Public Test Weekend #3: Update Notes (Deimos: Arcana Preview).

[[DE]Rebecca]

This Dev Workshop is an early Update Note preview specifically for what we have changed that is relevant to the build on the Public Test Weekend #3! Each section will have details that match the thread breakout we created for the Public Test Weekend - if you weren't one of the thousand or so people who participated, you may still want to know what changed!

Public Test Weekend #3 Notes:

Kitgun + Weapon + Arcane Changes:

Generally speaking, the major focus this week was split between Weapon tweaks and major Arcane buffs to give another chance at usability. The Arcane readability, numbers, and more have been significantly reviewed and changed for Deimos: Arcana! 

Weapon changes:

Bubonico

- Increased accuracy of primary fire

- Increased speed of ammo regen delay from .9 to .5 secs

- Increased ammo regen rate from 6.75 to 16.875

- Increased status chance of alt fire from 53% to 57%

- Decreased primary fire rate from 4.16 to 3.83
 

Sporothrix

- Increased damage from 363 to 371

- Reduced embed time from 3 to .9 secs

- Increased flight speed from 190 to 270
 

Proboscis Cernos

- Increased pull strength of the tentacles

- Increased ammo pool from 7 to 9
 

Catabolyst

- Added base punch through dept of 0.9

- Increased clip size from 19 to 27

- Increased ammo pool from 95 to 135

 

Pulmonars

- Increased attack speed
 

Arum Spinosa

- Increased spine damage from 60 to 70

- Increased spine flight speed from 33 to 49

- Increased accuracy of spine throw

 

Arcanes: Theorem and Residual 

The Theorem and Residual Arcanes were the most contested items on the Test Cluster over the weekend (well, second most next to Bonewidow but it was close)! We have made a concerted effort to reset how they work in context (mainly where the AoE spawns) and rebalance. The next steps for us are receiving feedback on the newer flow and newer stats for these upon release!

Notable changes include:
 

• Residual Arcanes will now leave their AoE at the position of the enemy at the time of death. You will see a ring on the ground (with upgraded FX) that you can enter to begin your Residual/Theorem buffing process. This means you will not need to search for corpses that may have been blown off in the distance -- instead, you should have an easier and faster means of finding these AOE rings.
• Significantly increased the active Duration of your stacks after leaving the AoE (from 5 to 20 seconds). 
• Theorem Arcanes now go up to 5 Ranks with Stats to reflect this. 

 

THEOREM INFECTION 

Before: Standing in a zone created by a Residual Arcane increases damage of companions and summoned allies within 60m by 4%/s stacking up to 15x. Effect persists for 20s upon leaving the zone. 

After: Standing in a zone created by a Residual Arcane increases damage of companions and summoned allies within 90m by 24%/s stacking up to 15x. Effect persists for 20s upon leaving the zone. 

 

THEOREM CONTAGION 

Before: Standing in a zone created by a Residual Arcane creates a globe that orbits the player every 2s. The globes will strike the nearest enemy within 5m dealing 100 damage and applying a Status Effect. Globes will persist for 8s upon leaving the zone. 

After: Standing in a zone created by a Residual Arcane creates a globe that orbits the player every 2s. The globes will strike the nearest enemy within 15m dealing 150 damage and increasing their vulnerability to the globe’s damage type by 200% for 6s.  Globes will persist for 30s upon leaving the zone. 

 

THEOREM DEMULCENT 

Before: Standing in a zone created by a Residual Arcane increases weapon damage by 4%/s stacking up to 15x. Effect persists for 5s upon leaving the zone.

After: Standing in a zone created by a Residual Arcane increases weapon damage by 12%/s stacking up to 15x. Effect persists for 20s upon leaving the zone.

 

OTHER ARCANE CHANGES:

• Theorem Infection increased from +90% to +360% Companion damage at max rank and stacks
• Residual Boils spawns cysts on the ground inside the trigger instead of on the enemy corpse.
• Residual Shock now fires Lighting from a spike instead of the enemy corpse.
   

