One Thousand Cuts and "fake" difficulty

[MegaStampz]

I thought the alert was fun, something different from the norm.

[--GOOLOO_GOOLOO_GOOLOO--]

Please tell me what the difference between "fake" and "real" difficulty is.

Oh and "fake" and "real" music.

Edited March 21, 2016 by --GOOLOO_GOOLOO_GOOLOO--

[StonedMakak]

10 hours ago, Sixty5 said:

All difficulty added to a game is fake difficulty. 

If you want real difficulty is has to be intended from the start. 

Buffing numbers, adding restrictions or new enemy mechanics just feels unfair to the player, given that these were not what the game was designed around. 

As far as melee goes, I think you will find that using combos does help out in combat, especially when you know what move does what. 

I ran Cleaving whirlwind Galatine for the TA and it worked great. Breaking bull gives knockdown resist as well as massive aoe damage. Its the bread and butter combo. Sundered tusk gives a bit of mobility, but is best used to kill and cc a single target in order to open a revive. Drifting Stamped gives a bit of mobility and is the alternative choice to ger out of the Sundered tusk path faster.

I know this because I use all of the combos rather than mashing melee like some kind of casul. 

For every stance like Cleaving Whirlwind or Tempo Royale, there is Pointed Wind and Crossing Snakes. Besides, other than "I'm pr0 not casual" there is little benefit to using them. Seriously, Blood Rush and Body Count on Crit weapon and you're set. Can you honestly say that not using combos will significantly decrease you performance, if at all? 

5 hours ago, Ellthan said:

The arguents you're using are fallacious and you're only trying to pre-emptively set us agaist the opposing idea.

If you want to talk about this like a grow up, then act like one, when you start out heavily biased like that its hard to take you seriously.

This can be copied&pasted as a response to literally every thread on the forums. Be a grown up yourself and elaborate. 

5 hours ago, --GOOLOO_GOOLOO_GOOLOO-- said:

Please tell me what the difference between "fake" and "real" difficulty is.

Oh and "fake" and "real" music.

*sigh* The amount of people who don't read the OP in general is too damn high. 

[Airwolfen]

26 minutes ago, tisdfogg said:

For every stance like Cleaving Whirlwind or Tempo Royale, there is Pointed Wind and Crossing Snakes. Besides, other than "I'm pr0 not casual" there is little benefit to using them. Seriously, Blood Rush and Body Count on Crit weapon and you're set. Can you honestly say that not using combos will significantly decrease you performance, if at all?

Yes, not using combos on a lot of the stances WILL decrease performance. even though there are the new mods. The underdeveloped stances like Pointed Wind and Crossing Snakes are not part of that though and really need an upgrade.

A lot of the stances have double (or tripple) hits, damage bonuses and hits that hit all surrounding targets that can dramatically increase the damage when looking at the entire combo.

The most broken being Broken bull from cleaving wirlwind of course that has 7 double hits at 400% damage -or- 58 attacks worth of damage in 9 presses... AoE... yeah that's a thing...

And the normal combo's like Heeding call from Blind Justice that effectively does the damage of 12.9 strikes over a actual 6 ending in a ragdoll and destined path that does 14.5 attacks worth in 6 strikes. that while the basic quick attack only has a double hit landing at 5 effective hits over 4 attacks

So again, will combos increase performance? Definitely yes.

(mind that these combos work with the combo counter just as well as the basic attacks)

[Rambit23Z]

Not to mention, that a lot of combos like Guiding Light provides heaps of mobility. (You can literally make U-turns and 360's with some practice)

[StonedMakak]

2 hours ago, Airwolfen said:

Yes, not using combos on a lot of the stances WILL decrease performance. even though there are the new mods. The underdeveloped stances like Pointed Wind and Crossing Snakes are not part of that though and really need an upgrade.

A lot of the stances have double (or tripple) hits, damage bonuses and hits that hit all surrounding targets that can dramatically increase the damage when looking at the entire combo.

The most broken being Broken bull from cleaving wirlwind of course that has 7 double hits at 400% damage -or- 58 attacks worth of damage in 9 presses... AoE... yeah that's a thing...

