Retune *all* The Frames! (11/19: Wildfire)

[PsychoticMarik]

17 hours ago, ChronoEclipse said:

Do any of them have an equivalent/comparable feature to Coptering or at least Parkour 2.0?

Not really no, and honestly I think that's what Warframe really has going for it. That and the overall visual design of the game. I'm convinced that if this game didn't have the interesting aesthetic that it does it would have never reached this level of success. Without its eye grabbing graphics and art, and relatively unique movement system it wouldn't have anything. The art team has(as far as I'm concerned)literally carried this game on their backs, and I'm sad that the rest of the game cant live up to what they have created.

Without getting into it all that much I've been playing things like League with some friends, and Blazblue for the PvP area. PvE would be Monster Hunter. Looking forward to souls 3 as well. The PvP games aside Monster Hunter understands its players, and makes things both fun and challenging. Warframe doesn't even make a real effort as far as I can tell.

DE really should be looking at games like Monster Hunter, Souls/Bloodborne, Dragons dogma for ideas on how to do enemy design. In fact I'd say Gears of war has some of the best enemy design as far as 3PS are concerned, but I haven't played anything recent in the genre either. Even the old Halo games had far better enemies than anything in Warframe. Every enemy in Warframe feels exactly the same. The factions have little identity to them, and frankly I cant imagine that down the road I'll remember any enemies in the game. In Halo I remember the Elites and Grunts most, in Gears of war "BOOM" and "GRIND" and that Kantus roar instantly come to mind. The frames are the main attraction and I get that and thats fine, but without worthwhile enemies the game is stale.

And the scary thing is that bad enemy design is only part of this games problem. The playable characters themselves are largely undercooked or downright poorly made. Among a list of other half baked features(Arcwing, Kubrows)and problems with enemy scaling and ability overuse. The list just never seems to end.

The games I mentioned are very different games indeed, but Warframe isn't so unique that it cant learn a thing or two from them, or at least the basic concept behind what makes them great.

Edited March 19, 2016 by PsychoticMarik

[--Q--uaint]

7 hours ago, PsychoticMarik said:

Not really no, and honestly I think that’s what Warframe really has going for it. That and the overall visual design of the game.

Hmm. I've encountered  巨人の猎手| Attack On Titan Tribute Game by Feng, and it’s pretty good on the movement. Sadly, there’s not a huge amount of gameplay there aside from getting good at going really fast.

The other thing Warframe really has is the variety. There’s so many different guns and 'frames.

7 hours ago, PsychoticMarik said:

ability overuse

From what I've seen of Destiny, there’s no limit on how much you can use your abilities. Is there something that keeps that from being a problem there?

Even the old Halo games had far better enemies than anything in Warframe. Every enemy in Warframe feels exactly the same. The factions have little identity to them, and frankly I cant imagine that down the road I'll remember any enemies in the game.

The original Halo had the most amazing enemies. They actually reacted in human-like ways, and it was great. Stick a grenade to his face? Maybe he just freaks out. Maybe he charges you. You don’t know until you try.

I think the sameyness of Warframe’s enemies is more due to the numbers game. Once you progress to a certain point, enemies are either tissue paper or great bulletsponges with the ability to one-shot you. The enemies are actually pretty diverse if you actually fight them on the level they're meant to be fought. I do feel that the different enemies should act more differently, though. It would also help if they didn’t have their own trashy “languages,” either. A lot of the enemy depth in Halo was sold by the fact that you could hear and understand their reactions. You hear “he’s everywhere!” and feel like your tactics matter, hear them curse their fates and feel powerful/skilled, or hear them mock you when you die.

TBH, there is no serious tone to Warframe anymore. I feel the enemies’ speech is now out of place compared to the old voices. I'm actually getting more salty about this as I write it. The old voices provided a few light spots of humor in the originally-dark game. Now? They'd just fit in.

The art team has(as far as I'm concerned)literally carried this game on their backs, and I'm sad that the rest of the game cant live up to what they have created.

Could you please explain Limbo’s design, then? The art team is fantastic, but they have their share of… mistakes IMO.

Edited March 20, 2016 by ChronoEclipse
herp derp more post needed

[PsychoticMarik]

16 hours ago, ChronoEclipse said:

Hmm. I've encountered  巨人の猎手| Attack On Titan Tribute Game by Feng, and it’s pretty good on the movement. Sadly, there’s not a huge amount of gameplay there aside from getting good at going really fast.

