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Scaling warframe ability is a mistake for balance, challenge and "endgame"


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Seeing how balance, challenge and endgame being the things put in warframe for whatever reason they want as the negative, I'm looking at another part of what I think makes that not easy to do : scaling warframe ability

As you can see, we can fight level 9999 enemies even without scaling damage through many means and with recently added scaling on warframe abilities on the rework, it makes it hard to set where the balance is when some warframes can wipe level 9999 enemies comfortably with scaling abilities while those who don't will have some struggling with that if they don't have any way to soften enemy defenses (Loki comes to my mind about it where he doesn't have anything for that)

If we say we want endgame, where is the end of our warframe power? Because those with scaling damage will comfortably play on level 9999 like nothing while those without will be left behind

If we want to say balance for endgame, how can you balance an infinitely scaling power?

If we want to say challenge? How can you challenge warframes with scaling power to break the odds?

I think having abilities with a flat amount of damage is where the balance can be put, means if you go too far, it becomes harder to fight

With balanced ability like that, we can determine how can we put the odds against players to make challenge and so we can set the so called endgame

Not only that, there will be a lot of nerfing that I'll see to find those unicorns people say this game need

Until next time

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Personally I think that all damage abilities should scale. Lvl 9999 enemies are meme content, no real player targeted one, and for all warframes to been able to be used, scalling its needed since frames scales only with ability strenght mods.

That or you need to allow the player to mod critical stats and status stats on abilities, since flat ability strenght cant compete with how many multiplicative damage sources weapons have.

A frame with flat numbers needs to either be broken at low level, or weak at high level. Scalling abilities fix that, making the frame deal a flat + % damage to enemies, it start soft not being a mass murdering machine at low level, like saryn does where her ult alone murder enemies in the lvl 50 range, and allows for high level performance at high levels of modding like xaku does.

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Depends on the type of scaling.

you have some abilities that scale so little per enemy level its debatable on whether it actually has scaling damage (looking at you Lavos 1). 

and then you have things like Revenants one shot gimmick where it’s only useful when every other damage option becomes unviable for the enemy level you’re facing. So in other words it’s also useless.

DE rarely implements ability scaling that’s actually good, so idk where your complaints are coming from.

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Trust me, the game was absolutely miserable when damage dealing abilities didn't scale. You are probably aware how useless and weak people consider Chroma's 1 to be. Back then, every damage dealing ability was equally useless. CC + survivability used to be the meta, because those things always 'scaled', and were effective no matter the level of your enemies.

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44 minutes ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

Trust me, the game was absolutely miserable when damage dealing abilities didn't scale. You are probably aware how useless and weak people consider Chroma's 1 to be. Back then, every damage dealing ability was equally useless. CC + survivability used to be the meta, because those things always 'scaled', and were effective no matter the level of your enemies.

And now CC is useless because the best CC is death. So the only viable build is damage/nuking

Back to square zero.

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Removing ability scaling wouldn't do Hek all in regards to the absence of balancing and challenge. We're on so many layers of powercreep and poor design that we need a dozen different systems knocked out before any difference is actually made besides making a handful of things at a time less effective.

I mean even a frame like Loki who has no actual damaging abilities is overpowered through invisibility and the bonus 700% "stealth" damage it enables for our already well overpowered melee weapons. Just to make Loki alone not broken would require hitting invisibility and melee weapons then if it even came down to CC being relevant again then Disarm would also need to take a hit for being overpowered.

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55 minutes ago, --F--NerevarCM said:

And now CC is useless because the best CC is death. So the only viable build is damage/nuking

Back to square zero.

That isn't exactly the case, many high level endurance setups combine CC with high damage to first completely disable enemies completely and to then deal the damage. The reason why CC isn't seen in average missions is the overall powercreep in the game. Even if DE nerfed the damage of abilities, weapons would be more than powerful enough to still make CC obsolete in regular missions. Some enemies are also completely CC immune so there's also that major design flaw.

