My Feedback On The Infested.

[TheErebus.]

Soooo because they got tougher and need to be taken more seriously to kill, they've resulted in being in the worst state ever?

[LtZefar]

Soooo because they got tougher and need to be taken more seriously to kill, they've resulted in being in the worst state ever?

They got cheap. You don't give all Ancient the ability to grapple. It's going overboard with buffing. Imaging if all melee enemy units got stomp to stop you from running away.

 

Infested also give far to little EXP for the trouble they are worth now. How can anyone be fine with this? 

[H.Katsura_999]

Before U14 players often complained that the weakest faction in the game were the infested and so DE decided to give them a buff, now the infested are one of the scariest faction you can face on high levels. 

 

Volatile runners explode when killed by guns and that explosion has a short stun proc on warframes but that short stun is all it takes for ancients to grapple you and zap you dry leaving you as easy prey

 

Using melee is near suicide now if your weapon in not a CC melee weapon like the orthos or you cant kill them in one hit like the nikana then they will swarm your &#! like bees stinging you with explosions,  toxic fumes, and not to mention the energy draining *@##$ slaps we all know and love (sarcasm)

 

I did an derelict infested defense solo with my Vauban and my best weaponry and let me tell this getting pass wave 25 is a miracle even for Ballsban.

 

Bastille will suspend them but that poison aura coupled with the healing aura that ancients have, plus the fact that stalks really really high made my orgris feel like a water balloon hitting a cars windshield and made Vauban gasping for health. And all it takes to kill me is one well placed grapple between my legs for Vauban to die a horrible death.

 

I really dunno how to suggest fixing this in a way DE can keep their "Buffs" and where players can still deem it enjoyable and challenging without upsetting the balance 

[Soniti]

It's almost as if I'm expected to play with friends

[Xeverous]

You're forgetting one thing: Vauban makes the Infested a complete JOKE.

 

They have to have something in order to kill us.

 

So you're saying i need to have Vauban to play Infested Missions now? Well, i don't have the frame, cuz i personally don't like him. What do i do now in your opinion?

Edited August 7, 2014 by FxG_ReAp0r

[(PSN)KestralSylver]

-snip-

That username... I died...

Edited August 7, 2014 by (PS4)KestralSylver

[(PSN)KestralSylver]

So you're saying i need to have Vauban to play Infested Missions now? Well, i don't have the frame, cuz i personally don't like him. What do i do now in your opinion?

stop playing infested missions until you get Vauban and learn to love him for the true CC beast that he is.

Edited August 7, 2014 by (PS4)KestralSylver

[(PSN)KestralSylver]

Soooo because they got tougher and need to be taken more seriously to kill, they've resulted in being in the worst state ever?

Seriously, the Infested were a joke prior to this. Just Boobenfodder really.

[Jaimas]

Seriously, the Infested were a joke prior to this. Just Boobenfodder really.

Except the new changes do nothing to fix or change this. They still are. Get someplace they can't go with AOE/Control frames, fire off huge damage weapons, let the hunt begin. The issue is that anyone trying to fight them any other way is pretty much hugely disadvantaged. Take a frame that's normally righteously good at slaughtering Infested, or was before U14, at least - Saryn. Miasma obliterated packs pre-U14, and allowed you to take them head-on - rare for a frame that wasn't Rhino, actually. Now, the Disrupting Ancients can make Miasma about as threatening as a wet fart in someone's trousers, and the healing ancient can suck all damage out of AOE weapons.

 

And there's the bigger issue - one I've yet to see defenders of the new Infested address - which is that the XP gain they give is virtually nil. You gain more XP on normal Survival and Defense missions now than you do for Dark Sector. And given that it's hard to get players to even stick around past wave 10 on DS maps, what the hell is even the point of playing Dark Sectors anymore if you're not cashgrinding?

[Phaenur]

The Infested are all but explicitly the "endgame" faction now, even compared to the Corrupted.  They only appear in Dark Sectors, which start scaling from ~20-25 even on Venus and Earth, half of Eris, one of the three highest-leveled planets in the game, and random incursions once every day or two, where you only need to run three of each mission instead of five to lock in each reward.  Oh, and Derelicts, which are also mid-20s-plus - and of course there's the massive buff Lephantis just received.

 

Frankly, the current design is, in theory, exactly where it needs to be for that - we're not supposed to go in with low-grade or underleveled weapons, they're balanced around a solid team and upper-middle-grade gear or better.  And when I say solid team, I mean it - every Infested mechanic is, in a sense, adapted from things we'd have seen earlier, but they're markedly more dangerous.  Eximus auras on standard units, longer-ranged and faster-firing grapple attacks, swarms of medium units punctuated by high-priority heavies, fast attackers who get right in your face and disrupt your aim...everything there is in the other two factions, just dialed up in level and threat with the Infested.

 

People need to watch one another's backs, focus fire on the Ancients and Eximi, yet still be ready to quickly switch targets to the swarm around them.  Nearly every Infested type has some option for crowd control, either through stagger, knockdown, or visual interference (poison clouds).  Health and energy regen are borderline essential for countering periodic poison and bleed damage and the various forms of energy leach.  All three weapon slots should be filled with something useful in a different situation - a burst-damage weapon for melting Ancients, an automatic or launcher for reducing the swarms, and a melee weapon of pretty much any sort for backup.  And, of course, we'll see what the Juggernaut turns into when they finish designing it.  That, plus the new Golem and whatever that feeder tendril on the ship ends up being.

