Please think of something, ANYTHING else enemies can do to us other than knock us down.

[Braneman]

I am just really, really tired of having tons of enemies around that can knock me down, and chain knock me down the second I actually get up. Ancients can do it, grineer scorpions can do it, heavy units can do a slam, MOAs can do a slam, blitz eximus can do it, Kuva Thralls can do it, hellion missiles can do it, shield lancers can do it, leapers can do it, arson eximus can do it.

I'm so tired of this passive non-mechanic because there is no counterplay to it other than "equip primed sure footed" because some of the most common sources of knockdown for the grineer/infested have so much auto aim they should be using this tech to stop bullets or particles of light. There isn't any sort of cooldown after you get up as to when you can be knocked down again, so what can happen is a grineer shield lancer will just push you into a corner and infinitely spam their knockdown shield slam, or you have multiple scorpions/ancients lined up with their harpoons ready to auto-aim knock you down.

I hate to say it but this feels like a bit of a crutch to just throw onto whatever enemy if they need their power level increased a bit and this pool of things like this needs to be expanded somehow so that every enemy doesn't just have the same frustrating, passive counterplay, copy pasted effect. I'm not saying this is the worst thing out there, or that this needs to change, I'm saying I would really appreciate some variety in the ways enemies can impede me other than an aimbot "you got knocked down" beam.

[Leqesai]

You've done a fine job of identifying a problem but have said nothing that would lead to a solution. "Please think of something, anything else..." is in your topic title but you have not written to your own request. If you want/expect change then you need to be part of the solution. Complaining and expecting people to fix something -you- feel is a problem is ridiculous.

What are some of YOUR suggestions for fixing this problem?

[AlendasNaro]

Disarm, irradiate, magnetize, duplicate, blind, ability category suppression and probably a bit more.

[quxier]

8 minutes ago, AlendasNaro said:

duplicate

Duplicate... like creating specters of our frames?

9 minutes ago, AlendasNaro said:

magnetize

Like not being able to shoot (as in Void bubble)?

[YUNoJump]

I feel like most of the enemies with knockdowns have deliberate "tells" or conditions that allow you to avoid knockdowns.

Heavy Grineer only use them when they're close and they usually don't try and approach you, so just kill them from a distance or bait out their slam (which has a unique animation before they use it). MOAs have another unique animation and also a very visible wave that can be jumped over. The Arson wave is a bit of a dodgy situation as its effect goes through terrain, but the knockdown doesn't. Hellions fly into the air as an obvious tell, and their missiles can be dodged. Most other knockdown enemies will run straight at you, which is an incredibly obvious tell and can be negated by killing them, as generally speaking these enemies are not particularly tanky. 

Overall I think the biggest offenders are Scorpions and Ancients, but mainly because they use the grapple as a primary attack (ie they always use it as soon as you're in range), rather than using it to grab retreating or unreachable enemies. AI changes could fix that.

Otherwise, there are lots of alternative CC effects in the game, as mentioned in an above comment. Various forms of ability negation, disarming, small enemies grabbing you, energy drains, and abnormal procs such as Magnetic or Cold.

[Drasiel]

just give us diminishing returns on chain staggers if go x time without stagger reset diminishing returns. We already have different tiers of staggers in game from the self damge to stagger change and could even add in the "slight pause because I resisted a stagger" animation from power drift for an additonal one. First hit, full knockdown, second hit, large stagger, third hit small stagger, 4th hit power drift pause, remain at that level until x.x seconds pass without stagger then start back at beginning.

Edit: what might cause a problem is the different kinds of stagger because they have different effects

1. grapple hooks, full knockdown and pull
2. blast damage (ie hellions) it's a status effect knockdown
3. Knockdown rings (moas) ring of full knockdown
4. Bounce pads, bounce you up and knock you down
5. heavy slams, unsure if blast status or not
6. self staggers from weapons (should not be affected by diminishing returns)
7. staggers from weapon attacks (tera corpus melee fighter can stagger you on hits with it's little axes)
8. probably others I'm missing

[AlendasNaro]

55 minutes ago, quxier said:

Duplicate... like creating specters of our frames?

