Why I No Longer Have Incentive For Growth

[Volt_Cruelerz]

I like update seven. I like sentinels. I like the new warframes (haven't tried them yet though). I freaking love the Paris. Yet, for some reason, I don't have incentive to level up anything anymore. I just keep playing frost on defense missions over and over again. I have an unleveled trinity for instance that I have zero desire to touch. Likewise for my Ember and also for my relatively low ranked Prime and Loki. I think I know why though and it comes down to two things: no guaranteed progression and mods only assimilate.

Without a lack of guaranteed progression over the course of levels, leveling up feels empty. I feel no desire to rank up my equipment. True, there are long-term goals of being able to use my fused mods, but in the short term which is especially important for new players, I have no incentive to leveling up the new items. True, I could increase my overall mastery, but that's an even longer-term goal.

Likewise and contributing to the first, mods no longer encourage progression. Players will by the nature of the game and the fact that mods now take up more space and you can see fewer of them on-screen at once and personally I find it difficult to see what rank a mod is without mousing over it tend to fuse their mods to the maximum usable level. I've started fusing lower level mods in with high-level ones simply because the duplicates are bugging me. You can't ever use more than one of the same mod on the same frame, so keeping duplicates is discouraged. Thus, whenever you try to use a new item, you'll have two options: only install high-rank mods when space is available or start from scratch and burn a ton of money in the process.

If nothing else, skill trees need to return in some form though I would keep them separate from mods (IMO, the current weight increasing passively per rank is fine by me). This would allow customization reliant on player effort, not player effort * RNG, giving the player discernable progression. It could be complex, or actually quite simple as follows for say, a melee weapon:

Damage: 10%/20%/30%/45%/60%/80%/100%

Rate: 10%/20%/30%/45%/60%/80%

Crit Dmg: 15%/30%/45%/60%

Crit %: 20%/40%/70%/100% (bear in mind that this is multiplicative with the base state, so 100% is really just double the default)

Chrg Spd: 20%/40%/60%/80%/100%

Chrg Dmg: 10%/20%/30%/40%/55%/70%

Note how the deeper into the tree you go the greater the difference is. That is to prevent generalists from reigning supreme. If it were constant growth, each node in a line would increase a diminishing % of your total stat. This helps to counteract that and also reward players who invest more heavily in a single thing. This is also obviously just an example for some hypothetical melee weapon. Please don't critique the numbers or number of nodes per category. Also, at the cost of infuriating the completionists, I would like to point out how important it is to not let the player be able to fill all nodes, even on weapons.

I would also advocate that instead of fusing mods, we can instead create stacks of mods. A stack of mods will behave identical to the current system except that it can be broken apart if so desired and does not cost credits to construct. I know this eats up the primary credit sink in the game, but being able to use several stacks of discrete mods seems more desirable to me than the current system of using a set of fused mods. I know this isn't a perfect solution and but hopefully this will prompt someone else to come up with a better system we can all get behind.

The severe problems relating to price of fusion have been fixed, but IMHO, there is still much work to do. I do believe update seven contained a great many fantastic improvements, but I feel like it incentivizes progression less than it did before and hopefully my proposed solutions might aid in that regard.

[Davante]

I don't know that we need that but I do agree that overall each level feels less weighty than it used to and thats a problem. I think the next big update needs to add a passive skill tree to the leveling of Frames/Weapons.

[Scherhardt]

I agree on the passive skill tree. The old skill passives on weapons is good enough. I wish they'd bring it back or a much much improved version of it.

[Tarudizer]

Yeah, I really, really like the new mod system, but I feel absolutely nothing when I level up anymore. Usually there is a sort of joy, some kind of accomplishment and yes, 5% increase to something as dull as reload speed HELPS, but it's just.... gone. World of Warcraft did the same thing, I love the talents there and how you must ACTUALLY choose which one you want out of a selection of 3, but you can only do that every 15th level! That's insane!

There needs to be some kind of middleground, SOME kind of "hey, I leveled up, cool" feeling.

[HadronVictorioso]

Ok, so to Tarudizer and everyone else:

I've been saying this for ages, let's follow what skyrim does. When the player levels up their Warframe, allow them to put a specified number of points into their Warframe's shield capacity / power capacity / health. This could be easily balanced, and would give people a sense of progression.