Enemy attack patterns and behaviors more similar to the game "Returnal"?

[(NSW)Zurashii]

 

Has anyone played Returnal here? I really like how the enemies are really aggressive and shoot all sorts of projectiles that have their own patterns that you can avoid with proper timing and spacing. Returnal's combat can get really exhilarating, 

but imagine having those same enemies in Warframe's mechanics instead! 

You'll have to make proper use of your Bullet Jump to dodge these enemies' massive bullet patterns, with some bullets you're able to Bullet Jump right through! I feel like Warframe would benefit largely from enemies like these, or even just the patterned projectiles themselves. We can equip Corpus/Grineer with new guns that shoot less realistic projectiles that are easier to foresee but trickier to dodge, really put your evasive maneuvers to the test! What do you guys think?

[Tsoe]

not sure if DE know about the concept of IA

but i keep thinking about it

ennemies are boring bullet sponge

 

only accolyte/lychs are kind of fun to fight

[(NSW)Zurashii]

The flaw with most enemy projectiles in Warframe is they mostly consist of hitscan bullets that zip to you. To avoid these you mostly have to rely on outliving the bullets that shave off your health constantly with abilities/mods, or killing the enemies before they can even shoot you.

I know it's more realistic this way but surviving in Warframe's gameplay feels more luck based (with specific builds affecting the luck) than actual skill based where you have to avoid the projectiles that are more visible in trajectory and visuals.

[Lutesque]

Now this is a good example of Attack Vectors...

 

That being said.... It looked like like a Boss Rush instead of a Horde Shooter and that would go a long way into explaining why the Attack Patterns look so clean and Consistent...

ttying to reverse engineer something like this for Warframe is going to take Miyamoto levels of Intuition and Insight....

One thing that's missing in the video is liberal use of transparent Ray Casting.... And I know exactly why they didn't want to do that.... But really they should have swallowed their Pride and implimented it....

 

 

[(NSW)Zurashii]

39 minutes ago, Lutesque said:

That being said.... It looked like like a Boss Rush instead of a Horde Shooter and that would go a long way into explaining why the Attack Patterns look so clean and Consistent...

It's a roguelite, and these enemies can be common and come in numbers, you should check out a playthrough of it! The maps are even procedurally generated kinda like Warframe so they share quite of few things in common. I feel like Warframe would be much more engaging if enemy projectiles behaved more like they do in Returnal.

[Lutesque]

6 hours ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

It's a roguelite, and these enemies can be common and come in numbers, you should check out a playthrough of it! The maps are even procedurally generated kinda like Warframe so they share quite of few things in common. I feel like Warframe would be much more engaging if enemy projectiles behaved more like they do in Returnal.

It definitely would be.... However... Games that are actually designed like this are few and far Between..... 

Do you think DE can pull this kind of thing off ? 

One thing that's Interesting is The Boss Fights in the Original Dark Sector kind followed this Design.... Albeit with signicantly less flair and Slower animations 😝 !!! 

In any case it's nice to have a nice visual example of what we want....

 

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

It's a roguelite, and these enemies can be common and come in numbers, you should check out a playthrough of it! The maps are even procedurally generated kinda like Warframe so they share quite of few things in common. I feel like Warframe would be much more engaging if enemy projectiles behaved more like they do in Returnal.

Facing 30 of the boss that spams missile swarms doesn't strike me as particularly good game design, though. Unless you're also proposing some means by which these bosses synchronise their projectile spam, you're simply going to ned up with overlapping patterns and no holes. At that point, we're right back to Warframe - enemy fire can't be dodged, so just tank it on EHP and don't worry about it.

Whether these enemies are "common" or not, they're designed like bosses. You could have aspects of them, but certainly not multiple at the same time. Not if you want a fair experience.

[Lutesque]

6 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Unless you're also proposing some means by which these bosses synchronise their projectile spam

Now there's an Idea 🙂 !!!

6 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

you're simply going to ned up with overlapping patterns and no holes.

Dark Souls in a Nutshell.... 

They may aswell add some Dialogue for the Enemies to make it more Obvious: "Back Me Up... I'm going in hard !!!"

8 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

 

Whether these enemies are "common" or not, they're designed like bosses. You could have aspects of them, but certainly not multiple at the same time. Not if you want a fair experience.

You can still make it fair by Playing a Specific way.... The idea here is not to try to dodge all the attacks as they happen but to put yourself in a situation so that you wouldn't have to do that in the first place... See... Fair. 😉....

But does that make for good game play ? Obviously Not 😁 !!!!

[(NSW)Zurashii]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Facing 30 of the boss that spams missile swarms doesn't strike me as particularly good game design, though. Unless you're also proposing some means by which these bosses synchronise their projectile spam, you're simply going to ned up with overlapping patterns and no holes. At that point, we're right back to Warframe - enemy fire can't be dodged, so just tank it on EHP and don't worry about it.

