Defense Missions: Quality-Of-Life Improvements, Getting Rid Of Stuck Enemies, Stopping Door Heroes

[DivisionByZero]

The 2 most common problems with Defense missions unrelated to game balance are:

-"Door Heroes". People who abandon the defense objective and spawncamp enemies at the doors to their spawns. This denies the rest of the team item drops and jeopardizes the defense objective.

-Enemies getting "stuck" at their spawns due to pathing issues and take minutes to hunt down way after a wave should have ended.

Here are my suggestions.

Introductions:

Designate a medium-size area around the defense objective as the "Defense Zone". Designate spawn areas as "Spawn Zones." The object to defend is the "Defensive Objective" or "Pod".

#1. "Toxic" Spawn Points

Anything that is in a spawn zone and not stunned, slowed, staggered, frozen, mind-controlled, or hindered receives a spawncamp timer that goes up to 20 seconds (If you are stunned/slowed/staggered/etc while the spawncamp timer is on, the timer pauses until all impairing status effects are gone).

If the timer goes up to 20 seconds on a spawncamping Warframe or an enemy, the spawncamper starts taking unavoidable armor-ignoring and shield-ignoring health damage at a slowly increasing rate until moving out of the spawn zone.

The timer resets after spending 45 seconds outside of every spawn zone.

That way: obnoxious spawncampers who block spawns will end up taking a lot of health damage (and who wants to revive them?). Enemies that get stuck or glitched in their spawn points will also wither away and disintegrate.

#2: Nerfed item drops and affinity for spawncamping

Enemies that die in spawn zones would also drop nothing and grant half affinity for players that did damage to them. For example, if there are 2 spawncampers farming enemies in spawn zones, they get no item drops (including ammo and energy drops) from those. These drops would only be visible and enabled for the non-spawncampers in the group who aren't doing the actual damage.

This discourages players who camp right outside spawn zones, as they wouldn't be inside the spawn zones and therefore wouldn't get the "Toxic Spawn" debuff.

#3: Melee Health-Link on Defense Objectives

After Damage 2.0, melee damage from enemies was buffed. Way too often I see people running off while Grineer Scorpions chop up the pod in Grineer Defense missions. Solution: If there are no players in the Defense Zone (as defined in the Introduction) all melee damage against the pod/defense objective is redirected to the player farthest from it. This forces door heroes to seriously reconsider ditching the pod because they could take a lot of damage if they spawncamp.

#4: Instant Item Drop Awards and Bonus Affinity in Defense Zone

"Door heroes" cause yet another problem - mowing down enemies far away from the defense objective/pod presents everyone else with a lousy choice: either run away from the pod to grab item drops, or stay at the pod and lose out on your item drops. This further jeopardizes the pod.

Solution: All item drops in the entire defense map except ammo and energy/health restores are instantly awarded to players in the Defense Zone. Yes, this means that if you always stay near the pod, you never have to run around and pick up items.

Furthermore, while in the Defense Zone:

-You gain bonus affinity

-Whenever your allies gain affinity, you get the same amount, with no range limits

[vaugahn]

This seems easily exploitable and unnecessarily restrictive. 

[Otenko]

I never personally took issue with spawn-camping problems. It is a pain sometimes, but I honestly think that these suggestions are pretty myopic and encourage a similar sense of camping.

Also, I'd like to say that I don't actually camp spawn points. I usually stay with the objective. But I take a bit more of an apathetic viewpoint towards door heroes.

 

Also, these suggestions didn't propose the problem for enemies that get stuck at spawn points or at various places around the map. So searching for enemies on the fringes of the map will get people killed? That'll end up with defense missions that never get finished or end up with people dipping in and out of those zones afraid of the health damage, which in turn makes the whole mission turn into a slog.

 

It may "fix" spawncamping but it creates a whole different set of problems.

 

#4 in particular rings back to those that stand on lightposts and use their Penta. It's strongly encouraging people to never move around the map. Yeah, people KOing enemies around the map spreads out loot, but I always bring Thief's Wit and take a quick run around defense maps to make sure I don't miss loot.

I'm pretty sure people hated (or still hate) the lethargic play of standing on a lightpost and using Vortex all day. Having that affinity boost and free item vacuum is nice, but at the same time I think vaugahn is right in that these ideas can be exploited.

 

Also, with #2. If affinity is nerfed, then it seems like that'll ruin affinity gain for the entire party. There's two ways that I usually see how door hero groups work:

 

The first is that people flock to the guy making the kills and the affinity so as to actually end up getting the affinity instead of being out of range and losing everything. So this means that affinity is basically turned to poop for everyone because someone likes to pick people off at the spawn points. So since everyone wants to be next to the affinity, this causes everyone else to leave the objective to get what little affinity they can scrounge up. Additionally, if people try to out-compete the spawn camper in kills by being at the spawn point, they'll either suffer the same dearth in exp while abandoning the objective or be at the mercy of the spawn camper's exp gains

 

The second is that they'll stay next to the objective, being out of range (or barely in range) of the exp, thus causing them to suffer similar drops in exp.

.

So basically now everyone abandons the objective and now affinity is nerfed for the entire party or just ends up losing exp anyway.

 

For #3, I can sort of understand it but in running around the map, it's easy to lose track of an enemy or the objective. So basically in going 20m from the defense pod, I am suddenly facing enemies that can attack me on 2 fronts? They either hit the pod, which you or I won't be able to see what's hitting us and also enemies can attack your actual corporeal form (and those enemies can be barely out of sight).

 

Compound the problem of having to protect two bodies with shield-ignoring damage and you'll end up dropping pretty quickly.

 

Sorry that these are out of order, but I wrote about them in the order that struck me. I think that spawn-camping definitely promotes some lazy play but at the same time, these suggestions are pretty draconian, potentially exploitable, and opening a whole new can of worms that may fix spawn camping but create more problems in its stead.