 

Note that I said in theory.  As people have pointed out in pretty much every Infested thread lately, there're a lot of balance problems left.

 

First, the grapple.  It seems really kind of random how it works - sometimes there's a telegraph, sometimes it just leaps out and flattens you.  Sometimes it leads you, sometimes it goes to where you're standing when it launches.  The telegraph itself is the same as the melee attack, but the cord's range seems to stretch out to infinity.  Creating a concrete animation with consistent properties would make it much easier to actually counter the attack.

 

Second, the auras.  On the one hand, these are great for making sure that the bulk of the Infested - which are still melee-only - can survive to threat range.  On the other, some of them are a little overpowered, in particular the AoE damage disruption from the healer.  Nearly every weapon nowadays "counts as" AoE, as we've also seen while trying to melee arc traps and the like.  As a result, Healers make their allies functionally immune to everything, not just launchers and flamethrowers.  That would arguably be bad design itself, just invalidating specific weapons that would otherwise be optimal, although considering just how powerful those guns can be against everything I'm not as outraged as I could have been.

The Disruption auras haven't really hit me very much for whatever reason - I'm pretty sure they only take effect when something within that aura actually hits you, while the energy-per-second drain means that there's a Parasitic Eximus running around nearby.  If that's the case, I think that aura is right where it's supposed to be, and if not then that's where I feel it should be.  Perhaps, considering how potent Vauban still can be, it should also reduce ability duration - maybe a dramatic cut to the energy leech and general power defense, but with a sizable cut to duration mixed in too.

Toxics are dangerous, sure, but Infested kind of call for high health pools anyway with all of the other toxic effects, and the gas damage reduction isn't that painful when blast and fire are still effective.

 

Quick aside, I'm not sure if auras stack, but if they do that needs to be capped.  I don't mind them stacking in the first place, or even overlapping to affect multiple Ancients, but the 90%+ damage reduction pretty much invalidates everything we try to do.  I'd say at most a -60% damage cap or something roughly equivalent would work reasonably well, reining in launchers and their ilk without totally blocking power and rifle damage.

 

Third and most importantly, there's the spawn rate.  Ancients come far, far too often for the power they have, often stacking twelve, fifteen different auras at the same point.  I wouldn't mind if there was a sort of formation AI that kept the Ancients somewhat spread out, at most one of each to each pack of Infested, but that would be a pretty significant investment for fairly little gameplay effect considering the Infested still have to all bunch up in order to attack.  As it is, I think both Ancients and Eximi could stand to see their spawn rate dramatically reduced, perhaps even with a hard cap on how many of each can be active at a time, although that's open to abuse.  Really, just reducing the Ancient spawns by 60% or so and ensuring they'll never outnumber the swarm enemies would probably rebalance the faction on its own, making it actually humanly possible to prioritize targets and take them out through the hurricane of buffs.

 

In exchange for lowering the spawn rate, I'd honestly say the Ancients could do with a bit more of an intimidation factor.  A slight increase in size and damage, perhaps, and a significant health pool increase - it'll still be possible to fail the mission by drowning in auras, but this time it'll be because we failed to kill the ones that were already there before the next batch spawned in, which seems much fairer to me.  It may also turn out that aura effects and grapple attacks are much saner when there are only two to five Ancients at a time and maybe twice that in a full wave, instead of fifteen or more spawning every time.  I'd put the spawn adjustment at the top of the review list, even though it's at the bottom of this one.

 

Lastly, as people have mentioned, there's the reward.  High-end Ancients and Eximi of any level gave massive experience boosts when they died before U14, and that was back when they were only threatening in a mob anyway.  If they were retooled to be rarer but more individually dangerous without losing their team support, I would definitely support giving them the 1000+ exp back.  Common Infested are probably in a good place, honestly, especially if they see their spawn rate increased to fill the gaps that would originally have been Ancients.

 

As I see it, the ideal goal here is to take the Infested and turn them into a viable threat despite being melee-only, and the Ancients are clearly the cornerstone of that philosophy.  Just...with the buffs they've just gotten, they need to be a little less common and maybe a bit more individually dangerous in return.  People should feel like Infested are a significant threat - maybe an Infested mission hijack added onto the tutorial, with Lotus warning us about how far in over our heads we're about to be, would start that ball rolling - and worthy of all of our firepower.  At the same time, I agree that things can really just feel unfair against them sometimes, and a modest balance pass or even just a major spawn count overhaul would help that dramatically.  Making them offer more experience per kill, especially stacking with Dark Sector bonuses or Invasion rewards, would make them much more attractive to fight too.

[Etsoree]

So you're saying i need to have Vauban to play Infested Missions now? Well, i don't have the frame, cuz i personally don't like him. What do i do now in your opinion?

 

Loki, Valkyr, Rhino, Zephyr, Oberon, Nova, Ash, Hydroid... Many Warframes make the Infested an easy-to-kill faction. Vauban is the easiest.