I've played my fair share of this game. Its great honestly. Movement that feels like nothing else I've played, and satisfying kills. Tho the game has horrible hitboxes and magnet hand grabs from the titans.

16 hours ago, ChronoEclipse said:

From what I've seen of Destiny, there’s no limit on how much you can use your abilities. Is there something that keeps that from being a problem there?

I cant speak for Destiny since I've never played it, or watched enough of it. I do know that they also employ the boring use of bullet sponge enemies tho, so maybe thats why. I'm also assuming they dont have powers on Nova's level in that game. Tho I could be wrong.

16 hours ago, ChronoEclipse said:

I think the sameyness of Warframe’s enemies is more due to the numbers game. Once you progress to a certain point, enemies are either tissue paper or great bulletsponges with the ability to one-shot you.

Thats the problem tho. Its the devs jobs to make sure this doesnt happen, and if its not possible to make enemies interesting and fun without chopping down the horde a bit...then chop away. Gears managed to throw quite a lot at you at once. Sometimes along with bosses, and its leagues more fun than anything warframe has done with its horde. If they dont want to cut down on the cannon fodder then they need to sprinkle in actually interesting enemies that are resistant to our powers, or have powers of their own. The game cannot keep going as it is imho. It will wear out its welcome in the future as is. I agree with your other points tho.

16 hours ago, ChronoEclipse said:

Could you please explain Limbo’s design, then? The art team is fantastic, but they have their share of… mistakes IMO.

No one does everything perfectly, but it varies depending on who ask as well. Personally I dont care about Limbo's design one way or the other. I think it blends in enough to get away with its odd ball design.

I hope this isnt considered to be off topic.

[--Q--uaint]

8 hours ago, PsychoticMarik said:

Thats the problem tho. Its the devs jobs to make sure this doesnt happen, and if its not possible to make enemies interesting and fun without chopping down the horde a bit…then chop away. Gears managed to throw quite a lot at you at once. Sometimes along with bosses, and its leagues more fun than anything warframe has done with its horde. If they dont want to cut down on the cannon fodder then they need to sprinkle in actually interesting enemies that are resistant to our powers, or have powers of their own. The game cannot keep going as it is imho. It will wear out its welcome in the future as is. I agree with your other points tho.

I don’t feel the horde size is a problem in Warframe for the content that DE has actually designed for. The enemies are actually relatively interesting and diverse to fight so long as it’s not oneshotting on both sides.

Resistance to powers is increasing the cheese-factor, IMHO. Perhaps give them the ability to grow a resistance to CC, so you can’t just keep them blind forever or w/e… but simply laughing it off is bad. Another thing that’s bad is Disruptor Ancients suffer reduced duration from all power-related debuffs… which is particularly bad since some powers aren’t recastable so you're stuck waiting for the full duration while the Ancient wrecks your face.

I suppose this ties back into the main topic: 'frame powers should be less cheesy, so we don’t have to have cheesy enemies. The question is how to make that happen.

8 hours ago, PsychoticMarik said:

I hope this isnt considered to be off topic.

I'm pretty sure it is.

[Archwizard]

Cross-posted to reddit, but:

Was doing Sorties on Public a few minutes ago with a friend of mine. I picked up a max range Mirage, he took a Mag, we gained an EV Trinity from the previous Sortie and just had to wait on a fourth.

Random pops in: Another Mirage. Great minds, I supposed.

The first round went off without incident; the other Mirage was taking over blind duty so I just popped my buffs and ran around swinging War.

The round ended, I ran to A, Mag ran to B, Trinity ran to C. We each made a note that D was not getting capped (it's being the worst one to have to back-cap), so I scanned the room to see who was slacking. That's where we started to notice something... off.

The other Mirage was in the middle of the room. He would fire a Prism towards D, blow it up, take 3 steps toward A (like he was looking at me to see if it was occupied), turn and take 3 steps back to his original position, ad infinitum. With no enemies around.  
When people went down, he wouldn't move to revive anyone. He just repeated the same motion, using the Trinity to fuel it.

My friend made some snarky comments in chat about how the bot was playing terribly, and its "player" came back midway through Round 3 to inform us he had made a series of macros to play for him using Autohotkey.

The Mirage went down at around 80% on Round 3. Karmically, nobody moved to revive him. He started whining, calling us idiots, saying he was going to put us all on ignore.  
^{Lucky we had another Mirage to pick up the slack.}

Just thought it was interesting, I'm used to it from WoW but this was my first experience in Warframe with someone who just played via macros and botting. My buddy and I were talking about it after, wondering just how many frames are used the same way; I feel this is especially relevant after the brief discussion from the last devstream about how "meta" abilities can create or amplify behavior toxic to the continued state of the game.

