Defense Missions Feel Stale.

[Cheseit]

Hi All!

I hope any readers are doing well thus far.

Title sums it up, but let me elaborate. Defense missions are one the oldest game modes in the game. They've been largely unchanged since their inception with some notable exceptions:

- Converting the Defense objective into a downable AI that will move about / follow you.

- The most recent mirror defense adding a secondary objective alongside defending the objective. (Notably the additional objective is not defense oriented so it may  encourage a more         diverse team)

 

Misson Speed / Map Size

My main gripe with Defense is definitely how slow it is. It's been my understanding that DE aims to provide optionally bite sized content. It's been years since I watched a dev stream, but once upon a time I heard talk of them aiming for about 5m per mission. This would mean a defense should take about 1m per  wave and reward a C rotation reward in about 20m. This all makes pretty reasonable sense to me in terms of general balance. They need to have a rough idea of what you're investing to gauge the value of a C reward, and give the player a fair idea of what to expect when the enter a mission. Defense missions in my experience are seldom near this mark. On average most defenses I see end up being much closer to 7m+ in duration. Even when not on Steel Path and most warframe abilities can comfortably one shot a room defense missions can often take an excessive amount of time. The only way to move a defense mission forward is by killing every enemy. If enemies spawn far away and take indirect or long routes to get even within ability range this will make each round take longer, and be problematic. The new map designs keep getting larger and more complex. Why is this a bad thing?! Large really cool looking maps are awesome! Lets make the game mode compliment that instead of detriment from it.

I've seen team comps that can hit the 5m mark, or even make it even potentially faster. Comps like Speed nova + a hard defense frame like Khora or Frost + 1-2 kill frames maybe a frame to pop nullifiers if its a particular issue can be pretty impressive on some maps. I'm aware of the niche builds that can make this game mode at least progress at a reasonable pace. Consider the difference in speed of a niche comp to a random comp. Also consider the difference between say the Grineer ship map (Smol) vs the Corpus ship map(Large). Despite these comps and differences I still have problems with Defense. 

I think the problem of speed or the slow feeling of the mission isn't related to the timer itself either. Especially with the new maps they add in being generally much much larger I often find myself or squad mates basically standing waiting around for the next wave to finish. There is no real feeling of pressure or danger, I don't really get that overwhelming feeling that I once did years and years ago defending a cryopod from a horde of enemies blasting my volt or frost shields. This isn't to say Defense missions aren't difficult, only that they feel that way until they aren't. This leads me to my next point.

Poorly Scaled Enemies/Objectives

I don't actually think this is a symptom of defense but perhaps the greater scale of the game in general. Many times I've defended a point for 20, 40, 60+minutes or been doing the circuit and hit a defense mission late into the rounds and immediately left in fear of having your cryopod 2 shot (2 thanks to the shield gate 😉). It's the most frustrating feeling having enemies scale to the point where they're doing 800k+ damage in a single hit against an objective that has anywhere from 5k HP to 500k HP. When the scaling is that far at odds with you it can feel really awkward that your objective doesn't scale meaningfully with it. I also feel its very important to note that Defense is an endless mission and it is reasonable to find yourself against very high level enemies. 

Age/Failablility

 I think my final issue with this mode is just how frustrating it is to fail the mission and lose everything. Having a lose condition is very important, I am in no way suggesting we essentially remove the whole objective of the game mode. If you compare a defense mission with something like a disruption or survival its possible to have heavy decline or to even fail the main objective in these missions and still be able to extract and leave with what you've earned. Even missions like Interception that also fail you still shift DRAMATICALLY in difficulty when your squad leaves (one player per console vs. 1 player playing whack a mole but I digress). Some kind of system like this would be really appreciated considering the later you stay the more you risk being 1 shot. I believe this hard cut off is a symptom of how old it is 

 

So how do we fix it?

The first issue I would tackle is the speed. 

