Hotfix 18.13.1

[Avalona]

3 minutes ago, LordOfInsomnia said:

U can use Banshee with max range and min duration for spaming silence and control enemies.
Not Mirage but better than Vauban.

See, this is one of the clear indication that the game itself needs balancing faster than the tools player use.

Banshee will get nerfhammer'd hard not because she's "broken", but because people will complain WHY IS BANSHEE EVERYWHERE?!

What's next? Vauban getting "balanced" because too many people tossing Bastille/Vortex around and "trivialize" the content?

Ash getting "balanced" because too many people using Bladestorm and "trivialize" the content?

Valkyr getting "balanced" because too many people keep using hysteria and "trivialize" the content?

Frost getting "balanced" because too many people keep using his Globe and "trivialize" the content?

The list goes on

In the end there'll be nothing left that works while you get one-shotted by invisible missiles, insta headshot'd from 2 rooms away, getting blasted by grenade that goes through the wall (it's still there despite what DE might have told you) and various issues that have been left untouched for years.

[GDSK-NXS]

44 minutes ago, Lazarous_Schmidt said:

FFS DE you have screwed over the game. LoR NM is damn near impossible now. Oh unless we bring your cash-grab frame, Vauban. Between the Mirage Blind nerf, and the Blessing Nerf, you're telling us that Vauban is the only CC you want us using. I hope to get a large number of people together to write a petition telling you to fix these changes, or we will take our money elsewhere. Ya know, WoW has a new expansion coming out, after all.

I would like to start my review of this update and the overall state of the game. As some in this post already said with sharp yet precise words, the main problem is enemy scaling. When you make content impossible without 1-2-3-4 skills and then make those skills less and less useful to the point they are useless, people is going to get mad. If you take a frame with only ONE. REAL. REASON to use, and drag it to the ground for balancing purposes on content you made, people are going to get mad. Because you make the game impossible, and when a glimmer of hope shines in the face of the player, you nerf it mercilessly.

If you need a more poetic approach, the end game is the sun and we are the Icarus, unable to reach it. When we get a little closer, you get 10 times hotter and melt our wings away.

With that aside, the passives are... something. They are supposed to be useful, but most of them just aren't at all. As an example, Volt's electric charge is useless unless you run a marathon around the enemy before shooting one (1) bullet.

The changes... Volt's shield carrying energy drain is insane, it basically tells you "you can pick this up but forget about energy" and we all know this game is ALL about having energy to spam, so the shield carrying is quite a negative effect (given the fact you already need to use energy casting it). The ultimate is good, it has A+ cheesing skills at stunning enemies (DMG is still too low to be considered anything other than a slight scratch into mid level enemies).

Mirage's and Trinity's nerf... ok, I have no problem with those changes... as long as you decease the one-shot % in any high level mission filled with grunts. The changes make sense. They are terribly bad for the game, specially for people plying raid, but make sense.

Excalibro's nerf is different, see, if you wanted to nerf him you could've just get rid of the punch through, that's a thing almost nobody uses... at max range, which is pretty low, dealing 10% of your damage on the first enemy, to be getting low numbers on a fully modded warframe who is supposedly melee focused yet it's ultimate got nerfed 2 times in different directions: first you get rid of the 360 jedi block that kept him alive, and now you expect that fragile thing to go melee level 100 enemies who one-shot you through any kind of melee block... it's insane. The cost on mini-radial blind is... ok?.

Valkyr change makes sense too, except for one little detail: If you're going to make valkyr more suceptible to die if you stay a long time in "rage mode", you may as well give her a damage buff over the period of time, because having 20m range despite the fact we have negative range and the energy drain being stacked with eximus parasites is almost a joke. My recommendation: a damage buff, not too big, but not useless.

Same with Mesa. She hit's hard yes we all know that. She's a stationary turret with no mean protection, so high level missions = insta-death unless you have a team of cheesers. And still, the drain is quite frankly the worst I have seen in a game (maybe just below the new bolt carrying one and the Inaros sandstorm). These insane drains need to stop. If the player want's to mod for less soul sucking they end up doing nothing to the enemy they are supposed to kill in the first place.

