What's DE's rework mindset?

[Tenno29543]

I am confused about how DE rework their stuff because some times they make it real gud and sometimes they nerf it to the ground, like with mag. Let's be honest, mag's effectiveness in damage have been crippled , the old shield polarize is a better ability to do insane amount of damage fast. 

i mean do they want everything to be weak or do they want you to actually play the game and not just hit a single button and win, because mag is still a 1 trick pony..

in the case of saryn, u hit more keys to do more to do more damage, but in the case of mag, u hit the same key and have to do more to do less damage...

Edited June 24, 2016 by BigBlackCook

[superbot34]

Instead of fixing enemy scaling, especially armor scaling, they nerf the exploits or synergy people find to take their matches to that next level into end game content. Ultimately, they will have to decide whether to nerf everything in the game to the same level making your weapon or warframe choice pointless, or look into enemy scaling properly and actually take feedback from players who actually use/used exploits to get to certain levels. 

[-N7-Leonhart]

49 minutes ago, BigBlackCook said:

I am confused about how DE rework their stuff because some times they make it real gud and sometimes they nerf it to the ground, like with mag. Let's be honest, mag's effectiveness in damage have been crippled , the old shield polarize is a better ability to do insane amount of damage fast. 

i mean do they want everything to be weak or do they want you to actually play the game and not just hit a single button and win, because mag is still a 1 trick pony..

in the case of saryn, u hit more keys to do more to do more damage, but in the case of mag, u hit the same key and have to do more to do less damage...

It's really simple. Obviously, what they did with Mag was a rework more intended as a nerf. They fixed broken and cheesy abilities, while giving some more juice to those that were weak. And don't ever tell me Mag was no broken before. My only gripe with that is why they didn't do it sooner and instead let it roam around like that for so long.

[Roachester]

1 hour ago, superbot34 said:

Ultimately, they will have to decide whether to nerf everything in the game to the same level making your weapon or warframe choice pointless, or look into enemy scaling properly and actually take feedback from players who actually use/used exploits to get to certain levels. 

Amazing ultimatum. This can't seriously be what people believe balancing boils down to. Either that, or you're exaggerating. Please say you're exaggerating.

If you are, then disregard the rest of this post. If not, feel free to disregard it anyway.

 

While I agree that enemy scaling needs to be addressed properly, let's pretend for a moment that the 18.13 patch never happened. Do you really think fixing the enemies would stop people from spamming Prism 24/7? Using Mag to steamroll anything that even LOOKS like it might have shields? Turning Excalibur into a bona fide mobile turret? Abusing Blessing to turn your entire team into nigh unstoppable death machines? Staying in Hysteria for literally hours on end? Looking even further back than 18.13, would it have stopped people from abusing Miasma? Peacemaker? All that other nonsense?

Of course it wouldn't have, because these were all things that turned enemies into helpless, sniveling messes with just one or two measly button presses. And that's assuming the ability didn't outright kill them first. DE has stated numerous times that they want us to feel powerful when going into missions. What they DON'T want, however, is for us to completely avoid playing their game, which is exactly what the aforementioned abilities achieved. With that in mind, they nerfed 'em. Fairly hard.

By getting rid of our ability to cheese every last bit of content, they can lay down some proper groundwork for fixing one of this game's other huge problems, which is the obvious enemy scaling.

DE's already figured out that, in order to make any headway with their game, they have to take the bad along with the good. If certain players can't manage to do the same, then who are they to say that they know what's best for Warframe?

Edited June 24, 2016 by Roachester

[Birdframe_Prime]

I'll sum it up in a simple statement: DE Don't support 'infinite' anything. Be that infinite range, infinite scaling, infinite stun locks, infinite spam... it's not good game design.

Mag had an infinitely scaling damage ability, they took that. Trinity had an infinite range heal, they took that. Valkyr had infinite invulnerability, they can't take the basic mechanics of the ability, so they changed the drain so it's way more difficult for it to be infinite. Saryn had near infinite spam on an ability that could be modded to deal 10k damage instantly, with no fall off or cool-down for 25 energy, they took that (well, they took it and re-worked it so that the combo between it, molt and spores could actually deal 15k damage if you mod correctly and combo correctly, but only 4-5k if you use it alone).

If everything is based on fixed numbers, with percentage buffs and de-buffs as game mechanics, then it can be balanced as the game goes on.

Like Excalibur, his Exalted Blade became quite powerful and easy to maintain at that power, many people could actually stay in EB for an entire mission and hit everything for consistently high damage at any range, or there were those creating Exalted Turret with him, Mirage and Equinox buffing his damage, hiding in a corner and nuking t4 survival missions with ease... So what did they do? They adjusted the numbers so his damage had range fall-off. Instant re-balance.

