No more lvl up after forma use please

[Spiros78]

The specific procedure, is tiresome, pointless and terribly boring. I don't know of anyone who has the mood to lvl up almost every day and waste so much time instead of enjoying the game as he/she should. The only reason that lvl up is required when forma is applied, is only to enforce paying customers to purchase boosters, no other logical explanation could stand.

I personally am disgusted and tired to lvl up warframes and weapons just because i applied a forma, or even worse two or three. This has to stop and keep all items on max rank no matter how many forma someone decided to use. Prices are already high on a bunch of virtual items, enforcing us to purchase booster to lvl up faster, points to greed, and greed leads only to loss in the end.

Surely nothing will change, either someone asks something in polite or not way (about many things). Same tactic from many companies until they see people leaving and i have seen it happening lot of times. Details that count and yet remain unattended and "frozen" send turn players elsewhere soon or later.

[Unksen]

Forma leads to grind.

Grind leads to greed.

And greed to the Dark Side leads.

[BlackCoMerc]

Agreed. No legitimate reason exists for this degree of disrespect for a players time. It is a disgusting practice from an otherwise very cool group of devs and I hope DE will consider reviewing the blatant insertion of business or monetization practices directly into the game.

Your monetization of Forma equates, in game play terms, to an impossible punishment levied by the Lotus against her children for attempting to better serve her needs.

This is, frankly and unavoidably, ridiculous.

[Fifield]

Sorry to burst your bubble here but wasting our time aka getting us to play is the name of the game.  They should just entertain us while they do it.

Levelling up weapons is no big deal.  You can have 2 maxed ones at the same time and still do any content in the game aside from a few Sortie 3s.

Levelling up frames?  That's a bit harsher.  Wouldn't want to be without a Frost, Trin or Loki for very long.

Another problem is that we're all seriously impatient and just grind away on Draco.  For the 200th mind-numbing time.  There's the beginnings of a good fix for the Draco problem here: 

 

 

[BlackCoMerc]

That is, with all due respect and by admission, NOT a fix for Draco at all. A fix rids us of the need for quick leveling loot caves, a la, getting rid of insulting resets. Or bringing other missions up to par reward wise. Or both.

That thread merely suggests additional tedium of tracking to which tile the loot cave has rotated, and how long until it does so again. That's not fixing anything at all, it's just changing something.

[Fifield]

4 minutes ago, BlackCoMerc said:

That is, with all due respect and by admission, NOT a fix for Draco at all. A fix rids us of the need for quick leveling loot caves, a la, getting rid of insulting resets.

If you choose to be insulted by a reset, that's your personal issue.  However, I don't think it makes sense to have a gun that suddenly does 1% of the damage so I'd rework that anyway.
 

6 minutes ago, BlackCoMerc said:

That thread merely suggests additional tedium of tracking to which tile the loot cave has rotated, and how long until it does so again. That's not fixing anything at all, it's just changing something.

Nope.  All nodes will be equally viable -- as deemed by the community.  The tedium is being compelled to do Draco repeatedly.  But go argue it on there.

[Tritanya]

To steer this back to the original topic as quickly as possible: you're not wrong in saying that it's a frustrating grind to relevel after Forma use.  It is, especially multiple times.

@BlackCoMerc mentioned, in this post, the idea of Forma resets being tied to your mastery rank to give it more presence in the game.  So instead of resetting your weapon to unranked, if you're MR2, your weapon starts at level 2.  If you've been playing the game forever and you're MR20, you Forma your weapon and it only drops back to level 20.

Not only would it reduce the time to level, it would also provide another benefit of increasing one's mastery rank.  It's not a perfect fix, but I think it's a little more likely to be implemented than no reset at all.

... But honestly, I'd be interested in knowing what the justification is - at this point in the evolution of the game - for forcing a reset.  Would it not actually be even more profitable if Forma were easier to use, if you could just jam them into your weapon at level 30?  Perhaps it's the idea of 'too much power too fast'.  A dev perspective on this matter would definitely come in handy, because I don't know the rationale here - I can only guess.

Edited April 9, 2016 by Tritanya
Properly crediting @BlackCoMerc for the MR-Forma idea

[Fifield]

1 minute ago, Tritanya said:

Not only would it reduce the time to level

Why would DE want to do that?

[Tritanya]

4 minutes ago, Fifield said:

Why would DE want to do that?

As evidenced by this thread and others, a less angry playerbase, perhaps.

