Some Arcwing Ideas

[ZeroWolfe]

I love the idea behind Archwing missions (its pretty thrilling to go speeding through space) but it needs some work.

Mechanics

First off lets address the mechanics problem in the room: the auto orientation is messing with people's heads (and yes everyone knows it). Simple fix would be to map roll to "Q" and "E"  and move the item wheel to 6 and melee to the middle mouse button (you can do this now and sorry console users I don't know your defaults). Next off a fix to the map is needed; I would propose something along the lines of this:

 

Pretty standard 3D map. Okay, yes I did that in paint and yes my artistic skills are terrible.

The blue circle is the plane that you are on, red dots are enemies, and red lines show where they are in relation to your plane (above/below).

Mods, mods, mods

Mods for Archwings currently are extremely limited and lack the diversity and power of mods for Warframes and weapons. Pretty simple fix just have remove the current mods for Archwings/Archguns/Archmelees and replace them with the Warframe/Main weapons/melee mods (only unique mod would be the Archgun mod that affects ammo regen but then again that could just be termed "reload speed"). This would give us more robust modding and more survivability at higher levels.

Companions in Space!

Yep that's right! Bring along your Kubrow or Kavat with their own set of wings! (I was going to add a concept picture here but you saw how good my map is) Let them fly around taking down enemies and buffing you! And Sentinels? Have them ride along in a R2-D2/BB-8-esque spot on your Archwing (the Archwing is the X-wing in this metaphor). A Vacuum in the Vacuum of space for everyone! Currently it is really hard to pick up the drops in Archwing missions this would alleviate that problem (note the range on Vacuum would have to be boosted for Archwings in order to truly fix this).

More missions

Enter the one place in our galaxy that hasn't really been covered: the asteroid belt. This would be an Archwing exclusive area littered with resource rich asteroids, dangerous enemy ships to take down, and hidden colonies to protect. Here's the mission list:

Archwing Excavation - Scan asteroids to discover their resource content, attach an asteroid buster drill to what you want, and defend it until it breaks the asteroid. Possibility to find all resources, endo, and maybe a new resource which is automatically sold for credits upon completion (it would be strange to find credits in an asteroid). Additional mission rewards like relics same as standard excavation. This mission would technically take place on a endless map; after each rotation reward players can vote to extract or move to the next area which spawns new asteroids to mine.

Archwing Ship Sabotage - Attack and take out a Grineer, Corpus, or Infested ship. First destroy the ships cannons and thrusters then fly into the ship, land, plant a series of bombs, and get out. Each tenno will carry a bomb to plant in critical areas (it can be dropped and picked up by a teammate but this is to encourage teamwork and let everyone play a part in the objective). This could go two ways: either when you go to plant the bomb you are in your Warframe or you stay in your Archwing and fly through trenches to get to areas. Planting would go similar to a spy mission where you do a hack to activate the bomb once in a alarmed room which gets protected by a blast door 30 seconds after triggering the alarm (unique Tenno console hack which could be the same as the Orokin one; maybe a slide puzzle or one of those "pipes" mini games).

Archwing Colony Defense - Tenno you have received a distress signal. Go to the location and defend the hidden colony from the Grineer or Corpus. Waves of enemies as like you would expect from your normal defense but add in missiles launched by a ship which will deal massive damage to the colony if not shot down.

[Chillingo117]

I love the map idea but while in theory it will be easy, practically it will be a bit tougher. If we attempted to put a whole 3D map into the small square we currently have it would be hard to see anything. 

Mods, agreed. Nuff said.

companions? Not so much. I just think it's not very practical to bring a kubrow or kavat into space. Sentinels would be more practical. And I think a vacuum should be a thing on the AW itself anyway. We shouldn't even need a mod or even a sentinel to have a small vacuum style effect in space. 

I like the idea of having a new AW exclusive zone. With the excav, I think it would be best to have a limited map area and just have resource rich asteroids casually float in at the same rate as we would get normal excavation points.

With the sabotage I'd say just a cripple or actually sabotage instead of straight out destroy. So we end up blowing up a chunk of ship. I'm thinking we could plant the bombs similar to how space mom teleports in life support units during survival. So we find the weak point, give lotus our coords (by just staying in the zone similar to interception) and then lotus teleports in the bomb and we have about about 10 secs to flee the zone before it blows. 

As for the defence we have a defence target which is a hidden colony. I'm not quite sure how the colony would manifest. I'm imagining that the whole fight takes place with lots of small "homes" but we protect special points such as a general reactor or life support station. The enemies attack that special point (which could also be a food storage warehouse or water storage). Then it would simply be us Tenno in AW defending that point until the steel meridian can take over the defence (just like the extraction team in other endless mission).

Edited February 5, 2017 by Chillingo117

[Devakia]

The orientation and map I can't comment on (I don't seem bothered by it at all, yet most, if not all I know in terms of warframe players do suffer from it).

Mods: Simply bring the numbers of our mods up-to-speed with normal weapon/melee mods and we're there.

Companions: Strange idea, But I suppose it could work in some sense. The Kubrow/Kavat "wings" could be based on simply a "harness" attached for wings on them (changeable via cosmetics of course)

Missions:...YES! YES!

Excavation - Would be perfect.

Sabotage - Perhaps the current arch-wing mission mode called sabotage but with several targets/means to complete & a moving ship.

Colony Defense - Perhaps defense of small Outposts that Lotus has heir splinter-cells in? "Tenno, a Grineer Galleon Platoon has found and is now enroute to a Cell outpost, assist them in the defense".