Jade Shadows - Dev Workshop: Enemy Resistances and Status Rework (LIVE!)

[armagedon112]

7 hours ago, insanitybit said:

It would be nice to see Magnetic get a little bit more of a buff. Right now it's useless against 2/3 factions in the game and very arguably useless against Corpus too (because Toxin bypasses shields). Give it *something* more than just impact on shields/ nullifier bubbles. The proposed changes won't make magnetic useful as far as I can tell.

Maybe something like: enemies with magnetic procs get pulled together. Increased procs will add increased strength an AoE, with 10 procs creating a magnetic pull. Enemies with shields could be immune to this effect but once the shields are gone the effect takes place.

I think it's important to remember that Magnetic is competing against Corrosive and Viral since it's got underlying electric and Cold, so it had better be *actually* good if the goal is for anyone to use it.

i wanted it do what melee vortex does but on each status effect. the original idea was if you had 2 enemies that were magnetized theyd be grouped together. the other idea was having a damage link between magnetized enemies.

[Ardhanarishvara]

I'm kinda' hoping this workshop is just a glimpse at a first draft 'cuz I've got a lot of questions and I'm not really clear on what a lot of the answers are. This is such a massive departure from what we've had for years that I kind of feel like the gameplay implications are too massive to be covered in only one short dev workshop.

Big list of questions on next page.

---

1. I'm curious how this is going to affect missions where you have multiple factions at once. Will Acolytes just inherit the resistances and weaknesses of the local faction? What about crossfire? What about Corrupted, where part of the issue was dealing with units from three separate factions?
    
2. Will Armour Bypass, as a mechanic, just completely cease to be? Or are the local faction weaknesses and resistances just going to be applied more uniformly to health and armour both, still allowing for Armour Bypass by using an element that armour is weak to? For example, Corrosive just straight up pretends like 75% of Ferrite Armour's total value just doesn't exist. Will this only apply on Earth Grineer now, or something like that?
    
3. What's going to happen with Bleed vs Armour, and Toxin vs Shields?
    
4. Will Petrify retain its ability to make health have greater weaknesses vs other damage types or is it going to lose that functionality entirely? What about resistance-altering effects like Magus Accelerant or Magus Destruct?
    
5. Is the plan here to just hope that players plan around straight damage rather than bypassing mechanics that ignore the problem entirely? What's to make a player genuinely prefer using Puncture/Corrosive in level 100, 200, 400 content vs using bleed against armour, or just using viral+heat vs everything in content with multiple factions, or in general since it'll be universally effective? Are you going to nerf the armour strip of heat because you're nerfing armour in general?
    
6. Will shielded enemies in higher levels gain enough regen speed and regen delay reduction to gain significant shields back between DoT procs to justify using Magnetic to halt it? Or will more regen on corpus shields just further reinforce using toxin against them to just completely ignore the problem, as is the case with bleed vs armour right now?
    
7. With DR on armour getting evened out, and armour getting capped, will that simply reinforce bringing Corrosive Projection all over again over using any actual armour strip options? Or is the hope that by reducing the efficacy of enemy armour, players will feel like they don't actually need to bring CorrProj since their damage will more naturally just be good enough?
    
8. By beefing health in response to the reduction of armour, will we be seeing armour stripping as a mechanic in various Warframe kits losing a lot of its value since it'll make less of a difference when fully stripping armour vs partially stripping vs not stripping at all?
    
9. Will "minimum armour" mean that armour stripping will never be able to remove 100% of it, and will simply lower it to minimum? Will Shattering Impact be shattered by the impact of minimum armour?
    
10. Why is Gas only getting a visual makeover, when even the people who attempt to deliberately use it for its mechanics struggle to make it usable since it lacks many of the mechanics that other DoTs do (can't give more element to make the DoT stronger, can't keep reapplying it for more damage over time, stuck at one weak instance per enemy)? 'Cuz, like, at this point Electric fills Gas' supposed niche _completely_ for as long as it has both of these mechanics, and that doesn't block out usage of Viral.