The problem with DE is the fact that they are too scared to develop proper high level content because they are still too busy caressing the fragile balls of every casual player out there. When Steel Path was released, people actually explored new and interesting setups, because raw damage wasn't enough with the scaling armor. Some even played Nyx lol.

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2 hours ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

Trust me, the game was absolutely miserable when damage dealing abilities didn't scale. You are probably aware how useless and weak people consider Chroma's 1 to be. Back then, every damage dealing ability was equally useless. CC + survivability used to be the meta, because those things always 'scaled', and were effective no matter the level of your enemies.

The golden days of nyx and loki

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It kinda depends on the ability and its effects,

Something that does direct damage as a specific element and can scale linearly (with incoming damage/ enemy levels/ time) , while the enemy EHP scales exponentially ,is still acceptable according to me - Vauban nail gun ,Octavia mallet and Saryn spore work this way and they dont feel overpowered by themselves (as observable in SP).

Something that does True damage and scales exponentially? probably a bad idea (revenant reave at 100%) if there are no other drawbacks/costs.

Something that strips enemy defenses up to 50% sure , but if it goes to 100%? might feel cheesy if you also have scaling damage capability. Xaku does this but its range is short enough and static enough to need some effort.

Something whose base power is minor and has a cap to scaling? like nyx 1 , probably better to use regular gun/ melee

 

So the scale needs to be defined and regulated , cant just say "no scaling"

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1 hour ago, trst said:

I mean even a frame like Loki who has no actual damaging abilities is overpowered through invisibility and the bonus 700% "stealth" damage it enables for our already well overpowered melee weapons. Just to make Loki alone not broken would require hitting invisibility and melee weapons then if it even came down to CC being relevant again then Disarm would also need to take a hit for being overpowered.

There's one thing we can tweak on the AI for that, we can make enemies spray on the last location the gunshot heard and the location where someone dies so you can't just melee or shoot in one place without any retaliation

5 minutes ago, 0_The_F00l said:

Something that does direct damage as a specific element and can scale linearly (with incoming damage/ enemy levels/ time) , while the enemy EHP scales exponentially ,is still acceptable according to me - Vauban nail gun ,Octavia mallet and Saryn spore work this way and they dont feel overpowered by themselves (as observable in SP).

That means there's no end on our power progression though, means not even level 9999 SP will put any kind of "challenge" with barely any odds against the player

6 minutes ago, 0_The_F00l said:

Something that does True damage and scales exponentially? probably a bad idea (revenant reave at 100%) if there are no other drawbacks/costs.

I'm still on the fence on this since the set up is quite a lengthy and you can only do it on your thralls as the cost

8 minutes ago, 0_The_F00l said:

So the scale needs to be defined and regulated , cant just say "no scaling"

I want to say it's not going at "no scaling" direction but seeing how scaling powers like what you listed makes it hard to set where the balance is, I'm going with no scaling since without any scaling, you can determine where is the peak power so the enemy scaling can be capped there.

Let's say the limit of our power is at level 150, that means the "endgame" can be set at level 150 - 160 because your power cap is around that range, not scaling to level 9999 for some warframes while leaving the rest behind

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49 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

That means there's no end on our power progression though, means not even level 9999 SP will put any kind of "challenge" with barely any odds against the player

I dont think you understood what i was saying ,

Damage scales linearly by factor of 2X: 1 , 2 , 4, 6 , 8 , 10 , 12 , 14.

EHP scales exponentially by factor of Ex: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 , 128 , 256.

As you can see , damage is scaling but its not really doing much beyond certain levels.

53 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

I'm still on the fence on this since the set up is quite a lengthy and you can only do it on your thralls as the cost

You do more damage to your thralls , but you still do scaling damage to all enemies, you do 5x the scale to thralls. if you have managed to get 100% on thralls, you do 20% on regular enemies.

57 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

I want to say it's not going at "no scaling" direction but seeing how scaling powers like what you listed makes it hard to set where the balance is, I'm going with no scaling since without any scaling, you can determine where is the peak power so the enemy scaling can be capped there.

