Can Survival please be reworked?

[Alphas]

Survival is a really fun mode to just turn your brain off in, but it has some extremely pressing issues with enemy spawn rate/density (even in Steel Path) and how that relates to the Life Support system.  Life Support drains way too fast, and it's an awful mechanic to play around.  Most of the time unless you get lucky with a good camping tile you won't be able to sustain Life Support for more than a few minutes before being in the Red critical zone unless you're using one of the most broken weapons like Kuva Bramma.

The entire Life Support mechanic should just get scrapped in favor of smaller objectives that have you moving throughout the map to set off different alarms or disrupt/sabotage various systems.  Having a failure mechanic so poorly balanced as Life Support really ruins most endurance runs of Steel Path and only allows for specific meta Warframes and weapons to be used.  Ideally Survival's only failure state would be player death.  There's no reason to have Survival runs end because the game doesn't spawn enough enemies for you to kill.  It's blatantly unfair.

 

>edit: I have discovered why I can't get life support to drop lmao  I've been an Ash main for the last 10 years, so I use him all the time, and he's really good in Survival, but apparently he's bugged and the kills from Blade Storm aren't actually counting as kills, so they're not dropping life support.  It's only been counting the enemies I have personally killed with my guns and melee weapons.  THAT'S why it hasn't been giving me the life support I need.  I can keep the KPM up in order to get life support, but the game isn't counting the kills, so it's not dropping them, and since I'm mostly getting kills with Blade Storm, I'm not getting many life support drops from the stragglers I clean up on my own.

Edited November 5, 2023 by Alphas

[Sevek7]

I think this is actually due to incompetent teammates.

Survival on steel path spawns enough enemies such that you'll never need a life support capsule. But, if you kill all the enemies around you then new enemies will spawn, but some of the new spawns will be near your teammate(s), not yourself. Therefore, if a teammate is killing very slowly, after a minute of play all the enemies are congregated in their area, and none are left in the areas where the fast-killing players are.

So, if you want to enjoy survival without these problems, your options are either to play it solo so all the enemies come to you, or follow your teammates around to make sure you don't get that buildup of enemies not being killed.

Personally I choose solo, since this works well for me. Ideally the game-mode wouldn't have this issue, and perhaps that's a good idea for a rework (something about enemies prioritizing spawnpoints near the high killcount players?)

[Zakkhar]

Enemy spawn have certain rules: 

1. There can be limited number of enemies on the map. The limit depends on the number of players, mission type (SP has increased number) and sadly the machine host plays on. Console players, especially the old console ones tend to have visibly less enemies spawning compared to PC hosts.

2. Enemies spawn: Near players, near objectives, but always of out line of sight (beside Void Fissures). Also there are tilesets. The enemies will normally spawn in neighbouring tileset (tileset is a room/corridor block, the map is made out of these blocks, in general if there is a gate with actual door in it is it most likely a border between tilesets).

 

Problem with players is that they either do not know this mechanics or do not care. They will see lots of enmies spawn behind the corner and instead of waiting for them to come, they will go there and kill them, which makes them stop spawning there, instead they spawn in next tilset, behind another corner, but it is close enough for a player to see them on minimap, so they go there again and again the nnext spawn spawn even further away (and also behind the player if there is enough space between them and their squad).

Also have in mind the DE had made countermeasures for camping in one tile. At some point enemies may stop spawning if the game feels the players do not move from one tileset.

PS: Kuva Bramma has been nerfed to ground and dethroned multiple times. 

As for survival itself, you can totally survive long time without killing a single enemy, just by using the stations sparingly (and breaking containers as they also have a chance to drop LS)

[Nimisha_Prime]

I mostly run survival with just a single other player, but we've done runs lasting well over an hour. The issue you're facing is likely in how you're performing the task, not in the task itself. Someone above stated how enemies spawn, and finding life support containers in crates and such. For the most part, Her and I pick a nice open room, go to the ends (because there's always some big looping maze area) and we just go down hall after hall, looping back, taking everything in our paths. It's rare our life support hits 60, unless we did something wrong or had some encounter (Like Cephalon Suda throwing a team of damn eximus at me for simply existing!) but other than that, it's my favorite type of mission because it's fun, easy, and gives by far the best loot farming on basic goods.

