Starting missions at higher levels

[Chewarette]

Hello all,

I'm that kind of guy that would do Survivals all day long. Sometimes I even like doing the Sorties missions more than once just for the setup.

It seems to me that we're missing some kind of options to increase the missions' difficulty. Beyond the spawn rate that is abysmally low sometimes, I have the feeling that a lot of missions are completely boring for way too long.

I'd love to farm ODD/ODS to help with the Hema research, but 20-wav'ing ODD or 20-minut'ing ODS is as interesting as staying 20 minutes in your Liset looking at Saturn's rotating. You can't hold your combo counter past 2x, you don't really care about sleeping in all the poison pools because that doesn't hit, you don't even care about a theoretical target priority because they'll all end being one-shotted. ODD and ODS begin to be "interesting" (as much as the high-level content of Warframe can be) at the 40th or 60th mark.

And that's the problem with nearly all missions. If you don't want to spend 90 minutes in a Survival but you still want to have some bit of fun, the options are limited to Kuva Fortress, Sedna, Sedna's side of the Void, and maybe Pluto. If you ever want to do a long run on Taveuni or Mot and you gear up consequently, then the first 30 minutes will not be challenging at all. All the other endlesses below Pluto are limited to Alerts (2 rounds), Sorties (2 rounds, 3 if Interception), specific-node mission like Nightmare or Kuva (basically one rotation) and fissures (most of the time, 1 round. If you're lucky, 4, if you're very lucky, 5. Never more).

Why couldn't we have an option, maybe only valid in a pre-made group, to set the beginning of the mission at a higher level ? For example, I want to do some Excavation on Earth but without level 4 enemies, I could decide to set-up the mission to start at the 2k cryotics mark or with level 80 enemies. Of course, you wouldn't have the rewards for skipped rotations and you can only start with A rotation. This would only upgrade the level and spawn rate of enemies, afterwards it's just a "normal" mission in terms of rotations and rewards.

[Marine027]

My personal opinion, i see more challange in actually havea mechanic like fighting a boss., not just fight waves of geting stornger enemys to onyl relay later on sepcific weapons or frames.

I myself find endless missions boring and not challanging, because in the end all end up the same, camp in some corner or corridor and spawm weapons and abilitys.

While bosses are mostly immune to such atleast, you have to think on some more and not just blindly fire. Just my personal oppinion.

Also some bosses do scale actually already while we at it, like Vor with high gear he starts at lvl 30-50 spawning mobs also around that level. So he starts 40 lvls higher then his mission is.

So i guess we can do such, bring back conclave rating and let it scale the level difficulty in the missions.

On the other end, peopld will complain also not able to do things just quickly for some stuff like alerts.

[LSG501]

I think it would be nice if once you hit a certain MR level a new option(s) appears on the lower level enemy where it has a higher enemy tier to fight.

So say earth, a tileset I enjoy but is stupidly low level for an MR20 player, could have the low level for the new players, then another one or two 'tiers' could be added for maps where they increase the base level by 15 levels (like mid level star map) and another one for +30 enemies (like high level star map).  There could even be another one if they wanted for 'sortie' level too.    In essence a low, medium and high level enemy for each map which is something which should be doable because you can get sorties on any map just with higher level enemies.

[Minak]

I understand you sooo much. And 100% endorse the idea. I once had some idea too, of 2 variants of the missions, or at least alerts and invasions. First option would be everything as it is, for new and casual players, but second would be some kind of 'nightmare' mode with at least enemies levels escalated already from the beggining, or some other difficulty improvement. However I highly oppose ideas like 'eximus stronghold', at least until it will be heavy tweaked.

[TheDemon117]

The only problem I can see with this is that with higher enemies you get a lot more xp and I think more eximus which means even more xp. Love the idea just think they probably won't do it because of that.

[DefectiveMagus]

39 minutes ago, Chewarette said:

If you don't want to spend 90 minutes in a Survival but you still want to have some bit of fun

If you want to have fun and the enemies arent challenging enough than try using weaker weapons,ta da! :D everybody can go indefinitely long with lets say,tigris (any variant),slow nova and a damaging frame.You can easily pass any part of the game if you chose to do so.Its on you to chose how hard you want the mission to be.The fun and challenging part is using weaker/other weapons and trying to mod them in a interesting/good way.You can do the same thing that you do with crit build soma prime or tonkor that you can do with lets say...miter! :D a personal favourite.You have so many weapons and mods in the game you just need to try to use them.Recently what i have been doing is using a mitter with a riven and trying to use just that with the riven giving an insane +200% slash,so there was a lot of cutting :D or taking tetra with the mod that gives the bullets bounce,or something that i did recently is use the new spear weapon to hold enemies in one spot and than use the staticor to irradiate all the enemies near the spear :D 

What im trying to say is,there is no end game in warframe because you have too strong guns and warframes,only possible endgame would be that more than half of the enemies are nullifiers and the other half are like kuva guardians,requiring special order of things to kill it.

So start getting some rivens and start going crazy with moding and using other weapons.

