Veilbreaker: Launch & Hot Topics

[GigabearPRIME]

I haven't actually done my Boreal fight because I was being randomly one shot on the defense mission and I mean...I'm playing Grendel with full umbra mods and it's not even some telegraphed attack. Current theory is rad procs are letting my own defense target instagib me.

 

Note: I play solo. This is probably much less of an issue in groups.

Edited September 9, 2022 by GigabearPRIME

[(XBOX)Cruiser Abukuma]

il y a une heure, Petroklos a dit :

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).

Basically, it isn't broken, rather it's an endgame build that someone put a decent amount of time into building. 

[--Q--Poeps]

 

Please fix Vile Discharge explosion damage not being affected by Mods.

 

[WardsROverrated]

Thanks for all the dedication! really loving the update all around, playing in a squad certainly feels better with less AoE around, worried AoE will need further nerfing once the community adapts, as I've find changes that make the weapon nerfs quite literally irrelevant for everything except steel path.

My only gripe is with the archon damage reduction, might be a little too much, I really wonder why you guys haven't embraced more gimmicky boos fights, the first phase of Exploiter orb (before leaving the cave) feels like really good design, doesn't restrict progress based on loadout, uses the environment and encourages team play, honestly wished there were more bosses like that (just the first phase, second one punishes you for not being on a team rather than rewarding team play, carrot vs stick and what not) and between gimmicks you could throw a few bullet sponge phases to keep up the "late game" feeling.

I'm sure this has been discussed extensively but we are left to wonder. 

Excited to see what the future brings :D 

[rainy]

43 minutes ago, TuxedoCatfish said:

Have you considered just normalizing player damage across the board, instead of constantly escalating an unnecessarily complex damage attenuation formula that cannot possibly handle all the game's thousands of edge cases and weird exceptions, making optimal play harder and harder to discover (because it's based on finding the one magical exception to the rule) while simultaneously making it more and more mandatory (because playing naively means getting hit with harsher and harsher penalties)?

The reason you can't balance boss fights is because a veteran player can do hundreds of thousands of times more damage than a new player. There is no way to balance that unless you wanted to go full Diablo 3 and make all (relevant) content in the game scale infinitely and under the player's control.

Indeed. Certain Weapons and Frames have unchecked levels of power. Saryn increasing weapon damage by over 20x, Mirage by the same degree, Chroma by ~8x.

I think some regulation in damage and its progression with weapons, mods and enemy levels would do wonders for the health of the game. Turn certain multipliers into common, low-rank mods, and smaller, higher-end fine-tuning multipliers to primed mods. Close the power gap!

Same goes for player health and general survivability, another huge chasm between frames!

[PublikDomain]

21 hours ago, LillyRaccune said:

I agree about the different builds creating the chasm, but what could be done differently?

It's simple: limit the number of damage-increasing mods players are allowed to equip on their builds.

Consider this example:

The Heavy Gunner dies in the same 5 bursts and the Burston has the same recoil, sound, reload speed, magazine size, everything. So has anything about the gameplay changed between these examples? What effect has choking 6 of the weapon's 8 mod slots with damage mods really had aside from a higher proc rate causing it to stagger more? Maybe we don't need builds that cram damage into every possible orifice?

What if those damage mods were limited to only a part of our builds instead of being allowed to consume the entire thing? As you can see in this example, making the numbers bigger doesn't really change anything about the gameplay anyways: to an appropriately scaled enemy there is no difference. So why allow people to fixate on them - which many people do - when all it does is make players so unmanageable?

With fewer factors ballooning player damage to such unpredictable levels, players would deal lower amounts of damage with their guns and melee in a narrower, more predictable range. And that range could be matched to enemies by adjusting enemy Armor/Health/Shield curves - finally fixing enemy Armor so that armored factions like Grineer don't have EHPs that balloon so much more than everything else. Would you build for more damage types if Armor wasn't the only game in town? And these could both be the same range of damage as Amps and Archguns and Abilities and Archwings and Necramechs and turrets and explosive barrels and so on! Would you use those mechanics more if they were just as good as your guns and melee? And if you had more room in your builds for things other than damage, what would you mod for? Accuracy? Recoil? Ammo? Aim-glide? Sets? We could have trigger mods, ricochet mods, alt-fire mods, combo mods, all sorts of creative things beyond the boring "hurr durr more damage" that sets the standards. And what about fodder weapons? Would you use them for more than a trip to ESO if they could have their downsides addressed without sacrificing giant chunks of performance compared to more meta options? And if player damage and enemy EHPs of all types were more consistent and aligned across the board would we even need mechanics like Damage Attenuation to begin with?