[Alphas]

1 hour ago, Sevek7 said:

I think this is actually due to incompetent teammates.

Survival on steel path spawns enough enemies such that you'll never need a life support capsule. But, if you kill all the enemies around you then new enemies will spawn, but some of the new spawns will be near your teammate(s), not yourself. Therefore, if a teammate is killing very slowly, after a minute of play all the enemies are congregated in their area, and none are left in the areas where the fast-killing players are.

So, if you want to enjoy survival without these problems, your options are either to play it solo so all the enemies come to you, or follow your teammates around to make sure you don't get that buildup of enemies not being killed.

Personally I choose solo, since this works well for me. Ideally the game-mode wouldn't have this issue, and perhaps that's a good idea for a rework (something about enemies prioritizing spawnpoints near the high killcount players?)

I'm playing solo myself and even I can't keep the Kills Per Minute up to maintain life support.  I'm playing as Ash and I'm using Blade Storm to kill 10+ enemies in one area while, at the same time, using melee to kill 5-10 more enemies somewhere else.  I find myself waiting for enemies to spawn so I can kill them, and I'm very quick about it, but even after 10 minutes on Circulus I only come away with roughly 350-500 kills, which is far below the expected 1000 needed to sustain life support.  There are certainly times where I can get enough kills, but it often requires an immense amount of luck with spawning to get a good camp tile as well as good spawn locations in and outside to funnel enemies in.  It's just NOT a good system and it's really showing its age since the mission type is 10 years old with almost no fundamental changes.

[Nimisha_Prime]

22 minutes ago, Alphas said:

I'm playing solo myself and even I can't keep the Kills Per Minute up to maintain life support.  I'm playing as Ash and I'm using Blade Storm to kill 10+ enemies in one area while, at the same time, using melee to kill 5-10 more enemies somewhere else.  I find myself waiting for enemies to spawn so I can kill them, and I'm very quick about it, but even after 10 minutes on Circulus I only come away with roughly 350-500 kills, which is far below the expected 1000 needed to sustain life support.  There are certainly times where I can get enough kills, but it often requires an immense amount of luck with spawning to get a good camp tile as well as good spawn locations in and outside to funnel enemies in.  It's just NOT a good system and it's really showing its age since the mission type is 10 years old with almost no fundamental changes.

Wait wait wait...

even after 10 minutes on Circulus I only come away...

You're not intended to survive in Circulus with only enemy life support. It's an entirely different type of survival, with an entirely different type of mission needs. It's the same as saying "survival" and then talking about KUVA Survival. The problem you're having here is 110% going to be the unique set up of Conjunctive Survival. First, random sentients are going to drop in and slow you down, so that's tanking your kills per minute and your life support. Second, every 5 minutes a group of Thrax spawn in, and double the rate your life support goes down. They drain it, and drain it fast. You're not intended to make it through Circulus the way you get through other survivals (although you can still be in there for hours, I've done, I have the Voruna as proof) but yeah, you need to specify if you mean a non-traditional survival type of mission.

[Seele]

A couple of accusations against players for moving about the map and killing enemies they see, rather than waiting for enemies to come to them... have you considered that camping is extremely boring?

The main sell of this game, what primarily sets it apart from competitors beyond aesthetic, is its mobility system. I don't want to sit on a pile of Wisp motes and watch my teammates mindlessly blast a door with rocket launchers. I want to experience dynamism. While replacing life support entirely is a daring idea which would almost certainly constitute a reworking of reward tables - I think that's actually a good thing. Survival lost its luster as soon as other endless missions started offering rewards more often. 5 minutes is a dreadfully long time between rewards now, with only certain defense maps being so stingy. It would be more fun and more flavorful to make it an endless sabotage or mobile defense-like (or even a bit of both) - continually making distractions for the enemy while your 'lone Tenno operative' continues to loot, or opening up locked doors for them. Then the reward schedule is output-dependent and demands attentive gameplay, rather than leaving a Bubonico aimed at a given wall with M1 taped down while you do who knows what else, far from your computer, instead (a tale from experience, unfortunately).

