Enemy Difficulty: Suggestions

[CrownOfShadows]

How to make good enemy difficulty for WF, imo:

Dynamic Difficulty

Forget scaling, it will only ever be temporary and always imperfect. Assess players instead and adjust difficulty to them, wherever they go. Do this by:

1. EHP rating of warframe (based on current mods, arcanes, shards, etc)
2. DPS rating of warframe (including weapons), this might further be broken up into Ability Rating, Melee Rating, and Ranged Weapon Ratings. While I am using DPS as a catch-all this would actually be a rating of effective damage, and would need to include things like elements and armor strip/bypass, etc. Notably, this would also factor in the enemies present. Running a bane mod, for example, or specific elementals.
3. General rating of warframe (a scale used as a baseline rating on what this warframe is generally capable of, necessary for multiple reasons including anti-cheesing the system)
4. Long-term rating of player and what content they can handle, possibly on a per frame basis but at least on a holistic basis (necessary to balance against the general rating - this rating lowers or raises the general rating based on how good the player is, it's how to weight the player vs the playerbase)
5. An Armor Stripping rating is surely necessary, as a squad without any armor strip will have a hard time vs one that does. Slash & Bleed would factor in here, probably, but this would include ability armor stripping.
6. A Crowd Control rating may also be necessary, things like 95% gloom slow should be taken into account and weighted

The potential for this should be quite obvious in a solo player setting, but let's look at it with squads. All of these ratings can be combined at a squad level so that we have a squad EHP, a squad DPS etc. This is a fine baseline, but there is an important multiplicative factor in having multiple tenno. To adjust for this, we need:

1. A general squad size scalar - this acts as a baseline difficulty throttle based on the number of warframes present. Important note: this should be tied to affinity zones. A tenno outside of the affinity range of other tenno is effectively alone. Most likely, the dynamic difficulty affects enemies at spawn, not enemies in real time. Also, it would affect individual spawn zones differently - for example, if 3 warframes are in one area, then the spawns around there would be rated based on 3 warframes, while spawns out by the lone 4th warframe would be rated for one.
2. Possibly, a synergy scalar. Basically this scalar analyzes a squad and determines if synergies between the warframes allow for greater difficulty than would normally be assigned. I think this would be very rare and somewhat unnecessary, but there are surely exceptions that won't be caught by all of the above ratings, and this is meant as a sophisticated lever for that.

Dynamic Enemies

Great, now we have dynamic difficulty. How does that translate into enemies? Well, we can simply scale the enemies based on these ratings. What this means is that you don't have to wait an hour or two or forty to reach the peak of what you and your frame and your weapons can handle, it's there in the very first enemy you face, and it doesn't get harder. That's fine, but we may want to make a little artificial scaling, just to ease players in and not make every mission absurdly hard right from the start. A little scaling is probably desirable for things like defense and survival as well, so there's a case for easing into it. Additionally, we may consider:

1. Enemy gradient: have a gradient of enemies (by difficulty - not just by type), with large numbers of cannon fodder that are lower than the rating (for multiple reasons, some of which involve items that need kills) - this would make up say 50% of the enemies, then a mid-tier, which make up perhaps 40% of enemies - these are rated higher. Finally, for the remaining 10% of enemies; these are at or slightly above the rating of what you are expected to be able to handle. Note that I'm not talking about enemy type here, but enemy difficulty (level) - for example you might have eximus scattered through all 3 tiers. Note these percentages were plucked from the air and are not gospels.

There are other - and probably better - ways of making dynamic cannon fodder, but to leverage what we already have this seems the simplest and most effective.

Adaptive Mini-Boss Auto-Spawns

Every so often, similar to acolytes perhaps, and in addition to them (or as a replacement or upgrade of them), spawn mini-bosses. These are special because they are based on the specific weaknesses of the warframes present. We stop spawning enemies, or perhaps only spawn relatively low level enemies during this time (these are going to be difficult, we don't want extra difficult enemies combined with extra difficult mini-bosses). We analyze the warframes and weapons (that are in affinity range of each other and the spawn point of the mini-boss). Each warframe has a weakness. Let's take some examples, the warframes and their counters:

• Wisp:          anti-healing, electric resistance, anti-haste
• Mesa:         anti-energy, ability disruption, anti-range, ability reflection
• Saryn:         anti-corrosion, anti-toxin, status cleanse
• Hildryn:      magnetic, toxin, silence, ability reflection
• Xaku:          anti-armor strip, exploding guns
• Titania:       anti-energy, ability disruption, homing missiles
• Loki:           anti-invisibility
• etc

First, note these are examples just off the top of my head, I didn't meditate for an hour on each one. Second, note that despite all the talk about how impossible it is to shut down warframes, it is very easy to do so. Third, note that it is SO easy to do so, that it must be done with finesse and a delicate touch. For example, you might look through these and say how unfair they are, but it depends completely on the implementation and the telegraphing.

Let's take the Titania example. If you are suddenly ripped out of your 4, you are likely dead, especially at high levels. But if a mini-boss telegraphed this was coming very visibly, giving you plenty of time to fly out of the way - then it's a good mechanic, because it forces you to break off your boring attack. Likewise, if your energy goes from full to zero in the blink of an eye, that's bs. But if the enemy shoots energy leeching rounds at you, and you only lose points of energy and/or energy regen if they hit you, then that's much more balanced. Or maybe the enemy pulses spheres of energy leeching that you need to avoid, or maybe the closer you get the more energy is leeched, and as you back off it is restored to you. These are just basic examples, you don't need to bother nit-picking them, I'm simply communicating ideas in a broad way here. Every warframe has weaknesses that can and should be exploited by smart enemies, and doing so in a balanced way is tricky but the very essence of interesting gameplay. Having no counters is the main reason gameplay is so uninteresting.

Let's take the Loki example because I can already feel the hackles rising. A miniboss has anti-invisibility to deal with Loki. Does this make Loki visible? No. You'd have some class about it, obviously. You'd create a very well telegraphed anti-invisibility ability, say a great eye that scans around in a sweeping ray. If the ray passes over Loki, he is visible to the miniboss and might be attacked. So get out of the ray.  Or maybe it's a directional pulse that reveals everything invisible as it travels. Or maybe it's a pulsed aura that prevents Loki from getting too close. Or maybe it's a bit more of a guess, where the miniboss sort of sees you on occasion, but not exactly, and attacks you with a weapon or ability (balanced to your EHP) designed to hit your ghost with some success. There are tons of possibilities, ways of making Loki less immune to everything, while still respecting his niche. Invisibility should always have a counter, that's basic game design.

