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Please don't nerf Sentients


(XBOX)Ancient Mutt

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The sentients? What about us!

Every update since tennocon i'm noticing small nerfs to us that either weren't mentioned in the patch notes, or were very hidden in the "fixes" section. Operator energy dropping to 0 on operator death, melee slam being much more vertical now, and i'm sure there are more i just haven't found yet.

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1 hour ago, NecroPed said:

I'd assume if sentients are being nerfed they're going to be much more prevalent ingame after the new war. 

My thoughts exactly. They are going to be our main enemy throughout the entirety of the New War and where nerfed to make fighting them more simple of a process since we will be fighting greater numbers of them.

While this may sound negative as players have been wanting more difficult challenges in Warframe I get the feeling that these changes where only one part of a sentient rework most likely coming out with the new war.

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1 hour ago, NecroPed said:

I'd assume if sentients are being nerfed they're going to be much more prevalent ingame after the new war. 

With respect to gameplay with Warframes, they were especially prevalent during the Scarlet Spear event and we didn't need nerfed sentients to do the event. Likewise, for Necramech gameplay, we didn't need nerfed sentients for Orphix Venom either.

I don't completely agree with the rationale for these changes... but if we must nerf sentients, IMO, there has to be some middle ground here. There's no way Steel Path Amalgam Corpus units (which are enhanced by sentient technology) are more durable than Steel Path sentients themselves (and they are currently!). In Steel Path, sentient units like Conculyst are now about as squishy as, say, Grineer Heavy Gunners. You toss Glaive Prime once and both sentients and Heavy Gunners die over a couple seconds. Although I realize the Steel Path Grineer units are extremely durable because of their armor. Lore-wise, Grineer are technologically backward compared to sentients and gameplay-wise, sentients are laughably easy to kill in Steel Path now (less than shadow of their former selves!). IMO, this has been an unreasonably extreme nerf to sentients. They should still be the toughest and most sophisticated faction... and they should certainly eclipse the Amalgam Corpus units and Grineer in durability.

If we really must keep sentients susceptible to DoT status effects like Slash, I think the adaptive damage reduction really should apply itself preemptively (so before first DoT tic) as well as per-tic.  Or if this happens already, the damage reduction needs to be increased! You really should need to toss, say, Glaive Prime multiple times to take down a Steel Path Conculyst or Battalyst (of course they'll be easier to kill in normal content)... possibly with ONE damage resistance reset with Operator. None of this one-shotting some of the most durable units in the game in the bullet sponge Steel Path mode.

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1 hour ago, Harvenger76 said:

My thoughts exactly. They are going to be our main enemy throughout the entirety of the New War and where nerfed to make fighting them more simple of a process since we will be fighting greater numbers of them.

While this may sound negative as players have been wanting more difficult challenges in Warframe I get the feeling that these changes where only one part of a sentient rework most likely coming out with the new war.

You expressed my thoughts better than I did. I was thinking the same thing about it being a stepping stone towards bigger changes.

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1 hour ago, nslay said:

With respect to gameplay with Warframes, they were especially prevalent during the Scarlet Spear event and we didn't need nerfed sentients to do the event. Likewise, for Necramech gameplay, we didn't need nerfed sentients for Orphix Venom either.

I don't completely agree with the rationale for these changes... but if we must nerf sentients, IMO, there has to be some middle ground here. There's no way Steel Path Amalgam Corpus units (which are enhanced by sentient technology) are more durable than Steel Path sentients themselves (and they are currently!). In Steel Path, sentient units like Conculyst are now about as squishy as, say, Grineer Heavy Gunners. You toss Glaive Prime once and both sentients and Heavy Gunners die over a couple seconds. Although I realize the Steel Path Grineer units are extremely durable because of their armor. Lore-wise, Grineer are technologically backward compared to sentients and gameplay-wise, sentients are laughably easy to kill in Steel Path now (less than shadow of their former selves!). IMO, this has been an unreasonably extreme nerf to sentients. They should still be the toughest and most sophisticated faction... and they should certainly eclipse the Amalgam Corpus units and Grineer in durability.

If we really must keep sentients susceptible to DoT status effects like Slash, I think the adaptive damage reduction really should apply itself preemptively (so before first DoT tic) as well as per-tic.  Or if this happens already, the damage reduction needs to be increased! You really should need to toss, say, Glaive Prime multiple times to take down a Steel Path Conculyst or Battalyst (of course they'll be easier to kill in normal content)... possibly with ONE damage resistance reset with Operator. None of this one-shotting some of the most durable units in the game in the bullet sponge Steel Path mode.

Those are events though, I'm expecting the new war to make big changes/additions to Warframe as a whole. Perhaps even sentient specific areas of the start chart, or more invasive sentients across all mission types not just the two(?) tilesets you can get them on. When I say more prevalent i don't just mean in bigger numbers, but more relevant to the core gameplay too. Though this is just my assumption. 

I do feel we need some strong sentient enemies, but we'd probably need some fodder as well if DE are going the way I'm expecting. 