[taiiat]

AFK camping in Survival isn't needed. don't argue, it isn't. several literal Years of bugtesting was put into adjusting the game so that this wasn't necessary. _{(hi, i was part of the group that volunteered so many Hundreds and Hundreds and Hundreds of Hours of play over the course of 3 entire Years, into optimizing just that one thing)}
it's an option to AFKfarm, but it isn't necessary.

what is necessary ofcourse, is Killing Enemies. the Gamemode is purpose designed around a high killrate. higher than any other Gamemode. it's intentionally balanced around forcing you to have a pretty high killrate. normally, this is significantly higher than the Players can actually maintain, and that is intentional. in every single Survival Mission in the game, mind you. it's designed that way. that's what gets you to actually use the Life Support Towers. that is the encouragement the Gamemode has for the Player to be moving.

 

however, it also ofcourse is possible to delay Enemies if you continually Kill them farther and farther away from yourself. as Enemies will Spawn roughly 2 Tiles (sometimes a bit closer of ~1 Tile, depends on Terrain) away from their point of death. if the Enemies are dying farther and farther away from you, then they have to travel farther to get to you.
but no, again, this is not "i need to AFKfarm". this is what produces the other main playstyle of Survival. being, well, anything other than being semi-AFK. you Kill Enemies and move with them, moving around the level to reduce the amount of time you wait before Enemies are killable. 
and yes....... this works just fine, as long as you are moving to cover that distance between you and the Enemies. 

 

however, that being said, Solo Survival can be a bit uh, surprisingly quiet sometimes. Life Support scales fine enough usually, but you have a suspiciously low count of Enemies to Kill, so one could say it's teetering on being boring.
it would be nice to adjust that, atleast at the higher Level bracket and Steel Path. drain the Life Support a little faster, Spawn Enemies a little more frequently.

if you want to specifically define whether Players will take the semi-AFK playstyle or the roaming playstyle, i'd suggest Recruit Chat, to well, Recruit, Players that which are looking for the playstyle you're looking to perform so that you can play together.

 

 

oh, this does not include Kuva Survival to be clear, sacrificing part of your Life Support, and so having less than normal - means that you may very well run out. that is a part of its design too, that you are literally throwing some of your Life Support away, and so far more likely to be putting a cap onto the lenght of your Mission.
so obviously, Life Support doesn't scale quite the same way there, nowhere else are you intentionally deleting part of your mission critical Resource.

3 hours ago, Alphas said:

I find myself waiting for enemies to spawn so I can kill them, and I'm very quick about it, but even after 10 minutes on Circulus I only come away with roughly 350-500 kills, which is far below the expected 1000 needed to sustain life support.  There are certainly times where I can get enough kills, but it often requires an immense amount of luck with spawning to get a good camp tile as well as good spawn locations in and outside to funnel enemies in.  It's just NOT a good system and it's really showing its age since the mission type is 10 years old with almost no fundamental changes.

i actually spend a fair amount of time specifically playing Conjunction Survival, as it's pretty fun - and Solo several times (half of it being because People tend to be boring and leave ☹). i find killrate to be fine, just kinda leisurely as aforementioned. i don't really have any issues with Life Support, it's fine - the count of Enemies is just a bit dull.
though, i am spending my time just in Steel Path, not much in 'normal'. if you're saying that it might be really bad in normal, i may take a look sometime.

while we're here, the Thrax drain your Life Support while they are not dead to be clear - as the Voicelines try to convey (quite directly IMO, Lotus literally says that). so if you take a while to Kill them, that can suck up a bunch of Life Support.

Edited November 5, 2023 by taiiat

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

2 hours ago, Seele said:

A couple of accusations against players for moving about the map and killing enemies they see, rather than waiting for enemies to come to them... have you considered that camping is extremely boring?

 

1 hour ago, taiiat said:

AFK camping in Survival isn't needed. don't argue, it isn't. several literal Years of bugtesting was put into adjusting the game so that this wasn't necessary. _{(hi, i was part of the group that volunteered so many Hundreds and Hundreds and Hundreds of Hours of play over the course of 3 entire Years, into optimizing just that one thing)}

Teammates moving about the map and NOT killing is the problem in survival. and hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of hours of playing is not just anectdotal. 