You should be able to see how all this would work well in a solo setting, but again, let's explore a team setting. Let's say you have (Xaku, Mesa, Citrine and Wisp), a very strong team. Let's say that we spawn between 1-4 minibosses, tailored to this unit comp. How exactly these counters are divvied up between the minibosses is another matter, not worried about that right now. We simply have a pool of counters available and these minibosses - however many there are - have them in whatever combinations. So let's say that from the pool we have anti-armorstrip, anti-healing, ability reflection and cleanse.

Here's what it would look like. Mesa jumps into her 4, nails about a million damage into them, then her bullets start flying back at her, slowly at first, a percentage of them, and then more and more until finally she is forced to exit her 4 or be in danger herself (this is ability reflection). After a little while, she is able to jump back into her 4 and not be targeted afresh, and the cycle goes from there. Meanwhile, Citrine's crystal is activated on them all, and it runs for awhile but then stops working as they individually cleanse the effect and it stops targeting them for the duration of the cleanse, let's say 10 seconds, after which it must be reactivated on them. Wisp meanwhile is doing wisp things, but suddenly the team isn't healing for quite as much as normal because the minibosses are shooting anti-healing bullets or swinging anti-healing melee that slows or stops the healing. This causes some people who are getting low to duck out of range to let the anti-healing effect wear off (a few seconds) and then jump back into the fray again after the motes heal them up. Xaku is doing xaku things, but the minibosses create counter bubbles of anti-armor strip around them which reduce or negate the effect. These are disrupted by enough heat procs though, and they turn off as heat builds up. As the minibosses cleanse, the heat is purged and the bubbles reinforced, and the cycles continues. During all of this, of course, the minibosses are attacking and you are attacking them. Again, these are just basic examples, if you want *real* ones get somebody with a salary.

Here's a few things to consider:

1. Each counter ability is here targeted at a specific warframe. In this example even though they have ability reflection to counter Mesa's 4, they aren't using it to counter Citrine's crystal, reflecting it back at her. I'm not saying that's not an option, it could be, but the point is these are not GENERIC defense abilities like you'd expect out of a lich or something. Each defense is targeted and activates only on what it is meant to activate on. This is subtle but extremely important to the health of any such system. We don't want to just slap ability reflection on them and call them done for 90% of warframes. They have ability reflection for Mesa's 4 quite specifically, and that's what they use it for, nothing else, and the same for each item in the pool. This allows for balancing (in theory). I'm not saying that a lot of counters might not look the same or even BE the same, but I am saying that they shouldn't be broad catch-all solutions that always ship out because that will end up being much less enjoyable.
2. Another important point is that each warframe has many ways to be countered, but the minibosses in this example only bring one. I think this is good because it means there's variety every time you encounter them. You might be facing one of half a dozen counters when they show up.
3. Also, this example is somewhat simplified. If, for example, the Xaku was running a high powered gloom, the minibosses would necessarily need to bring a counter to that in addition to their gaze counter. Warframes can be dangerous for more than one reason and may require multiple counters.
4. If each miniboss spawns with only one warframe's counter, the danger of the minibosses drops a lot, because it can only deal with one warframe. Thus, it's likely best that each miniboss, however many there might be, have most if not all of the tools it needs to fight several warframes at once. If instead of multiple, we just want to spawn one, then obviously this is the case. However, if we do spawn 4, we here have the potential to create gaps in their individual defense by shorting them, which can be a good way to add some tactical gameplay.
5. Likewise, it's important to note that while these minibosses should have tailored defense and offense, they should also have weaknesses. We don't want every tool that was brought into the mission to be countered, even if it's not a hard counter but a soft and situational one. We might detect the elementals of the weapons present and perhaps make one or two of them very weak to those, for example. While this type of native disadvantage is not as compelling as a situational disadvantage, it can still be useful.
6. There is huge potential for tag-team play with this mini-boss setup, where, similar to warframes, they are extremely formidable as a group but as one falls more defenses are left open and the attacks become less potent. Minibosses could perform wombo-combos on warframes or work together to attack high value targets. This is an entire tier above what I've laid out so far, but a potentially awesome one. Telegraphing here would be quite important when it comes to everything, but they can shield and heal and otherwise buff or enable each other.
7. The true beauty of these is that they aren't invalidating warframe abilities. They aren't immune. Rather, they counter them, and they don't completely counter them - that's important - they provisionally, circumstantially, temporarily counter them. This is how you deal with warframes without using invulnerability or nullifiers.
8. Phases: having the minibosses become enraged or defensive or charging up an ultimate attack or transforming and gaining entirely new abilities are all great mechanics that we just don't see much of in WF. I'd include them all and more.
9. Note again that all of these mini-bosses are dynamically adapted to your team. They're custom to your EHP, to your DPS, to your ability sets and what you have helminthed and what archon shards you're running and even what focus school you have - everything about your team is factored into them, thus they change every time you face them, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. I haven't talked about the design space for these guys, but you could do some really cool things based on what they're bringing.
10. A note on AI: personally I'd invest in some better AI for these minibosses. They should be able to recognize when they're taking enormous damage beyond what they're expecting, or when they aren't being effective and have backup plans. For example if they roll up and got one shot somehow (which really shouldn't happen after all the analysis above, but y'know WF), then it's time for a resurrection and a new plan. Further, some might try to lure warframes away from their companions or into hallways some other sneaky stuff like that. What we really want is a fight. A back and forth, a struggle, a brawl, where we take punches and deliver them.
11. And finally note that these wouldn't pop up everywhere - similar to acolytes you wouldn't see them running a fast rescue or a capture, but they'd show up eventually in longer missions.

Optional

There are a lot of reasons not to want to play at the limit of what your loadout can do (cracking rivens, experimenting, etc), so while I said make this the standard everywhere, that's with an asterisk. My suggestion would be to replace SP with such a system, and leave the toggle in place. This would allow dynamic and interesting play everywhere from nightmare missions to Circulus to Invasions - everything, anywhere you go, as long as you have the toggle on, is challenging your loadout in a very customized way.

Notes on MR Diffs

Where this system would likely suffer somewhat is when there is a large MR spread. If you have a well-equipped L3 matched with a badly equipped MR 14, the system would result in averaged enemies that the MR14 would struggle with and the L3 would shrug at. One possible solution to this would be to adapt the enemy gradient I mentioned to apply in this case where the majority of enemies are averaged around the MR14, a good chunk of them are averaged higher towards the L3 and a rare few are at the L3's level.

