~80 enemies without the need to min max with full forma builds.

 

[Tyreaus]

Yes and no.

Yes in the sense that Steel Path can be effective in highlighting possibly problematic differences in weapons. There might be some weapons that outshine others by a fair amount that, in ordinary Starchart gameplay, you're not likely to notice, just because the enemy's baseline is that low.

No in the sense that most of the game doesn't get up anywhere near the level of Steel Path, so if we were to balance things on that baseline, there would be a lot of over-buffing.

It's useful for fussing out potentially hidden balance problems, but it shouldn't be the standard.

[Ikyr0]

Absolutely. DE must choose a reference point for balancing the game. Balance is best around Steel Path levels, because the beefy enemies exclude certain obnoxious nuke frames, while including many others that are otherwise inefficient in regular content. 

Of course there are other obnoxious outliers in SP as well, such as Khora and slash-heavy melee weapons.

Balancing around lower levels is completely dumb, because there's no pushback on any nuke build. Most efficient frames are Saryn, Volt, and Mesa because they can wipe entire tilesets passively. Most efficient weapons are aoe weapons. The meta for regular content is utter garbage, and has been for years. Steel Path is an excellent place to start balancing the game. 

 

[Aadi880]

Steel path really highlights the disparity in weapons' effectiveness. So much that Abilities are the way to go there just to get rid of the armor and stuff

However, I don't think it should be used as a standard.

The thing I would do is to increase the effectiveness of certain weapon types. Burst, semi auto, auto burst, charge and sometimes even automatic ranged weaponry do very poorly. AoE weapons holds up because its AoE.

Melee is melee and its just borked regardless of the content (I don't mean it in a bad way though.)

[lukinu_u]

They definitely shouldn't.
If they balance stuff around Steel Path, it means most of stuff will get buffs to be easily usable in Steel Path, it will become the new normal mode and people will ask for a new "difficult mode", which would totally defeat the purpose of the current Steel Path.

[DeccanTraps]

2 minutes ago, Ikyr0 said:

Absolutely. DE must choose a reference point for balancing the game. Balance is best around Steel Path levels, because the beefy enemies exclude certain obnoxious nuke frames, while including many others that are otherwise inefficient in regular content. 

Define 'Best' also give DE makes nuke frames they clearly think they should exist, so extra credit will account for this and allow for a variety of play styles rather than 'Best = the way I like to play is rewarded, all other ways are punished'.

[Swagernator22663]

No

[VentiGlondi]

One of the issues with power in Warframe is that up until Steel Path came out there was basically no purpose in actually getting as strong as the game lets you. You got your 5 forma Bramma and what are you going to do with it? Take a few mods off of it and watch it one-shot everything anyway? Wait for two hours in survival?

The thing that Steel Path brings into the game is that now there's a place where your super powerful weapons are actually mandatory, thus giving them an actual purpose.

Balancing weapons around Steel Path doesn't really make much sense to me. It's Steel Path that should be tuned to whatever the players' power cap is supposed to be.

EDIT: Let me make it clear that I don't mean that Steel Path should be buffed whenever a new more powerful weapon comes up. What I mean is that the game needs to have a definite benchmark for how strong players can get, and Steel Path should be tuned to match that.

[Xylena_Lazarow]

If not Steel Path, then what? Lv30 basic star chart? Mid-level stuff like ESO, Arbys, Sorties, Liches?

Steel Path does highlight some massive disparities that aren't really noticeable even on regular Lv100 content because everything dies too easily to a geared late game player, mainly how most primaries and secondaries are laughably underpowered compared to a handful of meta guns, which themselves are laughably underpowered compared to melee. Diversity amongst viable melee weapons is great though!

[Kaotyke]

So... you want them to use the optional mode that was made to give us a reason to use the most powerful options in our Arsenal, and make it a cornerstone for BALANCE in the rest of the game?

I will actually be polite and just say "no".

[(XBOX)pwnSacrifice]

short answer: No

long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Steel Path is less warframe the horde shooter and more warframe the loadout puzzle. Balancing around it also means *another* look at scaling, damage overall, and a weapon pass of one sort or another (buff the F out of primaries/secondaries or nerf melee into the ground). While I think status still needs a look at, I wouldn't want the devs to devote that much time to balancing around a one off victory lap of the star chart. It's an anomaly and should remain as such. 

[Troposphere6]

Well shouldn't balance be determined by a multitude of factors weighted against each other? So are you asking if steel path should be heavily weighted in determining if something is balanced because if so, probably not steel path is supposed to be the most extreme environment for frames and weapons in the game but it probably shouldn't be totally ignored in determining if the game is balanced or not. 

