Giving enemies DR is design cowardice.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2021-05-07 at 5:31 PM, keikogi said:

The worse part is , almost none of that has any visual clarity. It's no wonder people can't be bothered anymore and just keep whatever build they had before and slaps more raw damage buffs on top.

Yup. Lack of any sort of player feedback is the kiss of death on the whole thing. How can I "git gud" if I have no idea what's actually going on in front of me? When I can't tell if I'm succeeding because I'm doing something right or through sheer dumb luck (or some other factor), then I can't DO anything to improve or adapt. If I can't actually engage with the game, then what choice do I have? Because the only one I see is "stack stats, render game irrelevant." Warframe's current state of balance makes us all worse players the longer we play, because we just stop even trying to play by the game's apparent rules. And it just keeps getting worse with all the hidden modifiers and multipliers.

 

On 2021-05-07 at 5:31 PM, keikogi said:

Nox is a good example off use of DR mechanics because it's well communicated visually and you can play around it. Even the infamous moa with DR on cc could be interesting if it had a shield drone deployed when it suffers cc giving a immense personal shield.

Yup. I guess the Nox will be DE's high watermark forever, even though it's such a dirt simple design (ostensibly an XCOM 2 Andromedon). Shoot body, do little damage. Shoot head, get a nice "cracking glass" sound effect. Break glass, get a nice meaty "headshot" sound effect, do lots of damage. Best of all, the Nox is an enemy who can be REALLY tough if fought incorrectly but also really soft if you shoot him in the head. He also has his own unique model with a distinct silhouette, a complete and unique sound package and - best of all - only shows up as one guy every once in a while, rather than having four of him around at all times. Yet time and again, DE seem incapable of replicating that success. Did the person who designed the Nox get fired afterwards and took the secret with them? What gives?

 

On 2021-05-07 at 5:31 PM, keikogi said:

Railjack damage system gave me a bit off a no confidence vote. It did a few things right ( in my opinion ) and a lot of wrong. The tear status was condition overload eletric Boogaloo and single target cc effects are effectively useless because any enemy worthy off single target cc will be imune to it. It also failed to adress the long running issues with armor and status resistence. The system had a few positives with less damage types and no elemental mixing. 

Oh, I agree. What WAS Railjack supposed to test in the first place? DE said it was an experimental redeisgn of Damage 2.0, but all it did was shift status effects around a little bit. As far as ambition goes, that's barely "getting out of bed" relative to what we actually need. Railjack Revised did more than that, and IT barely changed everything. Yet even so, it doesn't seem like anything will come of Railjack's damage types in terms of the rest of the game. What a pity.

 

21 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

Correction, The Railjack damage types still exist on the game. Railjack Retrofit only changed their name and icons.

So they still have their status effects? That's really all that was different about them, as I recall. I thought they'd moved them back to standard status effects. Even so, though - that's really very little in terms of test-driving a new damage system. It feels like surface-level changes at best, and even that doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

[keikogi]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

. Lack of any sort of player feedback is the kiss of death on the whole thing. How can I "git gud" if I have no idea what's actually going on in front of me? When I can't tell if I'm succeeding because I'm doing something right or through sheer dumb luck (or some other factor), then I can't DO anything to improve or adapt. If I can't actually engage with the game, then what choice do I have? Because the only one I see is "stack stats, render game irrelevant." Warframe's current state of balance makes us all worse players the longer we play, because we just stop even trying to play by the game's apparent rules. And it just keeps getting worse with all the hidden modifiers and multipliers.

The lack off proper feedback is the main reason a lot odf mechanics fail in warframe.  Out of sight out off mind.

There is another kiss of death to the whole git gud system. We've been pretty much conditioned to look for look holes instead off getting gud because there a long history off new units not really having any form off counterplay. Nulifiers when they came out where pretty much imune to anything but a high rof weapon , even daring to enter the bubble was punished with the might off a full auto Lanka. Necramechs are another example,  an Enemy that only has weak points on the back but has no fixed turning rate nor any meaningful ending lag on any off its moves. Bursas where supposed to be flanked but they could Tokyo drift their way thought the map even while bunkering down. Manics had invunerability , self healing  and damage gates meaning that it would only go down if it felt like it.  No wonder wonder people try to look for how to cheese a unit and not bothering to Lear how to fight it.