Whether these enemies are "common" or not, they're designed like bosses. You could have aspects of them, but certainly not multiple at the same time. Not if you want a fair experience.

Now this is simply a case for Quantity vs. Quality. Do you want more bullet sponges where the meta is to just nuke them before they can even attack, or do you want encounters that have less numbers but each enemy is an actual threat you can dispatch if you just react to their actions properly.

Some of these problems could be fixed if you did things like make certain projectiles not hurt during certain actions like Bullet Jumping, Aim Gliding, and Rolling, or maybe even let some of these projectiles be taken out by simply attacking them! For example: one enemy produces shockwaves along the ground you can't roll through so you will have to jump over, and another enemy shoots walls of projectiles that your bullet jump can phase right through, and another enemy have big but slow projectiles that you can't bullet jump or roll through, but you can shoot them. If you were to face only one of these it would be easy to take care of, but suddenly becomes a bit more tricky when a combination of them team up.

You'll have to time your bullet jumps at the window where one bullet jump can evade all their attacks at once. It'll be a lot easier too if you had a squad, each member can focus on one enemy each and stagger them from shooting too many projectiles.

I think this would be very good for Warframe, we don't have to replace every single enemy, we could drip feed these new enemies slowly. Maybe the Sentients could be the testing grounds for these new projectiles, and slowly but surely all the other factions would start using sentient weaponry that uses these projectiles. No more tanking hits like a sponge and relying on luck or exploits, have quality over quantity with the enemies.

[(NSW)Gamer-Steve]

48 minutes ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

Some of these problems could be fixed if you did things like make certain projectiles not hurt during certain actions like Bullet Jumping, Aim Gliding, and Rolling, or maybe even let some of these projectiles be taken out by simply attacking them! For example: one enemy produces shockwaves along the ground you can't roll through so you will have to jump over, and another enemy shoots walls of projectiles that your bullet jump can phase right through, and another enemy have big but slow projectiles that you can't bullet jump or roll through, but you can shoot them. If you were to face only one of these it would be easy to take care of, but suddenly becomes a bit more tricky when a combination of them team up.

Not to interrupt, but seeing that reminds me of Undertale's system of avoiding various kinds of attacks based on how you move / stay still, etc.

 

Theoretically speaking tying certain types of enemy attacks to the movement actions of the player could be one way to design a game (The combat that is), if not implement that for Warframe. One attack that comes to mind off the top of my head is rolling / Void Dashing into one of Profit Taker's shields to avoid getting knocked down; Eximus Auras are kinda like that too, now that I think of it. It still shoves you back regardless, but at least you could move immediately afterwards.

 

 Changing enemy attacks like this would be quite an update if it happened.

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

Now this is simply a case for Quantity vs. Quality. Do you want more bullet sponges where the meta is to just nuke them before they can even attack, or do you want encounters that have less numbers but each enemy is an actual threat you can dispatch if you just react to their actions properly.

Well, now you're going beyond the topic of enemy design and proposing a fundamental shift in the type of game Warframe is. This is a horde shooter, so the former IS by design. You don't go to Left 4 Dead or Playdy 2 and say "OK, but your game would be better if it were all boss fights with just one enemy." That's how you get Evolve. Whatever proposals you're making would have to fit within the underlying game. Otherwise, you're just proposing a new game using the same engine. If you want complex enemies, you'll need a system which supports complex enemies first. Simply replacing Warframe enemies with these doesn't work.

Don't believe me? Just watch.

 

3 hours ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

SFor example: one enemy produces shockwaves along the ground you can't roll through so you will have to jump over, and another enemy shoots walls of projectiles that your bullet jump can phase right through, and another enemy have big but slow projectiles that you can't bullet jump or roll through, but you can shoot them. If you were to face only one of these it would be easy to take care of, but suddenly becomes a bit more tricky when a combination of them team up.

A Shockwave Moa is capable of producing shockwaves along the ground that players have to jump over. A standard Fire Eximus is capable of producing a full-screen expanding AoE bubble that players can roll through. While not exactly the same thing, a Brood Mother produces parasites that players need to shoot or avoid. Warframe already has most of the mechanics you're outlining. The solution to most of them is usually "be Inaros." Failing that, just bring enough DPS to one-shot everything.

This is precisely what I mean. When you spam players with projectile damage, players respond by stacking stats and tanking it to the face, because trying to avoid everything all of the time simply isn't viable. You can do this with boss enemies like the Jackal, but you can't really do it with regular enemies unless you redesign the game's underlying enemy structure. Unless tough enemies exist whom we can't one-shot from range and who can do more to us than shove us back a little, this system isn't going to matter.

There's a reason I've been advocating for major changes to enemy design.

[(NSW)Zurashii]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Whatever proposals you're making would have to fit within the underlying game. Otherwise, you're just proposing a new game using the same engine. If you want complex enemies, you'll need a system which supports complex enemies first. Simply replacing Warframe enemies with these doesn't work.

