A Sergeant Rework.... (By Request!)

[CrownOfShadows]

[Because this is like a whole THING, I'm going to dedicate a new thread to it, but the original discussion that spawned this was regarding end-game content and how to counter Tenno rather than invalidate them, if anyone wants the context:]

And the progenitor comment/request:

8 hours ago, (PSN)jaggerwanderer said:

Wait so instead of designing a boss, you want to design an encounter? An encounter is like Profit Taker. Sargas Ruk would be a boss. 

You know what? Let's try it out this way instead. Let's revise current boss to be more difficult How would you make Phobos Assissination boss hard?

So... sure I'll take on The Sergeant, he could use a redesign anyway. Prepare for some depth, I guess.

*cracks knuckles* *a scream in the distance...* "MORTAL KOMBAT!!!!!.... FIGHT!"

A Random Tenno Squad Appears:

• Protea, MR28, helminth'd Pillage, emphasis on ability range & duration. Weapons are Kuva Karak (5forma), Laetum (5f), Dual Keres Prime (3f)
• Mag, MR24, no helminth, ability power. Weapons are Tenet Arca Plasmor (5f), Lex Prime Incarnon (3f), Prisma Ohma (2f)
• Ivara Prime, MR16, no helminth. Weapons are Rubico Prime (1f), Nukor (0), Paracesis (0)
• Baruuk, MR30, helminth'd Tharros, ability power. Weapons are Nataruk (2f), Despair Incarnon (3f), Venka Prime (4f)

First and foremost, we give him his own arena. I have some things to say about boss arena design, but shan't get into that here, except to say that he now has one and it takes place in a moa factory setting (we can steal assets from the RJ ships) and there are continuous - but not substantial - numbers of moas spawned from the perimeter.

The illustrious Sergeant gains 5 hp bars. These hp bars are unique in that they are mildly networked and all except two can be damaged at any time.

1. Weapon Bar: The first takes weapon damage (all other damage is heavily reduced but still has an effect, though minor). If the weapon bar is at max (undamaged), all the other bars start recharging.
2. Wildcard / Exalted Bar: Because we detect two exalted weapons in this squad, the second hp bar primarily takes exalted weapon dmg (if we only detected one or none, this bar would instead only take damage from melee or perhaps only certain elements or something else altogether, depending entirely on the squad. Optionally, if one Tenno is clearly better equipped than the rest, we can actually tune this bar to only take damage from that Tenno, which creates an interesting dynamic to this whole process - or the complete inverse too, tuning it only to the weakest player).
3. Ability Bar: The third takes primarily ability dmg (note that exalted do not count as ability dmg here). The ability bar is unique in that it naturally slowly recharges, the others can only be recharged through active heals or if the weapon bar is maxed.
4. Survival Bar #1:  this bar cannot be damaged directly unless all 3 of the other bars are completely down. Instead, it take indirect damage filtered from the others. As long as the other bars are up, this filtered damage is heavily mitigated. Once they're down, it takes full damage. Once this bar is eliminated, it cannot be recharged.
5. Survival Bar #2: this bar sits underneath the first survival bar and cannot be damaged in any way until the first is completely removed. Once the first is removed, this one still acts in the same way - that is, if one of the other bars recharges it will only take indirect damage, and all the other bars must be down for it to take any direct damage. Note that there is a 1 or 2 second invulnerability window (aka a hp gate) between these hp bars - they don't act as one bar. The point of this is to create a 2-phase boss. We could put in a some words of denunciation from the Sergeant and some animation or whatnot.

Detecting that this squad is (as per the usual) weighted for viral and heat, the Sergeant decides that shields are his best friend. (If it was instead say corrosive he would lean towards hp buffing, or magnetize he would lean towards hp & armor, etc, etc - he's an adaptive boy now). So on top of these hp bars is a shield; it's not especially big but it is synced with some other things...

