New Gameplay With Infested: No Vision, No Movespeed, No Damage, No Energy. You Wot, De?

[Ska-boo]

Ok, just finished that last survival mission for the third time. I've succeed on the second try, but I'd really like to share my impressions I got on my first one: a failed attempt to solo it, which failed at 29:30, so we may as well count as successful. I did everything right there, never died, killed all mobs, etc, and lost for the same reason I lose all survivals: stupid RNG screwed me over with drops and spawns.

 

Bur never mind RNG, I'd like to discuss new enemies and their UH, SO ORIGINAL special effect on players. The thing is, those were probably my worst 29 minutes I've ever experienced in this game. Having unfortunate experience in previous survivals with newly introduced enemies, I decided to go for the most solid variant - Valkyr with perma-hysteria. But m8s, usually when I played her, there was at least some variations available. This time all I could do is to hit 4 and then smash melee button. And repeat. I honestly tried to play normally, but then S#&$ became impossible - chain-knock down, chain hook, can't dodge because of slow, can't dispatch enemies, because of that damage reduction buff, can't find that ancient, because too busy rolling to be able to at least see something! Yeah, roll. What use is that feature if the moment you get on your feet that swarm is on you again?

 

So the whole game was: press 4, rush towards green light, and tap E til there seems to be no movement around. Then drop some energy restores to mitigate the effect of that cancerous draining aura (why is it still in game?) and go on. So, basically, half an hour of smashing one button.

 

My next (successful) run was no different and on the last one I decided to try what will happen if I approach it a bit more tactical. And just as I expected, the answer is: nothing good. No benefit from using brain, assessing surrounding environment and landscape; enemy will just spawn right from your &#!, fire grapple hook, or kick you down with shockwave and you're dead. Only one legitimate option left: spam energy pills and spam nukes/control.

 

The game always favored such approach, but now, with these new enemies it becomes so much more punishing not to do so, that the game becomes almost unplayable. Seriously, 3 bloody disables in one update! For the faction that spawns in the biggest number. I don't know, m8s, this is too bloody much.

 

There may as well be no gameplay left at all, beside restoring energy and pressing nuke, as if I don't do it, I'm blinded, I'm slowed, I'm drained of energy and damage and my FPS drop to 15 from excessive particle effects and too many creeps on the screen and then I die. Just lacking a mob that would have an ability to crush my game. Or I don't know, delete some driver so that I couldn't use my mouse. Then the course would be complete.

 

 

I don't really know what to do with it. There should be a "proposition of constructive alternative", but I have no idea what tweak could be done to new mobs to make it good. Nothing can be done. It had to be a whole new system of fighting, new AI, new tilesets, reworked quantity and quality of enemies. Infested species that feel like real alien horror, that stalk you from the darkness, attack suddenly and coordinately, and retreats back into ship's darkest corner to escape retaliation. Creatures that act as actual animals/predators with hivemind and not like Zerglings, controlled by 3 y.o. kid. Then, under those condition, any additional enemy would be welcome and advanced mechanics, like blinding and slowing and stuns would actually be fun.

 

But now, with fights and AI being what they are, any new content you add to enemy will just increase the turmoil of a clusterfuck, happening on every map, to the point of becoming simply unplayable one day. And nothing and no one will be left, only last 2 players: Vauban and speed Nova farming Sechura for 100000000000000 waves, who just didn't notice introduction of the new enemies.

 

Yeah, guess I've said all I wanted. Sorry, posting without checking for typos and grammatical/logical errors. Wanna sleep too much.

[vaugahn]

Disagree. I like the new enemies a lot, especially the tar MOA. It's tricky to deal with without directly disabling you, and synergizes well with hordes. The other ones are nice too, brood mothers are quite cool. 

[SaKuneKun]

imagine me on my ati radeon 2400 and core duo t3200 2.0gz, yeaaaaaaaaa sad life ...

[Tsukinoki]

Small tip: When doing infested survival bring corrosive + heat.
Your damage wont be reduced by the toxic ancients like if you were using gas or toxic, and you'll be dealing bonus damage to ancients and normal units.

But I thuroughly enjoy the new infested.
They prove challenging and difficult without just slapping the controls away from you or outright stopping you from doing things.
They just make it harder to manouver and see.

