Eximuses: What DE is trying to do, why it isn't working, and what should be tried.

[Sloth45]

It's no secret by now that Eximuses are in a poor state right now. I haven't caught the devstream about the eximus overhaul, but I can imagine the gist of what they're trying to do with them:

-Eximus Units, "Heavy Units", stand out above other enemies, being immune to typical tenno tactics, forcing them to move in to engage them with more focused weapons fire when abilities do not affect them.

-Eximus Units present a challenge distinct from the regular swarm of mob enemies, prompting switching up both movement and combat by both requiring a different approach to dealing with them, compared to other enemies, and being a threat that necessities swift removal, forcing players to prioritize them.

-Further supporting the fact that players should move towards the heavy unit to dispatch them, the MMO style 'incoming damage zone' warns players to step away from where they currently are, forcing them to move away from where they were previously and demanding their attention.

-To encourage more engagement from players, eximuses were then later buffed to have greater damage resistences, but then had a higher parazon finisher threshold, as to try to encourage players to weaken them and then finish them with a parazon kill.

 

Not inherently bad concepts. But the execution is what's flawed. The problems:

-Eximuses can attack from any direction, and being hit with a #*!%-you attack if you don't move within 1.5 seconds of being targeted is a problem if you happen to be engaged with any other enemy. Having two or three groups of 3-5 enemies on your screen otherwise means you're likely to be focused on other things and then blindsided with an attack you didn't see coming.

Solution: Make Eximuses more of an Obvious Threat. Have them be displayed on the minimap with a special colored dot, like Sayrn's Revealing Spores showing enemies up as green instead of red. Have their Enemy Radar blip be, I don't know, the color of their various eximus colors, with the Health Leech one being different, or give their enemy-radar dot an 'aura'. Alternatively, or in addition, you could have them emit a faint hum when they're within line of sight to the player. Lotus will occasionally warn you of a Heavy Unit Ahead... Very occasionally. Expect to be warned about an Eximus before you see it maybe one in thirty times.

Either way, the goal of player engagement is met, with attentive players quickly learning when a threat is in the area to prioritize, if they're already being attentive to audio/visual cues and what's going on around them.

-Players can be aware of the eximus unit, but still not be able to engage them, because the wind-up for the attacks is shorter then any existing stun.

This one is unfortunate. Sometimes, you get backhanded by a grineer melee unit, or a roller, and you get smacked around, unable to leave the eximus zone. You could make it so that the targeting delay is longer, but any player who still can't leave it gets hit with an even worse attack, but while that's an option, the truth is, this is indicative of another problem:

-Eximuses are #*!%ing Everywhere

The problem about having a threat that requires you to focus it down or suffer heavily is that it doesn't work so well when you have three of them bearing down on a player at once. High level missions, particularly in newer content, like ESO, Zariman, and so on, suffer from having excessive quantities of these, to the point you're about halfway to the Eximus Stronghold modifier on normal missions. For most players, if you get slammed into an Eximus' attack because you were stunlocked, odds are you were stunlocked by another eximus, batted around by another eximus, or were busy jumping away from another Eximus attack.  You can't prioitize on a threat when the threat is Literally Everywhere. By definition, you can only focus on a narrow field of tasks, not a multitude of them. That's what it means to focus.

Which brings us to our next problem!

-Despite encouraging Parazon Executions to eliminate eximuses, it's actually a trap.

Yeah, remember what I said about stuns? Well, getting animation locked into place while parazon excuting one enemy is functionally the same thing: You're literally asking to get whammied by an eximus attack by doing the one thing you're intended to be avoiding: Standing in place during the enemy wind-up. Or rather, the attack effect windup. You see, this problem is complicated by the fact that...

-Eximus attacks are immediate line-of-sight fire and forget unrelated to the attacker's state.

Remember when I mentioned stunlocks, again? There's a reason that a lot of the top shared builds will have Primed Sure Footed in them, because it's currently a huge threat. A managable one, other then Eximuses, but...