I don't hate defense missions at their core. In fact I would consider them to be an incredibly critical and foundational element of the game. These missions, just by existing, validate frame designs like Frost, Gara, Khora, some styles of Volt, and even Limbo (and many others). The idea of keeping something other than your warframe safe creates lots of really interesting and uniquely challenging play styles and problems the player needs to solve. I think this game mode and elements of it inspired other really fun modes like excavation and defection (Yea I like defection, fight me!). I think to speed up Defense we should reintroduce a feeling a panic or pressure. I would love to see elements of their new design ideas be ran with. I think the wave based system should be altered to instead be 5 waves per round, combine the waves into a singular round.

Next add other objectives in the map to optionally accomplish. They could have a resource to pick up like the citrine shards, but instead of using them as an actual currency for meta progression use them to buy upgrades in the mission itself. (I want to stay focused on changing core elements of mode rather just saying Defense now gives 5 forma after 20m so now people do it.) Look at how we interact with the Railjack forge system. We spend currency from mission to get semi permanent upgrades throughout the mission. Or maybe we can do side objectives to unlock weapons like in the Zariman Armageddon missions? Just this alone would be enough to tune and play with for years probably, but what else can we do?

To add panic to the game I think some enemy optional objectives would be really interesting. Add corpus dropships that continue to add the enemy count the longer to go undestroyed. Make it so enemies added this way aren't factored into the base calculation, allowing you to kill them to move to the next round faster at the cost of being constantly bombarded by dropships and extra enemies. Maybe play with the idea of adding factories that enemies will be either be made from or get upgrades from?

This could be taken to level 10 if you really wanted; I especially like the idea of this in an open world setting, maybe even an unmarked event sort of thing (non bounty reason to roam). Imagine you're doing your bounty for who ever and suddenly a defense objective appears. The Solaris United have a convoy down, and they're fighting for their life. You can choose to help them, or continue about your bounty and their corpses may end up as an objective in your bounty (find their lost dog tags). If you choose to stay you abandon your objective or if you were just roaming for fun you have found the action and hunker down with them to stay alive. You have to ensure their survival, but they're no chumps. By bringing them supplies you can fortify your position adding weapons or other resources available for your disposal. You can help them build physical barricades maybe even makeshift anti personnel/ Anti Aircraft Tenno manned guns (kinda like those dumb guns the grineer shred you with).  The more you resist the more the corpus become enraged, and they are a universal superpower. They start building factories to arm their troops with over shields. The factories get more advanced and start adding electrical status to their weapons. Corpus moa's start assaulting you with railguns capable of punching through the terrain itself. Left unchecked the factories will eventually start rolling more of those pesky spiders to bombard your position. Your warframe isn't suited to handle the full power of the corpus onslaught, so you get ahead of the equation and shut the factory down at the source. You arm the Solaris as best you can, and crank up their defenses to the max hoping they can last the short time you'll be gone and you rush off to the factory just down the road a few hundred meters from your position. Once there you trash the place sabotaging it worse than galleons you've left in debris. You know you have to be thorough or they'll repair even faster and be back on you. Quickly you return to the Solaris and continue to hold your ground until you have enough supplies to make a secure line to reach Eudico. You inform her of the situation and build what she needs to send a sneaky way out for the stranded Solaris. Victory! 

I know I paint a dramatic picture, but my point is adding some of these elements offer different ways to handle the threat. You could turtle up and focus on your defense against the enemy. You could aggress out and destroy any foothold they try to establish. You could just know that you're a god tier defense frame and ignore all side objectives and just do it all on your own merit. This would invite people who didn't wanna play frost to contribute to the mission. These changes could generally speed up the mission, and create be a case where even though you failed to defend an objective maybe you at least collected a bunch of resources, or dealt a huge blow to your enemy overall and at least you can limp away with what you managed to earn.

Personally I wouldn't tackle Scaling. I don't think its related to Defense as a mission type. I think it would really nice if when we look at changing this game mode we keep in mind that at some point we'll be in the same boat again. Maybe we don't just give the objective a health bar? Maybe let us upgrade it to become invulnerable until they enemy destroys or hacks a terminal? There are a lot of ways to approach this other than just an HP bar that will inevitably be out scaled. I want failure to feel thorough. I want to feel like I was overwhelmed by the enemy number, or they deployed a weapon I couldn't stop, or I was too focused on my own survival/damage and wasn't able to protect the objective, and I would LOVE if the more friends I had the more roles became available to play. A single well put together frost can solo pretty much all defense content currently. Why try to overwhelm him? Let the niche frames be niche and open the game mode up to other roles for other frames. I digress, I'm rambling.