The tar moas remove the one benefit we have over 99% of the infested: our ability to quickly run away and climb ontop of things.
The swarm moas prevent us from as easily shooting at the other infested until they are close enough to actually do anything so that we cant sit back and snipe them from across the map.
The brood mother spawns weak enemies that deal low damage and slow us, similar to the tar moas but different enough to be a different level of threat.
The boilers do what the infested do well: overwhelm us with more numbers.

Since infested are mostly pure melee they have to have ways to lock us down a bit so that they can actually get into melee range and do something.

Before those units were added it was far to easy to sit back and kill all of the infested before they got within range to do anything.
Now the normal infested actually stand a chance of getting in range and hurting me and I have to prioritize targets.
Thats a very good thing and a welcome change to the infested.

[Zyxmax]

Horrible framerate all kinds of visual effects that designed to make it impossible to see anithing i played that mission a few times for tethra mods (havent got any yet) i just spam my fourth and thats it no strategy or difficulty its just a mass of visual effects.

[Trichouette]

This guy is kinda right... We already had an amazing surprise with the hooking ancient and the eximus draining your energy, we already had the "ignoring shield" damage from the poison cloud of the infested osprey.

 

Now we have the sticky goo that make EVERY SINGLE move slow as hell, even taking a lifesupport.

The shockwave MOA were already lame as hell now they are even more because of the crowd, if an ancient hook doesn't help his mate to kill you you can be sure the shockwave will do it.

And we are also totally blinded and get even more gas cloud everywhere...

 

Also if someone can explain me why sometimes the goo kill me in 1,5 sec it would be nice.

[vaugahn]

Also if someone can explain me why sometimes the goo kill me in 1,5 sec it would be nice.

 

Because your shield is down.

 

Slow goo deals radiation damage, which does 75% damage to your health. If your shields are up you'll barely notice it though, shields resist radiation. 

[Filas312]

They prove challenging and difficult without just slapping the controls away from you or outright stopping you from doing things.

Yes, and the ancients do just that. They @(*()$ stunlock the S#&$ out of us.

[Tsukinoki]

@Filas312
I was referring to the new units.
I do think that something needs to be done with the ancients pull attack.
But the new units do it properly.

[Rollerlane]

mhm, this has been my worst experience ever on Warframe. unbalanced, no thought about newer players, i mean, 30 minutes in unbalanced hell and how exactly are lower ranked players going to survive? DE thinks everyone just has a 6 forma poatoed boltor prime and know a crack squad that can get through any situation. i highly doubt anyone mastery 4 and below will have completed the mission, unless they leeched off of other players

[Tails-san]

The biggest point I can agree with: Parasitic Eximus (Energy Drain). Every new unit can be one. so can all the ancients, and it is still the ONLY Eximus type for runners, crawlers, leapers, and chargers.

 

EVERY infested unit can be one, and for the most common units, it's the ONLY eximus type.

Edited November 30, 2014 by Tails-san

[Deruser]

A tip: Try using Melee. The swarms and the maggots will go away once you SWING THAT SWORD.

[Tsukinoki]

@Deruser
Rolling also works but isn't always the most practical way to remove the effects.

[Janzer]

As a melee only player I have to agree with these new mobs for melee players are definitely a bit of a pain. Ranged players or players that spam abilities probably don't feel the effects as much.

 

My experience on this tileset was pretty terrible. Waymakers aren't clear enough and with survival, you absolutely need to be where the O2 is if you're soloing, when you need to be there, not searching and falling off the map or getting knocked off the map while the timer still runs as you reset (which is another issue).

 

- The constant knockdown from the new Moa mobs

- as well as the knockdown and drag from Ancients

- the blurred vision which requires rolling

- the sticky goo to slow you down and eat your health

- the toxic spore clouds in the air that bypass shields

- the electric half man guys on the ground zapping you

- the toxic half man guys on the ground spewing toxin to make you have a seizure

- the toxin half man guys on the ground that expel a cloud of toxin when dead

- the ancients that take all your energy in one hit (not as often as they used to of course)

- the eximus that have auras that strip away your energy so you can't regain it even if you're using rage....