It's not the time spent leveling that's the problem here - it's the time spent re-leveling a weapon that you have already maxed out and now are forced to drop back to nothingness.  If the loss incurred by this design is the frustrated players, what then is the gain?  More time spent re-leveling means... what, precisely?

You could say that you're required to do lower-level missions, and that helps out newer players by providing match partners, but with affinity-sharing that's simply not true; you can simply equip it in your off-slot and kill with your other weapon in an endless mission somewhere (in my case, one of my fifty bajillion T1 Defense/Survival keys) while your teammates do the re-leveling for you.  The only end this really accomplishes - as far as I can tell - is temporarily preventing you from running absolute-maximum-level content where your entire kit needs to be fully functional.

I'm not sure whether that's the intent of this design choice, or whether it's simply 'this is the way we made it and we haven't changed it (yet)'.  I am hoping it's the latter.  But again, without a dev perspective, I'm in the dark as much as the next player.

[Tritanya]

7 minutes ago, Fifield said:

I'll just repost my existing comment because apparently you missed it first time round.

I didn't miss it; I merely found it unhelpful and disagreed with some of your positions, that's all.  I then took your 'Why would DE want to do that?' question to be legitimate and not rhetorical, and answered in good faith; it seems I was mistaken in doing so.  You've already ascribed motivation and reasoning to the devs in your mind, and nothing I say is going to persuade you otherwise, apparently.

Having said that, I'll go ahead and pull out of this thread before it gets any more heated.

[(PSN)Hooligonzo]

The only thing Formae ever did for me is waste days on Sechura.

I mean, sure, my weapons got stronger, but once they got there I was too burned out to enjoy the damned things.

[Currilicious]

It would be nice to have a piece of gear remain at level 30 after applying a Forma. Only catch is, it has to gain the affinity equivalent to leveling from zero to max, before another Forma can be applied.

[Sloan441]

28 minutes ago, Currilicious said:

It would be nice to have a piece of gear remain at level 30 after applying a Forma. Only catch is, it has to gain the affinity equivalent to leveling from zero to max, before another Forma can be applied.

The only reasonable statement in this thread.

This actually would be a sound idea and would remove some of the disconnect between modding and the wildly gyrating strength of weapons and warframes during the process.

[DuskLegendary]

I agree. After making several end game builds for both weapons, frames, and sentinels, all of which required 3-6 Forma, it got old very fast. At first, I didn't really mind it so much. But as time went on, it honestly became more of a chore and an annoyance than anything. I understand that there has to be some downside to using a Forma or else, what's the point in our current systems? But at least make the level reset to our mastery rank upon using a Forma, or something of those lines. Just something to make it less of a chore.

[Inugami8]

Remove it? Sure.

As long as they refund all the time and effort we spent by adding formas to stuff (it's not going to happen).

[YamiNaoya]

2 hours ago, Currilicious said:

It would be nice to have a piece of gear remain at level 30 after applying a Forma. Only catch is, it has to gain the affinity equivalent to leveling from zero to max, before another Forma can be applied.

I love this idea. For balancing purposes each forma would require more and more affinity. I thought something like 110% of rank 30 for first forma (so 450k to rank weapon to rank 30, then after applying first forma you need 495k to apply second), then another 110% (so 544,5k affinity before you can apply third forma). Percentage of course up to changing, if devs think 10% is too little or too much.

[(PSN)Zashukitsune]

Soooo....what's your suggestion?

I agree, having to forma things repeatedly becomes a chore, very quickly, to no real gain other than fitting another mod in.

Personally, I would prefer if weapons advanced like frames, gaining attack, speed, channeling efficiency, etc, at the cost of leveling taking a lot more experience.  Forma could still have the same purpose, but be applied at any time.  

Problem is, changing anything changes a lot of things. There's gonna be some aspect of grind regardless, DE would just have to figure out how much and for what reason.

[Demon.King]

10 hours ago, Currilicious said:

It would be nice to have a piece of gear remain at level 30 after applying a Forma. Only catch is, it has to gain the affinity equivalent to leveling from zero to max, before another Forma can be applied.

This would be the ideal solution.

But we all know nothing will be done till half the current playerbase quits.

[asop73]

A lot of the time when you get a new weapon you just know it won't be worth a damn until you stick 3-4 forma on it. That is pretty much the standard and I think we can all agree on that.

I look at this in the simplest of terms and ask myself "is the process of adding forma to this weapon fun?" and the answer is "no". This leads me to ask "what can be done to make this fun?" Currilicious above has the answer: keep the weapon at lvl 30.