1. often it is the teammate who is slowest at killing that runs around because they want to get some kills and can't in the presence of nuking braindead monkeys.  Or their desire to kite around means they leave enemies all over the map that never path back. to anyone.
2. the enemy spawns are not evenly distributed amongst the players... do a survival with 4 people who are chilling in one are of the map, ONE person decides its time to extract so they head to extraction...  all of a sudden the remaining three players won't have enemies anywhere near them on the map until that departing players excruciatingly long 1 minute count down timer lets him/her leave.
3. The (not so) new corpus ship tile  set that has enemy pathing issues, enemy spawn points above/below overlapping sections of the map with no short path to players etc. adjacent branches of the map enemies will spawn in that can't path to players...  That, and because unlike steel essence, reactant isn't mapped much past enemy/loot radar range it also tends to eff up relic runs since the void fissures are not evenly distributed across enemy spawns but rather seem to follow one player.
4. And map roamers are not the only problem- campers can be too. Certain rooms have far better nearby spawn points than others.  Even within 1 room, where you stand can make a huge difference.   Camping players often ruin things by choosing way out of the way dead ends that don't have many spawn points so enemy density is low.

 

7 hours ago, Alphas said:

Life Support drains way too fast, and it's an awful mechanic to play around

Even with all of the above, and even on a the prior generation low-end console that had low spawn rates before crossplay (its better now, although I'm not on last gen console and spawn rates still seem to be impacted by host hardware), the simple fact is that if you can't keep up life support,  you are not killing fast enough.  I've regularly done 5+ hour solo survivals on both regular (before SP even existed) and SP nodes - primarily void tile set, but if void missions were there, every other tileset in more limited quantities.  And sure occasionally i'd have to activate a life support if RNG was bad, but we're talking 1 or 2 activations PER HOUR - always with the max number of capsules available to me.  So if it's draining too fast - its a you or your teammates problem.

The reactant getting spread all over, not marked, and not enough dropping even when players don't spread out, well DE could do something about that - they adjusted exterminates... they could fix survivals for that too... but they choose not too... its good business for them to make it harder to open relics.

 

2 hours ago, taiiat said:

the Gamemode is purpose designed around a high killrate. higher than any other Gamemode.

sanctuary onslaught says hi 🤣

[taiiat]

33 minutes ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

Teammates moving about the map and NOT killing is the problem in survival. 

1. often it is the teammate who is slowest at killing that runs around
2. the enemy spawns are not evenly distributed amongst the players
3. overlapping sections of the map with no short path to players
4. Certain rooms have far better nearby spawn points than others.

• fair, but i can't really blame the game if Players aren't Killing the Enemies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Players that aren't working together makes things harder for everyone, for sure. if you try to mix the two main playstyles without any organizing, it only sortof works. it's a Co-Op game anyways so Players should work together, but we also can't expect them to always want to play the same way as someone else does. presumably if someone disagrees with the "chosen" playstyle they'll just leave the Mission, but they ofcourse may not.
  • i certainly do, if someone wants to demand that i AFK when i don't feel like it and i know better than almost anyone that it isn't actually needed - you bet i'm leaving, bye i'll go play better somewhere else. bonus points that usually they try to demand this after the first Reward, or close to, so they just lose a Player for the remainder of that session. kinda serves them right for having a crappy attitude on Public.
• some Tiles do take Enemies a lot longer to move through, some that there aren't practical places to place AI jump points, so they have no choice but to take some long set of Stairs or some side Hallway or w/e.
• some Tiles certainly are just better than others, some are actively worse than average - you should be able to manage camping in the vast majority of Tiles, if you really really want to. some might be dicey, but could manage if you wanted it badly enough.

41 minutes ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

sanctuary onslaught says hi 🤣

sorry, i was only thinking of the 'main' Gamemodes at that point, i forgot about Onslaught. we can agree that Onslaught is special and an anomaly 😛

[Alphas]

6 hours ago, (NSW)Nimisha said:

Wait wait wait...

even after 10 minutes on Circulus I only come away...

