Infested Are A Bit Too Op Right Now, And Not For Reasons You Might Think.

[PaxEthenica]

First off, I wanna say that I LOVE that the infested have been given an overall buff. For too long they were fodder and nothing more, however some of the ways in which the Infested have been buffed combine with other elements in the game for an extremely jarring and discordant jump in their difficulty. What am I talking about? Well, read on.

 

First off, a lot of the new visual elements, for one, are not well realized... anymore. Bloom, and flare, and auras, and flashes, and gunfire, and melee channeling, and color swirls, and explosions, and floating particles, and the just the sheer NUMBER of Infested that pile into the screen can make for a visually overwhelming, utterly unplayable chaos that WILL KILL YOU NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. Graphical settings tweaks aside, the game's use of filters and color and light has always been problematic. In the previous update 13, they seemed to finally have a handle on things and the game was both visually active and extremely playable, but now with the washing out yellows and damping blues it's gotten out of hand again, especially when 35 glowing Infested that ignore 75% of your damage are crowding the screen and you have no idea what's going on because they UI is STILL using idiotically borderless numbers.

Second, Volatile Runners need to stop exploding when they are shot dead, have a damage-taken amplification debuff, or they need to start exploding again when melee'd. A web series on game design called Extra Credits had an episode on game difficulty versus game frustration. They emphasized that the difference between the two was consistency with the game's own rules, and right now the allowance for melee to magically cause this suicide NPC not to detonate breaks the consistency of both the NPC itself AND the Infested in general. The Infested are SUPPOSED to be tough, relentless, seemingly numberless, and when they get close they should cut you to ribbons because you were stupid and arrogant enough to fight them on their terms. By not having the Volatile Runner explode when slashed open, stabbed through, or bashed apart is a massive incongruity... especially when my blade is literally wreathed in fire. The player should want to run away from the Volatile Runner, not give it a hug.
This isn't to say that I think that having the Volatile Runner explode even when melee'd is my PREFERRED solution to the Volatile problem. Far from it. I actually want them to stop exploding when shot more than blowing up when struck, and for the simple reason that when they explode when shot it makes playing Infested defense nearly impossible without very specific Warframes and weapons, and pigeonholing the game like that makes it DULL. Which, I think everyone will agree with me, is a very bad thing.

As for the energy draining and the pull and the knock down and stuff? I actually like that, but the shield-penetrating toxic damage debuff needs to be seriously nerfed or actually removed (Boo!), and companions need to either be given regenerating health (BOO~!), or benefit from healing and support items and powers.

[Maou]

Volatile Runners on sechura. . . scary sentinel killing jockies :l