Let's say the limit of our power is at level 150, that means the "endgame" can be set at level 150 - 160 because your power cap is around that range, not scaling to level 9999 for some warframes while leaving the rest behind

Yeah , balance is hard when you have power creeped the S#&$ out of one thing and ignored another for years and still continue to power creep a third thing while making things easier to achieve.

The problem is the poorly thought out multiplier mehcnics that exist in the game.

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8 hours ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

I think having abilities with a flat amount of damage is where the balance can be put, means if you go too far, it becomes harder to fight

Bullet sponges are not hard to fight. They just have bigger numbers but you have too small number to deal. There is nothing hard or interesting here.

In my opinion in order to get harder to fight enemies we need to make them smarter not have some huge HP pool. Orb Mother is easy but you cannot beat her easily because she is bullet sponge.

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Scaling isn't necessarily a problem, and neither is the lack thereof. They have their pros and cons each. For example, one of the big advantages of scaling is that content can also be scaled down, preventing the issue where power players curbstomp lower level missions - which in turn opens the possibilities for execution-based challenges. Of course, that in turn might dull the power fantasy by making it seem like you never get any stronger. By contrast, non-scaling stuff has discrete values which is way easier to mentally build loadouts around.

The issue lies in only some stuff scaling, that which does scaling at different rates, and everything being designed as if it wasn't scaling.

 

Enemy health, weapon damage and ability damage all have various aspects that scale but rarely do you ever have any that are using the same formulae so they scale at the same speed as each other. That means they're inevitably going to go out of sync with each other, and that screws up everything in respect to balancing. If the powers scale faster than armour, then higher levels might actually wind up easier, for example. If armour scales faster than powers but shields scale slower (which is all to common these days) then you have an awkward system where one group is laughably easy to kill and the other becomes nothing but a series of annoying bullet sponges.

That's not even considering stuff like Condition Overload or Blood Rush, which can't really be considered 'Scaling' as they don't go by any sort of level system, but neither do they maintain a consistent output.

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3 hours ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

they are too scared to develop proper high level content because they are still too busy caressing the fragile balls of every casual player out there.

More like, because they can't.

Casuals are just a scapegoat, because blaming irrelevant people is highly important.

DE hasn't designed any interesting "boss", even when our power levels are completely disabled or reset through using something other than Warframes/weapons.

This is before even considering everyone has a different idea of "difficulty" or "end-game". Some people view pointless inconveniences as a form of difficulty, and others like DE think adding some zeroes at the end of hp and damage stats while adding a decimal and some zeroes to the drop rates is a form of difficulty.

When the game mainly spams a bunch of enemies that don't do much, it only makes sense they inevitably have their defense lowered when they take too long to die. Steel Path didn't make the game harder for a reason.

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I would even prefer more scaling stuff. I'm playing PvE content not PvP, as long as something does not 1 hit kill a lvl 9999 enemy too easily, the scaling is worth it. Come on man, we need to work a lot for those to scale up, no ? The high scaling do not come from a few initial seconds from the moment you start casting the skills though. Even to scale well you gotta study the warframe's stats well, learn them, and start researching which mod is best optimized for high level content. I wanna bring my hard work into battle and fly further with it, not getting pushed down because I fly too high (lol).

I'm feeling sick of balancing and nerfing this weapon and that warframe, here and there, while playing PvE content (anyone who try to tell me a fallacy to quit and play other games can go f*** yourself).

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21 minutes ago, Yamazuki said:

DE hasn't designed any interesting "boss", even when our power levels are completely disabled or reset through using something other than Warframes/weapons.

I would have to disagree. Certainly, the execution hasn't always been up to snuff, but DE have certainly shown off some interesting boss designs when you divorce the encounters from our absurd power creep.

Alad V: multi-target bosses are nothing new, but I can't think of that many that necessitate half-killing one boss before being able to kill the other, but which discourage killing both. It's a neat little semi-puzzle encounter.

Raptors: good multi-phase design, again with a nice little semi-puzzle element in figuring out how to progress to the next phase.