The illustrious Sergeant now also has a rage bar, and his own energy pool as well as ability duration, strength, range & efficiency. These are all set based on an initial analysis of the squad. The rage bar increases efficiency (well, technically decreases it.... well it makes his abilities more efficient) and also increases his ability strength and his base DR - in this case it also supercharges his shield recharge, making it a bit of a monster. The rage bar increases when suffering above-expected damage, when suffering multiple rapid consecutive melee hits, when losing a health bar, and probably a few other scenarios as well. We could optionally tie moa spawns to rage bar increments - the angrier the more frequently mobs spawn.

The Sergeant has DR (and not just armor but also his own built in version of Adaptation - except his isn't lame *cough*), but no attenuation or invulnerability, and he is not immune to any ability - but he does have counters.

The sergeant has his own set of unique attacks and defenses, but additionally gains several anti-warframe abilities based on the detected squad:

• Protea: there's a lot to worry about from Protea but for now let's prioritize her turrets and grenades. The Sergeant gains the ability to erect a physical shield barrier that absorbs all turret (and gun) damage from one side, and he tries to stay behind it while turrets are active. He has perhaps 2 available at a time, but they operate off of cooldowns, so they aren't always available. To help us deal with grenade spam, we gain an ability that grants the Sergeant matching overshields to any received by the Tenno (by picking up and stealing one of the shield orbs on the ground).
• Mag: the biggest threat from Mag is Magnetize. When Magnetize is cast on him, he suffers it, but as soon as it ends it is replaced with a mimic bubble that envelops him, forces all Tenno outside of the bubble on instantiation (like Frost's globe does, but they can re-enter to melee after it's up), and heals his 1st hp bar for all gun damage absorbed. (note the Sergeant's version should be noticeably differently colored).
• Ivara: is a weapons platform, she provides almost no ability damage output, and we also detect that this player is not a substantial threat via weaponry compared to the others, and that her Artemis Bow is not a threat either. For now, we just completely ignore Ivara, she's currently invisible anyway.
• Baruuk: is a two-fold problem and we need two counters. One to get through his DR, and one to deal with Serene Storm, which on this Baruuk let's say is potent. When hit with Serene Storm, the Sergeant will steal 1 (possibly 2) daggers from Desolate Hands and use them himself. However, Baruuk is going to have a hard time charging Serene Storm unless we attack him relentlessly, so we also gain a secret mandate to not attack Baruuk very much, which should force him to eventually either rely on weapons or focus on the mobs, which suits us fine.
• Armor Strip: we also detect two armor stripping abilities in this squad. To help us survive, we choose an armor-reinforcement passive. This passive incrementally rebuilds our armor every time an element procs on any of our health bars, helping our base defenses remain in place as much as possible.

The Sergeant's Attacks:

1. The Prodman Special: the Sergeant uses an electric & magnetic melee attack that stuns and damages any non-shielded Tenno for a second or two, or deals strong damage (str) to the shields of any shielded or overshielded Tenno, as well as afflicting them with a debuff we shall call shield cancer (a continuous drain on shields and a debuff on shield recharging, duration based on the Sergeant's ability duration).
2. The Slam: the Sergeant slams a melee-ing Tenno away several meters, dealing strong physical damage (str) and stealing some health (str) which goes to his weapon bar. Occasionally, he may immediately leap into the air after the Tenno and perform a slam attack on them (something that may be influenced by his rage meter).
3. The Scalpel: the Sergeant fires volleys of adaptive shots at the Tenno. If the Tenno are shielded, these are toxin or magnetic based. If they are not, these are heat based. Additionally they all have base IPS values (str).
4. The Storm: The Sergeant charges a potent attack over a second or two (str). This attack will kill most un-shielded Tenno, but it has a build-up, is well-telegraphed and can be dodged without too much difficulty.

The Sergeant's Defense:

1. Rage Transfer: the Sergeant empties his rage meter to heal (str), this heal prioritizes the most damaged hp bar.
2. Moa Moa: The Sergeant activates 12 armored super-moas to assist him in battle (dur). These do damage (str) and attack the Tenno, but their primary purpose is that damage done to the Sergeant is transferred to them, Shield-of-Shadows style. The cool-down on this ability is fairly long and will be a more rare occurance, saved mostly for emergency use. Because the Sergeant might heal while this is in effect, it's important for the Tenno to prioritize the elimination of these moas.
3. Re-Retribution: The Sergeant activates a powerful electro-armor that severely shocks Tenno that come into direct contact (str), discouraging melee attacks while it is active.