If you have MR14, L3, L3, L3 in a squad, the averaging would leave the MR14 behind slightly, but if we weight mid tier towards the majority it should create as healthy a mix as possible. Thus, with the gradient, the lowest tier (and most populous) is targeted at the lowest member, the mid tier is targeted at the majority, and the high tier (rare) is targeted at the top player(s). While okay, the issue here is likely that the upper players would wipe the lower enemies away as they go - its not like they would leave the low enemies for the MR14. Alas, that's par for the course no matter how you stack it. This is where the SP toggle may help create a little, albeit imperfect, homogeneity.

Punishments/Debuffs

 

One of the main improvements I'd also suggest for more engaging play is better punishments. There is currently only one basic punishment: death. I'd implement a host of debuffs to accompany the minibosses in particular, but also in general gameplay. We do have some mostly invisible debuffs (elemental procs). The cold update is perhaps the most prominent of these, and the magnetic HUD effect, but I'm recommending a bunch of classic ones - they're obvious when you think about it.

Inflicting warframes with things like heal-cut, armor-cut, shield-recharge-cut, shield-size-cut, overshield denial, shield-poison, energy-cut, damage-cut, crit chance-cut, crit dmg cut, ability power debuff, ability range debuff, ability efficiency debuff, arcane blocking, aura blocking, shard blocking, weapon jams, vacuum blocking, etc, etc, etc - these temporary debuffs would add a lot of variety to gameplay. WF is currently lacking detriments to it's overpowered heroes' rampage - it's just Not Death or Death. Adding debuffs would create a huge arena of both interest and danger during gameplay, especially if they were dynamically scaled. We have buffs; buffs on buffs on buffs. We could do with some debuffs. I believe these would shine the most in prolonged combat scenarios (minibosses) but specialized enemies can deliver them too, as can the environment.

Another almost completely untapped area is enemy cc. There's a little of this - knockdowns and the guys that grab you (which eventually becomes a non-factor), but there could and should be so much more, most especially with important enemies like these suggested minibosses. Freezing a warframe solid - either for an instant or until a fellow tenno shoots you to get you free, throwing a warframe across the room, pinning them to a wall for a second or two, creating a field that gradually pushes everything away for a bit, tethering - all great gameplay variety especially if done in a way that doesn't seriously interrupt anything or make warframes helpless to incoming damage. It's touchy, and it can be done badly, yes, but it can be done great too, and having these as slaps on the wrist for carelessness is a great alternative to death, imo. Like, oh, you didn't get out of the way - well instead of insta-death how about this debuff or this cc?

TLDR

Scale basic enemies based on an analysis of the squad instead of using a gradual leveling system.

Add mini-bosses tailored to the squad, designed to counter the warframes in meaningful ways.

Add debuffs to gameplay.

 

[Zakkhar]

35 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Each warframe has a weakness

ability disruption

Pretty much every ability based frame.

[xXDragonGodXx]

1 hour ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Dynamic Difficulty

Forget scaling, it will only ever be temporary and always imperfect. Assess players instead and adjust difficulty to them, wherever they go. Do this by:

1. EHP rating of warframe (based on current mods, arcanes, shards, etc)
2. DPS rating of warframe (including weapons), this might further be broken up into Ability Rating, Melee Rating, and Ranged Weapon Ratings. While I am using DPS as a catch-all this would actually be a rating of effective damage, and would need to include things like elements and armor strip/bypass, etc. Notably, this would also factor in the enemies present. Running a bane mod, for example, or specific elementals.
3. General rating of warframe (a scale used as a baseline rating on what this warframe is generally capable of, necessary for multiple reasons including anti-cheesing the system)
4. Long-term rating of player and what content they can handle, possibly on a per frame basis but at least on a holistic basis (necessary to balance against the general rating - this rating lowers or raises the general rating based on how good the player is, it's how to weight the player vs the playerbase)
5. An Armor Stripping rating is surely necessary, as a squad without any armor strip will have a hard time vs one that does. Slash & Bleed would factor in here, probably, but this would include ability armor stripping.
6. A Crowd Control rating may also be necessary, things like 95% gloom slow should be taken into account and weighted

So what you are essentially saying is that with one of my builds that scales from hundreds of millions to negative damage cap would have the enemies scale from lvl 155 to level cap in less than 5 minutes? Even on steel path?

[Nekomian]

I like some of these ideas as concepts, but in practice this would be way too difficult to do at the scale the game currently functions at. There's entirely too many variables and branching conditions that would cause all sorts of cheesing or issues. You'd have to assign some "rating" and "usability" of: frames, weapons, abilities, cc and status procs available, general account, all equipment, and tons of other things, all in combination with one another. This is 100s of different factors all interacting with one another (i.e. frame is excal, has these abilities and their exact functions and usefulness per frame, this amount of EHP and grading based on values like overguard / HP / shield / overshield, these mods and this DPS, has this gear and all their modding, this MR level and play-time per equipment, these operator abilities, these cc's they can apply across all equipment, these status effects they can apply across all equipment, all having weights applied to them in a very long formula to determine "enemy level" for scaling), and it would be extremely difficult to quantify some of these interactions and their usefulness at different play styles and levels.

The solutions presented don't even take into consideration things like operator abilities (protective dash granting invulnerability) or gear like necramechs, and I don't know how you'd even deal with those unless you now nullify operators in some way or take them into consideration as "the player may use them, so scale the difficulty", or create some sort of counters for them as well.

I do think they should focus on making more interactive gameplay, but I don't think enemy scaling or "anti-frame countering" is a solution here - it just stagnates gameplay and makes things take longer rather than making them more interesting, or causes players to forgo working existing builds or mandates certain play styles for survivability purposes.

Players will always try and work around limitations of systems, and working with something as complex and numerous as Warframe's systems to this degree would require a ton of considerations that end up breaking and changing with every single hotfix / rework / revision of any system. I think they chose scaling the way they did because of its simplicity (level directly relates to EHP / damage output, bigger is stronger) to implement and understand - while it's not perfect, I do think it works for the majority of content the game has and for the majority of players.

[Tsukinoki]

3 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Freezing a warframe solid - either for an instant or until a fellow tenno shoots you to get you free

DE tried this with nervos back when seekers were introduced.
It sucked and was way too strong and disruptive to players and was removed.

