Warframe Power Fantasy vs Balancing

[MoonlightWidow]

I see lots of posting about these 2 things that can be distilled to a simple set of arguments.

 1: I want frames to be better balanced so I can have a role to play regardless of what kits my teammates run

2: I want x frame to be more powerful so I can solo content when I've put lots of work into x frame, instead of having to switch to a frame that is perfectly suited to a certain task.

Honestly both of these are valid wants for your experience, and I think in the state the game is in currently it's satisfying neither, but could be satisfying both. The primary thing I have to say is that nerfing frames and creating prohibitively niche difficulty multipliers (more on this later) is killing both sides of this slowly. When a new frame is released or a frame experiences a power bump from other new content release, people rail about it because it upsets an existing meta. I however am always excited for this. It is important to recognize, I think, that reaching the end of Warframe's available content requires an immense investment in time, that can be curbed only by a similar investment in money. However you feel about this, people are making sacrifices in time and effort to achieve the power fantasies they want to, and within a game this variable and huge that means sometimes frames outpace one another or dip into new roles they couldn't before as the players discover interactions to exploit between content. This is a natural and normal part of any game of this format, and in my opinion this is a GOOD thing. Players don't need to be incentivized to frame or kit swap any further than expanding mastery rank for access to more content. If that approach is fun for you, there is nothing stopping you from picking an optimal frame and kit to cheese content, but other players run into an issue where as frames receive nerfs or content difficulty becomes more barring to less niche kits, their favorites kits become stagnant with no avenue to move forward into the later game. If a frame has hit a fantasy that lets it solo all content, it will run out of things to improve, and thereby cease to evolve for the player using it. After you enjoy this a while you'll probably be itching to make a new build to tackle the game in different and interesting ways. If you've hit the ceiling of content difficulty and are advocating for frames to be nerfed to restore the difficulty of that content you are missing the point of this game. You should not want to rob a player whos put much time and effort into a spectacular build of their access to it. Instead you should advocate for greater attention given to frames and weapons who cannot be built to do so. You should not wish for content to prohibit the efficacy of certain builds through narrowing and narrowing the options for success, but instead for content to grow and grow in diversity and scale to create more opportunities to flourish differently. Archon hunts are a hot topic of discussion still as the nature of their fight brings this concept brutally into play, with archon Nira appearing easy to players who have acquired and cultivated the tools that excel at killing her, while players who enjoy builds outside this small selection are sometimes completely dissuaded from touching the content. 

Here's my proposed solution in 3 parts:

1: Do NOT nerf any frames or weapons

2: Work on abilities and weapons to improve the ones least used or swap their effects out entirely

3: Create content that rewards a diversity of play

 

Part 1

Frames and weapons being able to cheese content isn't an issue. While you may feel that other people cheesing something you queued up to play isn't fun, I can assure you it's fun for them. The problem is more that other tools may lack the possible interactions to achieve similar power, and THAT is what's not fun. You deserve to laugh maniacally while your build born of hours of research and experiments tears through scores like a swarm of locusts or shrugs off nuclear amounts of opposition. That's cool and good and should be possible for any 1 frame or weapon in some way at least. Lets not take it from people who've already found their fantasy.

Part 2

Weapons and abilities that are unloved or less used need to be more present and viable. If somebody wants to use Nyx, kunai, or a bo to play endgame content, they should have at least some path before them to creating a nasty interaction that takes them to that level. Rivens are a step in this direction, but still fall short in terms of access. Random bonuses are awesome, but the pool of available buffs will be better on certain types of weapons more than others, and increasing that pool will only make getting a synergizing set more difficult. I think if the devs focus on creating more things to do other than insane damage or status, we'll find this medium. Ex 1.) weapons with poor dps or status being updated to provide some other benefit like knockback resistance, energy, or invisibility. Also giving poor weapons weird new ways to do damage and status or other things entirely that don't involve their per shot effect (stuff like Halo's needler maybe, or Ana's team healing rifle from Overwatch)  Ex 2.) Good mid game abilities with poor endgame interaction being given additional effects rather than tweaking their existing effects. (perhaps letting people have true flight with Hildryn's 4 and making the damage of stopping it scale with your distance from the ground, stuff like this) Ex 3.) Poorly functioning abilities being changed entirely to reach outside of a frame's current kit, or synergize with it in a way they don't currently. Keep doing these types of things and players will have more reasons to grab everything they can and put it together in new and interesting ways, which in my opinion is already the core of Warframe's fun.