Edit: That goes as far as I've never seen someone posting a "play" they made. It also goes for strategy guides ,there are only build guides because there very little you can do in mission donadap to an enemy. The guides that do exist are for encounters that happen outside off the game damage system ( nihill , orb mother and so on ). To be fair the conclave community did post what they could do with the Parkour system.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

up. I guess the Nox will be DE's high watermark forever, even though it's such a dirt simple design (ostensibly an XCOM 2 Andromedon). Shoot body, do little damage. Shoot head, get a nice "cracking glass" sound effect. Break glass, get a nice meaty "headshot" sound effect, do lots of damage. Best of all, the Nox is an enemy who can be REALLY tough if fought incorrectly but also really soft if you shoot him in the head. He also has his own unique model with a distinct silhouette, a complete and unique sound package and - best of all - only shows up as one guy every once in a while, rather than having four of him around at all times. Yet time and again, DE seem incapable of replicating that success. Did the person who designed the Nox get fired afterwards and took the secret with them? What gives?

 

I actually thing manics are quite good but missed the mark on a few crucial point. Coming out with self healing made them a bulshiet unit that made it from a hight brush assassin into a juggernaut with invunerability phases. But the core off the unit is quite good, hight mobility assassination with a deadly backstabbing move. But the lack of ending lag on its basic attack and the back stab should do non scaling %hp finisher damage ( so it's dangerous regardless of build ) made it a badly designed enemy and DE ultimately effectively removed it from tbe game troughs low spam rate.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

, I agree. What WAS Railjack supposed to test in the first place? DE said it was an experimental redeisgn of Damage 2.0, but all it did was shift status effects around a little bit. As far as ambition goes, that's barely "getting out of bed" relative to what we actually need. Railjack Revised did more than that, and IT barely changed everything. Yet even so, it doesn't seem like anything will come of Railjack's damage types in terms of the rest of the game. What a pity.

I frankly did not understood the half measure. Railjack was perfect to text a damage overall. Few units , few enemies , few mods and few buffs. It was rhe perfect opportunity to try out an overall for the damage system as a whole.

[Steel_Rook]

16 hours ago, keikogi said:

There is another kiss of death to the whole git gud system. We've been pretty much conditioned to look for look holes instead off getting gud because there a long history off new units not really having any form off counterplay. Nulifiers when they came out where pretty much imune to anything but a high rof weapon , even daring to enter the bubble was punished with the might off a full auto Lanka. Necramechs are another example,  an Enemy that only has weak points on the back but has no fixed turning rate nor any meaningful ending lag on any off its moves. Bursas where supposed to be flanked but they could Tokyo drift their way thought the map even while bunkering down. Manics had invunerability , self healing  and damage gates meaning that it would only go down if it felt like it.  No wonder wonder people try to look for how to cheese a unit and not bothering to Lear how to fight it.

Tell me about it. Every time someone points out an issue with the game, someone else comes up with "Just use X! It's easy!" And they're usually right. Warframe doesn't encourage us to engage with its underlying system. It encourages us to find loopholes. It then seems to assume we'll find loopholes so it doesn't even bother giving us anything that compelling to engage with in the first place. "Defence mission too hard? Just use Limbo. Oh, you're just going to use Limbo on Defence? OK, then no point in trying to make it actually engaging to play since you're just going to cheese it anyway." And that works... Right up until DE realise that the workaround renders an major marquee event entirely inert, then they apply a bandaid fix. "Oh, you're using Limbo to turn Scarlet Spear into shooting harmless stationary targets? Crap! Uh... Sentients are immune to stasis now!" DE... That doesn't fix anything...