Especially because in 99% of cases everyone else will just ignore the frozen team-mate until that teammate dies, or the rest of the team finishes the mission (with the mandatory 1 minute waiting period at the exit).
The other 1% of the time?  The entire party gets tagged and then you just sit there twiddling your thumbs and waiting to slowly die with absolutely nothing that can be done about it.

Players are generally too selfish for those mechanics to work properly.

3 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Add mini-bosses tailored to the squad, designed to counter the warframes in meaningful ways.

One of the bigger issues with this idea is that warframe EHP can vary way too much.

Say a squad has an Inaros, full tank with maximum armor, health and adaptation.
The game spawns a boss that can actually do damage to said Inaros.  What about the rest of the squad?  They will just get one-shot by that boss with nothing they can do about it except for "Run away, that's an anti-inaros so no point in even engaging as every shot will deal tens of thousands of damage."  And they won't even know which one is the anti-inaros boss until it just starts one-shotting everyone else in the party.

 

Something like this can't really work with how varied the EHP of the squad can be.
Either it tends towards the majority of the squad, and therefore barely tickles the inaros, or it tends towards the inaros and everyone else just gets one-shot.

 

In a game where the EHP between party members can vary drastically, and even be time sensitive, this is just unrealistic.
If the players EHP was more normalized where you didn't have differences where some frames have literally 1000X the EHP of another frame this would be a more feasible idea.  The problem is that the differences are simply too big.

3 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Scale basic enemies based on an analysis of the squad instead of using a gradual leveling system

And again you have a very similar problem to the above, even with players of a similar MR to each other.

The damage output of some frames, such as Mirage or Chroma, is so high compared to what other frames can output that you either have enemies that everyone else in the squad can deal with and the mirage/chroma just blink out of existence, or you have enemies that the mirage/chroma have difficulty with and other frames that can't stack modifiers like that can't even hope to deal damage to them.

The possible damage just varies way too much, even with similar weapons in a similar MR category.
Again without some normalization of damage possibilities between the frames so that you can't have a frame that just goes "Yeah, I'm going to be multiplying my final damage by 6x what any other frame could do with the same gear....." and have any feasible "middle ground" that achieves what you're trying to achieve here.

 

 

There is simply far too much variance in warframe for this idea to be feasible without some massive number crunch on the players side.
You can't have a middle ground in enemy damage between two frames when one literally has 1000x EHP than another.
You can't have a middle ground in enemy defense between two frames when one literally does 6x (or more) damage than another with all other gear being equal.

Edited August 21, 2023 by Tsukinoki

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

Difficulty doesn't work well in warframe because we Tenno have way too many tools to ignore difficulty. The only possbile way to add difficult engagment in this game is to limit the player. Which by previous attempts isn't worth the effort.

[(NSW)Greybones]

I’ll admit, I just read the title, but “scaling” jumped out; so if I make a build with the express purpose of making things a little easier, the game won’t let me?

We already got scaling; the point of the different levels is to facilitate different builds, and players stick to a handful precisely because the game doesn’t scale with them. Your standard player isn’t searching “EZ Steel Path” because they want to fight, and players who haven’t done a search aren’t using those same builds because they want to fight

Edited August 21, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones

[CrownOfShadows]

10 hours ago, xXDragonGodXx said:

So what you are essentially saying is that with one of my builds that scales from hundreds of millions to negative damage cap would have the enemies scale from lvl 155 to level cap in less than 5 minutes? Even on steel path?

No. It would start at near level cap if that's what you can so easily handle, and then quickly reach it, if solo, only while on SP.

9 hours ago, Naroxas44 said:

I like some of these ideas as concepts, but in practice this would be way too difficult to do at the scale the game currently functions at. There's entirely too many variables and branching conditions

Partially disagree with this. Statistical algorithms can work magic.

9 hours ago, Naroxas44 said:

The solutions presented don't even take into consideration things like operator abilities (protective dash granting invulnerability) or gear like necramechs, and I don't know how you'd even deal with those unless you now nullify operators in some way or take them into consideration as "the player may use them, so scale the difficulty", or create some sort of counters for them as well.

I don't know why you think operators are a problem here. The only gear *problems* I can see are specters and maybe decaying dragon keys, I honestly don't know why either are still in the game and personally I'd take them out. Necramechs and archwings (and RJ) need expansion, not my fault they dropped the ball on them.

9 hours ago, Naroxas44 said:

I do think they should focus on making more interactive gameplay, but I don't think enemy scaling or "anti-frame countering" is a solution here - it just stagnates gameplay and makes things take longer rather than making them more interesting, or causes players to forgo working existing builds or mandates certain play styles for survivability purposes.

It would take longer compared to mowing down countless mobs, yes. Just like Lichs and Acolytes are supposed to. Do you dislike those? I don't see how it's less interesting. It wouldn't mandate builds because it factors in whatever build you currently are running, and also there would be a great variety of possible counters so you wouldn't be able to reliably anticipate what you'd be hit with.

9 hours ago, Naroxas44 said:

working with something as complex and numerous as Warframe's systems to this degree would require a ton of considerations that end up breaking and changing with every single hotfix / rework / revision of any system. I think they chose scaling the way they did because of its simplicity (level directly relates to EHP / damage output, bigger is stronger) to implement and understand - while it's not perfect, I do think it works for the majority of content the game has and for the majority of players.

This point about updates changing mechanics is a solid one, I hadn't really considered that aspect. I doubt they had a single thought in their head about the modern end-game when they designed enemy scaling at warframe's inception however. You're right it works okay, it's just boring af.

8 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

Something like this can't really work with how varied the EHP of the squad can be.

Either it tends towards the majority of the squad, and therefore barely tickles the inaros, or it tends towards the inaros and everyone else just gets one-shot.

In a game where the EHP between party members can vary drastically, and even be time sensitive, this is just unrealistic.
If the players EHP was more normalized where you didn't have differences where some frames have literally 1000X the EHP of another frame this would be a more feasible idea.  The problem is that the differences are simply too big.

You make a good point about the EHP gap in warframes, but the math isn't the whole story. Even so, let's take the case of just the one miniboss. It's EHP is based on the DPS of the squad, and it's rough DPS is based on the EHP of the squad. Now, because it's averaged, there might be a low EHP warframe on the squad and a high EHP warframe (I wouldn't use Inaros as an example, he's paper thin these days - unless he was a low EHP example lolz). But just as with regular gameplay, the low EHP warframe will be hiding from the fight and the high EHP warframe will be fighting in the open. Because the high EHP warframe is above the averaged DPS of the miniboss it will be able to tank with ease. You can scale this example up to two or three or four, because you would split the desired EHP and DPS between all of them. So while the differences are big, bigger differences actually make the fight easier, at least on paper. If you have 4 warframes all with the same EHP, then it will be harder.

