Regarding the Grendel missions

[PublikDomain]

19 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

I'm not sure this is the players' fault. In retrospect, the way the game is designed doesn't leave room for much else. It's entirely centered around "do X thing for Y reward" and the Y side of that is bloated like crazy. Then tie the MR system into this and it's the perfect storm to get people to want to be more efficient and speed run everything, otherwise they'll never reach their goals in a reasonable timeframe. I admit I played like this across two accounts until I reached MR 20 on both, where I finally felt I could relax a bit and just enjoy the game for the gameplay,

I agree, it's a behaviour that's been learned. Or I guess taught. Warframe's focus on "do X thing for Y reward" focuses the player on the reward, and once a player runs out of rewards... now what? If The New War is just a story quest that takes a few hours to complete... now what? What do you do in Warframe once you've gotten over collecting all the junk and done all the short quests? Especially when collecting everything means having access to a massive amount of power, to the point where nothing in the game can stop you or pose a threat without - essentially - cheating through opaque scaling mechanics? It's really hard to come up with a compelling "now what" when the developers' hands are buried in concrete.

19 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

but even with that, balance (or lack of it) has very little to do with that enjoyment. The game sells itself on the power fantasy in combination with fun/gimmicky mechanics. How could balance ever be a consideration? How could they possibly challenge us in a way that they aren't cheesing us or that we wouldn't cheese the content?

How can you have fun or gimmicky mechanics when other mechanics trivialize everything? You can make the most enjoyable mechanic for a weapon ever, but if another weapon can do it faster then what's the point? That's the reason balance is important. Because of the game's F2P nature and inherent need to monetize the player's time, most players would rather take the shortest route. DE will never be able to challenge the player without cheesing us or having us cheese them unless they balance the game.

And in regards to the "power fantasy" thing, Superman wouldn't be an interesting superhero if he only beat up defenseless bank robbers all day. Batman is only as interesting as the Joker or his cast of villains. You need some foil to prop the "power fantasy" up, otherwise you might as well be running through Skyrim with TCAI and TGM killing braindead mannequins. Are you powerful, being able to oneshot enemies who can't fight back? Yes. Is this interesting or engaging? For many, not in the slightest. Edit: Which is again why balance is important. You might like Warframe the way it is, but many don't and would like something more. And because the game is so poorly balanced anything other than casual content isn't really possible, because where do you balance it to? What is "hard" when players are so inconsistently powerful? If there were more focus on game balance, then there could be many flavors for many different preferences. There could be casual content and there could be hardcore content.

[Redfeather75]

I am currently doing them to get grendel blueprints. Ho boy it is hard finding groups for this. Really hard.

[FrostDragoon]

3 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

And in regards to the "power fantasy" thing, Superman wouldn't be an interesting superhero if he only beat up defenseless bank robbers all day. Batman is only as interesting as the Joker or his cast of villains. You need some foil to prop the "power fantasy" up, otherwise you might as well be running through Skyrim with TCAI and TGM killing braindead mannequins. Are you powerful, being able to oneshot enemies who can't fight back? Yes. Is this interesting or engaging? For many, not in the slightest. Edit: Which is again why balance is important. You might like Warframe the way it is, but many don't and would like something more. And because the game is so poorly balanced anything other than casual content isn't really possible, because where do you balance it to? What is "hard" when players are so inconsistently powerful? If there were more focus on game balance, then there could be many flavors for many different preferences. There could be casual content and there could be hardcore content.

No, there can't. That's my entire point. The game simply can't achieve any kind of balance because of the presence of so many mechanics that trivialize it. If you need challenge to have fun, this isn't the game for you. That's the bottom line. You'll never find it here. The option is to enjoy what it does have to offer--whether it trivialized the difficulty or not--or move on. I often find that the people who claim the game is boring are themselves taking really boring attitudes toward it. I find lots of ways to have fun with the game. The enemies aren't there to take all 6 of your revives and force you to fail. They are there so you have something to use all these OP weapons and abilities on. You should think of it like an elaborate sandbox, not something that would ever be Souls-like.

[FrostDragoon]

1 hour ago, Redfeather75 said:

I am currently doing them to get grendel blueprints. Ho boy it is hard finding groups for this. Really hard.

