[Focus V1.1] It Is Not A Bug Anymore, It Is A Nerf.

[KnightCole]

Fixing gain is great, but the grind is still way too much for such an underwhelming system of skills.

 

I agree with this one 500%, focus abilities are pretty much a joke. 

[BornWithTeeth]

Hmmm. Well, we got a notice in the General Discussion forum about how feedback belongs here, and an explanation that the rule of thumb is "If your target audience is other players, then it goes in Discussion, if your target audience is DE for game feedback then it belongs in Feedback." Cool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When seen in action it is clear that this change is a very significant reduction in Focus gain.

 

 

Convergence is an interesting mechanic, but it is quite obviously not even close to making up for the reduction in value of the affinity conversion from Lenses.

 

If I may copy this section in:

6:57 AM DERebecca said: If you look at it in isolation:

6:58 AM DERebecca said: Before greater lenses Turned about 7% of affinity earned from that item into Focus

6:58 AM DERebecca said: Now greater lenses turn up to 10.5% with convergence, but it can include Radial/Shared XP

6:58 AM DERebecca said: So what factor you choose to include or ignore will determine your conclusion

 

 

That statement is true, but I don't think it is very helpful. In particular, it is somewhat of a physicist's answer. (i.e. 'Assume a perfectly spherical Warframe, on a flat plain with a uniform density of enemy spawns...')

 

The factors which are "ignored" are the actual landscapes of tiles, enemy spawn rates, and Warframe/player movements. Convergence pickups always spawn some small distance away from the player, and are in no way guaranteed to coincide with clusters of enemies. The pickups are thus also pretty much guaranteed to spawn further away from Mobile Defence objectives, Defence objectives, Capture targets, life support capsules in Survival, and extractors in Excavation, and thus further away from the squad.

 

Once you account for whether it will be practical to go get a pickup once it spawns, and then how long it takes to go grab it and either get back into combat or return to the mission objective, the actual functional duration of their buff is much less than 45 seconds. 

 

 

 

 

That accounts for Convergence. Shared XP......well, the first thing to note is that unless there are additional hidden factors, Shared XP does absolutely nothing for players running a mission solo. Doing solo missions is thus an immediate, massive reduction to Focus. Unless you run with a team all the time, you're somewhat out of luck.

 

Convergence doesn't actually help here either. It may even be slightly counter-productive, as in most missions Shared XP has a limited range of 50 metres. Convergence pickups can either spawn outside that distance, or be rapidly left behind outside that range in a fast moving mission.

 

In addition, it doesn't look like the Convergence timer pauses while reviving. That's only a small factor, but it's one among the list which is becoming apparent.

 

 

 

 

 

Basically, once you take into account all the factors, it's very obvious that the changes in this hotfix are a massive reduction to Focus gain.

 

 

 

To related mechanics: Shared XP now means that having Lenses on all of your loadout is the optimal means of gaining Focus. That makes sense, but in another recent update, the acquisition of Lenses has been dramatically slowed.

                          Focus Lenses are now a non-repeatable Sortie reward, meaning that you can only get one of each type per season. Without trading, that means that Greater Lenses can now require a couple of months of resource gathering. If you didn't want to make a Greater Lens, but instead wanted to spread Lenses out amongst all your gear, then it will still mean that you can only upgrade five items per season, and only one item for each School.

 

 

 

 

 

People asked, many times, for the daily Focus cap to be increased, and for Shared XP to count towards Focus. These things arrived, but they have come bundled with what is unquestionably a savage nerf to the overall rate of Focus gain. This is obvious to everyone playing.

 

It is not a buff. It is not even a rebalancing. It is a nerf.

 

 

 

 

I am certainly not demanding anything of DE, but I am asking: could we possibly get a statement regarding the intended purpose of the changes?

 

What kind of change in the game are these mechanical changes intended to produce? Was it the intent to promote team play? Was it intended to reduce the amount of 'idling' in high XP density missions such as Draco? Or was it simply intended to drastically slow the rate at which players progress into the Focus system?

 

 

If it is one of the first two, then there are counter-statements which I would like to make.

 

If these changes are to promote team play, then they'll certainly achieve that, but at the cost of significantly punishing players who like to run solo missions.

 

If these changes are intended to reduce the amount of gameplay which can be described as "Sit in Draco, use your ultimate, and spam shotgun blasts" then they will certainly not achieve that. These changes have done the opposite. In a limited tile like Draco, Convergence orbs are guaranteed to spawn close to the party, as there is literally nowhere else for them to spawn, and the limited space plus huge enemy density will mean that Draco/any similar loot cave style mission will remain the optimal way of increasing Focus.

 

 

 

 

If the intention is simply to slow down the rate at which everyone gains Focus, then that's cool. But it may be worth making a statement to that effect, and it also has done very little to change boring, static farming in Interceptions.