The same can be done for Saryn, or Mag, or Volt now, already has been with Volt increasing his shields from 4 at a time to 6.

Balance the frames through capped abilities, no infinites, reduced spam, and then address the imbalance in the enemies once that's finished.

[marelooke]

Then they better also start looking into the weaponry as well. For example: I like the Saryn rework (and around 20% of my 1000-ish in-mission hours were spent on a Saryn), but if you got a few players running around with, for example, Tonkors blowing everything to crap it's hard to get or keep spores rolling before everything is dead, so you end up standing around, mostly. And at the levels where Tonkor's damage starts falling off you start to really feel the nerf to survivability Saryn got (besides, that's when the "tonkortards" tend to extract anyway).

Edited June 24, 2016 by marelooke

[Tsunero]

No fun allowed. Becuase they are too lazy to do anything with the scaling and nerfing frames/weapons is easier.

[Epsik-kun]

"Nerf everything. Except for Ash. Buff Ash."

 

Yes, I am literally covered in salt.

Edited June 24, 2016 by Epsik-kun

[Marthrym]

8 hours ago, Roachester said:

Amazing ultimatum. This can't seriously be what people believe balancing boils down to. Either that, or you're exaggerating. Please say you're exaggerating.

If you are, then disregard the rest of this post. If not, feel free to disregard it anyway.

 

While I agree that enemy scaling needs to be addressed properly, let's pretend for a moment that the 18.13 patch never happened. Do you really think fixing the enemies would stop people from spamming Prism 24/7? Using Mag to steamroll anything that even LOOKS like it might have shields? Turning Excalibur into a bona fide mobile turret? Abusing Blessing to turn your entire team into nigh unstoppable death machines? Staying in Hysteria for literally hours on end? Looking even further back than 18.13, would it have stopped people from abusing Miasma? Peacemaker? All that other nonsense?

Of course it wouldn't have, because these were all things that turned enemies into helpless, sniveling messes with just one or two measly button presses. And that's assuming the ability didn't outright kill them first. DE has stated numerous times that they want us to feel powerful when going into missions. What they DON'T want, however, is for us to completely avoid playing their game, which is exactly what the aforementioned abilities achieved. With that in mind, they nerfed 'em. Fairly hard.

By getting rid of our ability to cheese every last bit of content, they can lay down some proper groundwork for fixing one of this game's other huge problems, which is the obvious enemy scaling.

DE's already figured out that, in order to make any headway with their game, they have to take the bad along with the good. If certain players can't manage to do the same, then who are they to say that they know what's best for Warframe?

That's called doing things @ss backwards as far as I'm concerned. The devs are finally doing something, which is good. What would be better is if they had started with the beginning, and finished with the end.

Enemy scaling has a much more central, core role than abilities. It affects more things, more directly, basically it's the foundation, while abilities merely rest on it.

Balancing abilities without taking care of enemy scaling first is extremely misguided and counterproductive. Especially in DE's case. While the quality of their work in several aspects of the game is nothing short of awesome, their track record when it comes to proper balance and fair challenge is rather... awful. They're wasting valuable time, effort and money here. And it's the playerbase who ends up paying the bill, always.

As for cheese, thinking you can get rid of it entirely, or force players to never make use of it even when they don't feel forced to... bit of a delusion, don't you think?^^'

Edited June 24, 2016 by Marthrym

[Tenno29543]

13 hours ago, -BM-Leonhart said:

It's really simple. Obviously, what they did with Mag was a rework more intended as a nerf. They fixed broken and cheesy abilities, while giving some more juice to those that were weak. And don't ever tell me Mag was no broken before. My only gripe with that is why they didn't do it sooner and instead let it roam around like that for so long.

in my opinion, they did not "fix" the broken abilty, they just made it so that mag can only have 1 ability all over again. they didnt do anything about pull, crush and just nerf shield polarize down to the dirt so that people can't use it no more. I dont think this is a good thing because they could of made it so that you can't just hit a key to win, instead you have to do more to deal damage with her 3.

About mag being broken before, i disagree since you have to have a group of corpus bunched up together to do any sort of damage.

Edited June 24, 2016 by BigBlackCook

[Umbra-]

One does not simply to understand DE mindset... Just lost all my plat to finally get the EMP Aura, little did I know it got COMPLETELY NERFED few weeks ago. Like, DE style of nerfing. "Nerf it to the ground, so it's completely useless." Now it doesn't do anything.