 

---

I feel like a lot of the issue with limited build options/room for playstyle expression could've just been bypassed by working within the system as-is by making perks that are universally applicable -- for example:

• Making Puncture modify all health, armour, and shield types to have +weakness, allowing for damage types that are good against armour to bypass even more armour, and allowing shields to take even more damage. +4% per stack, up to +20% at 5 stacks, would be a decent general purpose damage boost while also allowing something like Corrosive to ignore 95% of Ferrite Armour even before the corrosion procs.
• Making Impact just operate as Shattering Impact by default, while the damage is good for shield innately.
• Slash's damage ticks constantly blipping damage against shields to ensure the recharge delay is constantly being reset.

Each of the above would allow for any weapon with IPS to have a different kind of answer to the problems of Shield and Armour, allowing for more gameplay variance when weapons have more of a focus on, or exclusivity with, only one of the trio. You could then adjust other more limited elements to have similarly universal benefits.

• Making Magnetic have a chance per application, with a higher chance the more stacks there are, to jam guns or disable machinery innately, making it useful against more than just Corpus, and making it continue to be useful against the Corpus even if using Toxin to bypass shields and kill them without even breaking their shields, and even when shields are already broken. Like, the big problem with Viral's dominance is that everything has health, so everything benefits from a damage multiplier versus health. The same cannot be said of shields, and unlike Viral, Magnetic does not assist the damage type that bypasses shields.
   
• Giving Toxin some kind of interaction with literally anything outside of Corpus, because at this point the Base Elements are just "slow" and three different flavours of DoT, one of which is good for single target, one which is good for groups, and one which is good for completely ignoring the core survival mechanic of one singular faction, which you actually don't even need the status effect for. ... Actually, if you make Toxin inherit the crit bonus from Puncture, that might be pretty good. On first application of Toxin, you'd start getting bonus crit over the period of a second or so, and once all toxin is gone, the crit bonus weakens over that same period, the way armour stripping works with heat.

This way, a bunch of status effects would be universally useful, while having more specialized bonuses that you could also take advantage of if you desired.
 

I dunno, just throwing ideas at the wall, here. Here's hoping Blast gets radial knockdown on hitting max stacks.

Edited May 7 by Ardhanarishvara

[LordVeximus]

So ignis wraith meta?

[Traumtulpe]

On 2024-04-26 at 6:00 PM, [DE]Sam said:

Blast
The blast is blasting! More to come! Our concepts and ideas with Blast are rapidly changing; no specifics will be made as of right now while we continue to work on the Status!

I wanted to give you a suggestion that's probably pretty good:

An enemy with Blast status effect is "primed to explode"; Any damage from direct hits (this is meant to exclude damage over time effects for various reasons) will cause the target to explode for 25% of the damage (with the finisher damage type, to avoid exponential protection via armor) after a 2 second delay, including the hit that procced the Blast status. 7m radius. If an enemy gets hit again within the 2 second window, the damage will simply be added to the impending explosion (instead of creating multiple delayed explosions).

The reasoning being that this'll feel blasty, and is both useful as a proc to put on an enemy via a primer, and if it's on your main weapon. It'll also be quite effective against groups of enemies, while still being useful, though not exactly great, against single targets.

The radius is kept mediocre at 7m, as a compromise between being practically useful and being not overly powerful, and the 2 second delay is there both for the feeling (like a burning fuse in a sense), to prevent performance issues from rapid damage applications, and also to absolutely make sure it can't be overly powerful (2 seconds is a long time at the upper ends of Warframes power spectrum).

As an added flavour bonus, status effect duration would both delay the explosion by the stated amount, but *also* increase the 25% damage value by just as much. In other words, +100% status duration would mean it takes 4 seconds of waiting for an enemy to explode, but then it'll deal 50% instead of 25% of all damage dealt to it in the 7m radius.

You could also increase the damage value with more procs of Blast on the target, though I'd suggest this being minor - for example a 6 proc cap, with each proc after the first adding another 2% for a maximum of 35% damage explosions.

Lastly, if the Blast status effect ends while an explosion was waiting to happen, it will take effect immediately.

