A Little Feedback From A Newish Player

[VoidianAgent]

Before I start, I've been playing for a couple of weeks, got to level 7, got most warframes so far and currently trying to test all weapons, obviously I haven't seen all of the content so I can't comment on anything, feel free to ignore this and I'm sure some won't agree with several points but still, it's just my opinion.

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

-Starter frames

 

I started my first account with Mag, before the buff, it was quite a mistake, honestly I got Loki recently too and I love him, he's great, but he's not "new player" material either, as the description says Excalibur is a no-brainer for beginners, at least among those listed frames, the choices might need some tweaking, Ember might be a better choice for beginners, I'm not sure which frame could be used as the 3rd choice, perhaps frost, not because he's "newbie-friendly" but because people would want to get frost prime eventually anyway?

 

-Difficulty

 

As you play the game, you get more modules, and upgrade them heavily making them more and more powerful, to the point where a level 10 weapon can often be decent at endgame content with a single heavily upgraded mod, or 2 if you have polarities, not to mention potatoes, the difficulty needs some hefty changes, cover needs to be necessary in a gunfight, melee must be deadly, right now I can easily solo even T3 runs which are the far above the rest of all content in the game excluding defense missions which, scale forever. This shouldn't ever happen.

I'm fairly sure part of the reason is how mods work, flat damage increase probably shouldn't multiply every other elemental damage mod, perhaps if everything worked on base damage? Then there's the multishot issue which does basically the same thing, either cripple these mods and mechanics, or buff enemies heavily. The problem is, as a first account, using a Braton MK1 unmoded, the game is hard enough (if you don't get high levels in your missions taking all the fun away from you destroying everything) so raising the mobs power might make the game too hard for new players without the good stuff, tricky subject here, but it should be at the top of your list.

 

-Endgame content

 

The game's a bit lacking here, I'm crafting a buttload of weapons and frames all the time but I'm sure it will get boring eventually, in fact I get bored very easily, what's keeping me here is probably the dinamic mechanics, combat, etc, which is quite fun, but you guys shouldn't rely on nothing  but this. PvP is a way to deal with it but I'm fairly sure the community wouldn't want to see how it would change the rest of the game, the balance changes, and the community itself, adding competition to a PvE game. Hard/legendary difficulties might work in the short term but it will need more, there needs to be a point in doing them besides farming and a leaderboard.

 

-Plastids

 

@(*()$ plastids, seriously, this S#&$ needs to drop like water if it's gonna be needed for nearly every item in the game.

 

-Trading

 

Could be fun, some players love to "play the market" but the economy might need to change, credits are worthless and with the current amount of content it might be a bad move, there isn't a whole lot for people to do and it might eliminate a lot of farming, but keep it as an idea for the future.

 

-Pistol mods

 

There are some obvious imbalances there, like the No Return mod, some numbers don't make much sense, but it's hard to ask for buffs when the game's currently so easy.

 

-Melee Mods

 

There needs to be better, and more varied mods for melee, there aren't many choices, and among the choices we have not many are good, plus melee weapons are split between 2 types of builds making the problem even worse.

 

-Weapons

 

We need more ranged stuff for sure, but the stuff we have is pretty cool.

 

-Founders pack

 

I supported the game, I wanted to be a founder as wel but I can't justify the cost, it's not worth it when 50% plat discounts exist, if they worked with these I'd be a founder by now, instead I chose to get 3k plat for less, kinda sucks.

 

-Cash

 

You're doing the right thing, selling convenience and time, not power, it's great, but you'll have to change a lot of stuff, first the game needs to be truly F2P if you're gonna label it as such, 2 frame slots and a couple of weapons doesn't cut it, make it 4, maybe even 6 frames, and 2 pages of weapons, let people get a taste of the game before they feel like they need to expand, you're cockblocking them too soon, my first frame was a Rhino, it was hell to farm for it having nothing, plus I got terrible luck, it was a horrible experience, I would have never known all the following frames would have been a lot easier to farm for, and sometimes even fun, let people know that. An alternative is to give "slot recipes" or something so people don't feel like they are playing just a trial of a game, slots are a necessity, not just convenience, specially with the amount given and how the mastery ranks work.

That being said, some great items are far too cheap, while others are overpriced as F***, most frames have an absurd price, the packs, and the colors, I'm not sure if anyone buys them at all, meanwhile necessary items that people have, and will WANT to buy, tons of them, are far too cheap, such as slots, formas and potatoes, most players will hate me for saying this but I'm saying it from the company's PoV, double their price, people will still want them, but make the obviously overpriced S#&$ at the very least 50% cheaper, it's not even worth looking at them as it is.

