For those who enjoyed it for fun, Why couldn't DE add Undertow as a hold option for tidal surge? like they did with bastille?

[Stormandreas]

5 hours ago, TARINunit9 said:

"it's a meme"  (in this context "memetically terrible") means it's so notoriously terrible players see no genuine value in the ability on its own, and its lack of value has become so infamous that its very name has become a punchline or otherwise a byword to indicate terribleness. It also often means players have taken to ironically pretending it has value for laughs. 

"Hard to maintain" is much more literal: it's difficult to keep the ability both active and useful. There is some ambiguity whether he means difficult for the player to actively maintain in a firefight, or difficult for the devs to maintain in the game without it being too glitchy and useless

The meme part is the short sightedness of Puddles usefulness. It absolutely had value and use which had to be combined with Armour Stripping and Grouping. Now, hydroid has that, boom, done. 
Puddle was one of the best damage scaling abilities IN THE GAME. 2% of enemies max health as damage, increasing by another 2% every second they're in the puddle, with 0.6% more for every other enemy in the puddle too.
To note, Reave is 8% of enemies max health/shields per hit. Grendels Feast is only a 2% of enemies max health and that's it, nothing extra. Puddle was VERY comparable to these abilities for damage.
Try and deny it's damage all you want, math doesn't lie. I even have footage of puddle working perfectly to just massacre SP enemies.

The Hard to maintain part is not hard at all. Puddle worked, straight up. It's worked perfectly fine other than how the AI is programmed. Puddle hadn't been touched for years. An ability that's so stable it needs no fixes for years, is hardly "hard to maintain"

Literally all it is, is that Pablo doesn't like Puddle, and thus doesn't want it in the game. That's all that really needs to be said. Considering he's not once mentioned the actual feedback and ideas the community has provided (other than a single instance of someone mentioning putting it on Hydroids crouch), and only focussing on 1 brief suggestion from Rebecca, is telling of this.

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

The doctor tells the patient they are losing their legs to help other people and that there is a much better option for moving rather than using those legs. The patient doesn’t quite understand why he has to do it so he tries to reason why he has to do such a thing. He doesn’t owe anything to anyone else and would like to live his life and use his legs to the fullest since he worked so hard with them despite knowing he probably won’t be winning any competitions or not. The doctor then forcibly amputates the patient without his consent much to the surprise to the patient.

 

The “rework” is akin to amputating someone’s legs but giving him an extremely fancy wheelchair that allows someone to perform so much better than when he had legs. Then pushing the guy off the wheelchair so some other people can use it. The person who had the legs originally now has nowhere else to go. 

 

It’s not murder. He’s definitely still alive! He’s breathing so he must be feeling fine right? Also, what’s wrong with this wheelchair? Why is it so slow? Why don’t we just use the car? *Throws wheelchair at disabled person*

 

“Have fun with your life! We’ll have fun with ours!” *drives off on their two legs with a car* 

 

Now the person with a wheelchair has a choice. He continues living like nothing ever happened even though living will always be completely different from now on or just gives up. He can’t do anything else because it’s not in his power to. 

 

I play the victim because that’s what this is and I have no other options. I’m a living breathing victim of a change that I didn’t want and am now traumatized with no where to turn to. Not allowed to have an experience I cherished and lived side by side for a long time. 

 

Why point out logical reasoning or feedback when even in the recent dev stream it’s not even given a serious thought? 

 

Why punish a long time player of a unique play-style that found the game itself fun and didn’t mind the meta? 

 

Was I too conceited? Did I bring a level of toxic elitism or discomfort to a large base of players for existing? Why did this end up happening? Why can’t I have what I always had enjoyed and other people can have what they always wanted? Why must there be a divide?

 

Must fun always be measured by instant gratification? 

 

I don’t understand. I just don’t understand it. Why couldn’t you leave people to enjoy themselves in their own island when you were already making so many islands already… Why does the hypocritical design just have to bleed everywhere.

[(XBOX)Lord ChibiVR]

14 hours ago, Dunkelheit said:

Devs: Here is one of the best reworks of Warframe ever. We need to get rid of puddle, because we had problems with it gametech wise. We really tried to do our best, we feel there is not much left to complain about.

Players: Hold my beer....

I mean, it's kinda like Nyx Absorb where it could be situationally useful if you needed a breather or wanted to cast abilities while immune to damage.

