Survival Balancing

[LanceAtredeis]

Seems like a lot of people jump to conclusions without actually playing Survival after the changes... 

Yes, there has been a slight nerf in PLS drop rate, but I've noticed that there are A LOT MORE enemies now, 
and the flow of the enemies mob is much more fluid as well. 
So there is never a shortage of PLS if you are killing them at a good rate. 

I was still ending up with more Lotus capsules than I need, without intentionally hording them. 
(no Nekros needed too, I was soloing as a Mirage)

So basically the mode still plays much as before, just that there are now more enemies for you to kill, which is GREAT. 

Always loved Survival, and I really enjoyed the couple of times I've played Survival post the changes. Thanks DE :) 


Having said that... I do hope that we get a true "endless horde" game mode, separate from Survival, that never ends, and has nothing to defend and no air support to pickup. The enemies just keep leveling up, and the only upper limit on how long you can last is your skills. 

Edited August 30, 2015 by LanceAtredeis

[Bigfuu]

An hour+++ soloing t4s with 18 orokin cell rewards aint good for me...

 

Same here

Edited August 30, 2015 by Bigfuu

[Bigfuu]

 

 

We'd like to bring back the original frantic gameplay style of survival, dashing from room to room while facing hordes of enemies against the clock. We've tried this solo, in small teams and in full squads, everything from Apollodorus to T4 Survival, and as far as we can tell the changes feel awesome.

 

 

 

 

Yes please...more frantic gameplay style of survival and a forma after 80 minutes thats what i like!

[(PSN)Eluminary]

Survival solo is one of my fav things to do in warframe.  My entire build for chroma is build is set up to laugh at lvl 150 bombards while shooting them in the face, which when this goes live to consoles he will never see again.    

 

I stopped grouping to do survivals all together when the only way most people want to do them is camping in a small room and waiting.  This is extremely boring and this change will make this strategy used to an even greater extent, since you will end up having little other options to get to an hour using nekros hydrod maybe vauban/loki(run for pods though with nekros/hydriod you probly still won't need them).  Now people will camp like this either way but at least you had another option.

 

Survival was the best mode... defense is boring, all the other ones are super easy.  Survival was the best place to test your metal solo, now you run out of air far before any of the enemies get difficult.

 

Change back would be nice but if not done maybe make 2 different survivals one where your surviving vs harder and harder enemies and the other just going for the air....  Or maybe add void excavation missions though digging on an old abandoned ship may be an odd thing to do =p

 

(disclaimer I am on console and havn't personally played the nerf first hand however I have watched people of similar lvl to myself on twitch have some trouble getting 20 to 30 min marks when prenerf could solo to over an hour as I can)

Edited August 30, 2015 by (PS4)Eluminary

[Fifield]

disclaimer I (...) havn't personally played the nerf first hand

 

^^ 70% of the comments on these forums.  Without the disclaimer.

[Deus_X_Machina]

Seems like a lot of people jump to conclusions without actually playing Survival after the changes... 

[...]

You know, that there have been additional tweaks, in several hotfixes, since the first implemention of the change right?

Meaning the situation now is different than the one after the first implemention.

[ZincKie]

why not use excavation as a template for survival 2.0 where you have LS that provides a small net gain per second but requires pickups from enemies to keep going (the battery units from excavation) and has a cap to how much air it will produce (instead of how long it takes to dig).

The difference would be that enemies don't attack the life support capsules (I feel like this is the main benefit to survival over other endless missions). To compensate for this, maybe each LS capsule needs more frequent battery pickups to keep working (so it requires 10 total to give ~30% LS net gain over x amount of time, for example). Players are encouraged to only have 1 capsule activated at a time when at high LS % and encouraged to have many active when at low %.

This wouldn't be a drastic change to the gametype but would deal with issues such as camping and requiring nekros/hydroid.