Mag is just... there. The one skill that made her useful is gone and we all got back something that isn't bad at everything but is also not good at anything. My recommendation would be to make the Polarize dmg be half and half -> fixed dmg + % dmg, so the skill scalates in order to avoid being useless while taking advantage of the enemy level. The new skills are just as good as they were before (haven't run into the self kill thing yet but that should be changed I suppose). Still, Mag is now in the middle of a build settup, since the 1st and 4th skill use range, and the 2nd and 3rd use duration. If the ultimate benefits from the 2nd, and they have different builds, they can't be used effectively.

If that's enough of the patches, I highly agree that more content can be put on hold for the main issues to be addressed. DE, for the love of everything good, if you keep building on top of bad foundation, it will end up crumbling, and we as players who play and love the game enough to (for example) write messages like these, would be sad to see the game die for something everything knew was coming. If you need to stop releasing new content for a year to fix the leveling problem, then so be it, I would gladly wait a year for it. Just make a game build with less or the same amount of bugs as the last one and we will survive.

Also you should be looking closer to that power creep thing going on, if you can't come up with interesting weapon mechanics then don't just release 100 weapons with the same mechanic but slighly higher damage, plz, it hurts so bad to have your best weapon NOT EVEN NERFED, but just outclassed by everything else because it's old.

4 minutes ago, DuchiPachi said:

Why did you make stupid affinity aura range. It doesn't make sense

M8 if you're not even close to your teammate when he pulls a legendary stunt you learn nothing from it...

[Stoner]

I'm really glad i spent 0$ on this game.

I know they're working their butts off... But nerfing frames like that and calling it a day is just so... infuriating. Why are they nerfing when this game is about PvE and having fun? I understand there needs to be balance, but to the point of making me hate warframes that i loved  is wrong in every damn way. For now, i just don't feel like playing this game.

 

 

[Nasair]

5 minutes ago, Stoner74 said:

I'm really glad i spent 0$ on this game.

I know they're working their butts off... But nerfing frames like that and calling it a day is just so... infuriating. Why are they nerfing when this game is about PvE and having fun? I understand there needs to be balance, but to the point of making me hate warframes that i loved  is wrong in every damn way. For now, i just don't feel like playing this game.

I was going to say something similar, except I've spent a bit of money on the game.

I don't think people that are asking for these nerfs get that for those that worked hard to get a specialized setup it is very discouraging.

It feels like I spent time, money, and energy to build a house, and then the city changed the zoning laws so I have to either sale or tear down the parts I like.

[Rhekemi]

Despite how we got to this point in the thread, the underlying issues raised about scaling and the root cause of trivialization is an important issue. Good that it's mentioned again. Pretty sure we've all discussed or mentioned it at one time or another, in some way. 

But back to some of the current changes. I'm not sure when Volt's speed being instantly granted to the team (when in range) became an issue, but the pickup doesn't seem like a good way to address players' concerns (if it is an issue).

Volt's speed has never been an issue for me (when granted), and I've never had a single player complain/tell me not to use it.

A fun tactic for me in T3s was to use melee Volt while on speed. Dragon Nikana with the mandatory mods. When the whole team is moving fast, our evasion is boosted as well, which eliminated the need for a Frost in T3 D (or any pod shielding 'frame). This isn't to say that is endgame, or we truly pushed things to the limits, it's to say we had fun playing a different way. (Trinity made things easier with the energy, of course.)

I ran Volt a bit post-rework and I've yet to see anyone pickup a speed drop (I don't actually know what it looks like/can't see anything on my screen that looks like a pickup).

I appreciate the changes, overall, but the justification for a few of these (I'm only commenting on what I've actually played with post-rework) seems thin.

With Volt, the speed pickup seems well meaning (giving folks an opt-in) but I don't know of any other buff that's opt-in.

