Survival Is The Worst Game Mode; Excavation Is The Best

[HibikiGanaha]

There is no progression for survival.  It takes 20 minutes to reach rotation C regardless of gear.  Once you hit the minimum amount of gear needed to hit 20, everything afterwards is wasted effort.  Nothing you do will increase your efficiency for rewards, unlike every other mode in the game.  The more mods you get, the stronger you get, the faster you can clear a node and the faster you get a reward.  But not for survival.

 

Sure you can hit a point where your gear is good enough to camp a tile for however many hours you want, but what's the point?  DE said they were looking into giving better rewards the longer you go into survival on a dev stream awhile back, I am almost certain that got taken off the table.  Top end players could grab loki, vauban, mag, and nekros and go camp a tile indefinitely.  It's bad for business if you let players get more shinies.

 

So all we have is a mode without reward progression based on gear.  You fight a trickle of enemies while touching some life support pods every so often.  woo?

 

Now let's look at excavation.  The more you progress in warframe, the more drills you can simultaneously defend.  Even with top end gear and spamming abilities, if you leave a drill unattended for a few seconds, you can lose it.  For grineer excavation the threats are the ballistas, bombards, seekers, and heavy gunners and for corpus excavation the threats are nullifiers, detron crewman, corpus techs, and railgun moas.

 

Weapon choice matters on this mode.  You need something for moving through hallways and you need something long range to defend your drills.

 

There are fewer spawns at the start thanks to the egate fiasco, but after awhile it ramps up to the old amount of spawns.  Super fun game mode all the time.

 

Just my opinions.

[DecapitatingJim]

Honestly if Excavation gave better rewards, I would play it and probably never touch survival again. Sadly all the S#&$ I need is survival only. But I definitely agree.

[(PSN)mikerocks1234]

its a fun mode more team play though., it  need a void map , but i like survival more because its less of the matter of protecting anything then all out killing and surviving,and its more end game where you have higher level stuff,and not talking about lame campers .

 

fun should not be based on quickness of your rewards. 

[BlueSilkMetallic]

survival is my favorite game mode.

nothing to hack, nothing to protect, just straight killing :D

[DSpite]

You could have game modes that reward efficiency as well.

 

Lets say that you are on a transport ship that was attacked by Infested and had to make sure as many Grineer/Corpus crew got out as humanly possible via their escape pods. Assuming the pods clusters are in multiple location on the ship, you would have to balance spreading out the team vs the danger of being overwhelmed by being alone.

 

You would also be on a time limit of sorts (personnel gradually leaving OR getting killed), plus you could not simply camp the escape pods, as you have to actually make sure the crew gets there alive, meaning running around protecting the fleeing crew, and your end reward is also based on how many "lemmings" get out alive.

 

You get the idea anyway. Missions where you have to weigh the pro-cons of doing certain things, and are rewarded on performance.

 

I actually like Extraction missions as they allow a team to decide if they want to run multiple drills and how to spread out. I'd like more missions with such parameters.

Edited March 27, 2015 by DSpite

[PEPIYEA]

If i need to farm void keys, i always go to excavation on earth or venus.

Because i get ~3 keys per run for ~25min,but on survival 15min for one key is too much.

[Ajreil]

I completely agree. Mobile Defense has the same problems. Once you can defend against the enemies there is no skill. It just becomes a waiting game, especially for the lower level missions like Tower 1 MD in the void, where the enemies are low level and scarce.