The Sergeant Thinks About Life:

After the first survival bar is depleted, the Sergeant re-evaluates his strategy based on how the fight has gone so far before phase 2 begins. We recalculate the value of the 2nd survival bar based on the average DPS and the peak DPS coming out of the Tenno. We also adjust his base stats if needed. We further take this moment to shuffle our loadout slightly, because we have a much clearer idea of who to worry about. We now know we have a serious Mag problem, Mag-related damage is through the roof compared to the others, and so we prioritize that. Also, we've noticed that the Ivara is being very annoying lately by spamming cloak arrows and hiding the team a lot for some reason, which we don't like.

We decide to activate our dormant anti-Ivara ability, and we decide to sacrifice our anti-Baruuk Serene Storm ability for an extra anti-Mag ability:

1. All Seeing Eye: The Sergeant gains an ability that launches a specialized drone (sentinel) into the air and it periodically sweeps the battlefield revealing any cloaked units, and they remain visible for several seconds after the beam has passed. The range of the beam is based on the Sergeant's ability range. The drone can be killed by the Tenno if targeted, but it is fairly sturdy. If killed, the Sergeant can replace it up to 4x, but after that he dons a visor instead which gives him a permanent sweeping vision cone of anti-cloak.
2. Re-Polarize: when hit with polarize, the Sergeant will wait a few seconds and then re-emit his own polarize (range), except his completely strips any Tenno shields it encounters (pushing Tenno into shield-gate window) and also applies shield cancer. Once again, this is a distinct color from Mag's.

Thus reinforced, we re-engage the Tenno. Alas we are forced to lose, plot armor op plz nerf. Note that if we wanted to we could even get more sophisticated - we could detect that almost all of this Mag damage is because of her Magnetize ability, and instead of adopting an anti-polarize we could instead adopt a secondary anti-magnetize.

The Sergeant's Rage:

Perhaps, during the last 10-20% of the final health bar, the Sergeant might enter a sort of berzerk mode, where he gains extra defenses and perhaps some special attacks, but I'll just leave this as a possibility without exploring it too deeply.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Summary and Thoughts:

I haven't thrown out any figures regarding the hp values because that's something I would have to leave to the professionals, and it would also vary based on the squad. Suffice it to say that we know what weapons are present, as well as what arcanes and abilities, and we can come up with a maximum damage peak for the Tenno as well as an average expected squad DPS. It might not be exact (a LOT of multipliers exist in warframe, for example focus schools also play a part) but we should be able to get within the ballpark pretty well. If I was DE, this would be a pretty refined science by now - they sure have no shortage of data if they want it. Anyways, we have a good idea how much potential damage this team can generally put out, and that's a good starting value. I don't think we should dynamically change values mid-fight (If they're really struggling, because we were dramatically overestimating their output, there might be a case to dynamically update I suppose, but that leads into exploit territory), but the beauty of a two-phase boss is that we can use the intermission to update things based on the actual average DPS coming out of the team rather than the theoretical.

As for the hp bar structure, it's designed to provide a bit of a balancing act for the Tenno to navigate. With a DR ability, multiple ways of healing, one bar with native recharge, and also a fast recharging shield, this should be a tough boss to take down. The rage bar acts as an important mitigator for when all our number crunching doesn't quite get us where we need to go. It is also a fantastic tool for ramping up the energy/momentum of a fight.

Note that the main purpose of this exercise is to show how to create boss/enemy mechanics that don't rely on invulnerability, ability denial, cutscenes, straight up leaving the fight, or attenuation (some DR is however necessary, or if you prefer hp bars in the high hundred-millions / billions - they're the same thing basically). We accomplish this here by creating a net system that reacts differently and requires multiple inputs to take down, but notably we are not canceling or denying or being immune to any warframe ability here. They all work.