A Shockwave Moa is capable of producing shockwaves along the ground that players have to jump over. A standard Fire Eximus is capable of producing a full-screen expanding AoE bubble that players can roll through. While not exactly the same thing, a Brood Mother produces parasites that players need to shoot or avoid. Warframe already has most of the mechanics you're outlining.

It sounds like you just contradicted yourself...? If enemies like these already exist, then I'm not necessarily proposing a new game. And even if I am proposing a new game, it sounds like something new Warframe might need. You seem to be fixated on the misunderstood basis that I want all the common enemies to be like bosses or every enemy should just be a boss encounter when that is literally not what I'm saying at all. Maybe you should take a look at a playthrough of Returnal to see what I mean because it seems like you think Returnal is some kind of boss rush kind of game when it isn't.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

This is precisely what I mean. When you spam players with projectile damage, players respond by stacking stats and tanking it to the face, because trying to avoid everything all of the time simply isn't viable.

That's what builds are for, and it's what Warframe has over other third person shooters out there. You COULD avoid bullets and focus on critical strikes that make it so your encounter with enemies are as short as possible- a glass cannon if you will, OR you could go for a tank build that just eats these bullets to the face and simply try to outlast your enemies. That's the magic of Warframe, there are many ways to approach enemies. I just want many more ways enemies approach you, instead of fights just degrading into a bullet sponge contest 90% of the time. Currently Warframe only rewards those who can sponge the most bullets because there is literally no other way to avoid the damage, changing it so that actual skill is required to avoid damage is not that big of a change to Warframe's core gameplay, it's just going to be a big change for players to how they approach taking bullets to the face.

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

That's what builds are for, and it's what Warframe has over other third person shooters out there. You COULD avoid bullets and focus on critical strikes that make it so your encounter with enemies are as short as possible- a glass cannon if you will, OR you could go for a tank build that just eats these bullets to the face and simply try to outlast your enemies. That's the magic of Warframe, there are many ways to approach enemies. I just want many more ways enemies approach you, instead of fights just degrading into a bullet sponge contest 90% of the time. Currently Warframe only rewards those who can sponge the most bullets because there is literally no other way to avoid the damage, changing it so that actual skill is required to avoid damage is not that big of a change to Warframe's core gameplay, it's just going to be a big change for players to how they approach taking bullets to the face.

We seem to be talking past each other. Let me try a different approach.

When you give people the choice of either dodging projectiles or simply passively facetanking them, the vast majority will choose to facetank. This is why Warframe is in the state it's in right now. Power creep has made us all objectively worse players because we're able to stack number so high as to essentially remove entire game systems. Warframe already has complex enemies, and they DO NOT MATTER because they either die too fast or just can't do anything of substance to us. I COULD roll through a Flame Eximus explosion... Or I could "be Inaros" and simply take it on the chin. I resist knockdowns so all it does is shove me around a little. And if that's too much, I could "be Rhino" and entirely disregard it. Players will optimise all the fun out of the game if you let them.

The other side of the coin is when the game itself makes these "more skilful" plays outright unpleasant. As an example, dodging an Infested Ancient grappling hook is fine. The ancient always opens with it and telegraphs it pretty hard, plus the hook travels fairly slowly. Not that hard to move out of the way. Good mechanic. Doding hooks from 7 Ancients who stagger their attacks such that there's ALWAYS a hook coming my way? Less fine. What this results in is stun-locking me as I get dragged up and down and all around the room for 15 minutes until I die. I might have had a chance if the stars aligned, but the spam pretty much cut off my options. My response in that situation isn't to "git gud." It's to get knockback immunity so they can't drag me, thereby rendering their attacks entirely inert. And because Warframe allows me to do this, I'm always going to do this over bothering to try.

If you want skill-based enemies, you need a system which doesn't allow players to equip a "thing" and negate them entirely. You also need a system that's not going to frustrate players into wanting to do that. For the Ancient example above - the kip-up DE added with self-stagger ALMOST convinced me to drop my knockback immunity, but the window of opportunity on that is so tiny it's nearly impossible to hit for me. They almost got it right, though.

What you're saying there isn't a bad idea at its core. However, it's the end point of a larger and very necessary shift in Warframe's enemy design that Warframe don't seem to want to undergo. We need a L4D style breakdown of enemies into Commons, Specials and Minibosses if we want any of them to be meaningful.

[(NSW)Zurashii]

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

When you give people the choice of either dodging projectiles or simply passively facetanking them, the vast majority will choose to facetank.-

Then builds shouldn't let you take damage AND do damage at the same time, which was the point I was getting at. If you want to be a Tank then you should sacrifice offense for defense, and vice versa if you want to be the DPS. I am not proposing an entirely new game, just Warframe in a better meta than it is now. I genuinely don't think Warframe was meant to become the bullet sponge contest it is now, and DE should put their foot down and make some serious changes to the meta. Warframe really should put more importance to the corrupted mods that increases one stat while decreasing another.