Like not being able to shoot (as in Void bubble)?

Yeap. Hmm... Actually the void bubble thing is old info. My bad but if you are interested to know. Sargas Ruk in before rework of him had Mag's magnetize ability.

[(PSN)VKPButcher]

While it is annoying and I get the frustration it is, in most cases, avoidable via various means. My biggest gripe is seeing it trigger so often as either a response to the unit itself getting cc'd in some fashion or Ancient/Scorpion 180 no scopes, both of which shouldn't be possible. Then you have the bouncers of Club Corpus in the OV, Trenchers and Embattor moas...I really hate that place sometimes, I really really do :(

[Braneman]

1 hour ago, Leqesai said:

You've done a fine job of identifying a problem but have said nothing that would lead to a solution. "Please think of something, anything else..." is in your topic title but you have not written to your own request. If you want/expect change then you need to be part of the solution. Complaining and expecting people to fix something -you- feel is a problem is ridiculous.

What are some of YOUR suggestions for fixing this problem?

First, if you ever think about making a post like this ever again, sit down and read it over once or twice and ask yourself "could this be applied to me? Am I being the unhelpful one?" Because I can see no purpose for your post other than to either provoke a negative reaction just increase your post count since you don't suggest anything yourself.

Second I would like you to sit down, calm down, and read what I wrote in that post, I'm listing out problems with the current system, lack of active counterplay, heavy autoaim, lack of any sort of cooldown. This is a feedback forum, I'm here to give feedback on a problem I see with the game's design, I'm not a paid developer for DE and it's not my job to fix their game for them.

Third I don't know what would be practical for the engine because whatever the solution is it needs to be everywhere, every mission would likely have enemies that can do whatever I suggest. If I would pick some obvious ones it would be changing the way knockdowns are delivered, a tripwire that makes electricity procs, some sort of thrown grineer rocket glove that explodes into a fire proc in an area stolen from the penta augment, they could reflect status procs in a way that splashes them onto the ground so you have to avoid them.

[Joezone619]

I agree, there is WAAAY too many enemies in the game that knock us down all the time, especially in the corpus.

[Murdamasta]

I agree.  I was thinking: The reason a knockdown proc is 1000 times more annoying than any other CC proc is because it reduces you to helplessness.  Magnetic scrambles your display, fire just gives you a DoT, the rarely used tether effect hampers your mobility and starts to get legitimately annoying, but knockdown is game over.  You play again or interact with the game in any way when it says you are allowed to and not a moment before.  If you're lucky you aren't chain-stunned into actual death, but nothing prevents the AI from doing that whatsoever except luck.

This is not the kind of effect that should be in any way spammable, let alone actively spammed by the AI.  But it is.

As far as ideas to mitigate this, how about: having some different enemy moves that hamper the player's agency somewhat?  Knockdown is all-or-nothing. 

1. How about: a proc that makes it so you can't jump, or can only jump a very short height, for a few seconds?  Almost as aggravating as knockdown, but I mean.  You can still walk or maybe even run, you just can't bullet jump out of there.

2. How about: a proc that makes it so you just can't fire your gun for a few seconds?  Your melee probably still works, but guns don't.  Again, aggravating, but compare it to knockdown, which is basically a cutscene you can die in.

My idea would be, tone down the frequency of knockdown attacks.  Replace a proportion of them with attacks that cause these two effects.  All three effects are aggravating losses of player agency, but only one is total.

[KitMeHarder]

5 hours ago, Braneman said:

because there is no counterplay

 

• Rolling, blocking with melee, Rolling Guard, full-body ability cast, etc... all make you immune to knockdowns.
• You can also hit the jump button while knocked down (when your frame flashes in its energy color) to half the knockdown duration.
• A lot of CC effects can prevent enemies from finishing their knockdown animation altogether.