Edited May 8 by Traumtulpe

[Fallowsthorn]

Honestly I'm just super here for anything that means I don't have to cross-reference a math class with an encyclopedia of esoteric game knowledge and loopholes in order to play effectively. Regardless of my actual skill level, I've never felt like I'm very good at this game, largely because much of the higher-level content (which admittedly creeps upwards over time -- I remember when I shied away from Oculysts) seems to require this sort of analytical optimization that doesn't come naturally to me. If it makes part of that headache smoother, I'm all for it.

But if you're simplifying the health types and then adding resistances and weaknesses by faction instead, haven't you basically just gone in a circle? You still have nine(?) differently-handled types of health bar, it's just that those types are now Infested Health, Grineer Health, Corpus Health, Infested/Grineer/Corpus Armor, and Infested/Grineer/Corpus Shields, plus the weird ones like Sentients and whatever, and then you're right back at "just use [Viral/Toxin/Gas]/Slash for everything and call it a day," because direct health damage that ignores armor/shields is just too useful. Second verse, same as the first. (Unless of course I'm misunderstanding something, which is entirely possible and potentially even likely. In that case ignore me.)

[BalaDeSilver]

Okay, I had more time to think and I'm quite positive y'all should change Toxin to work as Slash does to armor. Slash doesn't ignore armor, but its status does, and maybe it'd be better if Toxin did the same. The corpus are in a very weird situation where you don't really engage with shields because we can just pretend it doesn't exist and it becomes reality. We don't even need high status to do that, just high crit and having Toxin at all.

In exchange, you could make Nulli bubbles slowly remove abilities instead of instantly, so there's counterplay to a Nulli spawning on top of you, especially on Fissure missions. Really, the fight against Corpus is one of either them not existing at all, or them being the absolute worst and unfun thing to play against. There is no happy medium, they're just boring either way.

Make them matter to fight against and make it matter to try and do so.

[Tiltskillet]

1 hour ago, BalaDeSilver said:

Slash doesn't ignore armor, but its status does, and maybe it'd be better if Toxin did the same.

Yep.  Would need some rebalancing for players, enemies, and maybe equipment though.

[HasagiReportJngl]

В 26.04.2024 в 19:00, [DE]Sam сказал:

As such, The Star Chart will show recommended Faction Resistances per planet. Aligned with the present Faction, there will be listed Weaknesses and Resistances to communicate the recommended options for Damage against any specific Faction or location.

Bad idea. It will be misinfromation in most cases (like in shown example).

Btw, if you want to made Magnetic a decent choice against Corpus, you'll have to remove its weakness against Alloy Armor. Corpus units who have it (Oxium Ospreys, Index brokers, Ambulas, Sisters of Parvos etc.) get too low damage from Magnetic, so Cold/Radiation are better against them now.

[BalaDeSilver]

8 hours ago, HasagiReportJngl said:

you'll have to remove its weakness against Alloy Armor.

I think that's the whole point of the rework lol

Not that I agree, but it was well communicated that individual weaknesses per health type is to be removed.

[snoozecruise]

I admit I haven't read most of these 17+ pages, so I'm just going to drop my take and run:

First, one of the long-standing problems with Gas is that its optimal use case is not intuitive. Pablo said in one of the streams that gas is extremely strong, and from what I've seen from certain meta-gamer streamers, that does seem to be the case. But it arguably only fills a certain niche of weapons, that being very hard-hitting crit weapons. It's a way to make SOME single-target weapons into AOE, which is cool, but it's not immediately obvious. Maybe there are other good use cases too, but again, most people will never figure this out except by watching some spreadsheet gamer streamer. This is on top of the problems of gas stack overwriting and all that. A big part of increasing usability could be as simple as just updating its tooltip to inform players of its ideal use situation. But still, if you want AOE, the most intuitive thing to do is just... use an AOE weapon.