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Doding hooks from 7 Ancients who stagger their attacks such that there's ALWAYS a hook coming my way? Less fine. What this results in is stun-locking me as I get dragged up and down and all around the room for 15 minutes until I die.-

Hooks never were good to begin with, so they should just get rid of them for other projectile patterns. There's like only 5 projectile types that enemies shoot at you which does all sorts of varyingly annoying effects, changing them into different patterns instead would be overall better. Changing the projectiles from how it affects you physically to how you should approach and evade these projectiles instead. Instead of Ancients shooting hooks, they shoot a diamond formation of projectiles that track slowly but you can roll through, as a random hypothetical example.

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

If you want skill-based enemies, you need a system which doesn't allow players to equip a "thing" and negate them entirely.-

What you're saying there isn't a bad idea at its core. However, it's the end point of a larger and very necessary shift in Warframe's enemy design that Warframe don't seem to want to undergo. We need a L4D style breakdown of enemies into Commons, Specials and Minibosses if we want any of them to be meaningful.

...so what are we really arguing about? It almost seems like we're generally agreeing all things considered. Warframe needs to change, and I simply gave them one way they could change, a lot of things just need to be reworked to accommodate that change, which I wasn't prepared to elaborate going into this forum lol.

[Teljaxx]

One of the main problems Warframe has had for a long time, is that every time DE gives us something cool to deal with, they then give us an even more effective way to ignore it. And most of the time, with enemies, they way to ignore them is simply bring better gear. Because it doesn't matter how fancy your enemies are when the players can either do so much damage that they never get the chance to do anything at all, or when they can have so much EHP that no enemy attack will ever come close to being a threat. And worst of all, in Warframe, it is extremely easy to do both at the same time. There are so many builds that can kill everything so fast they may as well not even exist, and even if they do manage to hit you, you barely even feel it.

Before any kind of meaningful enemy changes can be made, DE needs to balance us, the players. Specifically, the mod system, because it is at the core of almost every overpowered problem we have. As @(NSW)Zurashii said, there need to be more mods like corrupted mods, with positive and negative effects. That way, we would actually have to actually make choices to min/max our builds, instead of just meta/maxing everything all the time.

They also need to decrease the overall percentages we can increase our stats by. Both by decreasing the boost on each individual mod, and by making it so that we can't stack multiple mods that boost the same thing. Mods like Serration should really only give like +30% base damage, not +165%. And you should only be able to have one base damage boost, not all of them, plus all the other secondary bonuses the other mods come with. Also, multishot should probably just be removed. It has an absolutely absurd effect on base damage, crit chance, and status chance effectiveness, while having zero downsides. Its the very definition of overpowered. Which is why its currently mandatory on basically every build ever, and that is a bad thing.

All this would do two main things: One, it would create a "stat squish", where the minimum and maximum power any player can potentially have is much closer together. This would make balancing everything much more feasible than it is now, because you wouldn't have some people dealing 300 damage, and other dealing 300 million damage anymore. Two, it would actually make more than just pure power builds viable, and create far more freedom in how we use the mod system. It would no longer simply be a choice between following the meta, or dealing so little damage that everything takes forever to kill. There would actually be good reasons to bring more peripheral/support mods, instead of just anything that directly boosts DPS.

And, it would also let all the fancy abilities that DE gives the enemies actually mean something for once. Because most of the enemies in the game actually already have some pretty cool powers, but they just don't matter as things are currently (un)balanced.

Though, there should also be way less hitscanners. Hitscan enemies have their place, and that place is NOT as the basic grunt/horde enemy. Basic grunts should have easy to dodge projectiles, and specific big scary elites should have undodgeable hitscan weapons that you have to avoid some other way.

[Lutesque]

1 hour ago, Teljaxx said:

Also, multishot should probably just be removed. It has an absolutely absurd effect on base damage, crit chance, and status chance effectiveness, while having zero downsides. Its the very definition of overpowered. Which is why its currently mandatory on basically every build ever, and that is a bad thing

Considering we rarely achieve 100% Crit or Status chance on our Favourite weapons I disagree with the removal of Multishot... Unless you are willing to give us some way of bypassing the RNG ?

1 hour ago, Teljaxx said:

, and specific big scary elites should have undodgeable hitscan weapons that you have to avoid some other way.

How exactly would we Avoid Undodgeable Projectiles ? 🤔 By staying in the safety of our Orbiters ? 😳

[Tyreaus]

On 2021-05-05 at 11:04 AM, (NSW)Zurashii said:

Now this is simply a case for Quantity vs. Quality. Do you want more bullet sponges where the meta is to just nuke them before they can even attack, or do you want encounters that have less numbers but each enemy is an actual threat you can dispatch if you just react to their actions properly.