You should join the official Discord and try recruiting in the appropriate channel as well as the in-game Recruiting channel. It probably still won't be easy, but usually there's at least 1 or 2 people who are willing to go on anything.

[PublikDomain]

Just now, FrostDragoon said:

The game simply can't achieve any kind of balance because of the presence of so many mechanics that trivialize it.

I mean, yeah. That's what the balance people are saying. We can't have balance because of the mechanics that trivialize the game, so dealing with the mechanics is the first step. And once that's done there can be content that's hard and content that's easy and DE can design encounters that don't throw away all of the game's mechanics because they have to.

4 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

The option is to enjoy what it does have to offer--whether it trivialized the difficulty or not--or move on.

Or, we can talk about the game's problems.

[(PSN)Wolf_Folivora]

The Grendel missions were not much of a chalange, they were more a test of player synergi. Every time our teams went to do the missions we pretty much focused on buffing each other and synergising our abilities. Mag and Hyldrin would strip enemy armor and shields, while each providing the entire team with owershields, mag would use her 2nd to buff everyones projectile dmg, than we wold bring a good cc frame like vauban to make it extra easy, and a Wisp or Nidus for health.
So at the end it was only about knowing how to use the frame abilities. At leased thats how I have always made the Grendel missions easy for myself and the team.

[nslay]

I used Cerata... it can be thrown, the manual detonation has a large AOE and hits extremely hard with a guaranteed Toxin proc... and it bypasses all the shields of Corpus enemies (and bleeds them to death with the strong Toxin proc). This thing even melts Bursas if you encounter any.

Seriously, this weapon makes Grendel missions so trivial, it's not even funny. Use any frame you want (because you won't even need abilities)... you can kill any Corpus squad before they can kill you with Cerata (you throw it and then explode it and then 5-10 Corpus die instantly).

Even after the nerf, Glaives are still very powerful. I did 4 rounds of Steel Path Index with Cerata and didn't even notice a difference. This is the weapon to use for Grendel missions IMO.

EDIT: Oh, I should mention... Cerata trivializes these missions even when playing solo. I did 2 sets of these missions solo (one for Helminth) all in one sitting because of how surprisingly easy the missions turned out to be with this weapon.

[FrostDragoon]

2 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

I mean, yeah. That's what the balance people are saying. We can't have balance because of the mechanics that trivialize the game, so dealing with the mechanics is the first step. And once that's done there can be content that's hard and content that's easy and DE can design encounters that don't throw away all of the game's mechanics because they have to.

Or, we can talk about the game's problems.

If you get rid of those mechanics, you are making Warframe into a completely different game--one that will drive away the player base. "Balance" isn't as important as fun and many games have paid a very steep price for that foolishness.

[PublikDomain]

10 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

"Balance" isn't as important as fun and many games have paid a very steep price for that foolishness.

Nah. Without balance there can only be one type of "fun", and depending on the person it might not be fun at all. I don't find endlessly grinding tissue-paper enemies to be particularly engaging or interesting. Like just today I did a SP Survival to get some of the new Arcanes, and the team wanted to go for an hour. But after a host migrate and 30 minutes of one-shotting everything and being totally unscarred - playing Yareli - I got bored and left. What was going to change for the next half hour? Or the next? Nothing interesting, that's for sure.

10 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

If you get rid of those mechanics, you are making Warframe into a completely different game--one that will drive away the player base.

There's a post of mine on the Banshee thread with plenty of examples showing that this just isn't the case. I'm sure you'll see it (though it seems like you might not read it or try it out 🤷‍♀️), but I'll try and remember to link it here for everyone else.

Balancing the game doesn't take anything away, it does the opposite. It lets all the games buried mechanics come out from under the mindless AoE spam that defines the game these days, and would make it easier to make new mechanics that build on the gameplay instead of throwing them away.

You know, like Sisters, which "get rid of those mechanics" through opaque damage resistance mechanics. Like, my guy, DE is already doing things to get rid of the damage mechanics breaking the game so they can keep making new content! Steel Path, Liches and Sisters, Orbs, the Wolf, Nihil, the New War which spends at least the first 30 minutes throwing your Warframe and all your power away so it can actually tell the story. There's a reason DE keeps having to do this kind of thing, and it's only going to continue unless something changes.