 

Edit: Oh and the credit booster is completely worthless, as we know credits are too easy too get, plus it says it only boosts credit pickups so....a real "noob trap", plus if you plan on ever implementing trade you might want to get rid of this now.

 

-Frames I tested

 

Rhino

Was quite lackluster, pretty good now, however the new iron skin is mad overpowered in every normal mission, while quite useless in later wave defenses, haven't tested in a T3 run yet, it needs to scale somehow, as it is now it's just bad, it can't be that good and that useless. Maybe a new skill, like "Rhino deactivates his shields and boosts his armor, giving him some damage reduction and mad regeneration"? At least his 150 armor would have a purpose that way.

 

The new stomp is awesome.

 

Nyx

 

Let's be real, Chaos is her real ultimate, as much as I love it, it might need to be swapped, in fact I don't even bring her 4th skill. Great frame overal.

 

Ember

 

Skills 1 and 3 are fairly useless/outclassed.... WHAT IF, they tanted targets? would be fairly sweet with her Overheat. Just saying.

 

Frost Prime

 

Great frame, as great as frost really, but some skills don't scale very well, this might need your attention, that polarity isn't too good either, it can be useful but it limits builds severely, I'm almost using a forma to remove it.

 

 

-Weapons

 

Paris

 

I could be wrong but it's just outclassed by Dread in every way, it needs some love, some guy even said Paris is now history with the new Snipetron Vandals, kinda sad, it's a cool weapon. I mean sure it can work, everything can, mods powerlevel is absurd, even a Skana can rape everything in this game with a potato and mods, but it's still outclassed.

 

Burston and Sicarus

 

Not bad at all, but the way the recoil works is fairly annoying, can't it shoot 3 bullets in the "area" instead?

 

Kunai and Despair

 

Might be overpowered, I mean, so much power, in a silent weapon with perfect accuracy? Something's wrong. Still I love them.

 

Glaive

Not as bad as people say, but it needs to compete with Kestrel, the extra bounces are really a liability, this could probably be fixed by greatly increasing it's flight speed, making so it can bounce off 3 targets using the same amount of time the Kestrel takes to get (and ragdoll) one. Balance trough incomparables as your design team will understand.

 

-Melee

 

Basic attacks are nice and all but I feel like they are outclassed by charge builds, I don't know how to fix it, maybe buffing pressure point a bit? But it might require your attention, single target weapons are also a bit tricky seeing as you can just shoot the target if it's alone.

 

-Power colors

 

Great addition, but I think an option to turn on/off custom colors wouldn't be such a bad idea, some people don't like to see pink fire for example, some do, and that's fine, people could just disable the custom colors in their own screen while others can see all the colors they want, everybody wins. Powers also need their own color slot.

 

-Helmets

Yes I still think nearly every one of them looks horrible and I'd pay plat to get faces, just saying.

 

-Armor

 

Mentioned this @ Rhino but yeah, it's fairly pointless if it doesn't do crap while shields are up, something might need to change, I'm sure most, if not all, frames with low MS would trade all their armor for a boost in speed, it's just not worth it to pay for armor with speed. And seeing as HP doesn't regenerate it's not worth it to make an "HP tank", haven't tried it with a Trinity yet but idk, even if it works it's far too limited and dependant.

 

 

Edit: Just a random idea, what if shield values were really low with a few exceptions, such as Frost, "shield tanks", making it a bad idea to slow for shield enhancers on most frames, boosting the usefulness of armor and healing? Obviously this would require major changes to armor values, some mechanics, and even add more viable ways to regenerate health in missions, but it could be interesting, or not, just an idea.

 

-Plastids

 

Again, F*** plastids.

 

-Party scaling

 

This is just a suggestion but, more people just make everything easier right? So why not buff mobs for each new member? You've got to be careful though as if it gets too hard people will just chose to solo all the time, you don't want this to happen in an online game, keep the overall difficulty about the same, solo or in teams, it's hard to do I know but it's IMO, the ideal.

Another idea is to increase drop rates if you aren't solo, to encourage people to play together, it's the whole point of online games anyway.

 

-Environmental Hazards

 

These should be deadly, not kidding, they should either deal massive damage or a flat % scaling at every level, you should be afraid of exploding barrels, fires, etc, just adds to the excitement.

 

-Sentinels

 

These guys need more mod variety, and some mods seem...Overpowered, like Guardian, the game was feeling like easy mode at all levels, so I crafted a shade and it couldn't equip Guardian yet, boy did I feel squishy, it makes a huge difference, yet people don't even notice or realize why they are so hard to kill.