Part 3

Content like Archon hunts may feel easy to those with the right gear, but it should be accessible to any gear of a similar level of player commitment. If the above two principles are followed, this should come naturally. But if everyone is hitting like a train or tanking armies like it's nothing, how will you participate in the fight when your teammates are outplaying your builds role??The answer, I think is for content to engage teamplay on a player by player basis. Imagine something like this: Instead of an Archon having the complex damage reduction upon receiving lots of damage from your team, they could maintain it constantly for all the players in a team except one. If this rotated periodically or at certain damage thresholds, then everyone would need to contribute a little to achieve their goal, but the mission could still be accomplished solo with your favorite build, just with you doing all the work instead of taking turns. This approach would still let well built players shine by getting their jobs done quickly or effectively, but without ending the content instantly for players who wanted to participate.

Thinking of creative ways to involve each player or each tool like this are going to be paramount to including the diversity of our player's styles as our available toolkit keeps growing, and I'd love to see anyone else's ideas for what could be altered across mid and endgame content to encourage this. 

 

TLDR; Reducing the viable options in abilities, weapons and strategies for winning is stagnating for players. Increasing the options and participation of each player is rewarding and life giving to Warframe.

Edited March 8 by MoonlightWidow

[AntifreezeUnder0]

We simply need natural scaling+ sp variation enemies starting with lvl 500+ and up. Natural scaling would sihpon out , show weak points in loadouts and encourage squad play more. Sad part it be still select few frames/weapon picks due to nature of them being best w/o flaw and still can get host migrates if one in squad didnt had min max.

But my concern is why would enemies become 10x more difficult to deal with, yet drops stay same as before. After all we care about loot being equal to the toughness.

[Aevire]

Posted this somewhere else but I'll put this suggestion by itself here:

The reason we need damage to be so high is so we can blend enemies. So much of the farming in the game relies on being able to one tap mobs. That is the meta of the game now and there is not really any going back.

BUT they also want to add units (eximi, acolytes, bosses, etc) which have a longer TTK, so that the game isn't just a pure power fantasy and sometimes you have to use skill and brain to survive and kill things etc.

So the solution in my mind for this problem is to make it so that non-eximus/acolyte/boss/etc EHP scaling - health shield armor etc - is while not necessarily linear, flat enough that they can significantly nerf players' damage and those enemies are still generally blendable. Then rework our damage. The goal being that DPS vs. survivability vs. utility becomes like a tradeoffs system worth building for instead of us being so powerful they have to artificially cap our capacities to make anything take longer than 10 seconds. If they bring the scaling in all the damage systems down so that you're not increasing damage by 360% and then multishot by 210% and then elemental damage (total damage) by 120%, 165%, 225%, and then crit increasing damage by 3-6x, and then roar or eclipse increasing it by 2x - they can still have progression but more marginal. If they want us to have to put a lot of bullets and effort into bosses, rather than adding artificial gating mechanisms and stopgaps every update, rather than solving the damage problem by spending every year since Eidolons simultaneously buffing our damage with new content and making new 'challenging' content which tries to circumvent our ability to do damage, they need to fix the system that is broken for them in the first place.

[Xzorn]

Power Fantasy won this battle years ago. It didn't happen over night. It was steady changes.

• Enemy Defense Scaling: Without it we don't need to really care about more than one damage buff nor maximize output per faction.
• New Status System: Proc Weight doesn't matter much. Everything caps so just stack the DoTs.
• Consistent Beating on CC frames: There's only a handful with room wide CC left and now Protection frames are under threat.
• Shield Gating: A horrible design that is very easily manipulated into immortality. Don't need DR long as I have 1 Shield per 2.5s.
• No actual Rewards In-Missions: Self explanatory. There's nothing of value as in-mission drops. It's all completion rewards.
• Adaptation: Not joking. This was the mod that put eHP miles ahead of "caster" frames that were already being hurt by anti-CC.

Fixed for some of this are really simple. First off Exponential scaling was a bad idea. I think it was just done to help control poor balancing.