Why would we have to pick? It's entirely feasible to have organized groups of enemies that, individually, are as interesting as a sack of potatoes, but work in some combinatory way with greater dynamics and efficacy. That'd probably fit Warframe's mass-slaughter power-fantasy concept better, anyway.

That said, let's also be real: give enemies projectile weapons across the board and bring scaling down to reasonable levels and you'd probably end up on the precipice of a perfectly healthy, more engaging experience - even before things like enemy organization and special patterns are introduced. The fact that enemies die so quickly and, by the time enemies don't die so quickly, we do, is about 85-95% of the problem: the former case obliterates engagement before it can start and the latter strictly discourages it.

(Not to say organizing enemies into more discernible, purposeful patterns wouldn't still be a good idea, mind. If Warframe as a whole needs anything, it's better organization. RNG goes only so far and things being so messily thrown together is part of why many new enemy units are so forgettable. Can't remember what you've never noticed, after all...)

As far as "attack patterns" and other such fine complexities go, while I find them pretty, I don't find them particularly necessary, and probably not as effective for Warframe. It's a similar sort of difference between, say, the Touhou series and the Raiden series. Warframe is more like the Raiden side, being more quick and imprecise with movement, and that kind of loose and slippery motion doesn't tend to work well with precision "some bullets you can bullet jump right through" sort of deals. For how Warframe handles, you're probably better off thinking macroscopic, like jumping to ledges to use terrain as shielding.

Again, that's probably something that fits current Warframe and the way we know to play. We just, you know, need to fix it. Give a reason to play tactically, give enemies a chance, and not have enemies spawn anywhere and everywhere and nullify any positional advantage as soon as your feet touch the floor. That sort of stuff.

[_R_o_g_u_e_]

Bullet hell style combat could work wonderfully with the mechanics in warframe. It would also give the squishy frames an bit of a reprieve from one shot hitscan weapons in higher levels.

 

I just worry that, with enemies usually come from all around like they do, that it wouldn’t really change much.

It would take a godly level of awareness to be able to manoeuvre around all of it. But that’s still preferable to what we have now. 

[Teljaxx]

2 hours ago, Lutesque said:

Considering we rarely achieve 100% Crit or Status chance on our Favourite weapons I disagree with the removal of Multishot... Unless you are willing to give us some way of bypassing the RNG ?

We really shouldn't need to hit 100% on either of those. Those things should always have a random chance of happening, and 100% is not random.

And again, orange crits and red crits, with their ridiculously high multipliers, really shouldn't even be a thing. Just like multishot, they only make the gap between minimum and maximum power way bigger than it should be. And that makes it impossible for anything to ever get properly balanced. Which makes it impossible for DE to design decent enemies.

2 hours ago, Lutesque said:

How exactly would we Avoid Undodgeable Projectiles ? 🤔 By staying in the safety of our Orbiters ? 😳

Hide behind cover. Turn invisible. Put the enemy to sleep. Freeze them. Stun them. Confuse them so they shoot their allies instead of you. Maybe shoot their guns off. You know, things that would actually make you think about your approach to combat, and give you a reason to actually use all of your capabilities. Instead of just boosting your EHP to absurd levels and ignoring everything, like we can do now.

[Lutesque]

3 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

We really shouldn't need to hit 100% on either of those.

It's not about need... It's about want...

3 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Those things should always have a random chance of happening

Why though 🤔 ?

3 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

and 100% is not random.

Exactly.... That's the point.... I don't want it to be random....

3 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

And again, orange crits and red crits, with their ridiculously high multipliers, really shouldn't even be a thing.

This I agree with.... 

3 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Just like multishot, they only make the gap between minimum and maximum power way bigger than it should be.

Hence why I would be fine with losing all the other benefits of Multishot.... But asking me to give up the Consistency it offers is something that I just can't do....

3 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Hide behind cover. Turn invisible. Put the enemy to sleep. Freeze them. Stun them. Confuse them so they shoot their allies instead of you. Maybe shoot their guns off.

7 of those things aren't particular interesting for a game about Ninja's.... 

Where's the option to Parry Bullets ? 🤔

 

[Teridax68]

I would very much like attacks that we could actually dodge, that's for sure. It feels like Warframe was originally a game that expected us to use our mobility to dodge out of harm's way, but that's not really possible given the amount of hitscan weaponry and ultra-fast projectiles coming from enemies. As a result, gameplay's devolved into a battle of numbers, where we're expected to tank through attacks using a combination of damage reduction, massive health values, and shield gating. Being encouraged to actually use our movement for combat, and not just for rushing to the objective, could make for much more stimulating gameplay, and I think would be a much better fit for the game if enemies had their attack patterns made more interactive.

