Enemy Level Is Misleading

[Lady_Khaos]

In the current state of the game, enemy level is a terrible indicator. Here is how the enemy level system currently works:

as level increases, resistance values get multiplied, meaning the enemies are harder and harder to kill (hence why Armor Ignoring weapons are king against high level Grineer). Uncommon and rare mods are slightly more likely to drop. However, affinity gained is barely higher than the lowest level enemies.

This is where the problem is. As you rank up your gear, you need exponentially more affinity to go from one level to the next. The formula being:

 

Frame/Sentinel is (Level)^2x1000= increase of ONE level, Weapon is (Level)^2x500= increase of ONE level.

 

But affinity granted by kills does not scale anywhere close to compensating for this. The current scaling means that if you are grinding for experience, your time will be better spent on Mercury, Venus, and Saturn because you will be getting almost the same amount of experience with kills that take a fraction of the time. This makes no sense! As you rank up, you should need to head to higher level areas to compensate for the increase is affinity needed to rank up. Killing higher level enemies needs to actually be rewarding. It needs to be more than "Congratulations, you made a little bit of progress on the nonexistent storyline." -.-

 

Affinity per enemy by level for reference:

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Experience_Mechanics

Edited July 3, 2013 by Khaos_Zand3r

[KamaNightfire]

This is why I always do Jupiter Defense Missions :P

[Chronodroid]

To rank I go infested def missions (when are we getting infested mobile defs, DE?!) and just try to make my team stick to the pod for more shared xp

[taiiat]

honestly, makes sense. scaling the rewards for enemies for their 'difficulty'. 

 

and, defenses should not literally be the only mission to play. that's dumb. the other missions should be worth playing too. 

[Sasha-]

Agree, tougher enemies should yield considerably more affinity

 

But personally, I level up my gear on more difficult planets simply because I prefer the challenge and it makes leveling up more interesting

[fatpig84]

I level up Skana prime on Palus.

[lstalri]

The amount of time/effort it takes to rank up weapons as it is now seems perfectly fine to me, but I see what you are trying to get at with the need to go to higher level areas in order to gain the exp necessary.  Perhaps if we could scale the exp required to level up and the exp gained proportionally between the higher levels (of both the weapon and the enemy) that would be a nice way to implement this concept. 

[InsomniacOvrLrd]

This is a very good point. I'd never looked at the graphs, and the numbers are fairly enlightening.  What this says is 'playing on missions with level 50 enemies is a total waste of your time'.  And here i liked to play on palus and outer terminus, but nope.  Just sit back and sneeze on level:wimp enemies all day, level your crap up in about the same time, with 1/100 the effort.

 

Please fix this mess.

[Lady_Khaos]

This is a very good point. I'd never looked at the graphs, and the numbers are fairly enlightening.  What this says is 'playing on missions with level 50 enemies is a total waste of your time'.  And here i liked to play on palus and outer terminus, but nope.  Just sit back and sneeze on level:wimp enemies all day, level your crap up in about the same time, with 1/100 the effort.

 

Please fix this mess.

 

Exactly. I really want the challenge of harder enemies, but the challenge itself isn't enough of an incentive to do it. You should be rewarded for taking on the challenge, not punished with a longer grind.