[Aruquae]

On 2023-10-27 at 5:32 PM, Stormandreas said:

The main thing he said addressing it was "It's a meme", and that's pretty much it. No clear information, no actual reasoning, just "it's a meme" and "it's hard to maintain" (WTF DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?)

Don’t forget when they posted the “reason” saying it promoted an “AFK play style” as if you’ve ever seen a Hydroid pre-rework, much less an AFK one. 

[TARINunit9]

12 hours ago, Stormandreas said:

Literally all it is, is that Pablo doesn't like Puddle, and thus doesn't want it in the game

And I don't blame him

Undertow was unique in that it was the only ability in the game that replied on the enemy coming to you. Nothing else works like that except maybe Citrine's Prismatic Gem. On top of that, once the enemy did come to you,  Undertow was really big on just sitting around twiddling your thumbs. Not just in game, IRL too. Sitting there in your chair, doing nothing. Something DE as designers want to get rid of in their game.

Lastly to get the most out of the ability it required communication with your team. This is iffy at the best of times, but Undertow makes it very difficult to actually do that because there's no visual queues to share with your teammates. Khora wraps a group of enemies in chains, Vauban creates a visible vortex that pulls ragdolls in. Undertow REMOVED things from the playing field, so the Hydroid player would have to tell his teammates "I'm using Undertow! Please look for my waypoint and shoot at the big pile of nothing on the ground"

Undertow was garbage in more ways than you're willing to admit

[(PSN)Hopper_Orouk]

It's not the fact that I want puddle, it's that I wanted Hydroid to keep his water transformation abilities.

 

previously he could turn into a tidal wave (still there) and turn into undertow (Rip) he also summoned water tentacles.

now Water tentacles got replaced with actual tentacles, undertow is gone and the only power that adds the oid in Hydroid is tidal surge.

[Stormandreas]

29 minutes ago, TARINunit9 said:

And I don't blame him

Undertow was unique in that it was the only ability in the game that replied on the enemy coming to you. Nothing else works like that except maybe Citrine's Prismatic Gem. On top of that, once the enemy did come to you,  Undertow was really big on just sitting around twiddling your thumbs. Not just in game, IRL too. Sitting there in your chair, doing nothing. Something DE as designers want to get rid of in their game.

Lastly to get the most out of the ability it required communication with your team. This is iffy at the best of times, but Undertow makes it very difficult to actually do that because there's no visual queues to share with your teammates. Khora wraps a group of enemies in chains, Vauban creates a visible vortex that pulls ragdolls in. Undertow REMOVED things from the playing field, so the Hydroid player would have to tell his teammates "I'm using Undertow! Please look for my waypoint and shoot at the big pile of nothing on the ground"

Undertow was garbage in more ways than you're willing to admit

Tentacle swarm, Strangledome, Tempest Barrage, Bastille all require the enemy to come to you/the ability to function. Not really a good excuse there. The difference with Strangledome and Bastille is that those abilities both have grouping abilities either integrated into them or within the kit. Puddle didn't, and Hydroid still doesn't.

As I've said to so many people, the absolute biggest mistake made when using puddle, is assuming you HAVE to sit in it all the time, which is the worst way to use it, something DE didn't get because they don't do overly extensively tests on their frames and kits like we do (and we do in a very short space of time).

You can claim Undertow as garbage, that just tells me you never actually did experiment with the ability to find where it's strengths and weaknesses actually were, and only focus on the weaknesses because it's easier to do. This has been the same arugments from people who never played Hydroid, and it really shows.

[TARINunit9]

8 minutes ago, Stormandreas said:

Tentacle swarm, Strangledome, Tempest Barrage, Bastille all require the enemy to come to you/the ability to function.

I vehemently disagree because of something else I forgot to put in my last post...

Every other grouping ability allows the caster to shoot things, not just their teammates. Undertow did not, Undertow was a more old school tanking ability from a classic WoW style game -- and i'm not saying tank players didn't ever have fun, but it's not a fit for Warframe 's combat loop

But much more importantly:

9 minutes ago, Stormandreas said:

As I've said to so many people, the absolute biggest mistake made when using puddle, is assuming you HAVE to sit in it all the time, which is the worst way to use it

Then it was just plain badly designed. If the worst way to do something is also the first thought on the player's mind, that's bad design. 