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

Then builds shouldn't let you take damage AND do damage at the same time, which was the point I was getting at. If you want to be a Tank then you should sacrifice offense for defense, and vice versa if you want to be the DPS. I am not proposing an entirely new game, just Warframe in a better meta than it is now. I genuinely don't think Warframe was meant to become the bullet sponge contest it is now, and DE should put their foot down and make some serious changes to the meta. Warframe really should put more importance to the corrupted mods that increases one stat while decreasing another.

Eh, I wouldn't want to go all the way back to the MMO Holy Trinity of Tank/Healer/Damage Dealer. I'm fine with a video game letting me do damage AND take damage at the same time. The problem right now is we have both in excess. We can deal so much damage as to spawn-wipe enemies before they even get a shot off, sometimes through walls. We can take so much damage that it quite literally doesn't matter what enemies are throwing at us. This results in a combat system where nothing really matters. Why dodge when they can't kill me? Why aim when my powers are NLOS PBAoE?

I agree with you completely. Warframe needs major systemic change to compress stats and actually make us give a damn about what's happening on the screen. You can still have a power fantasy while requiring the player to actually make it happen, rather than passively observing it happen from the sidelines. This game has all the systems needed to be a really cool action fighter, but none of it actually matters.

 

17 hours ago, (NSW)Zurashii said:

Hooks never were good to begin with, so they should just get rid of them for other projectile patterns. There's like only 5 projectile types that enemies shoot at you which does all sorts of varyingly annoying effects, changing them into different patterns instead would be overall better. Changing the projectiles from how it affects you physically to how you should approach and evade these projectiles instead. Instead of Ancients shooting hooks, they shoot a diamond formation of projectiles that track slowly but you can roll through, as a random hypothetical example.

Hooks were just an example of a system which COULD be good if it's handled with care. DE didn't handle them with care. They just threw hook enemies at us by the dozens and so undermined the whole thing. Special enemies with annoying mechanics is fine - even more so if you let players reverse those mechanics (like grabbing a hook and pulling the Ancient instead). But for that to happen, DE need to actually care about it and not just toss those mechanics into the game at random.

We do agree in principle, I think. The problem is Warframe as it stands right now would need major systemic change first before enemy design can even be relevant. We need to have reason to not get hit. We need to have the opportunity to not get hit. We need to have reason to know how our enemies work. We need to have opportunity to know how our enemies work. If we can get THAT done, that's like 90% of the way there :) After that, sure. We can talk about bosses with special attack patterns.

 

9 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

Why would we have to pick? It's entirely feasible to have organized groups of enemies that, individually, are as interesting as a sack of potatoes, but work in some combinatory way with greater dynamics and efficacy. That'd probably fit Warframe's mass-slaughter power-fantasy concept better, anyway.

This is what I've been saying for years, as well. It's fine to have hordes of dumb, single-minded enemies throwing DPS at us, because you can still have more complex and dangerous enemies mixed in with them, as well. In fact, having the background chaff of Commons constantly shooting at you means that Specials don't need to be as complex. Look at Payday 2. None of the Specials are all that "special." One has a hold, one has a OHKO, one has a shield, one has a lot of health and a massive headshot multiplier. That's not a lot of complexity. However, because you also have "run at the player and shoot" Commons and other Specials around at the same time, that makes things a lot more complicated.

Warframe could easily do the same. Pick one "shooting Common," one "melee Common" and populate the map with 95% just those. Then, occasionally spawn more complex enemies a few at a time and you already have a far more compelling system. For whatever reason, though, DE just... Resist structure in their game of any kind. No enemy has a "role," no enemy has a defined reason to exist, no enemy has an ability set that seems purpose-designed. Everything is ad-hoc, everything is chaos, and so everything feels the same. We need more structure.

 

6 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

We really shouldn't need to hit 100% on either of those. Those things should always have a random chance of happening, and 100% is not random.

I feel the exact opposite. In my opinion, we shouldn't have "random chance" in our own abilities at all. I've long wanted to get rid of random critical and status procs. All they do is affect DPS anyway, but in a roundabout way that's confusing to talk about and difficult to display. If you want critical damage, shoot critical points on the enemy. That's as complicated as it needs to be. We have a shooter with perfectly serviceable weapon mechanics, we don't need to "simulate" hitting weak points when we can let the player do it manually. The same goes for status. Scale the magnitude of a status effects with hits, don't bother with %chance. The more agency you move out of the back-end RNG system and into the player's hands, the better the game will "feel" to play in the long run.

Warframe is suffering from a crisis of identity. Is it an action game, or is it a tabletop game? It has all the action game mechanics, but none o them matter because success is determined almost entirely by your character sheet. And yet you can't just let the game play itself. You still have to be there nominally pushing buttons even though hardly any of it actually matters. It's the worst of both worlds. We really need to pick one as a focus, because you can't have both.

[(NSW)Zurashii]

12 hours ago, Lutesque said:

It's not about need... It's about want...

