Veilbreaker: Launch & Hot Topics

[[DE]Rebecca]

Warm Friday greetings, Tenno!

 

We are 2 days into the Veilbreaker release and we have released 2 Hotfixes.

I wanted to go over some continued hot topics and provide insight on where we are on priorities for our next Hotfix.

First - our Hotfix next week brings more Kahl, so look forward to his next weekly adventure soon!
Once this hotfix launches, you will have access to items through a new Character, Chipper and a new Syndicate, Kahl’s Garrison. This Syndicate is not Standing based, and you will simply rank up for doing Kahl’s weekly mission each week. New Mods, Styanax blueprints, new weapon blueprints etc., will be accessible when Kahl’s Break Narmer weekly missions begin. These missions are the only path to obtaining Stock, the currency used in Chipper’s offerings.

Second - Archon Hunts will continue to rotate through on a weekly cadence. While Tenno face off against Boreal this week, both Nira and Amar’s hunts will follow in the next two weeks. However, we want to take a moment to discuss the way bosses are handled in Warframe. In truth, there is no one way we approach these. And that can be confusing. It is worth stating that we currently do not have a perfect solution on single-target bosses for a game with such variety in player loadouts and experience, but we are intending to improve them based on our collective experience as a community and developers -- this process will take many weeks of further iteration and testing.

 

Between damage attenuation, certain exploits, or bugs causing instant damage, and more, we will be prioritizing our gameplay and feedback review to make this boss fight experience better. There is a chasm between people who find them too easy and those who find them impossible, and trying to balance this divide will inform parts of our plans. We want to make the bosses we want to fight. We are all on the same page on the quest for the right balance. 

Third - Weaponry & Upgrades (such as Arcanes) shifted a lot. Our Second Hotfix reverted changes to battery/recharge based weapons, but we are taking more time before next week’s hotfix to review the state of the meta and general player loadouts. As a reminder, we made both buffs and nerfs to reset the ammo economy and weapon fluidity, and we are reviewing these changes. 

 

We are continuing to review under the structure of:
- Is something too dominant (am I ‘playing wrong’ for not using it)?
- Is something allowing truly automated play?
- Is something disrupting others from playing in their playstyle?
 

Answers to these questions will guide next steps. We will not revert things to allow automated play (i.e Wukong’s Celestial Twin changes are remaining), but we will review how the ammo and Upgrade changes to player weapons are feeling and performing.

Lastly, thank you everyone! Styanax should be freely available despite a few bumps in the distribution, so just sit tight if you don’t have him yet. It is a remarkable honor to usher in our 50th Warframe with the community, and we will chat next week!

Thanks, Tenno!

 

- [DE]Rebecca 

P.S As an example & for transparency, here is what Archon Fights look like without any damage formulas. If we increase their health so Glaives don't one-shot them, they become near unkillable with other weapons. It'll be a tough problem to solve, but for perspective, this is what we don't want either. 

[Tiltskillet]

Really appreciate information / feedback updates like this, especially when they come with some insight into the issues involved. Thank you.

[LillyRaccune]

1) We called for Kahl, and you answered. Thank you!

2) There were some damage immunity parts to Boreal that I didn't understand. Like the spinning pyramid thing... Not sure how to actually fight back while he is invulnerable.

3-A) I agree that more than 90% of the gun arsenal has been buffed because of having greater pickups. I appreciate that.

3-B) Some guns are just too darn powerful. Some guns are more powerful than archguns, that's not fair to the players that had to fight to unlock them!

[-TRiX-]

any info on if the propa scaffold nerf will be reverted so eidolons can be enjoyable again?

 

[Fiedra]

Hm, didn't know Glaives were so busted in the first place. Is it this effective with Chroma specifically?

[(XBOX)Shodian]

I'm hoping more unique missions with Khal will be available in the future cause they are fun as heck.

Thank you and the team for all you do.

[Petroklos]

16 hours ago, Fiedra said:

Hm, didn't know Glaives were so busted in the first place. Is it this effective with Chroma specifically?

Glaives are strong, Chroma gives a ton (+769% here) of Base Damage and they also used Madurai's Void Strike for another big boost of Damage (maxed here, so a final 10x Multiplier an additional +1000% to Base Damage).