[FrostDragoon]

9 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

Nah. Without balance there can only be one type of "fun", and depending on the person it might not be fun at all. I don't find endlessly grinding tissue-paper enemies to be particularly engaging or interesting. Like just today I did a SP Survival to get some of the new Arcanes, and the team wanted to go for an hour. But after a host migrate and 30 minutes of one-shotting everything and being totally unscarred - playing Yareli - I got bored and left. What was going to change for the next half hour? Or the next? Nothing interesting, that's for sure.

There's a post of mine on the Banshee thread with plenty of examples showing that this just isn't the case. I'm sure you'll see it, but I'll try and remember to link it here for everyone else.

Balancing the game doesn't take anything away, it does the opposite. It lets all the games buried mechanics come out from under the mindless AoE spam that defines the game these days, and would make it easier to make new mechanics that build on the gameplay instead of throwing them away.

You know, like Sisters, which "get rid of those mechanics" through opaque damage resistance mechanics. Like, my guy, DE is already doing things to get rid of the damage mechanics breaking the game so they can keep making new content! Steel Path, Liches and Sisters, Orbs, the Wolf, Nihil, the New War which spends at least the first 30 minutes throwing your Warframe and all your power away so it can actually tell the story. There's a reason DE keeps having to do this kind of thing, and it's only going to continue unless something changes.

I responded to all that nonsense already. People here don't need to go see it. Here's the tl:dr;

You think a stat crunch will somehow balance a game that clearly isn't about that at all, to align with your undefined version of "balance," for the "health" of the game--by using methods that are sure to drive away all the players--and you have yet to make a valid case for why DE should do any of these things other than you don't find it challenging enough. Of course this is all foolish, but you still push it while sticking your fingers in your ears to the counter points and refusing to define your terms, making it impossible for anyone to support your propositions.

[PublikDomain]

3 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

I responded to all that nonsense already. People here don't need to go see it. Here's the tl:dr;

You think a stat crunch will somehow balance a game that clearly isn't about that at all, to align with your undefined version of "balance," for the "health" of the game--by using methods that are sure to drive away all the players--and you have yet to make a valid case for why DE should do any of these things other than you don't find it challenging enough. Of course this is all foolish, but you still push it while sticking your fingers in your ears to the counter points and refusing to define your terms, making it impossible for anyone to support your propositions.

No need to be so rude. I've explained my case many times, and this seems to have been your only response. As you say "sticking your fingers in your ears". You can try the changes I talk about today ingame and see for yourself that what you're saying isn't true.

Or if you don't want to actually try it, here, let's play "Steel Path or Not Steel Path": which of these clips is SP?

A:

B:

B:

I'm short 20 Vitus Essence or I'd show the same for the Grendel missions, which won't be all that different.

Anyways, one clip is with my full Quellor build using a R5 Arcane, Galvanized mods, and a Riven on SP Oxomoco, the other is with one of the limited builds I evangelize using Serration, Vile Acceleration, and Infected Clip plus some QoL mods on regular Starchart Oxomoco. Is there a difference? Will one drive away players while the other doesn't? Have I ruined the game? Is the game no longer fun? I don't see why anyone would come to that conclusion because the two clips show the same gameplay. The enemies die just as quickly in one as in the other.

But the thing is, in one of these clips Parazon Finishers are worth doing. Amps work. Damage-dealing abilities work. Explosive barrels are worth shooting. In the other, my gun is literally the only tool I have in these clips that can kill enemies because everything else has long scaled out. Parazon Finishers aren't worth doing, Amps don't work, my abilities don't deal enough damage, explosive barrels are only a hazard to me. One of these supports the game's mechanics, the other doesn't. Maybe if the game were balanced the Grendel missions wouldn't need to throw away all of your mods? Maybe DE could set out to make a difficult missions and just make a mission that's difficult?

If you're concerned with damage mechanics being lost... then they're already being lost because DE frequently ignores or discards them in so many parts of the game, like with the Grendel missions, Sisters, Liches, Nihil, etc., etc. And if you're concerned with mechanics being lost... then what about all the mechanics already lost because they couldn't keep up with weapon scaling? What about Amps? What about Archwing abilities? What about plain old damage-dealing abilities? What about so many weapons and mods that go unused? What about finishers and environmental hazards? Like, you seem to get it... You say it yourself: "the game simply can't achieve any kind of balance because of the presence of so many mechanics that trivialize it." How can DE "possibly challenge us in a way that they aren't cheesing us or that we wouldn't cheese the content?" If mechanics break the balance and and make it so DE can't provide anything but cheese or be cheesed... why so fervently defend them?