The only exception to this rule would be hard CC abilities, but there are none present in this squad so I didn't cover that - Mag's Crush would work as normal - it's brief enough that it doesn't matter. Ivara's sleep and noise arrows would work but likely with drastically reduced timers or something, and probably while asleep (a handful of seconds or so) the Sergeant would gain some extra DR to compensate for being helpless - or we might include a smarter counter ability specifically for this, especially if the Baruuk also had lull available instead of helminthing it over. Also note I've fairly limited the Sergeant here in his counters. We could adopt counters to every single warframe ability present, but we don't actually want or need to do that, we just need to prioritize the heavy hitting abilities. I made it so that he needs to sacrifice an ability to gain a new one, which I think is a good balancing mechanic, though not strictly necessary.

Instead of invalidating abilities, we're being creative in our way of dealing with them by making each prominent ability have a down side, yes, by countering it. For example, when you cast Polarize or Magnetize or... any ability... anywhere in the game, is there ever a single down-side to it? Nothing more than the mere consumption of energy. Creating counters is how to create engaging gameplay - it makes you think twice about doing things, when to do them, on what to do them, and this is true more with bosses than with anything else imo.

Note that while the multiple networked hp bars is a nice touch, it is but one of many possibilities, and for other bosses I would mix it up. The individual bars are also not immune - they still take damage even if it's not the appropriate type, so you can work harder and not smarter if you want to, which I think should be a crucial design axiom. For example the Exalted Bar in particular - people may not initially be wise to how to deal with this bar, but they can still slowly burn through it. Let me note here that all of this extremely theoretical, how this would work in reality is hard to predict and would have to go through several test-and-design cycles, I'm just spitting concepts here.

Admittedly, this is a high investment boss build, and the main argument against this is that you have to create counter abilities for all 50+ warframes. And that's true, that is definitely an undertaking. But you would then have a pool of counters and debuffs that any boss could have access to, or for that matter, any enemy, or for that matter, even the environment. This allows you to create smart enemies and smart bosses without knee-capping warframes. It's tactical combat instead of blunt force combat.

Ideally, each boss would have it's own flavor. Another danger with such a system is that every boss might start to feel the same, because they're using the same tactics against you. It's this area where I think that unique mechanics like special weak points, phases, boss-specific attacks and defenses (separate from anti-warframe abilities) really are important, which is the main reason I took a little time to dream up some attacks and defenses, even though they really aren't important in regards to the larger point about countering warframes. The anti-warframe techniques are designed to be part of the boss arsenal, not to overtake their personalities. Again, this requires a pretty serious commitment to making a fun and engaging boss, but as long as you're in there making them, might as well do it right imo.

Any boss, any squad, this style will work.

Hard CC is the only exception, and in some cases could even be allowed.

If you read and understood all this let me know if you think this isn't a great solution and why, because it's definitely how I'd go about developing a game's harder enemies.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

That's a really complex setup. I'll just use Xata's Whisper and ignore everything. It's not like the boss is can down the player in any way. I would suggest adding in random demolyst's cleanse map wide. Just to get rid of warframe buffs and get rid of debuff from the boss. How do you want to future proof the boss though? We will eventually get new warframe plus new abilities. Other interaction as well. 

[CrownOfShadows]

5 hours ago, (PSN)jaggerwanderer said:

That's a really complex setup. I'll just use Xata's Whisper and ignore everything. It's not like the boss is can down the player in any way. I would suggest adding in random demolyst's cleanse map wide. Just to get rid of warframe buffs and get rid of debuff from the boss. How do you want to future proof the boss though? We will eventually get new warframe plus new abilities. Other interaction as well. 