 

 

 

 

 

Cool, I'm gonna go back to being a total killjoy in General Discussion, telling peeps to chill out and wait for Umbra, DE know what they're doing.

[KirukaChan]

This is the new Viver. I can feel it.

[ashrah]

all this bad changes make me not play game really..i made pause up to patch 19....game lack on content that why are grind walls incresed.......

[CS0310]

GG DE, in the process of making the system easier for everyone, you've made everyone quit on focus.

 

I agree, I'll Lens equipment, but I'm not going to grind it out. It'll be a nice surprise when I view my focus in a months time and see I have 10,000 to spend.

 

and nothing to buy with the 10k because every upgrade costs multiples of 25k =3

[CCamp88]

This whole thing has me sorta sour. Okay, REALLY sour (which i very rarely get). A couple of days ago i decided to buy several greater lenses. Had i known this was going to happen, i would have totally held off.... Gaining 1.25% instead of the 1.75% would have been quite alright. DE might say "well its a 40% increase still" yeah it is, but its likes saying   0.000001%  is   1,000 times more than 0.000000001% of something. Its still so insignificant that its a joke.

 

Also, as someone who plays 95% of my game Solo, im really getting screwed. Don't get me wrong, the shared focus is good, as it should have always been this way. But damn.... there's NO WAY that it should somehow "justify"  lowering the gain %'s so much. And even how it was before, Unless you actually sat down and tried to farm focus (which I know a vast majority of the community does not) it was painstakingly hard to hit the focus cap as it was. Now its just flat out a joke. 

 

As for the boosters... errm excuse me, Convergence. Yeah its a good idea. But i was pretty sure I read "will spawn at a random point in the tileset a short distance away from a player. " That must have been a typo as everyone ive seen has been in an adjacent (if not further) tileset, a rather LONG distance away from the player. By the time you run (normally backtrack) to get one, there are rarely any enemies left around to kill until the 45 secs is up.    

 

Anyways, just a thought. As most others out there, I am extremely irked by this change

 

 

-CCamp88

[BornWithTeeth]

Yes.

 

I feel like it may be helpful to leave a simple bullet point list.

 

 

- Convergence pickups are very seldom, if ever, going to be actually useful for the full 45 seconds. They spawn too far from the action, from the objective, and from the team.

 

- Shared XP helps supports, but doesn't actually provide four times as much Affinity. It just makes sure that everyone gets an equal share.....provided the team stay within 50 metres of each other.

 

- This screws over solo players, big time, due to the above.

 

- These disadvantages apply to almost all missions....except Interceptions and Defence missions, like Draco. In other words, these changes, more than ever, reward sitting relatively still in a loot cave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just, to be 100% clear on this one: You guys know that you've nerfed everything except Draco, right?

Edited February 13, 2016 by BornWithTeeth

[Educated_Beast]

I feel the same way.

Focus was all I had left to do, guess I'm taking a break until this is patched out. Just reverse the changes. We were better off with kill stealing.

Makes the focus system utter garbage. Not only are most of rewards bad, forced playing of 1 frame, the grind is horrendous.

And, I can't gain focus solo and afk rules prevent me from pug matches.

DE, fix your game, ditch this idea. It's bad, it's unessesary, and it's splitting community. At very least, make solo play gain affinity at old rates without convergence.

Edited February 13, 2016 by Educated_Beast

[BornWithTeeth]

Speaking of Draco, I take it back. I was wrong. In all ways I eat my words. Pulled in 13k Focus for four rounds on Draco. Ok. I'm in, I'm down with the changes. If I spend an hour running Draco with Ember Prime, a couple times a week? Focus trees, all sewn up. Done.

 

 

 

 

DE, it's cool. I was dead wrong. We can gain loads of Focus.

[[DE]Grzegorz]

Speaking of Draco, I take it back. I was wrong. In all ways I eat my words. Pulled in 13k Focus for four rounds on Draco. Ok. I'm in, I'm down with the changes. If I spend an hour running Draco with Ember Prime, a couple times a week? Focus trees, all sewn up. Done.

 

 

 

 

DE, it's cool. I was dead wrong. We can gain loads of Focus.

Considering certain skills take up to 300k rep to get the final upgrade (and nearly a million to get it as a whole), yeah, 10 days of like 8 hours of Draco per day sounds quite sane.

 

You'd need like what, a month of 8hrs per day Draco grind to max out a single focus tree? Maybe slightly more? If I'm supposed to do so, I expect to get paid. With real money. Money I can then exchange for more enjoyable services.

Edited February 13, 2016 by Mofixil

[CrazyCatLad]

Old Focus numbers MUST be reverted.