Vey Hek (Chicken Phase): Whilst his floating head phase is indefensibly godawful, his 'chicken phase' is actually pretty cool, with a decently broad variety of attacks, a self-heal that the player can meaningfully interrupt (could be better telegraphed, but still) and he actually makes use of his whole arena.

Eidolons: Seziure-inducing lightshow aside, Eidolons generally have good telegraphing and distinct attacks.

Even Necramechs have some good points (namely the clear progression and classic 'bait the charge and shoot the back' design), despite also having some bizzare choices that spoil the whole experience

 

DE are hardly geniuses of boss design, but I've definitely played games with worse boss encounters, and I'd say that, especially before power scaling got noticeably bad, they had some pretty good boss fights. It wouldn't shock me if their inability to make good fights was largely due to a desire for anti-cheesing, more than them just not having any concept of what makes a good boss fight.

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8 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Even Necramechs have some good points (namely the clear progression and classic 'bait the charge and shoot the back' design), despite also having some bizzare choices that spoil the whole experience

Aka "I can turn on Storm Shield instantly after it wears off with no cooldown because...reasons"

Also I'd like to nominate Ralph (Ropalolyst) and technically the Glassmaker boss as solid boss fights, Glassmaker less so because it turns off everything but movement, but the idea of the boss is basically a classic Mario boss fight and it works well for what it is.

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6 hours ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

CC + survivability used to be the meta

it's still is



Your topic doesn't define what you mean exactly.
Why? Because in the game there are only 5 real(meaning they can deal with lv1 and lv10k with the same effort) scaling damage powers as far as I know - revenant combo 1-3, trinity's 2(with a viral status weapon to compliment), snow globe(with a viral status weapon to compliment), khora with an augment and a stat stick and octavia's mallet.

Correct me if I'm wrong but there is no other power on it's own that's really scaling? (that also means only octavia classifies tbh :D , maybe saryn but...ttk is not as fast the longer you go)

Armor strip is not scaling on it's own, it just descales the enemy defences imo.You can combine armour strip+a power and then get your scaling but that's not really 1 power or the other, it's a combination.
 

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10 minutes ago, Aldain said:

Aka "I can turn on Storm Shield

FTFY

Storm Shroud is just not a fun ability to fight against. It's such a clear example of how trying to fight the cheese by adding cheese to the fight just makes the fight cheesier. Whenever Storm Shroud goes on the fight turns from a battle of good aim and mobility to evade attacks whilst still being in a good position to retaliate to:

Spoiler

 

In other words, the best way to fight a cheesy 'damage reflection' invulnerability boss is to give yourself invulnerability as well and outlast it. Which also, naturally, makes the whole 'mobility' part of the fight moot for the most part since with how Warframe abilities are designed, you can probably stay invulnerable for most of the fight regardless.

It makes a lot of the interesting decision making moot.

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9小时前 , TheArmchairThinker 说:

As you can see, we can fight level 9999 enemies even without scaling damage through many means and with recently added scaling on warframe abilities on the rework, it makes it hard to set where the balance is when some warframes can wipe level 9999 enemies comfortably with scaling abilities while those who don't will have some struggling with that if they don't have any way to soften enemy defenses (Loki comes to my mind about it where he doesn't have anything for that)

What is scaling damage? How do you scale damage?

I don't believe that you could just scale up your damage without doing stuff, for example you need to proc status for CO or stack melee combo for blood rush and weeping wounds. Yes of course, I won't like it if you could one shot level 9999 enemies with an unmodded regulator.

However, think of how weak Chroma's 1 is. It is supposed to deal damage, but it is a joke right now. And take a look at Vauban's flachette orb, it is easy to tell that he got some scaling there, but do someone really bring him into a 4-hr endurance mission? Maybe yes, but not a lot. 

Loki is NOT a warframe for damage dealing or endurance. And for now, you can always infuse seeking shuriken into any warframes you like to shred armor or use melee to destroy enemies, so why is it an issue?

10小时前 , TheArmchairThinker 说:

If we say we want endgame, where is the end of our warframe power? Because those with scaling damage will comfortably play on level 9999 like nothing while those without will be left behind

I really wanted to say that warframe has no actual endgame content, but scrap that idea here.