Thinking about it now, changing Blast to be more of what Gas is would make more intuitive sense -- add more "blasting" to a weapon, making single-shot weapons AOE. It makes more intuitive sense for Gas to be what Radiation is now (perhaps confused enemies would do True damage to each other to make it generally more useful), and Radiation would have to be something else. Radiation adopting current Blast effects would make more sense, considering someone melting from the inside should make them less effective.

unrelated side note: Remember how awesome those gas arrows were in the game Thief?

 

Also, I think every element should have some use against ALL factions, because that's the appeal of Viral and Heat being an easy setup, and the effort of changing loadouts just to deal with a specific faction generally is hardly worth the effort -- you'll have to either nerf Viral, or bring others up to a similar level.

I doubt these changes to Magnetic and shields will do much because as others have stated: 1) Toxin exists; 2) literally any kind of damage prevents shield regen, so things like Heat, Gas, Elec all arguably have similar benefit against shields, with the added bonus of being effective against other things too. And 3) Magnetic does pretty much nothing on non-Corpus, except the edge case of magnetic progenitor bonuses added to Condition Overload damage.

The changes to Cold seem good for this reason -- it should work against everything. Magnetic would need some kind of effect against all enemy types, like perhaps having a weak enemy grouping effect like some suggested, or giving a chance to make enemies' weapons jam. These sound like strong abilities, but it's at the cost of up to two mod slots. Cold and Heat are arguably better, considering they only take one slot, and have significant damage + CC effects.

I think the "everything works against everything" could be doable and still have elemental damage type bonuses against certain factions: Viral+Slash is best against armored Grineer, but still works on Corpus. Likewise, Magnetic could be the best choice for Corpus, but it should still do something to Grineer too.

 

side note: Electric could use better visuals and something a bit different from "it's kinda like Gas," to better fulfill the "electric fantasy" role. I'm imagining a more satisfying visual and audio effect like Gyre's skills. Apply a shock stack, and after a second or two, it detonates with a satisfying crack, hitting the target and potentially chaining to other targets with a visible chain effect. More stacks could add larger damage, larger chain radius, more chains, etc.

[BoredWraith]

I didnt read any details here, just the title. I just wanna say, if this rework means i have to reforma the hundreds of weapons i have in my inventory, or if i have to adjust mods now for factions before EVERY mission, like i had to at the beginning 11 years ago - i will be finally done with this. No more energy for this grind bs.  I want interesting missions with good rewards - we have that now but only a few times per week - seriously  FCK timegates  - another thing that piss me off. Gimme hard missions with great rewards that i can replay as many times as i want - and if thats 24/7 so be it. Nah lets make players login every day/every week and let them check all the time if the right missions are up FCK THAT - let me play WHEN I WANT.

Oh and when i see new missiontypes, that are ON PURPOSE designed to make players miss out on loot because we have to split up all over the map - wont touch them, u can grind that crap urselfs

Edited May 14 by BoredWraith

[EmitterCactus]

nourish corrosive blast will have to compete with nourish corrosive heat.

 

 

Spoiler

Mirage-Residual/Demulcent Shock-Heat Thermal Transfer-Vermisplicer.

           Mirage's Vermisplicer                                                                                         |                  Mirage Dopples Vermisplicers

MODSLOTS INTO HCET PRIORITY H                                                                            |                  Mirage dopples don't receive Thermal Transfer buffs or

                                                      |     C                                                                     |                   Demulcent buffs. They do receive NOURISH Shock

                                                      |      \               E                                                    |                   Trooper etc but you can cast before Dopplegangers to

                                                      |                       |                       T PRIORITY            |                   be selective

Rad Mod     | Cold Mod+ Imbued Heat  | Imbued Electric+ Innate Toxin                     | Rad Mod    |        Cold Mod+ Innate Toxin

Radiation     | Blast                                 | Corrosive                                                     | Radiation    |        Viral

OR

Rad Nourish Corrosive Blast or Corrosive Heat go brr, mimic a fraction of our power.

 

Edited May 14 by EmitterCactus
Had embarrassing brain fart regarding elemental combinations. Nourish plus Corrosive Blast is already currently available. I made a chart and everything :(

[BalaDeSilver]

12 hours ago, BoredWraith said:

I didnt read any details here, just the title.