[Redfeather75]

19 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

You should join the official Discord and try recruiting in the appropriate channel as well as the in-game Recruiting channel. It probably still won't be easy, but usually there's at least 1 or 2 people who are willing to go on anything.

Oh wow, I had no idea! Thank you!

edit: I guess I need to try on the weekend. Nobody in recruiting chat or discord responded. I can't wait all evening.

[FrostDragoon]

4 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

But the thing is, in one of these clips Parazon Finishers are worth doing. Amps work. Damage-dealing abilities work. Explosive barrels are worth shooting. In the other, my gun is literally the only tool I have in these clips that can kill enemies because everything else has long scaled out. Parazon Finishers aren't worth doing, Amps don't work, my abilities don't deal enough damage, explosive barrels are only a hazard to me. One of these supports the game's mechanics, the other doesn't. Maybe if the game were balanced the Grendel missions wouldn't need to throw away all of your mods? Maybe DE could set out to make a difficult missions and just make a mission that's difficult?

If you're concerned with damage mechanics being lost... then they're already being lost because DE frequently ignores or discards them in so many parts of the game, like with the Grendel missions, Sisters, Liches, Nihil, etc., etc. And if you're concerned with mechanics being lost... then what about all the mechanics already lost because they couldn't keep up with weapon scaling? What about Amps? What about Archwing abilities? What about plain old damage-dealing abilities? What about so many weapons and mods that go unused? What about finishers and environmental hazards? Like, you seem to get it... You say it yourself: "the game simply can't achieve any kind of balance because of the presence of so many mechanics that trivialize it." How can DE "possibly challenge us in a way that they aren't cheesing us or that we wouldn't cheese the content?" If mechanics break the balance and and make it so DE can't provide anything but cheese or be cheesed... why so fervently defend them?

Your gifs are broken, so I can't view them. Unfortunate.

You have to understand that complaining about enemy scaling in SP is pretty ridiculous when it was only implemented at the request of players asking for harder content. What did you or they think was going to happen? All this was predicted. Nothing was solved. A stat crunch would turn out the same, except it carries immense risk of DE over-correcting, player backlash, broken mechanics, players feeling that they've lost massive pieces of their arsenal, SP becomes impossible for your average player (and with it the rewards), etc. We would still have the same endless cycle of power creep and players crying for more challenge, and we can know this now because this existed for years before SP came into being. As for why I would defend the status quo, "Better the devil I know than the one I don't." I don't trust DE to not completely screw this sort of endeavor up and make things worse than they are now. Even if by some miracle it were possible for them to get it right, I'm not convinced that it would be a better game than we have now. I've played plenty of "balanced" games and they generally suck. There's so much emphasis on balance that they suck all the fun out of the game.

 

As things are right now, I find fun in taking the right tools for the job into various missions. This doesn't mean the strongest loadout. I have a pretty strong sense of what various things in my arsenal are capable of doing, so I can take something that isn't SP viable and still have fun with it in high level Deimos bounties, for example. Basically, as you allude to, you already can make your own balance. You don't need to cram it down on everyone else and ruin the fun for them.

 

Lastly, you still haven't set up a proper definition of what balance means to you. I'm not sure why you're so evasive of that question unless it's because you know the same truth of it that I do.

[PublikDomain]

38 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

Your gifs are broken, so I can't view them. Unfortunate.

More than happy to provide direct links:

1. https://giphy.com/gifs/4TlUF48L1Ru1Zw8yJD
2. https://giphy.com/gifs/pub0sR8CNxpcwHWycK

I can provide direct links to the ones in the Banshee thread as well if those don't work for you either.