I posted here to hear other people's Ideas too. I'm really interested in hearing some your gripes about defense AND HOW YOU WOULD FIX THEM. Its easy to complain, lets try to stay constructive. At least paint a neat picture to consider.

Thanks!

[BroDutt]

Defense objective shield charging or healing turret/pods would be nice. We can only activate it after we kill number amount of enemies. Kinda like Void Armageddon mixed with Mirror Defense Crystal, but more buff instead of a turret (unfortunately not scaled with enemy level) that shoot the enemy.  

A vortex like in Circuit also kinda good addition.

Edited September 4, 2023 by BroDutt

[(PSN)IdoThea]

2 hours ago, BroDutt said:

Defense objective shield charging

Protea can do this with shield satellite. If you throw them at defense target it'll recharge shields.

[MBaldelli]

5 hours ago, BroDutt said:

Defense objective shield charging or healing turret/pods would be nice. We can only activate it after we kill number amount of enemies. Kinda like Void Armageddon mixed with Mirror Defense Crystal, but more buff instead of a turret (unfortunately not scaled with enemy level) that shoot the enemy.  

Time for some of you people that only decided on Zenurik or Madurai to reconsider Vazarin Focus School as Vazarin Mains have been doing the pod healing for years.  (Did I mention that they have also been instantly reviving and making you folk heal and temporary invulnerable during a fight when they void sling through you?  No?  Look into it -- it still works even though DE said they were removing that... And didn't).  

Further, the pod self-heals both shields and health and has been doing so for a while.  Not quite instantaneously -- but faster than most people realize  if they actually stuck around to defend the target (instead of running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to kill the enemies as they spawn in).  

[Cheseit]

13 hours ago, MBaldelli said:

Time for some of you people that only decided on Zenurik or Madurai to reconsider Vazarin Focus School as Vazarin Mains have been doing the pod healing for years.  (Did I mention that they have also been instantly reviving and making you folk heal and temporary invulnerable during a fight when they void sling through you?  No?  Look into it -- it still works even though DE said they were removing that... And didn't).   

Vazarin unfortunately has capped healing at 100/s on the objective. Almost all healing methods on any type of defense style objectives appear to be capped at about 100/s. I think in lower scaling examples the health of the Cryopod is pretty reasonable, forgiving even, but in higher level missions it really cant keep up. I've seen circuit pods with 400k hp. I've seen those same pods be destroyed in 2 hits. Assume you stopped it from being destroyed after the shields broke and wanted to heal it. Grenade fan can heal 50 shields per second(maybe 4x that with power?), and volt's augment to convert electrical damage to shields is capped at 250. At these rates to it would take 33 minutes to restore the shields. 

16 hours ago, (PSN)IdoThea said:

Protea can do this with shield satellite. If you throw them at defense target it'll recharge shields.

I'm sorry, but I just don't have that kind of time to wait around for an objective to heal. Beyond that, the pod's survivability still doesn't change how long these missions take compared to just about any other mode. Most all of our defense options for adding protections are capped at 50% and the most healing we can offer is 100 healing per second. Most if not all other invulnerabilities are completely disabled. This lines up with my experience in Defense objectives where your best bet ends up being keeping the pod from being hit at all by using a hard defense frame.

Plus I think its worth mentioning that you can place turrets with Vauben but we still see turrets in Armageddon missons. We could still expand on features even though some form of them exist in game. Heck compare Protea to Vauben as engineer themes, or Volt to Gauss as speedy melee frames. Any concept has potential to be expanded on and improved.

[CrownOfShadows]

Yes. Defense is VERY stale, OMG, seriously.

I agree with many of your ideas, but come from a slightly different direction with some of them.

