Just an idea about making focus endgame component more appealing

[.Jet.]

So, my idea is about connecting focus system to augment system. Four new branches are added to the focus tree. Each one of them unlocks 1 additional warframe slot (for every ability). Only augment mods can be equipped in these slots. IMO such a change makes the regular gameplay more interesting, lets us keep our builds intact, makes focus farming more rewarding and is not game-breaking at the same time.

 

Edit: in order to not damage the builds' diversity, the cost of augment mods should be reduced (maybe even to zero, like some sentinel mods).

Edited April 26, 2016 by .Jet.

[Cray]

The only issue is that we'd risk creating builds with impossible capacity requirements, since we only have 65-78 (depending on aura and whether or not it's polarized) capacity across what would now be 10 mod slots. Again.

A long time ago, frames actually had 10 slots, but abilities weren't inherent. You had to have the mod for that ability installed. Sentinals and Kubrows still use this mechanic for their precepts. Then abilities were de-modded, and they dropped 2 slots to balance the change. Then they returned one in the form of the exilus slot.

When all was said and done, we may have lost a slot, but we gained something quite valuable: We have more room for build variance. For instance, my Frost. The exlius slot and 3 normal slots are unpolarized. All 3 of my builds use all available capacity, but I still have room to fine-tune a build if I'm doing something special or if I just want to experiment, simply because I can swap two mods of different polarities (provided the cost doesn't go up). When a frame (or weapon) has room like that, it's considered a versatile build. In order to fill a 10th slot, I'd need to polarize the remaining slots, and remove that versatility.

 

TL;DR: The more slots you have to polarize to bring capacity costs down, the more restricted your template for builds will be, potentially forcing you to abandon one build in favor of being able to fit another.

 

Of course, all of this could be circumvented, if this augment-only slot had no capacity cost associated with it.

Edited April 25, 2016 by DeltaPhantom

[Xekrin]

1 hour ago, .Jet. said:

lets us keep our builds intact, makes focus farming more rewarding and is not game-breaking at the same time.

I don't want to say it is gamebreaking because that is beyond my ability to fathom, but the fact is warframe augments (and weapon ones) are intended to interrupt your building, ever so slightly.  You give up some part of your perfect build in order to augment one of your abilities.  Be it range, strength or whatever, the problem is there are actually few augments actually worth building around so people fret and complain and deem it better to just give us another slot because "augments aren't good enough to break out builds" for.  

So in reality, (in my opinion anyway), an augment slot would be nothing more than a band-aid for the mostly worthless augments and allowing the few really great augments to just be freely used without some downside would be pretty creepy in the power department, ya know?

 

BTW, all augments (for warframes anyway) are of the Zenurik focus school, so thematically speaking, they'd either make it a zenurik only ability that unlocks augment slot or they'd have to go through and revise all augments to coincide with the other schools.

[Ignaetious]

They said augment mods were originally part of the focus system a while back.  I personally think they should put them back into it.  It would make the focus system feel a lot more rewarding.  It would also de-emphasize the fact that a large portion of augment mods are not great.  I would be much more inclined to use an augment if it was just activating it on my focus instead of using a mod slot, even if it wasn't particularly good.

[BornWithTeeth]

Actually, I'm super happy to hear about what their real plans for the Focus system are.

 

To summarise:

- Big, hardcore Sentient units are coming. Large, imposing, actually kind of weird looking.

- They will basically be impossible to kill.....

- ...except through using the expanded top tier Focus abilities. Exact words as follows: "[fighting those Sentient units] requires the stuff that we're bringing in to the Focus system" "[killing the big Sentients is] reason for existence [of the Focus system]"

- Successfully killing these new enemies will grant weird new rewards in the form of direct Warframe mounted heavy weapons, which look like Sentient body parts salvaged from their corpses.