 

in terms of the LS mechanics, when activated they stop/cancel out the drain of air but can be (and should be) "overcharged" by the battery pickups to give more air. This way having a dry spawn period means you're not losing due to bad luck as simply activating the LS is enough. To ensure that this works, there will always be at least 1 LS capsule on the map at any time, increasing to 2 or 3 as time goes on. Multiple capsules being active at once is only beneficial if they're both overcharged and overcharging requires a more frequent flow of batteries than excavation. The lifespan of the capsules depends on when they are activated and overcharging has no influence on their duration. While overcharged, capsules will increase LS levels by (example only, numbers can be tweaked) 0.5% per second with capsules lasting 1 minute (so +30% if overcharged for the entire time)

 

 

I'll probably be back to edit this at some point but this is just an idea I had that wouldn't require a massive overhaul. it's possible somebody has suggested similar before and if so apologies but I didn't read all of the posts in this thread :P

Edited August 30, 2015 by ZincKie

[taiiat]

even though you know it already, i want to publicly say something constructive rather than the tinfoil hat theories that this thread is taken up by.

now that longstanding bugs have been addressed and the Game Mode balanced accordingly, playing Survival is much more interesting now. more enjoyable to play than it previously was.

i'd been wishing for some sub-objectives for Survival, but with managing Life Support being a more active process now, that abates most of that desire.

as usual, totally an improvement.

[xiaodenden]

My husband and I tried ODS last night.  I was Equinox, he Banshee, and we recruited a Trinity and a Nova.  I felt like it was such a mess because we pretty much ran out of pods by around 18 minutes so we ended up extracting around 21 min. The enemy spawn rate and life support drop rate were pretty messed up.  Most of the time we (except maybe the Nova, who knows what that player was doing) stuck together in the same room or adjacent room to encouraging spawning, but we had huge lulls in enemies spawning.  When the enemies did show up, we were able to kill them quickly, but individual LS barely dropped.  We were very active running around from room to room, but more often than not, we saw very few or no enemies, but then we head back to the previous room, all the sudden a big crowd was there.  We thought maybe Equinox's maim or Nova's molecular prime slowed down the enemy so we stopped those power for a while, and it doesn't seem to change the rate the enemies were coming towards us.  Despite our best effort, our life support hovered around 15-20% if we only relying on the LS dropped by the enemies.

 

We don't mind the running around and we don't mind a more actively managing LS, but it would be nice if there's a more steady stream of enemies coming towards us so we can actually kill enough to get life support up high enough, to say 45-60%.  We don't want to have to bring in Nekros every time we want to do survival, but after our ODS yesterday, we feel like Nekros is essential for survival missions now.  It's too bad because we rather play whatever frame we want to play instead of being forced to use Nekros for survival.

[Kotei]

I'd have to agree with the comments that state life support should be removed completely. It's a pain to hit a life support, in the Eris region, when your being swarmed by infested, in a part of the ship that the hull has already been destroyed, and you'd be losing life support anyway. Did I mention the fact that you get caught in the animation lock and still take damage. In what time period does this game take place... I can hit one button on my smart phone, in this day and age, and it instantly register my choice. Even if it has to load I don't have to hold the button down for it to work, and besides that I thought survival was to see how long one can last... on average 32 minutes for myself... So, why not just remove the life support all together. If someone wants to mindlessly slaughter hordes of Grineer, Infested, and Corpus for hours and can manage it let them. Why should their hard work, however tedious it be, go to waste. It will prove that team work is needed more if you want to reach higher minutes and better rewards. Problem with survival is that people stray to far from others as said in previous posts. Which will cause life support to drop less at higher rank enemies. The reason for this being we aren't grouped together well enough to effectively defeat them, but my biggest complaint has nothing to do with being overwhelmed with enemies. It has to do with the fact they get to far out affinity gain range. Which is why the misconception you get more affinity on defense missions arouse... you are forced to stay within affinity gain range on defense, so there should be more affinity gain. Something else that might be a much better improvement to survival is to extract by oneself... you can do it on defense missions and interception mission... it should be available on every mission type... either by running to the extraction and hitting a button to confirm a choice to extract, or just running to the extraction like normal and it auto extracts you... I don't see why I have to wait 15 minutes for someone to extract, because they want a void key if that's not what I'm there for... They have their own agenda as to why they are doing it. Apparently to the majority it's every Tennno for themselves.

 

Edit note: If you want a real survival mode improvement then I can easily come up with one... Raid was my favorite mission type. It made me feel like I was assisting the lotus and progressing the story. Now I'm forced to carry a key in the void, or it become a secondary objected during a current mission to retrieve an artifact. That being said maybe the survival mission I come up with will be to much like another mission type to merit being it's own... I guess I'll go play and test the current survival a little bit, on PS4, while I do some creative thinking about improvements. That's what a Beta Tester is for right?

Edited August 31, 2015 by Kotei

[Kruglov]

The reason survival isnt fun isnt because its too easy to get energy.

 

It's because it takes ages for it to get hard due to all the tissue paper bad guys, and even when it gets hard its still not fun because its the same enemies coming every time.