[PikeOrShield]

Mag could push one button and obliterate all the enemies in the tile set, so anything DE could do would likely have been a nerf since you can only go down from MLGod-tier.  However, I think that both Mag and Saryn reworks came with the idea that pushing more buttons deals more damage, which is good since it's more engaging than an "I win button".  The "problem" (I don't really see anything wrong with this) is that certain skills are viable on their own, which is totally alright.  Spores can stand on it's own and so can Magnetize.  They are still better than the pre-rework mechanics since players must actively use weapons to build up the damage of each ability.  Neither Spores nor Magnetize can deal significant damage on their own and they require players to stay engaged.

[OzoneSlayer]

6 hours ago, Thaylien said:

I'll sum it up in a simple statement: DE Don't support 'infinite' anything. Be that infinite range, infinite scaling, infinite stun locks, infinite spam... it's not good game design.

.

In b4 Radial Disarm is affected by Duration mods

[(PSN)CoolD2108]

Hm lets think about this....

 

Mag pre-rework:

Damage: best numeric damage in the game, fighting the weakest fraction in the game (just going for Slash Status results in the same goddarn thing), Vs grineer or infested? Useless. You didn't kill something? Pray. Nothing else you could do.

CC: nonexistant on a Meta build (negative efficiency. Why would you pull or crush? HOW would you pull or crush)

Overall: pretty Bad. Mag was underused, nieched and underperforming, even in her best category.

Mag post-rework:

Damage: magn. scales off scaling hostile and strong allied damage, makes singletarget fire AE, explodes for a totall number with bigger range after the use expelled. Works on all fractions. Numeric AND percentuall armor reduction to Counter endless scaling.

CC: a light vortex on the bubbles, controllable fast CC with pull, pinning enemys in place. Pick one. Quite possible with accessable builds. Even endless potential to set walls that protect you and your Squad from incomming fire.

Overall: better damage, better CC, better everything.

 

 

I can't quite follow. You said mag was nerfed? 

 

 

Edited June 24, 2016 by (PS4)CoolD2108

[Teridax68]

I think the mindset for reworks has been mainly to encourage players to use the entirety of their frames' abilities, and not just one or two. When you get to specifics, some warframes get reworked simply because they don't play as well as they should and deserve improvements, including better scaling and strong success in at least one well-defined situation (e.g. Frost, Volt), some get reworked because the game has evolved and they need an update, particularly if one of their abilities was based on older systems such as Parkour 1.0 (e.g. Excalibur, Vauban), and some get reworked because their ability sets cheapen gameplay by granting disproportionate returns on strategies that don't represent the most interesting kind of gameplay that could be had (e.g. Mag, Saryn). The general objective is to have frames that play smoothly, feel fun, scale well without getting abusive, have a well-defined niche that they can be the best at, and have a proper effort-to-rewards curve that allows players to succeed at least moderately with basic use of abilities, and far more if they make use of all the aspects of their frame.

Personally, I think the Mag rework was a success. Sure, she's not the Corpus one-shot machine she used to be, but really, judging a warframe's effectiveness based on the expectation that they should kill level 100+ enemies in a single ability cast is completely unrealistic, and unhealthy in a game that's already bent out of shape by cheesing. Her 3 does suck, and likely needs a buff so that it can scale better in its shield/armor removal, and her 4 desperately needs to fit better with the rest of her kit (e.g. by magnetizing enemies to each other, arresting projectiles and drawing them into enemies, etc.), but her 1 was and still is an excellent ability, and her Magnetize, which has replaced the completely useless Bullet Attractor, is tremendously useful, and scales extremely well. She's a fantastic anti-boss frame, and also has some of the best crowd control around.

[Chipputer]

9 hours ago, Roachester said:

By getting rid of our ability to cheese every last bit of content, they can lay down some proper groundwork for fixing one of this game's other huge problems, which is the obvious enemy scaling.

Wow. Someone actually gets it. Amazing.

Fix the players first, bring the enemies down to their level, everything else falls into place from there.

59 minutes ago, Marthrym said:

Balancing abilities without taking care of enemy scaling first is extremely misguided and counterproductive.

How, exactly? What are you basing your balancing level off of? Are you basing it off of sorties (level 100) or are you basing it off of that 2 hour T4 survival you tried to run the other night?

Because I can guarantee you that you still have the tools to do both with the latter requiring proper team setup and skill.

[(PSN)WINDMILEYNO]

3 hours ago, Epsik-kun said:

"Nerf everything. Except for Ash. Buff Ash."

 

Yes, I am literally covered in salt.

My sentiments exactly. 