You claim I never tried Undertow out. I tried Undertow out, and the heuristics of Undertow's design made it really boring. The most fun I've ever had with Undertow was in late 2015 when I used it to regenerate my shields at a critical moment against Zanuka Harvester.

Did I ever test Undertow on Steel Path? No, because I loathe Steel Path with a deep seething passion, and I refuse to play it anymore outside of Circuit (where I can turn the tables on its unfun BS with Decrees). Why would I ever play Hydroid, a frame with terrible durability and unreliable crowd control, just to experiment with an ability that trains the player to AFK with it?

You claim players aren't willing to experiment and get out of their comfort zones. I counter that players just don't want to be the worst flavor of masochists, both bored AND hurting themselves. When you want players to challenge themselves, you have to actually promise them fun

[Rakosta_Kai]

1 hour ago, TARINunit9 said:

Undertow was garbage in more ways than you're willing to admit

I'll have to disagree here but preface my commentary with the following:
I am/was not a Hydroid main
Didn't play one on TV.
Genuinely lacked the twitchy skill cap to be able to play one well.

Folks willing to sit long periods in Undertow were doing it wrong and are the source of a lot of misconceptions about the skill. It was an option for use but it wasn't the best use of time or resources. Not unlike the Ashhole Builds a lot of folks gravitated to with Blade Storm.

The best Hydroid mains I saw used Tentacles as choke points, surge for movement and rounding up mobs and a mix of Undertow, finishers, and melee for dispatching mobs while using Undertow to hide/heal from damage. Scott also used a similar playstyle in his original play introduction of the frame iirc.

I, personally, could never get good with the playstyle as I simply wasn't twitchy enough and found the effort:result ratio to be a bit much given how everything was dependent on the expectation that Undertow was going to be used so liberally. 
My attempts with the frame and playstyle left me with the impression that it was the most energy dependent frame in the game and I don't care for being limited by energy issues.

I get why you feel as you do though and would completely agree that an undertow spamming tactic would feel like watching paint dry.
I also get why Pablo did what he did regarding Hydroid regardless of stated opinions as Undertow was going to be hard to balance around.
A current Hydroid with Undertow as an optional power would be an insane level of powercreep with the current passive imo. 

I do wish it could have worked out amicably for all parties though.
 

Edited October 30, 2023 by Rakosta_Kai

[(PSN)Unstar]

DE has been very transparent about the answer to these questions.

From the Hydroid Rework Dev Workshop:

Quote

Undertow:

• This ability is being removed and replaced with Plunder.
  • Undertow is an ability which we feel makes Hydroid a bit less fun to play as, or play with. There are two main reasons we decided to replace this ability:
    • It forces the player to be stationary, while many objectives rely on regular movement.
    • It absorbs enemies without instantly killing them, which can lead to instances of hiding enemies that a teammate was trying to kill.

Additionally, in the most recent dev stream.  Rebb asked Pablo if they could maybe keep Undertow as a Helminth ability, and Pablo had added additional rationale as to why that would be a bad idea: every ability that they keep in the game has a maintenance cost, because as new content is developed it's common for old content to break in some way that requires a tune-up.  And Undertow was a special, particularly bug-prone ability that would run up against this cost more than most.

So whether you agree or not, those are their reasons.  As someone who would have liked to see Undertow stick around, I have to admit that the reasoning is good and I think Pablo made the right choice.

Edited October 30, 2023 by (PSN)Unstar

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

2 hours ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

So whether you agree or not, those are their reasons.

Dropping the ability and a unique experience because of maintenance cost. Since this is a legitimate problem with the development team I’ll just wait and complain occasionally. Since that’s all I can really do.

Maybe development will get resources one day to have Undertow again somewhere. High chance that it won’t be accessible to me specifically because of my play-style choices but that’s fine… However, it’s strange.

Warframe has been doing better than a few years ago, yes? Even still they have development problems to the point where they needed or wanted to scrap Undertow. 

The reasoning from Pablo isn’t good to me but that doesn’t matter so there’s no use elaborating at all. There’s already so many counter-arguments against Pablo’s view on Undertow with no rebuttal that I’d be a broken record anyways.

[Stormandreas]

3 hours ago, TARINunit9 said:

I vehemently disagree because of something else I forgot to put in my last post...