 

 

Survival needs a kick in the pants in terms of enemy variety.

As difficulty ramps, eximus should appear more.

 

And there ought to be minibosses.

Sort of like "elites" in any diablo-esque dungeon crawler.

Like if your'e doing a grineer survival maybe every few minutes have a OGMA (appearing outside of archwing) land and start hovering around firing missiles and pooping out grineer hellions and ramparts. The whole team would have to band together to take out the massive dropship, and upon death are rewarded with a hefty amount of Oxygen.

 

For the Corpus survival maybe have forms of HYENAS or LYNX spawn 2 at a time that chase players around. Or slightly weaker, smaller versions of locust drones or gox archwing units that fly overhead, units that are huge compared to the non-archwing tenno that release clouds of drones into the air. When destroyed they, like the ogma, would release loads of oxygen all over the floor for players to grab.

 

Minibosses that are very hard to solo are the real answer to the monotony of Survival.

They would wreck the predictability of the game in the same way Vor's void appearances do.

When Vor appears in void, teams quickly band together to kill him because they know:

 

a.) he can probably kill them if they singled out with ease

b.) he drops good loot

c.) he has enough health that teamwork is usually required to kill him

 

Void Vor is a great example of a miniboss done right.

 

Put more stuff like THAT into Survival missions and people will play as a team and be challenged properly.

It will also give the appearance of the stakes truly being raised.

As enemies get more desperate they begin to launch the BIG units. That would look cool and feel cool. Which is what Warframe is pretty much all about.

[Deus_X_Machina]

[...]

Something else that might be a much better improvement to survival is to extract by oneself... you can do it on defense missions and interception mission... it should be available on every mission type... either by running to the extraction and hitting a button to confirm a choice to extract, or just running to the extraction like normal and it auto extracts you... I don't see why I have to wait 15 minutes for someone to extract, because they want a void key if that's not what I'm there for... They have their own agenda as to why they are doing it. Apparently to the majority it's every Tennno for themselves.

[...]

That should be one of the most important changes to Survival.

You want to extract, because you are struggling, have time constraints, etc? Just go, no reason to get your team to agree or abort and lose your rewards.

You want to stay? No more being forced to extract a minute before the next drop (or even a few seconds before it).

Individual extract should be a priority, especially for survival.

[Lord_of_Lords]

I want the difficulty of the survival event back.

[(PSN)AyoJoe_301]

I dont know if this is the forum to talk about ideas but i really got one tat i've have talked about for a long time everytime i talk about survival mode and its that sometimes oxygen is really annoying and i would like to enjoy having waves of enemies coming at me and i dont know im pretty sure im not the  only one and i would like to see survival 2.0 without oxygen so i can really focus on enemies without worrying about anything else but my life and the others on my team...so i dont know that wold be a good idea to be considered to be changed in the game.`

[KnightCole]

Meh, all those wave modes need to improve thier reward tables wiht higher lvls.

 

going AABC, ABBC, BBBC, BBCC, BCCC, CCCC and then maybe restarting to AABC.

[Monolake]

My husband and I tried ODS last night.  I was Equinox, he Banshee, and we recruited a Trinity and a Nova.  I felt like it was such a mess because we pretty much ran out of pods by around 18 minutes so we ended up extracting around 21 min. The enemy spawn rate and life support drop rate were pretty messed up.  Most of the time we (except maybe the Nova, who knows what that player was doing) stuck together in the same room or adjacent room to encouraging spawning

 

[...]

You got spawn screwed by not staying together (and might have also slowed mobs with Equinox ult)

 

ODS Solo, plenty of drops and pods left, ~600 kills

(special note: garbage reward at rotation C)

 

 

 

That should be one of the most important changes to Survival.

You want to extract, because you are struggling, have time constraints, etc? Just go, no reason to get your team to agree or abort and lose your rewards.

You want to stay? No more being forced to extract a minute before the next drop (or even a few seconds before it).

Individual extract should be a priority, especially for survival.

Community been asking for it for 2 years, its always been especially bad in planet pub missions, when some people want to stay for keys/xp etc and others want out at 5.  Not going to happen.

[(PSN)DWreck1995]

 

Spawning fixes and tileset tweaks over the past year greatly improved flow by reducing enemy travel time to players, upped the intensity of attackers and grouped enemies together into more tightly packed squads, and increased availability of points during spawn selection. While we're happy with these changes to enemies, one side effect is that survival difficulty drifted over the past few months to where it is now; plentiful large canisters and no reason to use them, even when not trying to stockpile them.