[Daiwulf]

Many MMOs have raid/instance options to choose misison level (enemy base scaling), tier (enemies have stats multiplied and extra attacks) and group size (more people = more loot, more health...). People either run high level content for exp and better loot, or run low level for resource farm.
We could be able to choose the node, then set enemy level (like in the simulacrum), capped by the lowest MR of the squad, so it would prevent low MR leeching from pro squads. Drops could be sightly scaled up to compensate slower killing times and exp adjusted to prevent 5-wave 0->30 leveling.

Or instead of getting any node to do this, make the Dark Sectors like this, and add faction varieties to the DS so it won't be always infested.

[ChuckMaverick]

1 hour ago, Chewarette said:

You can't hold your combo counter past 2x

Tangential to your main point, but using both Body Count and Drifting Contact allows you to keep your combo counter up from one defense wave to the next.

[Chewarette]

9 minutes ago, AoBaka said:

If you want to have fun and the enemies arent challenging enough than try using weaker weapons,ta da! :D everybody can go indefinitely long with lets say,tigris (any variant),slow nova and a damaging frame.You can easily pass any part of the game if you chose to do so.Its on you to chose how hard you want the mission to be.The fun and challenging part is using weaker/other weapons and trying to mod them in a interesting/good way.You can do the same thing that you do with crit build soma prime or tonkor that you can do with lets say...miter! :D a personal favourite.You have so many weapons and mods in the game you just need to try to use them.Recently what i have been doing is using a mitter with a riven and trying to use just that with the riven giving an insane +200% slash,so there was a lot of cutting :D or taking tetra with the mod that gives the bullets bounce,or something that i did recently is use the new spear weapon to hold enemies in one spot and than use the staticor to irradiate all the enemies near the spear :D 

What im trying to say is,there is no end game in warframe because you have too strong guns and warframes,only possible endgame would be that more than half of the enemies are nullifiers and the other half are like kuva guardians,requiring special order of things to kill it.

So start getting some rivens and start going crazy with moding and using other weapons.

Yeah I don't really like those kinds of reasoning. Of course I could play with un-modded weapons, un-primed frames, hell yeah I could even play with the screens off yeah. But I'd prefer having a game mode adapted to the tools we have in-game rather than having to adapt the tools to the modes we have.

9 minutes ago, TheDemon117 said:

The only problem I can see with this is that with higher enemies you get a lot more xp and I think more eximus which means even more xp. Love the idea just think they probably won't do it because of that.

They could totally add the new feature they added to fissures some patches ago : Gaining a 25% Affinity boost after some rotations.

34 minutes ago, Marine027 said:

My personal opinion, i see more challange in actually havea mechanic like fighting a boss., not just fight waves of geting stornger enemys to onyl relay later on sepcific weapons or frames.

I myself find endless missions boring and not challanging, because in the end all end up the same, camp in some corner or corridor and spawm weapons and abilitys.

While bosses are mostly immune to such atleast, you have to think on some more and not just blindly fire. Just my personal oppinion.

Also some bosses do scale actually already while we at it, like Vor with high gear he starts at lvl 30-50 spawning mobs also around that level. So he starts 40 lvls higher then his mission is.

So i guess we can do such, bring back conclave rating and let it scale the level difficulty in the missions.

On the other end, peopld will complain also not able to do things just quickly for some stuff like alerts.

Sure, I get that people would prefer more mechanics over endlesses missions that are more like endless scaling nightmares. But for the time being Warframe is a horde-shooter with those mechanics. Bosses fights can be interesting but from my point of view, I'd rather fighting bullet sponges with tons of HP rather than bosses whose mechanics consist in "being invulnerable 98% of the time, try to hit the blue thinggy for the 2 seconds you can".

[Weidro]

1 hour ago, Chewarette said:

the options are limited to Kuva Fortress, Sedna, Sedna's side of the Void, and maybe Pluto.

to be honest even these are boring

and in my opinion "high level missions" don't start below enemy level 200
so yeah id love to see and option to increase the starting level of a mission even if that doesn't include higher rewards or anything

[NinjaZeku]

Wasn't there some kind of mission customization for / from Clan leaders supposed to come Soon™?

[Raqyia]

I suppose maybe at the cost of losing some credits or something, it'd be interesting going to Earth in a non-raid/sortie and fight enemies at level forty or so. Pls. I would still like this to happen

[Chewarette]

1 hour ago, Weidro said:

to be honest even these are boring

and in my opinion "high level missions" don't start below enemy level 200
so yeah id love to see and option to increase the starting level of a mission even if that doesn't include higher rewards or anything

Yes, Kuva fortress, Void and Sedna are the regular highest level missions, that's why I mentioned them, even though it is clear that they are not really challenging if you gear for a long run.

They can be challenging quite fast with a random setup, PUG, and/or not-maxed stuff, but if you gear for a long run (fully forma'd stuff with Primed mods, maxed mods, top-notch gameplay), those missions are also boring until the 40-60th mark.

I'd love to start some Mot runs at the same "difficulty" as it is after the first hour. But without having to wait an hour. Even though the rewards would be the same as the regular level 40 Mot. As of today, I don't really want to tag in a high-level Survival if I know I'll be looking for enemies half-sleeping for the first 30 minutes...

[ChuckMaverick]

I'd suggest a new 'Hardcore' tier of missions for all nodes with enemies starting at level 100 and scaling up faster than normal endless scaling.

To unlock Hardcore missions you'd need to complete all endless missions on that planet to wave 60 or 60 minutes.