8 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

The damage output of some frames, such as Mirage or Chroma, is so high compared to what other frames can output that you either have enemies that everyone else in the squad can deal with and the mirage/chroma just blink out of existence, or you have enemies that the mirage/chroma have difficulty with and other frames that can't stack modifiers like that can't even hope to deal damage to them.

Hence my suggestion to implement a three-level enemy gradient. Admittedly, this would work better in some game modes than others, but you'd want a mix of enemies tailored to the squad. If the mirage can handle those enemies, spawn them. The warframes that can't handle them won't. That's better than the mirage yawning while they wipe the map uncontested.

5 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

I’ll admit, I just read the title, but “scaling” jumped out; so if I make a build with the express purpose of making things a little easier, the game won’t let me?

We already got scaling; the point of the different levels is to facilitate different builds, and players stick to a handful precisely because the game doesn’t scale with them. Your standard player isn’t searching “EZ Steel Path” because they want to fight, and players who haven’t done a search aren’t using those same builds because they want to fight

Why are you playing SP?

[(NSW)Greybones]

13 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Why are you playing SP?

?

Typically I jump into SP to test a particularly potent combination of mods, loadout, schools, etcetera that wreck the main game. Sometimes it’s to have another shot at whatever rewards catch my eye at the time. Usually the goal is to see how far I can go before I get bored, and removing the fight as effectively as possible is part of that goal.

Usually I don’t bother with SP because it’s got a pretty poor cross section of difficulty and build variety, and since I know how to build for the different levels it’s a simple matter of tweaking a few components of my build or choosing a slightly different mission range to adjust the difficulty. The game auto-scaling isn’t necessary and I’d get kind of annoyed if I made a build for certain content and then took it outside of that content for a different experience and the game adjusted itself and I might as well not have bothered

[CrownOfShadows]

32 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

?

Typically I jump into SP to test a particularly potent combination of mods, loadout, schools, etcetera that wreck the main game. Sometimes it’s to have another shot at whatever rewards catch my eye at the time. Usually the goal is to see how far I can go before I get bored, and removing the fight as effectively as possible is part of that goal.

Usually I don’t bother with SP because it’s got a pretty poor cross section of difficulty and build variety, and since I know how to build for the different levels it’s a simple matter of tweaking a few components of my build or choosing a slightly different mission range to adjust the difficulty. The game auto-scaling isn’t necessary and I’d get kind of annoyed if I made a build for certain content and then took it outside of that content for a different experience and the game adjusted itself and I might as well not have bothered

Oh you don't really play SP?

[(NSW)Greybones]

12 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Oh you don't really play SP?

I… do…? It’s not the only thing I do because of obvious reasons, it’s only a part of the whole game that I engage with. I like a fight as much as the next person, but the sacrifice to build and playstyle variety is not worth living in SP when we’ve got the rest of the game, plus the main thing to do in it is to try and turn it off and is why I’m not so bothered by any balance problems for SP that the rest of the game already has sorted because I’m not thinking of whether what I’m bringing to the fight is balanced for the fight when I poke around in it

Edited August 22, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones

[(NSW)Greybones]

13 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Oh you don't really play SP?

What… point are you trying to make? I’m beginning to wonder what you thought your builds were meant to do as you were crunching the numbers and optimising your loadouts

[CrownOfShadows]

2 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

What… point are you trying to make? I’m beginning to wonder what you thought your builds were meant to do as you were crunching the numbers and optimising your loadouts

I'm trying to figure out if you are bored by the regular starchart, whether you play with the SP toggle always on or not. It seems you still find a great deal of enjoyment in the original starchart and that that's your default, and that's great, everyone's on their own WF journey.

This thread is geared towards people who are bored of the regular starchart and also are bored of the SP. We have already 'power fantasied' our way out of the SP, and instead of creating the Tungsten Path or the Diamond Path, I'm suggesting we make a longer-term solution that challenges us not only with appropriate leveling but with smarter enemies and more dynamic general gameplay.

[(NSW)Greybones]

7 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

I'm trying to figure out if you are bored by the regular starchart, whether you play with the SP toggle always on or not. It seems you still find a great deal of enjoyment in the original starchart and that that's your default, and that's great, everyone's on their own WF journey.

This thread is geared towards people who are bored of the regular starchart and also are bored of the SP. We have already 'power fantasied' our way out of the SP, and instead of creating the Tungsten Path or the Diamond Path, I'm suggesting we make a longer-term solution that challenges us not only with appropriate leveling but with smarter enemies and more dynamic general gameplay.

What was the point of doing what you did? When you crunched the numbers and optimised the build and took advantage of every single cheese tactic, surely you were fully aware that, y’know, the game wasn’t going to get harder. We’ve got things like loadout managers specifically to store builds that someone likes so that they can use something else that will find a place elsewhere across the different levels of the game, what’s… keeping you in the most powerful builds you could possibly make, and why should the game play catch-up when the game already offers both increased build variety and alternative challenge? The game already most likely has what you’re looking for if you weren’t… actively trying to avoid it (which makes the call for dynamic scaling a little weird)

[(NSW)Greybones]

29 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

I'm trying to figure out if you are bored by the regular starchart, whether you play with the SP toggle always on or not. It seems you still find a great deal of enjoyment in the original starchart and that that's your default, and that's great, everyone's on their own WF journey.

This thread is geared towards people who are bored of the regular starchart and also are bored of the SP. We have already 'power fantasied' our way out of the SP, and instead of creating the Tungsten Path or the Diamond Path, I'm suggesting we make a longer-term solution that challenges us not only with appropriate leveling but with smarter enemies and more dynamic general gameplay.