 

We'd like to bring back the original frantic gameplay style of survival, dashing from room to room while facing hordes of enemies against the clock. We've tried this solo, in small teams and in full squads, everything from Apollodorus to T4 Survival, and as far as we can tell the changes feel awesome.

 

Upcoming Changes:

- Each PLS drop is now worth +4 seconds of life support time instead of +6 seconds

- Small reduction to PLS drop rate (around 90% of what it was)

 

We'd love to hear your feedback and will continue to test and tweak if needed.

 

Please keep in mind players that last for very long periods of time. Sure at first everything can be very plentiful. But as time goes on over an hour air definitely starts becoming a top priority. At least for me and my group anyway.

[arman276]

Not sure about reducing the drop rate, theres already too much of a perception that Nekros is is a must-have for survivals...

 

Infact, had an idea;

 

Remove PLS entirely.

 

Instead of restoring a set amount of remaining time, using the LS capsule will simply prevent the mission from failing until the next one arrives.

 

When the next one arrives, players have a certain amount of time to activate it before mission failed.

 

This will require players to move at some point, will end those boring tunnel camps everyone only ever seems to do, and it removes the dependance on loot drops for the mission to continue, and it kills the noob trap of players just using the capsules as soon as they arrive without realising what it actually does.

You forgot to add that it will also replace Nekros with Loki as the one to go and get the pods :p

[smithf]

Declaration: This is not an "anti life-support" post. Just a twist in the representation.
TL;DR at end of post.

I'm actually fine with endless missions having an "attentuator", in this case 'life support'. But at the same time, may be nice to have the option of a sub-game (for challenge, rather than reward) where we can face increasing enemy waves without the anxiety of the "attentuator".

On a separate front, I could never get around to buying the idea of "life suppport" (once it was called "oxygen/air", but people pointed out the flaw when on planetside tilesets with supposedly an atmosphere)

How about we 'reversed' the 'life support' idea? Instead of it influencing Team Beta (the player squad), it actually affects Team Alpha (the lone tenno operative whom we believe exists coz momma Lotus said so.).

So the mission works like this:

Team Beta will go into the mission and attract lots of attention. And at regular intervals. Lotus will present a 'hacking opportunity' (which is sort of like sending in a Life Support Pod) where a random console will become "active" (mark on map). These hacking will help remote Team Alpha overcomes its difficulties (e.g. imagine opening remote doors, disabling/rewiring security turrets, messing up enemy systems to prevent them from hindering Team Alpha).

In other words, the "bar" is no longer life support for Team Beta, but instead represent the overall 'support' for remote Team Alpha. Every time an activated console is successfully hacked (the team will have to defend the person hacking too), it will increase the 'support bar' (no different from currently activating a Lotus Life support).

When the bar runs out, it means that Team Alpha has terminated (or failed if it didn't even reach first 5 min) its mission and extracted (i.e. no more periodic rewards), but Team Beta CAN choose to continue indefinitely in its mission of increasing enemy difficulties. Just no more "special rewards" every 5 min, (so it's really meant for people who just want to survive for fun, or kill lots of enemies (e.g. looking for some drop).

Game mechanics wise, the change is rather minor, just having more options as well as possibly having a better story than "life support".

 

Additional:

This is for the case where we still want equivalent of PLS (actually, can be totally optional to me). Instead of Portable Life Support, what we will be picking up is "intel", which are small bits of info that will directly benefit Team Alpha(i.e. increase support bar immediately, but amount is very low. Drop rate of this should be very low as well, possibly restricted to elite/leader units only).  The purpose of this is to act as a "bonus" rather than a reliable means of supporting Team Alpha.

 

 

 

TL;DR:

- Doesn't change survival game mechanics that much, just the "story/setting"
- instead of Life Support Pods for Team Beta (player squad), have randomly activated hackable consoles that when hacked will allow remote Team Alpha carry on its mission. What was the life support gauge for Team Beta will now be the "support" for remote Team Alpha.
- As long as Team Alpha still have "support", survival rewards will be dropped periodically (no change).
- if the "support" runs out, it means that remote Team Alpha must terminate its mission and extract: i.e. no more survival rewards will be dropped.
- Even after Team Alpha extracted, Team Beta can choose to extract as well, or continue to fight the enemy waves, though no more survival rewards will be dropped (but regular enemy drops still occurs).
- Team Beta can extract early before support runs out, which will also terminate Team Alpha's mission (which is actually no change from now).