 

Did I miss anything? All I need now is a mob that strips my Stamina (although some of those stances do just fine with that) and something sucking the O2 away faster.

 

To the guy saying swing your sword and the gnats go away, I melee only. All I'm doing is swinging. Those things don't just go away like that, or maybe they're just being shot at the player so often that there's no recourse other than try nab that dang moa as he jumps away from you.

[Guest]

*deleted because tl;dr*

Edited November 30, 2014 by Guest

[Tr1ples1xer]

Blame the ''its too easy'' crowd lol time for us to be as vocal as them because I can't see anything on my screen !!

[Zoracraft]

All I can say is that all of those people complaining about warframe being too easy got what they wished for.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have to deal with ESO style gimmicks on our enemies. Way to go guys, really needed to re-live that.

[Zoracraft]

mhm, this has been my worst experience ever on Warframe. unbalanced, no thought about newer players, i mean, 30 minutes in unbalanced hell and how exactly are lower ranked players going to survive? DE thinks everyone just has a 6 forma poatoed boltor prime and know a crack squad that can get through any situation. i highly doubt anyone mastery 4 and below will have completed the mission, unless they leeched off of other players

Definitely agree.

Do you want to know how my team beat the mission

Spam nekros, slow large m-prime nova, spam Vauban, and spam trinity.

And it was still not easy. If DE keeps trying to balance like this, players will never finish eris. (Or corpus missions, with the leaked crewman)

[Ordel]

To be completely honest, I logged in once I saw this to swat this thread to the ground. I thought it'd be another stupid and redundant rant about infested being OP or some other crap. But then I realized, you actually based this thread on valid points. +1 to you.

 

So, let me start this off.

Been playing since the old days- I think I started slightly after closed beta ended. No idea. My forum acc's been here since Oct 22 2013, but I made it far after I actually started playing. ANYWAY-

 

So, I solo 99.9% of all of my missions. I'm one of those "I'm not a scrub so I don't use Rhino or Nova" people (not because they're bad frames, only b/c they're overused and annoying to see after a while). I mainly play as Nyx or Excalibur for my missions, including the mutualist ones (which I've finished). Decided to bring out my dusty Amprex, except I had to update the builds on it since the ones I used were for casual gameplay, which is basically nothing over lv 20. Anyways, I picked a bland and basic corrosive+heat crit build. Brought twin wraith vipers with a corrosive+heat bullet hell build, and I bought a sheev since I only got it to 15 and I needed some mastery. Put a basic corrosive and heat build on it.

 

See what I'm getting at? Corrosion destroys anything with armor, not to mention it chains to enemies for added effect with the amprex. Fire cleans up all the other fodder units, and the crits/mass production of bullets ensure I'm doing enough damage to survive for more than three seconds.

 

--

 

And, if you don't have a good crowd control weapon, Shred goes a long way. Seriously- I turned a grinlok from a single-unit heavy damage weapon to an honestly decent crowd control weapon. It's not bad.

Edited November 30, 2014 by Ordel

[GeoffFromAccounting]

I agree with this, ever since the new infested have come I've spent 49% of the time on my &#! from the knockdowns (which can't be prevented even with knockdown preventions like Hysteria), 50% of my time rolling to get rid of the blinding and 1% of my time actually killing things with my guns because I never have any energy from those damn parasite eximus units, and that 1% of the time I am able to move, I do so very slowly because of all the slow downs

Now add all that to the fact that my playstyle is that of a sniper so I have very few crowd controlling weapons such as Amprex which makes this very difficult

 

This isn't challenge, this is just hell

[Ska-boo]

But I thuroughly enjoy the new infested.

They prove challenging and difficult without just slapping the controls away from you or outright stopping you from doing things.

They just make it harder to manouver and see.

What is that shockwave, if not slapping control? The blinding effect could have been alright, if it wasn't bloody permanent. The fact that you have to either forget about everything and just roll on circles or say goodbye to your vision doesn't make it much better than a normal stun.

Before those units were added it was far to easy to sit back and kill all of the infested before they got within range to do anything.

M8, it is still just as easy with "proper" build and (optionally) team. Just now it is more punishing not to use them. The alternative approaches could be hard and frustrating before, now they have moved one step closer to being impossible.