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7 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

The sentients? What about us!

Every update since tennocon i'm noticing small nerfs to us that either weren't mentioned in the patch notes, or were very hidden in the "fixes" section. Operator energy dropping to 0 on operator death, melee slam being much more vertical now, and i'm sure there are more i just haven't found yet.

Nice. I hope they do a few more fixes to our self healing, out of control energy generation and being immortal through Protective Dash as well. 

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13 hours ago, NecroPed said:

Those are events though, I'm expecting the new war to make big changes/additions to Warframe as a whole. Perhaps even sentient specific areas of the start chart, or more invasive sentients across all mission types not just the two(?) tilesets you can get them on. When I say more prevalent i don't just mean in bigger numbers, but more relevant to the core gameplay too. Though this is just my assumption. 

I do feel we need some strong sentient enemies, but we'd probably need some fodder as well if DE are going the way I'm expecting. 

These events concretely show that the sentient's durability wasn't an issue when sentients spawned in great numbers. Hence, they didn't actually need to be nerfed.

And we have sentient fodder already:

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Brachiolyst

These were prevalent during both Scarlet Spear, Orphix Venom and IIRC are still encountered in Anomalies and in Orphix missions.

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I think it’s safe to say whatever the reasoning behind adjusting sentients, players who equip all the power equipment combinations were secondary consideration.

I expect there was some thought given for new players joining because of the hype, who may not have access to all of the power by time they reach the point that they’re fighting Sentients, but that’s just me speculating

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19 hours ago, nslay said:

With respect to gameplay with Warframes, they were especially prevalent during the Scarlet Spear event and we didn't need nerfed sentients to do the event. Likewise, for Necramech gameplay, we didn't need nerfed sentients for Orphix Venom either.

The issue is balancing enemies between different loadouts. During SS there were complaints over the time it took to finish ground missions, and the time it took to finish them were tied mostly to how quickly Sentients went down.

For Murex missions, killing Sentients didn't matter when you could indefinitely cc them and there were 0 kill conditions.

OV is a joke when the ranged Necramech had obscene aoe damage that effectively meant Sentients were made of paper, and there was less impact on loadout options when there's only two to choose from, and despite the melee variant doing basically 0 damage, it still killed Sentients in a couple swings anyways unlike normal melee weapons.

Saying Sentients shouldn't be nerfed because hitting them once or twice and them dying is bad makes no sense. During SS I was killing them within two hits regardless, this nerf to Sentients changes nothing for me other than let people using worse weapons not take as long, which doesn't matter to me, not even slightly. I prefer this over the alternative with DE's DR nonsense that still get bypassed by specific Warframes anyways.

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1 minute ago, taiiat said:

wait, Sentients got nerfed?
when? they're already easy enough to Kill as it is.

Sentients in snooze path is already fine enough. if people can't Kill them, they should remember that Warframe is a game about Gear.

You can one-shot them with Glaive Prime now. They die even easier than Amalgam Corpus units.

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2 minutes ago, taiiat said:

wait, Sentients got nerfed?
when? they're already easy enough to Kill as it is.

Sentients in snooze path is already fine enough. if people can't Kill them, they should remember that Warframe is a game about Gear.

They aren't immune to status anymore, meaning they melt in a second with any weapon

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On 2021-09-10 at 10:54 AM, (XBOX)General Poke said:

I found them incredibly easy to kill today and they're supposed to be the ultimate threat against Warframe in general. I mean, isn't there supposed to be an invasion on the way?

The problem is that Sentients were designed to be challenging on their release, which was six years ago. Since then, runaway power creep has meant that even 95% damage reduction isn't nearly enough to make them durable. More generally, pretty much nothing in Warframe holds up to our strongest current builds, so if DE wants to give us a challenge, they're going to have to revamp many systems tied to our damage output (unlikely in the space between now and The New War), or find a way to strip us of our power (which will happen during the quest bits where we control non-Tenno characters).

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6 minutes ago, Yamazuki said:

For Murex missions, killing Sentients didn't matter when you could indefinitely cc them and there were 0 kill conditions.

Until DE nerfed Limbo's Catclysm so that you couldn't actually indefinitely CC them anymore.

In Condrix missions, you could not progress to Condrix vulnerability phases WITHOUT first killing every single sentient. So yes, players were absolutely killing sentients into the levels 100s+ (what was the cap, 17 Condrixes?) just fine without needing to nerf them. Now they're ridiculously easy... it's silly how easy it is to kill them in Steel Path.

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2 minutes ago, -Krism- said:

DE did say that they would "evolve" instead, but nothing detailed; I guess they want to keep it a secret for TNW

Definitely curious. I wouldn’t expect them to evolve to a point that a player requires all of the power to kill (I expect DE knows people make OP builds in order to be OP, not to be fighting on the non-OP build level), but it’d be pretty cool to see them getting as tough if not tougher than the earlier incarnation

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43 minutes ago, nslay said:

Until DE nerfed Limbo's Catclysm so that you couldn't actually indefinitely CC them anymore.