 

Edited September 2, 2015 by smithf

[Kalvorax]

-snip-

 

seems like something that could be a new mission type.

[Grimlar]

There have been a number of good suggestions for improvements to survival and things that would probably make interesting new modes. (Someone suggested tiles getting locked off as a way to move the Tenno on... could see that working on the sealab tileset where the base is flooding from the bottom up. Perhaps with old style Spy 1.0 mission objectives? Enter at the bottom as Sharkwing and work your way up, collecting data... Apologies for the digression.)

 

One thing that does strike me though is that there seem to be two groups of players here, those who are begging for a challenge and those who just want the current difficulty to work better.

 

Please DE, accept that you cant make both sets of players happy in the same mission. Add a new difficulty mode, Hard Mode/Mission +30 or whatever seems reasonable, which would basically have the effect of bypassing the first 30 minutes of the normal mission, ie increased damage, increased levels, increased spawn rates etc. Or just give everything +30 levels. Also, better loot to compensate for the effort, even though most players at this level will probably not need it.

 

It could even be extended to every mission type, every planet, and give more experienced players a reason to visit the earlier planets again, and make the later planets a real challenge for them. (Unlock hard mode for a planet if every node is completed and they have achieved a suitable mastery rank?)

If you want an example for a game that did something like this, (years ago,) Guild Wars 1 added Hard mode to every area & Campaign mission I believe. Seemed to work for them.

 

-

 

Talking of loot, you really need to look at that too DE. Receiving a few cores/orokin cells etc at 45 minutes in? Its not what I call a good risk/effort/reward balance and is a big turn off for me in the endless missions.

 

1) Drop all the junk (nice to have but not what we go to the void for,) to the A rotations. Ie formas, orokin cells, cores, ducats etc. Perhaps even add them as a rare chance on the main drop tables.

 

2) Reduce the number of A rotations once the mission gets going, you could even replace it with a rarer reward rotation, ie ABCABCBCDBCD etc. Perhaps have a catalyst or a reactor as a rare chance on the D rotation of the higher difficulties.

 

3) For your own sanity I would also categorise the rotation reward tables by the type of item dropped, not the specific. So the tower 1 missions have the easiest to find parts, the ones that are going to be retired to the vault soon. Tower 2/tower 3 has the stuff thats been out a while, and tower 4 has the most recently released stuff. And when a new set of prime parts is released, everything shuffles down the tables. This would essentially make it possible to automate the process of deciding where the new prime parts go.

 

Again apologies for the digression.

[BrazilianJoe]

We should be able to hack a terminal on survivals to cause an alarm and get the effects: 

 

-10 seconds until next reward (speeds up rewards)

+ forces spawn of a bunch of high level enemies close to the terminal. Eximus and stuff.(which naturally have chance to drop PLS)

+ has a cooldown to prevent abuse. Cooldown should be 20 seconds IMO, limiting the reward time reduction to a theoretical ~ 3:40 minutes. With the hectic action a well honed team might get close but not quite since hacking takes time. 

+ if a cypher (consumable) is used to hack, cooldown time increases by +10 seconds.

Edited September 2, 2015 by -TP-BrazilianJoe

[DesoPL]

The problem what i see is not about life support mods, but some Warframes are pretty OP.

 

Nova and her Molecular Prime.

 

Mesa and her Peacemaker + Limbo Banishment.

 

Saryn and her Miasma.

 

Trinity.

 

Frost and his Snow Globe.

 

Necros and his desecrate.

 

Excalibur and his Exalted Blade.

 

This warframes are most OP for Survival, so they can beat huge waves of enemies easily.

[Sunset_Thief]

In all honesty, I never enjoyed Survival missions because they don't promote teamwork. Setting out a camp strategy works for the most part, but it gets dull quite fast, and most players would rather just run about. Every player then spreads into different far-away rooms, never to be seen again.

I agree, on T4 survival 60+ mins if u go somewhere anywhere alone its like going to a basement in horror movies, no way u are making it back xD

[Deejudanne]

In all honesty, I never enjoyed Survival missions because they don't promote teamwork. Setting out a camp strategy works for the most part, but it gets dull quite fast, and most players would rather just run about. Every player then spreads into different far-away rooms, never to be seen again.

camping is still kind of a teamwork..