38 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

You have to understand that complaining about enemy scaling in SP is pretty ridiculous when it was only implemented at the request of players asking for harder content. What did you or they think was going to happen? All this was predicted. Nothing was solved. A stat crunch would turn out the same, except it carries immense risk of DE over-correcting, player backlash, broken mechanics, players feeling that they've lost massive pieces of their arsenal, SP becomes impossible for your average player (and with it the rewards), etc. We would still have the same endless cycle of power creep and players crying for more challenge, and we can know this now because this existed for years before SP came into being. As for why I would defend the status quo, "Better the devil I know than the one I don't." I don't trust DE to not completely screw this sort of endeavor up and make things worse than they are now. Even if by some miracle it were possible for them to get it right, I'm not convinced that it would be a better game than we have now. I've played plenty of "balanced" games and they generally suck. There's so much emphasis on balance that they suck all the fun out of the game.

Yes, and it was easy to predict that SP would fail to provide what it is intended to provide because of the game's poor balance, which is exactly the kind of thing the balance people want to address. SP was never going to work because the game isn't balanced, and we knew this long before it was even in the test cluster. Without balance there isn't consistency, and without consistency there isn't a workable definition of "harder" that the content can be set to. Or even "hard". Or "easy". There's no workable definitions for anything. And so all the things you're concerned about keep happening. SP is impossible for some players, and trivial for others. Massive pieces of your arsenal are lost because of the endless cycle of powercreep. And people keep asking for a challenge, yet everything DE tries to do to provide that falls flat. All the things you keep bringing up are caused by the lack of balance. So it seems pretty obvious to me that it'd be good to address that, and then the things you keep bringing up won't need to keep happening and can be reversed. The negative picture you keep painting is the game we're already playing!

38 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

As things are right now, I find fun in taking the right tools for the job into various missions. This doesn't mean the strongest loadout. I have a pretty strong sense of what various things in my arsenal are capable of doing, so I can take something that isn't SP viable and still have fun with it in high level Deimos bounties, for example. Basically, as you allude to, you already can make your own balance. You don't need to cram it down on everyone else and ruin the fun for them.

Except you can't. No amount of self-balancing will make Amps viable weapons at high levels. No amount of self-balancing will make Yareli or Hydroid's damages output useful. No amount of self-balancing will make explosive barrels or other environmental hazards worth blowing up. No amount of self-balancing will make a Sister feel anything other than a bullet sponge that removes the game's mechanics. You can self-balance overpowered content down, but you can't self-balance underpowered content up. It's a one-way street.

And if you have fun with the way the game is... Great! Nobody wants to take that away from you. And if you'll watch the gifs I've posted then it's pretty obvious that the balance I'm talking about doesn't do what you're scared of it doing. All it does is put things on the same level so other mechanics - mechanics which have already been lost - can actually function again and be a part of the game.

38 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

Lastly, you still haven't set up a proper definition of what balance means to you. I'm not sure why you're so evasive of that question unless it's because you know the same truth of it that I do.

Balance is consistency. It isn't making the game hard, it isn't making the game easy, it's making things consistent. That's it.

[(XBOX)OdinsDottir]

I quite enjoy the Grendel missions.

I full out brute strength regardless, so losing mods is no big deal 

Frost Prime

Ignis Wraith

Paracesis

On my 8th Grendel set considering I generally volunteer anytime recruiting has someone looking for squad.

I don't nuke/cheese/ or flick my magic wand as many players do, to me this is pure fun.

 

[FrostDragoon]

2 minutes ago, (XBOX)OdinsDottir said:

I quite enjoy the Grendel missions.

I full out brute strength regardless, so losing mods is no big deal 

Frost Prime

Ignis Wraith

Paracesis

On my 8th Grendel set considering I generally volunteer anytime recruiting has someone looking for squad.

I don't nuke/cheese/ or flick my magic wand as many players do, to me this is pure fun.

 

It was a boring, miserable experience solo. With a semi-coordinated group it was considerably better. Glad someone can genuinely enjoy this mode for what it is though. Most of us don't.

[CrazyCatLad]

On 2021-07-27 at 2:11 AM, DrivaMain said:

This really. With the challenge phobia casuals as the majority, they will label any type of challenge as an "annoyance". 

One shot attacks that is well telegraphed? Unfair.

Tileset that utilizes parkour? Too hard or Too much effort.

Quick Timed Events? Too fast.

Fights that requires weakspot? Hitbox too "small".

They only want to get the new shiny as fast as possible with the least amount of effort possible.

Too bad this shiny isn't even appealing.  I haven't bothered with these missions because Grendel looks stupid as do the 'challenges'.