If I were tasked with overhauling defense missions, I'd focus on these things:

1. Dynamic Objective: one thing Mirror Defense did very well imo was to create a defense target that evolved. This is a fantastic thing, because it allows for a changing defense strategy. If you suddenly don't need to worry about the objective as much, because it's entered a reinforced state, then your entire playstyle can shift. I would give defense objectives 3-5 different states, which the players can trigger in different ways or that trigger automatically,or both -  this encourages different tactics. You could do some really cool stuff this way like put it into lockdown, transform it, superpower it, etc.
2. Secondary Objectives: I agree about secondary objectives, another thing Mirror Defense did - not well - but at least did. Using this in combination with the above would be extremely good for variety. Some useful secondary objectives could be things like
   • Objective-charging - secondary objectives that fulfill help charge up a transformation of the main objective the longer they are defended.
   • Barriers that block the enemies from the main objective (thus letting it recharge in peace).
   • Recharge/Attack towers that are somewhat fragile but that hyper-heal the main objective - thus splitting/retargeting the defense focus. You could make it so the players could trigger these at will BUT put them on a cooldown afterwards, thus giving them tactical use. This could include things like towers that heal, shield recharge, overshield, overgaurd, DR/armor, or imbue the objective with attacking properties like Mirror Defense's crystal.
   • Buff/Debuff towers, encouraging tenno to venture out to protect these because they give certain buffs/debuff enemies, or instead to attack them because they debuff them/buff enemies
   • Cataclysm towers, these could be fragile but reward a good defense. If they stay above some % of health for x amount of time, they complete their charging and boom, wipe the map for you (thereafter disappearing), or start damaging all enemies in a radius around it for x amount of time (thereafter disappearing).
   • Turret style towers: Armageddon really kind of failed at this, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. I think this idea shines the most with a static defense target especially rather than a mobile defense style like Armageddon. It would shine even more if there was a strong demand for them - that is, a scenario where the Tenno actually need the extra DPS. So to make this worthwhile you'd need a flux of strong enemies.
   • I'm a little surprised we've never had multiple defense objectives, especially since frost and limbo and khora can all put down 2 of their abilities. There's definitely room to experiment with this (Basically 2+ crypts, and instead of hard failing you're rewarded on how many survive). This would be better for short-style defenses, for people who don't want to play more than the equivalent of 20 waves. It would put the pressure on to bring defense frames, especially if these objectives were slightly separated. The main thing to avoid here would be to make it feeling like an Interception (another game mode in dire need of an overhaul). You could make this more of an endless-friendly style too, simply by spawning them continuously and rewarding Tenno for how many are defended, or for how successfully they are defended, etc.
   • One thing that Mirror Defense also did - not especially well - but still did, was utilize loading tiles. You're stuck in a defense room all the time, but you can load any tile you want off to the side. SO under-utilized. Shifting the defense target to another tile is ok, and I don't mind it - it's good variety, but I think this tactic would shine the most by putting secondary objectives out in them, encouraging a team member to go out and activate them, defend them, or even bring them back through. Personally I'd give the Tenno some control over this, so they could proactively spawn them (on a cooldown) as the need arises. These other tiles could also spawn more and more enemies, so you'd have to send someone out to close them to prevent being overwhelmed.
3. Speed/Spawn/Cycle: I completely agree that the speed of defense missions is one of the main things killing them. A long time ago I actually ran the numbers on Nova comps, and while Nova can speed missions up very, very slightly, in the end it's not that useful, simply because of wave timers. What I would do is ditch the individual waves and instead just spawn enemies non-stop until the mission cycles. That is, you'd get a pause to gather yourself where the current wave 5,10,15,n is, but before those there is nothing but endless spawns. This alone might be enough of a speed improvement to make defense feel good, but giving players some extra options to reward their efficiency. The only danger here is that Speedva might become a little too valuable, but you could check for a speedva and create secondary objectives that are in more difficult to reach areas that grant enemies a counter (ironically, a slow, or a cleanse) - this would be better than making Speedva not work on defense anymore.
4. Enemy Phases: in other games I've played defense style modes on, one of the best parts is trying to defend against a particularly strong onslaught that you know is coming. I think this would be very healthy. To do it I would create some sort of alarm or alert to notify the Tenno of the impending attack. When it triggers, I'd spawn some really tough enemies that have some good ability to really break through and deal strong damage to the objective. This might sound bad in our current defense system, but in an environment where you can rapidly heal the objective, reinforce it, supplement it, etc, inflicting strong but temporary damage on it creates a rewarding balancing act. This is especially true if you give the Tenno advance notice, allowing them to erect defenses or otherwise prepare for it, and if the objective has something like a lockdown mode, there would be less concern that it would get 1 or 2 shot. After the strong wave of enemies is dealt with, the Tenno can turn their attention to bringing the objective back up to full (something they should easily be able to do). You could also put these on a spectrum, so you have like a tier 1 assault, up to a tier 5 or something, because this would create a great sort of anticipation - 'oh no this a tier 5 get ready bois'. Would also make all these relatively random rather than statically timed.
5. Objective Health: is a problem, but not a truly terrible one if you bring a defense frame. Gara's DR on an objective is just insane for example, but if you give some secondary objectives the ability to armor and heal the main objective, then the only thing I would really change is to give objectives a little native DR (resistance, not armor) and slightly faster native recharge (perhaps scaling with enemies). This of course would all need to be tested and balanced against any new systems introduced. One thing I would definitely do is make more Tenno abilities affect it, especially biological styles. For example, I'd make things like Garuda's Blood Altar work as well as Oberon's abilities. You could coordinate this with objective phases / secondary objectives so that it gains the ability to be affected by these after transforming.
6. Demolishers: in addition to phases, I'd occasionally include a demolyst/demolisher-type of enemy that will target secondary objectives only and due high damage to them, this would help create some extra strategy/movement/variety. If enemy phases were implemented, I'd preferentially spawn these during the easy phase.
7. Wandering Objectives: are not fun. I'd remove them or overhaul them (to be directed by the Tenno). This style is honestly more like a Hijack mode (or even a rescue), and I'd roll them into a sort of endless Hijack instead (another mode that needs a complete overhaul/modernization).
8. Total Failure: I would likewise probably not totally fail the mission if a defense fails, but rather just say it failed and give the Tenno their rewards regardless. (You could instead just reward the Tenno based on how long they kept it alive, but this incentivizes multi-hour endurance which DE doesn't especially want, it seems).