:Pepega:

[Beryliberries]

On 2024-05-08 at 6:46 PM, Fallowsthorn said:

Honestly I'm just super here for anything that means I don't have to cross-reference a math class with an encyclopedia of esoteric game knowledge and loopholes in order to play effectively. Regardless of my actual skill level, I've never felt like I'm very good at this game, largely because much of the higher-level content (which admittedly creeps upwards over time -- I remember when I shied away from Oculysts) seems to require this sort of analytical optimization that doesn't come naturally to me. If it makes part of that headache smoother, I'm all for it.

But if you're simplifying the health types and then adding resistances and weaknesses by faction instead, haven't you basically just gone in a circle? You still have nine(?) differently-handled types of health bar, it's just that those types are now Infested Health, Grineer Health, Corpus Health, Infested/Grineer/Corpus Armor, and Infested/Grineer/Corpus Shields, plus the weird ones like Sentients and whatever, and then you're right back at "just use [Viral/Toxin/Gas]/Slash for everything and call it a day," because direct health damage that ignores armor/shields is just too useful. Second verse, same as the first. (Unless of course I'm misunderstanding something, which is entirely possible and potentially even likely. In that case ignore me.)

No, we will only have three categories now: generic health, shields, and armor, shared across all factions. Factions themselves now hold the resistances of the enemies, not the health. If grineer remain weak to corrosive, it wont just be their armor. It will be both their health and armor that are weak to corrosive, due to it being tied to their faction.

[Nira]

Toning down viral status might go a long way to balancing things out. If enemies are going to have less armour and larger health pools it's only going to make viral even more potent.

[spider_enigma]

the issue with elements is not the elements them self, its fissuers

if your fighting corpus and portals keep dropping corrupted with armor, no matter what you do magnetic wont be good in that mission

you need to fix crossfire and fissures before you fix elements

and the corrupted enemies that didnt come from the portals arnt currupted

[Fallowsthorn]

On 2024-05-14 at 3:38 PM, Beryliberries said:

No, we will only have three categories now: generic health, shields, and armor, shared across all factions. Factions themselves now hold the resistances of the enemies, not the health. If grineer remain weak to corrosive, it wont just be their armor. It will be both their health and armor that are weak to corrosive, due to it being tied to their faction.

Ah, I see! Thank you for explaining, that makes more sense. Honestly I like it better that way, I already have my loadouts and configurations organized by faction/gimmick.

[MaxAltair]

Le 13/05/2024 à 20:58, BoredWraith a dit :

I didnt read any details here, just the title. I just wanna say, if this rework means i have to reforma the hundreds of weapons i have in my inventory, or if i have to adjust mods now for factions before EVERY mission, like i had to at the beginning 11 years ago - i will be finally done with this. No more energy for this grind bs.  I want interesting missions with good rewards - we have that now but only a few times per week - seriously  FCK timegates  - another thing that piss me off. Gimme hard missions with great rewards that i can replay as many times as i want - and if thats 24/7 so be it. Nah lets make players login every day/every week and let them check all the time if the right missions are up FCK THAT - let me play WHEN I WANT.

Oh and when i see new missiontypes, that are ON PURPOSE designed to make players miss out on loot because we have to split up all over the map - wont touch them, u can grind that crap urselfs

Thats why im afraid of these changes, looks like WF still on beta, DE experimenting different things. Personally I think this Simplification is going backwards how sofisticated the game already is. I repeat this: We have a rich variety of enemies, factions with its own nature...That was the core argument of WF gameplay!
Imagine We have Grineer Bionics and Machines. Following this they both will be treated as same...? Sorry but it's complete nonsense. Fighting against faction will be easier... and boring! Now the meta will be straightforward... maybe easy for lazy brains but for the veterans and returning players is a bad move.

[insanitybit]

I've been playing a lot more with gas and I'm now very much on team "gas needs to be buffed". The fact that it doesn't take mods into account is kind of nuts, and it doesn't last long enough to really act as a meaningful hazard. I'd suggest that that changes.

