U11 Made Enemies Too Easy, And Not Because Of Numbers.

[shut]

I'm referring mostly to Runners and Ancients here, although I'm pretty sure that there are others out there.

 

 

- Toxic Ancients no longer leave gas clouds upon dying. This is a huge plus for Defense and Mobile Defense-type missions, of course, but I feel that it takes out a lot of the fun in fighting them in any other situation. The gas clouds made it so that you had to keep an eye open if you wanted to come out of Infested fights unscathed, but now fighting Toxics is just firing away mindlessly at what is now "just another melee unit". There's no challenge in fighting Toxics anymore. No more need for Loki to Switch Teleport them away from otherwise-occupied teammates, no more need for them to be sucked away from chokepoints that the team is trying to pass through.

 

My suggestion: Give them their posthumous gas clouds back, but make Defense/Mobile Defense objects (artifacts, cryopods, computer terminals) immune to them.

 

 

My bigger concern, though, is:

 

- Infested Runners no longer stagger upon exploding. Prior to U11, this was literally their only role. They can't do more than tickle players (shielded or not), and they can't even survive after attempting to deal their pitiful damage. Unless a player is in hiding and attempting to restore their shields, they can now be ignored entirely at the loss of only a bit of Affinity. As of Update 11, Runners pose no danger. They serve no role.

 

My suggestion: Bring back the stagger, so players can be wary of their presence once again (although with a slightly smaller stagger radius, so fighting Infested is more fair for players who have trouble avoiding the stagger, especially slower frames like Frost). I don't think that they should explode when players kill them, though, regardless of the damage type. This is what made them most irritating to fight Pre-U11.

 

 

 

Infested enemies were considered "easy-mode" before, but now, they're a complete joke.

Edited November 24, 2013 by SortaRandom

[Yoridokoro]

You make a good point(s).

[NetSlayer]

Some potential fixes.

- Infested runners latch on to players and then blow up. Deal blast damage 30 % chance to proc knockback on tenno.

-Toxic ancients grab tenno, hold them in place and breathe toxic gas, then ragdoll slam them to the ground.

*shrugs* Maybe there should be more interaction between AI and Warframes.

[Aure7]

stagger from runners was avoidable, so that's a good stagger and I want it back.

[Morgax]

Nonono, leave the stagger buried in it's grave.

 

Maybe give them debuff that applies on tenno once runner dies.

 

Toxic clouds: odd i still get damaged after stepping on same place where their corpse got absorbed.

 

 

Some potential fixes.

- Infested runners latch on to players and then blow up. Deal blast damage 30 % chance to proc knockback on tenno.

-Toxic ancients grab tenno, hold them in place and breathe toxic gas, then ragdoll slam them to the ground.

*shrugs* Maybe there should be more interaction between AI and Warframes.

Ever played Mass Effect 3 multiplayer?

 

These interactions were frustrating as hell, they latency made you moonwalk back to your enemy and get the punishment, it depends a lot on host.

Plus the range of Ancient's attack is already questionable.

[shut]

Nonono, leave the stagger buried in it's grave.

 

Maybe give them debuff that applies on tenno once runner dies.

 

Toxic clouds: odd i still get damaged after stepping on same place where their corpse got absorbed.

 

I wouldn't mind the debuff too much, but these "run-fast-and-then-self-destruct" enemies in games all around tend to have a more "instantaneous" effect on the thing that they hit, such as high damage, or, in this case, the stagger.

I prefer sticking with this tradition; an AoE debuff from fast self-destructing enemies seems a bit out of place to me.

Edited November 24, 2013 by SortaRandom

[Paradoxbomb]

I agree with you on Toxics, I feel like there poison clouds actually provided a bit more challenge when fighting the infested and made it so that you actually had to be careful and even a bit tactical with them around (albeit it was unfair when you were downed in a cloud and people couldn't stop you from dying nearly instantly, but they could just add poison immunity to downed players).

 

I could care less about Runners though, they were probably one of the poorest, most unnecessary enemies in the game IMO, they served purely to stagger you, something 90% of the infested already do anyway. I say make them significantly less common, but actually make them a threat when they do spawn, capable of causing high damage when they explode (maybe even with a chance to trigger poison DoT), or decrease the player's movement speed or damage output.

[Vercinaigh]

The old ways are done, and with 350 shooting hours in this game, i am gflad to see them gone and may they -NEVER- return. We don't need them, if you want them to be harder, fine, but in a different and more meaningful and interesting way. Rather then oh get staggered once, prepare to be staggered/stunned/killed over and over again. Or oh look that cloud that didn't render for the non host just killed him, and instantly killed him after preventing rez, whhich you couldn't risk anyways.