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

On 2023-09-04 at 1:58 AM, Cheseit said:

They start building factories to arm their troops with over shields. The factories get more advanced and start adding electrical status to their weapons. Corpus moa's start assaulting you with railguns capable of punching through the terrain itself. Left unchecked the factories will eventually start rolling more of those pesky spiders to bombard your position. Your warframe isn't suited to handle the full power of the corpus onslaught, so you get ahead of the equation and shut the factory down at the source.

I think this in particular is a very good idea for a secondary objective - ignore them at your detriment!

[TheLexiConArtist]

On 2023-09-04 at 2:26 PM, MBaldelli said:

Time for some of you people that only decided on Zenurik or Madurai to reconsider Vazarin Focus School as Vazarin Mains have been doing the pod healing for years.  (Did I mention that they have also been instantly reviving and making you folk heal and temporary invulnerable during a fight when they void sling through you?  No?  Look into it -- it still works even though DE said they were removing that... And didn't).  

Further, the pod self-heals both shields and health and has been doing so for a while.  Not quite instantaneously -- but faster than most people realize  if they actually stuck around to defend the target (instead of running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to kill the enemies as they spawn in).  

Vazarin Object-objective protection is tantamount useless now since it was gutted down from having the same properties as the Actor (NPC/PC) buff of % heal and protection, to no protection and a weak flat heal.

Capped garbage healing and unscaled natural healing mean a damaged pod can take so long enough to 'heal', even with the extra bump, that the auto-fail timeout kicks in - this can be easily seen in a late-round Steel Path Circuit when the pod has hundreds of thousands of health (and yet, still also takes seconds to die at the respective enemy level scale when they deal tens of thousands per shot, or over 100k for something like a Blitz Eximus ability).

So, 'healing the objective' only works when you're at low levels where you probably don't need it.