[UltimateGrr]

3 hours ago, Marthrym said:

Balancing abilities without taking care of enemy scaling first is extremely misguided and counterproductive

Let's assume they actually fixed scaling first.  EHP drops across the boards at higher levels and all that jazz.  No more OHKs from Bombards, and Napalms and Bombards don't do punch through any more.  Awesome right?  It would be, except that the boards have exploded in rage posts of salt, players demanding to know where all the challenge went, and yelling about how DE is pandering to all the casuals and bad players, etc etc etc.

Let's not even pretend here, people.  Search your feelings, Tenno.  You know this to be true.

Then, six months later, DE rolls out the rebalances for the player side of things, retooling powers, weapon damage, all the stuff.  Game play is smooth as silk, most weapon choices are viable in late game content, etc.  Forums explode is salt again because we aren't pulling the same damage numbers we were before, and how we can't go 19 hours in T4 survival anymore and that my lato pistol can't 1 shot a level 90 Bombard anymore.  Mountains of salt as far as the eye can see about how DE ruined the game despite it objectively never being in a better state.

[Tenno29543]

6 hours ago, (PS4)CoolD2108 said:

Hm lets think about this....

 

Mag pre-rework:

Damage: best numeric damage in the game, fighting the weakest fraction in the game (just going for Slash Status results in the same goddarn thing), Vs grineer or infested? Useless. You didn't kill something? Pray. Nothing else you could do.

CC: nonexistant on a Meta build (negative efficiency. Why would you pull or crush? HOW would you pull or crush)

Overall: pretty Bad. Mag was underused, nieched and underperforming, even in her best category.

Mag post-rework:

Damage: magn. scales off scaling hostile and strong allied damage, makes singletarget fire AE, explodes for a totall number with bigger range after the use expelled. Works on all fractions. Numeric AND percentuall armor reduction to Counter endless scaling.

CC: a light vortex on the bubbles, controllable fast CC with pull, pinning enemys in place. Pick one. Quite possible with accessable builds. Even endless potential to set walls that protect you and your Squad from incomming fire.

Overall: better damage, better CC, better everything.

 

 

I can't quite follow. You said mag was nerfed? 

 

 

WOOO slow down there buddy, "Numeric AND percentuall armor reduction to Counter endless scaling.", unless i am understanding you wrong, you're trying to say that she strips armor based on a %, that is false, she only strips a fix amount of armor. All DE did was add things to buff the old bullet attractter, yes it's great but it comes at a cost and they nerfed shield polarize to the floor. shield polarize worked in the void, the hardest content in the game. Now it's useless, while the old bullet attracter was an useable abilty against bombards and bursas. The range of the old shield polarize is much greater than the range of magnetize, and you're trying to tell me that the CC is improved? That is why i think it's a nerf and not a "rework" because if it's a rework, they could have made all mag's abilties flow well with eachother and not just a 1 trick pony that mag still is today.

[Tenno29543]

6 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I think the mindset for reworks has been mainly to encourage players to use the entirety of their frames' abilities, and not just one or two. When you get to specifics, some warframes get reworked simply because they don't play as well as they should and deserve improvements, including better scaling and strong success in at least one well-defined situation (e.g. Frost, Volt), some get reworked because the game has evolved and they need an update, particularly if one of their abilities was based on older systems such as Parkour 1.0 (e.g. Excalibur, Vauban), and some get reworked because their ability sets cheapen gameplay by granting disproportionate returns on strategies that don't represent the most interesting kind of gameplay that could be had (e.g. Mag, Saryn). The general objective is to have frames that play smoothly, feel fun, scale well without getting abusive, have a well-defined niche that they can be the best at, and have a proper effort-to-rewards curve that allows players to succeed at least moderately with basic use of abilities, and far more if they make use of all the aspects of their frame.

Personally, I think the Mag rework was a success. Sure, she's not the Corpus one-shot machine she used to be, but really, judging a warframe's effectiveness based on the expectation that they should kill level 100+ enemies in a single ability cast is completely unrealistic, and unhealthy in a game that's already bent out of shape by cheesing. Her 3 does suck, and likely needs a buff so that it can scale better in its shield/armor removal, and her 4 desperately needs to fit better with the rest of her kit (e.g. by magnetizing enemies to each other, arresting projectiles and drawing them into enemies, etc.), but her 1 was and still is an excellent ability, and her Magnetize, which has replaced the completely useless Bullet Attractor, is tremendously useful, and scales extremely well. She's a fantastic anti-boss frame, and also has some of the best crowd control around.

Aw, like you said, 75% of mag's abilties suk so how does is it that they encourge you to use a frame's full kit?