Exactly.... That's the point.... I don't want it to be random....

Hence why I would be fine with losing all the other benefits of Multishot.... But asking me to give up the Consistency it offers is something that I just can't do....

To get 100% critical hits you just gotta shoot their heads lol, as it should be

[Teljaxx]

15 hours ago, Lutesque said:

It's not about need... It's about want...

Because what you want isn't necessarily what the majority wants. Or what makes the game actually function.

I get it. I also enjoy being able to stack mods and bonuses all over the place to see just how crazy high we can get our damage output. But its also gone way too far, and is making it impossible for DE to actually balance the game, or design anything properly anymore. So being able to do this one fun little thing is making the entire rest of the game significantly less fun. Is that worth it?

15 hours ago, Lutesque said:

Where's the option to Parry Bullets ? 🤔

 

Sure, that would work too. I was just listing things that are already in the game that we could use to avoid "undodgeable" attacks, but never actually need to, because we can always just boost our EHP so much or kill everything so fast that doing anything else is pointless.

11 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I feel the exact opposite. In my opinion, we shouldn't have "random chance" in our own abilities at all. I've long wanted to get rid of random critical and status procs. All they do is affect DPS anyway, but in a roundabout way that's confusing to talk about and difficult to display. If you want critical damage, shoot critical points on the enemy. That's as complicated as it needs to be. We have a shooter with perfectly serviceable weapon mechanics, we don't need to "simulate" hitting weak points when we can let the player do it manually. The same goes for status. Scale the magnitude of a status effects with hits, don't bother with %chance. The more agency you move out of the back-end RNG system and into the player's hands, the better the game will "feel" to play in the long run.

Warframe is suffering from a crisis of identity. Is it an action game, or is it a tabletop game? It has all the action game mechanics, but none o them matter because success is determined almost entirely by your character sheet. And yet you can't just let the game play itself. You still have to be there nominally pushing buttons even though hardly any of it actually matters. It's the worst of both worlds. We really need to pick one as a focus, because you can't have both.

Games should definitely be consistent overall. One of the main things that will completely ruin a game for me is when things just work wildly differently each time you try.

But weapon damage is one of the few places where a bit of inconsistency can actually be a good thing, as long as its not too extreme. It keeps you from simply memorizing exactly how many shots it takes to kill everything. Because when that happens, every fight basically just devolves into counting trigger pulls per enemy, and that gets tedious pretty fast. Combat should always have at least some unpredictability to it. If we were fighting against other players, this would be unnecessary, since they are always unpredictable. But AIs are nothing but predictable, so we need something else to keep things interesting.

The original Doom is a perfect example of this. All damage is functionally randomized based on the exact game tick it occurs on. This means that it doesn't always take exactly the same amount of shots to kill the same enemy, and that keeps things interesting for much longer, even though you're just killing the same 9 enemy types with the same 7 weapons over and over. Not knowing whether that imp will die in one shotgun blast, or three, always keeps you on your toes. It keeps combat from getting as mindless as Warframe has gotten.

 

Plus, if you add a 100% crit chance to a weapon, you're basically just adding a massive multiplier to its damage. And again, that is a problem. We shouldn't need a massive multiplier on top of all our base damage mods and elemental mods. That kind of massive increase in our stats is one of the main things that has made any kind balancing, or engaging combat, impossible to implement.

The difference between the minimum potential stats, and maximum potential stats of a weapon or Warframe cannot be this far apart if we are ever going to have any kind of enemies that amount to anything more engaging than paper targets. Because how can you possibly design an enemy that is just as threatening to someone that can deal 300 DPS, as someone that can deal ten times as much damage?

Instead of letting us reach 100% crit chance, or greater, it would probably be a better idea to just remove crits all together. Just do it like Borderlands does, and make crits happen when you hit a weakpoint, like you suggested. But, that would also end up removing a decent chunk of our potential modding options, and probably isn't really necessary, as long as the overall crit chances and multipliers are toned down far enough.

Status procs are a different story. Again, they should be something that happens rarely, as an extra bonus. But they should be more of a support effect, and one of the primary means of boosting DPS, like they are now. As they work now, they are basically just secondary crits, and they just end up multiplying each other's effectiveness to even more ridiculous levels when they happen together. They really should be their own system again, more like they were in the really early days of the game. They were a nice bonus when they happened, instead of being one of the only two reliable methods of dealing high damage.

But, that would probably require another overhaul of the individual status effects, and not just some number tweaking to make it work.

[Steel_Rook]

15 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

But weapon damage is one of the few places where a bit of inconsistency can actually be a good thing, as long as its not too extreme. It keeps you from simply memorizing exactly how many shots it takes to kill everything. Because when that happens, every fight basically just devolves into counting trigger pulls per enemy, and that gets tedious pretty fast. Combat should always have at least some unpredictability to it. If we were fighting against other players, this would be unnecessary, since they are always unpredictable. But AIs are nothing but predictable, so we need something else to keep things interesting.