And as others have said, most knockdowns have large tells. I don't think anywhere in this game has too many knockdowns... besides Profit Taker and maybe casual tridolons.

[(XBOX)Paul Roberts 27]

The biggest problem is survival missions.

There's eventually a horde of enemies that spear you, one after the other. In this case you don't get chance to react, or counter, and your mod is effectively nullified as there's only a chance to avoid the effect. 

So, a horde of scorpions, or ancients could well have you singing "I get knocked down, but I get up again"

 

[Drasiel]

3 hours ago, KitMeHarder said:

 

• Rolling, blocking with melee, Rolling Guard, full-body ability cast, etc... all make you immune to knockdowns.
• You can also hit the jump button while knocked down (when your frame flashes in its energy color) to half the knockdown duration.
• A lot of CC effects can prevent enemies from finishing their knockdown animation altogether.

And as others have said, most knockdowns have large tells. I don't think anywhere in this game has too many knockdowns... besides Profit Taker and maybe casual tridolons.

Rolling helps, but the iframes are the only reason this is so, I've been rolling through levels plenty of times and had the bad luck to be hooked just as I exit an iframe. Blocking's great so long as nothing comes up behind you, which is just a matter of time really unless one is a big fan of sewer camping. Warframe has been moving away from full body casts for years now and they are a lot less common than they were while more knockdowns comes with each new enemy set.

you can't hit the jump button to execute a counter to knockdown if you are dealing with any kind of host latency

Most knockdown animations for enemy attacks are non interruptable or the effect is instantaneous to the beginning of the animation not the end. Scorpions and ancients are a great example of this you can literally kill a scorpion and still be struck by it's hook because it had a microsecond to start the hook animation. If you cc an enemy before they can do anything sure, but even if you notice "oh S#&$ that ancient pulled back it's arm" it's normally too late

Knockdown Wind-ups, of which there are few decent ones in warframe, are pretty much useless in a horde shooter environment like most warframe missions turn into. Unfortunately. I would say the only enemy that actually gives anyone time to react is the moa stomps, maybe arguably the antimoa knockdown grenades as they spread slowly like the stomp ring. This is because of 3 reason: distinct sound cue, easy to identify enemy that requires close range, reactable attack speed, and no animation locks on the attack, plus for bonus points you can actually avoid the attack once it's launched. Then you have some of the worst offenders on the other end: bombards and hellions who have large range, low distance sound cues, can clip through ceilings and still shoot you (specific to hellions), and a wide area of instant blast proc, the first thing that normally causes you to notice a bombard is within range of you is being shot in the back with a rocket and knocked on your ass.

The problem isn't the knockdown itself per se it's more how common the resulting @#&$ up cascade from a single knockdown that becomes a chain of  uninterruptible knockdowns is.

If we want to keep knockdowns we could make them a lot more user friendly while keeping them dangerous. These are the changes I would suggest

• Hooks:
  • Reduce their damage the main danger should being prone not oneshotting a poor casting frame from behind
  • prevent them from targeting prone warframes with hook, the hook is for knocking down and bringing close not for playing fish the tenno.
  • remove ancient disrupters "special" attack on the hook, again the danger should be being prone not having your energy zapped if you are hooked you're close enough for it to slap you normally and zap your energy that way while still leaving you time to  respond fast enough to roll away and preserve your energy.
• AOE blast procs ie rockets
  • remove the blast proc from the explosion and put it on the rocket itself. If you dodge a rocket (while it might be realistic) it's unfair that you get yeeted to the ground because it hit a wall or ally behind you. The blast radius is generally so large that dodging is never enough unless you time iframes or can teleport far enough away.
• Moa stomps
  • 100% fine as is but in a perfect world it wouldn't push around already prone tenno
• Antimoa knockdown grenade
  • pretty fair all things considered, fairly close, specific audio cue, noticeable attack, can jump over it once launched
• on hit stagger attacks (trencher)
  • Slow down the attack speed of this unit a little more, right now unless your timing is really really good you can easily be chain staggered by a single trencher. One of these enemies shouldn't be as debilitating as they are currently
  • jump shockwave was improved to be much less frustrating and is in a decent place you can normally turn a bounce into a ground slam and continue attacking.
• Ground slammers (heavy units and blast eximus)
  • redo the animations. Make it so the knockdown component isn't triggered until after the animation plays so if we interrupt or kill the unit the knockdown doesn't still go off anyway