[tnccs215]

41 minutes ago, Archwizard said:

snip

 

Quite interesting. Never found one of those people myself but... The fact that it even happens-- on pub -- is quite worrying.

[RealPandemonium]

9 minutes ago, tnccs215 said:

Quite interesting. Never found one of those people myself but... The fact that it even happens-- on pub -- is quite worrying.

I've played with bots before as well.  Over a year ago, even.  

[Djego27]

18 minutes ago, tnccs215 said:

Quite interesting. Never found one of those people myself but... The fact that it even happens-- on pub -- is quite worrying.

I seen people running a melee macro non stop at a save space to avoid the afk check, that is fairly obvious since a normal player would just move every now and then instead of pressing his buttons for 10 minutes in a row for no reason.

Things like this are actually a bit harder to spot, since the "player" actually does something useful.

[Archwizard]

So, while it's not necessarily related to feedback, I have been working on some new Warframe concepts for a little while now, one of whom (Revenant) has energy-generation abilities. I'd been working on it as an alternative to Trinity's method, but since we've been working on making energy more precious, I was wondering if the alternative I had provided would be considered more acceptable.

Also, apparently the spoiler tags in the OP are... broken. May be temporary, maybe not, we'll see.

Edited March 25, 2016 by Archwizard

[--Q--uaint]

2 hours ago, Archwizard said:

So, while it’s not necessarily related to feedback, I have been working on some new Warframe concepts for a little while now, one of whom (Revenant) has energy-generation abilities. I'd been working on it as an alternative to Trinity’s method, but since we've been working on making energy more precious, I was wondering if the alternative I had provided would be considered more acceptable.

Also, apparently the spoiler tags in the OP are… broken. May be temporary, maybe not, we'll see.

I don’t think making EV cost health would be good. Now that Inaros is out, I really do like the idea of the affected enemy popping up a prompt to give allies energy.

Rework of my previous idea: 

Energy Vampire stuns the target for the full duration, much like Inaros’s Devour. The enemy would have an interact prompt that results in a Sparring-style finisher animation that drains the same as a current EV pulse would, and grants the same amount of energy to the person who does the prompt.
An alternative version could be to have them do the same thing as Devour lets them do, but that’s boring… and suplexing Chargers is awesome.

All damage dealt to the target, regardless of source, gives energy to Trinity at the same conversion rate as the current EV pulses. (This means Trin gets double energy if she does the prompt.) (It also means she will have more difficulty regaining her energy while fighting higher-level foes.)

Synergy with WoL is maintained because the target has more health to turn into energy.

[Archwizard]

25 minutes ago, ChronoEclipse said:

I don’t think making EV cost health would be good.

Well obviously not for Trinity, she can heal it back instantly. That's not the point though - this is for a specific concept whose expenditure of health is ultimately beneficial to him, and to whom the retrieval of health is more difficult as level increases. (The question I'm asking is less "would this be a good alternative to EV" and more "would this fit into our thinking on decreasing availability".)

Now, in THEORY, you could combine him with a healer like Trinity or Inaros and make the cost moot... which is why I added the note to stagger the energy output towards allies, perhaps playing more on ramping up the base energy generation we have in the OP.

Edited March 26, 2016 by Archwizard

[taiiat]

99% sure i've mentioned here before, but if Trinity and Energy Vampire are a current topic, this is what i have to say about it.

[--Q--uaint]

41 minutes ago, Archwizard said:

and more “would this fit into our thinking on decreasing availability”.

Sure. Making the health-cost moot through synergy would be fine, IMO, since that’s promoting teamplay? Then again, that just makes the optimal Draco group into nuker, Revenant, Oberon (buffing and Renewal)

11 minutes ago, taiiat said:

99% sure i've mentioned here before

You totally have and that’s where I got the idea that I had before and that I reworked in the post I just made. That all makes sense, right?