And the normal combo's like Heeding call from Blind Justice that effectively does the damage of 12.9 strikes over a actual 6 ending in a ragdoll and destined path that does 14.5 attacks worth in 6 strikes. that while the basic quick attack only has a double hit landing at 5 effective hits over 4 attacks

So again, will combos increase performance? Definitely yes.

(mind that these combos work with the combo counter just as well as the basic attacks)

Performance is a little unspecific for what I meant. I didn't refer to pure DPS output but overall performance. In fact I never thought that DPS was a huge problem for melee, even before the latest mods. The Combos on heavy weapons work so well because of swing momentum which is an attribute of a weapon not a stance - if it wasn't there, you'd be on your butt most of the time, not delivering sick damage via combos. Or you would have to resort to using some other type of gear (warframes themselves being gear) to mitigate that. That's my point essentially when I'm taking about melee - the benefits are not equal across the board. Momentum should be a thing for every weapon with a stance on. I suppose if you want to keep that advantage to heavies, you could make it so that a weapon either has momentum or allows cancels by rolling, makes sense thematically. 

And then there is the overkill - when you start needing this much damage, keeping enemies under Constant CC is more important than the damage. Case in point: Survival Sorties with enemy level 100+. I can easily slaughter the Grineer there with crit build Destreza using quick melee, with the added benefit of having constant access to my guns. I imagine that the mobs level would have to be ridiculously high to make all those damage multipliers count. 

 

1 hour ago, Ellthan said:

Rereading your thread, I think I misinterpreted it in the directly opposite direction.

My bad.

Happens to the best of us. 

Edited March 21, 2016 by tisdfogg

[fatpig84]

It was certainly better than the first few TAs. One of the early TAs drained your energy completely when within 60 meters of a capture target. 

Barring certain frame setups, you are forced to rely strictly on guns to mow down the target.  
Except with 700+ MR you can't really mod the guns heavily and the mob is level 85.

This TA is bar a cake walk in comparison. No ranged enemies after all.

 

[(PSN)PillarOfWar]

We need real melee combos. All I did was run around and smash one bottun and channel when my health got low for life strike. There was nothing fancy. Didn't even need warframe powers. But I liked it. I got like 150 cores in 40 runs. 

[ArcusVeles]

It's a tac alert.  I don't expect or even want them to put much effort in to it.

It's a fun little diversion from the norm they can make quickly while working on more important things, like making melee/combos/channeling/etc. actually fun and viable to use as something other than crazy-flipping-around-the-room life steal.

[Gamer3548]

I hated the alert. Too many knockdowns and slash procs it was more frustrating than challenging which is not what you want to be going for cause it is gonna make a lot of people to just ignore that. And even once you went through all the frustration you got nothing good except the 2 potatoes that are awarded at the first 2 parts, Machete needs a buff and Stratos emblem isn't nothing good looking compared to  Aseron Sekhara or Sevhati Sekhara but that is in the eye of the beholder.  

[CRCGamer]

Honestly, a couple lesser geared friends certainly had significant issues with it. Personally? I just effectively surfed my way through the crowds without my HP bar ever going below half. But that had a bit to do with Inaros, a fully modded Scindo Prime with all the fancy rare melee mods, Inaro's HP bar when Rage & Lifestrike are in play along with easy finishers from #1 cast blinds. Oh and Rapid Resilience just because that 75% reduction in status time on my frame makes bleeds and other annoyances much less deadly.

Best reward I got from doing it? Finally having the whip-sword stance decide to drop for me on an Endurance run while hauling a couple of those less geared friends along.

[Sixty5]

8 hours ago, tisdfogg said:

For every stance like Cleaving Whirlwind or Tempo Royale, there is Pointed Wind and Crossing Snakes. Besides, other than "I'm pr0 not casual" there is little benefit to using them. Seriously, Blood Rush and Body Count on Crit weapon and you're set. Can you honestly say that not using combos will significantly decrease you performance, if at all? 

 

Yes. 

Breaking bull lets you farm combo count super fast by hitting twice on each spin, additionally each spin does double damage, for a total of 400% damage off of each spin. It lets you shred tough enemies in no time at all. 