• Enemy Offense and Defense: Needs to be more linear and I'm sorry to say this does require DR and Damage amp nerfs. Even when both Armor and HP were exponential we hit level 7,000 like 7 years ago with a proper team. The system was already falling apart.
• Shield Gating: I'd recommend at least requiring a 30% of max shields threshold or it doesn't trigger. Ideally you'd want eHP values between "Tank" and "Caster" frames to be far less so such a mechanic isn't needed but that's asking too much I think.
• Revert Some Statuses: Gas most notably and Just do something neat with Magnetic. Anything, seriously.
• Remove Armor from non-Grineer Factions: Armor quickly became a crutch for DE to have enemies last longer. Bursa were just absurd.
• Put Drops Back In Missions: Don't care if it requires nerfing the meta farming frames. They were kinda a bad idea anyways.

I could go on for a very long time to be honest. I already posted a less destructive alternative to current Eximus in Feedback\General.
I don't think anything will change though. Mechanically the game is the worst state I've seen in 10 years.

 

[Raikh]

I never really got why Power Fantasy and Game Balance are viewed as polar opposites in Warframe. Balance doesn't mean it has to be flat, grounded, everything has to be equalized and that you can't feel incredibly powerful.

Game Balance should exist on a layer above the power fantasy and it should ensure that said power fantasy can be lived out in a fulfilling way and is coherent with the game as a whole. It should be a complementary relationship.

I think Game Balance has gotten so bad in Warframe that it actually detracts from the Power Fantasy. If you actually go and get all the power available to you there is a breaking point where Frame kits become nigh irrelevant. Why should I do some fancy ability combo with a flashy pay-off when everything dies midway through or its just faster to shoot/swing your weapon?

And imho the pinnacle of power fantasy is working your way up to overcoming challenges you can only tackle because you have become that powerful. Being able to just curbstomp everything w/o thought or regard loses its luster quickly, it primarily serves to show how far you've come but it shouldn't be where you go from there on. And neither is it satisfying to be pulled down from that power to have a "challenge" again.

Warframe simply has swept its balancing problems under the rug for years. I remember balance talk in Dev Streams from the end of 2015 talking about removing Base Damage Mods, Damage and Modding 2.0 and what not, since the problems were already showing back then. Thats been over 8 years now. Since then player power has increased dramatically but especially the content that power is used in has not grown anywhere near as much, which only further increased the ongoing dissonance.

[Nekomian]

It's a good discussion to be had, but this should probably be posted in feedback and not bug reports: https://forums.warframe.com/forum/21-general/

[Xzorn]

15 hours ago, Raikh said:

I never really got why Power Fantasy and Game Balance are viewed as polar opposites in Warframe. Balance doesn't mean it has to be flat, grounded, everything has to be equalized and that you can't feel incredibly powerful.

 

The primary reason is that "Power Fantasy" often includes slaying mass enemies.
While Enemy Density in of itself is a balance problem.

Power Fantasy is not an objective term either. One person could see a screen nuke one-shot as power fantasy while another could see going combo link crazy anime mode on a single enemy as power fantasy. Most commonly though it's associated with killing in mass quantities which has many flaws when it comes to balancing.

No one really used AoE weapons in old Warframe and it had nothing to do with speed. It was because of enemy density, designs and weak points.
Sad to say but this game lost much of it's balance the moment they turned it into a horde shooter.

[Raikh]

3 hours ago, Xzorn said:

The primary reason is that "Power Fantasy" often includes slaying mass enemies.
While Enemy Density in of itself is a balance problem.

Well, the point is that the game is not balanced around being a horde shooter whole heartedly. The game has been stuck in-between philosophies for so long and never really commited itself to anything fully.

3 hours ago, Xzorn said:

No one really used AoE weapons in old Warframe and it had nothing to do with speed. It was because of enemy density, designs and weak points.

That has to be very ancient Warframe. Back when I started the game somewhere in the latter half of 2015 it was Tonkor Meta, Draco Interception AoE spam and Mirage crashing the game with a hail of a million laser beams and bullets littering the map. The power level overall was a lot lower but the game direction as a whole was already heading there. So while there was a time before bullet jumps and the more fancy things the game is known for today, it was a comparatively rather short period of its lifespan by now. However it definitely still has a good amount of Warframes and game mechanics stuck in that mindset, despite being atleast somewhat outdated for over 8 years.

And thats whats really creating problems. Enemy density itself is a balancing concern like any other aspect of the game fundamentally. But it frequently clashes with other aspects of the game that never really adapted towards its more modern form.