There are a lot of other benefit to modding limits, too. It can be enforced entirely on the modding screen in the Arsenal, so there is zero change necessary to support them for the database. It changes no mods, or stats, or formulas, or mechanics, so it "preserves your investments". The only thing not preserved are your specific builds, but builds have always changed over time so what's different? And it could be done in a way that gets us nice things like Universal Forma (oooh) and a better Riven system (aaah) at the same time.

I'll also link my longer thread talking about this, with some more concrete examples and ways to achieve this:

Edited September 10, 2022 by PublikDomain

[Arcsyrine]

If you could make it so the archons don't enter an immunity phase every 2 seconds that would be appreciated. It just gets frustrating when I can only get 1-2 shots in before Boreal becomes immune again. Maybe break the health bar into 5 segments or so with a different immunity phase when you hit each segment like the angels? That would be better than 10-20 immunity phases every few seconds.

[Anherus]

Who's complaining about the damage in the Archon fights?

The vast majority of feedback I've seen is that they're absolutely BORING, talk about the worlds most uninspired "Endgame challenge" people have ever seen. There's absolutely no mechanics in this fight unless you classify standing still and pressing LMB for <10 minutes onto a bullet sponge a "mechanic".  This is nothing but a boring regular mob in the same old earth tileset, not an endgame boss encounter that's thought provoking or learnt, simply gunned down in utter boredom. You desperately need to get some boss designers onto the WF team ASAP and take a look at how other games make real encounters such as Destiny, Lost Ark, World of Warcraft etc for what a boss is actually meant to do and feel like.

Peak WF gameplay: Shoot an adds weak spot and walk inside a glowing bubble that does nothing then chase it across the map after killing a deacon which shocker, also does absolutely nothing, truly a challenging endgame boss fight that's inspiring thought and awe as you slowly learn to beat it.

Edited September 9, 2022 by Anherus

[(NSW)Mythryth]

As a player who raided in WoW for about 15 years, the Archon hunts felt like a welcomed thing to me, I thought they were challenging and fun. I can understand some that didn't enjoy them, they aren't the 5 min boss fight, or the 2 second Sargent. I feel like the abilities need to be Telegraphed better or have Lotus point out things like, "Shoot the red orbs, they are a weakness" when he was invulnerable in the pyramid. Like how you have marked out the red zone for a grenade to not be there, putting down a red cone for his lighting trail to help us see where "don't stand in bad is". I thoroughly enjoyed having what felt like a real raid boss. Something to accomplish as a team. I feel like Support and team work could feel right at home there, but a lot of us are still thinking in the "META" format. For a change, a support frame could be real group changing. Like having Rawr, Dispenser, Renewal, all the things a support frame could bring to the group. as for the DR, I felt it was fine. I ended up doing the whole hunt 3 times with different groups to help people through them, taking different weapons each time. Granted, I took rifles because I thought ammo would be a problem. I took the Phenmor, Tonkor, and Tennora (it was a buffed weapon). The Phenmor would shred, the Tennora took more effort and had to weapon juggle with the Tonkor and the Brakk. I took Vauban, (as I try to do everything with him, also to prove everything can be done regardless of frame). I have Eclipse on him to boost his two. I kinda wish there was a Stacking rebuff (status) we could put on the boss. Instead of fully armor shipping them, do like 4 stacks of a status that will lower the DR by like 1/3 or something if they is really where people are upset about it. lots of frames can remove armor and such, so refresh the debuff. Doing things like the more telegraphed attacks like doing audio queues to say when they do something and the debuffing to make the fight more intuitive for the players to feel like they are doing something to the boss themselves.

[Danielw8]

1 hour ago, Petroklos said:

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).

its not multiplier chroma and madurai base damage buffs (still great) and on top you can use volatile quick return that mod give you multiplicative damage

And you can push it even more by using arcanes... like avenger or any more damage arcane. also remember helminth

[Cryssoberyl]

Thank you for being wiling to rethink the ammo changes, which have undeservedly damaged the viability of a lot of weapons. In your haste to neuter the power of the ones at the very top, all you've done is hurt lesser choices, which if anything will only make people cling harder to the most efficient workhorses. Athodai is my favorite secondary, I love blasting the alt-fire whenever I can, but it was difficult to make it pay for itself even before with Ammo Mutation and the ammo bump from Secondary Merciless. Now it's basically unviable as a thing to try to be doing. There are many similar stories, I'm sure. For a lot of guns, "ammo economy" was already a real thing that existed, and for those weapons, the situation now is dire.