 

 

 

And you're the one of those 2 guys who'll stay on Sechura, I take it. Thanks for tips, m8, but I don't need them, cause I, as I wrote it in OP, have gone thought it and can almost easily do so again.

 

 

All I can say is that all of those people complaining about warframe being too easy got what they wished for.

Well, it doesn't get any less easy if you just autocast proper abilities Viver style. I heard it could be super easy, if you take exactly that team composition you've described below, but change slow Nova to speed one. Your team finds tight spot, Vauban places Vortex on choke-point thought which enemies will come and Nova speeds the whole map up and Nekros taps 3, as usually. Something like that. Oh, and most important part, then Nova and Vauban must go to forum and complain that event was too ez, and ask for more buffs

 

 

 

M8, I see what you are talking about, but it wasn't really my point. I don't say that they are OP and I cannot find a way to beat them - I did. The problem is that it is a bloody butchery, not a fight. It's either I steamroll them, or they steamroll me. "Hard" isn't really the word here. It is as hard as it is hard to, let's say, remove a hornet nest from your country house attic. All you need to do is to stick your vacuum cleaner into it and problem solved, but if you approach it casually, you're #*($%%@.

 

Now this is what it turns out to be in this game. On every mission, you either bring your right "vacuum cleaner", or get rekt without chances, no matter how fast, strong and accurate you are. Steve said that he wants this game to be skill-based, when he nerfed Viver. But I don't think that placing right cards into your warframe and weapon is skill. It is definitely part of it, but it should be the lesser part, otherwise this game may as well be turned into flash-player card simulator, where RNG just decides the outcome of the mission, based on what mods you have installed and that'd be all gameplay. Tho DE would probably be sued by Blizzard, if they did it.

[DSpite]

mhm, this has been my worst experience ever on Warframe. unbalanced, no thought about newer players, i mean, 30 minutes in unbalanced hell and how exactly are lower ranked players going to survive? DE thinks everyone just has a 6 forma poatoed boltor prime and know a crack squad that can get through any situation. i highly doubt anyone mastery 4 and below will have completed the mission, unless they leeched off of other players

 

I played with a Rhino P/Boltor P, and Excalibur with Glaive only. We got to 28:40 or so on my Excalibur run but someone dropped; someone tried helping them, THEY dropped, unkind words were exchanged in chat, one guy rage-quit. I was running towards the down guy, when I hit the zone where they were, my Kubrow made us invisible so I ran past some lower end stuff, and I still dropped in 3 secs or so because there must of been a ton of poison eximuses either on the floor above or below me.

 

The swarms are much larger then what you would think could logically spawn and run to you. It kind of comes down to one bad enemy combo and nothing will save you simply because you can't see enough to make decisions.

 

I did not think I could keep Excalibur alive as long as I did, but Radial Blinds will crit an Exploding Glaive in the high yellows all the time, just need not to get cramped into a corridor. Which is hard, as the entire ship is damn corridor. You get a "bad tile set", and it's even harder.

 

Both this mission and the Alad V one for Navs seem to have rather insane spawn rates.

[Guest]

 

sorry for misreading

 

that's my F*** up

Edited November 30, 2014 by Guest

[Feallike]

The only changes i would be happy with.

 

Getting rid of the Anctients hook (its not needed with the new enemies)

 

Nerf the graphic effect the Swarm maos have.

 

increase the hitbox of maggots to make them easier to shoot.

[Tails-san]

Definitely agree.

Do you want to know how my team beat the mission

Spam nekros, slow large m-prime nova, spam Vauban, and spam trinity.

And it was still not easy. If DE keeps trying to balance like this, players will never finish eris. (Or corpus missions, with the leaked crewman)

 

Actually, I feel like the leaked crewman, once it's actually working properly (I.E. not disabling your powers permanently) , could actually be a perfectly fine addition, substantially better than current anti-power measures. It simply prevents use of powers while under its effect, your energy remains intact. Once the unit is down, you can go right back to firing off powers. Contrast energy drain, where it just starts to feel like you NEED maximized power efficiency to be able to use powers at all, and quick thinking becomes worthless, as even after you take down the parasitic eximus, your energy is still gone.