Please revisit this idea, and if anyone really hates being sped up by Volt, please chime in. It's news to me. (No, that doesn't mean it isn't possible. I just would like to hear your side.)

I'm yet to take Mag and the others for a spin, but I'll probably pay more attention to how she feels over the others. Seems like the complaint is her ability to pulverize Corpus has been reduced in an effort to make her more useful across other factions. Is that about it?

Somewhat similar to making Saryn less of a one-trick-pony with her rework? I warmed to Saryn's new playstyle (after really only using her 3 and 4 before). Hopefully there's some light in this Mag rework, yes? If not, I'm sure DE will get an earful from the community.

I will miss being able to save teammates lives when they wander too far--especially if they're newer players. I'll still tell them to stay close, as I always do.

Edited May 28, 2016 by Rhekemi

[Avalona]

1 minute ago, Stoner74 said:

I'm really glad i spent 0$ on this game.

I know they're working their butts off... But nerfing frames like that and calling it a day is just so... infuriating. Why are they nerfing when this game is about PvE and having fun? I understand there needs to be balance, but to the point of making me hate warframes that i loved  is wrong in every damn way. For now, i just don't feel like playing this game.

DE is well-known to be one-of-a-kind master of great ideas, but also having the worst kind of skill executing it.

They wanted this game to be newbie-friendly, yet still not addressing the issues with them getting only 1,000 credits per run while needing 2.4 million to make a necessary mod usable.

They want to make low level players feel accommodated in the game yet locking the workable weapons and warframes behind massive grindfest that their skill can't keep up

and now they want to balance the game with good intention, but effectively made 20% of the game's content inaccessible to new-low-mid players and limiting them to the most extreme top-class players (like the ones who have completed 6 hours survival) with no way to keep them safe in case the veterans decide to bring them along to teach them the rope.

Oh, and anyone trying to streamline through the grindfest are called "exploiter" :^)

[Badger_XD]

Please fix Valkyr 

[MistressInsomnia]

13 minutes ago, Avalona said:

See, this is one of the clear indication that the game itself needs balancing faster than the tools player use.

Banshee will get nerfhammer'd hard not because she's "broken", but because people will complain WHY IS BANSHEE EVERYWHERE?!

What's next? Vauban getting "balanced" because too many people tossing Bastille/Vortex around and "trivialize" the content?

Ash getting "balanced" because too many people using Bladestorm and "trivialize" the content?

Valkyr getting "balanced" because too many people keep using hysteria and "trivialize" the content?

Frost getting "balanced" because too many people keep using his Globe and "trivialize" the content?

The list goes on

In the end there'll be nothing left that works while you get one-shotted by invisible missiles, insta headshot'd from 2 rooms away, getting blasted by grenade that goes through the wall (it's still there despite what DE might have told you) and various issues that have been left untouched for years.

totally agree with you

[Sepulture555]

I don't comment much on the changes to the game. I usually am content to sit back and see how it all plays out. I've also put a lot of time, money, and love into this game. I feel that all of these things are turning on head right now. You've decided that nerfing everything is the way to make players feel, "Powerful". You've decided that reading player feedback is optional. I have managed to read through most of the forum posts in the recent Update threads. Why can't a team of professionals do what some random player can? Lately I've less and less time to spend on gaming, but these changes make me want to spend even less of my diminishing time playing Warframe. I certainly won't be making any more purchases for a while. I feel like I'm losing trust in the developers of this game because they don't seem to trust their playerbase. At all. I've logged almost 1,400 hours into your game, according to Steam, and now it's a shame to think that it'll all have ended up wasted. Please rethink what changes you have made, as well as your general approach to balancing. The most important function of a game is that it should be fun, and the Warframe dev team has been making their game less and less fun, especially for players who want to do raids, sorties, and even some Tower 4 missions. I urge you all to stop, sit down, and think about what would make your players happy, but leave the game balanced. Making the players less and less powerful is NOT the way to go about bringing balance. I'll moniter the changes going on in the game, I'll probably play the events, get new weapons, or take part in tactical alerts, but I'm no longer satisfied to play this game in my precious free time as a fun activity, because it isn't one. I could play frames that haven't been changed yet, and pretend that I'm enjoying it, but simply knowing about how little you seem to care about your players makes the mere thought of playing the game any further seem inane. I hope that you figure out how to turn around what you've been doing.
My regards,
Christopher

[Augaisa23]

Still not the SENDA boss for opening new plants or doing Chroma storyline i see

[aerosoul1337]

Still no really fix Ash's fatal teleport not working.