[DoomFruit]

7 hours ago, (PSN)VKPButcher said:

Ancient/Scorpion 180 no scopes,

Which still hit you after you've jumped away, gone invisible and then changed direction.

 

Back to the OP, beware of what you wish for. "ANYTHING else" is a very large category and DE are basically one gigantic monkey paw. If they truly do "anything" else, expect to see the common trash fodder enemy on whatever tileset gets killed in the next "rework" to throw Vauban Bastille grenades.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

Yes knowdown spam is boring, and one of the acolyte even ragdoll you before performing a melee attacks that deals around 2k damages

But do you really want "anything else" ?

 I also don't want DE to spam any of these : nulli bubble, immune phases, status immune bullet sponges, instant energy drain in a zone.

Do you think that a parasitic eximus maniac with nullifier bubble, spammed in SP past the first 10min would be awesome compared to just fitting "prime surefooted" in your exilus slot ?

[KitMeHarder]

46 minutes ago, Drasiel said:

The problem isn't the knockdown itself per se it's more how common the resulting @#&$ up cascade from a single knockdown that becomes a chain of  uninterruptible knockdowns is.

This has never happened to me in normal game play, save for literally less than half-a-dozen times with shield lancers. Not to mention this is only what you can do generally with every frame; A third of the roster literally doesn't even care.

And almost all knockdowns are easy to read.

• Ancient - You literally just roll as they round the corner if they're in range. You don't have to wait for the animation, you know they're coded to either instantly hook you, or to rush you with that long-ass arm windup knockdown.
• Grineer heavy/shield - Are you in melee range? Instantly roll or cast Miasma, Pillage, etc... Reading an enemy is not timing the animation frame perfect.
• Moa - You already said they're easy.
• Arsonist - A very slow moving wave where you can either roll, or melee once to let your frame auto-block it.
• Etc...

The only difficult ones are Scorpions and Blitz eximus, as they are either too numerous to anticipate, or blend in too much.

58 minutes ago, Drasiel said:

Reduce their damage the main danger should being prone not oneshotting a poor casting frame from behind

Agreed. Ranged attacks should not have gotten the massive damage buff infested got in April.

59 minutes ago, Drasiel said:

remove the blast proc from the explosion and put it on the rocket itself.

Blast procs no longer knock you or enemies down.

[quxier]

3 hours ago, KitMeHarder said:

 

• Ancient - You literally just roll as they round the corner if they're in range. You don't have to wait for the animation, you know they're coded to either instantly hook you, or to rush you with that long-ass arm windup knockdown.

The thing is there will be many of them. When I play some ~30 minutes there will so many Ancient so I either kill them or roll all the time.

8 hours ago, KitMeHarder said:

Rolling, blocking with melee, Rolling Guard, full-body ability cast, etc... all make you immune to knockdowns.

While this is true (that those thing prevents knockdowns) but sheer number of enemies makes it impossible to NOT get hooked if you don't do this all the time.

11 hours ago, (PSN)VKPButcher said:

Ancient/Scorpion 180 no scopes

I think they are close to 360... I've been facing their back, thinking I'm safe, and I still get "hooked" from time to time.

 

 

And while not technically knockdown, Commanders stun you after teleporting you. It's one of the best avoidable stun. "The best" as not completely easy but it's preventable in most cases.