If you want I got tips that may tide you over until they introduce dynamic difficulty

[CrownOfShadows]

22 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

What was the point of doing what you did? When you crunched the numbers and optimised the build and took advantage of every single cheese tactic, surely you were fully aware that, y’know, the game wasn’t going to get harder. We’ve got things like loadout managers specifically to store builds that someone likes so that they can use something else that will find a place elsewhere across the different levels of the game, what’s… keeping you in the most powerful builds you could possibly make, and why should the game play catch-up when the game already offers both increased build variety and alternative challenge? The game already most likely has what you’re looking for if you weren’t… actively trying to avoid it (which makes the call for dynamic scaling a little weird)

7 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

If you want I got tips that may tide you over until they introduce dynamic difficulty

You're making WAY too many assumptions about me. I wasn't trying to insult you, I was just trying to figure out if you play the SP by default. You still prefer the regular starchart, and that's totally fine, I'm not knocking you for that. If you feel like you have an intelligent point to make, please just make it, with as much clarity as possible.

[(NSW)Greybones]

3 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

You're making WAY too many assumptions about me. I wasn't trying to insult you, I was just trying to figure out if you play the SP by default. You still prefer the regular starchart, and that's totally fine, I'm not knocking you for that. If you feel like you have an intelligent point to make, please just make it, with as much clarity as possible.

I didn’t feel insulted, it’s just mostly when players talk about being bored in Steel Path it’s usually some players who think the sole purpose of this game is to make the most OP cheesiest build that breaks the game as much as possible and then wonder where the build variety and gameplay went and start asking that the game cater to their weird backwards way of thought when they’re fundamentally searching for a broken game and will be forever at odds with anything a game designer throws at them

I guess some of that eyeroll came through, which wasn’t necessarily my purpose.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s no surprise that this game lets us make a few builds what break the game, right? We can do things like take Inaros to a No-Shield nightmare and basically turn off the modifier, and we can pretty much reach level infinity with things like shieldgate builds and their invincibility-on-demand.

Stands to reason then that if we explore the alternatives, we got the entire rest of the game to play around in, right? We got all this modless gear and a bunch of mods to equip that alter how they work and what they do, schools that further augment what we can do, gearwheel items that further augment what we can do, missions that provide the various playgrounds to take the result to. It’s a sandbox game where we play how we want, and if fleeing the fight makes for limited build and gameplay variety that eventually gets stale, looking for the fight makes for the opposite

[CrownOfShadows]

3 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

I didn’t feel insulted, it’s just mostly when players talk about being bored in Steel Path it’s usually some players who think the sole purpose of this game is to make the most OP cheesiest build that breaks the game as much as possible and then wonder where the build variety and gameplay went and start asking that the game cater to their weird backwards way of thought when they’re fundamentally searching for a broken game and will be forever at odds with anything a game designer throws at them

I guess some of that eyeroll came through, which wasn’t necessarily my purpose.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s no surprise that this game lets us make a few builds what break the game, right? We can do things like take Inaros to a No-Shield nightmare and basically turn off the modifier, and we can pretty much reach level infinity with things like shieldgate builds and their invincibility-on-demand.

Stands to reason then that if we explore the alternatives, we got the entire rest of the game to play around in, right? We got all this modless gear and a bunch of mods to equip that alter how they work and what they do, schools that further augment what we can do, gearwheel items that further augment what we can do, missions that provide the various playgrounds to take the result to. It’s a sandbox game where we play how we want, and if fleeing the fight makes for limited build and gameplay variety that eventually gets stale, looking for the fight makes for the opposite

While there is a strong sandboxing element to WF, like every game it also needs to be fun. All our various tools are interesting and awesome - we are excelling beyond belief in that department. I actually can't think of a single other game that is as technically intricate and rewarding as WF, and I'm saying that even though I have major gripes about the mod system and would also make a lot of improvements to the ability system.

The problem with WF has always been in having something to use all these fantastic tools on, with game modes and enemies that challenge us to find the limits of them and enjoy them through use. In this area WF is lackluster compared to other games. When it comes to enemies, having trash mobs that just run at you and die is really all we get. Now this is usually where we hear some parrot say "power fantasy!" but you can have a power fantasy and still have challenging enemies.

It's like we have an incredibly diverse toolbox but we never have a project and we just drag out our lil ol hammer to tap something here or there every week. So creating enemies that make us think and game modes that make us think is a good thing, because we have to crack open our toolbox and actually solve something. If all the lame cheesy crutches that people rely on, like invisibility and invincibility, suddenly had counterplay, then people would struggle, in a good way. We need struggle to be relevant.

I'm not saying that dynamic scaling and adaptive minibosses and debuffs are the ultimate solution, I'm just saying that they could be part of it and that they would give us trouble, and trouble is what we desperately need. If nothing troubles us, nothing challenges us, and if nothing challenges us, we run out of reasons to play.

[(NSW)Greybones]

2 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

While there is a strong sandboxing element to WF, like every game it also needs to be fun. All our various tools are interesting and awesome - we are excelling beyond belief in that department. I actually can't think of a single other game that is as technically intricate and rewarding as WF, and I'm saying that even though I have major gripes about the mod system and would also make a lot of improvements to the ability system.

The problem with WF has always been in having something to use all these fantastic tools on, with game modes and enemies that challenge us to find the limits of them and enjoy them through use. In this area WF is lackluster compared to other games. When it comes to enemies, having trash mobs that just run at you and die is really all we get. Now this is usually where we hear some parrot say "power fantasy!" but you can have a power fantasy and still have challenging enemies.

It's like we have an incredibly diverse toolbox but we never have a project and we just drag out our lil ol hammer to tap something here or there every week. So creating enemies that make us think and game modes that make us think is a good thing, because we have to crack open our toolbox and actually solve something. If all the lame cheesy crutches that people rely on, like invisibility and invincibility, suddenly had counterplay, then people would struggle, in a good way. We need struggle to be relevant.

I'm not saying that dynamic scaling and adaptive minibosses and debuffs are the ultimate solution, I'm just saying that they could be part of it and that they would give us trouble, and trouble is what we desperately need. If nothing troubles us, nothing challenges us, and if nothing challenges us, we run out of reasons to play.