[Danielw8]

2 hours 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. 

I just did a 5 min run with titania eclipse viral heat build, eclipse its quite bad here (its not consistent) and viral heat are not even the best damage type for the boss, and still a 5min fight. I agree here this dmg reduction formula need a good tweak

PD: instead of damage reduction i prefer much more something where i need actually aim and hit the enemy while he's moving pretty fast, something like 1/2 second window to hit a leg or arm while he's doing left and right flying movements

Edited September 9, 2022 by Danielw8

[BlueCatReal]

Any news on this still no?

 

 

[(XBOX)Darkskytzo]

 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?

answer to 1st question is no / everyone's playstyle is different and that will never change.
answer to question 2 is no not really / this game will never be a balanced game as it hopefully never should be
 the people who play this game 8-10 hrs a day are far into the spectrum and are and can be elite players
 and then there are more than half of the players who play in the evenings for 1-2 hrs
and then there are the weekend warriors 
you are trying to balance a game based on players that can run missions for hrs on end and reach level 9999 enemies (which are not alot)
answer to number 3 is yes / playstyles are being disrupted by ammo changes and unwanted nerfs, let the player get bored of a weapon and they'll move on to something else or put a higher mr rank to aquire alot of the top tier weapons.
if someone complains that the other squad member got more kills than them (you have an option to run it solo)
if someone complains about aoe explosions blinding their sight (run it solo then)
we already in warframe have many options to choose from ,instead of all these unnecessary nerfs we have been getting.

i said what i said 
the game is a very amazing game,please don't ruin it!

[Mirki]

I'd like to start off by thanking for the Ammo Economy changes, it now feels very relevant and Im loving it's impact on my gameplay.

Now for the most important subject, Im a Challenge Loving player, reason why I solo'ed my first Archon Hunt and I must say, Damage Attenuation on the Archon really made me feel bad the entire fight. Knowing you are very occupied for the Duviri Paradox I wasnt expecting something super mechanically engaging, but immediatelly discovering the Damage Attenuation felt like the Complete opposite was achieved, I should have not engaged in the fight as much as I actually did, trying to look for some Operator Interaction or some ''Device Hijack'' mechanic or, something.

I must say, just having one of those two in order to be able to do more damage or even just advance the fight would have been infintely better, as effortless as its implementation could have been, aside form the Archon Fight, I absoutely loved the rest of the Sortie. The ambientation and Gameplay elements, common enemies having deadlier attacks, all was great, and I hope you can turn around the game's past and realize, how much bad damage attenuation has done to it

[Wonteddead2]

Any idea on a hotfix for those afflicted by the update that are currently stuck in the new war quest line? Currently been unable to play or do anything in game for 3 days.......

 

Also here's a link to the forum post regarding the bug: 

 

Edited September 9, 2022 by Wonteddead2
Misspelled stuff

[TheTundraTerror]

The past week has only reinforced what I believe: Warframe is the only game I know about that actively punishes people for being good at it. You mod a Warframe to it's full potential? Expect it to get nerfed. You mod weapons to their full potential? Expect it to get nerfed. You're able to overcome some arbitrary restriction on a mechanic? Expect it to get nerfed. In Warframe, no fun is allowed. "If it isn't fun, why bother?" -Reggie Fils-Aimé

Frankly, this update tried to solve too many problems in too short of a time. Reducing the ability of zoom-and-boom isn't inherently a bad idea. However, slashing the ammo pool of AoE weapons across the board, regardless of their place in the meta, and then removing Merciless' ammo pool boost is just kicking someone when they're down. If the idea was to get people to stop using Zarr/Bramma meta, than I have to wonder why the Kuva Khom was made pretty much unusable considering how that weapon chews through ammo. Of course, Opticor Vandal still has its three digit ammo pool despite that weapon being a charge laser. There's also the fact that the battery charge reduction was not revealed ahead of time.