Other combos have slam attacks that give CC, or offer free procs. I love Iron Phoenix on the heat sword for instance because the pause combo gives you a massive fire explosion on the last hit, aoe fire proc = ~4 seconds of the enemy doing the wiggle dance instead of shooting me. 

New mods just made melee easier for those who can only brainlessly mash attack. 

[ComfyOlivia]

On 3/18/2016 at 3:19 AM, tisdfogg said:

-snip-

The alert was pretty easy for me. Although, I am an MR20 with nearly a thousand hours into the game, and even past that, I main Melees. Yes, difficulty is subjective. It would be exponentially harder for someone of low account hours. I would know, as a couple of my clan members and I have gone back and made all-new accounts to test the new player experience (not buying plat, not trading with original accounts of our own or of other clan mates, and doing everything as basic as we can). We tried the tac alert and it was impossible for us, even in the low level survival. So, yes, difficulty is dependent on your mods and equipment. 

 

However, I feel like the majority of the people in this thread and then people you folks have found on the forums don't understand what Fake Difficulty actually is. Here is a quick definition: 

 

"When you play a video game, you expect to be able to use your skills as a gamer to beat whatever challenges the game throws at you. If the challenges require a lot of skill, the game is hard to win. If it doesn't require much skill, it should be an easy game. However, some games that should be relatively easy are actually quite hard. It could be due to shoddy programming, a Game-Breaking Bug, poor implementation of gameplay elements or time constraints, or the developers threw in something which makes the game harder, but which has nothing to do with the player's or AI's skills. This is fake difficulty."

 

Honestly, there isn't very much, if any at all, fake difficulty in Warframe. I would say, however, a lot of synthetic difficulty is present.

 

I believe that in Warframe your skill as a gamer doesn't matter. All that matters is getting used to the movement system and then simply having the right builds. This means that, by definition, true difficulty isn't really there. 

 

First, we should look at the tac alert. If the game was truly difficult, a player would be able to accomplish most anything with enough experience. Granted, it would be increasingly difficult, but it would be possible. This is not a thing in Warframe. A great example is this tac alert. Despite all of our experience (about 4000 hours collectively), my friends and I could not make it to the end of the first survival. Enemies didn't die quick enough for us to get life support. We had no problem with staying alive, but we were unable to kill the amount of enemies we needed to. The enemies simply had too much health. Some would qualify this as fake difficulty, but would be incorrect, as with some more mods and leveling, it would have been incredibly simple. It was still a blocker that had nothing to do with skill, though. This is what I'm trying to get at. Our skill didn't matter in whether or not we succeeded, but it wasn't an impossible mission.

 

Second, we should look at how simple it is to make the "difficulty" a moot point. Bringing the correct squad comp can make level 200 enemies as meaningless as a level 10. With Rhino's damage boost, Banshee's crit boost, Nova's making the enemy weaker in terms of HP and slowing them to a considerable amount, Saryn's Viral procs to reduce enemy health by 50%, Loki's ability to disarm the enemies (making them useless outside of melee range), and then several other frame's CC, Buffing and Debuffing abilities you can buff yourself and nerf enemies. Using Trinity, Saryn, Loki, and Rhino, each equipped with Corrosive Projection, can simultaneously destroy all enemy armor, provide unlimited energy, increase all friendly damage output with a 150% bonus, cut all enemy health by 50% (Saryn's viral stuff), and allow you to avoid almost all enemy damage if you are outside of melee damage. Bring a tonker, and all you have to do is sit around, cast abilities from time to time, shoot a little, move to avoid afk timer, and eat some chips and you're golden. If you gave some dude with 50 hours the right frame, weapons, and mods, he could accomplish almost the same goal. This is my problem with difficulty in the game. It's either not present or sending you to extract.

 

So, I don't believe Warframe has this fake difficulty. There is nothing in the game you can't accomplish with the right equipment and mods. Synthetic difficulty is present, however. It can be difficult, but can be easily overcome with no extra skill.

Edited March 21, 2016 by CoRRh
Done now!

[Extroah]

Been playing Warframe for almost 3 Years, and i really liked 1000 Cuts.

Probably because i'm not one of those "Elitist" Players that ONLY want to use the best of the best stuff and expect the best content which often is out of reach due to those elitists having extremely high expectations. I'm chilled about it, i play it for fun, and 1000 Cuts was somewhat challenging and pretty fun for me as i played half of it with my friends and the other half with random new people.