[Drachnyn]

vor 13 Stunden schrieb quxier:

Duplicate... like creating specters of our frames?

Like not being able to shoot (as in Void bubble)?

I am not sure if Malice still works that way but I had it once where he put a magnetize bubble on me and I tried to shoot him with my opticor, which promptly evaborated myself.

[Steel_Rook]

I have a couple of suggestions here:

1. Institute a knockdown cooldown. If a player is knocked down, make them immune to further knockdowns for the next 2-3 seconds. That ought to be enough to prevent stunlock and cut down on most of the really annoying crap.
2. Drastically increase the kip-up window. You know - where you press Jump in the middle of a knockdown animation in order to get up immediately? Right now, it's WAAAY too hard to pull off reliably, causing most people to not even bother. Give us a wider time window, let us cancel out of a knockdown manually - it'll cut down on a lot of the frustration.

In terms of simple fixes, I think this should be sufficient without requiring major systems redesigns.

[Teridax68]

11 hours ago, Leqesai said:

You've done a fine job of identifying a problem but have said nothing that would lead to a solution. "Please think of something, anything else..." is in your topic title but you have not written to your own request. If you want/expect change then you need to be part of the solution. Complaining and expecting people to fix something -you- feel is a problem is ridiculous.

What are some of YOUR suggestions for fixing this problem?

I don't think it's actually a bad thing to just point out a problem without offering a solution of one's own on the feedback forums, because simply raising an issue is already valuable in that it brings DE's attention to it. Given that the company is full of seasoned developers whose literal job is coming up with creative solutions, it's not the worst thing in the world if a player doesn't deliver one fully-formed to their lap. There's the general saying that players are great at pointing out problems, but terrible at offering solutions, and I think the truth behind that is that the moment one starts mentioning specifics, and thereby making one choice out of many that are potentially just as valid, a lot of other players just end up squabbling because they have something different in mind. That, in turn, just adds noise to the thread and detracts from the main point. I wish this weren't the case, and that these forums had a culture that lended itself to more constructive exchanges, but those are the cards we're dealt.

12 hours ago, Braneman said:

I hate to say it but this feels like a bit of a crutch to just throw onto whatever enemy if they need their power level increased a bit and this pool of things like this needs to be expanded somehow so that every enemy doesn't just have the same frustrating, passive counterplay, copy pasted effect. I'm not saying this is the worst thing out there, or that this needs to change, I'm saying I would really appreciate some variety in the ways enemies can impede me other than an aimbot "you got knocked down" beam.

I think this is exactly why enemies are given knockdown. During one of the times when DE started talking about making enemies more of a challenge, they released Terra Corpus units in Fortuna, now infamous for spamming lots of AoE, staggers, and knockdowns, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Removing control from the player is a cheap form of difficulty DE has resorted to in the past to try to make enemies feel more threatening to us, though instead the end result has always been to make gameplay more annoying than challenging, as getting hard-CCed is simply not enjoyable. It's all the more jarring in Warframe given that we're normally hyper-mobile, and one of the game's key selling points is just how fluidly and freely we get to move via parkour.  Anyone who's obtained and equipped Primed Sure Footed knows just how much of a change the mod makes, and I personally consider it an essential QoL mod now due to how much much more pleasant the game feels with it (for me, at least).

If I were to propose a suggestion, it would be to remove staggers and knockdown entirely, including from our own AoE. Warframe is not a game made to make the player feel limited, let alone have them lose control of their character, and in practical terms hard CC has utterly failed to make the game any more difficult, only less pleasant. Even when one knows how to avoid certain moves, it is not reasonable to expect the player to Matrix dodge out of every possible instance when they are often swarmed from all sides (including the back) by many enemies capable of outputting staggers or knockdown, including through room-filling AoE (e.g. Arson/Caustic Eximus radial blasts). Thus, the game ought to get rid of those mechanics against us, and look to other ways of implementing a real challenge, a goal hard CC against players never managed to accomplish to begin with.