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I'm probably forgetting something but ohwell, just my opinions and a few suggestions, this game has potential, but it does require a lot of polishing.

Edited July 10, 2013 by VoidianAgent

[iamSippyCup]

Most thorough post I've ever seen. As a mainly F2P player I have to disagree with you about slots, I think that they offer enough to free players already, but I can see your point. +1

[winters.prime]

nice post but yeah @(*()$ plastids >:(

[Boyos]

The big advantage of the Paris over the dread is Paris has armor ignore so it does true damage to armored targets. Stack on armor pierce mod and that will increase its damage aginst grinner, and corpus crewmen.

[VoidianAgent]

The big advantage of the Paris over the dread is Paris has armor ignore so it does true damage to armored targets. Stack on armor pierce mod and that will increase its damage aginst grinner, and corpus crewmen.

Dunno, judging by the comments: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/74271-paris-vs-dread/  and the quote from the wiki I believe Dread is better than Paris in every scenario, but I'm too lazy to do the math myself so I'm trusting the people who did it.

Edited July 10, 2013 by VoidianAgent

[Boyos]

Dunno, judging by the comments: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/74271-paris-vs-dread/  and the quote from the wiki I believe Dread is better than Paris in every scenario, but I'm too lazy to do the math myself so I'm trusting the people who did it.

Almost everyone in that thread agree with me, paris for corp/grinner. Dread for infested. Crit build on the dread is better damage but your counting on crit.

[VoidianAgent]

Almost everyone in that thread agree with me, paris for corp/grinner. Dread for infested. Crit build on the dread is better damage but your counting on crit.

Yeah but I mean, after that wiki-guy-quote no math was presented, people just seem to assume it's better vs armored targets when it really doesn't seem like it, and it kinda makes sense.

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

"Here's the thing about the Dread vs. Paris. If both weapons crit, your looking at 150 vs. 300 damage. That means on crit, the Dread does double damage. The enemy's armor would need to be 50% to make the Paris as good. Unfortunately, basically every enemy hits beyond this armor once the lvl reaches 80's and up. 

Looking at the direct damage, the Paris wins. But the problem the ENTIRE Warframe community seems to have is that they only look at the base damage. They don't take elemental damage into account.

The thing is that every enemy has a different resistance for each element, and the Paris armor ignore DOES NOT affect elemental damage. Because the Dread's elemental damage scales off of a base that's 50% higher, the Dread's elemental damage does far more damage. Do this simple calculation: a paris and dread both crit on an enemy and both of them have a 60% AP mod on. In terms of critdamage(base(enemy armor) + elemental), the paris will deal 1.5(100(1) + 60) for 240 damage. The Dread will deal 2(150(x) + 90). That means the enemy's armor (x) would have to be 20% (or 0.2) before the Dread would do less damage than the Paris.

When I realized this, I also realized that the more elemental damage you have on the Dread, the more armor the enemy would need to make up for it. Since the enemy's resistances to elements would be same on both weapons, the Dread has an innate bonus from it's higher base damage and it's higher crit ratio. Theoretically, the elemental damage on the Dread would do more damage than the Paris even if the enemy armor reduced the base damage to 0. To find the magnitude of elemental damage you would need to reach this point, take graphing calculator and compare the Paris' equation 1.5(100 + x) to the Dread equation 2(0 + 1.5x). These equations COMPLETELY nullify the Dread's base damage and shows the elemental : base damage ratio you would in % on the x variable. They intersect at x = 100, which means that if your elemental damage magnitude is %100 of your base (i.e. your base and elemental damage is split 50/50), your dread will match the Paris in damage with the exact same mods AND assuming the enemy's armor COMPLETELY negates the Dread's base damage. If you do more elemental damage than base damage (which can be EASILY achieved with a lvl AP mod and any other lvl 5 elemental mod, picking the right elements against the right faction boosts the elemental magnitude even more) than your Dread's elemental damage will excede the Paris base and elemental damage COMBINED.

In conclusion, with maxed mods, your Dread will do more damage in every scenario simply because it's base stats scale elemental damage so much better than the Paris. Note that only one enemy in the game can scale enough armor to reduce the Dread's damage to 0, so the Dread does SIGNIFICANTLY more damage to every lvl 100 enemy in the game. The Paris armor ignore simply is not enough to counter the far superior stats on the Dread. If you still don't believe the Dread is better, have fun doing less damage with the Paris."

Edited July 11, 2013 by VoidianAgent