Well 3 points:

1. First, if you have a specific squad/warframe/setup you have in mind, I can comment on that, but you didn't specify you were going to have Xata's Whisper, so i just threw together a random squad. We can re-run this scenario with a different squad setup if you want.
2. Secondly, without even considering a custom Xata's Whisper counter, you will certainly melt one hp bar with weapons and Xata's Whisper, just like in this example the Protea would melt it simply by using Laetum. However, the entire setup is designed to prevent one-shots and such brute force attempts and instead encourages a multi-pronged attack. So your xata/weapon combo will work for one hp bar, what will you do for the others?
3. Thirdly, don't forget that the Sergeant is now adaptive, so it scales based off of your EHP and DPS etc, (and ideally take into account your individual history), so if you in this scenario are running in solo expecting to just bulldoze with Xata's Whisper you will find yourself in for quite a surprise, because the Sergeant is going to be laser focused on you and can scale all the way up to level cap.

As for cleanse, that is definitely something that would be in the boss arsenal - and is likely one of the easiest ways to combat hard CC because it still lets it work but just not for very long. Adding such a total map-wide cleanse for both boss and warframes is ... more what I'd consider an environmental hazard, I guess it could be a feature, but it might end up being pretty annoying too, because it inadvertantly knee-caps the warframes by invalidating their abilities/attacks to some extent, which is rather the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish with the countering system. If it could be triggered only through some environmental interaction, I could probably get behind that more.

As for future-proofing, yes any time a new warframe is released, such a system would require a suite of counters to be developed in tandem. So it requires some maintenance, but the beautiful thing about it is that if they're just being added to a huge pool of tools then we don't have to individually update every boss/miniboss/enemy in the game, don't have to redesign whole encounters or any of that - they automatically have access to abilities to deal with this new warframe.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

I do like the encounter you come up with. A good senerio for the "warframe countermeasures" is Sergent watching from his boss room. Analyzing the Tenno as they go through the Corpus ship leaving mayham behind. I gave Xata's Whispers as an base example. Gloom is an alternative for cheese strategy. One of the reasons why I suggest a hard cleanse ever so often just to distrupt the player. 

Ability countermeasures doesn't have to be warframe specific. I think most abilities can be generalize into categories. It would make it much easier to future proof the encounter.

[(XBOX)Rez090]

Meme: "I'm about to ruin this man's whole thread."

 

Sergeant doesn't need a rework, he just needs to switch nodes with the Jackal instead.

[CrownOfShadows]

19 minutes ago, (XBOX)Rez090 said:

Meme: "I'm about to ruin this man's whole thread."

Sergeant doesn't need a rework, he just needs to switch nodes with the Jackal instead.

Counter-meme: "I'm a cave-man wandering into a physics seminar"

[(XBOX)Rez090]

1 minute ago, CrownOfShadows said:

Counter-meme: "I'm a cave-man wandering into a physics seminar"

Geico commercial idea

[Lilybun]

I think specificity in what weapons you use to dps certain healthbars is a neat idea but you've gone so specific here that a single person leaving can essentially softlock the party and you're expecting too many different builds to be present and the boss adapting to specific ability effects creates an insane burden on the devs to label and maintain and past, present and future content to work with this system.

Multiple healthbars? Cool. Multiple different resistances and weaknesses for said healthbars? Cool. After that you completely lost me

[CrownOfShadows]

4 minutes ago, Lilybun said:

I think specificity in what weapons you use to dps certain healthbars is a neat idea but you've gone so specific here that a single person leaving can essentially softlock the party and you're expecting too many different builds to be present and the boss adapting to specific ability effects creates an insane burden on the devs to label and maintain and past, present and future content to work with this system.

Multiple healthbars? Cool. Multiple different resistances and weaknesses for said healthbars? Cool. After that you completely lost me

It won't softlock, even if both exalted members left. You can still damage any health bar, just not as fast.

Creating a system of counters, as I said, is a big undertaking for sure, but one that I think is very worthwhile for the health of the game.

Without counterplay, we will always be (and feel) overpowered, without challenge. We NEED counterplay to have engaging content. Since we have no PvP this must be fulfilled by the AI, and the AI needs tools to use instead of being slabs of meat - they currently have no such tools (the only exceptions perhaps being demolysts and acolytes). Give them the tools they need to fight us, and then we can fight. Now it's just meaningless slaughter, or in the case of bosses, time-gated slaughter.