I digress. So, if this is such a powerful tactic, why can't we use it? The Eximuses are designed to force engagement and switch targets, right? So, you'll do just that- You gun down an Energy Leech Eximus, parazon stab them, and-

While they're halfway through literally being stabbed to death, they still fire off the attack- Now that you have now animation-locked yourself into taking the hit. Doing what DE has encouraged has lead to the player being punished, because Eximus units immediately spawn their area of effect attacks- Other then Arson eximuses, which do have an attack wind up- And their attacks cannot be interrupted by engaging them.

Edit: Come to think of it, this ties into the first problem, too: While a lot of enemies will not start shooting immediately, pausing to unfold, or point at you, or have a ralleying cry, the fact that Eximus attacks start at lightspeed as soon as you enter line of sight for them is a large part of why you need to be more aware of them. Warframe players kill mooks fast, but Heavy Units attack even faster.

So, in conclusion:

-If DE want to encourage Parazon stabs as the solution to handling Eximuses, make players briefly invulnerable to attacks/status effects while performing the stab, and a brief period after, so they are not punished for doing so.

-Make a priority target more obvious in the area before they shoot you in the back by adding an indicator other then seeing them in person, whether audio or visual. Players are busy killing, and should know of an Advanced Threat prior to getting blindsided by it.

-Cut down on eximus numbers so you don't get chain-CC'd between them, either by force or by having to prioritize one and getting hit by the other, even if each individual eximus is more dangerous, or spawn them more consistently but have only a few in combat at once.

-Make Eximus attack wind-ups consistent, so that Eximuses cannot attack when otherwise interrupted by being hard-stunned themselves after their Overshield is depleted.

 

[(XBOX)Rez090]

LOL to this whole post

[Tiltskillet]

3 hours ago, Sloth45 said:

Solution: Make Eximuses more of an Obvious Threat. Have them be displayed on the minimap with a special colored dot

I agree with this part.  

[AntifreezeUnder0]

They already obvious and any more particles which can further decrease performance even i have set things disabled or set to lowest, and still screen being overfilled with particles...

Only issues you may have with eximuses are in eximus stronghold sorties/archons and thats it.

And now compared when eximuses first got introduced their are weakened and adjusted so you can kill them easely than before. They are still annoying, but overall aint too bad. Side note frames with status immunities will benefit most going agaisnt eximuses.

More fun is when on certain gas city maps you have swarm of nullifiers comming at you. And by swarm i mean 40 to 50 nullifiers only.

And eximus or not the ancient disruptor - The shadow ninja of energy leech is the worst and best. 

[(XBOX)RaeOvSunshyn]

3 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

I agree with this part.  

I do not. I already have rainbow vomit all over my screen, it doesn't need to be all over my minimap too.

 

As for the Eximus re-re-re-rework...

 

I liked the *original* reworked version. To me, those were fun and engaging -- kept ya on yer toes enemies. But then people started complaining and more and more and MORE stuff was done to "fix" them and now they're just a blah PITA. A hot pink roller that you can mostly ignore while it follows behind you like a lost puppy for an entire exterminate mission is pretty dang ridiculous.

[Tiltskillet]

1 hour ago, (XBOX)RaeOvSunshyn said:

1 hour ago, Tiltskillet said:

I agree with this part.  

I do not. I already have rainbow vomit all over my screen, it doesn't need to be all over my minimap too.

 

To be clear,  I'm only in favor of what I quoted and not the OP's more elaborate idea of different colors for every eximus type.   We've already got  HUD markers for the minimap that are color customizable under Options // Accessibility // Interface. What I want is simply one more category for heavy units.  

If somebody can't abide anything but red or whatever color they've chosen for enemies on their  minimap, they could still set this to the same color.. 

 

[gamingchair1121]

tbh eximus are fine

and I'm a limbo main

its really just a matter of learning how to deal with them

[_COY_]

In my experience the Eximus are OK now; I do not feel your pain.
Yes, they can be a bit annoying and sometimes even a little challenge if they come in big numbers
(depending on enemy level and the warframe of your choice)

But without them all standard missions would become even more boring; they spice it up a little sometimes .
I hope they don't touch them again. I really do.

-c0y