[quxier]

 

 

[MamboNo5]

Hello!

I spend some time thinking about it, also talked to Moug after his video release, and the table below sums it up.

Problems tried to solve:

1. Mods are not necessary for most of the game, as most of the time we don't feel a difference after modding most weapons (especially early on the game) and ofc when trying to min/max, level cap, etc.
2. Simplicity the understanding of what's good and what's bad
3. Balacing elements and making it in a way that future balacing changes are easier to make, so nothing feels so superior that you must use, increasing build diversity.

Assumptions

1. What is in the beggining of the post, about armor, shields, factions, etc
2. Each enemy will have a max number of armor and health rescaled.  

Rational of it:

1. Each "enhanced faction" shares the same elemental Resistances and Weakness as the normal one, but the reduction divisor is higher and the weakness multiplier is lower
2. Each IPS is good/neutral/bad versus Armor, Flesh or Shields and will be good early game and don't modify anything against factions
3. Each simple element is somewhat good against 1 faction and somewhat bad against another and neutral on the other 2
4. Each combined element is really good against 1, good against 1, bad against 1 and really bad against 1 faction. SInce you need to combine 2 elements to do it, the multipliers are better. Radiation is only one mod now, but its status effects doesn't provide as much value (in shear damage) than the others, opted to mantain the multiplier.
5. Each status have a max stats change after 10 procs, which is really easy to understand. You can still proc more DoTs status, but it will only increase damage and refresh time, not what the status procs itself does.
6. We hope that assumption 2, associated with the proposed changes will make the game harder specially if you have a wrong setup. 
7. Also: it would be great quality of life if we get 4 default slots instead of 3, so we could make one for every faction.

I hope we can have a nice and civic discussion on how to improve this. Lets try to make suggestions with the reasons behind it instead of complaints and hopefully we can make the game better. Together.

[moondog548]

So instead of one boilerplate optimal loadout we will have three boilerplate optimal loadouts that we have to manually swap each mission.

I love the thought and effort put into this, and it is an incremental improvement, but the actual problem is even more fundamental.

The game has been allowed to morph over the past decade into one mode of play: dps everything in the world asap.

You can't fix that by just tweaking the spices on the dps we do and the everything being dps'd.

We need different enemies that act in fundamentally different ways other than hordes that can (and therefore MUST) be dps'd asap.

And keep the hordes, don't get me wrong! That's awesome gameplay! Just don't let that be all there is!

[Operativ]

Thank you for tackling this giant topic, DE Team. Constant rebalancing to keep things interesting is very crucial to keep Warframe fun and long-living. As a nice case study, take a look at what happened to (modern) RuneScape when they ditched the balancing efforts, ignored power creep and went for 'one single meta' (answer: it constantly has 4-5x less active players than their Old School variant). Keep watering the garden, and the plants will keep growing.

More on-topic, I hope Viral gets another pass like how it did in the 2020. In my opinion Viral shouldn't be the best go-to element for everything, and in the current state it can do so because it competes on same level or even outperforms things like Corrosive or Heat against armoured opponents. I think it shouldn't even come close to 75% of Corrosive performance, yet here it does +/- 100% or better.
I think the problem with Viral is how it scales beyond +100% damage amplification, with +325% being the current cap. Perhaps experimenting with keeping it permanently at +100% (and additional stacks doing something else than just making the amplification greater) could do the trick, but then I'm not sure how to deal with this meta element. Truth is, the vast majority of folks go for Viral (+slash, but that one isn't problematic).

Once Viral gets addressed as being too universal & too good for everything, the rest of elements will have an easier time to shine, especially post-rework.

[moondog548]

On 2024-05-19 at 10:57 PM, moondog548 said:

So instead of one boilerplate optimal loadout we will have three boilerplate optimal loadouts that we have to manually swap each mission.

I love the thought and effort put into this, and it is an incremental improvement, but the actual problem is even more fundamental.

The game has been allowed to morph over the past decade into one mode of play: dps everything in the world asap.