 

They were awful mechanics, that's why they are gone, silly to beleive new ones are not int he works.

[aaa9]

The stagger isn't gone and the clouds aren't gone either. I've had both happen to me since the update. It's just that they use the same system as our weapons. So the chance of Toxics leaving a gas cloud is a status proc, the same with runners and the impact proc. I like this system better but I agree that the chances of each thing happening should be buffed. Maybe around a 75% chance.

[Zoid25]

Im pretty sure the knockdown physics is broken, that means runners will stagger later with a hotfix

[KARMA2605]

Good points OP - I noticed that the Xini Wave 20+ just didn't have the same "pop".  Was using ridiculously underpowered gear (just forma'd) and was sleep walking until the end of waves when we had to go hunt the stragglers.  Speaking of that, did Infested pathing get messed again because man alive did we have to roam to find them all to finish off waves.  Or was that done on purpose to pull players out of their bunkers?  Tricky De :P

[Agente_GentlePhoenix]

Theyre hard now, since the new update more than hard, i miss the damage 2.0 on first release, Nerfted every weapon and mod... now cant handle t3 with 4 people no matter how many mods you have on your weapon.

[Boomstick720]

I never thought I'd see the day where people were actually asking to bring BACK stun lock mechanics.

 

What a world.

[PaperAlien]

There's definitely better ways to fix Runners than bring back the stunlock. Giving their explosion increased damage, shield ignore or DoT poison would be much better options. As for the Ancients, I think the lack of cloud is just bugged out and will presumably be returned at some point.

[HateFueled]

the DEVs are killing this game. CLEARLY.

 

It's not us who is trying to defeat the MOBs.

 

It's the DEVs who are trying to defeat US.

 

They gonna make the gameplay boring and meaningless.

 

---

 

This is not even grinding anymore.. this is like a test "How long can we make they play this boring boring game"

 

Yeah... they just gonna make it as boring as possible to test how much of it we can take.. and they will keep on going until everyone Uninstalls WF.

[PaperAlien]

the DEVs are killing this game. CLEARLY.

 

It's not us who is trying to defeat the MOBs.

 

It's the DEVs who are trying to defeat US.

 

They gonna make the gameplay boring and meaningless.

 

---

 

This is not even grinding anymore.. this is like a test "How long can we make they play this boring boring game"

 

Yeah... they just gonna make it as boring as possible to test how much of it we can take.. and they will keep on going until everyone Uninstalls WF.

Living up to your name as usual. They made Damage 2.0 in an attempt to make gameplay more interesting for players, but apparently a few possibly unintended side effects that inevitably spew from such a large update is enough to set people with their pitchforks out again. It sure must be hard to be a game developer.

Edited November 25, 2013 by PaperAlien

[K_Shiro]

Infested. Well, they were always my favourites... for farming. Since they are easy to murder. It might seem a bit masochistic but I miss toxic clouds and staggering kamikazes too.

 

As for toxic ancient's cloud I would make it so it deals rather high damage at first few instances then go down the more you stand in it so in the end it's only substantial - thus eliminating the annoyance/sure-death when being unable to move while still posing a threat. Kinda like "diminishing-returns". Also I would make sure their damage doesn't go higher than a certain amount, because above a certain rank it was always a problem to get one-hitted (fully, no down time, sudden death because nobody else is on their feet...) by these things.

 

Stagger... I hated it. It's fine as long as you are only staggered once in a while (or get knocked off your feet a bit) but not always, not being to stand up or even move. But their current form is useless, absolute waste of game space. I'm a nekros, I just love it when I summon a bunch of rushers whom are not even good as meat shields (Shadows of the dead requires luck and being questionable in terms of effectiveness anyways - I mean chaos is cheaper and may be better in most situations).

I would give them a diminishing return too, as for you cannot get knocked off your feet or staggered more than once per 3 seconds and a new debuff: snare. If they explode close to you, you get a stackable 25% speed reduction. It can stack indefinitely but always slowing you by 25% of current speed so actually the amount diminishes the more stacks you have... still refreshing the timer if you get a new one exploding in your face.

I would hate them incredibly, would be even scared of them (I mean they slow you in the middle of a crowd of hungry fellas... that's not nice), yet the annoyance of constant stagger is no more.

 

- -

 

As for the new damage2.0...

 

The enemies ranks being less than before seems nice, it was getting hilarious to see 100+ enemies on every corner when our frames and weapons can only go for 30. I mean if there are levels in a game it's no surprise we expect these levels to cover the entire game instead of having different levels for enemies, armor, weapons etc.