We've entered a vicious circle, though. DE give us S#&$ design that's unpleasant to engage with, we look for workarounds. We become conditioned to look for workarounds, so they start designing them into their own encounters - or at least not bothering to close them. So now we have a game which HAS no core gameplay loop, and instead constitutes a large collection of edge case scenarios, each solved by a different specific build. We don't bother to engage with the game, the game doesn't bother to engage with us, so we're left as passive observers of events as they transpire.

And on the rare occasions that DE do try to implement some kind of more complex encounter that they want us to engage with, they end up having to basically disable the entire game and invent brand new rules just for that. You can't use your guns on Nihil. You can only use the stupid throwing canisters mechanic. You can't use your guns on the Exploiter Orb. You have to use the stupid throwing cannisters mechanic. You can use your guns on the Profit-Taker, you have to screw around with a rotating damage type restriction and then use the brand new Arch Guns we introduced. You can't use your guns on Eidolons until you play with the new Operator redesign. Pretty much every time they try to be fancy, they start from the standpoint of "you can't use your guns."

 

16 hours ago, keikogi said:

I frankly did not understood the half measure. Railjack was perfect to text a damage overall. Few units , few enemies , few mods and few buffs. It was rhe perfect opportunity to try out an overall for the damage system as a whole.

Same here. You had a brand new system where you could have done literally everything... And instead you went with renamed damage types with slightly altered status effects. Then again, DE released Railjack under... Just such BAD circumstances that they may simply not have had time to DO anything about it. The damage system was probably the last thing on their minds given that Railjack was about 2 years away from being ready to launch. It released with such a horrifying array of crippling technical issues that I couldn't even play it until about 5 hotfixes in, and even then it took until quite literally Railjack Revised - its second major redesign - for the system to resemble anything actually playable. I can understand the studio just not having the time to even think about a brand new damage system on top of everything else. Fair enough, but now what? What DO you do with Damage 2.0, when it's pretty clear that's not working out very well?

My opinion on Warframe keeps swinging wildly. The game as it stands right now is NOT GOOD. Fundamentally fun gameplay is consistently undermined by poor progression systems and builds more focused on workarounds than actual play. Every so often I see what looks like a glimpse of a brighter future, but DE never seem to have the guts to actually commit to any of it. Railjack was their biggest endeavour, and I sincerely hope they stick with it, but that's NEW content. Old content needs plenty of love, too.

[taiiat]

21 hours ago, (XBOX)YoungGunn82 said:

Delete hitscan please. I despise hitscan in all forms. For all. Intents and purposes it’s technically cheating. 

i'd love for everything Player or Enemy, to be Projectiles in all games!
it's just more interesting to work with IMO. and then you get another layer of balancing depth from that with some Weapons being able to have dramatically faster or slower Projectiles than the usual!

[bnuy]

Damage resistance stacking on enemies is an issue, however the core elemental resistance system is a good design direction and should be more heavily played into. Remove armour scaling, make it a life pool similar to health and shields. Adjust the elemental resistances to effectively replace armour reduction, since this system plays into elemental weaknesses it greatly encourages build diversity.

Left is with my suggested changes, right is current Ferrite armour. If DE were to remove armour as a damage reduction stacked on-top of other existing reductions and reverted it all to the elemental resistance/modifier system the game would have a wonderful amount of build diversity, and armour scaling would no longer be a massive balance issue.

[keikogi]

53 minutes ago, scam said:

Damage resistance stacking on enemies is an issue, however the core elemental resistance system is a good design direction and should be more heavily played into. Remove armour scaling, make it a life pool similar to health and shields. Adjust the elemental resistances to effectively replace armour reduction, since this system plays into elemental weaknesses it greatly encourages build diversity.