[taiiat]

7 hours ago, ChronoEclipse said:

You totally have and that’s where I got the idea that I had before and that I reworked in the post I just made. That all makes sense, right?

k. just have to make sure. i like the style of mine more.
i don't like QTE prompts unless for a damn good reason (which there are very few). and as far as i'm concerned game is too fast for 4 Players to run over and perform a QTE Finisher on an Enemy as a Support Ability. effectively becomes just a single Target CC because Players don't have the time to do that in Combat, which is when they'd need Support.

all what i have in mind there does is slow down the rate of results from Energy Vampire(without adding Cooldowns or other things that leave you unable to use your single Target CC Ability when you want CC), while still letting it be Support in the way it is now (and keeping what secondary uses it has now). it's okay for Trinity to supply others with Energy, just not infinite per second.

on top of those mentioned things, i'd also probably suggest a longer default Duration. so Players abusing 12.5% Duration have to wait longer.
to not break Synergy between Well of Life and Energy Vampire, increase Well of Life to 25 seconds and Energy Vampire to 22 seconds. that also means we're slightly increasing the CC Trinity can apply, the two max targets being CC'd for longer. not that big a deal though, other than using Well of Life to anchor Link being more effective. ([color=#777777]and might as well let Trinity cast again after 25% of the Duration of each to cancel one/both. literally just cancel. meaning like the Ability was Nullified. meaning no, you don't get the rest of the Energy from Energy Vampire if you cancel.[/color])

Edited March 26, 2016 by taiiat

[--Q--uaint]

5 hours ago, taiiat said:

on top of those mentioned things, i'd also probably suggest a longer default Duration. so Players abusing 12.5% Duration have to wait longer.

Except they won’t. You'll still be able to kill the target, and removing the ability to get the energy by killing the target kinda breaks it.

I suppose a decent fix would be to have EV scale like Miasma: You get a certain amount of energy per pulse, and there’s a pulse every second. Then it’s a simple matter of making it work like Magnetize in that it just sticks around after the target dies. Make it so you can recast to cancel, and pretty much the best of all worlds is maintained?

It does still enable the “sit still and spam abilities” gameplay, but makes it less efficient.

[taiiat]

47 minutes ago, ChronoEclipse said:

Except they won’t.

they will, the minimum duration to Smite an Enemy goes up to 3 1/8 seconds with those Durations. up from 1.5 seconds.

Energy would already be metered, so it's just to make Smiting less efficient at Killing, without removing it because it's neat synergy and a strategy i approve of employing for taking out the odd trouble Enemy. just not mowing down waves with it.

besides, i didn't say anything about shooting the Target and Killing it not acting exactly as it does now.
and making Energy Vampire only scale positively creates the opposite problem. now we're back to 100% of Trinities using 3 Duration Mods to get as much Duration as possible. we had enough of that when Blessing turned off the game. it's totally okay for Players to specialize their Abilities, as long as they aren't wrecking the Warframe (or the game).

 

if we want to focus on people running Macro's - which i'm not really at all - Energy from Vampre being metered already means Trinity is gone out of that hypothetical Mission. it'll get replaced with Pizzas and Focus though. but, suddenly what was free does not cost a lot and is a negative Resource trend... yay?

the primary goal shouldn't be to spite some Players, even if it's obvious they shouldn't be doing something. improving Gameplay and adding cool things should be the primary focus, with spiting abusive stuff as bonus points.

[blaes]

18 hours ago, ChronoEclipse said:

Energy Vampire stuns the target for the full duration, much like Inaros’s Devour. The enemy would have an interact prompt that results in a Sparring-style finisher animation that drains the same as a current EV pulse would, and grants the same amount of energy to the person who does the prompt.

thanks no.

that would pretty much be a rollback to previous version of energy vampire with nerf on top (no range possibility to regain energy), when said previous version was deemed impractical and weak (which is the reason it was changed).

reminder of previous version : it worked like well of life, without the life boost. and there is a reason well of life isn't used at all (and that reason isn't blessing).

 

if you want to nerf energy vampire, just give it the miasma treatment : reducing duration reduces number of pulses, increasing duration increases number of pulses. yes, people would still be able to get the energy instantly by killing the enemy, but how is that a problem? they'd have to work for it.

[--Q--uaint]

5 hours ago, blaes said:

thanks no.

that would pretty much be a rollback to previous version of energy vampire with nerf on top (no range possibility to regain energy), when said previous version was deemed impractical and weak (which is the reason it was changed).

reminder of previous version : it worked like well of life, without the life boost. and there is a reason well of life isn’t used at all (and that reason isn’t blessing).

 

if you want to nerf energy vampire, just give it the miasma treatment : reducing duration reduces number of pulses, increasing duration increases number of pulses. yes, people would still be able to get the energy instantly by killing the enemy, but how is that a problem? they'd have to work for it.