[Tiltskillet]

15 hours ago, YUNoJump said:

Otherwise, there are lots of alternative CC effects in the game, as mentioned in an above comment. Various forms of ability negation, disarming, small enemies grabbing you, energy drains, and abnormal procs such as Magnetic or Cold.

Players hate all these things too.  And we hate being damaged.  Really, it's better if game enemies have no effect on us at all. 

After all, even  a bizarre fantasy sci-fi game  like Warframe should take its bearings from what we experience in reality. In RL, do the sparrows I stalk with my Mosin Nagant fight back other than with a fine mist of blood and feathers?  No sir, no they do not.

 

[Tiltskillet]

17 hours ago, Leqesai said:

You've done a fine job of identifying a problem but have said nothing that would lead to a solution. "Please think of something, anything else..." is in your topic title but you have not written to your own request. If you want/expect change then you need to be part of the solution. Complaining and expecting people to fix something -you- feel is a problem is ridiculous.

Leqesai, it's a feedback forum.  Identifying problems one has with the game--or "complaining and expecting people to fix something" as you put it--is largely what it's about.   Proposing solutions can be fun, and sometimes really interesting for us as forum participants, but it's completely optional.  

[TheGrimCorsair]

52 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

  Proposing solutions can be fun, and sometimes really interesting for us as forum participants, but it's completely optional.  

Also not as useful to the developers, generally, as clearly explaining what your issues happen to be.

[Drasiel]

9 hours ago, KitMeHarder said:

This has never happened to me in normal game play, save for literally less than half-a-dozen times with shield lancers. Not to mention this is only what you can do generally with every frame; A third of the roster literally doesn't even care.

And almost all knockdowns are easy to read.

• Ancient - You literally just roll as they round the corner if they're in range. You don't have to wait for the animation, you know they're coded to either instantly hook you, or to rush you with that long-ass arm windup knockdown.
• Grineer heavy/shield - Are you in melee range? Instantly roll or cast Miasma, Pillage, etc... Reading an enemy is not timing the animation frame perfect.
• Moa - You already said they're easy.
• Arsonist - A very slow moving wave where you can either roll, or melee once to let your frame auto-block it.
• Etc...

The only difficult ones are Scorpions and Blitz eximus, as they are either too numerous to anticipate, or blend in too much.

Agreed. Ranged attacks should not have gotten the massive damage buff infested got in April.

Blast procs no longer knock you or enemies down.

It happens a lot when you play solo, and warframe has a fairly sizable and dedicated solo community. When I play with groups I almost never encounter the cascade of failure, solo? running a mission for 20 minutes almost guarantees it'll happen at least once depending on faction and enemy level (as enemy level also dictates which units will spawn more)

Ancients actually have 3 behaviours: hook, standard attack, and charge towards you into range. The problem is the hook and the run towards action both happen from about the same distance. Ancients are also a really common enemy in any endurance run or high level situation because of the infested's low enemy variety. If no more than 5 spawned at one time your solution would be a lot more viable but when they start pouring out of the woodwork you just can't keep them all in view. Also I will point out again, rolling only works if the iframes match with the attack, you can roll away from ancient to be hooked by another as your iframe (but not the rolling animation) ends. Maybe if infested got more units and the ancients were toned in spawn it would be a better solution. Or we could diversify the ancients so only one type got the hook and the others got a different behavior, it would make them more interesting.

The heavy shield strike is actually only a problem in tandem with being pulled into the shield strike by a scorpion or knocked into them by rockets (which has been fixed yay) and the fact they can still hit you and send you sliding across the floor while you were already on the ground.

I forgot about the arsonist eximi, I have no problem with them they are very fair.

Checking the wiki it looks like our blast procs were changed from knockdowns to reduced accuracy, I must have missed that in the patch notes.