[Minion135]

Thanks for the update on the process. I look forward to doing more Kahl missions soon!

[iPathos]

1 minute ago, Fiedra said:

Hm, didn't know Glaives were so busted in the first place. Is it this effective with Chroma specifically?

Reminder that the clip above is without the damage attenuation formulae that the live game Boreal uses.

Also I am curious to see how the coming weeks pan out - some interesting changes and some heavy-handed approaches that I hope to see rectified sooner rather than later.

[Digressive]

Thanks for the update Rebb! 

[JimmuTanno88]

I'm glad to see you guys are addressing feedback but not backing down on the whole point of the changes, keep it up! 👀

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

16 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

P.S As an example & for transparency, here is what Archon Fights look like without any damage formulas. If we increase their health so Glaives don't one-shot them, they become near unkillable with other weapons. It'll be a tough problem to solve, but for perspective, this is what we don't want either. 

Okay, but bad example since glaives get the effect of Vex Armor squared. So yea, bugged stuff OP, maybe fix that.

[Jarriaga]

2 minutes ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

Okay, but bad example since glaives get the effect of Vex Armor Squared.

Thank you for letting everyone know examples you don't approve of are bad rather than serving as a reflection of things any player looking for optimization can do. Next time, she will try with an MK1 Braton and Excalibur with no mods so you can deem it a good example.

[Auroreon]

Raw thoughts:

Idea: all damage builds up a break bar (perhaps in special ways per boss like headshots and weak spots) and the boss goes into a special Vulnerability state in which all damage deals a fixed amount of damage per weapon type that considers speed.  

Other ideas:

Path of exile aspirational bosses: phases of attacks and Uber bosses.

Roguelike bosses that have special attacks that must be maneuvered around, or use mastery to lean into for effectiveness.

Excellence of player actions that provide secondary objective during the fight that provide rewards if you complete, making extra difficulty optional.

In general, I think bosses should have more scale and swagger, thrilling fights rather than annoying, slightly-different-than-mobs loot dice rolls. They should be the best fights.

[Wheelhouser]

As someone who's LR2 and has "all the mods", the one thing I notice with any Damage Attenuation fight is that they are simply not fun.  It invalidates all the mods we've acquired.  Full Ability Immunity invalidates most of the frames we've acquired.  I don't want to one shot the boss, but I already dread "having" to do this fight (or another Archon with similar DR) next week, and every week after.  Because the fight, as it is now, for me, isn't any fun, I am absolutely going to go in with the most META weapon/build I can find to limit my unenjoyment of it every single time.  To be clear, I will beat it.  I already did, with a full PUG about 90 minutes after it came out, with no group synergy and "bad" weapons for the fight (being weapons that can wipe the floor with Steel Path).  But as it stands now, it's never going to be any fun.

Compare to Void Angels.  Sure, they're pretty easy, but they're interesting and fun.  I can armor strip.  There's parkour.  Operator usage, etc.  Or Eidolons and Orbs.

No one really cared about Attenuation on Liches/Sisters because we can power through it relatively easy (and strip armor and the like).

But with Archons, at least this first one, the lack of enjoyment is what will lead so many to META build for it (using backwards logic to NOT buff weapons to their highest damage) just to get it over with each week.  The lack of variety in frame usage will further META it.  Surviving is the only thing that matters from your frame, and whatever weapons people use will end up on your nerf list soon. 

Zealoid Prelate on Steel Path is very similar, but no one ever has to do it more than once.  This fight is one we're seemingly expected to do once a week for a very long time, and it's just a health bar immune to any frame ability and any weapon damage mod.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

Just now, Jarriaga said:

Thank you for letting everyone know examples you don't approve of are bad rather than serving as a reflection of things any player looking for optimization can do.

In the clip she's using a bugged interaction. Do you approve of bugged interactions then? Do you think they serve as a good example?

[LillyRaccune]

8 minutes ago, Fiedra said:

Hm, didn't know Glaives were so busted in the first place. Is it this effective with Chroma specifically?

Glaive Prime has forced slash procs that trigger on the heavy attack detonation when you throw it. That means you can easily do a slash status effect where you deal 20,000 - 50,000 damage per "tick" of slash effect.

[Zambad]

This level of communication is what sets DE apart, thank you.