You can't fix that by just tweaking the spices on the dps we do and the everything being dps'd.

We need different enemies that act in fundamentally different ways other than hordes that can (and therefore MUST) be dps'd asap.

And keep the hordes, don't get me wrong! That's awesome gameplay! Just don't let that be all there is!

Sorry to be redundant, but I thought of a better way to encapsulate what I think is the crucial point:

The fundamental problem is that in virtually every moment of warframe gameplay, time-to-kill is the ultimate key to success regardless of nominal gameplay objectives*.

So while elegant balance passes to the damage-type system are good, you are still constrained by the ultimate player goal of using that system to maximize the bottom lline of killing enemies as quickly as possible.

Change that reality via enhanced enemy behaviors and mission parameters, and you'll be able to put all those cool damage types to more interesting uses!

Lots of other posters have said lots of other good things, so I hope y'all are really reading deep here!

 

*(Spy missions are the lone exception, but only partially. Avoiding combat is optimal, but that is yet another challenge that is either an automatic success via correct wf loadout, or virtually impossible due to enemy spawning and behavior. And when combat can't be avoided, time-to-kill once again becomes priority #1.)

Edited May 21 by moondog548
typo

[MamboNo5]

59 minutes ago, moondog548 said:

Sorry to be redundant, but I thought of a better way to encapsulate what I think is the crucial point:

The fundamental problem is that in virtually every moment of warframe gameplay, time-to-kill is the ultimate key to success regardless of nominal gameplay objectives*.

So while elegant balance passes to the damage-type system are good, you are still constrained by the ultimate player goal of using that system to maximize the bottom lline of killing enemies as quickly as possible.

Change that reality via enhanced enemy behaviors and mission parameters, and you'll be able to put all those cool damage types to more interesting uses!

Lots of other posters have said lots of other good things, so I hope y'all are really reading deep here!

 

*(Spy missions are the lone exception, but only partially. Avoiding combat is optimal, but that is yet another challenge that is either an automatic success via correct wf loadout, or virtually impossible due to enemy spawning and behavior. And when combat can't be avoided, time-to-kill once again becomes priority #1.)

I do get what you are trying to say, but its ultimately a grind shooters game, we will always be trying to min/max and speed run through anything in the game. The solution you proposed was already tried with time gating stuff, like Tyana Pass, which most people just completely abandon once you get everything or don't even bother to do so, frustrating as it is.

For me, the main problem is that we can have an universal setup that works really well against anything and aren't really even needed (vide Yama beating Elite Deep Archmedea with all modifiers without weapon or warframe mods equipped). I think the game is supposed to get harder if you don't mod properly, otherwise, what's the point of its existance? 

The point of disagreenment would be if the game is supposed to be beatable without proper modding, specially mid/late game. Some people I talked to say it should, but way harder, some say it shouldn't, and I think the best way to make it begginer friendly while also challenging is through the proposed changes above. Also, modes like circuit and void would require carefull loadout consideration for its diversity of enemies, while also making every element viable in the right circunstances. 

Also I think its important not to point out the problems, but the solutions as well, even if not perfected some1 may get the idea and turn it out to be better. Maybe the changes could be accompanied by a quality of life changes by: a) giving more loadout options for the players or b) making an easier version of loadout changes on UI.

One of my thoughts to b) is: On the weapon modding system you could select how many "different from mod loadout" mods you could have as a selectable, and a Mod Loadout that you could select going into the game. For example: Supposed you have a weapon and select (5 different from loadout). Then you would select on the weapon only those 5 mods (4+exilus). The other 4 mods would have been inputted by the "Mod loadouts", usually 3 elemental and 1 bane mod. It would be a way quicker way to setup most weapons.

The changes would also allow for the IPS mods to be better, they are currently useless right now. For instance, you could mod the weapon to Puncture (to deal with grineer armor) while modding to Magnectic and Radiation to deal with Corpus and Infested.

Anyway, the meta would be a lot more fun with much more builds diversity and not a Slash/Viral kills all kind of stuff. Hopefully DE gets this right, but in Pablo we trust.