Difficulty Mode Suggestions

[MJ12]

Okay, we know difficulty modes are being implemented in some form or another, with 'Nightmare' mode. Let me make some suggestions for differing difficulty modes:

 

"Farming" Mode: "When you really need that Rubedo right now and don't want to struggle for it. Enemies have reduced intelligence but drops are poorer.".

-Poor Enemy AI, no coordination (like right now)

-Normal damage and health

-Enemies drop reduced numbers of mods. Rare mod drops do not happen.

-Stalker does not visit, no environmental conditions.

 

The New "Normal" Mode: For people who want a slight challenge.

-Enemy AI is more aggressive coordinated via an AI "Director", will attempt complex maneuvers such as ambushing, flanking, suppressing enemies in cover, and more interesting behaviors such as suicide grenade attacks, covering reloading allies, and so on.

-Normal damage and health

-Normal drops

-Normal environmental conditions

 

"Arcade" Mode: Because sometimes you just want to murder a ton of things. Try to get a high score in murder! You genocidal maniac, you.

-Poor enemy AI, no coordination

-Reduced damage and health

-Enemies spawn in increased numbers and far more rapidly

-Stalker does not visit, no environmental conditions.

 

"Maso" Mode (i.e. Frustration Mode): For masochists only. If you enjoy destroying your computer in rage, this is the mode for you.
-Enemy AI and spawns will adapt to your weapons loadout. If you have weak melee weapons, tons of enemies try to force you into melee. If you have short range weapons only, there will be lots of long-range units and snipers. Enemies will use grenades liberally, and they will set up booby traps.

-Increased damage and health

-Enemy drops will only exist to taunt you. They will never drop anything you need in-mission. Ever. If you have a sniper rifle and pistol, expect only shotgun and rifle ammo to drop. If you have an assault rifle, expect rifle ammo to never drop. Health orbs will only drop if you are maxed out on health, same with energy orbs (as long as there's nothing to use powers on).

-Enemies will attempt to make combat as drawn-out and brutal for you as possible. If they're going to lose, they will deliberately attempt sore-loser tactics such as forcing a lockdown by shooting out the windows (thus wasting your time), jumping in front of your bullets (thus making you waste ammo on a corpse), dropping live grenades when killed in melee, and other fun things. Infested, for example, may attempt to pen you in with their corpses so you can be given a hug from multiple Toxic Ancients.

-Increased other drops. No special non-cosmetic drops.

-Environmental conditions will be tailor-made to piss you off. High shields? Expect frost levels every mission. High agility? Expect an environmental condition to make you slow. Good armor? Yeah well, everyone's got armor piercing weapons. Long ranged weapons? Sorry! Weapon accuracy compromised!

 

And well, you have DE's own Nightmare mode. Thoughts? Comments? Hate mail?

[Exhack]

"Maso" Mod: All hail the new flesh.

[MJ12]

"Maso" Mod: All hail the new flesh.

 

Also, I forgot. Enemies will camp your corpse in Maso mode. Just in case you burn a Revive. Mostly to add excitement. The idea is that you're playing against totally unfair MAJOR LEAGUE GAMERS who will do anything to 'win' (and by 'win' we mean kill the players).

Edited July 10, 2013 by MJ12

[Fog_Ducker]

We should name maso mode impossibru mode, also maybe make stalker spawn without the flickering lights?

Edited July 10, 2013 by TastesLikeGoat

[azmyth1]

The primary concern I have is with the difficulty/late game.  It's not terribly hard to get to level 30 with a 'frame and weapon or two, and once you have, even Pluto is fairly easy.  I am a pretty hardcore FPSer so perhaps other players are having more difficulty, but based on what I see while playing coop, I don't think that's the case.  I have a few suggestions which I hope you find useful.

 

1. Use statistics to determine what is tough.  Do a random sample of players and see which missions they fail and which ones they succeed on.