You must've never heard about Resonator

43 minutes ago, nslay said:

In Condrix missions, you could not progress to Condrix vulnerability phases WITHOUT first killing every single sentient. So yes, players were absolutely killing sentients into the levels 100s+ (what was the cap, 17 Condrixes?) just fine without needing to nerf them.

Arquebex is a helluva drug

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16 minutes ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

Arquebex is a helluva drug

There was no Arquebex or Voidrig during Scarlet Spear.

EDIT: And even if there was, this was a normal Earth mission... and as you know... you still can't use Necramechs in normal missions.

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Just now, nslay said:

Until DE nerfed Limbo's Catclysm so that you couldn't actually indefinitely CC them anymore.

I never mentioned Limbo, you could cc Sentients without him and I semi-afked Murex without him, and his nerf wasn't even that effective and only mattered to people who were actually afking the mission, which isn't how most people were playing. This doesn't change primary focus of your Sentient kill speed had zero impact on Murex reward per x minute.

1 minute ago, nslay said:

In Condrix missions, you could not progress to Condrix vulnerability phases WITHOUT first killing every single sentient. So yes, players were absolutely killing sentients into the levels 100s+ (what was the cap, 17 Condrixes?) just fine without needing to nerf them. 

I never said Condrix missions had no kill requirement. My first sentence specifically mentioned ground [Condrix] missions and the complaints over the mission taking too long, due to people killing them too slow.

16 minutes ago, nslay said:

Now they're ridiculously easy... it's silly how easy it is to kill them in Steel Path.

They had been ridiculously easy to kill. Their kill speed, like everything else, depended on your loadout. There is a severe imbalance in damage between everyone's loadout configurations. Helminth only increased that gap even further, as well as any other additional grind layers introduced. This is before even considering that again, cc invalidated them in the first place.

There has only been a handful of ways DE handles loadout imbalance, such as:

-Silly DR that still gets bypassed; see Sisters for recent example or immunity phases.

-Nerfing enemy durability, Sentients aren't the only time. SP was pre-nerfed, armor changes at lower levels and RJ enemies nerfed as well as increasing loadout damage.

-Designing content where our Warframes/Weapons contribute to nothing or operate on a timer.

Your complaint should focus more on the imbalance of an individual's loadout rather than Sentient durability. DE not addressing the core issue is what led to multiple direct nerfs to enemies as well as indirect nerfs in the form of DE increasing our DPS. 

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5 minutes ago, nslay said:

There was no Arquebex or Voidrig during Scarlet Spear.

EDIT: And even if there was, this was a normal Earth mission... and as you know... you still can't use Necramechs in normal missions.

I auto translated that to Orphix for some reason. To address SS though, the common way to kill was to use Mesa (Extreme raw DPS that's kinda hard for most weapons to match) or Exodia Contagion with Vex Armor (bugged to this day to have the buff applied twice)/Volt Shield (bugged at the time to make contagion stick forever). Either way, it was decently restrictive and was a strict "Status weapon's need not apply." Not even all crit weapons would cut it.

"Easy" fix would be to make them actually adapt to true damage. Then your favoured Glaive Prime wouldn't hit so hard.

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3 minutes ago, Yamazuki said:

They had been ridiculously easy to kill. Their kill speed, like everything else, depended on your loadout. There is a severe imbalance in damage between everyone's loadout configurations. Helminth only increased that gap even further, as well as any other additional grind layers introduced. This is before even considering that again, cc invalidated them in the first place.

There has only been a handful of ways DE handles loadout imbalance, such as:

-Silly DR that still gets bypassed; see Sisters for recent example or immunity phases.

-Nerfing enemy durability, Sentients aren't the only time. SP was pre-nerfed, armor changes at lower levels and RJ enemies nerfed as well as increasing loadout damage.

-Designing content where our Warframes/Weapons contribute to nothing or operate on a timer.

Your complaint should focus more on the imbalance of an individual's loadout rather than Sentient durability. DE not addressing the core issue is what led to multiple direct nerfs to enemies as well as indirect nerfs in the form of DE increasing our DPS. 

Look, regardless of loadout, you still had to do more than just, say, toss Glaive Prime once and walk away.

This change is so silly and disproportional, I just one-shotted the Steel Path Stalker just now. This is absolutely bonkers man. If you were thinking this

6 minutes ago, Yamazuki said:

They had been ridiculously easy to kill.

... what do you think now? Should the Sentients be like Level 1 Earth enemies from when we first start the game? Because that's how it feels man. They were easy before... now it's just silly.

If you can't grasp the problem at being able to one-shot Steel Path Conculysts or Battalysts... or them being easier than Corpus units... can you at least see how silly it is for the Steel Path Stalker?

Here's what it used to be like... and no, he's never once been as easy or comparable to the Acolytes (who have always been easy)

Spoiler

 

Now you can one-shot that guy after DE's change. IMO, being able to one-shot Steel Path Stalker is a serious balance problem and DE should revisit their change. Tweak it a bit... jeez.

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