[StonedMakak]

43 minutes ago, Sixty5 said:

Yes. 

Breaking bull lets you farm combo count super fast by hitting twice on each spin, additionally each spin does double damage, for a total of 400% damage off of each spin. It lets you shred tough enemies in no time at all. 

Other combos have slam attacks that give CC, or offer free procs. I love Iron Phoenix on the heat sword for instance because the pause combo gives you a massive fire explosion on the last hit, aoe fire proc = ~4 seconds of the enemy doing the wiggle dance instead of shooting me. 

New mods just made melee easier for those who can only brainlessly mash attack. 

And then there is Pointed Wind. 

I covered most of what you said in the earlier response to @Airwolfen. Essentially, the fact that weapons are not equal across the board is one of the problems. Everything from Dagger to Scindo should be equally viable. And melee mashing was already easy as hell for E-mashers. We have two frames centered around it even. The recent bandaid mods for melee just raised the DPS cap for people who don't use Excal and Valkyr (IIRC, new mods don't work with Ults). And if you noticed, the damage output is not what I'm criticizing, in fact I rarely talk about numbers. The mechanics are what I find lacking. 

Edited March 21, 2016 by tisdfogg

[Sixty5]

11 minutes ago, tisdfogg said:

And then there is Pointed Wind. 

I covered most of what you said in the earlier response to @Airwolfen. Essentially, the fact that weapons are not equal across the board is one of the problems. Everything from Dagger to Scindo should be equally viable. And melee mashing was already easy as hell for E-mashers. We have two frames centered around it even. The recent bandaid mods for melee just raised the DPS cap for people who don't use Excal and Valkyr (IIRC, new mods don't work with Ults). And if you noticed, the damage output is not what I'm criticizing, in fact I rarely talk about numbers. The mechanics are what I find lacking. 

The mechanics are there, you just need to learn to use them. 

As far as weapon viability goes, I tend to think of class viability, which is determined by stances as well as mods. 

Machetes for instance are complete garbage because their stance has few good attacks, feels clunky and has low range. 

Daggers are artificially good because of how powerful covert lethality can be. 

In general I try to sync up my melee choice with what I am playing, and I'd like to think I could make just about any stance/weapon type work to some extent. 

But it takes time to master a stance and get a feel for all of the combos, the timing and effects, as well as when to use and abuse them. And I like that because it feels like I am being rewarded for my practice with that weapon. 

 

Then again, I mainly use the Glaive Prime, so what do i know?

[Syln]

@op you've got some interesting idea, just wanted to point that out !

 

EDIT : i'd love to see channeling featuring something more than just a raw damage buff, like ignoring shield/dispelling invincibility for a few seconds/being the only way to finish some enemy/change some weapon's property (shot energy wave, increase the range, add a damage type)

so much unexploited potential^

Edited March 21, 2016 by Syln
Some thoughts

[ComfyOlivia]

1 hour ago, CoRRh said:

The alert was pretty easy for me. Although, I am an MR20 with nearly a thousand hours into the game, and even past that, I main Melees. Yes, difficulty is subjective. It would be exponentially harder for someone of low account hours. I would know, as a couple of my clan members and I have gone back and made all-new accounts to test the new player experience (not buying plat, not trading with original accounts of our own or of other clan mates, and doing everything as basic as we can). We tried the tac alert and it was impossible for us, even in the low level survival. So, yes, difficulty is dependent on your mods and equipment. 

 

However, I feel like the majority of the people in this thread and then people you folks have found on the forums don't understand what Fake Difficulty actually is. Here is a quick definition: 

 

"When you play a video game, you expect to be able to use your skills as a gamer to beat whatever challenges the game throws at you. If the challenges require a lot of skill, the game is hard to win. If it doesn't require much skill, it should be an easy game. However, some games that should be relatively easy are actually quite hard. It could be due to shoddy programming, a Game-Breaking Bug, poor implementation of gameplay elements or time constraints, or the developers threw in something which makes the game harder, but which has nothing to do with the player's or AI's skills. This is fake difficulty."