 

Which faction has the highest kill rate of players.  Perhaps nerf the highest, boost the lowest and leave the middle one unchanged.  I have a 99%+ pass rate for hacking consoles, so perhaps lower the timer a bit until people start to fail maybe 5-10% of their hack attempts.

 

2. Multiplayer difficulty scaling.  I don't seem to notice any increase in difficulty for multiple players.  So there seem to be just as many/hard opponents while soloing as their are with 4 players in your party.  Perhaps I am mistaken.

 

I think Torchlight II does a good job of this, and what they do is scale the player's damage back the more players there are.  You don't want to scale all player stats because then you wind up over-nerfing big parties, but lowering damage simply puts the players and enemies back on equal footing for DPS.  Furthermore, it doesn't hurt lag.  If you just added a ton more enemies, you'd run into lag issues with large parties.

3. Bosses underpowered/not all that fun in large groups.  Somewhat related to #2, bosses can get kind of silly to fight in large groups especially with a couple CC frames like Vauban and Frost.  A couple players run up and stun lock the boss and the rest just pound the crap out of the poor guy.  I realize that while farming for warframe parts, players are bound to get really good at fighting a particular boss, but unless you are soloing, bosses seem a bit underpowered.

 

The best boss you have right now is the Jackal.  It does a lot of damage and can attack multiple players.  Get rid of/reduce the effectiveness of the leg-stun and you've got a challenging boss even for fairly high level players.  Humanoid bosses should be overall more resistant to CC.  Hordes of lesser enemies should continually spawn during the fight to pull some of the players away from pounding on the boss and force them to keep the lesser enemies under control.  Increasing the mobility of bosses by adding teleporting or flying might allow them to escape stun locks and keep the fight more fluid and entertaining.  It's not about increasing stats per se.  It's more about keeping players on their toes during the fight and preventing it from being a simple slug fest at point blank range.

 

4. Better "elite" enemies for Infested and Corpus.  Greneer are actually pretty darn good in this regard.  Bombadiers/Napalm/Heavy gunners/Seekers/Scorpions are all quite difficult to deal with and represent a variety of threats to the Tenno.  Corpus needs a more elite close range unit, perhaps related to the Jackel/Hyena bosses but in a smaller/nerfed version for random encounters.  Let's be honest, the hapless Prod Crewemen don't really cut the mustard against a Warframe with a Scindo.

 

However, the Corpus are still better off than the poor Infested at high levels.  The Disrupter Ancients still send a panicked feeling through even the most battle hardened Tenno, but that's pretty much the only big time threat.  Run at the Warframes and then stun them pretty much sums up the Chargers, Runners, Leapers and even the Toxic and Healer Ancients.

 

The Infested need a counter to the rush.  When you're playing against the other two factions, if you rush too much you can quickly find yourself overwhemed by massed ememies shooting the crap out of you.  In Infested missions, you only really run into trouble when you slow down.

 

Some ideas:

A winged creature that shoots a tacky goo which slows the player like the Orokin Void floor traps.

An enemy which shoots poisoned spikes similar to the Acrid.  It could be slow moving, but set them up in ambushes and force the player to take cover.

More enemies which can "pull" the player like Mag or the J3 Golem.

 

5. Planet level difficulties:  There aren't enough high level Greneer missions; the highest is Ceres at 25 - 35.  7/13 planets have difficulty between 15 and 25.  You could spread each planet over a 5 level difficulty and you'd wind up with difficulties 1-5 for Mercuty and 60-65 for Pluto, which wouldn't be too far off from what it is now.  Maybe throw one mission from each faction in each planet that way there is a level for each faction for each difficulty, even if each planet still has one dominant faction.

 

6. In Livestream 5, you mentioned allowing players to customize their personal difficulty.    Instead of modifying the enemies, which as you note would be difficult to implement for multiplayer, modify the player's stats.  For example, at the highest difficulty, a player would do reduced damage and have maybe half health and shields.  I know you can already do something similar because in the "cold missions", shields are halved.