Every other grouping ability allows the caster to shoot things, not just their teammates. Undertow did not, Undertow was a more old school tanking ability from a classic WoW style game -- and i'm not saying tank players didn't ever have fun, but it's not a fit for Warframe 's combat loop

But much more importantly:

Then it was just plain badly designed. If the worst way to do something is also the first thought on the player's mind, that's bad design. 

You claim I never tried Undertow out. I tried Undertow out, and the heuristics of Undertow's design made it really boring. The most fun I've ever had with Undertow was in late 2015 when I used it to regenerate my shields at a critical moment against Zanuka Harvester.

Did I ever test Undertow on Steel Path? No, because I loathe Steel Path with a deep seething passion, and I refuse to play it anymore outside of Circuit (where I can turn the tables on its unfun BS with Decrees). Why would I ever play Hydroid, a frame with terrible durability and unreliable crowd control, just to experiment with an ability that trains the player to AFK with it?

You claim players aren't willing to experiment and get out of their comfort zones. I counter that players just don't want to be the worst flavor of masochists, both bored AND hurting themselves. When you want players to challenge themselves, you have to actually promise them fun

You refuse to play SP, and yet are commenting on abilities being useless when used with methods that are designed for SP.

You say that Puddle is an AFK ability. That still tells me you never bothered experimenting, as when used in the right build, it's exceptionally powerful, and absolutely not an AFK ability.

[Hypernaut1]

I've given up hope. Pablo didn't even want to touch hydroid in the first place, im not expecting him to even look at the frame again after the rework. 

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

11 minutes ago, Hypernaut1 said:

I've given up hope. Pablo didn't even want to touch hydroid in the first place, im not expecting him to even look at the frame again after the rework. 

Yup. It’s definitely unfortunate.

[TARINunit9]

1 hour ago, Stormandreas said:

and yet are commenting on abilities being useless when used with methods that are designed for SP.

I never once commented on those methods

1 hour ago, Stormandreas said:

as when used in the right build, it's exceptionally powerful, and absolutely not an AFK ability.

Then someone should have told DE that! They ways they designed it, originally balanced it, and eventually removed it make it very clear it was intended as an AFK ability. As such, it's no surprise that everyone except you treated it as an AFK ability. That was my point

Edited October 30, 2023 by TARINunit9

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

1 minute ago, TARINunit9 said:

Then someone should have told DE that! They ways they designed it, originally balanced it, and eventually removed it make it very clear it was intended as an AFK ability. That was my point

This thread has been around for a long time. On DE’s forums. Which for sure someone from DE should’ve seen by now… But then again, this exists with no mention from DE:

 

So I guess you have a point after all.

[(PSN)Hopper_Orouk]

41 minutes ago, Turritopsis_Dohrnii said:

This thread has been around for a long time. On DE’s forums. Which for sure someone from DE should’ve seen by now… But then again, this exists with no mention from DE:

 

So I guess you have a point after all.

I use forums to make posts for fun and even post feedback for fun, I've given up hope on ever expecting DE to notice

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

38 minutes ago, (PSN)Hopper_Orouk said:

I use forums to make posts for fun and even post feedback for fun, I've given up hope on ever expecting DE to notice

Ah, I suppose that should be the expectation then. I’ll try to adopt that in some way if you don’t mind!

[(PSN)Spider_Enigma]

On 2023-10-28 at 4:34 AM, Naroxas44 said:

The main reason I heard that undertow was scraped as a whole was that it doesn't fit the pacing of the game, since it forces the player to sit as a puddle and rely on external damage (or internal DoT ticks). There are reasonable uses for it I'm sure, but it was probably more efficient from a dev standpoint to just scrap the ability as a whole and make one that functions a lot simpler and is less restrictive to playstyles (straight buffs in a kit almost always helps).