 

Honestly, there isn't very much, if any at all, fake difficulty in Warframe. I would say, however, a lot of synthetic difficulty is present.

 

I believe that in Warframe your skill as a gamer doesn't matter. All that matters is getting used to the movement system and then simply having the right builds. This means that, by definition, true difficulty isn't really there. 

 

First, we should look at the tac alert. If the game was truly difficult, a player would be able to accomplish most anything with enough experience. Granted, it would be increasingly difficult, but it would be possible. This is not a thing in Warframe. A great example is this tac alert. Despite all of our experience (about 4000 hours collectively), my friends and I could not make it to the end of the first survival. Enemies didn't die quick enough for us to get life support. We had no problem with staying alive, but we were unable to kill the amount of enemies we needed to. The enemies simply had too much health. Some would qualify this as fake difficulty, but would be incorrect, as with some more mods and leveling, it would have been incredibly simple. It was still a blocker that had nothing to do with skill, though. This is what I'm trying to get at. Our skill didn't matter in whether or not we succeeded, but it wasn't an impossible mission.

 

Second, we should look at how simple it is to make the "difficulty" a moot point. Bringing the correct squad comp can make level 200 enemies as meaningless as a level 10. With Rhino's damage boost, Banshee's crit boost, Nova's making the enemy weaker in terms of HP and slowing them to a considerable amount, Saryn's Viral procs to reduce enemy health by 50%, Loki's ability to disarm the enemies (making them useless outside of melee range), and then several other frame's CC, Buffing and Debuffing abilities you can buff yourself and nerf enemies. Using Trinity, Saryn, Loki, and Rhino, each equipped with Corrosive Projection, can simultaneously destroy all enemy armor, provide unlimited energy, increase all friendly damage output with a 150% bonus, cut all enemy health by 50% (Saryn's viral stuff), and allow you to avoid almost all enemy damage if you are outside of melee damage. Bring a tonker, and all you have to do is sit around, cast abilities from time to time, shoot a little, move to avoid afk timer, and eat some chips and you're golden. If you gave some dude with 50 hours the right frame, weapons, and mods, he could accomplish almost the same goal. This is my problem with difficulty in the game. It's either not present or sending you to extract.

 

So, I don't believe Warframe has this fake difficulty. There is nothing in the game you can't accomplish with the right equipment and mods. Synthetic difficulty is present, however. It can be difficult, but can be easily overcome with no extra skill.

Fixed! Is now available for criticism.

[StonedMakak]

37 minutes ago, Sixty5 said:

The mechanics are there, you just need to learn to use them. 

As far as weapon viability goes, I tend to think of class viability, which is determined by stances as well as mods. 

Machetes for instance are complete garbage because their stance has few good attacks, feels clunky and has low range. 

Daggers are artificially good because of how powerful covert lethality can be. 

In general I try to sync up my melee choice with what I am playing, and I'd like to think I could make just about any stance/weapon type work to some extent. 

But it takes time to master a stance and get a feel for all of the combos, the timing and effects, as well as when to use and abuse them. And I like that because it feels like I am being rewarded for my practice with that weapon. 

 

Then again, I mainly use the Glaive Prime, so what do i know?

I didn't say I have troubles using them, just that I find them lacking. 

For instance, Channeling as a mechanic is pretty bad because it competes with abilities for energy. Combos are a mixed bag like you yourself pointed out (Cleaving Whirlwind = good, Machetes = bad) and they can be so much better. Timed blocking, I use it from time to time for flavour, but it's mostly forgotten.

Covert Lethality is an interesting one. It's a good example of gear>skill scenario. You slap that mod on your dagger, take a frame with blind powers and what is a crappy weapon normally, suddenly oneshots everything. There is no possibility of failure either, just spam your blind and mash E. Now if that mod would only work on enemies that have been opened up to Finishers by a combo (in addition to insta killing unalerted enemies) then you have a skill factor in there, as consistency and practice are required to make good use of the mod.

I wouldn't want to destroy that feeling of mastering a weapon, trust me. Zipping around with Blind Justice is one of my favorite things to do in melee. I'm just saying, there can be improvements so that in addition to clever combo use, clever channeling use for instance, can also be rewarded with similar feeling.  