Still no fix for host migration in the liset.

 

[Dragonofdarkness13]

39 minutes ago, SmiteThemNoobs said:

Also, is mags 3 suposed to be that small? even with 145% range, it is something like 11m?
wooooooat?

fix plz

they made its range based on Duration ... it's basically an M.prime Clone

[-Jes-]

Still no fix for Asa, Aquiros, Pyra syandana energy color mismatch.

[Karixolu]

Not something urgent. But on the starting screen, when you first pick a frame at the very beginning of the game. Because of the new descriptions for Mag's abilities, Magnetize laps over onto Polarise's description.

[TheKurtiStryke]

5 hours ago, Harloq said:

 

 

Spoiler

i much prefer the new smart mag than the other walking-spam2-for-boring-nuke ;)

[Alanthier]

don't have the time or patience to read through all of it, but I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned that if mag doesn't have at least 100% power Duration* Magnetize doesn't detonate at the end of it's timer, it just disappears without shrinking and detonating.

Edited May 28, 2016 by Alanthier

[Tau.]

The thing about balance is that much of the fun of the game comes from finding the slight imbalances for leverage. Absolute 'balance' leaves things soulless and boring. The whole point of building up one's arsenal is so that the fight isn't fair for our enemies. 

Far more pressing, Akstiletto prime bug: on most missions, the energy color on the magazines defaults back to cyan. But only on the magazine, not the other parts of the guns that show energy color. This is almost as bad as that Meer arrow skin with the arrowhead that rotates when drawn, but not when fired. Literally unplayable!

[Lotond]

please take a look at this, it's an issue that should not be there.

[SeekersDude]

5 hours ago, DeejayPwny said:

There's nothing wrong with the nerf. It cements Trinity as a TEAM healer. You know, that sticks with her TEAM. 

And what if not everyone in your team is constantly in the same spot? Running 2 Excavators in 2 rooms at the same time is allready enough to be out of range. What if in order to kill enough enemies you want to split up in a survival mission? Not to mention the change on Blessings damage reduction, which completely removes the point of what it's supposed to be. When not abused for invulnerability, it's there to give you some get-out-of-there time, after you nearly died. That means those players need the damage reduction, that ran too far into the action and had to be healed, not everyone the same amount, while 3/4 people are in a safe distance. I think they should have reduced the duration of the damage reduction instead, so that you can't have it constantly active but it still provides protection for those who need it.

[GDSK-NXS]

16 minutes ago, TheKurtiStryke said:

  Hide contents

i much prefer the new smart mag than the other walking-spam2-for-boring-nuke ;)

Mag now kills itself, and the damage from her polarize is nowhere near the one it had in the past, they made it better for early -mid and worst for late game, which was specially the focus of that ability given the % damage multiplier. Tell me again how is a useless doll better than a cheap nuke.

14 minutes ago, Alanthier said:

don't have the time or patience to read through all of it, but I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned that if mag doesn't have at least 100% power Duration* Magnetize doesn't detonate at the end of it's timer, it just disappears without shrinking and detonating.

I found this out and not, no one said it, I'm not sure because I didn't test it all that much but my 85% duration build doesn't explode so this must be spot on.

5 minutes ago, Lotond said:

please take a look at this, it's an issue that should not be there.