[Cheseit]

14 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

 

1. Dynamic Objective: one thing Mirror Defense did very well imo was to create a defense target that evolved. This is a fantastic thing, because it allows for a changing defense strategy. If you suddenly don't need to worry about the objective as much, because it's entered a reinforced state, then your entire playstyle can shift. I would give defense objectives 3-5 different states, which the players can trigger in different ways or that trigger automatically,or both -  this encourages different tactics. You could do some really cool stuff this way like put it into lockdown, transform it, superpower it, etc.

I really like this idea! Especially because I think it ties in with having secondary objectives or rewarding the player for roaming and tackling a threat. I especially like the thought of having some phase of the mission where a different frame style might excel. I actually think that could be some of the solution to any particular frame being OP at X job. One option is to try to balance the job they're good at and make it harder, or to balance the frame but another approach is to just change the objective entirely for a short period of time.

That's actually and element of the Circuit I feel we could learn from. Long distance circuit runs basically cant happen without a hard defense frame, and it feels healthy. You get the option to leave and gain meaningful rewards if you don't have a defense frame, but you can stay longer and keep getting extra progress for longer if you don't have to reset.

A dynamic objective could bring a similar feeling, offering more problems or potential optimizations to address throughout the mission.

 

14 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

 

1. Enemy Phases: in other games I've played defense style modes on, one of the best parts is trying to defend against a particularly strong onslaught that you know is coming. I think this would be very healthy. To do it I would create some sort of alarm or alert to notify the Tenno of the impending attack. When it triggers, I'd spawn some really tough enemies that have some good ability to really break through and deal strong damage to the objective. This might sound bad in our current defense system, but in an environment where you can rapidly heal the objective, reinforce it, supplement it, etc, inflicting strong but temporary damage on it creates a rewarding balancing act. This is especially true if you give the Tenno advance notice, allowing them to erect defenses or otherwise prepare for it, and if the objective has something like a lockdown mode, there would be less concern that it would get 1 or 2 shot. After the strong wave of enemies is dealt with, the Tenno can turn their attention to bringing the objective back up to full (something they should easily be able to do). You could also put these on a spectrum, so you have like a tier 1 assault, up to a tier 5 or something, because this would create a great sort of anticipation - 'oh no this a tier 5 get ready bois'. Would also make all these relatively random rather than statically timed.

This would make me the most nervous. I still feel its a great idea, but I would be really nervous about its implementation. Most normal enemies we fight we can kill an infinite amount of basically instantly. Its pretty much the name of the game in SP survival. It could be some kind of boss type enemy like a Jackal, but I would be especially worried about the objective's health in that case if nothing else changed. I can imagine getting really frustrated at having your objective basically instakilled during some sort of immune boss phase.

That being said and considering all the other mentions, I would be much less scared of a big wave or surge or boss encounter if we were able to buff the objective's defenses temporarily.

15 hours ago, CrownOfShadows said:

 

1. Speed/Spawn/Cycle: I completely agree that the speed of defense missions is one of the main things killing them. A long time ago I actually ran the numbers on Nova comps, and while Nova can speed missions up very, very slightly, in the end it's not that useful, simply because of wave timers. What I would do is ditch the individual waves and instead just spawn enemies non-stop until the mission cycles. That is, you'd get a pause to gather yourself where the current wave 5,10,15,n is, but before those there is nothing but endless spawns. This alone might be enough of a speed improvement to make defense feel good, but giving players some extra options to reward their efficiency.

 

I whole heartedly agree with the bolded above. I think if I had to chose just a single element to change and modernize Defense missions it would be that. Wave timers can be downright frustrating these days. Once upon a time they gave you chance to get off the pod and loot and collect yourself, but we're much better at decimating maps now. 

 

[Zaghyr]

All missions in general, at least the base variants of them, should have additional optional side objectives. Hidden caches popping up on spy or sabotage is always nice, gives something else to do. Giving us extra things to do in a mission helps them feel fresh and diversifies the experience of each play session. An overhaul to syndicate missions could also be coupled with this, allowing you to find operatives in mission that can give you optional objectives that reward medallions.

[CrownOfShadows]

You could also have the enemy slowly construct a tower (or multiple towers) out on the perimeter, and when complete that tower slowly damages your defense objective, so you have to send someone out to destroy it or stop it from being built.