The Infested Ospreys. What The Hell?! Are You Serious?!?!

[Ralthor]

Play defense on Pluto.

Play defense on Pluto.

 

So good you said it twice? :) 

[DiabolusUrsus]

We are just going to have to agree to disagree on their damage output (on the max stacks, yes I can see that being tweaked) but considering you can mitigate the damage in other ways, no I don't agree the damage should be toned down outside of capping their proc damage.  

 

The visibility issue sounds like it is exactly how the torid used to have a problem where the cloud would stay around longer than the 3 seconds it was supposed to and was notorious for killing players as the cloud was no longer there but still was and was just not visible. 

 

I somewhat agree with this, but at the same time it's still off. 

Poison damage in general is poorly designed at the moment. I agree that it should be able to bypass shields. I understand that it is there to put pressure on players who only stack shield strength. I think that particular part of poison is reasonable and necessary. However, the problem with poison is that it is either relatively harmless (Toxic Ancients are pretty easy to avoid) or extremely lethal (areas get highly saturated by Mutalist Ospreys ridiculously quickly.) Beyond the immediately obvious absurd damage output attached to the gas attack, the player has no reliable way of recovering from that damage, unless they are playing as Trinity, Oberon, Valkyr, or Nekros (did I miss some healing ability?) or they have a rare and relatively difficult-to-acquire lifedrain melee mod.

 

Considering these things supposedly show up anywhere the Infested do (and that means they can show up as early as Venus,) the main problem is that poison is not immediately counterable. You can either negate it entirely or you can't do anything. That's either trivial or punishing, not challenging. That sort of polarity in difficulty is unacceptable, and is the same thing the rest of the community has been noticing about the game in general. It's either supremely difficult (e.g. new players trying to pass through Earth when Evsicerators were in their prime) or supremely easy (as soon as they acquire a powerful weapon and some decent mods). 

 

You keep mentioning that the community has been crying for a reason to use the resistance mods. I want to suggest that you are incorrect. Or at least... I haven't seen any requests for additional poison enemies or anything like that. We have been complaining that the resistance mods are useless, yes (and these damage numbers tell me that they still are,) but the principle behind that complaint is that the mods themselves need to be improved. 

Let's take Antitoxin as an example. It reduces damage taken from poison. Neat. Once again, unless the player has a healing ability available that doesn't matter, because the main threat poison poses to players is that it will eventually overwhelm them. If the player does have healing available (Warframe ability, mod, health restore gear) then they have no reason to take Antitoxin. Poison is a gear check, nothing more. So... how can we improve Antitoxin to be worth considering?

 

Instead of reducing toxin damage by a percentage that can be easily overwhelmed with larger numbers, Antitoxin now prevents poison damage from immediately bypassing shields. This does not mean that players are immune to it, however. Taking poison damage can still proc a toxin DOT. However, the Anti-toxin mod will trigger an ability (similar to the Sentinel Guardian ability) that dispels the proc before it does damage, on a 30-second cooldown. When this ability is on cooldown, the player is once again vulnerable to shield-bypassing poison damage, and if they are procced again the proc will last. To be completely specific, the player has a grace time of ~2 seconds to get away from poison damage once the dispel ability triggers before it wears off. This means that a player who carefully avoids taking poison damage for too long can potentially go an entire mission without taking health damage from it if they use the Antitoxin mod. Notice that the shield/proc defense is not dependent on RNG. 

 

Granted... that means poison is still nothing more than a gear check, but that's a flaw that is inseparably worked into the game at the moment, and won't go away until players have a more reliable means of regaining health and/or avoiding poison damage through skill. It's just that asking for mods not to be useless is not the same thing as asking for more enemies that strong-arm us into using them, especially when the mods themselves don't work. Asking for mods not to be useless is asking for the mods to be improved.