I think you are complexly missing the point of the post because off usual naming convention. People use DR to refer to blanket damage reduction and elemental resistances as another thing. I´m not talking about damage resitences I´m talking about enemies with innate blanket damage resistance like the Aurax Atloc Raknoid | WARFRAME Wiki | Fandom , it has 80% DR against everything so why not just raise its HP and shields.

edit: I'm also taking about enemies that have elemental DR but not listar on the damage table. Like deimos infested vital proc immunity and railjack corpus scaling DR ( DR that scales with your weapon dps ) 

About elemental resistances , there are too many damage types and resistance types for anyone to care , including the developers. 

lancer and elite lancer have literally the same model but have different armor types. the only difference between them is one uses a grakata and the other uses the hind but could you notice that on a crowd. 

Same goes for shield a bet you can tell witch units have proto shields or units that have shields. 

There are not consistent desing rules or visual rules to say who has what type off armor, health and shields  so the system is overconvoluted. The final hit to it is the weapon switch speed being to slow making swaping weapon per enemy a waste off dps. 

[bnuy]

8 minutes ago, keikogi said:

snip

Okay, I absolutely agree about the extra convoluted damage reductions. Things like the 50% reduction Amalgam Cinder Machinists have to their shields, Eidolons, the damage reduction that scales with on paper DPS that demolysts/demolishers from Disruption have. All of these stupid gimmicks need to be entirely removed, armour scaling taken out, and then the enemies will be much more balanced than the current state.

As for the enemy health/armour types and all, they could implement the following image and everything would be easy to discern at a quick glance. I have a massive rebalance post that you can find here. (there is no distinction for health types as each faction only has their one unique flesh type, then inorganic flesh which can apply to any faction)

With this I suggest armour be made a life pool similar to health and shields, so now they are all very distinctly recognizable when you look at an enemy unit. Armour applying just as an effective over-write to health resistances to me is poor design, which is one of the many reasons I say it should be made a separate pool. Having them all be easily discernable at a quick look would be very good for the health of the game, especially if the elemental modifiers become more prevalent, because now you have a greater desire to know exactly what types of health/armour/shields you're up against since you can't use a blanket damage type that is most effective against all of them. (slash for all armour types and toxin for all shield types)

[keikogi]

11 minutes ago, scam said:

As for the enemy health/armour types and all, they could implement the following image and everything would be easy to discern at a quick glance. I have a massive rebalance post that you can find here. (there is no distinction for health types as each faction only has their one unique flesh type, then inorganic flesh which can apply to any faction)

I think the colour codding works well enought but I would prefer a in universe desing consistency to back the system up. There is no dought if a unit has flessh , cloned flesh or infested flesh by unit desing alone ( does it look normal ? flesh. Is it a face only a mom would love or is it using grineer armor ? cloned flesh. Does it look like noodles , tumors or an insect  ? infested. Unfortunally the same cannot be said about armor, we could at least have shyny armor alloy and glossy armor ferrite , for shield it could be shields are invisible proto shields show up as an aura. Given the state the game is in right now colour codding is as good as it going to get without massive redesings. 

As far as your solution is concerned , going to have close look at it tomorrow but I can see you placed a lot off effort into it. 

 

[Teridax68]

On 2021-05-08 at 5:12 PM, (XBOX)YoungGunn82 said:

Delete hitscan please. I despise hitscan in all forms. For all. Intents and purposes it’s technically cheating. 

 

On 2021-05-09 at 2:47 PM, taiiat said:

i'd love for everything Player or Enemy, to be Projectiles in all games!
it's just more interesting to work with IMO. and then you get another layer of balancing depth from that with some Weapons being able to have dramatically faster or slower Projectiles than the usual!

I support this as well. For a game that expects us to use our mobility to evade enemy hits, it's pretty silly for Warframe to feature so much hitscan weaponry, especially on enemies. Meanwhile, games like Doom: Eternal, Hades, and Returnal don't even need half the complexity to their movement systems to let players dodge, because enemy attacks there are telegraphed and able to be evaded, not just soaked up. Even Devil May Cry, from which the devs pilfered the juggling system, has this, so I see no reason not to update enemies to attack us in ways we can truly dodge.

[keikogi]

 

On 2021-05-09 at 10:47 AM, taiiat said:

i'd love for everything Player or Enemy, to be Projectiles in all games!
it's just more interesting to work with IMO. and then you get another layer of balancing depth from that with some Weapons being able to have dramatically faster or slower Projectiles than the usual!