"Endgame content" in warframe could be eidolons, orbs or endurance missions etc. Do you really need to rely on warframe ability dmg scaling to destroy these people? NO! It is because none of these bosses take ability damage! And then what is about warframe power, when big and somewhat challenging content like this doesn't take ability damage and status as well?

Warframe isn't just level 9999 enemies, in fact, not many have seen a single level 9999 enemies. And scaling doesn't necessarily mean "expanding the end of warframe power", sometimes you do level 30 bounties and your damage could be scaled down.

10小时前 , TheArmchairThinker 说:

If we want to say balance for endgame, how can you balance an infinitely scaling power?

80% of the content are below level 100 and if the game is "balanced around", say level 60, then how do you do steel path?

It is also another kind of unbalance if you got all those mods but you are struggling in the first node of steel path, no? Scaling makes your weapons and warframes seem more usable instead of another piece of modded 5-forma 3k mastery garbage.

That is why saying "balancing" is a bad idea, since it is never balanced if you are trying to balance around a certain enemy level.

Also note that damage and ehp scales differently, where the former scales linearly and ehp scales exponentially (which means a lot more than former).

0_The_F00l went in detail for the numbers in his reply and go read his.

10小时前 , TheArmchairThinker 说:

If we want to say challenge? How can you challenge warframes with scaling power to break the odds?

Wait, do you see an actual challenging content in warframe?

"Mobile defense" and "fighting endurance level enemies" isn't challenging as it is just the numbers being higher. Shield gating and 2039850432384 ways of tanking damage still exists, dumb enemy AI still exists, CC/gathering abilities also exist.

What I tried to said here is that, ability dmg scaling isn't even the reason why warframe isn't challenging, because the problem is that you have a lot of ways to deal with enemies. I believe that you could use Nidus's Larva and a viral-slash melee to murder a group of enemies. You don't need to 1 them to their death (even though if you want, you could).

Here I brought up Nidus, which has his 1's damage scaled as well. But how about his efficiency compared to melee or viral HM/internal bleeding/hemorrhage weapons, hm?

11小时前 , TheArmchairThinker 说:

I think having abilities with a flat amount of damage is where the balance can be put, means if you go too far, it becomes harder to fight

With balanced ability like that, we can determine how can we put the odds against players to make challenge and so we can set the so called endgame

Not only that, there will be a lot of nerfing that I'll see to find those unicorns people say this game need

Flat damage? what

It sort of go against YOUR own opinion because it is VERY hard to find the point of balance. I could see that people complaining mesa's unmodded gun one shot level 30 enemies if they are balanced around level 60 or something.

The game does not need a nerf, since if you are nerfing, you would have to add cci to ALL enemies. And if not, CC viral-slash is still a way to destroy SP enemies in 3 seconds.

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6 hours ago, --F--NerevarCM said:

And now CC is useless because the best CC is death. So the only viable build is damage/nuking

Back to square zero.

At least we have Steel Path where CC can still shine.

 

5 hours ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

The problem with DE is the fact that they are too scared to develop proper high level content because they are still too busy caressing the fragile balls of every casual player out there. When Steel Path was released, people actually explored new and interesting setups, because raw damage wasn't enough with the scaling armor. Some even played Nyx lol.

It’s a fair point, but should be pretty obvious why DE does this. The casual players are the ones spending the most money on the game. Most vets doing high level content probably have all the plat they need from trading. It’s simply better for DEs bottom line to make casual and new player focused content.

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4 hours ago, 0_The_F00l said:

EHP scales exponentially by factor of Ex: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 , 128 , 256.

Enemies do not, and never have had exponential scaling. Enemy EHP scaling is a power function, and has a degree of <1 for enemies with only health or health + shields when current level - base level > 80 (that's level 82 for a lot of enemies. It goes up to level 96 for some high base level one). For armored enemies, it has a degree of 1.25.

Exponential Functions: The variable is in the exponent
Power Functions: The variable is in the base, not the exponent.

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