[Teridax68]

1 minute ago, BigBlackCook said:

Aw, like you said, 75% of mag's abilties suk so how does is it that they encourge you to use a frame's full kit?

Pull does not suck at all, and despite scaling poorly, Polarize at least has some good use in refilling shields and providing shrapnel to synergize with Magnetize, so even at high levels it's still somewhat worth casting. Even Mag's new passive synergizes pretty nicely with Pull, in that you can knockdown a bunch of enemies into a straight line and bullet jump over them to collect whatever they just dropped. At this point, the only ability that really sticks out like a sore thumb is Crush, and even then, it has some use of its own in providing area-wide lockdown. The good thing to Mag's kit is that there's at least a basic incentive to use any of her abilities due to their associated CC or utility, regardless of what level you're fighting against, in contrast to kits like Ember's or Oberon's where some of their abilities achieve pretty much nothing at all past a certain level threshold.

[Roachester]

5 hours ago, Marthrym said:

That's called doing things @ss backwards as far as I'm concerned. The devs are finally doing something, which is good. What would be better is if they had started with the beginning, and finished with the end.

Enemy scaling has a much more central, core role than abilities. It affects more things, more directly, basically it's the foundation, while abilities merely rest on it.

Balancing abilities without taking care of enemy scaling first is extremely misguided and counterproductive. Especially in DE's case. While the quality of their work in several aspects of the game is nothing short of awesome, their track record when it comes to proper balance and fair challenge is rather... awful. They're wasting valuable time, effort and money here. And it's the playerbase who ends up paying the bill, always.

As for cheese, thinking you can get rid of it entirely, or force players to never make use of it even when they don't feel forced to... bit of a delusion, don't you think?^^'

The way I see it, Warframe's three most prominent issues (Frame/Weapon balance, enemy scaling, the griiiiiiiiiind) are all equally severe, or at least close to it. To that end, I don't really think there IS such a thing as a wrong way to approach this. 

They rework us first, the enemies and grind become a bit less bearable

They rework enemies first, we stay ridiculously powerful. Also grind.

They rework the drop tables first, both we and the enemies are still completely and utterly broken.

Granted, they could have probably just tackled all of these things at once, but no one way could really be considered counterproductive. Like you said, it's just a matter of whether or not DE can actually do it properly. If they can, great. If not, things are going to get very, VERY rough.

And while people will always attempt to cheese, DE has complete and total control over the extent to which we can do it. Once more exploits come to rise, it's not unrealistic to think they'll eventually patch most, if not all, of them out.

[(XBOX)Ivan of Jupiter]

1. To open up more possibilities with a frames abilities beyond spamming a single button for an hour plus.

 

2. To lessen the amount of cheese one can do with a single frame. No more map wide stuns through solid steel.

 

3. To bring more outdated frames back into light and make them effective again.

 

That's about the gist of it. I know some will disagree with me or say they're doing all of the above poorly, but that's your opinion. I think theyre doing fine. Would it be better if they fixed frames, enemy scaling, and weapon balancing all at once? Maybe. It'd be a lot less jarring for some players, but if they did that we'd have no content updates for a year or more. I'll take what I can get.

[(PSN)CoolD2108]

4 hours ago, BigBlackCook said:

WOOO slow down there buddy, "Numeric AND percentuall armor reduction to Counter endless scaling.", unless i am understanding you wrong, you're trying to say that she strips armor based on a %, that is false, she only strips a fix amount of armor. All DE did was add things to buff the old bullet attractter, yes it's great but it comes at a cost and they nerfed shield polarize to the floor. shield polarize worked in the void, the hardest content in the game. Now it's useless, while the old bullet attracter was an useable abilty against bombards and bursas. The range of the old shield polarize is much greater than the range of magnetize, and you're trying to tell me that the CC is improved? That is why i think it's a nerf and not a "rework" because if it's a rework, they could have made all mag's abilties flow well with eachother and not just a 1 trick pony that mag still is today.

Fracturing crush got percentuall armor reduction addet. Improved CC trough builds that don't require max^max strength builds on negative duration. Indeed.

 

Magnetice, pull enemys into the Bubble, polarice for shards, Pin/crush them for reduced armor. Sounds pretty flowing to me?

Edited June 25, 2016 by (PS4)CoolD2108

[Tenno29543]

First of all, you can not pull guys into the bubble, i tired and they just go rite thru my bubble, 2nd, the aug was already there before the rework, plus, needing 200% power strength is not an easy thing to do especially if you're trying to keep a nice eff and mod slots for other mods for the magnetize build.

the shards from polarize does not make a huge or dramatic difference in damage.