It might seem like scrapping an already existing ability that had that effort and time put into it is wasteful, but consider it:

• Applied an invuln state to hydroid, which all damage types now need to respect
• Removed most parkour & other abilities from Hydroid in this state, and prevented energy regen
• Applied an "untargetable" effect if the wiki is correct, meaning enemy AI focus was deprioritized or removed from Hydroid (reading more, it looks like they just applied the "invisible" state to him, which makes sense)
• Captured enemies inside it, requiring the need to both cull the enemy model (including all of the effects it produces) and store the data associated with the enemies, and apply the "knockdown" state
• Treat the puddle object as a damage proxy, and distribute to all enemies inside (they seem to struggle with this, even in Zephyr's tornados too), with regard to keeping persistent status effects and debuff timers paused until enemies are no longer in Undertow, tracking each of them individually
• Calculate % damage that stacks while submerged, meaning max HP & individual timers per enemy per time submerged needs to be tracked to apply the damage growth per second
• Allow the player to target enemies and pull them in with a water tendril
• Track player movement / positional data in regards to velocity to account for energy drain (points per meters moved)
• Needs to respect cc-immune enemies or specific situations; the bugs section of the wiki shows some bosses (sargus ruk) were able to be submerged and could cause griefing, as well as downed bursas counting as alive since they're not a "corpse" from the game perspective, meaning lots of exceptions may need to be coded specifically to this skill as new content is added, adding technical debt due to its complexity

Keep in mind it also needs to do some of these in reverse, like know when to release enemies / free them up / re-enable all the players' disabled stuff, and also synergize with abilities like tidal surge (which tbf that one is just performing some velocity adjustments if the rest from undertow above is applied, since they'd get grouped in the puddle immediately anyways).

A lot of these foundations were probably used for something in the future like grendal's feast mechanic, but as a whole the ability itself has so many moving parts and points that changes could break it and they'd have to maintain and do upkeep on it constantly to account for new enemies, damage conditions, mods, etc. and it was likely deemed too much of an investment to maintain. That's not to say devs can't be ambitious and make things like this, but the game has evolved and changed so much from when this was first introduced that a lot of it likely does not account for or work with newer mechanics or features correctly and it seems needlessly complicated in comparison to some of the other skills we have.

From a technical perspective they could add it in as a hold mechanic for tidal surge (anything is possible given enough time and coding effort), but likely chose specifically not to because of the investment that would take and the considerations above.

Grendel 

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

45 minutes ago, (PSN)Spider_Enigma said:

Grendel 

Yeah, Grendel is mentioned in there. I guess they only had the resources to choose one and they dropped Hydroid’s since it was unpopular.

We haven’t gotten a response or highly likely never will get a response regarding this, unfortunately.

 

[(PSN)Spider_Enigma]

6 minutes ago, Turritopsis_Dohrnii said:

Yeah, Grendel is mentioned in there. I guess they only had the resources to choose one and they dropped Hydroid’s since it was unpopular.

We haven’t gotten a response or highly likely never will get a response regarding this, unfortunately.

 

my point is they used part of the code from the puddle on Grendel and saying that it would be too much upkeep is wierd as they would have to drop grendel entirely as a frame

[Turritopsis_Dohrnii]

2 hours ago, (PSN)Spider_Enigma said:

my point is they used part of the code from the puddle on Grendel and saying that it would be too much upkeep is wierd as they would have to drop grendel entirely as a frame

Yes, I find that weird too. Especially since Warframe has been doing better compared to a few years ago.

[(PSN)Hopper_Orouk]

There is this one thing that I really like about undertow (the rest of undertow was terrible) , you could cast Tentacle swarm and it would spawn only on you puddle form, as if you were the Kraken, and it also had a tentacle pull, it was so cool.

the closest thing to shapeshifting.

we will never experience something like that again,

Edited October 31, 2023 by (PSN)Hopper_Orouk

[(XBOX)DoomDio9046]

On 2023-10-27 at 4:32 PM, Stormandreas said:

From what we heard on the recent devstream, we can summise they didn't keep undertow because Pablo doesn't like it really.

The main thing he said addressing it was "It's a meme", and that's pretty much it. No clear information, no actual reasoning, just "it's a meme" and "it's hard to maintain" (WTF DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?)

It's utter nonsense because those of us that loved the ability are screwed now, instead we get generic [insert unoriginal ability].

[Reitrix]

2 hours ago, (XBOX)DoomDio9046 said:

It's utter nonsense because those of us that loved the ability are screwed now, instead we get generic [insert unoriginal ability].

Giving it back to us as a Hold option for Surge but removing the secondary effects is all i want to see. 
Puddle form used in the same way Operators use Void Mode, to create a safe moment to recover. 
Leave the tentacle grab in though. Thats just fun XD