So short answer: No

Long answer: Yes but not exclusively or as a starting place

[OniDax]

Absolutely not.

[kevoisvevo]

27 minutes ago, White_Matter said:

As in nerf/buff frames/weapons depending on their performance on steel path ? Should that be the gold standart ? 

Because the more I play steelpath, the gap between the power of certain weapons/frames become more and more apparent.

With that said, I rarely find squads when unlocking Steel path, so I admit that it isn't a perfect indicator of usefullness. A full squad would clean regardless of what frames/weapons they have, most likely.

Nope. Balance it around normal gameplay without the nonsense modifiers like extra Armor/health/shields. Their normal balancing already sucks. Taking steel path aka a dead mode which acts a throwaway dogbone to vets should not be taken into balance as it doesn't affect normal gameplay or in game economy for that matter. 

[SneakyErvin]

What they should do is probably balance the game based on Steel Path levels, without the added modifiers of the mode. That would then let them release more "high level" content that isnt SP while keeping that mode as something specific with its own extra scaling. The current "balance" just doesnt work since it accounts for level 30 missions as "high level" etc. So they need to find some point to center the balance around.

[(PSN)Ozymandias-13-]

Edit: Rethinking this, no.

The numbers keep climbing too high in this game which made it a balance nightmare to begin with. All numbers in the game need to be rebalanced back to the days when level 40 was considered difficult, and then Steel Path should be reworked.

If things keep climbing up, more frames and weapons will only continue to be left in the dust. Armor, health, shields, damage resistance, damage and so on. Those numbers need to plummet back to manageable numbers so that one weapon or frame can't be ten times more effective than another in all aspects of the game.

[TheGuyver]

I wouldn't want then to balance around a garbage uninspired game mode with next to no merits. 

[nslay]

Absolutely not. Steel Path should be and remain as a benchmark game mode that is only indirectly affected by balances at the normal game difficulty.

As it is now, Steel Path is completely reasonable. Even the worst bosses can be done in a reasonable amount of time with the right gear. It's neat that you have to think about how to best beat some of these nodes (like Corpus Disruption!). Balancing Steel Path directly as is done with the normal levels of difficulty would make it too easy for most gear. Perhaps too simplistic, but if they were to balance with respect some kind of median performance of gear, then about half of all frames/gear would be able to beat Steel Path with ease. That's not acceptable given what Steel Path is supposed to be.

[Jarriaga]

If the game is balanced around "hard" mode, then hard mode becomes normal mode while normal mode becomes easy mode by proxy of hard mode being the new normal.

Hard no from me.

[BornWithTeeth]

Part of the issue is that Steel Path is itself a bandaid.

 

“Look everyone, we have a mode which brings back some challenge to the game! We did it by ramping up the bullet sponginess of the enemy by several hundred percent, and, uh, that’s it actually. We just made all the numbers bigger and the enemies take bigger numbers to kill.”

 

While I don’t think Steel Path is bad, it is absolutely not the template for how the game should be balanced in future, because more than anything it just underlines the mechanical weakness of the game’s core. If the only way you can make the game challenging is by giving all the enemies like six times as much EHP, that means you have sone fundamental problems to fix.

 

Gonna piss y’all off very, very badly now. Very badly. Listen. If you want Warframe gameplay which is fast, lethal, and challenging, it doesn’t start with making all the enemy forces into hard-to-kill bullet sponges. It starts with a brutal review of Tenno power level. In other words, a rebalancing of player power. A nerf.

[White_Matter]

I think people misunderstood what I was trying to say.

I'm not asking whether they should make everything much more powerful so that we can just cakewalk through steelpath or not.

I'm just saying that higher level content exposes the unfair disparity between weapons and frames. My question was : "Should DE adress that disparity which can only be adressed within the context of Steel Path.

[BornWithTeeth]

1 minute ago, White_Matter said:

I think people misunderstood what I was trying to say.

I'm not asking whether they should make everything much more powerful so that we can just cakewalk through steelpath or not.

I'm just saying that higher level content exposes the unfair disparity between weapons and frames. My question was : "Should DE adress that disparity which can only be adressed within the context of Steel Path.

That’s a worthwhile issue, as it’s not ‘should everything be balanced to Steel Path’ but ‘should the power imbalances revealed by Steel Path be addressed’, and I agree it’s worth looking at.

 

But.

 

I also say, nerf the S#&$ out of the Tenno and normalize power level growth. A month old account still finishing the star chart is a space ninja with a cool assault rifle. An MR 29 veteran is a bored god. That’s the problem.