What they did to Glaive Charge attacks is one of my pet peeves by the way. 

 

Edited March 21, 2016 by tisdfogg
I actually wrote cleaver instead of clever. Enough of melee talk for today.

[Sixty5]

3 minutes ago, tisdfogg said:

I didn't say I have troubles using them, just that I find them lacking. 

For instance, Channeling as a mechanic is pretty bad because it competes with abilities for energy. Combos are a mixed bag like you yourself pointed out (Cleaving Whirlwind = good, Machetes = bad) and they can be so much better. Timed blocking, I use it from time to time for flavour, but it's mostly forgotten.

Covert Lethality is an interesting one. It's a good example of gear>skill scenario. You slap that mod on your dagger, take a frame with blind powers and what is a crappy weapon normally, suddenly oneshots everything. There is no possibility of failure either, just spam your blind and mash E. Now if that mod would only work on enemies that have been opened up to Finishers by a combo (in addition to insta killing unalerted enemies) then you have a skill factor in there, as consistency and practice are required to make good use of the mod.

I wouldn't want to destroy that feeling of mastering a weapon, trust me. Zipping around with Blind Justice is one of my favorite things to do in melee. I'm just saying, there can be improvements so that in addition to cleaver combo use, cleaver channeling use for instance, can also be rewarded with similar feeling.  

What they did to Glaive Charge attacks is one of my pet peeves by the way. 

 

Glaive charge attacks get on my nerves so much now, so much fluidity in cancelling animations lost :(

And I agree fully with the channeling thing, hell I made a topic about that about a year ago. 

The biggest issue I really have with the current system is that it is almost too simplistic. Sure getting combos down is awesome, and takes practice, but you could do so much more with the system. Break up melee into light and heavy attacks (use reload key for heavy attacks while melee is equipped) 

Combos immediately go from r r r ^ r r r to something more interesting. 

As far as channeling goes, you need to first separate the mods out of the normal ones you use for melee, and then make it more interesting. A well timed channeled block could let you block all of an attacks damage. Certain weapons could get inherent boosts from channeling like fire damage on the Heat Sword, or faster swings on the Jat Kittag. 

Being able to store energy for your next attack could also be cool. Change channeling to a constant slow  drain while activated, and have it stack up as time goes on. I'd love to funnel 1000 energy into my Galatine for a silly powerful charge attack. 

[CriticalFumble]

3 minutes ago, Sixty5 said:

The biggest issue I really have with the current system is that it is almost too simplistic. Sure getting combos down is awesome, and takes practice, but you could do so much more with the system. Break up melee into light and heavy attacks (use reload key for heavy attacks while melee is equipped)

Back when they were talking about stances in melee 2.0, I assumed they would more or less rip off the idea in Jedi Knight.  I was disappointed. 

There are uses for the combo system, but there's a lot of fluff and flash to get through before you find the good parts - and the game doesn't have any explanations for combos beyond telling you that "something" happens if you hammer the melee button like so. 

There's a lot they could do to add fluidity to the system.  Melee out you have all the movement keys, the reload key, and the alternate fire button.  There's also the aim/block and channeling buttons that are under-used.  Taken together you could build a system of small individual moves that work together to form DIY combos.  Side and melee swipes, back and melee uppercuts, forward melee lunges, block and alt does a precise strike, so on.  Many of those key functions could be done with a ranged weapon out as well, possibly bringing back some of the freedom of engagement from the older system. 

[clxrffdman]

This TA, in my opinion, was ridiculously easy. 

- Get Orthos Prime

- Put Primed Reach

- Put decent elements

- SPAM E

- Done.

[KusouTeitoku]

On 2016/3/18 at 4:36 AM, felixsylvaris said:

I do not expect TA to be difficult since difficulty is subjective. For new player it probably was difficult. For 80 drain not so much.

It has fun twist, since we need to use melee attacks, and cant blast our ways with abilities. Fair enought.

Also great rewards. It really helps new players if there is a chance for potato here and there.

I spammed e for 10mins with my exalted blade on, cant spam ability to win, wut?

Invisible loki with zenurik can also laugh at the event

[Hemmo67]

here is one very popular line that merges once every millanie

if u don't think the game is hard enough remove your mods and make it harder