 

Convergence MUST drop from an enemy that has died no more than 10 meters from the player.

 

Ugh. So worn out of the ebb and flow of this game going from great to convoluted.

 

 

 

Speaking of Draco, I take it back. I was wrong. In all ways I eat my words. Pulled in 13k Focus for four rounds on Draco. Ok. I'm in, I'm down with the changes. If I spend an hour running Draco with Ember Prime, a couple times a week? Focus trees, all sewn up. Done.

 

 

 

 

DE, it's cool. I was dead wrong. We can gain loads of Focus.

 

Can we just shut up about Draco? No offense.

Edited February 14, 2016 by Lanieu

[(PSN)Double991]

I really hope this gets fixed by the next update.  I have maxed out my focus every night since the day it came out and I have almost all of the good stuff from Zenurik and Naramon maxed out. If the gain is going to be nerfed this much i'll probably just stop maxing it since the cost of labor out weighs the reward.

[SonicSonedit]

The Division

Good game by the way.

And about DE going full korean farm simulator disregard to their players base opinion - I'm really surprised how people only start to understand this now. It was obvious like a year ago.

[Senoinya]

Welcome to the new Leyouframe. Where they tell us nothing will be changed after the buyout, then we watch as things slowly become more and more grindy.

 

"We want to get reduce the grindwalls" - DE said during a devstream.

 

Following this statement, every single Warframe since this has been grindier than any before them.

 

Equinox - 8 pieces instead of 3 (more RNG). At the same time, Ash was pushed to Manics. Since the aspects take 3 days as well, it takes almost a full week to make this one frame.

 

Atlas - RNG-filled quest. RNG to get the items you need to craft the item you need to do the next part, then RNG to beat the boss three times (which is boring, and its only "challenge" is a lot of HP, so all it does is consume your time rather than try to be "fun").

 

Ivara - Spy RNG with insanely low drop chance among the cluttered spy droptables.

 

Wukong - Nitain.

 

Nezha - Sorties.

 

 

 

On top of this, as mentioned, Nitain. A new alert-only resource. Sure, active players have stocked up on the stuff by now, but that doesn't change the fact that it's nonsensical.

 

 

Furthermore, it seems every change they make now is prettied up to sound like it's supposed to be done with the community in mind, then the actual change is the exact opposite. I don't like the way they're doing that, and I've seen it done before with other games and it never ended well. They said they were going to add checkboxes to sorties so that you wouldn't be getting repeating drops for stuff you already got from them, which is great, but then they just made it so something you already got is just replaced with fusion cores, thus not really increasing the odds of you getting one of the other items, but instead just increasing the odds that you'll get cores rather than anything else at all, and rendering trading useless because now nobody's going to give away a part that they only have one of, so all that really did was worsen the sortie system that people already felt was bad.

 

Then we have this, the focus booster drops that were supposed to help the community with focus grinding but instead just makes it even grindier by reducing the overall focus gain to a point where, like you said, even the booster won't bring you back to what you had before, and even if it did, that's only for 60 seconds. It's almost like either DE isn't doing math, or they're not listening to their community. I'll be honest and say that not listening to the community isn't really anything new for DE. They've shown on multiple occasions that the community's opinion falls on deaf ears most if not all the time. We asked for more Saryn adjustments because she's still kinda in "good-bad" limbo, we heard they'd let her "settle for a bit", and now we've seen nothing for months. We complained about the sorties having lackluster rewards and we got a bigger chance for cores with the only redeemable factor (trading) basically rendered moot. We complained that Focus was too grindy and we got worse grind for it.

 

I just don't know why a company so based around its community can be so blind to their community's desires. Honestly I'm not sure at this point if it's because DE is just confused or because they actually don't care. I'd really like to believe they care about their community, but more and more I'm starting to feel that's not the case. Warframe got to where it is now entirely because of community support, and since the game doesn't force you to pay, that had to be sheer support and love for the game and not just people dropping cash because that's the only way to progress, so it feels a little weird when changes like this are done. My only guess is maybe now that companies like Leyou are funding them more than us, we matter a little less. Maybe I'm wrong -- in fact, I hope I am -- but that's how it feels.

Edited February 14, 2016 by Valsako

[OneBuckShort]

Welcome to the new Leyouframe. Where they tell us nothing will be changed after the buyout, then we watch as things slowly become more and more grindy.

 

"We want to get reduce the grindwalls" - DE said during a devstream.

 

Following this statement, every single Warframe since this has been grindier than any before them.

 

Equinox - 8 pieces instead of 3 (more RNG). At the same time, Ash was pushed to Manics. Since the aspects take 3 days as well, it takes almost a full week to make this one frame.

 

Atlas - RNG-filled quest. RNG to get the items you need to craft the item you need to do the next part, then RNG to beat the boss three times (which is boring, and its only "challenge" is a lot of HP, so all it does is consume your time rather than try to be "fun").

