[Spoiler?] Focus Gain Ignoring Radial Xp Punishes Support Playstyles.

[Variatas]

As the title says, the way Focus gain currently works, only counting direct kills and power uses, disproportionately favors frames and playstyles that are best at killing enemies, while heavily punishing frames and playstyles that do other valuable things like Crowd Control, Healing, and otherwise providing survivability to the team.

I'm quoting the wiki on the mechanics, so maybe things are still being figured out, but according to their information, focus works only on direct affinity gain.  In other words:

Warframe Powers give the full 5/7% gain on a lensed frame.

Weapon Kills give half of the 5/7% affinity gain, because half of the affinity from the kill is given to your frame.  Whether or not having a lens in your frame recovers that half, I do not know.

Assists seem to work similarly, giving either the full assist affinity (for frames) or half and half (for weapons).


However, the Radial XP system where players get affinity for kills they are NEAR is apparently completely ignored.  This is a huge problem, because that system is responsible for keeping parity between people who are getting kills and others who are nearby and may be contributing in other ways.  E.g. Trinity with Energy Vamp and Blessing, Zephyr's Turbulence, really any non-kill Crowd Control frame.

Why is this a problem?  This is a personal anecdote, but after playing for several nights with a friend, we actually compared our focus gains and the difference left us stunned.  He had been playing Nova almost exclusively, and had regularly been getting tons of kills directly on his frame, while I had been playing Zephyr, Izara, and other supporty types, and had not.  He had routinely gotten almost double to well more than double the amount of focus, in one mission getting over 50,000 just on Nova while I had gotten about 20,000 in total.  This in no way represented our contributions to the team, because I had been picking him up consistently, capturing objectives, and blocking immense amounts of incoming fire with various shields; without that there is no way we would have done so well, but none of my contributions were valued by the game.  This happened even after I noticed the disparity and started bringing explosive launchers to explicitly try and hog more kills; weapon choices simply can't keep up with kill-frames.

There are people here who probably remember the cries of "Nerf Nova!", but that's not the direction I would go with this.  By and large, the way Radial XP works now, coupled with the kill-credit changes on Molecular Prime, render Nova's kill advantage meaningless for previous gameplay, because Radial XP will give you affinity anyways.  But the Focus system reverts all of that, and turns kills into the only way to progress again.  With the "beta" focus limit in place, the difference is whether you can hit the cap in two missions or more like the order of 6-7.  WITHOUT a cap, the answer is clear: play Nova or other kill-happy frames (Saryn, Reckoning Oberon, etc) to win at Focus forever, or go cry as you get a fraction of the Focus regardless of how much you contribute.



TL;DR: Turning Radial XP off for Focus gain explicitly rejects the current way that Affinity is balanced between playstyles.  

[bejuizb]

It's getting remedied soon.

[CelsiusPrime]

yeah they agreed that they are looking at it and didn't what it to end up like it currently is. what I think this game could really use is a stat that tracks damage blocked or avoided with abilities like snow globe or tubulance or other support powers. it would be a really cool end of mission stat that would help people see how useful as a support they have been

[Doomclaaw]

This is what I run into a lot since my main frame is nekros. Yes I can rack up kills too, but I serve the team better in the harder content, especially some of the new sorties as a support/cc frame. I'm also not 100% sure I am getting focus credit for the kills my shadows make, which should really be looked at. At least when I run other support frames I can get some measure of dps in while supporting like trin's link, banshee soundwave, ect but nekros has few damage abilities and if shadows isn't giving me credit it pretty much screws me over 100%....

[Sines314]

Not only are they looking at changing it, I believe DE Steve confirmed it to be an unintended bug. So it was never intended.

[DrBorris]

No, you should not get xp for work others do.

 

However, DE should add ways to gain affinity from "support" abilities. Like gaining afinity for bodies desecrated, enemies killed while in Vortex/Bastille, Mind Controlled enemies being killed, etcetera. If you could "leach" off of teammates that would lead to... well... leaching.

[Guest]

No, you should not get xp for work others do.

 

However, DE should add ways to gain affinity from "support" abilities. Like gaining afinity for bodies desecrated, enemies killed while in Vortex/Bastille, Mind Controlled enemies being killed, etcetera. If you could "leach" off of teammates that would lead to... well... leaching.

 

I'd suggest an expansion on that first comment.

 

Yes, there are and always have been leechers, and always will be.

 

Shared anything is a benefit of being in a team. Shared XP has always suffered more lone heroes blockading choke points (benefiting from huge increase in spawn numbers) out of share range of the team, whilst the guy(s) defending the objective (me, and others like me) get stiffed even though we're actually doing the "work". Even more so at this time, because of the focus grind.

 

However, maybe they'll all go solo the Ceres stealth bonus exterminate thing now they've found another way of grinding it; We can hope, right?