Could *this* work as solution to powercreep & scaling? (enfasis on questionmark)

[.Nin-JA.]

1 hour ago, (XB1)AnnoyedHaddock said:

It's all well and good reimbursing players for one mod that was reduced in rank from 10 to 5 with a legendary core but here we are talking about hundreds of forma. It would cause a huge amount of animosity within the community.

Legendary forma? Account bound, instantly adds a polarity without resetting level. 

[(XBOX)Prime Pedestal]

Just now, .Nin-JA. said:

Legendary forma? Account bound, instantly adds a polarity without resetting level. 

So I'm going to receive a forma to use in place of the forma I don't have any need for? And also how would this work? DE would have no way of knowing what if any polarities you would like kept so would have to remove all of them from everything which is impractical, and also, they would be giving a huge a portion of players a massive advantage by ensuring they would never have re-level a gun again after using a forma. I've used somewhere in the region of 400-500 which means I'd receive that many legendary forma. Could you imagine someone with 400 legendary cores? 

 

Hardly fair on others when you look at it like that is it?

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

Honestly, the problem with scaling is the fact armor negates 99% of damage at lvl 120+ , rendering all weapons pretty much useless without corrosive projection, plus the fact enemies at these level caps one shot most frames even with maxed redirection , vitality and steel fiber.

 

The fact that even once your remove armor with CP, 98% of weapons do not deal enough damage to kill a lvl 135 enemy doesn't help either. Even Tonkor barely dents enemies without corrosive projection at those levels.

Fixing Scaling would be rather simple... Lower the damage mitigation of armor ,allowing some damage to seep trough at higher levels and probagbly cap enemy damage at reasonable levels so bombads don't oneshot you the minute they get your sights on you.

Edited August 15, 2016 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[Marthrym]

I'd rather make enemies resilient enough to last more than a tenth of second, so level 30 is just way too low. That or make our own weapons less powerful. Also as far as I'm concerned the logical thing to do is to do exactly the opposite of what you propose OP, and cap their damage output to not go up endlessly in the most ret@rded way. It's the cheapest thing about enemy scaling, the fact that you can get insta-gibbed by a stray bullet shot from a lowly grunt.

Edited August 15, 2016 by Marthrym

[.Nin-JA.]

2 minutes ago, (XB1)AnnoyedHaddock said:

So I'm going to receive a forma to use in place of the forma I don't have any need for? And also how would this work? DE would have no way of knowing what if any polarities you would like kept so would have to remove all of them from everything which is impractical, and also, they would be giving a huge a portion of players a massive advantage by ensuring they would never have re-level a gun again after using a forma. I've used somewhere in the region of 400-500 which means I'd receive that many legendary forma. Could you imagine someone with 400 legendary cores? 

 

Hardly fair on others when you look at it like that is it?

You're assuming they don't add or re-balance mods so you'd need about the same effective capacity for a full build. People seem to buy a lot of forma, a major weapon overhaul will definitely include reasons to use them so it doesn't hurt their business model. I can see it being a pain in the &#! to log in after the update and have 400 forma and a bunch of guns you have to individually reapply them to, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. For example Path of Exile does the same thing with skillpoints every time they make changes to the skill tree and people mostly see it as an opportunity. This would be a fairly simple fix too though, just allow players to remove any "legacy" polarity once to redeem a legendary forma from it.

Honestly even if you have leftover "useless" forma it sounds totally fair if not generous, and if you have used 400 forma on guns you've already put in the time and resources so it hardly equates to an advantage. Who would you be getting an advantage over anyway? People in dojo duels?

[Zoretor]

3 hours ago, Marthrym said:

I'd rather make enemies resilient enough to last more than a tenth of second, so level 30 is just way too low. That or make our own weapons less powerful. Also as far as I'm concerned the logical thing to do is to do exactly the opposite of what you propose OP, and cap their damage output to not go up endlessly in the most ret@rded way. It's the cheapest thing about enemy scaling, the fact that you can get insta-gibbed by a stray bullet shot from a lowly grunt.

Nah, I would still prefer to have to provide ninja-like reflexes in dodging, juking, using cover, LoS, or simply killing before being killed, as befits an action game, to avoid getting insta-gibbed, rather than just standing in one place shrugging away shots while spamming your 6 forma synoid simulor or CC nuke, which I find excrutiatingly booooring.

I do, however, agree that it'd be a bummer to get one-shot by a lowly grunt. Maybe those units could be made to have a lot less scaling in their damage?

Edited August 15, 2016 by Zoretor

[DSpite]

8 hours ago, Zoretor said:

(I suppose this (or some version of this) has been mentioned by someone in some post somewhere, but I want to separate this specific idea and put it out there and see if it'd actually be viable or not)

I don't really understand the "deep maths" involved with scaling (even after having watched many videos and read many posts explaining it), but what I do understand is the "in-game feeling" that scaling provides. It's an unpleasant feeling. Specifically when regarding "bullet sponge".

Bullet sponge^(tm) is a problem to me, in any game. It's a cheap, lazy, and most importantly boring way to provide "challenge". Many players don't really care about this, especially when they use their 6 forma'd Sancti Tigrises or Synoid Simulors. The "meta" players don't really care for this, in many cases because CC spam dissolves bullet sponges. Or whatever.

This thread is not really for arguing about CC or meta, but to argue about fun gameplay. I'm not just talking about my fun, though, but a way to make the game fun for all, without losing the "challenge" aspect (challenge is definately fun, for the majority of gamers). I'm talking about fun gameplay, which in my humble opinion bullet sponge^(tm) is most definately not.