Usually people parroting “Power Fantasy” are the ones who decided to take Inaros to a no-shield modifier; clearly uninterested in anything approaching risk and uncaring about any sort of variety, they chose the options that let them avoid death. There is such a thing as too optimal at cost to variety, and turning off the modifier pretty clearly indicates what the player wants and doesn’t want

Which isn’t necessarily a problem; let them lean on their crutches. It makes the game more accessible. Means that multiplayer is full of self-sufficient players, but it’s a lawless land anyways. You can’t do what they do and expect an alternative outcome though; I would take Inaros to a no-shield specifically if I was looking for the easy path, the dude has no shields and the modifier is literally “No shields”, and otherwise I’d take something else. These are the players who build for level 100 content and take it into level 60 Arbitrations precisely because they don’t want to face death in Arbitrations, they specifically seek out endless energy not as an optional way to build and play, but the only way to build and play because they have to sit there and spam abilities to survive

The game’s already got the capability to make us think, but it makes sense that if you make a build expecting it to be the most optimal solution to your problem, it’s going to be the most optimal solution and that was the point of the build and the sweet spot between build variety and difficulty is somewhere in the middle of the game, not at the end of SP

[(NSW)Greybones]

20 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

While there is a strong sandboxing element to WF, like every game it also needs to be fun. All our various tools are interesting and awesome - we are excelling beyond belief in that department. I actually can't think of a single other game that is as technically intricate and rewarding as WF, and I'm saying that even though I have major gripes about the mod system and would also make a lot of improvements to the ability system.

The problem with WF has always been in having something to use all these fantastic tools on, with game modes and enemies that challenge us to find the limits of them and enjoy them through use. In this area WF is lackluster compared to other games. When it comes to enemies, having trash mobs that just run at you and die is really all we get. Now this is usually where we hear some parrot say "power fantasy!" but you can have a power fantasy and still have challenging enemies.

It's like we have an incredibly diverse toolbox but we never have a project and we just drag out our lil ol hammer to tap something here or there every week. So creating enemies that make us think and game modes that make us think is a good thing, because we have to crack open our toolbox and actually solve something. If all the lame cheesy crutches that people rely on, like invisibility and invincibility, suddenly had counterplay, then people would struggle, in a good way. We need struggle to be relevant.

I'm not saying that dynamic scaling and adaptive minibosses and debuffs are the ultimate solution, I'm just saying that they could be part of it and that they would give us trouble, and trouble is what we desperately need. If nothing troubles us, nothing challenges us, and if nothing challenges us, we run out of reasons to play.

🤔 Have you… ever known what a fight can look like? Usually if the community has any say, they’d steer players away from the fight and into the narrow “Power Fantasy”, and if someone doesn’t go out of their way to explore alternatives, they could be perpetually built for content they never tackle unless it was something lower-level

[CrownOfShadows]

14 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Usually people parroting “Power Fantasy” are the ones who decided to take Inaros to a no-shield modifier; clearly uninterested in anything approaching risk and uncaring about any sort of variety, they chose the options that let them avoid death. There is such a thing as too optimal at cost to variety, and turning off the modifier pretty clearly indicates what the player wants and doesn’t want

Which isn’t necessarily a problem; let them lean on their crutches. It makes the game more accessible. Means that multiplayer is full of self-sufficient players, but it’s a lawless land anyways. You can’t do what they do and expect an alternative outcome though; I would take Inaros to a no-shield specifically if I was looking for the easy path, the dude has no shields and the modifier is literally “No shields”, and otherwise I’d take something else. These are the players who build for level 100 content and take it into level 60 Arbitrations precisely because they don’t want to face death in Arbitrations, they specifically seek out endless energy not as an optional way to build and play, but the only way to build and play because they have to sit there and spam abilities to survive

The game’s already got the capability to make us think, but it makes sense that if you make a build expecting it to be the most optimal solution to your problem, it’s going to be the most optimal solution and that was the point of the build and the sweet spot between build variety and difficulty is somewhere in the middle of the game, not at the end of SP

11 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

🤔 Have you… ever known what a fight can look like? Usually if the community has any say, they’d steer players away from the fight and into the narrow “Power Fantasy”, and if someone doesn’t go out of their way to explore alternatives, they could be perpetually built for content they never tackle unless it was something lower-level

Well, in your Inaros nightmare example, the no-shield modifier is clearly designed specifically to encourage people to play tanks like Inaros, Grendel, Rhino, etc. I wouldn't classify that as an exploit or a cheese at all, but rather as simply playing it as it was intended to be played - it's using the right tool for the right job. Now you can create artificial difficulty for yourself by not taking a tank, but tbh I've always truly hated the 'just make your own difficulty' mindset - nobody actually handicaps themselves, that's so bogus, and I challenge anyone who spouts that nonesense to go play the grendel missions and remember what reality is.

But it's interesting to contrast that Inaros example with say shield gate abuse. Was decaying dragon key ever meant to be abused the way it is? No, it's more of an emergent, sandboxing development. Yet... DE has left it quite intentionally in place, and so it's as good as official. So how is shield gate abuse or invisibility abuse different than taking Inaros into a no-shield nightmare? Or how is it different than taking Revenant practically anywhere? And the answer to that is very tricky.

Anyways, the main point is more about what you're saying about being overbuilt. You're saying that simply ramping up the difficulty isn't going to be satisfying because it results in too-optimized builds with no variety, but I'm saying the only way to experience the power and diversity of our kits is to ramp up the difficulty further. I'm built for level 200 up on the majority of my frames, and doing regular starchart missions at level 20 is absolute misery. Doing arbitrations at level 60 is pain. Doing SP at level 120 is mildly analgesic. So let me ask you, how many missions do I have available to me that I can play at the level I'm built for? Here's what I've got, solo, without using cheese:

1. Tuvul Commons, Void Cascade, Zariman - Lvl 150-155: after about a dozen rotations it gets really challenging due to the Thrax and other enemies.
2. Circulus, Conjunction Survival, Lua, Lvl 180-200: difficult purely for the volumes of enemies, eximus and nullifiers, after 30 minutes or so the eximus really hit hard

... and that's it. Those are my options if I want a challenge and want to have fun, even though I have no actual reason to play them anymore beyond that. There are other missions around those levels, but I don't want to play Armageddon, Mobile Defense. So what do I play? I login, and what do I play?

Nothing.

I tinker in the shed instead of going on an adventure - because there are no adventures; I pull out a warframe or weapon I dislike and see what I can do with it. I'm not saying tinkering is bad, it's great, but it's not the same thing as a challenge. Tinkering is build variety, optimizing is build challenge - but even the most optimized builds can still be tinkered with, just not as much. The whole point of build experimentation is to find the optimizations, but optimizations are pointless if there's nothing interesting to use them on.

When SP first came out and nobody knew what to make of it, it was great, because I was out there mostly solo learning my limits, learning how to build properly, learning what worked and what didn't, trying new things. I figured out how to build to do SP interceptions solo. I figured out how to survive against punishing damage that I'd never experienced before, I learned warframes I'd never needed, weapons I'd never used - I had the tools, I had them all along, I just never had a worthy task that demanded I learn and apply them. I learned how to solo bosses that I'd always had groups handle before, I learned WHY certain things worked, I played missions I'd only played once before ever. It was a great time. It was a challenge. I'd log in and was happy because there was a mountain ahead of me, a thing to tackle, something to test my mettle. When I log in now, I've got a shed ahead of me.

