Warframe abilities, reworks and their relation to enemy scaling and build diversity.

[Zyrgi]

Short disclaimer:

Recently we received reworks to certain frames, which made me pose a few questions that involve the developer vision for the future of warframe reworks, the effects of the balancing of abilities on enemy scaling. My questions are - What is the developer vision about how effective should abilities be towards certain levels of enemies? How far should they scale? Is infinite scaling permissible? Are percentage based abilities better or worse because they can be adjusted to scale further through mods? This topic includes a wide variety of topics, but mostly abilities. Other topics that might be mentioned: Auras, enemy scaling, missions and their types. To be as objective as I can, I am trying to back up everything with mathematical calculations using information available in the warframe wiki, codex, arsenal menu etc. The intent of this topic is to provide constructive criticism based on objectivity by eliminating personal opinion and bias.

The curious case of Mag rework:

As far as I am aware, the intent of the rework was to make Mag more suitable for more factions other than Corpus and eliminating "Press x to win" strategy and integrating interesting and fun mechanics for Mag's abilities when used together. After doing some calculations on Polarize(Previously known as Shield Polarize that used to be able to kill most units whose base shield amount exceeded their base health amount with infinite scaling.) I concluded as follows:

• At maximum power strength (299% and 135% efficiency):

Polarize removes 1196 shield/armor of an enemy.

Costs 49 energy to cast per cast of the ability. Adding up to roughly 24,4 points of armor reduced per 1 point of energy.

According to warframe wiki, a level 100 Heavy Gunner has the exact armor value of 7332,38 based on formula( Armor = Base Armor × (1 + ((Current Level − Base Level)1.75 ÷ 200)) ).

It would take 7 casts of Polarize to strip said Heavy Gunner of armor completely adding up the cost to 343 energy.

This amount of energy can be generated through different means like:

With 1 energy siphon in the team sufficient energy can be generated within 571.66 seconds aka. 9.52 minutes at the rate of whopping 0.6 energy/s shortening the time to 142.92 seconds or 2.38 minutes with full team of Energy Siphons.

With maximum rank Energy Overflow(Zenurik focus passive trait) at the rate of 4 ene/s it takes only 85.75 seconds aka. 1.42 minutes.

Collecting orbs required would add up to 14. Or 1 Large team energy restore.

• Meanwhile the same effect can be achieved through the coordinated use of Corrosive Projection or Shield Disruption permanently.

Who in their right minds would use this ability for this specific purpose or even build around it when Magnetize, which calculates most of its effects based on percentages can provide infinitely scaling blockage of choke-points without the necessity to prioritize power strength through which its cost can be reduced drastically. Infinitely scaling abilities are more reliable and effective regardless of how high the enemy's level is, which might explain the reason why people tend to neglect abilities whose scaling is based on flat values with exceptions like WoF, RJ, Spore, Vortex etc. The result of which is the limited build diversity.

Does Equinox even balance?

Maim is probably the most used ability of Equinox. It also has a scaling based on percentage numbers. Coincidence? I think not. According to wiki: " Maim accumulates 50% / 55% / 60% / 75% of the maximum shields and health of each enemy killed within the aura as  Slash damage." With armor and shields out of the way it can deal 25% additional damage to flesh. Meaning it can yield 100% damage dealt while active to the enemies with flesh modifier with regressive scaling based on how far the enemy is. This also enables Infinite scaling and reliability, which might explain why Equinox built around Maim is more popular than other kind of equinox build essentially reducing build diversity.

By this time I hope you can recognize the pattern.

In conclusion, I could list the abilities that people build around endlessly, but I doubt that anyone has the time or patience to read that much text. If you've gotten this far I congratulate you an thank you for attention. If this tendency or pattern is recognized as a problem, I would suggest these solutions, of which I would gladly welcome constructive criticism:

• Limiting the maximum wave amount/length of endless missions. This would eliminate the appeal of using macros/bots to afk-farm the missions and with slight alterations to drop tables, rotations and/or enemy scaling might help to remedy that. Besides, playing a game non-stop for over an hour and the messages suggesting to take a break are quite hard to adhere to when you're determined to sit in an endless mission cheesing it for hours.
• Changes to how enemies scale and interact. With a different system of scaling there would not be a necessity for the extremely annoying enemies such as Nullifiers (Hail Pablo, the father of Nullifiers) that literally render bows, snipers and most shotguns inferior, block sight and require more ammo to disable than it takes to kill an equal level Bombard. Current scaling dictates the playstyle of "Start out run'n'gunning destroying everything in sight." to "Stay in your safe-space" after certain time has passed, because you'd get 1shot instantly upon leaving safety.
• Altering non-utility and flat damage based abilities to scale according to enemy scaling to increase the incentive to use those abilities more frequently and help the build diversity. This would promote the use of other abilities and increase the ways a warframe can be modded. Capping and balancing said abilities is always an option and altering the numbers of scaling abilities might be easier than reworking entire frames because people were using only 1 ability of a frame's entire kit.
• Different energy system. With warframe base energy ranging from 100 to 200 at base and 150 to 300 at rank 30, It makes mods like Primed Flow, Fleeting Expertise, Streamline etc. extremely appealing if not mandatory. considering the ability costs without maximum efficiency cost ranges from 25 to 100+, which would limit it to 12 consecutive casts of 1st at best to 3 casts of the 4th ability at worst. This is extremely limiting, considering the fast paced gameplay requires frequent use of abilities.

In conclusion.

I hope that this topic is somewhat useful. I hope that I do not come across as trying to insult anyone which is in no way my objective, the intent was to facilitate healthy discussion and exchange of constructive criticism. Please be free to correct me if I'm wrong and again - thank you for your time.

TL;DR

Some abilities scale, some don't, while all enemies scale. People tend to focus around scaling abilities, while abandoning the rest. Press x to win is running rampant and call out massive reworks and changes, that are extremely time consuming an might not result in the intended.

Edited June 3, 2016 by Zyrgi
Edited out some bad grammar.