Would it be better if the prompt activated an energy pulse for everyone? The whole point was to make energy less… infinite. Which allowing everyone to get energy by killing the target instantly doesn’t do in 90% of the game’s content. If the mobs are level 100+, you can say they “worked for it,” but not really before that.

[RealPandemonium]

8 hours ago, blaes said:

.there is a reason well of life isn't used at all (and that reason isn't blessing).

I'm pretty sure the reason is Blessing.  Blessing is the reason that pretty much every heal isn't sought-after.  

[Archwizard]

15 hours ago, blaes said:

there is a reason well of life isn't used at all (and that reason isn't blessing).

6 hours ago, RealPandemonium said:

I'm pretty sure the reason is Blessing.  Blessing is the reason that pretty much every heal isn't sought-after.  

Preeeeeeeecisely. Warframe is designed so that healing is rare, yet literally every frame who offers up healing has to be able to keep up with Blessing's infinite range, snap healing and mitigation, or nobody cares.

Which means Renewal can't (due to the delays and higher cost, and in spite of its anti-KO effect), Mend definitely can't (primarily because its overhealing goes nowhere, on top of the limited range and need to generate it), and Blazing Chakram barely even registers. Desecrate really can't either, but since it drops loot, nobody bats an eye. Scarab Swarm probably can, simply because it has periodic healing and scales with the number of enemies affected, which with the stun means it's absolutely outhealing the damage you're taking. And of course, since energy cost differences don't matter to the frame with Energy Vampire, Well of Life is blown out of the water by Blessing because it really has nothing to offer over it (Single target CC? Pfft.).

Edited March 27, 2016 by Archwizard

[blaes]

nope. take out blessing, and players still wont use well of life more than marginally, because pizzas/life strike are way more efficient/convenient. even renewal is way better than well of life.

[taiiat]

14 hours ago, RealPandemonium said:

I'm pretty sure the reason is Blessing.  Blessing is the reason that pretty much every heal isn't sought-after.  

ofcourse. Well of Life is also pretty garbage just on it's own, but Blessing obviously is much preferred and snowballs the situation.

[tnccs215]

mh...

I dont know if this has been proposed before, but what if Energy vampire, instead of granting Energy one way or another, simply reduced every ability cost by quite a lot, for a certain duration, within a certain range? Or, maybe better: What if it reduced every ability cost to zero for a set amount of time, but possessed cooldown to prevent abuse?

[blaes]

no to cooldowns. the devs are trying to avoid them, with reason : they break the pace of the game.

your other suggestion (reduction on every ability energy cost) seems better to me.

[tnccs215]

7 hours ago, blaes said:

nope. take out blessing, and players still wont use well of life more than marginally, because pizzas/life strike are way more efficient/convenient. even renewal is way better than well of life.

Agreed. However, why? What makes well of life bad? You fail to explain that and, more importantly, why cant we base Energy Vampire on it--which I don't believe is such a bad idea as you do.

Honestly, I feel that Well of Life problems are more of a QoL matter than anything else. The ability by itself can be quite a quick, cheap heal if you think about it. Yet it only is so for the trinity herself.

Because, in the midst of the cacophony of battle, it is borderline impossible to detect an enemy floating slightly above others. If it is on another room -- or even just behind your back -- you miss the oportunity to heal.

In the end, I think that informing other players that an enemy is affected by the power would make it substantially more viable: Something similar to how we are informed of convergence pick-ups. A (initially) flashy mark (with well of life icon, and the words "well of life" below) would be instantly applied to the victim, and therefore all players can know instantaneously that a well of life exists, and where it is located.

Of course, this isn't enough. It doesn't matter being informed of something that no longuer exists because -- regardless of how many life you add -- your teammates still manage to get it killed. And what if it would be of incredible use to have another well of life in the room you are, but you are still waiting for the timer to end on the one 7 rooms ago?

So, in addition to what I already proposed, I also defend these alterations:

In a similar fashion to Nyx's Mind Control, affected enemy now becomes invisible, but the totality of damage dealt during the duration of the ability is dealt at its end. However, it is not possible to end the power voluntarily.

Up to 4 enemies can be affected simultaneously by Well of Life. This allows for several rooms to be covered. More tactical use.

In order to prevent overhealing (and subsequent pointless waste of healing), a maximum possible heal per bullet is set. I believe this is more on the interests of the player than anything else.

Since different frames have different values of health, I propose for the maximum healing possible to be percentual, instead of a set value. For example, the maximum healing you can obtain, with a Rank 3 well of life (and no power strength additions), is 150% your warframes health. This is affect by power strength mods, of course.

what do you think?