Warframe Abilities and Augment Changes: 

We focused on the most consistently critiqued Warframes for this week, with some explanations on what’s to come (outside of this week). Generally speaking, we felt Zephyr needed the most attention, and while people appreciated aspects of Atlas and Nekros, there was more work to be done on their kits as well.

Chroma:

• In addition to Chroma being able to select elements in mission real-time (the biggest change), Chroma’s selectable element HUD now uses colour coding in addition to icon coding. 
• Increased Spectral Scream damage from 200 to 400 Damage Per Second at Max Rank. This, combined with 100% Status Chance and Chaining should lead to some more deadly or useful scenarios, especially since you can use all 4 elements now!
   

Nekros:

• Nekros’ Soul Punch now has a new mechanic: Marked for Harvest. Enemies that are hit by Soul Punch but don’t die have a Duration wherein they’ll be eligible to become a Shadow if killed while Marked! 
• This is in addition to the 25% lethality change and Shadow healing.
   

Zephyr:
The focus for this week was all about Airburst. Making the explosion valid for damage scaling changes the stakes when hitting groups with this ability which was a detail a few feedback posts requested or tried to make sense of. 

• Airburst now deals 35% Additional Damage per enemy hit either with the projectile OR the explosion damage.
• Airbust now has a 50% chance of dealing a Physical status effect hit by this slice of air or it’s explosion radius, heavily skewing towards Slash. 

Atlas:

Overall, we still intend to look more at Atlas’s Tectonics, but due to some AI complications and ‘gotchas’, we had to reset a timeline to revisit this with a future batch of abilities. For now, those who saw a slight utility boost in the AOE Damage / Stagger we added to Tectonics’ Bulwarks will benefit from what was observed on the Public Test Cluster. 
 

Garuda Bleeding Talons Augment:
Generally speaking the action we felt necessary to take for launch surrounded Garuda’s Augment. All other augments performed as expected either in general or within their niches, there was consistent feedback about Garuda’s having a ‘feel’ issue. 

• We have trimmed the animation time if released early and increased the range up to 9 meters for this Augment! 

 

Steel Path + Acolyte Changes 

In addition to written feedback and the poll results, we did a full statistical review of the amount of Steel Essence earned this weekend on both Test and Live, and we are moving forward with the values provided on the Test Cluster: 3 per Steel Essence Incursion Alert, and 2 per Acolyte (eligible for Resource Amount Boosting). 

We settled on these values because of what happens when they're broken down by different acquisition methods: people gain Steel Essence at better rates when playing normally (i.e no AFK Macro detected)! In practice, the actual dependency on RNG and Eximus spawning is gone. You will have a stable, matchmaking friendly way to reliably earn Steel Essence in shorter intervals across more content. 

In our view, it’s better to reward broader diverse play than hyper reward idle strategies, and the stats confirm this to be the case. On paper the absolute Top 1% of missions will see less Steel Essence per hour (i.e the single strategy AFK-Macro-run), every other mission strategy will see more.
 

• The Steel Path Acolytes now have received the same Status Effect eligibility treatment that Liches received in Update 27.3 earlier this year. This means we have slightly increased their health (scaled by squad size) as the Status Effect eligibility makes them easier to kill. 

• Reduced the Melee attack damage on both Misery and Malice to avoid the more reported 1HKOs 
• Created more regular spawn windows for Acolytes and fixed issues with them not spawning after 30 minute missions. They are guaranteed in each mission, and endlessly guaranteed in Endless missions! 

 

Bounty Changes:
Pacing and bugs for the new bounty types have been reviewed, with some specifics to call out:

Codename: Polyp Juggernaut Bounty:

• Decreased frequency of random Juggernaut sniffing by over 50% to improve pacing. 
• The Juggernaut moves faster. 
• Increased the likeliness of a ‘truffle’ being closer to improve pacing 
• General pacing improvements. 
• Enemies now spawn on your Polyp Juggernaut’s position, making battle phase more engaging 

Codename: Purifier Bounty:

• Purify Cell Carrier spawn rates increased to improve pacing. 

Codename: Fluid Sac Encounter:

• Reduced ranged enemy presence, increased enemy density and reduced delay between reinforcements. Increase sac explosion radius from 10 to 13 meters. 