You're not intended to survive in Circulus with only enemy life support. It's an entirely different type of survival, with an entirely different type of mission needs. It's the same as saying "survival" and then talking about KUVA Survival. The problem you're having here is 110% going to be the unique set up of Conjunctive Survival. First, random sentients are going to drop in and slow you down, so that's tanking your kills per minute and your life support. Second, every 5 minutes a group of Thrax spawn in, and double the rate your life support goes down. They drain it, and drain it fast. You're not intended to make it through Circulus the way you get through other survivals (although you can still be in there for hours, I've done, I have the Voruna as proof) but yeah, you need to specify if you mean a non-traditional survival type of mission.

I understand that Conjunction Survival is different.  I'm saying that even BEFORE the Lua Thrax spawn my life support drains faster than I can keep it up.  The Sentients aren't that big of a deal and they die fairly fast, only slightly slower than a beefy Eximus unit.  After the Thrax spawn I make a point to collect a life support tower to bump myself up, but it doesn't last long.

[Alphas]

3 hours ago, taiiat said:

i actually spend a fair amount of time specifically playing Conjunction Survival, as it's pretty fun - and Solo several times (half of it being because People tend to be boring and leave ☹). i find killrate to be fine, just kinda leisurely as aforementioned. i don't really have any issues with Life Support, it's fine - the count of Enemies is just a bit dull.

though, i am spending my time just in Steel Path, not much in 'normal'. if you're saying that it might be really bad in normal, i may take a look sometime.

while we're here, the Thrax drain your Life Support while they are not dead to be clear - as the Voicelines try to convey (quite directly IMO, Lotus literally says that). so if you take a while to Kill them, that can suck up a bunch of Life Support.

I'm almost exclusively a solo player, and I only dabble in squad stuff for mobile defense sorties or for Archon Hunts.  I like Steel Path the most since it's the only thing that's challenging these days, but even with the increased spawn rate in Steel Path I don't feel like there are enough enemies to kill even in Circulus.  I'm killing as fast as they spawn, and it's still just a coin flip whether or not they spawn quick enough for me to kill.  It's not at all a "leisurely" experience as I'm constantly moving around and marking enemies to kill with Blade Storm while finding other groups to kill with melee to double my kill potential.  I don't think my brain should have to fire on all cylinders just to get enough life support in Survival.  That, to me, sounds kind of stupid.  Personally, I'd like to see Survival's failure state be shifted to player death, or something more thematic to the mission itself vs some nebulous life support mechanic that may or may not be generous to you depending on the tile you spawn in.

[Nimisha_Prime]

7 minutes ago, Alphas said:

I understand that Conjunction Survival is different.  I'm saying that even BEFORE the Lua Thrax spawn my life support drains faster than I can keep it up.  The Sentients aren't that big of a deal and they die fairly fast, only slightly slower than a beefy Eximus unit.  After the Thrax spawn I make a point to collect a life support tower to bump myself up, but it doesn't last long.

Yeah, I agree with you on this. As I said, I play with my wife. I'm MR15, she's MR22. With us, it's not a problem of kill count on Circulus. On a normal survival we never get below 60%, because we have it down pretty good. But Circulus we do need life support units constantly and it seems unique to Conjunctive Survival. But my problem here is that you said "Rework survival" but this problem is unique to an entirely different game mode, Conjuctive Survival. Just like Survival versus Kuva Survival, it's an entirely different mission type.

 

I agree on Circulus, but please clarify that it's Conjuctive Survival that's being an issue, not normal Survival.

[Alphas]

1 minute ago, (NSW)Nimisha said:

Yeah, I agree with you on this. As I said, I play with my wife. I'm MR15, she's MR22. With us, it's not a problem of kill count on Circulus. On a normal survival we never get below 60%, because we have it down pretty good. But Circulus we do need life support units constantly and it seems unique to Conjunctive Survival. But my problem here is that you said "Rework survival" but this problem is unique to an entirely different game mode, Conjuctive Survival. Just like Survival versus Kuva Survival, it's an entirely different mission type.

 

I agree on Circulus, but please clarify that it's Conjuctive Survival that's being an issue, not normal Survival.

I think it's different than that.  Survival with even just one other person is a much better experience since the spawn rates seem to be much more forgiving and it's easier to maintain life support.  I'll admit that the issues I have with life support extend beyond Conjunction Survival and Kuva Survival.  They exist in the regular versions as well, often in worse cases since those modes don't specifically have even MORE enemies spawning. 