Of course bullet sponge^(tm) is directly linked to our good friend "powercreep", and in theory, to the eventual "damage 3.0", in that in order to solve "powercreep", bullet sponge^(tm) is implemented (or vice versa). Stronger weapons => more bullet spongy enemies => stronger weapons, etc.

So, after that loooooooooooong intro that I hope laid out the context for my proposed solution, which tries to tie in "damage 3.0" with "powercreep" and bullet sponge^(tm). Here it is:

TL;DR: Make enemies' EHP cap at level 30, but keep their damage scaling. Kill 'em before they kill you! Optional (margin idea): Enemy accuracy increases with difficulty.

(optional craziness) Elemental mods could now simply provide their respective status effects, instead of stacking damage (this would actually be such a huge change to how elemental and status works, beyond what I could ever imagine, that I'll definately just leave it as optional, but I just really like the sound of it).

The gameplay and systems rework that would birth from this concept I truly think would make for a more "tough but fair" approach. Enemies can actually be killed relatively easily, and you better get on that, or you're dead, because they can still one, two or three shot you (speaking of high level missions, of course).

A list of other immediate benefits I can think of:

• Suddenly there's a use for many mostly unused weapons.
• The supposed "damage 3.0" Serration removal would be easier to manage, and would actually make more sense.
• The supposed "damage 3.0" multishot ammo cost would have more of a chance to play into "player choice" modding.
• Many unused utility mods could now be considered for using.
• All warframe "damage powers", even the "1"s and whatever other currently "lame" ones, can now maintain their use throughout.
• CC powers are now in line with damage powers, so, everybody wins? (questionmark?)

 

So what'cha think, diverse Warframe forum community?

Sorry, I don't see it.

First off, we don't know why enemies even "miss" shots. You can't be 100% always moving in the right direction to cause 100% misses, which means that you reach a stage where you make a jump, miss a slide, stop for a fraction of a second and enemies have reached the insta-kill point. Down you go. Anyone coming to res you now takes more then one second to do so, are stationary, and even with Bubbles or whatever, every bullet hitting removes a layer and because multiple bullets are hitting, every one else now dies, and if a tactic is found as a workaround - say involving res under invisibility - then we are still immortal, as being able to res under fire from 1 million damage rounds is exactly the same as from under 100 million damage rounds - nothing changes.

To me, "challenge" probably means being given more and more things that I have to keep doing or keep track of, or adapt to, at the same time in order to continue a mission, not having to deal with increasingly larger amount of damage, reaching a point that the only way to stay alive is "wall running" everywhere.

Put it this way, as an example mission - and some units will sound similar to ones we have already.

 

Four players are defending a "fort", kind of like in Starship Troopers in the Whiskey Outpost battle. At the start you have regular bugs, but instead of just having the bugs simply get higher levels (like the OP stated), you start having other bugs that act as force Multipliers (but not like DE did with Nullifiers) like the flying ones. Now you have to watch the sky as well as the walls. Then they might start to try and pick up normal units and drop them on you, which will force players to also track bugs inside the fort, then you might have larger bugs that try to stay out of most weapon ranges (Snipers anyone?) that try to long range lob acid goo into the fort. Players might even be forced out of the fort protective cover to go and take them out.

After that you might have the next bug being a tunneler that can carry other units. Maybe players can spot them starting tunnels on the map and know they are coming. Maybe players might have to jump fort and run up the tunnel they are making and shoot them in the (less armoured?) backside, otherwise they will get a tunnel breach and an influx of units.

Basically you keep stacking more and more things that the players need to "juggle" to continue running the mission. To me, just "stacking damage" would be totally out of our control. This is the kind of difference in say, having a puzzle game that gives you ever more increasingly tricky puzzles and a set timer, then one that keeps the puzzles the same complexity and just makes the timer shorter and shorter, as eventually you WILL reach a point where the puzzle barely gives you enough time to see it before the timer hits zero, while in the first case, players can slowly adapt to the harder puzzle difficulty, and feel more rewarded from completing it.

Sure, you might hit a wall either way, but one wall seems much less fun to me.

 

Edited August 15, 2016 by DSpite

[ShiraHagane]

*emphasis

[DrBorris]

The only thing less fun than a bullet sponge is being one shot... so no, I don't think it is that easy. If anything I would do the opposite (and remove the polynomial part of scaling and just make it linear).

[Marthrym]

12 hours ago, Zoretor said:

Nah, I would still prefer to have to provide ninja-like reflexes in dodging, juking, using cover, LoS, or simply killing before being killed, as befits an action game, to avoid getting insta-gibbed, rather than just standing in one place shrugging away shots while spamming your 6 forma synoid simulor or CC nuke, which I find excrutiatingly booooring.

I do, however, agree that it'd be a bummer to get one-shot by a lowly grunt. Maybe those units could be made to have a lot less scaling in their damage?

The problem with that is that no amount of dodging, juking, or reflexes are enough when you face hundreds of enemies with aimbot, wall hack and a hivemind. I mean I really don't see how you think you can manage that. I have never, in 3 years, seen a single solitary player pull that off, not getting hit even once in a mission where enemies are everywhere and can neutralize abilities just by being in the vicinity. Ever. Also several enemies make cover irrelevant, like Bombards, Napalms, Railgun MOAs, just to name a few, as well as enemies with harmful auras, etc. once again invalidating that possibility. There are too many sources of unavoidable damage in this game for this way to work IMO. The only thing that counters this is powers. And we've seen the direction the devs are going with this too, more and more mechanics that take them away instead of actual challenging content.

[Zoretor]

Yeah, I guess that's true: You can't actually avoid bullets, practically ever. I was investing too much on the idea of low HP of enemies to be able to kill 'em off before they can actually damage you, but, yeah... 

So, I guess my question has been answered (and then some).

It has definately been an interesting read (for me).