I don't agree. "Counting our shots" is a skill that players should be allowed to have. Not even saying "rewarded" here, just allowed to benefit from. For weapons with continuous fire, let players get a feel of roughly how long an enemy takes to take down, as well. The more consistent our tools are, the better we can become at using them and the more we can notice small build changes. There are plenty of sources of randomness outside the player's own kit, such as terrain and enemy behaviour and enemy composition, etc. By all means, throw procedural generation and randomness into combat, but let my own tools - the ones I have manual control over - be reliable. To me, this is no different from my jump key working 80% of the time. Sometimes I press it and nothing happens. Yes, it's unexpected but not all unexpected things improve the experience.

Even better - the more you let players develop a "feel" for how many shots it takes to kill an enemy, the less players have to stare at the UI. This is an action game. Ideally we should be looking at the world - the enemies and the terrain. In practice, we spend the majority of our time staring at health bars, ability icons, energy bars and ammo counters. Not that having those is BAD or anything, but if people can commit some of that information to muscle memory then all the better.

 

15 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Plus, if you add a 100% crit chance to a weapon, you're basically just adding a massive multiplier to its damage. And again, that is a problem. We shouldn't need a massive multiplier on top of all our base damage mods and elemental mods. That kind of massive increase in our stats is one of the main things that has made any kind balancing, or engaging combat, impossible to implement.

That's all Critical Hit does anyway. In almost no instance in Warframe are individual critical shots make-or-break. Almost universally, what Critical Hits do is add DPS. That's it. 30% critical chance at *2 critical damage amounts to 0.3*2 = *0.6 extra damage overall. 75% critical chance at *8 critical damage amounts to 0.75*8 = *6 extra damage. That's it. Off-hand, I can't think of a single situation in Warframe where getting a random critical hit is even perceptible to the player. That's the problem with random criticals - you barely know when they happen. At best you can track the colour of the damage numbers which pop up from enemies - and you have NO idea how much I'd like to disable damage pop-ups entirely. They're ugly and distracting, but I NEED the damage numbers to tell if I'm dealing damage or if I'm hitting invulnerable parts on an enemy.

Now contrast this against headshots and weakpoint hits. With a decent enough system for hit feedback (Division 2 has a special "ping" sound on hitting weakpoints and a yellow hit indication marker, for example), players not only know when they're landing critical hits - they're actively choosing to do so. It's simple enough to say "just shoot it in the head," but actually pulling that off at range against fast-moving enemies isn't always easy. A lot less so than shrugging and hoping RNG rolls in your favour, anyway. At that point, it's just bonus DPS by another name. The exact same thing as multishot. Regardless of how it's modelled in the back-end, all it does is increase damage, and potentially status chance depending on how you're calculating it.

 

15 hours ago, Teljaxx said:

Status procs are a different story. Again, they should be something that happens rarely, as an extra bonus. But they should be more of a support effect, and one of the primary means of boosting DPS, like they are now.

Why, though? If a player's weapon freezes enemies, why not let the player actually rely on this? If the weapon sets enemies on fire, why not let it set them on fire? Why does it have to be rare or unpredictable. There are plenty of ways to scale Status per shot even if it happens on every shot. Granted, that's a more complex issue to address since it would require another redesign of Status, but it's not like the system couldn't use one of those. I understand the desire of "Oh! I rolled 20! Awesome!" in tabletop games where the player has very little real-time agency. In a shooter, however, that's not necessary. "Rolling a 20" is having good aim and placing your shots correctly. "Rolling a 20" is detonating the grenade pack on a firebomber enemy, setting three of his buddies on fire and setting off a flamable barrel next to them. We can DO rare things without the game setting them up for us.

And yes, that would reduce modding to an extent. Good. Warframe's current modding system is so cookie-cutter as to barely even matter any more. 6 out of 8 mods on all my guns are the same, and the other 2 are typically chosen from a pool of, like 6 other mods. If it's a critgun, you build for crit and elemental damage. That's 4 slots at least + damage and multishot. If it's a status gun, you build for 60/60 Elemental Status. That's 4 slots + damage and multishot. I'm not going to shed crocodile tears if some of those went away. RPG mechanics are fine and good if they offer actual choice in personalisation. When the RPG system is just a veneer over a stale meta, it ceases to have a function of its own. I'd rather make fewer but more meaningful choices - choices which affect how I play, not just what numbers I feed to the back-end computation engine while I sit on the sidelines watching the game play itself for me.

Pretty much everything you'll see me post on the forums has to do with giving players more agency and more things to do - moving decisions away from the Arsenal and into the mission. If Warframe were a standard-issue Tab-target MMO I wouldn't care, but there's a legitimately good action game buried underneath here.