I just think it's REALLY crappy to have a mode specifically based around rapid killing that doesn't guarantee the enemies spawn for you to keep that up.  That's what feels bad about the mode and that's why I'd like to see it reworked.  If DE can fix it so that enemies spawn much quicker and in higher numbers that would be great, but right now what we get just doesn't cut it if it's all RNG based.

[Nimisha_Prime]

2 minutes ago, Alphas said:

I think it's different than that.  Survival with even just one other person is a much better experience since the spawn rates seem to be much more forgiving and it's easier to maintain life support.  I'll admit that the issues I have with life support extend beyond Conjunction Survival and Kuva Survival.  They exist in the regular versions as well, often in worse cases since those modes don't specifically have even MORE enemies spawning. 

I just think it's REALLY crappy to have a mode specifically based around rapid killing that doesn't guarantee the enemies spawn for you to keep that up.  That's what feels bad about the mode and that's why I'd like to see it reworked.  If DE can fix it so that enemies spawn much quicker and in higher numbers that would be great, but right now what we get just doesn't cut it if it's all RNG based.

I'm all for [DE] reworking it so more enemies spawn, but your original post spoke about removing life support, not upping enemy counts. Still, that will be my final take on this. Upping enemy counts is fine, but removing life support is not.

[Alphas]

6 minutes ago, (NSW)Nimisha said:

I'm all for [DE] reworking it so more enemies spawn, but your original post spoke about removing life support, not upping enemy counts. Still, that will be my final take on this. Upping enemy counts is fine, but removing life support is not.

I'm fine with either.  Personally I would like to see life support removed and replaced with something more thematic that forces you to move throughout the map and explore to set off various alarms and cause damage as your entire reason for being there is to be a distraction.  I would like that more than life support, but I will admit that I would even accept NO life support at all over what we currently have to deal with.

[quxier]

10 hours ago, Sevek7 said:

So, if you want to enjoy survival without these problems, your options are either to play it solo

Solo has low spawns sometimes as well.

11 hours ago, Alphas said:

 

The entire Life Support mechanic should just get scrapped in favor of smaller objectives that have you moving throughout the map to set off different alarms or disrupt/sabotage various systems.  Having a failure mechanic so poorly balanced as Life Support really ruins most endurance runs of Steel Path and only allows for specific meta Warframes and weapons to be used.  Ideally Survival's only failure state would be player death.  There's no reason to have Survival runs end because the game doesn't spawn enough enemies for you to kill.  It's blatantly unfair.

Spawn rate is issue. It shouldn't be tied to only number of kills. In Deimos, afair, you have some sort of "protect X" where you get a circle where enemy can spawn. Enemies inside circle drains your "power", kills enemies in the circle to refill. Similar system can be used for normal Survivals: count how many enemies are within N meters and drain Life support based on enemy count.

Death state is horrible - that's why I don't like Archon hunts. Straight bullet and your 20 minutes goes "puff".

"Alarms" sounds nice. Conjunction survival do this with draining life support every 5 minutes.

[Alphas]

1 hour ago, quxier said:

Solo has low spawns sometimes as well.

Spawn rate is issue. It shouldn't be tied to only number of kills. In Deimos, afair, you have some sort of "protect X" where you get a circle where enemy can spawn. Enemies inside circle drains your "power", kills enemies in the circle to refill. Similar system can be used for normal Survivals: count how many enemies are within N meters and drain Life support based on enemy count.

Death state is horrible - that's why I don't like Archon hunts. Straight bullet and your 20 minutes goes "puff".

"Alarms" sounds nice. Conjunction survival do this with draining life support every 5 minutes.

Solo almost ALWAYS has spawn rate problems.  Ash has no issues scaling up to lv 9999, but I can't make it past 5 minutes in Survival because I'm getting 50% and sometimes only 25% of the kills required to keep life support up even when killing as fast as I can.

 

As for "death sate" I didn't mean it as the Archon Hunt system.  I meant it as you fail the mission when you get overwhelmed and die enough to lose ALL of your revives, not just a stray bullet taking you out for good.