On 2021-05-08 at 1:12 PM, (XBOX)YoungGunn82 said:

Delete hitscan please. I despise hitscan in all forms. For all. Intents and purposes it’s technically cheating. 

46 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I support this as well. For a game that expects us to use our mobility to evade enemy hits, it's pretty silly for Warframe to feature so much hitscan weaponry, especially on enemies. Meanwhile, games like Doom: Eternal, Hades, and Returnal don't even need half the complexity to their movement systems to let players dodge, because enemy attacks there are telegraphed and able to be evaded, not just soaked up. Even Devil May Cry, from which the devs pilfered the juggling system, has this, so I see no reason not to update enemies to attack us in ways we can truly dodge.

I would not go as far as too all ( balistas are fine , in fact they should deal more damage). And yep, hit scam enemy weapons kind of off remove allot the skill expression of the game. Also, there are problem with lack of different categories off projectiles like parrying missiles back to the sender. But as it is right now the game has a terrible balance between difficult to dodge/ block and damage, it´s frankly laughable the damage the aerolist genki dama attack dealing incredible low damage despite massive wind up and our ability to shoot it down, same goes for balistas. 

 

[taiiat]

1 hour ago, keikogi said:

I would not go as far as too all

if you wanted something fast, you just make it literally fast. works well if you ask me.
Projectiles put on a better show too, so everything just looks cooler by default.

[Bakaguya-sama]

Asking for all warframe ranged enemies to be converted from hitscan into projectiles is a waste of time. If the 30-50 grineers on the maps start pumping actual projectiles with their automatic weapon, it will destroy the host's computer. That's hundreds of extra entities to account for every frame. It will lag beyond belief. I doubt that Warframe's netcode is prepared to handle that volume of projectiles. You will start getting hit by projectiles that aren't there, defeating the point.   

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Doom: Eternal, Hades, and Returnal

These are single player game with significantly less enemy volume. Doing it to a Co-op, client side horde shooter is a whole another can of worm.  

Hitscan is simply an optimization. What DE does with it is very smart. They simply reduce enemy accuracy the more the player move around. Forcing them to aim badly with their hitscan weapon. This way they can approximate the behavior of evadable projectile weapons, without needing to make them projectiles. Optimization like these allow Warframe to be run ok even on lower specs systems.  I would do the same if I was DE.

The problem is, on many new enemies it seems that DE have forgotten about this mechanic and let enemy have 100% accuracy rate on their hitscan weapon, regardless of player's movement (like the corpus gattling gun crewmen). Which result in some enemy's damage output being far more than what we are used to.  

Projectiles vs Hitscan ... only really matter if it's a PvP game. Changing to projectiles will not make a significant impact on gameplay. 

[Teridax68]

2 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

Asking for all warframe ranged enemies to be converted from hitscan into projectiles is a waste of time. If the 30-50 grineers on the maps start pumping actual projectiles with their automatic weapon, it will destroy the host's computer.

You mean, unlike the 30-50 Corpus on the map who do in fact pump "actual projectiles" without so much as slowing the game down?

The problem with the "optimization" argument that gets trotted about whenever hitscan gets discussed is that it's bogus: on one hand, the game has no problem rendering projectiles from a faction whose weapons are almost entirely either beam- or projectile-based, and on the other, DE clearly hasn't made a meaningful effort to optimize the game's technical load when multishot still exists as a stat, and is used on pretty much every gun. As both the games I cited and your own explanation of hitscan's pitfalls show, there is a meaningful gameplay difference between projectiles and hitscan: projectiles can have their speed, size, etc. tweaked to fit our gameplay, whereas hitscan by nature is a simple yes/no check. Whereas the former can let us dodge projectiles, the latter can only at best give us the illusion of dodging via a random miss chance, a particularly unhelpful mechanic when enemies scale up to essentially perfect accuracy and any individual shot can deal significant amounts of damage.