 

So that part (apart from forgetting about raising the xp and not just hp and damage of ranks) get's a + from me, and I like the new system itself too. Yep, it needs balancing (quite a bit) but it's a good start.

As for boredom, I don't think it comes from the new system either.

 

My main problem with the game currently is not the damage system or certain enemies. It's the numbers. To be honest only came to this topic because "numbers" is in the title.

Anyways, while we are supposedly (space) ninjas, melee fighting lost it's meaning, if we want to succeed, we are better off shooting. I for one use Ignis. It produces rather high damage and hits everyone. I like it but I would love a firebat armor to complement it instead of this ninja setup.

As to what I mean, the game starts off nice when you are rank0 on Mercury, then it turns into a massacre. Immense amounts of enemies stupidly rushing towards you in waves, one after another. Doesn't matter if infested or others, you are more of a pest-control agent than a ninja.

 

- -

 

A Ninja is supposedly someone who uses special, possible stealthy techniques to assassinate/dispose of targets and opponents, not mass murder every living thing in eyesight in the blink of an eye, without any finesse - at least normally that's what you think, instead of the Naruto-ish meteor strikes and 30 stories tall "imagined" friend called Susano'o.

Latron is a good example, as it became tedious to use it - too many enemies to take that much care about every one of them. Even snipers are better as at least they have higher damage - with mutator mods ammo is no longer an issue. Same goes for melee, with this many enemies, any melee weapon that only hits one target in close vicinity is damned to oblivion. Even the machetes are not much fun since you can't do damage remotely comparable to ignis or most ranged weapons.

Stealth became nonexistent. It's not rewarding at all, and most of the time even close to impossible.

 

The game is becoming more and more like an Unreal Tournament/Serious Sam hybrid - at least compared to what we know about ninjas/elite agents.

 

I for one believe that the following could help:

- Less enemies.

- Lower health of enemies.

- Higher health damage of enemies. For example your resistances do not apply to health based damage - so when your shields are down.

- Higher importance to shields - shields should be what you consider your main health pool, if you lose HPoints, then you messed up bad etc.

- Enemies blocking/defending against (not just melee) attacks, etc. thus deeper melee/fighting system.*

- Better AI would be nice, though that's always the hardest part. As long as they are not rushing stupidly at you, it should be fine.

 

*As for a deeper melee/fighting system, first we should be forced to focus more on one enemy (or at least smaller groups of them) yet because of them having high health pool - that's maybe the most boring way to make an enemy "challenging" that ever existed

(only worse is making them invulnerable while something else happens - like Magdha's shielding in D3 if some of you know what I mean... you can't hurt her while her minions live even if you would one-hit her, you have to wait for her to cast her shield 3 times... ).

Situational melee moves (like the backstab in stealth) could make it way better - no I don't want assassin's creed but that direction might actually be not that bad. I mean stuff like a real melee system where you can block (not just resist a bit of damage but block melee, animation and all - also they can too, given the equipment - grineer are armored to begin with so...), you have defense breaker moves, it's harder to block heavy weapons with daggers etc., you can actually aim moves, including melee and shots - hitting legs slow them (or you can sweep their legs so they fall), hitting hand may cause disarm or debuff affecting accuracy and attack speed, maybe reload, hitting head death or concussion/stun, knocking/pushing them back... tons of stuff.

Just imagine yourself standing in the door, holding back an ancient with your scindo while your teammates try to shoot that bast*rd. Cool stuff like that.

I know this is hard, tedious work that requires a brutal deal of time - but it would make the game more like a game about ninjas than about mercenaries who use pocket sized weapons of localized armageddon. Hell, most of the time the tenno just stand there shooting and taking the hits - that's not very ninja like.

Edited November 25, 2013 by K_Shiro

[Liminal]

I'd keep the stagger gone. I'd just make the damage from runners more significant. Like the beheaded kamikazes in Serious Sam... that game was incredibly fun and it didn't need lame-arse stuns and staggers :P

[Dogoframe]

I am pretty sure it is not WAI, I got staggered by Runners (but it isnt 100%) and took damage from Ancient clouds (but they dont come up every time).

 

On a side note, I hated the poison clouds with a passion not because of their difficulty, but because if I joined a random game with Ancients, I had to make darn sure I was the fastest runner, or else one player being slightly faster than the rest of the group could kill one on the way, and block a passage for all others (unwillingly, and no way around it).

[Shinobi-kun]

I'll decide later once the Infested stop swarming in on me, cornering me, blocking my way out from all sides before rolling out the Ancients's 100% knockdown bump dash. Besides, a small portion of the community likes simple casual play.