Bonewidow Necramech Changes:

General Necramech Changes

• Necramechs (Bonewidow and Voidrig) now have a built in vacuum!
• Enemy Necramechs now have the ‘Lich’ treatment with vulnerability to Status Effects!
• Increased Shared Affinity Range in Landscape missions to 250 meters from 50 to assist with all things levelling on Landscapes (when Necramechs in non-Landscape missions come, this will of course change the levelling dynamic). 

Bonewidow Changes
The Bonewidow was flagged as the item needing the most review, and we took a look at each Ability and made changes to its power, energy economy, and scalability. 

Meathook

• Made the Meathook ability more responsive for targeting based on camera direction. 
• Added a damage buff to melee attacks while holding an enemy on Meathook.
• Meathook now only costs energy on successful hit. It no longer costs energy to throw an enemy that is already held. 

Shield Maiden

• Added ‘Ironskin’ style scaling to Shield Maiden, meaning all incoming damage right after the cast period scales the health of the Shield Maiden. 
• Made the angle of Shield Maiden’s blocking angle more sensible for the front area of the Necramech.  
• Blocking with both Ironbride and Shield Maiden will increase blocking angle. 

Firing Line

• Energy cost reduced from 75 to 50 

 

Exalted Ironbride 

• Increased the damage overall for Exalted Ironbride since its attack speed is slower by design. 
• Less energy is now required to sustain Exalted Ironbride.
• Slam attacks are better performing and more intuitive.

 

Not listed are the dozens and dozens of fixes included for launch on the more specific bugs and issues! A huge thanks goes out to the participants on the Public Test Cluster for giving us so much to work with. We spent the week with our heads down banging out as many meaningful changes that aligned with both the feedback received and our development goals. As is the way, things will still receive iteration and changes once our community-at-large is involved on PC and Consoles!

[adam3t4cat]

Keep up the great work

 

[Hadeik]

when update?

 

[[DE]Rebecca]

Just now, Hadeik said:

when update?

 

This week on PC! 

[bnuy]

Testing is good.

[Lored]

What's about missions reward (endless) on steel path?

[Pyus]

Rip in pieces Steel Path, I only ever solo'd 2hr survival missions and had more fun doing that than most things in the game. But to spite the AFK farmers the system gets nuked.

Why not leave the eximus alone and open it to mission rewards and acolytes?  Best of both worlds so to speak?

[(XBOX)DasCalamity]

I am assuming the next update for xbox/PS will be in December?

 

[(PSN)Starlight_Maiden]

Is there a chance that Zephyr's airburst synergy will get updated? The tornadoes don't benefit from airburst but a way you could make the synergy work better is making it so that when you use airburst on a tornado it increase the pull and damage transfer range of the tornadoes. 

 

Also I'm kinda worried about funnel clouds. Will they be tedious to spawn all of them in a single position or no? 

 

And final thing; in the future, is there a chance that Tailwind could be made into basically an aerial version of mach rush, giving her better mobility and control? 

[Blood_Poppy]

Thank You for your Hard-work DE Rebecca..!!

[DonGheddo]

Hey Reb

[Muxailo]

Does Bonewidow's shield ability increase damage when sliding into enemies? Would be a good addition if not.

[God_is_a_Cat_Girl]

41 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Chroma:

• In addition to Chroma being able to select elements in mission real-time (the biggest change), Chroma’s selectable element HUD now uses colour coding in addition to icon coding. 
• Increased Spectral Scream damage from 200 to 400 Damage Per Second at Max Rank. This, combined with 100% Status Chance and Chaining should lead to some more deadly or useful scenarios, especially since you can use all 4 elements now!

Element change should have changed to be rotatable by both Spectral Scream AND Elemental Ward, allowing for more flexibility with the Helminth system (because honestly most people won't want to keep Spectral Scream even with the changes and will only keep it to change elements).