As for Archons, people have already said everything that needs to be said. It's another example of "bullet sponge as a boss" that Warframe is becoming increasingly known for by the community. We already have the Pravos Sisters and Kuva Liches serving as a quasi-boss, and now Archons join those two. If the idea of Damage Attenuation is to keep people from love tapping the boss as they speed run to the exit, than it needs to be said that the mechanic fails in that regard. It fails in the regard of stopping a single love tap since DA requires a second to calculate and adapt which can be bypassed with a large enough single hit. It also fails in how it's not communicated to players that DA is being applied and when it's cooled off; something as simple as tinting the health bar gray to reflect an increase in defenses would make it more evident and having mechanics that force players to stop shooting the Archon in favor of something else would clearly communicate that you need to take a measured approach to your attacks. As for their ability immunity, I have to question the validity of DE's claims to wanting to prevent metas when ability immunity only leads to a meta of Warframes with high-survivability since targeted abilities and self-buff abilities are either duds or can lower your damage, respectively.

It's clear how the update as a whole was not thought about it. You made something that actively punishes people who don't being some kind of meta loadout which is going to require them to spend more ammo... but ammo as a whole has become more difficult to come across. If there's one of piece of advice I can offer, it's this: tell us what you want Warframe to be. Do you want it to be a looter shooter? Then you need to actually give us ammo to shoot our guns. Do you want it to be more survival orientated? Then you can't be spawning as many mobs as our CPUs can handle. I would also suggest DE avoid multiple, massive changes. The AoE blast radius nerf should have been first and then assessed before adding an ammo pool reduction which should have only applied to the top of the list. I'm glad that weapon switch speed finally feels more snappy and fluid. I feel like a wealth of mechanics and mods can be designed to take advantage of these changes. But I also feel like that will never happen when I look at how the update came out as a sum.

I'm glad the new team is willing to make some much needed changes. However, it really feels a lot like "The king is dead, long live the king" with boss-like mobs with heavy DR that punishing players for playing well. It also feels like DE is more interested in treating symptoms of core issues. There's a reason why people used zoom-and-boom with Wukong: it's because drop rates have been getting far lower which requires more runs of the same mission which also increases burnout. The reason the people use "meta" weapons with "meta" mods is because the mod system only gets more and more stacked on top of it which confuses new players who resort to copying what they see on build sites/guides.

I also do not appreciate you using Chroma/Glaive as an example consider it's a well know bug that Glaive Price double dips on damage buffs. I really want to believe that the new team has the games best interests at heart because I know people like Pablo and Reb have spent a good deal of time playing the game and many of their changes reflect that. But when you do things like showcase a bug to justify a mechanic that people have argued against, it puts a massive damper on my expectations.

Edited September 10, 2022 by TheTundraTerror
Cleaning up; expanding on my points

[Dioxety]

1 hour ago, Tiltskillet said:

There are max loadouts and there are MAX LOADOUTS.  And huge gaps between them. 

 

That’s why I specifically mentioned max loadouts with galvanized mods. Most endgame players are already there. They should require a/s tier weapons to take down.

[BabyKurama]

There is only one thing I'am annoyed over and thats the fact they are weekly, would be nice if we could do them more the once per week.

 

[Imppuccino]

I think fundamentally, you have to understand that your players will always find the meta way of doing things. And there will always be a meta. Unless there are some drastic measures taken to severely limit the power of mods so you can keep damage output to a predictable range and then design the content around it, this is not an issue that is going to go away. What happens in this fight is that I sat there for 10 minutes shooting the archon in the face on Titania. I was not challenged. I was never threatened. I was simply slowed down. This is not engaging gameplay.

The fights that I think Warframe has done well are the ones that give a mechanical or skills based challenge alongside damage considerations. Things like the orb mother or ropalolyst. They're not necessarily the most difficult but they are interesting to play. It doesn't feel like a chore. This does.

[Kymaeraa]

Honestly huge props for the transparency

[Skaleek]

46 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

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

Perhaps more iteration and refinement of your damage attenuation algorithm? I don't think its the wrong approach i think it's just not doing exactly what one might expect it to right now (ie removing mods actually increasing damage output). Anyways Reb, I applaud you for tackling the big issues right away as you take over the reins, and thank you for your communication on next steps.

[Koldraxon-732]

While I have enjoyed the launch content I have a few opinions.

1: releasing weapons available early via the Market with their primary acquisition vector being unavailable for a week or longer is a bad precedent. This may make people think of pre-order bonuses for various games where you get game-impacting items that are unobtainable until that content drops. I would suggest making Styanax's blueprints drop from the Orokin Tower challenge rooms alongside his signature speargun, and put the new Grineer weaponry blueprints in special crates on Murex found in Grineer Empyrean Veil Proxima missions as another way to get them.