And as a Wukong player: I find the changes fair and so far they haven't really impacted my gameplay, cause I actually play the game, i.e. I don't seek to automate. For changes like these, I think this is the desired result; "normal" playstyles don't notice anything major while the undesired extremes (in this case AFK and automation) get pushed closer to actually playing.

[taiiat]

the Special DR "damage attenuation" continues to show similar antithetical behavior like encouraging you to remove a few Damage Mods in order to do more Damage, among other things. and that's not how the game is supposed to work.

the game entirely revolves around collecting stuff to upgrade Stats to become better at Killing stuff. and uh, well, it needs to always be like that and not feel like it isn't or is even going in reverse, since Stat upgrades are how you drive all of your Content thusfar and the forseeable future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

1 minute ago, Fiedra said:

Hm, didn't know Glaives were so busted in the first place. Is it this effective with Chroma specifically?

yes. i don't recall any changes to the interaction so IIRC Vex Armor and Glaive Heavies are still 'extra special'.

[PublikDomain]

1 hour ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

There is a chasm between people who find them too easy and those who find them impossible, and trying to balance this divide will inform parts of our plans. We want to make the bosses we want to fight. We are all on the same page on the quest for the right balance. 

This chasm comes primarily from the divide in weapon damage modding. For every player that fills every slot with damage mods there's a player that doesn't, and these differences become more and more massive the more powercreep you allow into the game. Hopefully this is (another) wake-up call for you guys that the modding system needs more than just a little TLC.

Edit:

[[DE]Rebecca]

1 minute ago, taiiat said:

the game entirely revolves around collecting stuff to upgrade Stats to become better at Killing stuff. and uh, well, it needs to always be like that and not feel like it isn't or is even going in reverse, since Stat upgrades are how you drive all of your Content thusfar and the forseeable future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yep, also don't want 15 second fights, so onward we quest to solve the million damage excitement vs. bosses.

[Jarriaga]

Just now, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

In the clip she's using a bugged interaction. Do you approve of bugged interactions then? Do you think they serve as a good example?

It is bugged, but it doesn't matter. The purpose is to illustrate how it can literally take seconds to bend him to his knees without attenuation. Needing 4 throws instead of 1 only makes it 20 seconds longer at worst, which is still an absurdly low time for a boss fight.

[LillyRaccune]

1 minute ago, PublikDomain said:

This chasm comes primarily from the divide in weapon damage modding. For every player that fills every slot with damage mods there's a player that doesn't, and these differences become more and more massive the more powercreep you allow into the game. Hopefully this is (another) wake-up call for you guys that the modding system needs more than just a little TLC.

I agree about the different builds creating the chasm, but what could be done differently? Maybe if DE provided more player education on "how to mod properly" or "make sure you learn how to farm good mods" ?

[Deekkru]

You've only recently been promoted and you're already delving into some of the more complex issues Warframe (and other similar games) face; I don't envy you the challenge of being in the spotlight during this sort of change, but I appreciate the way you're handling it so far. Thank you for the communication and simple honesty!

[Casardis]

Really happy to see that you won't back down on the three questions you asked yourselves when making these changes, and to stand your ground on some of them (such as the Wukong changes). Some fine tuning will be needed on some others regarding the new ammo economy, but I'm sure you'll look into it. Remember that we have a lot of ways to get the old style back quite closely, such as Energized Munitions; it just takes more effort and investments now to make it work.

That said, concerning Archons and damage attenuation, I think we need more interactions. Currently we only defeat them by slowly chipping away their health with some invulnerable moments between, but what if we have stagger phases? Perhaps after dealing a certain amount of attenuated damage, you have an opportunity to open them up to a stagger phase, where you deal big damage with Operator Amps like with Thrax. Heck, that phase could even be preceded by an "enraged" DPS timer with Operator amps to destroy their Sentient shield (similar to Eidolons) and after that, they are staggered for 10 seconds and take big damage (with a cap). Maybe you even finish off with a parazon strike that deals a chunk.

I believe strongly the fact that the fight can take 10 minutes isn't that much of an issue if the players are constantly engaged through it with interactions that give them progress jumps. Being able to keep chipping away at its health while attenuated, having enraged attacks that give us opportunities to open them in a weakened state for high damage, using Operator alongside Warframes for these purposes; they all count.