I do really like the Conjunction Survival mechanics that shift your focus to something else.  My main concern would be getting the ENTIRE map used rather than one or two kill box tiles.  Have it be a murder buffet and every 2.5 minutes give a necessary objective like hacking a console, or setting off spy vault alarms to keep attention on YOU.  With that the failure state would be not doing those side objectives.

[taiiat]

6 hours ago, Alphas said:

I understand that Conjunction Survival is different.  I'm saying that even BEFORE the Lua Thrax spawn my life support drains faster than I can keep it up.  The Sentients aren't that big of a deal and they die fairly fast, only slightly slower than a beefy Eximus unit.  After the Thrax spawn I make a point to collect a life support tower to bump myself up, but it doesn't last long.

in the first few Minutes? that is quite curious. i haven't had the same experience (i did have Solo just literally stop Spawning any Enemies entirely once, like 40min in - that was friggin' weird. just zero Enemies all of a sudden, and nothing on my large Enemy Radar, no Enemies anywhere i went, including after my Life Support drained from full to empty) , but i'll do some more looking.

5 hours ago, Alphas said:

I'm almost exclusively a solo player, and I only dabble in squad stuff for mobile defense sorties or for Archon Hunts.  I like Steel Path the most since it's the only thing that's challenging these days, but even with the increased spawn rate in Steel Path I don't feel like there are enough enemies to kill even in Circulus. 

It's not at all a "leisurely" experience 

okay, so i take it you've been playing Steel Path, so i can focus on just that rather than having to play both.

by 'leisurely' i was referring to the amount of Enemies, referring to that sometimes one may have few Enemies to Kill, a suspiciously low count of them.

[quxier]

21 minutes ago, Alphas said:

Solo almost ALWAYS has spawn rate problems.  Ash has no issues scaling up to lv 9999, but I can't make it past 5 minutes in Survival because I'm getting 50% and sometimes only 25% of the kills required to keep life support up even when killing as fast as I can.

Not always. Sometimes I'm doing fine.

22 minutes ago, Alphas said:

As for "death sate" I didn't mean it as the Archon Hunt system.  I meant it as you fail the mission when you get overwhelmed and die enough to lose ALL of your revives, not just a stray bullet taking you out for good.

OH, then that's better.

 

[taiiat]

8 hours ago, taiiat said:

but i'll do some more looking.

well.... here's some more samples. still seems like it's doing fine.
every Mission was played with Concentrated Arrow because it's a goofy playstyle so i like having an excuse to use it. my Duration is not great on this config, so Prowl was not making a significant impact on Life Support.

Spoiler

 

 

 

these went smoothly for the most part.

Spoiler

 

these were annoying and dicey, however it has nothing to do with the Life Support. it was just me getting my Abilities cancelled a bunch of times and since i'm stacking buffs plus the Gamemode buff and so it can sometimes take multiple entire Minutes to recast my Abilities when anti-fun design cancels them on me.
or, getting deleted by a wall of bullets that were aimed at someone other than me and i got crossfired a bunch.

_{this is somewhat normal for this config, where sometimes it's a dicey mess as Enemies either just directly attack me while Invisible or they shoot me by accident while shooting each other, or some Sentients spam the entire area with Disco Lasers before i can spam Sleep on them to stop it, or Acolytes keep cancelling my Abilities since the Limbo mega sucks and the Nekros does if he lives long enough to Spawn a Limbo.
mainly the Acolytes, having my Abilities cancelled when it can take Minutes to recast is incredibly annoying, or a death sentence}

Spoiler

 

in all 5 of these, there were plenty of Enemies. my described oddities earlier in the Thread were infrequent occurrences, Enemies didn't cease to be around, i always had plenty to Kill.
most of the time i was following the Dax around, since my Abilities will inevitably get cancelled sometime, so being closer saves me time. also even if i was playing a different style, what else would i do anyways? the free buff is there to encourage you to use it, after all. but, sometimes i'd get distracted with the Kills and forget to follow the Dax around.
and ofcourse, the age old superstitions like Enemy Radar slowing down Enemy Spawns (which has always been untrue) definitely not breaking anything here, between the native, Ivara passive, and Primed Animal Instinct offering like 90 Meters of Enemy Radar...

however i do have a hunch about Sessions that didn't start Solo but other Players leave, behave differently than ones started Solo.