 

Increasing Spectral Scream does nothing unless it's moddable. It will always be a poor alternative to weapons and it's far more limiting and clunky than any exalted weapon or ability. Sure changing the elements in real time helps a lot, except it's really clunky to have to deactivate the ability and go through all the animations to use weapons again, the elements aren't any lethal by themselves when the proc rate (not proc chance) is so low, poorly moddable and how clunky it is to make proper use of the elements, which is to use Condition overload (or have your team mates kill and have fun while you 1 trick pony status). Plus since the ability works against the 2 good abilities it means it's damage will be even lower as you will inevitably lower str to increase range to make it useful (which I honestly doubt was taken into account and only STR was the only stat people looked at when balancing this ability, forgetting the STR of current builds exists because people aren't using spectral scream and therefore dumping range to unusable ranges), modding at least would make that issue far less noticeable.

 

To also note that while I understand that you don't want the public (because the public test cluster is a private test cluster and we can't even see the patch notes) to see the entire update post, not posting the entire Warframe changes feels a bit silly, we already have those frames anyway. So if the change I mentioned in the first paragraph already happened, good, if it didn't happen do consider it.

41 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

In our view, it’s better to reward broader diverse play than hyper reward idle strategies, and the stats confirm this to be the case. On paper the absolute Top 1% of missions will see less Steel Essence per hour (i.e the single strategy AFK-Macro-run), every other mission strategy will see more.

This is cool, but there's not much diverse play when it comes to Grineer missions due to the ridiculous armor scaling/modifier.

 

Are any Buzlok fixes included? It's quite sad that the Buzlok has been bugged for over two years.

 

Edit: I forgot to point out that if Status on Chroma only proc once per second, even if you switch Status you will only keep all status for 4 seconds before they start expiring, and that also means you won't be able to stack more than 8 status stacks, so not only you are dealing poor damage you can't even stack enough procs to have them compensate the low damage. This is unless there's some other way that keeps status (like environmental effects) for longer, again we don't have the full list of changes and those that couldn't take part in the "public test cluster" are seeing changes to changes in the dark.

[bluedragonpants]

It's pretty refreshing to see changes before the update even drops. Keep up the great work DE

[TylerFreeman]

so bonewidow's 4th got buffed.

 

How buffed we talkin?

[Styx_Prime]

NICE 👍

[Teoarrk]

Would have been nice to have seen some general changes to common AFK'able mission types to make such practices harder to pull off than simply removing another grind opportunity for those that were after it. But Steel Path is not endgame as has been said again and again. I look forward to the day when that  content, whatever it is can be announced.

 

[guytoune]

When birthday for nintendo Switch? @[DE]Rebecca

[(PSN)AGgammer_IsBack]

Ironbride still didnt get an overhaul on status/crit ? Are you kidding me? Archmelee has the worst mods in the game, and we dont have to only deal with that, but also we have to deal with stats that are barely modable? The only things you can put in that sword are damage , 4 of the full elementals and 3 dual elementals 

Range mod sucks, attack speed mod literally doesnt make a difference and crit/status mods will have a very minor boost to damage, to the point where modding for them is just blatantly stupid

Also none of the weapons have innate polarities.... Well those are some terrible news, at least the arcanes now seem useable

[Andele3025]

25 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Nekros:

• Nekros’ Soul Punch now has a new mechanic: Marked for Harvest. Enemies that are hit by Soul Punch but don’t die have a Duration wherein they’ll be eligible to become a Shadow if killed while Marked! 
• This is in addition to the 25% lethality change and Shadow healing.

Please reconsider this. Just remove the entire bit and plain let Soul Punch deal good scaling damage, doesnt matter if its true damage or % damage or just level scaling.
It and a improvement to tooltip or addition to tips section that explains that the ragdoll strength depends on distance from enemy and elevation compared to enemy is the only relevant bit his kit needs as far as his 1 is concerned.

The trashy execute shadow had a lower duration, didnt get shadows bonuses, doesnt work at all for builds that dont care about shadows AND all the while ruining nekros not having any forced """synergies""". Dont make me finally do the ending step to bone papa of removing soul punch for larva (cc use) and blood altar (to get better shadows and healing them) depending on loadout.