 

Ivara - Spy RNG with insanely low drop chance among the cluttered spy droptables.

 

Wukong - Nitain.

 

Nezha - Sorties.

 

 

And here I am, two months, waiting for the Vauban chassis to pop up in the alerts.

[0Skyrim0]

Lets see what happens on the upcoming patch. I highly doubt that they will "fix" this anyways.

The Focus stuff was the only thing left for me. Was going to do some tricky 3 hours Naramon run, but hell, missing 1 rank on each crit chance and invisible way/node.

 

Seems like, this won't work out anymore.

[DoomFruit]

And here I am, two months, waiting for the Vauban chassis to pop up in the alerts.

It took me 6 months to get the Vauban systems, and that's only because they came up in one of the Gradivus invasions.

Yeah - Vauban, the 0.5% Forma chance, Mesa, Hydroid, the list goes on. Their RNG obsession manifested long before Perfect World showed any interest.

EDIT: the amusing thing is that, if you take a pedantic view, the grind has been reduced. Grind implies a steady progression towards your goal - do 20 of these missions, and at the end you *will* get X part, for instance. We don't have that kind of certainty here. There's no measure of progress. Just compulsive gambling, rolling the loaded dice again and again.

Edited February 16, 2016 by DoomFruit

[0Skyrim0]

Still no changes to it? I am disappointed DE.

 

I thought like many others, that we are in "BETA" of the Focus and Lens system. I thought like any other, we are grinding to the cap to test out the Focus system and their skills?

Seems like DE doesn't care about mine neither the whole Community's thoughts. GG. I am out. Have fun guys.

[(PSN)Lord_Gremlin]

On 13/02/2016 at 0:06 AM, Mofixil said:

Considering certain skills take up to 300k rep to get the final upgrade (and nearly a million to get it as a whole), yeah, 10 days of like 8 hours of Draco per day sounds quite sane.

 

You'd need like what, a month of 8hrs per day Draco grind to max out a single focus tree? Maybe slightly more? If I'm supposed to do so, I expect to get paid. With real money. Money I can then exchange for more enjoyable services.

Umbra lance of zenurik 450K. And that's nothing compared to 1100K for max level madurai passives.

All I ask for, don't patch this unusable crap to consoles until you make it not as obnoxious. 

[Big_Gunz]

So every time.

1) Kill a lot of enemies.

2) Booster appears (sometimes close, sometimes far, far away).

3) Suddenly there are very little enemies.

4) Booster ends.

5) Enemies a plentiful.

 

I mean seriously, DE.

If you want to nerf the focus cause of Draco farmers, just nerf it for that map.

 

Every time you nerf to foil Draco farmers, you hurt everyone else more.

1) Mesa nerf.

2) Mag Greedy Pull.

3) Focus nerf.

 

[Senoinya]

14 minutes ago, ThunderTitz said:

So every time.

1) Kill a lot of enemies.

2) Booster appears (sometimes close, sometimes far, far away).

3) Suddenly there are very little enemies.

4) Booster ends.

5) Enemies a plentiful.

 

I mean seriously, DE.

If you want to nerf the focus cause of Draco farmers, just nerf it for that map.

 

Every time you nerf to foil Draco farmers, you hurt everyone else more.

1) Mesa nerf.

2) Mag Greedy Pull.

3) Focus nerf.

 

 

Don't forget the changes to Saryn (even the rework was good imo, it was still done to wreck Draco), plus the Radial Javelin nerf (redeemed by the rework), plus the Equinox maim range nerf...

[cx-dave]

I wouldn't call 384.2 F/s a nerf.

[Stormdragon]

It's a nerf unless you play with a full squad keeping at least 2 greater lenses on your gear (1 on frame, 1 on any weapon. Equip 4 greater lenses to get even more focus). Seems like a change done to promote buying crafting greater lenses instead of simply equipping one on frame and/or other on melee and go solo using exp multipliers to boost focus gain. 

[cx-dave]

You have experienced that the old way of non-selective, mindless killing, nets even less Focus now. To be honest, it wasn't even the most effective way to begin with. Adding conditions to the same method and theorizing that it will then somewhat work, is the wrong path to take. You're thereby excluding a large part of the game and ways to gain affinity. I'm not surprised so many are burned out by this way of playing and given up on Focus.

[Keltik0ne]

Meaning no disrespect dave, but it's hard to take you seriously when you post a screen grabbed number with no context, followed by an "explanation" with no information. My perspective is, I now get focus more slowly, which I'm ok with, but a lot of people seem not to be. The few posts by DE staff have been rebutted by mathematics too, which is a bad thing since it makes the individual staff members seem less informed than they usually are.