You can also bug vauban's grenades to never visually disappear, the grenade and the FX is still there even tho the grenade doesn't activate anymore, such is the case with Vortex, Bastille and all of the Tesla and grenades. As a side note to this, if you have the mod "Tesla Link" when this bug happens, the link will also never disappear, and it will continue to deal damage forever (since it's effect is passive -enemy walking through- instead of active -sapping enemies near-).

Fount this to be quite fun, made a giant tentacle monster out of like 40 vortexes that never disappeared and also a whole lot of pentagrams with the tesla link. Kudos to DE.

[RagDollRat]

1 hour ago, Rhekemi said:

Despite how we got to this point in the thread, the underlying issues raised about scaling and the root cause of trivialization is an important issue. Good that it's mentioned again. Pretty sure we've all discussed or mentioned it at one time or another, in some way. 

But back to some of the current changes. I'm not sure when Volt's speed being instantly granted to the team (when in range) became an issue, but the pickup doesn't seem like a good way to address players' concerns (if it is an issue).

Volt's speed has never been an issue for me (when granted), and I've never had a single player complain/tell me not to use it.

A fun tactic for me in T3s was to use melee Volt while on speed. Dragon Nikana with the mandatory mods. When the whole team is moving fast, our evasion is boosted as well, which eliminated the need for a Frost in T3 D (or any pod shielding 'frame). This isn't to say that is endgame, or we truly pushed things to the limits, it's to say we had fun playing a different way. (Trinity made things easier with the energy, of course.)

I ran Volt a bit post-rework and I've yet to see anyone pickup a speed drop (I don't actually know what it looks like/can't see anything on my screen that looks like a pickup).

I appreciate the changes, overall, but the justification for a few of these (I'm only commenting on what I've actually played with post-rework) seems thin.

With Volt, the speed pickup seems well meaning (giving folks an opt-in) but I don't know of any other buff that's opt-in.

Please revisit this idea, and if anyone really hates being sped up by Volt, please chime in. It's news to me. (No, that doesn't mean it isn't possible. I just would like to hear your side.)

I'm yet to take Mag and the others for a spin, but I'll probably pay more attention to how she feels over the others. Seems like the complaint is her ability to pulverize Corpus has been reduced in an effort to make her more useful across other factions. Is that about it?

Somewhat similar to making Saryn less of a one-trick-pony with her rework? I warmed to Saryn's new playstyle (after really only using her 3 and 4 before). Hopefully there's some light in this Mag rework, yes? If not, I'm sure DE will get an earful from the community.

I will miss being able to save teammates lives when they wander too far--especially if they're newer players. I'll still tell them to stay close, as I always do.

close to 3 years ago when speed was at its fastest ALLOT of people complained about motion sickness and said he was a troll frame, so in turn DE nerfed him 3 times in a row claiming it to be a "rebalance" which actualy killed him as my fave frame for 2 years, I like the rework so far need to do more testing but this rework might actualy bump him back to being my fave

[Eluner]

It would be cool if you could fix the Nova Prime Skin Bug, which is around like start of the year. I just want to use the visage skin properly. :(

 

[SeekersDude]

Heads up to all players trying the Nova passiv: it doesn't work. Well at least not the way you'd need it to work. The enemy that knocked you down will not be knocked down, because they're protected by their animation.

[OnlinePhenome]

Please add innate enemy radar on Valkyr's hysteria bubble. You're just going to die because of some random enemy peeking around the corner in your blind spot... Her sensing the enemies in her bubble makes sense too.

 

EDIT: Some times it doesn't even make sense when you take damage, please add an indicator on the map if something is in range or LoS if that's the case.

Edited May 28, 2016 by Irregardless_Existence

[Demaneth]

5 hours ago, ZaeXithos said:

Okay DE.  I'm going to step back from the actual decisions being made here.  I want to talk about the philosophy behind them, and what you, as developers, need to be thinking about when you make these changes.  They smack of kneejerk reactions, without understanding the deeper meanings of why things happen the way they do.  So as someone who's worked in game development myself, I'm going to help you bridge the gap between player's-eye viewpoint and dev's-eye viewpoint.