[Fabpsi]

Great to see the Bonewidow Necramech changes, they look very promising! (Overall every ability got one, sometiems even multiple, very positive buffs. Nice~)
Also thaaaaank you for the Polyp Juggernaut Bounty changes too! Now it should feel much more refreshing and less "taking the Juggernaut out for a 10min walk"(still: juggis "sniffing around" is adorable :) )

However, I still hope that you consider changing the requirement for accessing the new upcoming Isolation Vaults! (during the test-cluster it was very time consuming to play about 10 - 15min just to finish the old isolation-vault-mission so you can play the new mission afterwards.)
iiirc it was something like "To access the new isolation bounty, players have to first complete an Isolation Vault bounty - only then will the new bounty become available." ... let's see how this goes, maybe my perception of time was just a little bit wonky and it wasn't that tideous..and maybe the changes listed in this thread will make the mission itself shorter, who knows 😅

Anyway, overall I am totally happy with the changes/notes listed here, keep up the great work! 
Cheers,
Fabpsi~

[coot33]

On steel path changes.

The new ones have lowers drops rate and are now rng dependant on acolytes. Odin could not be AFK farm anyway and is the TOP1% mission that is affected.

Unless you have removed SE drops for steel path eidolons without telling us they are now the best SE farm. If you have not thanks a lot ! Although as a quality of life change can you make the steel essence drop with the lures loot when captured ?

 

[Wiz3rd]

16 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Necramechs (Bonewidow and Voidrig) now have a built in vacuum!

Okay, but what is the range in meters?
Is it the same as Vacuum / Fetch?

Spoiler: It's absolutely not.

[Caramello]

Drop the bamboozle act with steel essence cool? You know very well people are doing legitimate farm for SE now in Odin since you "nerfed" Ophelia, no "afk macro" situation going on there, is technically impossible by the nature of the mission itself, active play on interception is a requirement, pretty disappointed to see you try to shift the blame to the players, you have all the power to ban afk´ers, its in your ToS, if someone is to blame is you for not banning people that are breaking the rules, and in the meantime screwing over everybody that didn't break any rules. But this is besides the point, we all know its an excuse to nerf a certain red resource dont we? 

You could have done all the research and number crunching in the world, and i bet there was no intention to ever go above 3 per alert and 2 per acolyte. Its all about kuva nerfing, and we all know it. (Expect more riven complaining on the horizon btw, you refuse to make your cashcow feature any better for years now, and you just nerfed the only thing that alleviated the situation for the riven people, i dont think it will sit right with them).

The best part of it all, is that you say you want to disincentivize long play or afk´ing, but all you gonna do is make people do even longer runs to farm for acolyte spawns, or even afk while waiting for them to show up once they are done with their daily alerts (this is warframe after all, it will not sit right with people having to farm 7 days worth of alerts to get the operator suit or a frigging umbra forma, there will always be tryharding) the difference is, they gonna do the same old long runs, and get a fraction of steel essence,

And what do you think will happen on the kuva side? Back to hours and hours of kuva survival, DE; hours of steel path? Not ok! Must diversify! Also DE: Hours of kuva survival? Its fine... Sorry, but the logic for your excuse is completely contradictory... And in kuva survival people will get a fraction of the kuva, i wonder who will have to hear the complaints about it 🤣

Anyways, i have 130 days worth of alerts saved up, dont rly care about kuva myself but i guess i got any possible new cosmetics covered, have fun new steel path players ^^

Edit: Hah, something just came to my mind, guys, wanna know a resource that is in the game right now, requires long runs to farm, depends on rng, and is waaay more hard to get since the enemy that drops it is not an enemy that starts showing up in more quantities like eximus enemies do over time?

Yeah, vitus essence, funny right? It ticks all the same boxes steel essence does that DE is using to justify the nerf (plus the extra box of "consistancy", since arbitraions change every hour and you can end up with something like defense that has way less mobs going about), and yet, no nerf, hmmmmmm 🤔 hmmmmmm, i wonder why, oh, i know, since you cant mass farm it like you could SE, it cant be used for a reliable kuva farm 🤣. If it doesn't hurt the riven market = no nerf.

[Portlalaland]

Lots of buffs. I like it!