1a: weapons, parts, or blueprints that take ages to obtain deserve another acquisition path via multiple sources, be they via vendors (like Glast or Father Entrati during Orphix Venom) or additional drop locations. This is why I'd like Oberon and Ash to be re-included in their former sources as well as current ones (or go further and make each Eximus type have a chance to drop parts for frames of that element or theme, such as Vauban parts for Comba/Scrambus Eximus that have electricity element or something to that effect).

2: Kahl deserves to be a valid member of your Railjack crew, alongside Clem and Darvo.

2a: Railjack crew and other allies should be viable as companions, being able to fit a smaller mod count than other companions as a drawback for being as able as they are.

2b: Sentinels should be revivable. Them dying are one of the few reasons people self-rezz before anyone could try to rescue them.

3: I enjoyed Kahl's Veilbreaking quest and want to see the functionality demonstrated be adapted for companions and summoned allies to some extent (i.e: being able to command your pet cat/dog/robot/undead/clone/Specter/crewmate/??? to go somewhere or focus on one target or interact with something would be nice - even if it's accessible via the same way you get to the Railjack Tac menu and in a tab from that).

Bossfight-related thoughts:

Boss fights should involve their environment more in a manner akin to how Razorback needs the special Moas to down it's shields or how Exploiter requires you to lob fire cans to melt her brain or introduce other forms of weakpoints that allow for the constantly-increasing-damage-numbers kind of damage to shine. Some bosses, like Void Angels or hostile Necramechs* are another way to deal with high-damage weaponry or loadouts.

*Why can't our Necramech's health pool be segregated in the same way the enemy one is? It could also introduce a different way to impair them and make lasting in them more interesting than just running out of energy and eventually being overwhelmed.

Back to the bosses, but more particularly: our own survivability, and damage:
Given the fact that without Archon Shards, health/energy orbs don't scale in amount provided outside a narrow band of causes (which mainly focus on availability - like Nekros' Desecrate), I would appreciate if the following concept be considered:

A universal combo counter that reacts to your gameplay and enables additional playstyles.

Examples: 

Spoiler

Killing enemies quickly causes buffs to occur that affect your equipped arsenal, frame 'n' all.
-Let's say you mow down a hall of enemies with a Soma Prime. Your ranged weapons now deal X more damage, X being the amount of kills.
-Melee kills increase movement speed and parkour velocity more than other types of killing.
-All kills and damage reception add to this combo counter.
-Some abilities could add to the combo count via initial cast.
-The counter affects how often health/energy orbs may drop aside from other methods, making it easier to survive in higher level content if you can sustain the killing.
-The health/energy orbs gain an incremental increase based on combo amount.
-Abilities increase in range/strength/duration based on combo count and have their own separate combo counter. This would mean you could stack up kills, run into a room with lots of tough enemies, and cast an AOE ability (such as Radial Javelin) that kills some and damages most of them enough that you can finish them quickly.
-If a Necramech successfully kills with it's basic melee, it becomes able to melee siginicantly faster for a short period of time. If it kills again, it starts to deal more damage with additional kills. This would allow Necramechs to punch their way out should their user have ammunition trouble with weapons equipped by them. It should also be able to pick up health orbs and benefit from the counter as well.
-Healing allies adds to the counter. Successfully healing a certain quantity of health/shields frequently enough buffs your healing effectiveness, giving healed allies bonus health/armour/shields that last until the combo expires.

-After the counter is maxed, nothing happens until you're at 1 health, or are at a similar state. Instead of dying, your combo counter is reset and enemies around you are knocked back and stunned, and you max out your energy and health and keep the counter's benefits for the duration you managed to sustain the combo counter. Other benefits could be randomly applied with their own durations based on actions during gameplay.

Part of this 'universal combo counter' is inspired by games like DOOM Eternal which have a similarly frentic playstyle, this would make fighting a lot more enjoyable and reward everyone for their playstyle distinctions.

 

[Ryuoo89]

Hello, I hope you include the fix for bug on Protea Caladrius helmet in the next hotfix. It stucks and clipping weirdly. Thank you for your hard work.

19 hours ago, Ryuoo89 said:

It seems Protea Caladrius helmet skin still bugged after using her skill, and it's not turning back until returning to Orbiter.

 

 

[ThatRedGolem]

To be honest watching you actually use chroma's and your operator's buffs and having damage that is actually impactful considering the time it takes to reach max power, looks infinitely more fun than the bullet sponge fight we currently have. Just keep shooting until dead with no other way around it just incentivizes to just focus on being as big of a tank as possible since damage attenuation means nothing else matters.