Now, with any content you make, people are going to look for strategies that beat it.  That's the nature of the game.  It's the nature of every video game - to overcome the challenges the devs have put before you and reap the rewards, then use those rewards to meet and overcome the next set of challenges.  Your goal, as a developer, is to provide a challenge to your playerbase that is difficult enough to require strategy and tactics and preparation, but is also winnable within a margin of error that is humanly achievable.

Warframe's highest-end content has a serious problem with that.  Once enemy levels get into the 60s, 70s, 80s+, survival becomes increasingly binary.  You are either alive and strictly invulnerable, invisible, or sheltered behind tens of thousands of intervening effective health points, or you are dead the moment you are exposed to enemy fire.  First it's the bombards, who deal ridiculous damage over huge AoE.  Then you notice that seekers and eviscerators are one-shotting you too, and soon enough you fear stepping outside that Frost's bubble for even a half second lest you catch a stray Grakata round and spontaneously evaporate into a cloud of gore.

Some people look at that and go 'nope, not playing that, that's not fun.'  In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of 'em, typically.  I've never been fond of games where one slight mistake will end you.  This is why I don't play sorties, despite the rewards.  I don't know a lot of people, I don't like trying to put together a team for it, and it has such strict requirements on what you can and cannot bring to the table that most of my arsenal is useless in it.

Others, however, look at that and go 'challenge accepted.'  They will look for ways to overcome even this extreme difficulty.  Like Ivara surviving while invisible and using sleep arrow and covert lethality to score kills regardless of armor and HP.  Or Blind Mirage rendering entire spawns comatose across an entire map and then merrily obliterating them one after another.  Or Ash using a combination of invulnerability and finisher damage to kill enemies he could never take in a straight fight.  Or Excalibur utilizing EB's range and blind-spin to get free finishers and stay out of reach of enemies while still benefitting from his sword boost passive.

The fact is, players look for ways to trivialize content because there's content that's very good at trivializing players.  It is, in fact, using content-trivializing strategies is the only way to survive player-trivializing content.

When health and armor don't matter, and shields are merely a formality between enemies and your health, your best guns take off mere slivers of enemy health, and all the buffs in the world won't fix either of those situations, that's when players reach for the nuke options - invulnerability, invisibility, scaling damage absorption, finisher damage, finisher openers, and instant-kills.

What's important to remember is that players are right to do this.  You made the content capable of obliterating anyone without these tools; therefore, players are going to use the tools you gave them that work.  And they're going to keep using them, until you either take the tools away (nerfing), or the tools are no longer necessary and there are more efficient and less-drastic means of accomplishing the mission.  If my guns started to deal damage again, and my shields and health could actually survive a bullet or two, I might decide to use them over wtfhax bladestorm/stacked snowglobes/BLIND BLIND BLIND SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP FINISHER FINISHER FINISHER.

So here's what you, as game devs, need to do.  Ask yourselves the question, "What are players SUPPOSED to do to defeat this content?"  And gear your changes towards THAT.  You need to make a hard decision as to what gear and what methods players are allowed to use, and which are exploitative and need to be either nerfed-out or compensated for.  The answer "Players aren't supposed to defeat this content" isn't an acceptable answer; it's a terrible GM that measures success in trashed character sheets, and likewise it's a terrible developer that measures success in Game Overs.

Finally, you need to look at rewards in the light of the effort required to get them.  If defeating a piece of content is supposed to be a difficult task and a momentous event when you and your cell succeeds, then the rewards should be commensurate.  The rewards need to be something immediately good and useful.  If you throw out player-trivializing content, and then say to those who beat it "Congratulations, now run it five hundred times more if you want a reasonable chance to get the actual good rewards from it" then they're going to look at you, scoff, and walk out.

This is how you make good gameplay.

Mother of god... you sir with this post stated the very and first problem this game have... and you explained so well. But dont worry, because pro players will contrary you obviously saying that this nerfs are welcome and you have to learn how to play warframes