Its losing the weapons power when its forma'ed that makes it not fun. It essentially becomes a peashooter that renders it useless in all but 1 or 2 planets on the star chart. We will bag that weapon and never use it until we get 3-4 forma on it. That probably means a bunch of draco runs if you want to get it into shape asap.

I can still see a problem here though. Even if you were to keep the weapons rank at 30 when adding a new forma to it, how many of us would use a weapon with 1 forma? Or 2 forma? Wouldn't we still keep that weapon on our backs until it got the required 3 or 4 forma? Gonna be honest here, I think I would.

I would honestly prefer the damage to come more from the weapons themselves, and less from the mods. I would prefer mods to simply add utility, like larger clip size, faster reload, that sort of thing. And for weapons to be further spread out across the Mastery Rank range, so no Tonkors and Hek's at MR4, giving you more reason to rank up and aim for something cool. But these sorts of changes are admittedly not at all reasonable or realistic, and I don't know placing the coolest toys out of reach of new players would affect DE's business model.

There really is so much to consider here, and the ripple effect of any change could be profound. This is a Damage 3.0 thing I think.

Edited April 10, 2016 by asop73

[BlackCoMerc]

16 hours ago, (PS4)Hooligantuan said:

The only thing Formae ever did for me is waste days on Sechura.

I mean, sure, my weapons got stronger, but once they got there I was too burned out to enjoy the damned things.

And this sums up the problem perfectly. 

Firstly, having weapons in your game that are still functionally useless at their max level is bad design. Its just wasting a player's time.

Secondly, basically forcing us to spend money over and over again in order to have late game viable anything is sort of...insulting. I mean, sure, we COULD wait for Forma BP to drop. Somewhere. Sometime. Never mind that drop rates are abysmal. But then, we STILL have to wait for them to build, too, and that's a day of basically doing nothing, if the Forma is the only thing holding you back from higher level content. Think about that: The crafting time for Forma is so long, it actually encourages players waiting on that Forma to progress, TO NOT EVEN PLAY YOUR GAME AT ALL DURING THE WAIT TIME. 

But that is STILL not the end of the tedium. Because of course not. No. After USING the Forma, you to RE-LEVEL your stuff. Which is just wasting the player's time. Period.

[Sloan441]

19 hours ago, (PS4)Hooligantuan said:

The only thing Formae ever did for me is waste days on Sechura.

I mean, sure, my weapons got stronger, but once they got there I was too burned out to enjoy the damned things.

I disagree.

For one, I don't typically do things like grind away in places like Sechura and Draco. It...makes what is essentially a repetitive experience much worse than it has to be. Don't doubt me here.

I enjoy working on characters and weapons. That's what I like about these sorts of games: the progression. You see yourself (or selves, in this case) getting stronger and you see the mechanics of it happening. I enjoy playing them and having more reasons to play them is a good thing. At least, I think so.

Actually, once the weapon is done (six forma: check!), I start to lose interest in it in day to day play. I'll get it out for something that needs A Bigger Hammer, but otherwise, they tend to languish while I'm working on something newer which shows hidden potential.

Now the one thing where I think there is legitimate reason to gripe is that total reset of a weapon (or warframe) that is ostensibly getting stronger. That's why I do like this idea of retaining level, but resetting affinity to get to a point where it can be improved again. Then you can continue to do stuff at higher levels and don't have to do the Apollodorus-to-Mimas-to-Triton thing over and over. You could potentially still do void runs or whathaveyou as you need to.

[GrimAtrament]

On 4/9/2016 at 4:09 PM, Currilicious said:

It would be nice to have a piece of gear remain at level 30 after applying a Forma. Only catch is, it has to gain the affinity equivalent to leveling from zero to max, before another Forma can be applied.

i like this idea a lot reduces the pain of formaing weapons/warframes but keeps the need to level it to forma it again

[(PSN)puritan643]

Maybe something of a rank boost for primary and secondary weapons similar to auras or stances. This would mean that less forma would be needed to get the best build for a weapon. This could be something like "proficiency" or "gun art" or some other mumbo jumbo.

It could be a viable way to introduce more secondary firing modes to different weapons as well.  

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

Never gonna happen because DE wants to sell you those P2W affinity boosters.

Instead we should be asking for it to be tied to MR. i.e. when you forma something and are MR 8, the weapon should reset to rank 8 instead of rank 0.

[Replacement]

I'd honestly be happy with Forma resetting gear to <number of forma>.  So if this is my first forma, it's reset to level 1, which means I can throw on a 2-drain mod (because I thus have at least 1 polarity slot).  If this is my 4th forma, I have 4 drain, so I could start with a status/element mod.