 

[xXDragonGodXx]

4 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

No. It would start at near level cap if that's what you can so easily handle, and then quickly reach it, if solo, only while on SP.

Why? Because of an ELO system then?

[CrownOfShadows]

12 minutes ago, xXDragonGodXx said:

Why? Because of an ELO system then?

It analyzes you and your build. It understands that when you have this warframe and those weapons in this type of mission that you typically fight capably at a certain level and provides it. If you bring a different warframe and different weapons, perhaps ones that kinda suck, it will lower the level.

It wouldn't be an ELO system, those are designed for multiplayer pvp games and work by ranking players against each other, this would work based off your own individual performance and would ideally evolve over time with you.

[xXDragonGodXx]

1 minute ago, CrownOfShadows said:

It analyzes you and your build. It understands that when you have this warframe and those weapons in this type of mission that you typically fight capably at a certain level and provides it. If you bring a different warframe and different weapons, perhaps ones that kinda suck, it will lower the level.

It wouldn't be an ELO system, those are designed for multiplayer pvp games and work by ranking players against each other, this would work based off your own individual performance and would ideally evolve over time with you.

Still the same principal with even more values to add...

[(NSW)Greybones]

53 minutes ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Well, in your Inaros nightmare example, the no-shield modifier is clearly designed specifically to encourage people to play tanks like Inaros, Grendel, Rhino, etc. I wouldn't classify that as an exploit or a cheese at all, but rather as simply playing it as it was intended to be played - it's using the right tool for the right job. Now you can create artificial difficulty for yourself by not taking a tank, but tbh I've always truly hated the 'just make your own difficulty' mindset - nobody actually handicaps themselves, that's so bogus, and I challenge anyone who spouts that nonesense to go play the grendel missions and remember what reality is.

But it's interesting to contrast that Inaros example with say shield gate abuse. Was decaying dragon key ever meant to be abused the way it is? No, it's more of an emergent, sandboxing development. Yet... DE has left it quite intentionally in place, and so it's as good as official. So how is shield gate abuse or invisibility abuse different than taking Inaros into a no-shield nightmare? Or how is it different than taking Revenant practically anywhere? And the answer to that is very tricky.

Anyways, the main point is more about what you're saying about being overbuilt. You're saying that simply ramping up the difficulty isn't going to be satisfying because it results in too-optimized builds with no variety, but I'm saying the only way to experience the power and diversity of our kits is to ramp up the difficulty further. I'm built for level 200 up on the majority of my frames, and doing regular starchart missions at level 20 is absolute misery. Doing arbitrations at level 60 is pain. Doing SP at level 120 is mildly analgesic. So let me ask you, how many missions do I have available to me that I can play at the level I'm built for? Here's what I've got, solo, without using cheese:

1. Tuvul Commons, Void Cascade, Zariman - Lvl 150-155: after about a dozen rotations it gets really challenging due to the Thrax and other enemies.
2. Circulus, Conjunction Survival, Lua, Lvl 180-200: difficult purely for the volumes of enemies, eximus and nullifiers, after 30 minutes or so the eximus really hit hard

... and that's it. Those are my options if I want a challenge and want to have fun, even though I have no actual reason to play them anymore beyond that. There are other missions around those levels, but I don't want to play Armageddon, Mobile Defense. So what do I play? I login, and what do I play?

Nothing.

I tinker in the shed instead of going on an adventure - because there are no adventures; I pull out a warframe or weapon I dislike and see what I can do with it. I'm not saying tinkering is bad, it's great, but it's not the same thing as a challenge. Tinkering is build variety, optimizing is build challenge - but even the most optimized builds can still be tinkered with, just not as much. The whole point of build experimentation is to find the optimizations, but optimizations are pointless if there's nothing interesting to use them on.

When SP first came out and nobody knew what to make of it, it was great, because I was out there mostly solo learning my limits, learning how to build properly, learning what worked and what didn't, trying new things. I figured out how to build to do SP interceptions solo. I figured out how to survive against punishing damage that I'd never experienced before, I learned warframes I'd never needed, weapons I'd never used - I had the tools, I had them all along, I just never had a worthy task that demanded I learn and apply them. I learned how to solo bosses that I'd always had groups handle before, I learned WHY certain things worked, I played missions I'd only played once before ever. It was a great time. It was a challenge. I'd log in and was happy because there was a mountain ahead of me, a thing to tackle, something to test my mettle. When I log in now, I've got a shed ahead of me.

 

I think you’re approaching this from the wrong angle; everyone can do a No-shield Nightmare, Inaros just excels at it. That doesn’t mean that the game doesn’t want you to try it with others, it’s literally a modifier that affects shields that Inaros and Nidus don’t have and introduces alternative gameplay for Warframes that do have shields

I have to question your idea of what build experimentation is; you say that it’s to make the most optimal one, and I say that that’s only part of the picture and if you’re going to shoehorn yourself into that idea only you’re doing yourself a disservice. The point behind build experimentation is to facilitate making a playstyle for yourself, and it’s not exactly obvious how to do that because a bunch of guides and players giving you the Most Optimal Builds aren’t going to give you The Builds and Playstyles You Want, and in fact you’ll often find that you’ve got a plethora of build puzzles to solve which are presented by something as simple as changing a piece of loadout elsewhere; you say you can only use those builds in level 200 content, then use those builds in level 200 content and when you’re not doing level 200 content, break them apart and make new builds with the components or just make new builds period. The game’s also not stopping you from taking it elsewhere, but it’s not forcing you to do so either

You’re staring at a shed full of all sorts of things to mix and match that may or may not result in absolutely optimal builds but who cares, the end result is fun game which may or may not be challenging depending on how you build and where you take it, and you’re fixating on a few choices because…. what? You discovered those SP-worthy builds and now you wish you didn’t because they fulfilled their purpose and if only the game would undo that, then you’d be satisified. Right now there is absolutely adventure to this game, if you start from the beginning and build up using everything you’ve earned so far instead of trying to work your way down from the top. I don’t know if you were one of those players who got suckered into the idea that the game is grind and that you need to burn 7 mod slots for a “Default build” or that Serration was always equipped first and foremost, but if that’s the case you’ll want to reconsider that thinking